Four companies renamed or repositioned, starting with Vision Solutions out of Midrange Information Systems. One brand run across 50 countries on an $18M fund. New sales up 350% at Easly. Marketing-sourced opportunities from 4% to 12% at IDMWORKS.
Brand and demand usually get run as two departments with two budgets, and then nobody can say whether the new positioning did anything. The habit that has stuck across seven roles is to fix the measurement before touching the message.
At IDMWORKS that meant rebuilding Salesforce lead capture before the rebrand went live, because almost nothing carried program-level attribution. At Easly and Radium it meant building SEO, SEM, and automation from nothing, then setting lead SLAs both sales teams actually ran. At New Horizons it meant tying an $18M fund to KPIs the board and the franchisees had both signed off on, which is why the fund survived four CEOs.
The positioning still matters. It just has to survive contact with the pipeline report.
Each one was hard to sell because nobody could say what it was. Pick a company to see what changed.
Started in B2B technology marketing in 1997 and never left it. Seven roles since, most of them at companies that were hard to sell because nobody could say plainly what they were. Four came out with a new name or a new position: Vision Solutions, Island Data, New Horizons, and IDMWORKS.
New Horizons was fourteen years of that. Fifty countries, 200+ corporate and franchise locations, and an $18M fund built from corporate and franchise money. The CEO reviewed it. So did a ten-member franchise marketing council, twice a year. Four CEOs came and went, and the fund held each time.
The move from classroom training to live online delivery is the one worth singling out. It reversed how the whole network delivered its product, across 50 countries, and landed roughly two years before the rest of the category went the same way.
Recent work sits closer to the pipeline. At IDMWORKS there was no department and no attribution, so Salesforce lead capture got rebuilt first. Marketing-sourced opportunities went from 4% to 12% of total in twelve months. Event-sourced leads rose 145%. The martech stack went from twelve vendors to four and took $500K a year out with it.
Now running MKTg, an interim practice, three engagements since December 2023. Looking for a permanent VP seat. B.A. Marketing, Cal State San Bernardino.
The incremental departmental budget never materialized, so the whole thing ran on three people and $1.5M. Salesforce lead capture got rebuilt first, because opportunities carried almost no program-level attribution and nobody could trace a deal back to the event, webinar, ad, or campaign behind it. Then the market got narrowed to the industries, company profiles, and buyer roles the firm could actually win, and the web, collateral, and campaigns were rebuilt behind one claim: authority in identity access management. Sales alignment came last. A lead-volume SLA, monthly pipeline reviews, and a seller kit of messaging, qualifying questions, and competitive talking points.
Easly covered North America and Canada. Radium covered Australia and New Zealand. Both sold R&D financing to CFOs and founders on deals of $130K to $180K. What could be standardized across the two brands was standardized, and what could not, because North American and Australian regulation differ, was localized. Neither company had SEO, SEM, or marketing automation, and the Salesforce data at both was unusable. All of it got built or rebuilt, then lead SLAs and monthly pipeline reviews that both sales teams adopted and ran on their own.
Franchisees had been building their own websites for years and the brand had scattered across eight regions. The fix was a platform where any location could stand up a compliant, localizable, ecommerce-enabled site in days, including a right-to-left portal for the Middle East master franchisee, and then moving all 200+ corporate and franchise locations onto it. Running alongside that: the shift from classroom training to live online delivery, an annual plan built backward from required pipeline coverage, and an $18M fund defended through the move from public company to private equity.