Jonathon Blair

DTC Brand Fractional CFO | Follower of Jesus | Husband | Father of 3 | Fractional CFO | Leadership, Strategy & Productivity Nerd

www.FreeToGrowCFO.com

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🧔‍♂️ WHO IS FREE TO GROW CFO 
Outsourced CFO and Bookkeeping services for profit-focused DTC brands.   

Scaling a DTC brand is stressful. 

With messy books and no CFO on your team you run the risk of…  
-Hiring too quickly  
-Buying too much inventory 
-Scaling ad spend unprofitably 
-Running out of cash  

And that leads to stressful, sleepless nights. We don’t want that for you.  

Free to Grow CFO has given hundreds of DTC brands a plan for scaling alongside healthy profit and cash flow. Our plan will work for you too.

Fast, Insightful Reporting.  Proactive Strategic Advice.  From DTC Finance Experts.  
-M&A -Debt & Equity Funding 
-Accurate Financials by the 15th 
-Planning, Forecasting, Budgeting 
-Financial Dashboards and KPI Tracking   

All delivered through our proven, ready-to-implement “Free to Grow CFO Process”.

📈 WANT TO INCREASE PROFIT AND CASH FLOW AS YOU SCALE?
Book a Call Now → https://freetogrowcfo.com/book-a-call

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Founder | Fractional CFO

www.freetogrowcfo.com

Fractional CFOs for High Growth Direct-to-Consumer Brands

Outsourced, part-time CFO services for high growth D2C brands, designed to help you scale your business with confidence.

You don't have to suffer through another sleepless night worrying about making difficult business decisions alone.  Hire a Free to Grow CFO and get the financial insights you need to make fast, effective business decisions with confidence.

Get access to the CFO you need to scale your business without the full-time salary:
-Strategic Planning
-Forecasting & Projections
-Cash Strategy & Fundraising
-Financial Statement Analysis

Jon Blair

I'm hearing lots of people say that DTC brands "must go omni-channel." I gotta be honest, I think this is BS and I don't agree.

Now to be clear, if you have goals to get to $50m+ in annual sales, then yes you probably need to go omni-channel because physical retail will be required to hit those numbers.

But there are plenty of 8-figure <$50m niche DTC brands that crush it.

And there's nothing wrong with staying DTC-only and limiting your TAM.

You can still build a great business that way.

But just be honest with yourself about the fact that if you want to grow to $50m+ you're likely going to need additional channels beyond DTC.

Most Fractional CFOs say a DTC brand should have a 13-week cash forecast. I think this is BS, here's why...

Ok - so every time I post about this, people freak out and don't hear the point I'm making.

So please read carefully.

Do some brands need a 13-week cash forecast?

Sure.

Does every brand need a 13-week cash forecast? 

Not at all. 

Start by asking two key questions:

1️⃣ Do I actually need weekly visibility into cash flows, or is monthly enough?

You'd be surprised how often monthly visibility is enough for the decisions you currently need to make.

2️⃣ What time horizon is appropriate for the decisions at hand?

If your business decisions don’t require weekly insights over a 13-week period, building that kind of forecast is just a waste of time. 

For example - if you just need the weekly visibility to approved weekly AP payments, I often find that 2-6 weeks of visibility is plenty.

What's the point I'm making with all this?

𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁𝘀 𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘂𝗽𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗱 - 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲, 𝗻𝗼 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀.

𝗔𝗻𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲.

And let's be real - time is not something you can afford to waste right now.

--

Hi, I'm Jon Blair founder of the DTC Finance and Accounting firm Free to Grow CFO.

Want more tips on growing a profit-focused DTC brand? 

Give me a follow.

Want to learn more about how Free to Grow's Accountants and CFO's can help you increase profit and cash flow as you scale?

Shoot me a DM.

Until next time, scale on!

In the past year I've audited 100+ DTC brands' financials and Shopify data and I'm shocked by my findings...

Brand founders by and large don't understand that there is much more to ad spend profitability than simply tracking the impact on company-level contribution margin.

What are they missing?

You MUST bifurcate contribution margin into new customer and returning customer segments.

Why?

To understand how profitable your new customer orders need to be.

Why does this matter?

Because the answer to - "what CAC can I afford?" is determined by answering "how high does my first-order profitability need to be?"

And this can only be answered by understanding whether or not returning customers drive enough margin dollars to SUBSIDIZE a lower first-order profit.

