Over a drink the other evening, a friend shared the latest development from his job. He works in CRM for a subscription-based wine retailer. Their current turnover sits at £30 million. Senior leadership have now set a new target: £100 million. Not a distant ambition, it’s a formal target and it’s not been accompanied by any strategic plan, either. The number was declared and delivery teams were told to go away and define how they were going to get there.
My friend runs email and CRM. He understands his area inside out. But like most mid-level marketing team members, his scope of control is limited. He can improve email flows, test creative and build out better customer journeys. What he can’t do is create the conditions that unlock £70 million in additional turnover.
And yet, that’s what’s now expected.
This isn’t unusual. I’ve seen versions of this story play out repeatedly. And every time, it exposes the same dangerous confusion at leadership level: mistaking targets for strategy.
The shortcut that isn’t
Leadership loves big numbers. They sound bold. They sound ambitious. They sound like leadership. But there’s nothing strategic about declaring £100 million as a target. The number itself doesn’t build the bridge. It only announces the destination. And that’s the problem. Because when leaders stop at the number, they pass the real work of strategy down the chain… onto people who aren’t equipped to make the decisions that matter.
This is where delivery teams are left trying to reverse-engineer a path that doesn’t exist. They tinker with campaigns, optimise what they can control, and hope incremental gains will add up to something transformative. They won’t. Because transformation doesn’t come from marginal gains. It comes from structural decisions made upstream.
When leadership fails to make those decisions, they aren’t driving strategy. They’re avoiding it.
Strategy is always a forced response
In a post I wrote previously, I talked about how audacious targets (when properly used) force strategy into existence. Big goals create discomfort. They expose the fact that your current model is inadequate for what you now want. But only if you’re willing to face that discomfort.
What happens too often is that leadership declares the ambition but avoids the implications. They keep the current model intact. They avoid asking whether the product set is sufficient. Whether the channels are scalable. Whether pricing needs to evolve. Whether the cost structure can handle it. Instead, they hand the target downwards and expect execution alone to solve the gap.
But if the current operating model could deliver £100 million, you wouldn’t need to set it as a target. You’d already be tracking towards it. Growth requires something new — something different. And that’s where the strategic choices live.
The missing piece: TO-BY
This is exactly where the to-by framework provides clarity. TO-BY forces leadership to answer the question: how exactly do we believe we’ll achieve this?
The TO is simple: £100 million revenue.
The BY is where leadership earns its money: which levers will we commit to pulling?
Each BY is uncomfortable. That’s the point. Strategy is about trade-offs and bets. You cannot test your way into £100 million. You must choose how you intend to get there. Once leadership makes those choices, delivery teams like CRM, email, and paid media have something to build against. They can design workstreams that support those BYs directly. Until that happens, they’re operating blind.
Delegating strategy downstream
The deeper problem here isn’t just poor planning. It’s something more dangerous: the transfer of responsibility without the transfer of authority.
Delivery teams are left “owning” numbers they can’t materially influence. They pull every lever within reach: promotions, triggers, segmentation models, copy testing. But none of that shifts the underlying growth model. And when results inevitably fall short, post-mortems focus on execution rather than design.
Why didn’t conversion improve?
Why wasn’t churn reduced?
Why didn’t email drive stronger uplift?
The real answer is simple: because the structural moves required to make £100 million possible were never made. Leadership failed to define the BY.
This creates a toxic loop:
- Responsibility is delegated.
- Authority is withheld.
- Failure is blamed on the wrong layer.
Good people burn out inside that loop.
Why leadership struggles with this
Many leadership teams have grown up inside the machine that created the first £30 million. They understand the gears of that system. But moving from £30m to £100m rarely involves running the same machine faster. It demands design changes.
Sometimes it means new product sets. Sometimes new markets. Sometimes a repositioning of the brand or an evolution of pricing strategy. All of these require trade-offs. All involve risk. And all are uncomfortable. It’s easier, at least psychologically, to stay in operational mode. Declare the ambition. Pass the problem down. Let delivery teams “get creative”. But that isn’t leadership. That’s evasion dressed up as empowerment.
The simple test of real strategy
Whenever I work with businesses trying to scale, I always ask the same question:
Can your delivery teams explain not just what they’re doing — but why those activities have been prioritised?
If your CRM team can say:
“We’re building advanced reactivation flows because leadership are investing heavily in top-of-funnel acquisition, and we need retention to support customer base expansion.”
— then you have a strategy.
If instead they say:
“We’re testing some new segments and hoping we find uplift.”
— you don’t.
Big numbers require bigger choices
Ambition is not the problem. £100 million may well be achievable. But numbers on their own don’t create growth. They only expose whether leadership is willing to do the hard work of making choices.
- The higher the target, the sharper the choices must become.
- The bolder the goal, the clearer the BY must be.
Without it, you’re not building strategy. You’re just passing hope down the org chart.
