I get called in to advise on business and ecommerce growth strategy fairly often.
Almost always with the same brief: “We’re not growing. Help us figure out why and what to do”.
After 20+ years of running, building or advising different businesses, I’ve noticed the same pattern. Almost every time.
The story
A CEO asked me to audit his ecommerce strategy recently. No real growth for 12 months. Something had to change.
We never touched the strategy. That wasn’t the problem.
We opened the strategy deck he had prepared.
10 active strategic priorities across 5 key markets. All legitimate and all being worked on simultaneously.
I told him the strategy wasn’t the problem.
He pushed back. Hard. He had built this business for years – he knew what growth required. More markets, more products, more budget. In his experience, the answer to no growth was always more.
I asked him one question.
*If your team could only accomplish 3 outcomes in the next 90 days to significantly improve results this year – what would they be?*
He went quiet. That silence was the real audit.
We spent the rest of the session on three decisions. Not ten. Three.
In practice that kind of focus looks like:
- Pull back to the two markets with the strongest unit economics. Fully resource them. Pause activities in other markets temporarily.
- Shift the primary growth metric from new customer acquisition to second orders within 60 days. Restructure the team’s focus around it completely.
- Go deep on the three highest-margin, highest-performing products already in the range. Maximise what’s working instead of chasing what isn’t yet.
No new strategy. No new budget. No new markets.
Best quarter in the company’s history.
Why it matters
The problem wasn’t the strategy. Problem was: too many priorities + not enough focus and execution on the few things that actually move the needle.
I see this patter with leaders across industries – ecommerce, technology, professional services, manufacturing, retail, finance. The context changes, but the pattern is oftne the same.
When results disappoint, the instinct is almost always to add – more initiatives, more channels, more people, more tools. But it’s usually the thing making the problem worse.
Why “more” becomes the default
There’s real organizational pressure behind this instinct.
Boards and investors reward visible activity. Starting new things signals progress. Stopping things feels like admitting failure. Teams don’t push back because they want to be seen as capable. And leaders feel the pressure of delivering results – so they often launch, add, expand.
The result is a strategy deck full of legitimate priorities and a team executing none of them fully.
Ten priorities don’t get executed and never will be. They get managed. This is the major difference.
What scattered focus actually costs
When a team is spread across too many priorities, a few things happen that rarely show up on dashboards:
- Accountability diffuses. When everything is a priority, nothing is.
- Execution stays at 40-50% on ten things instead of 80-100% on three. The work gets done, but just not well enough or in the wrong direction to move a number.
- The team starts to burn out – not from overwork, but from the exhaustion of constant context switching and the quiet frustration of never finishing anything properly, and not seeing real progress.
- Leaders spend more time coordinating than deciding. The bottleneck moves from strategy to management overhead.
Why the metric shift mattered as much as the focus
In the story above, moving from new customer acquisition to second orders within 60 days wasn’t just a tactical adjustment.
It was a completely different growth philosophy.
New customer acquisition is expensive and uncertain. Getting an existing customer to buy again – within 60 days – is more demanding, but cheaper and a far more reliable signal that the product and experience are working.
That shift changed what the team prioritised, what they measured, and where they directed their energy. Same team with same products, but with different mindset and focus.
Why 90 days
It’s short enough to create real urgency. Long enough to actually move a metric if you execute consistently. And it forces the conversation about what matters *now*, not “someday in the future”.
Most leaders can agree on a three-year vision. Very few can agree on three priorities for the next 90 days. That gap is where execution breaks down.
Your action this week
This process works whether you’re running a business, leading a team, or driving a significant project:
1. Start with defining the right problem
What is actually causing the lack of results? Not the symptom – the root cause.
Is it truly a strategy problem? A focus problem? A resource problem? An execution problem?
Name it in one sentence. Leaders who skip this step end up with the right priorities for the wrong problem.
2. Ask the 3-outcomes question
“If you and your team could only accomplish 3 outcomes in the next 90 days to significantly improve results this quarter and this year – what would they be?”
- If the answer comes quickly and everyone agrees: resource those three things properly and protect them.
- If the answer is slow, or you get five different answers from five people – that’s your real problem. Not the market, not the competition, not the budget.
3. Check where your team’s attention actually goes
Look at this and past weeks – where is their time, energy and budget really going? Does it match your top three outcomes? Or is it scattered across ten?
Ask the same questions about yourself.
4. Remove one thing
Find one initiative, meeting, or project not directly serving your top priorities. Pause it, delegate it, or stop it. This week, not next quarter.
5. Keep the team accountable weekly
Once you’ve defined your three outcomes, build a simple weekly check-in around them. Not a status report – three questions:
- What progress did we make this week on each of the three outcomes? What went well?
- What didn’t work? What is blocking us?
- What specific actions will we take this week to get back on track?
Outcomes without a weekly accountability rhythm quietly become intentions.
The question often isn’t whether you have a strategy.
It’s whether you’ve made it possible for your team to actually execute it.
Cheers, Andrey Sergeyev
For short ideas on leading, living and scaling business with focus on what matters – follow me on Linkedin
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