Your fractional CFO for owner-operated ecommerce brands.
DTC site. Amazon. Wholesale. Retail. Subscription. Each channel has its own acquisition cost, its own margin, its own cash cycle, and they all land in one P&L that will not tell you which one is actually funding the business.
30 minutes. Free. No pitch, no obligation.
Five operational pains we hear most often
1. Blended MER hides the channel that is bleeding
Your marketing efficiency ratio looks fine on average. Average is the problem. One channel is quietly subsidizing another, returns are heavier on one than the rest, and the blended number means you cannot see it until the cash does. Real CAC and payback live at the channel level, not the blended level.
2. Inventory is where your cash goes to disappear
Revenue is up. The bank balance is not. The gap is sitting in inventory and in the working-capital cycle between paying your supplier and getting paid by your customer. Most brands cannot tell you how many weeks of cash are locked in stock, or what a growth quarter actually costs to finance.
3. Every channel has different economics, but one P&L
DTC, Amazon, wholesale, and retail each have different CAC, different margin, different return rates, different payment terms. Commingled in a single P&L, you are steering on a number that is true for no channel. Decisions get made on a blended average that describes nothing you actually sell.
4. Discounting props up revenue and quietly eats contribution margin
The promo calendar keeps the topline moving, so it feels like it is working. Contribution margin per order tells a different story, and most brands are not looking at it. The question is not whether revenue grew; it is whether each order still pays for itself after the discount, the ad, the shipping, and the return.
5. The AI search shift is changing product discovery
Shoppers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini what to buy and which brand to trust. If your products and brand are not in those answers, paid acquisition has to backfill a widening gap, and that gets expensive fast. The lever that changes this is not on your product pages; it is in your external citation footprint. A Website Audit measures exactly that footprint.
Diagnose, monitor, advise
Most founders meet us one of a few ways, and you do not have to know which one fits today. Start with a finding or an Intro Call; the right depth becomes obvious from there.
Diagnose
Understand your own business, in depth.
Exactly where attention and margin leak across DTC, Amazon, wholesale, and retail.
Website Audit: a three-layer read (classical search, answer-engine, generative AI) of your customer-acquisition surface. Every finding carries severity, evidence, a recommendation, and the expected outcome. The punch list. You leave with a severity-ranked fix list and the order to work it, instead of piecing the problem together yourself from scattered agency opinions. View a sample (PDF) →
Website Audit Pro: the Audit plus the synthesized diagnosis. Fix-sequencing, the entity and citation problems the rules cannot reach, and a strategic read. The diagnosis, not just the list. You leave knowing which fixes to make first because they compound, the sequencing done for you rather than left as a list to prioritize on your own.
Buyer Alignment Audit: the customer your public properties actually attract versus the one your margin model needs, classified three ways, with the unit-economics implications of the gap. You leave able to name the buyer you are actually drawing in across DTC, marketplace, and wholesale, and what the mismatch is costing you, without running that analysis yourself.
Full Business Diagnostic: the whole-business read. 13 findings across every channel, the opportunity sized across five to seven levers, and a 90-day roadmap. It sizes any upside in your own numbers, so what you stand to gain is measured against your business rather than a benchmark, and the whole-business read is assembled for you instead of pieced together across a dozen spreadsheets and meetings.
Monitor
Keep an eye on it, every month.
Drift caught before it shows up in your contribution margin.
Monitor: a monthly scorecard on your own surface against the ecommerce dimension framework, drift-watch alerts (search and AI, reputation, discoverability, schema, channel signals), and a monthly digest with one to three actions. It takes the monthly report off your plate, the data-pulls and the "how are we doing" write-up your team now loses hours to, and catches drift the month it starts instead of at the quarterly review.
Monitor Plus: everything in Monitor plus the cohort overlay. Four named peer brands tracked against you, peer-movement and AI-visibility and pricing-drift alerts, written analyst commentary, a visual-asset inventory, and the top three actions for the month. The richest read we sell without a retainer. It replaces the manual peer research and the cohort analysis your team would otherwise hand-build, and hands back the analyst read on the three things to do this month. View a sample briefing (PDF) → | Talk about Monitor Plus →
In our experience, DTC brands that separate Amazon halo from organic DTC ROAS tend to find that roughly 15-25% of their reported Amazon performance was actually subsidized DTC spend; the exact figure varies by brand. Monitor tells you which side of that you are on.
Advise
Put a CFO in the room.
The channel-mix, pricing, inventory, and capital decisions too expensive to make alone.
Engage: senior CFO judgment and the intelligence engine alongside your team, on a retainer. A monthly strategic-oversight call, a quarterly review with a refreshed 90-day roadmap, and Monitor Plus included. The work is structured around the decisions that move your business, not just activity. It also lifts the data-pulls, the agency status reviews, and the "what does this number mean" memos off the founder's desk, the eight to fifteen hours a month that should go to product, brand, and supplier calls. You keep your books; we are the CFO in the room.
