I work with owner-operated DTC and consumer brands between $1M and $25M in revenue. Most of them are growing and cannot say which part of that growth is profitable. I work in the ad accounts, not just the P&L, and budget spend off the ad metrics and the margin together.
Your agency reports ROAS on attributed revenue inside one platform.
Your accountant reports EBIT on all revenue minus all costs.
Nothing in either number forces the two to reconcile.
A brand can run a 4.0 platform ROAS and still lose money on the order once COGS, freight, returns and discounts are loaded in. The platform does not hold those figures, so it cannot report them.
That gap is the reason a brand can grow 40% and feel poorer at the end of it.
I measure the second number and call it ad margin. The full method, with worked examples, is written out at setting an ad budget from the P&L.
$1M to $25M in annual revenue, past proof of concept, with a stable customer base.
Owner-operated and founder-led. The person making the call is in the business every day.
Paid media is a material cost line. Usually Meta and Google, often a marketplace or wholesale alongside it.
You are keeping your own books and your marketing function is working. I am not the first finance hire.
Remote-first. The work runs over video, shared docs and async comms, so location does not matter.
If you are earlier or later than this, the work often still applies. This is where it fits best, not a rule.
| Ad spend as a share of net sales | 47% to 30% |
| EBIT margin | -0.7% to 16.6% |
| Revenue, FY2023 to FY2025 | +70% |
| Average order value | +18% |
| Repeat purchase share | 38% |
| Additional capital raised | None |
One brand, three fiscal years, figures from the client's own monthly P&Ls. Absolute dollars are redacted at the client's request and all ratios are real. The full engagement is at /case-study.
In FY2025 ad spend came down 24% and sales still grew 10.4%.
Google spend came down 64.5% year over year while active channels went from three to six and markets from one to four.
Those two things are the same decision made twice, once about how much total spend the business should carry and once about how that total gets divided.
Named access to every ad platform, not a monthly export from the agency. Most fractional CFOs hand marketing a budget and report on it afterward.
Not a marketing budget reported on after the fact. It gets tested against margin and against the overhead it has to clear.
You own what gets built for you, and you keep using the frameworks it runs on, permanently and at no further cost. The tools on this site show the kind of thing I build.
Builds the measurement system the brand is missing, then uses it to make decisions.
In practice that is a monthly P&L broken to line level, contribution margin by channel and by order size, a working capital view that covers inventory, and an ad budget set against what the spend actually earned after the cost to deliver the product.
A bookkeeper records what happened. A fractional CFO decides what to do about it.
They are reporting roles and this is a decision role.
Your bookkeeper closes the month and your accountant files the return. Neither is asked to tell you which channel to cut, what the next dollar of ad spend will earn, or whether your pricing supports your cost structure.
I do not replace either one, and the work runs better when the books are already being kept well.
Work with them.
The agency runs the campaigns and I measure what those campaigns earned the business after product cost, freight, returns and discounts. The agency does not hold the data for the second job.
In practice I bring the financial read to the channel conversation and the agency keeps the creative and the buying.
$1M to $25M in annual revenue, owner-operated, already keeping its own books, with a marketing function that is working.
Below roughly $1M the ad history is usually too thin to measure a spend response against.
Above $25M a controller or VP Finance is usually already in seat, which is the point where a fractional engagement stops fitting.
Before the first call if you want it.
Send your last twelve months of P&L and whatever SKU or channel detail you keep, and I come to the call with a first read on where your margin actually is.
It is free, I sign a mutual NDA before you send anything, and it is entirely optional. Plenty of good calls happen without it.
Twenty more are answered at the questions founders ask.
The first call runs 30 minutes. We cover your situation, whether I'm a fit, and which engagement makes sense.
If you want a head start, send your last twelve months of P&L beforehand and I'll bring you where I think the margin actually is. Mutual NDA first, no charge, entirely optional.
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