Welcome to the first issue of From Strategy to Scale — a monthly note on growth strategy, market expansion and AI adoption, written for the people who have to make it all actually work.
Once a month, on the first Thursday, I’ll share one idea worth thinking about, a few things I’m seeing across the businesses I work with, and one practical resource you can use straight away. No fluff, no recycled trend reports — just what I’d tell you if we were having a coffee.
This month’s idea: strategy has to leave the slide deck
Most strategy work I see never makes it out of the presentation. A workshop happens, a well-designed deck gets handed over, everyone agrees with it — and six months later very little inside the business has actually changed.
It isn’t usually because the strategy was wrong. It’s because the deck was treated as the deliverable, rather than the outcome it was supposed to produce. The hard part of strategy isn’t deciding what to do. It’s the unglamorous work that follows: deciding what to stop, giving someone clear ownership, changing how decisions get made, and checking progress often enough to adjust before it’s too late.
That’s the thinking behind how I’ve set up advance2global. Every engagement — whether it’s Business Advisory for a corporate, Growth & Market Expansion for a technology provider, or AI Adoption & Advisory — is scoped around one measurable commercial outcome, and I stay with it until that outcome is in sight.
A simple test for your own plans this quarter: for each priority, can you name the person who owns it, the number that tells you it’s working, and the date you’ll next check? If any of those three is missing, the priority is still living on a slide.
What I’m seeing
- AI is happening to businesses, not being led by them. In almost every conversation, people are already using AI tools that nobody approved and nobody is measuring. That’s a risk — and also a free map of where AI could genuinely help. The businesses getting ahead are the ones turning it into two or three owned, measured use cases.
- Market entry is being treated as a hiring decision. I keep seeing technology companies hire a country manager first and work out positioning second. Market entry is a strategy decision that eventually needs a hire — not the other way round.
- Positioning doesn’t travel for free. Buying committees, procurement timelines and what counts as a credible reference all change between markets, even between the US and the UK. Translating the deck isn’t a go-to-market plan.
In case you missed it
- Business Advisory — how I work with corporates to turn growth strategy into execution.
- Growth & Market Expansion — go-to-market and US/UK market entry for technology providers.
- AI Adoption & Advisory — a practical path from diagnostic to roadmap to enablement.
Coming up in October
- 13 October: The US–UK Market Entry Playbook for Technology Providers — what actually changes when you cross the Atlantic, with a one-page readiness checklist.
- 27 October: Shadow AI Is Already in Your Business — a 90-day plan to find it, focus it and scale what works.
- Fractional leadership: alongside advisory work, I’m now taking on fractional and interim executive roles — COO, CTO/CIO and Chief Growth Officer. More on that later this month.
Thanks for reading the first issue. If there’s a topic you’d like me to cover next month, reply or send me a message — the best issues will come from real questions.
Mark
Global Market Entry Strategies
Resource of the month: the entry models available to a technology provider and how to choose between them.
PDFFrom Strategy to Scale — Issue 1 (PDF)
Download this issue as a two-page PDF to read offline or share with your team.
PDFIf something in this issue is close to what you're working on, I'd rather talk than send another deck. Book a discovery call →