Vermont has the second smallest population in the country, which means your business will not survive on foot traffic alone. Being easy to find online is how you reach the next town over, the tourists coming through, and the folks who would gladly drive forty minutes if they had any idea you existed.
No phone call, no pitch, no obligation.One short form, and I will send you a digital audit within two days.
A good reputation moves fast in a small town and then stops cold at the town line. Twenty minutes down the road nobody has heard of you yet, and there is no crowd big enough to carry your name the rest of the way. In a city, a broken website gets buried alive under foot traffic because so many people pass the window every hour that a few wander in regardless. Vermont does not work like that, and everybody running a business here already knows it in their gut, but few know what to do about it.
There is no crowd to absorb an off day. The person who could not find your hours is not one of a thousand. Some afternoons they are one of eleven. Which is why your reach has to carry past your own village. Being findable online widens who counts as local: the next county over, a full season of visitors, and the person searching at ten at night from a rental cabin with one bar of service.
Pulled off Route 100 with two bars of service, thumbing in "lunch near me" while the car idles.
Nobody drives twenty five minutes on a guess. If your hours are wrong or your last photo is from 2016, they just drive to the next town and eat there instead.
Knows exactly who you are and what you do. Only needs to know one thing: are you open on a Sunday in March?
If they cannot find that out in about ten seconds, they call somebody else. It is not personal and it is not disloyalty. It is Sunday.
Somebody talked you up at the co-op, and now they are sitting out in the lot looking you up before they walk in.
Whatever loads on that phone speaks for you before you get the chance to. Your handshake is the better introduction. It just does not get to go first.
Lives an hour out, or across the lake in New York, and would happily plan a whole Saturday around what you do. Has never once seen your name.
People cross state lines to spend a weekend up here, and nearly all of them arrive by search. You cannot lose this customer, because you never had them. You can only go out and get them.
Nobody ever chose a business because the website was impressive. They chose it because the hours were right, the photos looked like the place, and the phone number worked on the first try. Small things, every one of them, and all of them go stale on their own.
Open any one to see what it covers, what is included, and what it costs. The numbers are ballparks so you can size the job before you ever contact me, and the figure I put in writing is the one I hold to.
Most businesses up here need less website than they have been sold. We start with the three things people actually came for, your hours, what you sell, and how to reach you, and build out from there only if it earns its place.
I write the copy with you, not at you. If you already have photos we use them. If you do not, I can take semi professional photos that will get the job done, or tell you straight when the job is big enough to be worth a real photographer.
What is included
What it costs
One page, live, with your Google listing cleaned up and real photos taken by me. Built for phones and for search. For most businesses up here this is the whole job.
Four to six pages. Two to three weeks start to finish.
Menus, staff, booking, galleries. Quoted after we talk.
You send me new hours or new photos, I make the change. For people who would rather never log into anything. Cancel any time.
The starter page is built on a site builder so you can keep editing it yourself. Builders charge their own monthly fee, usually fifteen to forty dollars, paid to them and not to me. A site I code from scratch is a different animal. It can look like the page you are reading right now, but it cannot be handed off cleanly unless somebody on your end can work in code, so plan on keeping me for changes. Editing an existing Google listing is included. Creating one from scratch costs extra. Photo visits more than 20 miles from Middlebury add $1 a mile past that.
Before anyone talks you into a rebuild, it is worth finding out what is actually wrong. A lot of the time it is one broken plugin, an expired domain, or a contact form that has spent two years mailing an account nobody owns anymore.
I will look at what you have and tell you straight whether it is worth saving. If it is not, I will say that too.
What is included
What it costs
I go through what you have and send back high level suggestions as a short slide deck you can keep and act on.
The common fixes in one pass. Usually done in two days.
For bigger jobs. I quote a ceiling before I start.
If the honest answer is that a rebuild costs less than the repair, I will tell you.
Google already has a page about your business whether you manage it or not. It shows your hours, your photos, and your reviews. When it is unclaimed it goes stale, and stale reads as closed.
This is the highest return work for most local businesses and it is not expensive. For some of you it is the only thing you need.
What is included
What it costs
One pass, done properly, and it is yours to keep.
Setup plus three months of me keeping it current.
Quoted based on how many.
Verification sometimes means Google mails a postcard to your address. That part is out of my hands and can take a week or two.
Selling online does not have to be complicated. We can start with pickup only, so the money changes hands before anybody drives anywhere and nothing leaves the building until you hand it over. Seasonal preorders and gift certificates work the same way.
When you are ready to ship, I will coach you through it and build the system around how you actually pack, not around how a platform thinks you should. I have run e-commerce with real inventory behind it, so this gets set up to fit the time you have.
What is included
What it costs
Up to 20 products, pickup and pay. About two weeks.
Shipping, variants, larger catalogs, seasonal windows.
If your site is already in decent shape.
Platform and card fees are paid to them, not me. I will tell you what they run before you commit.
Somebody who has already bought from you is far easier to sell to than a stranger, and almost nobody up here has any way to reach those people on purpose. Social platforms rent you access to your own customers and change the terms whenever they feel like it. A list of email addresses is yours outright and does not care what the algorithm did this week.
