How Much Does It Cost to Hire a StoryBrand Guide?
Every price is on this page. Messaging, websites, copy, local SEO, retainers, and the reason each one costs what it does. No form to fill in. No call to sit through first. Read it, do the math, and decide for yourself whether it's worth a conversation.
- Messaging alone (BrandScript, one-liner, brand story) runs $1,000–$1,500.
- A complete StoryBrand website — message, keyword research, copy, design and build — is $8,000, in WordPress or GoHighLevel.
- An existing site rebuilt as a StoryBrand site starts at $8,000, whatever platform it's on, and rises with the size of the site.
- A full sales machine — site, lead generator, email sequence and local SEO — lands in the high teens.
- Prices differ between Guides because of three things only: expertise, experience, and how much time your project takes. That's the whole formula.
- Not ready to commit? The AI Readiness Snapshot is free, the Total Online Presence Snapshot is $297, and the full Audit's $1,000.
You find a website. You book a call. You sit through a conversation with somebody who won't name a number, and two days later a proposal shows up. That's an afternoon of your week gone before you learn the one thing you needed to know at the start.
So here it is, all of it. Every service, what it costs, and more importantly, why it costs that. Read it, do the math against your own numbers, and decide before you ever pick up the phone. If you get to the bottom and decide this isn't for you, that's a good outcome. You got your answer without spending a week to find it.
What a Certified StoryBrand Guide actually is
A StoryBrand Certified Guide is a marketing professional who has been trained and certified in the StoryBrand framework — the messaging system Donald Miller built and wrote about in Building a StoryBrand, developed alongside Dr. J.J. Peterson. The certification isn't a weekend badge. You're trained to take a business apart, find the story its customer is already living, and rebuild the company’s message around that customer instead of around the company.
The program today is led by Tyler Pigott, who came up through the certification himself, built an agency, sold it, and then went to work at StoryBrand HQ. That matters more than it sounds like it should. The person running the Guide program has actually done the job. He's sat across from a nervous business owner, quoted a price, and delivered the work. I have a lot of respect for what he is building.
There are roughly 450 active Guides. We aren't employees of StoryBrand. We're independent marketers and agency owners who license the framework, which is exactly why the price of hiring one varies so much.
Why two Guides quote wildly different prices
You can call three Certified Guides about the same project and get three quotes that aren't remotely close. One says $1,500. One says $8,000. And here's the thing: they're both being honest with you.
It comes down to three factors, and only three.
Expertise. What is this person actually good at? Some Guides are copywriters who won't touch code. Some are designers who farm out the writing. Some of us, and I'm one, came at it from search and strategy. You aren't buying a certification. You're buying whatever the person holding it is actually excellent at.
Experience. How long have they been at this, and what have they seen? When you've been doing something a while, you've just run into more problems and had to work through more of them. You've got more arrows in your quiver, so to speak. That shows up as fewer wrong turns on your project, and yes, it gets priced accordingly.
Time. This is the big one, and it's the one nobody sees coming. Almost every price on this page is really a stand-in for hours. How many audiences do you serve? How many pages? Do you have brand material already or are we starting from nothing? How many people have to sign off? Every one of those is the same question wearing a different hat: how long is this going to take me.
Layered on top is who the Guide chooses to serve. A Guide working with enterprise clients has different overhead, different timelines and different pricing than one working with a twelve-person roofing company. Neither is wrong. They're different businesses.
Which is a decision I made on purpose
When I started, StoryBrand HQ painted a picture of certification opening doors to large brands and large organizations. And it's a true picture. It does. I've coached a billion-dollar brand.
What I found is that the money comes with a cost, and the cost is time. The bigger the organization, the bigger the budget. But you're also further from the person who can actually decide anything. Two people removed, sometimes three. There are committees. There are meetings about the meeting. And a huge chunk of the work is convincing people who weren't even in the room that this is the right direction.
None of that time goes into the work. It goes into the process around the work. So I stopped taking those engagements. Now I work with small business owners and with decision makers, because when you can decide, the money you spend goes into what you actually bought instead of into meetings about it.
The businesses that call me usually call because something isn't working. And they've tried. They've read the book, hired somebody, rebuilt the site. They've done everything they know how to do and they're still stuck. That's the problem I'm actually good at.
