Most digital strategies do not fail because people are lazy or ideas are bad. They fail because the plan lives in a beautiful deck that no one opens after launch. At Hickory Grove, we see the same pattern again and again. Teams spend weeks on offsites, spreadsheets, and slides, then drift back to urgent tickets and ad hoc requests.
This case study is about GrowthCo, an anonymized business media company that was heading straight for the shelf. On paper, they were ready for a smart reset. In practice, their president insisted that they already knew their audience and their team was drowning in competing priorities. The data told a different story. What follows is the playbook Hickory Grove used to pull them back to reality and build a framework that people actually followed.
Who Is Talking And What Hickory Grove Does
I am Krystal, founder of Hickory Grove Consulting, a fractional CMO and operations strategist who has led strategy, SEO, and digital growth for publishers, SaaS scale ups, and complex web ecosystems. Over the years I have helped teams cut migration timelines, turn sagging ad programs into subscription growth, and rebuild the connection between strategy decks and day to day work.
That experience now shows up in Hickory Grove’s Strategy Consulting and framework design work. We help leadership teams set clear goals, align around a shared scoreboard, and design decision frameworks that survive the first busy week back.
Meet GrowthCo
Think of GrowthCo as every content brand stuck in 2014.
They were a 25-year-old business media company with most of their revenue locked up in display ads. Audience growth had been flat for years. Subscription revenue existed, but it was not the hero of the story inside the company.
Inside the organization:
The COO wanted data driven roadmaps and a clear way to prioritize projects
The CTO was drowning in backlog tickets and quietly weeping into Jira
The president changed direction frequently and loved a good pivot
The audience growth team rolled its eyes at vague consultant diagrams
Everyone agreed something had to change. No one agreed on what, why, or in what order.
Hickory Grove was brought in to build a strategic framework that would align leadership, guide investments, and actually be used after the workshop.
Phase 1: Surface The Truth
The first step in any framework project is not brainstorming. It is listening and writing down what people already believe.
Stakeholder interviews
We ran short, focused interviews with key leaders across product, editorial, sales, marketing, and technology. Every conversation used a common set of questions, including:
What single metric, if it moved 20 percent, would make this year an undeniable success for you
Name three urgent requests you handled last quarter. Why were they urgent
When a feature underperforms, how does the team find out and what happens next
At GrowthCo, the answers collided in predictable but useful ways:
The CTO wanted more traffic and faster feature delivery
Sales cared about cost per lead under a specific threshold
Editorial focused on time on page and awards
The president described success in broad terms that shifted from week to week
On their own, none of these answers were wrong. Together, they explained why every new initiative felt like a compromise.
Mission and metrics whiteboard
Next, we put every stated goal and metric on one board and drew simple arrows where they supported or fought each other. No slides, just markers and honesty.
Seeing everything in one place made a hard truth visible. Traffic was a vanity metric. Qualified leads and paid subscriptions were what actually paid the bills. That realization led to some awkward silence, then overdue alignment.
Gap analysis
Once the group agreed on the real business objectives, we quantified the distance between today and where they needed to go. A simple table highlighted the biggest gaps:
Subscription monthly recurring revenue: 0.6 million now, 1.2 million target
Return visitor percentage: 22 percent now, 40 percent target
Number of audience segments in use in their subscription platform: 2 now, 7 target
This exercise turned vague frustration into a clear list of gaps the framework needed to address.
Phase 2: Craft The North Star Framework
With reality on the table, Hickory Grove designed a simple, layered framework that everyone could repeat without checking notes.
Three-tier model
We organized GrowthCo’s ambitions into three tiers:
Tier 1: Diversify revenue with a clear goal, for example 35 percent of revenue from non ad sources within a specific window, tracked by subscription MRR and related KPIs
Tier 2: Deepen engagement by doubling return visits and improving the value of each visit, tracked by return visitor percentage and key engagement metrics
Tier 3: Adapt quickly by cutting feature cycle time and improving sprint throughput, making it easier to experiment and ship
This model gave leadership a shared language for trade offs. Saying no to a shiny idea became easier when they could point to the tier it did not serve.
Impact and effort scoring
Next, we mapped every project idea into an impact and effort matrix.
High impact and low to medium effort items became clear candidates for Now
High impact and high effort items moved into a structured Next list with real dependencies
Low impact ideas, even if beloved or flashy, moved to Later or were removed
At GrowthCo, a high profile podcast revamp landed in low impact and high effort, while a relatively boring franchise portal that would support targeted subscriptions scored high on impact and medium on effort. The portal moved forward. The podcast revamp waited.
