CFO Summit: Turning Your Marketing Calendar Into a Financial Forecast

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: Good morning everyone. We'll give uh, just a second before we get started here. Give everybody a chance to pile in. Um, before we dive into round two of this series on the CFO summit and planning, um, it's been cool to listen to a ton of planning content coming out lately as this time of year as we get past Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and into conversations about.

[00:00:25] 2026. Today we're gonna be going through really what is, I think, the most novel portion of our approach to this process. And something I'd say we've learned over many years, um, in attempting to build and plan, uh, e-commerce businesses. And the reality is there's such a novelty to this industry because of how little of the revenue, uh, is secured and how much of it is wholly dependent on.

[00:00:53] Actions that you decide to take in the future versus an extrapolation of the past, which there's a lot of businesses, um, in, in particular if you think about like software business models or even my business model on the service side where there's so much more committed, obligated revenue in the future that you can model and illustrate against.

[00:01:12] Simply that is very distinct from how most e-commerce businesses run. Now, obviously there are lots of businesses. That have subscription components to them, but even all of those are subject to, uh, a opportunity, opportunity for opt-out at any moment versus any sort of contract in a software or service world where there's secured, committed revenue in the future.

[00:01:36] And so what that means is that so much of the obligation and opportunity is predicated on an intimate integration between. The marketing function and the finance function, uh, in our world. So today we're gonna be really leaning in on this idea of how to turn your marketing calendar into a financial forecast.

[00:01:53] How the root process and why I believe that ultimately this exercise should always sit, uh, first and foremost in the marketing department because. When it comes to an e-commerce business, the future revenue is a choice based on a set of actions, way more than it is a model and extrapolation of the past.

[00:02:10] Uh, and so we're gonna talk a little bit about how to turn that into a qualit or a quantitative process instead of one that is strictly qualitative. Uh, you'll hear a lot, uh, a couple of good examples that I was listening to. Um, the last anecdote here before we get started, um, both I think the operators podcast today that came out is about planning and then I was listening to, uh, the SaaS Operators podcast, uh, no affiliation between the two there, but, uh, with the founder of an app called, I think it's like back in stock or something like that, and he was talking about the, the complexity of forecasting moments like unexpected.

[00:02:45] PR hits or things like that in the future, or, and, and Jason was talking this morning about the complexity of modeling. Spend aggregation curves and things like that. But these are all elements that I think as you, as you deal with this repetition of this process, they move from the idea of anomalous actions that can't be understood to No, no, no.

[00:03:05] The job is to understand them. And part of the benefit we bring to the table is that we get to see them across a lot of, um, different endpoints so we can begin to build bounds of possibility associated with qualitative, uh, measures. So we're gonna dive into that today. I'm gonna share my screen here. I think we're good to go and get started.

[00:03:23] I believe we've overcome any of the technical difficulties that existed last time. Um, and so we're ready to roll. We've got about an hour. I'm gonna go dive into a bunch of different elements, uh, for this and hopefully it is helpful to you whether you're a CFO sitting here, a founder sitting here, or even if you're in the marketing department, sitting here on the C FFO summit, which, uh, you'd have to be my kind of people to do so.

[00:03:46] But the idea is that we want to empower you guys to build continual bridges between these parts of the Depart organization for the sake of the future, for the sake of building better, predictable, profitable growth. So today, how to turn your marketing calendar into financial forecast and why revenue starts in the marketing calendar For all of these events, we wanna start by thinking our sponsors fulfill tax, cloud and charge flow, all of whom, um, are interested in continuing to contribute, contribute to this kind of content in the ecosystem.

[00:04:12] It's really helpful. Um, so check these guys out. Each of them, I think, are aligned to the mission that we have about helping brands build a more profitable future for themselves and are committed to serving our ecosystem by funding this kind of content and it matters. It really is helpful to all of us for somebody to be willing to put, uh.

[00:04:32] Their own monetary, ben or monetary cost behind educational content, it serves the industry well. And so we're grateful for these guys in the work that they're doing, both on the product side. Um, each of them, whether it's ERP, tax planning or subscriptions, uh, uh, each of them are serving our ecosystem well.

[00:04:48] So thank you to fulfill tax, cloud and charge flow. Um, okay. So the general thesis that I want to propose to continue to deeply embed into all of you is that when marketing and finance plan together, both sides win, is that there's a benefit to both the expectations that get created and, uh, the corresponding organizational function that occurs when these things don't happen in silos, disparate from one another, but they're a cohesive exercise.

[00:05:14] I'll give you a little story. We were inside having a meeting just this week. Our teams with. A nine figure business that, um, in sitting with the marketing folks, there was genuine disdain for the finance department. Um, in part because what they felt like was that they are subject to the expectations created by that group of people, independent, their input.

[00:05:37] And if, when I think about organizational burnout, um, you know, people think about burnout often through the lens of. Um, excessive work time, but what I've found in my 12 years of leading organization is that burnout occurs when people feel, um. That they're held to expectations that they don't have the authority to meet or that they didn't have participation in creating.

[00:05:59] And so they feel a sense of helplessness it despite whatever effort that they could do, that there was a, there was an expectation created that was disassociated from reality or disassociated from the underlying mechanics that were gonna drive it in a way that. It's really discouraging for a team. Um, and so if that's something that, uh, could potentially be present in your organization, I would root it out as fast as possible because you want these two sides feeling like they're heard, understood, and contributing to the vision of the future in a way that is really important for how it plays out.

[00:06:30] Um, now I, I empathize with CFOs. The reason we wanted to do this summit, speaking to you specifically, is because I don't think that a lot of times, um. There is content that's, it is coming from a marketing lens, speaking to you in a way that's about building relationship, that we care and understand the position that you're in and the obligations that you face, and seeing how we can help you in the exercise that is often given to you.

