Our annual disclosure of operating numbers: client count, retention, average engagement length, top reasons clients leave, business we turned away, and what we got wrong this year.
**Active clients (April 2026):** 41. **Average engagement length:** 27 months. **12-month client retention:** 84%. **Engagements ended in the last 12 months:** 9 (5 client-initiated, 4 agency-initiated). **Net Promoter Score (last 12 months):** 71. **Internal headcount:** 6 full-time, 3 contract specialists.
These numbers are pulled from our internal CRM and accounting on the publication date. We do not adjust them for marketing.
We turned down 14 prospective engagements this past year. The most common reasons:
- **Misaligned expectations** (5) — prospects who wanted ranking guarantees, or results in 30 days. - **Industry conflict** (3) — we already work with a direct competitor in the same city. - **Ethical concerns** (3) — industries or tactics we will not work in (PBN-driven affiliate sites, pure scraper plays). - **Scope mismatch** (3) — too small for the engagement model, or too large for our current capacity.
We do not pretend to be perfect. Three honest mistakes worth disclosing:
1. **Slow on a Core Update response (March 2026).** A client lost ~18% of organic traffic in the March Core Update. Our diagnosis took eight days; it should have taken three. We have since added a Core Update response runbook. 2. **Schema migration regression.** A schema refactor on one client site temporarily broke 12 product-schema validators. Caught by our weekly health check, fixed in 36 hours, but should have been caught in pre-deploy QA. We added a staging-environment schema validation step. 3. **One under-performing engagement.** One 2025 engagement did not produce the outcomes we projected. We refunded the final two months at the client's request and documented why our forecast was off.
We charge fixed monthly retainers. We do not take commissions, kickbacks, or referral fees from any vendor we recommend. When we recommend a tool (Ahrefs, Semrush, Looker Studio, Stape, etc.) we are not paid by that vendor. The recommendation is based on fit, not commercial relationship. See Conflicts of Interest for full disclosure.
Because most agencies do not, and the gap creates room for inflated marketing claims. If we want clients to trust us, we should make it easy to verify what we say.
Yes. Next update is scheduled for April 2027 with the same line items so the year-over-year comparison is honest.