Referrals · Feast · Famine · Hope
The Leveraged
Pipeline
Your pipeline should not run on you.
How founders of IT services and systems integrator firms build a pipeline that keeps working on the weeks they are heads down in delivery. Seven playbooks. Ninety nine steps. One system.
A book by Ian Markram · Loading Growth · Written in public
The method
Seven playbooks. One of them is a gate.
Foundations
Build the infrastructure every campaign depends on. Your ICP, your messaging, your LinkedIn presence, brand, content library, CRM and website. Nothing downstream works until this clears, which is why it is a gate and not a stage.
Foundations is a gate, not a stage. Nothing downstream works until it clears, which is why most firms who start at Awareness end up running campaigns into a business that cannot convert them.
The argument
Founders get two answers about pipeline. Both are wrong.
Outsource it
Hire an agency, buy a list, hope volume does the work. Most founders have tried this once. It is why the word marketing still makes them flinch.
Referrals are enough
Relationships win, we have always grown this way. Comfortable. It also caps the firm at the size of the founder's address book, and it goes quiet exactly when delivery gets busy.
Leveraged
The pipeline runs on a system. Seven playbooks encoded once, then run by a team and a platform instead of by the founder between delivery days. This book is the playbook for answer three.
Written in public
Read it as it is written.
Chapters go up free and ungated as they are finished. No email required.
The Gate
Why Foundations is a gate and not a stage, and why running campaigns before it clears costs more than the campaign budget.
Read it →Reach Them By Hand
Five awareness campaigns, and how to choose between them when your market is small enough to contact personally.
Read it →The Listening Layer
What to do with the people who looked but did not reply, and why almost every firm skips this stage.
Nurturing, Conversion, Onboarding, Growth
The rest of the system, published as each is finished.
Where this sits
Book one covers nine keys. This is the deep dive on one of them.
The Leveraged Consultancy maps the whole firm across the Nine Keys. The Leveraged Pipeline goes down one level into the first, and into the three it touches on the way through.
Written in public
Get each chapter as it lands
Two chapters are up already and free to read. Join the list and the rest arrive as they are finished, with first access at launch. No noise, no spam.
Your email app should open so you can send it. If it does not, write to angelica@theitva.com and Ang will add you.
For IT services and SI founders. Unsubscribe any time.
The system underneath
The book gives you the playbooks. The rest runs them.
The Leveraged Pipeline
Seven playbooks and the order they run in. This book.
The Nine Keys diagnostic
A scored roadmap showing where your firm stalls.
See the diagnostic →ConsultancyOS
Installs the playbooks into your firm and keeps them running.
Join the waitlist →The IT VA
Runs the playbooks for you when you would rather not run them yourself.
See how →Email Ang →
IT Mastermind Talks
Founders running the same playbooks, comparing notes off the record at mastermind dinners and on the podcast.
Apply for a dinner →ITVA Talent
When the constraint is people, not process. ITVA Talent recruits and places developers and business talent, offshore and onshore.
Hire offshore developers →Questions, answered straight
What founders ask
What is The Leveraged Pipeline?
A book by Ian Markram for founders of IT services and systems integrator firms of one to a hundred people. It covers the seven playbooks that take a firm from nobody knowing it exists to clients who refer and expand, and it treats that as one system rather than a list of marketing tactics.
What are the seven playbooks?
Foundations, Awareness, Engagement, Nurturing, Conversion, Onboarding, and Growth. Foundations is a gate that has to clear before any of the other six will work. Ninety nine steps across all seven: 18 in Foundations, 23 in Awareness, 9 in Engagement, 17 in Nurturing, 14 in Conversion, 10 in Onboarding and 8 in Growth.
Why is Foundations a gate rather than a stage?
Stages overlap and run concurrently. A gate is binary: it is either open or closed, and while it is closed nothing downstream means anything. Each of the six campaign playbooks takes a required input from Foundations, so running them before the gate clears produces failures that look like campaign problems but are not.
Can I read some of it now?
Yes. Chapter one and chapter two are free to read in full, no email required. The book is being written in public and chapters go up as they are finished.
How is it different from The Leveraged Consultancy?
Book one is about the whole firm surviving the AI era across the Nine Keys. Book two goes down one level into pipeline. Read book one for the model. Read this one when you have decided pipeline is the key that is holding you back.
Who is it for?
Founders of IT professional services firms and SIs competing against Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG and IBM. Firms that grew on referrals and technical reputation, and have hit the ceiling that comes with both.
Do I have to run this myself?
No. The book is written so a founder can run it in house, and every chapter has a worksheet built for exactly that. If you would rather not, The IT VAITVA Talent runs the same playbooks as a service, and ConsultancyOS keeps them running either way. To talk it through with a person first, email Angelica at angelica@theitva.com.