What Actually Happens in Week One With a New Client
No pitch deck, no quiet ramp-up month. Here's the literal week-by-week of what happens before we ever touch your ad spend.
Most agencies' "onboarding" is a kickoff call, then radio silence for a few weeks while someone junior gets familiar with the account. Ours is four structured phases, each with a written deliverable at the end. Here's exactly what happens, in order.
Week 0 — Audit
A live screen-share of Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads, Klaviyo, and Shopify P&L — together, not separately. The goal isn't a general health check, it's the top 3 money leaks ranked by dollar impact, not traffic leaks. Attribution gets rebuilt off Shopify Source in the same session, because platform-reported ROAS is usually part of the problem, not the diagnostic tool. If the data itself is unreliable, that gets said in the first 15 minutes, before anything else.
Week 1 — Plan
The 90-day growth model gets built against the client's actual unit economics — contribution margin, AOV, payback period — never a template pulled from the last client. Channel mix, creative volume, and offer positioning get decided by what the P&L can actually support. On one account (Jersey Club Football), that meant one channel running, CPMs climbing, and a four-month tournament deadline — the Week 1 plan there was a weekly creative pipeline across formats that hadn't been tried yet, not "increase the budget."
Weeks 2–4 — Test
Structured testing: 3 angles × 3 hooks × 3 formats per audience, with kill/scale decisions made daily, not monthly. Landing pages get CRO sprints in parallel. Klaviyo flows — welcome, browse, cart, post-purchase, win-back — get rebuilt off the client's actual data in this same window, not deferred to "phase 2".
Weeks 4–12 — Scale
Only winners get pushed into broader audiences and bigger budgets, and only while blended ROAS holds. New channels — TikTok, YouTube, Google PMax — come after Meta is already profitable at scale, not alongside it. A new creative batch every two weeks to stay ahead of fatigue. A monthly contribution-margin review with the founder, not an account manager reading a templated deck.
Same process, every account
This runs the same whether the brand is doing $50K/month or already six figures — the phases don't change, only how fast we move through them.
Want this run on your account? Book the 45-min session
Same lens, same math, on your P&L. Free — you leave with the top 3 leaks and the fix order, whether we work together or not.