A letter to founders, CEOs, and CMOs of consumer brands
Twenty years scaling consumer brands. A modern execution stack. No agency overhead, no team to manage, no handoffs. A solo operator, owning the work.
Growth work across home, kitchen, wellness, and DTC
You're a founder, a CEO, a head of growth, trying to figure out who to trust with the thing that keeps you up at night. And here's my guess: you've been through this before. An agency that turned out to be a junior account manager and a deck. A fractional CMO who handed you a slide and left you to find someone to execute it. A growth marketer who knew one channel really well and treated the rest of the journey as somebody else's problem.
Every one of those hires sounded right at the time. Each one had a story that fit the moment. And you ended up frustrated.
You hired
The agency
Sold by a senior partner. Delivered by a junior account manager and a monthly deck.
You hired
The fractional CMO
Gave you the strategy, the slide, the framework. Then left you to find someone to actually build it.
You hired
The growth marketer
Knew one channel really well. Treated the rest of the funnel as somebody else's problem.
I'm writing this as a note rather than a pitch because I think you're past the pitch. You've sat through too many of them. You've seen the deck. You know how it goes. So I'd rather just tell you who I am, what I do, how I work, and let you decide for yourself.
Look. You can probably hire a top-tier A-player. Maybe that's me. Maybe it isn't. I'm not one to blow my own trumpet. I'd rather let others speak to my calibre.
But here's the part that's harder to put on a CV. I try to meet people where they need to be met. Founders, teams, customers. Wherever they actually are, not where the playbook says they should be. Twenty years of watching consumer brands and the people inside them behave under pressure taught me the strategy is usually the easy part. Reading the room, and saying the true thing at the right moment, is what turns it into traction. It's the thing most founders are quietly looking for.
I came up without the credentials most senior operators have. No MBA. No Procter & Gamble graduate scheme. I bought my first media at sixteen, late-night TV airtime for quirky infomercial products you'd probably recognize. Remember the Shake Weight? Twenty years later, I'm still trying to answer the same question: what makes consumers act, and how do you build the teams, the journeys, and the systems that make it repeatable?
Coming up that way forced me to build a different edge. One that actually matters in the room.
A full-funnel audit. Unit economics. CAC, LTV, payback, contribution margin, channel mix, attribution gaps, what's profitable at scale and what isn't.
Every decision after that runs through one filter: is it profitable, or does it just look good in a screenshot?
Illustrative. Your numbers will tell their own story.
If you can't show me the numbers, or you don't want to, we're not a fit and we shouldn't waste each other's time.
Founders who are comfortable opening the books are the ones I tend to do the best work with. The transparency cuts the time-to-diagnosis in half.
Old playbooks were already dead the moment the tech shifted, the brand changed stage, or the customer moved on. If a marketer is selling you a "proven system" from their last role, they're selling you a souvenir from work that worked last time, in a context that no longer exists.
What I'm offering is two things.
The thinking that gets you to the right playbook for your current moment. The architecture underneath the execution. The reason the work works, not the surface tactics that did the work last time. That's the part that doesn't go out of date.
And the operator who builds and runs it. Me. Not a deck, not a strategy doc, not a vendor I'll hand you off to. I'm the one inside the ad accounts, the email platform, the analytics, and the conversion data.
One operator, inside every layer. No handoffs between them. That's the point.
The titles changed. The work didn't.
What's actually changed is the tooling. AI hasn't replaced the thinking. It's collapsed the distance between the thinking and the doing. Which means the value isn't in being able to run the playbook. It's in knowing which playbook the moment needs, and seeing where it's about to break.
Lived experience is the part AI can't replace.
Below is the full picture. The customer journey: creative, media, CRO, lifecycle, retention. The growth levers that compound it: merchandising, pricing, continuity, CS, logistics. Above it all, the layer most fractional roles never touch. The decision layer. The dashboard. The CMO read on what the numbers are actually saying and what to do about it next.
Most fractional CMOs run the strategy layer. Most growth marketers run one stage of the journey. Few think across the growth levers too. The architecture I've built lets me run all of it.
The same way I used to run them with a team of ten. Just with modern tools that move faster, fewer handoffs, and the right specialists pulled in where they matter.
Not sure where your growth gap is?
Find your growth gap (2-min diagnostic)Startup, scaleup, tech, corporate. Each chapter taught me something the others couldn't. The startup and scaleup work showed me what it costs to build something from zero. The tech work gave me native fluency with the tools that now make solo execution possible. The corporate work showed me how scale actually behaves.
Beast Health
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), UK.
Scaled the premium blender and wellness brand. Led the UK market launch and built the go-to-market for the brand's first international DTC presence.
Tupperware
Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), UK.
