CEO at CartStars | Cultivating an Empathetic & Resilient Community for eCommerce Leaders

Your team got smaller this year. Your decisions didn’t.

You need to know what actually worked at a company like yours before you commit. You don’t need another vendor pitch or another analyst report. You need the real answer from someone who already made the call.

That room is called CartStars. I started it with six people at a dinner table because I was tired of expensive decisions made on bad information.

Estèe Lauder, Steve Madden, Bombas, and MERIT Beauty are in it. So is the person who just solved the exact problem sitting on your desk right now.

It’s not a network. It’s the room you check before you commit.

If you’re making a high-stakes decision right now, your peers already made it.

Start at cartstars.com

Debbie Kemunto Pearce

Three versions of the truth.


Shopify says one thing, Amazon says another, and your ad platform says something else.

But Krishna P. asks one question first:
Who's accountable for what's actually true?

At Oracle, he watched companies pay millions for the answer.
Then, bootstrapped Saras Analytics with his cousins to bring it to brands who couldn't.

Today, it's 180 people. Working with brands like HexClad, Ridge, Athletic Greens, and KFC.

His take on being the calmest person in a messy data room?
Know that your tool isn't the problem.
It's that no one owns the question.

That's what Visionaries is.

Krishna Poda, Co-Founder & CEO, Saras Analytics.
February 24th in Palm Springs. He's in the room.

Who owns the question at your company?

Debbie Pearce

It’s a living room, not a ballroom.


No badge lanyard. No sad buffet chicken. No one on a stage pretending they figured it all out.

While you’re on the conference floor right now, there’s a Michelin-trained chef in a kitchen cooking for a group of executives who are just talking. Actually talking.

Breaking down how they think, not the version they’d give on a panel.

There’s also a photographer in that room whose work made me save his number for ten years. I waited for a moment worthy of him. Today was it.

This room doesn’t exist tomorrow.

Visionaries Day is happening right now, and there’s still a way in.

You can find it here: https://lnkd.in/gzRuHHqK

Steve has receipts.


He doubled revenue at NYDJ.
He 3X’d Kut from the Kloth in half the time with a quarter of the staff.
You ask him how things are going and the answer sounds like an earnings call.
He doesn’t do vague. He does results.

We had a conversation in the room once about identity resolution and whether it crosses a line. Steve didn’t miss a beat. “I’m head of growth, not ethics.”
I laughed. But that level of clarity is why he keeps winning.

This is someone who was building fan communities 23 years ago on Myspace. He was doing it before anyone had a word for it. He just understood something most brands still haven’t figured out: your customer has to believe they’re the only one in the room.

He’s funny. He’s real.

Everybody knows Steve. But do you know his best dad joke? Drop it in the comments. 🤣

"I don't expect to learn anything."


Esteban Restrepo said that from a hot tub. With three people present at the end of Day 1 in Palm Springs. Just one of those conversations that happens when nobody's trying to have one.

He wasn't being cynical. He was being honest. 
He's been at this long enough.... where you stop expecting someone to hand you a trick that changes your business overnight. 

But then he kept going.

"What I loved about today is that it was real. I watched someone actually share something that works for them. And it was a contrast to the big stages where it becomes performative."

And honestly? That hit me.
Because most people in this industry already know the difference. The stage version and the real one. They've been in both rooms. They know which one they walked out of and actually used something from.

They just don't have a place where the second version exists.....till now.

When's the last time you were in a room where you got what you really needed?

Most people listen to the women they admire.


Not enough people watch them.

Listening gets you inspired for a day. Watching changes how you move.

These 10 lessons didn't come from a stage. 
They came from paying close attention to what the women around me actually do when nobody's clapping, when the easier choice is right there, when stopping would be completely reasonable.

At the end of the day, it's the people in your life that make the life you live. 

If you're a woman in my life, I'm grateful for you. 

I'm learning from you, I'm inspired by you.

You flew home, and nobody said thank you.


You sat in someone's session, visited a partner at their booth, gave someone 10 minutes of real conversation, and flew home. Back to the inbox.

I think about that more than I should.

Colleen Waters did all of that at a conference. She won an all-inclusive vacation.
And for the first time in I don't know how long, she stopped. 
She came back and posted about how the pause gave her something the grind had been taking. 

I read it and thought, OK, so this is the room. The one where someone shows up, and it doesn't go unnoticed. This is where CartStars did something right.

I've been building this thing for three years, and Colleen explained it better in one post than I have in 300.

Showing up looks different every time. 
This time at Visionaries, it's about who you bring with you. Because every room like this started with someone saying, "you need to be here" to someone else.

Visionaries is next week. See you in Palm Springs, February 24-25


When's the last time you showed up for someone and nobody said a thing?

Never go back.


New company, new industry, new title. Because that's what gets the "excited to announce."
Nobody writes the post about going back.

Niva Singer, MBA keeps going back.

First hire at Native. Built the ops, the website, the emails with a team under ten. Then P&G bought it for $100 million.

