The Rising Cost of Growth

Customer acquisition is getting harder.

E-commerce growth has slowed, consumer confidence remains under pressure and businesses are having to work much harder to justify where every pound of marketing budget goes.

So what does profitable growth look like when acquiring the next customer is becoming increasingly expensive?

In this episode of The Fractional CFO Show, Adam Cooper is joined by Daniel Dunn, CEO and Co-Founder of Paper Planes, a growth agency and technology platform helping D2C and e-commerce brands use data-driven postal marketing to acquire, retain and reactivate customers.

Dan's background spans Disney, data and insights consultancy dunnhumby, Tesco Clubcard strategy and managing major brand marketing investment before co-founding Paper Planes.

That experience gives him an interesting perspective on one of the biggest challenges facing founders today: balancing customer acquisition and business growth with profitability and return on investment.

The changing economics of customer acquisition

Dan explains why the environment for e-commerce and D2C brands has changed significantly since the growth experienced during the pandemic.

For years, businesses could increase marketing spend across channels such as Meta, Google and paid social and see relatively predictable growth.

Today, that equation is becoming more difficult.

Customer acquisition costs are under pressure, consumers have more choice and founders need a much clearer understanding of which marketing activity is genuinely creating incremental growth.

That means moving beyond top-line revenue and asking better questions about marketing ROI, profitability and where the next pound of investment should go.

Marketing needs both creativity and data

One of the central themes of the conversation is Dan's view that marketing is both an art and a science.

Great creative still matters. Brands need campaigns that attract attention, communicate effectively and stand out in crowded markets.

But creativity needs to sit alongside data-driven decision-making.

For founders working with more limited budgets, understanding the return generated by different marketing channels becomes particularly important. The objective isn't simply to spend more. It's to understand what works, remove ineffective spend and continually improve how capital is allocated.

Acquisition versus customer retention

We also explore the increasing focus on customer retention and reactivation.

Businesses naturally spend a lot of time thinking about how to acquire new customers, but Dan argues that many overlook the value sitting within their existing first-party customer data.

Once a business has paid to acquire a customer, there is an opportunity to build that relationship, increase customer lifetime value and encourage repeat purchases rather than continually paying to replace them with someone new.

For founders focused on sustainable and profitable growth, the balance between acquisition and retention is becoming increasingly important.

Why diversification matters

Another major theme is marketing diversification.

Many growing businesses become heavily dependent on a relatively small number of channels, particularly Meta, Google, email and paid social.

That can work extremely well, until performance changes.

Dan's advice isn't to abandon successful channels. Instead, businesses should understand which parts of their existing marketing spend are generating the strongest returns and continually allocate a small proportion of budget towards testing something new.

His recommendation to founders is simple: every quarter, try a new channel.

Testing doesn't necessarily require a larger overall marketing budget. It can mean identifying ineffective expenditure, reallocating it and using controlled tests to understand whether another channel can deliver incremental returns.

Over time, that creates a more diversified and resilient customer acquisition strategy.

First-party data and direct mail

The conversation also challenges some assumptions around direct mail.

With hundreds of billions of emails being sent globally every day, getting attention through an inbox is increasingly difficult.

Dan explains how modern postal marketing has moved well beyond traditional batch-and-blast direct mail.

By combining first-party data, customer segmentation, marketing automation and personalised campaigns, physical mail can become another measurable channel within a wider customer acquisition and retention strategy.

The principle is broader than direct mail itself: founders should be prepared to test different routes to market rather than automatically allocating budget to the channels everyone else uses.

Growth, profitability and financial decision-making

From a financial perspective, this creates an important question.

When does marketing spend represent genuine investment in growth, and when are businesses simply buying increasingly expensive revenue?

For founders, CEOs and finance leaders, good marketing decision-making requires visibility beyond revenue alone.

Understanding customer acquisition costs, marketing ROI, retention, customer lifetime value and incremental returns can help businesses decide where growth investment makes commercial sense and where capital could be deployed more effectively elsewhere.

That becomes particularly important when economic conditions are difficult and cash, margins and profitability are under pressure.

