Aaron Plotkin

A one-person shop, working with a handful of businesses at a time

Your customers look you up before they walk in.

I help small businesses win that moment — getting found in search, showing up well on social, and handing off the repetitive work to tools that don't need a salary.

Book a free 30-minute call See what I do

This is the storefront most customers see first.

You're good at the thing you do. Nobody ever told you that you'd also need to be good at search rankings, content calendars, and software.

I spent close to two decades inside large retail and e-commerce businesses, making the decisions that determine which products get seen and which quietly disappear. Now I run my own one-person business, and I use that experience on behalf of owners who don't have a marketing department — or a spare ten hours a week.

It's just me. No account managers, no handoff to a junior. You work with the person doing the work, and I take on only as many clients as I can genuinely pay attention to.

What I help with

Fixed fees. No hourly billing, no long contracts.

Start here — one-time engagement

The online growth audit

Two weeks. I go through everything a customer encounters between hearing your name and buying from you, and I tell you the three or four things worth fixing first. You get a written plan, in plain language, that you could hand to someone else and have them execute.

  • How you rank when someone searches for what you sell nearby
  • Your listings, reviews, and the gaps competitors are using
  • Where your website loses people, page by page
  • What your social presence is actually doing for revenue
  • Pricing and offer structure against the businesses you lose to
  • A ranked 90-day plan with effort, cost, and expected payoff

$1,250 flat. Fully credited toward your first month if you decide to keep working with me.

Project or ongoing

Search visibility

Getting you into the results your customers are already looking at. Most of the wins here are unglamorous and permanent.

  • Local search and map listings cleaned up and consistent everywhere
  • The pages and terms worth ranking for, chosen from real search volume
  • Site structure, speed, and mobile issues that quietly cost you rank
  • A review system that keeps new ones coming in steadily
  • Monthly reporting on rank, calls, and clicks that came from search

$2,400 as a one-time build, or $850/month ongoing.

Project or ongoing

Social media strategy

Not posting for the sake of posting. A short list of things worth saying, on the one or two platforms where your customers actually are.

  • Which platforms deserve your time, and which to drop
  • Three to five content formats you can sustain without burning out
  • A monthly calendar built around your real business rhythm
  • What to do with comments, messages, and the occasional bad one
  • Paid promotion only where organic has proven the message works

$1,200 for the strategy and first calendar. $600/month if you want me alongside you running it.

Build and hand over

Small AI tools that give you your evenings back

Not a chatbot bolted onto your homepage. Narrow, sturdy automations built around a specific task you're currently doing by hand — running on your own accounts, documented, and yours to keep if we stop working together.

  • Review responder. Drafts a reply to every new review in your voice, flags the ones that need you personally, and posts nothing without your approval.
  • Custom automations. Quote follow-ups, booking reminders, competitor price monitoring, inbox triage — scoped to whatever is eating your week.
  • Runs in your accounts, so there's no lock-in
  • Written handover document plus a live training session
  • I'll tell you when AI is the wrong answer, which is often
  • Nothing goes out under your name without your approval

Review responder from $99/month, no setup fee. Custom automations from $1,800 built and handed over.

Monthly retainer

Someone to think it through with

An hour a week with a person who has seen the decision before. For owners who don't need work done so much as they need to stop making big calls alone at 11pm.

  • Weekly 60-minute working session
  • Questions answered between sessions within a business day
  • A second read on any offer, price change, or hire before it goes out
  • A short monthly written check on the numbers that matter

$750/month. Three-month minimum, then month to month. Cancel anytime after that.

What it costs

Published, because you shouldn't have to sit through a call to find out

Online growth audit

Two weeks. Full review and a ranked 90-day plan you own outright.

$1,250flat, credited back if you continue

Search visibility

Listings, site fixes, and the pages worth ranking for. Build it once, or keep it moving.

$2,400one-time build  ·  or $850/month

Social media strategy

Platform choice, content formats you can sustain, and your first calendar.

