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For 25 years, I’ve helped businesses build marketing that cuts through and scales revenue.

The Growth Guide is where I share the strategy, GTM frameworks, and execution tactics that actually work, from zero to scale.

Today’s topic: The Outside In Strategy
Most people think marketing strategy begins with discovery. The stakeholder interviews. The dashboards. The CRM. The customer research. The product roadmap. Those things all matter, and eventually they become essential to building a great marketing strategy.

But I rarely start there.

I prefer to begin with something much simpler: examining the existing public view of the business.

Long before you ever speak to a customer, they've already started forming an opinion. They've visited your website, compared you to competitors, read your reviews, explored your content, looked at your pricing and searched for answers to their questions. Whether they're buyers, partners, investors or potential employees, they're making decisions based on the information that's publicly available.

That view is incomplete and it may even be wrong.

But it's also incredibly important because it's the only version of your business most people will ever see.

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is assuming their internal truth is the same as their market truth. It rarely is. You might have an outstanding product, loyal customers and a compelling competitive advantage, but if those strengths aren't visible from the outside, they can't influence how people think about your business.

That's why I like reviewing companies from the outside in. And it’s the exact approach I took recently while conducting a marketing evaluation for Everlab (now available to subscribers free of charge through July 31, 2026.)

Not because public information tells you everything. It doesn't. But it does reveal something incredibly valuable: what the market can see, what it can't, and where the gap between perception and reality might be creating opportunities for growth.

If this resonates or raises questions, hit “reply” or click here. I read every response.

Late last year, I built a strategic walkthrough of Everlab using nothing but publicly available information.

There were no stakeholder interviews. No internal data. No CRM. No analytics. Just the same signals available to customers, competitors, investors and anyone else looking at the business from the outside.

The objective wasn't to produce a finished strategy. That would have been impossible. Every observation in the deck was presented as a hypothesis to be validated, not a conclusion to be defended.

I waited six months before sharing that work publicly because the story was never really about Everlab. It was about the process.

The exercise reinforced something I've found to be true time and again: public information won't tell you everything about a business, but it can reveal where to look, what questions to ask and which assumptions deserve to be tested first.

That's the real value of outside-in strategy.

The goal of an outside-in review isn't to build a finished strategy. That's impossible, really, without speaking to the people who know the business best.

The goal is to build a strong hypotheses that will guide your marketing strategy.

By the time you sit down with the leadership team, you should already have a point of view. Not a fixed opinion, but a set of informed observations about what the market appears to see, where the opportunities might exist, and which assumptions need to be tested.

That approach inherently changes the conversation. Instead of spending the first meeting gathering basic information, you can spend it validating ideas, challenging assumptions and uncovering the context that isn't visible from the outside.

Over time, I've found there are six questions that consistently help me understand how a business grows (or why growth has stagnated.)

1. What is the product truth? Beyond the features, what transformation are customers really buying?

2. What is changing in the market? Which trends, behaviours or shifts are creating new opportunities?

3. What customer tension exists? What problem, frustration or aspiration is driving someone to act?

4. How does the growth system work? How does the business create, capture, convert and retain demand?

5. What deserves to be prioritised? Which opportunities are worth pursuing first, and which can wait?

6. What are the guardrails? Where could growth create risk if trust, operations or execution don't keep pace?

None of these questions require privileged access to begin exploring. Public information won't provide every answer, but it often provides enough signal to form a meaningful hypotheses.

And that's the point.

Outside-in strategy isn't necessarily about proving you're right before discovery begins. Rather, it's more about ensuring the discovery process starts from a much stronger place.

When I review a business from the outside, I'm going beyond summarising the website or generating a list of marketing ideas. I'm going a step further as I’m look to understand how the business grows.

Over time, I've found there are six questions that consistently reveal where a business is creating value, where it may be creating friction, and where the biggest opportunities are likely to exist. None of them will give you a complete strategy on their own. But together, they provide a practical framework for understanding the business before the first discovery session even begins.

As you read through them, don't think about whether your business has the "right" answers.

Ask yourself whether the market could answer these questions based on what it can already see. Because that's the perspective your customers, partners, investors and competitors are using every day.

The first question I ask goes beyond the obvious such as, "What does this company sell?" That first question is something more nuanced like, "What change does this company create?" That’s rarely the same thing as what a company sells.

The problem is that businesses often become so familiar with their offerings that they describe what they do rather than why anyone should care. Features, services and capabilities all matter, but customers usually aren't buying those things. They're buying the outcome those things make possible.

A financial platform might appear to sell software, but what customers are really buying is confidence in their decisions. A cybersecurity company isn't simply selling protection. It's selling peace of mind. A healthcare business may provide diagnostics, but the deeper value is often certainty, reassurance or a clearer path forward.

