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 up to speed on 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 rather than 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, instead of 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 30-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.