What a Profit Engineer Actually Does All Day

[00:00:00] Brian: And that is what then turns into a daily exercise. And so, you know, a very, a very typical day as we proceed through the rest of the week is, you know, we log on first thing in the morning. We're triaging everything that's happening at the individual business level, looking at how each day is going against plan.

[00:00:20] Did we meet our expectations? Do we exceed them? Why? Do we miss them? Why? And then again, taking daily action against all those different things. And this is just a rhythm that each profit engineer has as we proceed through the rest of the week.

[00:00:36] Richard: Hey, folks. Welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffan, director of digital product strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined today by a very special guest. Now, I don't know if, Brian, if we've had you on the pod before. Have we?

[00:00:49] Brian: We, I've been on here a couple of times, Richard.

[00:00:51] Richard: on a couple of times? Okay,

[00:00:52] I'm sorry.

[00:00:52] That's my bad, folks. So Brian has been on with us before. Brian's our profit engineer manager here at Common Thread Collective, which means he's kind of over the operations and generally the sort of like execution of our profit engine service and our specific profit engineers. Now we've talked ad nauseam on this podcast about what the profit engine is, so I won't kind of belabor that point.

[00:01:13] But we want to talk about with him today is what the sort of day-to-day, let's say the day, week, and monthly cadence of being a profit engineer looks like. And we're gonna be sharing something publicly that'll kind of be... Well, at the very least will be in the show notes of this podcast which is a document just breaking down actually what the day, week, and month looks like.

[00:01:34] So I will be kind of referencing that occasionally. That includes an hour-by-hour breakdown even of what the day in the life of what one of our profit engineers looks like. We won't get that specific or granular with the details, but primarily what I wanna do today is just talk to Brian a little bit about the overall kind of reasoning behind this and the experience of actually getting in there and doing it.

[00:01:54] So, let's kick off, Brian, maybe having you tell us a little bit about... Just give, give us a, a brief overview of what the cadence looks like maybe starting from like a weekly basis.

[00:02:06] Brian: Yeah, for sure. So I mean, the, the week is you know, a composition of, I would say, in-the-trenches work and strategic work. And so, you know, that is a mix of a few different things. And so starting from the top right, we're, we're kicking off the week looking at how are we pacing to our plan, and that plan is deconstructed into a number of different metrics that we're tracking at the business level, as well as against each media platform for each particular business that we're working on.

[00:02:39] And we're looking at how each of the channels and how all metrics are trending against the plan that we have for that month, and then what are the actions that we're going to take for the proceeding week in order to either get ahead of the course that we're on or get back on track to the course that we set out for ourselves.

[00:02:58] And that is what then turns into a daily exercise. And so, you know, a very, a very typical day as we proceed through the rest of the week is, you know, we log on first thing in the morning. We're triaging everything that's happening at the individual business level, looking at how each day is going against plan.

[00:03:18] Did we meet our expectations? Do we exceed them? Why? Do we miss them? Why? And then again, taking daily action against all those different things. And this is just a rhythm that each profit engineer has as we proceed through the rest of the week. And then depending on clients, we're meeting with each of our clients typically once a week to kind of give them an update on, you know, what, what is happening in their business, giving them strategic updates.

[00:03:47] We have a kind of different meeting cadence and things we review depending on where we place or where the meeting is, or when, excuse me, when the meeting is being hosted in any given month to make sure that we keep things moving along. And then there's a lot of other strategic and tactical work that happens periodically throughout the day.

[00:04:05] So that's a, you know, like a composition of being in the ad accounts, building, launching new ads looking at what are the creative tactics we need to employ in order to get things on track. That would also be looking at, hey, there's a particular metric that we are not meeting the expectations in our plan against.

[00:04:23] What are the things we need to do there? And doing some deep work around what that looks like. And then you mix that in, like I said, with client meetings interacting with other folks at CTC to ensure that each client is experiencing really the collective brainpower of CTC in order to ensure that we hit you know, the monthly target, which is starting from an annual target that we set with all of our clients.

[00:04:45] So that's kind of like a high-level overview. There's certainly like a, a dissection of each individual component, but that kind of gives folks sort of a high level of the rhythms.

[00:04:54] Richard: Yeah, no, that makes sense. So what's the and you've alluded to this a little bit, what's, what's the percentage split between execution and strategy here? Because obviously, like one of the, the things that the Profit Engine promises is the profit engineer, who's kind of like the guy who's guiding the ship or whatever for your business, is also in charge of some important executional pieces as well as the strategy.

