Jet Fuel For Smarter Growth with Kathryn Strachan

Growth isn’t a mystery; it’s a system. We sit down with award-winning fractional CMO and bestselling author Kathryn Strachan to unpack the moves that turn scattered marketing efforts into a commercial engine that compounds. From the mindset shift that frees founders from bottlenecking their teams to the exact sequence for building demand and then layering sales, Kathryn shares a clear, proven path to scale.

We start with the hardest habit to break: doing everything yourself. Kathryn explains how she stepped out of the weeds, hired senior operators, and aligned teams around outcomes instead of tactics. Then we go deep on foundations—positioning, ICP clarity, and validated messaging—so every tactic has a purpose. She walks through the first levers she pulls inside a company: rebuild the website as a true conversion hub and run a spend audit to stop wasting money on channels that don’t move pipeline. The result is a tighter story, a cleaner funnel, and a budget that works harder.

Kathryn also challenges a common startup reflex: hiring sales before marketing. Her approach flips the order. Keep founder-led sales while a fractional marketing leader builds brand, content, and credibility that drive inbound. Six months later, add sales to convert that momentum and amplify with targeted outbound. We explore how personal branding fuels trust at scale, why technical founders struggle with commercial storytelling, and how a visible leader can win enterprise attention without a giant ad budget.

Finally, we tackle the 2025 reality: AI is the new search. If your brand isn’t cited across the web, AI won’t surface you. Kathryn outlines a practical strategy to expand your digital footprint—third-party features, consistent expert content, and multi-channel visibility—so you become “pickable” by AI systems and human buyers alike. It’s a candid, no-fluff masterclass in scaling smarter.

If this conversation sparked ideas, share it with someone building something big, subscribe for more bold, practical strategies, and tell us: what lever will you pull first?

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Scaling with People, your weekly playbook for turning chaos into compounding growth. Each week we go under the hood with battle test experts in all areas of business, from marketing to sales, operation finance, and people, plus product and leadership to unpack the plays, numbers, and systems that turn chaos into compounding growth. Learn straight from founders and experts who've done it and continue to do it successfully. There's zero fluff, just moves that you can still immediately. This podcast is brought to you by Guide to HR, human expertise, AI-powered impact. Welcome everyone to today's Scaling with People podcast. I'm going to be your query, your host and CEO and founder to Guide to HR. All right, Strappin founders, because today on Scaling with People, we're going full throttle on the growth engine. Our guest, Katherine Strapkin, who is an award-winning fractional CMO, best-selling offer of scaling success, and the brain behind scaling copyhouse into a 2 million powerhouse. She knows how to build brands that don't just stand out, they break barriers. And we're talking revenue accelerating market strategies, how to actually build a marketing team that performs, and the playbook Catherine uses to help companies go from what's our message, to market leader. This episode is jet fuel for anyone ready to scale smarter and faster. Well, I'm excited to dive in. Catherine, it's so nice to have you. Beyond what I've shared of your successes, tell a little bit more about yourself to the audience.

Catherine’s Scaling Story And Background

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you for having me. Um, I am Catherine Strachan. So I used to own a content marketing agency called Coffee House. And I scale Coffee House from just myself to 32 people with over 2 million turnovers in like the space of five years. So I'm very good at scaling and pouring jet fuel, as you said, um onto commercial engines. So now what I do now that I've exited, um, I help companies to build these commercial growth engines that unite sales and marketing and really allow them to fly. It's incredible what you can do when you're headed in the right direction, you have the right positioning, you have the right messaging, and you know all the right levers to pull. Um, the commercial growth that can come out of that is fantastic. I've written a book that captures a lot of this. It follows a narrative of how I did this for Coffee House and how I did it for our clients. Um, it's called Scaling Success: How to Build Brands That Break Barriers. It's available on Amazon and is an international bestseller in the US and the UK. I obviously have a very American accent, so I am originally from Maine, but I'm based over in the UK. So a lot of my work has a global focus. It's helping companies go into new markets or launch new products. Um, but that go-to-market is a big part of what I do.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

I love that. Okay, so first of all, my audience knows I love asking founders, putting them in the hotspot. You're a founder yourself. Could you share a lesson learned during your time of owning and growing your own business?

