Module 2 · Plan: One Campaign, On Paper First

Budget, timeline & the gates you set early

Here’s a prediction you can bank: two weeks after launch, you will be emotional about this campaign, in one of two directions. Either panicked — “it’s spending and nothing’s happening, kill it” — or excited — “three leads yesterday, triple the budget.” Both instincts, acted on, wreck campaigns. This lesson is where the calm version of you writes the rules the emotional version will follow.

The pilot budget, from your own math

Open your Break-Even Calculator from Module 1 — you need one number from it: your allowable cost per lead. The pilot budget formula is simple: enough spend to buy roughly 20–30 leads at your allowable CPL, spread over three to four weeks. That’s the minimum purchase of an honest answer. Fewer leads than that and you’re reading tea leaves; a shorter window and you’re grading the calibration noise, not the campaign.

Meridian’s arithmetic (illustrative numbers from a fictional firm — yours come from your own calculator): their allowable CPL worked out to $50. Twenty-five leads × $50 = $1,250, spread over four weeks — call it $40 a day. Now compute yours and write the daily number in the Planner’s budget box.

Timeline honesty

Week one is calibration noise — Meta’s system is still learning who responds, and the numbers will swing. Weeks two through four are the actual read. So the campaign is judged at the gate review, on the date you set today — not nightly, and not by how you feel on day 9. Judge it the way you’d judge any new hire: a defined trial, defined success criteria, a decision date. Owners apply that discipline everywhere except marketing — mostly because nobody ever showed them where to put the numbers. This page is where the numbers go.

1. Wk 1

   Calibration noise

   Meta is still learning who responds; the numbers swing. No verdicts.
2. Wk 2–4

   The actual read

   Judged at the gate review, on the date you set today.

The three gates — written now, in your numbers

A gate is a pre-committed if-then: a number at which you will stop, continue, or add budget. Write all three in the Planner, with your own figures from the calculator — template numbers protect nobody. Meridian’s, as a worked illustration (every figure below is arithmetic on their $50 allowable, not a result):

1. The kill/fix gate. “If cost per lead is still above $75 — roughly 1.5× our allowable — after $500 of spend, we pause and fix the layer the numbers point to before spending more.” (Module 5’s diagnostic tree tells you which layer; the gate’s job is to force the stop.)
2. The continue gate. “If CPL is at or below $50, we run the full four-week pilot untouched and review at the gate date.” Permission to leave it alone is a real decision — for beginners, the hardest one.
3. The scale gate. “If cost per booked call holds under our allowable for two consecutive weeks, the budget rises 20%.” Gently — sharp budget jumps restart the system’s learning. And scaling before the gate clears just means losing faster.

Why gates work: they move the decision from week-three-you, who is emotional, to today-you, who is not. At the review, the question is never “how do we feel?” It’s “which gate did we hit?” The plan outranks the panic — and the excitement.

Two last boxes: the owner and the calendar

Write down who makes the calls — one name, probably yours — and put a recurring 30-minute weekly review on the calendar right now, same day each week. Module 5 gives that half hour its full ritual: five numbers, one decision, a log entry. A campaign that isn’t reviewed weekly isn’t failing — it’s unmanaged, which is how ad budgets die of neglect rather than of anything the ads did wrong.