About Granite Lane Partners
Marketing accountability for businesses with long sales cycles.
Background
Granite Lane Partners was founded in 2015 by Ruth Kalvaitis, after several years inside larger agencies watching capable teams produce confident reports from data nobody had checked. The founding premise was narrow and has not changed: measurement is not a reporting function, it is the foundation every other decision rests on.
The first year was three people and one client. We grew slowly and deliberately, turning down work that did not fit rather than staffing up to chase it. That cost us revenue in the early years and bought us a team that has largely stayed together, which in this industry is unusual enough to be worth mentioning.
Today Granite Lane Partners is nine people working out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, with clients across industrial manufacturing, logistics and field service businesses. We have deliberately not opened satellite offices, not launched a media arm, and not acquired anyone. The work has stayed the work.
Our mission
To make marketing measurable enough that the argument moves from “did it work” to “what do we do next.”
Every agency claims to be data-driven. Comparatively few will tell a client that the data they have been reporting for two years is wrong, because that conversation is uncomfortable and occasionally ends the relationship. We have had that conversation many times. It is the single most valuable thing we do, and we would rather lose an engagement than build on a foundation we know is unsound.
That principle scales down to small decisions too. We do not report on metrics we cannot defend. We do not attribute revenue to a channel on the strength of a last-click model we know overstates it. When we are uncertain, we say so, and we say how uncertain.
The team
Small, senior, and directly involved. The people you meet in the pitch are the people who do the work.
Ruth Kalvaitis
Founder & Principal
Twelve years in industrial marketing before founding Granite Lane in 2015. Started the firm after watching a manufacturer cancel a working campaign because the attribution window was shorter than their sales cycle.
Desmond Achebe
Head of Measurement
Owns the audit practice. Spends most of his time explaining why a ninety-day lookback window is not optional when the average deal takes seven months to close.
Priya Raghunathan
Director of Demand
Runs acquisition across search and trade channels. Previously in-house at a distributor, where she learned that the lead volume number is almost never the number that matters.
How we work
- Measurement first. No strategy work begins until we trust the numbers underneath it.
- Written hypotheses. Every test has a success criterion recorded before launch.
- No lock-in. You own every account, container and property we touch. Always.
- Senior delivery. No junior staff learning on your budget.
- Plain language. If a report needs an interpreter, the report has failed.
Work with us
We take on a limited number of new engagements each quarter. If what you have read here sounds like the way you want to work, we would like to hear from you.