These are the questions owners actually ask me, in the words they use. Where I have a number from real client work, it is here, and it points at the case study rather than sitting as a claim on its own. If your question is whether we are a fit rather than how something works, start here instead.
Almost always one of three places: inventory, receivables, or the gap between when you pay for ad spend and when the revenue lands. Profit is an accounting result and cash is a timing result, so a brand can post a good month and still be short.
The fix starts with a cash conversion cycle, which measures how many days your money is tied up between paying a supplier and collecting from a customer. Once you can see the number, you can shorten it with payment terms, order sizing and reorder points, and the cash shows up without a single additional sale.
By treating ad spend as a cost line with a target rather than a marketing budget that gets reported on afterwards. On one DTC engagement, ad spend went from 47% to 30% of net sales over three years while the revenue base grew roughly 70% and EBIT moved from minus 0.7% to 16.6%, with no capital raised.
Most profitability work buys margin by starving the top line, which you pay back in lost revenue a year later. The version that holds is finding the spend that was not buying incremental revenue in the first place, then reinvesting part of what you free up. The full case is here.
It depends far more on your channel mix and whether you manufacture than on your size. A brand buying most of its revenue through paid social sits in a very different place from one with a large repeat base. What I would say is that a single-digit EBIT margin at that revenue is usually a structural problem rather than a scale problem, and structural problems respond to the work.
Pricing and ad spend move within a quarter because you control them directly. Inventory and working capital take two to three quarters because they are bound to purchase orders you already placed. Anyone promising a full margin turn in sixty days is describing a cut, not a change in how the business runs.
Because they are measuring different things and neither one is wrong. ROAS is platform-attributed revenue divided by platform spend. EBIT is everything, including the orders you would have received without any advertising at all. A campaign can show a strong ROAS and still lose money once you load in COGS, freight, returns and the portion of revenue that was never incremental.
The number that reconciles them is contribution margin per order against blended cost of acquisition. That is a finance calculation, not a platform report, which is why it usually goes unowned.
There is no universal number, and anyone who gives you one without seeing your contribution margin is guessing. The right way to set it is backwards from the EBIT margin you want: start with your target, subtract fixed costs and your gross margin, and what remains is the ad spend the business can carry. That gives you a ceiling expressed as a percentage of net sales, which is a figure a media buyer can actually work to.
This is the single most expensive unanswered question in most consumer brands. Platform attribution claims credit for customers who were already coming back, which makes retention look like acquisition and makes spend look more productive than it is.
You test it by separating new from returning customer revenue, then watching what happens to each when spend moves. If returning revenue holds while spend falls, you were paying to reach people you already owned.
More than most owners expect, and the way to find out is not to guess. You move spend in deliberate steps, hold everything else still, and watch new customer revenue rather than total revenue. On the engagement above, spend fell 17 points as a share of net sales and the revenue base still grew, which tells you a meaningful part of the original spend was not doing the work it was credited with.
Contribution margin by SKU, with freight, returns, payment processing and a share of fulfilment loaded in. Most brands look at gross margin by SKU, which flatters anything heavy, bulky or frequently returned. The long tail is where this bites: a handful of SKUs are often carrying the ones that do not clear their own costs.
Price, usually, because it is the only lever that moves margin without touching the product or the customer experience. On one engagement, strategic pricing lifted average order value 18%. Cost cutting has a floor and it tends to show up in the thing you sell. Price has a ceiling too, but most owner-operated brands are further from theirs than they think.
They answer different questions and the honest answer is that it depends which one is actually costing you money. An operations consultant improves throughput and direct labor productivity on the floor. That is real work and I do not do it.
What I do is the money side: what your ad spend should be, which SKUs contribute, where working capital is trapped, and what each of those does to EBIT. If the constraint is the floor, hire the ops person. If the constraint is that nobody owns the connection between the media buy and the margin, that is me.
Days inventory outstanding tells you how long stock sits before it sells, and multiplying that by your daily cost of goods gives you the dollars parked on the shelf. Manufacturers usually carry more than they think because raw materials, work in progress and finished goods get counted separately and never added up.
The buying decision that follows is a trade: bulk purchasing lowers unit cost but lengthens the cycle. Which one wins depends on your cost of capital and how reliable your demand is, and it is an arithmetic question rather than a judgement call.
A bookkeeper records what happened. An accountant files and reports it. A CFO decides what to do next with it. All three are necessary and they are not substitutes, which is why I treat bookkeeping firms as partners rather than competitors.
The practical test is forward looking versus backward looking. If the person you are talking to cannot tell you what a change in spend does to next quarter's EBIT, they are doing compliance, whatever the title says.
No, neither. Clean books are an input to this work rather than a product of it, and I would rather tell you that plainly than take on something I am not the right person for. If you need a bookkeeper or a tax preparer I can point you at one.
They need to be reliable, which is not quite the same thing. If the categories are consistent and the bank reconciles, I can work with it. If the books are genuinely broken, fixing them comes first and is cheaper done by a bookkeeper than by me.
Three shapes: a 90-day starting package, an ongoing advisor retainer in two tiers, or a one-time project with a defined scope. Every one starts with a 30-minute call. The detail is on the engagements page.
I defer to the agency on tactics and keep the budget call. I take the books from whoever keeps them and do not duplicate that work. The usual failure mode is that your agency optimizes for platform metrics and your accountant reports after the fact, and nobody sets the target the agency should be buying to. That target is the thing I own.
Yes, if you want me to. Send the last 12 months of P&L and whatever SKU or channel detail you keep, and I come to the call with a first read: a high level pass on where the margin looks like it is and what ad spend is costing you in EBIT rather than in ROAS. No charge and no obligation.
It is a preliminary read rather than the per-channel analysis the engagement itself covers, and it is the fastest way for you to judge the work rather than the conversation. I sign an NDA before you send anything. It is also entirely optional, and plenty of first calls happen without it.
Owner-operated and founder-led, roughly $1M to $25M in annual revenue, past proof of concept, with a stable customer base. The fit is strongest where paid media is one of your largest controllable costs. The full fit criteria are here, including the two cases where I will tell you I am the wrong hire.
Yes, and it is a separate service. Per-property performance, DSCR and cap rate, actual NOI against the underwriting basis, a sell versus hold model that identifies the optimal exit year, and a Schedule E snapshot for your CPA. There is a full anonymized sample report here so you can see the deliverable before deciding.
If your question is not on this page, send it. I read every message and usually reply within a business day. Start a conversation.