What to do next, in what order, and what it is worth
Most founder-led brands do not lack ideas. They lack somebody who has stood at the same junctions before and can say which two of the fifteen things on the list will actually move the number this quarter, and what the other thirteen would cost in attention. I write that plan, with a number against every line, and I stay answerable for whether it worked.
You are probably here because one of these is true.
- There is a list of things to do and no agreed order to do them in.
- Every agency and every specialist has a plan, and none of them is the same plan.
- A six figure decision is in front of you and nobody in the building has made one before.
- The board asks what the ecommerce strategy is and the honest answer is the trading calendar.
- Growth has flattened and the response so far has been to try more things.
- You know you need an ecommerce director and you are not ready to pay for one.
What I actually do.
Establish where the revenue actually comes from. Contribution by channel, product and customer type, from your own data. Not the platform's view and not the agency's view. The plan starts from what is true, which is often uncomfortable.
Decide what matters this quarter. Every candidate move scored on likely impact, how confident I am, what it costs and how long before you know. The small number that survive are the plan. Everything else is ranked behind them so nothing is lost and nothing distracts.
Attach a number and an owner to every line. What each move should shift, by how much, by when, and who is doing it. A plan without numbers is a wish list, and a plan without owners is a document.
Brief the people doing the work. Your team, your agencies and your developer all working from the same page, with a single number to work towards. I have managed agencies for a decade and I know what a brief that gets good work looks like.
Make the expensive decisions properly. Replatform or repair. Change agency or change the brief. New market or deeper in this one. The case for, the case against, what it costs in money and months, and what happens if the assumption underneath it is wrong. Written so it can go in front of a board.
Report on the one number. Monthly, against what we agreed, in plain English. What moved, what did not, what we learned and what changes as a result. If the plan is wrong, the report says so and the plan changes.
The first ninety days.
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Weeks one to four
The Growth Review, or the equivalent inside a retained engagement. Data, store, acquisition, retention and margin examined, the decisions scored, and the quarter's plan agreed in a live session with you.
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Weeks five to eight
The plan in motion. Briefs out to your team and agencies, the first moves live, and the reporting set up against the number we agreed.
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Weeks nine to twelve
First evidence read honestly, the plan adjusted where the numbers say so, and next quarter's plan built from what we now know rather than what we assumed.
8
people in a team I built from nothing at Naturewall, alongside the profit and loss.
I joined with no ecommerce function to speak of and built one. Eight people, specialist roles, delivery standards and a way of working with brand, development and acquisition that held up under pressure. I owned strategy, roadmap and the profit and loss, set trading strategies that consistently exceeded stretch revenue targets across the financial year, and ran paid, search, CRM, affiliates and influencer as one plan rather than five budgets defending themselves. At inov-8 I led the Black Friday trading that delivered the company's first million pound net month. Most of what this page describes is what I did in those roles, compressed.
The full track recordTwo things I will not do.
I will not hand you a deck and leave. The plan comes with owners, numbers and a monthly report against them, and I stay answerable for whether it worked. Strategy that nobody is accountable for is decoration.
I will not recommend the expensive option because it is expensive. A replatform, a rebuild or an agency change is sometimes right. It is usually the slowest and costliest way to change the fewest things that matter, and the plan will say so when that is the case.
Questions.
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Is this the same as the Growth Review?
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The Review is the two week diagnostic that produces the first plan, at a fixed price. This page describes what happens if you want somebody to carry that plan forward, quarter by quarter, and to be in the room when the next big decision comes up.
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Do you work with the board or the founder?
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Both, in practice. The plan is written so it can go in front of a board without editing, and the monthly report is written for the founder who has to act on it. If an investor wants to talk to me directly, that is fine.
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What if we already have a strategy?
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Then the first job is to test it against the numbers rather than replace it. Plenty of brands have a sound plan and a sequencing problem, and fixing the order is cheaper than starting again.
Other services
Tell me the decision in front of you.
Twenty minutes is enough for me to tell you how I would approach it and what I would want to know before making it.