Most growth problems are symptoms.

Rising acquisition cost, weak conversion, poor lead quality, flat repeat purchase — these are usually where a constraint becomes visible, not where it lives. Start with the problem you recognise; each page sets out the symptoms, the causes worth taking seriously, the numbers to look at, and what commonly misleads.

Digital's influence on store sales isn't being measured

Search, store locator and calls are shaping footfall and phone enquiries, but digital only gets credited for sales it closes directly.

Customers hit friction moving between online and in-store

Stock, pricing, promotions and account details don't match between online and store, and customers absorb the cost of that mismatch.

Store and ecommerce are competing instead of compounding

Separate P&Ls, KPIs and stock pools put store and ecommerce teams in competition for the same customer.

Local search and discovery aren't converting into store demand

Store pages, local listings and local search are under-managed relative to how much footfall and call demand they influence.

Stock visibility problems are costing sales across channels

Online availability, store stock and delivery promises frequently disagree, and each mismatch costs a sale or a customer's trust.

Customer data is fragmented across store and digital systems

POS, loyalty, ecommerce accounts and CRM rarely resolve to the same customer, so retention and value metrics understate reality.

Growth has plateaued once single-channel gains are exhausted

Each channel has been optimised individually, but total growth has flattened because nobody owns the space between them.

Loyalty and retention don't hold together across channels

Loyalty and CRM activity often only reaches a partial, digitally-biased view of the customer base, weakening retention.

Digital investment can't be justified against total business revenue

Digital marketing's platform-reported return understates its real effect once assisted sales and halo effects are included.

No one clearly owns cross-channel decisions

Ecommerce, retail, marketing, CRM and agencies each hold a piece of the customer relationship, but no one owns the whole.

If several of these look familiar, the constraint is upstream.

That is the normal pattern: three or four visible symptoms with one shared cause. The Growth Diagnostic works through the growth system in order until the highest-leverage constraint is evidenced rather than assumed.