Most people who do good work for a living did not get into it because they wanted to build websites, run ads, or reconcile accounts. But those things decide whether the work is sustainable. This is practical help with the parts of a small service business that tend to get put off — no jargon, no packages you don't need, and nothing you can't eventually run yourself.
This is deliberately narrow. Staying inside a scope I can do genuinely well is more useful to you than a long list of services I'd be learning on your time.
If you don't know which of these you need — or whether you need any of them — start here. Ninety minutes, one honest look at everything you've built, and a clear picture of what would actually help.
We go through the whole thing. Your pricing, and whether it reflects what you're worth and what you can sustain. Your communications — website, email list, socials — and whether they're doing anything or just existing. Your sessions and packages, and whether they're shaped around how you actually like to work. Your systems, all of them, and where they're quietly costing you hours.
The question underneath all of it isn't whether you've built something good. It's whether you've built something sustainable for you specifically. There's no universal answer to that. A structure that keeps one practitioner energized will run another one into the ground, so I'm not checking your business against a template — I'm looking at yours, and at you, and asking whether the two fit.
What you get is someone else's eyes on it — someone who has run nonprofits, healing centers, retreats, private practices, and multi-person collectives, and who has watched which structures lead to burnout and which ones let a person keep being of service without disappearing into the work. That's the real thing being assessed here: whether what you've built lets you serve people and honor yourself, or quietly asks you to pick one.
After the first session you have two ways forward, and doing nothing at all is a real third. Keep meeting for strategy support at the lower rate, or hand off individual pieces of what we talked about — the website, the ad funnel, the books — and I'll take those on directly. Plenty of people leave with a plan and simply go do it themselves. Either way, you'll know what you're dealing with.
* If cost feels out of reach, reach out anyway — I keep a limited number of discounted spots open, I'm open to trade, and there are often creative ways to make it work.
“How does your brain even work like this? We had built something completely unsustainable and none of us could see a way out of it — we just kept absorbing it. Gabrielle went through the whole operation and rebuilt how we actually run. And then it was just… done. We could finally get on with the work we exist to do.”
Christy M. · business strategy & systems redesign
A website needs them. Ads need them. The eight posts from an audit need them. None of those include photography, so this is the one thing to sort out before we start — and I'd steer you away from filling the gap with stock images. Stock is fine as texture in one or two places, but a site made entirely of strangers in bright offices reads as exactly that, and people can feel it before they can name it.
What works is photographs of you, your space, and your hands doing the thing you actually do. They don't have to come from a professional studio shoot — but they do need to be taken by someone with a real eye, which is not the same as someone with a good phone. That difference shows up on every page.
If you don't have those, ask me. I can point you to someone local who shoots this kind of work well. And if what you really want is for somebody to run your social accounts week to week, I don't do that — but I know someone who's genuinely good at it, and I'm happy to make the introduction.
A site that says clearly who you are, what you offer, and how to reach you — and that loads fast on a phone, because that's where most people will find you. No template that looks like everyone else's.
These are hand-built rather than assembled in a drag-and-drop page builder, which is why they load fast and look like you. The tradeoff is that changes come through me rather than you logging in to edit them — so updates are handled at flat rates, and you're never guessing what a small change will cost.
Flat rates, not hourly, so you always know the number before you ask.
The line between them is simple: changing something that's already there is a small update. Making something that doesn't exist yet is a larger one. Anything bigger than a single new page — a rebuild, a batch of new sections, a whole second site — I'll quote before starting, so there are no surprises either way.
Squarespace and Wix start around $240 a year and never stop. Five years in, that's $1,200 and you still don't own the thing — stop paying and the site goes away.
A built site has no platform subscription behind it. Your only recurring cost is your domain name, typically around $15 to $20 a year. Even with a couple of updates annually, you come out ahead by roughly year three, and further ahead every year after that.
* If cost feels out of reach, reach out anyway — I keep a limited number of discounted spots open, I'm open to trade, and there are often creative ways to make it work.
