Marko Cvijić / Business consulting
One senior person accountable for the revenue side of the business, instead of four vendors each accountable for their slice of it. I audit what you have, tell you which parts are load-bearing and which are decorative, and give you an order to fix them in - including the things you should stop paying for entirely.
The problem
The call usually comes at the same moment. Revenue has flattened or the curve has bent the wrong way, spend has not gone down, and every individual channel report still says the channel is performing. Nobody is lying. Each vendor is optimising the thing they were hired to optimise, and each one is hitting their number. The business is still not growing.
That happens because the commercial side of the company was assembled one purchase at a time. An agency for paid, a freelancer for search, a tool for email, a dashboard bolted over the top of all of it. Each arrived with its own definition of a conversion, its own attribution window and its own report. What never got built is the thing that would tell you how a euro entering the top becomes revenue at the bottom - and which of those euros you could stop spending tomorrow without losing anything.
So the first job is not a campaign. It is finding out what is actually load-bearing in your commercial system, what is decorative, and what is quietly costing you margin every month.
What the work covers
01
Where the money actually goes
Revenue anatomy
Which products, categories, segments and markets produce revenue, and which produce activity. Volume against value: the biggest line by traffic is frequently not the biggest line by contribution, and the two get confused constantly.
Margin leakage
Discounting that has quietly become structural, acquisition costs recovered only on a second order that never comes, fulfilment and return costs absent from the channel maths, retainers still being paid for work nobody reads.
Channel dependency
What happens to the business if the paid channel is switched off for a month. Companies that cannot answer that are renting their demand, and the rent goes up every year.
Vendor and cost audit
Every retainer, licence and subscription against what it demonstrably moves. The usual finding is a tool stack overlapping in three places and a report nobody has opened since it was set up.
02
One system, not four vendors
Position, demand, convert, advocate
The four stages the whole system is judged against. Most companies are strong in one, adequate in a second and have never staffed the other two - which is why the strong stage keeps getting more budget without producing more revenue.
One source of truth
A single number, defined once, that everyone reports against. Not a new dashboard. A definition, written down, with the tracking verified against it and the disagreements resolved before they turn into a meeting.
Sequencing by return
What to do first, what to do second, and what to explicitly not do this year. Sequencing is most of the value: the same six projects run in a different order produce entirely different cash positions.
Build, buy or stop
For each capability, an honest answer about whether you should own it in-house, contract it, or shut it down. Some of what I recommend removes work from me.
03
The part that keeps it working
Decision rights
Who can change what, who signs off on spend, and who owns the number. Systems fail at handover far more often than they fail at design.
Operating cadence
A monthly review that examines a small number of things that matter, against a plan, with someone accountable for each - instead of a quarterly deck that reports whatever happened.
In-house capability
Your team should be able to run the system without me. I document, train and hand over. An engagement that ends with the client dependent on the consultant is a failed engagement wearing a renewal.
How it runs
Step 01
Thirty minutes. What has stopped working, what you have already tried, and what the number is that has to move. If the problem is not one I can move, I say so on that call.
Step 02
Data, spend, channels, tracking, tooling, org. Paid work, scoped and priced, delivered as findings you can act on with or without me. No engagement gets sold before this exists.
Step 03
A written plan: what changes, in what order, who owns it, what it should produce and how we will know. Including what we are deliberately not doing.
Step 04
We implement the parts we own, oversee the parts your team or your other vendors own, and report against the plan monthly. Then we hand it over.
Operating rules
01
No engagement without an audit. Buying a plan before anyone has looked at the data is how companies end up paying for the previous client's strategy.
02
Senior people only. Five partners and six senior specialists engaged as internal vendors - eleven of us, no juniors. The person in the diagnostic call is the person doing the work.
03
One number. If your team and my report disagree on what a conversion is, we fix that before we discuss performance.
04
I will tell you when the answer is not marketing. Sometimes the constraint is pricing, fulfilment, sales capacity or the product. Spending more on demand generation will not fix any of those.
05
Sharper, not bigger. The recommendation is regularly to do fewer things properly rather than more things adequately, which reliably makes the scope of work smaller.
06
We would rather share in what the system produces than bill you by the hour. When the model fits, we take part of the upside.
Fit
Revenue has flattened while spend has not. Multiple vendors report separately and none of them owns the outcome. A seven-figure budget has no internal owner who can defend it. You are entering a new market and it has to land the first time. Or you simply want one senior person accountable for the commercial system rather than five accountable for their slice of it.
You want execution capacity for a plan that is already decided and not open to challenge. You want the audit to confirm a conclusion. The budget is small enough that a single competent specialist would serve you better - I will tell you that and point you at one. Or nobody internally can make a decision, in which case no amount of analysis will produce a change.