Scott Sommers
Strategic Growth · Physical Products
Scott Sommers
For founder-led physical-product companies · $5M–$50M+
Stop just adding more marketing. Decide where growth should come from first.
Watch how Scott helps established product companies choose one growth direction, then build the commercial system to pursue it.
In the video:why growth stalls at this stage, the four tests, and what a first conversation covers.
Free, 25–30 minutes · You leave with a clearer decision frame, whether or not an engagement follows
- MBA, Entrepreneurship
- Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA)
- Harvard Business School, Strategic Marketing Management
Who this is for
You make a real product. You have real customers, working distribution, and more plausible ways to grow than you have people, capital, or hours. The question isn’t whether to do more marketing. It’s which growth decision the marketing should serve.
This is likely a fit
- Founder-led or closely held physical-product company, roughly $5M–$50M+ in revenue
- Growth has flattened after early success, or several promising paths are competing for the same resources
- Capable people working hard, but no shared answer about the next growth priority
- Sales, marketing, and product each have a different answer about what’s next
- Willing to make tradeoffs, with the founder or CEO at the table for the decision
Probably not a fit
- Pre-revenue, or still searching for a viable product
- The immediate need is only advertising, SEO, or website production
- Every segment and initiative must stay a priority
- Food, beverage, pharmaceutical, or another heavily regulated category
Experience
This isn’t theory. Scott spent his career inside a physical-product manufacturer as it scaled toward a billion.
The best-known example starts with a familiar product: printed and licensed duct tape. The opportunity wasn’t to promote repair tape harder. The team learned where customers were using the product differently, treated crafting as a distinct use case, and aligned product, licensing, insight, marketing, ecommerce, sales, and operations around that choice.
A commodity became a brand. And Scott is quick to say the results belonged to a team, not one person.
“Growth is often hidden inside a customer, use case, or route to market the company has not yet organized around.”
$25M → $50M
~$1M → north of $15M
$90M → $240M
Scott credits these results to the teams he built and led.
Operator
A career of commercial decisions inside a large U.S. product manufacturer: customer insight, innovation, ecommerce, and go-to-market, not campaigns from the sidelines.
Trained
MBA in Entrepreneurship. Harvard Business School, Strategic Marketing Management. The frameworks descend from that training, and from using them with real P&Ls.
Enterprise-value lens
A Certified Exit Planning Advisor’s view of the systems a company is building: marketing as a driver of durable business value, not a cost center.
How it works
From scattered opportunity to one focused growth system.
A deliberate sequence, because the strategy piece has to come in first.
01
Talk it through
A focused conversation about the decision, the competing choices, and the evidence needed to choose. No commitment, no automatic next step. If Scott isn’t the right fit, this is where he says so.
25–30 min · Free
02
Find the signal
Examine the evidence already inside the business: customer behavior, sales conversations, lost deals, channel economics, margin. The goal isn’t more data. It’s finding the evidence that should change a decision.
First 2–3 weeks
03
Make the choice
Rank the plausible growth paths against four tests: customer demand, strategic fit, commercial economics, and execution feasibility. The result is one primary direction, with explicit tradeoffs and a written list of what will not be prioritized now.
Weeks 4–6
04
Build the system, then learn
Translate the choice into positioning, messages, a go-to-market plan, named owners, and a practical scorecard, plus the feedback loop that improves the decision as evidence arrives.
The following 90 days
The work ends in a decision, not a deck.
The first working artifact is a Growth Decision Map: the choices in front of the business, ranked against four tests, with the tradeoffs recorded and the selected direction turned into a 90-day plan.
Ranked against four tests: customer demand · strategic fit · commercial economics · execution feasibility, each scored one to four. Composite example, not a client document.
Book the conversation
Book your conversation with Scott
Answer a few questions about your company and the decision in front of it, then pick a time that works for your conversation with Scott. He reviews every submission personally before the call. If a different specialist or a different type of hire is the better answer, he’ll tell you that too.
Takes about 2 minutes
Seven quick questions, then pick a time
About two minutes. Scott reads every answer before the call. Nothing is shared beyond this review.
Before you continue
Did you watch the video above?
Question 1 of 7
First name
Please enter your first name.
Question 2 of 7
Work email
Please enter a valid email address.
Question 3 of 7
Company name and website
Please tell us your company name.
Question 4 of 7
What do you sell, and through which channels?
A sentence on the product, then the closest channel mix.
Please describe the product and choose a channel.
Question 5 of 7
Approximate annual revenue
Please choose a range.
Question 6 of 7
Briefly describe the growth decision in front of your business right now.
A sentence or two here helps Scott prepare a useful conversation.
Question 7 of 7
When does this decision need to be made?
Please choose one.
Received. Now pick a time.
Choose a slot below for your 25–30 minute conversation with Scott. He’ll review your answers before you meet.
Your answers go to Scott ahead of the call, so the conversation starts with context, not introductions.
Common questions
Questions we hear often
Is this a fractional CMO service?
It can be, but fractional leadership is one delivery model, not the starting assumption. You can hire a channel agency to produce activity, a strategy firm to deliver analysis, or a full-time executive before the role is clear. Scott sits between those choices: he helps leadership decide what growth requires, converts that decision into an operating plan, and can stay involved while the team builds it.
Will Scott actually do the work, or hand us a deck?
Scott leads the strategic decisions and stays close enough to implementation to keep the strategy connected to reality. Before any engagement begins, the division of work is defined in writing: what Scott leads, what your team owns, and where specialist help is required. An unused strategy deck is a failure by his standard.
How much of our time does this take?
Less than you’d expect, but it isn’t zero. The standard rhythm is a kickoff, a handful of leadership and commercial interviews, one weekly working session, and a decision readout. What the work does require is access to evidence and a leadership team willing to make tradeoffs.
Do we need an existing marketing team?
Not necessarily. You need enough internal ownership to provide evidence, make decisions, and support implementation. Part of the work can be clarifying which roles and capabilities should be built internally, before you hire.
How does pricing work?
Every engagement is a defined scope with a clearly stated investment, agreed in writing before you decide anything. A qualified buyer receives a written recommendation stating deliverables, responsibilities, decision rights, exclusions, and timing. No open-ended retainers by default, and no surprises after the fact.
Do you work with companies outside your area?
Yes. Scott is based in Cleveland and works with U.S. physical-product companies nationally. The operating cadence of weekly working sessions and a monthly executive review is built to run remotely, with on-site time where the work genuinely benefits from it.
What happens in the first conversation?
Scott will ask about the growth decision, the evidence behind it, the competing priorities, the people involved, and what happens if the company keeps operating the same way. If there’s a fit, the next step is a scoped written recommendation. If another specialist or a different type of hire is more appropriate, the conversation should surface that too.
Prefer to diagnose it yourself first?
The Physical-Product Growth Decision Scorecard is a 10-minute self-diagnostic. No call, no contact details. It shows your largest growth-decision gap and the next question leadership needs to resolve.
Scott Sommers
Strategic growth leadership for physical-product companies
Cleveland, Ohio · email: Scott@scottsommers.com · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-a-sommers
MBA, Entrepreneurship · Harvard Business School, Strategic Marketing Management · CEPA
© 2026 Scott Sommers