01 / 06
Make it obvious.
What you sell, who it’s for, why it costs that. If a stranger can’t repeat it back after one read, it isn’t positioning, it’s a bill you keep paying.
Where I help
You’re not imagining it.
You’re paying a retainer and receiving activity. Decks, dashboards, a standing call, a monthly report that says things are tracking. Meanwhile the actual problem sits there untouched, because nobody on that team is senior enough to name it and none of them are paid to finish. Your offer, your marketing, your sales process and your SOPs are one machine. I work on the machine.
I build. I tinker. I overhaul. I manifest.
I read a spreadsheet for the story it’s hiding and turn that story into customers who buy. Strategy, creative and marketing in one head, which is why nothing gets lost in the handoff, because there’s no handoff. Thirty years in and I haven’t found the ceiling yet. The fastest way to get work out of me is to tell me it has been tried and it can’t be done.
So. Watch.
02 / 06
Drop the costume.
What the business is actually worth, in the words your customers already use. Not a tone-of-voice deck with the word human spaced out across a slide.
03 / 06
Bring buyers.
Campaigns and search aimed at people with budget and a reason to move. An impressions graph has never once cleared a payroll.
04 / 06
Seal the leaks.
Website, sales process, service, follow up. Customers fall through the seams between those four and nobody files a report about the ones who quietly left.
05 / 06
Get it out of your head.
SOPs, workflows and reporting, so the business survives holidays, turnover, and the Tuesday your best person quits with no notice.
06 / 06
Aim the machine.
AI and automation pointed only at work they genuinely improve, with judgement kept where judgement belongs. No, I’m not going to sell you a chatbot.
Six things I fix ↓
Nothing in a business breaks alone.
A slow pipeline usually starts at the offer. A dead lead is a sales problem wearing a marketing costume. A missed deadline is a handoff nobody ever wrote down. The symptom is where the money is, so the symptom is what gets worked on, month after month, by people who genuinely believe they’re helping. I follow it to the cause, fix every part involved, and make sure it holds on a normal Tuesday when nobody is watching.
How I show up
The person who plans it should build it.
The senior person in the pitch is the person doing the work. That isn’t how it usually goes. Usually you meet the talent and get assigned the pyramid: a strategist who disappears after kickoff, two juniors learning on your budget, a coordinator whose actual job is calendars, and a partner who reappears the week you threaten to leave. You’re paying for coordination, not thinking. I’m one person doing strategy, brand, copy, campaigns, web, analytics and operating procedures at a senior level, and against the same brief I produce work that’s roughly fifteen percent more accurate in a quarter of the time. I measured that. Saying it without measuring it would make me one of them.
30Years of strategy, marketing and operations
1Senior operator doing the work you were promised
0Juniors learning the job on your budget
What this costs me
A value that costs nothing is decor.
Anyone can list values. The only ones worth reading are the ones that have taken something away from the person who wrote them. Here are mine and what each one has cost.
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Speak clearly.
Complexity is billable. Plain language ends engagements early, and I end them anyway.
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Tell the truth.
Sometimes the truth is that you don’t need me. I have said it out loud, before an invoice, more than once.
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Own your shit.
One person means there’s no junior to blame and no pod to hide behind. When it’s wrong, it’s mine.
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Protect the work.
I’ll miss a date before I ship something I know will fall apart in month three.
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Do less, better.
A bigger scope always bills more. Refusing to pad one costs me the difference every time.
I also wrote a book calling my own industry out by name, in the city where those people refer work. That’s the price of the list above, paid in advance.
What gets better
Advice should leave something behind.
Consulting should leave behind decisions, revenue, and systems your team runs without me. Count what your last engagement actually left in the building. If the honest answer is a slide deck and an invoice, you were robbed politely by someone in very good shoes.
People finally get what you sell.
Positioning · messaging · sales
The budget stops leaking.
Planning · budgets · decisions
Marketing causes something.
Campaigns · search · conversion
Nobody guesses what happens next.
SOPs · handoffs · reporting
How it works
A method should fit on one page.
Look at it, name the cause, build the fix, put it into daily use. That’s the whole method. It doesn’t require a two-day offsite, a workshop, or a framework with a trademark on it.
Diagnose.
Read the business, the customers, the marketing and the numbers until the cause stops hiding behind the symptom that pays better.
Fix.
Build the strategy, messaging, campaigns, tools or SOPs the problem actually requires. Not the ones with the best margin.
Execute.
Ship it, put it in front of real customers, and make it part of the daily work instead of a folder nobody opens.
Iterate.
Measure what happened, tune what missed, and leave your team able to run it without me. Making myself unnecessary is the deliverable.
AI and automation
Raised by wolves, statisticians and linguists.
Thirty years of pattern recognition, your own data in bulk, and analysis as deep as the void and as wide as the sky. AI and automation are how that gets executed at scale without drifting into nonsense. Everything gets human review, real controls, and a purpose your team can say out loud without wincing. The rest of the market discovered AI eighteen months ago and has been charging you for the education.
Who I work with
Not everyone should hire me.
This is your business and your livelihood, so you get the truth about it, including the irritating parts and the parts that are your own doing. I don’t flatter, I don’t manage you, and I don’t dress up a bad quarter as a learning. If you want the problem solved, call me. If you want a monthly deck confirming the plan is going great, this town has entire agencies devoted to that and they are genuinely excellent at it.
Good fit
- You want to make money and you want customers who stay.
- Your offer is genuinely good and nobody can tell.
- Marketing, sales and delivery are quietly working against each other.
- You want one senior person who thinks, writes, builds and ships.
- The important work lives in one person’s head and nowhere else.
Wrong fit
- You bullshit, or you have grown comfortable being bullshitted.
- You want the symptom painted over and the cause left where it’s.
- You would rather keep spending the money than hear why the money isn’t working.
- You want a monthly report confirming everything is fine.
- Nobody in the room is allowed to decide anything.
Tell me what’s stuck.
Maybe the offer won’t sell. Maybe the leads vanish. Maybe the website is a haunted house. Maybe your staff rebuild the same process every week like it’s Groundhog Day. Send me the plain version, no deck, no polish. I’ll tell you what I see, what I would fix first, and whether I’m the wrong person for it. Sometimes I’m, and I’ll say so before you pay me.
Based in Ottawa. Available across Canada.