[00:06:55] So in many organizations, I see that the finance department, whether that's a CFO, VP of Finance Control, or whoever it might be, has the expectation of creating a forecast. Um, so that the burden sits with them to produce for the organization an accurate view of the potential future revenue. Um. But the problem that you face is that you may not actually have access or control over the core input of that forecast, which in my opinion is the marketing calendar, is the ability to decide what we are going to say.

[00:07:26] When is the primary determinant of when the revenue is realized and how much of it is realized, and whether things do or do not happen on the marketing calendar. Absolutely the, uh, core inputs whether or not that revenue realization is possible. And so to try to do a modeling exercise where you're just extrapolating out trends in conversion rate or traffic, or, um, CAC and spend in a spreadsheet independent to qualitative input of the marketing calendar, uh, is an impossible.

[00:07:55] Is the only thing is certain is that you will deviate wildly from the specificity of when the revenue will occur. You may be able to get to generally correct answers. Um. And the longer and more historical and consistent the patterns of your organization are, uh, the more likely that is true. But, uh, especially in the early days of a smaller, let's say in the five to $50 million range, or as a business that's perpetually doing novel things all the time that these things existing, independent one another is literally an impossibility.

[00:08:25] Um, and it's because our revenue is not software revenue. Um, I, I've interacted with a lot of financial leaders that come out of different organizations where they look at revenue growth as sort of a foregone conclusion, uh, based on historical patterns. So they'll just look at the cohorts of previous years and just assume future value of returning customer revenue or new customer revenue or media efficiency, and it's a trend-based analysis of the future.

[00:08:52] The problem with that analysis for e-commerce in particular is that literally your future revenue guarantee is zero. Zero. Um, Al I'm Frank, talk about this a lot, that just his business in particular, which is so driven by new customer revenue acquisition, if they don't go out next month and go mine a bunch of new customers through all sorts of initiatives, their revenue will just literally disappear.

[00:09:13] Uh, and that's the reality of a consumer product business. Uh, Tony Chopper, who's our VP of Media likes to use this phrase is that you don't own any customers. This idea of existing customers is that you have no guaranteed future relationship with anyone. Um, that's the reality of consumer product is next month.

[00:09:29] Whether they have previously bought from you or not, they have no obligation to the future, and so you have to go out and recreate that revenue all the time. 

[00:09:38] If you were to sort of like map your revenue, we talk a lot about this idea of four peaks theory building in moments that drive disproportionate value capture over time.

[00:09:46] But if you were to sort of plot, uh, and we do this in our, uh, tool stat list to help our customers begin to think about this, um, is to understand when did your revenue show up? What were the peaks? What were the drivers of those moments? What you'll notice is that there are, um. Obvious ways in which there is a causal relationship between some action and the realization of revenue.

[00:10:04] Now, there are some elements that are cultural that will sort of exist in your business, independent. Those actions, black Friday, Cyber Monday that we're coming out of, or holiday gifting for many businesses in illustration of that, where there's some. Externality that drives a persistent, uh, uh, increase in revenue that you could bank on every year, that you don't need a detailed marketing calendar to assert that Black Friday next year will be meaningful for your business.

[00:10:25] But it's all the in between. It's every other action that you take to the promotions you choose to run. The influencer campaigns, the product releases, everything that you plan to do is critically dependent, uh, is a, is a critical input to your future revenue. The reality is, is that the past is only like so much like the future in so much that you replicate the actions of the past.

[00:10:46] And I have yet to meet, uh, a business where their 2026 marketing calendar is a day for day replica of 2025. It just doesn't make sense that that would be the case. And there are very extreme versions of this. I'll give you an example of an extreme version. Uh, we work with Barstool Sports, um, and their calendar and their revenue is driven so much by cultural dependent actions.

[00:11:09] So when Scotty s Scheffler got arrested at the US Open in 2023, that actually created a giant revenue realization for them off the merch they created in support of that cultural moment. Well, as we go to Plan 2024, you can't plan Scotty Scheffler to be arrested. And if you forecast the revenue in some trend-based analysis of that path, you'll be wildly incorrect.

[00:11:30] Now, that's obviously an extreme example, but your business exists on some spectrum between that and Black Friday as the certainty that occurs. And think of Scotty Scheffler as the most uncertain thing that could occur. But all of the actions along the way are some version of certain or uncertain or planned or unplanned that you have to choose to recreate.

[00:11:48] If you don't actually have the timeline of literal product development to production to release date mapped into the flow of this revenue realization, then your forecast will be off. It'll be off at at uh, um, at best by timing and at worst by volume and likely by both volume and timing without a consideration for how those choices, those marketing moments, those campaigns you choose to launch, the Facebook campaigns you choose to release will be off.

[00:12:15] And then of course this has a, a dramatic effect on your spending power. So one of the things that we do with all of our businesses is we help them to build a spending power model that builds a relationship between the curve of spending and efficiency to help you identify your marginal frontier and answer this question that everybody loves to ask, which is, what should my budget be?

[00:12:33] In every given period of time and allows us to begin to ask questions about the seasonal impact on your spending curves. So if you think about the spending curve as a relationship, as you see here between volume and efficiency. So if efficiency is on the y axis and volume is on the x axis, you can see that there's a curve of degradation that illustrates, uh, that relationship over time that we help our businesses to model.

[00:12:56] And what you'll notice is that that curve, the slope of that curve, the rate of degradation is often directly connected. To the marketing moments that are deployed in that period of time, as well as the amount of creative that's launched, how many email promotions we're doing, all the surrounding actions affect the slope of that line.

[00:13:15] And so by modeling out the historical relationship, we can also begin to ask ourselves, what are the inputs that create that slope? What are the inputs that understand and underpin that action? And that's where, if I think about this bridge that I'm been building now for multiple years, another Popsicle stick in my bridge here is the marketing calendar.

