For engineering & technology B2B leaders — before you invest another dollar in AI, fix the part of your business that actually converts prospects to customers.
Instant access · 30-min read
They need to understand where conversion is being lost, long before they scale anything.
That understanding is what this book gives you. Not a workshop. Not a theory session. A clear way to see how opportunities move through your system, and where they break down.
Built from real-world experience across engineering, mining, technology and complex B2B environments.
If you sell complex engineering or technology solutions, growth is rarely constrained by lead generation alone. Conversion is usually the limiting factor.
When growth slows, the advice is predictable.
The underlying assumption is simple: if results aren’t improving, ramp up sales and marketing.
Most leadership teams follow this logic because it sounds reasonable, and because it’s what everyone else does.
Sales is rarely the weakest link. The constraint lies elsewhere.
Under-engineered conversion systems lead to long sales cycles, sustained price pressure, and delayed decisions, even when you have a strong pipeline of qualified leads.
When conversion is hard, the cause is almost always upstream, long before sales conversations, campaigns, or content calendars begin.
If a business hasn’t been deliberately designed to convert:
When activity is scaled before conversion is designed, the symptoms are consistent:
Deals drag on quarter after quarter.
Decisions stall despite qualified interest.
Discounting becomes the default lever.
Spend rises, output doesn't.
This isn’t a failure of sales or marketing. It’s a sequencing error.
Most businesses are taught to execute first and diagnose later. They’re rewarded for visible activity, not upstream clarity.
By the time friction becomes obvious, the business has already accumulated design debt: implicit decisions reinforced by scale and difficult to unwind.
Before increasing activity, spend, or volume, one question must be answered: is the business actually designed to convert?
That requires clarity on:
Design Before Scale answers a single question: are you scaling conversion capability, or conversion friction?
It applies first-principles engineering thinking to growth, covering:
Design Before Scale is not a motivational exercise. It’s not a collection of tactics. It’s a structured way to work out whether pushing harder makes sense, before you pay to find out the hard way.
Instant access · 30-min read
Read it. If it doesn't show you something about your own business worth much more than you paid, email me and I'll refund you, no questions asked.
Aidan continues to be a trusted mentor to me, as a CEO of a fast-growing engineering startup focused on the utilities sector here in Western Australia. We are now well on the path to market leadership in our SCADA and control systems segment. Aidan's real-world experience and strategic input has been a major factor in our continued growth.
Founder and CEO, SCADA/IIoT Startup, Perth WA
Aidan has enthusiastically imparted his systems and high-level thinking, and I look forward to our continuing association.
Managing Director, Engineering Consultancy (Mining), Western Australia
I have held leadership positions in some of the world's largest technology companies, and Aidan's engineering approach to marketing and business growth is the most practical and effective I have encountered.
Co-Founder and Senior VP, Technology Start-up, Sydney
About the Author
I am a professional engineer by background and a former Chartered Member of Engineers Australia. With experience as a design engineer in the mining and oil and gas industries, I’ve worked in design offices for companies like Rio Tinto and Fluor, and contracted on-site for Alcoa, Woodside (offshore exploration), Pertamina (Indonesia), and many others. These roles gave me a real understanding of how sophisticated companies operate and what it takes to capture their attention.
After a career shift, I led sales and marketing teams for some of the world’s most successful technology companies, including Cisco Systems, across Australia, London, Johannesburg and Singapore. I also headed up sales and marketing in Sydney for RESIMAC, Australia’s leading non-bank home lender, and have consulted for Dubai-based EDE Mining.
These diverse paths don’t typically intersect. That is the point. My combined experience in engineering, senior sales and marketing, fintech, and consulting is what lets me help companies with complex products and services sell to sophisticated decision-makers, in language both sides actually understand.