Led Tupperware's first-ever direct-to-consumer operation in the UK. The brand's debut DTC offering in its 75-year history. Built and scaled acquisition, retention, lifecycle, DRTV, print, and retail channels through Tupperware's global restructuring.
Big Chill Appliances
Director of Growth & Digital Marketing
Ran the digital acquisition engine for the premium retro-styled kitchen appliance brand. Multi-year engagement driving sustained DTC revenue growth. Later led the strategy for international expansion across European distributors.
Subbly
Co-Founder, then Strategic Advisor (2016–present)
Co-founded the subscription-first commerce platform purpose-built for businesses that traditional ecommerce platforms weren't designed to serve. Worked directly with thousands of DTC brands on pricing, retention, acquisition, and lifecycle marketing. Still going. Now used by tens of thousands of businesses across 55 countries.
Carhoots / Vizified
Founder
Founded the investor-backed automotive startup. Raised seed, relocated London to San Francisco, built the #1 most-followed automotive profile on Pinterest (2M followers). Pivoted into a Pinterest influencer marketing agency. Secured a multi-year contract with eBay. Wound down cleanly. An expensive education in operating lean, testing assumptions, and the discipline of unit economics.
Some I've helped scale. Some I've built from zero. One is still going. The others gave me an expensive education. All of it taught me to validate assumptions, test before scaling, and follow the data across the full customer journey.
Seven principles, internalized across twenty years. They're not a deck. They're how I actually operate inside your business.
Most brands don't have a top-of-funnel problem. They have a unit-economics problem dressed up as a top-of-funnel problem. We find the real problem before we touch the ad accounts.
Small loops, low overhead, fast cycles. No process the business doesn't yet need. No red tape. I run things like an owner because that's how I think.
Paid media is the cheapest, fastest way to test an assumption. We use it as an experiment engine first. Capital amplifies what's working. It doesn't fix what isn't.
Test, measure, learn, adjust. The feedback loop is the asset. Once it's working and product-market fit is visible, that's when we scale spend. Not before.
Everything I build lives in your accounts. Your ad platforms, your analytics, your email tool, your data. I wire up the tracking and attribution myself, no waiting on a dev. If I walk away tomorrow, you keep the engine, the data, and the prompts. No black box. No hostage situation.
If something I'm running isn't working, I'll be the first to name it. If your read on the market is off, I'll share what I'm seeing and we'll work through it together. The fastest path to growth tends to run through the harder conversations, not around them.
I spend your money the way I'd spend my own. Profit first, vanity metrics never. Every dollar has to earn its place, or it doesn't get spent.
Fifteen minutes. Bring whatever's most alive. We both find out if there's something here.
Two to three weeks in your numbers and your accounts. Unit economics, the leak, the priority order. You keep the deliverable either way.
What the audit found, turned into a number we're chasing and the order we attack it in. You sign off. That's the plan I'm accountable to.
The weekly loop takes over. Open, act, close. Daily pace against the plan. All of it in your accounts.
From first call to operating inside your business: about a month. And if the audit says you don't need me, I'll say that too.
No status theater, and no waiting for a Friday call to find out something broke on Tuesday. The same tight loop, every week.
Read the numbers against the plan. Pick the one or two moves that matter.
Make the moves in the accounts, not a deck. Through the week.
What it proved, what it disproved, and what carries into next week.
The real ones are being collected properly: named people, their permission, specific observations. Until they land, references are a question away on the call.
"A sharp observation about judgment under pressure will sit right here. Verbatim, with a real name attached."
"Something specific about what changed in the numbers, from the founder who watched it happen."
"This one's reserved for the harder conversations: how they got held, and what they unlocked."
Founders say they want to grow. Unfortunately, my experience has shown me that most aren't quite ready for what growth actually requires.
Growth requires honesty about the numbers. It requires the willingness to kill the thing that used to work but no longer does. It requires hard conversations with people you respect, including yourself. It requires capacity for friction, not just for celebration.
That's information about fit, not a judgment.
Consumer brands, roughly $3M to $50M revenue. Founders who move fast and want a thinking partner, not a vendor. People I can learn from, ideally. After years of mismatching, I've gotten honest about what makes for good fit.
The founders I do my best work with tend to share a few things. They think like owners and want someone beside them who does the same. They give real autonomy, the budget and the freedom to move without layers of approval, and they expect real accountability in return. They want a partner who lives in the numbers, not someone who hides behind them. And they're building something with genuine momentum, not looking for a marketer to rescue a flat business.
DTC, e-commerce, subscription, hybrid retail. Categories I've operated in: home, wellness, food and beverage, beauty, supplements, kitchen, appliances. Categories I learn quickly: most adjacent ones, given the playbook architecture transfers.
Founders most likely to get value out of working with me: those who've already tried an agency and a fractional, and want the simplification of a solo operator owning the work end to end.