[00:13:33] Just like contribution margin, I believe is the shared metric that unites these two departments. I think the marketing calendar needs to become, the way we think about building a forecast is actually through a calendar by which there are events and revenue intimately linked, qualitative and quantitatively all the time.

[00:13:48] There should be no forecast without the corresponding overlay of the actions Now. This idea is not something that exists in our data structure in almost any business I've ever seen, and this is, this is really where C'S database structure, I think differentiates itself from almost any of the marketing or the financial planning tools or data and analytics platforms that I have ever seen.

[00:14:10] This is unique to us in the way we think about how the qualitative actions that we take in the quantitative outcomes are connected to one another. And this is where I would start to encourage CFOs to step forward into understanding what I call the atomic units of growth. Uh, what are the atoms? What are the things that, as you insert them into your business, they produce an inflection point in the curve of revenue, in the curve of efficiency?

[00:14:33] What are the drivers and how do you think about a tool belt full of these atomic units of growth, such that if you want to alter the curve of the future, you want to improve your revenue, improve your contribution margin, improve your efficiency, you must begin with a causal input that generates that effect.

[00:14:48] And that starts by really beginning to think about quantitatively, how we analyze all of the actions we've taken in an organization and how they affect the future or the, the, the outcomes that we intend to generate in the future. So what does this actually look like? Um, I used to talk a lot about how, uh, I could understand the quality of an organization and think back like five years ago, back when Google Analytics was like the platform we all used to love.

[00:15:15] Um, I would get when we would sign a new client. I've been, I'd say one out of a hundred had an in-depth annotation. There was this feature in Google Analytics where you could literally like go into a graph and you can click and you could tag a note onto a date to illustrate what was happening that day.

[00:15:33] And sometimes I would open up a Google Analytics account and it would read like a beautiful narrative book like I was at the library and I could see the history of the business because they had annotated every day what they did. And this, to me, always stuck with me as. That is a business that understands itself, that they know why things happen.

[00:15:52] They have a retrospective, they reflect and they internalize that knowledge so that they can reach back to the past and pull out the effects that they generated, good inputs and apply them to the future. So I always wanted to do this, like, how could we annotate the past, uh, in a way that would allow us to begin to instantaneously understand this for brands, even if they hadn't done this exercise?

[00:16:14] And the reality is all those annotations exist in structural data form. Um. If I think about understanding the marketing moments of the past, they're contained in the subject lines of emails and the headlines of ads and the things that are launched. The budget changes, all the things you do, the changes to your website, any generative action that you take on your business contains metadata about what was contained in that moment.

[00:16:40] And so every time we start with a customer, we absorb that historical data in what we call the calendar report. Okay, so this is sort of a visual illustration of the idea that I'm talking about. We bring to life all of the historical actions that that overlaid your revenue in the past. And it looks like this.

[00:16:59] It shows up where I can see all of, in this case, this is a graph of contribution margin over time by day. You'll notice these little annotations here at the top that represent some action that occurred on that day. Was there an email sent? Was there a Facebook campaign launched? Was there some overarching marketing theme that generated the revenue for that day?

[00:17:23] That automated tagging of the past begins to set up for us a relationship between the effects of revenue and the corresponding action. We can start to build a map in the database between these things so that we know what kinds of actions drive, what kinds of outcomes. And so what this looks like, if you were to roll over, uh, any of these you'd see for November 9th, the contribution margin, uh, realized was $247,000.

[00:17:50] The goal for that day was 268. There was a Veteran's Day campaign on Fox and Friends, so we know that there was a moment, a TV moment that was created. There was an email that went out on 11 eight Veteran's Day Weekend reminder, and it went out to a specific subset of the list, another one, weekend three message from the CEO, how much revenue each of those emails generated, and I can roll over every day in the entire history of the marketing calendar and see what was done that day that created that revenue.

[00:18:20] See most businesses, it's like, oh, I can see your, I can open Shopify. I can see how much revenue you did on November 3rd that day. And then I've gotta go open Klaviyo and I've gotta see like, oh, okay, did I send a email? What was it? How much of it was new in returning? No, no, no. We bring that to life here by tying in the calendar events in into the revenue.

[00:18:39] Okay. And what that does now, if we think about this now from more of a database structure standpoint. We look at all of these historical actions. So for this business jogger, flash Sale, Cyber Monday, black Friday, veterans Day, 25% off flash sale. Every moment that exists on their calendar. And we tag them into a specific type of action, a promotion, a product launch, a site-wide sale, black Friday, Cyber Monday, seasonal events, product launches.

[00:19:05] We even go so far as to allow for like. This designation that I hear a lot in organizations, this is a tier A product launch. This is a Tier B product launch. This is a tier C product launch. And usually those are things that we use to to, to categorize the kinds of, how much creative are we gonna make? Is it gonna go out site wide and organic social and paid social?

[00:19:22] It sort of surrounds the actions that we're gonna take, but the more important question is what is the effect of that type of marketing moment on my revenue? And so you can see. On that day, what happened to new revenue? What happened to returning revenue? What was the relationship between new and revenue?

[00:19:39] What was the expected returning? What was a, what was the efficiency of my media? What was the actual, uh, the expected efficiency on media? So we begin to understand is when we do this moment, what happens? Do we drive more new customer revenue? Do we drive more existing customer revenue? Is it, what is the effect on the efficiency of acquisition?

[00:19:58] So that you begin to build, think about every one of these types of moments, then have a corresponding set of plotted outcomes relative to them. So the same way we think about spend in a MER models, spend a MER models are a, a, a map of every month, spend in efficiency, every month, spend in efficiency over the history of the brand, such that you begin to build these relationships between the actions and their expected value to you as a business.

