What to Expect From Your First 90 Days (& Beyond) With Growth Division

As the co-founder of Growth Division, I’m on calls with startup founders and heads of marketing every single week. And one question I often get asked is a version of: 

“What would my first 90 days with Growth Division actually look like?”.

In the early days, I found it tricky to give a definitive answer to this question. Every client taught us something new about the best way of working; we were still iterating and solidifying our process.

Now, after helping grow over 130 startups, I actually hope that potential clients ask me this question, because I’m really proud of the system we have in place – and we get a lot of great feedback on it. 

I figured it was worth capturing how we work to share with anyone interested. Here’s a roundup of what you can expect from working with Growth Division: 

‍(💡For the record, one of the other most common questions I get is “Have you worked with a startup like us before?”, and we’ve now organised our case studies to make that easier to check. Filter by industry, business model, or marketing channel.)

Before we start working together

So before we officially start working together, here’s what has already happened:  

• Across two separate calls (and with subsequent research), we’ve worked with you to identify what we believe are your most promising marketing channels using the Bullseye Framework.
• We’ve written up a proposal for which channels we would test first, how we’d recommend operating them, which of our experts would run them, and how much this would cost. 

The next 6 months together are spent figuring out whether these channels are profitable and scalable for your business.

“Growth Division took the time to understand our business's unique requirements and proposed a customised & thoughtful marketing strategy in keeping with our goals and budget before we even hired them.” – Raina Saboo, Head of Business at Optic.xyz

Book a free Bullseye workshop with me. I’ll help you set objectives, plan your budget and then build a suitable channel mix. Book a Discovery Call.

Phase 1: Setting channel strategy (Day 1-30)

Phase 1 is all about setting your strategy on a channel level. You’ll be added to a Slack channel with your growth team, including all your channel experts and your Growth Strategist. This will be the main way we keep in touch going forward.

The Growth Strategist will have given plenty of context to the rest of your growth team, but each expert will also want to meet with you directly to hear more about your business and gather any additional information that will help to shape their plan. 

By the end of this month, every channel expert will have set and shared their channel strategy and incorporated your feedback. They’ll have access to everything they need and be ready to go live on their channel. 

We use the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework to track progress and align on expectations, and each channel expert will set theirs during this phase, too. You will have visibility of these in Monday.com. 

Your Growth Strategist is there to make sure all channels are aligned to your overall goals and vision, to step in with feedback, and to support with the logistics. Phase 1 typically takes one month to complete, but we can sometimes condense this if needed.

“What stood out most about Growth Division was their ability to combine strategic clarity with hands-on execution. Many agencies specialise in either big-picture strategy or tactical delivery, but Growth Division managed to bridge both.” – Bradley Jones, Founder & CEO of ThatRound 

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Phase 2: Launching & running channels (Day 31 onwards)

In our second month of working together, each channel expert starts executing on their strategy. As well as tracking against OKRs, each channel also has clear deliverables, so you can see the work that was done, as well as what it achieved. 

You will have a clear breakdown of the monthly cost of running each channel – and these deliverables – within your proposal. 

A key part of our approach is experimentation. We know first-hand that the only way to unlock sustainable growth as a startup is through continuous and structured growth experiments, so this is core to how we work. 

Experiments and their results are recorded within our own experimentation tool, GrowthEX. This means that, both during and after working together, you will have a clear log of past experiments to build upon.

What to expect as part of our monthly cadence:

Day-to-day communication over Slack

Please think of Growth Division as an extension of your team – we find we get the best results with clients when this is the case. We’ll keep communication in Slack so that everyone has visibility, and we can pull together as one. 

“It sounds incredibly cliche to say, but it doesn't feel like a typical agency-client relationship, it feels like we're all Team Weavr.” – Anna Carless, Head of Marketing at Weavr

Weekly calls with your Growth Strategist

Your Growth Strategist will meet you weekly if there is enough strategy time scoped into your proposal. They’re there to act as a strategy sounding board, to help you unpack weekly numbers, and to take on board any feedback about the wider team. Think of them as your fractional CMO.

“Our weekly 1-2-1 calls are a great time for two-way feedback, and for taking a temperature check of the month’s numbers. I’m there to support our clients with this time in any way I can – often that looks like talking through things they’re struggling with, and drawing on my experience with similar startups to make suggestions.” – Clare Gittins, Growth Strategist and Partner at Growth Division

Monthly Growth Reviews

Early every month, the whole growth team meets with you to review performance for the previous month. Each channel expert runs through last month’s numbers, how they’re tracking against their OKRs, what they’ve learned, and what they will be testing, changing and working on for the current month.  

