What Kind of Work Does sosSTEVIE Take On — and What Does It Turn Down?

The story

I turned down a five-figure rebuild last spring.

Nice people, real budget, signed off internally, ready to start Monday. I asked what had prompted it and got a version of the answer I always get: the site felt tired, leads were down, the board wanted something modern.

So I asked what their enquiry volume had been doing month by month for two years. Nobody knew. It wasn’t measured anywhere — the analytics had been broken since a migration and nobody had noticed, because nobody had looked.

I told them I wouldn’t quote the rebuild. Not because it was a bad project, but because neither of us had any way of knowing whether a rebuild would fix the thing they were actually unhappy about, and I’d have been taking five figures to find out.

They went with someone else. Fine outcome. But it’s the clearest example I have of what this practice actually is, so it’s the first thing on this page.

Here’s the direct answer

sosSTEVIE is a one-person practice run by Stevie — Jacques Schinazi — covering four kinds of work: rescuing compromised or broken websites, rebuilding weak ones, making businesses findable by search engines and AI assistants, and keeping the result running. It takes on small and mid-sized businesses, works one engagement at a time, and diagnoses before quoting on every project without exception. It does not do branding, paid advertising, or enterprise work.

Key Takeaways

One person, not an agency. You get the person who does the work, on the phone, every time. The trade-off is capacity, and it’s a real one.
Four pillars: Rescue, Rebuild, Rank, Run. If a job doesn’t fit one of them, I don’t sell it.
$997 Diagnostic before any quoted project. No exceptions, including for people who arrive certain of what they need.
Prices are published where they’re fixed. Everything else says quoted after the Diagnostic, because quoting before diagnosing is the thing this practice exists to argue against.
There’s a list of work I turn down, below, and it’s specific rather than modest.

What the practice is

I’ve been building and repairing websites for about fifteen years, and trading as sosSTEVIE since 2015. In 2024 my own site was taken over by a spammer who built tens of thousands of hidden pages underneath it, and I lost the business — I found out from the silence, not from an alert. The full account is on the story page, including the six checks you can run on your own site this afternoon.

What matters here is what it changed. I don’t sell services I can’t evidence, I don’t quote before I’ve looked, and the order I work in is fixed: security, then foundation, then visibility, then conversion. That order isn’t a philosophy, it’s arithmetic — money spent ranking a compromised site is money spent advertising for whoever compromised it.

The name, briefly: I have a French name that clients struggle with, one of them texted SOS STEVIE late one night when his site went down, and it stuck until it was simply what everyone used. I registered the domain on the strength of it in 2015, nine years before I needed it myself. The longer version is on the story page too.

What I take on

Four pillars. Everything I do sits in exactly one of them.

Rescue — when something is actively wrong. Compromised sites, injected spam pages, malware, sites that are down or redirecting somewhere you didn’t choose. Flat-rate where I can make it flat-rate, because a panicking buyer shouldn’t also be worrying about an open-ended bill.

Rebuild — when the foundation is the problem. Sites that work but shouldn’t be trusted: abandoned plugins, unmaintainable themes, a hosting setup nobody has looked at since it was set up. New builds where the existing one genuinely can’t be saved.

Rank — when nobody can find you. Traditional search, local presence, and the newer half of the problem: whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overview name you when someone asks them what you do. Most audits still skip that second half entirely.

Run — when you want to stop thinking about it. Maintenance, monitoring, updates, and the ongoing work of staying visible. This is the least exciting thing on the list and the one that would have saved me.

The ladder is deliberate and I’ll say so plainly: people who arrive in a panic tend to become people who want a rebuild, then people who want to be found, then people who want it looked after. I’m not hiding that. It’s just what happens when the work goes well.

What I turn down

This list is longer than the one above and it’s the more useful of the two.

Branding, logos, naming, visual identity. Not my discipline. I’ll happily work alongside whoever does it.
Paid advertising — Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn. I’ll tell you when your problem is that you have no traffic and no time to earn it, but I won’t run the campaign.
Enterprise engagements. Procurement cycles, security questionnaires, six stakeholders. One person can’t service that honestly and I’d rather say so than find out at month four.
Rebuilds where nobody has diagnosed the problem. The one at the top of this page. This is the most common thing I turn away.
Clean it up quickly and don’t worry about how they got in. A clean-up without closing the entry point isn’t a rescue, it’s a delay. I’ve watched people pay for the same clean-up three times.
Work I’d be learning on your budget. If a job needs something I’m not good at, I’ll say so and point you at someone. This happens a few times a year.
Anything requiring me to claim a result I can’t evidence. Guaranteed rankings, guaranteed AI citations, guaranteed anything. What I can evidence is here.

