The services I turn down, and why.
An unusual shelf for a consultant’s website: a public list of the things I refuse to take money for. The fastest way to prove I’m not selling snake oil is to publish which bottles I won’t stock.
Why this shelf exists
Because you’re going to get pitched this week.
If you run a business with a website, your inbox is a bazaar: bulk backlinks, guaranteed rankings, a thousand AI-written location pages, content by the pound. The pitches work because the buyer can’t tell the difference — everything sounds like SEO from the outside. This shelf is the difference, in writing. Read it before any agency call and you become the most annoying prospect on their sheet — which is, of course, the point.
There’s self-interest here too, and I’d rather name it than pretend otherwise: an informed buyer is my best referral source. People who understand what they’re buying hire people who explain rather than people who promise. I do fine in that world. The bazaar doesn’t.
The taxonomy
Three ways a service earns its place on this shelf.
Not everything here is a scam, and the shelf is honest about the distinctions. Some services simply don’t work anymore. Some work briefly and then cost you more than they made — the hangover services. And a few work fine; you just don’t need to pay a consultant for them, and anyone who charges you for fifteen minutes of work you could own yourself is telling you something about the rest of their invoice.
If you want to see what the guaranteed-rankings bottle actually delivers, the landscaping teardown is that story: #1 rankings, technically true, worth nothing — the vendor kept the promise and the client paid for a mirror.
Use it
Bring the list to your next pitch.
New entries land in the archive as the bazaar invents new bottles — and it always does. Meanwhile, the closest reads on the site:
- Ranking for its own name — and nothing anybody searches forWhat a kept ranking guarantee looks like from inside the business that bought it.
- $3,000 a month in ads, landing on a page that lost three buyers in fourMoney spent confidently on the wrong thing — the shelf’s recurring villain.
And if what you actually want is to know what your site does need — ranked, priced, in plain English — that’s the Revenue Audit. It comes with the same policy: if something isn’t worth fixing, the report says so.