Questions, answered plainly
Fractional growth consultancy, answered for UK businesses.
What the work involves, what it costs, how contracts and data access are handled, and where we would tell you not to bother. Filter by sector and stage to see the answers that apply to a business like yours.
Sector
Company stage
18 answers
Working with a fractional consultancy
- What does a fractional growth consultancy actually do in a UK business?
- It supplies the senior commercial thinking a growth director would bring, without the permanent hire. In practice that means diagnosing where growth is genuinely constrained, setting the priorities, defining what gets measured, and holding internal teams and agencies to that plan. Delivery stays with your team and suppliers; the judgement, sequencing and accountability sit with us.
- How is this different from hiring a UK growth marketing agency?
- An agency is paid to run channels and is structurally incentivised to argue for more activity in those channels. We hold no media, take no commission and run no ad accounts, so the recommendation can legitimately be to spend less, stop a channel, or fix retention before touching acquisition. We are often the layer that decides whether your agencies are working on the right problem.
- Should we hire a growth director instead?
- Eventually, usually yes. The honest sequence is diagnosis first, hire second: a permanent director appointed before anyone has established the real constraint tends to inherit someone else's plan. A common outcome of our work is a much sharper brief for the hire, and a 90-day plan they can pick up on day one.
- When are we too early for this kind of work?
- If you are below roughly £5m revenue, spending under about £500k a year on marketing, or still searching for product-market fit, the constraint is usually execution capacity rather than commercial judgement — and cheaper help will serve you better. We will say so at the first conversation rather than sell you a diagnostic.
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All sectorsScaling (£5m–£15m)
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Engagements and scope
- What is included in the Growth Diagnostic?
- Three to four weeks of senior work across seven lenses: market and demand, discovery, acquisition, conversion, retention, measurement and capability. You get a structured intake, direct access to your data and platforms, interviews with the people doing the work, and a written diagnosis that names the primary constraint, the evidence for it, and a sequenced 90-day plan of stop, fix, scale and test decisions.
- How long before we see anything change?
- The diagnosis lands in three to four weeks and usually changes decisions immediately — most commonly by stopping planned spend or deferring a project. Measurable commercial movement depends on where the constraint sits: conversion and lifecycle work typically shows inside a quarter, while discovery and demand work is a two-to-three quarter horizon.
- Who actually does the work — is it juniors behind the scenes?
- No. Engagements are led and delivered by the senior consultant you meet in the first conversation. We deliberately run a small number of concurrent engagements rather than leveraging a delivery pyramid, which is also why availability is limited and start dates are scheduled rather than immediate.
- Do we have to replace our existing agencies?
- Usually not. Most engagements end with fewer, better-briefed suppliers rather than new ones. Where we do recommend a change it is because of overlap, unclear ownership or work that cannot be evidenced — and we will show you the reasoning rather than simply pointing at a replacement.
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All sectorsEstablished (£15m–£50m)
Commercials and contracts
- How much does a UK fractional growth engagement cost?
- The Growth Diagnostic is a fixed fee scoped to the size and complexity of the business. Sprints and Embedded Growth are monthly, priced on the number of senior days committed rather than a percentage of media. Every proposal states the fee, the days, the deliverables and the exit terms before you commit. The investment-fit estimator on each service page gives an indicative band from your revenue and marketing spend.
- What are the contract terms and notice periods?
- Diagnostics are a single fixed-scope piece of work with no ongoing commitment. Ongoing engagements run rolling monthly with 30 days' notice on either side. We do not use long lock-ins, and we do not tie the fee to media spend.
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Sector specifics
- We are a UK ecommerce brand with rising CAC. Where do you start?
- Not with the ad accounts. We start with unit economics and repeat behaviour, because rising acquisition cost is frequently a retention and margin problem presenting as a media problem. Then incrementality, so we know whether reported return is real, and only then channel structure and creative.
- Our B2B lead volume is fine but sales say the leads are poor. Is that your work?
- Yes, and it is one of the most common patterns we see. It is usually a definition, targeting and handover problem rather than a volume problem: unserviceable segments being paid for, no shared definition of a qualified lead, and slow first contact on the highest-value sources. Expect total lead volume to fall and opportunity rate to rise.
- We have stores and a website. Can you measure how digital influences store revenue?
- That is usually the first thing we fix. Multi-site UK retailers routinely judge digital against the ecommerce P&L line while digital is quietly driving a multiple of that in store. We instrument the high-intent local journeys — locator, stock check, appointments, click and collect — and rebuild budget allocation around catchment potential rather than historic revenue.
- We are a UK agency. Can you work white-label under our brand?
- Yes. We supply the senior strategy layer under your brand or as a named specialist partner, whichever suits the client relationship. We hold a non-solicitation commitment, never approach your clients directly, and never pitch delivery work that competes with yours.
Ecommerce & retailAll stages
B2B & servicesAll stages
Omnichannel & multi-siteGroup / multi-site (£50m+)
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UK practicalities
- How does invoicing, VAT and IR35 work?
- We invoice in GBP from a UK limited company with VAT applied at the prevailing rate, on standard 14-day terms unless your finance team requires otherwise. Engagements are outside IR35: this is a business-to-business consultancy service with our own methodology, tools and multiple concurrent clients, not a disguised employment arrangement.
- What data access do you need, and how is it handled under UK GDPR?
- Read-only access to analytics, ad platforms, search console and commercial reporting, plus aggregated order or pipeline exports. We work from aggregated and pseudonymised data wherever possible, never require raw customer PII, sign an NDA and data processing agreement as standard, and remove access at the end of the engagement.
- Do you work on site, and where in the UK do you work?
- We work with businesses across the UK and run engagements remotely by default, which keeps senior time going into the work rather than travel. On-site days are included where they genuinely help — stakeholder interviews, multi-site retail observation, and kick-off or findings sessions.
- Will our name appear in your case studies?
- Only with explicit written permission. Every engagement story in our proof library is anonymised by default and describes the situation, the constraint and the movement in ranges rather than naming the business.
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