What you are buying is the whole thing standing up and working: a signup on your site and at the counter, the list itself, a template that looks like you, and your first email actually written and sent. After that you either begin and maintain your email cadence yourself, or you hand it back to me and I develop the emails and the calendar.
What is included
What it costs
Platform, signup, template, and your first email written with you and sent.
All of the above, plus three more emails written and sent across one season.
Four emails a month, written and sent on the template we already built, so you never have to think about it. Cancel any time.
The account is in your name and the list belongs to you. Most email platforms are free until you pass a few hundred subscribers. A new custom template, as opposed to the one built during setup, is quoted separately.
This is the catch all, and for a lot of people it is the reason they call the first time. An email account that quit. A card reader that will not talk to the register. A domain nobody can find the login for.
There is no job too small here. If it plugs in or logs in, ask me. If it is a ten minute fix I will tell you that and not charge you for it.
What is included
What it costs
Billed in fifteen minute blocks, so a ten minute fix costs you ten minutes. Most of these get solved this way, over the phone or a screen share, without anybody driving anywhere.
For the things that need hands on the machine. Scheduled ahead, two hour minimum, plus $1 a mile past the first 20 miles from Middlebury.
If I can answer it in a phone call, I will, and that is the end of it.
Start with remote. It is cheaper for you and it settles most things the same day. I will tell you when a problem genuinely needs somebody standing in the room.
Not sure which one you need? Describe your needs and I will assess it and give you a path to a solution.
Do not run your business the same way. Three cryptids cross the ridgeline up top at their own pace, somewhere in among the deer and the moose and the fox, and one more is sitting perfectly still further down this page and has not moved since you got here. Click any of them to confirm the sighting.
Vermont is genuinely world class at keeping a secret. That is charming when the secret is a lake monster, and considerably less charming when the secret is a very good business with a phone number nobody can find. Confirm all four, then come back and let me fix the fifth one.
The three that move only appear when the wildlife is switched on, and Mothman keeps to the aurora. The one that does not move is hiding in plain sight a little further up.
You get a specific list of what is costing you customers, in priority order, and it is worth having whether or not you ever hire me.
Here is what I actually do with your name and your town. I search for you the way somebody three towns over would, on a phone, cold, not knowing what you are called. I write down where you turn up and where you do not. I open your listing and check whether the hours are right, whether the photos look like the place, whether anybody answered the last review. I load whatever site you have on a throttled signal and time how long it takes before a stranger could find your phone number.
Then you get the three things costing you the most, ranked, each one with what it would take to fix and roughly what that runs. Some of them you can fix yourself in an afternoon, and I will say so when that is true. The list is yours either way. Take it to somebody else, hand it to your nephew, work through it on a slow Tuesday. Most of what is broken out there is small, specific, and completely invisible until somebody sits down and looks. Once you can see it, you can decide what it is worth.
Business name, town, and what you do. That is genuinely the whole ask, and it takes about forty seconds to fill out.
The same way your next customer would, on a phone, cold. Then I write up the first three things I would fix, and send it over free.
One number for the whole build, agreed before I touch a single thing. If the scope does not change, neither does the number. Ever.
I build it, you look it over, it goes live. The domain, the site, the photos, and the list are all in your name from day one.
It is a start, and it is also rented ground. You do not own the reach, the layout, or the audience. Facebook decides who sees your posts, buries your hours three taps deep, and shows a stranger your last update from fourteen months ago. A real site plus a clean Google profile means the person searching at eleven in the morning actually finds you, on purpose, in the first three results.
Good, because that is the entire reason to hand this off. Leave your number on the form and I will call you, and we will talk it through in words you already use. You will never log into anything unless you genuinely want to, and I am not going to teach you a content management system against your will. You text me the change, I make the change, the change is live.
The numbers are open on this page so you can size the job before you ever contact me. They are ballparks, and the figure I put in writing is the figure you pay. No monthly retainer, no contract you have to read twice, no change order because the scope drifted while nobody was looking. Ask and I will tell you which tier you actually need, including the times when the answer is the cheapest one.
Not originally. I have travelled a lot of places and spent a lot of time in the woods, and Vermont is the one I stopped looking after. The wilderness here is most of the reason. I am planting roots and I am not going anywhere, which matters more in this line of work than where somebody was born, because the businesses I take on are ones I expect to still be looking after in ten years.
Give me your business name and your town and I will look you up the same way your next customer would, on a phone, cold. You get back the first three things I would fix, what each one takes, and roughly what it runs. No charge for that, and no follow up sequence afterward.
I will look you up cold, write down the first three things I would fix, and email the whole thing over. If you think of something else in the meantime, just reply to that email and it comes straight to me.
Want the long version first? See all services or read a case study.
There is no charge at this time and nothing here commits you to anything. Check off as many as you are curious about and I will come back with what each one would actually take. If you would rather just send me a note, choose the last option and write whatever you like.
I read everything myself, usually the same day. If you thought of something after you hit send, just reply to the confirmation and it comes straight to me.