Running an agency when clients expect more

Dan also shares his experience of building Paper Planes and how agency-client relationships are changing.

As technology makes it easier to start businesses and competition increases, clients have more alternatives and increasingly high expectations.

For agencies and other service-based businesses, delivering expertise alone may not be enough.

Dan talks about the importance of customer service, maintaining close relationships, understanding what clients actually need and creating a genuinely human experience, while still balancing the time and resources required to deliver that service profitably.

It's a challenge many agency founders will recognise: providing exceptional client service without allowing over-servicing to undermine client profitability.

Where AI genuinely changes the equation

We also discuss AI and where Dan believes it is creating genuine value rather than simply adding more hype.

For Dan, one of AI's biggest impacts is making information and data more accessible, much faster.

But access to information isn't the same as good judgement.

AI still needs quality data, experienced interpretation and human scrutiny if businesses are going to make good decisions from its outputs.

Dan also considers how differently he would build Paper Planes if he were starting again today.

His approach would be to stress-test what AI can achieve first, before deciding where additional people, technology, marketing investment or external support are genuinely required.

It's an interesting lens for any founder thinking about operational efficiency, resource planning and how to scale a business in an AI-enabled world.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The rising cost of customer acquisition
• Business growth versus profitability
• Marketing ROI and better investment decisions
• Data-driven marketing and measurement
• Customer retention and reactivation
• Customer lifetime value and first-party data
• Diversifying marketing channels
• Testing and learning with limited budgets
• Direct mail alongside digital marketing
• Agency profitability and client experience
• AI, automation and operational efficiency
• Building a more resilient growth strategy

If you're a founder, CEO, agency owner, e-commerce operator or finance leader trying to understand how to grow without simply throwing more money at customer acquisition, this episode offers a practical perspective on making marketing investment work harder.

Business Book Bonus

Dan recommends How to Make a Billion by Richard Harpin, drawing on Harpin's experience building businesses including HomeServe.

For something completely different, he also recommends The Rest Is History podcast as a way to switch off from business and maintain some balance.

About The Fractional CFO Show

The Fractional CFO Show, hosted by Adam Cooper of ACC Finance Solutions, features practical conversations with founders, CEOs and senior operators about the financial and commercial decisions behind building better businesses.

We explore business growth, profitability, cash flow, financial strategy, leadership, operational performance and the decisions founders face as their businesses scale.

Subscribe to The Fractional CFO Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your preferred podcast platform for future episodes.

Transcript

Adam Cooper (00:01.491)

Okay, so today I'm joined by Daniel Dunn, the CEO and founder of Paper Planes, a growth agency focused on postal marketing with consumer brands and customer acquisition in mind. And Dan has spent years helping brands navigate this world. yeah, very happy to have you with us. Welcome to the Fractional CFO Show, Dan. How are you doing today?

Dan (00:26.318)

Adam, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me on. Lots of experience, lots of gray hair is starting to come through. worry.

Adam Cooper (00:34.567)

Thank you for joining and I can see Dan, the audience can't, but I can't see any gray hairs, but we'll go through some of that experience and maybe we'll start there. It'd be great to hear a little bit. I saw on your LinkedIn, you've got a very interesting background that takes us from Disney all the way up to present day. So it'd be great to hear a little bit in a couple of minutes of how you've got to where you've got to in founding Paper Planes.

Dan (01:00.758)

Yeah, started off at Disney World when I was 18 in Florida, actually. Left after I got shunned for the big promotion to Mickey Mouse. I was like, that's it. That's enough for me. I'm going to be actually go somewhere else. No, in all seriousness with Disney, Cultural Representative, which was working in the fish and chip shop over there. But what a great company to work for in terms of customer standards.

you know, really high levels of values that drive the company and taking everything very seriously from a revenue optimization point of view. From there, a graduate outside of university was working with Dunhumbi. For those who don't know, Dunhumbi are the data and insights agency, marketing consultancy behind Tesco Clubcard. I was fortunate enough to work on Tesco Clubcard strategy there. We then began to establish some partners

partnerships with the likes of Meta and X and I was fortunate enough to work on that program. Managed P &G's investment in Tesco Media for a while through Dunhumbi and that's where I met my co-founder Steve. Steve owns a successful e-commerce business and was also working in app-based technology and analytics at Dunhumbi.