The honest part: certification isn't a guarantee
Before you spend anything, you should hear the part most Guides won't put on a pricing page.
Working with a StoryBrand Guide doesn't automatically equal success. There are levels of Guides, and holding the certification doesn't mean the work is going to be good. I've had my share of people call me who hired a Guide two years ago, got their message clarified, got a site built, and still weren't getting the results they needed.
Those calls are what taught me the thing that now shapes everything I charge for.
The internet is full of beautiful websites that get zero organic traffic.
A clear message is necessary. It just isn't enough on its own. There are a lot of agencies, and a lot of Guides, who will build you something really beautiful with absolutely no engine behind the scenes. No keyword strategy. No structure a search engine can read. Nothing that helps somebody find you who doesn't already know you exist. So the only people who ever see it are the people you send there yourself.
It's literally like buying a fine sports car with no engine in it. Looks great sitting in the driveway. It's not going to get you where you need to go.
So that's why I do the keyword research before I write a word of copy, on every single project. And yes, it makes my prices a little higher than a Guide who skips it. I try hard to keep that gap small. But I'm not going to hand somebody a car with no engine.
What that research actually involves
Once we have your BrandScript and I know precisely who we're trying to reach, I go find out what those people are typing into a search bar.
- I look at your existing site, if you've one.
- I search Google the way I believe your ideal client would search, and I pull the keyword profile of the top three businesses that come back, so I can see the terms actually earning them that traffic.
- Then I ask you who you think your competitors are, which is frequently a different list, and I do the same research on them.
You get a spreadsheet. Then, when I write, the terms that matter are built into the copy rather than sprinkled on afterward. Using the 80/20 rule, I'd guess only about twenty percent of agencies and website builders are doing this. It's the difference between a site nobody sees and a site that feeds your pipeline with the right people.
It's included in the copy price. It isn't an upsell.
And increasingly, the search isn't happening on Google
Something changed in the last two years that has moved a large part of my work.
I went looking for it on purpose. I wanted to know whether StoryBrand messaging actually gets picked up and repeated by an AI assistant, or whether it just reads nice to humans. So I picked a client whose customer I knew cold, because I'd built their site and written their message myself. The Business Brokers. And I sat down and asked an assistant the exact question that customer would ask.
It came back quoting their four-step plan. Not paraphrasing it. Repeating the plan we had written, as the reason to call them.
That's when it stopped being a theory. A clear message isn't just easier for a customer to follow. It's the thing an assistant can pick up and hand to somebody else.
Your customers aren't only typing three words into a search bar any more. They're asking a whole sentence — who should I call about a leaking flat roof in Cincinnati — and getting back a short list of two or three businesses with a reason attached to each. If you aren't on that list, you aren't in a lower position. You're absent. There's no page two.
That has become part of the keyword discovery I do at the start of every project. It's no longer enough to know the terms people search; I need to know the questions people ask, because those are what the assistants are answering. Full-sentence questions barely register in a keyword tool. They're most of what gets asked.
The other half of it's whether an assistant can actually read and repeat what you've written. I score sites against eight signals for this, and the pattern is consistent: businesses do far more than their website says they do. The assistant can only recommend you for the work it can see. So it recommends someone else.
This is also where StoryBrand and search stop being two separate disciplines. A message clear enough for a customer to repeat back is a message an AI can repeat back. Clarity was always the goal. It just became measurable.
Everything starts in the same place
You can enter at any rung. You can't skip the first one. Every engagement I run begins with clarifying the message, because everything above it is built on those words.
What I charge, service by service
These are current prices, quoted in full before anything starts. You'll never receive an invoice you did not agree to.
Clarify the message
Every single engagement I run begins here. Websites, strategy, social media. Even local SEO gets an abbreviated version. It's a one-hour to ninety-minute Zoom call where we walk the StoryBrand framework through your business. It doesn't just clarify your marketing. It tends to clarify the business.
BrandScript session — essentials
The core session and a written report. For a single, straightforward audience.
BrandScript session — full
Everything in the essentials version, plus the full report: your BrandScript, your brand story (the story of your customer), five variations of your one-liner, suggested taglines, a list of the top keywords I believe will reach your ideal client, unified messaging for your homepage, and worked examples of how to actually use it, like hero panel copy and social posts. Covers up to three characters.
