Fractional CMO · Ecommerce & DTC

    Your CAC isn't the problem. Your dependence on it is.

    For DTC and ecommerce brands where paid built the business and the math is turning. I rebuild the engine so both sides compound: high-ROAS acquisition, and owned channels that pull blended CAC down every quarter.

    Start a conversationStart with office hours
    7× ROAS
    At $2M+/mo spend
    $100M+/yr
    Attributed revenue · public co.
    40–90%
    CAC cut, across companies
    ~80%
    Non-paid volume, national leader
    The pattern

    Paid built your brand. Then the math turned.

    Auctions got more expensive, attribution got murkier, and the brands that rented all of their reach felt it first. If several of these sound familiar, the problem isn't your budget — it's the structure the budget flows through.

    Rising CAC, shrinking ROAS

    Same creative cadence, same audiences, worse math every quarter. The auction moved; the system didn't.

    Paid dependence

    Most of your revenue arrives through channels you rent. Pause the spend and revenue follows it down — that's a treadmill, not an engine.

    The LTV blind spot

    Acquisition optimized to the first purchase while payback quietly stretches. Growth that looks fine in ROAS and bleeds in cash.

    Attribution fog

    Every platform dashboard claims the same order. Blended math says otherwise. Budget calls get made on numbers nobody trusts.

    The agency plateau

    The agency optimizes in-platform ROAS. Nobody owns blended CAC, contribution margin, or anything that happens after the click.

    Owned channels as an afterthought

    Email and SMS underweighted, SEO perpetually 'in progress.' The compounding side of the business never got built.

    Receipts, not theater

    I've run this play at ecommerce scale.

    A public-company paid rebuild, a DTC turnaround to exit, and an owned-channel machine — the same dual-engine system, three different P&Ls.

    The RealRealGrowth lead · public company

    Rebuilt a public company’s acquisition function. $100M+ a year at 7× ROAS.

    $300K→$2M+
    Monthly spend at 7× ROAS
    $100M+/yr
    Attributed revenue
    −40% / +40%
    CAC down · LTV up

    A public ecommerce company had already taken paid acquisition off its agency, and the transition failed: the whole acquisition team turned over. I rebuilt it from a cold start with the Director of Customer Acquisition and the VP of Growth, built first-party data and honest multi-touch attribution, and scaled paid to $100M+ per year in attributed revenue. CAC down 40%, LTV up 40%.

    CubiiFirst hire

    A DTC brand losing $40K a month → profitable in ~60 days → $100M exit.

    ~60 days
    Loss → profitable
    $100M
    Exit

    The fix wasn't more spend — it was the customer, the offer, and the funnel economics. Operator decisions that turned the P&L in two months and set up the exit.

    CodaPetHead of Marketing

    The owned-engine proof: ~80% of demand on channels the company owns.

    ~50%
    Blended CPA cut
    6.5×
    Google Ads ROAS

    Built a national category leader where paid is the accelerant, not the foundation — ~225% growth with a lean AI-native team, most of it compounding through owned channels.

    The engagement

    Reset the math, then build both engines.

    An operating role with the number on my head — not an audit deck. Four moves, in order:

    01

    Audit the real math

    First 30 days: CAC by channel, LTV by cohort, payback windows, contribution margin. Not the platform dashboards — the blended numbers the bank account agrees with.

    02

    Rebuild paid to compound

    Creative testing cadence, channel mix, and spend optimized against blended CAC and payback — not in-platform ROAS. If an agency transition is needed, it runs in parallel, never a traffic cliff.

    03

    Build the owned engine

    Email and SMS carrying their real revenue share, SEO and content that compound, retention economics treated as acquisition's equal. This is what bends blended CAC down every quarter.

    04

    Leave the machine behind

    In-house team, honest attribution, dashboards the board trusts. The engagement is designed to end; the capability stays.

    Office hours · thirty minutes

    I'll tell you where your brand is leaking, before we ever work together.

    Send your numbers through a short intake. I'll read them before we talk, and on the call I'll tell you where you're losing money and what I'd do about it, in order. No charge, and you keep the plan either way.

    Book office hoursOr run the diagnostic
    Common questions

    The questions DTC founders actually ask.

    Our ROAS is falling — do we need more budget or a different system?

    Almost always the system. Rising CAC is usually a symptom: creative velocity too low, spend optimized to in-platform metrics instead of blended payback, first purchase treated as the finish line, and no owned channels absorbing demand. More budget into that structure buys more expensive revenue. The first 30 days of an engagement establish which of those is actually breaking your math — then the budget conversation makes sense.

    Do you replace our agency?

    Only if the numbers say so. Often the right structure is keeping the agency and putting an operator above it who owns blended CAC and holds them to business metrics instead of platform metrics. Be careful assuming in-house is the fix by itself. The RealReal had already taken acquisition off its agency before I got there and that transition failed, with the whole team turning over. What fixed it was rebuilding the function around real ownership of the number, not changing the org chart.

    What size ecommerce brand is the right fit?

    The engagement fits brands past product-market fit whose growth math needs resetting — typically somewhere between several million and low nine figures in revenue. Below that, you usually need execution help more than senior operating leadership. The honest qualifier isn't size, it's the situation: if paid built the business and the math is turning, that's the problem this engagement exists for.

    What about retention and LTV — or is this just acquisition?

    They're the same system. A brand that only optimizes acquisition is renting growth; a brand that grows LTV while holding CAC gets compounding. In practice that means cohort-level LTV analysis, email and SMS built to carry real revenue share, and payback windows — not first-purchase ROAS — as the number spend is judged against. At The RealReal, LTV up 40% mattered as much as CAC down 40%.

    How fast should the math improve?

    The diagnosis lands inside 30 days — you'll know where the math breaks and what it costs before the quarter closes. How fast it turns depends on the P&L: at Cubii, a DTC brand losing $40K a month reached profitability in about 60 days, but that fix was economics, not magic. Distrust anyone who promises a number before seeing yours.

    The first step

    Bring your CAC, ROAS, and payback. I'll tell you what I see.

    Twenty minutes on your numbers. If the math says your current setup is working, I'll tell you to keep it — the diagnosis is honest either way.

    Start a conversationOr book office hours