Welcome to this issue of Ecom CFO Notebook – a weekly letter for 7–9 figure ecommerce founders and CFOs, sharing my perspective and stories for profitable growth.

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Sam here and back from New Zealand!

A quote on my whiteboard this year: “I’m proud of you.”

I can count on one hand the number of times my dad said that to me growing up.

I think that’s why I’ve sought too much external validation and worked so hard to stop needing someone else to tell me I’m doing ok.

Another small reminder is the lock screen on my phone that reads: “I will be my own hero.” Because at some point, my opinion of myself is what matters the most.

It’s a reminder to live and operate my business in such a way that other people and (most importantly) myself would say “I’m proud of you”.

I swear I’ll relate my childhood trauma to you.

As I’ve worked with more and more DTC founders, particularly the $10M+ and $100M+ businesses, I see myself in them… chasing external validation and not having someone who acknowledges what they’ve accomplished – someone is proud of them.

We have clients making millions who set aggressive budgets and actually hit them.

One client, for the second year in a row, created her budget, made hard decisions, stayed disciplined all year, and delivered. She should be proud of herself, but no one tells her that because no one else knows.

Another client went from $40M to $90M in revenue and nearly doubled operating income. Margins were down, fair enough. But, I’m proud of them. And they should be proud of themselves.

These founders did something good.

That doesn’t mean your foot comes off the gas or that the imposter syndrome goes away, but it’s important to stop and have someone say: I’m proud of you.

I see the numbers and I know what it took. No one else in the company sees the financials. Spouses may see some of the results but they don’t really know. Unless they have a coach or advisor, they have no one else to say it.

Today I’m sharing my 2025 Annual Shareholder Letter. There’s something about reflecting that just makes me feel good. I learn more from my own reflection than I do from any goal setting exercise or any business book.

So even if you don’t have someone telling you they are proud, you can still pause to reflect on how far you’ve come.

2025 Annual Letter to Shareholders

2025 Quotes on My Whiteboard

This is a new section I’m adding this year. It’s not incredibly relevant to shareholders but it speaks to big themes of the year and my state of mind. I may expound on the rest of them besides “I’m proud of you” in a future newsletter, but for now, I’ll just leave them here:

• “Long term gains with long term people”
• “The valley is the value”
• “Sam will know what to do”
• “This is what hard feels like”

Market Position

Last year, I said our problems are harder and more plentiful, but growth is still up and to the right. While that may have not been as true financially this year, I still consider our growth to be up and to the right.

I continue to believe Ecom CFO is on the path to becoming the indisputable finance and accounting leader for $10M+ ecommerce companies.

At present, there’s no way to objectively measure our market position. But, I continue to ask myself these three questions as a barometer:

• Are clients asking for our help in solving problems of greater complexity?
• Are clients proud of the work we deliver?
• Are we proud of the work we deliver?

Clients are (thankfully) asking us to solve higher complexity problems – accounts receivable, COGS, employee bonus pools, Netsuite, M&A support.

Many clients are proud of the work we deliver. I want to be able to say all, all the time – something we should strive for, but acknowledge it’s never going to happen. We have to get better at defining what it is we’re delivering, constantly checking for understanding, and following up on expectations.

Maybe a better question is – “are more clients proud of the work we delivered than last year?” That answer is confidently “yes”. Our team posting in our internal slack channel client reactions like this one are reasons I believe this to be true.

Lastly, are we proud of the work we delivered? Again, a confident “yes” (most times). Moreover, we’re usually prouder of what we’ve accomplished than the client. Why? The honest answer is the client doesn’t quite understand how bad the situation was before or appreciate the true level of effort required to deliver great finance and accounting work.

We have to increase the visibility into the sausage-making such that our client’s pride and our own pride are aligned as closely as possible.

Financial Performance

Our revenue grew ~31.6% from 2024 while Net Income fell to 10.2% (from 18.69% in 2024). Last year, I measured EBITDA but using Net Income this year to include interest paid to SBA.

