Growth Marketer — Reverse-Engineer Your Growth Goal Into Every Number That Matters

The Growth Planner

Your goal, reverse-engineered into every number that matters

Slide anything. Every output updates live. Benchmarks are marked on each input with a real, linked source — these are planning estimates to pressure-test your goal, not promises.

Your goal

Start from what you want, not from what marketing costs. Everything below falls out of this.

New revenue you want to add in the next 12 months

Your target. Be ambitious — the planner will tell you if the maths holds.

% of that from brand-new customers

The rest comes from existing customers buying more — usually the cheaper half.

% of new customers via digital marketing

Referrals, partnerships and walk-ins cover the remainder.

Your funnel

How strangers become customers. If you don't know these numbers yet, the benchmarks are a sane starting point — and not knowing them is itself a finding.

Cost per lead At benchmark

Benchmark: ~$66 average across industries — WordStream / LocaliQ 2025 Google Ads benchmarks.

% of leads that are actually qualified At benchmark

Benchmark: ~25% lead-to-MQL — FirstPageSage benchmarks.

% of qualified leads that become customers At benchmark

Benchmark: ~20% — FirstPageSage funnel report 2025.

% of leads that arrive free (SEO, content, referrals) At benchmark

These leads cost you time instead of media. 30% is a healthy mature mix; 50%+ is excellent.

What a customer is worth

Not one sale — the relationship. This is the number most businesses under-count, and it changes everything downstream.

Average revenue per customer, per year

Type your real number — this varies wildly by business and the slider is just a guide.

Years a customer typically stays At benchmark

3 years is a common planning figure; 5+ means retention is a genuine asset.

What you keep

Gross margin — revenue minus the direct cost of delivering. Marketing has to be paid out of this, which is why it sets your ceiling.

Gross margin At benchmark

Service businesses often run 50–70%; retail and e-commerce lower; software higher.

Your marketing ceiling

The affordability check: what share of the lifetime margin those new customers generate are you willing to reinvest to win them?

% of lifetime customer margin reinvested in winning them

For context, average marketing budgets sit near 7% of company revenue — Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey. This lever is a policy choice, not a benchmark race.

New + existing

Growth isn't only new logos. A small retention budget protecting the revenue you already have is usually the highest-ROI line item on the sheet.

% of existing revenue spent keeping those customers

Email, loyalty, win-back — typically well under 1% of the revenue base it protects.

Your customer-acquisition budget (calculated)

Falls out of sections 1–2 automatically. This is the number most businesses guess.

$—

Your numbers

Live — every slider above updates this panel instantly.

$—

Total annual marketing budget · —

$—

Cost to win one customer

$—

Margin one customer is worth over their lifetime

—

Dollars back per dollar spent winning a customer

New customers needed—

Qualified conversations needed—

Leads needed this year—

Leads needed per month—

Acquisition budget (new customers)—

Retention budget (existing customers)—

Months to earn back one customer—

Lifetime margin pool / affordable ceiling— / —

—

Want these numbers to actually happen?

These are your targets. The gap between a plan and a P&L is execution — get a free, personalised strategy showing exactly how a senior operator would hit them: channels, order of operations, what to automate. Built by hand, in your inbox within 48 hours.

Planning estimates, not promises — the tool exists to make the conversation honest. Benchmarks: WordStream/LocaliQ, FirstPageSage, Gartner.

Why trust this planner

Built by an operator who's run these numbers for real

Every figure below is from the operator behind Growth Marketer — with the context attached, because numbers without context are how marketers lie.

110+

SMB clients whose campaigns I managed simultaneously at a digital agency — retail, trades, services, hospitality

above investor-acquisition targets for a regulated, property-secured NZ investment fund — ads, landing pages, email, compliant messaging, the full funnel

70,000+

people brought to live events across multi-city US tours — 95% sell-out rate

17x

top-end ROAS on the live-events campaigns — with Meta landing page views driven down to $0.20

7 figures

annual revenue of the DTC e-commerce brand I founded and bootstrapped over ~10 years — no investors, no funding

10+ years

hands on the tools the whole time — never just managing from a distance

The real enemy

You already know the problem. You've probably paid for it.

Most businesses I meet are stuck in one of three places. They've hired an agency, and the retainer disappears into account managers, overheads and margin while a junior they've never met runs the ads. They've hired a freelancer who's brilliant at one channel and invisible everywhere else in the funnel. Or they're doing it themselves — and Meta and Google are very happy to let them.

I spent years inside a digital agency fixing Google Ads accounts that were quietly bleeding money. Accounts run by other agencies. Accounts run by owners doing their best at 11pm after a full day of actually running the business. The pattern was always the same: money going in, clicks coming out, and nobody able to answer the only question that matters — which dollar turned into a customer?

