Retention is already doing its job. The real leverage sits upstream, in how efficiently you acquire. The whole path to $20M at 10% net reduces to one number: ad spend has to fall from 53% of revenue to about 45%, and you get there by earning more per ad dollar. Everything here serves that one move.
Scoped entirely to Hadley's own Meta, Shopify, and Klaviyo exports. Every figure is sourced from your data or flagged as a stated assumption.
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Net revenue | $2.67M | Shopify TTM, complete months (excl current partial month) |
| Meta ad spend | $1.41M | Meta 12mo export |
| Meta-reported ROAS | 1.92 | Meta |
| True Meta ROAS | 1.37 | FB+IG referrer revenue $1.93M ÷ $1.41M spend |
| Channel mix | Meta 69% | Google 0.6% · Pinterest $0 |
Meta reports 1.92 ROAS. Its own incremental attribution says 1.65. Shopify-actual says 1.37. Your Purchase event match quality is 9.1 out of 10, so that gap is genuine over-attribution rather than a tracking blind spot, and the Shopify number can be trusted. Against the ~1.89 contribution breakeven, and the ~3.0 net breakeven your 10% target implies, the account is below water. Per campaign, on Meta's own incremental attribution:
| Campaign | Spend | Freq | Incremental ROAS | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ADV+ Cold (Head Start) | $693K | 5.4 | 1.88 | dead breakeven |
| CBO Top Performers | $478K | 4.4 | 1.75 | losing |
| CBO Bibles | $303K | 4.0 | 1.61 | bleeding |
| CBO Busy Book | $200K | 3.7 | 2.01 | only one above water · lowest CPC $1.19 |
| Retargeting | $2.5K | 1.5 | ~0 | claims organic conversions |
The driver is creative. The winning ads are recycled UGC that worked in 2024 and no longer converts efficiently, and Advantage+ can only spend into what the creative converts. The clearest symptom:
69% of revenue is Meta. Google is 0.6% and Pinterest is $0. At 4.5% repeat on one-time products, there's no LTV tailwind, so every growth dollar must come from first-purchase acquisition on one channel whose audience is saturating (campaign frequency 4.0-5.4 and climbing). You cannot 8× revenue on a single cooked channel, however good the creative.
55% of people who reach checkout don't complete. Cart-to-checkout is healthy at 74%. The leak is the final step. Site conversion is also declining as traffic scales (3.2% → 2.6%), consistent with saturation. Separately, three domains split attribution and dilute the backlink authority and brand equity that matter increasingly for SEO and agentic, LLM-driven discovery. The early-learning store paid traffic lands on has a broken placeholder homepage.
Each of these moves the $20M-at-10%-net model directly.
| Metric | Now | Target | Lever |
|---|---|---|---|
| MER (ad spend ÷ revenue) | 53% | ≤45% | master metric, lower is more efficient |
| Blended ROAS (revenue ÷ spend) | 1.89 | 2.2-2.4 | the same move, higher-is-better |
| True CAC | ~$45-54 | <$30 | creative + checkout + channel mix |
| Blended CPC | $1.42 | $0.90-1.10 | creative-driven CTR + CPM relief |
| Checkout completion | 45% | 60% | +33% orders at the same spend |
| Channel concentration (Meta) | 69% | <40% | Google Shopping + Pinterest + TikTok |
| Repeat rate | 4.5% | 8-9% | product-ladder flow (secondary) |
| Discount + returns | 22% of gross | <15% | outcome-led creative |
A note on CAC: your dashboard cost-per-purchase is ~$37, but on a true-incremental basis CAC is ~$45-54. That is why each new-customer order is breakeven-to-negative before a dollar of OpEx, and why efficiency has to come before scale.
| Line | Today | $20M target |
|---|---|---|
| Net revenue | $2.67M | $20.0M |
| COGS 10% + Fulfillment 22% | 32% | 32% |
| Ad spend | 53% of rev | ≤45% of rev |
| OpEx (assumed 16% → 13% at scale) | 16% | 13% |
| Net profit | ≈ breakeven (−1%) | 10% = $2.0M |
Ad spend from 53% to 45% of revenue. That is your MER from 0.53 to 0.45, lower being more efficient, or blended ROAS from 1.89 to about 2.2. Depending on OpEx leverage at scale, the target lands between 2.1 and 2.4 ROAS. The gap is the work, and it's recoverable.
The 90 days make the account safe to scale, so the spend you add on day 91 returns profit.
Boots on the ground in Texas, on my own dime. Meet Becca, Josh, the creative strategist, the warehouse and logistics team, and learn who owns what. In parallel, two no-regret moves needing zero team buy-in: standardize attribution to incremental so every later decision runs on causal truth, and the checkout-completion fix. Metrics: incremental model live and reconciled to Shopify; checkout completion off 45%.
Cohort-resonant creative (retire the recycled UGC; build for the 55+ and teacher audiences); cut and rebuild the zero-incremental retargeting; replicate the Busy Book formula onto the bleeding campaigns; consolidate the domains with proper 301 redirects to preserve link equity; launch the first Google Shopping test. The email/SMS product-ladder runs as a smaller parallel workstream. Metrics: incremental ROAS per campaign; CPC sub-$1.10; first revenue outside Meta; checkout → 60%.
Stand up the testing engine with clear ownership; expand audiences to break saturation; scale spend only on campaigns and channels clearing ~3.0 net, kill the rest. Metrics: blended true ROAS toward 2.2-2.4; Meta concentration trending under 40%; a repeatable test cadence live.
All runnable on your current stack. None depend on data you didn't provide.
The single highest-leverage hire. Every constraint above is creative-bound, and right now the copywriter is doubling as strategist, which caps both. Free the writer to write; give creative a dedicated owner who also owns ad-account structure: concept, brief, test, read, iterate, plus campaign architecture. This one hire owns experiments 3 and 4 and the CPC lever. ⟦ ~$90-130K loaded ⟧ Pays for itself if it lifts blended incremental ROAS even ~0.2× across $1.4M+ of spend.
This role builds durability. You can't reach $20M on pure first-purchase acquisition without an LTV cushion and a brand asset, and this role owns the product-ladder repeat flow, email/SMS, and the brand/GEO layer. Its job is to let you pay more per customer than competitors can and still profit. ⟦ ~$80-110K loaded ⟧
Deliberately holding off: a junior media buyer (you don't scale spend on an underwater account), and a B2B/wholesale lead (outside the DTC mandate). I saw the wholesale opportunity, and it's a separate conversation.
Existing team, restructured around the strategist: copywriter to pure copy; video editor and UGC creators feed the testing engine; TikTok affiliate team to organic and TikTok Shop. The two senior hires are ~1% of revenue at $20M, the cheapest leverage in the entire plan.
You're at breakeven today, single-channel, with the best campaign in the account still below your net bar. Every dollar of that is recoverable. Fix the measurement and the checkout in month one, fix the creative and open a second channel by month two, scale only what clears the bar by month three. The number to watch is ad spend as a share of revenue. Get it from 53% to 45% and $20M at 10% net is an arithmetic certainty.