WELCOME TO HELM
You don't have a marketing problem. You have a nobody-owns-it problem.
Most small businesses don't need to hire a marketer. They need someone to decide what gets made, make it, ship it, and report on it — every month, without being managed. That's what we do.
Monthly retainer, starting at $5,000/mo in Central & South Florida. Minimum 6 months. We take on a limited number of these at a time.
Why it stays stuck
There are three normal ways to handle this. All three fail for the same reason.
Nobody with authority owns the outcome. Marketing becomes the thing that happens when someone finds time — which is never, because the business is the priority and it should be.
Option one
You do it yourself
It works for about five weeks. Then a busy season hits, and the account goes quiet for two months. The audience you built forgets you exist.
Fails on consistency.Option two
You hire someone junior
You now own a direct report who needs a strategy, a brief, feedback, and a review cycle — from you. You didn't buy capacity. You bought a management job.
Fails on direction.Option three
You hire a consultant
You get a deck, a positioning framework, and a 90-day plan. Then they leave, and the plan sits in a shared drive because nobody was hired to execute it.
Fails on execution.The role you keep almost posting
Now hiring · Full-time · On-site
Marketing Manager
- Own the marketing calendar and decide what we publish
- Shoot and edit photo and video on location, monthly
- Write captions, emails, and landing page copy
- Keep the website, hours, and listings accurate everywhere
- Manage reviews and respond to inbound messages
- Report on what actually moved — not impressions
You were never going to fill that role.
And you shouldn't. Even at six figures, one person can't be a strategist, a shooter, an editor, a writer, and an analyst — the good ones specialize, and the generalists you can afford need direction you don't have time to give.
We run the whole function instead. That's Helm — same responsibilities, split across people who each do one thing well, for less than the salary line alone, and without you writing a single brief.
What sits under us
Five functions. One retainer. This is Helm.
We decide what the business should be saying this quarter and why, then hold the line on it. This is the part that's missing when marketing feels random.
On-location shoots, monthly. Video, stills, and short-form built from your actual business — not stock, not templates, not repurposed vendor assets.
Publishing on the channels that matter for your category, on a schedule that doesn't break when you get busy.
Website, listings, hours, reviews, and inbound messages — kept accurate and answered. The unglamorous work that quietly costs you customers.
One monthly call. What we made, what it did, what we're changing. Measured against the thing you care about — bookings, calls, walk-ins — not reach.
How a month runs
Your total involvement: two hours a month.
One shoot day where you mostly keep working. One call where we tell you what happened.
We set the angle
Before anything gets made, we decide what this month is about. You get a one-page plan, not a 40-slide strategy deck.
We show up and shoot
A half-day on location. You keep running the business. We work around service, not through it.
We build and publish
Editing, copy, scheduling, posting. You see the month in one review link and approve it in ten minutes.
We report and adjust
Thirty minutes at month's end. What worked, what didn't, what changes next month. Then it starts again.
Before you book
This is a bad fit for most businesses. On purpose.
We'd rather lose the call than take a client we can't move. Read both columns honestly before you book.
Built for you if
- You're doing real revenue and marketing is the bottleneck, not the product
- Nobody in the building owns marketing today
- You have a physical place, a service, or a face customers respond to
- You can commit six months before judging results
- You want it handled, not explained to you
Not for you if
- You want one campaign, one video, or one project
- You want to approve every caption before it posts
- You're looking for the cheapest option available
- You need leads inside 30 days to survive
- You already have someone in-house doing this well
$5,000 / month
Priced on presence. On-location, in person, every month — no travel fees, you're on our home turf.
$7,500 / month
Priced on production. We fly to you for a 3-day shoot every quarter and run everything remotely in between. Travel included. Monthly visits can be arranged for additional travel cost.
Two ways to pay for the same function. In Florida you're paying for us to be there monthly. Nationwide you're paying for us to handle the whole thing — we bring the production to you four times a year, cover our own flights and hotels, and keep the accounts running the other eleven months from here. Different value, same caliber of work.
Six-month minimum, both tiers. Everything above is included — no per-asset pricing, no ad-spend markup, no hidden line items. Nationwide travel is included for standard continental-US markets; genuine outliers (peak-holiday fares, Alaska, Hawaii) are quoted up front, never marked up. If we're not the right depth for you, we'll say so on the call and point you somewhere better.
Hello, World!
Straight answers
The questions everyone asks on the call.
Why does Florida get monthly visits and nationwide gets quarterly — for more money?
Because you're not paying for visit frequency, you're paying for two different things. In Florida you're paying for presence: we're down the road, so we show up monthly and there's no travel to cover. Nationwide you're paying for production and logistics: we fly to you for a concentrated 3-day shoot each quarter, bank enough content to run the whole quarter, cover our own flights and hotels, and manage everything remotely in between. The quarterly rhythm is a feature — batching a big shoot beats squeezing in a rushed monthly one, and you're not paying our travel twelve times a year. If you'd rather we come monthly, we can arrange that; it's the quarterly travel plus the additional trips at cost.
Is nationwide right for a restaurant?
Usually not, and we'll tell you so. Quarterly shoots work when what we're filming holds up over three months — a service business, an office, an evergreen brand. If your menu, specials, or space change with the seasons, content shot in January looks tired by March, and you want the monthly Florida cadence or the monthly-visit nationwide arrangement instead. On the call we'll ask one question: does what we'd film change month to month? Your answer decides the cadence.
How is this different from just hiring an agency?
Most agencies sell you deliverables — a set number of posts, a campaign, a website. You still own the decisions and the direction. We own the function. The difference shows up when something isn't working: an agency waits for you to flag it, we change it.
Why a six-month minimum?
Because month one is setup, month two is the first real output, and month three is the first honest read on whether it's working. Anything shorter and you're paying for onboarding and calling it a test.
Do you manage ad spend?
Yes — up to $5,000 a month in ad spend is handled inside your retainer, across the platforms that fit your business. If you need to run more than that, we'll talk it through and price it month to month rather than baking a number into the agreement you may not use. The spend itself is always yours, on your own accounts — we manage it, we never mark it up.
What if we already have someone doing social?
Then you probably don't need us. If they're posting but nobody's setting direction or measuring outcomes, that's a different conversation — bring them to the call.
Who actually does the work?
We do — Jonathan and Mollie, the two of us who own The Digital Shore, backed by a tight-knit team of designers. But you are never handed off. Every Helm client is run by an owner, personally, start to finish. You'll know who's shooting your content, who's writing it, and who's on the monthly call, because it's the same two people every time. That's the whole point — you're not buying an account coordinator and a ticket queue.
Twenty minutes. We'll tell you if Helm can't help.
No proposal deck, no discovery sequence, no follow-up drip. You describe the business, we tell you whether Helm is the right depth — and if it isn't, we'll tell you what is.