Reef — Building a Scalable Growth Operating Model

The challenge

Reef had momentum across categories but their performance program was wired to channel KPIs that didn't roll up to unit economics. ROAS was healthy on paper, but spend wasn't translating into the kind of incremental, profitable growth the business needed at its next phase. The team needed less channel reporting and more operating discipline — a way to ask, every week, whether the engine was actually working.

The approach

We reframed performance around unit economics — LTV/CAC, incremental contribution margin, and platform-attributed payback — and built the operating cadence around those numbers. Then we installed a structured testing rhythm: every campaign decision tied to a hypothesis, every hypothesis tied to a target metric. Finally, we built clear KPI ownership across the team so no decision waited on a slack thread to get unblocked.

The full story

When Reef came to Stellar, the brand was in a phase that a lot of consumer companies recognize: the top-line was growing, the marketing team was busy, the dashboards looked fine — and yet the business wasn't compounding the way leadership wanted. Channel-level ROAS told one story. The P&L told another. Closing that gap was the actual job.

We started by stripping the reporting back to what the business actually cared about — contribution margin per cohort, payback by channel, incremental lift on top of organic. Then we re-built the testing program around those numbers. Every test had a north-star metric, a control, and a decision threshold defined before it launched. No more "let's run it another two weeks and see."

The biggest shift wasn't a tactic — it was rhythm. We installed a weekly performance review where the same six numbers got reviewed every Tuesday, in the same order, by the same people. After six weeks, the conversation had moved from "what happened in the dashboard" to "what are we going to bet on next quarter." That's the operating model the team still runs today.

Building a Scalable Growth Operating Model

The challenge

The approach

The full story

More work.

The lever you can't find. The bet you want to make work.