Chris Endersby

Why organisations work with Chris Endersby

• He treats a brand as an internal operating system before he treats it as a marketing asset, so the work changes how the leadership team behaves, not just how the company looks.
• The DARE methodology he co-developed at Firestarter gives founders a structured way to test whether their positioning is genuinely differentiated, authentic to the team, resonant with the buyer, and expressed consistently across every touchpoint.
• His background sits at the intersection of corporate change work at JP Morgan, KPMG, UBS and Barclays and front-line risk management in child safeguarding, which gives him a non-marketing read on how people actually respond to disruption and uncertainty.
• He is registered in both coaching psychology and psychotherapy, which means he can hold the harder conversations that surface when a founder’s stated brand and the team’s lived experience do not match.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder and COO of Firestarter, a London brand consultancy for purpose-led scale-up B2B businesses.
• Co-developer of the DARE methodology (Differentiation, Authenticity, Resonance, Expression).
• Corporate change and consulting experience with JP Morgan, KPMG, UBS and Barclays.
• Dual professional registration in coaching psychology and psychotherapy.
• Earlier career as a front-line child safeguarding practitioner, manager and researcher.

Biography

Scale-up B2B brands tend to fail in the same way. The founder’s original conviction gets diluted in committee, the language drifts toward whatever the competitor set is saying, and the team can no longer explain in plain terms why a customer should choose them. Chris Endersby’s work starts from that failure pattern, and from the observation that brand is rarely a marketing problem first. It is a leadership and behaviour problem that surfaces as a marketing problem.

Endersby co-founded Firestarter, a London consultancy that works with founders of scale-up B2B businesses to rebuild that conviction. Alongside his business partner he co-developed the DARE methodology, which moves a brand through four practical tests: is it genuinely Differentiated in its market, Authentic to the people who have to live it, Resonant with the audience it is trying to reach, and Expressed consistently in everything the company does. The methodology is designed to make brand work auditable rather than aesthetic.

His credibility for this work comes from an unusual stack. He has spent years inside corporate change programmes at JP Morgan, KPMG, UBS and Barclays, where he learned how large organisations actually metabolise new strategy. Before that he worked in child safeguarding as a practitioner, manager and researcher, which gives him a working understanding of risk, human behaviour under pressure, and the gap between what institutions say they do and what they do. He is registered in both coaching psychology and psychotherapy.

The result is a speaker who can sit in front of a founding team and ask the questions that brand agencies usually avoid: whether the leadership group actually believes its own positioning, where the team’s behaviour contradicts the stated values, and what the cost of that contradiction is in hiring, pricing and retention.

Key speaking topics

• Brand differentiation for scale-up B2B
• Authentic positioning and purpose
• Founder-led brand strategy
• Organisational behaviour and brand
• Change and transformation in growth-stage businesses
• Coaching psychology applied to leadership teams

Ideal for

• Founders and CEOs of Series A to Series C B2B businesses approaching a rebrand or repositioning
• Chief marketing officers and brand leads inside scale-ups where the brand has outgrown its origin story
• Leadership teams preparing for a funding round, acquisition or international expansion where positioning is under scrutiny

Audience outcomes

• A clearer test for whether their current positioning is actually differentiated or just well-written
• A working understanding of why brand work fails when it stays inside the marketing function
• Specific questions to take back to their own leadership team about the gap between stated values and lived behaviour
• A framework (DARE) for auditing brand expression across product, sales, hiring and internal communication