Run Digital works with Utah businesses on the economics underneath the channels: what a customer is worth over their life, what you can afford to pay to acquire one, and which of your channels is actually producing the customers who stay. It is the least glamorous work we do and it changes the most.
Every agency says they are different. These are the three we will be held to, on every engagement, from the first month.
A standing meeting cadence, real project management, and deliverables with dates on them. You always know what shipped, what is in flight and what slipped.
You decide if we earn our seat at your table every month. There is no contract asking you not to.
Not a generic benchmark from somebody else's industry report. Your margin, your repeat rate and your retention decide the plan, and they are specific enough that no benchmark helps.
Ask for something specific and the answer is usually yes, built for you rather than pulled off a shelf.
Not a sales rep, then a success manager, then an account manager relaying your question to someone who can answer it.
You talk to the people who will run the channels afterwards.
It is an understandable mistake. The first purchase is the one you can see immediately, and the ones after it are uncertain. So the budget gets set against it, and any channel that does not pay for itself on day one gets cut.
The problem is that your competitor may not be making the same mistake. A business that knows a customer is worth four purchases can afford to pay several times more to acquire one than a business that only counts the first, and will simply outbid you everywhere while being no better at marketing than you are.
This is why we start here rather than with channels. Everything downstream, including which channels are viable at all, depends on a number most businesses have never worked out.
Four figures you already have. There are no benchmarks in this and nothing assumed. It just shows you the gap between what you measure and what a customer is actually worth.
Four numbers you already have. This is the calculation that decides what you can afford to spend to acquire someone, and most businesses only ever look at the first purchase.
The gap between the first two numbers is the entire point. A business judging acquisition on the first purchase will underspend and lose ground to a competitor who understands the second, even when the competitor is worse at marketing.
This page is about arithmetic rather than infrastructure, but ownership matters here for a specific and underrated reason. You cannot work out lifetime value without your own customer history.
Repeat purchase rate, retention, which channel produced the customers who stayed. All of it lives in the CRM and the analytics history. If either of those belongs to an agency, you cannot answer any of these questions, and you certainly cannot answer them about the period before you left.
That is why we build everything in accounts registered to your business. Not as a principle, although it is one, but because the analysis on this page is impossible without it.
Doing this properly needs somebody who can get the data out, somebody who understands the finance side, somebody running the channels against the result, somebody working on retention, and somebody senior deciding what the business is actually optimising for.
We built our careers inside in-house teams before we built this one. Brian has twenty years in search and marketing operations. Quinn came up in-house at large publishers where lifetime value was the entire commercial model. That is the team you are renting time on.
Two of the five seats you would otherwise be recruiting for.
Utah is growing faster than almost anywhere, which makes acquisition genuinely worth investing in and makes underspending genuinely costly. Every figure below is published and linked.
population growth over the past decade against 6.2% nationally, second fastest of any state. A continuous supply of customers with no existing supplier.
USAFacts, US Census dataof Utah businesses are small businesses, 371,569 of them. Most are setting budget against the first sale, which is the opportunity.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025of Utah employees work at one of those small businesses, about 690,069 people. Customer relationships here are long and personal.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025competitors. The first one in your category to work out their real ceiling gets to outbid everybody else for years.
SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025That last point is the whole argument for doing this work first. In a growing market, the business that can afford to pay the most to acquire a customer wins, and that is decided by arithmetic rather than by cleverness.
This is the list you would be hiring five people to cover.
Built from your actual purchase history rather than an industry benchmark, with the assumptions written down and challengeable.
What each channel really costs to produce a customer, not a lead, including the ones that arrive by phone.
Whether the customers you acquired last year are behaving like the ones from two years ago, which is usually where the surprise is.
How long before a new customer pays back their acquisition cost, which decides how fast you can safely grow.
The cheapest growth available to most businesses, and the one nobody owns. Reactivation, repeat purchase and the reasons people leave.
