Hire the growth team your brand deserves.
If leadership is not aligned on the actual goal, teams build in different directions. You do not need to tell the whole business you want an exit, but you do need a goal everyone can work toward. Revenue, margin, contribution profit, cash, or capacity.
Most brands know their numbers, but not the ones that drive decisions. The right metrics depend on the goal. If you have not nailed the goal, you cannot choose the right metrics. That is how brands end up optimising vanity KPIs.
You can work hard and still go sideways. New ideas, new channels, new tests, all half-finished. Growth comes from repetition. Fewer priorities, executed better, for long enough to learn.
If your product, offer, and messaging look like everyone else’s, you compete on price and CPMs. Differentiation does not mean being strange. It means being clear and distinct enough that the right customer chooses you quickly.
“Because we always have” is how brands get stuck. It blocks new offers, new creative, new pricing, and new processes. The market changes, so your playbook must change too.
When things slow down, most brands try harder. The better move is to zoom out. Diagnose the constraint, pick the few highest-leverage bets, and build a plan around them.
Growth isn't easy, but brands tend to make it harder for themselves. Here's a few core areas where brands to go wrong.
We see too many brands don't know there numbers.
This isn't about ROAS or CPA but the numbers that matter.
There are so many and brand tend to lose focus on which numbers they should obsess over, the ones that truly move the business forward.
This is a huge one and it creeps into to every part.
We all suffer from shiny object syndrome, but brands are especially impacted by this.
New tech, new tools, new agency and so on.
It's all distraction from the end goal.
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