And we looked at the market about nine years ago and we're like, okay, what do we see in the market? Well, we see that D2C and e-commerce spend is increasing, tick. We see that customers are gravitating from the high street onto online stores for buying products. And we see that there's an increasing amount of money going into marketing automation and expenditure on Google and Meta and every other channel that's popped up since then. But what we didn't see a lot of is brands utilizing postal marketing.

as a way of reaching customers in the same smart advanced ways that they were doing on email or SMS or Google. So that's when we found in Paper Planes we were like, right, there's a better way of doing direct mail. It's not about batching blast and it's not about...

Dan (03:03.81)

non-personalization and sending stuff out just to an acquisition audience per se. It's about actually using first party data, triggering specific content based on segments within that data, having your big blast campaign supported with always on stuff and being really close to the detail of what's happening when campaigns launch so you can make refinements and improvements along the way. And that's what we do here at Paper Planes. To your point, we are a growth agency.

SaaS product which enables DTC e-commerce brands to make the most of their investment in direct mail and postal marketing and reach customers with something that's going to get them noticed.

Adam Cooper (03:46.1)

That's very comprehensive, great start. yeah, very interested. You've obviously been in this space a long time and a lot has changed, I guess, in that time. You started, I think, nine and a half years ago or so. And obviously we've had the pandemic, there's been financial crises. Current climate is not that conducive to spend and budgets. And I wondered from your point of view, what have you seen that's changed most in the last few years from a customer acquisition perspective?

Dan (04:16.47)

Yeah, it's great, isn't it? mean, it's been what a time, what an amazing time to actually start up a business, last 10 years. I always say I've joked a lot recently about, know, imagine, you know, as my co-founder, was like, imagine if we started this business when the economy was thriving. Like we would be on our desert island by now. It's having a great time. consumer confidence is low. Obviously, we know that from what we've seen in the media this week.

So I don't know when we're going when this is going out, mid May, let's say 2026 mid May, you are effectively in a place where we know consumer confidence is low. But what's also interesting is despite all of the crises going on across the world, expenditure seems to the economy has seemed to have grown at a top line. But if you think about e-commerce and certainly where we are at, there are two stats that I think we need to have on top of mind. And that is that e-commerce spend has been

flat year on year. I mean, that's according to IMRG data. You know, so these are the masters of tracking the growth of online spend and online retail. And we know it's been flat and it's been difficult since COVID. And also consumer confidence surveys, eight out of 10 consumers are planning to spend less. So this has already been, you know, a difficult environment. It was interesting coming out of e-commerce, sorry, coming out of COVID, coming out of COVID or going into the pandemic.

It was a boom time for e-commerce in particular, you know, because obviously we couldn't go to the high street. We couldn't go and get things in a way which was analog in its nature. So we had to go via the e-commerce stores. And that was where a lot more marketing spend came about is where there was a lot of growth for DTC. But ever since that post 2021, 2022 period, it's been really difficult. But what that means is it allows you, should

getting more optimized, you should be getting more refined with how you're spending money. So it's an opportunity.

Adam Cooper (06:20.539)

And yeah, I think that's exactly right. Do you think that everyone is grasping that opportunity? I mean, I don't know from your point of view, but from what I see, a lot of brands are still operating as though things haven't necessarily shifted. I wondered if you see that and why you think that might be.

Dan (06:41.304)

FOMO in marketing, I think, is, it runs wild. You know, I think that the problem is, and again, we have to speak specifically within e-commerce and online retail here, more so than other areas, because it's the area, it's our bread and butter, right? It's where we're kind of like working with a lot of our clients, it's where we're doing a lot of collaboration. It's very difficult, I mean, when you have a marketing budget and you're planning out what you're gonna do with your marketing spend,

There are certain things that you will put money on, which is either number one, expected of you from the board or from your senior leadership team, or number two, if you make a suggestion as to where to place a significant amount of your expenditure into certain channels, certain brands, no one's gonna buy an eyelid. So when it comes to e-commerce, there's a general feeling that a proportion, a substantial proportion of the budget has to go into search. It just has to go into search.

