At your stage, the solution isn’t “more marketing”. It’s positioning that is tuned to the exact clients you want to work with.
Most marketing firms rely on observations and instincts, but we start with the customers you are actually trying to reach. This results in a strategy that is pre-validated by the market, and positioning that is rooted in the voice of your ideal customer – so you can win premium clients, increase revenue, and move upmarket.
Business is good. Revenue is steady. But “good” and “steady” aren’t enough anymore. You know what makes you different, but no one outside of your inner circle can explain it clearly. Your prospects see you as a category, not a choice. You’re one of dozens of similar firms competing for the same business, and nothing you’re doing or saying is making you stand out.
Our 3-phase approach closes that gap.
The Strategy x Story System™
Phase 1: Extraction
Understand what you believe about your business, how your clients perceive their situation and your value, and identify any gaps or misalignment.
What You Get
Voice of Customer Research Brief — a synthesis of what your clients actually said, including the triggers, decision criteria, and language they use to describe the problem and the outcome.
Positioning Gap Analysis — a score of how well your current messaging, offers, and content are aligned with your clients’ needs, identifying gaps and opportunities.
Competitive Analysis — an overview of how you compare your competitors, strengths and opportunities, threats or weaknesses, revealing your differentiated advantages.
What to Expect:
4-5 weeks
90-minute intake call during week one
30 minute status check call in week 3
90-minute call in week 5 to present findings.
Any timeline slippage in this phase is usually related to availability and scheduling of customers for interviews.
Phase 2: Alignment
With client evidence in hand, we build the strategic foundation. This is where your past marketing strategy will be pressure-tested against your current business reality, using real voice of customer data to adjust and refine your positioning and messaging.
What You Get:
Buyer-Ready Messaging Guide — your offer, ICP, positioning, and differentiation translated into language clients recognize and act on. Written from their perspective, and ready-to-use on your website, in sales conversations, or to brief anyone who communicates on your behalf.
Positioning Narrative — the story that anchors how you think about the problem, what makes your approach different, and why it matters to the leaders who hire you. This is a foundational document for training AI tools or onboarding a content team.
Conversation Language — Talking points, objection responses, and key phrases grounded in what your clients told us they needed to hear before they felt confident choosing you. This is not a script, but a guide for language to use in common situations with prospects.
What to Expect:
3-4 weeks, depending on your team’s availability and schedules.
One 60-90 minute session per week, formatted as a structured workshop with the agenda shared in advance.
Some work may be required between sessions, no more than 1-2 hours per week.
Working documents shared via Google Drive.
Phase 3: Activation
We will evaluate your marketing tactics against two questions: does it reach the right prospects at the right stage of their decision process, and is the time investment proportionate to the result?
What You Get
Content + Marketing Direction – covering the core content themes that keep your positioning strong across channels, recommendations for tactics that are worth investment (or not), and a framework to evaluate performance so you can fine-tune your strategy based on real-world response.
What to Expect:
2-3 weeks, primarily desk work completed by Kate Turner.
One 60-minute marketing activities review
One 60-90 minute report session, debrief, and next steps review
Investment
This is a fixed-fee engagement based on the size and complexity of your firm. Let’s schedule a call to discuss your needs.
This is an optional continuation of the engagement, following the close of phase 3. The focus is to provide ongoing strategic support for the full implementation of your marketing strategy, including content creation (blogs, newsletters, etc.), creation and management of the marketing calendar, quarterly reporting, and oversight of any external marketing partners (such as graphic design, video, web, or advertising/agency).
To be scoped as a separate engagement with weekly or biweekly strategy meetings, content ideation and interview sessions, quarterly planning and review, and annual customer research refresh and case study creation.
Pricing:
This is a monthly engagement that is scoped based on the strategic work that we complete together.
Katie’s ability to create messaging that is unique, attention grabbing, and impactful is unmatched, from social media posts, to emails, to blogs, to stories and more.
Katie took the time to really understand our vision and goals, and worked with us to clarify who we are and how we communicate that to the world.
We worked with Katie to plot a path to building brand awareness, and have now executed better branding, clearer positioning and messaging
How do I know if this is a messaging issue or something else (sales process, offer, ICP, lead gen)?
