For solopreneurs and business owners

A weekly note on getting your business to run without you.

Written for solopreneurs and business owners who are ready to stop the chaos and grow past their blockers. I'm Jon Grogan, a fractional CMO and COO, and every week I send one decision from inside the businesses I work with, the process behind it, and the number it moved.

Written from inside these businesses

The operating seat · Sample note Saturday, 7:00 AM

Field notes

We stopped letting the owner approve every quote. Close rate went up.

For three years every estimate over $2,000 waited on one person's phone. The team called it "the Tuesday pile." We wrote a two-page pricing playbook, set a ceiling the dispatcher could approve alone, and moved the owner to a weekly review instead of a daily gate.

Quotes went out in hours instead of days. Here's the playbook, the ceiling we picked, and what it did to the number.

Quote turnaround 3 days → 4^hrs

Quotes out the door, week by week

Jon Grogan — Fractional CMO + COORead the full note in your inbox →

01 — What I dojongrogan.co

What I do

Three areas, one driven intrapreneurial role.

Marketing leadership, operational growth, and a seat next to the founder. The notes come from doing all three.

01 · Marketing leadership

Market share and growth marketing.

Positioning, brand, website, and the demand behind it, run by someone who owns the number.

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Brand · Positioning · Demand

02 · Operational and foundational growth

Operations that hold when you grow.

Every process written down, the structure to run it, and the numbers that prove it's working.

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Process · Structure · Systems

03 · C-suite support

A seat at the table, not a vendor on a call.

Daily decisions, hiring and firing, org structure, and the hard conversations, alongside the founder.

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Decisions · Hiring · Structurejongrogan.co

Senior operating help, without the full-time salary.

02 — Free resourcesThe tools I hand clients first

Free resources

Two things I give every client before we start.

Drop your email and they're yours. You'll get the weekly note too.

All resources →

Free download

Know Your Numbers

Workbook · 28 pages

The unit economics behind a marketing budget. Seven worksheets to work out your lifetime value, your real cost to acquire a customer, and the ratio between them before you spend another dollar.

Lifetime value, with gross margin applied
Fully-allocated acquisition cost, not just ad spend
The LTV to CAC ratio that tells you whether to scale

Free download

Brand DNA Worksheet

Worksheet · 1 page

The positioning questions I ask before anyone designs anything. Twelve brand dimensions, your core attributes, and one clear sentence at the end. Usually the hardest page a leadership team fills out all quarter.

Who you serve and who you do not
The one thing you want to be known for
What a buyer believes before they call you

03 — ResultsOperator, not observer

By the numbers

Real stories with exceptional growth.

The owners were doing too much. Here's what we changed and what the numbers did.

01 / 04

A large construction group

Manufacturing and construction · Oklahoma · marketing leader, 2024 to early 2026

47 → 333

Page-one keywords in seventeen months

Top-three rankings 20 → 63 over the same stretch · Semrush, US

A construction group with forty-five years of history and a marketing budget still tied to traditional channels. I served as their marketing leader through a digital transformation: the technology around marketing, a new website built around quote requests, and a brand that carried four and a half decades of trust online without losing it.

By the time I handed it off, the company sat on page one for more than three hundred searches in its market, sixty-three of them in the top three. In local construction search, that is what dominance looks like.

Dominant

333 page-one keywords, 63 in the top three

Rebuilt

Brand and website, forty-five years of trust moved online

Modernized

The technology around marketing, end to end

Marketing leadershipDigital transformationWebsiteBrand

04 — Recent notesThe list reads it first

Recent notes

Read a few before you decide.

The archive →

03 Your Marketing Isn’t Underperforming. Your Business Is. Jul 15, 2026· 11 min read I’ve watched too many owners fire agencies for problems that weren’t the agency’s fault. I get some version of the same call almost every month. A business owner reaches out. Read → 02 Sometimes Your Agency Doesn’t Want You to Fully “Win”… Jul 7, 2026· 8 min read I have run agency SEO programs for years before I finally admitted the pattern out loud from my constituents. I get some version of the same call every couple weeks. A business owner. Read → 01 AI Didn’t Kill SEO. It Killed Bad SEO. Jul 1, 2026· 7 min read Everyone keeps asking me if it’s over. I’m sitting here watching it work better than ever. A guy I’ve known for a few years called me recently trying to figure out his next step in business. Read →

05 — Who writes thisTulsa, OK

Jon with his wife and daughter at a Tulsa Drillers game — Drillers game · Tulsa, OKSummer 2026

Who writes this

Husband. Dad. Tulsa through and through.

I started Animus Digital in 2015 and spent the next decade inside hundreds of small and mid-sized businesses, close enough to see what was really going on. The product was usually fine. The owner was buried. The message was muddy because nobody had time to make it clear.

That's the work I care about now. I come in as a fractional CMO and COO at the same time, sit next to the owner rather than above them, and measure myself on one thing: did the founder get their business back, and is it bigger than when I showed up. I'm relationship driven to a fault and I get more passionate about a client's business than is probably reasonable.

Off the clock I'm a husband and a dad, and our little family is usually out doing something around Tulsa and cheering for this town as it grows.

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. The line I build businesses around

Right nowWhere I'm working today

AYS RentalsOperations and growth · portable restroom and site services, Oklahoma ↗

Kingsway CharitiesSystems and operations · donated medical supplies to clinics that need them ↗

Animus DigitalFounder since 2015 · the team I bring in for the full build ↗

06 — Hire meFractional CMO + COO

Need more than a newsletter?

Hire the operating seat.

A fractional CMO and COO in one chair, usually for a year or two, with one goal: a business that runs well enough that it no longer needs me.

What you getRoleWhen

Every process in the business, mapped and writtenOperationsWeeks 1–4

Brand and positioning rebuilt around the customerMarketingWeeks 3–8

Org structure, hiring, and the hard conversationsPeopleOngoing

Daily decisions and C-suite reliefOperating seatWeekly

Playbooks and staff guidance so a manager can run a daySystemsOngoing

Hand it back and leaveExitLast

A good fit usually looks like

B2B service company with a team, not a solo operator
Ready to stop the chaos and grow past whatever is blocking the next stage
Real revenue, but growth has stalled or outrun the operation

07 — Join the listFree · No spam · Leave anytime

One note. Every week.

Get your business back, one note at a time.

Free. No spam. Leave anytime. Written for solopreneurs and business owners ready to stop the chaos and grow past their blockers.