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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Six Weeks: What to Actually Do When the Board Wants Pipeline by the Next Meeting
An honest triage note, including the sentence to say when the true answer is nine months.
Somewhere right now a marketing leader is walking out of a board meeting with a pipeline number and six weeks to produce it. This is a field guide for that person, in questions and answers, with the receipts attached. Every figure below comes from an independent operator or research shop publishing its own data.
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The File That Travels Without You
Why your spreadsheet will outlive your job, your company, and your byline, and what a 1982 home computer already knew about it
An article gets read once. A spreadsheet gets saved, renamed, emailed to a colleague, uploaded to a shared drive, and opened again in 2031 by somebody who has never heard of you but is reading a tab with your name on it. That is a different kind of publishing, and almost everyone in professional services is doing it by accident. What follows is the case for doing it on purpose.
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Your Compliance Department Is Your AI Search Problem
A negotiation guide for the meeting you are about to have with your own lawyer.
When you were seven you wanted to be an astronaut or a fireman. So did the person across the table in that review meeting. One of you grew up to write marketing copy. The other grew up to be the fireman, and the fireman’s job is to look at your beautiful new page and ask what happens when it catches. Hold that thought. The astronaut comes back at the end, and the astronaut wins you the argument.
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Local is Underpriced
Why the Twelve Best Clients You Will Ever Have Live Within Forty Minutes of Your House and Have Never Heard Your Name
A firm can publish at a rate that would embarrass a small newsroom, build an audience measured in tens of thousands, and still be a complete unknown to the twelve best-fit buyers within a half-hour drive. That is not a content problem. It is a geography problem, and no one sells a dashboard for it. Here is the argument, with receipts.
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Follow the People, Not the Logos
Why the warmest prospect in your market is a person who just changed buildings, and why your CRM is the last place you will find them.
Q1. Give me the whole argument in one breath.
Your CRM is organized around buildings. Your revenue is produced by people. When a person leaves a building, the system logs a churn risk and your pipeline logs nothing at all, which is exactly backwards. A champion who moves is a pre-sold buyer with a fresh budget, a bigger title, and a ninety-day mandate to change something. The three most expensive parts of enterprise sales, which are finding a person who cares, teaching them what you do, and getting them to defend you in a room you are not in, have already been paid for by someone else. Most companies respond to this windfall by marking the contact record inactive.
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The Candidate Asks the Machine First
Your hiring costs are being set by a Reddit thread, a Glassdoor rating, and a lawsuit that got covered once in 2023. The employer-side AI audit that no one in your company owns.
Every casino in Nevada knows something most employers have never bothered to learn: the number that ruins you is small, invisible, and charged on every single transaction. The average slot hold on the Las Vegas Strip runs above 8 percent, and about 11 percent on penny slots, according to figures cited in Nate Silver’s On the Edge. Not one player at those machines feels an 8 percent bite. They feel it later, at the ATM, wondering where the evening went.
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Teach the Course They Are Legally Required to Sit Through
The only channel in American marketing where attendance is a legal obligation, the audience files paperwork proving they consumed your content, and your name stays in a government catalog for years.
There is a room in your industry right now with forty licensed professionals in it. They paid to be there. They cannot leave early. And when it ends, somebody uploads a roster to a state database certifying that they sat through every minute. Somebody is standing at the front of that room. There is no structural reason it is not you.
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The Mirror Test: Ask Five Machines Who You Are
Your positioning statement is no longer the one on your homepage. It is the one an assistant recites when no one is watching.
A one-hour diagnostic that costs nothing and will probably ruin your afternoon.
1. The paragraph you did not write is doing your selling
Somewhere this morning a buyer typed your category into a chatbot and read a paragraph about your company that you have never seen. She did not visit your website. By the time she books a call the shortlist is drafted, and you are on it or you are a name she scrolled past. The numbers are not soft:
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