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Workforce intelligence · Embedded GTM · 2025–2026

Sixteen months embedded inside a workforce intelligence startup

Arch helps large employers turn messy workforce data into answers executives can act on. I worked as an embedded partner to the founding team across client strategy, product marketing, service design, and GTM enablement, and served as client engagement lead on both of the enterprise accounts that carried the company's revenue.

Client · Arch
Role · Founding GTM & client engagement lead (consulting)
Scope · Positioning, GTM engine, enterprise delivery, product strategy
$6M+in documented client value delivered in a single quarter
$30K → $600Kdesign-partner agreement grown into a production expansion case and signed multi-stage SOW
growth in weekly active users during the merit cycle, from 3–4 to 13–16
$537Kin delivery cost cut: taxonomy build from 4 analysts and 6 months to 1 admin and 6 weeks, merit-cycle effort from 1,600 to 400 hours

The situation

Workforce analytics is a category owned by incumbents whose answer to every question is another dashboard. Arch's bet is different: an ontology of workforce data with AI as the interface, giving executives answers instead of more data to interpret. As an early-stage company, Arch needed everything at once: positioning that made the difference legible, a repeatable GTM engine, and enterprise delivery strong enough to prove the value proposition on the two accounts funding the company.

Enterprise clients

  • Served as client engagement lead on both enterprise accounts: named owner of data intake, weekly executive communication, kickoff logistics, and escalation, including a 16-month continuous tenure on the anchor account, the longest of anyone at Arch.
  • Grew the anchor account, a NYSE-listed restaurant technology company, from a $30K design-partner agreement into a signed multi-stage production SOW scoped to identify $5M+ a year in operating income, authoring the $600K expansion case that converted it.
  • Owned delivery of a merit cycle that produced $6M+ in documented value in one quarter: 93 promotions processed alongside a concurrent restructure, roughly 97 sales-commission plans folded into total target compensation, and an equity coverage gap identified across 155 managers with cost-to-close modeled.
  • Delivered the account's job architecture in a 4-week window: 4 career streams, 23 levels, 14 net-new global pay grades, and roughly 120 sub-functions benchmarked across 11 countries. The client ran its merit cycle through Arch instead of its incumbent HR platform because the data was more complete.
  • Landed the second enterprise account, a multi-billion-dollar energy carve-out, on a three-phase SOW: a free 30-day audit, a $150K pilot, then a recurring annual fee set at 20–35% of quantified savings. Authored its value model, quantifying $4.5–10.5M in three-year savings with explicit confidence ratings and a deliberate haircut applied to its own largest lever.

Positioning & product marketing

  • Authored the Client Acquisition Strategy Brief, the company's core positioning system: per-persona positioning for CFO, CHRO, CEO, and Chief Digital Officer, a 10-dimension offer scorecard with a launch gate, ICP routing cards, and a 3-stage sales architecture.
  • Built the platform-vision narrative and company one-pager, including the durable articulation "the ontology is the asset, the AI is the interface" and an amplification-not-substitution point of view that separated Arch from headcount-reduction AI.
  • Ran the company's "why now" messaging test, cost-reduction framing against output-velocity framing, tracking which language prospects echoed back in their own words.

GTM engine

  • Wrote the Design Partner Strategy & Outbound Charter: a sharp ICP, a joint CFO-plus-CHRO buying motion, founding-partner pricing of $200K–$600K against a $1M list price, a capped 10-partner cohort, paired 5-touch executive sequences, and an objection-handling framework.
  • Built the GTM operating model that kept the funnel math visible, 10 clients at a 10% win rate means 100 opportunities and 200–250 executive conversations, with a weekly cadence, a Friday learning loop, and a monthly discipline of keeping the top 3 winning messages and killing everything else.
  • Designed vertical campaigns end to end: a Texas CFO energy campaign with a 6-touch sequence and go/revise/pause thresholds committed before launch, and a 105-institution banking target list tiered to live M&A integration budgets.

Product strategy & company building

  • Turned four bespoke enterprise audits into a productized roadmap: 7 recurring use-case patterns scored on frequency, dollar impact, data availability, and build complexity against a $27M–$53M identified value envelope, governed by the principle "a use-case taxonomy, not a client list."
  • Produced the competitive analysis spanning 20+ competitors across 5 tiers with battle cards and a CFO-versus-CHRO entry-point matrix, and led an acquisition analysis to a structured pass recommendation.
  • Stood up the operating stack from scratch: Notion project systems, CRM migration, the company OKR process, a recurring competitor teardown series, and a 30-day onboarding program for the company's first marketing hire.

The result

Arch's two enterprise accounts carried the company through the period, and both deepened: the anchor account converted from design partner to production SOW, and the second signed a savings-based recurring structure. Behind them sat a positioning system, a GTM engine, and a productization roadmap the team still runs on. The founder's assessment of the positioning work: "a fantastic framework."