About groa° | Retention-First Growth® and Agentic AI

The groa° story

In 2022, we identified a structural problem costing the global commerce economy an estimated $4.8 trillion annually. Ecommerce brands were acquiring new customers to replace those who never returned. Around 70% of first‑time buyers disappeared within weeks. Revenue appeared to grow, but profit margins eroded as brands continuously used this month’s acquisition spend to refill last month’s churn.

The constraint wasn’t insight. It was infrastructure.

Tools built for campaign cycles couldn’t keep up with how fast customers move. By the time teams pulled reports and launched campaigns, the 24–48 hour retention window had already closed, and manual work couldn’t preserve momentum at the speed behaviour changes.

groa° was founded to close this execution gap. Emma Powell originated and developed the Retention‑First Growth® methodology through hands‑on consulting with premium Shopify and Klaviyo brands, then codified it in her book Retention‑First Growth®: The Future of Profitability in Ecommerce. The work demonstrates that governed retention Flywheels, operated inside live ecosystems, can outperform acquisition‑led funnel models on both growth and unit economics.

Participation in a UK government think tank on AI and business resilience with leading experts from Oxford and Cambridge led directly to groa°’s agentic AI foundation. The team combined the methodology with execution architecture to build an agentic operating system, software that watches live behaviour, assesses Flywheel health and economic risk, and executes interventions within clear profitability and brand guardrails.

Our leadership team

Emma Powell

CEO

Creator of the Retention-First Growth® methodology and published author, Emma architects the vision behind groa°'s agentic AI operating system, pioneering from funnels to flywheel-driven retention as ecommerce's next competitive frontier.

Michael Fasosin

Chief Growth Officer

Multiple‑exit founder with extensive experience as CEO and SVP Sales. Michael brings deep technical expertise and go‑to‑market sophistication, having scaled multiple technology businesses from early stage to meaningful exit.

Heidi Hennerman

CMO & GTM Strategist

Former Drunk Elephant executive with leadership roots at MAC and Jo Malone London, Heidi now co-founds groa°, embedding Retention-First Growth®️ as a new operating standard.

Monika Virsilaite

Chief Financial & Operations Officer

Former GE M&A executive and tech startup CFO. Monika combines enterprise-grade financial rigour with startup operational agility, ensuring groa° scales efficiently.

Laura D'Eath

Retention Growth Architect

Design‑driven growth strategist powering agentic AI for lifecycle scale. Laura translates retention strategy into executable campaigns and lifecycle programs that drive measurable performance.

What we built

Agentic OS innovation

Consultancy expertise

Institute & insight

Live & experiences

Agentic OS innovation

groa° OS is autonomous lifecycle intelligence for modern commerce brands, built on the Retention‑First Growth® Flywheel. It maintains a live view of each customer’s position and velocity across five lifecycle orbits: Capture, Activation, Value Core, Loyalty, and Reactivation. The system interprets behavioural signals through Flywheel‑health and churn‑economics logic, then autonomously orchestrates interventions within the profitability and brand guardrails you define.

It operates as a live retention ecosystem that preserves and amplifies customer momentum at behavioural speed. One‑time buyers become repeat customers, revenue per recipient moves toward top‑decile benchmarks, and lifecycle operations run continuously instead of in campaign bursts.

Consultancy expertise

groa° Consultancy builds the retention foundations that groa° OS runs at scale. We design and implement Retention-First Growth® Flywheels for modern ecommerce brands, covering readiness diagnostics, live ecosystem implementation, acceleration modules, team enablement, and ongoing advisory.

We act as hands‑on retention infrastructure, turning replacement economics (for example, $0.10 campaign RPR and 70% first‑purchase churn) into compounding retention systems that reach top‑decile performance ($0.97+ RPR and 40–50% repeat rates) within 3–9 months. That level of performance creates durable profitability through stronger customer economics, capital efficiency by reducing acquisition dependency, and valuation resilience through more predictable, compounding revenue.

By grounding your growth in governed Flywheels and agentic infrastructure, we future‑proof your commerce stack so it can pivot with platform shifts, privacy changes, and the next wave of AI.

Institute & insight

The groa° Institute develops the retention-economics frameworks that power groa° OS. Our research focuses on Flywheel architectures, agentic AI governance, and retention maturity systems across the modern, fragmented commerce landscape.

