You know the value of your business. But does the market?

A fractional Head of Marketing for owner-managed businesses across Bavaria. We set the strategy, deliver it in full and evidence what it returns. It is the work for which there is never time.

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sample-company-example.com

[Your Service] in [Your City] – Sample Company Ltd

A short description, the way it appears in real search results …

your-company-example.com

[Your Service] in [Your City] – Your Company

Structured content, a clean technical build, real substance. Exactly what AI search quotes, too.

An illustration of how a Google result can look. Whether and how AI search engines actually mention you is what zeitwert | labs, our own AI visibility product, measures.

When did you last research your own company?

Your existing clients appreciate the excellence of your work, because they experience its value at first hand. Prospective clients do not enjoy that advantage. Long before they meet you or your team, their first impression rests entirely on digital touchpoints: a search result, your website, an article written by somebody else three years ago. Those initial interactions are decisive, since they alone determine whether a prospect makes contact or moves on. Meanwhile your own time goes where it properly belongs, into the business, the clients and the work itself. Marketing is what gets deferred to next week.

Who leads your marketing once it outgrows being a secondary duty?

A sextant and a tablet showing growth figures on a wooden table

Capable marketing leaders are in short supply, and the majority of those who exist are employed by large corporates. Recruiting one on a full-time basis becomes commercially sensible only at a scale you may have no wish to reach. An agency will not close the gap either, since agencies are constituted to execute rather than to lead. That gap is precisely where we operate. We act as your fractional Head of Marketing, accountable for the strategy and, where the situation requires it, for its delivery as well, from the opening question through to the final detail.

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When did a supplier last ask questions before presenting a proposal?

Most proposals are written before the first meeting has taken place. We proceed the other way round. We ask about the business, the figures and the market. We examine your competitors. We establish what your customers genuinely enter into a search engine. Only once that picture holds together do we begin to build. You understand your business and we understand how markets behave; taken together, the result is a plan drawn up for your circumstances rather than adapted from somebody else's. And it is you who signs it off, not us.

Marketing and advertising are not the same discipline.

A hand pours a spice blend from a spoon into a jar

Advertising is one instrument among many. Determining which instrument to deploy, and when, is a decision that sits considerably higher up. Which markets are genuinely open to you? Which sales channel earns its keep, and which merely absorbs budget? Where is something shifting that has yet to register in the revenue line? That is the substance of the work, and it amounts to running a business from the outside in. We work on expansion, on new routes to market and on entry into markets you do not yet serve. We take responsibility for the brand. And where circumstances call for it, we involve ourselves directly in the day-to-day. Classical advertising is where we come from; digital is where we operate now. Whether the answer proves to be stronger visibility in search, a single coherent narrative across every channel, or a poster site at the right junction, the instrument does not make that determination. Your objective does.

Are your customers still searching the way they did three years ago?

Very few businesses can answer that with any certainty. The usual moment of discovery arrives when enquiries begin to thin out, by which point a competitor has already established a lead. When AI-driven search emerged, we did not wait to establish whether it would prove durable. Our clients were visible there while the wider market was still debating its relevance. Today they appear wherever the questions are being asked. That is not a refinement at the margins. It is the difference between following a market and arriving in it first.

A strategy nobody has the capacity to execute remains a document.

No business has ever grown on the strength of a weekly call and a handful of good ideas. We produce a strategy that merits the name and we then execute it, supported by our own AI-assisted systems, which now carry out work that once required a full department. If you already have an agency whose work you rate, keep them; we will ensure that every party is pulling in the same direction. Either way, one party remains answerable for the result, and that party is us.

Selected engagements

A proportion of this work is confidential and will remain so: a sale in progress, revenue figures, a market move that has yet to be announced. What follows is therefore a deliberate selection. The remainder we are glad to discuss in person.

Google rank

weeks to get there

Schütze Kunst & Antiquitäten

First on Google for art buying in Munich within three weeks of launch, ahead of competitors paying for the placement, and achieved without any advertising budget.

Essendorfer Genussschmelzerei GmbH

We built their e-commerce operation from the ground up in 2019, integrated it with their ERP system and took it from a standing start into six figures. The account moved elsewhere during the Covid years. In 2023 the company returned and handed us a setup that had been rebuilt by other parties, parts of which were no longer functioning. We repaired it and developed it further, delivering sustained revenue growth in the low double digits in a market that was contracting sharply.

Systemplan GmbH (sp-led) · Ocuris GmbH · Xylo LED · ELMA · Mobene GmbH & Co. KG · Com-Oil Energie + Service GmbH · Verbraucherzentrale

Corporate identity, websites and campaigns. Several of these relationships have run for more than a decade, from the first line on the page through to ongoing stewardship. They span companies and institutions trading nationally and across Europe, from the European Letterbox Marketing Association to the Verbraucherzentrale, Germany's federal consumer advice body.

Sonnen-Oase, Mana-Design, regioshop24

Our own ventures, run personally since 2001: a tanning studio, a brand-building operation and a market development project in Spain.

“Ocuris returned to us after fifteen years. Our relationship with sp-led spans decades. Schütze has extended the brief on more than one occasion.”

A screen is forgiving. Print is not.

Every colour looks convincing on a monitor. Commit it to paper, foil or an embossed plate and the truth emerges. For that reason we approve nothing on screen. We check the work in the medium where it will finally appear, and we continue checking until the artwork and the finished piece are indistinguishable from one another.

Are you building the business, or preparing to pass it on?

The majority of our clients are in growth: greater visibility, better-qualified enquiries, higher revenue. A number are in an altogether different position, preparing to sell or to hand the business to a successor. That is a separate undertaking, and it calls for a separate approach.

Goal

Growth

More enquiries, better-qualified ones, or a market you have yet to open. You determine the destination. We build the route and demonstrate, in figures, which parts of it are performing.

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Goal

Succession and sale (M&A)

Purchasers do not confine themselves to the balance sheet. Due diligence weighs the intangibles just as carefully: how much of the business depends upon you personally, how robust the client base is, and whether the brand holds up when you are not in the room. All of that can be addressed well in advance, long before anyone sits down to negotiate.

The person you will be working with

Alexander Weileder was managing international budgets for Sara Lee, Procter & Gamble and Unilever at CD Europe, an agency outside London, at a point when his job title still read trainee manager. When the work and the recognition ceased to correspond, he left. That was 2001, and he began working on his own account. Clients followed, as did a degree in media management taken while the business was already trading. In 2010 the enterprise acquired a name: zeitwert. He remains personally answerable for every project. The work itself is delivered by a team.

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What would be the right next step?

Our engagements range from a single, tightly defined piece of work through to taking charge of your marketing outright. Tell us where you are trying to get to and we will tell you which of them fits. If none of them does, we will say so. There is no obligation on either side.

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