[00:05:18] So this is a growth strategist who's also a creative strategist and a meta media buyer and a Google ad buyer and an Apple 11 buyer, whatever the case may be. So, talk to us a little bit about what that split looks like and, and how that gets balanced.

[00:05:31] Brian: Yeah. So I mean, the, the whole profit engineer or the idea of the profit engineer came from this shared belief at CTC, which is, you know, the future of e-com operators are gonna be tech-enabled generalists, right? So really sharp folks who can think holistically about the business, but use technology in order to employ all of the best practice tactics to grow their e-commerce businesses.

[00:05:58] And so it really depends on week to week what the key priorities are. Of course, if we're, you know, off course to plan, tactics and in-platform optimizations are going to flex up in terms of percentage, and then strategy will sort of be a lower percentage. But then as we're trending ahead of plan, how do we keep the pace going where then you would flex?

[00:06:21] I would say, like, if you were to start at a baseline, you know, it's, it's probably 50/50 as kind of a general rule of thumb. But as we start to look at each individual brand, as I mentioned, right, there's, there's certain brands where we're like mid-offer or mig- a big marketing moment. That's gonna be more tactics in the trenches, checking ad accounts in our hourly trackers to make sure things are, are tracking accordingly.

[00:06:45] "Hey, did that email go out and hit the revenue number that we expected?" More tactics versus, "Hey, we're thinking ahead for this big marketing moment in a couple months." Then there's more strategic thinking, strategic thought work, more collaboration with the clients on, well, the things we need to plan ahead for, which would then lead to the flex up against strategy.

[00:07:06] Richard: Gotcha. So I-I'm kind of digging a little bit, maybe one level deeper here. So there's, there's a diagram or a kind of infographic or whatever you wanna call it on this, on this particular day in the life of a profit engineer document that, again, we're sharing with you, that breaks down the daily sort of cadence here.

[00:07:23] Now, and I'm sure that this sort of changes, again, like you were saying, depending on what day the client can meet. But here's, here's how it's broken down here. I'll read it out and then I want to draw out a couple of different things. So Monday, we reset the plan, which is to say review the weekend performance and then kind of reassess what the week is going to look like based on what has happened the previous week, including the weekend.

[00:07:45] Tuesday, diag-diagnose the levers, which is really just saying like what can be done in order to bring about the outcome we want this week. Wednesday, align decisions with the client. Thursday, ship the changes, which is get in there and do the execution. Friday, close the loop. Now, I'm sure that there's some mishmash where the actual ch- change, shipping of the changes happens maybe throughout the week and there's a little bit of, of wiggle room here.

[00:08:08] But the thing that I want to draw out is between Monday and Friday, I think what's useful to point out here is that on Monday you check the plan, on Friday you close the loop on the plan. And part of what that is, is assessing assumptions and assessing whether they've been proven or disproven, which is ver- a very sort of scientific way of approaching something that can be very difficult to think about in a scientific way.

[00:08:28] So we decide, we turn this is how it's phrased, kind of, we decide what changed, what was disproven, and what to watch through the weekend, and which assumption moves into next place or next week rather, right? So the point here is that Monday you set your assumptions, Friday you determine whether they've been proven or disproven, and then you re-kind of calculate what you're doing based on that.

[00:08:47] So talk a little bit about the thought work that goes into that and how that maybe differs from the average a-agency experience.

[00:08:57] Brian: Yeah. So I mean, the the really helpful aspect of a tool like Statlas, and now we have, you know, different plugins with our, our MCP that we can use, you know, tools like Claude to sort of, extract more insights around, is we can get really specific about what is the core problem in the business that's inhibiting us from hitting our bottom line targets, right?

[00:09:19] So we could get really isolated around what is the core thing we're trying to solve. And sometimes that is a traffic problem, an AOV problem, a conversion rate problem, an LTV problem. It could be unit economics around products. There's a whole myriad of different core problems that we can isolate to then come up with, hey, what are the strategies and tactics we're going to then deploy in order to solve for those things to get to our ultimate bottom line target?

[00:09:47] And so, yeah, using this framework, right, when we kick off the week, it's really about, hey, we have a hypothesis around what is going to be the tactic that is going to lead to the lift against that metric that we're trying to solve for. We're going to then deploy a tactic and give it the appropriate amount of time to see if it moves in the direction that we're aiming for, setting an expectation against that.

[00:10:12] And then at the end of the week, we can then close the loop on how is that actually progressing. Is it meeting our expectations? Is it not? Why? Do we need to make adjustments, et cetera? So it really does come down to, to your point, Richard, like that scientific method, right? Hypothesis, conclusion, and having a consistent feedback loop around measuring that.

