Founder-led marketing strategyFind the truth.
For founder-led businesses that have built something valuable, but need the market to understand why it matters.
I work with founders to find the commercial truth in what they've built, turn it into a narrative people understand and build the marketing system around it.
Make it obvious.
The real problem
Most businesses don't have a marketing activity problem. They have a clarity problem.
The product is good. The team knows what it can do. The website is live. Content is going out. Campaigns are running.
And somehow, the market still doesn't quite get it.
That's where I start.
Before we add another campaign, channel or piece of content, I want to answer the harder questions.
What are you really selling?
What problem are you solving that actually matters?
Why should someone care now?
What should your market understand about your business that they don't understand today?
Because once that becomes clear, everything downstream gets easier.
What I do
I make the value obvious. Then I build around it.
Not a tagline for the sake of having one.
A clear commercial narrative that connects what you've built with something your customer already cares about.
Then we build from there.
Positioning & narrative
We get underneath the features, terminology and internal language to find the simple truth at the centre of the business.
The problem. The tension. The opportunity. The reason someone should choose you. Then we turn it into positioning, messaging and a narrative your website, sales team, campaigns and content can actually use.
Go-to-market & launches
A strong product with a weak route to market is still a weak commercial proposition.
I build the plan around the audience, message, market, channels, sales journey, launch sequence and measures that matter. Not activity for activity's sake. A system built around a commercial objective.
Fractional marketing leadership
Sometimes the business doesn't need another agency. It needs someone senior enough to hold the whole picture.
I work directly with founders and leadership teams to set the marketing direction, make the calls, align internal and external teams and keep execution connected to the strategy.
Marketing orchestration & performance
Strategy cannot live in a deck.
I stay close to what happens after launch: paid media, digital performance, content, website behaviour, customer response, conversion and the signals that tell us whether the strategy is working. We diagnose. We learn. We change what needs changing.
The plan can move.
The objective doesn't.
How I work
Five
stages.
Find the truth
What have you actually built? Where is the real value? What does the customer care about? What is everyone else missing?
I spend time here because getting this wrong makes everything that follows more expensive.
Build the narrative
We turn complexity into a story people can understand.
A strong narrative doesn't make the business sound clever. It makes the value feel obvious.
Orchestrate
Website. Sales. Content. Paid media. PR. Search. Social. Partnerships.
The channels change from business to business. The important part is that they are all reinforcing the same commercial idea.
Diagnose
Marketing creates signals long before it creates revenue.
I use those signals to understand what is working, where the journey is breaking and what deserves more attention.
Pivot
Good strategy isn't stubborn. When the evidence changes, we change.
No attachment to a campaign because we spent three months making it. No protecting an idea because it came from me.
Keep what works. Fix what doesn't. Move.
Selected thinking
Different businesses. Same job.
Strip away the complexity until the commercial truth is simple enough to build around.
The challenge
Multi-location brands were judging locations mainly against their own network.
A branch could look strong internally while still losing to the competitor down the road.
The truth
Customers don't choose between your branches. They choose between the options around them.
Best in your branch network can still mean second best on the street.
A 4.0 can look good internally until a 4.7 competitor is down the road.
The reframe
PercepXion became less about “competitor data” and more about local competitive context.
One organising idea: See the competitor view behind every location.
That idea became the organising principle for the website, sales story, campaigns and product narrative.
The challenge
Collections, supplier payments, approvals, verification, integrations and payment rails created a broad product story that was technically correct but harder to understand quickly.
The truth
For many businesses, the accounting is already in Xero. The messy part starts when the money actually has to move.
That is the gap Paycycle solves.
The reframe
Instead of leading with a list of payment features, the story became:
Payment operations for businesses running on Xero.
Start with the system the customer already understands, then show them the operational work Paycycle removes around it.
The challenge
The AI market is full of agents, copilots, workflows, memory and productivity claims.
Another feature-led AI story disappears into the category.
The truth
Your people are already using AI. And your people eventually leave.
When important business context lives with individuals, their tools or their prompts, valuable company knowledge can leave with them.
The reframe
The story moved away from another productivity tool and toward:
Institutional intelligence that belongs to the business.
The value is not simply helping one employee work faster. It is helping the company retain, control and compound what it knows.
A point of view
Marketing is psychology
before it is channels.
Good marketing doesn't manufacture need. It makes an existing problem impossible to ignore.
People buy when something suddenly makes sense. They recognise the problem, understand the consequence of leaving it unsolved and see why your solution matters.
The channel simply delivers the idea.
That is why I start with the idea.
You work with me
Botes & Co. is the home of my independent strategy work.
When I work with a founder, I stay close to the thinking and the detail.
I work directly with the people building the business.
I'm also not going to pretend I know everything.
If I know, I'll tell you.
If I disagree, I'll tell you.
If something isn't working, I'll tell you that too.
And if I don't know, I won't dress up a guess as expertise.
I'll figure it out.
That is how I work.
Operating model
Senior thinking.
Modern leverage.
I use my own Control Room and AI-assisted workflows to stay close to the detail: research, analysis, diagnostics and execution.
But the technology doesn't decide the strategy.
I do.
That gives me the operational leverage to stay close to the detail without losing sight of the bigger commercial picture.
Campaigns / Search / Behaviour / Content / Market
Patterns / anomalies / performance / context
What should change and why
Judgement / accountability / commercial context
Implement approved changes
Did it work?
The point
As execution becomes easier,
judgement becomes more valuable.
Start a conversation
Built something good? Let's make sure the market gets it.
If you're building a founder-led business and you know there is something valuable there, but the story, marketing or route to market hasn't quite clicked yet, we should talk.