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A Foundations-first approach to Marketing, Strategy & Leadership
Why questioning assumptions and defining the problem come before action.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I've always been drawn to the idea of making things better. Finding solutions, creating something useful, helping people and ideas move forward.
But over the years, I've become increasingly interested in what happens before we begin.
Before the strategy, the plan, the new direction or the beautifully designed thing.
The questions we ask. The assumptions we make. The things we take for granted because they've always been there.
We're often encouraged to focus on where we want to go. What we want to achieve. Who we want to become.
And those are important questions.
But I've found that sometimes the more useful place to start is with what already exists.
What are we building on? What do we believe to be true? What matters enough to carry forward? And what might we have outgrown without quite realising it?
This is the thinking behind a simple principle that runs through much of my work:
Foundations first. Then we build.
The temptation to just get on with it
There's something reassuring about action.
A new website. A marketing campaign. A revised business model. A fresh set of goals.
They're tangible. They give us something to work towards, something to measure and, perhaps most importantly, the feeling that we're making progress.
And sometimes getting started really is the best thing we can do. But I've also seen how easy it is to mistake activity for progress.
A business invests in a new website when the real problem is that its positioning no longer reflects what it does. A founder decides they need more marketing when they haven't quite worked out who they're trying to reach. A team commits to a new platform without questioning whether its existing processes make sense.
None of these are necessarily bad decisions. But without understanding the problem, we risk creating an expensive solution to the wrong one.
I've learnt that one of the most useful things I can bring to a project isn't always an immediate answer. Sometimes it's the willingness to ask another question.
Questioning what we think we know
We all operate with assumptions. About what customers want. What a successful business should look like. How things ought to be done. What we're capable of. What other people expect of us.
Some are based on evidence and experience. Others are inherited, absorbed or simply repeated often enough to become accepted truths.
And because they're familiar, we don't always recognise them as assumptions.
In business, this might sound like:
"We need a complete rebrand."
"Our customers won't pay more."
"We have to be on every social platform."
"This is how we've always done it."
In our personal lives, the language changes, but the underlying process can be remarkably similar.
"I should be further along by now."
"I'm not the sort of person who does that."
"If I disappoint someone, I've let them down."
"I can't change direction after everything I've invested."
The question isn't whether these beliefs are right or wrong. It's whether we've stopped to examine them. What evidence do we have? Where did this idea come from? Is it still useful? What might become possible if we approached it differently?
For me, this is where meaningful change often begins.
Not with a dramatic breakthrough, but with the possibility that something we've always taken for granted might not be the whole story.
Clarity before commitment
In my experience of strategic marketing and business leadership, I've learnt that the most valuable contribution isn't always a solution. Sometimes it's the ability to step back, challenge the brief and help a team understand what problem they're actually trying to solve.
I might be brought into a business because a project has stalled, a website needs rebuilding or a founder has several competing ideas about where to invest next.
The temptation can be to move straight into a plan.
Instead, I start by looking at what we're trying to achieve, what's already in place and what's getting in the way.
What does success actually look like? Which assumptions need testing? What are the constraints? What happens if we do nothing? And is the proposed solution really the most sensible one?
Sometimes the result is a clearer brief for the project everyone expected to undertake.
Sometimes it's a different project altogether. And occasionally, the most useful conclusion is that something doesn't need to be built at all.
I think there's real value in reaching that conclusion before committing time, energy and money. A good outcome isn't always a new thing. Sometimes it's a better decision.
Building on solid foundations
Of course, clarity on its own only gets us so far.
Once we understand what we're working towards, the next question is how to make it happen.
This is where I enjoy bringing structure to the work: shaping priorities, defining scope, reviewing options and deciding what needs to happen now versus what can wait.
It's also where experience becomes particularly useful.
A project that looks straightforward on paper can involve multiple suppliers, competing priorities, technical dependencies and decisions nobody quite realised they would need to make. Without someone holding the wider picture, it's easy for the original purpose to get lost.
I've supported businesses through website rebuilds, platform changes, positioning reviews and new product or membership propositions. Each has required a slightly different approach.
