Everything I’d Do to Fix a Flailing Growth Engine in 90 Days
How a CRO can quickly audit, prioritize, and realign a revenue org
As a consultant, I’m often parachuting into businesses where growth has been stagnant or in-decline for a while. When I worked for growth-stage startups, there were plenty of times where we were months away from death, and I was the person most-accountable for driving the revenue that would save us. If I synthesize what I’ve learned, here’s the playbook I’d follow in a turnaround — I’d love to hear what you’d add.
Rough outline of the playbook is as follows:
Start Shipping One Thing
Build a Growth Model
Spot Leaks, Pools, and Overflows
Run a Roadmap Prioritization Session
Communicate Your Top 2 Priorities—and What Fires to Let Burn
Focus on Unlocking New Opportunities Over Paying Down Debt
Organize Pods and Pod Leaders, and Growth Meeting Around Each Lever
Set up a Growth All Hands Meeting for Team Leads to Present
Plug Talent Gaps with the Right Mercenaries
Now let’s get into the weeds.
1. Start Shipping One Thing
In a turnaround situation, every day matters. So probably within the first 2-3 days I’d align with my CEO on one thing that’s a top priority (usually a funnel step in the existing GTM motion that’s floundering). You don’t have time to get to 70% information (let alone 100%), so I’d push the existing team to download context then lean heavily on my own intuition. Next, I’d pick one thing, and get the team going on that one biggest opportunity straightaway. This would help to build momentum and hopefully extend our runway so we can keep learning.
2. Build a Growth Model
Understanding Layers and Levers
In order to have a data-driven approach, you need a growth model. You don’t have a ton of time to make it perfect, but I’d try to create a simple 1-sheet version in week 1.
A growth model is totally different from a financial model: financial models show lagging indicators (i.e. Revenue Recognized in the month). But a Growth Model is about assumptions, inputs, and leading indicators (i.e. new leads acquired and new customers closed that Month).
First, map out a high-level funnel and get baseline historical data for the last ~12 months. The goal is for v1 to fit on a single sheet, and have perhaps 4-5 funnel layers (i.e. Media spend, Site Visits, Leads, Purchases, Revenue) and 4-5 “levers” (i.e. CTR, Lead Capture Rate, Purchase Rate, and LTV).
Think of Levers are the conversion rates between Layers. If you can ship projects that improve a Lever, you’ll improve all the results in all the Layers below it.
Note: Make sure to consider if there are any major “axes of difference” within the business that must be modeled separately in order to understand what’s happening.
Example: if you have a cash cow product that’s mature, and 3 experimental products that are just getting going, looking at blended CAC and blended conversion rates may not be helpful. You might need to build the model as two separate branches that come together at the end (i.e. in this example I’d build 1 branch for the cash cow, and 1 branch for the other 3 combined, and then sum them at the bottom).
Don’t Overlook How Time Is Being Allocated
An oft-overlooked area is to also think about the rough time-allocation of team. Try to understand how your headcount is distributed across channels, product lines, and regions? This uncovers misallocations and areas ripe for optimization.
3. Spot Leaks, Pools, and Overflows
Now you’re ready to start analyzing what your growth model is telling you. The goal of this is to identify 5-10 hypotheses for areas where you can optimize. Each one of these hypotheses will need to be drilled-into and investigated. You should be capturing all these hypotheses as potential projects.
Leaks
Look for layers of the funnel where you see a big drop-off. One common example—at Coding Dojo, we noticed that in the past quarter our sales demo call show-up rates had dropped by 50%. We’d sprung a leak!
When you spot a leak, zoom-in and get more data. As one-off, we pulled a ton of more detailed metrics. We studied the open rates and CTRs on the emails and SMSs that fired just after a meeting was booked, and just after someone no-showed.
After investigating, it became clear that when an interested prospect tried to book a demo, the next available timeslot was too far out in the future. If you’re shopping right now, and the next appointment is in a week, there's a good chance you'll find another provider that can talk right now.
Pools
Look for places where a lot of leads are pooling/getting stuck. Recently at another company we noticed the average speed-to-lead was quite high. When we zoomed in, we found leads were sitting for days without getting assigned to an SDR.
