Marketing strategy & operations · founder-led businesses
I build the strategy, then I
stay and run it.
Most founders end up with a strategist who hands over a plan and a contractor who waits to be told what to do. I'm the person in between, I decide what should happen, and then I'm the one who makes it happen.
Currently fractional for a creator-economy platform · Taking a small number of new clients
WHY THIS KEEPS GOING WRONG
A plan nobody executes is just an expensive document.
HIRE A STRATEGIST
You get a deck, a roadmap, and a set of recommendations. Then it sits — because the person who wrote it was never going to build it, and the person who could build it wasn't in the room when it was decided.
Hire an executor
You get someone capable who needs to be told exactly what to do. Every decision routes back through you, so you're still the bottleneck. You've just added a management job to your week.
WHAT I DO
I work in the seam between those two — senior enough to decide, close enough to the work to actually do it.
WAYS TO WORK TOGETHER
Three ways to work together.
Two smaller ways in, and the full engagement. Most people start small — a lot of what a founder needs genuinely doesn't require nine months of anyone's time.
ADVISORY
$1,500-2,500
per month · rolling
A standing call and async access between. You run your own marketing; I'm the person you think out loud with, and the one who tells you what you're not seeing.
For: founders who broadly know what they're doing and need judgment, not hands.
Launch Sprint
$5,000-8,000
project · 3–4 weeks
A launch plan built end to end — positioning, audience, channels, calendar, and who does what. Any launch: a product, a program, a book on a short runway.
For: something real is coming and there's no plan for it yet.
THE FLAGSHIP
The Launch Arc — a book launch, held end to end.
The full engagement for founders and thought leaders with a book coming. Nine months built backward from your publication date — because the campaign is governed by other people's booking calendars, not by how long you hire someone.
Bearings
Pub −12 to −9
Runway
Pub −9 to −3
Launch
Pub −3 to 0
The After
Pub 0 to +3
erin horner
Strategy is the easy half. I'm here for the other one.
I've spent my career on the operational side of marketing — the half that quietly decides whether the strategy was worth writing down. I've run marketing for a creator-economy platform on a fractional basis, and built the systems underneath it: the email infrastructure, the campaign operations, the reporting that tells you whether any of it worked.
Willow Sidekicks is the practice I run around that. Sometimes it's a full book launch. Often it's a founder who needs someone senior for four hours a month, or a business whose marketing stack has quietly become three spreadsheets and a person remembering things.
