Our History
About Us
Octopus & Son is the Calgary marketing strategy and fractional CMO firm of Dario Hudon-Verrelli. For over a decade Dario has helped growth-stage companies fix the foundation beneath their marketing: a clear picture of who they serve, a consistent message across every team, and a system that connects strategy to execution.
About Octopus & Son
How it Started...
Meet The Team at Our Digital Marketing Agency Calgary
Octopus & Son began as a solo venture built on a simple belief: most organizations communicate far less clearly than they think. The problem is rarely effort. It is almost always architecture.
Over ten years of working with growth-stage companies, the same pattern kept surfacing. Leadership had strong instincts. The team was capable. The tools were in place. But the foundation underneath, a clear picture of who they were selling to, a consistent message across every department, a system that connected strategy to execution, was almost always missing.
The result was fragmented communication, inconsistent positioning, and marketing that couldn’t compound the way it should.
That gap is what Octopus & Son was built to close.
Today we work as a marketing strategy consultant and fractional CMO firm, operating upstream of campaigns and content, extracting what is strategically true about a business, and building the communication architecture that makes every downstream decision coherent.
The work starts with signal. We surface what buyers actually respond to, where messaging is breaking down between teams, and what the market sees compared to what leadership believes. The output is a communication foundation every campaign, hire, and AI workflow traces back to.
I taught marketing at Mount Royal University for nearly 9 years, because the discipline matters and so does passing it forward.
Octopus & Son is not a vendor managing deliverables. It is a strategic partner that leads the decisions determining whether execution compounds or fragments over time.
Thanks for stopping by.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Octopus & Son do?
Octopus & Son is a Calgary marketing strategy consultant and fractional CMO firm. It works upstream of campaigns, defining who a company serves and building the communication foundation that keeps messaging consistent across every team, campaign and AI workflow.
Who does Octopus & Son work with?
Growth-stage companies whose leadership has strong instincts and capable teams but lacks the strategic foundation underneath: a clear picture of the buyer, a consistent message across departments, and a system connecting strategy to execution.
Who is behind Octopus & Son?
Octopus & Son is led by Dario Hudon-Verrelli, who has worked with growth-stage companies for over a decade and taught marketing at Mount Royal University.