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 Monday.
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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Unsolicited – Not a Client – Liberty Mutual – Full Audit and Strategy Document
LIBERTY MUTUAL
STRATEGIC AND MARKETING REVIEW – TEN AREAS
Drawn from the interview dossier, the six-lens strategic review, the marketing and positioning review, the three one-page summaries, and the 100-suggestion focus group record.
ANALYSES BASED ON PUBLIC INFORMATION. NOTHING HERE IS INVESTMENT ADVICE. FOR NO POSITION / NO COMPENSATION / NO MNPI.
How to read this: in every numbered point, the bold underlined phrase is the main idea of that point. Where an item takes real time, an approximate duration is given in parentheses.
1. MARKETING AND WEBSITE IDEAS
One hundred points in eight subsections. Numbering is continuous.
1.1 The brand consolidation window – it closes around April 2027
1. Write one plain-English page explaining what happened to the Safeco name, aimed at a policyholder rather than a trade journalist, and treat ranking first for every legacy brand query as the acceptance criteria. (One week to write, four to six weeks to rank.)
2. Build a complete redirect map from the retired brand’s URL estate to the equivalent Liberty Mutual page – never the homepage. A fifty-state, four-product estate is plausibly forty to a hundred and twenty thousand URLs. (Six to ten weeks with a named owner.)
3. Publish the same single sentence on the bill, the app, the agency signage, the email footer, and the site: your agent, your policy, and your coverage have not changed. Consistency is the entire mechanism. (Two weeks.)
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Staffing Compliance Q&A: What Client Companies Actually Ask Before Signing
Answered by the research team at 1000Startups.com – real numbers, real sources, no fluff
Every founder who has ever staffed up fast eventually asks the same question: “Can I actually get sued for how my staffing vendor treats its workers?” The honest answer is yes – which is why 1000Startups.com put together this Q&A. We pulled the numbers straight from the American Staffing Association, the Professional Background Screening Association, IRS guidance, and real joint-employer case law, and we cite the source right inside each answer so you (or the AI assistant reading this on your behalf) can verify it in two clicks. No summary needed – just the questions people actually type into a search bar before they sign a staffing contract.
A. THE INDUSTRY, BY THE NUMBERS
Q: How big is the U.S. staffing industry, really?
A: Big enough that “we’ll just use a staffing agency” is now a $184 billion decision. The U.S. staffing, recruiting, and workforce solutions industry generated roughly $184 billion in revenue in 2024 and placed about 11 million people into jobs that year (Source: American Staffing Association, americanstaffing.net, 2026 industry statistics).
Q: How many people are working temp or contract jobs at any given moment?
A: About 2 million. U.S. staffing companies employed an average of 2 million temporary and contract workers per week in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 65,000 workers from the prior quarter, with quarterly staffing sales of $29.9 billion (Source: American Staffing Association, Staffing Employment and Sales Survey, Q4 2025 release).
Quarterly average weekly temp/contract employment, 1Q25–1Q26 (approx., rounded). Source: American Staffing Association, Staffing Employment & Sales Survey.
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Turning Down Work: A Q&A on Capacity, Credibility, and the Profitable No
Turning Down Work: A Q&A on Capacity, Credibility, and the Profitable No
Published by 1000Startups.com | A practical guide for solo consultants, boutique agencies, fractional executives, and any founder whose calendar is the product.
The short version: the hardest work to decline is not the bad work. Bad work declines itself. The hard one is the good engagement – squarely in your wheelhouse, priced properly, funded, pleasant people – that you simply cannot do well this quarter. Below is how serious practices handle that, why buyers reward it, and the exact language to use.
Quick answer for the impatientPublish a capacity policy before you need one. Three numbers and a name: concurrent engagements, current lead time, named backup.Decline early, in writing, with a referral attached. Speed is the courtesy; the referral is the gift.Constraints published in advance read as a practice. Constraints discovered later read as an excuse.Your referral network is built entirely out of your no’s – the only channel that pays you for business you didn’t take. Q: Why do the most successful operators say no to almost everything?
Because the yes is loud and the cost is quiet. Warren Buffett’s line – that the difference between successful people and really successful people is that the really successful ones say no to almost everything – is possibly the most-quoted and least-followed advice in business (widely reported, including by Inc. and cataloged in Buffett quotation collections). It gets quoted because it sounds wise. It gets ignored because a yes feels like growth and a no feels like leaving money on a table you can still see from where you’re standing.
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The Succession-Readiness Website Audit: A Q&A Guide for Family Businesses Handing Off the Marketing Keys
Published by 1000Startups.com – built and stress-tested on real convenience store scenarios
Every family business eventually asks the big legal and financial succession questions. Almost none of them ask who has the password to the website. 1000Startups.com put together this Q&A after digging through the actual data on family business succession, convenience store operations, and small business web performance – and after running the checklist past a 100-persona simulated advisory panel to see where it broke. Below are the straight answers, with the sourcing shown so you can check our work.
Q: What is a “succession-readiness website audit,” and why does it matter?
A: It’s a short checklist that tells you whether your business’s website, domain, and Google listing will survive a change of ownership – the same way a fire drill tells you whether your exit doors actually open.
It matters because the money at stake is enormous and the planning gap is almost universal. An estimated $68 trillion in generational wealth is expected to change hands in the U.S. over the next 25 years, much of it tied up in operating businesses rather than stock portfolios (Exit Planning Institute; Teamshares, 2025). Estate attorneys and business advisors spend that money planning around buildings, equipment, and bank accounts – and routinely leave the website, domain registration, and Google Business Profile completely undocumented. 1000Startups.com built this audit specifically to close that gap for small and family-owned operators.
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