About Us

Black-and-white line illustration of the Founder, Erika Lang, with a high bun, facing forward with a calm, confident expression

Over the past decade plus, I’ve worked across marketing, sales, and business development with organizations spanning a wide range of industries from SaaS to aerospace defense to eCommerce to streaming services – and nearly everything in between. I’ve partnered with founders and C-Suites, navigating the most viable routes to the next stage of growth.

Across those environments, my work often sat at the intersection of multiple functions:

  • Marketing 
  • Sales 
  • Business development 
  • Sales Enablement 
  • Product 
  • Customer Success 
  • Revenue Operations 

What that breadth taught me wasn’t just how each function works. It was how they fail each other. 

Marketing generates demand that sales can’t close. Sales closes deals that business development never should have pursued. Business development opens doors that the rest of the organization isn’t built to walk through. Each team doing their job – without a strategy to connect them.

An Emerging Pattern

Over time, a pattern became impossible to ignore. Whether the product was data lakes, streaming services, or patient self-scheduling solutions, company after company struggled with the same underlying problem: a fragmented strategy that lacked the clarity needed to reach the next stage of growth.

The response was predictable. Launch another campaign. Add another channel. When neither worked and funds waned, cut marketing entirely. Hire more people. When growth stalled, cut staff. To correct the problem, invest in new tools that diffused energy and layered complexity onto an already brittle foundation.

I saw this happen across organizations of every stage – from newly launched startups to companies well into Series E funding. The pattern repeated.

The ones who broke it weren’t the ones who moved the fastest or spent the most – they were the ones who finally developed a strategy clear enough for every part of the organization to execute against. The ones who didn’t? They continued to struggle, reduced headcount, or closed their doors entirely.

Black-and-white illustration of a curving highway stretching left to right toward a minimal city skyline in the distance.

When companies recognize the problem, the options available to them tend to create a new one. 

Retainer-based agencies offer templated strategies built to sell, not to solve. Boutique firms charge steep fees for engagements that take months to produce results. It’s an even more protracted timeline to hire someone who can develop an intimate understanding of your business. Bringing on a dedicated strategist is often accompanied by a hefty price tag- anywhere between $75K to well over $200K, with an onboarding curve that presumes time and runway to spare. Often, by the time you’ve realized you have a problem, you no longer have these luxuries.

Every one of these options costs more time and capital at exactly the moment you can least afford to spend either. 

Why South of 195th Street

South of 195th Street was built with that constraint in mind. The engagements are modular – designed to address specific problems, move efficiently, and hand off the strategic clarity you can actually run with. No prolonged ramp. No retainer dependency. Just a clear picture of where you are, where you’re going, and what needs to connect for you to get there.  

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