Practical thinking on marketing as business value.

6 To Fix is a marketing strategy framework that organizes the entire work of marketing into six areas — Brand, Customer, Offering, Communications, Sales, and Management. Each area maps directly to a specific driver of business value. The framework gives business owners a structured way to diagnose where their marketing is strong, where it's weak, and — most importantly — where the gaps are quietly reducing what their business is worth.

Each of the six strategy areas produces a corresponding value driver: Brand builds Brand Worth, Customer builds Customer Yield, Offering builds Category Claim, Communications builds Demand Engine, Sales builds Revenue Quality, and Management builds a Transferable System. The first three are assets — they grow earnings. The second three are systems — they expand the multiple a buyer is willing to pay. All six feed into Goodwill, which is the acquisition premium paid above book value at exit.

Marketing owns more of a business's transferable value than most owners realize. When a buyer evaluates a business, they're asking whether the brand has authority, whether the customer base is durable, whether the offering holds a defensible position, whether demand generation runs without the owner, whether revenue is predictable and documented, and whether the whole function can transfer to new ownership. Those are all marketing questions — and they directly affect what the business sells for. The 6 To Fix framework was built to make that connection visible and actionable.

Goodwill is the premium a buyer pays above the book value of the business's tangible assets. It represents the intangible value — brand reputation, customer relationships, documented systems, category position — that makes the business worth more than the sum of its equipment, inventory, and receivables. In most owner-operated businesses, Goodwill is the largest component of the sale price. The 6 To Fix framework is designed so that every marketing decision can be evaluated by what we call the closing-table test: does this decision improve what a buyer would pay?

It's a simple mental exercise. For each of the six areas, ask yourself the question a buyer would ask. For example: If a buyer asked your three best customers what you stand for, would they answer in roughly the same words — and would those be the words you would have chosen? If a buyer asked you to produce your documented sales process, your win/loss analysis, and your customer concentration percentages, could you? Most owners, asked these six questions honestly for the first time, score themselves harder than they expected. That's not failure — it's the gap the framework is built to close.

The framework applies to four ownership paths, not just selling. Whether you plan to stay and grow, sell, plan a succession, or step back into an absentee ownership role, the six value drivers determine how well your business can operate and grow independent of you. A business with strong Brand Worth, documented systems, and predictable demand generation is a better business to own — not just a better business to sell.

No. The framework is designed so that every area can be assessed independently, and most businesses have natural strengths in some areas and gaps in others. The diagnostic scorecard identifies where the biggest gaps are — usually between activity that's happening and documented strategy that isn't. The work starts where the gap is widest and the leverage is highest.

The 6 To Fix framework and Strategic Glue's services are built for owner-operated businesses in the $1M to $15M revenue range. The target isn't defined by industry — it's defined by a situational profile: a real business with real business value, a founder-dependent go-to-market, an undocumented marketing function, and leadership that's approaching or considering a transition of some kind.

The scorecard measures two independent dimensions across each of the six strategy areas. The first is Activity — how much marketing work is actually happening in each area, scored 0–10, for a total of 0–60. The second is Documented Strategy Coverage — whether the strategy underneath that activity has been written down, scored as None, Partial, or Current in each area, for a total of 0–6. The two scores are never blended. The gap between them is the diagnostic signal.

The scorecard places your business into one of four quadrants based on the relationship between your Activity score and your Documented Strategy Coverage. Transferable Performance means high activity with current documentation — the business is doing the work and it's written down. Hidden Risk means high activity with little or no documentation — the most common quadrant for owner-operated businesses, where marketing feels like it's working but none of it would transfer to a buyer. Plan Without Action means documentation exists but activity is low. Inactive means both are low. Most businesses land in Hidden Risk, and that's exactly the gap the framework is built to close.

Brand is the strategy area that decides what the business stands for, who it serves first, and why its version of the offer is the one to choose. It governs positioning, audience priority, voice, and visual identity — the accumulated authority of the business in its market, considered as something that can be stated rather than merely felt. The corresponding value driver is Brand Worth.

A logo and a website are brand expression, not brand strategy. The real question is whether your positioning is documented, whether your team can articulate your differentiation consistently, and whether your best customers would describe what you stand for in the same words you would choose. Brand awareness alone isn't enough — in a market where most products and services are commodities, the way a brand acts and behaves is the true differentiator. Brand Worth is built when that differentiation is deliberate, documented, and consistent enough to transfer.

Customer treats the customer base as an asset rather than a list. It covers the Ideal Customer Profile, the personas the business sells to, the economics of acquiring and keeping customers, the intentional customer experience at every point of contact, and the retention discipline that decides whether the most valuable customers stay. The value driver is Customer Yield — the economic productivity of the customer base.

Getting customers and getting the right customers are different problems. If you don't have a documented Ideal Customer Profile, your lead flow is whatever the market hands you — and the cost of acquiring the wrong customer in support load, margin compression, and distraction from the right ones never makes it onto the P&L. Customer Yield improves when you know what a good customer is worth over a normal lifecycle, how much it cost to acquire them, how long they typically stay, and whether new customers increasingly resemble your most profitable existing ones. Retention is the highest-yield investment most owner-operated businesses aren't making.

