Growth Consulting: Finding Where the Money Actually Leaks
Almost every business that calls me has already decided what the problem is. Traffic is down, the agency is underperforming, the ads have stopped working, the content is not converting. They are looking for someone to fix the thing they have named.
The thing they have named is the symptom about seventy percent of the time. Growth consulting is the work of establishing what is actually happening before anyone spends money fixing it, across acquisition, conversion, retention and the economics underneath all three, rather than inside whichever channel happens to be under suspicion.
Every Growth Problem Gets the Same Diagnosis
There are five genuinely different ways a business fails to grow. They all get described the same way in the meeting.
This is the most reliable pattern I encounter. A business is not growing, and the conversation converges within about ten minutes on needing more traffic, more leads, more reach. It is the intuitive answer and it is correct in roughly one case out of five.
The other four times, buying more traffic makes things worse rather than better. If the wrong people are arriving, more of them costs more and converts the same. If the right people are arriving and the experience loses them, you are paying to fill a leaking bucket faster. If customers buy once and never return, acquisition is subsidising a retention problem indefinitely. And if the unit economics do not work at current conversion rates, volume simply scales the loss.
None of that is a reason to be pessimistic about growth. It is a reason to spend twenty working days establishing which of the five you actually have, before committing a year of budget to the answer everyone guessed in the first meeting.
The Order the Questions Have to Be Asked
This is the single most useful thing I bring to an engagement, and it costs nothing to apply.
Work from the bottom of the funnel upward rather than the top downward. Start with whether the economics work at current performance, then whether customers return, then whether the right visitors convert, then whether the right visitors are arriving at all, and only then whether there is enough demand.
Almost every engagement I inherit was running in the opposite direction. Somebody asked whether there was enough demand, decided there was not, and bought more. That order guarantees you spend the most money on the least certain question, and it explains why so many growth programmes feel busy and produce nothing.
Running it in the correct order also has a pleasant financial property: the fixes get cheaper as you move down. Improving conversion on traffic you already have costs a fraction of acquiring the equivalent revenue, and improving retention costs less again. The cheapest growth available to most businesses is nearly always something they have already paid for and are currently wasting.
What Growth Consulting Actually Covers
Acquisition strategy
Which channels genuinely fit your buying cycle and margin, which are being kept alive out of habit, and what the realistic ceiling is on each. Covers organic, paid and everything between. See SEO and paid media.
Conversion and experience
What happens after the click, and where the leaks are between arriving and buying. Usually the highest-return area and consistently the most neglected. See conversion rate optimisation.
Lifecycle and retention
Whether customers come back, and what that does to how much you can afford to spend acquiring them. Retention quietly sets the ceiling on every acquisition channel you run.
Measurement and attribution
Whether the numbers you make decisions on can be trusted. This is frequently the finding that reframes everything else, and it is uncomfortable because it means the previous year of reporting described something that did not happen.
Unit economics
What a customer actually costs and what they are actually worth, calculated properly. Plenty of growth problems are pricing or margin problems that no marketing activity can solve.
Team, agencies and vendors
Whether you have the right people and suppliers, whether they are pointed at the right work, and whether the reporting they give you is telling you anything. See fractional leadership.
Where I Come From, and What That Means
Worth stating plainly, because every consultant has a bias and the useful thing is knowing what it is.
I came into growth through search rather than through paid media or product, which is unusual and it shapes how I work. Search is the channel where you cannot buy your way past a structural problem: if the foundations are broken, no budget fixes it, and you are forced to become good at diagnosis rather than at spending.
That produces a specific instinct. I look for the constraint before I look for the opportunity, I am sceptical of activity that cannot be measured, and I am biased toward fixing what exists over adding something new. Those instincts serve most businesses well and they are not universal truths. If your actual problem is that nobody has heard of you and you need a brand campaign, I am not the right person and I will say so early.
The other half of the background matters as much. I have run marketing functions from inside, which means I understand that the constraint is rarely knowing what to do. It is getting it shipped through an organisation with a roadmap, a release cycle and other priorities. Advice that ignores that is not advice, it is a wish list.
How a Growth Engagement Runs
What you get from the diagnosis:
- Which of the five failures you actually have, with the evidence
- The single constraint currently capping growth, named
- Unit economics calculated properly, including what a customer is really worth
- An honest assessment of whether your measurement can be trusted
- A sequenced plan with owners, not a ranked list of suggestions
- What to stop doing, which is usually the most valuable page in it
What I Do Not Do
Brand and creative
I have no useful opinion on your visual identity or your campaign concepts, and I will not pretend otherwise. Plenty of good people do this and I am not one of them.
Execution at volume
I am not a delivery agency. I do not staff content production, campaign management or design. I direct that work, whether it sits in-house or with a supplier.
