08:36
Why we charge a setup fee for Meta ads
Yes, we charge a setup fee.
That’s unusual in this space, and I get why it raises eyebrows.
I’m not going to tell you what the setup fee is here — you’ll find that out on a discovery call — but I do want to explain why it exists.
The easiest way to think about it is foundations.
When you build a house, you don’t rush the foundations.
You spend money there, because everything else depends on it.
Our setup fee covers the foundational work that determines whether your campaigns work long term or quietly fail.
Video shoots aren’t optional for us.
Funnels are bespoke, not templates.
Creative output runs into the hundreds of assets, not a handful of ads.
On top of that, we spend serious time understanding how your sales process actually functions — not how it should function on paper.
That understanding is why we can compare performance properly across clients, avoid giving bad advice, and position ads in a way that actually fits your business.
When you onboard, you also get immediate access to learnings from over 20 clients collectively spending well into six figures per month on advertising.
That context matters.
And you benefit from it on day one.
This video explains why we do things this way, and why charging a setup fee is a deliberate decision — not an arbitrary one.
For context, this video was originally recorded on 5 December 2024, views & strategies may have changed since.
Featuring
Video transcript
So yes, we have a setup fee. Pretty wild, because very few people in this space do. I’m not going to tell you what the setup fee is—you’ll have to book a discovery call to find that out—but I will explain why we charge one.
When you build a house, you lay the foundations first, and you spend a lot of money on those foundations because without them, the house falls down. That analogy pretty much explains this entire video. We charge a setup fee because we do a significant amount of foundational work that determines the long-term performance of your campaigns.
The first part of that foundation is enforcing that we actually come out and shoot video ads with you. This is not an add-on for us—it’s a non-negotiable. It’s simply how we work. If you already have your own videographer, that’s great and we can potentially reduce the setup fee slightly. If you don’t, we bring our own.
Next, we build a fully bespoke funnel for you. We don’t use Meta’s native lead forms. They’re free and easy, but they’re not the best solution. Instead, we build mobile-first, custom funnels designed specifically for performance.
After that comes full post-production and creative processing. From a single shoot, we turn the footage into anywhere from 50 to 300 ads. We typically have 15 to 30 creative angles, and each of those has five to ten variants based on different hooks and calls to action. You can imagine how resource-intensive that is, especially across more than 20 clients.
We also spend a significant amount of time understanding your sales process—how you currently operate, where you’re at, what reporting you have in place, and how everything fits together. This allows us to reliably see what’s actually happening in your business. Without that understanding, we could plug you into a CRM and generate numbers, but we wouldn’t truly understand your process or why you do things the way you do.
That understanding is critical. We compare metrics like lead-to-call rate, call-to-survey rate, and survey-to-deal rate across all our clients. If we don’t understand your specific process—and if you don’t fully understand it either—we could give you completely incorrect advice or position your ads in the wrong way. That’s why we haven’t had a client churn in two years. We take the time upfront to understand where you’re trying to go, so even if things don’t work perfectly immediately, we know exactly what needs fixing.
Finally, when you onboard with us and pay the setup fee, you get immediate access to insights and data from over 20 clients who are collectively spending well into six figures per month on advertising. You benefit from that data from day one. That alone is probably worth the setup fee, because you’re standing on the shoulders of giants and applying proven learnings directly to your business.
That’s why we charge a setup fee. We’ve even done some creative things in the past where people pay more overall but structure the payments differently. If that’s something you’re interested in, just get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.
Hopefully that explains why we have a setup fee when others don’t. I’ll catch you in the next one.
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