Doctrine
Five things I will not do, and why each one is a refusal, not a policy.
The home page names them in a line each. This is the long form, the years behind them, because a policy nobody has to defend is not really a policy at all.
I watched these happen to other people first
Before Origami Digital, I did this work as the operator behind other people’s agencies, across three countries, for years. I was never the name on the account. I was the person who actually wrote the plan, built the pages and watched what happened next.
That seat teaches you things a client seat never does. You see the report get written the night before it is due. You see the call where a business owner asks a plain question and gets a paragraph that answers a different one. You see what actually moved a ranking, and how rarely that thing was mentioned out loud.
The five refusals below are not principles I read somewhere. Each one is the direct opposite of something I watched happen, more than once, to somebody who trusted the wrong report.
The five, and what sits behind each one
No account manager
An account manager exists to translate between a client and the person doing the work. That job only needs to exist because the person doing the work is not allowed to talk to the client directly. I have sat on the other side of that wall and watched a client's plain instruction arrive to me reworded twice, losing the one detail that mattered both times. The person who answers your message is the person who does your work. There is nothing to relay, so nothing gets lost in the relay.
No forty seven page welcome pack
I have seen one sold as strategy, and I have watched the client read the first four pages, put it in a drawer, and never open it again. It existed to make a fee feel earned, not to be used. What you get from me is a plan you can read in ten minutes, in words you already know, and check against the actual work later. If it takes longer than ten minutes to understand what I am going to do, I have not finished writing it yet.
No words that mean nothing
Impressions, SERPs, click through rate, holistic synergy, deliverables actioned as per scope. I have written these words into reports myself, for other people's clients, because they sound like expertise and they do not commit to anything checkable. Now I write times shown, page one, spot two, calls, bookings. A number with no meaning attached to it is not information, it is a costume information wears.
No quiet months
A report has to exist every month whether or not the month produced anything worth celebrating, because silence reads as hiding something even when nothing is being hidden. I have sent reports that padded a slow month with charts nobody asked for rather than writing the true sentence: this month was quiet, here is why, here is what changes next month. The true sentence is shorter and it is the one I write now.
No borrowed credibility
Bought links, stock photography of meeting rooms nobody has ever sat in, a team page built from stock headshots when the team is one person. Borrowed credibility is a bet that nobody checks, and Google increasingly checks. My own site names one operator because that is who is there, and every number on it can be opened and read at its source.
Every one of these is something an agency has already done to somebody
That line is on the home page for a reason. Nobody had to invent a hypothetical to write this list. It is why the agencies who did it lost the client, and why the refusal is worth more than the feature it replaces.
Tell me what’s broken.
A few sentences is enough. I look at your site, your rivals and your Google listing before I reply.