That's the real enemy. Not your competitors. Not the algorithm. It's not knowing. Dashboards full of impressions and reach while you still can't predict where next month's customers come from. Reporting meetings that explain everything except revenue. A new 'strategy' every quarter because the last one was never measured properly in the first place.

You don't need more marketing. You need a growth engine — measured end to end, fixed where it leaks, fuelled properly, and run by someone senior enough to be accountable for the whole thing. That's the job. Here's how I do it.

The operating system

The Full-Funnel Growth Engine — five stages, in this exact order

Every engagement runs on the same operating system I've refined over 10+ years and 110+ businesses. The order matters — buying traffic before the tracking and the fixes is how ad budgets get burned.

1. Map the money

Full attribution before anything else. GA4, conversion tracking, CRM wiring — every lead, touchpoint and conversion mapped. No more guessing what's working. Most businesses skip this step and then optimise blind for years.

2. Plug the leaks

Before buying more traffic, I fix where your current traffic dies: broken ad accounts, landing pages that don't convert, leads that never get a follow-up. At the agency I did this for a living — accounts bleeding money the owner couldn't even see.

3. Fuel the engine

Paid acquisition where your buyers actually are — Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Microsoft, TikTok, Reddit. Built on top of the tracking from stage one, so every dollar is accountable from day one.

4. Automate the follow-up

AI agents and n8n/Make automations take over the repetitive work: lead enrichment, personalised outreach, CRM updates, follow-up sequences that never forget. Running 24/7, in your tools — not mine.

5. Compound

Pricing, upsells, referral engines. This is where growth stops being linear. I grew per-attendee revenue 270% for a live-events client through pricing and VIP packaging, and built a 60+ partner referral engine from cold email alone.

Receipts

Before and after, with the context attached

Numbers without context are how marketers lie. So every number here comes with what it was, where it happened, and what I actually did. No client names — I don't trade on them — but every claim is specific enough to interrogate on a call.

8x above investor-acquisition targets — regulated NZ investment fund

A property-secured investment fund needed qualified wholesale investors — one of the hardest, most compliance-bound sells there is. I ran the entire funnel: ads, landing pages, email sequences, compliant messaging. Qualified investor leads came in at 8x above target. I also ran their investor summit end to end at 120% of target attendance, and recruited 60+ channel and referral partners from scratch using cold email.

70,000+ people through the doors — US live events

For the biggest Arabic and Bollywood live-events company in the US, across multi-city tours: 95% sell-out rate, 98% table purchase rate, Meta costs driven down to $0.20 per landing page view, up to 17x ROAS. Per-attendee revenue grew 270% through pricing, VIP packages and upsell funnels. Videos regularly passed 2,000+ organic shares each.

Zero to 7 figures — my own brand, my own money

I founded a DTC e-commerce brand and bootstrapped it to 7-figure annual revenue over roughly a decade. No investors, no funding — just smart marketing and hustle. Every dollar of ad spend was my own money. That teaches you to optimise harder than anyone working with someone else's budget.

110+ SMB accounts at once — the agency years

Retail, trades, services, hospitality. I managed campaigns for 110+ small businesses simultaneously and fixed the broken Google Ads accounts that were bleeding money. That volume builds pattern recognition you can't get from a single vertical: what a leaking funnel looks like, where the money hides, which lever moves first.

Run your numbers through the planner

Range

Eight industries so far. Same mechanics underneath.

The surfaces change; the acquisition mechanics don't. Your industry's specifics take me weeks to learn. The decade of pattern recognition — what a broken funnel looks like, which lever to pull first — is the part nobody can shortcut. And the range is the point: pricing and upsell mechanics from live events transfer straight to e-commerce; compliance discipline from financial services transfers to any trust-sensitive sale.

Financial services & investor acquisition

Compliant full-funnel investor acquisition for a regulated NZ fund — leads at 8x above targets

Renewable energy

Investor funnels for wind-energy projects: LinkedIn, Google Search, email, GA4 journey mapping, automated lead scoring in Zoho CRM

E-commerce & DTC

My own brand — zero to 7-figure annual revenue over ~10 years, bootstrapped

Live events & entertainment

70,000+ attendees, 95% sell-out rate, up to 17x ROAS across US multi-city tours

SaaS

Cold outreach and full-funnel campaigns driving signups

Transport & logistics

AI + n8n automations replaced manual booking, dispatch and follow-up entirely

EdTech

Founded an e-learning company — trained 6,000+ professionals, ran B2B programs with global telecom companies

Hospitality & SMB

Part of the 110+ accounts I ran simultaneously through the agency years

The unfair advantage

One operator — plus machines that never clock off

Here's the honest maths on hiring one person: I've got two hands and one calendar. That used to be the ceiling for a solo operator. It isn't anymore.