$1,200build  ·  or $600/month alongside you

Review responder

Set up on your accounts, then it runs. Nothing posts without your approval.

from $99per month  ·  no setup fee, cancel anytime

Custom automation

Scoped to one task that's currently eating your week.

from $1,800quoted after a scoping call

Monthly advisory

A weekly hour plus answers between sessions. Three-month minimum.

$750per month

The first ninety days

The audit, the search visibility build, and the social strategy, run in sequence over three months — which is how most businesses should start, and cheaper than buying them separately.

$3,900saves $950  ·  payable monthly

Every price above is fixed and quoted in writing before anything starts. I don't bill hourly, I don't charge for the first call, and there's nothing to cancel on the one-time work. If a job turns out to be bigger than we scoped, that's my estimating problem, not your invoice.

What good looks like

The patterns that move the needle most often

A two-van home services business

Invisible in the searches that mattered

They ranked nowhere for the emergency searches that drive most of their calls, and their listing showed the wrong hours in three places. Fixing the listings, building one honest page per service area, and asking every finished job for a review changed who the map showed first.

Result: calls from search up 63% in four months, and roughly 10 more booked jobs a month

A neighborhood café and roaster

Plenty of followers, almost no revenue

Posting daily on three platforms and getting nothing back. We cut to one platform, replaced product photos with the roasting and the people, and pointed every post at a single action — order online or come in before eleven. Less work, more traffic through the door.

Result: online orders nearly tripled, weekday morning traffic up about a quarter, on half the posting

A small consumer goods brand

Growing, but not keeping any of it

Revenue was climbing while margin fell. Half the catalog was losing money once shipping and ad spend were counted properly. Cutting the losing products, re-pricing the rest, and moving the budget to the two that actually converted made a smaller business a more profitable one.

Result: revenue down 12%, profit up 41%, and the owner working fewer hours

How working together goes

Usually two to three weeks from first call to first deliverable

A call

Thirty minutes, free. You describe the business and what's stuck. I'll tell you honestly if I'm not the right help.

A written scope

One page: what I'll do, what you'll get, a fixed price, and the date it lands. You decide with everything in front of you.

The work

I get access to what I need and go. One check-in partway through, so nothing arrives as a surprise.

Handover

You get the plan or the tool, plus a session walking you through it. Ongoing help only if you actually want it.

About me

I'm Aaron. For close to two decades I've worked the commercial side of e-commerce and consumer goods — the part of a business that decides what to sell, what to charge for it, and how to get someone to choose it over the alternative. Category and portfolio strategy, pricing, assortment, negotiating terms with suppliers, and getting things to market.

A lot of that was launch work, where the mandate was broad and the operating model didn't exist yet. I owned partner strategy for a new online commerce format and built the onboarding program that brought luxury brands onto it. The part I've always cared about is what's left standing afterward: the review rhythm, the framework someone else can run without me, the plan both sides are actually measured against.

That's what I try to leave behind with a small business too. Not a dependency on me — a way of working that keeps going after the engagement ends. It's why the audit comes as a written plan you could hand to someone else, and why the tools I build run on your accounts, not mine.

These days I run my own one-person business doing this for owners who don't have a marketing department. I know what it is to be the whole company: selling, doing the work, and answering the emails at night. That's the situation I build for. I take on a small number of clients at a time, and if I'm full I'll say so and point you somewhere useful.

This tends to work well for

  • Owner-operated businesses doing real revenue with no marketing staff
  • Local service businesses whose customers search before calling
  • Small brands selling online who suspect the numbers hide a problem
  • Owners who want to understand the plan, not just receive it

Probably not a fit for

  • Pre-revenue ideas looking for a co-founder
  • Anyone wanting posts published on a schedule and nothing more
  • Businesses needing a full rebrand or a new website built

Start with a call

Thirty minutes, no cost, no slide deck. Tell me what the business is and what isn't working, and I'll tell you whether I can help and roughly what it would take. If the answer is that you don't need me, I'll say that too.

aaronplot@gmail.com
Book a 30-minute call