Marketing & Business Strategy engagement – a founder-led, multi-region B2B service company (anonymized)

The Situation

My client had the problem most companies would kill for: customers adored them. A 4.7-star average across 275+ public reviews, with buyers thanking individual technicians by name. Eleven locations, a recurring-revenue service model, three decades of operating instinct.

And almost nobody could find them. Competitors 10 to 100 times their size owned page one, the comparison guides, and increasingly the AI assistants buyers now ask first. Growth came from referrals and cold calls. Marketing wasn’t underperforming – it didn’t exist as a function, sharing a job description with other areas of the company.

What I Did

I don’t open with tactics. I open with evidence, in this order:

1. Baseline audit. Public-information-only research: website, reviews, employee sentiment, org chart, category economics, competitor footprints. No guessing, nothing confidential.
2. Five-angle strategic review. One business, five lenses – operating model, category context, stakeholder opinion, a four-quarter hiring and financial plan, and how investors would read it.
3. A 100-person AI persona focus group. One hundred participants – buyers, procurement leads, technicians, former competitor staff – in 20 groups of five. Output: 100 distinct ideas, each traceable to a named voice.
4. Competitive teardown. Five rivals assessed on what’s working, what isn’t, and what each means for my client.
5. Consolidation. Everything compressed into ten decision-ready lists – 150+ action points sorted into hurdles, do-it-now moves, things to avoid, and open questions for leadership.
6. Execution architecture. 22 launch-ready campaigns across four platforms, each with audience, creative, budget, bid strategy and KPI. No homework left for the client.
7. The one-pager. Because ten lists are for the team; one page is for the boardroom.

What We Found

Three findings did most of the work. The service reputation was the building’s most valuable and least-used asset. The highest-leverage move wasn’t a campaign – it was a hire. And where the hardware is identical, the fight is won on service, proof and visibility, and lost the moment it becomes a fight about price.

The Outcome

Leadership walked out with a sequenced plan, not a wish list: hire a marketing owner, fix technical and local SEO, publish honest comparison content, then scale paid spend behind geo-holdout tests, not optimism. Against category benchmarks of 8–9% annual growth, the plan targets roughly a 30% lift in inbound qualified leads inside four quarters, plus a shorter sales cycle for a team selling from a cold start.

“You showed us our own company – and then you showed us what to do about it, in the right order.” – Client leadership

Could This Be You?

Customers love you, strangers can’t find you? That’s a sequencing problem, not a branding one. Let’s talk.