SPEAKER_01 3:02

I think the biggest lesson is how to trust and build a strong team around you, and then how to delegate a lot of it. I mean, I think the biggest challenge that I see with founders is that they become the bottleneck. You know, if everything has to go through you, then it's really difficult for your company to scale and grow. When I first started my company, I started as a copywriter, so it was a content marketing agency. Like I was a doer. And, you know, at the beginning, I would review all of the content, but you know, that became very unsustainable very quickly because we were producing so much content that for me to look through absolutely every single piece of content was not realistic at all. And, you know, it really held the company back until I could wrap my head around the fact that I was no longer a copywriter. You know, I now haven't been for six or seven years, but I was no longer a copywriter. I was the leader of the company. And my responsibility was to set the company vision and lead us towards that. So, you know, I was no longer responsible for the copy. We had a fabulous team. We had a very senior content director who was 20 years my senior that I brought in who knew how to do that a lot better than I did. And, you know, getting my head around that was quite a mental transition. I see a lot of founders struggle with that to go from being the doer to being the leader is a big mental change, but it is one that needs to happen if you do want to scale and grow, because otherwise you get stuck and you create a bottleneck that is not fair to yourself, the company, or your team.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

I love that. I mean, I I even see some parallels there of when you become a manager for the first time, too, that hard transition of delegating, trusting. But it also, you know, if you don't end up letting your team do the work and you dive into it, you're the bottleneck, you you know, get into the weeds, you're eroding the trust that you have with them or that they have with you. And ultimately you are breaking down the chain of command in the sense of these people are don't feel trusted. So why would they stay? And you're going to have this rotation happen constantly, which is also a very negative impact to your business.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

Yeah, massively. I mean, I think it's difficult, especially if you're a bit of a perfectionist because you think that you know how to do everything way better than everybody else. But a lot of things in business don't just have like one answer. You know, they have 50, 60 different answers. You know, there's a thousand ways to skin a cat. So just because somebody might do something different or their brain may work different than your brain doesn't mean that it's wrong or that it would produce like inferior results. You know, you have to trust them. I think it's much more powerful to give them, we need to achieve X. How do you think we should get there? And helping them to kind of own that. Um, because I mean, just delegating or, you know, not even just delegating, but just telling people what to do and exactly how to do it puts you in a pretty bad position and really stops you from being able to scale and grow. Um, so I mean, I was always an empty plate founder who, you know, built a really strong team, was very good at like identifying what I didn't know, knowing that, you know, I was never going to be a CFO. So bringing in a strong CFO who could really own those finances and make sure that we were in a good financial position. Um, but like building a team around you that did the things that you couldn't do or that you weren't great at makes you stronger as a whole. And when you're leading a company, your responsibility is that whole.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Yeah. That is so true. So you mentioned your book, and we'll put the link in the description. But what was the core problem you wanted to solve for founders when you were writing it?

SPEAKER_01 6:43

Yeah. Um, so I mean, I wanted to kind of share a lot of the insights and wisdom that I was already sharing across multiple platforms. So I've got uh almost 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, which is cool. Um, and I have a podcast and I do a lot of public speaking. So, you know, I was already telling a lot of these stories and I wanted to capture these stories in one place rather than having them all over the place. Um, but the book itself talks about how I built that commercial growth engine for Coffee House. So it kind of follows that narrative, but with lots of practical advice, it's mostly practical advice, peppered with personal stories of things I did right and things that I did wrong and some of the lessons learned along the way in building that commercial growth engine.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Yeah, that's awesome. And you talk about brands that break barriers. What's the biggest barrier you see founders hit when trying to scale and how do they smash through it?

