Seven years ago I registered ikaros with no clients and no team. I knew the work. I had built ventures at Rocket Internet, worked in investment banking at Barclays and led growth inside a PropTech scale-up. What I had never done was build a consultancy. I had to learn that while running one.
The plan for ikaros was to help good businesses grow faster by fixing the machinery they run on. Marketing is only ever part of that. The work runs through data, systems, pricing, process, and the way teams operate week to week.
Since then we've worked across more than 50 engagements spanning SaaS, ecommerce, fintech, B2B services, and consumer, with PE firms and founder-led scale-ups in Australia and internationally. We've run through a pandemic, the cheapest capital anyone under 40 has ever seen, and the correction that followed. Most of what I believed in 2019 didn't survive. These are the seven lessons that did.
1. Readiness beats fit
In our first two years, I spent a lot of time pursuing companies because their brief matched our experience and they looked like ideal clients. We won surprisingly few of them.
The clients who turned into our best work had all already tried. One CMO put it plainly when he engaged us: they'd spent 12 months attempting to do it themselves and hadn't made meaningful progress. He didn’t need convincing the problem was real. He just wanted someone who'd seen it before.
There's a second ingredient, and it took longer to learn. Consulting is bought on trust, and in the early years trust is the scarcest thing you have, so people fall back on relationships as a shortcut. One prospect asked me directly why he'd hire us when he could hire BCG. He wasn't being rude. Nobody gets fired for buying IBM, and when you're the new firm you're the risky choice by definition. We borrowed trust from relationships until the track record could speak for itself. It does now, and the relationships still matter anyway.
These days we spend less time asking whether a company fits a sector profile. We look for enough pain to act and enough trust to let us into the difficult parts of the business. Then we try to be findable when both are present.
2. Charge for the diagnosis
The biggest change we made was a pricing decision. We stopped giving the diagnosis away.
Early on we did what many consultancies do: a free audit followed by a long proposal and a scope written before we understood the problem. It put all the value on delivery, even though finding the right problem was often the most important part of the work.
Now most relationships start with a fixed-fee growth audit. The scope is tight and the client leaves with a diagnosis, a strategy, and a prioritised roadmap. Boards can make a decision in the room instead of commissioning another internal review. Prospects who do not want their assumptions tested tend to opt out early, which is useful for everyone. We also stopped sinking time into work nobody had defined properly.
Charging for the diagnosis made the commercial model healthier because we were finally pricing the thinking clients came to us for.
3. Nobody wakes up wanting a system
We've built a lot of measurement infrastructure over seven years. Some projects were technically excellent and still got looked at twice and never again. Others changed how businesses made decisions. On every shelved project the story was the same: nobody had agreed in advance which decision the data was supposed to inform. Build quality had nothing to do with it.
The same mistake appears outside data. Clients rarely care about attribution for its own sake. Usually somebody needs to decide where the next dollar should go. Once we understood that, we changed how we sold. We began pricing against the value of the outcome, and on a handful of engagements we've taken equity to share the risk. It can be an uncomfortable conversation. It is still better to ask what an outcome is worth before deciding what to build.
Now we ask who will use the data and what they will do differently with it. If the answer is vague, we do not build it.
4. Validate, then transform
One of our clients is a national services business with more than 700 technicians. Our diagnostic pointed at the renewal journey, and a full rebuild would eventually touch customer communications, scheduling and field operations.
Before asking the business to take that on, we wanted to know how much value sat in the customer experience itself. We deliberately built what I’d call a Potemkin village: a convincing front with little rebuilt behind it. To the customer, the renewal experience looked fully built: a reminder before the card gets charged, one-click scheduling for the next service visit. Behind it, the operational processes carried on unchanged. Nothing about it required change management or another team's roadmap. Subscriber renewal rates went up 54%.
Then we scaled it, because it worked and nothing about it needed permission. The deeper operational transformation, real-time technician tracking among other things, is still on the roadmap, and I still believe there's uplift in it. It will now be built on evidence rather than a business case, and the client banked most of the impact years earlier.
We still sell transformation, but evidence comes first. In this case a small test captured most of the upside and gave the larger programme a much firmer basis. That is a better reason to change an operation than a slide showing what might happen.
5. Growth depends on velocity
After more than 50 engagements, we recognise patterns and know where to look first. That narrows the search, but anyone promising certainty about which idea will unlock growth in a particular business is selling snake oil.
The metric I care about is velocity: how often a business can get a meaningful change into market and learn from it. A pricing test can wait weeks for approval or sit in the product backlog. Within marketing, media and CRM work can drift onto different priorities.
Putting advice on a slide is the easy part for me; experience helps with that. Delivery means earning buy-in and working around BAU, often in systems that were never built for the proposed change. Most strategies lose their value somewhere in that work. We stay because the recommendation is only the start of the job. We work through the blockers until something reaches market, then use what happened to choose the next move.
I would rather leave a client able to do that repeatedly than leave them with a handful of clever ideas.
6. The work that compounds always feels optional
Every consultancy I know runs the same cycle. You're busy delivering, so business development stops. A few months later the pipeline looks thin, so you do BD. The pipeline fills, you get busy, and BD stops again. We rode that rollercoaster for years before accepting the fix had to be structural. BD now runs on a schedule whether we're busy or not, and this article exists because of that decision.
The same trap shows up inside delivery. After 50-plus engagements across a dozen industries, a lot of what ikaros sells is pattern recognition. Been there, done that, know which of the nine possible causes to check first. My instinct is still to apply the pattern myself because that gets today's work out the door. Writing it down and coaching someone else takes longer. The payoff comes later, when the team can use it without me.
I'd love to tell you we've solved this one. Mostly we've learned to notice when today's shortcut is creating more work for next year.
7. Positioning is a lagging indicator
Our positioning has followed changes in the work and in the clients who hire us. But we didn’t realise until the changes had already happened.
We eventually had to describe what clients were already paying us to do. They brought us into messy situations, often spanning several functions, and expected us to find the commercial problem and fix it. The clients getting the most from that work had urgency and the budget to follow through. Once we admitted both facts, our focus moved from start-ups and SMEs towards PE portfolios, enterprise, and larger scale-ups.
The work is moving again. We've started venture building alongside the consultancy, with Bonded Matter as the first example. We're also looking to acquire founder-led businesses with strong economics, roughly $2-5m EBITDA. After seven years of running growth playbooks inside other people's businesses, we have a clearer view of which ones we would be willing to own.
I unpacked the systems side of this in You don't have a growth problem. You have a systems problem. And if you're wondering where your own bottleneck sits, our Growth Systems Assessment is self-serve and takes about 10 minutes.
Daniel Lohrmann is the Managing Director of ikaros, a growth consultancy that builds the systems, infrastructure, and squads that turn revenue targets into results.