Most of the time, you don’t, at first. What founders read as a messaging problem usually turns out to live upstream, in the offer, the ICP, or how the firm is positioned. Figuring out where the actual misalignment is happens to be the first thing we do together, because better messaging on top of an unclear offer just dresses up the same problem.
We’re growing through referrals. Why fix what isn’t broken?
Referrals are the most common reason firms in the $1M–$5M range plateau. They got you here, and they’ll keep you here. The work isn’t about replacing referrals. It’s about building messaging that does the same job those referrals do (vouching for what you’re actually good at) when you’re not in the room to make the introduction yourself.
Can’t I just hire a good copywriter to rewrite the website?
You can, and a lot of founders do. What usually happens is the new copy reads better and the website looks sharper, but the pipeline doesn’t move. Copywriters are hired to write words. If the underlying clarity about who you’re for and what you actually solve isn’t there, better words on top of that won’t fix it.
How is this different from StoryBrand or other positioning frameworks?
Frameworks like StoryBrand are built around a story structure that anyone can apply. They give you a scaffold to fill in. What they don’t do is figure out who your real buyer is or whether your current offer is the one to go to market with. The SxS System works upstream of that. We start with the strategic foundation (offer, ICP, positioning, GTM), then activate it through messaging that’s specific to your business, not a template you’re filling in.
I’m already working with a [social media, website, SEO, advertising] agency. Does this still make sense?
Often it makes more sense, not less. Agencies execute. They post the content, build the website, run the ads, optimize the SEO. What they don’t typically do is establish the underlying clarity about who you’re for and what you uniquely solve. When that’s missing, even excellent execution underperforms. Most of the agency relationships my clients are already in get sharper after the foundation work, because the agency finally has a strategic direction to execute against.
We worked with a positioning consultant before and the work never made it into anything. Why would this be different?
That’s the most common pattern I see in second-time engagements. The positioning work was technically correct and never made it out of the deck. The SxS System is built specifically to prevent that. The Strategy phase produces the foundation, and the Story phase activates it across your sales conversations, your website, your content, and the way the team talks about the work day to day.
What happens once the engagement ends? Can we keep working with you?
The foundation is yours. The deliverables (your messaging guide, the positioning work, the language assets, the content prompts) are built to keep working long after we wrap. Some firms continue with ongoing activation support. Plenty don’t, and they’re fine. The work is designed so you don’t need me afterward.
Have you worked in [my industry]?
Probably yes, but the more useful answer is that it matters less than you’d think. The patterns I see across founder-led B2B firms (HR consulting, IT, accounting, fractional finance, creative agencies, operations) are remarkably similar. The work isn’t industry-specific. It’s specific to the shape of the business: founder-led, $1M–$5M, mostly referral-grown, heavy on expertise and light on a marketing function. If that’s your shape, the work translates.
We’re under $1M / over $5M / [something else]. Are we still a fit?
The sweet spot is founder-led B2B firms in the $1M–$5M range. Below that, the work is sometimes more than the business needs at this stage. Above $5M, the work still applies, but the engagement shape usually shifts. The most honest test isn’t your revenue or your structure. It’s whether your messaging is the constraint right now. I am happy to talk about your specific situation and together we can determine if it is a fit.
Who actually puts the new messaging into our website, sales deck, and LinkedIn?
You do, with my support. Strategy delivers the foundation. Story delivers the messaging itself: language for the website, language for sales conversations, talking points for your team, content prompts for whoever’s writing. I’ll review the final implementations and flag where the new messaging is getting diluted or quietly rewritten back into old habits. The actual updates live with your team. (For firms that want hands-on implementation help across the website, decks, and content, ongoing partnership covers that.)
How much of my time will this realistically take? I’m already maxed.
Most of the time investment goes into working sessions with me, where the goal is to get the thinking out of your head efficiently. Plan on roughly 1-2 hours per week, sometimes less. The biggest time cost isn’t the meetings. It’s the part you’d be doing anyway: thinking clearly about your business. The engagement just makes that thinking productive.
My partner/team has spent a lot of time on our current messaging. How do I bring this up without it feeling like criticism?
This is one of the harder internal conversations. The reframe that usually helps: the messaging worked. It got you here. The fact that it’s not working anymore isn’t a failure of the messaging or the people who built it. The business outgrew it. You’re not asking for a redo. You’re asking for what comes next.
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