[00:20:26] Then these categorized actions. Okay? All high spend events, Christmas shipping, cutoff days, product launches, boxing days, promotions, clearance sales, sitewide Sales, VIP drops, PR moments, seasonal events. We have a database of all of them across hundreds of brands. So where we can look at the individual effects of those actions in your business versus the categorical effects across all businesses.

[00:20:50] And we can look at, all right, what are the confidence intervals of the effect of different improvements. So what is the impact on A MER? What is the recommended effect on returning customer revenue? What is, what would be the average? What is the median result? What is the bounds of possibility that are created from these different kinds of actions?

[00:21:07] What we're now doing is we're building these atomic units of growth that you can pull back from the past and apply now into the future with some effect on the revenue curve, with some effect on the spend in A MER degradation of efficiency. That if you have a plan that is yielding a result that you don't like, the solution is not to edit your spreadsheet.

[00:21:28] The solution is not to just take a OV up a few dollars. The solution is not to just reduce CAC in the spreadsheet a little bit until it gets to the output you want. You are forced to deal with the reality that the effect that you desire is connected to an action you must take. The effect that you desire is connected to an action you must take.

[00:21:48] That's a bar right there. Think about that as how you plan and how you begin to build a tool chest of these kinds of actions in your system. So then when we go to build the future, so this is now what it looks like in our tool for us to build the future is you have a transformation capsule launch, a Savage one camel launch Christmas day, and we have an expected effect.

[00:22:11] And so you can, you can adjust the expected effect. Now this is where again, we still believe that there's a very important human qualitative process here, by which the model is a excellent starting point that helps the you to understand the bounds of possibility. And then someone can come in and say, okay, no, no, no.

[00:22:30] This capsule launch is gonna be even bigger. This Christmas day. We have this thing happening that, and it's going to overperform, it's gonna go one standard deviation above the mean. It's gonna minimally underperform the expectation. And so it allows a human to have tools to affect the data of the daily expectation of the future, of those actions.

[00:22:51] So you aren't just reaching out and doing this thing where you're like, well, we're gonna launch product X and we just, we think it'll be good. What does good mean? Well, you have bounds now you have expectations of the past that help you to categorize these things. And so what this does, I'm gonna jump now into stat list to give you sort of a visual illustration of the actual tooling that underpins this as I go to build the calendar.

[00:23:18] What I'm given then is an entire year's worth of historical action. So you can see everything that we did in December. Every Cyber Monday event, site-wide sale. I can see what happened last year in that day, and I have an option then as I go to build January, 2026 if I'm in the planning process, right? I have AI recommendations.

[00:23:42] So one, one thing that can begin to happen is our system can now begin to recommend actions. They can recommend emails that you should send on different days, what audience it should be sent to, what product it should focus on. January kickoff, men's Flex Recon jeans, and women's fleece leggings. Email.

[00:23:59] That's a recommendation. Then you can one click, add it to the calendar, or you can build your own marketing moment. You want to add an SMS, you wanna build a marketing event, you want to add an email? You can begin to enter the event name. Let's call New Year, new you target audiences. Um, let's call it, uh, existing VIP Oh, let's, let's just say we're gonna do a VIP customer promotion.

[00:24:23] And then the product type is gonna be, uh, we'll do all and it runs for a day. Boom. Now this is gonna show up on my email calendar, and it's gonna actually have an expectation of revenue associated with it. And I can build out every day this way. And this is our expectation, but our profit engineers do in coordination with our retention team or the customers, is they integrate every marketing, send, every SMS, send every thing that we're going to be saying on the website so that it's mapped into the calendar so that a qualitative effect becomes part of the data set.

[00:24:53] And then what that allows it to do is, as I save these changes. As I begin that reality, then what I can do is now as I go to build the day-to-day expectation of my revenue, you'll see that I have the event contribution margin goal, total revenue expectation, returning revenue, new customer, A MER, total spend, channel level, spend every single day and every dollar, and I can see them right next to each other.

[00:25:17] So I know that the flow is mapped. From a channel level, from an event effect, from new and returning, and I can see and adjust in real time before my daily plan is set. So everyone in your organization from the finance department who has an overall revenue goal, and you can see we have for December, we have 29 events.

[00:25:35] We're trying to generate $1.1 million in contribution margin, total revenue of 6.2, returning revenue of 2.9, new revenue, A MER, total spend, channel level spend. And then each of those get broken down into the daily expectation that we can see directly next to the marketing calendar. Now we can go forward and execute together.

[00:25:53] Now we have a plan that we know brings together both all of the actions that we're gonna take as an organization, their intended effect, and then the overall result that ladders up to the goal that you as the CFO know and wants. So this is how you turn the idea of a forecast, a plan into a day-to-day set of actions that every person on the team knows their role to play in it.

[00:26:14] Whoever's managing Facebook knows what they need to do every single day in this plan. They know how it relates to the overall impact on the organization. Your head of growth, your CFO knows what to expect each day. You can flow this into a 13 week cashflow forecast with immense accuracy. Excuse me. And the end result is now at a macro view.

[00:26:37] You all get to log in every day and see where are we relative to where we intended to go. Where are we at relative to the expectation? Across 35 different metrics in status, we can see from contribution margin to discounted sales, ad spend, any RAOV orders every single day where we at relative to where we intended to go.

[00:26:55] This is really the key is that the most important thing to remember, and you're gonna hear me saying this until I'm blue in the face in this process, is that we're not trying to make predictions here. This isn't poly market. We're not trying to win some game about guessing the future. The process of forecasting and financial planning is about setting expectation for what needs to happen to reach our goals.

[00:27:20] This is about designing an execution function. Not a game where I write down a number and I sit back and watch for 30 days and hope that I guessed correctly. And CFOs, sometimes that's my experience of your forecasting process is that you are playing guess the m and ms in a jar and waiting to see what will occur.

