Senior growth thinking, available when your business needs it most.

Growth advisory is senior, independent guidance for founders and leadership teams on how to grow a business sustainably. It covers strategy, marketing, customer economics, team structure and the decisions that sit between departments. Rather than running a single channel, a growth adviser looks at the whole business and helps you decide where to focus, what to invest in and what to stop. At Vertical, our advice is grounded in the numbers and in daily experience of running brand, creative and performance marketing for growing brands.

Growth advisory suits founders, chief executives and leadership teams who want experienced input without hiring a full-time senior marketing leader. It works well for businesses at an inflection point, such as after a funding round, before entering a new market, when growth has stalled or when acquisition costs are rising faster than revenue. It is also useful for companies with capable in-house teams who want an outside perspective, challenge and support for board level planning and decision-making on the biggest questions facing the business.

There is overlap, and some clients use our advisory work in a similar way to a fractional chief marketing officer. The main difference is breadth and backing. Our advisers look across commercial strategy, unit economics and team structure as well as marketing, and they are supported by a full team of strategists, creatives and performance specialists. That means advice can move quickly into action when needed, without you having to find, brief and manage separate suppliers to carry it out on your behalf.

Most engagements start with a review of your goals, numbers, customers and current marketing, followed by a clear set of priorities and a plan. From there we usually meet regularly with your leadership team, review performance, prepare input for board meetings and help work through major decisions as they arise. The format is flexible. Some clients want a short, focused project to answer a specific question, while others prefer an ongoing advisory relationship over several months or longer, adapting as the business changes.

Unit economics describe the profit or loss you make on each customer or order. They include contribution margin, customer acquisition cost, retention, purchase frequency and customer lifetime value. They matter because a business can grow revenue quickly while losing money on every customer, which is not sustainable. Understanding unit economics tells you how much you can afford to spend on acquisition, which customers and channels are most valuable and where improvements in pricing, retention or costs will have the biggest effect on profit over time.

Yes. We help leadership teams present marketing performance, growth plans and budgets in a way boards and investors can follow and trust. That can include building a clear narrative, preparing evidence on customer economics and channel performance, stress-testing forecasts and anticipating the questions you are likely to face. We focus on honest, well-evidenced reporting, because credibility with a board is built on numbers that hold up rather than optimistic projections that later have to be explained away in difficult meetings.

Yes. We advise on which roles to hire, in what order, and which skills are better sourced from agencies or freelancers at your stage. We can help write role descriptions, define responsibilities and set up ways of working between in-house teams and external partners. The aim is a structure that matches your budget and ambitions, avoids expensive gaps or overlaps and gives people clear ownership of the outcomes that drive growth, rather than a collection of disconnected activities owned by nobody in particular.

We agree goals at the start of each engagement, which might include profitable revenue growth, lower acquisition costs, better retention, improved marketing efficiency or a successful launch or fundraise. We then track progress against them in regular reviews. Some value is harder to measure, such as faster decisions, fewer wasted projects or a clearer plan, so we also check in with leadership on whether the work is helping. If it is not, we would rather say so and change course.

Yes. Vertical runs brand strategy, creative, paid social, paid search, email, SEO, analytics and website work in house. When advice needs to be put into action, we can take on as much or as little as you need, from a single project to running several channels. Many clients start with advisory and then ask us to deliver specific parts of the plan. Others keep delivery in house and use us purely for senior guidance, challenge and planning support, which works equally well.

We use AI agents to bring together commercial and marketing data, model scenarios, monitor performance between meetings and draft papers and plans for discussion. That gives our advisers a clearer and more current picture of the business and frees more time for thinking and conversation. Every analysis and recommendation is reviewed by our senior team before it reaches you or your board, so AI speeds up the groundwork while experienced people remain responsible for the advice itself and how it applies to your business.

The best first step is a conversation about where the business is today, what you want to achieve and the decisions you are facing. From there we usually suggest a short review of your numbers, customers and marketing, then agree the shape of the engagement, whether that is a focused project or ongoing support. We will be clear about where we think we can help most, and equally clear if we think a different kind of support would serve you better.