Marketing consultant · Author · Vistage speaker
Four out of five CEOs don’t trust their marketing leadership. Three out of four marketers don’t think they’re set up to succeed. Same broken relationship, two sides of the table… And it’s why your marketing budget isn’t producing.
I’ve been on both sides of that table for twenty-five years. I fix the thing in the middle.
01 · The problem
“I paid the agency, but when will I start making money?”
“We went to the trade show, but did it work?”
“We spent $40,000 last year. I couldn't tell you on what.”
Here’s the uncomfortable part: your marketing person is probably asking the same questions from the other direction. They don’t know what winning looks like either, because nobody ever defined it. They’re producing work and hoping. You’re spending money and hoping.
That’s not a talent problem. It’s a structure problem, and structure problems are fixable.
02 · Why me
Inside the building
At 25 I was a marketing director who raised his hand in the middle of a branding crisis and said “I think I can fix it…” and did, on a brand that’s still on shelves at Target and Walmart more than two decades later.
Across the table
Then I spent eighteen years running an agency, sitting across from CEOs who’d been burned and couldn’t articulate why or how.
That’s an unusual pair of vantage points, and it’s the entire reason I’m an extremely effective marketing executive today. I know what the CEO isn’t saying out loud. I also know what the marketing manager is too junior, too outranked, or too tired to say back.
Most of my work is translation. The strategy part is easier than people think; the agreement part is where companies actually fail.
03 · The offer
Not a deck that describes your industry back to you. Not a list of tactics somebody’s agency wants to sell.
1
Specific tactics, tied to specific goals, aimed at a specific stage of your buyer’s journey, inside a budget you agreed to. Every item passes a four-part test before it earns a place, and if it fails any one of the four, it doesn’t go on the plan.
That test alone kills most of the wasted spend in a typical marketing budget.
2
Agreed before anything starts, so success isn’t debatable afterward. Numbers your marketing team can actually control, because holding someone accountable for something they have no authority over is how you lose good people.
Nobody has to win the attribution argument, because nobody has to have it.
3
A plan built on what everyone in the room already believes is a guess with money attached. So when the question is whether the market is really there, my other company,Ophea, goes and asks. Real interviews with your buyers and the deals you lost, adapting as the conversation goes, instead of a survey box that only captures what you thought to ask.
Win/loss, customer experience, or whether a market is viable at all. Weeks, not months.
04 · The method
Every engagement runs on the same framework, tested across hundreds of businesses. It starts at the center with your Ecosystem: your customers, your competitors, and the real conditions your business has to survive. Everything else points outward from there.
Four directions, each with a tangible half you can see and an intangible half most companies never discuss. Miss one and the whole plan wobbles.
05 · Measurement
Most consultants change the subject here. I have four numbers.
LTV
Lifetime Value
What a customer is actually worth to you across the whole relationship, not what they spent this week.
CAC
Cost of Acquiring a Customer
Everything sales and marketing spends, per customer won.
PAS
Pipeline Assist Score
The percentage of your sales-ready leads that marketing meaningfully touched. Marketing can control this one, which is why it's fair to hold them to it.
MIR
Marketing Influenced Revenue
The share of new revenue marketing helped earn. Not created. Helped earn. That distinction is what ends the argument.
No attribution.
No arguments.
Your sales team stops fighting your marketing team over who owns a lead, because nobody has to own it. We measure influence instead of claiming credit.
06 · Services
Most people start with a plan. Where it goes from there is up to you.
You need to know what your buyers actually think, not what your team assumes.
Qualitative research run through Ophea, my market research company. Structured interviews that adapt as the conversation goes, rather than a survey that only captures what you already thought to ask. Win/loss, customer experience, or whether a market is viable at all, from kickoff to findings in weeks.
Details →You're about to spend real money and nobody can tell you what it buys.
A fixed-scope engagement that produces one thing: a plan built on The Compass, connecting your market to your budget to your goals to your tactics, with the measurement system agreed up front. Most engagements start here.
Details →You need marketing leadership and can't justify a quarter-million-dollar hire.
I take the seat. Strategy, budget ownership, team leadership, agency and vendor management, and a real presence in your leadership meetings, at a fraction of the cost and with none of the ramp-up.
Details →07 · Track record
Branding Expert
Launched dozens of business and consumer brands including a global children's product brand.
18 years
Built and ran an award-winning marketing agency.
Four books
Including Everyone Hates Marketing!
Speaker and Educator
Approved Vistage Worldwide speaker and adjunct professor of marketing. Spoken at national and international conferences.
Hundreds of growing businesses, mostly small and midmarket, mostly the ones nobody writes case studies about. Founder of Ophea, an AI-enabled market research platform.
“Erik brings deep marketing expertise and strong systems thinking. He helped us move from scattershot efforts to intentional & effective marketing. His insight and experience have proven invaluable in the work that we do.”
Tim Maxwell · CEO, Karuna Care Services
“Erik brings the strategic insight we were missing. He guides our marketing manager, improved our website, set clear goals, launched our podcast, introduced successful awards, and helped build our client review program.”
Andrew Doyle · CEO, The Doyle Group
“Erik’s straightforward approach and well-formulated framework were enlightening. He was able to take various marketing concepts and ideas that I knew from prior experiences and package them in a way that allowed me to create a comprehensive marketing strategy and executable plan with a unified message.”
Boyd Bell · Founder, Useful Rocket Science
08 · The book
(But you’ll love this no-nonsense strategy that actually works.)
Thirty thousand words. No jargon, no 10,000-foot philosophy about what marketing could be in a utopian world. Specific actions, at what time, with a framework that works whatever size you are. Written for busy CEOs, which mostly meant cutting things out.
09 · Speaking
I speak frequently at conferences and at Vistage Worldwide CEO and peer groups. The content I deliver is built to be used, not admired: executives leave with a decision-making framework, budgeting guidelines, and a way to prioritize that survives contact with Monday morning.
Speaking details & availability
10 · Me
I’m Erik
I’ve launched brands, started and run an award-winning marketing agency, written books, and I managed to use the F-word more than a dozen times in five minutes in front of a full house at Denver’s Oriental Theater. But my story and what makes me tick goes deeper.
The longer version
It usually isn’t. A conversation costs you half an hour, and I’ll tell you plainly whether I can help, including when the answer is no.