The Book And Commercial Growth Engine

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the biggest barriers is like actually, well, that impact going back to that empowerment that we were talking about, but it comes into play a lot with marketing and sales because they are often very technically brilliant. So, I mean, most most startups, especially in the tech world, especially in product-based companies, they're technically brilliant people who know how to build that product, but aren't actually very commercially savvy. So they don't have that extroverted personality that can get on stage, that can do the public speaking, and they don't have the smoozing of like the big network, and they don't understand like the value of marketing really at all. Um, and they don't like aren't natural salespeople, you know, they're very good at the technical, but they're not very good at the consultative selling or which is required, you know, even if you're not doing it for your actual product, you do need to have that approach when it comes to investors, you know, selling to an investor and getting funding is a consultative sale because you need to tell that story a lot better than if it's just a transactional sale. Um, so I mean, they're not very good at that part of it, and it's a very difficult thing for them to get right, to hand over, to find somebody that they can trust to be able to do it. And it comes back to that trust that we were talking about. You know, it's very scary to trust somebody to do something that you don't, you have a limited understanding of that is uncomfortable for you, that doesn't come naturally to you. And it can be quite a like confusing, scary, vulnerable place for a lot of founders until they kind of make and push through that and get to a place where they have that up and running and they have somebody who they can trust who can run it and manage it. Um, and then you know, it becomes about thinking about how they're going to present the brand because a lot of these founders, who's technically minded founders, aren't naturally good at being on stage and like having that public persona. But I do really believe that brands need a public persona. You know, people don't buy from faceless organizations. If you think of any of the big companies, you know who runs them, you know Steve Jobs, and you know Apple, like you know, Microsoft, you know who runs these big successful companies because people want somebody that they can build an emotional relationship, emotional connection with. They want somebody who they feel like they can relate to, you know. So you have to have a little bit of that personal approach. And that's where personal branding and decorative profile building comes in. I mean, I built my personal brand from zero to almost 20,000 followers as part of that copyhouse journey, and it created so much success for the company and continues to deliver success for me today. Um, but you know, it's something that founders need to either do or find somebody who can be part of that C-suite who is really like sold into the brand who can do it for them.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Yeah, that makes sense. So let's jump into some of the fractional work you've done. Uh, I'd love to know like you jump into companies, assuming mid flight, right? What's the first three or one to three levers that you pull when you want to try to accelerate their growth?

Biggest Barriers: Technical Founders And Commercial Gaps

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Yeah, I mean, so there's always an element of building like foundational and long-term planning as well as like short-term activation. So, I mean, the process that I go through when we're building a long-term marketing strategy and a long-term commercial strategy is to do some like core messaging. So to define the market position, like how are you going to stand out from competitors? Where is it that you're going and what's the ultimate vision for the company? I mean, it's surprising how many companies don't have bigger visions of what they ultimately want to achieve, but like what is it? Who do you sell to? Like, who are your who's your core audience? And what is it that's keeping them up at night? So there's a whole host of like foundational messaging that needs to be done. And then that needs to be validated with external research into the market competitors. If they don't know that audience very well, doing ICP interviews to like make sure that the assumptions that we've made are actually accurate, and then pulling all this together into a strategy that's really going to accelerate growth. Of course, at the same time, there's always like short-term immediate priorities that need to happen at the same time. So ultimately, yeah, it's always like a bit of a juggling act of like, okay, building a long-term strategy. You know, we want to have that strategy, we want to know where we're going, but we also have some maybe short-term priorities that need to get off the ground. I mean, in terms of activations, one of the first things that we always look at is the website. I mean, your website's the foundation for everything that you do, everybody you talk to, everybody you meet, everybody who sees any of your content or campaigns is going to come back to the website. So the website is a direct correlation to the ROI of any of your marketing or sales investments. So if you're doing lots of like more top-of-funnel activations, but your website's crap and you know, nobody knows what it is that you do from it, and it looks like it was built in the 1980s, then that's going to be a wasted investment. And one of the things that I'm always really keen on is not wasting money. I hate wasting money. You know, I want us to spend money in the right way and not in the wrong way, which a lot of companies are spending money in the wrong way. Uh, so one of the first things I always do is like review that spend as well. So, like, where are we currently spending money? Do we actually need to be spending money in these places? And is there smarter ways to spend this money? So, can we get better quality for less? Or, you know, can we actually make sure that we need to spend that? Or is there a better way to have spent that? Um, so reviewing that spend and doing a spend analysis and then tightening that up as much as possible so that you know we aren't just wasting money. Um, but yeah, I mean, those are normally the first two priorities in terms of activations is you know, making sure that the website's in an okay place and then making sure that they're not wasting money um on something stupid.

