You are paying three invoices for marketing and getting less every quarter.

A typical £30m revenue B2B business in the UK spends between two and six percent of revenue on marketing. That is £600k to £1.8m a year, split across a combination of three to five suppliers. The most common configuration is a web agency on retainer for maintenance and occasional redesign, a content agency producing monthly output, a PR freelancer or small agency placing coverage, and sometimes a separate SEO consultant or LinkedIn specialist.

Each supplier invoices separately, reports separately, and optimises for their own metric. The web agency optimises for site quality. The content agency optimises for content volume. The PR freelancer optimises for placement count. The SEO consultant optimises for ranking position. None of them optimises for pipeline, because pipeline is not visible inside their contract.

The financial impact of this is not only the total cost. It is the overhead cost of managing four or five supplier relationships, the coordination cost of stitching their outputs into something coherent, and the opportunity cost of the time your marketing director spends on vendor management rather than strategy. On a £30m business this typically amounts to the equivalent of 0.5 to 1.0 FTE of hidden overhead, layered on top of the direct supplier spend.

When margin compresses, the CEO's instinct is to cut each line item by ten percent. That is a tactical response. The structural response is to consolidate the stack. Fortitude Media is built for the structural response.

The numbers below are representative and drawn from typical London B2B agency rates in early 2026. Your specific stack may cost more or less. Request an audit and we will benchmark yours against this baseline.

Fortitude Media Professional is £2,999 a month. That is £35,988 a year for a single coordinated service that includes the website (rebuilt in year one, continuously tuned thereafter), six expert content pieces a month, two PR placements a month in tier one publications, LinkedIn authority programme for the senior team, quarterly conversion audits, continuous schema tuning, monthly AI visibility reporting across four AI tools, and a team on call for change requests with 48 hour turnaround.

The direct saving against the fragmented stack is approximately £50,000 a year. The indirect saving, from eliminated coordination overhead and freed marketing director hours, is typically another £20,000 to £40,000 of equivalent value. The total annual impact on margin is £70,000 to £90,000 on a £30m business.

The equivalent impact on EBITDA is cleaner than a ten percent across the board cut, and it does not reduce output. In most cases it increases output because the consolidated service produces coordinated work rather than fragmented work.

Consolidating the stack is not the same as cheapening the stack. Fortitude Media is not a budget alternative to three specialist suppliers. It is a deliberately different delivery model, where specialist work is produced by a senior team under one coordinated plan rather than three separate ones.

Specifically:

• Consolidation is not a drop in quality. The writers, strategists, designers and PR specialists on the Fortitude Media team are hand-picked operators with deep sector experience. Every piece of work is reviewed by a member of the founding team before it ships.
• Consolidation is not a reduction in strategic input. You get a named strategist, monthly review calls, and a quarterly business review with the numbers on the table.
• Consolidation is not a lock in. Two months notice from day one. Everything we build stays with you if you leave.
• Consolidation is not "one person doing all of it." It is a team of specialists operating on a shared plan. The difference compared to three separate retainers is that the plan is shared, not fragmented.

The right mental model is not "cheaper agency." It is "in-house marketing team without the overhead of hiring one." That is what a consolidated subscription gives you.

Month one of a Fortitude Media subscription for a profitability focused CEO usually looks like this:

1. Audit delivered and reviewed.

   Baseline established on AI visibility, website health, content gap, PR footprint and competitor position.

2. Supplier mapping session.

   We review which of your current suppliers do what, identify genuine specialist value that should be retained (rare, but it happens), and plan the transition for the rest.

3. Named contact agreed on your side.

   One decision maker who approves copy, signs off wireframes and closes out review rounds.

4. Kickoff call.

   Two hours. Voice and brand guide signed off. First three months' content pillars agreed.

5. Website rebuild begins.

   Delivered inside one hundred twenty days as a proper project, with the authority engine compounding from week one.

The commercial transition from existing suppliers is usually straightforward. Web agency retainers typically have three month notice periods. Content retainers one to three months. PR retainers one to three months. Most clients run the final months of those contracts in parallel with the first months of the Fortitude Media subscription, so there is no gap in output and the consolidation is smooth.

By month four, in most cases, the legacy suppliers are fully off the books and the marketing line on the P&L is one invoice rather than four or five.

The single most immediate benefit of consolidation, beyond the direct saving, is the reporting discipline.

Before consolidation, a CEO asking their marketing director "how is marketing performing this quarter" typically receives four separate reports from four separate suppliers, each on a different cadence, each with a different definition of success, each optimised to make the supplier look good. Reconciling them takes hours and usually produces a picture that does not quite add up.

After consolidation, the same question produces one report. Pipeline attribution, organic traffic trend, AI citation rate, share of voice, content output, PR placements, LinkedIn authority metrics, conversion rate. One page. One source of truth. One cadence. Quarterly business review sits on top, with Ross and David present, and the numbers drive the conversation about what changes next.

This reporting discipline is the thing most CEOs tell us they did not realise they were missing until they had it.

Consolidation only produces the saving and the output quality if the operating model underneath it supports the consolidation. Four suppliers working in parallel have a coordination problem that no individual supplier can solve. One supplier doing the work of four has the same coordination problem internally if the workflow is not designed around it.

Fortitude Media is designed around it. The automation infrastructure that David Adams built, the citation tracking, the content pipeline, the reporting dashboard, the review workflow, is what makes it possible to deliver a six content piece a month, two PR placement a month, full website, LinkedIn programme, quarterly audit subscription at £2,999 without losing money or quality.

This is the specific thing that a generic "one stop shop agency" cannot replicate. They are trying to do the same work at a comparable price point without the underlying operating model, and it either degrades the quality (because the specialist time is not there) or degrades the margin (because they are subsidising the work), at which point the retainer either gets cancelled or the service gets quietly reduced over time. Both outcomes are familiar to any CEO who has worked with a generic integrated agency before.

If margin discipline is the lens you are using, the audit produces the consolidation benchmark specific to your business. Five working days. No obligation.