The First 30 Days I Run With Every New Client

Most companies expect month one to produce a plan. A deck, a channel roadmap, a list of things we are going to launch next quarter.

Month one is mostly subtraction and arithmetic. I am not trying to add anything yet. I am trying to find out which numbers in the building are true, and which line items are quietly paying for nothing.

That is slower in feel than in result. Subtraction is usually the fastest money available, because it needs no new budget, no new vendor, and nobody's permission to run a test.

Week one is about whether the data is honest

Before I have an opinion on a channel, I want to know whether the reporting can support one.

The check is unglamorous. Which conversion events are actually firing. What is duplicated. Whose pixels these are, and whether we own them or a vendor does. Whether the number in the analytics tool reconciles with the number in the CRM, and whether either one reconciles with the bank account.

What I usually find is not fraud or incompetence. It is drift. A tag went in for a campaign three years ago. An agency installed its own pixel so its own reporting would look right. A form got rebuilt and the event never came along with it. Nobody did anything wrong on any particular Tuesday, and now the account is optimizing toward a conversion that includes people who bounced.

This matters more than it did five years ago, because you are not really the one bidding anymore. Smart Bidding and Performance Max are exactly as good as the conversion data underneath them. Most teams feed the machine garbage and then blame the algorithm for what comes back. If I fix nothing else in a first month, I want the machine being told the truth, because every decision after that inherits it.

Last click is the other one. It hands all the credit to the final touchpoint and none to the channels that created the demand in the first place. At PartnerSlate we built a simple multi-touch model that weighted first touch, lead creation, and opportunity creation. It was not elegant. It did show immediately that some of our most expensive channels were doing close to nothing while some of the cheapest were producing most of the pipeline. You cannot make that call off a last-click report, and until somebody can make it, every budget conversation in the company is opinion.

The kill list

Then I write down what we are going to stop.

Clients tend to remember the kill list more than anything else from a first month, partly because nobody hands them one. An agency is structurally incapable of writing it. Their revenue is a percentage of the thing that belongs on it.

At PartnerSlate we killed the bottom 20% of spend every month. Not every quarter. Campaigns, ad groups and keywords ranked by cost per qualified lead rather than cost per click, because a click is not a business outcome. Cut the bottom fifth, push the money up into what is working, repeat next month. It is simple, it is uncomfortable in the room, and it compounds. CAC went from $150 to $11 and new customer acquisition grew 8x. No single clever tactic did that. Relentless subtraction and content built to compound did most of it.

The list is rarely only media spend. It picks up the weekly report nobody reads, the audience segment nobody has opened since it was built, the campaign that exists because someone who left the company asked for it once.

The rule I hold is that nothing goes on the list for being unfashionable. It goes on the list when I can show what it costs and what it returns. Subtraction without evidence is just the new person rearranging furniture.

If your spend has quietly grown a bottom fifth that nobody has looked at in a year, that is the sort of thing I dig into on a [20-minute call](/contact).

What I will not launch in month one

New channels.

Not out of caution. A new channel in week two is usually the most expensive available way to answer a question the current account could answer for free. Most accounts I open have something inside them that already works and has never been given room to run. A market, a creative angle, an audience, a page that converts well and gets no traffic. Finding it and pointing budget at it costs nothing and pays inside the same month.

There is a self-serving reason teams launch fast, and I have felt the pull of it. A new channel is legible. It looks like the new person is doing something. It is much harder to sit in a leadership meeting and say the most valuable work this month was turning things off and repairing a conversion event.

I would rather be boring in month one and aggressive in month three.

Aggression is what the first 30 days buys you

The reason to do the unglamorous version is that it earns the right to push.

At The RealReal I scaled paid spend from $300K to more than $2M a month at 7x ROAS, with CAC down 40%. Nobody pushes a budget that hard on faith. It works because the measurement holds at every step up, so a bad week reads as a signal instead of setting off a panic. Honest data is what lets a team be the most aggressive one in its category without gambling.

That is what the first 30 days is for. Not the plan. The conditions that make a plan worth writing.

Day 30

A baseline I trust, which for some companies is the first one they have ever had. A kill list that has already been executed instead of debated. And one or two things that were already working, now funded like it.

The strategy work comes after that, and it is much better strategy, because the numbers underneath it are real.