What Kind of Work Does sosSTEVIE Take On — and What Does It Turn Down?
One person, four kinds of problem, and a short list of jobs I send elsewhere. What I take on, what I turn away, and how the work runs.
About · one person, four pillars
What Kind of Work Does sosSTEVIE Take On — and What Does It ?
One person, four kinds of problem, and a short list of jobs I send elsewhere. What I take on, what I turn away, and how the work runs.
Not sure it fits? A call, twenty minutes, free. Or send a short message.
- Compromised site, injected spam pagesRescue
- A foundation nobody has looked at in yearsRebuild
- Nobody can find you, or AI doesn’t name youRank
- Maintenance, monitoring, updatesRun
- Branding, logos, paid advertisingsent elsewhere
- A rebuild nobody has diagnosedturned down
If a job doesn’t fit one of them, I don’t sell it.
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.
What the practice is
One person. Building websites since 1997.
The history
I built my first website in 1997, after a weekend teaching myself HTML, and wrote it by hand in Notepad. I’ve been building and repairing websites ever since. 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 it changed
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
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.
The Rescue services →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.
The Rebuild services →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.
The Rank services →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 Run services →- 01In a panic
- 02Want a rebuild
- 03Want to be found
- 04Want it looked after
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
I hold myself to a strict standard, and I expect you to hold me to it too. Here are the four questions you should ask me (and anyone else you interview).
How the work actually runs
Six steps. One engagement at a time.
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 Site Rescue — $997, fixed.
I find what’s wrong and fix what’s causing the damage: malware, rogue accounts, the entry point. Full backup first, every change logged. You get a written account of what was found, what was fixed, and what’s left. How the Site Rescue works
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 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.
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 Site Rescue is for. One fixed price to find out what’s wrong and fix what’s causing it.
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.