Additional characters
Per additional group of three. If you sell to homeowners, general contractors and property managers, that's three sets of fears and three sets of wins. I have a client right now running nine characters.
Expanded success & failure buckets
Added when you tell me you're using this for social media. One item out of the success or failure bucket is a social post. You can write a whole one off a single line. It's social media gold, so I write the long version and you leave with months of content ideas.
Words
Website copy
Includes the BrandScript session above and the keyword research. Covers homepage, about page, two service pages and a contact page. I've written the copy for entire websites for under $6,000. It comes down to how much time it takes.
Additional pages
If you want an individual page per service rather than one combined page, which is usually the right call for search.
Lead generator
The thing people trade an email address for. What I've learned is that helpful content isn't enough. It has to be helpful content aimed squarely at the problem standing between your customer and what they want. That's what makes someone hand over an email.
Automated email sequence
Six to seven emails, written and installed. Length and pacing depend on your price point: on a smaller purchase people move fast, but on a $50,000 or $200,000 decision we stretch the sequence out to give them room to think. There's real psychology in the spacing and we work it out together.
Find out where you stand first
Three ways to see the picture before you commit to building anything. The research behind the Snapshot is what I run as step one of every local SEO, website optimization and Strategy First engagement, and I've done it well over a hundred times. So I offer it on its own rather than making people buy a project to find out where they are.
AI Readiness Snapshot
Your score across eight signals, your tier, and the gaps. No call required and nothing to cancel.
Total Online Presence Snapshot
How you actually show up right now: website performance, Google Business Profile, your top local competitors and your AI score. Delivered in about two business days. Quick answers, plus proof of how you're competing.
Total Online Presence Audit
Roughly five times the depth of the Snapshot, and it adds recommendations rather than just findings. Website, Google Business Profile and keyword research, with real numbers on what is working. About two weeks.
Websites
Every website price below includes the BrandScript session, the keyword research and the copy. By the time we have done the message and the wireframe you're already at $3,500. The website price is that plus the build.
Complete website — WordPress or GoHighLevel
Home, about, service pages, contact, and a thank-you page so we can actually track what works. That's where the conversion pixel lives. Built on the keywords, structured the way search engines and AI assistants need it, ready to work the day it goes live.
Starter website — WordPress
Home, about and contact, including the BrandScript and the copy for home and about. Less scope, less time, lower price. Includes six months of hosting and care.
One-page website — GoHighLevel
A single long-scroll page carrying the whole StoryBrand structure: hero, the problem, your three-step plan, services, the guide section and a lead form. Not a stripped-back landing page. My Iowa Ranch is a live example. Includes the BrandScript and the copy. Then $97/month, which also gives you the email system, calendar and basic automations.
StoryBrand website makeover
You already have a site and it's underperforming. Message, keyword research, new copy, and I go in and rebuild it. I work in WordPress, GoHighLevel, Showit, Squarespace, Wix and others. Once you're in the back end the platforms are more alike than different, so the platform doesn't change the price. The size of the site does. It starts at the same place as a fresh build, because untangling what is already there takes about as long as starting clean, and it rises from there. Untangling forty pages is a different job from untangling six.
Website optimization
For the site that looks great and gets no traffic, where we have established that visibility is the actual problem. Includes the BrandScript and keyword research, then I make the structural changes search engines are looking for. Starts here and rises with the size and complexity of the site. A five-page site and a two-hundred-page site aren't the same job.
E-commerce
Added to any website build. The number is real hours, not a deterrent: product setup, payment, tax, shipping rules and the endless small decisions that come with selling online take a lot longer than a content site, and none of it can be rushed without breaking on you later. Worth knowing that e-commerce isn't the work I'm best at, so ask me who else you should talk to before you commit.
Custom development
Custom plugins, or a platform built from the ground up in code rather than assembled in a page builder. Peer2Peer.group is my own example. A peer advisory platform currently in beta, built entirely from scratch. If you need something that doesn't exist yet, this is a real conversation rather than a price on a page.
When a makeover beats starting over
A rebuild is not automatically the better option, and this is the part that costs people the most money when they get it wrong.
If your site already gets traffic, that traffic is an asset you paid for. It came from pages that are ranking, and those pages rank because of the words on them. Build a brand-new site and that copy is gone. The rankings go with it. You are back at month one, waiting three to six months to get back to where you already were, and you paid to get there.
