These are the things people most often want to know about how we work, who we work with, and what makes us different. If something isn’t covered here, just ask.
What makes RESOLVE different from a regular marketing agency?
Most agencies are built to execute. They’re good at running campaigns, building websites, and producing content – but they start from what you ask for, not from a diagnosis of what you actually need. The result is often activity without direction.
We’re built differently. Everyone at RESOLVE has worked client-side in senior marketing roles before joining an agency. Our founder spent over ten years as Marketing Director at engineering and manufacturing companies. So when we sit down with you, we’re not asking what you want us to do – we’re trying to understand your business well enough to tell you what you should do. Then we deliver it.
That’s what we mean when we say we diagnose like a consultancy and deliver like an agency. It’s not a tagline. It’s how we actually work.
Are you consultants or an agency?
Both, and that’s deliberate.
Pure consultancies are good at diagnosis. They’ll tell you what’s wrong and what to do about it – then hand you a report and leave. Pure agencies are good at execution. They’ll produce work to a brief – but the brief has to come from somewhere, and if it’s wrong, the work is wrong.
We combine both. We do the strategic thinking ourselves, and we do the delivery ourselves. One team, one relationship, one version of the truth. There’s no hand-off between a strategy team and an execution team, and no moment where the people who understood your business stop being involved.
Who do you typically work with?
Established B2B businesses, usually turning over between £10m and £150m, where marketing needs to catch up with the ambition of the business. Typically in engineering, manufacturing, construction, life sciences, or healthcare – sectors where what you sell is complex, where buyers are technical, and where the sales cycle is long.
We also work with businesses going through transitions: new ownership, market repositioning, preparing for exit, or integrating an acquisition.
We selectively work with innovative startups we believe in, usually on an equity or revenue-share basis.
Do you only work with engineering and manufacturing companies?
No. Our background is in technical B2B. We understand long sales cycles, sceptical technical buyers, and products that can’t be explained in a sentence. We’ve launched industrial IoT sensors, IT storage hardware, repositioned century-old engineering brands, and built marketing capability from scratch inside manufacturing businesses.
We also work in life sciences and healthcare – where regulatory requirements, clinical communication, and credibility with sophisticated buyers demand a different kind of thinking.
And we work on M&A transactions, helping businesses on both the buy and sell side manage the marketing dimension of a deal.
If you’re in a sector where complexity is a feature, not a problem, it would be a good fit.
What’s the Plug-in Marketing Director service?
A lot of businesses we work with don’t have – and don’t need – a full-time Marketing Director. But they do need senior marketing leadership: someone to set direction, challenge assumptions, make strategic decisions, and ensure execution is aligned with the business.
The Plug-in MD service gives you that without the full-time headcount. You get a senior marketer with genuine Board-level experience, working as part of your team on a part-time basis. They’re embedded in your business, attending your meetings, and accountable for your results.
The difference from other fractional MD services is that you also have RESOLVE’s full execution capability behind them. Strategy and delivery in one place, without having to manage multiple separate relationships.
Can you work alongside our existing marketing team?
Yes, and it’s one of the most common ways we work.
Some businesses have good marketing people who need senior strategic oversight or a specific capability they don’t have in-house – creative, design, technical copywriting, bid management, systems integration, campaign strategy. We plug in where we’re needed and work alongside your team rather than replacing it.
Others have existing agency relationships, and we work collaboratively with them.
The key is being clear upfront about who owns what and how we fit together. We’re not interested in building dependency – we’d rather build your team’s capability alongside delivering results.
How do you charge?
It depends on how we’re working together.
For most ongoing relationships, we work on a monthly retainer – defined scope, clear deliverables, regular reviews. For project-based work (a repositioning, a campaign, a systems build), we agree a fixed fee against an agreed scope. For the Plug-in MD service, we structure it around the time commitment and responsibility level involved.
What we don’t do: bill by the hour for things that should take ten minutes, pad scope to keep people busy, or sign you to a long contract and then deprioritise you while we win new business. We work on retainers – but you can leave if we stop earning them.
We’re not the cheapest option, nor the most expensive. What you’re paying for is senior people, genuine sector knowledge, and accountability for results – not a team of account managers and a polished credentials deck. If budget is the primary driver, we’re probably not the right fit.
What’s the minimum commitment?
We don’t have a fixed minimum, but very short engagements rarely work well for either party.