[00:27:41] Instead, we need to, uh, culturally and institutionally alter the way that we approach this effort is that we are building a day to day way of working together for the sake of achieving this outcome. Execution or great forecasting is an exercise in execution, not in modeling. And let me show you how our team does this and why I think we're better at forecasting than anyone else in the world is because we manage the execution of that forecast.

[00:28:09] And when we are off course, we course correct to uh, to examples. On the left, Lacey, one of our best profit engineers here at CTC, uh, is giving an example about how in an individual day, so on big days, we actually take this exact same exercise and we break it down into an hourly expectation. And you'll see here she says, persistent pays off.

[00:28:30] Brand X was behind target by 30% at 1:00 PM Eastern yesterday due to slow spend volume and lackluster email performance. 'cause here's the reality. Whatever you think was going to occur on every one of those individual atomic units of growth is not what will actually occur. The only certainty is you'll be wrong by some magnitude and some volume in some direction, but it is the clarity of that miss.

[00:28:56] It's the revelation of the gap that allows you to assert yourself into it to solve it. So here she says. We adjusted segmentation and sends in the evening coupled with launching five more meta, highest volume campaigns to triple spend pacing in the evening hours. Watch them very closely to land at our updated model, locked forecast, and within 6% of our scale scenario forecast for the day.

[00:29:24] Stay persistent with your teams through the weekend. Okay, and, and if I could just give you anything about if you struggle with forecasting as an organization or if you've been off course by any magnitude in the past. This is the problem is that it is the accountability to say we will act in the way that we committed to acting for the sake of generating that outcome.

[00:29:48] That is the behavioral principle that underpins great predictable forecasting as an organization. It's to say that. How many emails you will send, how many campaigns you will launch is not a fixed number. It is a mechanism to generate an outcome that you've committed to delivering and that your job is to do whatever it takes to get there.

[00:30:09] And that organizationally, when we say we're going to do something, we do it and we don't stop until we've realized that. And if we fail, we reflect and we learn from the gap and we reconcile and improve against the future. Why were we off about those emails? What were we wrong about? Why was spend slower than we thought?

[00:30:26] How do we make that adjustment in the future so that we avoid it and learn and go again? But this is why a profit engineer, a human, must sit at the center of the system and they must move everyone with force and energy every day to towards the outcome. This is not about having a great guess at the beginning of the month and sitting back and watching it will not work, and this is why there isn't no software that can actually solve this problem for you.

[00:30:49] There is no way to improve your forecasting with software alone because it is the energy of the gap of how the gap is minded, how you reconcile and close those missed expectations that determine whether or not you get to where you are trying to go. I'll give you another example here on the right. This is for a brand and it illustrates Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the most important moments of the year.

[00:31:14] As you can see, a lot of great days, a lot of green days exceeding target leading up to that moment. The week of the sale starts, I believe that's a Monday, pretty close to target, but then we get to Black Friday and there is a major miss. The promotion that we intended to launch on that Friday did not work.

[00:31:33] It was soft. The response was not as we intended. We were incorrect about our expectations of the future, as you will be all the time. All the time. The question is what do you do in response? And so you can see that the team regrouped Saturday got kicked in the teeth again, and by Sunday we had redesigned the entire offer, completely changed the website, every email, every meta ad, and we were able to close an immense gap.

[00:32:01] Hundreds of thousands of dollars of unrealized loss from the previous two days were made up on a Sunday, Sunday on Black Friday weekend became bigger than Black Friday itself. Because the job to be done was, well, we missed Black Friday. It's not just, oh, well it's, we committed to doing this. How do we go out and improve against the outcome?

[00:32:21] And it's the clarity of the, uh, of the delta that has to be solved. That becomes the superpower. Our team and really what, what we designed this idea, this role of a profit engineer is a human being that sits at the center of all this data system, all the technology enablement, and they press with the persistence of Frank Sluman at Snowflake.

[00:32:40] If you know who he is and the way he talks about managing his organization, this is the energy that we apply to show up and go, we are off course. We must quote, correct. Right now. There is no time to wait. We must resolve the gap. What actions can we take? What must we do to get back on course? So for you as a CFO who don't necessarily have control of these inputs, what do you have to gain from this process?

[00:33:04] Well, the key is we want to build you predictable cash flow. I know that the core job of CFO, my, my, uh, head of finance and I meet every day to review our cash flow forecast. What payments are we gonna make? When, what ar do we have coming in? What is the in and out flow of cash? This gets you down to a daily expectation of contribution, margin spend, and revenue every day, that you can flow and build the management of your precious resource into the most real-time visibility possible.

[00:33:33] You'll end up with daily targets across revenue, contribution, and marketing channel performance, 35 different metrics every day with an expectation handled and owned by an individual. So you have an organizational way to attach each person in your organization to a key KPI that ladders up to the overall organizational impact.

[00:33:49] Then you get to learn the impact of each marketing action, and you can adjust in real time, and you begin to understand the value of actions over time. You know what drives the effects, what happens every time you launch a new Facebook campaign? What happens every time you send an email? What happens every time you go live on YouTube or CTV or whatever it may be?

[00:34:09] What happens? What is the effect so that as you reach back into the past and apply it to the future, you can have some sense of the expected effect. So if you wanna see your next 12 months, clearly start in the marketing calendar. Begin with a deep understanding of all of the actions, and I would even start by going back as far as you can take whatever marketing calendar has existed and a very simplest basis.

[00:34:35] You could do this by just starting to write down what email did we send every day? Get the email calendar overlaid with the marketing calendar. Then go to the Facebook campaign launch. You can export your order history or your, uh, edit history in meta pretty easily. Look at your amount of spend. Were there any big pr moments that happened?

[00:34:50] Were there any influencer posts? Were there any anomalies that occurred that you can begin to write the story of your business or simply connect the that list and we can do that for you? Remember, and this is the organizational cultural disposition that I would encourage you and your people to adopt.

