Marketing, AI and the systems underneath.
We solve marketing and growth problems, then build the technology, automation and systems that fix them. Strategy and execution sit in the same room here, on purpose.
- Problem
- A £12m business with no dedicated marketing department.
- Built
- The whole function, including its first talent attraction team.
The founder
Andy Pirie.
A marketer who builds things. 28 years of working out how businesses create demand, win customers and candidates, convert them and turn marketing activity into commercial growth.
At Sanctuary Personnel, Andy joined a £12m business with no dedicated marketing department, built the function from scratch and led it for 12 years as the business grew beyond £100m.
At Newcross Healthcare, he rebuilt the candidate-acquisition engine end to end. Applications rose 107% in 12 months, the available workforce doubled, and the work then spread into the wider hiring system, where time-to-hire came down by more than 50%.
Different businesses. Same underlying job: find the constraint, understand the system around it, fix it and measure what happens.
SetpointHQ is that operating experience, put together with marketers, engineers and the AI systems we build and run ourselves. Senior people diagnose the problem, and the same people stay with it through the build.
How we work
Start with the problem. Not the service.
What we do
- Find the real constraint before recommending a solution
- Work across marketing, AI and automation, web, search, data, attribution, strategy and growth
- Move from recommendation to implementation without throwing the problem over the wall
- Build around the way the business actually works, rather than forcing the business around the technology
- Set the baseline and measure what changed, so the next decision is based on evidence
What we don't do
- Sell a predefined service because it happens to be what we offer
- Recommend AI, a new website or another platform when the existing system can be fixed
- Hide delivery behind a junior team: the person diagnosing the problem stays close to the build
- Create dependency for the sake of a retainer. What we build is designed to create capability, not lock-in
- Make the answer bigger than it needs to be. If the fix is smaller and cheaper than you expected, we'll say so
What we work on
One problem can cross five disciplines. So can we.
The toolkit is broad because real business problems rarely stay inside neat service lines. We bring together senior marketing thinking with the ability to build the systems underneath it.
Marketing · Growth
Create and convert demand.
Strategy, positioning, paid acquisition, campaigns, conversion and go-to-market, built around commercial outcomes rather than marketing activity.
Explore ServicesTechnology · Measurement
Build the system underneath.
Websites, conversion infrastructure, tracking, attribution and the connections between marketing activity, customer behaviour and the result that matters.
See what we buildAI · Automation
Remove work. Add capability.
Practical AI and automation built around real workflows: reducing manual effort, improving decisions and making previously uneconomic capability possible.
Explore AI & automationWhere we run deepest
Recruitment and workforce marketing.
SetpointHQ isn't defined by recruitment marketing, but it is where our experience runs deepest. Two decades inside candidate-short, high-volume businesses means we understand the whole system: employer brand, acquisition, advertising, candidate journeys, CRM, ATS, conversion, automation, talent pools and measurement. If you run an agency, our guides to marketing for recruitment agencies and SEO for recruitment agencies are the place to start.
Product · Studio
20 years, productised.
Add a job and Studio writes an 11-asset playbook across Define, Attract, Source, Screen, Sell and Interview. Desk Radar adds 3 business development tools for agencies. £149/mo per seat after a 7-day trial. Card required, cancel inside the window.
See StudioService · Engagements
Find the constraint, then fix it.
Every engagement opens with a diagnosis of the whole attraction system, and that diagnosis becomes the plan for the work. You can see how it runs for agencies and for in-house teams.
How we workProgramme · Pro
Measure AI visibility.
Longitudinal tracking of how employer brands are represented and cited across major AI assistants, benchmarked against the wider UK employer market.
See ProThe principle
The toolkit is enormous. Knowing what to leave alone is the job.
A new website, another platform or an AI project can all be the right answer. They can also be expensive ways of avoiding the real problem. We care about the commercial outcome first: revenue, demand, conversion, productivity, candidate supply or whatever the business actually needs to change.
Start with the problem
Tell us what's not working.
The easy first move
No pitch deck.
Tell us what's in front of you. You don't need to know whether the answer is marketing, AI, automation or something else. Working that out is our job.
Talk to usIf you'd rather write first
Write it down.
Put the problem in writing. A senior member of the team replies within 1 working day with our read and the first step we'd take.
Send a messageJust looking
Read something useful.
The blog is open, along with our research and practical thinking on marketing, AI, automation and recruitment. No email wall on the reading.
The blog