The cause? Turns out that someone (who probably long-since left the company) had created a rule that leads couldn't be assigned if they were missing a location field. (My guess is that at some point, SDRs might have been organized by region.) Because of the rule, SDR managers were manually adding a location to every lead, and leads were spending a half-day stuck at this step. Once we removed this step, leads got routed to an SDR in near real-time.
Overflows
Going back to our Time Allocation, look for places where there's a misalignment between resources and results. Example: I recently worked on a business that had a global marketing team of 40. Each region needed it’s own organic social team that spoke the local language. When I added them all up, I realized 25% our global headcount was allocated to a channel that drove zero revenue. We immediately started pulling those folks onto more-strategic projects where they could have more impact on the bottom-line.
Another example: A new product launch was a top priority for the product team, and was eating up a big chunk of the Marketing team’s bandwidth. That made sense when we were in “shoot for the stars” mode.
But now that we were in “grow revenue every month like your life depends on it” mode, we needed to reprioritize. We shifted the focus of our PMM to a repackaging/pricing project for our cash cow product. By making one of our upsells a bit more prominent in our pricing, we were able to grow our average sale price by double-digits.
Years later, that one small pricing change to the cash-cow is responsible for far more revenue than the new product ever produced.
4. Run a Roadmap Prioritization Session
Now that you’ve identified your leaks, pools, and overflows, it’s time to prioritize them.
I like the ICE framework—use t-shirt sizes. It's okay if the first go-round is mostly educated guesses. Knock it out in 2 hours or less. You'll be doing it again in another 2-3 months and you will have learned a ton in the interim.
5. Communicate Your Top 2 Priorities—and What Fires to Let Burn
What happens is that if you keep pointing to your top priorities—but don't tell people what they can drop?They'll still try to juggle everything.
If a CEO calls something a “low” priority, but it’s a pet project of one leader, resources might still go there. Horse-trading might still occur as the leader tries to bring it to reality. That horse-trading slows down the whole organization.
That’s why I love this idea from General Stanley McChrystal: “The best leaders are those who empower their teams by letting them know what’s okay not to do.”
Make it clear that you want zero progress on everything else, and clear the road for these 2 things to get done fast. Note: as a leader, it’s your job to run interference for your team with outside stakeholders, so they can say no to everything else.
Sidenote: why just 2 priorities (instead of the usual 3?)
In a turnaround we can’t afford to be multi-threaded. We need to put out the biggest fires right now. And that likely means surging on just 1 short-term and 1 medium-term problem at a time.
Selina Tobaccowala, a seasoned entrepreneur behind companies like Evite and SurveyMonkey, advocates for the concept of “letting fires burn.”
By deliberately allowing some fires to rage, leaders can direct their energy toward the fires that will kill us first.
6. Focus on Unlocking New Opportunities Over Paying Down Debt
I love this idea from Good to Great. Author Jim Collins argues you should put your best people not on fixing problems or paying down debt. Instead, put your top folks on unlocking the biggest opportunities. There will always be debt that needs to be paid down. But in a turnaround situation, you need revenue growth to eat first from the trough.
This seems obvious, but I often encounter good people, often conscientious, technical people, that have been at a company a while. They see all the debt that has accumulated and they want to attack that first (i.e. junk data in Salesforce that needs clean up, our documentation is woefully lacking, we need to migrate the whole system from old tool to new tool).
In a turnaround situation, you need to keep the team focused on shipping iteratively on things that unlock incremental revenue. If we do that, we will live to fight another day, and we will eventually be able to attack that debt.
A best practice for eng teams is to allocate 20% of our resources to paying down debt and protect the other 80% for unlocking new opportunities. That’s a good ratio to stick to.
7. Organize Pods and Pod Leaders, and Growth Meeting Around Each Lever
The mistake I see a lot of leaders make is they organize teams around functions (i.e. the performance marketing team works on all paid ads, the design team works on the design queue, etc.). Instead, break the funnel down in to levers, give each lever an owner, north star metric, weekly targets, and a slide where they have to present in front of the entire tribe.