Manage: we run the finance function outright. Close, cash, books, dashboard, and the finance-project library as recurring work, with Scott as your fractional CFO. Your finance function runs without you: the close, the cash, the dashboard, and the channel and inventory reconciliations, all handled. Every major pricing, channel, and capital call gets CFO judgment before you make it. We own the books.
The line between Engage and Manage is who owns the books.
Ad hoc
Hand us the project, scoped to the work.
The one-off builds and analyses that do not fit a subscription. We scope the work, price it to the scope, and own delivery end to end.
Website builds: a new storefront engineered for the way buyers actually find you now, classical search, answer engines, and AI. You leave with a property that converts shoppers and wins the category answer, built and shipped for you instead of managed through an agency on retainer.
Channel and halo analysis: what each channel is actually earning after CAC, fees, returns, and the halo between DTC spend and marketplace conversions. You leave knowing which channel funds the business and which is riding on another, the modeling done for you rather than guessed at over a spreadsheet.
Process redesign and automation: the manual, repetitive internal work, the reporting, the reconciliations, the hand-offs between systems, rebuilt and automated. You get hours back every month and a process that does not break when a key person is out.
Other project work too. If it has a defined scope, we can price it and own delivery.
Outcomes, including any time freed and any monetary gains, depend on your current business practices and your own execution. We size and pursue them against your real numbers; we do not promise a figure.
What another six months of waiting actually costs
Every DTC ad dollar driving an Amazon conversion is a dollar Amazon credits to its own ROAS. The halo effect is real, measurable, and routinely ignored. In our experience, most DTC brands over $5MM are subsidizing Amazon's reported ROAS by something on the order of 20-40% without seeing it; the exact share varies by brand.
Every 14-day Amazon settlement cycle you finance with line-of-credit interest is margin you are paying to be a vendor to Amazon. At $1M / month of Amazon revenue, the LOC interest alone can run on the order of $30-60K / year of margin compression, depending on your rate and terms.
Every customer cohort you analyze on a blended LTV number is a cohort hiding a worse cohort inside it. Cohort decay rates can vary widely by acquisition channel, in our experience by as much as 3-5x; blended LTV averages the good and the bad and tells you neither.
Every channel competing for the same customer is a channel pulling margin from the others. Site, marketplace, wholesale, and retail look fine in aggregate; per-channel contribution is where the truth lives.
Amazon's economics are designed to be opaque to you. Ours are designed to be transparent.
Visibility, acquisition, closing, servicing
Four operational layers, each with specific work we take off your plate.
Visibility
Three-layer audit (classical search + answer-engine + generative AI) calibrated to ecommerce. AI-search query pack tuned to how shoppers actually research your category and products. Monthly Monitor briefing tracks how you move against four named peer brands across all three search layers.
Acquisition
Public-surface channel diagnosis: where is your site, search, and AI visibility delivering attention, and where is it underperforming for the customers you need? Buyer Alignment Audit if your public properties are signaling for one buyer while your margin model needs another. Cohort intelligence on which channels your peers are winning in.
Channel-economics analysis (DTC, Amazon, wholesale, retail, subscription) draws on your inside ad spend and attribution data and lives inside an Engage or Manage retainer. The Full Business Diagnostic reads the public-surface signal for each channel and names where attention is leaking.
Closing
Conversion analysis on the landing-to-cart and product-page-to-checkout paths (from public surface plus the conversion data you supply). Pricing and discount-architecture review across full price, promo, bundle, and subscription. LTV and cohort model: retention curves by acquisition cohort, contribution margin by SKU and channel, three-year value projections.
Servicing
Subscription and repeat-purchase economics: what a second and third order are actually worth, and what they cost to earn. Quarterly Buyer Alignment Audit (subscription cadence inside Engage and Manage) catches signal drift before it shows up in numbers. The retainer tiers put a CFO-grade voice in your monthly and quarterly business reviews.
Take the Ecommerce Assessment first
Five minutes. Tell us about your channel mix, top challenges, and growth goals. We send back a written Ecommerce Profile within one business day. No pitch.
What ecommerce founders ask
We read the channel mix the way a CFO reads a P&L. DTC site, Amazon, wholesale, retail, and the marketplaces each have their own CAC, margin, and cash conversion. Most brands run them on one ROAS number and miss the halo effect (DTC ads driving Amazon conversions that the platform credits) plus the working capital trap (Amazon paying 14 days after the ad runs).
Yes. Most of the meaningful unit-economic work in ecommerce is separating the channels so you can see what each is actually doing. Halo attribution between DTC and Amazon is the killer module: if you cannot see it, you are flying blind on the channel mix decision and over-attributing revenue to Amazon.
The Website Audit benchmarks visibility, search authority, AI-search citation rate, and channel signals. The Buyer Alignment Audit (the usual right entry point) diagnoses whether your acquisition is reaching the right customer mix. The Full Business Diagnostic adds operational, supply chain, and working capital. Monitor Plus is the ongoing read.
Pricing is set at the Intro Call, scoped to your channels and goals. The Website Audit, Buyer Alignment Audit, and Full Business Diagnostic are fixed-scope diagnostic instruments; Monitor and the Engage and Manage retainers are quoted per client. The fastest way to a number is a 30-minute Intro Call.