About us
Built for Small Businesses, Backed by Experience
Eight-plus years in the marketing industry, spent almost entirely with companies that have a real budget, a phone that has to be answered, and nobody whose job title contains the word marketing.
01Our mission
Make world-class marketing ordinary for a business with nine staff
Arri exists because the gap between what a large company gets from its marketing and what a small one gets is almost never about talent. It is about coordination. A business with nine staff can afford good search work, a good website, a proper identity and a well-run ad account. What it cannot afford is to be the project manager holding three suppliers together, chasing the developer for the change the SEO consultant asked for while the ad agency sends traffic to a page nobody owns.
So we built the coordination into the product instead. One questionnaire briefs all four disciplines. One plan says what happens first, second and third, and why in that order. One dashboard carries every brief, approval and report, which is what lets us publish flat prices: when the overhead is software rather than account management, the fee stops depending on how much chasing a project needs.
The rest of it is a set of positions we are not willing to trade. You own your domain, your source files and your ad accounts from day one. Ad spend goes straight to Google and Meta and is never marked up. Billing is month to month and cancelling is a button. If your budget will not clear the floor for paid search in your category, we will tell you that in writing and put the money into search instead, because we would rather keep a customer for four years than win a project this month.
Where we work
English-language small businesses across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland. Trades and home services, clinics and practices, independent retail and hospitality, and professional services firms under about thirty staff.
How we are set up
A small, specialist team rather than a pyramid. There is no layer of account management between you and the person doing the work, because that layer is where information goes to be softened.
02The team
The people who will actually be on your account
Four specialists, each leading one discipline. Whoever is assigned to a piece of your work is named in your dashboard, and they write your briefs themselves.
Dana Whitfield
Founder and Strategy Lead
Dana spent six years running acquisition for two regional franchise groups before starting Arri. She writes most of the strategy briefs and still reads every onboarding questionnaire that comes through the platform.
Marcus Reyes
Head of Search
Marcus has worked on local search since 2017, mostly for trades, clinics and independent retailers. He is the person who will tell you that your third-best keyword is the one worth having.
Priya Raman
Design Director
Priya leads website and brand design at Arri. She came from a print and packaging background, which is why Arri identity systems ship with a signage spec and not just a logo file.
Tomas Lindqvist
Paid Media Lead
Tomas builds and manages every paid account on the platform. He has rebuilt more than four hundred Google Ads accounts and has strong opinions about broad match.
03What we hold to
Four positions we will not trade away for a sale
These are the commitments customers hold us to, and the ones that occasionally cost us a deal.
- We tell you when the answer is no
- If your budget cannot clear the floor for paid search in your category, we will say so and put the money into search instead. If your existing site is fine, we will not sell you a rebuild. We would rather keep a customer for four years than win a project this month.
- You own everything, always
- Domain, source files, ad accounts, content, analytics history. All of it is registered in your name from day one. Leaving Arri means we remove our access and you keep working, which is the only arrangement we think is defensible.
- Reports name things, not adjectives
- A monthly report should tell you which rankings moved, how many calls came from search, what was published and what happens next. If a month was quiet, it says that. Nobody has ever made a good decision from a chart with no numbers on it.
- The work is done by the people you meet
- The specialist assigned to your account is named in your dashboard, writes your briefs and answers your questions. There is no layer of account management between you and the person doing the work, because that layer is where information goes to be softened.
048+ years in the marketing industry
How Arri got from a spreadsheet to a platform
Seven things that changed how the work is done. Each one came out of a constraint rather than a plan.
2018
Two clients and a spreadsheet
Arri started as freelance search work for a heating engineer in Boise and a dental practice in Sacramento. Both had been quoted four-figure monthly retainers by agencies that would not explain what the money bought. The spreadsheet that tracked their work is, in a sense, the first version of this platform.
2019
The first hundred service-area pages
A year spent almost entirely on local search taught us the thing the rest of the business is built on: for a company that serves a defined area, a page about one service in one place, written by someone who knows the place, outperforms almost anything clever. We wrote a hundred of them and watched which ones held.
2020
Rebuilding for businesses that had two weeks
When shops and clinics had to move online in a fortnight, we stopped taking three months over a website. We built the seven-page structure that is still our starting point today, and shipped forty of them in six months. The constraint made the work better, and we never went back to the longer version.
2021
Design joined search
Priya Raman joined and brought a print and packaging discipline with her. Identity work stopped being a logo at the start of a website project and became a system with a signage spec, applied templates and a type licence, which is why Arri brand projects still ship with a document a sign maker can build from.
2022
One brief, four services
Customers kept asking us to take over their advertising because it was easier than briefing a third supplier. Tomas Lindqvist came in to run paid media, and we merged four separate onboarding processes into a single questionnaire. It cut the time a new customer spends on us from about eight hours to about ninety minutes.
2024
Arri becomes a platform
The spreadsheet finally retired. Every brief, approval, schedule and report moved into one dashboard, which is what let us publish flat prices: when the coordination overhead is software rather than people, the fee stops depending on how much chasing a project needs.
2026
Eight years, one account
Today Arri runs search, websites, brand and advertising for small businesses across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland, on month-to-month terms with published pricing. The work is done by the same named specialists, and customers still own everything at the end.
Want to see whether we are the right fit?
Book a free thirty-minute consultation. We will look at your search position, your site and your ad account, and tell you honestly which one is worth fixing first.
