Case study · Professional services · Cheshire
One interview, ten assets.
A specialist consultancy had no time to "do marketing" and plenty to say. We sat them down for one good conversation and turned it into a month of joined-up content across every channel.
A small Cheshire consultancy with deep expertise in a narrow field and a founder whose calendar was already full. They believed in marketing in principle and never found the hours in practice. The brief was blunt: make this take almost none of my time, and make it sound like me.
The problem
Marketing kept losing to billable work, every time. The founder would draft something, decide it wasn't good enough, and never publish. Months passed between posts. The expertise that made the firm valuable was locked in one very busy head, and the cost of getting it out — as they understood it — was hours they didn't have.
The constraint was real. The assumption that good content needs lots of the founder's time was not.
The thread we pulled
We flipped the cost. Instead of asking the founder to write, we asked for one hour of talking — a structured interview about the questions clients always ask. One hour of genuine expertise is a deep seam; the job after that is ours, not theirs.
"I gave you an hour and got a month back. I didn't write a single word and it all still sounds like me."
What we made
- →One long-form article answering the question clients ask most, written from the founder's own words.
- →A run of short social posts, each pulling a single idea from the interview and standing on its own.
- →Two emails to the firm's existing list, turning quiet contacts back into a warm audience.
- →A reusable interview structure, so the next month's content is another hour away, not another standing start.
What changed
The firm went from sporadic to a full month of coherent, on-voice content built from a single hour of the founder's time. More importantly, the founder stopped seeing marketing as a thing they couldn't afford to do and started seeing it as a thing they couldn't afford to skip.
No invented percentages here — the engagement is recent. What's already clear: the cost-per-published-piece of the founder's time dropped sharply, and the model is repeatable without our hand on every step.
What we'd do next
Make it a standing rhythm: one interview a month feeding a predictable content calendar, with a lightweight measurement loop so we double down on the themes that pull in the right enquiries. One hour in, a month out — every month.
