I talk a lot about 'building a growth machine', and today I want to share why I believe it's absolutely critical for ecommerce brands to take ownership of that machine rather than simply renting someone else's toolbox, working to somebody else’s playbook.

My job is helping ecommerce brands manage their growth activities in-house and understanding Shopify apps and how to maximise their potential is fundamental to that process. But this isn't just about tool, it's about a fundamental shift in how you think about your ecommerce growth engine.

When you work with agencies, you're essentially renting access to their growth machine. They have the expertise, they control the tools, they hold the data insights and they make the optimisation decisions. You pay for results, but you don't own the process that creates those results.

This rental model works in the short term. Agencies can often deliver quick wins and handle the complexity while you focus on other parts of your business. But there's a hidden cost that compounds over time: dependency.

Every month you pay agency fees, you're not just paying for their current work, you're paying for knowledge and capabilities that could be building inside your own organisation. That institutional knowledge, those optimisation insights, that deep understanding of what drives your specific customers to convert… it all lives outside your business.

When you eventually outgrow an agency or need to make a change, you're starting from scratch. The learning curve resets. The optimisation history walks out the door. You're back to being a beginner in your own business's growth.

Taking ownership of your growth machine doesn't mean firing all external help overnight. It means systematically building internal capabilities and taking direct control of the tools and data that drive your growth.

This starts with understanding and directly managing your Shopify apps. These apps are the building blocks of your growth infrastructure. Your email marketing platform, your conversion optimisation tools, your customer data systems, your inventory management, your partnership program. When you truly understand how these pieces work together, you start to see opportunities that no external party ever could.

What really happens when you own your growth machine? Insights compound. Your team starts connecting dots between customer behaviour patterns, seasonal trends, product performance and channel effectiveness in ways that only deep, daily exposure can reveal.

Your email marketing person notices that customers who engage with specific product education content convert at higher rates. Your conversion optimisation specialist realises that certain design changes work differently across your various traffic sources. Your inventory manager starts predicting demand patterns that your previous forecasting couldn't capture.

These insights only emerge when the people optimising your growth are the same people living in your business day after day. They can't be outsourced because they're born from intimate familiarity with your specific context.

When you own your ecommerce growth machine, you move at the speed of decision, not the speed of communication. Need to test a new email sequence? Launch it this afternoon. Want to adjust your checkout flow based on customer feedback? Deploy it before lunch. Spot an opportunity in your data? Act on it immediately.

Agencies, no matter how good, add layers of communication, approval processes and competing priorities. When the ecommerce growth machine lives in-house, your response time becomes a competitive advantage.

The economics of ownership versus rental change dramatically over time. In year one, agencies might seem cost-effective. By year three, you've likely paid more in agency fees than it would have cost to build equivalent internal capabilities.

But the real economic advantage isn't just cost savings, it's the value creation that comes from having growth expertise permanently embedded in your organisation. Internal teams don't just execute campaigns; they build systems, document processes and create repeatable frameworks that benefit your business long after any individual campaign ends.

Taking ownership starts with identifying which growth activities are truly core to your business and which can remain outsourced. Email marketing, conversion optimisation and customer data management are usually core. Specialised creative production or complex technical integrations might remain external.

Then it's about systematically building capabilities. Start by deeply understanding your current Shopify app stack. Learn how each tool works, how they integrate and where the optimisation opportunities exist. Document everything. Build internal expertise gradually.

The goal isn't to become experts in every tool overnight, it's to develop the internal capability to evaluate, implement and optimise the tools that drive your growth.

Ultimately, this is about making a strategic shift from being a buyer of growth services to being a builder of growth capabilities. Instead of asking "what agency can solve this problem?" you start asking "how can we build the capability to solve this ourselves?"

This shift changes everything. Your team starts thinking like owners, not renters. They optimise for long-term learning, not just short-term results. They build systems that get stronger over time instead of relationships that create dependency.

Your growth machine becomes truly yours, responsive to your unique context, aligned with your specific goals and built to compound value over time rather than extract it.

The rental model will always be there when you need specialised expertise or additional capacity. But your core growth engine,the systems and capabilities that determine your long-term success, should belong to you.

Part of my task working with my clients is to figure out who is doing what both short and long term. Rarely does the business model direct brands to outsourcing everything. I’m on repeat with the following statement … ‘you know your customer best. You know your products best. You know your market best. Now it’s time to know your growth machine best’

Start having these conversations. Need external advice? I’m here to help.