Notes · The numbers · May 26, 2026

What I actually look at in an audit.

Every engagement I take starts the same way: two to three weeks in your numbers and your accounts before I touch a thing. Founders sometimes hear "audit" and picture a deck. It isn't a deck. It's me finding out where your money actually goes, so neither of us spends the next year guessing.

Here's what I'm hunting for, in the order I hunt for it.

First, the unit economics.

Before channels, before creative, before anything with a logo on it. What does it cost you to get a customer, what is that customer worth over time, and how long does it take their money to pay back the cost of getting them. CAC, LTV, payback. If those three don't work, nothing downstream can fix it, and most "marketing problems" I've walked into were never marketing problems. They were unit-economics problems wearing a marketing costume.

Then, contribution margin.

Revenue is a vanity number until you subtract what it cost to make and deliver. I want margin by product and by channel, because averages hide the truth. I've seen brands where the hero product everyone loved was quietly funding its own funeral, and the boring SKU nobody talked about was carrying the company. You don't find that on a dashboard. You find it by pulling the numbers apart.

Then, where the money leaks.

Every funnel leaks somewhere. The question is where, and how much it costs. Sometimes it's traffic that never should have been bought. Sometimes it's a conversion step that bleeds out buyers who already said yes. Sometimes it's retention, where the back door is wide open and acquisition is sprinting to refill a leaking bucket. The audit's job is to find the biggest leak first, because fixing the biggest leak is worth more than improving everything else slightly.

Then, the channel mix and what's actually true.

Attribution lies a little everywhere. Platforms grade their own homework. So I look at where the spend is, what it claims to return, and what the blended numbers say really happened. The gap between those two stories is usually where the most interesting decisions live.

What you get.

At the end you get the read: what's working, what's leaking, and the priority order I'd attack it in. It's yours either way. If we carry on, it becomes the plan I'm accountable to, and the cost is credited toward your first month. If we don't, you've still got the clearest picture of your business you've had in a while. And if the audit says you don't need someone like me, I'll say that too. I'd rather lose the engagement than borrow your money to tell you what you wanted to hear.

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