Working brief off the Monday 21 September call with Jack Blair. Jack is leaning to Option 2 — the discrete performance marketing audit. James has the proposal to write and wants an email to Jack before Friday. This is the raw material for it.
The through-line: the audit’s real product is a data inventory. Campions is sitting on records no competitor can see, and almost nothing is being asked of them.
Campions Group — Emeria’s UK estate-agency arm, established 2023. A mid-London roll-up since the February 2026 South West exit. Brands: Chestertons (largest), Chase Buchanan, Retirement Homesearch, Campions Lettings & Management (2,500+ units), Aston Chase (Apr 26), Madison Brook residential, Battersea & Nine Elms Estates — three London deals inside roughly a month. MD Keith Shields; UK Ops Richard Davies; Marketing Director Laura Richards, in post since around mid-2026.
Each one is an issue with an opportunity already sitting inside it. That matters: Jack is not asking to be told what’s broken — he knows. He needs the thing he already half-built finished and monetised.
Two years in post, and a performance marketing manager nearly three years in, and the group still cannot answer the budget question. There is no PPC and no Meta activity at all — the stated reason is that London geo-targeting is too difficult, and two hires brought in to do it both failed probation. Organic is flat-to-down, masked by the 2024 website migration; the acquisition-driven growth hasn’t shown up in traffic. Leads come from Rightmove and Zoopla on their terms.
The opportunity: two failed hires is a hiring problem, not a channel verdict. Nobody has tested whether paid can work here — they’ve tested whether two people could make it work. That question is answerable in weeks, and answering it is what unlocks the 2027 budget conversation.
And the portal maths is moving against them. Rightmove’s average revenue per advertiser went from about £1,530 to about £1,636 in H1 2026. The listing costs more each year and still doesn’t guarantee an instruction. The question to put in the room: what does a portal lead cost after it fails to instruct?
Messaging across the group is awards, market position and self-congratulation. Jack’s own verdict on it is blunter than anything we’d have written. There has been no brand manager for an extended period, and Laura inherited the whole department unexpectedly.
The opportunity: Jack already found the differentiator and doesn’t know it yet. His lost-appraisal callouts came back with one repeated sentence — your fee is too high and your price was too low. That is a positioning brief. High fee plus honest price is a defensible strategy; it just needs the evidence and the words behind it.
Sites are slow, clunky, content-light and lost material in the last migration. Not optimised for SEO, nothing built for generative search. Meanwhile rental reform has every landlord in London running queries they’ve never run before — and Campion turns up in none of them.
The opportunity: Jack’s own read is that “the market’s just generally really slow” on this. The window is open, Renters’ Rights Act Phase 1 is already in force — so landlord duties and advice are a live cost on the lettings book this quarter, not a 2027 theme — and the group is mid-migration to a new website partner, so the content model goes in while the sites are being built rather than retrofitted after.
The 21 Sep research pack put a number on where that audience actually is. Across the twenty UK property channels ranked by 2026 views, Samuel Leeds alone passed ~9.1 million views this year, with Premier Property, Property Accelerator and UK Housing Signal in the next tier. They almost never say “book a valuation with our branch”. Agency groups keep paying portals while the audience learns somewhere else entirely.
Lead the email with these. Jack is a capable operator hemmed in by a task-oriented culture, and he is about to put his neck out on a new mandate. Everything we propose should read as finishing his work, not replacing it.
When Laura took over she couldn’t believe the group had no ROAS model. She didn’t get an answer from inside her team, so she asked Jack — and Jack built it in August. Lead-to-instruction, imperfect data, honest about it, and good enough to steer by. Her reaction was the same as Anthony’s on the call: this becomes the weekly heartbeat.
He put in a platform that cross-references the ~400,000 active vendor and landlord files against what’s appearing live on Rightmove and Zoopla, and surfaces the matches as call opportunities to the branches. Trigger-based automated email is in development behind it — timely and relevant, templated rather than AI-written, which is the right call for now. He built the supply of opportunity before anyone asked for it.
Rather than accept the internal account of why appraisals are lost, Jack ran his own callouts to customers who had Campion out and then listed elsewhere. He came back with a single, repeatable, commercially loaded sentence. That is the most valuable asset in the whole conversation and it currently lives in his head.
