Fixing the economics, then reshaping where the business could win

The situation

Embla is a Danish medical weight-loss business combining GLP-1 medication with clinical and behavioural support. It had grown successfully in Denmark, raised a Series A and launched in the UK, where early growth had been helped by access to Wegovy during a period of constrained supply.

By the time I joined, that market had changed. Supply was widely available, online pharmacies were proliferating and customer acquisition costs had risen sharply in both markets. In the UK especially, Embla was competing against much larger businesses selling cheap, fast access to the same medication, while on the surface our proposition of medication, coaching and an app could look much like everyone else’s.

The immediate priority was to reduce the amount of capital Denmark was consuming and get the established market as close to self-funding as possible, freeing scarce capital to prove whether the UK could become the second large market the business needed. I took P&L responsibility across both markets, with a team of fifteen across marketing, sales and customer operations and a seven-figure budget.

What I did

I stopped treating Denmark and the UK as one business in two languages. In Denmark I hired a local market lead, rebuilt the funnel around the Danish customer, shifted the creative towards member stories and changed the conversion model so coaches handled more of the sales journey. Because I held the P&L, I could move resource between acquisition, conversion and service delivery rather than asking marketing alone to solve acquisition cost.

At the same time I led a full repositioning across both markets. Customer research and the clinical evidence pointed to something much more distinctive than the category’s standard promise of medication, coaching and an app: people wanted to be treated as individuals, and they wanted a provider honest enough to acknowledge that sustainable weight loss is difficult. We built the proposition and a much more distinctive brand around that.

My remit then widened beyond marketing. I took on UK sales and clinical operations, worked with clinical psychologists and the product team to reshape how support was phased through the member journey, and improved how we set expectations before people joined. I also worked with product to define a North Star around member value and initiated development of an AI coaching assistant.

Denmark went from consuming capital to funding itself.

The result

In Denmark, acquisition cost fell 67%, sales conversion rose from 29% to 55% and churn fell by around 30%. Payback fell by two thirds and the market became effectively self-funding.

In the UK, changes across product, sales and clinical delivery nearly doubled sales conversion and reduced churn by around 40%. Membership also grew, but acquisition costs remained too high for the model to scale sustainably.

By then the strategic question had changed from how to improve the UK funnel to whether UK direct-to-consumer was the right place to keep putting scarce capital. Competitors were spending ten to fifteen times our budget and had infrastructure and customer bases we couldn’t economically replicate. I worked with the CEO and board on the decision to pull back from UK consumer acquisition and concentrate resource on Denmark, partnerships and the US.

What it took

The bigger challenge was deciding where the business could realistically win with the capital it had, then aligning the organisation around that choice.

That meant moving well beyond a marketing remit: making trade-offs across two markets, product, sales and clinical operations; working closely with the CEO through restructuring and changes in direction; and communicating those decisions clearly to the board and the wider company.

The answer wasn’t always to push harder at the existing plan. Sometimes it was to change where we were putting the company’s time, people and money.