In my previous role, we had bigger teams, more systems and more stuff, which don't necessarily always add more value to my opinion. My intention with that was demonstrating that the thinking and the process can be scaled up or down, but it's always the same. I wanted to prove that it's not about being a series C or D and only then you can think strategically. You can be five people in your business and apply the same thinking. 

On a simple Notion page, you can go through the same thinking, the same reflection - have that growth-oriented thinking embedded and go through the process of making your strategic choices based on the growth constraints or the company objectives. You do that every quarter with fairly lightweight work.

My vision of an ideal scenario would be that we use growth modeling end-to-end type of work to actually see whether it's feasible or not so you can bring it down to that constraint. 

Then you can easily see if you want to hit this trial goal or in this revenue goal, then we need to triple the number of content we create, for example. Can we do that with the budget that we have? If we can, then that's really. If it’s ‘no,’ we cannot. Even with a small company like Bonsai, this is so hard unless you have full executive sponsorship.

One win with this framework and growth modeling is getting acknowledgement that these are extremely challenging forecasts. Instead of me kicking and whining, for example, and saying we can’t do this, I practically demonstrated with data that this is going to be extremely hard.

We can decide that we put whatever number we want in this forecast. But at the end of the day, we're in alignment that this might be a pretty tough stretch to make work.

Eva Thouvenot

An example of a quarterly business strategy that I build after we’ve done our team quarterly business reviews. This shows data-based forecasting and some insights helpful in decision-making processes.

Grow XX % revenue from our Ideal Client Profile

Acquire XXX Ideal Client Profile trials </aside>

Double Paid spend while maintaining Payback sub X months

Scale SEO traffic from new ICP by XX % vs LY

Affiliate - # of paid subscribers generated per affiliate and volume of net new affiliates

Audience / Ideal Client Profile (Where to play)

 Micro Businesses with X+ employees, $XXX+ Revenue per year

What are the 3-4 initiatives that we need to focus on to achieve our growth ambitions this quarter

Launch a new campaign focused on X keywords on Google Search

Improve Link Building Velocity & Quality by hiring new link building agency

Win back our rankings for top 10 staled articles for ICP

Standardize acquisition process for new ICP

 List all the key execution commitments per channel. If the strategy failed, you need to be able to answer whether it was because of the wrong strategic choice or the execution.

 Oct Nov Dec Total SEO $ $ $ $ Paid $ $ $ $ Affiliates $$ 

 What hypothesis do we need to prove for this to be a successful strategy? (What has to be true)

Quarterly Marketing Strategy at Bonsai

Quarterly Marketing Strategy at Bonsai

2023 Company Goals

2023 Marketing Goals

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