[00:35:06] Forecasting is more of an exercise in execution than in planning. The planning is simply the road that we get to walk on together. I want you to think about this more like you're driving in Google Maps. There's an end destination, but you are inevitably gonna end up off course or traffic's gonna show up, or something's going to cause you to have to adjust in real time to reach that destination.

[00:35:28] The destination doesn't change. We have a goal together. We have some financial reality that we want to create in the future, but the mechanism by which we get there will most certainly change. It'll change every day. It'll change in some small magnitudes and some large, based on some inevitabilities about the unknown future that is coming.

[00:35:45] About how quickly you can see it and how fast you can course correct will determine the likelihood of reaching that destination. So if you want this modeling done for you, the event effect model, spend an A-M-E-M-R model retention curves, building your marketing calendar directly as an overlay on top of your data.

[00:36:02] And you want the execution done with you. That profit engineer is sitting there and whip everyone along the way to drive them towards the expectation, whether it's us on the execution side, your team on the execution side, a separate agency. On the execution side, we sit in the middle and ride the revenue.

[00:36:16] Our job every day is where are we? What happened? Where are we at relative to expectation? What are we gonna do about it? How are we gonna course correct every single day to drive towards the expected, desired outcome that you have as an organization? Every dollar tracked down to every campaign. I didn't even get into the level of detail that we go into showing what's happening at the individual channel level where every Facebook dollar.

[00:36:37] Every, uh, campaign has an expectation of revenue and performance every single day, so that every media buyer, every email strategist, every person on your team knows their role to play in the process. So, um, that's how I think about this. I know we aren't at a full hour here. I wanna see if there are any questions, um, or anything that comes up.

[00:36:58] I'm happy to interact, uh, with any, I'm gonna do a few here. Um, and we'll go from there. So it says. Is this approach only applicable to B two CAA or A-K-A-C-P-G or e-commerce products? Um, no. This is the exact same process. We at CTC Run. Um, people will joke, um, that, uh, my nervous system is connected to what we call our, uh, sandbox here at CTC.

[00:37:28] It is our real time view of the p and l that is connected to all of our own actions as well. And so I would encourage any business to operate this like this. What I'll say that is unique about e-commerce and CPG is that it's uniquely challenging because there is no committed future revenue. It is more true that your future revenue is intimately integrated into your marketing calendar than it is for me because so much of my revenue is a fixed contract that is guaranteed next month no matter what I do.

[00:37:54] Um. So those are big distinctions. So it is more true I think in e-commerce and CPG than other businesses, especially those that are D two C. As you get into retail, this becomes less volatile in that way, in the sense that there are committed revenues that move on different timescales. But when you run a.com business where your revenue tomorrow is generated by the actions that you take almost exclusively than this has to be the center of point, uh, the tool is stat, it is at the center, um, of our.

[00:38:21] Um, at, at our platform, STA list would sit to the center of CTC service offering. It's not a publicly available SaaS. We are not a SaaS business. It's really important because I believe if you go back to this again, I just told you and I believe wholeheartedly that we are not, uh, that this is not a process that can be executed with software.

[00:38:39] The magic is the profit engineer that sits at the center of it. Puts themselves accountable for telling you the outcome, making all those adjustments, building the marketing calendar, understanding the effects of the intended actions, understanding your inventory positions, understanding what's possible, and then every day is writing our team or your team to move actions towards the outcome.

[00:38:59] That's the magic. The conductor of the train. Uh, the train is useless without the conductor, without someone to drive it towards its destination. Uh, and so it's the combination of the tooling and the people that matter. Um, so I'm not seeing the calendar ad plan items in my status menu. Uh, Todd follow up directly, I can show you.

[00:39:16] Some of this is, um, is, uh, newer stuff that's only available in specific instances. Do you run this playbook with D two C brands who are in heavy drop model? Yes. I think that, um, drops tend to be one of the hardest. Uh, things to forecast for brands, especially as it relates to thinking about how the media spend affects those drops and how to build the plans and expectations of the velocity of them over time.

[00:39:42] Um, it is one where you are going to have, uh. Error bars that are going to be wider. 'cause the drop effects tend to have a lot to do with the sort of product market fit at any given moment in time. The quality of the person, maybe that's driving the distribution, but absolutely. I see so often people with like hard to forecast businesses, like drop models just give up.

[00:40:02] What I'll say is true is that you will get better at this over time as you begin to build the data set. So the more drops you have, the tighter the range of potential outcomes becomes, the more clear you can see the focus over time, and you widen your gap between the competition and your capacity to be operationally effective.

[00:40:18] So I would say that you should expect that early on. It'll be challenging as the data sort of builds itself over time. It's no different than really like the process of running incrementality tests over time. Um, any business that runs, runs like one incrementality test, the value and impact of that individual single test is gonna be fairly small.

[00:40:36] But if a brand commits to an always on, uh, testing roadmap, the quality of truth that they operate with will improve over time dramatically. And they'll distance themselves from the cost their competition with the clarity of their knowledge. Um, what's the best way to organize a 12 month marketing calendar?

[00:40:52] I feel like we have individual calendars for email, product development and launches. Social post? No, the, the, so this is the key. I, I would, um, I would put it all in one place. Um, and the key is to bring together, the real key here is like, uh, to think about the, the finance, the revenue, and the calendar living together.

[00:41:14] Um, and this is where marketing and finance. They, we build separate things is that I would tie together the idea that there is the qualitative, all the actions that you're taking, and then the revenue expectation for those periods of time all the way down to the daily level. And 'cause what it'll force you to ask ourselves is, why do we think this revenue is gonna be this on this day when there's no email or no action?

[00:41:34] It's amazing how often I see brands that are like, oh yeah, this is our revenue expectation. It's like, oh, but you have no email plan on that day, so how are you gonna get to this revenue number? There's, there's no, there's literally no bridge. Between the actions you're taking, the units of growth and the revenue expectation.

