Entry — flagship

Find what's really restricting growth

A senior commercial review of the complete 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 growth plans fail on prioritisation, not effort

Established 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

Investment

What it costs, and what moves the number

£7,500 – £18,000, fixed fee, agreed before we start

Fixed project fee, agreed before we start

What moves it

Number of business models, territories or brands in scope
How many channels and suppliers need reviewing, and how accessible their data is
State of measurement — a clean warehouse is faster to read than fragmented platform reporting
Depth of customer-level analysis needed to make retention and margin conclusions defensible
Number of stakeholder interviews and the level of readout required

Never charged extra

The leadership readout and the questions that follow it
Access to the working analysis, not just the summary
A written recommendation even when it says do not spend money with us

Investment-fit estimator

Four questions for an indicative number

Published band: £7,500 – £18,000, fixed fee, agreed before we start. This narrows it to your situation. Nothing is captured and no one contacts you.

Roughly what revenue are you running at?

Annual group revenue, near enough.

What do you invest in marketing each year?

Working media plus agencies and tools.

How much is in scope?

Brands, territories and channels the work has to cover.

How settled is the diagnosis?

Whether you already know what is limiting growth.

Answer all four to see the band.

Sample output

Read a full sample report before you buy

A complete, anonymised Growth Diagnostic report — scorecard, constraint map, opportunity stack, 90-day plan and the recommendation we would have said no to. Figures are illustrative, the structure and standard of reasoning are exactly what you receive.

Open the sample report (PDF)

No email required.

Deliverables

Growth diagnostic deliverables

Growth System Scorecard

Each of the seven lenses scored and evidenced, so strengths and constraints sit side by side.

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. A document you can run yourselves — the separate 90-Day Growth Sprint exists for when you want us to implement it.

12-Month Roadmap

Sequenced direction for investment, capability and channel decisions.

Scope

What a growth diagnostic actually examines

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 the growth diagnostic 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.

Artefacts

What you end up holding

Named documents and working assets, yours to keep and reuse — with or without us.

During (weeks 1–3)

A scoped plan naming the decisions the work has to make possible
A data and access checklist so nothing stalls mid-engagement
Interim reads shared as they firm up, rather than held back for a reveal

At the end (week 3–4)

Growth System Scorecard across the seven lenses, evidenced
Growth Constraint Map showing what sits downstream of the constraint
Opportunity Stack ranked by commercial value against effort and confidence
Stop / Fix / Scale / Test view of current activity and investment
90-Day Growth Plan with owners and the metrics it should move
12-Month Roadmap for investment, capability and channel decisions
A live leadership readout, and the underlying analysis in full

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, your commerce or CRM systems, 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.

Hesitations

The reasons people hold back, answered plainly

Is now the right time, or should we wait for a cleaner quarter?

There is rarely a clean quarter. The diagnostic is most useful immediately before a budget decision, a replatform, an agency review or a plan sign-off — because that is when the cost of the wrong priority is highest. If a specific event is about to change the picture materially, we will say so and suggest waiting.

We have a capable in-house team — is this not their job?

It usually is, and they are usually right about most of it. What internal teams struggle with is ranking competing plans they each own part of. An independent read gives your team the evidence to back the priority they already suspect, and the cover to stop the work that is not earning its place.

We already have agencies. Will this cut across them?

No, and it is not an agency audit. Channel independence means we have no delivery team to feed, so the finding can be that your agencies are doing good work against the wrong priority. Good partners generally welcome a ranked plan; the ones that resist it tend to be the finding.

Where this sits

Related engagements

90-Day Growth Sprint

Implement the top of the Opportunity Stack.

Embedded Growth

Ongoing senior ownership of the plan.

Evidence and context

The proof, frameworks and thinking behind this work

In practice

Home & interiors · £12m–£18m online revenue

The acquisition problem that was a retention problem

Commercial lending · £20m+ revenue, seven-figure marketing budget

More leads, fewer customers

The frameworks behind it

Framework

The Growth Constraint Map