People often asked me “What do you do?” and I used to say “marketing” or “startups” or “I work in tech.” Now, I tell them that I started a growth consulting company called Winston Francois.
That, in turn, leads to more questions:
“Who is Winston Francois?”
“What is growth consulting?”
So here’s the story.
In 2015, I met a woman named Alyssa. She had a one year old French Bulldog namedFrank. Turns out his formal name was Francois and he was the coolest dog I’d ever met. I fell in love with the woman and the dog.
At the time, I was working on Heal, a startup that provided doctor house calls. I helped start the company and was responsible for growth, marketing and just about anything else that needed to get done. My experience had led me there after a long tenure at Google and a brief detour into television marketing at Comedy Central.
Love is funny and I quickly moved in with Alyssa and Francois (Frank). Shortly thereafter, we grew our family with another adorable baby Frenchie named Winston.
Fast forward to the fall of 2019. In the past few years, I led teams at two more startups – Soothe, as Chief Marketing Officer, and Headspace, where I led growth and marketing.
Alyssa is pregnant with our first child, a girl. She tells me it’s time to hang up the startup superhero cape and get ready to be a super-dad. I leave Headspace and find my way to a big company where I have the opportunity to be a 9-5’er. But I miss growing startups.
That same fall of 2019, I incorporated a little limited liability company in California called Winston Francois, affectionately named after our two buddies, Winston and Frank.
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Over the course of the next 4 years, I advised and consulted with interesting founders, executives and investors building businesses that were disrupting verticals like healthcare, finance, and travel. These companies are on the way to becoming household names, category leaders and true world-changers. I’ve been lucky to help them grow.
In 2022, I left my big corporate job to give Winston Francois my full-time attention. It’s the best job I’ve ever had because of the amazing people I get to work with every day – from the founders to the consultants who help them. We share a common goal: discover and build pathways to sustainable growth. Our gift to the companies we work with is that they learn how to grow without our help.
The growth consulting that we practice at Winston Francois spans many functional areas including strategy deployment, product marketing, performance marketing, and lifecycle marketing – with more services continuously added as we expand our team and their capabilities.
Our greatest strength is our team. They are a collection of domain experts across all of these disciplines. They are quite literally the best people I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. When they partner with a company, they quickly work to understand the challenges and opportunities that the business faces and identify how their efforts can be best used to further the company’s objectives.
At Winston Francois, we have a simple thesis: we provide consulting services to help our client partners develop a strategy. Then, we offer the expert resources to help execute that strategy and provide ongoing support for the internal teams to sustainably grow the business beyond our engagement.
That is what we call growth consulting.
We’re Winston Francois.
Let’s fucking grow.
