This replaces the plan we sent on 30 August. We have rebuilt the profit side of the model against your full cost structure rather than a single margin percentage, and the numbers moved enough that we did not want you working from the old version. What changed and why is set out below.
The previous plan treated your contribution margin as a single figure. It is not, because two of your biggest costs are per order rather than per pound, and your revenue figures include VAT while your product margins are quoted excluding it. Working it through on the mix you have actually sold this month:
| On every £100 of sales | Amount | Note |
|---|---|---|
| VAT | -£16.67 | Your revenue figures include it, so it comes out first |
| Product cost | -£31.61 | At your 60% blended margin, on product revenue only |
| Fulfilment | -£8.97 | £4.50 per order, and £100 is about 2.0 orders |
| Payment processing | -£2.20 | 1.7% plus £0.25 an order |
| Left to cover overhead and ads | £40.55 | Not the £56.50 the old plan assumed |
Your fixed overhead is £28,896 a month, or about £963 a day, and that has to come out of the £40.55 before a single pound of ad spend is paid for. This is the same calculation your financial dashboard runs, and it reconciles with it exactly.
The most useful thing to come out of the rebuild. Breakeven blended ROAS is not a fixed number, and it gets lower the more you spend. That is because the £28,896 of overhead is the same whether you spend £1,500 a day or £3,500, so the more revenue you put through, the less each pound has to carry.
| Ad spend per day | Breakeven blended ROAS | Revenue needed that day |
|---|---|---|
| £1,456 (where we started the month) | 4.09x | £5,959 |
| £1,600 | 3.95x | £6,313 |
| £2,000 | 3.65x | £7,299 |
| £2,500 | 3.41x | £8,530 |
| £3,000 | 3.25x | £9,762 |
| £3,354 | 3.17x | £10,633 |
So a 3.0x day at £3,354 of spend is a profitable day, and a 3.0x day at £1,456 of spend is a loss. Judging any single number against a fixed target, whether that is 5x or anything else, will send us the wrong way. We have added this line to your daily sheet so every day can be read against the right threshold rather than one average.
You are right that this happens, and right about the cause. You take the Recharge schedule, which is everyone due to renew on a given date, and the actual comes in lower because people skip or churn in between. We have now measured exactly how much, every month this year, so it can be a number in the sheet rather than something to hold in your head.
| Month | Scheduled | Actually billed | Realised |
|---|---|---|---|
| April | £73,056 | £67,308 | 93.7% |
| May | £63,999 | £59,855 | 95.1% |
| June | £70,853 | £65,415 | 93.9% |
| July | £78,121 | £71,620 | 93.2% |
| August | £80,611 | £72,080 | 90.0% |
| September so far 1st to 8th, fully settled | £22,388 | £19,162 | 85.6% |
Two things stand out. The first is that your instinct to trim is correct, and your trim is about the right size historically: the £64,427 in your sheet is 95.3% of the £67,621 scheduled, and the five closed months averaged 93.2%. So the method is sound.
The second is the one worth acting on. The rate has fallen every month since May, from 95.1% to 90.0%, and September is currently running at 85.6%. That is not a forecasting problem, it is a retention one, and it is the difference between £57,646 and £53,729 for the month. On the rate September is actually running, the subscription line lands near £53,729, about £10,698 below the sheet.
Our suggestion is to stop absorbing it in the daily targets and put it in as a formula instead: scheduled amount times a realisation rate, with the rate updated each month from what actually billed. Then the sheet corrects itself and the churn shows up as its own line, which is where it can be worked on. We would also like to look at why the rate is sliding, because recovering it to May's 95.1% is worth about £3,917 a month at current volumes, with no ad spend attached to it at all.
Your goal is £260,154. It arrives in three parts that behave completely differently, and only one of them responds to ad spend. Building it up from what we can actually see rather than from the target down:
| Component | September | What drives it |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription renewals | £53,729 | Scheduled in Recharge, at the realisation rate above. Ads do not change it. |
| Returning customers | £67,282 | Your email and launch calendar. Ads barely move it. |
| New customers | £139,143 | The only part ad spend drives. About 2,085 customers. |
Put another way, 47% of your goal arrives whether we advertise or not. That is the number that decides how hard the ads have to work, and it is why we size the budget against new-customer revenue rather than against the total.
Worth flagging on the sheet itself: your daily rows currently add up to £248,177, which is £11,977 short of the £260,154 goal. Combined with the subscription line landing about £10,698 light, there is roughly £22,675 that is currently in the goal but not in any day. That gap has to land somewhere, and new customers is the only part of the mix that can move at short notice, which is what the rest of this page is about.
