I help technical agency founders ($1M+) escape the feast-or-famine referral cycle — by making your firm the obvious choice for the clients you're built to serve.
Their homepage. Yours. The one next to yours.
Sound familiar?
If your homepage and your competitor's could swap logos, buyers will swap you for a cheaper version.
From the desk of David Hoos
There's a moment, somewhere between $1M and $5M, when most agencies stop being chosen and start being compared.
It doesn't happen the day the referrals dry up. It happens in the months before, when the founder stops being able to explain — in one sentence — why a smart buyer should hire them over the next firm down the list.
The work is still good. The team is still great. The proposals still get sent. But somewhere in the buyer's mind, you've stopped being the obvious choice and started being one of three. Then one of five.
Most founders try to fix that with more marketing. More posts, more ads, more polish. None of it works, because the problem isn't that the marketing is broken. The problem is that the thing underneath the marketing — the positioning — is generic.
That's the whole game I'm playing here. Make you unswappable. Then watch what your existing marketing starts doing.
Engineering depth, custom builds, hard problems — the technical side isn't the issue. The market just can't tell that from your website.
Revenue is real but unpredictable. Most new business arrives through people who already knew you. When the well dries up, so does the pipeline.
Big enough to staff delivery. Small enough that the founder still owns growth. Generic positioning starts becoming the actual ceiling here.
If two of those three feel like your reality, you're in the right place.
Everything I do is built around one idea: when your agency is clearly relevant to the right buyers, growth follows. Five disciplines, executed in order.
Default agencies push a narrow top into a wide bottom. Relevance Engineering inverts it — manufactures warmth at the top so conversion stops being the bottleneck.
Who you're best for and why. Define the buyer who makes the rest of the system easier.
Package your expertise into offers buyers can hold in their head and choose without a custom scope.
Earn trust by working in public — concise points-of-view that compound across your audience.
Build the routes to qualified demand: ecosystems, referrers, and platforms your buyers already trust.
Build the operating system that keeps the first four running after the engagement ends.
When your message is clear, your services are aligned, and your market sees you as the obvious choice — sales cycles shorten, pricing power increases, and the pipeline becomes consistent.
A focused, founder-led positioning engagement. Define who you're best for, what you're known for, and the words that make you easy to choose — in three weeks.
Fractional GTM leadership for what comes after the Sprint. Positioning, content, sales process, and partnerships — built and run with your team, not handed over a wall.
Three ways into the Sprint. Same methodology underneath — different depth, different deliverables, different scope of follow-through.
1 week · diagnostic
Diagnose. Decide whether to keep going.
Get the diagnosis without committing to the full Sprint.
3 weeks · full Sprint
Diagnose, define, and ship the new positioning.
Where most founders land. The deepest output, ready to deploy.
3 weeks + Day-90 review
Sprint plus a checkpoint when the new positioning meets the market.
For founders who want a partner past the handoff.
Tiers stack — you can start at I and upgrade after the diagnostic. Most clients land at II. None of this is billable until the discovery call is done and we both agree on fit.
Book a discovery callNeed embedded leadership past the Sprint? See The Authority Accelerator — 6-month fractional GTM.
Command C
Command C had been winning on referrals for two decades, but couldn't explain on a sales call what made them different from a cheaper shop. The Sprint produced the narrative they're now using across the site, deck, and pitch.
The Good
Pulled from the generalist trap of broad SEO into a productized point of view buyers could repeat. The result: a clear pricing power story and a category-of-one position in conversion optimization.
Mabane Media
A new firm entering a crowded market needed more than capability slides. We built the 'Why Us' from scratch — strategic narrative, podcast launch, target outreach — and earned credibility before quarter two.
One client, in their own words
“If you want someone who gets it fast and gives you strategic clarity without the fluff, I'd highly recommend working with David. What started as a low-risk sprint has me thinking about how to keep working together.”
I've spent the last decade working inside and alongside technical agencies. Three of them as the marketing lead. Dozens more as a consultant. I'm not a generalist with an opinion about agencies — I'm a specialist who's been in the seat.
You learn things from inside the building you can't from outside it. Where deals actually go cold. Why proposals get re-read three times before they're sent. Which sentences on a homepage move a buyer and which ones just decorate.
That's the playbook I run now. Better clients, better margins, happier teams, and a pipeline that doesn't depend on which conference you happened to attend last quarter.
Book a 45-minute discovery call. We'll talk about your situation, see if there's a fit, and answer your questions. If it makes sense, we'll schedule the Why-Us Sprint.
2–3 Sprint clients per quarter · Spokane, WA · Remote-first