The Fit Test — four questions worth asking any consultant

Ask me these. Ask the next three people you talk to as well. The answers separate people quickly and none of them require you to be technical.

1. What would you need to know before quoting this? The answer tells you whether they diagnose or pattern-match. “Not much, we’ve done loads of these” is not the reassurance it sounds like.

2. What’s your best guess at what’s actually wrong — and how confident are you? You’re listening for a number and a hedge. Anyone certain before looking is selling you the service they wanted to sell you anyway.

3. What would you do first, and why that first? There should be an order and a reason for it. If the order is whatever they’re best at, that’s your answer.

4. What’s a job like this you got wrong? Everyone competent has one. People who don’t have one either haven’t done enough work or aren’t going to tell you the truth about yours either.

How the work actually runs

A call, twenty minutes, free. You describe what’s happening. I tell you whether it sounds like something I do. If it isn’t, I say so on that call rather than three emails later.
The Diagnostic — $997, five working days. Read-only access. Nothing on your site is modified. You get a ranked fault list, what each fault is plausibly costing you, and a 90-day roadmap.
The findings call — 60 minutes, recorded. I walk you through it. You argue with the assumptions. You leave with the document whether or not you hire me.
A quote, if there’s work to do. Fixed scope, against findings, not against a hunch. The full $997 comes off the first invoice.
The work. One engagement at a time. You talk to me, because there isn’t anybody else to talk to.
Handover, or Run. Either I hand you something documented that you or your team can maintain, or I maintain it. Both are fine. Handover is not a failed sale.

The exception is Rescue. If your site is actively down or serving pages you didn’t write, skip all of this and call (754) 302-4631. Diagnosis and containment happen at the same time in an emergency, and the sequence above assumes you have the luxury of a week.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is sosSTEVIE an agency or one person? One person. Stevie — legally Jacques Schinazi — does the diagnostic, the work and the calls, and brings in specialists occasionally for things outside his range. The advantage is that the person who scoped the job is the person doing it, so nothing is lost in translation and nobody is being upsold by an account manager. The disadvantage is real capacity limits, which is why work runs one engagement at a time.

Why do you insist on the $997 Diagnostic before quoting? Because the symptom a business owner notices is rarely the cause, and quoting against a symptom means selling work that may not fix anything. A paid diagnosis also changes the incentive — it means getting paid for the honest answer, including that your site is fine and your problem is elsewhere, which a free audit structurally can’t deliver. The entire $997 is credited against the first project if you go ahead.

What size of business do you work with? Small and mid-sized businesses, typically those with a website that matters commercially but no in-house technical staff. Professional services firms — law, dental, accounting, clinics — tend to fit best, because they carry compliance exposure and have nobody internally watching for the kind of failure that took down my own site. Enterprise engagements are turned down rather than accepted badly.

Do you build new websites, or only fix broken ones? Both, but rarely in that order. Most people who arrive asking for a new website turn out to have a specific fixable fault and an old website that’s doing better than they think. When a rebuild is genuinely the right answer the Diagnostic will say so, and it’ll say why. Rebuilds sold without that evidence are the single most common thing turned away here.

What happens if you’re not the right person for the job? You get told, on the first call where possible, and pointed toward someone who is. This happens several times a year — branding work, paid advertising, and anything at enterprise scale all go elsewhere as a matter of course. Referring a job out costs a fee once; taking one that doesn’t fit costs a reputation, and this practice runs almost entirely on referral.

If you’re deciding

I’d rather you left this page knowing whether to call than impressed by it.

If your site is down, compromised, or doing something you didn’t ask it to, call (754) 302-4631 now and don’t book anything.

If it’s the slower problem — leads thinning, rankings sliding, a nagging sense that something’s wrong and no way to tell what — that’s what the Diagnostic is for. Five days, one diagnosis, a plan you own whether you hire me or not.

And if it’s neither, run the six checks on the story page and get on with your week. That’s a fine outcome too.

Start with the SOS Digital Diagnostic — $997 →