Your fractional CFO for owner-operated ecommerce brands on the California coast.
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. Written one-pager within 24 hours.
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.
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-by-channel CAC and payback analysis (DTC, Amazon, wholesale, retail, subscription) requires inside access to your ad spend and attribution data. The Full Business Diagnostic gives you a framework-level read using your reported numbers; Engage and Manage retainers deliver the ongoing data-driven version.
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.
Time redeployed, role by role
The owner / founder
Time freed: 8-15 hrs/month on data-pulls, agency status reviews, and "what does this number mean" memos.
Redeploys to: Product, brand, supplier relationships, the calls only the founder can make.
The head of growth
Time freed: Reconciling platform-reported ROAS against what actually hit the bank.
Redeploys to: Creative, channel testing, and scaling the channels that actually pay back.
The ops / inventory lead
Time freed: Guessing at reorder quantities with no working-capital picture.
Redeploys to: Supplier terms, lead-time management, and the buys that protect cash.
The bookkeeper / finance
Time freed: Rebuilding the same cohort and contribution-margin spreadsheet every month.
Redeploys to: Clean reporting, tighter close, and the analysis leadership actually reads.
Three entry points; most graduate to Monitor Plus
Customer Acquisition Audit
$1,495 one-time. Fastest read on what is and is not working on your customer-acquisition surface. 7-14 day turnaround. Good if you suspect the website and search layer is the bottleneck.
Buyer Alignment Audit
$1,995 one-time. Best if you suspect you are attracting the wrong buyer, or the messaging across DTC, marketplace, and wholesale is not coherent.
Full Business Diagnostic
$4,995 one-time. The whole-business read across all eight dimensions. Best if you have not had a structured outside look in 12+ months.
Then most graduate to Monitor Plus ($600/mo) for ongoing cohort intelligence and monthly briefings — peer movement, AI visibility drift, pricing drift, sentiment, visual asset inventory, and three prioritized actions per month.
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.