Free playbook
Your marketing isn’t working like it should. Find out why.
The Senior Strategist’s Playbook is the same step-by-step audit we run with clients to find what’s working, what’s wasting money, and what needs to change.
You already know something is off. You don’t need another quiz to tell you that. You need a way to find out what’s broken, what’s working, and what to fix first. This is that process, step by step.
Who wrote this playbook
The process we run before we touch anyone’s marketing.
Every question in this playbook is one Mike and Nada ask when they start with a new business. It comes from building marketing that had to pay for itself, inside a brand that grew into a category leader.
Annual DTC revenue at Grunt Style, with Mike as partner and CMO.
Email subscribers at Grunt Style, with Nada running the lifecycle and loyalty programs that turned the list into repeat revenue.
Conversion rate lift for UNDR Industries, from 1.82% to 2.38%.
Lead response time for Areli Sportswear, down from days.
Mike Birt
Co-Founder and Lead Strategist
A senior marketing strategist and CMO who has led marketing for ecommerce brands, healthcare practices, law firms, and local retailers.
- Grunt Style: partner and Chief Marketing Officer as it grew into a category leader in patriotic apparel with more than $80M in annual DTC revenue.
- Complete Care: built a direct patient acquisition system that didn’t exist before, across 30 injury clinic locations in Central Florida.
- Berry Law: led the brand strategy for a veteran-led national law firm.
Nada Djuric
Co-Founder and Retention Strategist
Builds the systems that bring customers back after the first sale: lifecycle email, texts, loyalty, and repeat purchases.
- Grunt Style: as Retention Strategist, built and ran the lifecycle email, loyalty, and repeat-revenue programs.
- Loyalty: more than $1M in monthly loyalty revenue.
- Email: grew the list from under 100K to more than 2 million subscribers.
Built on the Four Gets.
Every customer you’ve ever had went through all four. When marketing feels off, one of them is usually broken. Every tactic you run fits under one of them.
Get seen
People who need what you sell can find you.
Get remembered
They think of you when they’re ready to buy.
Get trusted
They believe you’re the right choice over the alternatives.
Get purchased
They actually buy, and your marketing turns into money.
What you’ll work through.
Thirteen steps in the order a senior strategist works: frame the question, get the facts, judge them through the Four Gets, then decide.
Part 1: Frame the problem
Step 1
The question
Write down the 12-month goal and what’s in the way, and find out whether your leadership team agrees.
Part 2: Get the facts
Step 2
The business numbers
Margins, COGS, seasonality, capacity, and the most you can pay to get a new customer while still making money on the first sale.
Step 3
Where your profit comes from
Which products, customers, and sources bring in your profit, and which bring in revenue while losing money.
Step 4
The market
Find out whether the market is shrinking or you’re losing customers to someone. The fixes are different.
Step 5
Your customers and your spending
Ask your last 20 customers why they chose you, and list everything you spend on marketing, with your team’s time counted.
Step 6
How you measure
The numbers you watch, the targets your team is held to, whether they conflict, and who owns your accounts.
Step 7
Every channel
Ads, social, email and texts, events, and everything else, each measured by what it really costs and what it brings in.
Part 3: Look through the Four Gets
Steps 8 to 11
Seen, remembered, trusted, purchased
Use the facts to find where buyers get lost, from search results to your sales pipeline and checkout.
Part 4: Decide and track
Step 12
Decide
Find the root causes, rank your fixes, make a stop list, and write a one-page brief and a 90-day plan.
Step 13
Track it every month
Pick 6 to 8 numbers, check them in 30 minutes a month, and decide whether to keep, adjust, or stop each fix.
Two ways to work through it.
Both follow the same steps and end in the same place. Either way, you do the fieldwork. No tool can talk to your customers for you.
On your own
Read each step in the guide and fill in the workbook as you go. The workbook does the math and builds your scorecard and plan.
- Step-by-step guide (PDF)
- Workbook (Google Sheet)
With your AI tool
Upload the AI facilitator file to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. It walks you through each step one question at a time, pushes back when an answer is too vague to use, and writes up your plan.
START MY MARKETING REVIEW
What you walk away with
A short list of decisions you can act on.
- The most you can pay to get a new customer, and which channels are over it.
- One sentence on why customers choose you, built from what they actually said.
- A score for each of the Four Gets, and the one to fix first.
- Your top three fixes, each with an owner and a date.
- A clear read on your email and texts: what they bring in, and which automated messages you’re missing.
- Your repeat purchase rate, and how much more you could make from customers you’ve already paid to get.
- A stop list of what costs money and brings in nothing.
- A one-page brief you can hand to a partner or your banker.
- A monthly report that shows whether the plan is working.
How deep this goes
There’s no shortcut in here.
This is about 40 hours of work, because it goes as deep as we go with paying clients: your margins, your customers’ own words, what every channel really costs, and what your team is measured on. You can hand pieces to your team. The playbook shows who can take what.
If you want a quick fix, you won’t be happy with it. Anyone who promises to fix your marketing in five minutes is lying, and you’ll end up telling everyone how an agency scammed you again.
Do it yourself. Or hand it to us.
A lot of owners don’t trust anyone else with their marketing. Plenty have been burned by an agency, and plenty are sure they can do it all themselves. Fair enough. So here’s the whole process, free. Every step, every question, every formula.
If you’d rather have it led by people who do this every week, talk to us. We run the review with your team in two weeks, then do the work.
Do it yourself
Free
- The full guide, workbook, and AI facilitator file
- You gather the information and run the analysis
- You build your own action plan
- About 40 hours of work, split across your team
Have us do it
Focused Audit: $2,500, done in two weeks
- We lead the process and work with your team
- We analyze the findings and set the priorities
- You get the recommendations and a 90-day plan in two weeks
- The fee is credited toward your first 90 days if you start within 30 days
Get the free playbook.
You’ll get everything in one email: the guide, the workbook, and the AI facilitator file. Pick your path when you’re ready to start.
- Step-by-step guide (PDF)
- Workbook (Google Sheet)
- AI facilitator file for ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini
You’ll also get occasional emails from Mike and Nada. Unsubscribe anytime.
Questions before you start.
Quick answers about how the playbook works.
Is this a quiz?
No. It’s a working process. You gather real information about your business, and the playbook shows you how to read it and decide what to do.
How long does it take?
About 40 hours of work, spread over one to three weeks. Most of it is pulling numbers and talking to people.
Do I have to do it all myself?
No. Your bookkeeper can pull the numbers, whoever runs your ads can do the ads section, and your front desk can call customers. The decisions stay with you.
Do I need an AI tool?
No. The guide and workbook cover everything. The AI facilitator file is there if you’d rather be guided through it one question at a time.
Is this only about getting new customers?
No. Step 7 covers email, texts, and how often customers come back. The cheapest sale is usually to someone who already bought from you.
Do I need to know analytics?
No. Every step is written for owners who aren’t marketers. If you can search Google and talk to a customer, you can do this.
Will this fix my marketing overnight?
No. It shows you where to focus and what to stop paying for. Marketing keeps changing because customers do, and this process helps you spot problems while they’re small.
Why give this away?
Because plenty of owners want to do it themselves, and they should have a real process to do it with. If you get halfway through and decide you’d rather have it done, you know where to find us.