If you are arriving from www.baker-marketing.com, welcome to our new website.
I’ll give you the short version to start.
I launched Baker Pivot & Acceleration when I realised in the last couple of years that the impact I had on the owner(s) and team of the small and medium size organisations I worked with, while helping them to pivot their business and accelerate their sales through a more agile approach to management, was far greater that the one I had helping them with their marketing.
I started Baker Marketing 10 years ago when I opted to go back to consulting (I owned & operated Baker Marketing Services in the 90’s) after a decade of creating and managing new B2B tech product lines in large companies.
My mission with Baker Marketing was to make my customers’ marketing function more efficient through using data to its full extent.
The increasingly rapid evolution of the markets now means that agile maketing is no longer sufficient. Management, at all levels of the organisation, must be agile in order to thrive.
In addition to my professional activities, I cofounded the Lean Startup Circle of Montreal 6 years ago, and founded Mentors Montreal, 4 years ago. These communities dedicated to helping entrepreneurs, where I contribute voluntarily, have allowed me to work with hundreds of organisations. This has helped me understand the many challenges facing entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs who want to innovate and the roots of those challenges.
Baker Marketing clients have benefited over the years from the expertise I developed at the Lean Startup Circle.
In 2018, I joined the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), as an external consultant, to bring the Business Model Innovation (BMI) program to their customers. It was an extension of what I had already started doing with Baker Marketing.
The BMI is a 3-step program based on the Lean Startup approach. First the management team and key team members map out the current business model and competitive landscape. The second step gets them to create a new future business model for growth. In the last step the team validates the new model through experimentation. This allows the company to not only de-risk the new business model but to start implementing it as well.
A few of these companies, either BDC’s or Baker Marketing’s customers, although well managed, were in a dire situation when we started working with them. Sudden market shifts had struck near fatal blows to them and a new business model and a more efficient way of working was the only way out.
Their cupboards were bare resource-wise and failing with the new business model was not an option.
The Lean Startup approach (one of the agile management approach Baker Pivot & Acceleration works with), that allows to de-risk a new business model, enabled these organisations to find a new path to profitability quickly.
Helping those teams build a new business model based on their strengths and see it through its validation period was exhilarating.
Implementing the new model however was anything but a smooth and easy ride. The old ways of doing things would soon clash with the agility needs of the new model, especially at the top management level.
The team had been busy de-risking the new business model with experimentation and learning agile management and tools in the process. That was not the case for top management. Hence it became clear that coaching was necessary if top management was to keep up with their team.
My mentoring experience came in as highly useful as the coaching needed to be done at a human level as much as at a professional level.
These experiences allowed me to have some of the most significant impacts in my career.
Not only were the companies profitable again but they had a great future ahead of them. Most team members also truly preferred the agile way of working. An added bonus was that those organisations were now having a much easier time recruiting younger highly qualified team members. Finally, the owners felt rejuvenated and excited like they did when they first started their company. The overall mood was a complete night and day shift.
So although marketing is and will remain for a long while second nature to me, I now derive significantly more satisfaction out small and medium size organisations pivot and accelerate it in an agile way with Baker Pivot & Acceleration.