Whitlock & Sato Marketing consultancy

Whitlock & Sato · Denver, Colorado

Marketing for companies that sell something that takes explaining.

Two consultants, not an agency. We fix what your company says about itself first, then build the three campaigns that carry it. Every engagement on this page has a price, a length and a handover date.

Book a 30-minute call See the engagements
Booking engagements from October In person along the Front Range · remote elsewhere

Three engagements, described the way we would describe yours.

Clients are named by category, not by name. Their numbers stay theirs. References on the call.

We publish the work, not the results. A consultancy that prints a percentage next to a client it will not name is asking you to take two things on faith. You can ask the client instead.

Commercial HVAC service · Front Range · 2025

Eleven ad campaigns and no offer.

The website said "solutions". Eleven Google campaigns ran at once and none of them named a service, a place or a time. Every sales call opened with the rep re-explaining what the company did.

BEFORE "Solutions" AFTER Boiler repair · 4 hr Rooftop unit service Seasonal contracts
Eleven campaigns into one page, then three campaigns into three pages, each with its own phone number.
  • Sat in on fourteen sales calls before writing anything. The reps already knew the offer; the website did not.
  • Rewrote the site around one promise: four-hour on-site response for commercial boilers, anywhere on the Front Range.
  • Replaced eleven campaigns with three, each tied to one service page and one tracked phone number.
  • Wrote the one-page leave-behind the reps had been improvising on the back of estimates.
  • Handed over the measurement sheet: what counts, where it is read, who reads it on Mondays.

Positioning sprint, then a launch plan9 weeks start to handoverHanded over to the office manager and one rep

Scheduling software · seed stage · 2024

A product for everyone, bought by no one in particular.

The pitch was to "service businesses". The trial list was mostly dental offices, and nobody had looked closely enough to notice. The homepage, the pricing page and the onboarding email all spoke to a customer the company did not have.

  • Interviewed nine trial users. Eight were office managers at dental practices with the same problem: a 2:00 cancellation and a waiting list nobody had time to call.
  • Rebuilt the message around that one job, and rewrote the homepage and pricing page so a dental office manager recognises herself in the first line.
  • Wrote the five-email trial sequence, one email per thing a new office has to set up before the software earns its keep.
  • Left the founders a one-page positioning document they now hand to every new hire.

Positioning sprint6 weeks, including two weeks of interviewsHanded over to the two founders

Employment law · three partners · 2024–2025

Referrals only, and a website that said nothing.

New clients arrived by referral and then could not tell from the site what the firm did, for whom, or what to expect. The partners had strong opinions about their work and had never published one of them.

  • Service architecture: three practice pages, one per thing an employer actually calls about — terminations, wage-and-hour audits, executive agreements.
  • Four point-of-view articles the partners wrote themselves and we edited, each answering a question a client had asked that month.
  • Six months as the firm's fractional marketing lead: one of us in the Monday partners' meeting, a monthly plan with one number on it, the measurement sheet.
  • Helped them write the job description for, and interview, the marketing coordinator who replaced us.

Positioning sprint, then fractional lead8 months in totalHanded over to the coordinator they hired

Three shapes. Each one has a price, a length and an end.

Most companies start with the sprint. Nobody is upsold; the call is where we tell you which one fits, or that none does.

Positioning sprint

For a company whose homepage could belong to a competitor.

$9,500fixed

Three weeks · one company, one buyer, one sentence

  • Eight to twelve customer and sales-call interviews
  • The messaging document: who it is for, what it does, why you
  • Your homepage rewritten, ready to paste in
  • A twelve-slide sales narrative your reps can use on Monday
Ask about the sprint

Launch plan

For a message that is right and a market that has not heard it yet.

$18,000fixed

Six weeks · follows a sprint, ours or yours

  • Channels chosen, with the reasons written down
  • Three campaigns built and handed over live, with their landing pages
  • The measurement sheet, and the Monday routine for reading it
  • A sixty-minute handover with whoever runs it next

Ad spend is yours, in your accounts, billed to you directly. We never mark it up.

Ask about the launch plan

Fractional marketing lead

For a company with things to run and nobody senior to run them.

$6,000per month, from

Three-month minimum, then month to month · thirty days' notice either way

  • One of us in your Monday meeting, every week
  • A monthly plan with one number attached
  • The campaigns, the vendors and the freelancers, run
  • Hiring help when it is time to replace us with someone full-time
Ask about the fractional lead

Not on the menu.

Things we are asked for and say no to, so you do not spend a call finding out.

  • Open-ended retainers.Every engagement has an end date on it. If the work is not done by then, that is our problem to explain.
  • "Awareness" with no number.If nobody can say what counts as working, we will not take the money.
  • Running your ads forever.We build, we hand over, we leave. The accounts are yours and so is the person who runs them.
  • Social media management, logos, brand books.Good people do these. We will tell you who.

How it runs

Nothing is written until we have listened.

The same four moves, whichever engagement you pick. You know what arrives each week and you see drafts on Thursdays.

01

A thirty-minute call

Tell us what you sell and what is not working. We say which engagement fits, or that none does. About a third of the time it is the second, and we say who to call instead.

02

Two weeks of listening

Customer interviews, sales calls, your numbers as they actually are, not as the last agency reported them. We do not write a line of copy until we have heard how buyers describe the problem in their own words.

03

The work, in writing, with dates

A one-page plan that says what ships each week. Drafts arrive on Thursdays. You comment in the document; we do not do slide reviews. Nothing at the end is a surprise.

04

Handover, then we leave

Everything lives in your accounts, under your name, in plain files you can open without us. We stay on call for a month after. Then you run it, and you call us when something new needs to be said.

Point of view.

Three things we believe strongly enough to lose a client over. Each is the opening of a longer piece we send after the call.

Positioning

Your homepage headline is your whole strategy.

If the first line could be said by a competitor, you have not decided who you are for. Every campaign downstream, every sales call, every job posting is paying for that indecision at retail.

Measurement

Impressions are not a number.

A number is something a person can be held to. Calls booked. Quotes sent. Trials that reached day seven. When a report leads with reach, ask what it is protecting.

Engagements

Why we will not run your ads forever.

An agency's incentive is to stay. Ours is to leave with the thing working and to be called again when there is something new to say. Those produce different advice, and you should know which one you are paying for.

Who you would be working with.

Both of us, on every engagement. There is no account team and nobody junior doing the interviews.

Nadia Whitlock

Positioning · message · sales enablement

Eleven years in-house, most recently as head of marketing for a regional industrial-services company with three hundred employees and a sales team that had stopped using the website. Before that, two business software companies through their first sales hires. Runs the interviews.

Ken Sato

Demand · lifecycle · measurement

Nine years at two agencies running paid search and lifecycle email for professional-services and software clients, then three years in-house seeing what the reports had left out. Builds the measurement sheet every engagement hands over.

We started Whitlock & Sato in 2021 to do the parts of marketing that agencies skip because they are hard to bill by the hour: deciding who the company is for, and writing that down in a way a sales rep can say out loud.

Bring the homepage. We will read the first line together.

Thirty minutes, no deck. Tell us what you sell and what is not working, and we will tell you which engagement fits, or who to call instead. We reply within one business day.

Email hello@whitlocksato.example Call (303) 555-0147

Office

2101 Blake Street, Suite 3B
Denver, CO 80205

Hours

Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 Mountain. Client Monday meetings are booked first.

Availability

Booking sprints from October. One fractional seat opens in November.