Somewhere between a million and ten million in revenue, the decisions get harder. The scrappy tactics that got you off the ground start to strain, the problems get more expensive, and every choice to double down or pull back carries real weight. It's the stage where growth itself can become the problem.
At Growth Unlocked: The Summit, our email product lead Rory Jeffries sat down with two operators who've lived it, and taken very different routes to the same place. Matt Hammonds co-founded Full Leaf Tea Co. in Oregon twelve years ago on a $2,500 credit card limit, and has grown it to 52 staff and a 14,000 square foot facility, almost entirely direct-to-consumer, with everything done in-house. Wendy Toscano is head of ecommerce at GALXBOY, a South African fashion brand that started with its founder selling from the boot of his car in Mamelodi and now runs 17 stores alongside a busy online business.
Different products, different countries, different playbooks. The same hard lessons. You can watch the full session below, or read on for the wrap-up.
The hardest year
Both operators, asked independently for their hardest year, gave the same answer: 2024.
For Matt, it was a fulfillment crisis brought on by success. Full Leaf had always prided itself on shipping almost every order within 24 hours, but as volume climbed, the systems behind that promise started to crack. He'd known for a while the business needed a new warehouse management system, and had put it off. The orders kept pouring in, the backlog grew, and for the first half of the year he and his wife Lisa were working 14-hour days, seven days a week, just to catch up. Customers felt it, and it showed up where it always does: their rating dropped from 4.9 stars to 4.7.
"Growth can be just as bad as no growth," as he put it. You wish for it, it arrives, and it brings a new set of problems with it.
For Wendy, 2024 was a capacity crunch of a different kind. GALXBOY had set an ambitious goal of opening a store in every province while ecommerce was growing fast at the same time. The result was a squeeze on everything at once: in-house capacity, supply capacity, and team morale, with stock being pulled from online to fill new store openings. "We did amazing things," she said, "but it was torture."
The cost of waiting too long
Matt's warehouse management decision became the session's clearest lesson in the price of caution.
He'd first looked at upgrading in early 2023. The new system cost around $27,000 against the $6,000 he was already paying, and when you start a company broke, he said, you always feel broke. So he waited a year. In hindsight, "that would have been the best $7,000 I ever spent."
The deeper lesson was about how he was framing the decision. He'd always asked what the business could survive if the worst happened. What he'd failed to ask was the opposite question: what if the best case happens, can we survive that? For a fast-growing store, planning for the upside turned out to matter just as much as guarding against the downside.
Wendy's version of the same lesson was about pacing. Looking back, she'd open a store, let supply catch up, then open the next, rather than committing to a fixed goal no matter the cost. Keep the ambition, she advised, but set realistic timelines, and protect your supply chain by spreading it. GALXBOY now splits production across multiple suppliers by product type, one maker for t-shirts, another for handbags, another for shoes, so no single factory becomes a single point of failure. As Rory noted, the stories of a warehouse fire or a delivery truck going up in flames are more common than anyone expects, and anything that reduces reliance on one supplier is worth doing.
Knowing when to stop and fix
How do you decide to halt and change something mid-scale? Wendy's answer came from getting it wrong first.
GALXBOY's early instinct was to put a solution into play and go. It backfired, repeatedly, because a team in another department, left out of the decision, would surface a problem only after the fact: had you told us earlier, we'd have said this wouldn't work. Two rules came out of that. Every solution goes to the c-suite first, because it has to be affordable, scaling quickly doesn't mean spare cash, it usually means more care with money, not less. And every affected department comes into the room before anything is decided. Including the right people early, as Rory observed, saves you the far longer conversations that happen later when you didn't.
Matt's version of "when to act" was about hiring. He'd held off building a proper marketing team for too long, caught in the familiar trap of we're still growing fast, is it worth the investment? When he finally did it earlier this year, the relief was immediate, and it freed him to focus on driving the business rather than running every function himself.
In-house or agencies: there's no single right answer
This was where the two operators diverged most clearly, and both made their case well.
Matt runs almost everything in-house, down to handwriting cards, and has never taken outside money. Full Leaf used agencies early on and had the familiar revolving-door experience, a new one every 18 to 24 months. The problem, as he saw it, was that an agency rarely gets the whole picture, and you're never their only client. Going in-house is slower, you have to learn everything yourself and build the expertise, but it buys you people wholly focused on your business. His one piece of advice holds either way: understand what the work involves, even if you outsource it. "If you don't have a basic understanding of Google Ads, you don't really know if an agency's doing a good job or not."
Wendy recently switched agencies and made the opposite case, well. The agency she moved to earns its place by going deeper than campaigns: it digs into the analytics, looks at how products are performing, and surfaces operational issues on GALXBOY's side, not just marketing ones. When an agency starts bringing realistic revenue goals and a genuine read of your business, she said, that's the kind of partner worth having, an extension of your team rather than a vendor.
The through-line, as Rory summed up: whichever route you choose, understanding the work yourself reduces your risk. If the agency drops out, you can pick it back up without a cliff-edge in growth.