[00:10:32] And the reality too, and I, I think this is something that brands do need to get comfortable with, is it does take sometimes a few days for a new campaign to get ramped up, especially if you're using, you know, a seven-day click attribution window. So with all those things sort of in mind, that's why we kind of have like this general weekly workflow, which allows for us to give each tactic an appropriate amount of time in order to do something.

[00:10:58] But to be really clear too, like if we have a day of marketing moment that we're executing against, that's gonna warrant a different weekly workflow, but this kind of gives people an idea of generally how we're thinking and, and how we're operating.

[00:11:11] Richard: Yeah. Because I think, yeah, one thing to add going one level deeper is that on a daily basis, we-- part of the kind of value proposition of Profit Engine is that we'll take action on a daily basis. And so there's, there's, I guess what you might call it or what it sort of sounds like is there's a sort of a pre-alignment with the client in a sense of saying like, "We trust you with this forecast to execute against this plan.

[00:11:34] Therefore, you are free as the profit engineer to take decisions or to take action against that plan without having to consult me, the client, first." Right? So again, this is-- differs from traditional agency work in the sense of like a lot of the times the agency waits until the weekly call to update people on what happened and then say like, "Hey, is it cool if we do this this following week?"

[00:11:56] But of course, by the time you do that, it's, it's too late. And so there's, there's this daily cadence as well, where if execution needs to happen today, it happens today. And there's no-- or we do our best anyway, to get as m- rid of as much bureaucratic red tape as possible so that you, the profit engineer, are free to do that.

[00:12:14] Talk to me a little bit about what that daily cadence looks like. Obviously, we don't have to get into hour by hour, but what happens in, let's say, the case of emergency? Let's say you wake up this morning and it's off plan for a Tuesday in a way that you don't like. What happens next?

[00:12:33] Brian: Yeah. So it, you know, first, first things first is in the morning I'm, like I say, kinda triaging what is happening. We have Statlas and, and other reporting that a lot of our profit engineers have built to give us sort of a look at, "Hey, how are things progressing in the business and, and what things should we need to be aware of first thing in the morning?"

[00:12:54] Typically that very quickly goes into, hey, if something's off course, you know, going into the media accounts, triaging for all things media related. It could be anything just like, hey, a new campaign or ad that we launched isn't meeting the expectation we set, or do we need a triage for something technically happening?

[00:13:13] So that's gonna be sort of the first place looking, making sure all marketing moments and agreements we had with the, with the brand have actually been deployed. You know, sometimes there's cases where like an email didn't get sent or an email got shipped to the wrong list, like just looking for those types of things.

[00:13:31] Or an email didn't hit the expectation that we had. So, hey, now we have a gap to our email revenue plan, we're gonna go execute against that. And there's a whole laundry list of, of different things we're looking at, which is why we go through this exercise leading up to a month to ask for what is your marketing calendar, getting clear about the gaps in the plan and different marketing moments we need to have.

[00:13:52] How many emails and how many SMS sends are you gonna have? How much media budget are you gonna deploy and what targets you have? There's this whole planning process that leads up to all of this, so everyone is holding hands. You know, in this case, we're just kicking off July planning, you know, to look at, hey, on July 1st, like we're all holding hands with this is the agreement we made to each other to execute.

[00:14:14] So now we're gonna hold you accountable to it, just as we expect you guys to hold us accountable to, to, to our work. So, yeah, that's typically how things are going. And then we have contingency plans in place, whether it's like backup ads or backup campaigns. Usually ask, you know, brands, especially in a key marketing moment to have, you know, backup sends potentially on, on docket.

[00:14:36] Or in some cases we've actually, and I was just talking about this earlier with, with one of my other brands, was we had a very specific case with a very large brand and their offer went live during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and it was flopping. But thankfully, the profit engineer had already a contingency plan of offer option number two.

[00:14:57] They flipped the switch, we got back on track to plan. So all those pre-thought work exercises were already done well advance of these key moments to make sure that, hey, we were off track, now we can go implement that. I realize I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm just kind of talking through examples here.

[00:15:14] So then obviously those, those tactics get employed, and then we have our hourly trackers which allow for us to look at how are things pacing. Do things start to pick up? Do they start to deviate in a way we don't expect? And then it's just this regular you know, check-in of are we on plan? Are we off plan?