And then there's a proportion of the budget that just has to go into Instagram or Facebook, has to go into the properties of Meta. Or, you know, there's a big burst of investment that's gone into TikTok and there's a massive surge in marketing around TikTok and it's everywhere. let's do some TikTok marketing. You know, so there's an element of FOMO with dictating marketing spend and fear in terms of we need to be spending on those channels. And I think there's a general

kind of...

I think there's a general kind of feel that if you're not in an environment where you're forced to be made scrappy with your investment, if you're not having to question every single thing, or you don't have data oriented marketers, then it is easy just to kind of like, you know, spend across the things you think you should be spending on. But I think what we're seeing is a lot more brands that are scrutinizing what it means to put all of their marketing budget into growth.

Dan (08:40.09)

And especially if you look over the last couple of years, the important sharp rising shift of taking money that goes into growth, you the marketing budget that goes into growth and placing it more into retention. You know, that's been a massive, massive shift change because now we're beginning to see brands who are applying the principles that worked for Tesco or Homebase back in the late 80s, early 90s in that if we reinvest in our data asset, our first party data, we can drive a lot more

from retention and reactivation then we will do just regrowth and I think you know we're beginning to see that shift change but it's not always prevalent.

Adam Cooper (09:19.791)

Interesting. And do you think, is there something you're seeing that separates the businesses that are able to do that well from the ones that aren't? They either try and fail or they don't try. What is the sort of the key differentiating factor? You mentioned, you know, data oriented approach. Is there, you know, anything in addition to that or anything that you'd like to dive in to explain that to the audience?

Dan (09:44.11)

Marketing is an art and it's a science.

Right, so you've got the art of putting together the creative concepts, the campaigns that work really well, the ones that are going to get noticed and attention grabbing. But as much as it's important to have your John Lewis Christmas advert every year, or your Super Bowl advert, or your big broadcast piece that's going to get eyeballs, it is as important to know categorically what return your advertisers is going to be spending. So for me, the best performing companies

out there, the ones that have geared themselves up the most are the ones that apply data analytical principles to tracking on top of also having a big focus on creative outputs. So immediately, you know, the type of brands that spring to mind to me are the Gustos of the world, who essentially Timo has done a great job in sort of the building and marketing platform and a meal subscription platform, which is also massively trackable on its data. And it's

marketing and what goes out the door. mean, and of course, I mean, look at the growth of something like Amazon over the last 15 years alone. you forget everything that came before then Amazon with its personalization and its data principles and its machine learning and its expansion into AWS. mean, if there is ever a better example of a company that has just lent on data to really inform its build in terms of what it offers people, but also its marketing, you

There's very few out there that are better than Amazon. And I think that that's probably the difference between let's create a marketing budget and spend on TV and spend on all these different channels, you know, without having that very strict principle of data applied to it versus the brands that can like really focus down on data and really know what they're doing in terms of that approach. And I have to say that, you know, traditionally a lot

Dan (11:48.678)

the CPG FMCG brands like the likes of Coca-Cola or the likes of Procter & Gamble and their assets in their estate and the likes of Unilever, these brands are used to getting data back through their engagements with the supermarkets, the likes of Tesco, the likes of other grocery retailers and these are the type of brands who are very strict in adapting data-driven principles to their marketing. So they'll spend a lot of money on the arts.

and they'll get themselves out there but they'll also be very close. They apply the same principles you can get from you know tracking analytical impact of marketing campaigns at a grocery retailer through to your broadcast media as well.

Adam Cooper (12:32.299)

That's really interesting. And you've mentioned a lot of good case studies there and some great brand names. But I wonder for the purposes of the audience of this podcast, who are typically founders or small business owners, how do you take that sort of lesson around art and science, around data and creativity on limited budgets? Cost of acquisition is going up, profitability is being challenged.

So how do you take those learnings for the current climate for this audience? So more targeted to smaller businesses that will have more limited spend.

