What changes when the
foundation is right.

Nobody had asked who they actually wanted to do business with. When that question had an answer, the customer changed, the model changed, and the organization built to execute it was worth something to a buyer.

The Situation

A national semi-truck sales and leasing company had been acquired out of bankruptcy following fraud at its former parent. A multinational fleet management company took full ownership with a 36-month wind-down mandate. A turnaround CEO was installed to stabilize operations, move inventory, and position the business for acquisition. Rob came in as interim marketing leader two months later. No marketing organization existed. No strategy existed. Both had to be built from the ground up, under a deadline.

What the Diagnostic Found

Owner-operators, the primary sales target, were defaulting on leases at more than 50% within 18 months. When drivers could not afford repairs, they abandoned trucks. The company absorbed towing, storage, and repair costs on top of lost lease revenue. The marketing program was built to attract exactly these buyers. Google Ads ran against terms broad enough to capture pickup truck shoppers. Print spend went to publications serving price-shopping owner-operators. Volume was the only goal.

The competitive landscape told the real story. Fleet giants like Ryder and Penske owned large fleets with new trucks. Predatory lenders owned the owner-operator market. The gap, mid-sized fleet operators running ten or more creditworthy trucks, was entirely unaddressed. An additional constraint: more than 5,000 trucks in inventory carried liens from prior transactions where collateral had been overstated. Lenders would not allow sales below floors the market could not support. Leasing was not just a product. It was the only viable revenue path.

The Strategy and What Was Built

The engagement repositioned entirely around fleet operators: creditworthy, ten or more trucks, defined purchasing cycles, repeat business potential. Leasing solved three problems at once. It generated more revenue per vehicle than a lien-constrained sale, enabling faster debt paydown. Managed maintenance built into lease terms meant trucks came back in serviceable condition for secondary market auctions. And bundled service partnerships gave fleet operators a reason to stay beyond the relationship alone.

A new website launched with live inventory connected to Salesforce. A marketing team was hired and trained. A 27,000-contact database was segmented by region, fleet size, and job title. An account-based marketing program was built around a formally defined ideal client profile. The channel strategy covered email, social, paid search, direct mail, PR, webinars, trade shows, and full sales enablement. The Q1-Q2 budget was lean by design, a proof-of-concept phase while brand assets were being built. The full annual program, budgeted at just under $1 million, would have layered integrated campaigns on top of that foundation in the back half of the year.

The 72-point bumper-to-bumper inspection program the turnaround CEO had already launched became the center of the marketing message, directly countering reputation damage from the prior regime and giving fleet buyers a concrete reason to trust the product.

How It Ended

COVID hit in early 2020. Both acquisition conversations pulled back. The parent company proceeded with its planned wind-down. The marketing work did not save the company from that outcome. What it built was a professional marketing organization operating from a documented strategy, with a segmented database, a proven fleet-buyer repositioning, and a clear roadmap for what the full program would have looked like. Two serious buyers got far enough to evaluate all of it. They were not looking at a distressed asset with no direction. They were looking at a business that, under different external conditions, had a real path forward.

This was full interim marketing leadership inside a high-stakes turnaround. The work that mattered most was the same work the Keystone Diagnostic is designed to surface: finding out who the right customer actually is, what the right offer is for that customer, and whether the organization has the infrastructure to reach them. None of those questions had answers when Rob arrived. All of them did when he left.

Clear positioning and disciplined targeting allowed a brand with 2% awareness to become a top-three player in two years.

The Situation

UK-based Elecosoft had built a dominant position in European commercial construction with its Powerproject scheduling software. None of that mattered in North America, where brand awareness tested below 2% and the category was owned by entrenched players with deep relationships and switching costs built in. The company decided to test the U.S. market lean: a small sales team and a dozen reseller partners. Budget was modest. The strategy had to be precise.

What Rob Found

Nobody had defined what problem Powerproject specifically owned in the U.S. context. The product had a genuine differentiator: it was significantly easier to learn than incumbent software, which meant companies needed less training and could onboard new hires faster. In a construction labor market that was chronically tight, that was a meaningful operational advantage. But that story was not being told.

The Shift

Rob defined the positioning around a single defensible claim: Powerproject reduces the training burden at a time when construction companies cannot afford long onboarding curves. The strategy narrowed deliberately. Target mid-to-large construction firms where the training advantage was most financially meaningful. Build authority through industry media before scaling advertising. Equip resellers with structured co-branded marketing they could actually use.

