What an ongoing partnership includes, from CA$3,000 a month

What 12 hours a month actually buys.

The 12 hours include the monthly planning call, a weekly written update, and the implementation, testing and support that comes out of whatever we agree to prioritise that month (byImprint pricing, revision 2026-09-06). It is not 12 hours of build time with planning and reporting added on top; the update and the call are part of the reserved capacity, because a partnership that only reports at the end of the month is not actually being managed, it is being hoped at.

There is no automatic rollover of unused hours and no unlimited-request promise hiding behind the word partnership. What twelve hours buys is real, bounded, and I would rather say that plainly than let the number imply more than it delivers.

I would rather under-describe what twelve hours covers than over-promise it. If a month’s priority turns out to need more than twelve hours to finish properly, that gets said in the planning call, with the choice of extending into the next month or agreeing a one-off addition, not silently absorbed or silently dropped.

None of this is meant to sound rigid for its own sake. It is meant to make a recurring monthly fee something you can actually evaluate, month to month, against what it bought, rather than trusting a number to average out over a year.

One priority at a time.

A partnership works through one agreed implementation priority at a time, with at most one additional project running alongside it if that is part of the agreed mix. That is a deliberate constraint, not a limitation I would remove if I could: twelve hours spread across four half-finished priorities delivers less than twelve hours spent finishing one.

That does not mean nothing else gets acknowledged. Smaller requests get logged and triaged in the weekly update; they simply are not what the reserved hours are spent building until they become the priority, or until there is genuine spare capacity in a given month, which the update will say plainly rather than imply.

The same rule applies if something genuinely urgent shows up mid-month: we talk about whether it displaces the current priority or waits, rather than both quietly running at half speed and neither finishing on time.

How response and completion actually work.

I respond and give a next step within two business days, Monday to Friday, Pacific time, excluding local public holidays and any leave agreed in advance. That is not a completion deadline and not round-the-clock incident cover; it is an acknowledgement and a next step, with completion dates depending on what the work actually needs, not a fixed turnaround promise.

I would rather set that expectation clearly than promise a turnaround I cannot reliably hit. A two-day acknowledgement is a commitment I can keep every week; a same-day fix on anything, regardless of size, is not, and pretending otherwise would make the partnership less useful, not more.

Completion dates for the priority itself are agreed in the planning call once the scope is clear, the same way they would be for a focused project; the two-day figure is about acknowledgement, not about how long the underlying work takes.

The readback method, from a real ninety-day engagement.

The rhythm an ongoing partnership runs on is the same one I used with Doggy Tales, a Whistler dog-walking business, over a fixed ninety-day sprint: a short written plan, paste-ready changes Chad made himself, and a plain-English readback at Day 0, 30, 60 and 90 against dated records. By the Day 90 check, search clicks had gone from about four a day in June to about seven in August, the best month on record; every page unindexed at Day 30 was indexed by the next check; and the Business Profile appeared in six of eight sampled Whistler searches where June had found none (Doggy Tales case, verified 3 September 2026).

That was a fixed sprint with an end date, not an ongoing partnership, and enquiries, bookings and revenue were not measured in it. What carries over into the partnership is the method: a plan you can check, work you can see land, and a readback against real records instead of a general sense that things are improving.

I use the same readback structure inside an open partnership, just on a rolling basis instead of four fixed checkpoints: what moved this month, checked against what we said we would do, not a general sense of progress.

• Read the Doggy Tales case

If I can’t supply the reserved hours.

If byImprint cannot supply the reserved capacity in a given month, we agree replacement time or a proportionate credit or refund; you are never charged for the time it takes me to correct an in-scope fault of my own making. That obligation sits with me, not as a favour.

This clause exists because a reserved-capacity arrangement only works if the obligation runs both ways. You are committing to a monthly fee in advance; the least I can commit to in return is not keeping that fee for capacity I did not actually supply.

In practice this has mostly meant a planning call moving by a few days around a holiday, not a missed month. I mention the clause because a monthly-in-advance arrangement should say plainly what happens if the other side of it does not hold up, not leave it unstated.

Payment, notice, and what doesn’t roll over.

The partnership is paid monthly in advance, with 30 days’ notice from either side to end it and an agreed handover at that point. Reserved hours do not roll over month to month; an unusually quiet month does not bank hours for a busier one later, which is part of why the priority stays deliberately narrow rather than trying to stretch coverage across everything at once.

Starting needs the same groundwork as a project: agreed scope for the first priority, access to whatever it touches, and the initial month’s payment landing before work begins. If something on your side needs more time, the start date moves by agreement; I do not rush the beginning to hit an arbitrary date.

None of these terms are unusual for retainer-style work; they are the same shape a contractor or an agency retainer would use. I state them here because the pricing page gives the numbers without the reasoning behind them, and the reasoning is worth having in one place.

What counts as support fit.

A partnership does not automatically cover a workflow that needs continuous response, something breaking overnight and needing an answer before morning. If that is what a business actually needs, appropriate support cover has to be arranged explicitly, in its own scope, rather than assumed to be included in twelve reserved hours.

In practice, that conversation happens early, usually in the first planning call: is anything in scope the kind of thing that breaks and needs an answer outside normal hours, and if so, what does covering that properly actually require, separately priced, rather than assumed to be absorbed into the standard twelve.

Where cover is arranged, it is scoped and priced on its own terms, separate from the twelve reserved hours, so the partnership’s core rhythm, one planning call, one weekly update, one priority, stays the same regardless of whether support cover sits alongside it.

The weekly update, in practice.

The weekly written update is short on purpose: what moved, what is next, and anything that needs a decision from you before I can keep going. It is not a status exercise for its own sake; if there is nothing worth reporting in a given week, the update says that plainly rather than padding itself out to look busy.

It is also the record that makes the monthly planning call useful. Neither of us is starting that call from memory; we are starting it from four short updates that already say what happened, which leaves the call for deciding what happens next instead of reconstructing what already did.

If a priority is genuinely stuck on something outside my control, waiting on you for a decision, waiting on a third party for access, the update says that too, rather than staying quiet until the next planning call makes it awkward to explain.

What an ongoing partnership is for, that a single project isn’t.

A focused project fits a defined improvement with a clear finish line. An ongoing partnership fits a business where the priority keeps moving: a workflow that needs adjusting as the season changes, a website that needs regular attention rather than a single rebuild, or simply wanting one person who already understands the business checking the whole surface on a schedule. If what you actually need is one thing built and handed over, the focused project is very likely the better fit, and cheaper.

If the first priority still needs investigation before it can be scoped properly, a CA$750 focused discovery is a lower-commitment way to start; if we move into a partnership within 30 days, that fee counts toward the engagement rather than sitting on top of it.

If you are choosing between the two, the honest test is whether the work you are describing has an end date. If it does, a focused project probably covers it for less. If it genuinely does not, the partnership is built for that, not as an upsell from the smaller option.

I would rather lose a partnership enquiry that should have been a project than sign a partnership that does not fit the actual shape of the work. That has meant saying no to the bigger number more than once, and I expect it will again.

• What a focused project includes

What to send me first.

Tell me what has been recurring rather than one-off: the thing that needs attention every month, not once. That is the clearest sign a partnership fits better than a single project, and it is enough to start the conversation. The first 20-minute call is free.

If the honest answer is “I’m not sure yet whether this is one project or an ongoing thing,” that is a normal place to start from. Working that out together, before either of us commits to a shape, is part of the first conversation.

• Tell me what’s getting in the way