Salary survey research & actuarial recruitment marketing · Ezra Penland Actuarial Recruitment The Client Ezra Penland Actuarial Recruitment, a national actuarial search firm. Before I was the founder and business strategist behind 1000 Startups, I was a founder and partner there, and the salary surveys were mine – built them, ran them, defended them at…
Marketing & business strategy engagement · small insurance advisory services practice (anonymized at the client’s request) The Client An insurance advisory practice in a licensed, credential-gated field, two years old. Forty combined years at name-brand employers, signatures carrying personal liability, a hard-deadline busy season, and profit from the first invoice. Almost nobody knew it existed.…
How a 40-year-old local institution finally started showing up where its customers were looking The Situation A client came to me with a small, family-oriented organization and a rare asset: four decades of community trust, a staff-to-client ratio well above average, and customers who referred friends unprompted. On paper, impossible to miss. Online, practically invisible…
Client: a four-founder, pre-revenue technology venture in a heavily regulated, high-ticket transaction industry. Engagement: strategy, competitive research, and go-to-market planning. The Situation They had been in stealth for seven months, and it showed. Real technical talent, a genuinely ambitious plan, a fee already picked out – and a digital footprint of precisely zero. Nothing indexed.…
Case study: pre-launch positioning and growth strategy. Anonymized at the client’s request. The Client A first-time founder in a heavily regulated, trust-dependent industry. Twenty-plus years of elite credentials and a licensed specialty his competitors can’t buy in a hurry. A co-founder, an incubator address, a decade of patient building – and a website that still…
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…
This morning I put 500 fictional venture capitalists in a building. I broke them into 100 rooms, five people each, and had them argue about a client’s funding strategy. Standard stuff – I run persona work like this on most engagements, whether the question is fundraising, positioning, or go-to-market. Then I added an open bar.…