Without this "returning customer subsidy," you must rely solely on first-order profitability as the driver of company-level profit.

Do you wish you had a better understanding of these dynamics for your brand?

Consider hiring an expert DTC Fractional CFO to help.

--

Hi, I'm Jon Blair founder of the DTC Finance and Accounting firm Free to Grow CFO .

Want more tips on scaling a profit-focused DTC brand? 

Give me a follow.

Want to learn more about how Free to Grow's Accountants and CFO's can help you increase profit and cash flow as you scale?

Shoot me a DM.

Until next time, scale on!

If your DTC brand doesn’t have meaningful 3–6 month LTV (in 𝘮𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘯 𝘥𝘰𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘴) you need to be first-order profitable.  Guaranteed.

Losing money on acquiring a new customer basically means you’re “loaning” your business cash—hoping to get it back through repeat purchases (ie, LTV).

But there are financial dangers you need to watch out for if your CAC payback is too slow:

• If customers don’t buy again fast enough, you run out of money before the payback ever happens.
• The slower the payback, the slower you can reinvest into new customer acquisition.
• Scale stalls because you can’t afford to keep spending on ads.

Think of it like this: 

You can loan a friend $100 for 2–3 years.

But if you’re also loaning $100 to more friends every week, you’ll eventually run out of cash because you are loaning out money faster than you are collecting it back.

Now flip this: 

If your friends pays you back in 7 days, you can immediately redeploy that same $100 into the next week's loan. 

Cash keeps circulating—and if your are charging interest, growth can compound.

Ad spend works the same way. 

If your payback cycle is slower than your rate of new customer acquisition, you become unprofitable and cash runs out. 

If it’s faster, you can reinvest and scale with positive profits and cash flow.

The morale of the story?

The faster your repeat purchase pays back new customer losses, the faster you can grow. 

If that payback isn’t happening in 3–6 months, first-order profitability isn’t optional—it's required.

The fastest way to manage CAC payback cycles is by working with an expert DTC CFO who speaks ad spend. 

That’s exactly what we do at Free to Grow CFO 

In DTC, growth lives and dies by paid media. 

That’s why our CFOs are experts in ad spend profitability—channel by channel, cohort by cohort. 

We go beyond surface metrics to help you scale what works, cut what doesn’t, and hold your agency accountable. 

Got anything to add?

Jacob P. Liam Veregin Bernardo Caixeta Dylan Byers Thomas Gleeson 🦸 Karl O'Brien 🦸 Jeff Lowenstein

"Real estate isn’t dead. You’re just underwriting it wrong."

That’s one of the biggest takeaways from my upcoming Free to Grow CFO Podcast episode.
 
I sat down with Ryan Kelly  — investor, broker, and mortgage lender — to talk about what’s actually happening in today’s market and how brand founders should be thinking about deploying profits outside their business.
 
We get into the operator mechanics of real estate investing:
 
• Why “nothing pencils” usually means you’re looking in the wrong market  
• The underwriting mistakes new investors make  
• Why you need an investor-focused agent, not your personal home agent  
• How to structure deals so they work on today’s numbers, not future hope  
• The difference between active income strategies and true passive plays
 
Scaling your brand is step one.
 
Turning profit into distributable cash is step two.
 
Deploying that cash into appreciating assets is step three.
 
If you’re a founder generating real cash flow and wondering how to turn it into long-term wealth, this episode will give you a clear starting point.
 
🎙 Drops next week.  

🔔 Like and subscribe to the Free to Grow CFO Podcast to be the first to know when the episode drops: 
📺 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/eFz-S425 
🎙️ Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/eKsJzCfK 
🎙️ Spotify: https://lnkd.in/e85eV5p3

Debt capital has never been more accessible to DTC brands.
 
In today’s ecom world, it’s everywhere.
 
Shopify Capital.  
Revenue-based financing.  
Credit cards with big limits.
 
It takes minutes to apply.  

The cash hits fast.
 
It’s at your fingertips.  

It’s alluring.
 
But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
 
Just because you can use debt doesn’t mean you should.
 
Not all growth should be financed.  

Not all risk should be levered.
 
Access to someone else’s cash changes how you think.
 
It subtly nudges you to go bigger.
 
“Let’s push spend harder.”  
“Let’s double the PO.”  
“Let’s hire ahead of revenue.”
 
Not because the data supports it.
 
But because the money is there.
 