SPEAKER_00 13:38

Yeah, that it makes no sense. I mean, I feel like as an un as not an expert in marketing, it can be daunting as a founder to like there's so many ways to spend money and there's so many ways to just throw it. I mean, you could just put it the in your uh toilet instead because it's like it doesn't do anything for you, or it feels like it doesn't do anything for you because you don't have the right knowledge to understand where the ROI is coming from. And that's why I think having a market expertise come in like yourself and really help guide founders is such a crucial moment for scaling and growing the business because you could spend thousands, millions of dollars and get nothing for it. And you could spend a couple hundred or maybe a few thousand and get a lot for it with the right strategy in play.

Personal Brand As A Growth Lever

SPEAKER_01 14:22

So yeah, well, and normally they'll do that first too, because normally like they don't understand the value of a strategy before they've fallen on their face two to three times. Normally take some fuck ups in order for them to like realize, oh wait, like we actually do need somebody senior to tell us what to do. And we also probably need a strategy in place. So almost always, almost always, they're spending money in the wrong way or have wasted money or made bad investments or bad decisions because it takes some of that. Like, I mean, I I wish that I could be there from like the very beginning to prevent this, but they almost always need to fall on their face before they realize, hey, maybe we should learn to walk before we run. Um, but yeah, like it kind of takes that hard learning for them to then realize like the value of a like somebody senior who knows this stuff, but also the value of a strategy. I mean, I think one of the difficulties is we all consume marketing all day, every day. You know, we're bombarded with marketing, which then makes us falsely assume that we are the experts in it, even though we've probably never done it. And that's like probably the reason why a lot of founders and early stage need to learn the hard way before they learn the smart way. But yeah, I I wish I could get involved right at the beginning. I am, I'm currently a tech scalar mentor, so tech scalar is one of the is part of Codebase, which is the largest, largest tech incubator in Scotland where I'm based, and doing men like hourly mentoring sessions for the companies within that. And hopefully like being able to get in so early and at that stage will help some of these companies avoid some of those mistakes.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Right. Yeah. I um I feel so passionate about the same thing in regards to the people side. There's so many times I come in and it's like, oh, why didn't you call? I wish I had gotten here like, you know, a year earlier, or just like even being an advisor, right? I think there's a lot to be said. Maybe they can afford even a fractional strategist like yourself and or HR person like myself, but having advisors you can help kind of direct them, right? A little bit. Hey, that's the mind of uh, excuse me, that's a field full of minds. You do not want to go and explode yourself. Let's go this direction, right?

SPEAKER_01 16:50

So uh well, that's why I do um I do one hour consult like coaching calls. So, you know, I can't build the whole strategy in the hour, but I can advise you on that strategy. So I do like one hour coaching calls, um, both through tech scalers and then privately for to be able to give like startups who maybe can't afford a fractional yet that support. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 17:15

I love that. Okay, so diving in a bit more for those listening and wanting to learn a little bit more about marketing, what's um what's a strategy you're seeing that works brilliantly in 2025 that most founders still haven't caught on to?

