Is your growth an engine — or is it you?
I help founder-led B2B companies build marketing systems that keep working after you stop doing everything yourself. Not another hire — something you actually own.
About four minutes. Seven scores. A number you’ll actually remember.
You took a vacation last summer.
Actually unplugged. Phone in a drawer, most of the time.
And when you got back, the pipeline had a hole in it, right where that week should’ve been.
You probably chalked it up to timing. A slow month. Everybody has slow months.
It wasn’t timing, though. It was a measurement.
It showed you exactly how much of your growth is a system, and how much of it is just you — your network, your calendar, you personally explaining the product better than your own website does.
That’s not a discipline problem, and it doesn’t mean you’re bad at this. Founder-led growth works — it’s the reason you’re here. It just has a ceiling, and the ceiling is a person.
Most founder-led B2B companies get something like sixty percent of their pipeline straight from the founder. Most don’t realize it until the week they stop.
So you hire someone. And it almost works.
They’re good — you didn’t make a bad call. They ramp up over a few months, run real campaigns, and things start moving.
Then, fourteen months in, they take a job with a bigger budget.
And you find out how much of what they built was actually a system, and how much was just them, showing up and doing it every day.
Usually, it was just them.
You didn’t buy a machine. You rented a person, and the lease ran out. You’re back where you started, minus about $180,000 and a year.
An agency is the same trade in nicer packaging. They run your campaigns, get results, and walk off with everything they learned the day the retainer ends.
A hire gives you effort. It leaves the day they do.
A system is yours. It keeps working even when you’re not.
There’s a name for this: rented growth. Paying for more people to do more manual work, over and over. It’s the default move, it’s expensive, and at this stage it’s probably the fastest way you’re burning runway.
Eighteen months ago, this argument didn’t work.
I’d have told you to build a system instead of hiring, and you’d have asked, fairly, who’s going to build it. A real go-to-market engine used to take a team — research, pages, campaigns, reporting, redoing it all — four people minimum, about a year.
That’s not true anymore, and most people haven’t caught up to it.
Work that used to take a hire now runs on agents. Not “AI helps you write faster” — it actually runs, while you sleep, with nobody ramping up or quitting.
So the thing that used to be impractical is just the obvious move now. You can own a compounding engine without building a team to run it, and without your fractional lead quietly turning into that team.
The companies that get this pull ahead on a lot less burn. The ones still renting growth stall out, and spend a lot of money finding that out.
Take two weeks off. Nothing happens.
That’s the goal. Not a dashboard, not a strategy deck, not a Leverage Score.
You go away for two weeks and the pipeline doesn’t notice. Your board asks about next quarter and you’ve got a real answer instead of a guess. Someone asks where your last ten customers came from and you just know — no digging through four tabs.
And you get to spend your time on the reason you started the company, which almost certainly wasn’t marketing.
Growth stops being something you’re doing all the time. It becomes something you just have.
First, I find out where it’s leaking.
Vague dread is hard to fix. So I turn “something’s wrong with growth” into seven specific things I can actually score.
Each one is really asking the same question in a different spot: does this compound on its own, or does someone have to keep cranking the handle?
Positioning Leverage
Does your positioning sell for you when you're not in the room — or does every deal need you to explain it?
Offer Leverage
Can someone buy without you inventing the deal — or are pricing and scope reinvented every conversation?
Message & Content Leverage
Does your message get reused — or rewritten from scratch every time?
Demand Leverage
Where does the next customer come from if you stop networking?
Pipeline Leverage
Could someone other than you close this?
Ops & Instrumentation Leverage
Do you know what's actually working — including which campaigns?
AI & Automation Leverage
How much of your engine runs without a human starting it?
One through three are the foundation. Four and five are the campaigns and the sales motion the foundation amplifies. Six tells you what’s actually working. Seven multiplies all of it.
Here’s what I got wrong for a while: the system doesn’t replace the campaign. It’s what makes the campaign work twice. Run a campaign on weak positioning, no real offer, and a message you’re rewriting from scratch, and it’s a one-off — you pay once, you get one result. Run that same campaign, same budget, on a foundation that actually compounds, and it keeps paying off.
Same money. A completely different asset.
My first client is an AI company that wasn’t using AI.
Not in their product — that part’s genuinely good, it’s why I took the job. I mean in their own marketing. Research done by hand. Pages built one at a time. Reports someone puts together every Monday.
Which is completely normal. It’s true almost everywhere, including at companies that sell AI for a living.
I can score dimension seven honestly because I actually build this way myself. Most fractional CMOs can’t.
I’m not a pair of hands.
I don’t run your ads day to day. I don’t manage your staff or vendors. I don’t do design or write high-volume copy. I’m not sitting in your Slack.
I build the engine, then get your team — or a system I’ve set up — running it.
If what you actually need is someone to execute, tell me and I’ll help you find them. That’s not what I do.
This is in every agreement I sign, and I say it on the first call, because the fastest way this falls apart is by quietly turning into an agency retainer where you’re renting results forever.
This works when three things are true.
- You have real customers who stick around. This isn't a product-market fit fix. If the product isn't landing yet, go talk to your users — that'll do more for you in the next ninety days than anything I'd build.
- Growth is real, but it depends on you. Roughly pre-seed through Series B, founder-led, and you can feel the ceiling.
- You want to own this, not rent it. If you just want someone to run ads, a good agency will do that better and cheaper than I will.
I’ve been the person carrying this number.
Fourteen years, five companies, most of them at exactly this stage. I was employee 56 at GitLab, back when go-to-market was mostly conviction and a wiki. Then Qualtrics, MX through its Series B and C, Crucial Learning, and now SchoolAI.
Demand gen, SEO, paid, lifecycle, brand, revenue modeling — the whole thing, not one slice of it. Always in-house, which means I’ve sat on the side of the table where the board asks why CAC just moved.
Across every one of those companies, the same pattern kept showing up, even though they had nothing else in common: growth was either a system or it was a person. Most people couldn’t tell you which one they actually had.
So I built a way to measure it.
The longer version →Start small. That’s on purpose.
The Leverage Score quiz — free, four minutes
Answer the questions, get a number and seven scores, and you'll know within four minutes what's compounding and what's still just you. No data access, no call needed. Most people should stop here for a while.
The Leverage Score assessment — fixed fee, 2–3 weeks, hard stop
I get real access — analytics, pipeline, CRM, ad accounts — and come back with your actual score and a prioritized 90-day roadmap. Fixed scope, fixed price, a clear end date.
If you don't walk away with three leverage gaps worth more than what you paid, don't pay it.
It's yours whether you keep working with me or not. About a third of people stop here, and that's a fine outcome.
The retainer — monthly, capped hours
This is the building phase. A 30/60/90 loop: assess, build and guide, re-map every quarter. Flat monthly fee with a real hour cap, so the scope stays honest in both directions.
Is your growth an engine — or is it you?
Four minutes, seven scores, one number.