Make growth repeatable.
31 years finding out the campaign was never the problem
22 of them running my own agency. More than 70 engagements. Nearly always the same fault underneath.
I set up my own B2B marketing agency in 2002 and ran it until 2025. The work was good. The results were real. They just didn't hold.
Campaigns landed and the leads came in, and 18 months later the same client was back with the same problem. Not because the work was wrong. Because nothing underneath it had changed.
The route in
I started in 1995 in tech publishing and computer-based training, building product launch content for Schlumberger and the presentation material they took into Shell and BP.
Then agency-side. Design first, then early digital, back when industrial firms were still working out whether the web was worth bothering with. In 2002 I went out on my own and stayed there for 22 years.
What that taught me
Across more than 70 engagements, the failure is almost never the campaign.
It's that nobody owns the number. Sales and marketing are working from different definitions of a good lead. The reporting can't tell you which half of the spend did anything, so decisions come down to whose argument sounds better in the room.
Fix the campaign and you get a better quarter. Fix the system underneath and the quarter repeats.
What I do with it now
There's a piece of the commercial director's job that rarely gets done, because whoever's in the seat is busy hitting this quarter's number. Building the system underneath. That's the piece I do, in short fixed sprints, then it's yours to run. No retainers, no day rates.
I run the work with an AI layer underneath. That's how one person delivers at a depth that used to need a team. The judgement is still mine, and so is the accountability.
I'm not there to replace anyone. The person in that seat usually knows exactly what's wrong. They've just never had a clear month to go and fix it.
The record
Manufacturing and engineering, logistics and distribution, industrial recruitment, specialty materials, energy, utilities and higher education. The detailed write-ups are on the results page.
Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Director of Sapius Commercial Ltd, registered in England, company number 17046077. Based in Cheshire, working across the UK.