First Levers: Strategy, Website, Spend Discipline

SPEAKER_01 17:30

Well, the big one, which I mean, people are starting to realize like the value of AI, but how you actually market for AI. So the AI is becoming one of the biggest search engines. People are moving away from going to Google to search for things and are going to AI. And you know, how AI determines the results that it picks up is based on your digital footprint. So the more times that your company is mentioned or featured across the internet, the more likely it is to appear in the AI like search results. So brand awareness is still, I mean, always has been, but is still very important, but needs to be thought of across multiple sources on the internet. So, you know, if the AI can see that there are 10, 15 different publications or sources mentioning your company, it's far more likely to think that your company is more important than if you only just have your website and you don't appear on any other touch points. So one of the things that like companies really need to be thinking about in 2025 and going forward is like your brand awareness and where you appear online and how you can create content that caters to some of the things that people are going to AI to search for. So I mean it's always kind of been, it's not necessarily incredibly new because search has always worked like this, where people, where you need to think about search intent and like what people are actually looking for and what they want and what's meaningful and good content. And good content has always been important, but it's even more important these days because you want to appear in AI, you know, when people are using it as a search engine. I think, you know, eventually Google probably won't even exist and people will just go straight to and only really to AI. You know, they might then use the links that the AI provides them to go check out additional information and make sure that that information's right. But, you know, I know that I almost never search on Google anymore. Um, and it's becoming very common for people to not use the more common search engines and to only use AI as its primary source of sifting through the internet and finding information. So I think that's a big thing that people should be thinking about.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

I can't agree more. I mean, even if you do go to Google uh and do a search, what comes up at the very top is Google Gemini AI and the response from the AI first before you even get to anything else that you would normally see. So uh, and on the phones, all you had to do is like, hey, Siri or whatever tool you're using, or you know, hold down your phone. Apple now has the AI where you can just hold it down and start talking to it. So yeah, it's uh it's pretty incredible how things have changed from how people use the internet and technology. So curious, uh, thinking about building a marketing team for a founder, when when should a founder start thinking about hiring their first marketeer and versus also like starting to build like a team?

Learning The Hard Way And Early Mentorship

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Yeah, I mean, I think marketing is going to be is one of the biggest growth engines you can pull. So the sooner you can bring in marketing, the better. I mean, you should really be thinking about marketing from day one because marketing really is about relationships. So from day one, you should be thinking about relationships with your partners and with your customers and with new new prospects. Um, you know, all businesses really are, but are you doing straight doing it strategically? Probably not. So um from day one, I mean, at the beginning, having you're better to hire fractional who can come in a couple of days a week and then can pull in freelancers and can pull in people for execution than to hire like a junior marketer. It may seem it is cheaper to hire a junior marketer, but I've seen a lot of companies do this where they hire a marketing executive, but the founders themselves don't have any marketing background, so they can't give them any guidance. There's no marketing strategy in place. And the market poor marketing executive, who's like a 20-year-old kid straight out of university, is told to bring in, you know, millions of pounds of deals with absolutely no idea, no direction, no support, no nurturing, no development. Just go for it. Um, and they have absolutely no idea what to do, and they have a really terrible experience. Um, and I mean it doesn't do the company any good either, because they will eventually leave um and they'll waste some money in the meantime. If they manage to do anything at all. So see a lot of people. And time. I mean, time is precious too for startups. Yeah. Yeah. And I see a lot of companies make that mistake where they hire somebody really junior, and that junior person doesn't have what they need to actually be able to do a good job. Or like you're much better to build that strategy from day one, have a strong strategy in place. It can be scrappy, it can be lean, you know, and you can pull in minimal external support for freelancers and things like this. But at least you have that strategic direction from the very get-go. I mean, it was one of the things that really allowed my company to flourish was I set it up in January 2020. Obviously, fantastic time to set up a company. March, COVID. And, you know, we lost almost all of our clients overnight. At the time, we didn't have a clear positioning. We did travel, we did recruitment, we did technology, we did like everything. You know, we didn't have a clear positioning. We didn't know who our audience was. And when COVID hit, I didn't want to lose a team that I had just built. So what I did instead was I looked really hard at what we did and what we did well and where I saw a gap in the market, which was around complex industry. So working in tech and financial services. And then I niched us really hard after that. Um, I was able to get a loan from the UK government. They did a bounce back loan, which like helped companies during that time. And I used all of that in our marketing, and that allowed us to massively like flourish. You know, we were able to slingshot out of the pandemic and do very well during a time that a lot of other companies weren't doing very well because we invested in our marketing. So we invested in our marketing a lot earlier than other agencies do. You know, my uh I brought in a marketing person probably, the fifth hire. Um, you know, so that's a lot earlier than a lot of other agencies do, but it massively allowed us to build our brand from like day one and allowed us to punch above our weight. So we won really big clients like Meta and Klarna and Wise, and like these names that we all mostly know because of our positioning, but our brand awareness as well. You know, we had really strong market brand awareness of not only were they referred into us, but they knew me. They saw my profile, they saw me speaking, like they saw all of this. Um, and it allowed us to punch above our weight massively during a time that was quite challenging. So, I mean, I think marketing is probably one of the best things you can do for your company. And the earlier you can do it, the better your company's gonna do.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

