The Teardown: a three-week audit of everything your marketing is doing
Twelve areas in. One prioritized roadmap out — with owners, effort estimates and a timeline. It's month one of every engagement, and it's separately sellable if you're not ready to sign six months on a first conversation.
What the Teardown is
Definition
The Teardown is a three-week diagnostic of your entire marketing operation — twelve audit areas, from positioning to attribution — that ends in a prioritized roadmap with owners, effort estimates and a 90-day plan. It's the paid audition: roughly half of Teardowns roll into a full engagement.
Exactly what gets audited
- Positioning — what you claim, and whether a buyer who isn't an engineer can repeat it
- ICP definition — who actually buys, who actually signs, and where the two diverge
- Messaging — the deck, the site, the one-liner, tested against real buyer language
- Website — the commercial pages, the conversion paths, the dead ends
- Search and AI visibility — where you appear in Google, and whether ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini cite you or your competitor
- Content inventory — what exists, what's working, what's invisible
- Demand channels — outbound, paid, events, referral: what each actually produced
- CRM and attribution — whether "what did marketing do for pipeline" is answerable
- Sales collateral — what your closers actually send, and what they improvise
- Competitive set — who you lose to, and what their story does that yours doesn't
- Event program — what the booth costs, what it books, what it should
- Team and vendor structure — who does what, what it costs, where the gaps are
What you get
- The prioritized roadmap — every finding ranked by impact and effort, with an owner and an estimate against each. This is the document the engagement (or your team) executes.
- A 90-day plan — the first quarter sequenced week by week.
- The findings deck — the evidence behind every call, including the AI visibility readout against named competitors.
- One working session — two hours with your leadership to walk the roadmap, argue with it, and leave with decisions.
- Long-term recommendations — what the function should look like at your next stage, whether or not I build it.
The three weeks, day by day
| Days | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1–2 | Access and intake: CRM, analytics, ad accounts, the deck, the collateral folder, the last board update. A one-hour kickoff with the founder and whoever owns sales. |
| 3–7 | The outside view: positioning, messaging, website, search and AI visibility, competitive set. I run your buyers' real prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini and log who gets cited. |
| 8–12 | The inside view: CRM and attribution, demand channel performance, content inventory, sales collateral, event economics, team and vendor structure. Short interviews with sales and anyone doing marketing work. |
| 13–17 | Synthesis: findings become a ranked roadmap with owners and effort estimates, plus the 90-day plan. |
| 18–21 | Delivery: the findings deck, the roadmap, and the two-hour working session. You leave with decisions, not homework. |
What it costs
A fixed fee, quoted on the first call once I know your size and the state of your data. If the Teardown rolls into a six-month engagement within 30 days, the fee is credited against month one. Either way you keep everything: the roadmap, the findings, the plan.
What happens next
Three honest outcomes. About half of Teardowns roll into an engagement — Lead, Build or Run, whichever the findings point at. Some companies take the roadmap and execute it themselves, which is a success, not a loss — the roadmap is built to be executable without me. And occasionally the finding is that marketing isn't your bottleneck yet, in which case I'll say so and tell you what is.
Start with the Teardown
A 30-minute review first — free, three observations prepared. If the fit is right, the Teardown starts within two weeks.