When Charlie started working with Simba four years ago, they were a bootstrap mattress company with almost no paid advertising presence. The founding team was scrappy, camera-ready, and had an incredible product. Charlie's job: figure out if paid ads could actually work for them.
Fast forward to this year, and Simba is on track for £36 million in revenue. They ranked third on the Telegraph's fastest growing businesses list. What started as cautious £10k monthly spend turned into one of the most successful e-commerce scaling stories in the UK.
But Charlie has a confession: he wishes he'd scaled more aggressively.
This is the story of what actually worked, what he'd do differently, and the complete framework that took Simba from startup to $45M - including the controversial decision to eliminate account managers entirely from his agency structure.
The Bootstrap Beginning
When Charlie first met the Simba team, they had something most e-commerce brands don't: founders who were genuinely comfortable on camera. Not the stiff, corporate "let me tell you about our product" comfortable - actually natural, engaging, personality-driven content.
Charlie recognized this immediately. "We very quickly established that founder-led creative was very impactful," he explains. While other mattress brands were running generic lifestyle shots and benefit-focused ads, Simba could lean into authenticity.
The early strategy was simple: test founder-led content, pile budget behind what works, and scale carefully. That last part - the "scale carefully" approach - is what Charlie now questions.
"We had some really winning concepts and I think because we were new to ad spend, initially spending £10k a month felt like a huge amount of money," Charlie recalls. "We were a bit slow in the early days to pile in. In those early few years we were getting just the most phenomenal CPAs that were highly profitable to the business, and I think we could have scaled even more aggressively."
Conventional wisdom at the time said you needed to "lean into campaigns" - the industry expression for scaling slowly to avoid "buttering" performance. Charlie followed that wisdom, increasing spend gradually even when creatives were producing exceptional results.
But looking back, those exceptional CPAs represented missed opportunity. When you find something that works that well, especially early in a brand's lifecycle, the right move isn't caution - it's aggressive scaling.
Building A Paid Media Team
As Simba grew, Charlie faced a decision that would define how he approached the entire business: how to structure his team to handle the increasing workload.
The traditional agency playbook was clear: hire account managers to handle client communication, bring in junior media buyers to execute campaigns, create channel specialists for Meta and Google. Build a hierarchical structure with clear roles and responsibilities.
Charlie tried this approach. It failed.
"I found that it created a sort of disconnect," he explains. "When I hired more junior media buyers, the person making decisions in the account aren't as closely linked to the business and the goals and the actual metrics that define the success of the business."
The problem revealed itself in Simba's growth. Charlie would have strategic calls with the founding team, discuss business objectives around new customer acquisition and profit margins, then distribute tasks to junior media buyers. By the time those insights got translated into campaign decisions, something was lost.
"There's a sort of Chinese whispers effect," Charlie says. "I would have these calls, these sessions with clients, and by the time I distributed that to the junior, I might as well have done the work myself."
The Platform Truth vs Business Truth
One of Charlie's core insights from scaling Simba relates to the disconnect between what platforms report and what actually matters to the business.
"I think fundamentally making decisions based on profit, new customer revenue - those sorts of things, what the client is telling me on day-to-day calls - and making sure I'm contrasting everything I do in the accounts with that sort of core truth data versus the risk that a media buyer is making decisions based on what's giving them a good ROAS in Meta or Google."
He gives a specific example: Performance Max campaigns showing 8:1 ROAS.
"We've all run a Performance Max campaign that's got an 8 to 1 ROAS, but it's taking all the brand credit and actually the new customer growth hasn't changed at all in the account. And these systems will always gravitate towards the low hanging fruit."
For Simba, this meant constant vigilance around new customer acquisition versus brand credit. The platforms would report fantastic numbers while just harvesting existing demand. Charlie had to stay close to the actual business metrics - profit, new customer revenue - rather than trusting platform reporting.
"As we know, those things, especially these days, are not always in solidarity with each other."
Scaling More Aggressively
Looking back on the Simba journey, Charlie's main regret is clear: he should have scaled more aggressively when they found winning formulas.
"I think back then there's an argument that I was sometimes going too slowly with creatives that were just having an incredible impact and would run for sort of a year plus at amazing numbers."
The caution made sense at the time. Industry wisdom said aggressive scaling would break campaigns. The "learning phase" was a terror that kept media buyers awake at night. Everyone talked about needing to "lean into" scaling carefully.
But Charlie now believes that wisdom was outdated even then, and it's definitely outdated now.
"I do think that's a lot easier now. We're now in a place with Meta where actually you can double spend and expect linear performance for quite some time if you have enough creatives and enough diversity in the account."
The key insight: the algorithm has gotten significantly more robust. What used to be fragile - where a 20% budget increase could crater performance - is now resilient. With enough creative diversity, you can scale aggressively without the performance degradation that used to plague rapid scaling.
"Whereas to be fair, two, three years ago, I think you had to handle it with a little bit of care," Charlie notes. The caution was warranted then. But the platforms have evolved. The algorithms handle scale better.
If Charlie could go back to those early Simba days when CPAs were phenomenal and creatives were crushing it, he'd be far more aggressive. Double the spend. Find those winners and pile in immediately rather than scaling cautiously over months.
