Discovery to review, in five phases.

Discovery to review

Each phase has an objective, a set of activities, something you receive, a duration, and a list of what we need from you. If a phase is skipped, the next one inherits a guess. We would rather delay a launch by a week than traffic ads into a page that still explains last year’s product.

1. Discovery

   Objective. Write down what is true: the offer, the buyer, the current accounts, the constraints, the political map of who signs off.

   What happens. Interviews with commercial and marketing leads, a read of the site and creative, access to ads and analytics, a look at competitors as they actually appear in Singapore search and social.

   What you receive. A findings memo with risks, opportunities, and the open questions we still cannot answer. No sixty-slide theatre.

   How long. Two to three weeks, faster if access is clean.

   What we need from you. Time with the people who sell, logins or a transfer plan, current spend, any brand or legal rules, and one person who can arrange the rest.

2. Roadmap

   Objective. Agree what will happen in ninety days, what the year is for, and which numbers will tell us if it is working.

   What happens. We draft the channel mix, production load, budget split, named owners, and the measurement plan. We argue it with you in a working session, then we lock a version.

   What you receive. A written roadmap, a RACI in plain language (who does the work, who is consulted, who signs), and a first-ship date.

   How long. One to two weeks after discovery.

   What we need from you. A decision. A roadmap that sits in “we will think about it” is not a roadmap. If finance needs a purchase order, this is the moment to start it.

3. Build

   Objective. Make the assets, pages, tracking and account structure the Run phase will need, so week one of live work is not a scramble.

   What happens. Creative production, landing builds, tag implementation, audience and campaign architecture, content backlog. Two-pass review before anything is queued.

   What you receive. Working files in your spaces, a launch checklist, dashboards that already have definitions, and a date when paid can turn on.

   How long. Two to six weeks depending on whether a site is in the brief.

   What we need from you. Approvals on claims and faces, product facts, and a developer if your stack requires one. Silence here is the usual cause of delay.

4. Run

   Objective. Operate the plan: ship, optimise, report, and keep the calendar honest.

   What happens. The weekly stand-up, fortnightly working session, monthly review. Media changes, content, and corrections live here. This is where most retainer hours go.

   What you receive. A weekly shipped-work note, live dashboards, and a monthly written report with a call.

   How long. The life of the engagement. Retainers have a three-month minimum because media and content need a cycle before they teach us anything.

   What we need from you. An approver who answers, product updates, and the willingness to kill a tactic.

5. Review

   Objective. Decide what the next quarter is for, or whether the engagement should change shape or end.

   What happens. We look at leading and lagging indicators against the original questions, not against a slide of green arrows. Budget split is recast if it needs to be. Scope changes that have piled up are either priced or dropped.

   What you receive. A quarterly note, a revised 90-day plan, and a clear recommendation — continue, recast, or wind down with a handover map.

   How long. A working session and a written follow-up, each quarter.

   What we need from you. Commercial context we cannot see in the ads: a price change, a delayed SKU, a new competitor, a hiring freeze on your sales team.

Week one, day by day

The first five working days are about access and truth, not about a launch film. If week one is theatre, week six is confusion. This ledger is the default for a new retainer; a pure project compresses it.

If you are in a hurry to spend media, we can traffic a contained campaign in parallel from week two — provided tracking is not fiction and the landing page matches the ad. We will say when that shortcut is safe and when it is just a way to waste the first month’s budget.

The operating rhythm

Calendars fill with meetings that do not decide anything. Ours are few, named, and owned. If a meeting has no decision or no review of shipped work, we cancel it. You should feel the week has a pulse without living in our inbox.

Between meetings, communication is email and a shared workspace. We do not run briefs on messaging apps. Urgent media pauses can go by phone during office hours: Monday–Friday 09:00–18:30. If your team is split across time zones, we still keep Singapore as the clock for production, and we write the overlap hours into the kick-off note.

Reporting

The monthly report is a document you can forward to someone who was not in the meeting. It is written in sentences. Charts exist to support those sentences. A typical pack contains: the questions we said we would answer this month; spend versus plan; what shipped (creative, pages, emails, tests); channel notes with brand/non-brand or prospecting/retargeting split as relevant; leading indicators; lagging indicators; a list of things that broke; and the three decisions we need from you. It also contains a short section most agencies skip — what we do not know yet, and what the numbers cannot say.

Dashboards are for live monitoring, not for the monthly story. If a dashboard and the report disagree, the report wins until we find the bug, because a live number without a definition is how rumours start. Definitions live in a measurement note you own. When a platform changes a metric’s meaning, we write that in the pack rather than hoping nobody notices the jump.

A bad month is handled as a fact. We say whether the cause looks like execution (wrong audience, weak creative, broken tracking), like strategy (offer, price, market), or like something outside marketing (stock, sales capacity, a delayed launch). We recommend a change with a cost and a time box. We do not bury the month in a three-month rolling average so it looks smoother. If we were wrong, the report says we were wrong. If you were slow to approve, the report says that too, without theatre. The point of the document is to decide the next action, not to protect anyone’s feelings.

Escalation and changes

Scope changes are normal. A new landing page, an extra market, a film that was not in the roadmap: these are not moral failures. They are work. We price them before we make them. A change request names the task, the effect on the calendar, the fee or the hours it will consume, and what will be dropped if the monthly hours cannot stretch. You approve in writing — email is enough. We do not start the extra work on a verbal “can you just”.

Small corrections of our own errors do not go through this path; they are done immediately. A change of legal language after approval, a new product name, a founder who wants a recut: those are changes. If a change is needed because a campaign is failing, we will still write it down, even when we are the ones recommending it, so the quarterly review can see how the plan moved.

Escalation inside the engagement is simple. Day-to-day issues go to the account lead. If you are not getting a decision, or if the work is missing the brief, you write to Mira at hello@scoopsrescueservices.com and we will put a working session on the calendar within three working days. If the relationship is the problem, we would rather rewind the scope or end cleanly than let a retainer rot. Ending follows the notice in the engagement letter: 30 days for retainers, a pause-and-requote rule for projects, and a handover map so your next team inherits accounts and files rather than a locked folder.