The more clearly you understand that underlying transformation, the easier everything else becomes. Positioning becomes sharper. Messaging becomes more relevant. Sales conversations become more human. Marketing shifts from describing products to describing progress.

When reviewing a business from the outside, I'm looking for evidence that this deeper value is visible. If I can't identify the transformation from public information, there's a good chance prospective customers can't either.

Every successful business benefits from forces larger than itself. Technology changes. Customer expectations evolve. Regulations shift. New behaviours emerge.
The strongest strategies align with these movements.

That's why I always ask, "Why now?" I aim to determine what has changed to make this business more relevant today than it would have been two, five or even ten years ago?

Sometimes the answer is obvious. Artificial intelligence, remote work and demographic change have reshaped entire industries. Other times, the shift is far more subtle such as a gradual change in buyer expectations, growing dissatisfaction with existing solutions or an emerging cultural trend can create just as much opportunity.

Markets create momentum long before companies do.

The role of strategy isn't to manufacture that momentum. It's to recognise it, understand it and position the business so customers immediately understand why it matters today.

Knowing who your customer is isn't enough. Understanding what's happening in the customer’s world before they find you is where strategy becomes more interesting.

People rarely buy because they've suddenly discovered a new product category. They buy because something in their current situation has become uncomfortable enough to justify change. They're frustrated. Uncertain. Overwhelmed. Ambitious. Curious.

Whatever the emotion, it already exists before your business enters the picture. And that's why I spend less time thinking about demographics and more time thinking about tension.

When you can clearly articulate what your customer is struggling with, worried about or trying to achieve, your marketing stops interrupting their attention and starts reflecting their reality.

Often the best positioning simply puts a name to a problem that the customer has been feeling, without necessarily naming it before.

While you do this, always remember. Are they willing to pay for the solution to that problem? It’s a core idea founders forget behind the product-market fit challenge.

One of the easiest mistakes in strategy is confusing activity with systems.

• Paid media isn't a growth system.
• SEO isn't a growth system.
• Content, partnerships and events aren't growth systems either.

They're components and the more important question is how the components work together. You’ll need to ask questions such as:

• How is awareness created?
• How is trust built?
• How is demand captured?
• How is interest converted into customers?
• How are customers retained, expanded and turned into advocates?

When I review a business, I'm looking for those connections and I take this approach because growth rarely comes from improving a single channel in isolation. Growth comes from strengthening the way the entire system works together.

Remember: a business with an average campaign and an exceptional growth system will usually outperform a business with brilliant campaigns and a disconnected customer journey.

Good strategy creates options, but great strategy eliminates them. And one of the hardest parts of leadership isn't generating ideas. It's deciding which ideas deserve attention first.

Every business has more opportunities than resources and that means prioritisation isn't simply about choosing what to do. Rather, it's about choosing what not to do.

When I evaluate a business, I'm constantly asking which initiatives create momentum for everything else. Which actions unlock future opportunities? Which assumptions need to be validated before significant investment? Which ideas feel exciting but are ultimately distractions?

Strategy is measured by the clarity of the decisions underlying that strategy, and not by the number of initiatives in the plan.

Growth isn't automatically good. Growth that outpaces trust, operations or customer experience can damage a business faster than slow growth ever will. This is why every strategy needs guardrails.

• Can the business deliver on the promises its marketing makes?
• Can the customer experience support increased demand?
• Are there regulatory, operational or reputational risks that become more significant as the business grows?

You can’t view these as separate operational questions; they're strategic questions. And the goal isn't simply to create more demand. Your objective is to create demand that the business is ready to fulfill. And if you’re not ready to fulfill them, then what’s the plan to address that?

The strongest brands grow because their promises and their operations remain aligned as they scale.

Every business has two stories. The first is the one the leadership team knows intimately. It's built from customer conversations, operational experience, product knowledge and years of context that only exists inside the business.

The second is the story the market pieces together from the outside. It's built from websites, search results, reviews, content, messaging and every other public signal a potential customer encounters before they ever speak to someone on your team.

Those two stories are rarely identical.

The role of outside-in strategy isn't to replace internal discovery or suggest that public information tells the whole story. It doesn't. Its value lies in revealing the gaps between what the business knows to be true and what the market is actually able to see.

That's where some of the most valuable strategic conversations begin.
Not with certainty, but with curiosity.
Not with answers, but with better questions.

How much information you collect rarely determines the quality of the story. More often, t's determined by the questions you're asking when you collect it.

Hit reply and tell me or simply click here and share what’s on your mind. I respond directly, and the best insights often shape what I write next.

See you in the next edition,
Geoff