Excelerate Consulting — nine months building the growth engine.
Excelerate Consulting hired me as their Marketing Analyst in January 2025. LinkedIn was a trickle; the site had no lead capture; outbound was done by memory. The brief was simple in principle and hard in practice — turn marketing into a system that compounds without needing a studio, a crew, or six-figure ad spend.
The problem
Excelerate offered commercial-acumen training to finance-adjacent teams, but the growth layer was manual. LinkedIn was posted on vibes, not cadence. The website collected nothing. Leads came from referrals. The founder wanted a repeatable inbound engine but, like most B2B services, didn't have budget for a full content team.
What I built
Three stacked systems, each cheap to run once the flywheel was pointed at the right thing.
1. A weekly cadence on LinkedIn
I ran a weekly rhythm on LinkedIn — short commentary posts, client-signal posts, and AI-generated video explainers. The video pipeline used HeyGen avatars with ElevenLabs voice, produced at ~10% of the cost of traditional explainers. View-through rate climbed 70% above the baseline of human-on-camera posts, and weekly impressions hit 60,000 by month nine — a 20× lift.
2. An ebook lead funnel
I authored a short ebook walking prospects through a common commercial-acumen gap, then gated it on excelerateconsulting.co/e-book/. Distribution was LinkedIn-first. I A/B tested at the funnel level — not just at the ad or landing page, but hook → download → nurture → call-book — and held the download page constant until the upstream hooks stabilised. CPL dropped against paid benchmarks.
3. AI-powered acumen quizzes
The quiz funnel was the highest-signal one. A prospect took a commercial or financial acumen quiz; they received a personalised PDF with their score and interpretation; Excelerate captured name, email, and company; the team then researched the lead and reached out with tailored coaching suggestions. The quizzes ran on a custom WordPress build with Make.com stitching in routing and delivery.
Operations
Underneath all of it: a Make.com operations layer that shortened time-to-contact, WordPress forms for reviews and capture that actually held up under load, and a handful of Looker / GA4 dashboards tying social, site, and SEO metrics into a single weekly optimisation review. The numbers were in one place; the conversations about them were short.
What I'd do differently
I'd instrument the quiz funnel earlier. For the first two months it worked, but we were measuring the wrong things — open-rates on delivery emails rather than completed-quiz-to-call conversion. The moment we moved the measurement to the conversion point, the right optimisations became obvious.
In Erik's words.
It is with great enthusiasm that I recommend Anthony Ligyat for his outstanding contributions during his time at Excelerate Consulting.
Anthony has been a driving force behind our marketing, technology, and content efforts. His work has had a transformative impact on the efficiency and visibility of our business.
Technical innovation & efficiency
- Built and maintained custom WordPress plugins that improved efficiency across reviews, contact forms, and lead generation tools.
- Designed and deployed the Financial & Commercial Acumen Quizzes, integrating bolt.new and WordPress, with participant data stored and managed through Airtable.
- Leveraged Supabase and Airtable as backend solutions for data storage and analytics.
- Developed automation workflows via Make.com, drastically reducing manual lead processing time.
- Built a social media tracking dashboard on lovable.dev, providing real-time insights into campaign performance.
Marketing growth & campaign management
- Designed and executed a complete marketing funnel: from Ebook lead generation campaigns on LinkedIn → managing leads via forms → distributing content → nurturing through campaigns.
- Successfully reduced cost-per-lead while maintaining precise audience targeting.
- Delivered a 20× increase in viewership, achieving 60,000 weekly impressions on LinkedIn.
- Managed and optimised campaigns on LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Brevo, and integrated with CRM systems like HubSpot.
Content creation & analytics
- Produced professional content using Canva (posters, videos, infographics) saved in multiple formats.
- Edited videos with Canva, CapCut, and Shotcut.
- Conducted detailed financial analysis using Excel, publishing insights into banking data, APRA results, and comparative studies.
- Leveraged Google Analytics and Ubersuggest to track performance and optimise campaigns.
AI & emerging technologies
- Expert-level user of HeyGen for AI-generated videos, ElevenLabs for voice cloning, and ChatGPT, Gemini, Manus, Claude, DeepSeek for content generation, strategy, and creative campaigns.
- Applied AI to create viral posts, generate marketing assets, and support plugin/code development.
In summary: Anthony has been instrumental in building a robust, data-driven, and creative marketing engine for Excelerate Consulting. His unique blend of technical development, marketing strategy, creative content, financial analysis, and AI expertise is rare and invaluable.
He is exceptionally well-suited for future roles in the education, technology, and finance sectors, where innovation, marketing growth, and efficiency are critical drivers.
Current live project: Yuan Packaging.
Since October 2025, I've been building the international brand for a packaging manufacturer expanding out of Huai'an, China. In-flight work rather than a finished case.