We analyse live performance data, zero- and first-party signals, client transformations, and academic collaborations to answer three questions: how retention systems maintain continuity across disconnected platforms and channels, how autonomous AI acts at behavioural speed within profitability and brand guardrails, and how businesses measure structural health across lifecycle orbits.

This work underpins the book Retention‑First Growth®: The Future of Profitability in Ecommerce and continues to evolve through ongoing implementations and research partnerships.

Live & experiences

groa° Live is the annual summit for operators implementing Retention‑First Growth® (RFG) systems. Our Austin, Q4 2026 event brings together brands, agencies, and platform partners running RFG flywheels on Shopify, Klaviyo, and connected stacks.

Sessions are operator‑led: designing lifecycle orbits that capture zero‑party data, reading momentum across fragmented stacks, and presenting flywheel economics as board‑level profitability metrics. We select partners building privacy‑first, connected commerce infrastructure that unifies data, channels, and customer signals into a single compounding system.

Attendees leave with operator networks, implementation frameworks, and performance evidence that retention‑led, connected ecosystems consistently outperform acquisition‑dependent models on margin, CLV, and revenue durability.

Talk to the groa° team

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Why agentic intelligence matters

Retention now operates at behavioural speed, not reporting speed. Customer behaviour shifts within narrow windows, yet most teams still work on reporting cycles measured in weeks, and that mismatch quietly erodes profitability. Funnel analytics and traditional AI are largely retrospective: they excel at explaining what happened and who is likely to churn, but they stop at insight.

Human teams then interpret dashboards, align stakeholders, brief campaigns, and wait for results. By the time action is taken, early signs of risk have hardened into full churn.

Agentic intelligence is different. It watches live customer signals continuously, reasons about what action to take, and then acts autonomously. Instead of producing static scores, it runs a sense → decide → act loop while customers are still influenceable. In practice, that means detecting subtle changes within a Flywheel orbit, and adjusting journeys in near real time, within clear profitability and brand guardrails.

Retention stops being a backward‑looking KPI and becomes an active control system for the business. Agentic intelligence turns your growth strategy into an operating system: it learns your economics, runs your Flywheel logic continuously, and compounds value with every interaction.

FAQs

groa° OS is a headless, agentic AI operating system that runs the Retention‑First Growth® (RFG) Flywheel over your live ecommerce stack. It turns raw customer signals from Shopify, Klaviyo, loyalty, subscriptions, reviews, and quizzes into governed next‑best actions that compound profit across the lifecycle.

Retention‑First Growth® is a Flywheel‑based methodology that replaces funnel‑driven, replacement growth with compounding customer value. Growth is structured across five connected orbits: Capture, Activation, Value Core, Loyalty, and Reactivation, so every interaction adds intelligence and contribution profit instead of resetting after each purchase.

Klaviyo is the orchestration and messaging engine; groa° OS is the intelligence layer that sits on top. groa° continuously reads flywheel health, detects decay, and then uses Klaviyo and adjacent tools to trigger governed, real‑time interventions at behavioural speed, all within profitability and brand guardrails.

groa° OS is built for Shopify‑led and modern ecommerce brands in any industry that want profitable unit economics, not just higher open rates. It’s designed for teams running a live customer ecosystem in‑house or with an agency, who have meaningful first‑ and zero‑party data and want to personalise at scale whilst shifting from acquisition‑dependent growth to compounding systems.

groa° OS addresses three core problems: fragmented customer data, churn risk that appears before dashboards catch it, and retention that still depends on manual effort and guesswork. groa° unifies your ecosystem, surfaces early signals, and coordinates actions so retention runs continuously, not in campaigns.

It tackles the structural profit leakage where acquisition costs exceed first‑purchase margins and most first‑time buyers never return, using the Retention‑First Growth® Flywheel and Flywheel Health Index™ to close the gap to top‑decile benchmarks, reduce churn tax, and turn disconnected lifecycle activity into a governed, compounding profit engine.

groa° OS runs as a governed intelligence layer over your existing infrastructure, using first‑party and zero‑party data that stays under your control. Its agentic architecture applies strict guardrails to data access, intervention scope, and audit logging, and is engineered against Gartner‑grade criteria for genuine agentic AI, including autonomous state management, contextual decision‑making, and transparent decision tracing.