About

Who is behind this?

Vander Els Partners is a senior specialist team founded and led by Matt Vander Els. There is no account-manager layer: the strategist who scopes the engagement is the one who runs it. Every figure in your monthly report can be traced to the system it was pulled from, by the person who pulled it.

Most of our clients are contractors and practices competing in local service markets, the kind of business where one missed call is a real job lost. We build the operating system that produces their work, and we run it.

The site We build it, host it, secure it and maintain it, and it is registered in your name from the first day rather than ours. Written by hand, not assembled

The servers We run the hosting, the certificates, the mail delivery and the backups, which is why we can tell when a form has quietly stopped delivering instead of waiting for you to notice. Logs we can actually read

The reporting We wrote the automation that pulls calls, forms, ad exports and search data, and reconciles them against each other before we ever look at the month. Built for our own accounts first

The calls Every monthly review and every awkward conversation about a month that went sideways. None of it gets handed to an account manager. Same person, every time

Where we are

Your market, read at street level.

Any market in the country

PHOTOGRAPH

The people on your account

Strategy, build, paid media and reporting are each held by a specialist. You are given the names, and they do not rotate.

No junior inherits an account after it is sold, and nothing on it is offshored.

We run local campaigns in markets across the country, and we read each one as its own map rather than as a city name.

That matters more than it sounds. Local search is decided at street level. Knowing that a metro splits across a state line, that one county reads as a separate market to Google even though you drive it every day, and that the competitor beating you on the map is two towns away rather than downtown, is the difference between a plan and a guess.

Everything is run remotely, which means the geography of your business matters and ours does not. We have clients we have measured street by street and never once driven to.

See how we measure a service area →

Structure

Why a specialist team instead of a large agency?

No handoff

Because in a big agency, the person who sells it is not the person who builds it, and neither of them is the person sitting on your monthly call explaining a number they did not produce.

No account layer There is no account manager between you and the work, relaying your question to somebody you have never met and relaying an answer back a week later. You are talking to the person who did it

No handoff Nothing gets sold by one team and then handed to a junior who inherits the promise without the context behind it. Nothing changes hands

One accountable name When something breaks, and things do break, there is no internal ticket queue and nobody to blame. It is our problem, and you know exactly whose problem it is. One name owns it

The build informs the report Because we built the site and run the server, the reporting is not a summary of somebody else's dashboard. We can go and check the raw record when a figure looks wrong. Same hands, both ends

Honest edges

What are the limits of that?

Read before booking

There are things this model does not do, and it is better to read them here than to discover them in month three.

DEPTH

Named specialists

Strategy, build, paid media and reporting are each held by a specialist who is named on your account and does not rotate.

Nothing is offshored, and no junior inherits an account once it is sold.

FIT

We say no

If the budget will not carry it, if the market is too thin, or if the phone does not get answered reliably, we will say so plainly instead of selling you a smaller version of something that was never going to work.

SCOPE

Not everything

We do not do everything a full agency does, and we will point you elsewhere rather than take on work we would be learning on your money.

We also cannot fix what happens after the lead arrives. We can only prove it arrived.

If the answer is no, you get it in the first reply, not in month seven.

What happens next

Start with a straight read on your market.

A reply from Matt

The fastest way to find out whether we are the right answer for your business is to tell us about it and get an honest read on whether it fits.

Work with us › Or just email us

One team · one point of contact · one accountable name