Fractional Head of Growth, Two Days a Week, One Owned Number

The first thing I do is take channels away. Companies that call me are usually running nine or ten routes to market and can defend three with evidence. The first month is spent finding out which three, and after that the growth number stops being an average across a portfolio and becomes one line with a name against it. What the engagement is: Two days a week inside your leadership team, in your Slack, in your weekly management meeting, and on the board call. I hold one number, agreed in writing in week one, and it is never traffic and never pipeline. For a local-services operator it is usually booked jobs per market per week at a cost we have defended. For a developer tool it is accounts that reach a second paid seat, because that is where retention stops being a coin flip. For a kids-and-family app it is D30 retained payers, since installs in that category can be bought cheaply by anyone and mean nothing. If nobody can name your number today, that argument is the first fortnight, and it is not a comfortable one. Days one to ninety: I read the data before I read the deck: warehouse tables or the GA4 BigQuery export, the CRM, every ad account at admin level, three customer interviews I book myself, and two conversations with customers who left. Week four produces a constraint memo, one document naming the single thing limiting growth this year, the evidence for it, and the three activities we stop so that the money and the calendar exist to fix it. From week five the cadence runs: a Monday allocation meeting where budget genuinely moves between lines, a Thursday review where whoever ran an experiment reads out its result, and a monthly written note to the board that I draft and sign. On Japan: Japan entry gets sold as translation and it is a distribution question. The messaging surface is LINE. Search is bought in two places rather than one, and Yahoo! Japan Search Ads has its own review queue and its own structural conventions. Domestic buyers of a service want a Japanese company name, an address and a phone number visible before they convert, and reviews carry more weight than any landing page you write. If your product does not yet need a Japanese entity, I will say so; that answer has saved clients more than the engagement cost. The exit: Every engagement names its end at the start. I write the scorecard for your permanent head of growth, sit on the interview panel, and hand the person who takes the seat the constraint memo plus the reasoning behind the last two quarters of decisions. I do not convert into the permanent role, and that is written into the contract. Not included: I do not sit in the ad accounts changing bids and budgets. That is separate work and I keep the two apart deliberately, because the person who owns the number should not be the person grading their own execution. No creative production, no PR, no brand identity work, no fundraising materials. I do not run performance reviews for your team; if what the team needs is a manager rather than a growth owner, that is a different engagement. Not for you if: You are before product-market fit and want growth to substitute for it. You want a name and a title on the website for a raise. Your board has already made the decision and wants a second opinion that agrees with it. Or the budget you control is small enough that allocation is not really a decision, in which case you need an operator rather than an executive, and I will tell you so on the first call.