Mark Leach · Independent eCommerce consultant
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 in eCommerce, and most of what I know about reading a business came from getting the reading wrong first.
Most days I’m in a Yankees cap, and on board days it’s a tweed one. That is roughly the shape of the job as well. Half my week is spent with founders who built a brand out of their own taste, and the other half with the directors who have to fund it, and I’m at home with both.
I’m an eCommerce consultant, and I work at board level with consumer brands between £20M and £150M. 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.
It took me a long time to learn that read, and the rest of this page is roughly how it happened.
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. We were busy and unclear, which is the most expensive state a business can be in. We narrowed it to one ideal client and one question, which was how we actually made 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 while I was there, it was never worth selling.
I have grown a couple of businesses myself and lost my way on both of them often enough that the wrong turns are now the most useful thing I bring to yours.
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 present, it isn’t a method. It’s a dependency. 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, and a clear sense of whether a Clarity Diagnostic is the right first move.