Always Be Testing (ABTs)
One lesson Charlie emphasizes from the Simba journey: never stop testing, even when you think you know the answers.
"I even do this now after 10 years of doing this - I think we're always looking for a one size fits all silver bullet of how to manage ads," Charlie admits. "Every so often I'll get connected to someone in the space and I go into the conversation thinking they might have all the answers, and they're in a very similar position to me. They're constantly testing and learning."
He uses a memorable analogy: "I heard an expression once in the context of media buying that you touch the stove and you check it's hot so you don't touch it again, but actually you kind of have to keep touching the stove because something you did yesterday didn't work then, but actually today it might work incredibly well."
For Simba, this meant constantly cycling through creative concepts, regularly testing new approaches even when old ones were working, and maintaining diversity in campaign structures.
"From the perspective of Meta, I'm always running some ABO campaigns and some CBO campaigns. I'm always running some campaigns on cost cap, some campaigns without."
The diversity serves multiple purposes. It prevents over-reliance on any single approach. It provides constant data on what the platform responds to at any given moment. And it ensures you're not missing opportunities because you're stuck in outdated patterns.
This philosophy proved critical when Simba needed to identify underperforming campaigns. "I ordered an account this morning actually, and it's got every single campaign on CBO and there's certain ad sets that have just had very low spend."
Charlie's solution was moving to more manual setups. "When accounts are feeling a bit stuck, move to more manual setups, make sure you're pushing diversity to a range of different creatives, and then leverage the more A+ setups to get that scale."
Scaling Creative Volume
As Simba scaled past certain thresholds, Charlie hit a new challenge: sheer creative volume. The business was testing dozens of creatives weekly, requiring constant uploads, monitoring, and iteration across multiple markets.
"It got to a point where the ad spend, the amount of uploads and so on became quite challenging," Charlie admits.
Eventually, Simba made the decision to bring someone in-house full-time just to handle the operational load of creative management. Charlie transitioned to a consultancy role, still managing Google and providing strategic oversight, but the day-to-day Meta management moved in-house.
This isn't a failure of the scaling approach - it's the natural evolution when a brand reaches enterprise scale. The strategic framework Charlie built got them to $45M. At that point, the operational overhead justified dedicated internal resources.
The lesson: different scale requires different operational approaches. What works for £100k-500k monthly spend looks different than what works at £1M+ monthly spend.
The Performance Model That Actually Works
As Simba grew, Charlie developed strong opinions about compensation structures based on what actually aligned incentives properly.
His preferred model might surprise you: percentage of ad spend rather than percentage of revenue.
"I'm still quite a fan of the model, which is unpopular with a few people these days, but the percentage of ad spend," Charlie explains.
His reasoning comes from direct experience with brands like Simba that have significant non-paid marketing impact. Simba does product drops that create organic traffic spikes. Should compensation spike just because they launched a new mattress line that drove organic sales?
"I have clients where around a product drop, we see huge spikes in revenue, huge spikes in traffic, and the ads swallow that all up. We know it's not the ads. We know some of it's the ads, but we know not all of it is," Charlie says.
His policy is clear: "I kind of have a policy with them that around big drops, we don't increase spend. We wait to sort of sweat the organic impact. And then we ramp up spend and see if the system will also ramp up paid as well."
The percentage of spend model aligns incentives properly. Charlie only makes more money if he spends more. He only spends more if performance justifies it. The business doesn't feel like they're overpaying for organic success.
"It correlates directly with what you're doing on the ads as opposed to what the business might be doing elsewhere."
For businesses with steady, predictable marketing mixes, revenue-based models can work. But for brands with product drops, seasonal spikes, or significant organic/brand components, the spend-based model prevents misaligned incentives.
How To Replicate Simba’s Success
Charlie's approach to scaling Simba reveals a clear framework any media buyer or founder can apply:
1. Find Your Unique Creative Edge: For Simba, it was founder-led content. For your brand, it might be UGC, product demonstrations, or educational content. Identify what you can do that competitors can't easily replicate.
2. Unify Channel Oversight: Don't let separate people manage separate channel budgets. One person (or team) should control the entire media buying budget and allocate dynamically based on performance.
3. Prioritize Business Metrics Over Platform Metrics: Track new customer revenue and profit, not just ROAS. Platform reporting is increasingly misleading. Build systems to measure true incrementality.
4. Scale Aggressively on Winners: When you find exceptional performance, test doubling spend rather than 20% increases. The algorithms are robust enough to handle it if you have creative diversity.
5. Maintain Structural Diversity: Always run multiple campaign types simultaneously (ABO + CBO, cost cap + no cost cap). Don't let your entire account depend on one structure.
6. Test Constantly: Yesterday's losing strategy might be today's winner. Keep touching the hot stove. Market conditions, platform algorithms, and audience behaviors shift constantly.
7. Align Incentives Properly: Structure compensation to reward the right behaviors. For brands with organic/brand components, spend-based models often work better than revenue-based.
The brands that scale successfully - like Simba's growth from bootstrap to $45M - do so by making strategic decisions based on business metrics rather than platform metrics, maintaining creative diversity, and scaling aggressively when they find what works.
You can get Charlie's 11 Rapid-Fire Questions With A $45M+ Media Buyer
For more, watch the full Q&A interview with Charlie here.
