When you step into a business where performance has flatlined, the instinct is often to look for big, transformational changes. New platforms, rebrands, complete strategy resets.
In reality, moving the dial quickly is rarely about doing everything. It’s about identifying the few things that matter most—and acting on them fast.
When I joined Harrier Trail Running, the business had plateaued. Growth had stalled, and while there were plenty of ideas, there wasn’t a clear focus on what would actually unlock performance in the short term. Within four months, we turned that into 35% year-on-year growth. Not through one big change, but through a series of focused, commercially driven decisions.
The first priority was getting control of trading. Before looking at acquisition or brand, you need to understand how the business is making money day to day. What’s selling, what isn’t, where margin is being made, and where it’s being lost. By tightening up trading and making more deliberate commercial decisions, we were able to drive a 98% uplift through optimisation alone. No major investment, just better control and sharper execution.
At the same time, we looked at operational constraints. Growth is often limited not by demand, but by the business’s ability to fulfil it. In this case, the existing setup was inefficient and costly. By restructuring the 3PL and improving how orders were managed, we reduced costs by £60K and removed a key barrier to scaling.
Once the core was stable, the next focus was on unlocking demand. Paid social became a key lever, but not in isolation. It was tied into a clearer acquisition strategy, resulting in a 15% increase in leads and over 10,000 new prospects entering the funnel. Alongside this, influencer marketing and digital PR were scaled aggressively, driving a 300% increase in traffic. The key wasn’t just adding channels, but making sure they were working together with a clear objective.
Conversion and retention were tackled in parallel. Rather than broad, generic CRM activity, we focused on segmentation and lifecycle improvements—targeting customers based on behaviour and intent. That alone delivered an additional £80K in revenue, proving that growth doesn’t always require more traffic, just better use of the customers you already have.
Finally, with short-term performance improving, we defined a longer-term product and growth roadmap. This wasn’t about immediate wins, but about ensuring the business could scale sustainably. A clear plan was put in place to deliver £2M in growth over the next two years, aligning product, marketing and ecommerce around a single direction.
The common thread across all of this is focus. When you come into a business, it’s easy to get pulled into everything at once. The reality is that only a small number of areas will truly move the dial in the short term. The job is to find them quickly, prioritise them properly, and execute without overcomplicating things.
Growth doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from doing the right things, in the right order, with commercial clarity.
