Retainer-free marketing consultancy, Brisbane

Goodbye is in the contract.

Phase 1 Diagnose Phase 2 Build Phase 3 Embed
Ninety days. One defined problem. Then we go. 13% revenue growth for City Cave in a quarter

Growing brands, national institutions, and one very large reef.

Selected clients

City Cave Great Barrier Reef Foundation Snapchat Samford Valley Steiner School Liferoad Nesta Builder Brokers

The rule

Most agencies are built to be kept. The retainer renews, the scope creeps, and the knowledge stays on our side of the wall. Because the moment you do not need us, we stop getting paid.

Why three months

We built Three Month Rule the other way round. The engagement is designed to end.

Ninety days. One defined problem. An end date written into the contract on day one.

In three months we do the work, and we teach your team to do it without us. Then we go. Not because it did not work. Because it did.

Three months is a deliberate number. Long enough to change something real. Short enough that we cannot coast. It is roughly how long it takes to find out whether something is actually working.

That is the rule. It is in the name so we cannot quietly drop it.

Talk about the next three months.

Results

What the last three months bought, in each case.

13%

City Cave

Wellness, national

Revenue growth inside a single quarter, from one closed engagement rather than an open-ended retainer.

Funnel rebuilt
end to end

Samford Valley Steiner School

Education

Enrolment reworked end to end, from first enquiry through to the offer.

Conservation,
on a youth platform

Great Barrier Reef Foundation

Not for profit, with Snapchat

A reef brief taken to an audience that does not read reef briefs, through a platform collaboration.

Figures for Liferoad and Nesta Builder Brokers to follow

Phase 01

Diagnose

Find the one number worth moving

Not a list of opportunities. One.

  • Where the money actually comes from today
  • The single constraint holding the number down
  • What the market already believes about you
  • A written scope, costed, with an end date
  • The measure we will both be judged on
Weeks one to four

Phase 02

Build

Make the thing, in market, not in a deck

It goes live inside the month, not at the end of it.

  • The work built and shipped, not presented
  • Live in market with real spend behind it
  • Measurement in place before launch, not after
  • Weekly readouts, no monthly status theatre
  • Changes made on evidence, inside the scope
Weeks five to eight

Phase 03

Embed

Shape it around the people who will run it

Still building. Just building it around your team, until they do not need us in the room.

  • Tuned to how your team actually works, not how we work
  • We sit alongside them while they run it
  • Every decision written down with its reasoning
  • Assets, access and accounts in your name
  • Results against the number we named in phase one
Weeks nine to twelve

In practice

Anyone can say this. These are the four things we sign.

This is what a client and an agency owe each other when the engagement is built to end.

01An end date in the contractPage one, written in, not implied. It does not move because the work went well.
02What you keep, not a final deckDocumented systems, recorded walkthroughs, and the actual working files. The deliverable is your team's capability, not our presentation.
03Priced for the engagementThe total is agreed before we start. No line item quietly renews.
04Results published after we leaveSix and twelve months on. Anyone can show a result while they are still being paid. The number that counts is the one that held once we were gone.

Selected work

Six engagements. Every one of them with an end date.

Reasonable questions

01What if we still need you?Hire us again, for a different problem, for another three months. What we will not do is sell you a renewal you do not need.
02Three months is not long enough.It is for one problem. It is not for a permanently outsourced marketing department, and that is deliberately not what we are.
03How do you make money?We charge properly for ninety days of senior attention, and we get referred more than we get pitched.

Before you hire anyone

One week. One page. No charge.

Send a paragraph and a link. We point a lot of machinery at it, and a person writes the answer: the number we would go after, and what we would ignore.

If it says you do not need an agency, that is what it will say. Four a month, because the machinery scales and the judgment does not.

Send us the paragraph.

Start a project

What needs to move?

One paragraph is enough. You will hear back from Dominic.

dominic@threemonthrule.com