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. I spent four years as Marketing Director, then seven years as Sales and 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. When too many initiatives are competing for the same limited time and budget.

They don’t need another tactic. They need to know what’s actually constraining growth before they spend more trying to fix it.

That’s what the Growth Constraint Diagnostic investigates: not just positioning, but choice, offer and value, demand, conversion and focus, so the next investment goes to the problem that’s actually there. Positioning remains part of that work. It’s often where the answer lives. It’s no longer where I start by assuming it does. Where the evidence points there, the Category Control System, the method I built for positioning specifically, still underpins that part of the investigation.

I see a future where genuinely better businesses win, not because they shout louder, drop their price or guess at the next fix, but because they understand what’s actually holding them back and act on it.

As founders make better-informed decisions about where to invest, 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 initiative meant to justify it.

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