Guaranteed numbers
Growth depends on competitors, on market conditions and on how much of the plan gets implemented. I commit to a correct diagnosis and a defensible sequence, not to a figure.
Work I cannot improve
If the problem is operational, or the budget is too small to move anything, or somebody else is a better fit, I say so on the first call rather than take the engagement and manage expectations downward for six months.
Four Situations Where This Pays For Itself
The Findings That Recur Most Often
After enough engagements the same handful of problems account for most of the recoverable value. None of them are exotic.
Acquisition is subsidising retention
The business is spending to replace customers it is losing, and calling it growth. Every acquisition channel looks expensive because it is carrying a cost that belongs somewhere else entirely.
Nobody knows what a customer is worth
Lifetime value either uncalculated or calculated so optimistically that it justifies any spend. Almost every budget argument I walk into is really a disagreement about this number that neither side has stated.
Two channels claiming the same conversion
Paid and organic both reporting the same revenue, so the total across channels exceeds actual revenue. Once seen it cannot be unseen, and it usually means one channel has been over-funded for years.
The site converts badly and nobody owns it
Sitting between marketing, product and engineering, which in practice means nobody. Frequently the single largest recoverable number in the business. See conversion rate optimisation.
Activity mistaken for strategy
A busy calendar across six channels with no stated view on which one is supposed to matter. Teams in this state are exhausted and cannot point to anything that compounded.
A good plan nobody can implement
Written for a team that does not exist, with no owner and no room in the release cycle. This is the failure mode of consulting itself, and the reason I ask about capacity before writing anything.
When Growth Consulting Is the Wrong Purchase
Four situations where I would tell you to keep your money, and I would rather say it here than on an invoice.
When the product has a retention problem. If customers try it and do not come back, that is a product and positioning question, and every pound spent on acquisition is buying a slightly larger leak. The honest engagement ends in week two with that finding.
When you are too early. A business without enough data to diagnose anything needs to run experiments and talk to customers, not hire an advisor to interpret a sample too small to interpret. Advice at that stage is expensive guessing.
When the real problem is capacity. If you know what to do and cannot get it shipped, you need people or a supplier, not a strategist. I can help choose them, but that is a short conversation rather than an engagement.
And when the decision has already been made. If the organisation has committed to a direction and wants validation, an independent view is not going to be welcome and will not change anything. That happens more often than anyone admits, and it is worth being honest about before starting.
Growth Consulting Questions
What is growth consulting, as opposed to marketing consulting?
Marketing consulting usually starts from a channel and asks how to do it better. Growth consulting starts from the business and asks where the money is actually leaking, which is frequently not in the channel anyone is worried about. The output is often a recommendation to stop doing something rather than to add another activity.
Do you only work on SEO?
No, though it is where most people find me and it is where my deepest technical expertise sits. I have run whole marketing functions, including paid media, lifecycle, analytics and team structure, as an in-house leader and as a fractional one. The search background is useful precisely because acquisition is measurable, which makes the rest of the funnel easier to diagnose honestly.
How is this different from hiring an agency?
An agency is generally organised around delivering a channel, which means the recommendation tends to be more of that channel. I have nothing to sell you beyond the diagnosis and the plan, so telling you to cut a channel or fix something operational costs me nothing. That independence is most of what you are buying.
What if the problem turns out to be the product?
Then I will say so, and the engagement probably ends there. Retention problems and positioning problems masquerade as marketing problems constantly, and no acquisition work fixes either. That answer arrives quickly, and it is a better outcome than a year of spending against a ceiling.
Do you take equity or performance-based arrangements?
Rarely, and only where I would genuinely influence the outcome over a long enough period. Most performance arrangements in consulting are structured so the consultant carries risk on things they do not control, which distorts the advice. I would rather be paid to be honest.
How long is a typical growth engagement?
The diagnosis is two to four weeks. What follows is either a defined project, ongoing advisory alongside your team, or a fractional leadership arrangement that runs for several quarters. I will always recommend the smallest version that solves the problem.
Can you work alongside our existing agency?
Frequently, and it is a common arrangement. Sometimes as the senior direction they are missing, sometimes as an independent read on whether the programme is working. I say plainly on the first call that nobody is being replaced by default.
What size of business is this for?
Businesses large enough to have real data and a real budget, and small enough that a single senior person can change the direction. Below a certain size the answer is usually to do fewer things well rather than to hire an advisor. I will tell you if that is where you are.
Related: the full list of services, conversion rate optimisation, fractional marketing leadership, digital marketing consulting, SEO consulting, case studies, and the sectors I work in.
Sure the problem is traffic?
It is, about one time in five. The first conversation is thirty minutes and free, and it is usually enough to tell whether you have a demand problem or something further down the funnel wearing a demand problem as a disguise.
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