Michael H.

Took a DTC health brand from a $2.9M annual loss to beating a cash-positive plan in two years. When their dashboards said CAC had tripled to $900, I went into the raw data and proved the real number was $472, which saved the channel and the year.

I'm a fractional CFO for DTC, subscription, and Amazon brands doing $3M–$25M. My edge: I don't sit on top of dashboards. I go into the raw data myself (Shopify exports, ad platforms, 3PL invoices, cohort tables) and find where your numbers have drifted from reality. Every brand has at least one number that's lying to it. Finding it is usually worth multiples of my fee.

What I do:

1. Growth and marketing finance. Channel-level unit economics, blended LTV-to-CAC ceilings, marketing mix modeling, Amazon vs DTC spend allocation, retention cohorts. I sit between you and your media buyers and make sure every dollar can be defended on the P&L.

2. Subscription economics. Most subscription brands are SaaS businesses measured with e-commerce math. Rebuilding one brand's finances around cohorts, LTV payback, and retention is what turned that $2.9M loss around and cut blended CAC roughly 25%.

3. Ecom-native FP&A. 13-week cash forecasting tied to inventory cycles and ad spend, scenario modeling for launches and peak season, KPI dashboards your team will actually use, clean monthly close.

4. Investor readiness. Board materials, valuation analysis, deal structuring. I led due diligence at a UK investment agency that took equity on my recommendations: 22 calls, publicly scored, including the one I got wrong. I know what investors will dig into because I was the one digging.

5. AI-native by design. I build Claude-based agents for transaction categorization, anomaly flagging, and forecast updates. You get senior CFO judgment plus automation, at the cost of neither.

Background: MBA from IESE Business School, engineering by training. 120+ early-stage companies on the fundraising side through TribeFirst due diligence and Bitcoin Startup Lab pitch coaching. I've run finance for brands selling on Amazon and own-channel DTC, so I understand the tradeoffs between the two.

If your finance function can't give you a straight answer to "is this growth profitable and can we afford it," let's talk. 30 minutes, I'll look at your numbers and tell you where I'd start.