A Note from the Founder: What a Year of Building Heat Has Taught Me
- Aug 10
- 5 min read
By Samantha Baker, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Heat Strategic
With more than a year of Heat Strategic in the books, I’ve learned a lot.
Starting a business is hard. Starting a self-funded business is even harder. But there’s something underneath it all that keeps the flame going. No pun intended. :)
Candidly, I never imagined entrepreneurship for myself. Throughout my career, people would ask me, “What’s the dream? Where do you ultimately want to end up?”
I never had a good answer.
Usually, it was some version of: I don’t know. I don’t really see a ceiling. I just want to keep figuring out how to make things better — and how to be better.
Looking back, I think that answer was telling me something long before I was ready to listen. Some people might call it an entrepreneurial spirit. I’ve always seen opportunities to fix things, but I’ve never necessarily been the person who wanted to invent a product to solve every problem.
What I love is figuring out why something isn’t working — and building the strategy and plan that makes it work.
My heart has always lived somewhere between creativity, strategy and human behavior. I love creating something unique, but it also needs to make an impact. I want to understand the people on the other side of the campaign: what they care about, what they notice, what they ignore and, ultimately, what makes them act.
One of my favorite areas of study in college was ethnography — the study of people, cultures and behaviors through observation and lived experience. It became the focus of my graduation project, but in hindsight, it was also incredibly good training for becoming a marketer.
Growing up, I couldn’t get enough of biographies and documentaries. I wanted to understand how successful people got where they were. What decisions did they make? What happened before the part everyone else saw? What made them tick?
I wanted to understand people well enough to anticipate what they might do next. Admittedly, there’s probably a little anxiety mixed into that curiosity. But I’ve learned to put that energy to work.
In marketing, thinking three steps ahead can be a competitive advantage. You’re anticipating the objection before it happens, building the next touchpoint before someone asks for it and thinking beyond the campaign launch to what actually moves someone through the funnel.
That’s where we thrive.
Founder POV: Why Heat Had to Happen
After more than 16 years in the corporate world, I had the opportunity to build marketing teams from the ground up, repair strategies that weren’t working, lead rebrands, launch products and create demand across organizations ranging from large enterprises to early-stage startups.
I also developed a bit of a reputation for “be-bopping” from one opportunity to the next every year or so. It wasn’t because I wasn’t loyal. I kept reaching a point where I wasn’t challenged anymore. I wanted another problem to solve. Another business to understand. Another strategy to build. Another opportunity to make something better.
Eventually, I had to admit something to myself: owning a business was probably the right path for me precisely because it terrified me.
There would always be another challenge. I was right about that.
The Biggest Lesson? Trust Wins.
During this first chapter of Heat, one lesson has risen above almost everything else: Trust is the ultimate win.
Throughout my career, I’ve built that trust through honesty, loyalty, accountability and grit. Heat was intentionally built around those same principles.
The people who work within Heat are, in many cases, people I’ve worked alongside before. I know how they operate. I know the quality of their work. I know they’ll tell the truth when something isn’t working. And I know they genuinely care about the businesses we’re trusted to support.
That matters to me.
Because somewhere along the way, the "marketing agency" model became very good at selling deliverables. We wanted to build something different.
Then Came the Hard Part: Positioning Ourselves
As a marketer building a marketing company, I probably made this harder on myself than anyone else could have. Heat’s positioning kept me up at night.
Was what we were building truly needed?
Could I explain it simply enough?
Was our ideal customer specific enough?
Could someone immediately understand why they would choose Heat instead of hiring internally, engaging a fractional leader or working with a traditional agency?
I tested the messaging. Changed it. Changed it again. Watched the numbers. Talked to clients. Looked at what converted. Paid attention to who renewed. Refined our ICP. Refined the value proposition. Then did it all over again.
Because that is marketing.
You don't declare your positioning finished because everyone likes the tagline in the meeting. The market tells you when you've gotten it right. And lately, the market has been telling us something.
The Numbers Started Validating the Strategy
As we build Heat's own growth engine, I’ve stayed incredibly close to the metrics.
Our monthly newsletter, The Heat Index, consistently generates an open rate above 51%. That isn't because we found a magical subject-line formula. It's because we're focused on the right ICP, delivering information that actually matters to them and showing up consistently.
Our multichannel outbound campaign is generating a 34% acceptance rate and putting Heat in front of more than 2,000 targeted prospects each month. Again, there’s no secret trick. It’s audience. Message. Timing. Relevance. Consistency. Measurement. Refinement.
The same fundamentals we preach to our clients.
But the metric that meant the most to me recently wasn't sitting in a dashboard. It happened on a client kickoff call. The decision-maker told us they had interviewed several marketing agencies before choosing Heat.
Then they explained why they chose us: We were different.
They didn't see Heat as another agency that would sit outside the organization, complete a list of deliverables and report back once a month. They saw us as a team that would embed ourselves into their business, operate as partners and become an extension of their marketing organization.
That hit differently.
Because after all the late nights refining the value proposition, questioning the positioning, analyzing our ICP, watching conversion data and studying the clients who continue renewing with us contract after contract, there it was.
The answer. It's working.
We're resonating with the businesses we built Heat to serve.
That's the Heat Difference
And I think this is the part of entrepreneurship I've come to appreciate most.
You don't figure it out once. You keep figuring it out.
You pay attention. You listen. You measure. You question your assumptions. You make adjustments. You double down when something works. And then you keep going.
That mentality doesn't stop with Heat's own business. It's exactly how we work when we enter yours.
We don't stand on the outside and hand you marketing deliverables. We become your marketers.
We learn the business. We understand the customer. We challenge what's not working. We find what is. We build the strategy, execute it and stay close enough to the results to continuously make it better.
Your pipeline matters to us.
Your positioning matters to us.
Your growth matters to us.
Your results become our results.
After more than a year of building Heat, I can finally put words around something I couldn't answer earlier in my career. Maybe I never needed to know where the ceiling was. I just needed to build somewhere there wasn't one.
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