A forthcoming book by Rob Higley

GoodBones

This book is a framework for CEOs who know something is off with their marketing but haven't been able to name it clearly.

Rob Higley  ·  Reveal

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Good bones doesn't mean no problems. It means the problems are fixable, the structure is sound, and the thing is worth saving. That's a different statement than it's easy. It's a statement about possibility, and about whether the work is worth doing.

Good Bones  ·  Chapter One

Learning to see your own business the way an outside operator would.

Most CEOs running growth-stage companies know something is off. The marketing is running. The agency is sending reports. The internal team is working hard. But the pipeline isn't reflecting any of it, and nobody has been able to say clearly why.

Rob Higley has spent 25 years as a marketing strategist and, in parallel, buying, renovating, and selling properties. Good Bones takes that lens as its starting point: learning to look at your own business the way an experienced operator looks at a property for the first time. Not from the street, where everything either looks fine or looks hopeless. From the inside, where you can tell what's cosmetic and what's structural, what's hiding a problem and what's load-bearing, what needs to be fixed before anything else can be fixed.

The details change from company to company. The structure of the problem almost never does.

Chapter One

The House on the Hill

On seeing what's actually there before touching anything.


A farmhouse in Greenfield, Indiana. A crumbling foundation hidden beneath a layer of concrete skirting. The most important work on the entire project, invisible by design, costing more than anyone would ever see or appreciate.

The thought that came to me standing at the edge of that excavation would return, nearly word for word, the next time I sat with a CEO and looked at their pipeline data for the first time.

Chapter Two

The Three-Legged Stool

On the gap between knowing what to do and being able to do it.


A construction project manager who taught his clients that time, cost, and quality are the three legs of every project. You can hold two rigid. Never all three.

And who could not bring himself to apply that framework to his own business.


The diagnostic approach in this book is the same one I bring to client engagements.

I work with B2B companies between $10M and $30M as an embedded senior marketing resource. Not an agency, not a full-time hire. Someone who comes in, looks at what's actually there, and tells you honestly what to fix first.

The work comes in three phases. Each has defined deliverables and a clear end point. None of them are designed to run forever. They're designed so your team has the strategy, the systems, and the confidence to own it without me.

Learn more at revealcmo.com
Phase 01

Keystone Diagnostic

A structured audit of your marketing, brand, pipeline, and team. Frank findings and a prioritized action plan for what to fix first.

Phase 02

Keystone Blueprint

A full marketing operating system. Positioning, messaging, channel strategy, campaign calendar, and team structure.

Phase 03

Fractional CMO

Ongoing embedded senior marketing leadership. In the meetings, reviewing the data, making strategic calls alongside your team, for as long as it takes to build something that runs without me.