Here’s a simple discipline I recommend to founders:
 
1️⃣ Remove debt from the equation entirely.  
2️⃣ Ask: What decision would I make based only on the data and my real risk tolerance?  
3️⃣ Then bring debt back in and ask: Do I want leverage to support that same decision?
 
Where brands get into trouble isn’t just using debt.
 
It’s using debt to justify a decision they wouldn’t have made without it.
 
Debt is an amplifier.
 
If your unit economics are strong and your cash flow is disciplined, it can accelerate growth.
 
If your economics are fragile or emotional, it will expose that fast.
 
Leverage doesn’t fix business models.
 
It magnifies them.

🎙️ We dive into this topic and more on the latest episode of The Ecom Scaling Show.

Give it a listen if you’re considering taking on debt this year ---> https://lnkd.in/dRFTShjs

Most DTC brands don’t run into trouble because their forecast was “too aggressive.”

They run into trouble because they built their entire business around the assumption that the forecast had to come true.

Here’s what that usually looks like:
→ You predict $10M in Q4
 → You place POs to support it
 → You take on debt to finance it
 → You hire to operate at that scale

Now you’re boxed into one outcome.

Hit the number? You are a success. 

Miss it? You’re managing a cash crisis.

That’s not strategy. That’s a binary bet.

Smart operators don’t plan around prediction.

They plan around cause and effect.

They ask:
-If CAC rises 20%, what happens to cash?
-If revenue lands 30% below forecast, are we still solvent?
-What revenue actually supports this inventory decision?

That shift changes everything.

In my latest newsletter article, I break down why scenario-based planning is the difference between scaling profitably and getting crushed by growth — and how to build financial optionality instead of financial fragility.

If you’re heading into your next growth stage, this is worth the read.

👇 Full article below.

View newsletter: The Free to Grow Newsletter

The biggest failure I see in DTC business planning isn’t a lack of ambition. It’s the assumption that your plan will go exactly as expected. In realit

Open article: Stop Treating Your Plan Like a Prediction  by Jon Blair • 4 min read

Stop Treating Your Plan Like a Prediction

Profit from your brand doesn’t make you wealthy. What you invest it into does.
 
That’s a core theme from the latest Free to Grow CFO Podcast episode.
 
I sat down with real estate investor and broker Ryan Kelly to talk about how founders should think about deploying the cash flow their brand generates.
 
Not from a hype perspective.
 
From an operator perspective.
 
We get into:
 
• Why running a rental property is a business  
• The biggest traps new real estate investors fall into  
• Why deals need to work on today’s numbers  
• Why the agent you work with matters more than most investors realize
 
If you’re building a profitable brand, the question eventually becomes:
 
What are you doing with the cash your brand produces?

If you're a founder thinking about getting into real estate investing, this episode is a great starting point.
 
🎧 Episode is live.  

Listen here → https://lnkd.in/eNKf_EvR

CEO, SplitBase. Conversion Optimization & Landing Pages for DTC Brands.

Most website changes hurt conversions.The problem? You'll never know which ones.That redesign your team loved? Could be costing you sales.That "best practice" you copied from a competitor? Might be killing your ROAS.(You'll never see it in your data. It just looks like a slow decline.)I've spent 10 years proving this at SplitBase. We've run 10,000+ A/B tests for brands like Dr. Squatch, Once Upon a Farm, Manduka, Kiehl's, and Hyperice. We've generated over $100M+ per year in incremental revenue for our clients.And here's what all that testing taught me:→ What works for one brand almost never works for another→ “Best practices” fail more often than they win→ Internal opinions don’t scale→ Random changes hurt more than they helpThat's why we don't just test random ideas. We start with research:Where the funnel is leaking, why shoppers hesitate, and which constraints actually limit growth.Then - and only then - we build tests designed to move revenue, not just metrics.We work with DTC brands doing $10M to $100M+. Brands that are scaling hard but watching their efficiency drop. Brands that know something's broken but can't pinpoint what.If that sounds like you, here are 3 ways I can help:1. DM me your biggest conversion questions2. Take our free 3-minute CRO Assessment (see below)3. Get a free, 1-1 CRO audit to pinpoint your 3 biggest CRO opportunities (see below)

Raphael Paulin-Daigle

Most CRO agencies would fail at Hyperice.

Here's why: Hyperice is Fortune Magazine's "Most Innovative Companies" 2021. They're the Official Recovery Partner of the NBA, MLB, UFC, and PGA TOUR.

You can't run generic best practices on a brand at that level.

