For e-commerce brands

Every stockout, refund and ad problem still lands on you.

Free to Build is a 12-week program that builds the systems for your e-commerce brand with you: the full pipeline, from sourcing the product to actually selling it. You get repeatable processes for whatever product you want to sell or grow. E-commerce is heavy, extremely heavy, on logistics and execution.

Take the free scorecard About six minutes
Written by

Operator. Ran a 100-person manufacturing company, now COO for owner-led small businesses.

01 Where the week goes

Sound familiar?

  • 01Your ads are not being shown to people, or your checkout is not converting. You might have a setup or tech issue somewhere, and the problem is when nobody tells you about it for days.
  • 02Every complaint and refund lands on you and needs your decision to be resolved.
  • 03You’re doing too many things at the same time, and you decided to also provide content because you know your product best. You run into a deadlock where media buyers can’t do their job properly.
  • 04Most of the time you need to put cash up front: suppliers, shipping, ads, before you even make your first dollar.
  • 05You pay for middlemen services throughout the customer journey, and you end up not knowing why your margin is thin, because you don’t have a helicopter view of where exactly your money is going.
  • 06A stockout: the e-commerce worst nightmare. You’re selling physical products. If you don’t have the product, you’re not making money.

02 The real problem

You’re stuck between the gas pedal and the brand

The founder is the one who understood the market and the product that the market demands. They try to also be the marketing expert and the platform expert, and obviously you cannot wear that many hats at the same time. They focus on the product, but they’re also responsible for the content, because they believe they know the product best.

They didn’t train their people properly, so other departments don’t have enough media to work with. That’s especially true for social media, when you really need new content on a daily basis.

Growth marketing, all the social media channels and all the platforms want speed. They want to test things: what’s working, what’s not working, this content, this format, this platform. The gas pedal on the floor. You also need to have branding and communication integrity, and the founder is the one in between.

03 The numbers

Every test is paid for out of a thin margin

E‑commerce is a numbers game, and you really need to know and understand where money comes from and where money is going.

Your contribution margin sets your minimum ROAS.

Break-even return on ad spend is 1 divided by your contribution margin, before ad spend. At 25%, you need 4× just to break even. Revenue is just a number: if you’re doing $10 million on 5% margin, your business is going down the drain.

What your ads must return to break even
Break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ contribution margin
MarginROAS
20%
5.00×
25%
4.00×
30%
3.33×
40%
2.50×
50%
2.00×

At a 25% contribution margin, every $1 of ads has to bring in $4.00 of sales before you make anything.

Source · The formula: 1 ÷ contribution margin, before ad spend

Every stop takes its cut of the margin.

There are a few stops before the product reaches the customer, and every stop essentially takes their cut of the margin. On Amazon, fees and ads passed half of the average seller’s sale in 2022 (Amazon disputes the figure). Meta’s average price per ad rose 10% in 2024 and 9% in 2025.

Ad spend is one thing, but what about refunds, customer service and shipping back and forth? US retailers expected 16.9% of 2024 sales to come back as returns. You really have to look at the full pipeline of getting the product to the door of the customer.

Source · Marketplace Pulse, 2023 · Meta Platforms, Form 10-K for 2025 · NRF and Happy Returns, 2024

From the sale price to what’s left
Schematic · labels only · steps are not amounts
The sale price
01Supplier cost
02Shipping
03Customs and duties
04Import taxes
05Inbound freight
06Warehousing
07Outbound shipping
08Marketplace and payment fees
09Ads
What’s left
Still yours This stop’s cut What’s left

04 What we build with you

Six parts, in order, around your brand

E-commerce is one workflow from A to Z. This is the full system around it, in order.

In this order · 01 → 06

Ideally, each part stacks on top of the other. It’s an oversimplification: nothing is perfect in business. It’s a guide.

  1. 01

    Foundation

    A place for information first: a product information management tool. Products, logistics, shipments, margin, competition, images and copy, all a few clicks away.

  2. 02

    Direction

    Who are we as a brand, what problem do we solve, what values do we represent, where do we want to get to. And: high volume and cheap, or small volume and expensive?

  3. 03

    People

    Functions, not people. What functions does your brand need on the platforms you sell on? Hire or outsource an expert per platform.

  4. 04

    Rhythm

    You look at the most important metrics, at least gross margin, contribution margin and MER. You analyze customer sentiment about your product and discuss any issues that came up last week.

  5. 05

    Process

    Repeatable processes, and the full workflow mapped from ordering the product to delivering it and getting the feedback.

  6. 06

    Data

    Customer acquisition cost, landed cost, marketing efficiency ratio, lifetime value, attribution. Tracked every week.

