I run brand and marketing at mode40, and most of my career has been about helping small teams compete with much bigger ones.

This list is how I work, in the order I work it. Each one opens right here.

• Research: 01 to 06
• Strategy: 07 to 15
• Messaging: 16 to 24
• Design and build: 25 to 30
• Launch: 31 to 36
• Run: 37 to 42
• Measure and learn: 43 to 47

The links at the bottom cover the rest: who I am, where I've worked, and what it's like to work with me.

Nobody buys a product because they want the product. They buy it because something in their day is broken, slow, risky, or expensive, and they want it to stop.

So I start with the problem, described in the customer's own words, and I keep the product out of the first few sentences of almost everything. The late shipment, the failed audit, the spreadsheet that breaks at month end: that moment is usually the opening line.

The reader needs to feel understood before they'll care what we sell.

The best marketing ideas I've ever had came out of someone else's mouth. A customer describing their week. A sales rep repeating an objection. A founder explaining why they started the company in the first place.

Early on, I talk to customers and the team one person at a time, because people say different things alone than they do in a room where the loudest voice wins.

Customer language is almost always better than anything a marketer would come up with, and it makes the final copy sound like it came from someone who gets it.

What people say they do and what they actually do are often two different things.

Surveys and interviews tell you what buyers think they want. Their behaviour tells you the truth: which pages they read, where they drop off, what they ask on the sales call, what they buy and what they leave behind.

I listen to what customers say, and then I check it against what they do.

Nobody wakes up thinking about a software platform. They wake up to a failed audit, a missed shipment, a new hire who can't find anything.

Those moments are when people start looking for help. I map them out, then make sure the company is the first thing buyers think of when one of those moments hits.

It's much easier to own a handful of specific moments than to be top of mind for everything.

Ask a company who its competitors are and you'll get a list of companies that look like it. The real competition is usually a spreadsheet, a consultant, the system they already have, or doing nothing at all.

A lot of deals aren't lost to a rival. They just stop, because changing feels riskier than staying put.

Good marketing has to make the decision feel safe, which is why clear pricing, real case studies, references, and a small first step matter as much as the product itself.

If everyone is a potential customer, nobody is a best customer. I'd rather a company be the obvious choice for a smaller group than a vague option for everyone.

Writing down who isn't a fit feels like leaving money on the table. In practice it does the opposite: it sharpens the message, and it tells the sales team exactly where not to spend their time.

Most marketing problems are really positioning problems. If a company can't say who it's for, what it's up against, and why it wins, more advertising just spreads the confusion faster.

The answers are almost always already inside the company, scattered across the founder, the sales team, the support inbox, and the customers. My job is to pull them out, test them against what buyers actually do, and get it all down on one page everyone agrees on before anything gets designed.

It feels slower at the start. It's much faster by the end, because the website, the deck, and the sales call stop being arguments.

People don't remember lists. They remember one thing.

Pick the sentence a customer should say when they describe the company to a friend, lead with it everywhere, and make everything else prove it.

Most growth comes from people who don't buy from you yet.

It's tempting to focus all the effort on existing customers, because they're easier to reach and easier to measure. But the market is mostly made up of people who buy from you rarely and people who've never heard of you. Reaching them, again and again, is where the growth is.

Look after your customers, and spend most of your marketing on the people who aren't customers yet.

Price tells customers what to expect before they've read a single feature. When they understand exactly why a company is different, they stop comparing it line by line with cheaper options.

When they don't, every conversation turns into a discount. Strong positioning protects price, and the price customers are willing to pay is one of the clearest signs the brand is actually working.

The more a small team tries to do, the less it actually gets done.

A long list of small, easy tasks feels productive. Usually it isn't. I sort the work into what drives pipeline, what supports it, and what can wait, and I protect time for the first bucket.

Three things done well beat ten things done halfway.

The best advice is the advice you'd follow if it were your money on the line.

That means saying the uncomfortable thing when it matters: this campaign won't work, this event isn't worth it, this message is too vague. It's easier to say yes. It's more useful to say what you'd actually do.

When I recommend something, it's what I'd do if I owned the company.

Most wasted marketing comes from starting before anyone agreed on what it was for. A short brief fixes that: who it's for, the one thing we want them to remember, what we want them to do next, and how we'll know it worked.

When the feedback comes in later, the brief settles it. "Does this help them understand the one thing?" ends a lot of arguments about colours and fonts.

Before committing to a plan, I flip the question around: what would make this fail?

