About
The world didn't need another marketing agency. So this isn't one.
I built Say/Show because I got tired of watching smart companies with genuinely good products spend a lot of money saying absolutely nothing.
Every brand says the same four things.
- Industry-leading.
- Customer-first.
- Innovative solutions.
- Trusted partner.
Cool. Prove it.
Who you'd be working with
Hi. I'm Carly.
A marketing executive, brand strategist, and chronic asker of one question: why should the customer care?
I've spent my career inside real businesses. Revenue targets, sales teams, budgets, competitors, operational constraints, executives who want results yesterday, and customers who could not care less about our beautifully formatted brand strategy deck.
That changes how you think about marketing. When you are the one responsible for growing a business, you learn quickly that marketing doesn't get points for being pretty. It has to work.
What does everyone inside the company assume customers already know, that no customer actually knows?
How I work
I don't start with your brand. I start with the people you're trying to convince.
- What are they worried about?
- What annoys them about your industry?
- What do they not believe?
- What are your competitors promising, and where are those promises weak?
- What do you do differently that your own website buried on page 37?
That last one is usually where things get interesting.
And I've spent my career on the inside.
Not standing outside a business telling people to tell more authentic stories. Inside it.
- Sitting with sales teams working out why leads aren't converting
- Listening to customer calls and reading the terrible reviews
- Reading the competitors' terrible reviews too
- Checking with operations whether we can actually keep the promise marketing wants to make
- Turning obscure operational advantages into reasons to buy
- Finding the policy customers love that the company forgot to mention
- Noticing the throwaway line from a salesperson that turns out to be the whole value proposition
- Explaining that no, "we care about our customers" is not a differentiator, because your competitors have customers too
You don't need me to know your industry better than you do, and you shouldn't hire anyone who walks in pretending they do. You know your business. Your sales team knows what customers ask. Your customers know what frustrates them. My job is to connect the dots, ask better questions, and turn what we find into a position your competitors can't easily copy.
The four steps that came out of all of it are on the Method page.
The part that isn't on a résumé
I collect people.
Not contacts. People. I've spent my career finding talented people, developing them, and staying close long after the org chart changed. It is the thing I'm proudest of and the least able to put on a slide.
It also happens to be the reason a one-person practice can take on work that normally needs an agency.
What that means when you hire me.
- There is no bench to keep busy. An agency staffs from whoever is free this month. I staff from whoever is right for the problem.
- The person who scoped the work is the person who does the work. Nobody gets swapped for someone cheaper after the contract is signed.
- Specialists, not generalists in costume. Designers, writers, developers, media buyers, researchers, photographers, each doing the one thing they are best at.
- If I don't have the right person for it, I say so. That is cheaper for you to hear in week one than to discover in week six.
The developing half matters as much as the finding. Most of these relationships started with me hiring someone early, managing them, or handing them the work nobody else wanted to give them. That is why they pick up the phone.
A roster you can browse. The right people for a positioning reset are not the right people for a launch, so the team gets assembled per engagement. If you want to meet them before you commit, ask. I'll introduce you.
Fair warning
I will probably tell you when your baby is ugly.
Lovingly. But still.
- 01 If your value proposition could belong to six competitors, I'll tell you.
- 02 If you're trying to solve a positioning problem with a new logo, I'll tell you.
- 03 If you want to call yourself the most trusted brand in your industry and the proof is essentially because we said so, we're going to talk about that.
- 04 And if the best strategy is changing a policy, fixing part of the customer experience, or building something worth talking about, I'll tell you that too.
I'm not here to sell you more marketing. I'm here to make the marketing you do harder to ignore.
Receipts
Not logos. Specifics.
An About page arguing for proof should contain some. This is where it goes: what I found, what it became, and what happened to the number that mattered.
It is empty right now. Writing three convincing examples from memory would take an afternoon and would make this the least honest section on the site. Real ones land here as the work clears to publish, names removed where they need to be, and each one becomes a Field Note.
So, why trust me?
Maybe don't.
At least not because I wrote a convincing About page telling you that you should. That's sort of the entire point.
- Look at how I think.
- Look at the questions I ask.
- Look at the work.
- Look at the proof.
Then decide. I wouldn't ask your customers to do anything different.
Say something meaningful. Show them it's true. That's how I think brands should earn trust. It's also how I intend to earn yours.
- Free
- No call
- Fixes, not a pitch