Dan (13:08.748)

Yeah, it's a great question. I think when it comes to and look, we work with so many like high growth, you know, entrepreneurial businesses with paper planes, you know, with our area. Think about if you're going to build a website now, you want to sell something direct to consumer, you're probably going to build it on Shopify, because it gives you all of the relevant ecosystem to build it on. You are going to I mean, there's 2.8 million merchants out there on Shopify.

globally.

As you grow that business, clearly you're going to start thinking about marketing spend and you're probably going to put some money into paid social to get yourself established there. You're going to put some money into social media. You're going to get an email service provider like Klaviyo or Ametrior or one of the others. So you can reach out to your first party data. You're going to start building a marketing budget in line with the growth of your business and you're going to be focused on growth.

I think the key challenge is, do you know, Adam, how much email is being sent every day globally now?

Adam Cooper (14:24.784)

No idea.

Dan (14:26.862)

376 billion emails a day. So the challenge is when it comes to my ability to reach someone who has bought my product.

Adam Cooper (14:33.735)

Yeah.

Dan (14:43.808)

And my only direct way to do that first and foremost is via email. If I am one of the 376 billion emails that are being put out into the universe every day, is there a chance that my message is not reaching the recipient or the recipient is seeing it and not engaging, or they just blind delete it, or it just doesn't get delivered in the first place? And...

We don't need every single person listening to this podcast will agree with the fact that we get too much email.

And probably everyone listening to this podcast hasn't printed off one of their emails and put it up on the fridge and gone, I'll come back to that. That's a fantastic email. So we are aligned to the fact that if we are going to grow, we need to then bring other channels into that mix. if you're a, so if, if the email had a hundred percent conversion rate and an engagement rate and it just drove you, as a small or growing

Adam Cooper (15:14.419)

Mm-hmm.

Adam Cooper (15:31.005)

Mm-hmm.

Dan (15:43.072)

entrepreneur with a business, you wouldn't have to worry about diversifying into other channels. But you need to worry about diversifying into other channels because there's always something that can help complement or supplement what you do better. And I think when it comes to direct mail, what is the advice? So when it comes to a top line marketing spend for founders, you have to be thinking about the channels that's going to grow your business and is going to allow you to continue that conversation from a retention perspective with your customers.

But then if you're going to invest in other channels to support that You have to invest in small Quantities first you have to put small budgets towards something to test properly Direct mail was prohibitive in a lot of ways for Brat founders looking to do that for a number of years because you would have actually found a print partner production facility Pay for artwork, know pay for scheduling pay for postage. You'd have different invoice

is coming from different places, it wasn't easy. What we try and do is we try and say, look, we appreciate your budget is going to be on a smaller scale to begin with. Give us a hundred pound, 200 pound, 500 pound, access the platform, see what it can do, what this form of marketing can do for you firsthand before you have to make any big decisions as to what you do. And that's how I'd approach as a founder. Well, that is how I approach every channel that I invest in. Every channel I invest in has to have return on investment that comes off the back of it.

So we can put together a compelling creative, but we need to know then what it returns before we put more money in. And if we see it return in, then more money goes in.

Adam Cooper (17:23.579)

No, that's really helpful. And I love the way you've outlined that. I just wondered, took obviously talking about diversification and we're talking about small business owners who will have a limited budget and limited time. And so your your your sort of invest and test and iterate is not always possible for for founders without potentially the missing something without them spreading themselves too thin or not being able to test all of the channels. So how do you advise those founders that you work with?

about how to diversify without missing something, without spreading themselves too thin perhaps.

Dan (17:59.726)

Chopping up the proportion of the budget so you're not ultimately spending more but essentially you're optimizing every channel that you have and then you're taking a proportion of that spend and you're putting it into testing something new. My recommendation to a founder would always be every quarter you should be trying out a new channel. You should be putting money somewhere else and you don't necessarily have to be finding extra money to put into something else.

But what you should be seeking to understand is, let's say within your paid social spend, what proportion of that spend is generating the highest return? What audience targeting is getting you the sales? What type of incrementality is every channel returning for you? Easy to do that through test and control principles. It's not black magic in terms of applying test and control or A-B methodologies in order to understand incrementality.

sure on where your spend is coming from, you proportion budget to those cohorts and you remove the ineffective budget and you put that ineffective budget into testing something new. Then it comes down to what are the barriers of entry to any new channel that you want to test. So are these guys trying to get me to pay for a platform fee? You know, are they trying to lock me into a long-term contract? Are they trying to essentially say

that there needs to be some sort of setup. If the barriers to entry are high, then you need to consider that obviously as a factor. Nowadays, for many of the different channels that you could or should be investing in from a marketing perspective, there shouldn't be high barriers to entry. You should be able to jump onto a platform, integrate into Shopify quickly, integrate into Klaviyo quickly, get access to a dashboard to track your analytics, get access to AI-generated creatives or support on designs.

is all there, and you can do that on a limited budget to begin with. So for me, Adam, it's a case of readdressing where the spend is going and just making sure your marketing plan has tested learning in it. It's so easy to sit back and rest on your principles and say, I'm always gonna invest in this, or I just don't have time, I don't have time to look into new channels. It's excuses.

Dan (20:22.24) (19.54 – 20.24)

If we're being honest with ourselves when we're saying, we don't have the time, it is an excuse because we all know as entrepreneurs and founders, if we had the mindset of I didn't have the time, then we'd probably be going back into corporate because effectively we're all here because we've driven ourselves into different areas to try and make a difference in something. And we know that being a founder and an entrepreneur is motivating yourself to find the time. Don't treat your marketing spend any different to that. Every quarter, try something new.

Adam Cooper (20:34.855)

Yeah.

Dan (20:52.144)

rigorous as part of your plan that you're going to put money into something new because then that's the only way you're to have a diversified marketing portfolio and if you want to be really successful you need a diversified marketing portfolio.

Adam Cooper (21:04.923)

I love that. I love that every call to try something new, test and learn and diversification. think there's a lot of truth in that. And I wonder, like, obviously you as an agency founder, know, agencies are under pressure, right? At the moment, both commercially, operationally, clients are demanding more from less, as we said at the outset. How has that affected, you know, how

agencies support their clients? How in your opinion of agencies changed over the last few years in terms of providing that quality support for their clients?

Dan (21:43.374)

It's like a full circle moment back to what we were talking about at Disney World at the start of this call. But I always say to my team that there's a real importance in...

guest standards, guest, customer service standards, guest relations, what's called a Disney. But there's a real importance in not just being a faceless SaaS based platform, but making your client feel as if you are important to them and you have a direct engagement with them and you care about what you're doing.

And I think sometimes that can spill over. mean, probably sometimes as a company at Paper Plains we're a little bit too passionate. We can let things spill over in terms of really emotionally being invested in what we're doing for brands. clients will come and go. Sometimes you feel justly, sometimes unjustly, but they will come and go. It's just the nature of the beast. But I never want that to be because they didn't have an excellent customer service experience with us. And I don't care whether it's a B2B SaaS platform

home you're building now or whether it's an agency-based model or if it's a combination of two, you need to ensure that your clients feel as if they have your full attention and they have a good experience with the people who they do business with.

the scenes because I don't think there's any doubt with the rising technology and how easy it is for anyone to be an entrepreneur nowadays in terms of building their own business or doing their own thing that AI is making it is removing against so many hurdles. You know, you are going to have more competition and I think clients are going to become more demanding and I think they're going to become.

Dan (23:32.374)

on the lookout for more things. They're going to be aware of more opportunities, different providers, different alternatives. So holding on to long lasting relationships is going to become harder and harder. So there you have to go back to the basics of what works well for some of the largest established companies there. Immediate guest recovery, excellent client standards, giving yourself a face, humanising the people behind the brand. So you're not just buying into an agency, you're buying into

to the whole team.

Adam Cooper (24:04.635)

Yeah, that's some really good advice there. And I think the foundations and sticking to the basics, there's a lot of truth in that. I wondered, there was a couple of things I wanted to dive into that you said there regarding that guest relations and that spilling over, as you said, in terms of the attention that you're giving and the passion that you're putting in. How do you, this is a fractional CFO podcast, so ask from a client profitability perspective, how do you manage that? How do you balance that sort of...

additional service, giving the best guest experience, the best client experience, while keeping an eye on the bottom line from a client, project and agency and company perspective.

