If you're looking for someone to guide you through the marketing process, to get you through a down-cycle, or get you fighting fit to face a recession-based future, then we can help.

This is a one-on-one marketing consultation process run on a coaching foundation. We'll guide you and advise you, agree with you on goals and objectives, and you and your team will go and do the execution work and report back to let us know the results. We keep you on track - we will hold you to the commitments you make, and do all we can to make sure you deliver them. Short of actually coming and doing all the work - which we can do if you wish - but at an extra cost.

Think of ASVP as being just like an outsourced Marketing Director. Someone who guides, cajoles, coaches, mentors and instructs, brainstorms with you, injects creativity, helps you stay on track and tries to prevent you making mistakes - but doesn't do your job for you. (We don't want to add to unemployment by doing you out of your job!)

So how does this work, and what does it cost? There are three options:

Option One - $995 per month: We meet by phone once a month at a prescheduled day and time for about one hour. It's your call - we talk about whatever challenges you at the time; usually a marketing (or business) project or problem that needs fixing. If that's too confronting, or you have so many problems you don't know where to start, let us know and we can take you through a process that steps right the way through your marketing, focuses on key problem areas, and prioritises an approach to fixing them fast. We'll end the call with an outline of tasks to be done and goals for you to achieve before our next meeting. In between, you can e-mail questions, and we'll respond promptly - generally same day, depending on your time zone and what time the e-mail comes in.

Option Two - $1,995 per month: We meet by phone twice a month on prescheduled days and times as above - only with double the contact levels, to address more issues, faster. Prepare to be challenged!

Option Three - $5,995 per month: - We start with a half or full-day workshop at your offices with your core team, and go through a strategic marketing planning process. Then we meet twice a month and in between you have copious phone and e-mail access to our partner-level marketing consultant.

As your de-facto "Director of Marketing" we'll run your marketing on an outsourced basis, working with your team and your suppliers, (or we can bring our suppliers, where required).

What will you get? Often clients start by wanting to fix the really big issues first - developing new value propositions, implementing pricing changes working up the next big marketing campaign, maybe targeting new segments or re-focusing R & D to address product or service gaps in the market.And that's fine - but when you start addressing such big issues, it's going to take a little longer to turn the ship around. We find we will often make a huge investment of our time into this early stage of the relationship - within a few months, as the burning issues start to get resolved, things will settle down and we'll drop back into more of a maintenance mode as you start to get the results you were after.

In all three of the above options, out-of-pocket expenses are extra for your account. If you want us to redevelop your website, design collateral materials, engage SEO experts, develop databases, conduct research, or tactical campaigns, we can certainly do them for you, but they are not an included part of the cost of being your strategic guide.

Do you have to enter into a long-term commitment? Up to you - if you want to lock the relationship in, we can do that. Otherwise it's just six weeks notice, from either side. Unless you want to step up from one optional level to a higher level - which we can do any time, at your request.