The list usually comes quickly. Nobody owns it. The audience is wrong. Sales won't use it. The timeline is fantasy. Once those risks are written down, avoiding them is much easier.

And most decisions can be undone. Knowing that makes it easier to move quickly on the ones that can, and slow down on the few that can't.

Before a big campaign, event, or launch gets built, I argue against it on purpose. Would the buyer notice or care?

How would a competitor respond? Does the line from idea to revenue actually hold? Can we deliver it alongside everything else? The answer is go, change it, or don't, along with the cheapest test that could prove it within a couple of days.

Killing a weak idea on paper is the cheapest kill there is.

Good messaging passes one test: can a customer repeat it accurately to their boss? In B2B, the person reading your website almost never decides alone.

They have to explain it to finance, to IT, and to whoever signs. So I build messaging in layers: one sentence that says what it is and who it's for, one short paragraph on why it matters, then the proof.

Every audience gets the same core story, told in the order that matters to them.

If a reader has to stop and ask "what does that mean?", the line failed, so rewrite it as the thing it means.

And when copy keeps coming out vague, it's usually a sign the strategy underneath isn't finished yet.

Words like "innovative" don't mean anything anymore, and readers skip right past them.

A real number, a named industry, or a customer's own words are believable because they can be checked.

"Food processing" beats "manufacturing" every time.

Buyers care about what they get before they care about how it works.

So I write in that order. Start with the value: the outcome the customer gets. Then the benefit: what that changes in their day. Then the feature that makes it possible.

Most companies write it backward, starting with what they built. Turning it around is one of the fastest ways to make a page clearer.

Buyers are smart. They can tell when they're being sold to, and they can spot an empty superlative from across the room.

When a product is genuinely similar to its competitors, the lazy move is to invent a trivial difference or claim to be "number one." I'd rather tell the truth well: what it does, who it's for, and why that's worth something.

Treating buyers like adults is good manners, and it's good marketing.

Anything a company says about itself is a claim. Anything a customer says about it is proof.

People look to others like them when they decide. Case studies, testimonials, recognizable customers, real numbers, and references do more persuading than any headline I could write.

So I collect proof constantly, and I put it right next to the claim it backs up.

A lot of stalled deals die from indecision. The buyer is worried about picking wrong, so they don't pick at all.

Good marketing lowers the risk of saying yes: a clear recommendation, honest answers to the hard questions, references they can call, and a small first step that doesn't require betting the whole budget.

Make the decision feel safe and more of them get made.

People forget claims. They remember stories, and they repeat them to the people who sign off on budgets.

A good story has a before, a problem, and an after, with the customer at the centre and the company there to help. One true customer story does more than ten polished claims, and once you have it, it should show up everywhere: the website, the deck, the booth, and the launch video.

A plant manager and a CFO want different things from the same product, so they should hear different things.

The best marketing sounds like it was written for one reader: their industry, their job, the problem on their desk this quarter. At mode40, one platform is sold as Singularity for Manufacturing, Singularity for Aerospace & Defence, and so on. Same platform, a different story for each industry, told in its own words.

AI finally makes this practical at scale, as long as a person still decides what's true.

Design is how an idea looks when it's finished. Without an idea underneath, it's decoration, and decoration is noise.

I start with who it's for and what they need to believe, so every design choice has a job. That also changes the arguments. "Which one do we like?" becomes "which one does the job better?", which is a much easier question to answer.

Take away the photos, the illustrations, and the colour. If it still holds together, the hierarchy and the words are doing their job.

If it falls apart, the pictures were covering for something.

This site is my attempt to pass that test.

Before people can prefer a brand, they have to recognize it.

That comes from distinctive assets: a colour, a shape, a phrase, a way of showing the product. Things people can spot in a second, even when they're barely paying attention.

Being different matters. Being recognizable matters more, and it only works if you pick those assets on purpose and then keep using them for years.

Brand lives in the button labels, the form fields, the error messages, and the confirmation email, as much as in the headline.

These small pieces of copy get the least attention and do a surprising amount of the work. A confusing button loses a lead just as surely as a weak headline does.

I write all of it with the same care, because the customer reads all of it.

A small team can't design every piece from scratch. It needs a grid, a type scale, a short colour palette, and a handful of components that fit together.

With a good system, the hundredth piece is as good as the first, even on a busy week, and anyone can make something that looks like it belongs. I keep the system as small as it can be, because every extra rule is one more thing someone has to remember.

