Your company has outgrown founder-led marketing.
It hasn't outgrown the need for senior leadership.

Strategy ownership, not more deliverables

• ✓Full positioning and messaging framework — built for your specific buyer, not your org chart or founder's ego
• ✓Go-to-market strategy with channel priorities ranked by realistic ROI — so the team knows exactly where to spend first
• ✓Demand generation engine design — ICP to pipeline, with clear attribution from marketing activity to revenue
• ✓Sales and marketing alignment — one narrative from first digital touch to closed deal, so reps stop rewriting the story
• ✓Monthly strategy day with your team + weekly CEO check-in — maintaining momentum between sessions
• ✓AI-generated playbooks, campaign briefs, and content frameworks ready for your team to execute against
• ✓Board-ready marketing dashboard — clear evidence of what's working when your investors ask
• ✓Quarterly growth review — a strategic reset that keeps the plan honest and the team focused

The difference between advice and cross-industry operating experience

Most fractional CMOs come from one sector. I've held VP and Director-level marketing roles across telecoms (TELUS, Bell Canada), enterprise hardware and software (SMART Technologies), SaaS-adjacent technology (Veriforce, Userful), and peer advisory networks (TEC Canada) — with early-career exposure to professional services consulting at PwC. That breadth means I've navigated the specific commercial dynamics — long sales cycles, buying committees, channel conflicts, demand gen in sectors where no one clicks ads — that your alternatives haven't.

An MIT credential drives the analytical rigour: frameworks, attribution modelling, and scenario-based decision making rather than gut feel. AI tooling compresses strategy development by 40–60%, so what used to take months of consultant time takes weeks — and your team gets execution-ready deliverables, not slide decks full of recommendations. The result is senior judgment with a pace your competition can't match.

Strong on governance. A blind spot on go-to-market.

Most private company boards are excellent at finance, legal, and operations. They're significantly weaker on commercial strategy — the decisions that actually drive enterprise value: pricing architecture, new market entry, channel investment, customer acquisition design, and net revenue retention. The result is a boardroom where major growth decisions get made without a credible marketing voice challenging the assumptions or identifying the blind spots.

If your board can dissect a balance sheet in minutes but goes quiet when the conversation turns to CAC, NRR, or why pipeline coverage is slipping, you have a gap. This advisory role fills it — with the same analytical rigour and operating experience your CFO brings to financial governance, applied to commercial growth.

Growth intelligence at every board meeting

Before each quarterly meeting, I run your customer data, board deck, NPS scores, and pipeline reports through AI analysis — surfacing patterns, risk signals, and strategic questions your management team may not have flagged. I arrive with scenario models ("what happens to CAC if we shift 20% of budget from events to content?"), competitive context, and a point of view that challenges comfortable assumptions.

Between meetings, I'm available for ad-hoc counsel on major decisions. The time commitment is low. The strategic leverage is significant.

What I bring to every meeting

• ✓Pre-meeting AI intelligence brief — customer patterns, NPS trends, pipeline health, competitive signals synthesized into 3 pages
• ✓Scenario models for major commercial decisions — data-backed, not gut-feel
• ✓Growth health scorecard — leading indicators of commercial performance, not just lagging revenue metrics
• ✓Sharp questions for management: the ones that surface assumptions and pressure-test the strategy
• ✓Ad-hoc counsel between meetings on pricing decisions, market entry, M&A marketing diligence
• ✓Annual growth strategy review — a full-day session to reset the commercial plan and challenge the roadmap

Marketing activity without a strategic foundation is expensive noise

Your team is working hard. Someone's posting on LinkedIn, running Google ads, attending tradeshows. But there's no documented ideal customer profile. Messaging is different on your website versus your sales deck versus your email campaigns. The team doesn't know which channel to prioritize when budget is tight. Marketing leadership comes and goes, and institutional knowledge leaves with each departure.

What's missing isn't effort — it's a documented, actionable strategy that survives people changes and scales with the business. This engagement builds that foundation in 30 days — and leaves your team with everything they need to execute independently.

Eight fully-documented strategic assets

• ✓Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) — specific, data-backed, documented with firmographics, psychographics, buying triggers, and the language your buyer actually uses
• ✓Positioning and messaging matrix — consistent language for every channel, persona, and stage of the buying journey
• ✓Channel strategy ranked by ROI potential — so the team invests first in what works, not what's familiar
• ✓90-day demand gen plan — campaign outlines, offers, and targeting ready for immediate execution
• ✓6-month content calendar — topic clusters, formats, and distribution mapped to buyer stages
• ✓KPI dashboard template — the 8–12 metrics that actually predict growth, and how to track them
• ✓AI prompt library — 40–60 prompts that let your team generate on-brand content independently
• ✓Full documentation package — structured so the playbook survives staff turnover and scales with the team

Structured, defined, and surprisingly fast

Week 1 is discovery: customer interviews, data review, and team alignment sessions to understand where the business actually is versus where leadership thinks it is. Week 2 builds the ICP and positioning — the strategic foundation everything else rests on. Week 3 designs the channel strategy, campaign architecture, and content framework. Week 4 is documentation and handoff — every asset packaged for your team with training on how to use it.

You're acquiring customers. Something is leaking them back out.

Every B2B company leaks revenue somewhere in the customer journey. A confusing website that fails to convert qualified prospects. A sales process that overpromises and creates disappointed customers. An onboarding that overwhelms instead of activates. A support experience that erodes trust. A renewal motion that barely exists until it's too late.

