Case Study
How I took a national mastermind of 800+ investors and business owners from one $20-a-day ad campaign to a three-channel paid media engine with a 12x Return on Ad Spend in 18 months.
Founded in 2012, Gobundance had grown for more than a decade on word of mouth and member referrals. That engine had slowed, and lead flow had become the biggest constraint on growth.
The company had never built a comprehensive marketing strategy for generating new members. Paid acquisition was almost nonexistent: one $20-a-day campaign promoting the book, tracked to book opt-ins but not to applications or new members.
There had never been a dedicated marketing leader, so the COO was carrying marketing on top of running operations. Without a dedicated owner, marketing decisions queued behind everything else and projects took longer than they should have.
The mandate: build a data-driven acquisition system that brings in the right members without diluting the culture.
I stepped into the CMO seat and ran the work on MomentumOS™, my marketing operating system: one theme per quarter, then diagnose, focus, deploy and track.
Q2 2025. Rebuilt the funnel – website design, copy and the book offer – so paid media could convert into qualified applicants. Stood up the first managed paid program and its measurement.
Q3 2025. Built a KPI scorecard with UTM attribution from every campaign to each pipeline stage, down to new members.
Q1 2026. Grew spend toward ~$20K a month and added new channels: Google Ads and TikTok Ads.
Q2 2026. Rebalanced Meta spend, tested YouTube Ads, and lifted intro-to-strategy-call conversion from ~60% to 95%+.
Along the way I reshaped the team around the strategy: added inside-sales capacity, hired a full-time team member into marketing ops, and set a weekly rhythm that held everyone to the numbers, with the goal moved from top-of-funnel leads to qualified applicants and new members.
Qualified applicants by month, January 2025 to June 2026.
Qualified applicants rose from 13 in the first month to a peak of 131 in October 2025, and were at 98 a month in June 2026, about 7.5x where they started. Much of the early-2026 dip traced to Meta spend concentrating in the wrong places; rebalancing it in Q2 brought applicants back up. The dashed line shows the trend.
Qualified applicants, the north-star metric, went from 13 a month to a peak of 131, built on a paid media engine and ad creative pipeline created from scratch.
Across the engagement, $193K in ad spend brought in 61 new members worth about $2.4M in member value. Google was the standout at about 22x.
New leads grew from about 85 a month when the paid program launched to a peak of 794 in May 2026.
By the end of the engagement, spend that had once run about 86% through one channel was spread across Meta, Google and YouTube, so acquisition no longer depended on one platform.
Before Shane, our marketing lacked consistency, strategy, and measurable data. He built that foundation from the ground up – a real strategy, disciplined execution, and reporting that finally showed us what was working.
Qualified applicants grew from 13 a month to a peak of 131, and $193,000 in ad spend produced roughly $2.4 million in member value.
More importantly, it gave me confidence we were building a repeatable growth engine instead of relying solely on referrals. If you’re looking for someone who can build a scalable marketing engine and create accountability through data, I’d confidently recommend Shane.
Matt KingCEO, GobundanceWe had never had a marketing strategy. We had a team that managed internal marketing and relied on member referrals and a couple of podcasts.
Shane built an actual growth strategy, backwards-mapped to where we wanted to go, with paid social producing leads from sources that had never converted, a 33-email nurture sequence (that was a game changer), and reporting that finally gave us visibility into what was working.
He ran it as a true CMO, setting the metrics and holding the team accountable, and eighteen months later we have an external marketing machine instead of an internal marketing team. If another COO asked me, I would say 100% do it. Worth every penny.
Stephanie BrackettCOO, GobundanceAfter 18 months, the engagement wrapped at the end of July 2026 with the foundation of the growth engine built, a strong full-time operator in place, and a working paid media operation handed off. Gobundance’s next chapter centers on brand sponsorships and organic content, and I helped make that transition a smooth one. I’m still an active Gobundance member, and proud of what we built together.
If new clients still come mostly through relationships, let’s look at what it would take to build an acquisition engine alongside them.