A small, senior team. On purpose.
No account layer, no bench of juniors billed at senior rates. You work directly with the person who does the work and signs the report.
Founder, 2 Steps Ahead
I run this directly.
2 Steps Ahead started from the same observation this whole site is built on: search moved into the answer, and most of what agencies were selling — keyword lists, backlink counts, monthly blog quotas — stopped being the thing that decided whether a brand got named. I build the audits, set the baselines, do the technical work, and write the reports myself. When a specialist is brought in for something outside that, I stay the one person you deal with.
That does not scale to fifty clients, and it is not meant to. It scales to being direct, fast to reach, and honest about a number that says a change did nothing — which is a harder thing to promise the bigger an agency gets.
Small enough that nothing gets lost in a handoff
One senior operator, not an account layer
You work with the person doing the work, not a junior account manager relaying it from someone more senior. Every report, every recommendation, every "do nothing this month" comes from the same person.
A small bench, brought in on purpose
Specialists join for what they are actually needed for — a technical crawl issue, a paid media setup, a structured-data problem — instead of a fixed team of people padding out a retainer.
Small enough to say no
A fifty-person agency has utilisation targets to hit. A one-person one does not, which is the entire reason it can tell you a package is not worth it yet and mean it.
Want to know who you'd actually be working with?
Send the domain and what you think the problem is. You will hear back from me, not a coordinator.