No countdown timers. No aggressive pop-ups. No cheap conversion tactics. Everything needs to respect the brand.

That's the constraint. That's where most agencies fail.

We ran 50+ A/B tests. Created 29 landing pages. Made countless UX improvements. Every single one brand-appropriate.

One example: Mobile users couldn't tell the difference between Hypervolt models. We added a compare feature. Clean. Simple. On-brand. Result: 6.2% conversion rate lift.

The program results: $934,000 additional monthly revenue. 78x ROI. Significant AOV and CVR increases.

But the real result: Optimization that respected a Fortune-recognized brand partnered with world-class sports leagues.

Premium brands need different optimization. Research-backed. Brand-respectful. Strategic.

Document breakdown below 👇

Get a free CRO assessment: splitbase.com/assessment

CRO & Conversion Design for DTC brands: Transparent Labs, Oakcha, Amika, Dr Squatch, Laura Geller & more. 12+ years in ecommerce optimization. Follow for daily A/B testing & conversion optimization insights.

How Hyperice Added $934,000/Month

Moon Pod sells a $299 bean bag online.

High-ticket. Considered purchase. Customers can't try it before buying. Can't feel the comfort. Can't compare to competitors.

The challenge: How do you sell "floating" through a website?

We started with research. Customer surveys. Session recordings. Analytics. The questions people had before buying.

Three opportunities emerged.

First: Bundles and upsells. 

Moon Pod had multiple accessories. But no focus on showing what goes together. We added cart cross-sells. Tested product combinations. Created bundles based on buying behavior. 

Result: 5 figures per month just from that.

Second: Clarity. At $299, unanswered questions kill conversions. Research identified what people needed to know. Product details. Shipping. Returns. Size guidance. We removed the friction.

Third: Messaging and landing pages. We tested different angles. Does comfort matter more than design? Benefits over features? Built multiple landing page formats. Hero-style. Advertorial. Facebook-specific. Google-specific. The landing pages became their acquisition strategy.

The result: $273K additional monthly revenue. $3.3M annualized. AOV increased. CAC reduced.

High-ticket products need different optimization. Research found the friction. Tests removed it.

Document breakdown below 👇

Get a free CRO assessment: splitbase.com/assessment

Case Study - Moon Pod 

Your CRO program has budget. Tools. A data team. Determination.

But it's stalled.

I see this across 8-9 figure brands. Five patterns show up repeatedly.

➡️ Pattern 1: Unrealistic expectations. "We need to go from 2% to 5% conversion rate." No matter who they work with, they'll say CRO failed. The expectation is impossible.

➡️ Pattern 2: Fear of losing tests. Most tests will fail. That's experimentation. But brands stop programs when tests lose. No learnings compound.

➡️ Pattern 3: Random test sources. Ideas come from competitors and best practices. Not research on their own customers. Random sources create random results.

➡️ Pattern 4: High activity, no system. A publicly traded company had senior data team, fast devs, right tools. But majority of tests were false positives. Tests run for just a couple days. High activity. Zero momentum.

Pattern 5: Ad/website imbalance. Amazing ad team. Scaling spend. But no one updating the website. 50% of ad work going to waste.

What all five have in common: Missing the system. No process. No research foundation. No strategic prioritization. No testing integrity.

Activity doesn't equal progress. Tests don't equal growth. Tools don't equal results.
Process does.

Document breakdown below 👇

Get a free CRO assessment: splitbase.com/assessment

Why CRO Programs Fail

Premium fragrance brand Riddle Oil had a problem most 8-figure DTC brands run into.

They were scaling fast. Paid media was ramping. Traffic was pouring in from Meta, Google, and beyond. But conversions weren't keeping pace with the spend.

The site looked fine on the surface. But customers were confused by the product line. 

They didn't understand the layering system or know which product to try first. And the overall experience wasn't doing the brand justice.

Sound familiar?

Most brands in this spot jump straight to a redesign. Riddle Oil thought so too.

But here's what I've learned after 13 years of optimizing ecommerce sites: a redesign without knowing what's actually broken is just an expensive guess.

Before you change anything, you need to answer a few things first:

Where exactly are people dropping off, and why?

Not just which pages they leave from. Why they leave. There's a big difference between someone bouncing from a PDP because they're confused about the product and someone bouncing because they don't trust the brand yet. 

The fix for each is completely different.

What are your customers' actual objections?

Analytics show you the "what." Surveys, polls, and voice-of-customer research show you the "why." Most brands skip this step.

They look at heatmaps, see a drop-off, and start guessing at solutions. That's how you end up redesigning pages that didn't need redesigning.

Is the problem the page, or is it the offer?

Sometimes the product page is fine. But the way you've structured your bundles, your entry point offer, or your product lineup is what's confusing people. 

No amount of design changes will fix a product education problem.

This is exactly where we started with Riddle Oil.

Customer behavior analysis, voice-of-customer research, Heatmaps, Journey mapping.

We studied how real visitors moved through the site, where they dropped off, and what actually pushed them to buy.

Then we tested. Not random stuff:

Targeted experiments around product education, navigation, trust messaging, and how the full product system was presented.

That CRO program delivered a 7x ROI in the first three months. Then it kept climbing.

Conversion rate went up. AOV went up. Add-to-cart went up. The revenue impact over 12 months: $2.4M+.

No guessing or "best practices." Just a research-backed testing program built around how Riddle's actual customers think, shop, and buy.

Read the case study here to read the full breakdown: https://lnkd.in/evPk-FXK

Laura Geller is a 25-year beauty brand. Strong retail presence. In Macy's.
But online, they had high customer acquisition costs and low conversions. Traffic was going to homepage or product pages. The funnel couldn't support scaling paid acquisition.

We started with research. Customer surveys. Social media comments. Support tickets. Purchase data.

The discovery: Laura Geller has a slightly older customer avatar. And they crave information.

They want to know everything about a product before buying. They're ready to read every word on a product page. They're not coming from TikTok or Instagram. They're detail-oriented buyers.

Most beauty brands optimize for quick scrollers. Laura Geller needed to optimize for careful readers.

We built two landing page types. Advertorial style that reads like an article and builds trust. And traditional product pages focused on features and benefits customers told us mattered. Both on mobile and desktop.

The result: 43% conversion rate increase. Lower CAC. Funnel could handle paid social scale.

Research revealed who was actually buying. Landing pages were built for that customer.

Get a free CRO assessment: splitbase.com/assessment

I ask every brand: "How do you currently get your test ideas?"

The answer tells me everything about why their program works or doesn't.

Most say: "We look at competitors. We read best practices. We try things that worked for other brands."

This is why testing programs stall.

Random test sources create random results. No strategic direction. Low win rate. Wasted capacity. No compounding insights.

The brands with momentum get test ideas differently.

Session replays showing where customers get stuck. Customer interviews revealing what's confusing. Behavioral data identifying patterns. Support tickets showing common questions.
Research-backed test sources create strategic direction. Higher win rates. Focused capacity. Compounding insights.

One brand was testing for a year. Fast execution. Right tools. High activity. But no confidence in results.

We asked: "Where do your test ideas come from?"
"Competitors and best practices."

That explained everything.

Test ideas sourced from research compound. Test ideas sourced from competitors create noise.

The source determines the outcome.

Document breakdown below 👇

Where Your Test Ideas Come From Determines Your Results

Brands discovering their competitors are doing CRO:

"Wait, you're optimizing?"
"Wait, YOU'RE optimizing?"

This is happening more. Not crisis-driven. Competition-driven.

Conference conversation shifts from "How's your ad spend?" to "What's your testing velocity?"

Someone mentions their CRO program. Suddenly everyone's asking: "Should we have one?"

This pressure is different than crisis pressure.

Crisis = Reactive
Revenue crashed. Need results. Timeline short. Expectations unrealistic.

Competition = Strategic
Competitors optimizing. Want to be better. Timeline reasonable. Expectations aligned.

The brands calling me now aren't panicking. They're strategizing.

"Our competitors are doing this. We should be too."

Not "We NEED CRO." Just "We can be better."

That awareness drives better decisions. Better timelines. Better programs.

The brands that succeed? The ones that move before they have to.

Competitive awareness beats crisis reaction every time.

Follow for insights from brands that moved early.

BestSelf Co. had a bounce problem on their Self Journal page.

Visitors were landing. Then leaving. High bounce rate. Revenue leak.
We ran research. Heat maps showed people weren't scrolling past the fold. Surveys told us why.

"I don't understand what this does."
"I don't trust it will work."

They were landing on the page and nothing was hooking them fast enough.

Then qualitative research revealed something interesting. Most buyers identified as professionals. Not students. Not hobbyists. Professionals.

That insight wasn't anywhere on the page.

So we changed the headline.

