🚀Tech Platform: Strategy & Scale

If you're responsible for the launch of a new product, whether you're a new founder or CEO of an established company, you know how difficult it is to launch, grow, and scale your product. Things break, margins unexpectedly fall, and customers fail to convert.

I was hired to help a small business and repeat client capitalize on a newly launched tech platform.

🥅Goal: Grow customer base and expand margins

😕Problem identified by client: Pricing for products and shipping too low and team stretched too thin to spend time on growth opportunities

🚀Result: Discovered the right levers to improve gross margin by ~5-10% (hint: it was not pricing), recommended most scalable product mix, and identified expansion opportunities via targeting ideal customers, platform enhancements, and international expansion opportunities

📰Projects: Deep dive into transaction data, platform enhancement and subscription model mockup, target customer profile, financial and operating model, product margin calculator, strategy action plan creation and management, in-depth customer journey analysis and marketing copy review and revision, and a review of international opportunities



Summary

My client is a free-to-use, online publishing and print-on-demand platform that empowers any creator to publish, print, and sell through their online bookstore or directly to customers via eCommerce tools or a customizable API.

While operating in a traditional industry, the Company is pivoting to better serve a more agile, entrepreneurial customer base that will enable growth, scale, and a stickier customer base.

The Company launched a new product in April 2020. With this transition came the challenges of setting up new systems, processes, and data sources. Due to a single focus on the successful launch and performance, data capture, monitoring, and analysis capabilities were lost.

The executive team also wanted to investigate capturing new, innovative customers to use the platform but did not have the bandwidth to do so.

I was hired to dig deep into the performance data and results from 6 months of 2.0 sales, discern trends, and analyze new potential customers.

After an initial review, I outlined a path to growth that included data and analysis, cross-functional collaboration, revamping customer analysis, marketing strategy and channel focus, and rethinking pricing and product business models.

I gathered performance data across customers, channels and products, and conducted market analysis to identify gaps and deliver strategy recommendations including new pricing models, operational improvements, and enhanced customer channel focus.

Ready to take your business to the next level? 🚀 Let me do the heavy lifting so that you can focus on the things that matter most 👉 Strategy & Scaling

Read on below for more project details 👇



Outsourced Strategy Lead

My client hired me to join their team to create and lead the company's strategy initiatives. As a lean team, my client did not have any single owner of strategic initiatives.

After an initial review and a deep dive into the company's data, I outlined 10 strategic recommendations and created a detailed action plan including timelines and priority levels. Going forward, I will continue to oversee and manage these initiatives to ensure the company stays on track with its strategic priorities.

Data Organization & Analysis

I dove into hundreds of thousands of lines of performance and transactional data to consolidate results, identify problem areas, and communicate findings and recommendations in an easy-to-digest format.

Through this analysis, I found that pricing was not an issue hurting the company's performance. Instead, there were anomalies, unintended discounts, backend functionality issues, and vendor errors that were superficially lowering margins and causing pricing to appear problematic.

New Opportunities for Growth

A key client goal is to not only increase efficiency but also to quickly grow and scale its new technology platform.

I helped the executive team understand who the most valuable existing and potential customers are across each channel. I also market, performance, and customer data to recommend a product mix that would allow the Company to target the more scalable, sticky eCommerce sector.

In addition, I explored different business models that leveraged freemium and subscription models, innovative premium product enhancements, and international expansion opportunities

Financial Processes & Operating Model

In partnership with a trusted finance expert, I am helping to revamp my client's financial reporting systems and creating the Company's first financial projection model that will enable scenario analysis and near-real-time monitoring.

Due to the migration to a new platform, the financial systems no longer accurately depict the business model resulting in delayed reporting and insufficient visibility into performance results.



Ready to take your business to the next level? 🚀 Let me do the heavy lifting so that you can focus on the things that matter most 👉 Strategy & Scaling