Growth spread thin across every market at once.
The business was selling into homes, gated communities and commercial sites simultaneously, with acquisition spend spread evenly across every city it operated in. Blended numbers looked acceptable, so nobody could see that a minority of territories and segments were carrying the entire result while the rest consumed budget.
Details anonymised at client request.
What changed
We separated the economics by territory and by segment, then moved spend and sales attention to where the payback period was genuinely short.
- Rebuilt reporting so cost and payback were visible per territory, not blended.
- Concentrated spend on the geographies where density made service delivery profitable.
- Split messaging for commercial and residential buyers rather than running one campaign.
- Reset channel mix against contribution, retiring the channels that only looked cheap.
Monthly revenue moved from $1.5M to $3M without a proportional rise in spend, because the growth came from reallocation rather than volume.
What we would do next
Commercial contracts are the margin opportunity. Residential subscriptions built the density; the enterprise and multi-site accounts are what make that density pay.