That link goes to Rooted Manual Therapy, a practice in Missoula — a full site with articles, intake and waiver forms, and booking, built the way described above. Have a click around and judge it for yourself.
“This is the nicest website I've ever had, and the price was unbeatable. It looks like my actual practice instead of a template, and it's one more thing I don't have to think about anymore.”
Rob D. · manual therapist. Full disclosure: Rob is my husband. He also paid full freight, and he'd have told me if it were bad.
Advertising is where small businesses most often spend money without knowing what it bought. The goal here is the opposite: a funnel built properly once, set up so you can see what's actually working — and stop the parts that aren't.
This is a build, not a retainer. I set the whole thing up, get it running, and hand it over to you working. I don't manage ad accounts month to month, because doing that well means checking them near-daily, and that isn't the kind of work I want to be doing for people.
Ad spend is separate and goes straight to Meta. Most small practices run somewhere around $300 a month to start. That money is yours and never passes through me — you're paying me to build the thing, not to hold your budget.
A one-time look at what you're already posting and where it's going: what's working, what's wasted effort, what to stop doing, and what would actually move people toward booking you. You don't just get a diagnosis — you get a plan, and eight posts already built to fill the gaps I found.
* If cost feels out of reach, reach out anyway — I keep a limited number of discounted spots open, I'm open to trade, and there are often creative ways to make it work.
“What surprised me is that the ads sounded like us. Nothing salesy, nothing yucky — I wasn't embarrassed to have them out there with my name on them. And they worked. New clients started coming in within a couple of months, which is not how it went during the years I spent waiting on word of mouth.”
Kaitlin G. · Meta ad funnel
For most solo practitioners this is the piece that generates the most dread and the most avoidable cost. Books kept steadily through the year mean tax time is a formality rather than an emergency, and it means you actually know, month to month, whether the business is working.
I take on simple books for service-based businesses, and I keep them in spreadsheets rather than accounting software. That's a deliberate limit: it works beautifully for a practice with straightforward income and expenses, and it's the wrong tool for a business with inventory, payroll, or complicated multi-account bookkeeping. If yours has outgrown a spreadsheet, you need someone else, and I'll say so.
I'm not a CPA. I am registered with the IRS to prepare and file returns on behalf of clients, and year-end filing is included in the monthly rate rather than billed separately when tax season comes around.
$250 per month, tax filing included
* If that feels out of reach, reach out anyway — I keep a limited number of discounted spots open, I'm open to trade, and there are often creative ways to make it work.
“I was years behind and dreading every bit of it. Having someone else's eyes on my books was such a relief. Self-employment taxes are genuinely hard when your brain works in a creative way and not a numbers way — and now it's off my plate, and it stays off.”
Sarah K. · bookkeeping & tax filing
Most of this is done for you, not taught at you. There is an entire industry built on selling small business owners a course — six modules, a workbook, a private community — and you finish it more confused than you started, holding a to-do list longer than the one you walked in with. You didn't need homework. You needed the thing done.
So this is collaborative, but the work lands on me. We talk through what you want, I build it, you look at it and tell me what's off, I fix it. You stay in the decisions without having to become a web developer, an ad strategist, or a bookkeeper along the way. And when it's finished, it's finished — off your plate, not moved to a different corner of it.
It stays affordable because I know exactly how hard it is to get a service-based business off the ground. I've done it for myself, for friends, and for nonprofits, healing centers, retreats, private practices, and multi-person collectives — organizations at very different scales, with very different problems, which is most of how I learned what actually transfers between them and what doesn't.
So this isn't theory I picked up somewhere. My own work is a practice with clients, a training program with visiting teachers, retreats, lodging, waivers, insurance, and the bookkeeping that holds all of it together. Every system I'd set up for you is one I've had to build and fix for myself first — and then watched work, or not work, in somebody else's hands.
It also means I understand what makes this different for practitioners specifically: that marketing can feel at odds with the work, that pricing brings up more than spreadsheets do, and that most business advice is written for a kind of business that yours isn't. That doesn't make the numbers optional. It just means you deserve someone who takes both parts seriously.