Standups,GoogleasReferee,andHeroConfPrep

Last week started the way every week here starts: 10am team standup. It's a simple ritual, but it's the one that keeps everything else honest. Fifteen minutes, everyone on, what shifted over the weekend, what's landing this week, where anyone needs cover. Boring on purpose. The interesting work happens because the boring stuff is in place.

Client calls, mostly good news

A heavy week of client calls. The tone across most of them was positive: accounts tracking ahead of plan, a few sectors quietly recovering, and a couple of brands starting to feel the benefit of the structural changes we made earlier in the quarter.

The conversations that matter most aren't the ones where the numbers are up. They're the ones where we agree on what we'd do if the numbers were down. Most of last week was the second kind: pressure-testing assumptions while things are good, so we don't have to scramble when they aren't.

Hiring: more interviews

Several interviews this week for new hires. We're protective about who joins. The team is small enough that one wrong addition is felt across every account inside a month, and small enough that one good one lifts everyone.

The pattern we keep coming back to is curiosity. Technical skill we can teach. Commercial instinct we can sharpen. But genuine curiosity about why a brand makes the margins it does, why a category behaves the way it does, why a Google rep is pushing a particular feature this quarter: that's the bit you either have or you don't.

A new client onboarded

We onboarded a new client this week. Kickoff completed, access in, first review of the account underway. The pattern was familiar: revenue-led structure, a feed doing about 70% of what it should, and a Performance Max setup that had been left to its own devices for longer than anyone wanted to admit.

Nothing dramatic in the first fortnight. Baseline, audit, low-hanging fruit, then a proper conversation about contribution margin and what a profit-led structure actually looks like for them.

Building something useful

We've been heads-down on an internal tool for clients. Think attribution and analysis meeting better business decisions, both inside Google Ads and outside it. The honest version of the brief: most attribution tools tell you what already happened. We want one that helps you decide what to do next.

More on this when it's ready. We're not in the business of shipping half-built dashboards just to put a logo on a slide.

Sitting between Google and the client

A run of calls with the Google team in Dublin about client plans. We do a lot of these. Officially they're strategic reviews. In practice we often end up as the referee in a quiet fight between what Google wants to recommend and what's actually right for the client.

That's not a criticism of the reps, most of whom are excellent. It's just the reality of how the relationship works. Google has targets. Clients have margin. The two don't always pull in the same direction. Our job is to translate honestly in both directions and refuse to implement anything that doesn't survive a contribution-margin test.

We don't blindly implement Google's ideas. We also don't reflexively reject them. The good ones we run with. The ones that are really about Google's roadmap rather than the client's P&L, we politely park.

HeroConf prep: Every SKU Has A Job

Chris has been deep in deck prep for his HeroConf Brighton talk on 30th April: Every SKU Has A Job. The argument is the one we've been refining with clients for a couple of years now. SKUs aren't interchangeable. Some are there to scale, some to protect margin, some to recover lapsed buyers, some to act as a gateway. Treat them all the same in your bidding structure and you'll quietly destroy contribution margin at scale.

The talk pulls together client examples, the framework we use internally, and the uncomfortable bit: how often "scale" briefs end up scaling the wrong SKUs faster than the right ones. If you're at HeroConf, come and say hello.

What's next

More of the same: client work, more interviews, another sprint on the internal tool, and Chris finalising slides ahead of Brighton. The standup will still be at 10am.

Chris