Who is behind it?
Phil. I started in retail, like most people do, then went corporate for a while: customer service management, process improvement, then sales and account management. That last job had me sitting across the desk from small and medium businesses all day, and after enough of those meetings you start noticing the same gap in every single one.
I grew up in New Zealand, which isn't a qualification, it just means I'm fairly hard to rattle. Chill guy. Turns out that's worth more than it sounds when something goes wrong mid-project.
What does Echo Studios actually do?
Three things. We build the website. We do the work that gets it found. And we put in the system that catches an enquiry and chases it until somebody answers. They're meant to be one thing, which is the whole point, because most businesses buy them separately from three suppliers who have never spoken to each other, and then wonder why the site looks great and the phone is quiet.
We build on Next.js and serve it off a CDN, so copies of your pages sit near your customers instead of on one server somewhere far away.
What a CDN is We do the unglamorous search work: structure, entities, a
Google Business Profile that's actually filled in, pages that answer what somebody typed. And we wire up a CRM underneath, so a form becomes a tagged contact, a text and a follow-up sequence instead of an email nobody opens.
HighLevel
How small is small?
Count it on one hand small. We take on a set number of clients at a time and we don't go past it, because that's the moment the senior person you met at the pitch quietly turns into the junior person who does the work. I have watched it happen at other places and I'm not interested in doing it here.
It also means we say no sometimes. If it isn't a good fit you will hear that on the first call, not three invoices in. And when something genuinely needs a bigger team than ours, we bring in partners we have worked with before rather than pretend the job is smaller than it is.
Who is it for?
Trades and service businesses, mostly. That's where we started and it's still most of the client list. Electricians, painters, towing, cleaning, landscaping, property maintenance, automotive. It's honestly where we're most useful too, because a booked job is worth real money to those businesses and a missed call costs it in a way you feel that week.
It isn't a rule though. We take work in other industries when the problem is one we recognise, and it usually is, because it's the same problem whatever you sell.
How much do you need to be involved?
As much or as little as you want. If you want to be across it, great, an hour a month answering the questions only you can answer makes everything else work harder.
And if you genuinely never want to think about marketing again, that's fine too, that's a service. We run as your marketing department: strategy, campaigns, follow-up, reporting, all of it, with a summary each month you can read in five minutes. Handing it over properly is a completely legitimate choice. It's just a different thing from buying a website and hoping.
Where are you?
Headquartered in Melbourne. I travel between here, the Gold Coast and the States, and clients are spread across Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales, so most of the work happens over Zoom and on the phone regardless.
I just paid for a website. Why would I need you?
You might not. But it's worth checking what you actually got, because we open a lot of brand new sites and find the WordPress template still carrying its default Hello World post, no schema, no favicon, no social preview image, and a page title that says Home. That's a brochure. It looks fine and it can't be found, and none of it means the person who built it was dishonest, only that nobody was asked to do the other half of the job.
Do I have to be in Melbourne?
No. Roughly half the work is interstate and it has never been the thing that mattered.
What if my industry isn't on the list?
Ask anyway. The list reflects where we have done the most work, not a restriction. If the problem is that people can't find you and the enquiries that do arrive go cold, that's the same problem whatever you sell.
How long before anything happens?
Profile and technical work can move within weeks. Content and links are slower and compound. Anyone giving you a date for page one is guessing, and we would rather tell you that than sell you a timeline we can't control.