Before: Generic product messaging.
After: "Help 500,000+ professionals achieve their goals"

Three things in one line. Who it's for. What it does. Social proof.

Results: 27% sales increase for the Self Journal. 74% lift on desktop.

One headline change.

The page started speaking directly to who was actually buying. They saw themselves in the copy. They understood the benefit immediately. They trusted it because 500,000 other professionals were using it.

Research showed us who was converting. Copy made that obvious to visitors in the first three seconds.

Sometimes the fix is simpler than you think.

Breakdown below 👇

Case Study - BestSelf Co

Two numbers that changed everything:

Acquisition costs: ↗️ Going up
Consumer spending: → Flat

The math that used to work doesn't work anymore.

A few years ago, if your conversion rate was mediocre, you could scale ad spend and compensate with volume. Traffic was cheaper. Consumers were spending more freely. The inefficiency was absorbable.

Now? You're paying more per visitor. And those visitors are harder to convert.

I'm hearing the same thing from brands: "We can't just buy our way through this."

One founder put it clearly: "We could increase conversions by five to ten percent and generate an extra six figures to a million dollars annually. Without touching ad spend."

That efficiency gain used to be nice to have. Now it's necessary.

The brands calling me aren't coming because revenue crashed. They're coming because the landscape shifted and waiting is expensive.

This is macro pressure, not internal crisis. And it's why CRO suddenly moved from "we should do this" to "we need to do this."

Follow for insights from 8-9 figure brands navigating scale.

"Did you have any employees or you just do this out of your garage?"

People assume selling blinds online was a simple operation.

Jay Steinfeld had 500 employees when he left Blinds.com. 125 of them were engineers.

The software they built was product-agnostic. Designed to work across any custom product category.

When Home Depot acquired them, they got technology that could handle custom decks, custom doors, custom vanities. Billions in revenue across categories.

The brands that scale beyond their first product are building infrastructure. Systems that work across multiple categories.

Watch the full conversation 👇
https://lnkd.in/e6vYKSi4

Before I look at data, tools, or capabilities, I ask one question:
"What does your team expect from conversion optimization?"

This tells me more than any analytics audit.

If they say: "We need to increase conversion rate from 2% to 5% this year."

I know the program will fail. Not because it's impossible to improve conversion. Because they're measuring the wrong thing with unrealistic expectations.

Overall site conversion rate is a bad metric. It hides segment behavior. It averages out context. It doesn't show what's actually working.

But beyond the metric, there's a deeper issue: Alignment.

What does the team expect to get from CRO? What time frame? Are they open to failure?

Most tests will lose. If a brand is afraid of losing tests, CRO won't work for them. Experimentation means not everything works.

This alignment conversation happens before methodology. Before tools. Before activities.

Because without it, nothing else matters.

I've seen brands with perfect setups fail because expectations were misaligned. And brands with basic setups succeed because everyone understood what CRO could and couldn't do.

The fastest signal that tells me where the real problem lives: What they expect CRO to be.

Follow for insights from 8-9 figure brands.

Kareem Elgendy runs an 8-figure brand.

I asked him: If there's one lesson you've learned as a CEO, what would it be?

His answer: "Be very curious about the numbers. Every number you're either presented or you analyze, be very curious about how that number is generated, calculated, and understand it inside and out. In great depth."

He continued: "Be optimistic about your business. People want to buy good products. But you sometimes have to be honest with yourself and be willing to really see what people want and supply them with it."

Two insights here:

Number curiosity at scale means questioning everything. Not accepting metrics at face value. Understanding how conversion rates are calculated. What's included in revenue numbers. How averages hide segment behavior.

The second part is harder. Being optimistic while staying honest about what customers actually want requires research. Not assumptions. Not what you hope they want. What they actually want.

Most 8-figure CEOs I talk with have both. Deep number literacy. And the willingness to let customer research challenge their assumptions.

Kareem has both.

Full conversation here:

https://lnkd.in/ePJ-7Cu9 

Follow for insights from 8-9 figure brand leaders.

A brand reached out the other day. They've been running tests for the past year. They understand optimization conceptually. They know what A/B testing is. They've read the articles. They've run experiments.

But something felt off.

"We're getting some wins. But we're not confident in the direction. And honestly, we're not sure if we're approaching this the right way."

Then they said something that explained everything:
"I know enough about CRO to do some of it. But at this point, for an eight-figure business, I'm realizing that might not be enough."

That's the sophistication trap.

Beginners know they don't know. They're aware of the gap. They seek help or education immediately.

