HomeWorksFractional LeadershipPutting a global stock imagery business on course to beat its £5m growth target by 25%

Putting a global stock imagery business on course to beat its £5m growth target by 25%

Situation

An international online supplier of stock images and video, sourced from agencies, independent photographers, news archives, museums and national collections, had 47 employees. Its parent company wanted the leadership team to deliver £5m of additional revenue, a 30% increase, in two years. I was brought in to find where the growth would come from and to build the technology strategy to support it.

The execution risk

The business was not built for the growth it was being asked to deliver. Servers were on premise, sized for small retail volumes and underfunded, and developers were constantly upgrading them just to hold performance. The e-commerce platform was home-grown, could not scale and did not meet all e-commerce standards. Billing was unreliable: some commercial clients were charged for content they had not used, and others were not charged for content they had.

What our Fractional Leader did

  • Reviewed the business from a technology and commercial view with the CEO, and identified the infrastructure, technology and process issues that were holding back revenue.
  • Delivered a transformation roadmap, built with stakeholders around how staff and customers actually used the systems.
  • Moved the platforms and information stores to the cloud so the business could scale, and replaced the home-grown e-commerce build with a supported off-the-shelf solution, with simple payment options and online billing accounts.
  • Fixed the customer experience for consumers and commercial clients, replacing manual merchandising, weak analytics and a missing relevancy engine with AI-driven recommendations, tagging and conversion tracking.
  • Tightened the financial processes behind the commercial client portal and put in place a new digital asset management approach covering discovery, acquisition, conversion, inventory and content tagging.

Results

  • Revenue uplift was immediate, and after two quarters was tracking 25% above the £5m target, equivalent to about £6.25m.
  • Operational costs fell, and real-time data gave leaders better information to decide on.
  • The business created several new roles to meet the extra demand.
  • The platform is built to scale with volume and to adapt as working practices change.

Why it matters

Growth targets fail when the operating base cannot carry them. This engagement shows my approach: find what is really holding revenue back, fix the foundations first, and build the technology plan around the growth the owners want.