Hire a marketing generalist
$6,500+
per month
- Salary $4,500–6,000
- Tools $300–800
- Management 8+ hrs/week
- Ramp 3–6 months
- Covers 2 channels well
- No guarantees
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Website, SEO, email, content, ads and outbound — we build each one as a system that runs itself, then we run it for you. One person answers for the results. No agency roster to manage, no contractors to chase.
A designer, an SEO guy, someone doing ads, a VA on email. Each owns a slice. Nobody owns the result, so you became the project manager.
You didn’t hire wrong. You hired pieces.
Real agencies start around $8,000 a month, and you would still be one of forty accounts on a junior’s list.
Agency-grade operation. Not agency-grade overhead.
You know what needs doing. The site needs rebuilding, the list hasn’t been touched in a year, the ads are running last quarter’s creative. There’s just nobody whose job it is.
It’s not a strategy problem. It’s an operations problem.
Every marketing channel working at once — building, publishing, pacing spend — under one operator. This is what you're hiring: a running system, not a to-do list.
Build → staged → live
Ships on merge
Publish cadence held
Rewritten weekly
Flows firing unattended
Welcome · winback · post-purchase
Queue never empties
Publishes while you are away
Spend against ceiling
Ceiling enforced in code
Sequence with retries
Logged, not copy-pasted
Illustrative. The shape of an operation, not a client account.
What each operation returnsYour content pipeline does not stop because someone is on leave, and your outbound is a system with retries and logging rather than a person and a spreadsheet.
Set by you and enforced in code, not in a policy document or a calendar reminder. The system stops before the invoice surprises you.
Every operation reports what ran, what failed and what it cost — so when something breaks we see it before you do.
Two weeks inside your numbers and your funnel. We find where growth leaks and what it is costing you. Everyone starts here.
The first system live in production, seven days from a signed brief. One operation, working, before anything else is discussed.
We run it. A written pulse every week, a review every month, and our pager rather than yours when something breaks.
The next operation, once the first is paying for itself. Adding operations raises the tier, not the number of vendors.
| UpcurveLabs | Growth agency | Freelancers | DIY + ChatGPT | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who operates it | We do | You manage them | You coordinate | You |
| Accountable for the result | One person | An account manager | Nobody | You |
| Built as | Systems | Manual labour | Manual labour | Manual labour |
| When someone’s away | Runs anyway | Stalls | Stalls | Stalls |
| Scope | Whole operation | One channel | One task each | Whatever you reach |
| Cost control | Ceiling in code | Hourly creep | Per invoice | Your evenings |
| Who owns the assets | You | Sometimes | Sometimes | You |
| Time to first system | 7 days | 30+ days | Varies | Never quite |
| Monthly | From $2,500 | $8,000–15,000 | $2,000–6,000 | Your time |
One operator, whole operation, everything yours.
$6,500+
per month
$8,000+
per month
From $2,500
per month
80%
of consumers now rely on AI summaries for at least half of their searches.
Which is why every page we build is structured to be quoted, not just ranked.
The build is the short part. This is the part that decides whether the operation is still earning in six months, and it is the part an agency roster hands back to you.
A short written note every week: what ran, what it returned, what it cost, what changed. No meeting unless something needs one.
The numbers against the ones we agreed at Diagnose, and a decision on anything that has drifted since the last pass.
One conversation about the next operation — only once the current one is paying for itself. Nothing is bundled ahead of that.
Three active accounts at a time.
Not a scaling problem. A design decision. The person who built your systems is the person who runs them, and that only works at small numbers.
A growth operator builds the systems your growth runs on and then keeps running them. Growth operations is the practice of treating marketing as infrastructure rather than as projects: your website, SEO, email, content, ads and outbound each become a system with an owner, a budget and monitoring, instead of a task that gets done when someone has time. The distinction from a consultant is that an operator is measured on whether the thing runs, not on whether the advice was good.
No pitch. You leave with a written list of what is leaking, either way.
Not ready to talk? One teardown a month, in writing: