Hyper-Growth Strategy

Situation

Cymax Group is a Vancouver-based eCommerce enablement company that had spent 15 years building, losing money on, and learning from direct-to-consumer furniture eCommerce — and had emerged from that education with a unique set of capabilities: a proprietary pricing engine, deep marketplace relationships with Target, Walmart, and Google, a freight brokerage platform called Freight Club, a channel management service, and a data and merchandising operation. Freight Club alone had grown from 300 shipments a month to 1,000 a day with almost no marketing spend. Its CEO had set a target of $500 million in revenue. The leadership team believed they had all the pieces to get there.

Complication

The pieces weren't adding up. The company's business units — Cymax, Freight Club, Channel Gate, and a nascent marketplace operation — operated as separate silos with different cultures, different incentives, and no shared identity. Externally, vendors and partners couldn't articulate what Cymax Group actually was. Internally, 80% of revenue came from 20% of customers, but 80% of the work went to the bottom 20%. A deeper strategic question had never been resolved: the company's marketplace business was heavily dependent on Amazon, but the leadership team hadn't agreed on whether to continue down that path or shift toward owning the customer relationship directly — a choice with direct implications for exit valuation.

What They Tried — and Why It Wasn't Enough

Individual business unit heads had developed their own growth plans, and the CEO had set clear financial targets. But those plans had been built in isolation — each unit optimizing for its own metrics, with no shared framework for deciding which bets were worth making, which customers were worth keeping, or what kind of company Cymax Group was trying to become. A previous company off-site had included 50 people and produced no lasting decisions. The hard choices kept getting deferred — not because the leadership team lacked intelligence or ambition, but because they were running too fast to step back.

Question

Cymax had the capabilities, the market position, and a credible path to $500 million in revenue — but four business units pulling in different directions, no shared identity, and a leadership team too deep in day-to-day operations to make the hard strategic choices the goal required.

Answer

MMG structured the challenge across four interconnected topics — Who We Are, Purpose, Hyper-Growth Opportunities, and People, Leadership and Culture — ensuring that identity decisions would inform growth decisions, and that both would be grounded in the leadership capacity required to execute. Owners were assigned to each major initiative during the workshop itself, making accountability a feature of the output rather than an afterthought.

Output

The Cymax leadership team left with three things their day-to-day operations had never forced them to produce:

• A shared identity and purpose — a resolved definition of what Cymax Group is (an eCommerce enablement company that makes it easy to win online), which business units fit under that identity, and how to communicate it consistently to vendors, carriers, employees, and potential acquirers or investors.
• A prioritized growth agenda with owners — a set of concrete hyper-growth bets — including a B2B commercial marketplace, private label, Freight Club expansion, and data monetization — each with a named owner and a clear connection to the $500M goal and exit value strategy.
• A people and culture blueprint — a prioritized EMT hiring plan, a professional development framework, a clearer definition of what a great Cymax employee looks like, and a commitment to the disciplined performance management the organization had previously avoided.