In one case, rebuilding a recruitment agency website wasn't simply about improving its appearance. It involved reconsidering the underlying technology, reducing dependence on a single supplier, simplifying data protection processes and creating a more flexible foundation for future integrations.
For a small studio, the more useful starting point was reviewing its positioning, pricing and digital presence before spending money on advertising.
And when founders are considering a new product or membership model, the first question isn't necessarily how to build it, but whether the proposition makes sense in the first place.
Different challenges, but a similar process: understand the problem, agree a sensible direction and create the conditions for good work to happen.
Sometimes my involvement ends with a clear plan that a team can take forward independently. Other times I stay involved, coordinating specialists, overseeing delivery and helping people make informed decisions as things evolve.
What matters to me is that the work remains connected to its original purpose.
Knowing when to pause, adapt or change direction
There's another part of this philosophy that I think is just as important.
Foundations aren't necessarily permanent.
We learn things. Circumstances change. New information emerges. Something that made sense six months ago might no longer be the best approach.
And yet, once we've committed to a direction, it can be surprisingly difficult to question it.
We've invested money. We've told people what we're doing. We've spent months working towards an outcome.
Changing course can feel like admitting failure. But I don't see it that way.
I'd much rather build deliberate opportunities to review a decision than discover too late that we've continued simply because stopping felt uncomfortable.
That's why I tend to approach projects in stages, with clear decision points between them.
We can assess what's working, reconsider priorities and decide whether the next stage still makes sense.
Sometimes the right thing is to continue. Sometimes it's to adjust. None of those outcomes is inherently a failure.
The point is to remain intentional rather than being carried along by momentum.
The human side of building something
Although much of this thinking comes from my experience in marketing and business leadership, I find myself returning to the same questions in coaching.
Particularly when working with founders and people navigating change.
Because the direction of a business and the direction of a life aren't always as separate as we might imagine.
A founder might come to a conversation wanting to grow their business, only to discover that the model they're pursuing would create a working life they don't particularly want.
Someone considering a career change might be perfectly capable of making the move, but find themselves held back by assumptions about security, success or what other people will think.
In coaching, the work isn't about me deciding which direction is right. It's about creating space to explore what matters, notice familiar patterns and consider possibilities that may not have felt available before.
The foundations here are different from those of a business project. We're exploring experiences, beliefs, values and ways of relating to ourselves and others.
But the underlying curiosity is similar.
What are we taking for granted? What are we trying to achieve? And is the direction we're pursuing genuinely ours?
Sometimes, before we can build something new, we need to understand why we've been holding on to something old.
Thoughtful doesn't mean slow
When I talk about taking a considered approach, I don't mean spending months contemplating every possible outcome before doing anything.
I'm a practical person. I like making things, solving problems and seeing ideas become real.
I also know that perfect clarity is rarely available. Sometimes we have enough information to make a reasonable decision, test an idea and learn from what happens.
The difference, for me, is between moving forward with intention and moving forward simply because we feel we should be doing something.
A thoughtful approach can be decisive. It can be efficient. It can even be fast.
It just asks us to understand what we're trying to achieve before we get too attached to how we're going to achieve it.
Different Disciplines, the same approach
Whether I'm working on a marketing strategy, supporting someone through a period of change or creating a memorial book, I keep returning to the same questions.
What matters here? What are we really trying to express, understand or achieve?
And what would it look like to create something that reflects that?
I don't believe every problem needs a complicated solution. Or that every new beginning requires us to reinvent ourselves.
Sometimes the work is about simplifying. Sometimes it's about challenging something we've believed for years. Sometimes it's about recognising that the foundations are already there and we simply need to build on them.
And sometimes we discover that what we've been building towards isn't quite what we want anymore.
That's useful information, too.
For me, the aim isn't to produce more work for the sake of it.
It's to create work, decisions and directions that make sense and that we can stand behind.
Did something resonate?
Perhaps something here has prompted a question, challenged an assumption or got you thinking about a project or change of your own.
If you'd like to explore it together, I'd love to hear from you.
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