All three are James’s own text, already in the E5 library. The Campion proposal is the CFRA skeleton with the Kaplan deck behind it.
| Proposal | Why this one | In the vault |
|---|---|---|
| CFRA Research Oliver Gibson · 23 Jul 2026 |
Closest structural match. Discrete regional sales campaign plan, 6–8 weeks, fixed price for cost certainty, 30/60/90/180-day roadmap. Carries the two lines we need verbatim: “Equals Five operates differently from a traditional marketing agency… senior-led teams as an extension of our clients’ businesses on a fractional basis”, and “our role would not end with designing and planning the strategy. We would also help you execute it.” | library/extracted/Supporting CFRA Research in Delivering its Growth.md |
| BW Interiors Rob Marr · 31 Jul 2026 |
The same skeleton, tighter. Best version of the capacity argument — “move from strategy into execution without needing to build a larger permanent sales and marketing resource” — which is exactly Jack’s case against a team of 7–8. Use if we want the shorter email. | library/extracted/BW Interiors Sales Campaign Strategy Proposal.md |
| Kaplan Data & Technology Growth Strategy v2 · 23 slides |
The deck that sits behind the email — what James means by “put it on the slide deck”. Three-phase structure (Discovery & Assessment wks 1–2 → Strategy & Growth Model wks 3–4 → Roadmap & Final Presentation wks 5–6), deliverables slide, budget slide (£12,750 + VAT, 50% on brief / balance on completion, fixed-price option), then team and credentials. | library/extracted/Kaplan Data and Technology Growth Strategy Proposal v2 25.09.25.md |
Rocket Consulting (Nick Garnett, 23 Apr) is the fuller blueprint version — growth model tied to a valuation model, Jon Daniel as “KPMG in a box”, cost spread over three months. That is the Option 1 letter. Keep it filed in case Jack comes back from his boss with a broader mandate than expected.
Sequenced on James’s own horizons from the call — what’s in front of us, what’s tomorrow, and the big picture. One through four all start inside the audit, so none of them needs a second sale. Each names the data set it runs on.
Runs on: the data inventory itself — what exists, where, and what it can answer.
The agreed way in. Audit what’s working and what isn’t across the group, firm recommendations, each one carrying a commercial number, then a plan for execution. The first thing it settles is the paid question: is London geo-targeting genuinely unworkable, or did two hires fail? Two failed probations is not evidence about a channel.
Second thing it settles: what the Rightmove and Zoopla dependency actually costs per instruction, against what the same money buys elsewhere. Jack cannot make his 2027 budget argument without both numbers, and he is expecting the budget to be cut.
Runs on: the ROAS lead-to-instruction model, plus appraisal-to-exchange by brand.
The model exists. Laura wants it reviewed every week. Nobody owns making that happen, and a task-oriented business will not spontaneously start. We instrument it, chair it, and reduce it to one number — marketing’s contribution to instructions — reviewed the same way every Monday: where is it, where should it be, what are we doing this week, what did last week teach us.
This is also the fastest way to make Jack’s October mandate visible to the CEO. It produces a report he can take upstairs in week one.
Runs on: lost-appraisal callouts, price-accuracy against time-to-exchange, the 45% managed conversion.
Take “your fee is too high and your price was too low” and build the answer: what the service actually is, what the higher fee buys, why the honest valuation is the one that sells, and the data that proves it. Then push it down into appraisal decks, branch scripts, portal copy and the sites — so it is one story rather than something that lives in the head of a good sales manager running twelve-hour days.
This also works politically. It is a positioning programme sourced from Jack’s commercial data, not a critique of Laura’s brand work, and it gives her something she has never had: a differentiator with evidence under it.
Runs on: the 400k records, published as evidence. This is the citation engine, not a blog.
The method Anthony set out on the call: take the top 100 queries by funnel stage for each brand and market, find who is currently being cited in the AI answers, then build content that is authoritative, recent, sourced, authored and frequently updated. Group it into problem pillars, not content pillars, and write it 80% for the machines and 20% for the humans. Then build named author authority — ex-journalists and credible third-party voices, linked across properties.
Head start — already built. The 21 Sep pack ranked the top 20 UK property YouTube channels by 2026 views, pulled 200 videos, fetched captions and summarised every one: 175 of 200 captions succeeded, and the 25 that failed are marked as failed rather than invented. Per-channel theses and per-video takeaways are sitting in Campions/pack-2026-09-21/youtube/DIGEST.md. That is the content brief, and it was drafted before the call happened.
Timing: do it as the new website partner builds, not after. And point Chestertons’ young LinkedIn/Instagram/TikTok team at it — the enthusiasm is already there and undirected.
Runs on: the full 4–5M estate, segmented, scored, and priced as services rather than instructions.
Roughly 400,000 active vendor and landlord files, 4–5 million in total, around 800,000 having enquired in the last six months. Asked directly on the call whether an opportunity analysis had ever been run against it, the answer was no. Everything in it is mined for one thing: a buy or a sell instruction.
