Performance Marketing Lead

DTC brand, $20M revenue

Outcome

ROAS improved 2.5x within 90 days

Client context

The brand had grown from $4M to $20M in topline revenue across three years on the strength of a single hero product and a creative team that consistently outperformed the category on Meta. AOV sat around $78, repeat purchase rate inside 90 days was 31%, and the founder had personally signed off on most creative decisions until late the year before. Blended ROAS had peaked at 4.1 in their second year, then drifted to 2.6 over the next four quarters as they pushed harder into top-of-funnel video. iOS 14 had quietly eaten about 20% of their attribution, and the move to MMM was on a Notion roadmap that nobody had opened in months. They were spending around $650K a month across Meta, Google, TikTok and an emerging YouTube test budget. Inventory had just been pre-ordered for a full new product line, so the pressure to make paid efficient again was not theoretical, it was a cash-flow question for the fourth quarter.

The challenge

The in-house team consisted of two media buyers and a creative strategist, all sharp on platform mechanics but none with experience running a portfolio above $300K a month. The founder had tried a fractional CMO for two quarters, and while the strategy decks were impressive the work never reached the account level. He was clear with us on the call: he did not want another advisor. He wanted an operator who would log into Ads Manager on day one, pull the structure apart, and rebuild it. The other constraint was that this person needed to work alongside an opinionated founder without flinching. Two previous senior hires from agency backgrounds had left within six months, both citing the same friction. The cost of a third miss was an entire holiday quarter run by a team that already knew it was out of its depth.

Search strategy

We anchored the scorecard on three non-negotiables. The candidate had to have personally managed paid budgets above $500K a month for at least 18 consecutive months. They had to have done it inside a DTC P&L, not an agency one, so they understood contribution margin rather than just ROAS. And they had to have shipped at least one full account restructure on Meta in the post-iOS 14 era. We market-mapped 62 DTC brands in the $15M to $80M range across the UK, US, and Western Europe, plus a tight set of senior buyers inside three growth agencies who had done in-house tours of duty. 34 candidates were approached, 14 took a first call, 7 cleared the deep-dive on attribution and structure, and 3 made it to the founder for the working session. The shortlist landed on day nine. We deliberately filtered out candidates who could not explain a single losing quarter in their own words, because the founder needed someone who could be wrong in public and recover.

Result

The new Performance Marketing Lead joined on a Monday and spent his first two weeks doing nothing but data work. He rebuilt the Meta account into a flatter structure with broad targeting and tighter creative testing, paused two TikTok campaigns that were spending without producing first-purchase revenue, and quietly moved 18% of the budget into Google Shopping where the product feed had been undermanaged for a year. By day 45 blended ROAS had moved from 2.6 to 4.9. By day 90 it hit 6.5 on a comparable spend base, which the founder shared with us as a 2.5x improvement against the trailing three-month average. The new product line launched on time and hit its first-month revenue target by 22%. He also moved the team from weekly to twice-weekly creative drops, which the in-house creative strategist later said was the single biggest unlock. He is now in his second year and has built a four-person paid team underneath him.