Five questions worth asking before you hand anyone your growth.
Including me. These are the five I’d want answered if it were my number on the line — so here they are, answered the way I’d answer them on a call. A couple of these have cost me work. I’d rather you know now.
What does this actually return — and how fast will I know?
It’s less than a single month of a full-time CMO’s salary, without the six-month search. But cost is the wrong frame, so here’s the other one: if you’re doing $5M and your conversion rate moves one tenth of a point, that’s roughly $250,000 a year.
That’s one lever of several. The same arithmetic runs on CAC, on repeat rate, on contribution margin — and the compounding across them is the actual case for senior growth leadership.
You’ll know in weeks, not quarters, against numbers you pick before we start. The plan says up front what should move and by when, so drift shows up fast. No sunk-cost speeches — if it isn’t the right fit we adjust the scope or we part ways honestly.
Have you actually run the business, or just advised on it?
Both — and the advisory half was at a scale most people never touch. As Head of Strategy at Kibo (MarketLive, after Vista Equity bought it) I ran ecommerce growth strategy across a $1.3 billion portfolio, personally managing Armani, Disney and others. Average client sales lift of 28% year over year, 43% above the platform benchmark.
Then I went and owned the number myself: a beauty ecommerce P&L across DTC and B2B, conversion and retention on Shopify Plus, stores launched from zero to $8M in six months.
So I’ve read several hundred businesses’ data, and I’ve also had my own quarter depend on it. I know what the Monday revenue report feels like when it’s down and nobody knows why — and which four places to look before anyone touches a theme file.
That’s also why I take a few companies at a time. This isn’t work you can do well across twelve accounts — and I’d rather you know that going in than find out in month four.
Is this conversion work, or marketing leadership?
Leadership. The conversion work is how you can tell whether the leadership is any good.
A conversion rate is where growth becomes visible — it’s almost never where growth comes from. It moves when positioning gets sharper, when you stop buying traffic that was never going to convert, when the offer finally answers the objection people actually have. Those are strategy decisions that happen to show up as a percentage.
Which is why the two halves don’t split cleanly. Someone who only does CRO can tell you which button won, not why nobody wanted what was behind it. Someone who only does brand can tell you the story is stronger, and never put a dollar figure on it. I work from the growth side and price it against revenue — and the number on your dashboard is the honest scoreboard for whether that’s working.
That’s three of five. If it’s already landing, the call is thirty minutes and there’s no pitch in it. Book a clarity call →
I’ve been burned by an agency. Why is this different?
Because I’ve run agencies. I know exactly where the waste hides, because I used to bill for it.
Most ecommerce agency relationships fail the same way: everyone optimizes the slice they were hired for. The media buyer finds cheaper traffic that converts worse. The CRO shop lifts add-to-cart and nothing reaches the bank. The email agency harvests demand the site created and calls it their number. Every dashboard is green and contribution margin is flat.
I sit above the slices, on your side of the table. If your paid agency is doing good work I’ll tell you — and I’ll fix what’s upstream and downstream of them instead of replacing them.
Why not just hire a full-time CMO?
Sometimes you should — and if that’s the answer, I’ll tell you.
But it’s a long, expensive bet on one person’s judgment, and the search alone runs six months at a moment when your number is already flat. Hiring a head of ecommerce instead gets you a channel owner, which is a different job than the one you’re describing. And any senior hire inherits your current assumptions. Part of what you’re buying here is someone who arrives without them.
Structured so a mismatch costs you a month — not a year.
Five is a start. The sixth one is usually the one actually keeping you up — the one about your business, not about me. Bring it.