Dan (24:47.534)

Well, mean, time is money, so probably not as well as we should in terms of, you know, we don't look at it and go, right, this is kind of like who we're going to spend all of our time on because they spend the most with us. there'll be an argument to say that you could or maybe should do that. But we've kept it a little bit broader and we haven't wanted anyone really to experience the planes or when they do have a bad experience, you kind of want it to be, you know, OK, how do we rectify this? Like, how do we understand it? Why it happens?

in how to erect a fire. I think that...

It's difficult when you're a mid-size business, you know, we are still as founders, you will be still hands-on in the kind of like the engagement with clients. You know, you will be close to, you still got a small team, you know, you know that you need to dip out for strategy, but it's very easy to get back into the detail of what you're doing. Probably some sort of MPS tracking, you know, would be good, you know, so we can keep track of what our clients think about us and what they're saying and kind of like how we

can keep them happy. The regular check-ins in terms of making sure that we are doing what we should be doing. But it's difficult. You've got to balance out your time. You've got to think about where should time be spent every week. And there's no doubt that you need to spend a lot of it with your ear close to the ground and understanding what your clients are saying and what they want and what their perception is of what you're doing. But it is also equally important to focus on your social media content.

or to put together your investment deck, or to close out the month for your board, or to effectively go to that conference. So everything is balancing as it feels. Everything has to be balanced around what the priorities are for that day of the week.

Adam Cooper (26:41.715)

Yeah, no, absolutely a good answer. the other thing I wanted to circle back on, you were talking about AI and how it's removing hurdles and obviously 2026, no conversation about marketing growth is complete without a focus on AI. But there's obviously there's a lot of noise as well at the moment. We see this in finance, see it in marketing, seeing it across the board.

In your world, where do you think it's genuinely changing things? Like where do you feel it's actually changing acquisition strategy versus where there's too much hype?

Dan (27:19.138)

Yeah, it's funny, isn't it? mean, it's a lot of the stuff that gets talked about with AI is it feels like a relabeling sometimes. I swear 10 years ago, was personalization. I swear AI was personalization 10 years ago. And I'm pretty sure 20 years ago, it was data-driven marketing. You know, the right person. And then programmatic came up. The right person at the right time with the right channel.

Look, there's no doubt that AI is driving change and the way in which AI is driving change is that it's making data accessible.

to people in a way that we have never seen before. So it allows us to become, to build a baseline understanding of an area or to put together something with a lot less time demand than what ever has been possible before. But fundamentally, you need data.

in order to drive relevant AI. So you need to have some sort of data well or data asset that you are really comfortable with in order to inform an AI, which is going to give you the best responses. And then secondly, just like a good data analyst would do with anything that comes off of, you know, the results of insights or, you know, a big dump of

numbers or sales or whatever it is. You need someone with experience to analyse and interpret what is actually being provided to you with a good eye for detail and a potential level of scrutiny as well because

Dan (29:05.77)

AI is getting better and better and better every year, there's no doubt about that, but it still needs to be carefully governed and it needs to be looked over and you need someone with a level of critique to be able to pick out the good from the bad. Because this is data driven stuff at the end of the day. I think where it's really making a difference is speed.

and accessibility. Those are the two big differences from let's say personalisation 10 years ago or data driven marketing 20 years ago. There's a lot of data driven and personalisation that comes with AI but how quickly you can access information is crazy now.

Adam Cooper (29:44.756)

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I guess just a follow on question, if you were starting paper planes again today, given what you've just said about data, accessibility of data, analysts to interpret, is there anything you would have changed about the structure of your business, about how you would start it out today versus 10 years ago?

Dan (30:09.055)

I would...

Dan (30:15.0)

Question, you would have to build a business today like stress testing AI as much as you can.

before you then work out, now where do I need to spend further money? Like how far has AI taken me? And then where do I need to really now kind of like lay out the extra? So I think, you know, we always knew with the build of paper planes. So look, we started with a fairly modest budget back in the day. Like when the concept was first launched, it was 25 grand effectively to launch it, know, website, PR, kind of like tech.

