We noticed something odd in the middle of last year. Three separate mid-market clients — a B2B software publisher in Antwerp, a specialist trade media group in Rotterdam, and a subscription newsletter business run out of a converted warehouse in Ghent — all described the same symptom in almost identical language: their editorial output was rising, and their returns were falling. More posts, more newsletters, more freelancers. Flat organic traffic. Stalled subscriber growth. Strategy decks that ran to forty slides and never left the drawer.
One of those operators, a managing editor we will call L., eventually sent us the document that had triggered her frustration. It was a content plan, twelve months long, built over five weeks of workshops. It contained no dates, no owners, and no definition of done. She had hired an independent strategy partner to fix it, and the fix took thirty days. That partner was Nicholas Spyer.
The starting position
L.'s operation was not failing in any dramatic sense. It was drifting. The site published roughly eighteen pieces a month across four loosely defined pillars, and nobody could say which pillar was supposed to carry the commercial weight. The newsletter had 9,200 subscribers and an open rate hovering in the low twenties. Two freelance editors were producing competent work against briefs that changed every quarter.
The trigger for the engagement was a board meeting. L. had been asked to justify the editorial budget against a rival publication that appeared to be growing faster on a fraction of the spend. She had no answer that fit on one page.
Days 1–7: narrowing the brief
The first week was deliberately unglamorous. No workshops, no stakeholder interviews with fourteen people, no brand audit. The working assumption was that the plan was not the problem — the scope was. L. and her new counterpart spent the first three sessions cutting the four pillars down to two and writing, in plain sentences, what each one was for.
The decision point that mattered came on day five. One of the two remaining pillars had a loyal readership and almost no commercial relevance. The instinct inside the business was to keep it because it drove traffic. The counter-argument was that traffic without a path to revenue is a vanity line in a board deck. They kept it, but demoted it to a fixed, low-cost cadence and stopped treating its performance as a strategic signal.
That single decision removed roughly a third of the monthly output from the critical path — and, crucially, freed the two freelance editors to work on fewer, longer pieces.
Days 8–21: rebuilding the operating rhythm
What replaced the twelve-month plan was closer to a production schedule than a strategy document. Every piece had an owner, a publish date, and a single sentence describing what a reader should be able to do after reading it. The newsletter was repositioned around one recurring format rather than a rotating mix of interviews, roundups, and commentary.
Two obstacles surfaced here. The first was internal: a senior commercial colleague who had been promised thought-leadership slots and now found them cut. The second was mechanical — the CMS and the newsletter platform were not talking to each other, so attribution was guesswork. Neither problem was exotic. Both were the kind of thing that a generalist strategy deck quietly ignores and a working operator has to solve in a fortnight.
The output cadence settled at nine pieces a month, half the original volume, with two-thirds of the effort concentrated on the two commercial pillars. The demoted section ran on a fixed four-week rotation.
Days 22–30: shipping, and the first numbers
The plan went live on day twenty-six. Not a pilot, not a phased rollout across two quarters — the whole thing, across all channels, on one Monday.
We followed the account for the following six months. The headline figure is the one that gets repeated in board meetings: organic traffic rose 3.1x over that period, against a baseline that had been flat for eleven months. Newsletter open rate moved from the low twenties to just under 40%. The commercial team, which had spent a year complaining about lead quality, reported a measurable shift in inbound enquiries toward the two retained pillars.
Less quotable but more useful: L. could finally explain the editorial budget on a single page. That was the actual deliverable.
What this case suggests
Three things stood out to us, and they generalise beyond publishing.
- Scope is usually the constraint, not ambition. Cutting a third of the output did more for growth than any addition to the plan.
- Thirty days is enough if the decision rights are clear. The bottleneck in most stalled strategies is not analysis; it is an unresolved argument about priorities that nobody has been forced to settle.
- Short engagements leave a working artefact. A schedule, an owner list, a definition of done. Not a deck.
It is worth noting that this kind of work sits in a particular niche. Nicholas Spyer runs engagements short by design, and the writing is direct — you can see the shape of it on the services and engagement page. For mid-market operators weighing whether to hire a full-time strategist or bring in outside counsel for a defined sprint, the case above is a reasonable test: if the core problem is an unresolved prioritisation argument, a thirty-day external intervention will surface it faster than another internal planning cycle.
The broader context is that European mid-market firms have been slow to treat editorial and content operations as a discipline with its own operating cadence. The ones that do tend to look less like media companies and more like product teams: fixed cycles, clear owners, small bets, fast retirements. L.'s business is now one of them. The plan that failed was forty slides long. The plan that worked fits on one page and has dates on it.