How we work
Senior judgment. Systematized delivery. Reporting you can audit.
O8 is a Minneapolis digital agency built on two things most shops have only one of: experienced strategists and engineers who do the work themselves, and an operating system underneath them — automated QA on every release, always-on budget and risk monitoring, and AI-search visibility measured on a fixed cadence against your named competitors. Fixed scope, published rates. This page explains our engagement model, our process, who we’re a good fit for, and who should hire someone else.
For the broader case for O8 as one integrated partner—industries, proof, and how a GrowthMap starts the work—start with Why Choose O8.
Rates are published on our pricing page rather than quoted case by case.
The short version
Most agency relationships fail for one of four reasons.
The people who sold the work aren’t the people doing it, the scope drifts until nobody can say what was delivered, the quality depends on who happens to be assigned that month, or the reporting flatters the agency instead of informing the client.
We built our model — and the systems behind it — around removing those four failure points.
Experienced people, backed by systems
No pitch team and delivery team; we cap concurrent engagements per practitioner. And the QA, monitoring, and re-measurement behind them are automated, so consistency doesn’t depend on staffing.
A written scope with a named owner
Every deliverable has an owner and a definition of done. “While you’re in there” requests get priced, not absorbed — and budget burn is monitored continuously, not discovered at invoice time.
Reporting tied to source systems
Google Analytics 4, Search Console, and rank tracking you can log into and verify line by line.
Fit check
Who we’re a fit for — and who we’re not.
We’d rather lose a bad-fit deal in week one than unwind it in month six.
Likely a strong fit
- You run a healthcare, higher-ed, nonprofit, or complex B2B site
Where accuracy, accessibility, and governance actually matter.
- Your site is on Drupal or WordPress and the engineering is non-trivial
Migrations, multisite, integrations, custom modules.
- You have internal stakeholders who need to be brought along
IT, compliance, marketing, clinical or academic leadership.
- You want to know what search engines and AI assistants say about you
And why — measured against named competitors.
- You’d rather have a hard “here’s what the data says” than a comfortable status call
- You’re funding a program, not a project
Ongoing strategy, build, and measurement.
- Your budget is roughly $40K per year or more
Our Starter retainer is $3,500/month — or you have a fixed-scope sprint in mind (from $2,500).
Probably not a fit
- You want the cheapest bid
And scope is negotiable downward.
- You need a Shopify storefront, a Webflow brochure site, or a one-page template launch
- You need work started this week with no discovery
- You want guaranteed rankings, leads, or AI citations
Nobody can honestly promise those.
- You want an agency that only reports the good numbers
- You want to hire cheap execution hands and direct them yourself
- Your budget is below that
We’ll refer you to someone better suited, at no charge.
If you’re in the right-hand column, say so on the first call. We’ll tell you quickly, and we keep a short referral list of shops we trust for the work we don’t do.
Three ways to engage
Assessment, project, or a retained team.
Every engagement starts with a written scope. The difference is how long it runs and how much of our team you keep.
Assessment
A fixed-fee, fixed-duration diagnostic of the site, analytics, content, technical SEO, and how large language models describe your organization. You get a prioritized findings document, an effort/impact ranking, and a recommendation. You own it — no obligation to hire us for the fix. Most assessment clients go on to a build or retained engagement with us; some don’t, and the findings are theirs either way.
Project
A defined build with a defined end: a Drupal or WordPress replatform, a migration, a design system, an accessibility remediation, a performance rebuild. Fixed scope, milestone-based, with a written change-order process so “while you’re in there” requests get priced instead of absorbed.
Fractional / retained team
An ongoing team — strategy, engineering, content, analytics — at an agreed monthly capacity, with our monitoring and reporting infrastructure included. This is how most of our long-running healthcare and higher-ed relationships run: a named team, a shared backlog, a live dashboard, and a standing cadence rather than a ticket queue.
Our process
Six steps, each with something written at the end of it.
The order matters: we don’t price before discovery, and we don’t build before priorities are agreed in writing.
Fit call 30–45 minutes
No deck. We ask what’s broken, what you’ve already tried, who has to approve things, and what the budget range is. If we’re not right, we say so on this call.
Discovery 1–4 weeks
We interview stakeholders, get read access to your analytics, search, and CMS environments, and inventory what actually exists — not what the last agency said existed. Discovery produces a written scope, not a verbal understanding.