Offering is the strategy area that decides how the business's products and services are framed in the market and delivered to the customer. It covers the value proposition, the unique selling proposition, the pricing rationale, the delivery process, and the competitive positioning that explains why this offer is differently better — not merely cheaper or closer. The value driver is Category Claim.

Category Claim is the position the business occupies in the buyer's mental map of the category. It answers the question every prospect asks before they ever call: what kind of company is this, and is this the kind of company I should be talking to? When it's working, prospects arrive already understanding what you are and what you aren't, and the sales conversation starts at terms rather than at introductions. When it's draining, you show up in commodity comparisons and your sales team spends most of its time educating before it can sell.

Communications is the strategy area that turns strategy into reach. It governs the channel mix, the editorial cadence, the messaging framework the whole team writes from, and the demand mechanism that creates and qualifies opportunity on a schedule rather than by accident. The value driver is Demand Engine — the documented mechanism by which the business generates and qualifies opportunity on a predictable cadence, without the owner's daily intervention.

Activity is not infrastructure. Posts are getting posted and ads may be running, but the question is whether anyone can tell which of it is working. Is your lead flow feast or famine? Does it correlate more with the owner's energy in a given month than with any system? A Demand Engine means marketing can be turned up or down and a predictable response happens at the funnel. The team knows which channels produce the best leads and why. Content production runs on a cadence that doesn't depend on whether the owner had time this week.

Because the character of the revenue matters as much as the amount. Sales in the 6 To Fix framework covers the sales process, the qualification criteria, the marketing-to-sales handoff, the pricing discipline at the point of close, and the institutional knowledge of the people who do the closing — captured in documents rather than carried in heads. The value driver is Revenue Quality: the difference between the same dollar arriving from a high-quality source versus a low-quality one.

High-quality revenue is recurring or highly repeatable, concentrated in customers who are themselves stable, growing at a healthy pace, and earned through a documented sales process that someone else could run. A buyer evaluating your business wants to see a pipeline that's visible, deals that move through stages on a measurable cadence, and customer concentration that's being deliberately managed. If your revenue forecasts are guesses and your sales process exists in the senior reps' heads, a buyer has to take the owner's word for what the pipeline contains — and they discount accordingly.

Management is the strategy area that runs the marketing function as a function. It governs documentation of strategy and process, reporting cadence, KPI tracking, vendor and contractor relationships, and the degree to which the marketing function can be operated by someone other than the owner — without loss of quality, judgment, or institutional knowledge. The value driver is Transferable System.

Ask yourself one question: if you stepped out of the business for ninety days, would the marketing function continue to operate at recognizable capacity? Could a buyer review the function from documents alone and understand what it does, why, and how well? In most owner-operated businesses, the answer is no — not because the owner has failed, but because the business was built around the owner's judgment and relationships. The marketing function is in the owner's head. Management is the area that moves it out of the owner's head and into a system someone else can run.

A fractional CMO is a senior marketing executive who works with your business on a part-time, retained basis rather than as a full-time employee. You get executive-level marketing leadership — strategy, team direction, measurement, accountability — at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire. At Strategic Glue, the fractional CMO role is part of a three-part Tier 3 engagement that also includes marketing management and AI-native execution.

An agency runs campaigns and produces tactics. Strategic Glue builds the documented strategy, execution cadence, and measurement infrastructure that makes the marketing function transferable. The difference shows up at the closing table: agency work produces activity, but if that activity lives in the agency's head and stops when the contract ends, it hasn't built value the business can keep, transfer, or sell. Strategic Glue's work is designed to build assets and systems the business owns permanently.

Tier 1 — The Audit. A diagnostic that scores your business across all six areas on both Activity and Documented Strategy Coverage. It identifies where the gaps are, what they're costing you in transferable value, and where the highest-leverage work is. Tier 2 — The Documented Strategy. Takes the audit findings and produces a written strategy for each of the six areas — positioning, ICP, messaging framework, channel strategy, sales process, management system — documented to a standard that survives the owner walking out for ninety days. Tier 3 — The fCMO + AI Retainer. Ongoing fractional CMO leadership plus marketing management plus AI-native execution. The strategy gets operated, measured, and kept current — and because the system runs from documented strategy, transferability is a structural byproduct of how the work gets done, not a project bolted on at the end.

Tier 1 (Audit) is typically a 3-week engagement. Tier 2 (Strategy) is a 30-45 day engagement. Tier 3 (Execution) is an ongoing monthly retainer. Most clients enter through Tier 1 and progress based on what the audit reveals. The real timeline question is how long it takes to close the gap between activity and documented strategy — and that depends on where you start.

It means that a significant share of recurring marketing production — content, reporting, campaign mechanics, enrichment — is executed by a proprietary AI-native system that runs against your documented strategy. The fCMO directs it, marketing management coordinates it, and the system produces. The capability case isn't primarily about speed or volume — it's about transferability. In a traditional marketing function, documentation is the first casualty of a busy team. In an AI-native system, documentation is the operating substrate — the thing without which the system produces nothing. The result is a function that doesn't have to be made transferable as a separate project. It is transferable because of how it runs.