Head of Growth

Growth agency, UK-based

Outcome

New service line generated £500K in first year

Client context

A UK-based performance marketing agency had grown to roughly £4.8M in annual fees with a team of 38, serving a healthy book of mid-market SaaS and DTC clients on paid media and CRO retainers. Average retainer sat at £11K a month, utilization was running at 78%, and gross margin had been stable at 41% for three years. The two founders had built a strong delivery business, but they had hit a familiar ceiling. Their best clients kept asking for help that was not, strictly speaking, a paid-media problem. Pipeline strategy, attribution architecture, lifecycle design, organizational shape. The founders had been quietly turning that work away or referring it to consultants in their network, until they sat down at an offsite and realized they were giving away the most strategic part of every relationship. The plan was to launch a growth-consulting service line that would carry a different commercial model from the retainer business, run by someone who could think and sell at that level.

The challenge

The profile they needed was unusual. The hire had to be credible inside a paid-media agency, so a pure management consultant would be rejected by the senior delivery team. But they also needed to walk into a CMO conversation and price a £40K to £80K strategic engagement without flinching, which most agency operators had never done. The founders had spoken to three candidates through their own network before bringing us in. One was a partner from a Big Four consulting practice who wanted equity and a salary the agency could not support. Another was a former in-house growth lead who had never sold a day of consulting in his life. The third had the right instinct but had built a single product service inside another agency that had failed commercially. The cost of a wrong hire here was not just lost revenue on the new line. It was a public signal to the existing team that the leadership team did not actually know how to scale beyond paid media.

Search strategy

We rewrote the role around three measurable outcomes for the first year: bookings on the new service line, gross margin against retainer benchmark, and at least two case studies the founders could publish without legal redaction. From there we mapped 53 candidates across UK independent agencies, growth consultancies, and a small set of in-house growth leaders who had moonlit as advisors. 26 were approached, 11 took a first call, 6 went through a structured working session where they had to scope and price a real anonymized prospect engagement, and 3 reached the founders on day ten. The differentiator at the final stage was not strategic eloquence. It was the ability to translate a £60K consulting engagement into a clean statement of work, a delivery plan, and an honest answer about which client problems the engagement would not solve. We also did extended references covering both commercial track record and how candidates behaved when a deal slipped.

Result

The new Head of Growth joined six weeks after offer and spent his first month doing two things: defining a productized version of the consulting service with three clear tiers, and personally calling the agency's top 20 existing clients to introduce the new line. By the end of his first quarter he had closed three pilot engagements totaling £140K. By the end of the first year the service line had booked £500K in new revenue at a gross margin two points above the retainer business, with a pipeline of another £380K in late-stage conversations. Three of the early consulting engagements converted the client into a larger paid-media retainer as well, which gave the founders a clean answer to the question they had been afraid of, whether the new line would cannibalize the core business. He hired his first analyst inside month nine and is now scoping a second senior consultant for the following year.