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 revenue and c.90% revenue concentration in a single insurance partner. A chief executive who had joined about a year earlier had spent that time reshaping the business and stemming losses. With that work underway, attention had turned to growth.

The company had set an ambition to roughly double revenue over three to five years and was developing the three-year plan to support it. Sales and marketing were the next part of the organisation to assess. I was brought in to help the CEO understand the capability already in the team and, across the proposed growth initiatives, what would need to be true for them to succeed.

What I did

I started by building a view of the business quickly: meeting the executive team and the sales and marketing leaders, reviewing the revenue plan and existing strategy, going through the go-to-market materials and data, and developing enough understanding of the market to challenge the assumptions behind the plan.

I then worked through the three revenue streams separately, private medical insurance, B2B partnerships and direct-to-consumer, asking what would have to be true for each one to deliver, how the existing capability matched that, and what needed to happen first.

For direct-to-consumer, the immediate priority was to build the foundations and prove the economics rather than assume several million pounds of new revenue. That meant reliable data and tracking, a clearer proposition and funnel, controlled acquisition tests and evidence that acquisition cost, conversion, retention and payback could support larger investment.

For B2B, I re-segmented the market and recommended a much more structured sales and marketing model around it. That included better pipeline management and forecasting, clearer use of HubSpot, stronger pitch materials and meeting preparation, and marketing organised around segment-specific demand generation and lead nurture rather than working separately from sales.

For the existing insurance business, the opportunity was different again: protect and grow a strategically important relationship, including cross-sell and new products, while treating the partner as a long-term account rather than simply assuming the existing revenue would continue.

I pulled that into a report for the CEO and recommendations for the three-year plan, which I presented to the board five weeks after joining. Alongside the strategy work I coached the Sales Director and Head of Marketing, recommended changes to the shape of both functions, and started addressing suppliers and capability that no longer matched what the plan required.

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

The result

The board challenged parts of the plan, but the direction the business subsequently took closely followed the recommendations.

Direct-to-consumer was treated as a foundation-building exercise rather than an immediate multi-million-pound revenue channel. The planned launch with around £3m of media spend was paused, and the business later acquired a small consumer pharmacy to bring capability in-house rather than attempting to build everything from scratch.

B2B partnerships took a larger role in the growth plan, using the segmentation I had recommended. Three new commercial roles were approved to strengthen leadership and capability across the commercial organisation. And the insurance strategy put greater emphasis on deepening the existing relationship rather than simply relying on it.

I also ended around £120k a year of consultant spend that no longer matched what the business needed.

What it took

Getting inside a complex listed healthcare business quickly enough to be useful. I had five weeks to understand three very different revenue models, the market around each one and the capability of the sales and marketing organisation, then give the CEO and board a clear view in time for the three-year planning discussion.

Some of the initiatives already had momentum and senior support, so challenging them meant building trust with the people behind them rather than simply pointing out what was wrong. At the same time I was coaching the sales and marketing leaders and starting to change how the teams worked day to day.

The hard part wasn’t finding a long list of things that could be better. It was working out which ones really mattered, what needed to stop, what the business could realistically build next, and getting enough people behind that sequence for it to move.