How We Build a Growth Machine in 90 Days

Most agencies onboard you with a questionnaire, a kickoff call, and a lot of promises. Then you wait six weeks to see anything. By the time you're looking at results, three months of budget have already disappeared.

We built our process differently. The first 90 days are the most structured period of any engagement with Baba Yaga — not because we're rigid, but because structure is what turns scattered ad spend into compounding growth as fast as possible.

Here's exactly what happens, week by week.

Week 1–2: The Free Audit

Before we take a single dollar of your budget, we do a 90-minute deep dive into everything you're currently running. That means your Google Ads account, your Meta campaigns, your email flows, your attribution setup, and your landing pages.

We're looking for four things:

Where you're leaking spend — broad-match keywords with no negative lists, ad sets cannibalizing each other, landing pages with 80% bounce rates. These aren't rare. In almost every account we audit, we find five to fifteen of these in the first session.

What's actually working — every account has at least one campaign, ad set, or keyword that's quietly outperforming everything else. Most clients have never noticed it. We do.

Attribution gaps — if your tracking is off, all your optimization decisions are based on fiction. We check every pixel, every conversion event, every UTM parameter before we change anything else.

Your actual unit economics — what a customer is worth to you over 12 months, what you can afford to pay to acquire one, and whether your current targets are realistic or aspirational.

Week 3–4: Strategy Build

Once the audit is complete and we've agreed to work together, the strategy build begins. This is where we design the full system — not just the campaigns, but the architecture underneath them.

Channel mix and budget allocation

We decide which channels you should be in and in what proportion, based on your margin structure, your funnel length, and where your customers actually spend their time. For most DTC brands, that's Google Search plus Meta. For B2B, LinkedIn plus Google Search. For brands with strong visual products, we layer in TikTok or Pinterest. The mix is never the same twice.

Creative brief

Every campaign starts with a creative brief: what hooks we're testing, what offers we're leading with, what the creative hierarchy looks like. If we're producing the creative, we write the brief and share it before a pixel gets touched. If you're producing creative in-house, we give you the brief and review the output before anything goes live.

Tracking and attribution setup

If the audit flagged any tracking issues — and it usually does — we fix them now. GA4 events, Meta Pixel, Google Tag Manager, UTM structure. We also set up our reporting layer: the custom dashboard you'll check every week to see what's happening without needing a decoder ring.

Weeks 5–8: Launch and the First Learning Phase

This is the part most clients are surprised by. Campaigns go live — but we don't optimize aggressively in week one. We let the algorithms learn, we watch the data accumulate, and we catch any setup issues before they cost real money.

What we're doing in the background during weeks five and six: checking conversion events fire correctly on every device, reviewing search term reports for irrelevant spend, watching CTR and creative fatigue metrics, and adjusting bid strategies as early signals come in.

By weeks seven and eight, we have enough data to make the first meaningful optimization moves: pausing underperformers, increasing budget on winners, refining audience segments, and updating the creative based on what the numbers are telling us.

Weeks 9–12: Optimization and the Flywheel

By week nine, most clients start to see the numbers move. ROAS climbs. CPA drops. The test-and-learn matrix starts returning clear winners. This is when the work shifts from "building the machine" to "running the machine."

We hold bi-weekly strategy calls where we walk through performance, explain what changed and why, and align on the next two weeks of work. We don't wait for the call to surface a problem — if something goes wrong, you hear from us the same day.

At the end of the 90-day initial agreement, we do a full review: what we tested, what we learned, what the results were against the targets we set in week three. If we've hit the targets, we talk about how to scale. If we haven't, we're honest about why and what the path forward looks like.

What Makes This Work

The 90-day structure works because it creates accountability on both sides. You know exactly what we're doing and when. We know exactly what we're being measured against. There are no hidden phases, no surprise pivots, no mystery.

It also works because we treat the first 90 days as the highest-leverage window in any engagement. The structural decisions made in week three — channel mix, creative hierarchy, attribution setup — compound for months. Getting them right early is worth more than any optimization we could make in week 50.

If you're curious what this would look like for your specific business, start with the free audit. You'll leave with a written plan either way.