And then we went from there. I would question where that 25K was going today. I think my first portal call would be, found myself a founder, a co-founder, sorry, you can do all the data stuff in the analytics. And then I'd probably sit there with Steve and I go, okay, what should we do to really maximise this 25 grand? And I could probably guarantee a lot of it would go into Claude or Anthropic or Perplexity or GPT. And then we would be finding fractional support in the areas that we need.

fractional support and it may be that our resource plan or our marketing budget or our know need for premises whatever it is it may be that that you know was a fraction of what it would have had to have been nine years ago and then we just kind of like build as it makes sense push it as far as we can go and then where do we need to bring in the talent or the resource or the marketing spend or the development with an actual person in order to build further.

Adam Cooper (31:46.162)

Yeah, definitely. Good insights. Okay, so I'm going to change tack slightly and we're going to move on to our final section, which I call our business book bonus section. And this is where we ask our guests to recommend a book or a podcast or another resource that's really helped you and influenced the way that you think or operate and then can recommend to our audience. So Dan, is there a particular book or piece of content that's been particularly valuable for you during your career that you'd like to recommend?

Dan (32:15.936)

Yeah, I I take I've really closely followed Richard Harpin's career for a number of years. Richard Harpin is the former CEO of HomeServe and CheckerTrade. And he has this amazing network business leader.

enough to be a part of the forum in Business Leader. I'm in an entrepreneurial forum there. He released a book last year from his experience called How to Make a Billion and it's his tips for what you need to strive for, what you need to be thinking of if you want to go from, you know, I think he was selling rabbits when he was six years old or seven years old to illegally selling newspaper.

articles and stuff in his university through to billion pound businesses. So he's got entrepreneurial spirit running through his blood. And I'd thoroughly recommend that book, How to Make a Billion by Richard Harpin, because it's someone who's been there and done it. So there's that that I'd recommend. And then, you know, I'm a big fan of

lots of different podcasts and lots of ways of pulling out information. But I always am on YouTube listening to different inspirational, motivational speeches, or finding inspiration from different podcasts. So I could give you one which is non-business, which I'd recommend just to relax and chill out from.

Adam Cooper (33:54.715)

Yeah, yeah, sounds good. We all need a bit of that. Go for it.

Dan (33:59.022)

The rest is history, it's fantastic. The two guys who do that is effectively, they're amazing. They cover so many different topics ranging from the Titanic through to the Great Northern War. And I just find it's in such a way that kind of like, if I ever want to get into my space of chilling out and not thinking about business and not 24-7 thinking about my bottom line.

or anything like that, that podcast for me is fantastic. And I think it's nice to have a balance of personal and business. yeah, there you go.

Adam Cooper (34:30.899)

Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. I love the rest is history, massive thumbs up from here. Richard Harpin, I've not heard of How to Make a Billion, so we'll put that, both of those in the show notes. And so yeah, before we wrap up, Dan, thank you very much again for your time. there any final thoughts and where can people find you? Learn more about what you're doing over at Paper Planes.

Dan (34:56.684)

Yeah, diversification of that marketing portfolio is absolutely key. And if you are a

an entrepreneur or founder who has a high growth e-commerce business that's focused on D2C, regardless of whether you're on Magento or Shopify and you think you could be doing a little bit more to drive sales from your first party data than what you're currently getting from email, please get in contact with us because we can help with that. Anyone who's just an entrepreneur or founder and wants to reach out, know, I love networking and I love building the network, so please do find me on LinkedIn.

I'm Daniel Dunne, CEO and co-founder of Paper Planes. Hopefully that's clear by now. And if you can find us at www.paperplanes.co.uk. And if you want to reach out to find out more, is info at paperplanes.co.uk.

Adam Cooper (35:50.511)

Excellent. Well, thank you very much Dan for joining me today on the Fractional CFO Show. Really appreciate your insights, your perspective and your time. Thank you.

Dan (35:58.904)

Thank you.