GrowthTeam leadership

Fix the leak before chasing the growth

Organisation: Synchestra Pte Ltd
Role: Regional Growth & Digital Transformation Consultant
Period: Jul 2018 – Aug 2022 · Singapore & Malaysia

A sales and marketing platform for financial professionals, losing more than half its subscribers a year while spending to acquire more.

revenue generated within months: SGD 200K–250Krevenue generated within months
subscriber churn: ~1/3 lowersubscriber churn
client database within a year: ~50% largerclient database within a year
cost optimisation: ~30%cost optimisation

How the system actually worked

Fix the leak before chasing the growth — figure 1 — Diagnose, re-package, re-engage — and only then expand. Doing those in the other order is how a business spends four years standing still.

Context

A platform serving financial professionals across Southeast Asia, treating Malaysia and Singapore as one market when they behave nothing alike, and losing subscribers faster than it could replace them.

What was actually needed

The instinct was to sell harder. The arithmetic said otherwise: when you lose more than half the base annually, acquisition spend is rent, not investment.

What I did

I worked the retention side first — finding out why subscribers actually left rather than why we assumed they did — then rebuilt the offer around the answer, introducing five new products priced and positioned separately for each market, and leading the digital transformation work that took cost out of delivering them.

What changed

Churn fell by roughly a third, the client database grew about half again within a year, the work generated a couple of hundred thousand Singapore dollars in revenue within months, and around 30% came out of operating cost.

The insight I kept

This is where I first learned the pattern I used again at iLyF years later: fix the loop before funding the funnel. Same problem, different industry, four years apart.

Stack & practices

Growth strategy
Pricing
Retention
Digital transformation