The Approach
A consultancy for marketing decisions.
GTO Consulting was set up to do one thing well: help companies make better marketing decisions, and then help them execute on those decisions without drift. Most of what we do is unglamorous - interviews, audits, written documents, weekly reviews. The glamorous part, when it comes, is what's left after the work that wasn't worth doing has been removed.
We work with founders who haven't yet hired a marketing leader, and with marketing leaders who need a second pair of senior hands. Engagements are typically a few weeks to a few months.
The work, before the work.
An essay, briefly
Marketing is one of the few business functions where activity is easy to confuse with progress. There is always another channel to test, another launch to plan, another dashboard to build. It is harder, and lonelier, to stop and ask whether the thing being made is the right thing to make at all.
Our approach is to take that question seriously. We start every engagement with a written diagnostic - not a deck, a document. We work through positioning before we work on a plan. We agree on a small plan we are willing to defend, and then we make the things the plan calls for, with senior people on each piece. At the end of each cycle we come back to the metrics we said we cared about and write down honestly what we got right and wrong.
None of this is novel. It's the way good work has always been done. It is, however, increasingly rare to see it done in marketing, and that is the gap we exist to fill.
What we tell every client.
Diagnosis before prescription
We don't quote a deliverable on the first call. The work that follows is only as good as the problem we agree to solve, so we spend the first weeks getting that right.
Strategy in writing, not slides
Slide decks reward fluency over rigour. Our strategy work is delivered as a written document - shorter, harder to write, easier to argue with, and far more useful six months later.
Smaller plans, kept
We'd rather agree on three things and do them well than write a 40-line roadmap nobody believes. Most of the value comes from a small plan, executed without drift.
One team, no pyramid
The people in the room on day one are the people doing the work on day ninety. There's no account layer translating between you and the practitioners.
Do we have to do the whole process?
No. Many engagements start at Diagnose or Position and stop there. Some are only a Plan. We'll tell you on the first call which phases we think are worth doing, and which we'd skip.
How is this different from a typical agency?
Most agencies sell deliverables. We sell decisions. The deliverables come later, once we agree on what's worth making. It's a slower start and, in practice, a faster finish.
Will you work alongside our existing team?
Yes - that's most of what we do. We work with internal marketing leaders as a second pair of senior hands, and we hand the work back cleanly when we're done.
What kinds of work do you decline?
We don't take on work that requires us to misrepresent a product, and we don't participate in unpaid pitches. Beyond that, we say no when the timeline isn't honest or when the brief is solving the wrong problem.
If you'd like to talk