How we met.

Y ears before Ben Schneider became my flagship Fractional CMO partner, he installed sod at my house.

I watch tradesmen carefully. The way someone treats a stranger’s lawn before there’s a contract, the way they answer a question they didn’t have to answer, the way they leave a worksite at the end of the day. Those are the signals I look for. With Ben, every signal pointed the same direction. He cared more than the job required, and he treated my customer relationship the way I want to treat mine.

I run a consultancy, not an agency, and one privilege of that distinction is choosing my partnerships on those kinds of signals. I look for founders who serve their customers excellently. Ben did. I filed it away. So when, late in 2020, he called me about his marketing, I was already inclined to listen.

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I watch tradesmen carefully. With Ben, every signal pointed the same direction.

The local search era.

Ben opened the first call the way most founders do. He wanted to grow. He’d been running Google Ads with a prior agency, and revenue had doubled, $150K in 2019 to $300K in 2020. He’d sold 87 jobs at a $3,450 average. He believed about half his business came from Google Ads, though he admitted he couldn’t prove it.

I asked the questions. The first mattered most: when he said half his business came from ads, did he mean revenue, or simply his biggest source of leads? Those are different claims. He answered honestly. He could feel the number was real, but he couldn’t prove it. He’d been paying for tactics without owning the strategy.

Here was his challenge. Ads can accelerate a business, but they cannot anchor one. The visibility that compounds comes from being the business search engines understand and trust, the one they return for a given question, month after month, with no media spend behind it. Ben had a faucet, not a well. So I sent a proposal that did two things at once: a Local Search Strategy Project to build the foundation, and a Google Ads campaign on top of it to drive demand while the foundation took hold. Strategy first, spend after. He said yes.

What followed was three years of compounding. Positioning. Brand identity. A new website. A content strategy. Local pages. Google Business Profile management. Year over year, the answer to “who installs sod in Wake County” became, in Google’s eyes, Peak Sodding. By 2023, Peak was at $876K, almost three times where we started. The local market was no longer one Peak competed in. It was one Peak had won.

When the work matured.

By early 2024, the work in front of Peak was a different kind of work. The strategy was built, the playbook existed, the market position was secured. What remained was consistency: capture the photos from the install crews, the customer stories, the content that fed the engine. Tactical work, the kind an in-house marketing lead would do well, so I recommended it. Ben leaned toward an agency and pursued it instead. I stayed close. Peak kept growing. 2024 finished at $1.33 million.

A million in revenue was a milestone, and a door opening. A business at $300K can’t responsibly afford a Fractional CMO. A business at $1.33 million can. My work meets a business only when both sides are sized right for it. Peak had finally grown into the room. What I didn’t fully grasp, in early 2025 right before Google launched AI Mode, was that the room itself was about to change shape.

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My work meets a business only when both sides are sized right for it.

When search changed.

I’d been watching the AI transition with intent, and every signal pointed the same way. ChatGPT was answering more commercial-intent questions every quarter. Google was rolling out AI Overviews. Perplexity was eating the top of the funnel. The search results page, the thing every small business had spent a decade optimizing for, was being replaced on more and more queries by a single AI-generated answer.

The positioning discipline that won traditional local search in 2020 was the same one that would win AI answer engines in 2026. Topical authority. Schema clarity. The pages that get cited. The brand that gets named. Same play, new field. In June 2025, Ben asked me to run a mid-year audit on Peak.

The audit told the story I expected. Peak was still winning traditional local search, but the ground had started to shift, and faster on commercial-intent queries than informational ones. Some of the answer engines that would soon recommend a sod installer to a Raleigh homeowner had no idea Peak Sodding existed. The old rankings were holding. The new rankings were a coin flip. A few weeks later, I sent Ben a deck, built page by page for what the shift meant for his business.

The Fractional CMO chapter.

The deck was titled Search Isn’t Search Anymore. It made the case for AEO as the next chapter of the work I’d been doing with Ben since 2020. He read the whole thing in one sitting, and said he wanted to be the authority in that space.

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I’d very much like to become that type of authority in the space.

His response was the inflection of a five-year relationship. We weren’t talking about Google Ads anymore, or local pages. We were talking about what kind of brand Peak Sodding wanted to be in a market where the customer’s first question wouldn’t be typed into a search bar at all. Within weeks I’d proposed three Fractional CMO structures. Within two weeks of that, Ben signed.

The strategic work that was wrong in 2024 was right in 2025. Not because Peak had changed, and not because I had, but because the market underneath both of us had. The discipline we used to build a local search foundation in 2020 was the discipline to run early to answer engines now. And Peak had grown into the operational size where a strategic marketing partner could pay for herself many times over.

The proof.

Phase one of Peak’s growth was a story about being early to local search. The numbers are the proof.

Almost an eight-fold expansion in five years, built on a positioning discipline that didn’t change as the surface of search did.

Phase two is a story about being early, about a market shift that newly aligned the work I do with the work Peak needs. And the only reason I get to write that story is that the trust we built in phase one made it possible. Five years of compounding produced the kind of relationship where a Fractional CMO conversation is a question of ambition, not vendor selection.

When founders ask what makes Peak my flagship case, this is the answer. Not the numbers, though the numbers are real. It’s the willingness, on both sides, to let the shape of the work change when the shape of the business changed. And the readiness, when AI rewrote the search results page, to recognize that the same play we’d run in 2020 was the right play for 2026, just on a new field.