Growth strategy
Blended CAC is £340. No channel actually costs £340.
The average cost of acquiring a customer is one of the most quoted numbers in a growth plan, and one of the least useful for deciding where the next pound goes.
Rialto Bridge
The bridge to the knowledge you need
Research, frameworks and market analysis from our consulting practice: written up for small and medium business owners and enterprise teams alike.
Free to read: all you need is an account.
Create a free account Sign in
Growth strategy
The exit is five years away. The buyer will read the last three.
Business value is assessed on a trailing record rather than a plan, which means the window a buyer will eventually…
Leadership
The owner was away for two weeks. Nothing broke.
A fortnight tests the decisions a business makes weekly and none of the ones it makes twice a year, which…
Leadership
Every task has been delegated. Every decision still comes back.
An owner can hand over all the work and remain the constraint, because what was handed over was execution and…
Operations
The dashboard refreshes every morning. No decision has changed because of it.
Most management reporting measures what the systems happen to export, then narrates it. A small number of metrics earn their…
Operations
The extra work is worth 0.4 of a person. The smallest hire available is 1.0.
Demand grows in fractions and capacity arrives in whole people. The gap between the two explains more margin volatility in…
Marketing
The reviews average 4.9. The most recent one is from 2023.
A high star rating that has stopped moving says something to a buyer that is very different from what the…
Marketing
Seven in ten clients arrive by referral. Nobody has heard the sentence that sent them.
Referral is the only channel where your pitch is delivered by an amateur, in one sentence, with no brief, to…
Operations
Twelve per cent of delivery hours are rework. The timesheet has no code for it.
Doing the same work twice is often the largest controllable cost in a service business, and almost the only one…
Leadership
The decision was made in March. It has been reopened four times since.
Some decisions come back because the world changed. Most come back because the decision was never actually closed, and the…
Take it further
This is the general pattern. Your business is the specific case.
Everything here is free to read with an account, and always will be. What it cannot do is tell you which of these applies to your numbers, your market and your constraints. That is the work we do with clients.