Vanity metrics don't survive a board meeting. Growth should be underwritten like any other investment: EBITDA, contribution margin, ARR.
Lance Muranaga. Fifteen years operating inside PE-backed and founder-led companies. The mandate is always the same: find where value is leaking, fix it, and hand the engine back stronger. By referral only, a few mandates a year.
Book 30 minutes The operating systemTwo ways in. Same operator.
Sponsor mandate or founder mandate, the job doesn't change: an executive in the seat who owns a number, not an advisor who owns a deck.
Portfolio companies don't need another agency. They need an operator in the seat.
Fractional or interim CMO, VP Marketing, or VP Analytics for portcos where the growth engine needs to be assessed, fixed, and systematized. Measurable impact inside 60 days, board-ready reporting from day one.
The language here is sponsor language: hold-period math, value creation plans, exit narratives. Not marketing theater.
Most companies hire a head of growth eighteen months too late.
The fractional model fixes the timing: senior judgment and hands-on execution from one person, before the full-time hire is justified. The engine gets built, measurement, media, forecasting, operating cadence, then the handoff includes hiring the replacement.
No account team. No markup. No junior staff learning on your budget.
Performance media is the price of entry. The edge is everything around it.
Four disciplines, one operating system. Most operators bring one or two. The compounding comes from running all four against the same P&L.
Google, Meta, and affiliate are tablestakes. Expert-level buying is assumed, not advertised.
The algorithms change every quarter, so buying is a craft that gets practiced daily or lost. Account architecture, creative testing, and bidding strategy at the level of someone who still runs accounts, because the accounts are still being run. That standard also makes existing teams and agencies better: more output per dollar already invested.
- Hands-on across Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, affiliate
- Agency & in-house team integration, not replacement
- Forecasting, flighting & scenario planning
Incremental growth lives upstream. Most performance marketers can't get there.
CTV, programmatic, linear TV, OOH, audio. Performance buyers can't plan these channels and traditional buyers can't measure them. The rare skill is both: planning reach media like a brand strategist and holding it accountable like a performance buyer. That's where growth comes from once the performance channels saturate.
- CTV, programmatic, linear, OOH & audio planning
- Upper-funnel investment cases a CFO will sign
- Reach channels held to performance standards
None of it matters if the measurement lies.
Measurement first, then media. As deep as the problem requires: tracking and attribution foundations, MTA, MMM, incrementality testing, and the forecasting layer on top. A smarter analytics setup is what lets a CTV dollar and a Meta dollar be compared honestly, in the same P&L conversation, instead of in separate decks.
- MTA, MMM & incrementality design
- Tracking & attribution infrastructure
- Forecasting tied to contribution margin
Most companies pilot AI. Few convert it to EBITDA.
The difference isn't the tools, it's whether each initiative maps to a P&L line. An AI-native operating model compresses the cycle: reporting, competitive intelligence, creative analysis, and forecasting in a day instead of a week. The team learns to work the same way, so the speed stays after the engagement ends.
- AI-native reporting & analysis workflows
- Team enablement, not shelfware
- Every initiative tied to an operating metric
Performance buys the customer. Reach builds the demand. Measurement makes them answer to the same number. AI compresses the whole cycle.
The operating system.
Four phases, one rhythm. Every engagement is scoped against a number agreed on up front.
Assess
Full diagnostic of media, measurement, and team. The fact pattern, on paper, inside two weeks.
Strategize
A plan that works backward from the business outcome: EBITDA, contribution margin, ARR. Sequenced, costed, owned.
Execute
The work gets done, not delegated. Accounts, dashboards, forecasts, creative direction. Measurable impact inside 60 days.
Systematize
Playbooks, cadences, and a team that runs the engine on its own. Every mandate has the exit built in.
Outcomes, not activity.
A sample of mandates. References available on request.
ROAS improvement · PE-backed D2C sleep brand, $50M+ rev
Post-IPO revenue decline and over-reliance on branded search. Full-funnel acquisition rebuilt, CTV and programmatic launched, and held to performance standards. Six months.
CAC while scaling spend · Menswear D2C, Series C+
CAC had doubled in 18 months on creative fatigue and no incrementality testing. Rebuilt the testing framework, introduced holdouts and geo-experiments. Spend went up, CAC came down.
Contribution margin in four months · DTC apparel
Current mandate. Measurement rebuilt from the tracking layer up, Google and Meta restructured. CM from 35% to 47% of revenue, with revenue up 23% YoY on 7% more spend.
The person behind the engine.
A career that started in sales, which is why marketing activity never gets confused with revenue here. The fifteen years since have been spent inside consumer and B2B companies building the technical side of growth: media, measurement, and the operations underneath them.
Based in Austin with my wife and son, with working hubs in New York, LA, and San Francisco.