I'm Rob McNicoll.
I've worked in marketing for around 25 years, I'm a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and I also hold an MBA. Over that time I've worked across a lot of different areas of marketing, but these days most of my work is centred around ecommerce.
The Next Stage came out of that work rather than the other way around. I didn't sit down one day and decide that the world needed another ecommerce framework. It developed because I kept finding myself having the same conversations with business owners.
Sales had slowed down. Advertising was getting more expensive. Conversion wasn't where it should be. Email wasn't doing enough. A good month had been followed by a disappointing one. Or sometimes the business was actually growing nicely, but the owner wanted to know whether it was genuinely ready to push harder.
There were always plenty of things we could do.
The difficult bit was deciding which one actually mattered.
The channels have changed. The important questions haven't changed nearly as much.
Marketing looked very different when I started. We didn't have Meta Ads, Google Shopping, Klaviyo, Shopify or most of the tools that now make up a normal ecommerce marketing stack.
What hasn't changed very much are the commercial questions underneath all of it.
Who is the customer? What do they actually want? Why should they buy this product? Why should they buy it from you? What is making them hesitate? How much can you afford to spend to acquire them? What happens after the first order? And where is the next pound of investment most likely to make a difference?
As more of my work moved into ecommerce, I became increasingly interested in how all of those things interact.
It is very easy to look at advertising, conversion, email, merchandising and retention as separate disciplines. In a real ecommerce business they aren't separate at all.
A weak offer can make the advertising look bad. A poor product page can make perfectly good traffic look bad. Weak customer economics can make a respectable ROAS difficult to scale. Email can change what a customer is worth. AOV affects what you can afford to pay to acquire somebody in the first place.
Once you're working inside the business, rather than commenting on it from the outside, those connections become very difficult to ignore.
My experience has never been limited to ecommerce. Over the last 25 years I've worked across different businesses, sectors and commercial environments, from hands-on marketing activity through to broader sales and commercial work.
Across that career, the marketing and commercial work I've been involved in has generated more than £256 million in revenue for organisations.
I don't use that number to suggest that every result came from one campaign, one channel or one clever idea. It didn't.
What it does reflect is a long time spent making marketing and commercial decisions in real businesses, where the outcome ultimately has to show up in revenue.
A lot of my work today happens to be in ecommerce, but the commercial thinking behind The Next Stage has been shaped by much broader experience than ecommerce alone.
Most of my work sits somewhere between marketing and the commercial reality of running an ecommerce business.
In practical terms, that means I get involved in paid acquisition, conversion, product pages, email, offers, merchandising, customer acquisition, retention and the commercial numbers that sit behind all of them.
I've managed advertising at significant scale, worked directly on ecommerce businesses as they have grown, and spent a lot of time trying to understand why performance moves in one direction or another.
Sometimes the answer is obvious. Quite often it isn't.
For example, if conversion drops, it is tempting to immediately start changing the website. But the website may not be the problem. The traffic mix might have changed. The offer may have weakened. A competitor may have changed its proposition. A product that previously drove a large share of revenue may no longer be performing.
Likewise, if advertising is profitable, that doesn't automatically mean the answer is to spend more. You still need to understand whether the wider economics of the business support it.
That is the part of ecommerce I find most interesting: working out what the numbers and customer behaviour are actually telling you before deciding what to do about it.
The Next Stage is built from work inside real businesses.
One of the ecommerce businesses I've worked closely with is a UK home and garden retailer. When I became involved, monthly revenue was around £20,000. Within three months it had grown to around £80,000, and the business has continued to develop from there. It is now generating approximately £125,000+ per month.
Over roughly two years, monthly advertising spend has grown from around £1,500 to around £20,000 as the wider commercial operation has become strong enough to support that investment.
I've also worked on another ecommerce operation that grew from zero and went on to average approximately £40,000 a month in revenue over a two-year period.
I don't present those numbers because I think there was a single clever tactic behind them. There wasn't.
Growth like that tends to come from getting a lot of decisions right over time: acquisition, conversion, merchandising, email, offer, customer experience and the economics that connect them.
That is a much less exciting answer than claiming that one change doubled a business overnight, but it is much closer to how ecommerce actually works.
Past results are examples of work inside real ecommerce businesses. They are not promises of what every business will achieve.
There is no shortage of ecommerce advice. That is part of the problem.
If you run an ecommerce business, you can find somebody telling you to do almost anything.
Spend more on Meta. Move budget to Google. Start TikTok. Improve your CRO. Add subscriptions. Send more email. Improve retention. Increase AOV. Produce more content. Redesign the site. Change your pricing.
A lot of that advice is perfectly sensible in the right circumstances.
The problem is that it is usually given without much context.
A business trying to prove that it can generate consistent sales should not be making the same decisions as a business already doing £100,000 a month and looking for its next source of growth.
Likewise, if people are reaching your product pages but not adding to basket, buying more traffic may simply send more people into the same problem.
On the other hand, if the store is converting well, customer economics are healthy and acquisition is working, endlessly tweaking the website rather than increasing investment can be just as costly.
So the question I've become increasingly interested in is not simply, "What could this business do?"
It is, "What should this business do next?"
That is really the idea behind The Next Stage.
I'd rather understand the problem before prescribing the fix.
I tend to work by starting with what is actually happening rather than what we assume is happening.
That normally means looking at the numbers, looking at customer behaviour, understanding what has changed and trying to narrow the problem down before deciding what to do.
Once we have a reasonable idea of what is going on, the next step is usually quite simple: choose the most important improvement, make it properly and measure what happened.
Then make the next decision from there.
That doesn't mean everything in ecommerce can be reduced to a neat formula. It can't. Businesses are different, customers are different and context matters.
But I do think there is a huge advantage in being disciplined about the order in which you solve problems.
It is very easy to stay busy in ecommerce.
It is much harder to make sure you are busy with the right thing.
The Next Stage is primarily for people who already have a real ecommerce business to work on.
You don't need to be running a huge business. But there needs to be something real happening.
You have products. You have customers. You have traffic. You have numbers. You have some evidence about what is working and some evidence about what isn't.
You may be doing £5,000 a month and trying to make those sales more repeatable. You may be doing £30,000 or £50,000 a month and finding that growth has become harder. Or you may already have a significantly larger business and want a clearer view of where the next phase of growth is going to come from.
The common thread is that you are past the point of asking, "How do I start an ecommerce business?"
You're now asking better questions.
Why aren't more people buying?
Why did last month outperform this one?
Should we spend more?
Is the problem acquisition, conversion, the offer or something else?
What deserves attention first?
Those are the conversations I want The Next Stage to help with.
You don't need to know the answer before you get here.
If you already know exactly where the problem is, one of the £7 diagnostic products may be enough to help you work through it.
If several parts of the business seem to be affecting each other, or you need a deeper look at what is going on, there are other ways we can work together.
And if you genuinely don't know which route makes sense, that's fine too. Tell me a little about the business and what is happening and I'll point you towards the option that seems most appropriate.
If the smaller, cheaper option is enough, I'll tell you that.