Ecommerce growth advisory: a weekly call, and the models someone else keeps honest.
Advisory is the seat most clients sit in: a 60-minute call every week, Slack and email between, and working spreadsheets built and kept honest by me, rather than by whoever on your team had time. From $10,000 a month (USD) on a twelve-month term, no hours tracked.
"The thinking partner I didn't know I was missing · until nothing was the same after working together."
The benchmark set behind every Read is public: 8 trackers (including the consumer brand exits ledger), 27 calculators, 226 rated ad-to-page pairs.
What a month looks like.
This is what people mean when they ask for a fractional advisor. It fits consumer brands from $5M to $100M and software companies past $1M ARR, where the decisions come monthly and getting one wrong is expensive.
- Weekly call
- Sixty minutes, same slot. The agenda is whatever is live: the channel that stopped working, the hire, the price change, the retail conversation, the inbound from a buyer. You bring the situation; I bring the read and the reps.
- Slack
- A shared channel, same business day for anything time-sensitive, next business day otherwise. Most of the value of Advisory happens here, in the forty-five seconds it takes to say "do not sign that".
- The models
- I build and maintain the working spreadsheets we decide from: contribution by channel, cohort LTV, the cash forecast, the pricing model, the hiring plan. They are yours to use and mine to keep honest.
- On-site
- An optional one-week on-site each quarter, for planning, a leadership offsite, or a hard problem that needs a room. Travel at cost.
- The network
- Introductions where they help: agencies I would use, operators who have solved your exact problem, investors and acquirers when the time is right. No referral fees in either direction. The same circle is what I check my own answers against, so a question outside my direct reps still comes back with a definite answer.
Where the weekly hour tends to go.
Consumer & DTC
Unit economics and channel mix, retention, the ad-to-page handoff, retail and wholesale expansion, the $5M and $20M walls, and whether the agency is earning its retainer. Deeper on the DTC growth consultant page.
Commerce SaaS & apps
Pricing and packaging, App Store distribution and partner motions, free-to-paid, churn and NRR, the first operator hire, and the fundraising narrative. Deeper on the Shopify growth consultant page.
Shopify & Plus
Replatform decisions, Plus and enterprise scope, checkout and B2B, headless and agentic commerce, from a former early Shopify employee. Deeper on the Shopify Plus consultant page.
Read down until one sounds like you.
If the list above described your last quarter, you already have the only input I need. The useful first call looks at which explanation is real, and a retainer is not on the agenda.
$10,000 to $15,000 a month, and what that buys elsewhere.
Three things move the number inside the range: the size of the business, how many people on your side I work with directly, and whether a raise, acquisition, or sale is in process. It is set before you commit: on the scoping call, or in the readout if you start with The Read. Set against the market, Advisory sits at the low end of what an experienced fractional CMO or CRO charges for ten hours a week inside one function, and well below a full-time leader, before that leader hires a team. For that you get a weekly seat across the whole business, with the models included.
A full-time hire runs well past this for one person's hours; the fractional and agency comparisons, with figures, are on the engagements page.
Twelve months, renewing a year at a time.
Twelve-month term, renewing for twelve months at a time. Sixty days' written notice either side once the term has run. One thirty-day pause per contract year at a holding fee, with the Slack channel and the models kept open. Ten percent off for twelve months paid in advance, not combinable with the credit from The Read. Billed monthly in advance in US dollars. The full terms, including what is quoted separately, are on the engagements page.
Questions before we talk.
Bring the five explanations.
A free 30-minute call: which of them sounds closest, what a weekly call would need to cover, and whether Advisory is the right seat or a lighter one is. I will say so either way.