Advantage Roofing is the clearest example. Tim Mallory's site was carrying a lot of dead weight and it took real work to clean up his web presence. But it was also putting thousands of people in front of his business every month, because of SEO work he had already invested in years earlier. Those visitors were arriving and bouncing straight back out. The traffic was real. The message was not landing.
Scrapping that site would have thrown away the one thing that was working.
Your old site's problem is usually the message, not the traffic.
So a large part of what you are paying for in a makeover is the analysis before anything gets touched: working out what is actually earning attention and only needs refining, and what is genuinely dead weight that should be cut. A handful of his original blog posts were ranking well and pulling in serious numbers of people. I kept the core of that copy and rebuilt those pages in an E-E-A-T format, so they doubled down on what was already working instead of starting from zero.
That is the honest case for the higher number. A makeover starts at the same place as a fresh build and can run above it, but on a site with existing traffic it is usually the cheaper decision, because you keep what you already paid for.
Getting found and staying found
AI Search Readiness Review
The full version of the free Snapshot. A 100-point scorecard across eight signals, a second scoring run against everything your business actually does, a one-hour interview to capture the expertise that never made it onto the site, and a content roadmap that closes the gaps. $3,500 for a new client, which includes the BrandScript call; $2,000 if you already have a BrandScript on file with me.
Done-for-you content packages
Because most owners buy a good roadmap and then never execute it. Not from lack of discipline, but because the business eats the time. Findable is $5,000 (a pillar page and five posts), Citable is $7,000 (pillar, ten posts, a landing page) and Authoritative is $9,500 (pillar, fourteen posts, a landing page and a quarterly re-interview). A $1,000 credit applies if you book within 60 days of a Review.
Local SEO
Google Business Profile optimization, a citation building campaign that distributes your business information to the directories that matter, and a review process if you don't have one. Three months start to finish. Billed $2,000 to begin, then $1,900 in month two and $1,900 in month three.
Social media management
A quarterly strategy call, a monthly report, and where useful an interview with you to mine the content only you have. Volume scales to what you want to publish.
Website hosting & care — WordPress
Server space plus active care: I'm in your site twice a month keeping plugins current and checking everything renders, I manage the server, and uptime monitors alert me twenty-four hours a day. More than once I've found the site down, fixed it, and told the client afterward. Six months are included free with a website build.
GoHighLevel platform
$97/month for the starter tier, which gets you email, calendar and basic automations. $300/month for the full platform: website, CRM, automations, email campaigns, text messaging, payments, the lot.
Strategy and ongoing work
Strategy First
A paid diagnosis before anyone builds anything. Full audit of the site, search presence and Google Business Profile, competitor and keyword research, messaging review, customer journey map, and a 30/60/90 action plan you can hand to any team, including your own.
Fractional CMO retainer
For clients who have seen results and want to keep going. I dedicate hours of my week, every week, to your business. The rate moves with how much I'm running. My largest retainer today is around $6,000 a month.
StoryBrand coaching (done-with-you)
Everything above can be done with you instead of for you. I give you the resources and the homework, you do the work, then we spend an hour reviewing and tightening it. That's how we built the messaging for Historic Marbold Farmstead. I coach on BrandScripts, wireframes, lead generators, emails and even SEO. I have a client in Seattle who knew search cold and only needed direction, so we do a quarterly call and he executes. If you're capable of doing it, coaching costs you a fraction of what done-for-you does.
What I don't do: paid ads. No Google Ads, no Local Services Ads, no pay-per-click. I ran them when I started, and there are people who are a lot better at it than I am. So when you need paid media, you get introduced to a StoryBrand Guide who specializes in it. You should have someone excellent on it, not someone ordinary billing you for it.
How much does a StoryBrand website cost?
This is the question most people actually arrive with, so here it's on its own.
A complete StoryBrand website from me is $8,000. That's the message, the keyword research, the copy, the design and the build. Not a design fee with everything else quoted separately later. A makeover of an existing site also starts at $8,000: you save nothing by keeping the old site, because untangling what is already there takes as long as starting clean, and it climbs from there with the size of the site. A three-page starter site in WordPress is $3,500, and a single-page StoryBrand site in GoHighLevel is $1,500.