[00:15:32] Are things not meeting our expectations? What are the new things that we need to do to implement here? And of course, right around a key moment like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, where there's substantially more ad spend happening, you can imagine there's more frequent hourly checks versus more of a regular day where it's gonna be, "Hey, okay, we missed Tuesday, but now here's what we're gonna do against Wednesday in order to get things back on course."

[00:15:57] So of course, it varies based on the intensity and the the critical nature of that day of how much we're going to change because it's a dance, right? Like with media platforms, in some cases, they can be very finicky to a lot of tweaking. You know? There's, there's brands we start working with and they make hundreds of changes in the ad accounts on a daily basis and that's usually a conversation that we need to have 'cause it just doesn't set things up most appropriately.

[00:16:27] And so just being cognizant of what is the right amount of changes in the ad account is really what we're trying to drive towards, which is why we set up these plans to know what is the right amount of changes we need to make if things are off course, and then to have that rhythm on a daily basis to ensure we stay on track to our goals.

[00:16:44] Richard: No, so there's two things that I noticed in there. One is that the cadence, of course, is the cadence of communication and action is scaled to meet the moment, like you're saying. So if we're in a place where hourly communication and hourly action is po-potentially needed, like a Black Friday, Cyber Monday situation, we do so.

[00:17:02] We have a, a system that is able to scale to that. But then maybe in the regular cadence of the week, thinking about it on a daily basis makes a little bit more sense, and there's certain things too that thinking about them on a weekly or monthly basis, bases also makes sense. But the, the difference here is that the cadence is not every week we'll do something because that's, you know, that's how our kind of m-m-meeting cadence is or whatever.

[00:17:23] It's, it's completely scaled to the need. And then part of the reason we're able to do that is that in some sense, it kind of sounds like the work for, like you mentioned, is, it's June 2nd and everybody's finishing their July plans right now. So the idea is that for next month, or by the time, let's say, you hit that marketing moment where all of a sudden sort of like hourly action is needed, there's no scrambling happening.

[00:17:46] Because again, in that example you gave us, there was a contingency plan. The work for the next month is kind of already done because the work is the strategy. So I think, yeah, those are two two elements that I think are-- make it distinctive from the general service offering of an agency. Which, speaking of which, I think it'd be helpful to talk a little bit about, in your experience and maybe just generally, how this approach, if it's not already obvious to listeners, how this approach differs from a traditional agency kind of cadence.

[00:18:18] Brian: Yeah. I mean, and I hear this from, from clients all the time, which is there's-- And there's a whole myriad of different offerings out there and some really well-respected agencies out there who do great work. But in some cases you have one point of contact who isn't doing the work and is just kind of the messenger.

[00:18:36] That could be one particular setup where a profit engineer is not only the person communicating on the calls, but also the person who, "Oh, you wanna jam on Meta really quick? Cool. Let me screen share and I'm gonna take you through everything," and they know how to navigate and build campaigns and make optimizations right then and there.

[00:18:55] So they're not only the communicator and, I guess, for lack of a better term, an account manager type role, but they're also keys on keyboard to go execute. So that's, that's pretty huge. And then we also have like our tech stack, right? And so that helps with allowing for a profit engineer to be at the intersection of media, financial planning, creative, right, which are in, in a legacy type of setup, these fragmented roles.

[00:19:24] And so a profit engineer is really able to step into this tech stack and also supported by the larger collective in order to make creative recommendations with specific hooks, angles, products that we need to go after. And then also go in and make very specific recommendations of which ads we need to run or which products we need to prioritize for our contribution margin targets to be hit.

[00:19:47] So yeah, it's, it's a really exciting intersection of a lot of different historically fragmented individuals. And so now we've been able to produce a, I think, a really differentiated and unique offer in the market that also attracts like incredible operators who I have the privilege of working with on the profit engineer team, who can step into a variety of different e-com businesses and really just start driving the ship right from day one.

[00:20:16] Richard: Yeah. So I mean, speaking of that, I think, like, it'd be interesting for me anyway f- to hear you talk a little bit about your personal experience of like what it was it-- 'cause we have a before and after with Profit Engineer. Did-- You were a growth strategist, a senior growth strategist for us for a while.

[00:20:30] Now you're kind of heading up a lot of our Profit Engineer management. So like from a personal perspective, how has your workflow changed, and how has your experience of that been?

[00:20:40] Brian: Yeah. It's a great question. You know, even just going before I came to CTC, like I was operating my own small e-com shop. And prior to that, a number of different e-commerce and in-house brand roles and different agency roles as well. And so when I first came in as a growth strategist, it was largely focused on you know, designing what the high-level strategy was gonna be, all the forecasting that CTC and what we do exceptionally well in the market does.

