Growth Strategy Consultants: What They Do and When to Hire One

Growth strategy consultants help businesses identify where revenue is being left on the table, build a plan to capture it, and pressure-test the assumptions standing in the way. They are not brand strategists, and they are not execution agencies. The best ones sit at the intersection of commercial thinking and market reality, which is a narrower space than the job title suggests.

If you are running a marketing agency and wondering whether a growth strategy consultant could accelerate your trajectory, the honest answer is: sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the difference usually comes down to whether you have a clarity problem or an execution problem. Consultants fix the former. They cannot fix the latter.

What Does a Growth Strategy Consultant Actually Do?

The title gets applied to a wide range of people doing very different things. Some are former management consultants who moved into fractional advisory work. Some are ex-agency leaders who consult on new business development. Some are generalist business coaches who rebranded when growth became a fashionable word. The work varies accordingly.

At their most useful, growth strategy consultants do three things. They audit where the business is currently generating revenue and why. They identify which growth levers are underused or untested. And they build a prioritised plan that accounts for the business’s actual resources, not an idealised version of them. That last part is where most generic strategy frameworks fall apart, because they are built for businesses with infinite capacity and no political constraints, which describes almost no agency I have ever worked in.

I spent the better part of a decade running agencies where growth was not optional. When I joined iProspect, the business was losing money and operating well outside the top ten in its category. We grew the team from around 20 people to over 100 and moved into the top five. That did not happen because someone handed us a growth framework. It happened because we were brutally honest about where we were competitive and where we were not, and we stopped pretending otherwise. A good growth strategy consultant forces that same honesty from the outside.

For a broader look at how agencies can build sustainable commercial momentum, the Agency Growth & Sales hub at The Marketing Juice covers the full range of growth levers, from positioning and new business to team structure and client retention.

When Does Hiring a Growth Consultant Make Sense?

There are specific moments in an agency’s lifecycle where outside perspective genuinely accelerates progress. There are also moments where it just adds cost and noise. Knowing the difference saves a lot of time and money.

Hiring a growth strategy consultant makes sense when the leadership team has reached the limit of what internal debate can resolve. When the same conversations are happening in the same rooms with the same people and producing no new conclusions, an external voice with commercial credibility can break the deadlock. It also makes sense when the business is preparing for a significant transition, whether that is a move upmarket, a new service offering, or an acquisition. Those moments benefit from structured thinking that most agencies do not have the capacity to do well while also running the business.

It makes less sense when the problem is operational. If the agency is losing clients because account management is weak, or pitching poorly because the creative output is inconsistent, a growth consultant will diagnose those problems accurately and then tell you to fix them. That is useful, but it is not what most people imagine they are buying. The consultant is not going to fix your account management for you.

It also makes less sense when the leadership team is not ready to act on what they hear. I have seen businesses bring in external consultants partly as a way of validating a decision that has already been made internally, or as political cover for a direction that someone in the leadership team is nervous about proposing themselves. Consultants are expensive validation tools. If that is what you need, there are cheaper ways to get it.

How Do You Evaluate a Growth Strategy Consultant Before You Hire Them?

The market for growth consultants is not well-regulated, which means the range of quality is enormous. Someone who has spent three years inside a high-growth SaaS business and someone who has read the same books and built a personal brand on LinkedIn can both present themselves as growth strategy consultants. Telling them apart requires asking the right questions.

Start with the specifics of their commercial experience. Ask them about a business they helped grow and what the revenue or margin impact was. Ask them what went wrong in the process and what they would do differently. The quality of the answer to the second question tells you more than the answer to the first. Anyone can describe a success. The people who have genuinely done the work can describe the failures with the same clarity.

Ask them how they handle disagreement with a client. Growth consultants who have only ever advised from the outside tend to present recommendations and then defer when pushed back on. Consultants who have run businesses themselves tend to hold their position more calmly, because they have been in the room where the hard calls get made. That distinction matters when you are paying someone to tell you things you might not want to hear.

Check whether their approach to new business development is grounded in how buyers actually behave. Tools like Vidyard’s AI sales pitch generator reflect how modern agencies are thinking about outreach, but the best consultants will have views on personalisation, positioning, and conversion that go well beyond tooling. If they cannot articulate a point of view on why agencies lose pitches they should win, they are probably not going to help you win more of them.

Also look at how they structure the engagement. A growth consultant who proposes a vague ongoing retainer without defined milestones is either not confident in their ability to deliver measurable outcomes, or they are optimising for their own revenue rather than yours. Both are problems. The engagement structure should have clear phases, defined outputs, and an honest conversation about what success looks like at the end of it.

What Should a Growth Strategy Engagement Actually Deliver?

This is where a lot of engagements disappoint, not because the consultant is incompetent, but because the outputs were never defined clearly enough at the start. A deck of strategic recommendations is not a growth strategy. It is a starting point. The value of the engagement should be measured by whether the business is in a materially better commercial position at the end of it, not by whether the slides are well-designed.

