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Stop guessing.
Start building
Customer Success.
With the people who've done it.

You're the first CS hire. Or you've just been promoted. The pressure is real, the expectations are high, and nobody handed you a playbook.

Customer Success from the Ground Up is the community, podcast and newsletter for CS professionals who are building from scratch and want to get it right.

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100+ Community members
10+ Years CS experience
Adobe & WalkMe Where the playbook was built
Customer Success from the Ground Up Mike Marshall

Real people.
Real impact.

“Mike combines deep CS knowledge with the ability to bring people together. I'd recommend him without hesitation.”
Deborah Knight
International CS Leader · Podcast Host
“The collective IQ and experience of the CS leadership in London has definitely been raised by Mike's efforts.”
Jon Mell
Founder, Frontfoot
“A fantastic, vastly knowledgeable mentor. The CS from the Ground Up leadership programme has been very helpful.”
Luke Guy
CS Manager, Infotechnics

The role exists.
The playbook doesn't.

You've been hired — or promoted — to own Customer Success. Leadership believes in you. The customers are waiting. And you're staring at a blank sheet of paper wondering where to start.

The content online is generic. The advice is built for enterprise teams with headcount and budget. The CS influencers are talking to people with established functions. Nobody is talking directly to the person who's building it from nothing.

And underneath the practical overwhelm is something harder to admit: the fear of being the person who let churn happen, who never got taken seriously by leadership, who built a reactive support function when they were supposed to build a strategic one.

The gap isn't knowledge. It's the absence of a clear framework, and of people who understand what you're going through. That's what this is built for.

Without the right foundations

You spend years firefighting

  • Reactive, not strategic — always behind the curve
  • Leadership sees CS as a cost centre, not a growth driver
  • Churn happens before you see it coming
  • You're exhausted — and not sure you're actually making a difference
Built the right way from the start

CS becomes your career-defining work

  • A function leadership trusts and invests in
  • Retention and expansion that compound over time
  • Customers who become your biggest advocates
  • A playbook you built — that you're genuinely proud of

One community.
Three ways in.

The Community
100+ CS professionals building the same thing you are. Monthly events, peer groups, and a space to ask the questions you can't ask on LinkedIn. Not a leadership network — a room of people who are building CS from the ground up, just like you.
The Podcast
Real conversations with CS practitioners about what it actually looks like to build from nothing. No theory, no generic advice — honest accounts of what worked, what didn't, and what they wish they'd known at the start.
The Newsletter
Practical lessons from our panels, podcast guests and community, written for people building CS from scratch. Subscribe free and get access to our library of recorded panel sessions with experienced CS leaders.
LEARN

Get the newsletter

Practical ideas you can use straight away, plus free access to our recorded panel sessions.

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CONNECT

Join the community

Monthly online panels and workshops, face-to-face meetups in the UK, and peers who get it.

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TALK TO US

Get in touch

Building CS at your company and want to talk it through? Drop us a line.

Email Mike →

Stop building
in the dark.

Join the newsletter and community for CS professionals figuring it out from scratch. Subscribe free and get access to our panel recordings.

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