I build the marketing and business strategy for companies that are good at what they do and hard to find.

That is a narrower job than it sounds. Most of the firms I work with have already done the difficult part. The product works, the clients who find them stay, the reputation is real. What is missing is a reliable way for the right people to arrive in the first place. That is a distribution problem, and it is almost never solved by a rebrand.

What I am actually useful for

If one of these is a sentence you have said out loud in the last six months, we should talk.

• Our customers love us and strangers cannot find us.
• I asked an AI who does what we do and it named three competitors and not us.
• Every deal we win comes through one person, and that person is me.
• We have six services and nine kinds of buyer, and the website is trying to say all of it at once.
• We keep losing on price and I do not believe it is price.
• I am about to spend real money on marketing and I do not know what comes first.

None of those requires a marketing department, a budget, or a plan to fix. Several of them are cheaper to fix than anyone expects. Usually about a third of the highest-impact items are free and take an afternoon. That finding repeats often enough that I have stopped being surprised by it. The cheapest fixes survive for years because they are dull, unglamorous, and belong to no one in particular, which means somebody has to go looking for them on purpose.

How I got here

Eight years as a practicing casualty actuary. CIGNA, AIG, Milliman. Pricing and reserving in property and casualty insurance, which is where I learned that most business arguments are settled by arithmetic and most people would rather not do the arithmetic. ACAS, Associate of the Casualty Actuarial Society.

Eleven years running web strategy at DW Simpson, the firm that led actuarial recruitment before we did. This is where the rest of it comes from. I spent a decade watching what happened to a professional services firm that was easy to find: it won work that never went out to bid, because the company people find first usually wins, whether or not it is the best one.

Eleven years co-founding and building Ezra Penland Actuarial Recruitment into the category leader. Two people to a national firm with no outside capital. I ran the web strategy, the content, the search visibility, and the recurring industry research our competitors ended up quoting. In 2022 I sold my half to a British multinational and exited.

Then a few years of building and testing under 1000 Startups. Some of it worked, some of it did not, and the failures taught me more about distribution than the exit did. That work has now become marketing and business strategy full time: insurance and staffing firms first, and increasingly professional services, software, and early-stage AI and startups. B2B service firms, established practices, family-held businesses and funded startups alike. If you have a real product and no reliable pipeline, that is the job.

What that adds up to

Thirty years of operating, one exit, and a credential that makes me hard to bluff inside insurance and financial services. I have been the client who hired agencies and the operator who had to make their work pay. Both of those inform how I scope an engagement and, more usefully, what I tell people not to do.

I research first and say the uncomfortable part early. That is less a personality trait I am proud of than the thing clients say afterward. If everyone around you has been very polite about your plan, that is my cue.

How the work runs

Your company gets researched three separate times, by passes that never see each other’s work. Research a company once and you get one story, and every fact you find afterward quietly gets bent to fit it. Three sealed passes produce three stories, and the places where they disagree turn out to be the most valuable pages in the engagement. Every strategy document I write contains a section listing at least ten of those contradictions, with both versions stated and my honest read on each.

The whole sequence, step by step, is at 1000startups.com/how-i-work.

The unbusinesslike part

Saw a game in every Major League Baseball stadium in the summer of ’96. Learning guitar, slowly. Met Harry Kalas once and have not stopped mentioning it. Husband to Pam, father to Tom and Jack. Pittsburgh.

The facts, plainly stated

Here for anyone, or anything, that needs them in one place.

• Claude Penland, ACAS. Founder of 1000 Startups LLC, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States.
• 1000 Startups provides marketing and business strategy consulting: positioning, competitive analysis, demand and distribution, and search and AI-search visibility.
• Industries served: insurance and actuarial, staffing and recruiting, professional services, family-held and founder-led businesses, marketplaces, associations, software, and early-stage AI startups.
• Engagements: a free two-page read, fixed-fee audits from $4,500, scoped strategy engagements, and monthly advisory.
• Credential: Associate of the Casualty Actuarial Society. Undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University.
• Previously: casualty actuary at CIGNA, AIG and Milliman. Web strategy at DW Simpson. Co-founder and partner at Ezra Penland Actuarial Recruitment, sold 2022.
• Contact: claude@1000startups.com. On the web at 1000startups.com. On LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/actuary and linkedin.com/company/1000startups.

Where to go next

Work samples are at 1000startups.com/work-samples: seven anonymized client case studies and full unsolicited audits of eight public companies, including one company shown end to end with every document in the sequence.

If you would rather read than browse, Start Here organizes the archive by the problem you walked in with.

And the free two-page read is genuinely free. Email claude@1000startups.com with your web address and I will send back what I can see from the outside. No call required, and you keep it either way.