From invisible to thriving:
how a small paper business grew sales 20x
A specialist paper and stationery wholesaler had taken a chance on retail, buying a nearby shop that was otherwise going to close. After a few years, the economics no longer stacked up and the shop was closed. The plan was to move retail online instead. But the website was not working, and with wholesale alone not enough to carry the business forward, it needed to. Six years later, monthly retail sales are twenty times what they were when we started.
The situation
The business had been wholesaling specialist paper and stationery for years, building up solid trade relationships and deep product knowledge along the way. When a nearby retail shop selling similar products looked like it was going to close, the owner bought it rather than see it disappear. It was part pragmatism, part genuine affection for the craft.
The retail shop ran for a few years, but the costs of running a physical space (rent, staffing, overheads) eventually made it unsustainable. Closing it and moving retail online felt like the logical next step. The wholesale operation would continue as it always had, but it alone was not enough to take the business where it needed to go. The owner was approaching retirement age, and the online retail side had to work.
The problem was that the website was essentially invisible and, for anyone who did find it, very difficult to buy from. Product listings had almost no information. Photos were poor. There was no discoverability through search at all. To place an order, you had to already know exactly what you wanted. For a new customer arriving without context, there was almost nothing to hold their attention or give them the confidence to buy.
The business also had its wholesale warehouse, and retail customers were welcome to visit and shop there in person. It was a genuinely appealing proposition, the chance to see and handle the products properly, but the space had been set up for wholesale order preparation, not for browsing customers.
What I did
I started the way I always do: by going through the entire customer experience myself. I found the business online, navigated the website as a new customer would, and visited the warehouse in person. I was looking for every point of friction, every moment of confusion, everything getting in the way of a customer deciding to buy.
Online, the core problem was that the business was asking customers to do all the work. The product descriptions gave very little away. The photos did not show the products clearly or in any useful context. And with no SEO, the site was entirely invisible to anyone who had not already heard of the business through trade connections or word of mouth. The loyal wholesale customers could find it. New retail customers could not.
In the warehouse, the work was different but the thinking was the same: look at the space through a customer’s eyes rather than through the eyes of the team working there every day. Decluttering and reorganising made it easier and more pleasant to move through. But the most revealing problem was at the point of purchase.
When a customer was ready to buy, a staff member would sit down at a normal desk facing the wall, processing the order through the wholesale invoicing system while the customer stood over them and waited.
The customer was physically looking down at an employee working with their back to them, on a system designed for trade orders rather than quick retail transactions. It was slow, it felt awkward, and it put the customer in an oddly dominant position at exactly the moment they should have been feeling relaxed and well looked after.
The fix was straightforward once the problem was visible. The desk was replaced with a standing desk and repositioned at the exit end of the warehouse, overlooking the whole space. Staff and customers now stand at the same level. The transaction happens on the way out rather than as an interruption in the middle of browsing. The invoicing system was replaced with a proper point-of-sale setup for retail customers. What had been a slow, stilted moment at the end of every visit became a quick, easy, natural conclusion to it.
Throughout all of this, changes were introduced gradually and deliberately. This was a small team running a real business with a wholesale operation to maintain alongside the retail work. There was no appetite for disruption and no capacity to absorb it. So we worked layer by layer, making sure each change had time to embed properly before moving on to the next. Nothing was destabilised. Everything stuck.
The results
Monthly retail sales have grown from less than $1,000 to at least $20,000, and they’re still growing at a slow and sustainable rate. Online sales began improving relatively quickly once the initial website changes were in place. Warehouse visits increased significantly over time, and the in-person conversion rate is now exceptional: almost everyone who comes in to browse leaves with a purchase.
The wholesale side of the business continues alongside a retail operation that now genuinely holds its own. The business is discoverable, credible, and well-regarded by its customers in a way it simply was not before.
But the best measure of where things stand is probably this: the owner, who came into this needing it to work well enough to carry him through to retirement, is now having too much fun to stop. The business he was worried about became a business he is proud of. Retirement can wait.
A fresh start:
rebuilding a software business from the outside in
An education software company had two established products with steady recurring revenue and a flagship product that had been on the market for ten years without making a single new sale. The business had recently passed from one generation to the next. The foundations were solid. Almost everything built on top of them needed rethinking.
The situation
The company made software to help schools manage their administrative tasks. Two of its products had been on the market long enough to build a reliable base of paying clients. The third had a longer and more complicated history.
The product had been developed in-house using technology acquired from another company, along with a small initial client base. It had been actively marketed for a decade. In that time, it had not gained a single new client. By the time I came on board, attrition had reduced the inherited client base to three schools, and no new sales pipeline existed.
Ten years in market, no new sales. That is not a marketing problem. It is several problems at once.
The sales approach was mismatched to the audience. Cold email campaigns and passive search discoverability might work for a broad consumer product. They do not work well for a specific, relationship-driven market like school administration software, where decision-makers need to be found, engaged in person, and guided carefully through a purchase.
The website made things worse. What should like a single company online was actually three separate sites roughly stitched together, each with its own visual identity and structure. It was difficult to navigate, difficult to understand, and difficult to trust. A school administrator arriving for the first time had very little chance of finding what they needed or knowing what to do next.
And the products themselves had not kept pace. Visually, they felt dated. The onboarding documentation was dense and inconsistent. Getting started required more effort from new clients than it should have, which was a problem in a sector where busy staff have limited patience for software that does not immediately make their lives easier.
The business had also just gone through a generational handover. A change in leadership always brings a change in direction, and this one brought its own particular challenges around inherited decisions, team confidence, and a sense of what the business was actually trying to become.
What I did
The work covered a lot of ground, which was necessary given how many things needed attention at once.
The most urgent change was to the sales approach. I worked with the team to shift away from cold outreach and toward in-person sales and genuine account management: spending real time with the existing client base, building those relationships properly, and letting satisfied clients become advocates within a sector where schools talk to each other constantly. Word of mouth in a community this specific is worth more than any campaign.
The website was rebuilt from the ground up. Three separate sites with incompatible identities and structures were replaced with a single, coherent presence that clearly communicated what the company offered, how its products related to each other, and what a prospective client should do next. The most important action, booking a product demo, became the obvious next step rather than something a visitor had to hunt for.
The rebrand extended that logic to the products themselves. Each had its own disconnected visual identity with no clear relationship to the others or to the parent company. Bringing them into a coherent family made the business look like what it was: a single company with a range of complementary tools built for the same audience.
I also worked on the products from the inside. User testing and process reviews identified where the software was creating unnecessary friction or confusion. The documentation that came with each product was reviewed and rewritten where needed, so that new clients could get started quickly and confidently without needing hand-holding or running into avoidable misunderstandings early in their experience.
Throughout all of this, changes were introduced methodically and at a pace the team could absorb. A business navigating a leadership transition does not need the added pressure of disruption on top of it. We worked through things together, keeping the team involved at each stage.
Where things stand
The business now presents itself in a way that reflects what it actually is. The website works. The products look the part and are easier to get started with. The sales approach is matched to the market it is trying to reach.
Leads have increased meaningfully. Word of mouth within the sector has improved. After ten years without a new client, the first new sales of the flagship product have been made. The energy in the business has shifted noticeably: there is more confidence, more clarity about what the company stands for, and more momentum than there has been in some time.
Converting that increased interest into a reliable sales pipeline is the work that comes next. But it is a considerably better problem to have than the one they started with.