Rung 4 · Monthly · 3-month minimum
A senior pair of hands inside your team, with the documentation as a by-product.
Fixed monthly hours for the backlog nobody gets to: connector hygiene, lifecycle changes, reporting, enablement. Weekly recorded working sessions; runbooks written as the work is done, not as a separate deliverable.
A fit when
- The audit or sprint is done and the backlog it produced needs a senior operator, not a ticket queue.
- You have a marketing ops seat open, or a new hire who needs a pair of hands for the first quarter.
- The work touches connectors and the CRM, where a mistake is expensive and the vendor's support queue is slow.
Not a fit when
- You need same-day SLAs or on-call coverage. This is standing hours, not a help desk.
- The work is campaign execution, content or paid media. Not this.
- You want an agency of record. There is one operator here, and the hours are the hours.
What you get
Deliverables
Hours, tracked
32 or 48 hours a month, logged against named backlog items and reported at month end. Unused hours do not roll over; the scope flexes instead.
Weekly recorded session
One working session a week with your team in the room, recorded and transcribed. The transcript becomes the documentation.
Runbooks as the by-product
Every recurring task gets a runbook the first time it is done. By month three your team can run most of the backlog without me.
Async by default
Questions answered within a business day; changes proposed in writing before they are made; nothing irreversible without your go.
Quarterly review
At the end of each quarter: what was done, what it cost, what the next quarter should hold, and whether you still need the hours.
Month to month after the first quarter
Three-month minimum, then rolling monthly with 30 days' notice either way.
How it runs
Timeline
Month 1
Backlog triaged and ranked with you; access model set up; the first three runbooks written while the work is done.
Month 2
Cadence running: weekly session, async queue, month-end report. Your team runs the first runbook themselves.
Month 3
Quarterly review: hours used, backlog burned down, what to keep. Decide on month to month, a step down in hours, or a stop.
What you have on day 30. A ranked backlog, an access model in place, the first three runbooks written, and one month-end report showing where the hours went.
Two rules on every engagement
Nothing irreversible runs without a captured before-state and your explicit authorisation.
Every engagement leaves recordings and a runbook your team can operate from.
Questions
Is 32 hours a month enough?
For most post-audit backlogs, yes — that is roughly a day a week of senior time. 48 hours suits a team in the middle of a migration.
Can the hours be used for a sprint?
No. A sprint has gates, guards and a fixed outcome and is priced as one. Embedded Ops is for the ongoing work around it.
What tools do you work in?
Yours. HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, and the usual connectors, warehouses and reporting layers. The recording and transcription stack is agreed with you and stays inside your tenant where required.
What about time zones?
Toronto, Eastern time. Sessions are scheduled in your working hours; UK and Irish mornings are fine.
Other rungs
3 weeks · read-only
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USD $4,500
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Systems Rescue Sprint
Dedupe, a lifecycle rebuild, attribution, a migration reconcile, a broken sync. Gated rollout, before-state captured for every irreversible action, and the upstream rule that stops it recurring.
USD $14,500
4–8 weeks
Custom Build
The executor or integration the platforms don't offer: a guarded merge executor, a Marketo–Salesforce sync repair, a HubSpot–Dynamics ownership layer, a reverse-ETL reporting spine.
USD $9,500 – $28,000
Start the retainer.
A 30-minute scoping call tells you which rung you need — or that you don't need one. No deck, no discovery theatre.