We write a growth plan before we ask for any money, and you keep it whether or not you hire us. This piece explains exactly what is in it, what is not, and why giving it away is not a trick.
The short version: four pages. Where the revenue leaks. The first three fixes, in order, with reasoning. What we would leave alone. A scoped quote, which is a base fee plus growth share for the fixes on page two, month to month.
It is written by a person who has walked your store on a phone, not generated from a scan. That is the difference that matters, and it is also the reason we cannot write hundreds of them a week.
If you take it and do the work yourself, that is a real outcome and the document is written to be usable that way. If you take it to another supplier, it works as a brief. Both of those are fine, and both are cheaper for us than persuading a store to hire us for work it did not need.
Page one: where the revenue leaks
The first page is a diagnosis, not a summary of your analytics.
It lays out your four numbers as we can see them: visitors, conversion rate, average order value and repeat purchases. Then it says which one is weakest and what evidence points there, including where visitors drop off on the way to an order.
The reason this comes first is that everything after it depends on it. A recommendation with no diagnosis behind it is a preference. If page two says rebuild the feed, page one has to explain why the feed is the thing holding the store back rather than the checkout or the flows.
It is also written so you can disagree with it. If we have read something wrong, because a number is distorted by a promotion or a wholesale order or a season, you will be able to see the reasoning and say so. A diagnosis you cannot argue with is not a diagnosis.
The plan is written so you can act on it without us.
Page two: three fixes, in order, with the reasoning
The second page is the work. Three fixes, ranked, each with what it involves, roughly how long it takes, and what we would expect it to move.
The ranking is the part to read carefully. Anyone can list problems. The order is where the judgement is: what applies to the most visitors, what is reversible, what can be read within a month, and what has to start early because it matures slowly.
Each fix names the lever it belongs to, so you can see the plan as a whole rather than a list of tasks. If all three sit on one lever, that is a deliberate statement about where the store's problem is.
And each says what would count as it having worked. That matters because it is the standard we then hold ourselves to in the monthly report, and it is the standard you can hold anyone else to if you take the plan elsewhere.
Three is not a magic number. It is what fits in a first month or two of honest work, and a longer list would be a wish list rather than a plan.
Page three: what we would leave alone
The third page lists what is working and should not be touched, and it is often the page stores tell us was most useful.
There is a reason it exists. Every supplier who looks at a store has an incentive to find fault everywhere, because faults are billable. That incentive produces the sixty-point audit, where everything is a problem and nothing is prioritised, and the store ends up either paralysed or paying for a rewrite of things that were fine.
So we write the opposite list on purpose. If your product photography is good, we say so. If your email flows are already well built, we say so and take that work out of scope. If your brand voice is doing something distinctive, we will not quietly standardise it.
It also protects you from us. A written record of what we said was working is a record you can hold up if a later proposal suggests replacing it.
Occasionally page three is short, and that is a finding too.
Page four: the scoped quote
The last page is the price: a base fee plus growth share for the fixes on page two, month to month.
It is flat, so it does not move when your sales move or when your ad spend moves. Ad spend goes to the ad platform from your own account and we never take a share of it. There is no separate setup or onboarding fee, because the diagnosis you are reading is the onboarding and it was free.
It comes last so that everything before it is a description of work rather than a justification for a number. You should be able to read the fee, look back at page two, and see what you are buying.
And it comes with no deadline attached to it. There is no expiring discount, no this month only, and no pressure to sign in the meeting. Month to month cuts both ways: it is easy to start, and it is easy to stop, so there is nothing to gain from rushing you into it.
What we need to write it, and what we do not
We need your store address, a monthly sales band, and what you are trying to achieve. Where you can share them, the four numbers and your rough margin make the plan much more specific, because they decide what is realistic.
We do not need logins. No store admin, no ad account access, no analytics access. Everything on page one can be reasoned from your numbers and from the store itself, walked the way a buyer walks it: land from a search, find a product, add it, get to checkout, on a phone.
We then walk it the way we work: traffic sources as far as they are visible from outside, product feed behaviour, page speed, shipping settings, checkout steps, what arrives after an order. The unglamorous parts.
If you would rather not share numbers before you know us, the plan can still be written, it is simply less precise about size. We will say which parts we are estimating.
And we do not need an agreement, an intent to purchase, or a call before the plan. The call is more useful afterwards, when there is something on the table to argue with.
Why free is not a trick
The obvious question is what we get out of it, and the answer is a filter.
Writing the plan tells us whether we can help. Some stores turn out to have a problem that is not marketing: margin that cannot support acquisition, stock that cannot support demand, a category we do not know well enough. Better to find that in the plan than three months into an engagement, for both sides.
It also replaces the pitch. We would rather spend the hours writing something specific about your store than producing a deck about ourselves, and the plan sells the work better than any deck could, because it either engages with your business or it does not.
The cost to us is time, and that is the only limit. We can write a certain number of these properly in a month, which is why we ask for the numbers up front and why we occasionally say no.
What it is not
It is not a generic checklist. No sixty-point audit with red and green ticks, no scan output with your logo at the top. Those documents look thorough and cannot be acted on, because they do not rank anything.
It is not a pitch deck. There is no page about our values, no team photos, no client logos.
It does not contain statistics we cannot stand behind. No industry benchmarks presented as findings about you, no invented percentages, no case studies about stores we have not worked with. Where a number is needed to show the shape of a calculation, it is either your number or a clearly labelled example.
It is not a promise about revenue. Nobody controls demand, competition or platform policy. What we commit to is the work, the measurement and an honest monthly report.
And it is not a sales meeting in document form. There is no pressure to sign, no expiry, and no follow-up sequence designed to wear you down. If you read it and do nothing, that is a perfectly acceptable ending.