[00:41:49] So, um, I would, uh, I would think primarily about to the actions that are going to have the most dramatic effect on revenue, uh, as being, needing to live there. So the spreadsheets are like uniquely built for this in a way that you think about sort of the, the, um, the y access of a spreadsheet just being date.

[00:42:08] Um, and then you have lots of columns for, you could have, uh, either do it where you go, um, channel, so it's like website, email, et cetera. And you can live it all sort of, uh, verticalized in the columns that way and the rows of the dates. Um, and then revenue becomes one of the columns. So think about it, if you had your email calendar, your social calendar, your product release schedule as, uh, columns A, B, and C, and then row D became.

[00:42:35] Revenue, new customer revenue, returning customer revenue. A lot like this, like, so let me, let me go back to sort of the illustration of the calendar report, right? Like I think about, you want it to look like this, right? Where, um, this over here is dailies. You have your marketing actions, and so we, because it's software we can use like iconography to illustrate this.

[00:42:57] But imagine that you just have columns here for. Email moment, et cetera, and then you have all of your revenue next to it. This is what, when we used to build this in a spreadsheet, that's what it would look like, is that the first set of things is you have your date, you have all the marketing actions, and then you have all the expectations of efficacy there.

[00:43:14] Um, or anonymous attendee, just hire us. This is why we built this tooling for you. Um, I'm curious how CDC enables internal external tools to enable instant decision making that can turn around revenue pacing versus forecast. For example, sending more emails. Does it always equal more revenue? Yes, it does.

[00:43:29] Uh, how do you change your entire website around when all your ads are built around the plan that took weeks, et cetera, to build? So. One of the things I'll say is that I, I've, I've actually never, it's very rare for an email to generate $0 of value. It may not generate very much incremental revenue, but it almost always will generate more, especially if you're thoughtful about the send and the message.

[00:43:46] But, um, but in addition to that, there, there's a narrative here that I would just, I would say is, is not the rhythm of e-commerce. So you just said how do you change your entire website around when all your ads are built around the planet? It took weeks, et cetera, to build out the campaign. Um, this is not a week's building business.

[00:44:02] It's just not, it's a, because the second that doesn't work. You have to have a backup plan. The other thing that I'll say is that, um, what this process begins to teach you is that when you try and solve that problem, divas, what you learn is that you need to plan to fail. Um, is that you, you begin to understand that your expectations are unlikely to be correct.

[00:44:22] That's like a really important attribute to being great at this, is that you, you lose hubris, you gain humility of planning, which is to say that I am likely to be wrong. So in the event that I'm wrong, what will I do? And that becomes part of the plan. And so like you may have heard me talk about the idea of like, uh, uh, the backup promotion, which is to say like every month you have a plan.

[00:44:44] That might not involve having to discount at all or run anything. And the goal is to go out that month and deliver the expectation as desired. But if you get to the last week of the month and you're off course, well then we may need to pull the shoot and execute a backup plan that we didn't initially have to do or want to.

[00:45:00] Um, so there are so many different actions, right? Like, so if we think about the core units of growth, they're launch new ads. So that's, that's one action. Send new emails. Run new promotions, uh, through organic social, uh, other distribution access points. Like those are the atomic units of growth. The reality is like if you want more money in e-commerce, you have to say, take a message, uh, with a call to action and distribute it.

[00:45:25] That's like the only way to do it, right? So that can happen through organic social, it can happen through paid social, it can happen through, uh, email. It can happen through SMS wherever you own distribution and audience. That's the only mechanism is to take a unit, a little object, a digital object, and distribute it that goes out and calls revenue.

[00:45:44] Um, so your only action you can take when you have revenue missing is revenue's not just gonna show up from nowhere, right? Like if you go through the old Google Analytics channel breakdown, it's like organic search, organic social, paid search, paid social, direct email, uh, referral. Like money has to come from one of those places.

[00:46:02] So what causal actions affect revenue in each of those places. Those are your choices. Um, and you can only do those things if you want more revenue today or this week. Um, so Paul, uh, again, uh, there is no, uh, there is no, uh, availability for the platform. It's not, I'm not selling you software here. I wanna be very clear.

[00:46:23] I'm selling you guys a service. I think that the magic is our people. Like if I go back to the Lacey example, I'm just telling you that it is absolutely a fact that the organizational disposition, dis disposition of having someone show up every day. I promise you, you probably don't have that behavior internally ingrained in your people.

[00:46:42] Uh, and so it is, it is, it is imperative that you have a person showing up to ride that revenue and drive the actions and understand the inputs. And so this is like. The profit engineer is the magic. It's the human at the center of the technology. That is what we're offering. We're not offering you a, a software.

[00:47:00] So love the software CTC provides. Is it possible for more s and b agency any way to get ahold of the software? We build an in-house profit engineer. Again, uh, appreciate all of you, but this is what we've done is we've created CTCs advantage in the marketplace to deliver this methodology. 'cause if you think about the combination of things that have to exist here.

[00:47:19] There's an underpinning ideology and methodology that is 12 years of us trying to solve this problem that exists. Then there's a technology layer that brings that to life, and then there's a human execution layer. And so all of that is what makes this possible is you have to have ideology about how e-commerce businesses should run.

[00:47:36] What are the core inputs to track how you do the modeling? Then there's technology that enables it, and then there's a human bubble of execution. So it can't be replicated elsewhere, right? You just can't. It's not, it's not. You would have to create your own version of each of those things, uh, in order to bring it to life.

[00:47:50] Um. So fractional CFOs, that's a great question. We love to work with you as a group of people because we feel like we can help you build more confidence in this relationship. And so we have a part of our work that is called Building a Profit System, which is to build you this financial forecast that we can partner together to do that delivery work.

