How I build systems that drive sustainable, compounding growth

Welcome to Growth Models.

I appreciate you stopping by and I’m looking forward to working with you.  

What is a Growth Model?    

Put in simple terms, it’s a marketing strategy that focuses on growing revenue. 

That might sound obvious, but there are lots of types of marketing meant for other things like branding, brand equity, or PR for reputation. These can play a part in a growth model, but they’re not the focus. They’re a means to an end. 

A growth model specifically focuses on getting and keeping customers while also increasing lifetime value.  

The best growth models are systems where each new customer becomes a potential advocate for the brand. By turning users into promoters, you unlock potential exponential growth.  

Who I am and who I’ve helped

I’m Pete, the founder of Growth Models.

More than a decade ago I was working in a role where potential users would have to fill out an online application form. The sales reps would then pull from this list to make sales. 

As it was a commission-based role, I realised that if I had more leads, I had more opportunities to make a sale, and thus more opportunities to earn higher commissions.  

After speaking to some of the applicants, they complained that it took them a long time to figure out what they were applying for. As a result, I reworked all of the pages I was in control of, ensuring each one…

• Fit an easily scannable format
• Included the key information the end user wanted
• Removed elements of friction that stopped people from applying

The result was 2 fold. 

First, I became the top salesman in the company within 3 months. 

Second, I left the company. I’d seen how much impact good copywriting and simple systems of conversion could have on companies. And I wanted to try more of it.  

I initially started out as a copywriter creating high-converting sales pages for SaaS, info product, service, and eCommerce brands.

Often, my pages would outperform the control and help the brand secure more leads, customers, and revenue.  

But I noticed there was a problem. 

Even the best sales page in the world won’t achieve incredible growth if you’re driving poor traffic or not properly nurturing the users once they’ve taken that conversion action.  

To help my clients grow more effectively and ensure that I kept getting best-in-class results, I had to shift focus from single elements to a wider customer journey. 

Before long I was running a small agency which created full funnels for clients. We’d drive high-value traffic through ads, turn them into leads by capturing emails, and then nurture them to the sale through email. 

By focusing on the full journey I was able to create compounding gains which led to more sustainable growth. This approach helped clients add millions of dollars in new revenue.  

I now help brands set up more effective models for sustainable growth. I help them look at everything from the ideal user and positioning, all the way through to user satisfaction and reducing churn rate.  

A few of the brands I’ve helped and been featured by over the years include…

And these kind folk have had this to say about my work.  

To see if it’s possible for me to help you with your growth, book a time to talk and get a free analysis through this page.  

Why I employ the sniper approach 

A common approach to growth is to try as many things as possible and see what sticks.  

I disagree with this approach on a fundamental level. We’re all limited by the resources available to us. Be it financial, time, or manpower. 

The idea that trying 100 things to find 10 that work simply isn’t a smart way to grow. It’s the shotgun approach. You’re betting on simple volume helping identify the small handful of actions that actually add to growth.

This is a resource-heavy approach that’s not based on any sort of research. Wins are from luck, not from accurate planning. And there’s a better way to do things.  

With a little upfront research and analysis you should be able to identify the bottlenecks and potential reasons for those bottlenecks. 

That will help identify a small number of actions that will have the highest potential impact on increasing growth.  

You end up spending a little more time analysing and identifying the cause, but at the same time, far less time waiting to see results.  

The changes you make have a faster impact and leave you with more of your precious resources to run the next test. 

Great growth comes from picking out a handful of high-impact actions rather than trying anything and everything to see what sticks.  

It’s the sniper approach, and it’s what great campaigns are built on.  

What few understand about successful company growth

We’ve hit a time where everyone is doing surface-level analysis of brands in an effort to stand out as an “expert”. You’ll see newsletters, social posts, and blog analyses of things like…

• The social ad headlines that drove $100MM for company X
• How Brand B grew to a $1B valuation with this blog format
• The referral sequence behind $10MM in sales

These are snappy headlines that get clicks. But they’re misguided and shouldn’t be followed as a framework.  

They try to boil success down to a single asset within a growth model. Which is never the true cause of growth. 

Sure, a great sales page might help increase overall engagement and revenue. It could even be so good that it has a measurable impact on the businesses as a whole.

But I’ve analysed hundreds of brands in private, published dozens of breakdowns of entire growth models for the world’s leading brands, and helped create dozens oif profitable growth strategies.

