The consultant who actually does the work
I'm Ian Dolan. For fifteen years I've worked on search, paid media and growth, including years embedded inside a Fortune 100 organisation and active consulting engagements with Fortune 500 companies. I now run a deliberately small consultancy so that senior experience goes directly into the accounts I take on.
Averaged across engagements and dependent on market, budget and starting position. Not a projection of your results.
Enterprise experience, applied at a human scale
Most consultants have either enterprise experience or the willingness to get into an account and change things. The two rarely come together, because the people with Fortune-level experience usually end up managing other people who do the work.
Years spent embedded inside a Fortune 100 taught me how large organisations actually move: how budget gets approved, how legal and brand shape what ships, and why good strategy dies in the gap between a deck and a delivery team. Consulting engagements with Fortune 500 organisations keep me in that world today.
At the same time, I've spent fifteen years in the technical detail of search and paid media. I still run the audits, still write the tracking specs, still look at the account. That combination is what I sell, and it's the reason I keep the client list short.
Where I'm useful
The engagements that work best tend to look like one of three situations. A firm with real demand in its market that isn't visible for the searches that matter. A team spending meaningful budget on paid media without trustworthy conversion data underneath it. Or a leadership team that needs an independent read on whether their agency, their hire or their plan is actually any good.
I work most often with law firms, professional services firms and enterprise marketing teams. Those aren't hard boundaries, but they're where fifteen years of pattern recognition is worth the most to you.
Where I'm not
I'm not an agency. There's no bench of juniors, no pod structure, no account management layer. If you need forty landing pages produced next month, or you want someone to own social media day to day, that's a genuine need and I'm the wrong person for it. I'll usually be able to point you at someone better placed.
Four things that don't change
The person auditing your account is the person you talk to
No account manager relaying questions to a specialist you never meet. When you ask why something changed, you're asking the person who changed it.
Measurement before optimisation
Most accounts I inherit are being optimised against numbers nobody has verified. Fixing tracking first is unglamorous, and it's usually where the biggest wins are hiding.
A small number of clients at a time
Capacity is the constraint that protects quality. I take on a limited number of engagements so each one gets senior attention rather than a junior with a checklist.
I'll tell you when you don't need me
If your budget is better spent on your site than on ads, or if the problem is intake rather than traffic, I'd rather say so and keep the relationship than sell you a retainer that won't work.
Brands I've worked with
Across fifteen years, some as direct consulting engagements and some during in-house and agency roles.
- Sysco
- Halliburton
- HealthLabs.com
- Semrush
- The Home Depot
- VetLaw
Want a straight answer about your account?
Book a free discovery call. You'll get my honest read on where the opportunity is, whether or not we work together.