Moving budget toward the channels producing customers who stay, which is frequently not the channel with the lowest cost per lead.
Not our field to decide, but the arithmetic often points at it, and we would rather say so than optimise around a problem.
The numbers recalculated as they move, because a model built once and never revisited stops being true quite quickly.
The businesses that grow fastest are usually not the best marketers. They are the ones who worked out what they could afford to spend.
We would rather be useful before you hire us than persuasive. Take any of these whether or not we ever work together.
We work through your lifetime value and acquisition cost with you and write down what we find. Yours to keep whatever happens next.
FreeThe spreadsheet we use, so your team can track this without paying anyone to build it.
FreePhysical NFC cards and counter stands that send customers straight to your review page. We print them and send them to you.
FreeStuck on a platform you do not own? We will move the site for free. Getting you onto your own infrastructure is the point.
This work is mostly getting data out of systems that were not designed to give it up. This is the order.
Purchase and customer data from wherever it actually lives, which is usually three places that disagree. Reconciling them is most of the first month.
Written down, yours to keepLifetime value and acquisition cost calculated with the assumptions visible, so you can argue with them. A model you do not believe is useless.
Yours, in your spreadsheetCohorts by channel and by period. This is the step that usually changes somebody's mind about a channel they were about to cut.
Budget moved toward what produces customers who last, at a pace your cash flow and your payback period actually support.
Retention and repeat purchase, because raising lifetime value raises your acquisition ceiling everywhere at once. It is the highest leverage work available.
The findings get written down. You keep them either way.
Those are counts, not projections. There is deliberately no industry lifetime value figure anywhere on this page, because a number averaged across every business in a category is worse than no number at all. It gives you false confidence in a decision about your money.
If you want to see how we present this work, ask on the call and we will walk you through a real model rather than a template.
We do this for businesses in Salt Lake City, Provo, Orem, Lehi, Ogden, West Jordan, St. George and across the state. Utah customer relationships tend to run longer than the national picture, which usually means lifetime value here is higher than owners assume and the ceiling is higher too.
If the arithmetic says your problem is the offer or the margin rather than the marketing, we will tell you that. It is not what anybody wants to hear and it is the most useful thing we can say.
Once you know what a customer is worth, every channel conversation becomes a question of arithmetic rather than of opinion.
Google charges you per lead and decides what counts as one. We run the profile, the disputes and the pacing.
Takes the repetitive work off your team without taking the judgement away.
Earns the clicks you would otherwise rent, and keeps earning them after the budget stops.
The page everything else sends traffic to. If it does not convert, nothing upstream matters.
You probably have more than you think, and even a rough version beats the first-purchase assumption you are using now. If the data genuinely is not there, the first piece of work is making sure it will be next year.
We would rather not, and we will explain why on the call. An average across every business in a category has almost no relationship to yours, and using one gives you false confidence in a decision about real money.
Then we will say so. Sometimes the answer is that acquisition is working and the problem is retention, or pricing, or capacity. Those are not our services to sell and it is still the right answer.
Possibly, and that is a decision rather than an accident. It depends on your payback period and your cash position. What matters is that it is chosen deliberately rather than discovered afterwards.
A flat package rather than a percentage, with current pricing on the packages page. This work is often a one-off piece followed by channel work, and we will tell you if that is all you need from us.
At least annually, and whenever something structural changes in your pricing or your offer. A model built once and never revisited becomes wrong quietly, which is worse than not having one.
You do, in your own spreadsheet, with the assumptions visible and editable. You should be able to challenge every line of it, and if you cannot then we have not explained it properly.
There is no contract, so you leave whenever you want and keep the model, the data and the analysis. This is also the piece of work we are most comfortable handing over and never hearing about again, because it is worth having either way.
Bring whatever purchase history you have and we will work out what a customer is worth to you and what you can afford to spend acquiring one. You keep the analysis either way, and if the answer is that the problem is not marketing we will say so. Prices are published, so you can see what this costs before you speak to anyone.