I’m going to share with you the process that I share with any brand I partner with. Think of it as an open letter to you. It’s not my ‘secret sauce’, rather a structure I’ve refined over the many MANY years running this business. Feel free to steal it.
- Stage One: The Growth Unlock. Gaining financial clarity and fixing profit leaks across your ecommerce business (before you invest another £1 into Google or Meta)
- Stage Two: Next Phase Growth Strategy. Reducing over-reliance on paid ads by accelerating results across customer retention & the growth channels you actually own (organic, partnerships, email)
- Stage Three: Scaling What Works. With growth components in place, we’re building and optimising an ecommerce growth machine that you can scale profitably with clarity and confidence
Most founders who come to me aren’t failing. I’m not hired to fix the unfixable. The brands I work with? They’re growing. Revenue is up, ads are running, the team is working hard. Somewhere along the way the numbers stopped making sense. CAC keeps on climbing. Margins feel thinner every quarter. And there’s this nagging feeling that the business is becoming more dependent on paid ads, not less. It’s a good place… the business is growing… and it’s a challenging place because there’s a huge difference between growth for growth’s sake and ‘good growth’.
That’s usually the point where someone asks me: “So Ian, you’ve gotten to know our brand. What are you actually going to do to help us grow?” It’s a fair question. And I want to give you a straight answer.
First, Let Me Tell You What I’m Not Going to Do
I’m not going to audit your ad account, find a few quick wins, and call it a strategy. An audit shouldn’t be a ‘hook’ to win your retainer work. I do run audits, but they’re honest audits. I’m not there to do the work for you. I’m there to show you what I believe are the best decisions you can make at any one point in time. That’s what an audit is meant to do.
I’m not going to tell you that you need to post more on Instagram, fix your email flows, or test a new landing page. Because those things don’t matter? No, because doing any of them without understanding your growth constraints first is just expensive guesswork and not the most productive use of time. Anyones time.
What I’m hired to do is own the scaling process. The whole thing. Not a channel. Not a campaign. The business system that determines whether growth builds your bank balance or just inflates your ad spend. There’s a big old difference. Most brands are doing the latter and haven’t noticed yet.
Stage One: The Growth Unlock
Before I recommend spending another pound on Google or Meta, I want to understand what’s actually happening in your business.
Here’s what I usually see. A brand with strong traffic, reasonable conversion rates on paper, and ad ROAS that looks acceptable (without any real comparables). But when you look at first-order economics – and I’m talking specifically Meta Ads here, the payback period is too long. If new customers become profitable, they aren’t profitable fast enough. And the brand is essentially funding its own growth by bleeding cash at the acquisition stage. Money in. Money out.
The default response, of course, is to blame the ads. Watch a few YouTube vids… change the creative to what’s working for other brands. Maybe try a different audience? Sometimes the agency gets fired. The ads aren’t the problem. They rarely are. The problem is that the economics weren’t ready to be scaled in the first place.
So the first thing I do is a proper diagnostic. I want to know your CAC by channel and by acquisition source. I want to see your conversion architecture, specifically what happens between a customer discovering your brand and actually buying. I want to make sure you’re making decisions based on clean data. I want to understand the strength of your offer and how it stacks up against your competition (because, believe me, if you’re running Meta Ads they love to throw your competitors offers under the fingers of your audience. We then face a challenging question, is the first purchase compelling enough to justify the cost of acquiring that customer? Do ads work for you? Can ads work for you?
Most brands have at least one fixable constraint sitting in that journey. A product page that’s doing the job of a warehouse receipt rather than a conversion asset. No clarity. No hook. No compelling reason to buy (other than a bundled offer of products or customer may not need). An offer that’s priced for margin but not structured for acquisition. A traffic mix that looks healthy in aggregate but is quietly pulling in low-intent visitors who inflate bounce rates and suppress conversion.
Find the constraint. Fix it. Then, and only then, does it make sense to pour more budget into acquisition. But, you’re not going to do that yet… instead…. we move on to Stage Two….
Stage Two: Next Stage Growth Strategy
Once the paid economics are making sense, the next conversation is one brands avoid. You are too dependent on paid ads. You’re addicted to spend. That’s not a judgment. It’s a structural risk.
When paid is your primary growth engine, you’re renting your customers. The moment you pull back spend, revenue drops. You have no floor. And every year, as platforms get more competitive and CACs rise, the rent goes up.
The brands that grow sustainably are the ones that build owned growth channels in parallel. Not as an afterthought. Not as a nice-to-have. As a deliberate strategic priority.
For most ecommerce brands, that means three things;
1.) Organic search, done properly, which means content and SEO built around the actual questions your customers are asking before they’re ready to buy.
2.) Owned channels, primarily email, but repositioned not as a retention tool but as a communication layer that deepens relationships with customers you’ve already earned.
3.) And partnerships, which is the most underutilised growth channel I see across almost every brand I work with.
When we talk about partnerships, I don’t mean adding an affiliate platform and a few links to the footer of your store. I mean a process. Collaborative Commerce to be specific. We’re going to do this properly;
These channels take longer to build. But they compound. And they reduce the cost of every customer you acquire through paid, because more of your traffic arrives with intent, familiarity, and trust already in place. I set out with one objective for each, ‘how can we turn this channel into your primary growth channel?’ we go big on each.
We get down in the weeds of customer insights and data. Tools like SEOTesting are useful here for validating what’s actually moving the needle on organic, rather than assuming. The data tends to challenge assumptions in ways that are genuinely useful. We become data-informed, not data-driven.
Stage Three: Scaling What Works
By the time we get to stage three, the business looks different. CAC is under control. First-order economics are healthy. You’re not entirely dependent on paid to keep the lights on. Now the question changes from “how do we survive scaling?” to “what can we confidently put more behind?”
This is where I help founders build their ecommerce growth machine. See, I keep everything I do ‘on brand’. Ecommerce Growth. Your machine is not a collection of channels being managed independently. A system where acquisition, conversion, retention and economics are connected, measured, and optimised together. They’re all components that work together.
You can make confident budget decisions because you understand your cohort LTV by acquisition source, not just blended averages. Tools like Lifetimely and RetentionX are genuinely useful at this stage for making that data visible and actionable. You know which customers repurchase. You know which channels deliver those customers. You know what your payback period looks like across your portfolio.
That clarity is the unlock. Because you stop making decisions based on last-click attribution and start making them based on what’s actually building the business.
So, What Am I Going to Do?
I’m going to grab your business the way a growth director should. I’m going to work it as a system, not a set of channels.
This is the process I work to. If a founder tells me that their unit economics are fine, I can’t do my job effectively. I need to make them ‘finer’. I know how optimisation works. I learned the hard way running my own ecommerce business before setting up this consultancy 16 years ago. Yes, 16 years doing the job of ecommerce growth…. folks get medals and knighthoods for less.
I’m going to help you find where the constraint is, fix the economics, reduce your dependence on paid, and build the architecture that lets you scale with confidence rather than anxiety.
The question I’d ask you is this: right now, if you doubled your ad spend tomorrow, would your profit grow? Or would you just be buying more of the same problem at twice the price?
If you’re not certain of the answer, that’s probably where we start.
Written By:
