This is where scaling companies come to think differently about growth. Brand strategy for founders looks different than brand strategy for anyone else: you don’t have the luxury of treating positioning as a side project, and you’re usually the one person in the building who both understands the product deeply and has to sell the company’s story to people who don’t.

These are the ideas, frameworks, and field notes from 30+ years of solving that exact problem: helping companies turn confusion into clarity, and clarity into momentum.

Some of these stories were inspired by client work. Some come from conversations on my podcasts Where Growth Stalls and The Translation Gap, where I sit down with operators, investors, and specialists who’ve diagnosed and solved these non-obvious problems from the inside. All of them share the same starting point: the belief that most growth stalls aren’t sales problems or marketing problems. They’re brand and positioning problems in disguise.

You won’t find generic marketing advice here. What you’ll find is a consistent argument: that brand strategy for founders has to be built like a system, not a slogan. Something with enough discipline behind it to survive contact with a skeptical board, and data-driven founder.

Non-obvious thinking, held to a high bar of “does this actually work,” is the through-line.

If a piece here names a problem you recognize, it’s worth reading the ones around it. The same underlying pattern tends to show up in different clothes across sales, hiring, positioning, and go-to-market. And if you want to talk through how it applies to your specific situation, a meeting is the fastest way to do that with – no pitch, just an exchange of ideas.