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.
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The Man Who Bought the Future by the Minute: Harry Crane
Seven marketing lessons from Harry Crane, the least likable visionary in advertising history – and what he tells us about the AI lead who just started running your company.
He Opened the Wrong Paycheck
Every great career pivot has an origin story, and Harry Crane’s is petty. In the third episode of Mad Men’s second season, “The Benefactor,” a soft, bespectacled media man opens an envelope that is not his. It is Ken Cosgrove’s paycheck. Ken is making $100 more than he is.
Most people would sulk into a highball. Harry called a friend at CBS.
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Last Firm Standing: Positioning in a Category That Is Shrinking
Why the most defensible position in American business may be a market everybody else is quietly leaving.
1. Every Positioning Book Assumes the Room Is Filling Up
Open any marketing text and the same assumption sits underneath the advice: your category is getting bigger, and your job is to grab more of it. Land grab. Category creation. Total addressable market. The whole vocabulary points upward. Plenty of excellent businesses do not live there. Paper checks, commercial print, long-term care coverage, funeral homes, physical records storage. Real companies, real cash flow, customers who are not going anywhere this decade.
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The Duck Phillips School of Marketing
Five expensive lessons from Mad Men’s most useful failure – and what his second act says about executive recruiting, then and now
The Man Who Was Right About Almost Everything and Still Lost
Everybody who watches Mad Men wants to be Don Draper. Nobody wants to be Duck Phillips. Which is exactly why Duck is the more useful study – most of us will not spend our careers dazzling clients with a carousel. Most of us are the person in the room with the numbers, the forecast, and the uncomfortable opinion about where the business is heading.
Herman “Duck” Phillips joins Sterling Cooper as Head of Account Services in late 1960, hired by Don himself. He comes over from London, he is a recovering alcoholic, and he is – on nearly every big strategic question – correct. He wants younger copywriters who understand the youth market. He wants the agency to get serious about television. He wants scale, because he can see that independent shops are about to get squeezed. He is right, right, and right. He also loses the client, the merger, the job, the sobriety, and the dog. That gap between being right and being effective is where the actual lessons live. Here are five of them, with the receipts.
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Ask Your Own People First
The one-question audit that takes an afternoon, costs nothing, and predicts your market position better than the deck you paid an agency to build.
Send one email to every person on payroll. No warning. No preamble. No agenda item, no calendar invite, no courtesy heads-up to the department heads. One question:
In one sentence, what does this company do and who is it for?
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