The five questions we ask before quoting a Revenue Engine engagement

Every Revenue Engine engagement starts with the same scoping call. By the end of the call, we ask five questions. Until we have the answers, we can't quote. The questions aren't gating — anyone with answers gets a quote — they're scoping. They tell us what your engagement has to deliver.

We're sharing them because most operators we talk to have never had a vendor ask them. And because if you're going to engage us — or anyone — you should already know your own answers.

1. What's your 12-month revenue target, and is it growth, mix-shift, or margin-led?

There are three different engagements behind this single question.

• Growth-led: you need top-line revenue you don't currently have. Most of the work is acquisition, discovery, on-domain conversion infrastructure.
• Mix-shift-led: the revenue exists, it's just landing on the wrong rails. The work is moving transactions off third parties onto your domain, retiring vendors, restructuring how customers find you.
• Margin-led: revenue and mix are fine, you need to spend less to produce them. The work is consolidation, automation, attribution discipline.

We've seen operators ask for one and need another. The math is different for each. We need to know which.

2. What is the customer profile, in one sentence each, for the top customer cohort and the next-most-important one?

If you can't describe your two most important customer profiles in plain English, your discovery and conversion work will be unfocused, and we will burn budget figuring out who you're actually targeting.

We're not asking for a marketing persona deck. We're asking the operator to say it out loud. If they can't, we surface that on the call. It's not a deal-killer; it's a project we'd add to the engagement.

3. Of the marketing and operations vendors you currently pay, which would you stop paying tomorrow if you could?

This question does three things at once.

It tells us what consolidation looks like. It tells us where the political resistance lives — usually the vendors the operator can't bring themselves to name. And it gives us an honest baseline of monthly spend, against which we can compare the engagement quote.

Operators who can answer this in 60 seconds are usually 90 days away from a clean install. Operators who can't are usually six months away — and the first 90 days of the engagement is going to be the audit they didn't do.

4. What's the single most important number on your dashboard, and what's it currently doing?

If the operator says "revenue" — they don't have a dashboard. We will build them one in the engagement. That's fine.

If they say "cash conversion cycle" — they have a sophisticated finance function and their needs are different than the operator who says "leads per week."

If they say "ROAS" — we have a specific conversation about whether they're measuring incrementality and what attribution model they trust.

The number they pick tells us where the cultural center of gravity is. The number's trend tells us how soon they need to see a result.

5. What did the last vendor relationship that didn't work look like, and what specifically went wrong?

This is the most important of the five.

Operators who've been burned have specific, narrow lessons. They will tell you the lessons if you ask. Those lessons are gold for scoping the engagement. We will design around them.

Operators who haven't been burned tend to be earlier-career, smaller, or working with vendors they've never made contact with. That's not bad — but the engagement needs more onboarding scaffolding than for an operator who's been around the block.

If the operator's answer is "no vendor has ever worked for us," that's also useful. We have to decide whether the issue is the vendors or the buying. Sometimes it's the latter. We'll tell them.

What you get back

By the end of the call, we tell you which of three engagement shapes fits — Get Found standalone, full Revenue Engine, or Enterprise scoped — and we send a quote within 48 hours. The quote is a single fixed monthly number with a defined SOW. No usage-based pricing surprises.

If we don't think any of our engagements fit, we tell you that too, and ideally point you somewhere useful. We'd rather not take an engagement we can't deliver on.

Book a scoping call here. Bring answers to the five questions, or come without them — we'll work through them together either way.