Financial Performance Highlights

• Measurement – I’m embarrassed to admit 2025 was the first year we had real scorecards and a systematic approach to viewing margin by client thanks to our COO. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. This is probably the single biggest driver of gross margin improvement for the year.
• Churn – I dramatically underestimated churn this year – particularly related to the Seller Accountant acquisition but also due to team churn. For this letter, the why is less important. But, going forward, I will assume higher churn.
• Annual Trip – I wrote a longer post about this, but I was very proud we were still able to take a trip this year despite missing our revenue and profit targets.
• AOV – Our AOV increased steadily in 2025 as we expanded our scopes with current clients and said “no” to smaller, low AOV clients – nice win.
• People – Our executive team doubled from 2 to 4. For a company our size, we’re too top heavy. I knew this going into 2025 but wanted to invest ahead of growth. I wouldn’t change my decision and it’s ultimately paying off but it’s certainly a drag on profitability in the short term. Great people are increasingly harder to find and commanding higher salaries, period.

2025 SWOT

Strengths

• Updated CFO Model – This is now a massive strength. We now have 4 CFOs who are, frankly, better than me—and can give our clients the time and attention they deserve. Resounding success
• Size Advantage – Being bigger continues to have its advantages. We were able to accommodate multiple maternity leaves this year without the wheels completely coming off. That’s a milestone for us.
• Executive Leadership – My personal energy and drive for the business has increased because I was able to release much of the day-to-day responsibility to our exec team. I took a four-week vacation in December and was barely missed.
• Content and Marketing – Our benchmark report is driving more notoriety than ever. We’re getting noticed by more prominent people in the industry. Our marketing efforts are really paying off—elevating our brand and driving leads.
• Macroeconomics (Sort Of) – The current macro environment is forcing clients to pay more attention to finance and accounting, which means they’re allocating more resources to it. That works in our favor.

Weaknesses

• Size Disadvantage – The same size that let us handle maternity leaves exposed us when multiple teammates left at the same time. We’re big enough to handle one person leaving, but not big enough to handle several at once. We learned how quickly that can spiral—and we learned what we need to do to overcome it.
• Marketing Harder Than Ever – What worked in 2023 and 2024 didn’t work as well in 2025. We had to do a major overhaul of our marketing efforts. It now takes double or triple the effort to get the same results. Optimizing for LLMs, standing out in content, investing more marketing dollars for the same output—it’s not easy. Attribution is muddy, and you have to be multi-channel now.
• Talent Market – Accounting talent is in high demand. Great people are increasingly harder to find and commanding higher salaries, period.
• Industry Growth Slowing – We’re seeing the broader ecommerce industry growth slow, and we’re not immune to that.

Opportunities

• Automation / AI – Our partners and the industry at large is continuing to build better and better automation and leveraging AI. And it’s happening in every part of our business from practice management, to financial modeling, to day-to-day accounting.
• Content Gap – there is a massive opportunity to provide actually useful finance and accounting content in our industry.

Threats

• Increased Costs – We’re not immune to inflation and rising costs. We continue to make larger investments in our team and our technology
• Macroeconomics (The Downside) – Most of our clients sell consumer discretionary products. Although our services are usually the last to be cut in a downturn, I’m always nervous about an impending sharp, sustained macro decline. The tariff impact was real this year, and although the worst seems behind us, I’m not holding my breath.

Looking Ahead to 2026

There’s so much to look forward to, but I’m particularly excited to improve the value and depth of our content.

We found something special in our benchmark reports, but they’re too long and too focused on the past. Very few people make it past page 4, the tables are overloaded with data, and it’s difficult for the reader to parse the statistics. We’re going to address all of these points.

I’m committed to publishing more video content – not just podcast episodes where I’m interviewed – with the written word still serving as the foundation.

— Sam

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