Getting to grips with a business – its markets, its customers, its constraints, its history – takes time. A two-week project won’t get us to the level of understanding that produces useful work. In practice, most of our relationships run for at least six months, and many have been going for years.
That said, if you have a specific, well-defined problem – a proposal you need help with, a positioning session, a campaign audit – we’ll tell you honestly whether a shorter engagement makes sense.
We‘ve had bad experiences with agencies before. What’s different?
We hear this a lot.
The most common complaints we hear: the senior people pitched the work then juniors delivered it; the agency kept producing activity without asking whether it was working; the strategy and the execution were handled by different people who didn’t talk.
None of those things happen here – not because we say so, but because of how we’re structured. We’re small, deliberately. Senior people do the work. We start with understanding your business before we recommend anything. We’re not producing activity to justify a budget. We’re accountable for outcomes.
The best way to test that is to talk to our clients. We’re happy to make introductions.
What does a typical engagement look like at the start?
We start with understanding, not activity.
Before we recommend anything, we want to get under the skin of your business: your markets, your customers, your sales process, your competitors, your constraints, your team. That usually means a structured discovery session – a proper conversation, not a credentials pitch – followed by a clear recommendation on where to start and why.
From there, most engagements move into a defined first phase with clear objectives, so both sides know what we’re working towards and how we’ll know if it’s working.
We don’t start by designing a website or running ads. We start by understanding whether that’s what you actually need.
Do you do one-off projects or only long-term relationships?
Both, depending on what the work requires.
Some things are naturally project-shaped: a positioning exercise, a bid, a campaign build, a specific piece of collateral. We’ll take those on if the brief is clear and the fit is right.
But the work we do best – and the work that delivers the most value – tends to be in longer relationships where we have enough context to make genuinely good decisions. The longer we work with a business, the more useful we become.
What’s your M&A marketing service?
It’s one of the things that genuinely sets us apart, because almost no one else does it.
On the sell side, we work with business owners preparing a company for sale – getting the brand, the marketing infrastructure, and the company narrative in the best possible shape before it goes to market. Buyers price in perceived risk. Marketing that’s professional, coherent, and demonstrably working reduces that risk and supports a stronger valuation.
On the buy side, we work with acquirers and private equity firms on the marketing dimension of a deal: due diligence on target companies’ marketing capability and brand equity, integration planning, and the communications work that follows a transaction.
It’s a niche, but it’s one where marketing expertise and commercial understanding matter in equal measure – and where most agencies either don’t go or don’t have the credibility to operate.
How do you handle AI and technology?
We use it, we build with it, and we’re honest about what it can and can’t do.
AI is part of how we work – for research, for content drafting, for analysis, for automating repetitive tasks. We’ve also built custom AI tools for clients: a competitor intelligence tracker, a document generation system, a case study database with AI tagging. When a business has a specific problem that software can help solve, we can design and build the solution.
What we don’t do is treat AI as a shortcut that replaces thinking. The strategic judgement, the sector knowledge, the understanding of your business – that’s still human, and it has to be. AI makes us faster and more consistent; it doesn’t replace the thing that makes the work good.
Do you work with businesses outside the UK?
Most of our clients operate internationally, and so do we. We’re based in the UK, but the businesses we work with typically have multiple offices, international markets, or global customer bases. That’s the nature of the sectors we work in. Where face-to-face matters – for workshops, strategy sessions, or key moments in a project – we’ll be there.
RESOLVE is a commercial transformation partner built for businesses that make things and solve complex problems.
Experienced. Straight-talking. Accountable. We combine the strategic thinking of a consultancy with the delivery capability of an agency – and we’ve worked in the industries we serve, so we understand them from the inside.
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![[01] Strategy & Positioning](https://resolveagency.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Menu-card-1.strategypositioning2.webp)
![[02] Comms & Campaigns](https://resolveagency.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Menu-card-2.CommsCampaigns2.webp)
![[03] Collateral & Toolkits](https://resolveagency.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Menu-card-3.CollateralToolkits1.webp)
![[04] Bids & Tenders](https://resolveagency.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Menu-card-4.BidsTenders.webp)
![[05] Marketing Operations](https://resolveagency.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Menu-card-5.Marketing-Operations_.webp)
![[06] Systems](https://resolveagency.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Menu-card-6.Systems.webp)