Across the wider StoryBrand Guide community you'll see complete websites quoted anywhere from about $5,000 to well past $15,000, and enterprise builds run into six figures. Those are all real numbers for real scopes. What moves yours inside that range:
- Page count. The single biggest driver, because it's the clearest proxy for hours.
- E-commerce. Selling products online adds roughly $6,000 to a build. Not because the design is harder, but because product setup, payments, tax and shipping rules take a great deal of time and can't be rushed.
- Existing brand assets. If you have a logo in vector format, brand fonts and colors, we start. If you don't, that's added scope.
- How many audiences. Three characters is three messages, not one.
- Custom functionality. Anything that needs actual code — a portal, a calculator, an integration, a platform that doesn't exist yet — is a different kind of project and gets quoted on its own.
- Whether you write. Done-with-you coaching costs less than done-for-you. If you can write, you should.
WordPress or GoHighLevel — and why it isn't a price question
The build price is the same either way. The difference is what happens afterward.
With WordPress you own actual files. If you ever want to leave, I zip the site up, hand it to you with installation instructions, and you take it wherever you like. Assuming it's paid in full, it's yours. You'll pay $250 a month for hosting and care, with the first six months included.
With GoHighLevel you don't own files, but you get a platform instead of a website. Your CRM, email, calendar, automations, text messaging and payments all live in one place. This site is built entirely in GoHighLevel. The pages, the chat widget that texts my phone, the calendar you'd use to book a call, the payment for the Total Online Presence Snapshot. All of it.
I moved my own business there about a year and a half ago. Before that I was setting new clients up with a mail platform and a scheduler and watching them reach $100 a month in software before they had a single lead. Consolidating cut my own monthly software bill by close to a thousand dollars. That's the case for it. The case against it's simple and worth taking seriously: you can't pick the files up and walk.
If ownership matters to you, take WordPress. If you want everything working together and would rather not manage six subscriptions, take GoHighLevel. I'll build either.
Packages, if you'd rather not assemble it yourself
Most people don't want to build a quote out of a menu. These three bundles are the combinations I put together most often, in WordPress.
Each one shows two numbers. Paid in full is the price, and it includes six months of website care at no charge. Monthly is for the far more common situation where the cash isn't sitting there: $2,000 down, then twelve payments covering the balance plus the six months of care at $250. Financing costs $1,500 more in total, which is the care you'd have received free, and there's no interest on top of that.
The Small Business Website
What's included
- BrandScript session and full messaging report
- Competitor and keyword research, delivered as a spreadsheet
- Custom copy for home, about, two service pages and contact
- Website design and build, plus a tracked thank-you page
- Six months of hosting and website care
This is right for you if
- You're launching, or your current site is old enough that starting over is cheaper than fixing
- You need to be findable, not just presentable
- You aren't yet running email marketing and don't want to be sold it
The Sales Funnel
What's included
- Everything in The Small Business Website
- A custom lead generator, written and designed
- A six-to-seven email automated sequence, written and installed
- Setup in your email platform, or on GoHighLevel at $97/month if you don't have one
This is right for you if
- You're getting traffic but nothing to show for it
- Your sale takes weeks or months and people go quiet in between
- You've a list you've never really used
The Sales Machine
Buying the pieces separately comes to $18,800.
What's included
- Everything in The Sales Funnel
- Google Business Profile optimization
- A full citation building campaign across the directories that matter for your industry
- A review process, set up and running
This is right for you if
- You're a local business and being in the map results would change your year
- You want the message, the site and the visibility handled as one project
- You care about showing up when someone asks an AI assistant who to call
Not sure which rung you're on? The free AI Readiness Snapshot takes no call and no money, and the Total Online Presence Snapshot is $297 for a full look at how you currently show up. Either one tells you more than guessing.
How people actually pay for this
Very rarely does a small business have this kind of money sitting in cash. It happens. It just isn't the norm, and the timing of your bank balance shouldn't decide whether your marketing gets fixed.
The structure is always the same: $2,000 down, then twelve monthly payments covering the balance plus six months of website care at $250 a month. Working it through on the Small Business Website: $8,000 less the $2,000 deposit leaves $6,000, plus $1,500 of care makes $7,500, which is $625 a month for a year. At the end of it the site is paid off and, on a WordPress build, you can take it and host it wherever you like.