[00:21:13] Working closely with media buyers and creative strategists to come up with what are going to be the recommendations for an upcoming timeframe and also day-of tactics when we need to make pivots in critical moments. And the technology has just evolved at such an accelerated rate to where CTC, over a long period of time, has just acquired so much institutional knowledge, and that institutional knowledge has been built into the systems and the technology that we have today.

[00:21:48] So it makes it substantially faster for, you know, a very competent individual to come in, pick things up really quickly and, and start to deploy the things that we see work best across, you know, a very, a wide spectrum of different e-commerce brands. And so, you know, it's, it's been an amazing evolution here.

[00:22:11] I think like when I first started, we were we were working mainly out of like a very large just kind of built together spreadsheet, you know, the growth map which, which longtime listeners probably have heard us talk about. And now we're, you know, in a world of, of AI and, and Claude and our Statlas and our MCP and, and all the different things that just enable us to come to an assessment of what's happening in a business very quickly and diagnosing that issue very quickly.

[00:22:41] And then having just a plethora of different playbooks to go execute that we know work well across a variety of different brands, and we can get ahead of those mistakes that a lot of e-com operators make just by way of all the institutional knowledge that's here. So yeah, it's been, it's been a wild ride in terms of the changes here.

[00:23:03] But I've been bought into the profit engineer idea since day one especially coming from an operator background, just knowing that, yeah, it was only a matter of time that technology would converge everything and we're just at the beginning of it all.

[00:23:18] Richard: So yeah, it's, it's, it's an exciting time for us for sure. It's been, I think, an incredibly successful pivot for us and yeah, it's just like you're pointing out, it's just the beginning, which I think is exciting. So o- one thing that I, I wanna-- I really like the way this is phrased in kind of the, the document that we're posting is that the, the product that we're selling in some respects is clarity.

[00:23:39] And this is not only clarity about business objectives, but also clarity of communications, clarity that ultimately what you're paying for, I think with any expert, is peace of mind. Like the idea that the person that you've paid to do something that you can maybe kind of do yourself, but maybe not quite to the level that you'd like to, what you're hoping for is peace of mind that they know what they're doing.

[00:24:00] You can turn your brain off to some extent about that and focus on something else. And that's what we're setting out to do, and that's, I think, ultimately, as opposed to the traditional agency model, which often offers a lot of obfuscation. What we're offering here is crystal clarity into what's happening.

[00:24:16] We agree upon what we're going to do, and then we go out and do it. And if we don't do it, we hold ourselves accountable to that. So, any final thoughts here you want to share with us, Brian?

[00:24:26] Brian: the, the main thing that I'll just double down on is it's you know, there's, there's certainly a template for how profit engineers work, right? And I think that that sort of template applies very neatly across a wide variety of e-commerce brands of, of a variety of different sizes. But I think, like, one thing to be really clear, and I think the beauty of this profit engineer sort of offering and the people here who are the profit engineers really have been empowered and enabled to curate the strategy and the tactics for each individual e-commerce brand.

[00:25:05] You know, a large, you know, $100 million consumer technology brand is gonna warrant a very different media structure and account strategy and creative strategy than, say, a $5 million supplement brand or a $25 million apparel brand, right? And so what this system allows for us to do is very quickly come in, get very clear about the underlying opportunities and underlying problems of the business, and then just go attack those with diligence, and then have this system to hold not only the brand, but the profit engineer accountable so that we can then drive towards the brand's, you know, monthly, quarterly, annual targets and, and see them grow year after year as a long-term partner of ideally CTC.

[00:25:56] So yeah, I think that's where I would just kinda leave us off is, is just how, yeah, it's, it's a template for sure. And I think that allows for it to neatly come together in a document like this, but behind the scenes, very individualized to each brand, and this just gives us a good starting point that allows for us to work very closely with a variety of different types of e-commerce brands.

[00:26:16] Richard: No, that's, that's a really good point, that it's not, it's not a one-size-fits-all solution. A better way to think about would maybe be this is a machine that will produce, let's say, like a T-shirt that fits you perfectly, if that's the analogy that we're using. And it's the machine itself, there is a template and a system for constructing that, but the actual output needs to be consi- consistently and considerably different on a brand by brand basis, and that's what this is all about.

[00:26:39] So, cool. Well, appreciate you joining us, Brian. For everyone else out there, if you want a custom fit plan, you know who to call. Commonthreadco.com, hit the Hire Us button, let us know you wanna talk. We would love to chat with you about building a profit system for you. So, until next time, folks, thanks for joining us and and we'll see you.

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