I build production AI agents — Claude, GPT-4, RAG pipelines, n8n, Make.com, custom APIs — that run marketing and ops around the clock. Not chatbot demos. Working systems: lead enrichment, personalised outreach at scale, CRM updates, content production, follow-up that never drops a lead because it never gets tired or busy.

For a transport client, AI and n8n automations replaced their manual booking, dispatch and follow-up workflow entirely. Nobody types those bookings in anymore. The system just runs — nights, weekends, public holidays.

And everything gets built inside your accounts and your tools. If we ever part ways, the machines keep working for you. That's the model: the output of a full marketing team at the cost of one person.

Your three options

Agency vs freelancer vs one senior operator — the honest version

You've got three real options for growth help. Here's the comparison played straight — including the row where I'm genuinely the riskier choice.

	Agency	Freelancer	One senior operator
Who actually does the work	senior people sell the deal, then day-to-day execution sits with juniors behind an account manager.	one person, usually one channel.	the person you talk to is the person in the account — 10+ years, whole funnel.
Cost structure	your retainer funds account management, office overhead and margin before any actual media work.	cheap hourly rate, but you become the project manager stitching specialists together.	one senior fee, no overhead layers, AI agents multiplying the output.
Scope of coverage	broad on paper, siloed in practice — handoffs between ads, creative, email and reporting.	strong in one channel, gaps everywhere else.	ads, landing pages, email, CRM, automation, analytics. No handoffs, because there's nobody to hand off to.
Communication and speed	requests relayed through an account manager, weekly or monthly reporting cadence.	variable — often juggling many clients.	daily communication, direct line, same-day changes. Not next sprint. Today.
Commitment required	lock-in contracts with notice periods — you're committed long before you've seen results.	project ends, continuity ends.	month-to-month, no lock-in. I earn the next month or I lose it.
Skin in the game	your account is one line on a junior's client list.	the incentive is billable hours.	I bootstrapped my own DTC brand to 7 figures spending my own money on ads. I optimise like it's my budget — because for ten years it was.
Continuity risk	staff churn hands your account to a new junior with zero context, again and again.	the work lives in their head.	still one person — that's a genuine risk, and I address it head-on in the FAQ below — but the automations run without me daily, everything lives in your tools, and no contract traps you.

The actual deal

No fake guarantees. Here's the actual deal.

I won't promise you an 8x or a 17x. Those results happened — but past results tell you the operator has done it repeatedly, in different industries, under different constraints. That's the honest ceiling of any claim. What I can do is structure the engagement so your risk stays close to zero:

See the thinking before you pay

The free 30-Day Growth Plan is built from your website and delivered within 48 hours. If it reads generic, bin it — you've lost 48 hours, not a retainer.

Month-to-month, always

No lock-in contracts. You're never more than one month deep. The engagement has to re-earn itself every 30 days.

You keep everything

It's all built in your ad accounts, your CRM, your n8n and Make automations. Walk away any time and keep the assets. Nothing is held hostage on my laptop.

Watch it live

Daily communication, and you see performance in your own dashboards — GA4 and the ad platforms — not a polished monthly PDF.

A scoped first month

Clear deliverables pulled straight from your 30-day plan. Judge me on 30 days of real output, not a pitch deck.

How it starts

Numbers first. Strategy second. Then you decide.

No discovery calls, no pitch decks. The planner is useful on its own, and everything after it is free until you choose otherwise.

1. Run your numbers

Two minutes in the planner above. You leave with your marketing budget, cost per customer, leads per month and an honest verdict on whether the goal holds together.

2. Request the strategy

One click sends your numbers across. Within 48 hours you get a personalised plan for hitting them: where money is leaking now, which channels to hit first, what to automate. Built by hand, free, yours to keep.

3. You decide

Run the plan yourself — genuinely fine, some people do. Or hand the whole engine to one senior operator, month to month, no lock-in. The plan becomes the scope for the first 30 days.

The operator

The short version of a long apprenticeship

Ripan Singh

Founder & Operator, Growth Marketer

I'm Ripan Singh. I've been doing this for 10+ years, and almost none of it happened in a classroom.

The agency years came first: managing campaigns for 110+ small businesses at once — retail, trades, services, hospitality — and fixing Google Ads accounts that were bleeding money while their owners had no idea. That's where the pattern recognition comes from. You can't run that many accounts without learning what actually moves the needle and what's just noise.