The only difference between paying in full and paying monthly is that $1,500 of care. Pay up front and I absorb it. Spread it out and it goes into the balance. There's no interest and no finance charge beyond that.
And you should know exactly how it works before you sign anything. Because I'm managing the site and the server space, your website stays under my management until it's paid off. That's the trade for starting without the lump sum. It's never once been a problem, but you shouldn't discover a term like that halfway through the year.
How long before any of it works
This is the part that costs people the most anxiety, so let me set expectations before you spend anything.
Google is processing over three billion websites. A brand-new site doesn't get noticed in a fortnight. Across the hundreds of sites I've worked on, organic search moves in three steps.
- Three months. Google starts picking up the keywords we targeted. You'll see impressions appear and your keyword profile grow in Search Console. Almost no traffic yet. But the signal is there and it's real.
- Six months. The first meaningful jump. Traffic arrives, leads start, you're having conversations that came from the site.
- Ten months. Another big jump, and roughly where the content you published on day one finally shows its full result. Sometimes it takes the full twelve.
Local SEO is the exception, and it's much faster. I've watched businesses move from page six to page one. The target is the local stack, the top three businesses shown on the map when somebody searches for what you do. Three months is what it takes, which is also how long the citation campaign runs. That's why local SEO is the first thing I recommend to a local business in a hurry.
And if you need leads now, not in six months
Which is most people, honestly. Nobody rebuilds their marketing while business is comfortable.
What I recommend in that situation is to buy your way across the gap. Run pay-per-click for the first three to six months, or Local Services Ads if you have a Google Business Profile, since those put you above the map results and you pay per lead rather than per click. Then, as organic traffic starts showing up and the local stack starts working, you can dial the ad spend down. You aren't funding ads forever. You're funding the months before the asset you just paid for begins carrying its own weight.
Now, I should point out that I don't sell ads. I don't run pay-per-click and I don't run LSA. So when I tell you to do this, understand there's nothing in it for me. And if you want it done well, I'll introduce you to a StoryBrand Guide who specializes in it.
I bring it up because I've watched the alternative play out too many times. An owner spends real money on a website, waits four months, sees almost nothing, and decides the whole thing was a waste. It wasn't a waste. It was month four. The ad spend is what keeps the phone ringing while the slower, cheaper, more durable channel catches up.
The budget conversation nobody wants to have
On every call, I ask what your budget is. It isn't a negotiating move and I'm not trying to find your ceiling so I can price to it.
I ask because the gap between what people want and what it costs is usually enormous, and finding that out on the call is far kinder than finding it out in a proposal.
I did a call earlier this year with a man who walked me through everything he wanted. New platform. A significant amount of coding. Genuinely ambitious. And the whole time he's talking, I'm doing the math in my head and landing somewhere north of $40,000, possibly $60,000. Then I asked what he was thinking. He said under $3,500.
He wasn't being unreasonable. He just had no way to know. Nobody publishes this stuff. And that gap, right there, is a big part of why I wrote this page. So you can come in educated, already knowing roughly what your goals are going to cost, and we can spend the call on strategy instead of sticker shock.
So here's my commitment to you. If you come to me with $20,000 and the work honestly only needs $12,000, I'm going to tell you, and you keep the difference to spend somewhere else. And if what you need isn't something I do well, I'll tell you that too and point you at whoever does it better. Doing nothing is the most expensive option on this page. But overbuying is a close second.
What it looked like for one client
Advantage Roofing had been online since around 2012, carrying more than four hundred blog posts, most of them doing nothing but slowing the site down. A few were doing a great deal. Sorting one from the other is where the work started.
The business went from a plateau around $2.2M to $3.3M and climbing. The full numbers are in the case study.
The relevant part for a pricing page: that was a makeover, not a rebuild. Not the most expensive thing on this list, and cheaper than starting over would have been once you count the traffic a rebuild throws away.
Questions I get asked
How much does it cost to hire a StoryBrand Certified Guide?
Across the Guide community, expect roughly $1,500 to $3,000 for messaging alone, $5,000 to $15,000 or more for a complete website, and $9,500 upward for a full sales funnel. Mine sit inside those ranges: $1,000–$1,500 for messaging, $8,000 for a complete website, and high teens for the full machine. Where a particular Guide lands depends on their expertise, their experience and how much time your project takes.