You know what I’ve learned. 

That better results come not from focusing on one aspect like traffic, or a sales page, or your onboarding. 

Great results come from looking at the user journey – from first point of content through to custom support – and analysing not only how each stage can be improved, but also how each stage builds on the one before it.  

When you take a full journey approach with your marketing, you’ll get better overall growth simply from the compounding gains.  

A lot of agencies and consultants will wax lyrical about a single tactic and sell you on the idea that this is the cure to all growth woes…

• “We’ll help you improve your ads”
• “We’ve got the best sales page copywriters in the business”
• “Our onboarding specialists will drive more revenue from each new customer”

But, when you look into any successful brand there’s never a complete reliance on one tactic. It’s all about a coherent system that works in concert.  

The Growth Models’ Methodology

I take a different approach to a lot of the marketing consultants and agencies out there.  

When you dive into the processes these people take they tend to approach growth from one of two perspectives. 

1. Starting with aggregation tools. They’ll use tools like SEMRush as their starting point. These tools can be great and they’re easy to use. However, your competitors are using them and often taking the same actions as the agency. You end up increasing your competition by using these as your start point.  
2. They only implement “best practices”. Best practices are great. But by the time they’ve become best practices, everyone is doing them. And if there’s a surefire way to get the same results as everyone else, it’s to take the same actions as them.  

I’m not here to tie with the competitors. I don’t want to take the same actions and get the same results.  

Winning is the name of the game. And to win, you have to do things others either haven’t yet thought of or identified. 

The only way to do this is to dive into the data and come up with creative ways to overcome the bottlenecks in your business.  

Core fundamentals of my approach

To get great results you have to understand a number of guiding principles that lead to better growth.  

There are 3 macro levers to focus on

If you boil it down to the absolute basics, there are three main levers to pull to increase any brand’s online revenue.  

• Reach – the number of people who see your offer
• Conversion – the number of people who turn into customers
• Retention – the number of people who keep paying your brand

This is an oversimplification as there are dozens of levers within each macro step that can be pulled. The difficulty is in breaking down your approach and understanding which to pull.  

The ACCER model

After years of working with brands to increase growth, I’ve developed what I’ve terms the ACCER model.  

This is a sequence of steps within a growth model that help identify actions to take that improve the 3 core metrics above.  

Here’s how the ACCER model breaks down. 

• Attract – How are you attracting ideal users to your website and what can you do to increase that number?
• Capture – Less than 5% of your website visitors are ready to buy right now. Capturing their details is key to building trust and being top of mind when they are ready to buy. 
• Convert – How are you turning leads into users and customers and what can be done to improve the conversion rate? 
• Engage – Churn is the silent business killer. Profitability comes from repeat purchases and billings.  
• Refer – How are you getting your customers to talk about you and refer new business to you? 

This model has helped dozens of brands increase conversions, revenue, and growth by helping them take the unwieldy goal of “growth” and break it down into smaller, manageable improvements.  

Begin and end with the user

Many of the marketers out there play to the algorithms and platforms. They’ll say things like…

• “We need to rank better on Google”
• “We can include more ads if we increase the length”
• “This platform rewards people who share X times per day” 

These can be important understandings and discoveries to speed growth. However, this is not what you should be optimising for.  

Some brands go out of their way to create content for the algorithms and platforms. The result is that when a real person sees the asset, they experience zero value and so don’t take the next step action you need them to. 

You have to focus on the user and their experience. They’re the one paying you. 

Creating for the user, and then optimising for the platform you’re reaching them through is the way to more effective growth. 

You may experience lower rates of engagement for stages like impressions, or even CTR, but you’ll see a far higher number of people who do come to your site take your key conversion actions.  

By building for the end user, you get lower reach, but far more customers. 

Data is the core of success

You can’t make informed decisions without data. 

I’ve seen entire strategies collapse because the team default to the HiPPo (highest-paid person’s opinion) over what the data is telling you. 

The problem is in how many potential actions there are to take. With the various mix of marketing channels and tactics, there are literally thousands of potential approaches to grow your company.

Most will not be a fit for your brand, offer, audience, and stage of business.

When you rely on assumptions and opinions, you’re literally taking a stab in the dark.

Using data will help you thin the options to the most high potential successes. You’ll identify obvious bad fits and can remove them from your planning.

