6
Years running Guardian's local growth
Guardian runs more than 200 centres the way you run facilities. Every location is its own local market, new sites open empty, and the budget should only chase the rooms still free. Same shape of problem, and we have it down to a method.
National Storage is 290 plus facilities across Australia and New Zealand. Each one lives or dies inside a three to five kilometre radius. Someone needs space, searches, and chooses within a day or two. Occupancy is the whole game, and every new site opens at zero.
Childcare works the same way. Guardian has more than 200 centres, each filling local places against local demand, with around ten brand new centres opening every year. We have spent six years pointing real budget at that exact pattern: which suburb, which centre, which week, and how cheaply we can fill the next place.
Guardian brought us in because it was not working. Spend could not be split cleanly by location, the website converted poorly, and occupancy was soft. We started where we always start, with an audit that laid out the opportunities in order of value.
From there: cleaner tracking so the numbers could be trusted, a run of split tests that lifted conversion (we shaped the tests, their team built the pages), and a repeatable method for filling new centres. When COVID hit childcare hard, we adjusted fast and kept them growing. Six years on, we still run it.
The reporting did not exist when we arrived, so we built it. Every channel, Google, Meta, and the rest, pulled into one place and broken out by centre, so the team and the board can see which locations are winning and which need help, without anyone stitching spreadsheets together.
Empty places, real demand. Push hard until they are taken.
Healthy occupancy. Keep it ticking, spend efficiently.
A brand new centre at zero. The launch playbook takes over.
No places left. We switch the spend off and move it elsewhere.
The point of an audit is not a clean bill of health. It is to find the places the account can do better and to bring the cost of a new customer down. We go looking for those on purpose, and we are straight about what we find, because that is where the gains are.
We frame what we find as a way to bring the cost per customer down, not a list of who got it wrong. The team should look good and the numbers should improve. Both can be true.
We check the data matches what the platforms actually did, then build reporting that pulls every channel into one place, split by location. Most accounts leak signal here, including the brand and sponsorship spend that rarely gets measured well.
Not a junior handoff. People who have watched millions in spend and billions of impressions, and who know where the AI tools genuinely help and where they quietly mislead.
One thing we picked up early: you put real money into team sponsorships and above-the-line, and that spend almost never gets measured properly. Part of the audit is showing you what it returns, and how to read it next to the search and social numbers.
On an account with 200 or 290 locations, seniority is not a nicety. It is the difference between catching the pattern that is quietly wasting budget and missing it for a quarter. Brad and Robin have each been doing this for more than twenty years.
Brad founded Red Valkyrie and has spent more than twenty years building acquisition systems across paid search, paid social, SEO, landing pages, and conversion. He has co-founded five companies, in web development, marketing, e-publishing, and local search. His attention goes to the levers that move profit fast: account structure, measurement, creative testing, and the flow of the page. On a client you find him in the strategy and on the calls that count.
On National StorageThe growth model and the new-site playbook. Where the budget should sit, suburb by suburb, and what to fix first.
Brisbane based, with two boys deep in junior soccer. A coffee is easy to arrange.
Robin has run digital performance since the early days of paid search, driving more than 100 million visitors across search, social, and display and helping over 100 businesses grow. He is sharp on account structure and on scaling without losing control. For the last two years he has gone deep on where AI genuinely earns its place in the work, and where it quietly gets things wrong.
On National StorageTracking and the data audit. Make the numbers match the platforms, then use AI to surface the patterns a person would miss across 200 plus locations.
Outside work, usually at CrossFit or on a pickleball court.
Marketplaces, finance, ecommerce, childcare. Different industries, the same job: find the demand, lower the cost of winning it, and prove the result in the numbers.
Closer to home: we have already run this kind of audit inside La Trobe Financial, another business in the Brookfield portfolio. They put the findings to work on how their marketing spends. We are happy to walk through it in the room.
No retainer, no switching agencies, nothing that touches the brand and creative work you already run. One deep diagnostic that shows where the money is working, where it leaks, and what to fix first. It is the step Brookfield said they would want to begin with, and it is what we do best.
Where the money goes, what it returns, and which campaigns are carrying each location.
Events, UTMs, GA4, and the platform numbers. Do they match reality, or are decisions built on bad signal?
What is being said, who it speaks to, and why it is or is not converting.
Where people drop off, the friction killing conversion, and what to test next.
The full audit. A document, typically 80 to 130 pages, depending on how deep the account runs.
An executive summary built for leadership and the board, not just the marketing team.
A 90-day roadmap, ranked by impact and effort, so your team knows exactly where to start.
A working session to walk through the findings and answer the hard questions.
Turnaround is two to four weeks, built by Brad and Robin, not handed to juniors. If we cannot find enough to justify the work, we will say so. On an account this size, that has not happened yet.
Brookfield is making the introduction. When your team is ready, we will walk through the Guardian work in detail and show you what an audit of the National Storage account would look for.
Red Valkyrie · Performance growth partner for ambitious teams