So: size it properly. What could each segment be worth beyond instructions — landlord education and compliance products under the new legislation, advisory and valuation services, rent protection updated for the reform, the referral economics that already exist but nobody owns. Add lead scoring on genuine propensity, which Jack wants built internally anyway. Then fix the leak underneath it.
This is also where the Dubai parallel earns its keep: as transparency and data availability rose there, agents stopped selling transactions and started selling consultations. Campion has the database to do the same and has never priced it.
Everything above resolves into one thing. Jack’s reach with leads, the performance of eight brands, conversion at each funnel stage, visibility, the media landscape per segment, revenue per instruction, close dates, what gets published, and which tools are worth building — all of it is a data question, and Campions already holds the data.
So the most valuable output of a sales and marketing audit is not a list of channel fixes. It is an honest inventory of what data sets this group has that nobody else can get at, and what each one can be made to answer. That inventory is the asset the rest of the engagement is built on.
Jack has already arrived at this on his own, which is why it will land rather than sound like consultancy. He came back from a JLL session talking about exactly this.
| Data set | What it could answer | State |
|---|---|---|
| ~400k active vendor & landlord files 4–5M total; ~800k enquired in 6 months | Segment value, propensity, lifecycle worth by borough and by brand. What a Wandsworth vendor is worth over ten years versus a Barnet one. | Mined for exactly one thing: a buy or sell instruction. No opportunity analysis ever run. |
| CRM × live portal match Jack’s platform, running | Which past customers are transacting right now, and with which competitor. A live win/loss feed nobody else has. | Live, surfacing opportunities, badly under-called. |
| ROAS lead-to-instruction model Jack built it in August | Marketing contribution to instructions, by brand and by channel. The number the 2027 budget argument needs. | Built. Not yet an operating rhythm. |
| Lost-appraisal callouts Jack’s own customer interviews | Why instructions are lost, at what fee and price gap, and what price accuracy does to time-to-exchange. | In Jack’s head. Not structured, not connected to anything. |
| 45% of new lettings instructions go fully managed high for London | The one thing the group is measurably best at — and nobody has worked out why, or how to repeat it across the other brands. | Known as a number. Unexplained. |
| Appraisal → instruction → exchange, by brand eight brands, one CRM | Where each brand leaks, and which one converts an appraisal best. Eight natural experiments running side by side. | Never compared brand against brand. |
| Direct mail attribution platform being bought now | Whether cutting £800k to £100k to zero was right, in numbers rather than assertion. | In flight, on Jack’s own initiative. |
This is the part worth putting in the email, because it is where the data stops being an internal measurement problem and becomes the reason anyone finds Campions at all.
Every agent in London publishes the same advice piece. None of it gets cited, because none of it contains anything the model couldn’t already say. Proprietary data is the difference between content that gets ignored and content the AI puts front and centre — and it has been the difference on every client engagement where this has been done properly.
Campions can publish what actually happened to 400,000 London vendor and landlord records: what asking prices really did by borough, how long accurate pricing saves, which landlord segments are exiting under the reform and which are consolidating. Nobody else can write that piece. It is the one thing a portal cannot take from them, it arrives exactly as landlords are re-deciding under Renters’ Rights, and it is the input the AI answers are currently starved of.
Then it compounds: the data informs the content → the content gets cited → visibility recovers → leads arrive without a portal in the middle → and those leads feed the same database. That loop is the argument for the whole programme, and the audit is what starts it.
Not “what should we spend on paid?” but: what can we answer that no competitor can, and what would it be worth if we published it? Everything else — channel mix, positioning, which tools to build to take load off the agents or make buying easier — falls out of that answer rather than being argued about separately.
The 21 Sep prep pack was built before the call and nothing in it has been spent yet. Most of the evidence the proposal needs is already sourced.
| Asset | What it holds |
|---|---|
| The full pack 10 sections | Who they are, strategy moves from the press, HMRC transactions, regions and London, BBC coverage Jul–Sep, tech and tactics winners and losers, X voices verbatim, the YouTube ranking, and meeting angles. pack-2026-09-21/index.html |
| YouTube digest 20 channels, 200 videos | Ranked by 2026 views, captions fetched and summarised per video, per-channel theses. Method and caption failures both documented. pack-2026-09-21/youtube/DIGEST.md |
| Numbers, research, brief earlier cuts | Narrower versions, superseded by the pack but useful if a single section needs pulling out on its own. |
Three constraints the email has to respect, all of them from Jack’s own words.