NBCC is pleased to introduce our new member, Patrick Ide, Founder & Managing Partner of GrndWorX. GrndWorX is a strategic B2B marketing agency. They help leadership teams cut through complexity, make the right strategic decisions, and translate them into execution that delivers measurable outcomes.
Introduction & Background:
Could you start by introducing yourself and your role at GrndWorX?
I'm a founding partner at GrndWorX. My focus is growth strategy — helping B2B leadership teams identify what's actually stalling growth, and then helping them make the decisions that unblock it. In practice, that means working at the crossroads between client insight, positioning, marketing strategy and activation. I help organisations to clarify what value they create when they meet their clients’ needs, and how do this in a way that is unique. This has the effect of helping businesses to reconnect with their clients.
You bring experience as a strategic marketing leader, how has your background shaped the vision behind GrndWorX?
I've spent much of my career working with sales and marketing teams to identify the barriers to growth and building strategies to diminish those barriers and open up growth opportunities. Recently, I have observed marketing teams exceeding their targets, and all the while, not receiving recognition for the impact that they have on business outcomes. More technology, more data, more granular segmentation seems to lead to more dilution of effort, less focus on business impact and a very real risk that marketing teams market to their KPIs rather than to their clients. Their impressions, click-throughs, Marketing Qualified Leads — the metrics look fine. But the connection to market share, price resilience, and long-term growth is missing. In effect the biggest barrier to growth has become the obsession with vanity metrics rather, client insights and true value creation. When we decided to set up GrndWorX we wanted to fix that by reconnecting marketing teams with customer needs and relevant business outcomes.
About GrndWorX – Vision & Positioning:
For those who may not yet be familiar, how would you describe GrndWorX and its core mission?
Marketing in B2B companies has become synonymous with marketing communications. The original mandate of marketing was to enable firms to charge a higher price for their products by connecting and engaging with client needs. That has been lost. Most marketing teams in B2B industries don’t come within a mile of price and don’t even track pricing evolution and its impact on profitability. However, with the rise of AI and the trend to lookalike strategies and pattern-based messaging, there is a rapidly growing need for businesses to re-connect with their clients more strategically, not just through sales. This means that marketing needs to rediscover the original mandate, and this starts with the client. GrndWorX restores the influence that marketing is meant to have on business outcomes. We work with mid-market B2B companies where the commercial ambition is clear but marketing isn't yet contributing to where the business goes. Using the knowledge and expertise that already exists within the firm, we rebuild the relationship between marketing and leadership, marketing and sales, and between marketing and the client by focusing marketing initiative on the things that drive customer value and growth.
GrndWorX positions itself as a strategic marketing partner for B2B, what does that mean in practice for your clients?
Our organizing principle is to connect marketing with business outcomes through a better insight into client needs and value. This starts with surfacing the insights and knowledge about clients that is held collectively with the firm, knowledge that is scattered across functions and never consolidated. Working across business development, sales, customer services, technical services, and R&D we identify what value a firm generates when it meets clients’ needs and how it does this in a unique and differentiating way. The resulting value proposition is founded upon a common understanding and a common language, and it reconnects marketing to the other functions across the business. With the client in focus, the discussion is no longer about impressions, clicks, downloads or time on page. It’s about client value strategies, the company's position in a market, pricing, market share, customer loyalty, new market opportunities — and then we help to make it happen.
Your team emphasizes helping clients focus on what truly drives business growth—how do you translate that into measurable impact?
Understanding how and when your firm generates client value is fundamental to driving business growth. Without it, companies and sales teams default to talking product features and service deadlines because they don't have the insights to know what else to say. The feature list is safe because it requires no client insight. GrndWorX brings customer value into focus as a central organising principle providing firms with customer a strategic filter for decision making, and a central pivot for evaluating pricing, innovation, customer services, distribution and promotional activities: the elements that drive revenue, net income and shareholder value.