[00:48:09] Um, so reach out to us. Um. On our website and we can talk about the best referral relationships. We have a lot of financial referral partners that it's just we want to help you do better work, build more confidence in your organization, bring together those parts of your org. And again, we don't. Be if, if your organization has an agency that handles execution, not a problem.

[00:48:30] Like we prefer to handle the execution because we wanna be as accountable as we can to the outcome. But there's many relationships where we sit in sort of a hub and spoke style model where our profit engineer manages all the vendors and sits as a relational bridge between those parts of the organization and your finance team to help deliver these outcomes and ensure you're getting where you need to go.

[00:48:50] Um, we also will do work. Right now we have a. Uh, a service that we call Bud, uh, board Budget Bonus, where we're just delivering a three, uh, scenario planned financial forecast for 2026. We recognize that that's part of this year. So if you wanna see a 50th, 75th and 25th percentile, uh, expectation of your revenue based on what is presently true, happy to do that.

[00:49:09] Um. What is the difference for you between forecasting and target setting? If you, uh, if you set stylists to go over the model, does this not shift from forecasting to targets? Yes, you're exactly right Michael. And if you were here at the first webinar, I would encourage you to go back and watch the e-comm CFO Summit episode one, where we talk about the distinction between the three scenarios that I talk about, which is board budget bonus.

[00:49:29] So you're calling them forecast and target. So when I think about, um, forecasting is an exercise in probability. Uh, none of it is about certainty. It's about a distribution of what is likely to occur on a probabilistic spectrum. So when I think about the job of building a, a forecast, like I do this for my organization, we have a board.

[00:49:47] Uh, the number that I show the board is a higher probability outcome than the number that I use as the target for the bonuses of my executives. Those are different plans I would call those bonus and board, right? And in between those is what I usually like to do is the 50th percentile outcome is my cashflow projection.

[00:50:04] I call that my budget. That's me and my CFO. It's what we think is going to occur. We plan our cash against that board. I like to even go a little bit below that. I think about the board presentation or if you have a bank partner. The bank presentation is the lowest acceptable number. It's the lowest acceptable number that could exist.

[00:50:20] Um, so that is, that is how I think about that distinction, uh, uh, is that you want to build, uh, a probabilistic set of outcomes and you want to stretch for bonuses. Like if you're gonna bonus your team or set targets, you want your team to stretch out beyond what is likely to occur to something that they have to strategically solve new novel problems in order to reach.

[00:50:40] So when we set the spend and a model to above model. That should be a signal is that there's something that we need to change in order to get there. The present set of actions isn't likely to yield this result. We have to go do better creative more moments, create some deeper product release, et cetera.

[00:50:55] My agency has many fractional CFOs, so in that sense they can use this. Would our CFOs be working with your profit engineers? Uh, even in the execution is down through the agency. Yeah, that's right Jason, now. Um, we do offer currently a product that is just a project of building the forecast and giving it to you.

[00:51:11] Um, we don't think that's the best use of this. I don't think it's the way to do it, but what it often is used for is sort of to red team your own expectations of like, Hey, we have a forecast. Do we believe that this is the right number? Get a third party point of view, et cetera, et cetera. Um. So I've gotten a few takeaways from this, so thank you per my previous question.

[00:51:28] In my experience with our business, most intraday actions can take, have a lot of diminishing returns or camp incident in time. Um, so I, yeah, like the bounds of possible change that you can make on any narrow period of time, um, is different relative to individual days. So in other words, black Friday has.

[00:51:50] More potential change in outcome than other days, whereas on a given random Tuesday. So if we look at like on this visual here, October 23rd, if I wanna go in and try and just increase budgets, you're absolutely right that there is a diminishing return curve in every campaign, in every moment. Now you wanna make sure that you're maximizing that in every possible way every day.

[00:52:11] You're right that there is not it every day like a totally elastic set of possibilities. And that's, that's for sure true. Um, so I don't wanna represent that every day has infinite possibilities like it does in the sense that you could take an infinite number of actions in theory, but you have to build a system to be able to launch.

[00:52:30] New ads fast or to spin up new ideas or to come up with, uh, changes in promotion or et cetera. And you have to build a culture that like, sort of embraces that level of, um, flexibility in a system that does so. So there certainly is limitation on any given day, but you can begin to build a muscle where you'll see more possibility.

[00:52:50] Um, so yeah. Uh, Jason, this will be sent out as a recording. I'd be happy to chat with you all, uh, and, and, and see if there's ways that we could work together. Fractional CFOs, again, uh, especially fractional folks, often it's very hard for them to get intimately connected to organizations. And here's the truth.

[00:53:07] 98% of organizations, and this is absolutely true, do not have a daily marketing calendar that goes out beyond a week, two weeks, three weeks. I'd say like 50% of people might have the key product releases that they have planned next year. 20% have a full email calendar out one month. And literally of the 200 customers we have, one of them, one out of 200 has a one year daily marketing calendar of every action that they're going to send when they come to us.

[00:53:36] Like it is an wildly underdeveloped part of every organization that we interact with is how much planning they have down and how intimately that interacts with, uh, the, the financial planning process. And it, and it's mind boggling to me. It's why I think people are so bad at forecasting ultimately is because there's just no actual, uh, relationship between how we're going to get there and what the numbers end up being.

[00:54:03] Um. So 10 56, 4 minutes early. I appreciate all of you that stuck around for, uh, that level of depth on a nerdy topic that I love. Um, we'd love your feedback on these e-comm CFO summits. We're trying to bridge this world more. There's not a lot of content out there that speaks specifically on this area, and it's, uh, who we're trying to be in the world.

[00:54:23] So we appreciate you coming. Uh, we're gonna keep building tooling for this. We have so much cool stuff, uh, that's yet to come in this arena. So we appreciate all of you and. Thanks for coming by, and thank you again to fulfill charge flow and tax cloud for, uh, helping make this possible.