Growth System Scorecard
Each of the seven lenses scored and evidenced, so strengths and constraints sit side by side.
Entry — flagship
Find what's really restricting growth
A senior commercial review of the complete ecommerce growth system — market, discovery, acquisition, conversion, retention, measurement and capability — designed to identify the biggest constraints on profitable growth and produce a prioritised 90-day and 12-month plan.
- Investment
- From £7,500
- Shape
- typical 3–4 weeks
Why this exists
Most ecommerce plans fail on prioritisation, not effort
Established ecommerce businesses rarely lack activity. They usually have several channels running, a set of suppliers each optimising their own metric, and a plan assembled from whoever argued most convincingly. The diagnostic replaces that with one ranked view of where growth is actually constrained.
- Channel reports can all look healthy while contribution stays flat
- Discovery is fragmenting across search, marketplaces and AI assistants
- The cost of the wrong priority is a full quarter, not a small overspend
Where it fits
Typically the right instrument when
- Investment is meaningful but the next improvement isn't obvious
- Channel reporting looks fine while commercial performance doesn't
- Several credible plans compete and nobody can rank them
- A new leadership team or investor needs a defensible growth thesis
Probably not for
When we'd point you elsewhere
- Businesses looking for a cheap channel audit to shop around suppliers
- Teams who already know the constraint and simply need execution
- Pre-revenue or very early stores, where the answer is usually demand, not optimisation
Deliverables
What you get
Growth Constraint Map
Where growth is being restricted today, and what sits downstream of that constraint.
Opportunity Stack
Opportunities ranked by commercial value against effort and confidence.
Stop / Fix / Scale / Test
A single decision view across current activity, channels and suppliers.
90-Day Growth Plan
The prioritised near-term plan with owners and the metrics it should move.
12-Month Roadmap
Sequenced direction for investment, capability and channel decisions.
Scope
What we actually look at
Demand & discovery
- Category demand, seasonality and share of visible demand
- Organic and paid discovery position across the buying journey
- How the brand and products are represented in AI-assisted discovery
- Marketplace, feed and comparison presence where relevant
Acquisition economics
- Channel mix, efficiency and evidence of incrementality
- Contribution after discounting, returns and delivery — not ROAS alone
- Overlap and cannibalisation between paid, organic and affiliate
- Supplier scope, fee structure and what each is really accountable for
Conversion & retention
- Proposition clarity, product experience and checkout friction
- Segment-level conversion rather than a single site average
- Repeat rate, cohort behaviour and margin quality of returning revenue
- Lifecycle and CRM coverage against the actual buying cycle
Measurement & capability
- Whether reporting is good enough to make investment decisions with
- Data integrity across platform, analytics and finance
- Where senior judgement, specialist skill or automation is missing
- Decision speed: how long it takes to act on what you already know
Shape
How it runs
Week 1
Align & collect
Commercial objectives agreed; data, platform and system access in place.
Week 2
Discover
Outside-in review plus interviews across the team, agencies and specialists.
Week 3
Analyse
Unit economics, discovery position, conversion and retention evidence.
Week 4
Prioritise & recommend
Scorecard, constraint map, opportunity stack and leadership readout.
Illustrative example
How we'd reason through it
A hypothetical scenario, not a client result.
Situation
Organic revenue is down materially year on year and the immediate instinct is to increase SEO investment.
Conventional answer
Buy more content and links, and expect organic to recover within two quarters.
What the evidence shows
Branded search has softened, part of the category has shifted towards AI-assisted and marketplace discovery, affiliate is intercepting demand already won elsewhere, and conversion on the highest-margin range has fallen.
The decision
Organic is a symptom rather than the constraint. The near-term plan protects margin by fixing conversion and affiliate overlap first, while discovery work is rebuilt around how the category is now searched.
Questions
Before you commit
- How is this different from an agency audit?
- An audit usually reviews one channel against that channel's own best practice. The diagnostic looks across the whole growth system and ranks constraints commercially, with no incentive to recommend a retainer we would then sell you.
- What do you need from us?
- Read access to analytics, ad platforms, ecommerce platform and CRM, a view of contribution or margin by range, and roughly four to six short conversations with the people closest to the numbers.
- How much of our team's time does it take?
- Typically half a day in week one, interviews in week two, and a leadership readout at the end. We work outside-in wherever possible so the burden stays low.
- What happens at the end?
- You own the outputs and can execute them internally, with your existing suppliers, or with us. There is no obligation to continue.
Where this sits
Related engagements
Output
Answers, not artefacts
- What should we stop?
- What should we fix?
- What should we scale?
- What should we test next?
Worth knowing
- Not a 150-page audit. A short, defensible set of decisions with the evidence behind them.
- Specialist execution and media budgets are scoped separately.
- If we don't believe a diagnostic is the right instrument, we'll say so before you commit.
- This engagement is also available through agency partners, white-label or co-branded.
Start with the constraint
Answer four questions on the homepage, or request a conversation to pressure-test whether a diagnostic is the right next step.