Experts know deeply. They've done this hundreds of times. They have systems. They have confidence.

But there's a dangerous middle ground. Brands that understand optimization conceptually. Know enough to run tests. But not enough to do it strategically at scale.

They're testing. Activity is happening. Some tests win. But there's this nagging uncertainty. "Are we prioritizing the right things? Are we running tests properly? What are we missing?"

The sophistication trap isn't lack of knowledge. It's having just enough knowledge to move forward without the expertise to move forward well.

This founder saw it. That awareness opened the conversation.

The gap between knowing how to test and knowing how to build a testing program that scales is bigger than most brands realize.

Follow for insights from 8-9 figure brands navigating scale.

I talked with a founder recently who was scaling ad spend aggressively. Performance was good. Traffic was growing. Conversions were sitting at 2.8%.

They were adding $50K monthly to their ad budget. Nobody was working on the website.

We ran some math together. A 5% improvement in conversion rate would add about $800K in annual revenue. Same traffic. Same ad spend.

That number shifted the conversation.

They'd been focused on getting more visitors. Which made sense because ad performance was strong and traffic was scaling. But conversion rate had been 2.8% for six months.

The decision they made: take 20% of what they were planning to add to paid media and put it toward where that traffic lands. Landing pages. Product pages. Checkout.

I think what stuck with me was how small the reallocation was. They didn't pull budget from ads. They just matched some of the effort going into acquisition with effort on conversion.

Six months later, conversion rate hit 3.1%. That 0.3 point lift generated the $800K we'd projected. Ad spend kept scaling. The website could handle it now.

The brands I see scaling profitably are doing this. They're putting effort into both sides.

Follow for insights from 8-9 figure brands navigating scale.

Most brands optimize for desktop.

Because that's what looks good in stakeholder meetings.

Someone pulls up the website on a projector. Desktop. Someone demos the checkout flow. Desktop. Someone reviews creative. Desktop.

Meanwhile, 70% of ecommerce traffic is happening on phones.

Mobile converts at 1.8%.
Desktop converts at 3.9%.

That's a 54% conversion gap.

I see this pattern repeatedly with 8-9 figure brands. Beautiful desktop experience. Mobile feels like an afterthought.

The revenue leak is happening on the screen they barely test on.

The brands closing this gap are treating mobile differently. 

They're testing on actual devices. 
They're looking at mobile analytics separately. 
They're building for where the traffic actually lives.

When 70% of visits happen on phones, and those visits convert at half the rate of desktop, there's leverage there.

Most brands optimize for what stakeholders see in meetings. Some optimize for where customers actually buy.

Follow for insights from 8-9 figure brands navigating scale.

The Mobile Conversion Gap 

Research First, Test Second: The $9.6M Framework

The system behind Hyperice ($934K/month) and Dr. Squatch ($800K/month).
$900K+ in monthly revenue lifts. 78× ROI. 28%+ conversion wins.

We've used this system to scale premium brands like Hyperice, Dr. Squatch, Amika, and YSL Beauty.

I've turned our entire 3Ps framework into a free whitepaper.

What's inside:
→ How to spot exactly why people buy (and why they don't) using Patterns
→ How to use Brand perception and aesthetics as a conversion lever
→ The 3 key areas to focus on for A/B testing that compound results
→ Real case studies, including how Hyperice added $900K+/mo

I'm giving it away for FREE.

Comment "3PS" and I'll DM you the link right now. 📩

If I was running ecommerce at a $50M+ beauty brand and conversions were stalling, here's what I'd be hearing from the team.

"We need a redesign. The site feels dated."

"Let's refresh creative. New photography."

"Traffic is the issue. We need more visitors."

I get it. These feel like the moves.

But I've seen this play out with beauty brands at scale. Laura Geller increased conversions 43% without touching creative or traffic. INH Hair increased product page conversions 26% without a redesign.

What actually moved the needle: customer research, PDP education, landing page strategy.

Laura Geller discovered their customers craved detailed product information. Older avatar. They wanted to read everything before buying. So we built landing pages with more text, not less. Advertorial style. Traditional product pages with deep features.

43% lift.

INH Hair focused on product page education. Helping customers understand what they were buying. Clear benefits. Detailed information.

26% PDP conversion increase.

The pattern I see with beauty brands stalling: they default to what's visible. Redesign. Creative. Traffic.

What works: understanding why customers aren't converting and giving them what they need to buy confidently.

