I’m Mel Chapman. I build marketing functions for businesses that do real work.
Machinery, components, engineering, industrial services, agriculture, specialist trades. The industries people call boring. Usually by people who’ve never had to win the trust of an engineer with a budget and a healthy suspicion of marketers.
Twenty-plus years in marketing taught me where I do my best work. It’s here.
Twenty years in, the pattern still holds: the problem usually isn’t effort. It’s that nobody senior owns the whole thing.
What I believe about marketing.
A few convictions, earned the long way.
Marketing is a commercial discipline or it’s nothing.
If it can’t explain what it contributed to revenue in language a CEO can repeat to their accountant, it’s activity, not marketing.
B2B isn’t boring. It’s hard.
Nobody impulse-buys a $400,000 machine. Making a cautious buyer feel safe enough to bet their budget on you: that’s the job.
Sales and marketing are one pipeline.
Most of the buying decision happens before sales hears from anyone. If marketing isn’t carrying influence into that stretch, you’re running two half-functions.
Good juniors fail in badly built functions.
It’s rarely because your marketer is bad. It’s because nobody built the foundations under them.
AI is leverage, not magic.
It’s a large part of why one senior person can run what used to take a team. It is not a substitute for knowing how buyers think.
You’re not paying senior rates for agreement.
How I work: directly.
I’m the person at the table, in the HubSpot portal, on the workshop floor, not an account manager relaying messages from someone senior you never meet.
I’ll tell you what I think, including when you won’t love it.
I ask a lot of questions of a lot of people. Your sales reps, your engineers, whoever answers the phone. The truth about a business lives across it, not just at the top, and people tell you that truth once they trust you’re listening.
When the work needs more hands than mine, I bring them: a network of senior specialists (research, paid media, SEO, design, video) assembled around your situation and directed by me. You get one accountable leader, not a roster.
And I keep two sessions a month free for self-funded founders and early-stage builders making something real: same session, same preparation, no invoice. Ask about an open door session.
Fair warning: there will be banter. I’ve yet to meet a business problem that got worse from being discussed by people who actually enjoy talking to each other.
From the egg. From the very beginning.
Abovo comes from the Latin ab ovo. It’s on the logo, and it’s the whole method: go back to first principles, find what’s missing, build on what’s there.
The name was earned. My first business, Local Crowd, was forty clients, every service, fully remote with contractors across three countries, years before that was normal. Clients were happy. I wasn’t: not with the depth I could give forty businesses at once. First businesses are where you learn what works. Coming out of COVID I rebuilt the model to go deep with a few, and renamed it for the method.
I also founded StoryFuel, where I work with filmmaker Pablo to find the human stories inside organisations, creative work and places, shape them around an audience and an outcome, capture them properly and put them to work. Different business. Same instinct: find what matters.
The record.
Twenty-plus years, most of it in senior seats, all of it where the buyer takes their time.
The full record, every role included: LinkedIn →
Outside work.
Off the clock, I’m a serial collector of new skills: pottery, pilates, snowboarding, languages, and one furniture-restoration phase that produced a complete set of gear and zero restored furniture. I’m on the local school board and the pool committee, help run community events, and will say yes to almost anything that involves learning something new or meeting someone interesting.
Always
- Coffee
- Near the beach
- Learning something new
- Meeting someone interesting
- Travel
Never
- Feijoas
- Anything claiming to taste like feijoas
- Getting in the water
Recently a New Zealand citizen. Permanently an Aussie at heart. And travel stays the one obsession: the fastest way to understand people, and the surest way to become more tolerant.