ZILU Launches Growth Audit for Founder-Led Businesses Ready to Break Through Their Next Growth Barrier
For founder-led businesses, scale-ups and growing companies, marketing can often become busy without being commercially clear. You built your marketing function yourself. It worked — until the business got more complex.
Now growth has stalled, and you're not sure why.
Sound familiar?
- You're spending on marketing, but can't draw a straight line to revenue.
- Your team is busy, but nothing feels like it's compounding.
- You're wondering whether to hire a CMO — full-time or fractional — but you don't even know what the real problem is yet.
- You've tried a playbook that worked for someone else. It didn't work for you.
However, the obvious problem is often only the symptom and **no business is the same. **
The real issue may sit deeper: unclear positioning, weak demand, the wrong channel mix, poor sales and marketing alignment, team structure, measurement gaps, or a strategy that no longer fits the business stage.
That is why ZILU Consultancy has launched its Marketing Audit for Growth — a focused diagnostic engagement designed to help founders and CEOs understand what is really holding growth back, where marketing is leaking value, and what needs to change next.
“The real value of senior marketing leadership is knowing where to look, what to challenge, and how to connect marketing decisions back to commercial outcomes.”
Catherine Mak, Founder of ZILU Consultancy
ZILU’s Diagnostic Approach to Growth
At ZILU, we believe growth problems need proper diagnosis before another campaign, channel, hire or tool is added. Your business is unique and so as your problems, so no marketing playbook will work for your specific situation unless you build it your own.
The Growth Audit is designed for founders and CEOs asking these questions:
Why has growth slowed?
Why is marketing busy but not clearly driving commercial impact?
Are we spending in the right places?
Is our message landing with the right market?
Is our team structured for the next stage of growth?
Are sales and marketing aligned?
Are we ready to build a more AI-native marketing process?
What should we fix before we invest more?
A Focused 4-Week Engagement
The ZILU Growth Audit is a focused four-week, fixed-fee engagement. We aim to give you clarity on what is really holding growth back and what to prioritise next.
Across four weeks, Catherine will review your growth ambition, positioning, current strategy, team structure, funnel performance, measurement approach and cross-departmental alignment through leadership interviews, team input and hands-on analysis.
What You Receive
At the end of the Growth Audit, you will receive:
a clear diagnosis of what is actually holding growth back
a prioritised 90-day action plan
explicit stop / continue / change recommendations
a proposed marketing structure for your next stage
a clearer way to measure marketing ROI
a practical 12-month direction of travel
Typically, the process requires only 2–3 hours of your time. We do the rest.
Long term, the Growth Audit helps protect your business from making expensive decisions based on the wrong diagnosis.
Complimentary AI Visibility Assessment
As buyers increasingly use AI tools to research, compare and validate suppliers, understanding how your brand appears in AI-generated answers is becoming an important part of modern marketing visibility.
As a launch offer, the first four businesses that book the ZILU Growth Audit will also receive a complimentary AI Visibility Assessment.
This assessment will review how discoverable your brand is across AI and LLM platforms, and where the visibility gaps may be.
Why Trust ZILU?
Catherine Mak brings more than 20 years of marketing leadership experience across global corporates and growing businesses, with sector experience spanning fintech, SaaS, insurance, events, financial services and B2B across APAC, the UK and Europe.
Her work has consistently focused on finding the real commercial issue behind stalled growth, then building a strategy that fits the business, market and stage.
A few examples of what “finding the real problem” looks like in practice:
1. When Paid Search Was Converting, But CPL Kept Rising
Paid search was the highest-converting channel, so the obvious instinct was to spend more. But looking closer, the real issue was not budget. It was demand.
The business was trying to capture demand before enough demand had been created. By rebuilding awareness first, then scaling search when the market signals were stronger, the business reduced CPL by 50% within six months.
2. When a Product Was Written Off as “Too Expensive to Sell Online”
A business believed one of its products was too expensive to sell online without a sales conversation. Digital marketing had almost been dismissed as something that had been tried and “did not work”.
But the real issue was the roadmap, customer journey, messaging and budget allocation. By rebuilding the digital strategy and reallocating spend, online marketing-driven revenue grew from 4% to 15% of total contribution, generating over £900k from a four-month campaign.
That level of contribution was then sustained across the year.
3. When a Market Had Almost Been Written Off
An insurance company had lost internal confidence in a certain market after years of weak performance and high loss ratio. But the market itself was not the real problem.
The issue was proposition fit, local execution and partner trust. By working closely with sales, adjusting the proposition and rebuilding intermediary confidence, the business delivered 30% year-on-year revenue growth.
None of these results came from an off-the-shelf playbook.
They came from proper diagnosis, senior judgement and a strategy built around the specific business problem.
Book a Discovery Call
If your marketing feels busy but growth is not moving at the speed that you wish, the ZILU's Marketing Audit for Growth may be a sensible next step.
Book a discovery call with Catherine to discuss what you are struggling with and whether the audit is the right fit for your business.