We measured this properly rather than guessing, across 18 real product launches going back to 2024, using every order in your Shopify history. On a launch day, revenue from existing customers runs at a multiple of a normal day:
| Day type | Returning revenue vs a normal day |
|---|---|
| Launch day, new Pott releases | 4.26x |
| Launch day, all launches | 3.47x |
| Ordinary campaign email | 1.02x |
| A day with no email | 0.70x |
| The day after a launch | 1.05x |
The lift is almost entirely on the day itself. By the following day returning revenue is back to normal, which held across the Autumn Scents, New Season, Raku and Teal launches. It means a launch is worth planning tightly around one date rather than spreading it over a week.
For Rust & Amber on the 12th, that points to roughly £8,857 of returning revenue on launch day against a normal £2,079. So on your £15,497 target for that day, the ads need to find about £5,455, not the whole figure. It is the easiest day of the month for us, and it is the reason we step the budget up on the 12th rather than earlier.
We have worked this backwards from profit rather than forwards from a spend figure. At your £260,154 goal, every pound of ad budget is a pound of profit, so the budget that brings September in at breakeven is exactly:
| September at your goal | |
|---|---|
| Revenue goal | £260,154 |
| Less product, fulfilment, payment and VAT costs | -£154,531 |
| Less overhead | -£28,896 |
| Available for advertising at breakeven | £76,727 |
| Currently in your sheet | £76,204 |
Your ad budget was already right. The £76,204 in your sheet is £523 under that figure, which for a month this size is the same number. We are not asking you to change it. What needs rebuilding is the revenue side, because the day rows and the subscription line between them leave roughly £22,675 of the goal unaccounted for.
Stepped through the month, weighted to the launch:
| From | Meta per day | Total per day |
|---|---|---|
| 8 to 11 September | £1,372 | £1,600 |
| 12 to 18 September launch | £2,330 | £2,500 |
| 19 to 25 September | £2,862 | £3,000 |
| 26 to 30 September | £4,273 | £4,327 |
| September total (including £10,193 already spent) | £76,727 |
We hold the current level until the 12th deliberately. There is no point paying to reach people before the thing we want them to buy exists, and the launch gives the ads a genuinely new reason to be seen. After that we step up weekly, and only move to the next step if the cost of acquiring a new customer is holding.
Being straight about it: this is a stretch, and it is worth you knowing the size of it.
| Running now | Needed for the goal | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to acquire a new customer | £42 | £37 |
| New-customer return on ad spend | 1.58x | 1.81x |
| New customers in the month | 241 in 7 days | 2,085 |
That is roughly a 13% improvement in acquisition cost while spending more per day than we are now, which is harder than it sounds, because costs normally rise as budgets go up. We are not treating it as impossible: the Isle of Wight tomato launch in June moved your acquisition cost 24% at flat spend, so a strong drop can do it. But it needs the launch to land, and we will know by around the 18th whether it has.
The upside is simple. Every £1 we come in under the £37 target is about £2,085 of September profit, because that is roughly how many customers we are buying. Beat it by £3 and the month clears about £6,255.
| Actual | Your plan | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | £41,994 | £48,248 | 87% |
| New-customer revenue | £16,087 | £24,193 | 73% |
| Ad spend | £10,191 | £10,042 | £149 over |
| Cost per new customer | £42 | target £37 |
The gap is entirely in new customers, not in total revenue. You are at 87% of plan on the top line but 73% on the part the ads are responsible for, with the difference made up by subscriptions and repeat buyers running ahead. That is the number the launch has to fix, and it is what we will be reporting against daily.
Nothing to approve on budget. Keep the £76,204 you already have, stepped as above with the increase landing on the 12th for Rust & Amber. That figure is within £523 of the exact breakeven budget for a £260,154 month, so it needs no change at all.
What we would like from you instead is two things. First, put the realisation rate into the subscription column as a formula so the sheet stops carrying revenue that will not arrive, and so the churn becomes visible enough to work on. Second, tell us where you want the remaining £22,675 to come from. If it is new customers, that is us, and this plan is how we go after it. If some of it is a promotion, a second drop, or a push on subscription retention, we would rather build the ad plan around that than quietly assume the ads carry all of it.
Figures on this page are pulled from Shopify, Recharge, Meta and Google directly, and the cost structure is the same one your financial dashboard runs, so the two reconcile exactly. September actuals are complete to the 7th.