Now, Next, Later
We then placed every project into simple columns: Now, Next, Later.
This is where the framework gets real:
Now contained a small number of funded initiatives with named owners and KPIs
Next contained work that would only move forward when specific conditions were met
Later collected everything else including many of the CEO’s initial must do items
After rescoring, roughly 60 percent of the original must do list moved into Later. Engineering and product teams finally had table stakes project clarity instead of a wall of equally urgent items.
Phase 3: Operationalize And Communicate
A framework is only useful if people use it after the workshop. Hickory Grove bakes simple operating rituals into every framework we design.
Shared decision log
We helped GrowthCo set up a public decision log that captured:
Date of the decision
What was decided
Who owned it
Which KPI it connected to
The result once enough time had passed
For example: on March 6, the team killed a one off advertiser export that was generating negative ROI. The COO owned the decision, it was tied to subscription MRR, and it freed 120 developer hours for more strategic work.
When names, dates, and linked metrics became visible across the company, urgent feature requests dropped by about 60 percent. It was no longer easy to sneak in pet projects without confronting the trade offs.
Quarterly state of the platform
We replaced long decks with a one page quarterly brief. It included:
Money invested
Movement in the top KPIs
Next bets
Known risks
Specific asks from leadership
A typical note might read: 62 thousand dollars invested, 8 percent lift in subscription trials, here is where we are ahead and behind. No slides. No jargon. People read it because it was short and clearly connected work to outcomes.
Cross department playback sessions
Hickory Grove encouraged thirty minute playback sessions each cycle where teams:
Recapped a specific win or learning
Showed the metric that changed
Agreed on what would happen next week
These sessions stopped surprise escalations. Sales had fewer reasons to ambush marketing because they could see where their needs showed up in the roadmap.
Continuous KPI checks
Finally, we set up a simple red, amber, green view of critical KPIs. Two red periods in a row triggered a retrospective. Each KPI had a clear owner, such as audience growth owning return visitor percentage and technology owning sprint throughput.
Accountability became visible without being punitive.
Results Snapshot
Within six months of working inside the new framework, GrowthCo saw:
Subscription revenue up roughly 18 percent
Urgent feature requests down about 60 percent
The backlog aligning more closely with revenue and subscription strategy
Leadership still debated priorities, but they did it inside a shared structure instead of in disconnected conversations.
Common Pitfalls And Fast Fixes
Hickory Grove sees the same traps in many organizations. Here are a few and how we address them.
Pitfall: "We already know our audience."
Fast fix: Run a short reality check. Ask a handful of questions rooted in data, such as which segment drives the most revenue and what specific behavior changed in the past year. If half the answers start with "I think" instead of "we saw," it is time to refresh the research.
Pitfall: Endless jargon filled decks.
Fast fix: Limit strategy presentations to one idea and one real metric per slide. Move detailed models into an appendix and focus the conversation on choices, not diagrams.
Pitfall: KPIs with no owner.
Fast fix: Assign a directly responsible individual to every key metric within 24 hours of naming it and log that publicly. A metric without an owner is a hunch, not a lever.
Why This Kind Of Framework Matters Now
Generative AI has made it easier than ever to produce more content and more ideas. Display ad markets remain volatile. In that environment, teams without a clear framework chase the loudest request of the week.
A tight strategic framework gives you two advantages:
Focus: you solve deeper problems than a generic AI generated listicle or another superficial feature
Agility: you can pivot earlier because you notice red signals sooner and have a shared process for making changes
Both make your CFO and your team breathe a little easier. They know what you are trying to achieve, how you will measure it, and what will happen if the plan needs to change.
Your Five Step Action Plan
If you want to borrow from the GrowthCo playbook, start here:
Book stakeholder interviews and ask a small set of sharp questions about success, urgency, and failure.
Put every goal and metric on a board at the same time. No erasing. Let the conflicts show.
Score each initiative by impact and effort. Move low impact and high effort ideas out of the Now column.
Create and publish a simple decision log. Treat it as the one source of truth.
Send a one page update each quarter that reports on money spent, KPI movement, next bets, and risks. Celebrate the greens and fix the reds.
Hickory Grove can facilitate this process end to end or help your team refine an existing framework that has stalled.
Calls To Action
If any of this sounds like your world:
Leaders and executives: If you need a strategic consulting partner who can turn chaos into a clear framework and KPIs your team believes in, consider a Strategy Consulting engagement with Hickory Grove.
Teams and operators: If your roadmap feels like a wish list instead of a plan, we can facilitate a framework workshop and leave you with a documented model, decision log, and next steps.
