This is the first of what I'm planning to make a monthly note — what we're working on, what I'm thinking about, and what I've learned that might be useful to you. Less polished than the rest of the blog. More like an email from someone you know.

Let's start with something I did recently that made me a little nervous.

I Put Our Prices on the Website

Branding packages start at $750. Websites start at $650 for a template build, $1,500 for custom. Print design starts at $150. Social media management runs $350 to $750 a month. Retainers run $450 to $1,200.

All of it is public now, along with the commission structure on ad management and our typical turnaround times.

Almost nobody in this industry does that, and there are reasons. Scope genuinely varies. A number without context invites the wrong comparison. Someone will see $750 and assume that's the whole story for a project that's actually much bigger.

All of that is true. I published anyway.

One thing I want to be clear about, because I don't want a number to be the reason someone doesn't call: these are starting points, not fixed prices. Some projects run higher, some lower, and plenty don't fit neatly into any range at all — those get quoted individually, case by case, budget by budget. I'd rather work with you than around you. Publishing a number doesn't mean it's firm. It means we've got somewhere honest to start the conversation.

Here's Why

Two reasons, and the second one matters more.

The first is that hiding prices wastes everyone's time. If you have $500 budgeted and you need a complete brand system, neither of us benefits from discovering that thirty minutes into a call. You've lost your afternoon. I've lost mine. Nobody got anything out of it.

The second is harder to say out loud. When nobody in an industry publishes anything, price becomes whatever a given client seems able to pay. That's not a hypothetical. It's how a lot of creative work gets quoted, and it's why so many business owners walk into these conversations braced for it.

I'd rather the conversation start with scope than with guessing.

What I Keep Running Into

The thing that pushed me toward this was a pattern I noticed across several clients.

One of them, before we worked together, had been paying an agency every month and getting nothing. When he actually reviewed the recorded calls he'd been charged for, they were spam. Not a few — the leads themselves.

That experience did what you'd expect. It made him skeptical of agencies generally, and it made asking anyone for help feel like setting money on fire twice.

Rebuilding that took months, and none of it was clever. He controlled the budget — his number, set by him. Nothing was hidden. When he wanted information he got it that day rather than at the end of a reporting cycle. When something stopped working, he heard it from me before he noticed it himself.

That's it. That's the whole method. It just takes a while.

I've written that story up in more detail if it's useful: How Do You Trust a Marketing Partner After the Last One Wasted Your Money?

Something I Had to Correct About Myself

While I was pulling all this together, I went back through our own marketing and found a few numbers I couldn't actually back up anymore.

I'll get into the whole story next month — what I found, what surprised me, and what I'm doing about it. For now: I fixed what I could verify, and said less where I couldn't.

What I'd Rather Point At

Instead of statistics I can't source, here's what's actually true and verifiable:

Sassy Marina in Algonac was the first client this business ever had. That was 2017. They're still here, nine years later.

Kyle Media — the publisher behind Great Lakes Scuttlebutt and Latitudes & Attitudes — has been working with us over four years. There's no retainer. Every project gets quoted individually and they keep coming back anyway, which is a harder thing to earn than a signed monthly agreement.

Rapid Dry Carpet Cleaning holds a perfect 5.0 rating across more than 110 Google reviews. You can go count them right now.

Those are checkable in a way a percentage never is.

One Practical Thing

If you take one thing from this month's note, take this:

If you're paying anyone per lead — Google Local Services Ads, a lead-gen service, an agency — go listen to your recorded calls this week. Not the summary report. The actual recordings.

Spam leads, wrong numbers, and out-of-area calls all show up as activity on a dashboard. They look like performance. Most of them are disputable for credit, and almost nobody disputes them.

It takes twenty minutes and it's the highest-return twenty minutes available to most local businesses right now.

What's Coming

Over the next few months there's a run of pieces built around real client work — what the problem actually was, what we did, and what I'd tell someone facing the same thing. A brewery's tap handles. A marina's contracts. A racetrack's event calendar. A publisher's video backlog.

There's also a series on AI search — whether small businesses should care yet, and what the data actually says versus what everyone's selling. Short version: it's a real channel with excellent conversion and very small volume, growing fast. The honest answer is more interesting than either the hype or the dismissal.

If there's something you'd want covered, tell me. This is more useful if it's answering questions people actually have.

Thanks for reading.

— Jon

Jonathan Petrous
Owner & Operator, Jpetrous Creative Services
jpetrous.com | jonathan@jpetrous.com | 586-563-6634