Three companies. Three wrong diagnoses. Three fixes that actually held.
Every result here comes from the operating seat, as CMO and operator inside scaling consumer businesses, not from the sidelines. The through-line is the same one I bring to founders now: the problem everyone agreed on wasn't the real one.
Here's what changed once the actual constraint got found and fixed in the right order.
The performance problem that was an authority problem.
DDG (Digital Distribution Group) · CMO · Mobile gaming subscription, multi-market
The problem. I joined a fast-scaling mobile gaming subscription business as CMO with a mandate to unlock growth that had started to stall. On the surface it looked like a team-performance problem, expansion was slowing, and the experienced leads looked like the choke point. Everyone was watching the wrong layer.
The approach. The real constraint wasn't skill or effort. Authority had never been designed to scale. Decision rights were undefined, so senior leads were trapped approving work while junior staff couldn't move without permission, both levels running below capacity. I redistributed decision rights, turned the senior leads from approvers into coaches, and built a training cadence so managers could make calls on their own. In parallel, I sequenced the multi-market expansion and rebuilt user acquisition around unit-economic discipline.
The result. In year one, revenue grew from $43.8M to $62.5M, EBITDA more than doubled from $8.2M to $18.8M, and margin expanded from 19% to 30%. CPA dropped 44% while the footprint went from 6 countries to 12.
The part I'm proudest of. The next year, carrier purges, COVID, and adverse FX compressed the top line by roughly 20%. EBITDA held near $19.8M anyway, margin expanded toward 40%, unit economics stayed stable, and the footprint reached 21 countries, without me back in the room. Growth in a tailwind year is common. Holding margin and unit economics through a contraction is the part that's hard to fake.
The spending war that was a positioning problem.
Lieferheld (Delivery Hero Germany) · Interim CMO · European food-delivery app
The problem. The brand was losing share in one of Europe's most brutal food-delivery markets, outspent massively on TV and outdoor by a dominant competitor. The obvious instinct was to fight on the same terms: match the spend, buy more channels, make more noise. That instinct was wrong, and expensive.
The approach. The real constraint wasn't budget or channel mix. It was that the brand had no differentiated reason to be chosen, so every additional euro just reminded customers the competitor existed. The constraint lived upstream, in positioning, not performance. I ran a two-day positioning workshop with the leadership team and found a powerful asset sitting unused inside the brand's own name. Instead of competing on the category's generic claims. speed, variety, reliability, we built a distinct identity around personality, warmth, and humor.
The result. Q4 acquisition grew 54% year on year. CPA was cut roughly in half. SEO reversed from steady decline to double-digit growth, app order share climbed from around 22% toward 40%, and the business closed the year profitable at €16.4M EBITDA. The differentiated positioning became part of the foundation that contributed to the company's later $1.1B sale to Takeaway.com.
The lesson. When you stop trying to win on the competitor's terms and start competing on your own, the math changes. Find the real constraint first. Then the spend compounds instead of leaking.
The media problem that was a message problem.
Mobile subscription app · New-market launch · Built under capital constraint
The problem. A mobile subscription app brought me in to crack a new international market from zero presence. with a weak cash position, so the work had to generate fuel, not just results. The internal read was a media-buying problem: poor conversion, inefficient spend, channels that weren't performing. The team wanted to fix the execution.
The approach. The real constraint was upstream. Nobody had validated which message actually moved a new customer to subscribe, they were spending against internal conviction instead of market data, and every dollar against an unproven message was a dollar spent learning nothing. So we sequenced it: message first, conversion second, scale third. Aggressive creative testing across every product angle let the market pick the winner, landing-page optimization ran in parallel, and only once the message and page were proven did media spend scale. ruthlessly, with CPA discipline throughout.
The result. $4M in new revenue in twelve months from a standing start of zero. CAC of $2.14 against an LTV of $4.15, a 48% profit margin on every customer acquired, with the entire engine built under capital constraint. The model was proven before a dollar was scaled against it.
If any of this sounds like where you are right now, the stall you can't quite explain, the fix that keeps missing, that's usually the moment worth a conversation.
Tell me what you're seeing, and I'll tell you whether the real constraint is where you think it is.