You've got a store that converts, a team around you and customers who come back. Somewhere between £1m and £3m a year, the business is real. The question now is what the next stage of growth looks like.

For most founders and leadership teams, the next level feels harder than getting here. The tactics that got you to your first million start to flatten out. Acquisition costs creep up every quarter. And the easy answer, the one everyone around you will suggest, is more budget.

A bigger ad spend. A new agency. Another app, another channel. It can buy a few good months. But as acquisition costs rise, spend on its own stops paying back, and you end up renting growth you can't keep.

The brands that make the jump do something different. They optimise.

In most businesses, optimisation happens at the bottom. A junior marketer tweaks subject lines. An agency runs a few A/B tests. Someone updates a product page when they get a spare minute.

That's the mistake. Hand optimisation to the most junior person in the room and it stays small: isolated tweaks, no joined-up thinking and no link to the numbers that actually run the business.

Real optimisation is a decision about how the whole business works. Which lever matters most this quarter. Where the margin is leaking. What to stop doing altogether. Those calls belong with the people who run the business.

The brands that win treat optimisation as a mindset, set from the very top. The founder and leadership team know the unit economics, ask what the data says before every big call, and expect every part of the business to get a little better every week.

In practice, that looks like this:

I've spent 28 years as a practitioner and worked with more than 750 ecommerce brands, across conversion, SEO, email, ads and retention. Every one of those disciplines needs constant optimisation. You don't build something and leave it.

Every ecommerce brand grows through five levers: Traffic, Content, Conversion rate, Average order value and Retention.

Content is the one that feeds the other four. It brings in the right traffic, helps people decide to buy, gives them reasons to spend more and keeps them coming back.

The levers multiply each other, so small gains on each one compound. Here's how that plays out.

Take a store turning over £1m a year. It gets 1,000,000 visitors, converts 2% of them, and the average order is £50. That's 20,000 orders.

Now lift conversion from 2% to 2.25%. Same traffic, same prices. That's 22,500 orders, and £125k more revenue.

Next, bring in 10% more quality traffic. Those extra 100,000 visitors land on a store that now converts better, so at the new rate they add another £112k.

Then nudge average order value from £50 to £55 with better bundles, thresholds or recommendations. Across all those orders, that's another £124k.

Add it up and you're looking at £361k a year. More than a third more revenue, from three modest gains. And that's before retention and content keep compounding it, year after year.

You don't need one big breakthrough. You need small changes, backed by real customer data, made consistently. Those gains keep paying back long after the work is done.

Agencies have their place. But their incentives are rarely the same as yours. More spend often means a bigger fee. A new campaign looks like progress, and fixing a leaking checkout rarely makes a case study.

When you and your team understand optimisation, you can question what you're told. You can tell whether a recommendation is your biggest gain or simply the easiest thing to sell.

The good news is that it has never been easier to run this in-house with the team you already have. Building lean means making full use of what's already in the business:

A bigger budget can buy growth for a while. Optimisation is what makes it last. It builds a brand that's profitable, sustainable and far less dependent on paying for every new customer.

That's why I started How To Optimise. Every week, I take one real optimisation challenge from the brands I work with and show the working: the lever, the challenge, the process and the tools. So you and your team can understand it, question what you're told and put it to work in-house. Subscribe and you'll get each one as it lands.

I also coach founders and leadership teams through it directly, building the habits and the weekly rhythm so optimisation becomes simply how the business runs.

You've already built something that works. The next stage comes from making it work better, lever by lever, week by week. Most brands do. The best ones optimise.

Start by finding your biggest marginal gain.

Want the tools behind the work? Browse The Optimisation Toolbox. If you'd like help taking your team through the next stage, Work with Ian.