Data collection and analysis doesn’t remove 100% of the potential bad options, but it usually removes a good 80% of the obviously bad ideas and suggestions leaving you with a much higher chance of success.

Your job is to collect data so you can make more informed decisions. 

The best way to collect that data? 

Rapid testing = better feedback loops

A lot of testing success comes down to running small experiments to see what best impacts the growth of your business.  

The more tests you can push out, the faster you learn what works and what is a waste of your time.  

The wonder of testing is that it has a hard end date. 

If the test fails and ends up damaging your growth, you simply end it and move on to the next one. If it wins and you see key metrcis grow, you can leave it in place for compounding gains over time.  

Turn as many users into advocates as possible

Few people believe your own brand’s claims of greatness. 

For example, if I were to tell you that I’m the greatest business growth advisor on the planet, would you believe me? 

Unlikely.  

But if I had a dozen clients just like you who were saying that my approaches had a profound effect on their business, would you believe them? 

More likely, right? 

These clients have nothing to gain by promoting me and so their testimony has more impact and leads to higher conversions.  

A referral element that turns your happy customers into promoters of your brand is a core aspect of a solid growth model.  

It not only has more inherent trust, but also helps increase traffic to your offer. 

Get this right and it could help lead to exponential growth. 

Understanding threat levels and how to mitigate them

You might have heard marketers mention some variation of “like trying to have sex on a first date”. 

It’s basically a mismatch between threat level and next step action. 

A lot of brands go straight for the jugular. They run an ad to a cold audience and try to get them to purchase a high ticket offer. Ot they do a cold outreach message and immediately request 30 minutes of the lead’s time to “jump on a quick call”. 

These approaches rarely work and lead to poor conversion rates.   

The solution is something I call the “yes ladder”. You start with a low-threat ask and offer something that’s matched with that threat.  

If the user says “yes” to that ask, you build the next step at a slightly higher level threat level. Each step offers value to the user and builds trust so, when they hit the big ask, it’s only one small step instead of a giant lead. 

The 9-step approach to growth marketing

Growth marketing can be systematised. Below is the system I’ve used to successfully help brands grow.  

Step 1 – Goal alignment

What do you want to achieve? What are the specific goals you’re shooting for and what are the metrics that we need to improve to help get you there.  

This early alignment helps keep everyone on the same page and accountable.  

Step 2 – Basic audience research

We start with the customer. We cannot expect to generate more of them for you if we don’t understand who they are and what they want.  

What we need to understand about them is who they are, what they want to achieve, what’s stopping them from getting there, and of course, how your offer can help them achieve that. 

In addition, we need to understand where they go online and where we can most easily reach them.  

Step 3 – Analysis of current assets and performance

Break down the current marketing strategy and assess the core assets and elements at each and every stage.  We need to see how customers find you and the path they take to purchase and beyond.  

Then we need to track the success rates of each stage so we can start to identify the easiest elements for improvement.  

Step 4 – Competitor research

Who are your competitors? What makes them stand out in a crowded field? Why do customers choose to work with them over you? What do people like about them and what do they dislike? You need to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities that are present in your competitors. 

Step 5 – Unearthing your competitive edge

At this stage, we have a lot of data and information on your customers, your offer, and the competition. Here we need to see if there are any easy wins and high-impact potentials. 

You’d be amazed what you can find out here. Be it that there’s a simple differentiator to help you stand apart from the crowd, or hidden trust-building assets that’ll spike conversion but are currently hidden.  

Step 6 – Ideating high-impact solutions for testing

There are lots of things you could do to grow your business. A lot of brands and marketers tend to default to the most obvious things that jump out to them immediately. These, often, are not the highest impact actions.  

We’ll look for the actions that have the highest impact with the lowest resource cost and that have the fastest implementation time.  Using the data we’ve collected, we should be able to devise several ideas to rank and prioritise.  

Step 7 – Creating assets for high-impact experiments

Once we know what it is that will have a measurable impact on your business, we need to implement it.  

We’ll use the details from the research and analysis to make sure that the strategy we create is built around what people want and that will have a large impact on your growth. 

Step 8 – Analysis of results

We’ll help you identify the best tools and services to continue to monitor the results of the experiment.  Once the testing is complete, you’ll have more data on which to implement the next round of improvements.  

Step 9 – Return to step 5 and repeat

Once you have the results, it’s time to go back to step five and look at how you can find more advantages from the data that’s been collected. More tests are launched, and more data gathered for continual improvements.  

