PDQ is a Norfolk-based digital firm running paid acquisition, lifecycle, and analytics programmes for the operators who do not have eighteen months to wait for an agency to "ramp up." We work at speed — and we charge for it, because speed is a deliverable.
// the operating thesis
// our case for moving faster
// six programmes · plain prices
// week 0 → week 6
// who actually does the work
// how to start
The standard agency model rewards ramp time. A six-month ramp gets billed as "phase one" and conveniently lines up with the contract renewal. We have built the opposite firm — and the operating thesis is on the cover of every issue.
A founder we worked with last year said it best. "I don't need an agency that's good. I need an agency that's here."
PDQ was started in 2019 by three operators who had spent the prior decade running paid programmes for venture-backed D2C brands. The bottleneck they kept running into was not the work itself — the bottleneck was the agency model.
A retained agency on a six-month minimum, charging a six-figure annual contract, was incentivised to take three months to "diagnose" and two more to "architect" before shipping anything that touched the actual paid account. That meant the founder paid for five months of slide decks before the team that was supposed to fix the problem actually started fixing it.
We do not run that play. The diagnose phase at PDQ is six business days. The architect phase is two weeks. By the end of week four, we are shipping creative, and by the end of week six we are operating at full cadence. The compromise is honesty: if we cannot reach operating cadence in six weeks, we say so and refund the engagement fee.
This is not a philosophical position — it is a billing position. Our retainers are weighted to the front of the engagement. You pay a premium for the first ninety days, and a steep discount for everything thereafter. The math is set up so we are financially worse off if we slow-walk the engagement.
It is also not for everyone. A studio rebrand is not a PDQ engagement. A heritage brand that needs ten weeks to consult its board on a colour choice is not a PDQ engagement. The clients who get the most out of working with us are the operators who would rather be slightly wrong fast than slightly right next quarter.
The operating numbers from our active roster, as of issue 04.
No "starting from" pricing. No "contact for quote." If you cannot work out what an engagement with us costs from this list, we have failed at the job before we have started.
Meta, Google, TikTok, second-tier. Account architecture, weekly creative testing roster, monthly performance review. Single named operator.
Static, motion, UGC briefs. Two creative leads in-house. Briefed by the same operator who runs your paid programme. 50–80 statics/mo output.
Email, SMS, on-site. We touch your ESP directly. Klaviyo, Attentive, Iterable, Customer.io, Postscript. Documentation in your Notion.
GA4 + server-side via Stape. CAPI / CAPI alternatives. Attribution model. Weekly board dashboard. 6-week build sprint, then maintenance.
Marketing site, microsite, or landing programme. Designed and built in-house. Production handover to your team. 8-week fixed sprint.
For founders between full-time hire and single agency contract. Sits on weekly leadership call, owns marketing P&L, runs vendor stack. 9–14 month engagements.
"By the end of week six we are operating at full cadence. If we are not, we refund. The contract is built that way on purpose."
— FROM THE OPERATING BRIEF · MAY 2026
One half-day. We get into your ad accounts, ESP, analytics, warehouse. Either in-person at Bungay or over a call.
Audit of the prior 18 months of paid spend. 6 customer interviews. Single doc at the end: what works, what wastes, what's missing.
Channel mix, account structure, creative testing roster, lifecycle map, measurement framework. You sign it off.
Ad account rebuild. First creative drop ships. Analytics layer wired. By Friday of week three, you see the first weekly dashboard.
Two creative drops per week. Daily channel optimisation. The dashboard updates Friday at 16:00 every week.
Weekly creative drops + monthly performance review + quarterly strategic reset. The programme is running.
PDQ Digital Media Solutions was founded in 2019 by three operators who had spent the prior decade running paid programmes inside venture-backed D2C brands. We have always been in Norfolk; we have always been small; we have always charged for speed rather than billable hours.
The firm is eighteen people in one converted Georgian building on Lower Olland Street in Bungay, a market town in the Waveney Valley about three hours from London and ninety minutes from Cambridge. We do not run a London office and we do not plan to.
The roster is nine to twelve engagements at a time. We take new work in monthly cohorts of two — meaning we have, at most, two new clients in onboarding at any given moment. That cadence is what lets us operate the way the deploy log on the previous spread says we do.
The clients we keep tend to be founder-led businesses between £3m and £40m in revenue, mostly D2C or digital-first retail, with at least one operator on the leadership team who can read the analytics with us in the room. We say no to about three quarters of the briefs that arrive — usually because the fit isn't right, occasionally because we are simply full.
A short paragraph is enough. If it is a fit, we reply within two business days, with a sensible first conversation. If it isn't a fit, we tell you and pass you on to the best firm we know for the work.
PDQ Digital Media Solutions
Dunelm House, 65 Lower Olland Street
Bungay NR35 1BY, England