Growth audit
Find out what your marketing is actually earning.
The growth audit is a fixed piece of work that ends in decisions: what to back, what to fix, what to test and what to stop. The working is shown, so your team can check it.
Free self-assessment
Start with the growth maturity audit
Twenty questions across the eight areas that decide whether growth is planned or accidental. About eight minutes. You get a maturity score, a chart of where you are strong and weak, and the verdicts I would start with.
- Leadership
- Are senior leaders aligned on a ranked set of growth priorities and a numeric target?
- Investment
- Does the budget match the growth you are asking for, and does it move to what returns?
- Market
- Is the sector growing, or do you have a repeatable way to win customers in it?
- Acquisition
- Do you know the cost of acquiring a customer, and can you forecast the pipeline?
- Customer value
- Do you know profit per customer and lifetime profit, and can you hold price?
- Retention
- Is churn low and falling, and is NPS strong enough to bring in referrals?
- Measurement
- Do leaders trust the numbers, and does the board see return rather than activity?
- People
- Does the team have the skills, capacity and habits to grow without the founder?
The full growth audit
Four words, each with a reason
Every channel, campaign and major activity gets one verdict. I lead with what to back, because the fastest growth usually comes from something already working that nobody has funded properly. Cutting is part of the job, not the headline.
- BackOrganic search. Rising traffic on a small budget. Fund the content behind it.
- FixEnquiry form. People start it and don’t finish. Cut it to four fields.
- TestLinkedIn ads to CFOs. Plausible and unproven. Eight weeks with a capped spend.
- StopTrade directory listings. No enquiries traced to them in twelve months.
Illustrative findings. Your audit will have its own.
How the full audit works
Five steps from numbers to decisions
- Numbers inYou share twelve months of marketing, sales and finance data, plus access to analytics, ad accounts and the CRM.
- DiagnosisI trace revenue back to channels, segments and campaigns, and test whether the tracking can be trusted.
- VerdictsEvery channel, campaign and major activity gets a verdict and the reason for it, with the chart behind it.
- Working sessionWe go through the verdicts with your team. Where the numbers support a different call, the verdict changes.
- PlanA 90-day plan with owners, budget moves and the measures that will show whether it worked.
What you get
Deliverables
- A written audit with a verdict on every channel and major activity
- Annotated charts showing the evidence for each verdict
- A 90-day plan with owners, budget moves and measures
- A one-page summary for your board
- A working session with your team
Who it suits
Three common starting points
- CEOs and founders whose growth has stalled, or whose marketing spend is rising faster than revenue
- Boards that want an independent view of marketing performance
- Marketing leaders who need evidence before asking for budget
Timing depends on the size of the business and the state of the data. You get a fixed scope and fee before anything starts.
What the evidence looks like
Charts with the working shown
Every verdict comes with the chart behind it, the source of the numbers and a plain note on what it means. In this example, cost per acquisition halved while organic traffic rose. Lower costs are drawn in the favourable colour, because what matters is what the change means for the business, not which way the line moved.
Neto. Organic traffic +36%, cost per click −50%, cost per acquisition −50%. Indexed, before = 100. Client result; period not shown.
Request a growth audit
Tell me a little about the business and what you are trying to grow. I’ll come back with a scope and a fee.