You know, I love that when you say, like, you know, it was your fifth hire. I think about so many founders that I know who they're the ones selling at the very get-go. And they they're the sellers of the business for quite some time, typically, right? And so uh then they go and hire a salesperson. I think, you know, if you hire a marketing person first, stay in that sales role a little bit longer, you could actually have a lot more impact and go further and punch above your weight, like you were saying, and then get to a point where, you know, okay, now it's time to hire a salesperson. So you can go as a founder and start focusing on maybe it's the investors or building the product better or whatever it might be that is your wheelhouse as a founder.

2025 Play: Marketing For AI-As-Search

SPEAKER_01 25:06

Yeah. I mean, you're much better to bring in marketing first, probably about six months before you bring in sales, because then you get inbound leads. Like what happens if you just bring in sales first? And a lot of companies mess this up because they think, oh, we need to sell more. So we're just gonna bring in a salesperson. Yeah. But that salesperson can only really has their own Rolodex, and Rolodexes aren't scalable. They know they only have their contacts that they can reach. They're not growing your share of voice. So their impact's gonna be relatively limited. And you know, most companies I know that brought in sales first and brought in marketing later are unhappy with their salesperson because their salesperson's not bringing in enough, but it's not really the salesperson's fault. There's no market awareness, there's no brand awareness, there's no credibility, there's nothing for them to actually be able to confidently sell. So you may have a great product, but if you don't have case studies, you don't have any of this credibility, you don't have any market awareness, nobody knows who you are, you have none of this, it makes their job so much harder that like they get frustrated or you get frustrated with them and then they leave for because or you fire them. Yeah. And you know, you get you get absolutely nowhere. So I mean, you're much better to stay in that like sales position, bring in marketing, and then six months after marketing is really up and running and producing good quality leads, then bring in a salesperson who can do those leads, but then can also use their own network. And the power of both of those, inbound and outbound leads, is how you build a commercial engine. You can't have a commercial engine only based on outbound, like it just does not work.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

Yeah, that makes so much sense. I literally just clicked in my head when you said that. And so now I'm definitely gonna watch out for the those founders that are doing it backwards. Well, as we wrap up today, Catherine, any last final thoughts or tips or tricks you'd like to share with the audience?

SPEAKER_01 27:01

Read my book. It's all in there. All of this stuff that we've talked about is all in there. Um, so yeah, definitely read my book or check out my LinkedIn. I post a lot on LinkedIn and try to share this, um, share knowledge and insights as much as possible. So yeah, check out my LinkedIn, drop me a line, um, say hi.

SPEAKER_00 27:23

Awesome. Well, thanks, Catherine, for joining us. We appreciate your time. And for those listening, I hope you got some good tidbits. I know I did, and we will see you on the next one. Until then, have a great day. That's a wrap for today's episode of Scaling with People. If you got value from this conversation, do me a favor, share it with someone building something big. And hey, I'd love to hear your take. Drop a comment, shoot me a message, or start a conversation. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss the bold, unfiltered strategies we drop every week. I'm Gwynaver Cruy, founder and CEO of Guide to HR, where we help high growth companies scale smart with people for strategies and AI powered systems that don't just keep up, they lead. If you're building fast and want your HR to move faster, head to guide2hr.com and let's talk. And remember, scale isn't just about speed, it's about people. Until next time, have a great one.