About Mark Leach
I have been the operator and the agency.
Which means I know exactly where both sides hide their problems. I’ve hidden them in both places myself.
The short version
Twenty years finding the signal, mostly by missing it first.
I scaled eCommerce through its loudest decade, built an agency and sold it, then ran a larger one from the inside. Along the way I learned the thing this whole business is built on: the brands that win aren’t the ones with the most tools or the biggest budgets. They’re the ones with the clearest read on what actually matters.
That read is rare. It’s also learnable. The rest of this page is how I learned it.
The longer version
Three rooms that taught me the same lesson.
While everyone played it safe riding the eCommerce boom, we moved £150m of payments to a newcomer called Stripe. On paper, reckless. In practice, the only move that made sense, because the goal was never the migration. It was a checkout that didn’t lose people. It added a million pounds a month. We stayed at the front of the field for three years.
The decision looked risky. Standing still was the real risk.
Then I ran an agency, User Conversion, and for a while I ran it badly. Churning clients, revenue lurching month to month, cash running short. The honest version is that we were busy and unclear, which is the most expensive state a business can be in. So we got clear, down to one ideal client and one question: how do we actually make them money. Thirty percent growth a year for three years, and not a single client lost in eighteen months.
Nothing changed except what we paid attention to.
Brainlabs came knocking. They weren’t buying the client list. They were buying the method, the purpose-built way of working we’d grown into. A seven-figure exit, and then I ran a larger operation from the inside as MD, applying the same discipline at a different scale. That was the proof: the method travelled, and it wasn’t me, it was the way of seeing.
If it only worked when I was in the room, it was never worth selling.
You are the one growing the business. I’m the one who has walked this road before, and got lost on it often enough to know the way.
What I believe
A few things I’d stake the work on.
- Clarity beats capability. The brand with the clearest read on what matters will out-trade the brand with the better tools, every time. Tools are cheap now. Clarity isn’t.
- The brief is rarely the problem. What a brand asks for and what’s actually holding it back are seldom the same thing. The job is finding the gap, fast, and saying it plainly.
- Give the method away. If an approach only works with its author in the room, it isn’t a method. It’s a dependency. So I write mine down and hand it over.
- Stay until it lands. Strategy that stops at the presentation is theatre. The work is finished when the decision is made and the result shows up, not before.
Get started
Start with a conversation.
Thirty minutes, no pitch hiding in it, and a clear sense of whether a Clarity Diagnostic is the right first move. It’s usually also where the room starts to shift.