# Culture Foundry — onboarding: what we need from them Drafted 2026-08-27. Source: the Optimization Review, the Task Checklist, and the sales thread. Organized by **who at CF actually holds it** — Tanya is the driver but most of these live with Hans (dev) or Nancy (marketing/impl). --- ## The one that unblocks the most: the NAP decision (task B-a) `B-a` — "Standardize the official NAP" — is a **decision, not a task**, and it blocks nine downstream items including five of the six priority-1 urgent ones: B-b, B-c, B-d (all citation work), A-d, A-e (GBP services + descriptions), D-a (footer), D-g, D-j (location/contact pages), F-a (LocalBusiness schema). Nothing in Sections A, B, D or F can start until CF picks: - **One business name** — "Culture Foundry" or "Culture Foundry LLC"? Both are in circulation. Which is canonical for directories and schema? - **One address format per office**, character-for-character, matching GBP: - Seattle: confirm `600 N 36th St #200, Seattle, WA ` — exact suite notation ("#200" vs "Suite 200" vs "Ste 200") - Austin: full street address + suite (review doesn't state it) - **One phone format** — `1-206-487-3330` is the main. Is there a separate Austin number? Which number goes on which profile/page? - Confirm the **old Seattle address (5101 14th Ave NW)** is fully retired and there's no lease/mail still attached to it. Get this in writing (email is fine) — it becomes the reference every later task is checked against. --- ## 1. Google tools → Tanya to route For rob@plusroi.com, rian@plusroi.com, yulia@plusroi.com, plusroi@gmail.com. | Tool | Access level wanted | Minimum acceptable | Note | |---|---|---|---| | GA4 | Administrator | Editor | Need Editor+ to check config, not just read | | Google Search Console | Owner | Full | Ask if a **Domain property** exists; if only URL-prefix, we may want to add one | | Google Business Profile | Manager on **both** Seattle **and** Austin | Manager | Granted per-location; check if profiles sit in a business group/org | | Google Tag Manager | Publish | Read | Optional — for a config review | | Google Ads | Standard | Read-only | Optional — connection check only | | **Bing Webmaster Tools** | Full | Read | **Add this.** Copilot and ChatGPT search lean on Bing's index — it matters for the AEO half of the program | Also ask about: - **Looker Studio** dashboards they already rely on (share, don't rebuild) - Any **existing SEO tool subscriptions** (Semrush / Ahrefs / Moz / BrightLocal) so we don't duplicate spend or contradict a report they already trust - Any **prior SEO agency** work, reports, or redirects we should know about ## 2. Website / dev → Hans Half the checklist is Work Type = *Web Development*, and the agreement is that **CF's team writes the code**. So the real ask here is process, not just logins. - **CMS admin** for Rian + Yulia — individual named accounts, not a shared one. (Rian already has site access — confirm it's admin-level and get Yulia her own.) - **Stack write-up**: it's a hybrid setup with Wagtail in the mix. What renders what? Which of these is CMS-editable vs templated vs hard-coded — page titles, H1s, footer, breadcrumbs, JSON-LD, category page intros, author bios? This determines whether ~20 tasks are "us" or "them". - **Staging environment** — URL + access, and confirm it's noindexed. - **How work reaches their devs**: ticket system? Jira/Linear/GitHub? Who triages? What's realistic lead time and sprint cadence? *This is the single biggest schedule risk in the engagement — our checklist can outrun their dev capacity.* Hans committed on the call to forecasting resources for the urgent 30-day items; worth holding him to a named amount of dev time. - Known context: **breadcrumbs aren't rendering** (Nancy raised it). Ask what they already know about why. - Whether they want us to **spec in their format** (ticket templates, etc.). ## 3. Local + citations → Nancy / Tanya - **Access to existing directory listings** they already control — Clutch, Yelp, BBB, LinkedIn company page, Crunchbase, Apple Business Connect, industry directories. *Correcting the old Seattle address requires either the login or a claim.* Without these, B-b turns from cleanup into a claim-and-wait slog. - **An email address for directory verification** they'll actually monitor, plus **someone who can take a verification phone call** during business hours. - **Photos** (task A-c, urgent) — team, workspace, exterior/signage, for **both** Seattle and Austin. Brand asset library or a Drive folder is ideal. Nothing to do here until assets exist. - **Confirm the 24-hours-weekday GBP listing is accurate.** If it reflects support coverage rather than office hours, we'll say so plainly on the site. - **Service list** to publish on the profiles (web design, web development, managed hosting, …) — their words, ranked. - **Confirm Portland / Boulder / Sarasota** are service areas with no physical presence, and that reframing those pages as service-area pages is fine. ## 4. Reviews → Tanya (urgent, client-side effort) Seattle has 1 review, Austin has 0. This is the fastest visible win and it's almost entirely on their side. - **A list of clients OK to ask** — recent and long-standing — with owner names. - **Who sends the ask** (Tanya? account managers? Nancy?) and from what address. - **Any constraints** — NDAs, enterprise clients who can't publicly endorse, procurement rules. - Whether they'll take a **short drip cadence** rather than a one-time blast (a burst of reviews in one week looks manufactured to Google). ## 5. People / author authority → Tanya + Nancy The review calls missing author bios *"the single biggest E-E-A-T gap on the site."* Tasks E-f/g/h/i + F-c all wait on this. - **Which people will be regular Cultivate authors** (pick a real, sustainable set — 3–6 rather than everyone). - For each: **credentials, years of experience, domain focus, headshot, LinkedIn URL**, plus any external profiles — conference talks, published articles, GitHub, podcast appearances, certifications. - **Consent to publish** those details. - **Years in business + client/project volume** (task G-b) — "20+ years, hundreds of launches" style numbers. Not currently stated anywhere on the site, and it's one of the strongest AEO signals available to them. ## 6. Strategy inputs → the keyword call with Tanya + Nancy Rob promised this call *before* work starts. Bring: - **Which services are the priority for visibility** (task D-e) — the site currently treats all services evenly, so machines can't tell what matters. This is a business decision only they can make. - **What they want more of vs. what they merely do.** - **Target client profile** and which markets actually matter commercially. - **Competitor list** — the agencies they lose to — for the backlink/keyword gap analysis (B-f). - **Hans's "wagtail support" idea** — worth testing as a low-competition, high-intent opportunity. - **Original data (G-f)**: what internal data could they publish that nobody else has? Performance benchmarks, migration outcomes, hosting uptime data. Heads-up ask now, real conversation later. ## 7. Process / logistics → Tanya - **Approval chain** — Tanya drives, Hans decides. Who signs off on published copy, and what's the turnaround we can count on? (Program duration estimates assume fast approvals; say so.) - **Comms channel** — email, or a shared Slack channel? - **Meeting cadence** — biweekly check-in? monthly report review? - **Where the checklist lives** — we'll run it on our side and share status. Confirm they don't need it mirrored into their own PM tool. - **Reporting** — monthly summary; agree the day of the month. - **Billing** — invoicing contact, PO/billing details, payment terms, first invoice date (September start). - **Anything on their side we should sign** — Hans asked about paperwork earlier; Rob said email confirmation was enough. If they want an NDA or MSA, better to know now than mid-engagement. --- ## Credential handling — say this explicitly Ask for **individually named accounts wherever the platform supports it** (Google tools all do). For anything that genuinely only has one shared login — some directories — ask them to send it via a password manager share or a one-time secret link, **not** in an email body. Cheap to say up front, awkward to retrofit, and it's the professional posture for an agency-to-agency engagement where they're evaluating us as much as buying from us.