Marketing and business strategy for companies that are good at what they do and hard to find.

The product works. The clients who find them stay. But there’s no reliable way for the right people to find them in the first place. That’s the problem I solve.

Positioning, competitive analysis, website plans, and search and AI-search visibility. Specific enough to act on this week.

See work samples → How I work →

Engagements start with a fixed-fee audit from $4,500, through full strategy work and ongoing advisory. The free two-page read is genuinely free – email claude@1000startups.com.

  • Unsolicited – Not a Client – Allstate – Full Marketing Audit and Strategy Report

    ALLSTATE

    The Allstate Corporation  |  NYSE: ALL  |  Northbrook, Illinois

    STRATEGIC MARKETING REVIEW: TEN QUESTIONS, TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX POINTS

    Built from every document in this process and from the one hundred marketing suggestions produced by the reconvened focus group.

    NO POSITION / NO COMPENSATION / NO MNPI

    ANALYSES BASED ON PUBLIC INFORMATION. NOTHING HERE IS INVESTMENT ADVICE. 

    How to Read This Document

    Ten headings follow. Under the first there are one hundred numbered points, organized into eight subsections. Under each of the nine remaining headings there are between twelve and eighteen points. In every point, one to four consecutive words are set in bold, underlined and one point larger than the surrounding text. Those words are the main idea of that point, and a reader in a hurry can read only those words and still come away with the argument.

    Where a recommendation takes real time to carry out, the approximate elapsed time appears in parentheses at the end of the point. Those are calendar estimates for an organization of this size and regulatory complexity, not effort estimates, and they assume the compliance review cycle described under Hurdles is not first repaired.

    Every underlying fact comes from public disclosure: second-quarter 2026 results, the Form 10-Q, the proxy, trade and financial press through August 2026, and the public web presence. Nothing here is investment advice, and no valuation, price target or transaction recommendation appears anywhere in it.

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  • The Cutler Doctrine

    What Mad Men’s least likable partner understood about marketing money – and what unapologetic financial leadership looked like then versus what it looks like now

    The Man Nobody Rooted For

    Everybody who watches Mad Men picks a favorite. Nobody picks Jim Cutler. He arrives in season six from the rival shop, and Peggy files him away in eight words: just like Roger, but with bad breath. He brings his personal doctor in to shoot the staff full of “energy serum” before a pitch weekend. He tells Don Draper to his face that he is “a bully and a drunk. A football player in a suit.”

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  • The Six-Year Billboard: Why a Laminated Chart Outlives a Month of Programmatic

    Digital distribution decays on a schedule. Objects on walls do not. Here is the arithmetic almost nobody runs, the research that backs it up, and the reason a 1978 teen idol explains the whole business better than your dashboard does.

    1. The Leif Garrett Rule

    In October 1978, Scotti Brothers put out a disco-pop single by a seventeen-year-old actor with feathered hair. “I Was Made for Dancin’” climbed to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 4 in the UK, and it finished No. 37 on Billboard’s year-end chart for 1979. Then it did what singles do. It fell off.

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  • Joan Harris Ran the Best Marketing Operation on Madison Avenue. Nobody put it on her business card.

    Marketing lessons from the most underestimated operator in Mad Men – with a detour through a 1960 television studio and a green cartoon owl.

    EVERYBODY QUOTES DON. NOBODY BILLS LIKE JOAN.

    Don Draper gets the mug, the poster, and the LinkedIn carousel. Fine – he was a spectacular closer. But he was a spectacular closer inside an agency that would have folded around season two without Joan Holloway Harris keeping the lights on, the staff paid, and the clients calm.

    Don sold the dream. Joan built the machine that delivered it, invoiced for it, staffed it, and quietly cleaned up after it. For four seasons her official title was “office manager.”

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