Rootline is a performance agency built around a single idea: an agency should only get paid when the campaigns it builds actually move revenue. This page is the long version of how that works, and the questions every founder asks before they hand over an ad account.
Performance is a fee structure, not a tagline. Most performance agencies still bill a retainer of $5k–$15k a month whether revenue is up 40% or down 20%. That's a subscription with a results-flavoured wrapper. Rootline charges zero retainer. Zero management fee. Zero setup fee. The only money that moves between us is a percentage of the revenue that campaigns we build and run on your account generate. If those campaigns don't earn, we don't invoice.
Campaign-attributed. Not lift-over-baseline. Old performance-fee models took a cut of lift above a pre-engagement baseline. Every quarter became an argument over what counts as lift, what counts as the brand's own work, and which seasonality to discount. Rootline only takes a cut of revenue tracked at the campaign / UTM / pixel level on the campaigns we build. Meta Pixel + CAPI, TikTok Pixel, Shopify reporting. Your existing campaigns get paused at kickoff. Everything we take a fee on is something we built end to end.
You own everything. Always. The ad accounts, the pixels, the Shopify store, the CAPI integrations, the creative assets. All of it stays in your Business Manager and on your domain. Rootline operates inside your accounts at Manage / Operator level. Revoke access in two clicks if you ever need to. Ad spend goes on your card, not ours. We don't mark spend up, we don't hold media credit, we don't take commission from Meta.
There's a band the math actually works in. Below $30k/mo in online revenue we'd love to help, but your brand has to be the right fit; margins and content discipline both have to be there. Above $100k+/mo the model still scales, but you'll likely want an in-house buyer alongside us. The sweet spot is $30k–$100k/mo in Shopify DTC revenue, with real margin, a working checkout, and a founder who can stand in front of a camera once a month. If you sell mostly through Amazon, Walmart or Chewy, this isn't a fit. The attribution doesn't work.
Rootline Marketing LLC is a Nevada-registered agency founded by Sean McKinley in 2026. Solo founder, systems-first operations, built to run like a tight five-person shop on day one.
Sean is a systems-first operator. The SOPs are tight, the pipeline is mapped, and the audit deliverable is a real document, not a slide deck dressed up with stock photos. The offer is built on speed: audit started within 4 hours of an application, audit delivered within 48 business hours, performance agreement turned around within 2 hours of a verbal yes.
The reason the model is performance-only isn’t marketing. It’s belief. Retainers misalign incentives. Skin in the game changes which clients we take, what we focus on, how fast we move, and how the work actually feels.
Pulled verbatim from the first 45 minutes of every audit call. If something you need to know isn't here, that's what the audit is for.
A written teardown of your paid + organic setup, the two things we’d ship first, and a proposal. Or an honest reason we’re not the fit. We tell people no for a living, if it’s wrong, we’ll say so.