The Myth Of The One Lever

By Eddie Cheng, founder of performance agency Penang Media and co-owner of global footwear brand VIBAe.

There's a question I get asked more than any other.

Brand owners, founders, operators… doesn't matter who. Same question, different wording every time:

"What's the one thing we should change to scale?"

And the answer is always disappointing.

There isn't one thing.

I've managed Meta spend across dozens of brands. I co-own a DTC footwear brand doing over $2M a month. And the pattern is the same everywhere I look.

The brands that scale aren't the ones that found a magic lever. They're the ones that got slightly better at everything all at once.

Better creative. Better offers. Better email flows. Better margins. Better ops.

None of it individually moves the needle much. All of it together compounds in ways that are hard to see until you're living inside the numbers.

That's the unsexy truth about scaling. There's no single hire, no single channel, no single campaign that 10x's your business overnight. There's just the slow, relentless work of improving the system. And being honest about which parts of it are still broken.

And here's why that's hard to hear:

It means you can't just hand your growth to an agency and check out. You can't outsource the thinking. You have to actually be a competent business operator. Someone who understands how creative affects CAC, how email affects LTV, how margins affect how aggressively you can bid, how ops affects whether any of it holds together at scale.

The whole machine matters. Not just the parts you enjoy working on.

I run an agency that manages over $5M a month in Meta spend. I also run a brand that spends it. I see both sides of this equation daily, and the gap between brands that scale and brands that stall almost never comes down to one thing.

It comes down to the system.

Which is what this series of letters is about.

Not hacks. Not "the one weird trick." Not whatever framework is trending on Twitter this week.

Just how the system actually works — from someone who's building it on both sides.

More to come.

— Eddie

P.S. If you're looking for silver bullets, you'll hate it here. If you're looking for someone who thinks about this stuff like an operator, not a guru… you're in the right place.