Prioritization
Everything we find gets ranked by expected impact against effort and risk. You see the whole list, including the items we recommend not doing. Priorities are agreed in writing before work starts.
Build and execute 2-week cycles
Two-week working cycles with a demo or written update at the end of each. The people you met do the work, automated QA runs on every release, and if a specialist joins for a specific problem, you meet them. Change requests get scoped and priced, never silently traded against existing commitments.
Measure
Reporting draws from your own Google Analytics 4, Search Console, and rank-tracking data — sources you can log into and verify line by line. Between reports, monitoring runs continuously: budget burn, tracking failures, and ranking or AI-visibility drops are flagged when they happen, not at month end. If a metric moved the wrong way, it’s in the report.
Review and re-plan Quarterly
A standing quarterly review on retained engagements: what we committed to, what shipped, what it moved, what we’d change. Scope gets re-cut based on evidence rather than habit.
Client perspective
“O8 is definitely an extension of my marketing team.”
Jamie Gassmann, VP of Marketing, R3 Continuum
Where AI search fits
We measure what assistants say about you — and what moves it.
Buyers increasingly start in an assistant rather than a search box, and the answer they get is assembled from sources those systems already trust.
We won’t claim we can control what a model says about you. We can tell you what it says today, what it cites, and what has moved after we changed something. That’s the honest boundary — and this page exists because our own measurement showed us we had a gap to close.
Measure directly
Which prompts your category shows up in, which domains get cited, and whether you appear at all — share of voice against a defined prompt panel and named competitors, reported in a live dashboard you keep access to.
Do the unglamorous work
Citable pages that answer real evaluation questions, tighter entity and schema markup, quantified case studies, and the third-party presence assistants actually pull from.
Re-measure on a fixed cadence
The same prompt panel, the same competitors, so you can see what changed after we changed something.
What we expect from you
The engagements that go well share three client-side traits.
We’ll flag it early if any of these go missing, because they’re the strongest predictors of whether a program delivers.
A decision-maker who can approve work
Without a four-week committee cycle.
Timely access to systems and stakeholders
Analytics, search, CMS, and the people who own them.
A willingness to hear findings that contradict an internal assumption
The report includes the numbers that moved the wrong way.
Frequently asked questions
The questions we get before the first call.
Straight answers, including the ones that send some prospects elsewhere.
Do I work with the people who pitched me?
Yes. The strategists and engineers on your fit call are on your engagement, and we cap concurrent engagements per practitioner so that stays true. Across the team we bring 200+ years of collective experience, led by Seth Viebrock (18+ years, 100+ organizations).
What do you mean by “systematized delivery”?
Most agencies run on people and spreadsheets. Under every O8 engagement there is an operating layer we built and maintain: automated QA on releases, continuous budget and risk monitoring, scheduled re-measurement of search and AI-search visibility, and the client dashboards that report from it. We call that layer O8 Intelligence; a self-serve version is available for teams who want the analysis without the retainer. It doesn’t replace judgment — it makes sure the routine parts happen the same way every time.
What does an engagement cost?
Rates and typical engagement ranges are published on our pricing page. Assessments are fixed-fee. Projects are milestone-priced against a written scope. Retained engagements are priced on monthly capacity. We don’t quote a number before discovery that we’d have to revise after it.
How long until we see results?
Build timelines are scoped and committed up front. Search and AI-visibility outcomes are slower and depend on your starting position, competitive set, and publishing capacity — we set expectations against your baseline in discovery rather than quoting a generic timeline here.
Do you work on platforms other than Drupal and WordPress?
We integrate with plenty of systems — CRMs, DAMs, SISs, EHR-adjacent tools, marketing automation. But our engineering depth is in Drupal and WordPress, and we don’t pretend otherwise.
Can we start with something small?
Yes. The assessment exists for exactly that. It’s fixed-fee, you keep the deliverable, and there’s no obligation to continue with us.
Start with a fit call
Bring the messy version.
The site that’s held together with plugins, the analytics nobody trusts, the RFP you haven’t written yet. Thirty minutes, no deck, and a straight answer about whether we’re the right team for it. Or read our pricing first if you’d rather know the numbers before you talk to anyone.