Test, learn, then double down or cut
Both operators run on a test-and-learn philosophy: make a bet, give it a defined window, measure it, then commit more or cut it.
Matt's biggest winning bet was national TV advertising, something a friend in a different business was succeeding with. He'll try anything once as long as he can measure it. It's become a major driver of new-customer acquisition and, just as valuable, a channel that runs independently of digital advertising, which only gets more expensive as you scale. Attribution was the hard part, TV doesn't hand you clean numbers, so they worked through several analytics approaches and QR scans to judge the lift.
Wendy's example ran the other way. GALXBOY went big on WhatsApp and SMS, then had to pull back. The channels work, but they're expensive, and as a subscriber list grows, every broadcast costs more. The fix wasn't to abandon them but to get specific: segment tightly and send targeted messages rather than blasting the whole list. A channel being wrong for a moment doesn't make it wrong forever.
A word on attribution windows
One exchange is worth singling out for anyone relying on channel analytics. Matt described running a subscribe-and-save reminder email five days before each renewal. The email looked like it was performing phenomenally, until he realized his email platform's seven-day attribution window was crediting it with subscription revenue that would have arrived anyway. They shortened the window to four days to fix it. It's a clean example of how an attribution window can quietly distort your entire read of what's working. As Rory put it, the reality is usually that a sale comes from a bit of everything, and no single touchpoint deserves all the credit.
Getting ready for Black Friday
With peak season closing in, both operators shared how they prepare.
Wendy's advice was to start earlier every year, because it always arrives faster than expected. On the ecommerce side, make sure your site performs under load, GALXBOY makes much of its money in the first hour after midnight, so they build hype around the countdown, and keep stock in reserve, because demand can surprise you and oversold orders pushing stock negative is a lesson learned the hard way. And invest in the post-purchase experience, since more people than ever will be going through it.
Matt plans his marketing calendar three months ahead and, crucially, freezes his website from November 1st: no major changes, because a glitch or a hidden add-to-cart button during Black Friday is expensive. Being reactive and making last-minute changes, he's found, almost always backfires.
Their shared underrated tactic: test your own store, and buy from it, regularly. Matt gives friends gift cards and asks them to go through the full purchase. Wendy has started using mystery shoppers, online and in-store. You look at your own site every day, so you stop seeing the problems a first-time visitor hits immediately. And listen to the warts, not the flattery, "I don't want to hear what they think I want to hear," as Matt said. "I want to hear what the problems are."
Growth on a low budget
The most-upvoted audience question was the one every early operator wants answered: how do you find strong growth on a low budget?
Matt's honest answer started with how buried a new store is. Nobody sees it, and getting those first customers, and those first reviews, is genuinely hard. What broke it open for Full Leaf was a Pinterest beta advertising program back in early 2015. With a $50 total budget and no prior digital-ad experience, their first ad returned $150 in sales, and they kept reinvesting. But the real engine, he insisted, isn't a hack: "There's no home runs. Anyone tries to sell you that, just walk the other way." Slow, steady improvement, every single day. "It takes 10 years to become an overnight success."
Wendy's growth came from community, and from being genuinely in it. GALXBOY runs events and collaborations with local artists, which has made people comfortable with the brand in a way that translates into organic growth. Her advice goes further than the usual "find where your customers are": go to the places they physically are, meet them, talk to them, learn about them. And lean into user-generated content, which for GALXBOY has been enormous, customers love being photographed in new apparel, and that content spreads. "User-generated content on a digital form is the closest you're going to get to word of mouth."
The shared thread
Two operators, two routes, one conclusion: there are no shortcuts at this stage. Growth compounds slowly, the hard years are usually the successful ones in disguise, and the real advantage is knowing your customers and your business better than anyone else could.
It's also worth noticing where Full Leaf's growing pains showed up first. When fulfillment slipped, it wasn't a dashboard that sounded the alarm, it was the reviews, dropping from 4.9 to 4.7 as customers felt the delay. Reviews aren't only social proof; they're one of the earliest, most honest signals of how your operation is actually holding up. At this stage, that's worth paying attention to.
How Judge.me helps you scale
Much of what Matt and Wendy described comes back to one thing: knowing what's really happening in your business before it shows up in your revenue. Reviews are one of the clearest early signals you have, and Judge.me is built to help you collect them, act on them, and turn them into growth.
Collect reviews automatically, at any volume. As your orders climb, automated review requests keep collection steady without adding to your workload, so quality signals don't slip when you're busiest.
Catch problems early. AI sentiment and topic analysis reads every review and flags what customers keep raising, from shipping delays to sizing, so a dip like Full Leaf's 4.9 to 4.7 is something you spot and fix fast, not months later.
Turn reviews into new customers. Reviews that AI shopping assistants can read, and that earn star ratings in search, put your social proof to work acquiring customers, a channel that doesn't get more expensive as you scale.
Build trust that converts. The Trust Badge and review widgets answer the "is this a real business?" question at the moments shoppers decide.
It's the kind of foundation that holds up as you grow, from your first hundred orders to your ten-millionth in revenue.
