In one engagement, Carl Phillips ran a single UX test on a page for CarFinance247. It added £300,000 to their monthly revenue. No rebrand, no new channel, no big swing, just one page, tested properly.
"That result is the standard I bring to every engagement," Carl says. It's also the clearest example of how he works.
As Managing Director at The PMC, a digital consultancy built around pragmatic and sustainable growth, Carl spends his time with B2B founders and marketing leaders who know something is off, a website that attracts visitors but fails to convert them, lead generation that produces inconsistent results, a strategy with no measurable commercial impact, but can't name the exact thing holding growth back. His job is to find it.
Routine over disruptive
The PMC positions itself as pragmatic rather than flashy, and Carl is direct about why. Most in-house marketing teams and founders are working with strict limits on time and budget, and disruptive tactics or unproven new technology bring risk that rarely pays off against projections.
"My accountant often points out that the correct approach is usually the most routine one, and I apply that exact logic to marketing," Carl says.
Instead of pushing the newest tool or platform, he looks closely at a client's practical capabilities, their limitations, and their specific commercial objectives, then builds around consistency, precise measurement, structured reviews, and iterative growth. He compares it to keeping a hot air balloon in the air: it takes a steady, measured input of fuel, not occasional bursts of activity.
Sponsors worth chasing beat sponsors chased at volume
When Manchester Fashion Week needed international sponsors, Carl's team didn't run wide outreach and hope. Acting as their fractional marketing partner, they built an Ideal Customer Profile defining the exact calibre of sponsor required, then focused research and outreach specifically on global brands within the beverage sector matched to the scale of the event.
The result was qualified leads with Diageo, Casio, Brother Sewing, Asahi, Beavertown Brewery, Bombay Sapphire, and Bacardi, each handed to Manchester Fashion Week's internal team with a full record of the conversation. "It proves that taking the time to understand the unique commercial requirements of a project yields far better partnerships than simply playing a numbers game," Carl says.
Data before diagnosis
When a founder tells Carl that traffic is fine and spend is happening but growth has stalled, he doesn't reach for a new tactic. He audits the analytics setup first, checking for false positives and negatives before trusting any headline number.
Citing Avinash Kaushik's Web Analytics 2.0, Carl points out that year-on-year traffic growth on its own can be misleading.
Segment it and the growth might turn out to be low-intent blog traffic, duplicate session counts, or visitors outside the target ICP entirely. Only once the site's performance and competitive landscape have been audited at that level of detail does he build the actual strategy.
From portfolios to pipelines
Carl didn't train as a marketer. He studied photography at the University of Leeds, graduating into a photography agency in 2012 that shot commercial work for Toyota, Nestlé, and The Guardian, back when portfolios were still delivered physically to WPP in London. Alongside that, he built the agency's first social media strategy and digital presence, and saw firsthand the limits of relying on a single skill.
That instinct carried into every industry he's worked in since, automotive, finance, sustainability, B2B services.
The tactics shift, the core needs don't: reducing costs, building brand reputation, generating quantifiable sales. He sees the same hurdles on repeat, a pipeline that isn't consistently qualified, pain points nobody has correctly identified, and founders with no time freed up to work on strategy instead of daily operations. "Founders often hope for automated, 'set and forget' solutions to these problems," Carl says, "but the reality is that sustainable growth requires active, ongoing management."
Sixteen years, one method
Sixteen years in, Carl is available for project-based work, ongoing retainers, fractional roles, and on-call advisory.
The method hasn't changed: cut through the noise, find what's actually blocking growth, build a pragmatic plan around it, and measure the result against numbers that matter to owners and directors, not vanity metrics.