See the full 12 weeks →

The founder: “We’re a small team, so we don’t need that.”

There’s no way you can scale any e-commerce brand without repeatable processes.

Thomas Machura

05 One path for every reorder

From stock check to review, the same way every time

The founder, COO or head of revenue makes the call to reorder. Then the ops team handles the full reordering pipeline. A day without inventory is lost revenue. Suppliers and delays are where it usually breaks, so you have to be on top of it, with feedback loops that fix it as soon as possible.

  1. Inventory and cash.

    Inventory analysis against sales velocity, and a cash-flow forecast. Do we reorder?

  2. Feedback.

    Is there something we should change on the product?

  3. Order, and check the law.

    Has anything changed for customs, or whatever law applies to your product? Do we need to change the product, the packaging or the communication?

  4. Inbound.

    FBA or your own 3PL: make sure they have the capacity and a time frame to take the goods in. Crucial for Q4.

  5. Ads.

    Same ads or new ones? What does the data show?

  6. Customer.

    Is the experience the same when they get the product? Feedback, reviews.

06 The 12 weeks

Start any quarter but the fourth

  • 01About four hours a week, combining videos and live sessions.
  • 02Don’t start in Q4. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas come first.
  • 03For e-commerce, most of the value is in the process and data weeks.
  • 04You take the program yourself, or your right hand or best head of ops does, with you on board.

By week 12, your quarterly priorities are set, your weekly meeting is running and your weekly numbers are live. If they aren’t, we keep working with you, free, until they are.

The guarantee →

07 Fit

This is for you if

  • You founded and run your own e-commerce brand.
  • You’re doing more than $2 million, so something is working.
  • You have the product, and customers want to buy it.
  • Your team is up to 30 or 40 people.

It isn’t for you if

  • You don’t have the product yet, or you’re still testing market fit. Get a go-to-market strategist first.
  • You run the no-value-added kind of dropshipping: buy cheap from China, sell it in the US. Dropshipping can be worthwhile, but we’re looking for founders with their own product.
  • You’re a solo seller. It would be overkill.
  • You sell thousands of products. You might be too big for this program.

08 Questions

Questions owners ask

Will you help with go-to-market or product-market fit?

No, that’s not what we’re doing. We’re looking at the systems around your product and marketing strategy, so you should have those already.

Will you run our marketing or ads?

No. We’re not touching marketing, content, media buying or branding, and not product development: you’re the expert in your product. We look at the systems around them: the customer journey, the workflows, and the profitability of the product, from cost of goods to logistics, cash flow and platform profitability.

Is this only about logistics?

No, but logistics is a huge part of e-commerce. We look at how to analyse data, what metrics to watch and how to monitor the different parts of logistics.

I’m only doing Amazon FBA. Do I need this?

Yes. People think Amazon FBA is the whole business model, but it’s a marketplace, nothing more. It’s the biggest marketplace on earth, and an expensive one. You still need to understand your brand, where you’re going, how to manage the team, what numbers to look at and how to calculate your margin.

Do I have to remodel my whole business?

It depends on what you have already. If you’re doing more than $2 million, something is working, and we build on top of that. Once you have a better view of your business, you might decide some parts need to change.

Will you help us with the tech stack?

Yes. We look at the tools available, what can streamline workflows and processes, what can be automated and what AI agents we can build.

I don’t have time.

If you don’t have time in business, you might be spending it on things someone else could handle. We build the systems with you so you have time for what actually moves the needle.

How small is too small?

It’s more and more common. We’ve worked inside an e-commerce business doing over $15 million with a team of about ten. Daniel Priestley says it’s easier than ever to build a small, successful business, and that $1 to $5 million with a team of 10 is “totally, super possible.” But you still need the different functions in the business, and when you’re small you have to be lean and efficient. You have to think about everything you do from a systems perspective.

How long do you want to keep doing it this way?

With the system set up properly, it’s possible to spend your time on what you love, like designing the product. The scorecard takes about six minutes and shows which of the six parts is holding your business back.

Take the free scorecard Or join the waitlist →

Sources

  1. Marketplace Pulse, Amazon seller fees and advertising as a share of sales (2022 data, published 2023) — marketplacepulse.com
  2. Meta Platforms, Inc., Annual Report on Form 10-K for 2025 (average price per ad) — investor.atmeta.com
  3. National Retail Federation and Happy Returns, 2024 Consumer Returns in the Retail Industry — nrf.com
  4. Daniel Priestley on The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, “AI’s Seismic Shifts” (March 2026) — youtube.com