I'm a marketer who can code. When an idea needs a demo, a calculator, or a landing page, I don't have to wait for a developer's calendar to open up.

I build a working version and put it in front of real people. If it works, it gets polished. If it doesn't, it cost hours instead of months.

And if a good tool already exists, I just use that.

It's faster to react to something real than to describe something imaginary.

I show drafts before they feel finished, with one clear question and a date.

Early feedback is cheap. Late feedback is expensive.

Launches, trade shows, and board meetings don't move.

When time gets tight, I cut scope instead of quality or the date: ship the three pages that matter instead of ten, the core message now and the extras next month.

A smaller thing done well beats a bigger thing done badly.

Marketing that sales doesn't use is wasted, and sales that ignores marketing ends up re‑explaining the company on every call.

Before anything launches publicly, the people who talk to customers every day should have it and be able to explain it. It works the other way too.

The objection a rep heard on Tuesday should be the headline on Friday.

A message only works if people hear it more than once. The website, the deck, the booth, and the social posts should all say the same thing in their own way.

Most teams get bored of their message long before the market has even noticed it.

I'd rather a company get tired of its brand than its customers forget it.

LinkedIn, a trade show booth, an email, and a sales deck are different rooms. The same message needs a different shape in each one.

Copy pasted from one channel into another usually falls flat, and then people decide the channel "doesn't work." Often the channel was fine. The format was wrong.

I keep the core message the same and rewrite it for every room it's going into.

A lot of good marketing fails at the very end: the reader is interested and can't tell what to do next.

Every piece gets one clear next step that fits where the reader actually is.

The bigger the decision, the smaller that first step should be.

Most of a company's future customers aren't shopping today. They'll be ready next quarter, or next year. Brand is the work that makes sure that when they are ready, this company is the one they think of first.

That means being easy to remember and easy to find, all year, through the same look, the same voice, and the same few ideas repeated longer than feels comfortable.

At RocketRez, unaided brand recall rose 75% in six months doing exactly that.

The team gets tired of a campaign long before the market does.

New buyers come into the market all the time. Most of the people who'll buy next year haven't seen this year's best ad yet. Replacing something that works because it feels old to us is one of the most common mistakes in marketing.

If it's still working, keep running it.

AI can write a thousand words in seconds, and most of them are forgettable.

AI is good at volume. People are good at judgment: what's true, what's specific, and what's good enough to put a company's name on.

I built a system of AI agents, organized like a small marketing team, that work from the company's real positioning, voice, and proof. Every piece gets checked against a quality bar, and nothing is published, sent, or paid for without my yes.

AI is incredibly good at helping understand an audience: summarizing calls, finding patterns in reviews, pulling together research that used to take weeks.

It's much weaker at the part that makes marketing work: the idea, the insight, and the voice. That's still a person's job.

I use AI heavily to understand customers, and I keep the creative work human.

The first time, do it by hand and pay attention.

The second time, it becomes a system: written down first, then a template, a checklist, or an automation. That's how one person keeps up with a department's worth of work, and keeps the quality steady on a busy week.

If marketing can't show how it helps a company make money, it's arts and crafts: a post here, a booth there, a nice brochure nobody asked for.

I tie the work to pipeline, revenue, retention, or price, and I keep the CRM clean enough that the numbers mean something. At RocketRez, I was part of a five‑person marketing team while the company grew from under $1M to over $10M in recurring revenue.

Clicks and impressions are easy to count. Whether marketing changed what buyers actually did is harder, and it's the only number that really matters.

Some work fills this quarter's pipeline. Some makes sure next year's buyers already know the name. I measure both, on their own timelines, and I'm careful with credit: whatever got the last click didn't necessarily create the demand.

A number going up after a campaign doesn't mean the campaign made it go up.

Seasonality, sales activity, a competitor's mistake, or plain coincidence can all move a metric. Before giving marketing the credit, I ask what else changed, and whether the result would have happened anyway.

Honest measurement makes marketing more believable, especially when it does work.

Won deals tell you what's working. Lost deals tell you what to fix.

Most losses carry a positioning lesson: the buyer didn't see the difference, didn't trust the claim, or decided not to decide at all.

I take those lessons back to the start of this list.

If I think something won't work, I say so early and explain why. I'll push back once. If the call goes the other way, I commit to it fully and make it work.

And "we don't know yet" is a perfectly good answer, because it tells you what to find out next.

Which brings us right back to the beginning: the customer's problem.