About

Most of what I know came from doing it wrong first. I spent money on advertising while ignoring the customers I was losing. I sent promotional emails to people who needed something else entirely. I watched customers drift away and assumed it was the product, the price, or bad luck, when the real cause was sitting in the silence between their last order and the day they stopped buying.

What changed my thinking was not a course or a consultant. It was a number. I sat down one afternoon and worked out what a customer was actually worth to the business over their full lifetime with us. Then I worked out how many of those customers we were losing every month, and what that was costing in lifetime value terms rather than revenue terms.

The number was uncomfortable. Not because the business was in trouble, it was not. But because I could see clearly for the first time that a significant portion of the acquisition budget was being spent replacing customers I had already paid to find.

That afternoon is where the book started, and it is why the first tool on this site is a lifetime value calculator.

What I actually did

At Lean Greens I built and ran the whole operation rather than one slice of it. That included:

• An end-to-end Shopify, Recharge and Klaviyo setup with no gaps between systems, so data flowed cleanly from first touch to nth purchase.
• Customer service redesigned as a retention channel rather than a cost centre, on the principle that every interaction is a chance to strengthen the relationship rather than just close a ticket.
• Segmentation and automation across welcome, re-engagement, win-back and VIP, written to feel personal rather than automated.
• Fulfilment run several ways to find what worked. In-house first, with custom packaging, carrier negotiations and a team to hire and train, then a move to a 3PL, including restructuring the Shopify SKU architecture to cut fulfilment errors.
• Manufacturing relationships end to end, from price negotiation to inventory forecasting that kept cash out of stock sitting in a warehouse.
• Amazon on both FBA and FBM, and an affiliate programme built with personal trainers selling to their own clients.
• A rule about discounting that I still hold to: never run one without measuring incremental lift against baseline.

Before any of that I spent eleven years as an IT project manager across EMEA, running infrastructure projects with budgets up to a million dollars out of Edinburgh and Luxembourg. That is where the process discipline comes from, and it is probably why I find undocumented, unmeasured marketing so uncomfortable.

What I do now

I run Leithen Lane, working with ecommerce founders and small businesses on the retention and operational work that most agencies skip past on the way to the next campaign.

The free tools and guides here are the same thinking, given away, because most of the value is in seeing the numbers clearly rather than in hiring anyone. If you want to go further than that, there are two ways to work together.

The book, Fix the Leak, is built from what actually worked, not what looked good in a case study.

You can reach me at sam@leithenlane.com.