Research reveals the why. Landing pages and PDPs solve it.

Follow for insights from 8-9 figure brands navigating scale.

Your beauty brand is losing sales for a reason most agencies will never tell you.

It's not your ads, your traffic or even your pricing.

I know because we talk to beauty ecommerce leaders every week who've tried all of that. New product photos. Updated descriptions. A homepage refresh. Some have done full redesigns.

And their conversion rate is still stuck, CAC keeps rising.

Every time, the real issue is the same: it's not what the site looks like, it's what the site fails to communicate.

Let me explain.

Beauty is one of the hardest categories to sell online. Your customer can't touch the product, swatch it, smell it, or feel the texture.

So they land on your PDP with questions they need answered before they'll buy:

"Will this shade actually work for my skin tone?"
"How do I use this? What's the routine?"
"What makes this different from the 50 other serums in my feed?"
"Is this worth it, or should I just try the dupe I saw on TikTok?"

Most beauty PDPs don't answer these correctly. Customers leave.

Add that beauty customers are less loyal than ever. New brands, new launches, new influencer favorites every week.

If your site doesn't build product confidence fast, someone else's will.

The questions we hear from beauty ecommerce leaders are always the same:

"How much product info is too much on our PDPs?"
"Our products have complex ingredient stories. How should we tackle product education?
"How do we replicate the in-store consultation experience online?"

These are conversion questions - not design questions. They need to be answered with research, not opinions. By strategists, not designers.

That's how we approach it at SplitBase.

We survey your customers. We study their behavior. We find out what's making them hesitate and what they need to see before they'll buy. Then we test it.

For one beauty client, our research revealed buyers didn't understand how their top product worked. We tested short demo video clips on the product page. That single change increased conversions by 26%.

For Laura Geller, we built advertorial-style landing pages rooted in what customers said mattered to them. 43% higher conversions. Significantly lower CAC.

Beauty is one of our deepest specialties. Over 10 years, we've helped 30+ beauty and skincare brands grow through research-driven CRO.

Our work with Kiehl's generated ~$1.6M in additional revenue. L'Oréal expanded the partnership to YSL Beauty, Lancôme, NYX Cosmetics, Urban Decay, and Biotherm.

We've also worked with Laura Geller, Glamnetics, Amika, INH Hair, Riddle Oil, and a celebrity-led beauty brand that saw 406% ROI on their CRO program in just 3 months.

We don't slap on countdown timers or copy what some other brand is doing. We treat your brand like the asset it is.

Because in beauty, brand perception isn't separate from conversion. It IS a conversion lever.

Running a beauty brand doing $10M+ and your site isn't converting?

Get started with a free CRO diagnostic: https://lnkd.in/eGVtRY9x

70% of carts are abandoned.

That number creates panic for most brands.

But here's the context: 43% of those people were browsing without purchase intent. They were never going to buy.

The real number is 57%.
Still high. But different than 70%.

Most brands optimize for the wrong number. They try to recover all 70%. They add pop-ups. Exit intent offers. Aggressive remarketing.

They're chasing people who were just looking.

The brands getting this right focus on the 57%. The ones who had intent but didn't convert. That's where recovery actually works.

Context changes everything in CRO.

Follow for insights from 8-9 figure brands navigating scale.

Traffic up 40%. Revenue flat.

This is the math problem most brands don't see until it's too late.

When your traffic grows but revenue doesn't, you have one of two reactions:

Reaction 1: "Our ads aren't performing. We need better targeting. Better creatives. Different channels."

Reaction 2: "Our traffic is converting worse than before. We have a website problem."

Most brands default to Reaction 1. They double down on acquisition. More spend. More tests. More traffic sources.

But if traffic is already growing and revenue isn't, more traffic just makes the problem more expensive.

The pattern I'm seeing across 8-9 figure brands right now: Traffic growth masked a conversion problem for months.

Dashboard showed green arrows. Visitor count climbing. Ad performance holding steady.

Nobody looked at conversion rate trending down.
Until revenue plateaued. Then the math became obvious.

Traffic up. Revenue flat. Conversion rate down.
That's when the bottleneck shifted from "get more visitors" to "convert the visitors you have."

The brands figuring this out early don't wait for the plateau to force the conversation. They track conversion rate as closely as traffic. They see the trend before revenue flatlines.

The ones calling me now are the ones who waited. Traffic looked healthy until it didn't matter anymore.

Follow for insights on CRO at scale.

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