Turning a revenue target into a practical three-year growth plan

The situation

Doctor Care Anywhere is a listed digital healthcare business with c.£40m in revenue and c.90% of it coming through a single insurance partner. A new CEO had spent 12 months reshaping the business and stemming losses, and the business was now cash generative. Given the progress made, attention had turned to growth, and the business was writing the three-year revenue plan to be reviewed and signed off by the board.

I was brought in to assess the sales and marketing capability, determine what would have to be true for each growth initiative to deliver, and ensure there was a credible strategy behind the revenue plan.

What I did

It was crucial to get up to speed quickly, both to understand the existing workstreams and to build trust with the people leading them. I spent significant time with the executive team and the wider leadership group to understand the priorities, the progress against key initiatives and the capability behind them. I joined project working groups and took ownership of aspects of delivery, while challenging assumptions where I thought they were weak.

At the same time, I spent time with the sales and marketing teams to understand how things worked day to day, and to support the leaders on the immediate needs and blockers they were dealing with.

There were three main sources of future growth: private medical insurance, B2B partnerships and direct-to-consumer. I looked at each separately, considering the size and shape of the opportunity and what would have to be true for it to deliver against the revenue plan. I assessed whether the business could actually deliver it, and the sequence that would need to happen for it to work.

For DTC, my view was that the business needed to prove the economics before putting significant capital behind it. Critically, the measurement needed to be reliable enough to make decisions on, and the proposition needed to be clear about who it was for, why they would choose it and how it was differentiated from the other options in the market.

B2B partnerships were a significant growth opportunity, but lead generation was not systematic and opportunities were not being managed well through the funnel. I worked with the Sales Director to re-segment the market and set the priority areas to focus on. Reviewing how sales and marketing worked together, I led work to improve how HubSpot was set up and used, giving the team better visibility of the pipeline, more accurate forecasting and closer management of individual deals. I also took the lead on reworking the sales materials with an external designer, building a clearer narrative around the value of the business.

Five weeks after joining, I brought the recommendations together into the three-year growth plan and presented it to the board. I also presented the strategy to the wider leadership team at a strategy day, where it had strong support.

What would have to be true for each one to deliver?

The result

The biggest immediate change was in DTC. A launch plan with c.£3m of media spend was paused while the business built the foundations and tested whether the economics worked. Consultant spend supporting the launch, c.£120k a year, was also stopped.

B2B partnerships became a bigger part of the growth plan, using the segmentation I had recommended, and three new commercial roles were approved to strengthen the team.

The insurance strategy also shifted towards growing the existing relationship through cross-sell and new products.

The business went into its three-year plan with a different set of priorities: less capital committed to an unproven DTC model, more weight behind B2B partnerships, and a clearer route to growing the insurance business.

What it took

I had five weeks to understand three very different revenue models and give the CEO and board a clear recommendation in time for the three-year-plan board meeting.

Some of the initiatives already had a lot of momentum and senior backing, particularly DTC. Changing direction there was not just a matter of pointing out where the assumptions were weakest. It meant understanding the thinking behind the plan and building enough trust with the people behind it that a different recommendation would be heard.

At the same time, I was working with the sales and marketing leaders on what needed to change in their teams and how they worked together.

The difficult bit was not coming up with more growth ideas. It was deciding which ones were worth backing, which needed proving first and where the business should not spend its money.