Łukasz Piotrowski
I have run SEMFLEX since 2010: advertising, software and research for clients in Poland and abroad. I work with a settled group of specialists on a business-to-business basis rather than with salaried staff. That is not a saving, it is a decision that changes how the work is done.
A team without fixed overhead
I have regular collaborators for design, video, implementation and code. We have worked together long enough that they need no onboarding, and on a larger job I can add hands within days. When the job ends, the structure returns to its original size.
This is not the absence of a team, it is a team without fixed costs. That structure removes the pressure to keep a fixed headcount occupied, which means I can tell a client when something is not worth doing.
The third part of the arrangement is artificial intelligence. It takes on work that once needed several people: going through thousands of records, searching a market, preparing comparisons. Analysis that would take a team weeks comes down to a dozen or so hours.
The machine does not know what to ask, though. The whole flow of work, the order of steps, the criteria and which results are excluded from the final analysis are designed by a person. Without that you get a thousand rows that look neat and mean nothing. So I treat it as a tool in the workshop, not as a contractor you can hand the job to and walk away.
What does not change: advertising, visibility and measurement still come together in one place, with me. I can see that a drop in conversions coincided with a website release, because I am looking at both. The client talks to one person and gets the answer from that person, including when the answer is "that was my mistake".
How to check it
Google Partner status is not a badge you buy. Google awards it after checking three things: the optimisation score of the accounts under management, the size of the budgets handled, and current certification. Verification is continuous, so the badge speaks about today rather than an exam passed years ago.
Workshop
I write some of the tools myself, because off-the-shelf dashboards show what looks good rather than what the client is asking about.
- Daily monitoring of accounts and websites that reports a measurement failure the same day, not in the month-end report
- Map and search rank measured on a geographic grid, separately for each branch
- Tracking competitor offers and presence in the channels that influence the buying decision
- Reports built from source data, with the origin of every number available on request
Who I work with
Close to thirty ad accounts under ongoing care. Manufacturers selling through distributors, service companies with premises in several cities, property developers and online shops. Sectors: automotive, real estate, health and beauty, and local services in crowded markets. I work with clients in Poland and abroad, including markets where the brand is only just arriving.
My approach
I approach this trade as a craft. I want to know how things work underneath, so instead of waiting for a feature to appear in somebody's panel, I more often sit down and build it myself.