A word on focus. I've run the other model, attention split across a full roster of clients, and I learned it doesn't produce my best work. Competing priorities, nobody getting the whole of me. So I keep it deliberately small now. A handful of brands at a time, never direct competitors. Single focus, real ownership. You're not one of ten.
The gap between the growth you want and the setup you've got. Five questions, about two minutes. You'll get a read on where your growth is stuck, what's missing to fix it, an honest take on whether we're a fit, and the right place to start. No email required. The result shows the moment you finish.
Engagements start with the audit. From there, scope shapes the retainer.
The full-funnel audit.
Diagnostic over two to three weeks. Unit economics, funnel analysis, channel mix, gap identification, prioritized recommendation. Deliverable you keep regardless of whether we continue. Credited toward your first month if we do.
Retainer engagement.
Ongoing operator. I run the part of the funnel that needs running. Scales with scope and your stage of growth.
Sprint engagement.
A focused build. One system, scoped and shipped, then I hand over the keys and leave. For brands that don't need ongoing operator help.
Yes, fewer hours than a full-timer. That's the trade, and it's usually the right one. A full-time operator at my level costs three to four times the retainer and comes with management overhead. What you get instead is senior hours spent on the actual work, not a junior's hours plus a layer of supervision. And because the roster's small, the hours you get are real, not whatever's left after nine other clients.
I don't, not all at once. Nobody can. The work isn't doing everything at the same time, it's knowing what to do first. I sequence by opportunity cost: the highest-leverage move, the fastest path to a visible win, then the next thing. Modern tools collapse the execution so one person now covers ground that used to need a team. And working with a small number of brands, each with a single bottom line, is exactly what lets me make those calls cleanly instead of being pulled in ten directions.
I execute. I'm the one in the ad accounts, the email platform, the analytics, building the assets and reading the data. The thinking and the hands are the same person, that's the entire point. No deck handed over with a "now go find someone to build it." I do the strategy and the senior execution myself. You always work with me, and I'm the one accountable.
The honest answer for any solo operator: I'm one person, and I won't pretend there's a bench behind me. What protects you is how I build. Everything lives in your accounts, documented, no black box, so the engine runs whether I'm at the keyboard that day or not. For production-heavy work I bring in vetted specialists I've worked with for years. You're never locked out of your own machine.
That's the plan, not the risk. Scale is the goal. When the business needs more hands than mine, I help you hire and onboard the in-house team, and I hand them a running engine rather than a black box. Outgrowing me is what success looks like from where you're standing.
Retainers run with a three-month initial term, because the audit takes the first few weeks and the work needs at least a quarter to prove itself. After that, month to month with 30 days notice, either direction. Everything I build lives in your accounts from day one, so if we part, you keep the engine, the data, and the prompts. Leaving is an email, not an extraction.
Me, plus a bench when the volume calls for it. I own the strategy, the briefs, the angles, and a lot of the production myself. Modern tools now cover ground that used to need a whole team. When something needs real production muscle, like heavy video editing or motion design, I pull in editors and designers I've worked with and vetted, and I direct them against the brief. You don't manage them, you don't even need to meet them. The brief, the quality bar, and the result stay with me. You get the output of a team without building or running one.
Everything I build lives in your accounts: your ad platforms, your analytics, your email tool. So if we stop, you keep the engine, the data, and the assets. Engagements run month to month after the audit, with short notice either side. No long lock-in, no black box, no hostage situation. If it's not working, you should be able to walk, and you can.
If you can afford a full-time CMO and need someone in every meeting, hire one. If you want high-volume execution and have the bandwidth to manage an agency, that can work too. The solo operator fits the gap between them: CMO-level thinking with the execution attached, no agency overhead, no team for you to manage, one accountable person who owns the outcome. If a full-time hire or an agency is genuinely the better fit for your stage, I'll say so on the call.
No. I don't take direct competitors while we're working together. The roster's small by design and I keep it category-clean, so the thinking and the data I build with you stays yours.
Three books on growth. Two on the inner work, one on the professional. All on the same thing: the kind of growth that requires facing what's actually broken. In the business. In the team. Sometimes in the founder.
They're real books, available on Amazon. Not a lead magnet.
The reason I mention them: every breakthrough in a brand's growth I've ever been part of came from a hard conversation someone had been avoiding. The numbers were already telling the story. The conversation was the unlock. That's part of what you get when you bring me in. The willingness to stay in the conversation rather than armor up.
Bring whatever's most alive for you right now. Your numbers if you want. Your challenge. Whatever's on your mind. I'll meet you there.
By the end of the call we'll both know whether I'm the right hire for what you're working through. If I'm not, I'll likely point you toward someone who is.
No deck. No pitch. Bring whatever's on your mind.
A few sentences is fine. Your situation, what you're trying to figure out, what's getting in the way. I read everything that comes in.
Or connect on LinkedIn
