The Divergence Audit

Find out where your numbers stopped telling the truth.

Somewhere in your business, a number you rely on has drifted away from reality. A CAC that's counted wrong. A fulfillment cost your 3PL's invoices bury. Cohort revenue your forecast can't see. You're making decisions on it anyway, because nobody has gone into the raw data to check. I check.

Book the audit $6,500 fixed · two weeks · findings in writing
How it works

Three steps, two weeks.

Week 0 · Access

You open the data

Read access to your platform, ad accounts, 3PL invoices, your current model or forecast if one exists, and whatever your accountant produces. Setup takes your team an hour or two, then I disappear into it.

Week 1 · Teardown & forensics

I go in myself

I audit your model's assumptions line by line: CAC math, retention curves, contribution margins, unit economics. If you don't have a formal model, I reconstruct the one implied by your dashboards and decisions, and test that instead. Then I go where the assumptions came from: the raw exports, the cohort tables, the invoices.

Week 2 · Findings

You get the truth, in writing

A written report covering the two to four divergences that matter, what each one is costing you, and the corrected numbers you should be running the business on. We walk through it together on a call. The report is written so you can hand it to a partner, a board, or an investor without me in the room.

After: your call. There's no retainer attached and no pitch at the end. Most clients do ask me to stay on, because the findings usually open questions worth pursuing. That conversation happens if you start it.

What divergence looks like

Three brands, three findings.

The fulfillment costs that weren't

A brand believed shipping to Canada cost under $40 an order. Their 3PL's invoice structure buried the true figure, closer to $70, and Canada wasn't the only country affected. They were about to launch discounted international subscriptions on those numbers, which would have locked in a loss on every order. The audit caught it first.

The revenue the model couldn't see

A $12M apparel brand's weekly forecasts kept drifting from actuals, and their own CFO couldn't find the cause. In the raw cohort data I found customers acquired years earlier had grown to roughly 25% of revenue, invisible to the model. Retention targets sat too low, so the marketing team could underperform all year and still beat plan. The board had no idea.

The business healthier than its owner believed

A founder came to me convinced things were falling apart, under pressure from his board. The corrected projections said otherwise: a clear path to cash positive. He walked into his next board meeting with numbers he could defend. That company went from –$2.9M EBIT to cash positive. Read the full story →

Three different brands, three different divergences. The constant is that dashboards didn't catch any of them. Someone had to open the data.

What it costs

$6,500, fixed. Here's the honest math.

A brand doing $5M+ typically spends $40–80K a month on advertising alone. If your CAC is miscounted by 10%, or a fulfillment cost is understated by $10 an order, you're losing more than the audit costs every few weeks, indefinitely, without knowing it.

The audit is priced as a fraction of what one wrong number costs you per quarter. Not as a discount on a retainer, because it isn't one. It's a complete engagement with a beginning, an end, and a deliverable you keep.

What it's not: a free 30-minute "profit leak" call that exists to sell you a subscription. Two weeks inside your actual data, in writing, with my name on the findings.

Fit

Before you book, check the fit.

This works if

  • You're doing $5M+ in DTC or subscription revenue
  • There's a decision on the table: scaling spend, a new channel, a raise, an inventory bet, a board meeting
  • You have real transaction history and books in reasonable shape
  • You have a bookkeeper or accountant already. Keep them. I work alongside them, not instead of them.

Not for you if

  • You're pre-revenue or well under $5M. The price won't make sense yet, and I'd rather say so here than on a call.
  • You need accounting cleanup, catch-up bookkeeping, or audit coordination. Important work, not mine.
  • There's no decision riding on the numbers. Better numbers only matter if something changes when you see them.
FAQ

Questions founders actually ask.

What access do you need, and is it safe?

Read-only access to your commerce platform, ad accounts, and whatever reporting your accountant produces, plus your 3PL invoices as files. I sign an NDA before I see anything. Read-only means I can't change or break anything.

We already have Triple Whale / Northbeam / a dashboard stack. What will you find that they don't show?

Dashboards report what they're fed and mirror your own assumptions back at you. The divergences worth money live underneath: in how costs are invoiced, how cohorts actually behave, how attribution counts. Every example on this page came from a brand with dashboards.

Our accountant produces forecasts already. How is this different?

Your accountant reports what happened, and does it for far less than $6,500, as it should be. The audit answers a different question: whether the assumptions underneath your forecasts are still true. That's not their job. It's mine.

What if you don't find anything?

In practice there's always something; a model that matches reality everywhere would be a first. But if your numbers genuinely hold up, the report says so, and that's worth having: you get to scale with confidence instead of doubt. Either way you get the corrected baseline in writing.

Why isn't this free? Others offer free audits.

A free audit is a sales call wearing a costume. Its job is to find just enough to sell you a retainer. This is the opposite: a paid engagement with no retainer attached, which means the findings answer to you, not to my pipeline.

What happens after the audit?

Whatever you want. Some clients take the report and run. Most ask me to stay involved, monthly or per project. There's no obligation and no pitch; the report's final page maps what ongoing work would look like, and you decide if that conversation happens.

Can you do this for a brand under $5M?

Usually I'll say no, not because the work is different but because the economics are: at $2M, a $6,500 audit is a real cash decision, and the divergences I find are proportionally smaller. If you're close to the line and something specific is at stake, write to me and I'll tell you honestly whether it's worth it.

Book the audit

Two weeks from now, you could know.

Which number is wrong, what it's costing you, and what the corrected version says about your next move. Tell me what's on the table and I'll reply within one business day.

Prefer to talk first? Book a 20-minute call instead.