If you sold your business, what would they change first?
On last week’s episode of the Operators podcast, Ben Leonard told the story selling his brand Beast Gear to Thrasio in 2019 for life-changing money.
3 years later, Thrasio had run it into the ground – revenue went from $6M to $500k.
Then Ben bought it back for pennies on the dollar.
No one cares about Thrasio anymore.
BUT, this episode sparked a great reframing question I think all ecommerce founders should be asking themselves in this era of hard mode.
If you sold, what would they do?
In Ben’s case, he discovered Thrasio had killed the website, killed email marketing, and they hadn’t posted on social media in (literally) years.
So yes, Beast Gear was a highly distressed asset. No question.
But much of ecommerce right now is distressed – maybe not to the same extreme – but distressed nonetheless.
All the data we’ve published about 2026 and the conversations I have with founders everyday backs it up.
I see more founders doing things they didn’t do 2-3 years ago – combing through ad accounts, reviewing email flow copy, auditing every software subscription, beating up suppliers, leaving no stone unturned.
Easy mode is over.
In this newsletter, I consistently publish content through a financial lens. Obviously, there’s a ton of operational, marketing, and product stuff that’s worth auditing in a tough environment.
Other people cover the non-financial stuff better than me.
What I can talk about is what an unbiased third party would look at from a (mostly) financial perspective if they were doing due diligence on your business today.
You’re not turning around. But you’re turning.
Beast Gear is a classic turnaround story. But the word “turnaround” implies you were running in one direction and now you need to sprint the opposite way.
That’s not what most brands need right now.
Most of our clients aren’t making 180-degree pivots.
They’re making adjustments—maybe 15 or 30 degrees—to fix things that have been quietly compounding in the wrong direction.
The degree to which you need to adjust is largely subjective, but if you want to know what “good” looks like, our benchmark reports will show you exactly where you stand.
But for most brands, you don’t need to blow everything up. You need to fix the stuff that an objective outsider would see immediately—the stuff you’ve been too close to, too busy for, or too uninterested in to address.
The financial questions an outsider would ask
If someone bought your business tomorrow and sat down with your financials, here are some examples of where they’d start.
Where is your revenue actually coming from?
A buyer performing due diligence is going to map every revenue channel.
How much is Meta? How much is email? How much is organic? What’s the source of truth for attribution?
I had a client last month who historically drove 20-40% of revenue through email but email had dropped to 10% and something felt off to her.
When she actually went back and looked, she found broken links, outdated product images, and abandoned cart sequences that hadn’t been firing properly.
She had been focused on other parts of the business—content, hiring, all the things that feel more strategic—and the foundational email infrastructure had deteriorated.
An unbiased third party would have caught that on day one, but it took her 6 months to notice.
These aren’t sexy fixes. But they’re high-impact and they’re the kind of thing that compounds negatively the longer ignored.
Are you carrying dead weight?
I have another client with multiple brands. One of them just wasn’t working. Period. But he held onto it because he’d bought the business and didn’t want to see it go to zero – classic sunk cost fallacy.
Meanwhile, the opportunity cost of running that brand was pulling resources, attention, and cash away from everything else that was actually working.
An outside buyer doing a turnaround would have no emotional attachment to that brand.
They’d cut it immediately. That’s not being heartless, it’s being clear-eyed about where value is actually being created.
What are you spending on your team relative to revenue?
If personnel costs went from 12% to 20% of revenue, are you making it up somewhere else?
What is your growth budget? If you need more to invest in growth, where’s that money coming from?
Another client this year fired their ad agency and started managing the accounts themselves.
That’s not revolutionary, but the reason matters. The founder realized nobody was going to care about their ad spend the way they would, and in this environment, every dollar of marketing spend needs to be working harder.
Are you paying for tools you’re not using?
I saw a client spending $4K/month across seven tools when two would do the job. Nobody had looked at it in three years. When’s the last time you audited your Shopify application spend?
When did you last have a hard conversation with your suppliers?
This is the one I think gets underestimated the most.
Tariffs haven’t gone anywhere. Interest rates are still elevated, so financing costs are tight. The dollar has been devaluing. All of these should be fundamentally changing how you think about supplier negotiations.
And I don’t just mean “can I get a discount.”
I mean: Who do I owe? How much do I owe them? What leverage do I have? Can I negotiate better payment terms? Can I recover money on defective inventory? Can I restructure lead times to improve my cash position?
If you listen to people who do turnarounds for a living, one of the first things they look at is the payables. Who does this business owe, and what can be optimized? It’s not just suppliers, either, it could be debt providers, note holders, anyone you’re making payments to.
Some of the biggest financial improvements come from hard conversations, not better marketing.
Do you know where your cash is going?
We have a brand new client looking at hyper-growth ($250k / month → $2M / month) who has no idea where their cash is going.
If someone bought their business, the first thing they’d do is create a 13-week cash flow forecast. We wrote about how to approach this in our cash flow forecasting series.
The cost of not looking
These issues don’t get fixed for understandable reasons.
Auditing email flows is boring. Negotiating with suppliers is uncomfortable.
Killing a brand you bought is emotionally painful.
Going into your website’s backend to fix broken form logic isn’t what got you into business.
Me neither.
But these are the things that move the needle. And the gap between brands that are thriving and brands that are struggling is increasingly about who’s willing to do the boring, uncomfortable financial work.
You don’t need a full turnaround. You probably just need to turn slightly.
Try and see your business like you just bought it yesterday. What’s the first thing you’d change? That’s your answer.
Your future self will thank you.
— Sam
Looking for more? Some of our most popular posts:
- 2025 Q3 Benchmark Report: Key insights from financials across 30+ companies – including revenue growth, margins, ad spend, and more.
- The issue with KPIs: Everyone has tons of data, but doesn’t know what to do with it. This is my take on managing the right metrics.
- Responsibility Map: I walk through how to define who owns, participates in, and supervises every key finance & accounting deliverable