This is also a great time for you to update us all in person on anything we need to know for the months ahead.

Looking for manageable and actionable growth insights?

Sign up for our monthly newsletter, Thoughts on Growth, where my co-founder and I take turns to share: 

⭐ How we’re tracking against our own North Star Metric

🎯 One growth channel insight

📖 One growth resource we rate

💡 One growth experiment we ran, and the results

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6-month OKR and channel review (Day 180)

Now, I really want to stress right away: we’re monitoring channel performance closely every month. 

And if a channel clearly isn’t working, we’ll cut it long before we get to this stage. Similarly, if something is flying, we’ll see how we can shift the budget to support it. 

But in general, we find the 6-month point is when we have enough data to confidently take a call on which channels are proven to work for you. Channels pay off at different points, and impact the performance of each other; we want to be careful to avoid false negatives or positives.

We re-run the Bullseye workshop session, taking into account new data and insights we have drawn from our experiments to conclude where budget and focus should be prioritised for the next 6-month stint.

After 6 months of testing, we can move successful channels to the centre of the Bullseye, and say with confidence: “This works for your business. Let’s double down on it.” 

‍We move quickly, and we’re as hungry for growth as you are. Many of our clients have seen incredible results long before the 6-month mark, including Eat Sleep Cycle:

Case study: Eat Sleep Cycle

Eat Sleep Cycle came to us with flatlining growth. They were looking for a true long-term growth partner, which is always music to our ears. 

🎯 I assembled a team that blended long-term vision (SEO and Community Building) with faster-acting channels (Paid Ads and Email Marketing). 

✅ Within 6 months of starting work together, we’d added €1 million in sales, and had increased their monthly revenue by 4x compared to the same month the year before. We’re still working closely with them at the time of writing this post.

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What to expect throughout working together (according to our clients)

We’re proud to have many positive reviews of Growth Division on Clutch, which go into a great amount of detail about what it’s actually like to work with us. I’d definitely recommend checking them out if this is something you’re curious about.

Here are some of the common themes:

We act as an extension of your team

We’re not the kind of agency that only drops in once a month with a progress update. We’re on hand day-to-day in Slack – just like your in-house team. 

“What stands out the most about Growth Division is their seamless integration into our team. They've transcended the typical marketing agency role and truly feel like an integral part of our team…It's evident that they genuinely prioritise our success.” – Rahat Ahmed, Head of Marketing at Retain

Top-tier channel experts 

We have over 85 independent, vetted channel experts working with Growth Division. These professionals are at the top of their game, and the fact that they’re all independent gives us total flexibility to pull in the best people for different channels, business types and industries.

“I think Growth Division's approach to marketing is fantastic. They work with experts to validate a channel, rather than hiring a team. This means I can work with the best freelance talent on a flexible basis to test a channel. If it doesn't work, I can stop and test another channel. I really like this approach.” – Alexander Phillips, Founder of Breezy

Rapid and systemised experimentation

I already mentioned experimentation, but it’s worth mentioning again because it is so core to our approach. We will rapidly try lots of ideas, and ask that our clients be patient while we unlock successful experiments, find a scalable channel to market, and keep pushing to make each channel work even better.

“It's never been a case of 'oh it works great now', even with a channel campaigns success, the GD team are continuously looking to make the channels sing even better - it's a constant iteration environment which is in keeping with the Weavr culture and approach to all projects.” – Anna Carless, Head of Marketing at Weavr

A flexible and startup-friendly approach

My co-founder and I started Growth Division after building and selling our own startup, and many of our Growth Strategists are also founders or exited founders. 

‍Which is all to say that we get startups. We understand that priorities shift quickly, and we will shift with you. We have a bias for action and results, and we’ll never blow your budget on fancy slide decks.

“They get startups. They understood the chaos that comes with small teams trying to do many jobs at once. They've simplified the work to focus on the most effective metrics and not fuss about pointless data.” – Nicola Telford, CEO & Co-Founder of a Donation Technology Platform

So – what’s next?

If you like the sound of our approach to scaling startups, book a no-obligation discovery call below to find out if we’re a good fit. We’ll learn more about your business, and then use the Bullseye Framework to recommend the channels we believe have the most potential for you. 

And if there’s anything I didn’t cover that you’d like to know, drop us a message! Here’s the best place to do that.

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