£40M+
Revenue in 18 months
£5M
Gross sales in the record month
3-tier
Marketing architecture rebuilt
11 to 1
External agencies consolidated
Overview
Built the marketing function for an investment start-up from the ground up. Founders had secured £5bn of investment in previous careers, but the business was running through eleven external lead-gen agencies with no feedback loops, no data ownership, inconsistent creative, and a linear marketing model that couldn't compound. Rebuilt the operating model end-to-end. Revenue scaled past £40M inside 18 months, with a record month of £5M in gross sales at peak.
- Marketing Operations Architecture
- Reporting & Data Infrastructure
- Phased Audience Targeting
- Iterative Variable Testing
- MQL-to-SQL Conversion System
- Content Production System
- Funnel Strategy & Lead-gen
The Challenge
The founders had deep credibility: prior careers had secured over £5bn of investment and a track record of profitable returns. The product was sound. But the company was three months in and underperforming. Eleven external agencies were running campaigns in parallel, all competing for the same audience with the same product, with creative that didn't look like one brand. Campaign data sat with third parties. No reporting system existed to share that data back to the client. The bottom-of-funnel sales focus was burning cash on cold traffic that wasn't ready to convert. Operating costs would see the company through for another year. The window to fix it was now.
Our Approach
01
Replaced the linear, autonomy-led agency model with a directives-led three-tier marketing architecture: directives (set by company execs, planning), implementation (build), and sales (action). Workflow moved from ideation through creation and into action across one month cycles, with sign-off from heads of department at each stage. Bottlenecks fell sharply. Campaign data came in-house. Reporting structures were built to capture quantitative and qualitative signals from each campaign and feed insights back into the next cycle.
02
Built a value-delivery funnel rather than a sales-direct funnel. Reverse-engineered competitor search data: the bottom-funnel terms had 20 monthly searches; the top-funnel terms had 3,600. Phased the campaigns: brand awareness to learn the audience, traffic to retarget and segment, conversion to lock in purchase intent. Iterative variable testing across content, messaging, audience and creative. Lookalike audiences built off the best-converting cohorts. Lead magnets and downloadables tested to identify pain points around trust, transparency, time, financial risk, market guidance and quality assurance.
03
Built the MQL-to-SQL conversion system that aligned sales and marketing around shared messaging. Audience segmentation database identified the six core challenges the buyer was navigating. Email automation, retargeting layers and conversion sequences were built off the back of this. Central planning, aggressive execution, and a feedback loop that compounded performance month over month.
Results
Revenue Achieved
£40M+ revenue inside 18 months. £5M gross sales in the record month at peak.
Operating Model
Eleven external agencies replaced by one internal marketing department running on the three-tier architecture.
Data Ownership
Campaign data brought in-house. Reporting structure feeding insights into each subsequent cycle.
Funnel Strategy
Moved from bottom-funnel sales focus to a value-delivery funnel built on top-funnel search volume that competitors were ignoring.
