Portland, OR · Est. 2019
We work with a small roster of home service clients across the Pacific Northwest and Mountain West. Strategy, search, and the kind of slow work that compounds.
Start a conversationAlex Corbin founded Fieldnotes Marketing in 2019. The firm publishes a short monthly essay on local-business marketing and works with a small roster of home service clients across the Pacific Northwest and Mountain West.
The name comes from the practice of writing things down as you observe them — before theory gets in the way. Most marketing advice is built around generalizations. We try to do the opposite: work closely with a handful of clients and pay attention to what actually moves things in their specific markets.
We're based in Portland but most of our client work is done remotely. Our client list stays short on purpose — we cap at eight active engagements at any given time. When a spot opens, we take on one new client.
Partnerships
Robin Criel, Director of Partnerships
Director of Partnerships
Robin oversees new business at Fieldnotes. Joined the firm in 2022 after eight years in business development across the commercial services sector. Robin's role is the first most prospective clients encounter: an outbound introduction, a short note, occasionally a follow-up.
Before anything else, we work out what a business actually stands for and how to say it in plain language. For local service companies, this usually means writing that sounds like a real person — not an agency approximation of one. We do the interviews, shape the narrative, and produce the language that goes on the website and in outreach.
Search visibility for the queries that lead to booked work. We research the keyword landscape, build the content plan, write or edit the pages, and handle the technical layer. For local businesses, this means both organic rankings and a strong map pack presence across their service area.
Links, mentions, and local credibility signals that search engines and prospective customers both notice. We build relationships with local publications, neighborhood platforms, and industry directories. This work is slower than ads but the results tend to hold.
Our clients are typically owner-operated home service businesses doing $500k to $4M annually — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, and specialty trades. They operate in defined service areas across the Pacific Northwest and Mountain West: Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado.
What they share is a certain impatience with marketing that doesn't explain itself. They've usually been through at least one experience with an agency that sent monthly reports full of vanity metrics and couldn't explain what changed or why. We try to be different in the most basic way possible: by being direct about what we're doing and what it's producing.
We don't work with businesses that are just getting started, or that need high-volume lead generation campaigns. That's not our model. Our model is a small set of clients, a long-term engagement, and work that compounds over time.
We respond to most inquiries within two business days. If you're reaching out about a potential engagement, a short note about your business and what you're looking for is enough to get started.