Erin Flaxman is a Global Growth Advisor who works with agencies, marketing services firms, and nonprofits to strengthen their commercial strategy and improve how they compete for clients and funding.

She is also a member of the Chameleon Collective, which allows her to bring together the right senior expertise when she needs it across branding, marketing, customer experience, commerce, sales, and technology.

Over nearly three decades, she has led growth, marketing, and communications for global media organizations, contributing to more than $3 billion in new revenue across 30 countries. Her experience spans positioning, go-to-market strategy, business development, and many of the industry's largest and most complex competitive pitches.

Today, she advises CEOs and leadership teams on the decisions that shape long-term growth, helping them understand how the market sees their business, where they can credibly win, and how to align their strategy and commercial efforts around that ambition.

1. How do you define the role of growth?

Growth has always been difficult to define because it touches almost every part of a business. Revenue is the outcome everyone measures, but the decisions that influence revenue happen across strategy, marketing, finance, operations, client service, and business development.

Leading growth gave me a different perspective. I could hear what clients were asking for, where leadership wanted to take the business, how competitors were responding, and where those things no longer lined up. That helped me identify issues long before they appeared in the pipeline.

I saw the role as helping leadership make better commercial decisions by connecting information from across the business. When those decisions improve, growth usually follows.

2. How has working across different types of organizations changed the way you think about growth?

I expected agencies, marketing services firms, and nonprofits to face very different growth challenges. The organizations were different, but the patterns were surprisingly familiar.

Businesses evolve. They develop new capabilities, enter new markets, attract different clients, and respond to changing conditions. Everyone inside the organization experiences those changes as they happen.

The market forms an impression over time. When the business changes but its positioning and marketing don't keep pace, a gap begins to emerge between who the organization has become and how it's perceived.

I've found that many growth challenges can be traced back to that gap. It influences how opportunities are evaluated, how easily the business is understood, and whether the right clients see a reason to engage.

My role is to help leadership teams understand that gap and decide whether it's time to close it.

3. What sources of insight do you use to identify how an organization needs to evolve the way it goes to market?

I start by listening.

The CEO, the leadership team, people working closely with clients, current clients, former clients, partners, and anyone else who can help me understand how the business is viewed from different perspectives. Then I compare those conversations with what I see in the market through competitors, websites, thought leadership, AI search results, pitch materials, and publicly available information.

What interests me is consistency. If the same themes keep appearing from different sources, I pay attention. They usually tell me more than any single interview or report.

The answers are scattered across dozens of conversations and observations that no one has connected yet.

4. What areas of growth are most frequently overlooked?

I think organizations underestimate the value of asking a few more questions before everyone gets to work.

When an important opportunity appears, or the pipeline starts to slow, the instinct is to move quickly. Teams begin writing proposals, building decks, redesigning websites, or generating more leads. Those activities are important, but they don't always address the reason growth has become more difficult.

I like to spend time understanding what has changed. Has the market shifted? Has the business evolved? Are we pursuing the right opportunities? Are we communicating the value of the business in a way the market understands?

The answers to those questions influence almost everything that follows.

5. What can organizations learn from the opportunities they win and lose?

Quite a lot, provided they're willing to look beyond the outcome.

Win-loss discussions tend to focus on the explanation everyone feels most comfortable with. Pricing, chemistry, procurement, timing, incumbency. Those factors all matter, but they rarely tell the whole story.

I prefer to look back through the opportunity from beginning to end. Which questions kept coming up? Which assumptions turned out to be wrong? Which concerns appeared early and never received enough attention?

Every opportunity leaves behind useful evidence. The organizations that improve consistently are the ones that take the time to examine it before moving on to the next pitch.

6. What have you learned about leading growth that you wish you had understood earlier?

I wish I had become comfortable asking more questions about the brief.

Like many people leading growth, I enjoyed moving quickly. A brief arrived, the team came together, and the work began.

Experience taught me that the quality of the early conversations has an enormous influence on everything that follows. The discussions that challenge assumptions, test the brief, or question whether the organization is solving the right problem can change the direction of an entire opportunity.

Those conversations aren't always easy, particularly when deadlines are tight and everyone is eager to get moving. Looking back, they've consistently been the conversations worth having.