Four disciplines.
One retainer.
No silos.
A Nine Stones engagement is a single relationship. Underneath that surface, four disciplines do the work — support, maintenance, optimisation and strategy — held together by one retainer.
- One senior partner across all four disciplines
- Support, maintenance, optimisation, strategy — one team
- Fixed monthly fee. Senior people. Work that ships.
- A retainer designed to build value, not churn
Bought separately, these four fight each other.
Most businesses end up buying these four things from four different places — a support desk somewhere, a maintenance plan bolted onto the hosting, an SEO agency on one contract and a strategy consultant on another. Each one does its bit. None of them talks to the others, and the gaps between them are usually where a website quietly falls over.
A Nine Stones retainer puts all four under one roof and one senior partner. Maintenance keeps the platform stable; support is there for when something breaks anyway; optimisation builds the value month on month; strategy decides where the whole thing should point. They're priced as one fixed monthly fee, run by one team, and reported together — so the work joins up instead of competing for budget.
That's the difference between a retainer that builds value and one that churns. You're not managing four suppliers or refereeing whose fault the latest problem is. You get the same faces every week, work that ships, and a programme accountable to revenue rather than activity. Pick a discipline below to see how each one works, or book a thirty-minute call and we'll map the right mix for a business your size.
Four disciplines, one retainer.
Website Support & Incident Response
What happens when something breaks — severity triage, defined response and resolution targets, a priority queue, and a plain incident report at the end. The reactive counterpart to proactive maintenance.
Read the chapter →Bedrock — proactive website maintenance
Bedrock, our entry package — performance, security, accessibility, plugin and CMS updates and uptime monitoring. The unglamorous work that keeps a commercial website out of trouble.
Read the chapter →Continuous Digital Optimisation
CRO, retainer SEO, lifecycle email, paid media, and the analytics foundation underneath it all — the disciplines that deliver value over months.
Read the chapter →Sector & Role Strategy
Where the retainer should point — strategy shaped around your sector and the role hiring us. Practical priorities for MDs and founders, solo marketing managers, B2B services firms and specialist retailers.
Read the chapter →Thirty minutes. No pitch deck.
We'll tell you honestly whether we can help. If we can't, we usually know someone who can.
What the thirty minutes covers: what you're trying to grow, what's worked so far and what hasn't, and an honest view on whether we're the right team to own it.