The clients I work with

I am, unfortunately, a solo consultant. This means my time is limited and I’m not able to work with everyone out there.  

I’m selective about who I work with because I like to win. I’ve found through hard-won experience that if a client and I are not aligned on the below areas, the chances of success with an engagement are slim. 

If you are interested in working with me, please take a second to read through what I’ve found to be the best-fit clients for my services. 

They move fast (but don’t want to break things)

I’m impatient. I like to move fast and see what actually works rather than get caught up in theory without results. I get the best results when working with clients who also share this approach. 

I’m not talking about “move fast, break things” approaches. With the right research and analysis, we can move fast and add value instead of breaking the offer and annoying users.  

My wife works for Amazon and they have a policy that if an action is easily reversible, it should be taken without hesitation. After all, if it’s wrong you can simply reverse it. 

This not only helps you ship more improvement ideas faster, but it leaves you with more headspace to figure out how to implement the less easily reversible decisions. 

Action breeds success. With action, you get super valuable user feedback and data that helps you understand whether you’re on the right track or need a course correction. 

The best growth I’ve ever achieved is by working with clients who understand that implementation is key. They don’t get bogged down in useless deliberation or bureaucracy. 

They share my belief that the customer should be the center of focus

I spent too long optimising my efforts to appeal to te algorithms and platforms in the space. For a whole, this was a valid way to achieve growth.  

However, as the years have gone by, the platforms are focusing more on the UX. After all, Google wouldn’t be popular if they didn’t serve the person who’s using the service.  

These platforms, services, and algorithms we all rely on for traffic and reach are, first and foremost, built for the user.  

By also focusing on the user you align with these platforms and usually get better results through them. You also better serve the customer which leads to higher conversions and customer happiness.  

Win, win.  

They have the ability and will to make big decisions

Small changes lead to small results. It’s a simple fact. 

Out of all the brands I’ve worked with I cannot think of one where we drastically improved results by making small changes. I’m not saying you need raze your business to the ground and start from scratch, but you have to be willing and able to do things that might make you uncomfortable.  

Growth happens outside of your comfort zone. 

A lot of brands stagnate with growth because they keep doing the same thing but expecting different results. 

We won’t be taking damaging actions with your brand, but we will be challenging your existing practices. We’ll be using the data to find what we can do to mix things up and really grow things.  

They have the resources to implement and scale experiments

I am a solo consultant.  

And I’ve had some great success by advising brands on how to improve their growth. However, that success is not 100% down to me. There’s a team that helps with growth in every way. 

My job as a growth marketing consultant is not to get you a % gain today. My job is to train your internal team on how to approach growth. 

Yes, we will get a lift in revenue during the time we work together. However, the real value is in teaching your internal team how to approach growth and experimentation. This is what builds long-term success.  

Of course, that means you either need to have an existing team, or the resources to bring people in as consultants or employees to help action all opf the ideas we’ll find.  

How can we work together? 

I work with clients in a few different ways. There’s a simple one-time collaboration in the form of an audit, and another where I’ll embed myself within your team for a set period of time to create increases and build a system of improvement.  

Growth Model Audits

With the Growth Model Audits I will analyse the entire marketing and growth strategy of your brand and identify the highest impact changes and experiments you can run to increase sales. 

I’ll look at the entire system from traffic acquisition all the way through to customer retention and referrals. 

You’ll get an easy-to-follow step-by-step plan on how to improve your strategy and approach which can easily be handed off to your team so they can action those changes.  

In addition, I’ll record several videos explaining exactly how and why those changes need to be made.  

Growth Model Sprint

Here, I’ll embed myself as a fractional CMO within your team to run through the whole Growth Models methodology for high-perfomance growth outlined above.  

You’ll not only get a world-class growth specialist helping you, but at the end you’ll better understand who your best customers are and how to find more of them. You’ll have greater numbers of happy customers that are telling their friends and colleagues about you. 

But most importantly, you’ll have an incredible growth strategy in place and a team that better understand how experimentation and action lead to long-term gains. 

Want to work together? 

Get a free analysis of your growth strategy by clicking here.  

These are completely free for brands I’m able to help. 

On the call, I’ll run you through some potential improvements you could make. And, if you see the value of those recommendations we can talk about the potential of working together to further the growth and impact of your brand.