What It Actually Takes to Turn a Brand Around

Three Cuts. No Silver Bullets.

For everyone who knows me well, you know that I'm happiest when I'm on my soapbox talking about the art of the sales process and demystifying marketing hype. I love sharing real-world examples of customer service hits and misses. I use my talks on networking and what entertainers can teach executives as platforms to share the mechanics and steps for success.

This piece is different. This one is a framework. A repeatable system for what happens when a brand shows no meaningful growth for 20 years and someone finally has to walk in and fix it.

The Inherited Mess

World-class product. Legendary technology in one category. The kind of thing engineers swear by when they need precision tools. But the business? Paralyzed.

More than 70 SKUs active—many selling fewer than ten units a year each. Manufacturing and procurement stretched across all of them, which meant effectively delivering on none of them. The internal joke: "peanut butter, no jelly." Some components for a product. Never all the critical ones. Certainly not the capacity to service demand at scale. Just operational chaos spread thin across too many products that nobody was pushing.

No focused product. No global messaging. No internal marketing. No dealer buy-in. Because why would a dealer push a SKU that nobody at the manufacturer cared about? The incentive structure didn't exist.

And the brand identity? There was no style guide. None. I sent product to a high-profile venue to observe reactions and harvest language from engineers and tastemakers who had no reason to be diplomatic. The consistent note I kept hearing? The fonts. Four different fonts on a single product. That's how visible the absence of brand identity was—it showed up on the hardware itself.

Oh, and there were critical category gaps. Foundational products that should have existed but didn't. For a company in this space, that's inexcusable.

The Three Cuts

I'll tell you exactly what I did. None of this is complicated in concept. All of it is brutal in execution.

The first cut was SKUs. I was vicious and relentless. Thirty-plus dead products eliminated, and I would have cut more given the chance. Feelings were hurt. People were frustrated. Manufacturing hated me. Procurement pushed back. Every department had a reason why their particular product deserved to survive. None of those reasons involved the customer.

What SKU reduction actually does—and why almost no one has the discipline to execute it—is that it forces clarity everywhere downstream. Dealers suddenly know what your focus product is. Marketing suddenly has something to get behind. Manufacturing can actually build inventory at scale instead of scrambling for parts across 30+ product lines. Sales reps can walk into a conversation and know what they're selling. You don't just cut products. You cut paralysis.

The second cut was brand identity. I hired the best Creative Director I've ever worked with. There was no old style guide to replace—there was simply nothing. We built everything from scratch.

The brief started with a question I kept asking the engineers: why does the core technology matter? They'd give me a technical answer. I'd say, so what? They'd go deeper. I'd say, so what? And they'd finally arrive at the human truth underneath the specs.

So I stopped talking about the technical specifications. I stopped saying what everyone else in the category was already saying. Instead we landed on ideas that captured everything the product actually delivered. We built the visual language around what the product was made of and how it was made—precision, honesty, craftsmanship. That became an award-winning brand aesthetic that eventually caught the attention of partners who saw themselves in the work before they even made contact.

When the right partners encountered the rebrand, they recognized their own values reflected back. That's not coincidence. That's what happens when brand language is right. Partners find you.

The third cut was pricing. The dream state would have been premium positioning across the board. The reality was that the company had launched expensive products in categories where they still didn't have the foundational offerings—while industry benchmarks existed at a fraction of the price. I fought to align pricing with market expectations and then overdeliver on value so dramatically that the price conversation became irrelevant.

The products launched at price points that made sense. They won awards. Multiple years of consecutive award recognition is not luck. It is what happens when SKU discipline, brand clarity, and price-value alignment compound.

The Networking Layer Nobody Sees

None of this happens without the relationship infrastructure operating simultaneously. The press doesn't document how brands achieve market saturation—so I will.

Before flagship products launched, the category had already been seeded through content creators and tutorial channels. That wasn't organic. That was intentional product placement through a network built over years—creators who trusted the product because they'd been brought in early and given the tools to succeed. They talked. Others listened. The category grew.

When new product lines launched into adjacent markets, the same network activated. Early adopters used the products not because of advertising but because the people they trusted had already been using them. By the time the hero products launched, the pattern was established: the brand shows up where credible operators are performing, those operators talk, and the market inherits the vocabulary.

This is market vocabulary that had already been normalized through years of placement, press seeding, and relationship activation before anyone read a single press quote.

What This Means for Your Brand

Three cuts. That's the framework.

Cut your SKUs until it hurts, then cut more. Cut your brand ambiguity by finding the language that makes technical truth emotionally resonant. Cut the gap between your price and the value you actually deliver.

Then activate your network—before the launch, not after. Build the relationships that will carry the vocabulary. Seed the placements that will create the language. Let the market inherit belief before you ask them to make a decision.

And don't forget the grit. Because every single one of these cuts required fighting people who had good reasons for the status quo. Operational reasons. Financial reasons. Emotional reasons. You fight anyway. Because 20 years of stagnation isn't a market problem. It's a discipline problem.

And discipline, applied consistently, wins awards.

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