Alongside it, I founded a DTC e-commerce brand and built it from nothing to 7-figure annual revenue — no investors, no funding, just smart marketing and hustle over nearly a decade. Every dollar of ad spend was my own money. That teaches you to optimise harder than anyone working with someone else's budget.

Since then: qualified investor leads at 8x above acquisition targets for a regulated, property-secured NZ investment fund. 70,000+ people brought to live events across multi-city US tours at up to 17x ROAS. Investor funnels for wind-energy projects. AI automations that replaced a transport company's entire manual booking and dispatch workflow. Earlier still, I founded an e-learning company that trained 6,000+ professionals and ran B2B programs with global telecom companies.

Now I run Growth Marketer, working with businesses across Australia, New Zealand and the US — remote, end to end, one engagement at a time, done properly.

Meta AdsGoogle AdsFunnelsLanding PagesCRMAutomationEmail & LifecycleAI AgentsCold OutreachCROAnalyticsSEOEvent Marketing

Straight answers

The questions you're actually asking

Fair questions get straight answers. These are the real ones I hear — including the uncomfortable ones.

You're one person. What happens if you get sick, disappear, or get too busy?

Real risk, honest answer. Three mitigations. One: the systems are the asset — the automations built in n8n, Make and your CRM keep running without my daily input; the transport client's booking, dispatch and follow-up runs entirely on automation. Two: everything lives in your accounts and tools, so nothing is hostage to my laptop. Three: month-to-month means you're never structurally trapped. And the quiet truth — agencies have a bus factor too. It's called staff churn, and it looks like your account being handed to a new junior with zero context, over and over.

A senior operator sounds expensive. Why not a cheap freelancer, or an agency with a whole team?

With an agency, a big slice of the retainer pays for account managers, office overhead and margin — and the person actually inside your ad account is often the most junior one on the team. With me, 100% of the fee buys the senior person doing the work, and the price risk is capped by design: month-to-month, never committed beyond the month you're in. As for cheap freelancers — I spent years fixing Google Ads accounts that were quietly bleeding money. The cheapest option is rarely the one that costs the least.

How can one person cover what an agency team does?

Two answers, both factual. Capacity is proven: I managed campaigns for 110+ SMB clients simultaneously at an agency, and ran a regulated NZ investment fund's entire funnel — ads, landing pages, email, compliant messaging — at 8x above acquisition targets. And it's not actually one pair of hands: I build production AI agents that run enrichment, outreach, CRM updates, content and follow-up 24/7. Full-team output at the cost of one person is the model, not a slogan.

What if it doesn't work? I've been burned by marketers before.

No honest marketer can guarantee an outcome — anyone promising you an 8x is selling, not forecasting. What you can control is the structure of the bet: a free 30-Day Growth Plan first, so you see the roadmap before spending a dollar. Month-to-month, so your downside is capped at one month, not a contract you can't get out of. Daily communication, so you see what's working in real time instead of discovering a problem at a quarterly review. The exit door is always open.

Eight industries — do you actually know MY market?

Your industry's depth is learnable in weeks. The mechanics of acquisition take a decade — and running 110+ accounts at once builds pattern recognition you can't get from one vertical. The range is also useful: pricing mechanics from live events (270% per-attendee revenue growth) transfer to e-commerce; compliance discipline from financial services transfers to any trust-sensitive sale. And you can test this for free — the 30-Day Growth Plan is built from your website. If it reads generic, you've lost 48 hours, not a retainer.

Can't I just run the ads myself?

You can — Meta and Google are built to let you. They're also built to spend your money fast while you learn. A big part of my agency work was fixing self-managed accounts bleeding money without the owner realising. The real cost of DIY isn't the ad spend; it's the tuition you pay the platforms, plus your own hours — the scarcest resource in your business. I paid my own tuition over ~10 years with my own money on my own brand, so you don't have to pay it with yours.

Shouldn't I hire someone in-house instead?

If you can find one person who's senior at paid ads AND email AND landing pages AND CRM automation AND analytics — hire them. They're rare, expensive, and take months to recruit and ramp. Most businesses hire one channel-specialist and find the gaps later. I give you the full stack from day one, month-to-month, no recruitment risk, no severance conversation if it isn't a fit. Some clients do both eventually: I build the engine and the automations, and an in-house hire later runs what's been built.

What does it cost?

It depends on scope, and scope comes from your 30-day plan — which is why the plan comes first and costs nothing. What I can tell you up front: month-to-month with no lock-in, one senior fee with no agency overhead layers baked in, and a scoped first month with clear deliverables so you know exactly what you're buying before you buy it.

Know your growth goal?Now get every number it takes to hit it.

Your numbers are ready.