CASE STUDY

From zero clients to $1.5M: built an APAC business from scratch

SITUATION:

  • The APAC operation effectively started from zero: no established client base, no qualified pipeline, and no proven commercial model to inherit. The challenge was compounded by not having any brand recognition and the varied portfolio of service offerings of the Cross Marketing group. Different language (Japanese clients), expectations, competitive intensity and commercial norms varied significantly across markets.

  • Rather than assuming a global playbook would translate directly, I treated the market as a series of hypotheses to test. The immediate objective was to identify the quickest wins, build brand recognition along the way and use that knowledge + success cases to commercialise offerings by defining a combination of proposition, pricing and delivery model that could create a credible wedge into the market.

COMMERCIAL HYPOTHESIS

  • My hypothesis was that growth would not come from trying to cover APAC broadly. We needed to concentrate on a small number of customer problems and buyer segments where our capabilities could be differentiated, then use early wins to sharpen the proposition and create repeatability.

  • That meant treating commercial execution as a learning system: every conversation, loss and win had to improve our understanding of the buyer, proposition, pricing and route to market. Instead of separating strategy from sales, the market itself became the feedback loop for building the strategy.

WHAT I DID:

  • I owned the commercial motion end to end - 1st half of the day was spent running cold outbound (emails + cold calls) referencing a traffic-lighted excel; 2nd half and well into the night was spent writing proposals, running analysis and strategy decks. Overall, my day included some combination of ICP and account prioritisation, building target lists, running outbound, leading discovery and proposals, negotiating opportunities and remaining close to delivery so customer feedback fed directly back into the proposition.

  • We operated lean, without the benefit of dedicated commercial infrastructure. That forced discipline around where we spent time and made iteration essential. As patterns emerged, I narrowed our focus around the segments and problems showing the strongest response, refined the proposition around what buyers actually valued, and converted those learnings into a more repeatable regional motion.

RESULT:

The business grew from zero revenue to $1.5M by year three, compounding at roughly 1.5× year-on-year. More importantly, we moved from an unproven regional presence to a functioning commercial operation with repeat customers, a clearer market proposition and an established base for further expansion.

The experience shaped how I think about zero-to-one GTM today: early-stage growth is rarely about executing a finished strategy. It is about creating a tight loop between market evidence, commercial judgement and action, and learning faster than the market changes.