How much does a StoryBrand website cost?
Mine is $8,000 for a complete site including message, keyword research, copy, design and build, and rebuilding an existing site also starts at $8,000, rising with its size. A three-page WordPress starter is $3,500, and a one-page StoryBrand site in GoHighLevel is $1,500. Page count, e-commerce, existing brand assets and custom development are what move that number.
Do I have to hire a Guide, or can I do this myself?
You can absolutely do it yourself, and if you have the time and the aptitude you probably should. Start with the BrandScript and the free website wireframe. The difficulty isn't the framework. It's that reading the label from inside the bottle is hard, and most owners write about themselves instead of their customer. If you want the middle path, I coach at $350 an hour and you do the work.
Why is StoryBrand messaging alone not enough?
Because a clear message that nobody encounters isn't doing anything. I've had people call after a Guide clarified their message and built them a site, still with no results, because there was no search strategy underneath it. Clarity and visibility are two different problems and you need both.
What does an AI Search Readiness Review cost, and do I need one?
$3,500 for a new client, which includes the BrandScript call, or $2,000 if you already have a BrandScript with me. You don't need one to start. The AI Readiness Snapshot is free and will tell you your score and tier. The Review is what you buy when you've seen the score, want the full picture of the gaps, and want a roadmap for closing them.
Should I rebuild my site or make over the one I have?
If your current site gets no traffic, rebuild. If it does get traffic, be careful. That traffic comes from pages that rank because of the copy on them, and a brand-new site throws that copy away along with the rankings, which puts you back at month one. A makeover starts at $8,000, the same as a fresh build, and part of what you are paying for is the analysis that separates what is genuinely working and only needs refining from what is dead weight worth cutting.
Do you build e-commerce sites, or anything custom?
Yes to both. E-commerce adds roughly $6,000 to a build, because product setup, payments, tax and shipping take a long time to get right. It isn't the work I'm strongest at, so if selling online is the centre of your business, ask me who else you should talk to. For fully custom work I build from the ground up in code: Peer2Peer.group, a peer advisory platform now in beta, is my own. That kind of project gets scoped and quoted individually.
How long does a project take?
A complete website is typically a matter of weeks, depending on how quickly we get through the message and how fast feedback comes back. Local SEO is a defined three-month campaign. Organic search results build over three, six and ten months. Strategy First is 30 to 45 days. If you need leads before organic traffic arrives, I'll tell you to run pay-per-click or Local Services Ads for the first three to six months and then taper it, even though I don't sell ads.
Can I pay monthly?
Yes. $2,000 down, then twelve monthly payments covering the balance plus six months of website care at $250 a month. On the $8,000 Small Business Website that works out to $625 a month. Paying in full includes those six months of care at no charge, so financing costs $1,500 more in total — there's no interest beyond that. Because I manage the site and the hosting during that period, the site stays under my management until it's paid in full, and then it's entirely yours.
Do you run Google Ads?
No. Not Google Ads, not Local Services Ads, not pay-per-click. I ran them early on and other people are better at it, so you get introduced to a StoryBrand Guide who specializes. I'll still tell you to run them when it's the right call. Ads for the first three to six months are usually how you cover the gap before organic search starts working.
Do you only work with businesses in Iowa?
No. I'm based in Waukee, Iowa, and clients run coast to coast. Nearly all of the work happens over video, which is how it would work even if I were down the road.
You have the numbers. Now let’s talk about yours.
A free call, no pitch. Tell me what you've tried and what isn't working, and I'll tell you honestly what I think it will take, how long it will run, and what it will cost. Or that you should spend your money somewhere else.
Who you'd be working with
Tim Yates is the founder of StoryWorks Marketing in Waukee, Iowa. He has been a Certified StoryBrand Guide since 2020 and is a Duct Tape Marketing Certified Fractional CMO. He has coached roughly 140 business owners through their messaging as a breakout coach on some twenty StoryBrand livestreams, and manages more than thirty client websites across the country.
He has been building marketing for small businesses since before it was websites. TV and radio scripts, jingles, documentary video. Which is why the strategy tends to come with someone who can also build the thing.
Verify: StoryBrand Guide directory · Duct Tape Marketing directory · LinkedIn · 515-305-3096
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