Services & Client Impact:
GrndWorX offers services ranging from strategy development to execution, including thought leadership, digital presence, and events—how do these elements come together to create value for clients?
At GrndWorX, strategy and execution are inseparable by design. Consultancies help leadership think about transformation, promise you the world and hand you a deck of PowerPoint slides. Creative agencies execute campaigns and channels. They measure success through awards and media spend. Neither solution addresses the work of ensuring that strategic decisions actually change how a company competes in the real world of the competitive marketplace. That is the gap in that we fill. Partnering with clients across strategy and execution ensures our interests are fully aligned. Furthermore, coherence matters. Most B2B organisations don't have a storytelling problem — they have a positioning problem that their content makes visible. A whitepaper, a website, and an event will all pull in different directions if the underlying decision about what you compete on hasn't been made. We address that before we touch the content.
Expertise & Differentiation:
What sets GrndWorX apart from more traditional marketing or advisory agencies?
Most consultancies stop at recommendations and leave you with the challenge of implementation. Creative agencies optimise the creative execution, their value, by definition measured in terms of their creativity. On the other hand, GrndWorX is engaged by clients looking for help to cut through complexity and clutter before key decisions are made. We then remain accountable for how those decisions shape execution and concrete business outcomes. We commit deeply to a small number of clients rather than spreading ourselves across dozens of accounts. That's a different model, for clients who are looking for a deeper form partnership. It’s what we were looking for when we were client-side, and struggled to find – so we set up GrndWorX to do it.
Your team highlights firsthand experience in managing complex projects, how does that shape the way you work with clients?
The GrndWorX team is composed of senior practitioners across the full cycle — from diagnosis through to execution. That breaks the common dynamic where senior people win the work and junior teams deliver it. We’ve operated both client-side under real commercial pressure and agency-side within delivery environments. That combination means we understand not just what should be done, but what will actually get done - and what tends to break along the way. Strategy and execution stay with the same senior team throughout the assignment. No handoffs. No dilution. Just experienced people, accountable for the outcome.
NBCC Membership & Collaboration:
What motivated GrndWorX to join NBCC, and what excites you most about being part of this network?
GrndWorX operates internationally. We are based in NL but our working language – due to a very diverse and international team – is English. NBCC connects organisations that navigate the Dutch and UK market. That's a very relevant context for us — and for the clients we work with, many of whom are building or extending their cross-border commercial presence.
How do you see GrndWorX contributing to the UK–NL business community, particularly in helping companies grow and communicate more effectively?
By being direct about where growth stalls. Many companies expanding across both markets have a strong proposition at home that loses definition when it crosses a border. The positioning decision that was implicit becomes a liability. We help sharpen that early - through clearer narratives, aligned messaging, and decisions about what not to say - so companies don’t just translate their offering, but make it land commercially in a new context. In doing so, we help UK-NL businesses grow with more focus, and communicate with the kind of clarity that builds trust across markets, not confusion.
What types of collaborations or partnerships are you hoping to build through NBCC?
We're very keen to hold conversations with B2B industry, financial or professional services firms, who are looking to evaluate their marketing or are seeing commercial underperformance in their clients where positioning and lack of client understanding is the root cause. We are seeking to build deep, long-term partnerships with a view to generating long-term growth, commercial advantage and, ultimately, increased value for their clients. That's a shared problem worth addressing together.
Looking Ahead:
What are your ambitions for GrndWorX over the next few years?
We're building a body of proprietary thinking on B2B positioning and the relationship between marketing and growth outcomes. The ambition is to be the firm that mid-market B2B organisations reach for when they know their commercial model is right but their market position isn't delivering on it.
How do you see the role of strategic marketing evolving, and how is GrndWorX preparing for that future?
Marketing has more tools, more channels, and more data than ever. It is also, in most organisations, further from the decisions that matter. That's the problem. The firms that get this right will be the ones where marketing shapes the business's position in a market — not where it reports on how campaigns performed. GrndWorX is built on that premise. We're not preparing for that future. We're already working in it.
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