Building a New Revenue Engine When the Old One Never Had to Sell
The Client
An offshoot of a larger, established brand, they had grown almost entirely on brand equity of the parent company and inbound demand. Work flowed in reliably. The team were strong builders and developer, and selling had never been a core muscle.
Their growth was structurally capped by dependence on the parent brand’s inbound leads. To grow further, it needed to stand alone.
The Perceived Problem
Leadership believed the solution was to create a new brand with distinct positioning and offerings, and hire someone to “set it up.” A senior hire was brought in to build the new engine from scratch. New messaging, new motion, new market.
What wasn’t fully visible yet was the depth of the transition required. This was a team that had always operated in a captive-demand environment. They had not needed to prospect, position, or generate demand independently.
What Was Actually Happening
The organisation was attempting to create a standalone go-to-market engine while keeping the same people, the same habits, and the same operating assumptions. Selling wasn’t underdeveloped, it was absent.
Trying to build everything in-house would have required:
Teaching an entirely new muscle to a team optimised to build and deliver
Diverting senior attention away from core revenue
Accepting a long, error-prone learning curve
Time was the real constraint.
The Uniquely Hard Challenge
This wasn’t about capability alone, it was about sequencing. There were three theoretical paths:
Teach the existing team to sell
Hire heavily for sales and marketing
Or temporarily outsource non-core capabilities while the internal system matured
Doing this wrong would have slowed both businesses.
The challenge was to build a revenue engine without forcing the organisation to become something it wasn’t, yet.
What Changed
The work followed a deliberate build–operate–transform model. Rather than forcing all capabilities in-house, we designed and oversaw an external ecosystem:
A demand generation firm was selected and onboarded
A content and design agency was brought in to support positioning and narrative
A specialist was added to support partnerships and ecosystem development
Tools and workflows were chosen for immediate needs and results
The internal team stayed focused on what they did best: building and delivery. We acted as the connective tissue:
Helping decide what to outsource, and what to defer
Vetting vendors and partners
Setting rules for when external capability should give way to internal ownership
Ensuring the system worked as a whole, not as disconnected parts
Immediate Outcomes
A functional go-to-market engine was operational within a quarter
The new brand could stand independently of the parent’s inbound pipeline
Core teams were protected from context-switching and dilution
Leadership gained clarity on when, and how, to internalise capabilities over time
Had the organisation attempted to build this entirely in-house, it would likely have taken a year or more to reach the same level of readiness. Instead, they bought time, and used it intelligently.