She left. Then she walked back in.
Not for the title. Because there was always space for optimizations.
Worth a $580K annual revenue lift.
She tested the placement of one feature on the homepage. Build-Your-Pack, one test.
That's what going back looks like when you're paying attention.

Then she went back to the same category. MUD\WTR, now Auri Nutrition. Second mushroom wellness brand. Same lane but deeper.

Some people chase what's next. She goes back to what matters.

She brought that energy to fondue night at The Matterhorn in San Francisco.
Grateful to Klaviyo and Loop Subscriptions for making the night possible!

You make 100 decisions a week. You can't explain how you make one?


That's not a criticism. That's most of us.
We asked a small group of senior leaders to do something most people never take the time to do.

Write down the things they see before anyone else does. Their frameworks.

And I've been reading these Visionary questionnaires over the last few weeks.
We haven't even hit record yet, and it's already changing how I think.

Tomorrow:
Two chairs, a living room in Palm Springs, sixteen peers, a full camera crew.
No spectators. Real questions, real pressure.

I'm equal parts excited and terrified!

Visionaries, Feb 24-25.

Link in comments if this is the kind of room you want to be in.

Marcel Petitpas

I help boutique agencies and consulting firms measure and improve their profitability.I started Parakeeto to create what I couldn't find: The right combination of Finance, Operations and industry specific expertise I could trust handle profitability, and just tell me what I needed to know.When I went looking for that, here's what I found:- All the tools, accounting principles and benchmarks felt like they’re stuck in the past, treating anything that wasn't hourly billing like an edge case.- Accounting firms and fractional CFO’s didn't get deep enough into operations to drive actionable change.- Fractional COO’s and Ops consultants didn't have the financial acumen or visibility to connect those dots either.- There was no standard for metrics, benchmarks, and formulas around profitability. When I asked my friends how they calculated metrics, I'd get different answers.It was obvious that a solution had to exist that bridges the elusive gap between finance and operations without being prohibitively expensive, complicated, or time consuming.A solution that didn’t require me to change all my software, processes and accounting data, or require me to track and update an impossible number of data points. So we started Parakeeto, the world's first Profit Management Firm.WTF Is that you ask?We combine the best parts of fractional CFOs, COOs, accountants and data engineers into one comprehensive consulting service specifically designed to help agencies measure and improve their profit.We've built proprietary tools and processes to help us pull together data from any set of ops and finance tools, and turn it into accurate and trustworthy reports you can actually benchmark against the industry apples to apples.We act as "Fractional Chief Profit Officers" for our clients, and take care of measuring their finance and ops metrics, reviewing the numbers with them, and coaching them every step of the way to better profitably.We’ve been focused exclusively on this since 2018 and have served over 300 firms around the world.From small shops with just a hand full of staff, to global agencies with hundreds.If you're sick of flying blind and leaving money on the table, we can help.Learn more at https://parakeeto.com

Founder

As a speaker and consultant - my primary focus is helping creative and digital agencies, consultancies and service businesses optimize their profitability and get a hold of their core metrics.

In my keynote talk & training “Advanced Agency Profit Optimization” I share:

- The 3 core metrics that are at the heart of every service business that must be measured and mastered. 
- The exact formulas to accurately track them in your service business.
- The benchmarks industry leading agencies are achieving to make 2-3X more net profit than their competition.
- The 5% tweak that can boost profit by over 100% and increase valuations by over 400%
- Free tools and resources to start implementing these metrics in any agency today.

On my podcast - The Agency Profit Podcast - I interview thought leaders and successful agency owners on their tactical strategies for optimizing operations and profitability and truly mastering the service business model.

As a consultant, I help fast growing agencies go from 7 figures to 8 and beyond by helping them get the systems in place to measure and manage their operations for maximum growth and optimal cash flow. 

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking on stages like the DigitalMarketer.com Agency Partner Training Day and being a guest on industry leading podcasts like The Digital Agency Show with Brent Weaver, The Grow Your Digital Agency Show with Robert Kraven and The Bureau Briefing with Carl Smith. 

For more information about what I do, or to inquire about a podcast or speaking appearance, visit:

https://marcelpetitpas.com

🚨Parakeeto is launching accounting and bookkeeping services. 🚨

 For the past seven years, we've helped hundreds of agencies & consulting firms get a grip on profitability — utilization, margins, project economics, all of it.

Along the way, we kept hearing the same thing: "I wish you could just handle all of our finances."

So we've been quietly building exactly that.

Parakeeto is now offering accounting and bookkeeping for agencies.

Same team that already understands your business. Same financial lens. No more explaining how agencies work to a new accountant.

We've been testing this with a small group of clients over the last couple of quarters. It's working.

Now we're getting ready to open up 3–5 more spots in Q2.

We're being intentional about how we grow this — so we're building a waitlist.

If you want to be first in line when a spot opens up and get a quote, you can sign up using the link int he comments below.

Helping Digital & Creative Agencies Measure and Improve Profitability Best Selling Author, Keynote Speaker & CEO

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The Battle

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Engagements

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