I built this method inside
a real business.
Then I watched it work.

The concept for Dairylea Dunkers was created on my father’s boat. At the time I didn’t understand category creation or commercial leverage, but I understood something important very early: ideas can become products, products can become brands and brands can become assets that shape markets.

I travelled as an unaccompanied minor to visit my father while he built businesses internationally. I watched companies built, scaled, sold and stretched by growth. I saw success up close and the responsibility that comes with it.

I saw brilliant ideas fail because nobody understood them. I saw average offers outperform better ones, simply because they were easier to buy.

Years later, I saw that same pattern up close in my own career, as Marketing Director inside a growing business. Revenue was increasing, new customers were arriving and on paper everything looked right. But scale has a way of revealing what early growth can hide. As competition increased, customer acquisition got heavier, margins tightened and every sale required more explanation.

The issue wasn’t effort. It was clarity. The business had real value and the market simply wasn’t recognising it fast enough.

That distinction became undeniable at a demo in Wholefoods Market, standing behind a table identical in every way that mattered to the ones either side of it. A buyer could have swapped any of us for any other and lost nothing. So I fixed it, not with a rebrand, but with a repositioning: a deliberate change in what we asked buyers to compare us on. The shift was immediate. That repositioning is what won us a Selfridges concession.

Most businesses don’t have a marketing problem. They have a clarity problem.

I created Anna Elliot for founders and scale-stage businesses who know they have something valuable, but know growth is becoming harder than it should be. They come to me when marketing feels busy but underwhelming, when sales rely too heavily on explanation, when competitors feel interchangeable or when the business has outgrown its original message.

They don’t need more tactics. They need a stronger position.

Through the Category Control System: Diagnose, Expose, Eliminate, Define, Sharpen, Prove, I give founders and leadership teams the clarity, the method and the proof to be chosen without competing on price, so there’s more time doing the work that made them good in the first place.

I see a future where genuinely better businesses win, not because they shout louder or drop their price, but because their position makes the difference impossible to miss.

As founders build businesses that are chosen on merit rather than margin, they’re able to grow in a way that compounds: better clients, better margins, more capacity to reinvest in the work itself rather than the next campaign to justify it.

Proud partner and advocate for B1G1 and a believer in business as a force for good.