Contribution-Margin Growth Audit and 90-Day Roadmap

The first number we ask for is contribution per order after returns, payment fees and both shipping legs. In apparel work it usually sits eight to fifteen points below the margin the growth team is optimising against, which means the channel mix has been tuned to a figure the business does not earn. Correcting that denominator reorders the channel ranking in most audits we run, and it is why the roadmap you receive is short. What we open first: Warehouse or Shopify order lines, the payment processor settlement file, the returns export, and campaign-level exports from every ad platform. We reconcile them against each other before we read any of them. Where platform-reported conversions and settled orders disagree by more than a few percent, that gap becomes the first item in the audit, because every decision downstream is being made on the larger number. Cohorts, not periods: Payback is measured in weeks by acquisition cohort, split by first product bought and by discount depth on the first order. A first order taken at forty percent off in a Black Friday cohort and a full-price first order are two different businesses, and averaging them hides which one you are actually buying. In insurance the equivalent split is by acquisition route, aggregator against direct brand search against affiliate, read on second-year renewal rather than first-year premium. The aggregator cohort is frequently unprofitable on a two-year view and profitable on the view the dashboard shows. How we decide a channel works: Geo holdout, run properly. In the UK that means holding out whole ITV regions or grouped postcode areas rather than a scatter of towns, and reading at four weeks minimum. Anything measured over a fortnight is noise wearing a confidence interval. We design the holdouts and specify the read; your team or your agency runs them. Where you have at least two years of weekly spend and revenue we will sanity-check against a mix model, and where you do not we will say the model is unavailable rather than fit one to eighteen months of data. The roadmap: Six to nine items for the quarter. Each carries an owner by name, an internal cost estimate, the week it gets judged, and the condition under which it is killed. Items without a kill condition do not go on the list. Every roadmap opens with a stop list, what gets switched off in week one and what that frees. Most of the argument in the readback is about the stop list, which is the reason it is written first. Not included: Running the media. We do not take the ad accounts, we do not sit in the tools, and we take no commission on spend. Creative production. Attribution software selection; if the answer to your measurement problem is a purchase order, it is not our answer. Ongoing dashboards. The audit is a decision document with a date on it, not a subscription. Not for you if: Finance and marketing numbers have never been reconciled and nobody will do it, because that reconciliation is the audit. You are below roughly two thousand orders a month, where the cohorts are too thin to read and the honest advice costs nothing. Or you want a scored list of sixty recommendations to circulate; you will get nine, and we will argue for three. How it ends: A written document, a two-hour readback with marketing and finance in the same room, and a call at week six to say which kill conditions have fired.