Michael Taylor’s résumé contains the expected nouns of B2B marketing: strategy, growth, positioning, sales, brand. Then comes the word that unlocks the rest of it. Doodler. More precisely, “eternal doodler,” tucked into his professional headline like a sketch in the margin of a board paper. It sounds playful because it is. It is also a compact explanation of how Taylor has spent more than three decades making a living.
He works where expertise has become difficult to explain. The client may sell cybersecurity, payment technology, sales consulting or warehouse automation. Its people know the machinery intimately. Their buyers do not. Between those two facts sits a thicket of acronyms, service lists and claims of comprehensive capability. Taylor’s job is to find a line through it.
That line can become a picture, a name, a product architecture or a new way for marketing and sales to work together. The medium changes. The instinct does not. Reduce the noise until a useful idea is visible, then organize the company to deliver it.
The pencil came before the corner office
Taylor studied advertising art at the University of North Texas, with design and English in the mix. It was fitting preparation for a career spent moving between image and language. In 1991, he founded Merge Agency in Atlanta and served as its CEO and creative director. He would lead more than 100 B2B accounts there, learning the intimate oddities of companies that sell knowledge rather than objects.
A global consulting firm, The North Highland Company, acquired Merge in 2004. Taylor became a partner. The deal widened the map: the agency’s work expanded across a dozen American cities and six countries. It also placed a creative business inside a consulting environment, where a persuasive idea must survive contact with operations, process and senior leadership.
By 2011, Taylor had founded Simple Mind Inc. The name carries a small joke. His clients are not simple and neither are their offerings. The simplicity is the result, not the raw material. The firm says Taylor has now led more than 150 strategic marketing accounts across ten cities and six countries. His LinkedIn biography uses a slightly larger city count, but the shape of the claim is consistent: many complicated rooms, many attempts to make the value legible.
“How can you tackle communicating a complex idea with a kazillion points… without exploding any heads?”Michael Taylor, from a 2016 article introduction
A fractional title, an operator’s brief
The word “fractional” risks making an executive sound like a reduced serving. Taylor’s version is closer to concentrated leadership. Simple Mind sells the role around outcomes rather than attendance: map the opportunity, define the movements, execute the vision and measure what changes. Strategy is not treated as a handsome deck allowed to retire undefeated.
That distinction is clearest in Taylor’s work with Solutions-II, the Colorado-based cybersecurity, data-center and managed-services company where he became fractional chief marketing officer in 2022. The engagement began with a familiar mid-market problem. Solutions-II had expanded, then reached a plateau. Its marketing needed to express something more consequential than competence. The company wanted to be understood as a strategic partner whose work supported business continuity and growth.
It is a hard translation because the underlying services are invisible when they work. Resilience, threat detection, identity access and recovery reveal their value most dramatically when something has gone wrong. The marketer has to make preparedness tangible without turning every conversation into a disaster film. Taylor’s approach moved the language upward, from technical inventory toward the business consequences executives already understood. Cybersecurity could be discussed as continuity, confidence and the ability to keep operating.
Taylor’s response crossed departmental borders. Marketing and sales were pulled closer through hybrid roles. Services were turned into clearer products, including ASM Illuminate, an attack-surface-management offer designed to speak to senior executives without requiring them to become security specialists. Interactive assessments and digital event tools gave prospects a way into the conversation. A dashboard made performance something to inspect and adjust, not merely celebrate at quarter’s end.
Todd Bowling, Solutions-II’s CEO, credits Taylor with refocusing marketing toward growth, sharpening value propositions, creating service products and building trust across management, sales and marketing. Founding partner David Stone points to clearer storytelling and a new top-of-funnel strategy. Both descriptions dwell on integration. Taylor’s product is not only the sentence on the website. It is the agreement inside the company that makes the sentence true.
The economic value of a better frame
Taylor’s portfolio repeatedly shows companies changing the category in which buyers place them. NPSG had been seen as a construction-services business, a commoditized frame that constrained margins. Research and workshops produced a different position: a global e-retailer integrator, with warehouse strategy, robotics, conveyance and installation assembled into a full-lifecycle story. The company became NPSG Global, and revenue rose from $200 million to $700 million in three years.
Merchant e-Solutions presented a different puzzle. The payment processor was moving toward financial technology and needed its services to feel like a coherent system. The answer was almost childishly clear: Money IN, Money OUT and Money MAX. Take payments. Pay invoices and employees. Use data to manage funds. The business became MerchantE, supported by a new identity, website and digital presence developed with Marsden Marketing.
The project figures include leads up 1,004 percent, email click rates up 609 percent, social engagement up 1,000 percent and 82 percent of marketing-qualified leads converting to sales-qualified leads. The website and video collected seven awards. Such numbers belong to a collaborative client project, not to a lone consultant in a cape. Still, the underlying move has Taylor’s fingerprints: stop presenting a pile of services and give the buyer a map.
Ice cubes before urgency
There is another Taylor metaphor, and it comes from outside the conference room. In a 2017 interview about redefining success, he advised putting the ice cubes in first. Protect 15 minutes each week for reflection before other people’s urgency fills the glass. The recommendation is charmingly small. Nobody needs a retreat, a scented candle or a new subscription. A quarter-hour will do.
The idea has a practical edge. Taylor encouraged listeners not to absorb the urgency of everyone they meet. He also argued for a definition of success that includes revenue and margin while leaving room for enjoyment, balance and integration. These are not decorative concerns for a fractional executive. They shape which problems deserve attention and which merely arrive shouting.
“I love my profession. But upselling a meditation is a bridge too far.”Michael Taylor, writing in 2022
That line catches his public voice: serious about the craft, suspicious of its excesses, willing to use a joke as a small crowbar. His article titles do similar work. “You Are Not What You Do.” “What Mountain Do You Move?” “The Sales Channeling of Everything.” He writes like someone who knows that business prose can become upholstered. Better to remove a cushion.
His 2021 article on brand influence asks firms to identify the mountain they move rather than describe themselves as a pile of products and services. Another argues that professional-services companies should take hyper-personalization seriously because customers increasingly expect a close fit, not a hopeful approximation. The language changes from piece to piece, but the complaint is stable: businesses too often narrate themselves from the inside. Buyers are left to perform the translation. Taylor would prefer the seller do the courteous work first.
His civic work offers a quieter continuity. Taylor chaired the Ray of Hope fundraiser for The Bridge, an Atlanta children’s shelter, and contributed communications help to Project Open Hand and the Georgia Conservancy while volunteering with Clifton Sanctuary. The same skills that clarify a commercial offer can help a cause organize attention.
The doodle survives the machine
Simple Mind now includes AI-enabled marketing transformation among its services. Taylor’s stated approach is utilitarian: use AI to analyze behavior, automate necessary lower-value tasks and help a small team produce more, while learning and deploying new capabilities in a way clients can adopt safely. The shiny object is welcome only if it agrees to work.
That may be why the doodler matters more, not less. Automated media can produce an ocean of competent material. It cannot decide, by volume alone, which idea a company should stand behind or which promise its people can deliver together. Those choices require conversation, friction and a picture clear enough for a room to point at.
Taylor’s career has moved from art school to agency ownership, from acquisition to consulting partnership, and from brand strategy to the fractional C-suite. The durable gesture is simpler. He enters a complicated business, listens for the idea buried under expertise, and draws until other people can see it. Then comes the less romantic part: roles, measures, meetings, execution. A straight line is lovely. Making an organization walk it is the work.