About Sparkplug.

Why I started Sparkplug

The idea showed up at three in the morning in the winter of 2023. I could not sleep, and I was tired of being micromanaged; tired of doing work I already knew how to do while somebody stood over it. I wanted to be responsible for my own results, good or bad. That was the first half of it.

The second half is harder to say without sounding soft, so I will just say it. The first thing I ever built for anyone was a set for a local theatre production. Volunteer, a lot of hours, nothing in it for me except that the show went up. I liked it far more than I expected to, and it took me a while to work out why. It was not the building. It was watching something work for someone else and knowing I had a hand in it. Their good night felt like mine.

Those two things together are why this company exists. I wanted to work for myself, and I wanted the work to be the kind where somebody else wins when I do my job right. Advertising is where those meet. It had the lowest barrier to entry of anything I looked at, and that is the honest reason I started there. What kept me is that it is one of the few things you can do for a small business that shows up directly in their revenue. When a campaign works, a phone rings that was not ringing before.

The usual way to price this work is privately, so the number can bend to what a business looks like it can afford, and then to bill a percentage of the ad budget, which pays the agency more the more you spend. Sparkplug publishes every price and charges a flat monthly fee. Your ad budget passes through untouched. The person who sells you the work is the one who does it.

None of that is accidental. Each one is a place where I looked at how it is normally done and decided it was wrong, then built the company around the difference.

What I do

Paid advertising, built around what you sell and where your customers spend their time; the channel mix follows the business. Ad copy, images and short video, made in variants so they can be tested against each other. Local search presence, so a click has somewhere to land. Tracking, so the numbers mean something. And the reports that tell you what all of it did.

Why the back office is automated

Most of what an agency bills for is not marketing. It is administration; chasing assets, rebuilding the same folders, retyping the same numbers. I did not want to charge anyone for that, and I did not want to hire around it either, so I built the systems first and the client work second. The result is that the hours you pay for go into campaigns. The specifics are on the pricing page, under what every plan includes.

Who this is for

Businesses with something specific to sell, and enough margin on a sale that new customers pay for the advertising that found them. Local service businesses, trades, clinics, studios, shops.

It is not for everyone. If the margin is too thin, or the budget too small to buy meaningful data, I will tell you that instead of taking the money. Sometimes the honest answer is that you do not need an agency yet.

Where it is going

Not every business is a fit for digital advertising. Some do not have the budget to buy useful data; for others the return does not justify it yet. That is what the next step is for: social media management, for businesses that need presence and consistency more than they need paid reach.

Past that, the plan is to keep adding services until there is an honest answer for most kinds of business that come through the door, rather than one offer everybody gets told to want. The roadmap shows where each piece stands.