DON'T GO INTO 2027 NOT KNOWING FACT FROM FICTION

Outside in

Four weeks to work out what's actually going on, where your strongest opportunities for profitable growth sit and what deserves your attention and investment next.

You're probably not short of ideas. The problem is knowing which ones are actually worth backing.

Let's talk

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Outside In is for businesses asking:

Why has growth slowed?
Where will our next phase of growth come from?
Has our customer changed?
Is our proposition still distinctive?
Are we spending marketing money in the right places?
Which markets, products or audiences should we prioritise?
What should we stop doing?
What's got us here that might be stopping us getting there?

Most businesses aren't short of things they could do. The difficult bit is knowing what they should do.

The view from inside

When you're inside a business every day, it's hard to see it any other way.

The longer you spend inside a business, the easier it is for assumptions to quietly become facts. We know our customers. We know our category. We know why people buy us. We know what works.

Until it doesn't.

Meanwhile, the world outside the business keeps moving and your own numbers are telling a story too. Customers change. Categories shift. New behaviours emerge. What's selling changes. Acquisition gets harder. Things that used to work stop working.

Sometimes the answer is sitting outside the business. Sometimes it's already sitting inside the numbers. Usually, you need to look at both.

OUTSIDE + IN

Two different brains. One big question.

Where should this business focus to unlock its next stage of profitable growth?

Carly looks outside.

Carly gets outside the assumptions inside the business and looks at what is changing in the world around it.

Customer

What are people actually doing now?

What's changing in their lives, needs, behaviours and expectations?

Amy looks inside.

Amy interrogates the growth engine to understand what's actually driving growth, what's constraining it and what can profitably scale.

Commercial performance

Revenue, margin, AOV, customer/product/market performance.

Acquisition

CAC, channel performance, dependency, scalability and funnel performance.

Retention

Repeat purchase, cohorts, LTV and customer development.

Marketing effectiveness

Where investment is going and what's actually driving growth.

Growth constraints

What's preventing the business from scaling profitably?

Outside + Inside

What's actually going on?

Where is the opportunity?

What's actually worth backing?

The interesting bit is where the two collide.

The customer story might contradict the commercial story. Something that looks like a marketing problem might actually be a proposition problem. The product everyone internally believes is the future might not be the one customers are voting for with their wallets.

Looking outside without looking at the numbers can send you chasing an opportunity that isn't commercially viable. Looking only at the numbers can tell you what's happening without telling you why.

Neither view gives you the whole answer on its own.

The four-week sprint

Four weeks. One clear direction.

We investigate

Customer. Category. Elsewhere. Commercial performance. Acquisition. Retention. Marketing effectiveness.

We investigate what's relevant to your growth question rather than analysing everything for the sake of it.

We join the dots

We put what's happening outside the business against what's happening inside the growth engine.

What did we think we knew? What does the evidence tell us? What doesn't add up? Where might the opportunity actually be?

We make choices

You leave with four things:

The growth diagnosis

What's actually happening, what's driving growth and what's constraining it.

3–5 growth opportunities

Where the strongest opportunities for profitable growth sit. For each:

Evidence → Why it matters → Commercial potential → What would need to change

The priorities

Everything goes into one of four buckets:

Do now

Do next

Test / explore

Stop / deprioritise

The 90-day focus

A clear roadmap for what needs validating, testing, building or changing next.

Not another enormous strategy deck full of things you could do. Clarity on what actually deserves your attention.

Outside in, in practice

FMCG: FOOD

The business question

A food brand had strong equity with a specialist audience. Could the proposition travel much further without losing the people who already loved it?

What we found

The specialist credential mattered, yet taste and enjoyment opened up a much bigger conversation. The category was defining itself by what its products didn't contain.

What it changed

The white space wasn't becoming a better dairy-free alternative. It was becoming a delicious product people wanted to eat that happened to be dairy-free, opening up a much bigger potential audience.

FOOD INNOVATION

The business question

The business had invested in genuinely differentiated technology. Would technical superiority translate into customer value?

What we found

The technology mattered enormously to the business. It wasn't necessarily the reason somebody would buy.

What it changed

The proposition was rebuilt around what the customer wanted to achieve, rather than asking them to care about how the product made it possible.

WHO'S DOING THE THINKING?

Two different brains. One big question.

Carly Osman Holme

BRAND + HUMAN INSIGHT

Carly has spent twenty years getting underneath why people do what they do, what makes brands matter and why businesses grow, or stop growing.

She's worked with global organisations, household names, scale-ups and founder-led businesses across food and drink, health, beauty, consumer goods and beyond.

In Outside In, she gets outside the assumptions inside the business to understand what's really changing with customers, categories and the wider world.

Coca-Cola
Nestlé
BBC
Chupa Chups
Cheeky Panda
Oddbox
Valerie
Manilife
LCN
Jux

20 years. Different categories. Big questions. Real experience.

AMY BOTT

Commercial + Performance

Amy's expertise sits where marketing meets commercial performance, understanding what's really driving growth, where it's leaking and where the biggest opportunities are hiding in the numbers.

She's led marketing and growth for some of the UK's fastest-growing consumer brands, worked inside businesses from scale-up to £100m+ revenue, and now advises DTC and e-commerce brands on acquisition, retention, customer economics and commercial marketing strategy.

In Outside In, she brings the commercial lens, connecting what customers and markets are telling us with what's actually driving performance.

Gymshark
Snug
Net-a-Porter Group
TUI Holidays
Dunelm
Victoria Plum
Mauvais
47 Skin

Nearly 20 years. Growth, marketing and commercial performance. From the numbers to what happens next.

We look at the same business from completely different directions. Then we compare notes.

Four weeks. Two lenses. One clear direction.

£30,000 + VAT

Outside In is a four-week strategic growth diagnostic combining external customer and market insight with internal commercial and marketing performance.

You leave knowing:

What's actually going on.
Where the strongest opportunities sit.
What deserves backing.
What doesn't.
And what to do next.

If you've got an ambitious growth target but aren't completely convinced where the growth is going to come from, that's probably a conversation worth having.

Talk to Carly + Amy