Their weekly slide template should include:
Lever: Grow Leads from Paid Ads
Team Lead: Jean-Luc
Members: Geordi, Beverly, Will, Deanna, Worf
Volume Metric Target: 33 Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)/week
Efficiency Metric Target: $100 Cost per SAL
Graph of Weekly Performance
Commentary: How, Why, So What
How: How are the numbers doing? How should we feel?
Why: Why are the numbers moving that way?
So What: What are we going to do about it?
What Shipped Last Week:
A list of the project shipped last week
Here’s what makes this so powerful:
How. Why. So What is the Engine that Drives a Data Driven Culture
Having the data is the beginning of being data driven. By looking at the data over time, everyone can see if we’re closing the gap to our goals.
The ‘Why’ forces us to make connections between the work we’re shipping and how the metrics are moving.
The ‘So What’ is an opportunity to reprioritize the roadmap, or to surface misalignments. Sometimes the “so what’ might be that we’re not going to do anything, because we’re focused elsewhere. That’s healthy.
Putting the whole team’s name on the slide
People are wired through millennia of evolution to care about acceptance by the tribe—there is tons of research showing that acceptance is a far more powerful motivator than money. In an organization with politics (i.e. all organizations) people form their own opinions about who is most accepted by the tribe - they’re motivation is to be agreeable and dole out favors. But when we create and share pod targets vs. actuals, we’re really creating a non-political, objective scorecard for who deserves acceptance. We’re defining the rules of acceptance for the tribe as shipping —and hitting these targets.
Putting projects next to metrics
In a lot of organizations, the “what” is divorced from the “how” - we look at numbers that are good or bad, and then we go back to our pet projects. If the numbers are down, and the team immediately pivots to talking about a project that has no hope of moving the needle in the next future, it’ll become pretty obvious. They end up course-correcting on their own, or getting uncomfortable questions from me.
8. Set up a Growth All Hands Meeting for Team Lead’s to Present
Early in my career the mistake I made is that as the Head of Marketing, I felt like I had to do all the analysis (and all the presenting) alone.
Today I make sure that it’s the pod leaders that are doing all the talking. If they’re out, someone else from their pod fills-in.
This is the most powerful motivator. Tou want to be able to explain to the tribe what’s going on. And ideally you want to bring the tribe good news.
9. Plug Talent Gaps with the Right Mercenaries
Bring in Experienced Consultants for Immediate Impact
Now your team is at least rolling in the right direction and you’re on your way to stabilizing the business in the short-term. But now you also have the medium-term to worry about.
Startup marketing teams are often overweight on young hungry people with little experience, and underweight on experienced mercenaries. If one of your top 3 things isn't getting done extremely well once you re-allocate resources there—it's because you don't have the right people. These are the spots to start bringing-in mercenaries.
Why Mercenaries
Full-time hiring takes too long. I don't like agencies much because you're really getting 1 hour of the senior person's time and then 10 hours of junior people's time. I much prefer consultants. They know they have to self-onboard and deliver value almost immediately. And to get hired they’re constantly having to prove they are experts at their craft, and constantly learning from multiple companies at once. The result: they are typically sharper and more-current than FTEs.
How to hire mercenaries
I look for someone who comes through a referral and has done this exact thing 3x before. I look for people that are comfortable with month-to-month contracts, and they have to teach me things I don't already know in the interview process. I don't mind hiring expensive people.
Most importantly—I make clear how I'll be measuring success in terms of metrics. It's a red flag if they want a 6-month contract right off the bat. It's a red flag if they need more than 2 weeks to onboard. The right type of mercenary will put a ton of pressure on themselves to prove their ROI.
Final Thoughts: Turning Chaos into Clarity
A turnaround can feel overwhelming, like there are fires to put out in every corner. But by focusing on just 2 priorities at a time and letting everything else burn, by marshaling all your resources behind just a few things, and by building a data-driven culture with a sense of urgency, you’ll start to see clarity through the chaos. Week One is about setting a foundation that lets everyone pull in the same direction, building a rhythm that aligns daily actions with growth goals.
Ultimately, the key is to avoid getting bogged down by every small issue or every past inefficiency. Instead, channel your energy into the areas that drive results and trust your team to execute with focus and intent. The work done in this first week will not only stabilize the business but will also create a lasting roadmap for sustainable growth.