The targeting logic started at the top of the market. If the largest firms in the ENR Top 100 were clients, the mid-market would follow. Credibility travels down, not up. Marketing spend went into the publications those buyers actually read: Engineering News Record, Construction Executive, Construction Business Owner. Media relationships built from paid placements extended into editorial coverage over time.

The growth was not driven by louder marketing. It was driven by sharper decisions about who to reach, what problem to own, and what proof would move the right buyers.

In a category crowded with competing technologies and well-funded lobbying groups, the only path to traction was owning a specific use case with an economic argument nobody could dispute.

The Situation

Crosspoint Kinetics was a startup division of Cummins Crosspoint, a regional Cummins distributor, created to bring an electric-capacitor hybrid retrofit system to market for Class 3-7 commercial trucks and buses. The product development followed Cummins' formal six-phase VPI commercialization process, with go/no-go gates at each stage covering concept definition, design architecture, prototyping, product validation, production launch, and full commercialization. Rob came in as fractional CMO during the ramp-up and market testing phase, responsible for proving the marketability gate.

The category added its own headwinds. Green transportation was an education-heavy market where hybrid technology competed for buyer attention, grant funding, and regulatory support against well-funded alternatives including compressed natural gas, biodiesel, and battery electric, each backed by established lobbying groups and trade associations pursuing federal and state adoption rules. Out-spending or out-lobbying those competitors was not a realistic option for a startup division of a regional distributor.

The Strategy

The system had a specific performance envelope that defined the strategy. Too large for passenger vehicles. Too light for heavy-duty semis. Class 3-7 vehicles were not just a marketing choice. They were where the physics worked. Within that segment, the use case narrowed further: the system captured energy through regenerative braking, which meant it performed best in frequent stop-and-go duty cycles. That pointed directly to two target segments: public transit fleets including special needs buses and tour buses, and commercial delivery vehicles like urban delivery trucks.

Rather than competing across the green transportation category, the engagement focused on the buyers for whom the economic case was clearest. State and federal incentive programs through NYSERDA, CalStart, Clean Cities Chicago, and others were available to qualifying fleets. Rob made those incentives central to the marketing conversation and actively connected qualifying fleets with granting organizations, removing a friction point that was slowing purchase decisions. The question shifted from whether fleets could afford the retrofit to how quickly available grant funding could get them to positive ROI.

What Was Built

Rob built the full marketing infrastructure from scratch. Salesforce was implemented to segment and track prospects by fleet type and individual role, because a fleet manager's purchase criteria differ from those of a senior executive or procurement director. Nearly two dozen trade shows in under two years put the technology in front of buyers directly, with co-branded demo vehicles available for live demonstration.

A signed development agreement with Morgan Olson, one of the country's largest manufacturers of commercial delivery truck bodies and producer of vehicles for FedEx, UPS, and USPS, validated the product commercially and enabled co-branding that gave the technology immediate credibility with delivery fleet buyers. A FedEx pilot deployed units for proof-of-concept ROI testing, with national rollout potential once the price point reached production scale. Additional deployments included city bus fleets in Colorado, tour bus operators in Florida, and commercial fleet operators across multiple states.

By the end of the engagement, the product had reached Phase 5 of the formal VPI commercialization process. Several hundred prototype units had shipped. An annual industry survey conducted by Green Fleets and Heavy Duty Trucking measuring unaided brand recall among commercial fleet operators showed meaningful growth from near zero in year one to consistent mentions among the core target audience by year two.

How It Ended

Cummins undertook a major corporate reorganization, acquiring its network of semi-autonomous regional distributors and bringing them fully under corporate ownership. The new Cummins focused its product portfolio on business units capable of generating $500 million or more annually. Crosspoint Kinetics, with realistic near-term revenue potential of $50 million to $100 million, did not meet that threshold. The program was wound down along with other trial initiatives that had not yet reached that scale.

The product had not failed. The market validation had worked. The phased gate process had been cleared. The program ended because of a strategic financial decision made several organizational levels above the division, not because the technology did not perform or the market did not want it.

The discipline that drove the results was the same in every phase: narrow to the buyers for whom the economics are clearest, build the infrastructure before scaling the spend, and prove demand before asking for full production investment.