John Wanamaker said it a century ago. For most small and mid-sized companies, nothing has changed. You hire good marketing people because the great ones won't take your job. You pay an agency two and a half times the salary of the people doing the actual work.
The team is busy. Campaigns go out on schedule. Meetings produce slides. And nobody in the room can tell you, with any real precision, what's driving growth and what is simply dead weight.
Marketing becomes the ceiling on your growth. You stop noticing, because nothing looks broken.
The people who know how to build world-class marketing are expensive, in demand, and not looking for your job.
The team optimizes for looking busy, because looking busy is the only metric everyone can agree on.
The CMO is paid whether you grow or not. The agency is paid whether the work works or not.
Too slow. A senior hire takes months. An agency takes weeks per deliverable. AI has shortened what's acceptable. Your competitors are not waiting.
Strategy in one place. Creative in another. Media somewhere else. Analytics a fourth. Everyone owns their piece. Nobody owns the outcome.
Two of us ran marketing at a Fortune 56 company with more than sixty billion dollars in annual revenue. One of us built a consumer brand from a San Diego garage, scaled it with private equity capital, and sold it to Trek. Those are useful lines on a resume. They're also the least interesting things about us.
Former Global CMO at HP Inc., where he ran a marketing organization of a thousand people across sixty countries. Before HP, strategy and major accounts at Omnicom. Currently co-founder of Maximon, building AI-first marketing for Fortune 200 companies.
Former SVP Marketing for HP's Personal Systems division, a thirty-six-billion-dollar business with 350 marketers and a nine-figure budget. Before HP, senior leadership at Element 79/DDB and Ogilvy. Currently chairman at Pebbles Ai.
Co-founded Electra Bicycle Company in a San Diego garage. Scaled it through Caltius Equity Partners, built it into one of the most recognized lifestyle bike brands in the world, and sold it to Trek in 2014. Has been on the founder's side of every mistake you are about to make.
Most firms sell you a piece. A fractional CMO. A creative agency. A media shop. A martech implementation. You end up with five vendors, four opinions, three strategy decks, two reporting dashboards, and one person responsible for making them all work together. That person is usually you.
We take the whole thing. Strategy, execution, the team, the agency relationships, the budget, the number at the end of the quarter.
One integrated unit. No handoffs. No waiting for three vendors to align on a slide. We find what actually drives revenue, and we kill what doesn't.
No internal versus external. No strategy versus execution. One team. One outcome.
A way of working. What used to take weeks takes days. Vikrant has spent the past year building AI transformation inside Fortune 200 companies through Maximon. We deploy methods that already work at scale, not learn on your budget.
Performance media. Creative. Social. Content. Analytics. Specialists who built billion-dollar brands, passed through to you at cost. We don't mark up labor. Agencies do.
We measure everything. We kill what doesn't work. We double down on what does. Last year's campaign is not sacred. The agency your board member likes is not sacred. Nothing is sacred except the number.
These are the functions we can take responsibility for. Most engagements use a handful. None use all of them. What we deploy depends on what's actually broken.
A meaningful piece of our compensation is always tied to your revenue growth.
Sometimes it's equity. Sometimes it's a share of incremental growth. Sometimes both. The structure depends on your situation and what keeps you awake at night.
We become the marketing department, own the number, and only make real money when the number moves.
That need a step-change before exit.
Trying to escape the plateau.
Who are good at everything except getting customers through the door.
The specifics are a conversation, not a webpage.
One conversation with a founder. No deck. No pitch. We listen, we tell you what we see, and you decide what to do about it.
info@8jaguars.com