A well-structured growth strategy engagement should produce a clear diagnosis of where the business is currently losing or missing revenue. It should identify the two or three growth levers with the highest probability of impact given the business’s actual resources. It should produce a sequenced plan with owners, timelines, and metrics. And it should include a realistic assessment of what needs to change internally for the plan to work, including people, process, and sometimes culture.

That last element is often the most uncomfortable, and the most valuable. When I was turning around a loss-making agency early in my career, the hardest conversations were not about strategy. They were about the people and behaviours that had created the problem in the first place. A growth consultant who is not willing to have those conversations is not doing the full job.

For agencies thinking about how personalisation can sharpen their new business approach, Unbounce’s piece on using personalisation to land new business is worth reading alongside whatever your consultant recommends. The principles are sound and the application to agency pitching is direct.

How Do Growth Consultants Approach Agency Positioning?

Positioning is where most agency growth conversations start, and where many of them stall. The reason is that positioning requires agencies to say no to categories of work they currently win, and that is a genuinely difficult commercial decision when the pipeline is uncertain.

Good growth consultants understand this tension. They do not just recommend that agencies narrow their positioning because the textbook says specialisation commands a premium. They help agencies work out which specialisation is defensible given their existing client base, their team’s actual capabilities, and the competitive landscape in their market. That is a much harder piece of analysis than drawing a Venn diagram on a whiteboard.

I have seen agencies completely reposition themselves based on external consultant advice and then struggle to win any work in their new category because they had no proof points, no relationships, and no credibility in that space. The positioning was theoretically correct and commercially disastrous. The consultant had done the strategy. Nobody had done the transition plan.

The agencies that get positioning right tend to do it incrementally. They identify a category where they already have two or three strong client relationships, build case studies around those, and use that evidence base to pursue more work in the same space. It is slower than a full rebrand, but it is reversible if the market does not respond the way the strategy predicted. That reversibility matters more than most growth frameworks acknowledge.

If you are exploring how agencies build their presence and new business pipeline from the ground up, Buffer’s overview of starting a social media marketing agency covers some of the foundational commercial decisions that apply more broadly to agency positioning at any stage.

What Is the Difference Between a Growth Consultant and a Fractional CMO?

This question comes up more often now that fractional executive roles have become common in the agency market. The short answer is that a growth strategy consultant diagnoses and plans, while a fractional CMO executes. In practice, the lines blur because some consultants also take on execution responsibilities, and some fractional CMOs operate more strategically than their title implies.

The practical distinction for an agency is this: if you need someone to build and run your marketing function on a part-time basis, you need a fractional CMO. If you need someone to tell you what your marketing function should be doing and why, and then step back, you need a growth strategy consultant. Both are legitimate needs. They are just different ones.

The mistake agencies make is hiring a consultant when they need an operator, or hiring an operator when they need a strategist. A fractional CMO who is brilliant at execution will struggle if the business has not resolved its positioning or its target client profile. A growth consultant who is brilliant at strategy will frustrate an agency that already knows what it needs to do and just needs someone to do it.

For agencies thinking about the freelance and fractional talent market more broadly, Moz’s piece on building a freelance SEO practice offers a useful perspective on how independent specialists think about their own positioning and client acquisition, which is directly relevant to how you evaluate the consultants pitching to you.

How Do You Measure Whether a Growth Consultant Has Delivered?

This is the question that most agencies forget to define before the engagement starts, and then struggle to answer honestly at the end of it. The consultant will typically point to the quality of the work produced. The agency will typically point to whether revenue has grown. Neither metric on its own is sufficient.

The right framework is to agree on three to five leading indicators at the start of the engagement that are measurable within the engagement period, and two or three lagging indicators that will tell you whether the strategy worked over the following six to twelve months. Leading indicators might include the number of qualified new business conversations initiated, the win rate on pitches in the target category, or the average contract value of new clients. Lagging indicators are revenue growth, margin improvement, and client retention in the repositioned segment.

If a consultant is not willing to agree to this kind of measurement framework, that is worth noting. It does not necessarily mean they are not good at what they do, but it does mean they are not fully accountable for outcomes, only for outputs. That is a meaningful difference when you are deciding whether to renew the engagement.

One of the things I learned from judging the Effie Awards is that the agencies who win for effectiveness are almost always the ones who defined success clearly before the work started, not after. The same principle applies to how you evaluate the consultants you hire to help you grow. Clarity at the start is what makes honest evaluation possible at the end.

For agencies building out their broader growth and commercial strategy, the resources in the Agency Growth & Sales section of The Marketing Juice cover everything from new business development to client retention and agency positioning, with the same commercially grounded perspective that makes the difference between strategy that looks good on paper and strategy that actually moves the business forward.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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