The insidious thing about journey leaks is that they're invisible until you go looking. The CEO knows something is broken — churn is higher than it should be, NPS is flat, win rates are declining — but can't pinpoint the cause. This audit finds the leaks, quantifies the revenue impact, and hands you a prioritized fix list ranked by what will make the biggest difference fastest.

Built by someone who's owned both marketing AND product

Most customer journey audits are done by marketers who understand the top-of-funnel but have no visibility into product experience, support dynamics, or renewal mechanics. Optivus's background spanning VP Marketing and Product Management at Userful means he evaluates your complete customer journey — from first digital impression through renewal conversation — with equal fluency at every stage.

The result is an audit that catches what single-discipline consultants miss: the friction in your onboarding that marketing never sees, the support failure that sales never hears about, the renewal script that silently destroys NPS.

A fix list, not just a map

• ✓Full customer journey map — visual and narrative, from first awareness through post-renewal advocacy
• ✓Friction point inventory — every identified point of failure, rated by severity and revenue impact
• ✓Top 10 prioritized fixes — ranked by effort vs. revenue impact so your team knows what to tackle first
• ✓Quick wins list — improvements your team can implement within 30 days, no significant resources required
• ✓Improved email flows, onboarding scripts, and help-center content — rewritten and ready to deploy
• ✓90-day CX improvement roadmap — with owner, timeline, and success metrics for each initiative
• ✓Executive readout presentation — for your leadership team, clear enough to take straight to the board

Your competitors are getting faster. Your team is still debating where to start.

Every professional services firm, manufacturing company, and established B2B business is facing the same reality: AI is transforming marketing productivity at a pace that's difficult to ignore and even harder to act on responsibly. Your board is asking about your AI strategy. Your marketing team is either paralyzed by the uncertainty or experimenting with ChatGPT behind IT's back with no oversight, no consistency, and no brand safety guardrails.

The gap between AI-augmented marketing teams and traditional ones is compounding monthly. Every week without a structured AI capability is a week your competitors gain leverage on speed, content volume, and cost efficiency. This engagement closes that gap — in 90 days, with a real system that your team owns and runs independently.

Practitioner-led. Not theoretical.

There is no shortage of AI consultants selling frameworks. There is a significant shortage of senior marketing leaders who actively use Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini for real B2B marketing work — and can demonstrate the difference between using AI correctly and using it in ways that damage your brand or leak confidential data.

Dean's approach is that of a strategic architect, not an IT vendor: define what to use AI for, which tools to adopt, what guardrails to set, and how to train your team to deploy it with the same confidence they bring to everything else.

A real AI capability — not a pilot that goes nowhere

• ✓AI readiness audit — current state, capability gaps, and a prioritized map of where AI creates the most marketing value for your specific team
• ✓Approved AI tool stack — with security review, data governance guidance, and clear policy on what goes into which tool
• ✓Top 10 prioritized AI use cases — specific to your marketing function, ranked by impact and implementation ease
• ✓Custom prompt library — 50–100 prompts calibrated to your brand voice, audience, and marketing objectives
• ✓Governance policy and brand safety guardrails — what's in bounds, what isn't, and how to handle edge cases
• ✓3-session team training programme — role-specific for copywriters, demand gen managers, and social/content teams separately
• ✓SOPs for every approved AI workflow — documented so the capability survives staff turnover
• ✓AI marketing playbook — the complete system your team runs without you

Your buyers are reading your competitors. Not you.

B2B buyers today do extensive research before they ever speak to a sales rep. They read LinkedIn posts. They follow thought leaders. They build a mental shortlist of "who gets it" in their industry — and that shortlist heavily influences who they call when they're ready to buy. If you're not consistently showing up with insight that demonstrates your expertise and earns trust, you're not on the shortlist.

The cost isn't a vanity metric. It's real pipeline. It's talent that chooses a competitor because their CEO's content signalled a more compelling company. It's the speaking invitation that goes to someone else. It's the referral that goes to the person who's top of mind.

Content that doesn't sound like you destroys the credibility it was meant to build

Most executive ghostwriting services produce content that is technically correct, strategically hollow, and unmistakably not written by the person who supposedly wrote it. Sophisticated B2B buyers — the ones you actually want to reach — can tell. They disengage. Worse, they quietly conclude that the executive who outsourced their thinking probably has a shallow point of view.

The approach here is different: every piece of content starts with a real conversation, uses your actual arguments and examples, and is shaped by a strategic editor who understands your industry, your audience, and what a CEO audience finds credible versus performative.

A full content presence. Two hours of your time.

• ✓Monthly 60-minute strategy and conversation session — the source of everything, extracted and built upon, not fabricated
• ✓4–6 LinkedIn posts per month — a mix of long-form narrative, short punchy takes, and data-driven insights calibrated to your goals
• ✓1 longer article or newsletter piece per month — for platforms where depth and nuance build authority
• ✓Content repurposed for secondary audiences — adapted for your industry, your board, or your sales team's social selling
• ✓Rolling 90-day content calendar — always planned, never scrambling on Sunday night
• ✓CEO voice and positioning guidelines — a documented style guide ensuring every piece sounds unmistakably like you
• ✓Monthly performance summary — what resonated, what didn't, and what that tells us about the next month's strategy