Why the POWERplan is now at the centre of my consulting and coaching work
For most of my 25+ year career in ecommerce I’ve helped brands grow by fixing things.
Better acquisition.
Better retention.
Better use of technology.
Better decisions.
And for a long time, that work looked like optimisation. Because optimisation is what the market rewarded. Evolving. Doing what works, but doing it better.
Over the last few years, something has shifted not just in ecommerce, but in how growth itself behaves. And by the end of 2025, it became clear to me that continuing to sell “optimisation”, whilst lucrative, was no longer my true value.
I’ve been doing this long enough to see the cycles
I started working in ecommerce in the late 1990s.
Before Facebook ads.
Before Shopify.
Before “growth hacking” was a thing.
Back then, growth came from:
- distribution
- partnerships
- wholesale
- repeat customers
- expansion into new markets
It was all very manual. No playbooks to download or podcasts to watch. This was pioneersville. Paid ads existed, but it wasn’t the strategy. It was just one lever among many.
Over time, paid ads became easier, faster, and more measurable.
And slowly, almost invisibly, they became the default answer to every brand’s growth question.
That worked. Until it didn’t.
The problem isn’t that ads stopped working
This is important to note. Ads didn’t suddenly “break”.
What broke was the assumption that they could carry growth on their own.
By the time most ecommerce brands reach their next stage of scale, I see the same pattern over and over:
- Growth is technically happening, but feels fragile
- CAC is rising faster than confidence
- Teams are busy, but unclear on priorities
- New initiatives are added, but nothing is retired
- Leadership feels pressure to “keep pushing” without knowing where leverage really is
The issue isn’t execution as a challenge, it’s structure as a concern.
Somewhere along the way, growth became narrow
When growth is framed primarily as acquisition efficiency, everything else becomes secondary.
Retention becomes a project.
Partnerships become experiments.
Organic becomes “something we’ll invest in later”.
Wholesale and expansion feel risky or distracting.
This isn’t because they don’t work… they’re harder to prioritise when ads are always there as a fallback. Like roulette, you focus in on where your money goes. And this is how ecommerce brands slowly become dependent on rented attention without realising it. It becomes a sort of addiction. And that’s not good. Dependence always shows up eventually.
What I kept noticing in the strongest brands
The brands that navigated this shift best weren’t the ones with the smartest tactics, they were the ones with balance.
They didn’t rely on a single growth lever. Instead they designed portfolios.
Some growth came from partnerships.
Some from organic demand.
Some from wholesale or B2B.
Some from international expansion.
Some from existing customers coming back more often.
Not all at once. Not equally. But deliberately. That’s the key. This was a strategic change. That’s when it clicked for me.
Growth isn’t a channel problem… it’s a prioritisation problem
Most brands don’t suffer from a lack of ideas. Instead, it’s
- too many options
- too little sequencing
- and no clear framework for saying “not yet”
What founders actually struggle with isn’t what to do. It’s knowing what matters now. That’s not something another channel audit solves.
The thinking behind the POWERplan
The POWERplan grew out of that realisation. I’ve been running ecommercegrowth.com as a consultancy since 2009. You can become slightly reactive to the needs of your client. It’s easy to do. “Ian… we need x… you’re the guy right?”. Sure. Since the lockdown days I’ve started to challenge the requirements asked of me from the first conversation onwards. That’s what a consultant is meant to do. Not just to be a yes man but to challenge. If not to break conventional thinking at least to challenge the wisdom behind the need to scale on fragile terms. Like a house of cards, as CAC increases a business can fall down.
So, now I’m focused on pushing clients, or the industry as a whole, to ‘think beyond just ads’. It’s not a pivot away from what I’ve done before. It’s a consolidation of all the work I’ve done.
Over the years, my work has consistently revolved around five growth levers, whether I named them that way or not:
- Partnerships that are borrowing trust and distribution instead of buying attention
- Organic strategy building demand and authority that compounds
- Wholesale / B2B that is stabilising revenue and unlocking volume
- Expansion that is finding new international growth without over-optimising the same market
- Retention strategy that is making growth profitable, not just visible
And “hey look!” I’ve got an acronymn too. Every good consultant leads with an acronym, right?
Back on topic. The mistake most brands make isn’t ignoring these 5 foundational levers of next-stage growth. It’s treating them all as “important”, and therefore never truly prioritising any of them.
The POWERplan exists to fix that.
Why 2026 is the right moment for this
The environment has changed.
- Paid media is structurally more expensive
- Trust has shifted toward people and communities
- Growth requires more coordination, not more activity
- Boards and founders care more about resilience than spikes
This is no longer the era of “just turn the ads up”.
The next stage of ecommerce growth belongs to brands that:
- design growth deliberately
- invest in what they can own
- and stop relying on a single lever to carry the business
That requires leadership, not hacks.
What my role has become
I no longer see my job as “helping brands grow faster”. As dopamine friendly as that role can become, this is about creating change within businesses because next-stage growth requirements demand change.
I see it as helping leadership teams:
- identify the real constraints on growth
- choose the right levers for their stage
- sequence them properly
- and resist the pull back toward reactive, ad-led decision-making
The POWERplan gives that work a name, a structure and a shared language.
It allows growth to be led, not chased.
So… where do we go beyond just ads?
This 3 word phrase has become central to my work because it captures the shift perfectly.
I’m not anti-ads. Yes, I disagree with the stranglehold Meta and Google can place on businesses of all sizes. I just want you to no longer be dependent on them.
Ecommerce Growth beyond just ads means:
- owning multiple levers… a portfolio approach just like you’d take in personal wealth growth.
- building assets, not just optimising spend, so that your business has something to show.
- designing for longevity, not volatility, so you can keep running your business on your own terms for as long as you’d like.
That’s the work I want to be doing in 2026 and beyond. For some brands it’s very hands-on. If they haven’t run partnership strategies in the past, I’ll take ownership and lead that growth channel. For most founders, my role is as their advisor or coach. To help them lead the process themselves. To prioritise the work but more importantly to help them see growth beyond the constraint of advertising. To help them see what ‘building a community around their brand’ really looks like. To be that advisor I wish I had when I was running my own ecommerce business.
And that’s why the POWERplan now sits at the centre of my consulting and coaching.
A last thought
If you’re a founder who feels like growth decisions are heavier than they used to be, that’s not a weakness, it’s a sign your business has outgrown a single-lever model.
Your question is no along whether growth is still possible, it’s whether the way you grow is still fit for what comes next. That’s the conversation the POWERplan is designed to start.
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