More money than you spend.
That's the whole job. But I'm very aware that a lotttt of people claim that, and do very little to prove it.
I'm also not going to lay out my entire ops framework for floundering agencies to (try to) rip it. But you need to see a bit of how I work to understand why this works.
So this page is a little view into what that looks like. What I do, what you actually get when we work together, what it costs, and how to start.
Every client board opens on this: the Map.
One instrument holding everything I track for a business. The arc on the left is where the data comes from; it fills the rings: your brand at the centre, your market around it, the macro on the rim. Rays on a node are its connections; faded rays are aging data; a hollow node has gone stale. Hover or tap anything, including the legend, to trace it.
This one runs on an invented joinery so you can poke it. Yours runs on your live feeds, your competitors, your suppliers, your numbers. It never leaves your portal.
Tools, for tools.
Performance ads, SEO, margin work, conversion mapping, automation: all
useful, none of them the point. They're just tools.
Aimed at the right problem they pay for themselves many times over. Aimed
at the wrong one, even with good intentions, and they're a cost centre in
a nice report, managed by an account manager who doesn't actually manage your
account.
I'm not keen on being an asshole who dunks on (all) agencies. I quietly whitelabel behind a few of them, fixing what they're stuck on and keeping their clients. Most of the industry is fine, if mediocre. But some of them just extract. The test is simple: does the work make you money, or only look like it.
Money, I guess.
This whole thing works best for:
- Founders and operators who can see the revenue but can't see the profit.
- Businesses spending real money on acquisition and unsure if it's paying for itself.
- Agencies that want the system I run, with their own name on it. Skip to the bottom.
The order I work in.
This isn't always fixed, or necessary. If you'd be wasting your cash, I'll tell you.
- 01Margins first. If the unit economics don't hold, nothing else matters. We model the real profit per order before either of us spends a dollar on ads.
- 02The conversion path. Where people drop, why, and what to test first. Sometimes tracking comes before this, depending on where you're at.
- 03Measurement. Get the tracking telling the truth, or the first two steps are guesswork.
- 04Scaling. Only now. I take over acquisition, cut the waste, and scale what converts against your real margins.
- 05Workshops and speaking, if you'd rather your own team learned to do it.
You don't have to start at step one. Most people do, because it's usually where the money is hiding.
What a month actually looks like.
Not a Loom and a vibe. A system, mapped out with the same methodology that worked in bomb disposal. You don't buy it; it's not for sale. But you get access to it when we work together.
The macro weather, read for your business.
Around a hundred economic indicators, a read on what regime we are in, and a map of how those forces connect to your costs. This is the public cut of what every client board opens on. The full causal map and the weekly brief sit behind the engagement.
92+ series tracked continuously. The six above are this week's signal; the rest sit underneath, scanned every day so you don't have to.
What moved
- ▲ +4.9% Cotton rose for a third straight month. Garment input costs follow within a quarter.
- ▲ +5.8% Brent crude pushed back towards $85. Freight surcharges are already appearing.
- ▼ -6.2% Container freight eased off its April spike.
Why I care
Cost-push regime, still. The pressure in the system is coming from inputs, not from demand. Households are steady, rates are parked, and the squeeze lands on margins before it lands on price tags.
What to watch
- Cotton 71.2 USc/lb Third monthly rise. A fourth would mean repricing the autumn drill range, not absorbing it.
- AS/NZS hi-vis standard Oct 2026 Compliance deadline. Non-compliant reflective stock becomes unsellable for site work overnight.
The causal map
287 relationships · 92 concepts · most hidden
Hover to light up a path. The hubs are named; the rest stay hidden here. Clients get the whole map, wired to their business, updated weekly.
Three layers, one table.
This is the shape of the whole practice. The macro weather sits above your market; your market sits above your numbers. Most of what happens on the top two planes never reaches you. The system's job is to catch the threads that do. The gold thread here is one of them: diesel moves, delivery fees follow, and three weeks later it shows up in your cost per lead. That's the kind of chain I want found before it lands, not explained after.
Static by design: a briefing model, not a screensaver. The live version of every thread on this table runs inside the client portal.
One story, told the same way everywhere.
Before I touch your ad spend, I check your ads, pages, SEO and emails are saying the same thing. This is the map: message pillars flowing into channels, then into the distinctive assets that carry them. A thin ribbon is a thin message. You get the findings, not another login.
Pieces read
Message pillars
Tensions found
Channels covered
Coverage of every pillar against every channel. A dashed cell is a gap: that message is missing where the channel has copy to carry it.
The Meta ad promises carbon-neutral shipping; the refill landing page never mentions it. The ad writes a cheque the page does not cash.
Meta Ads "The jar is for life. The scent comes back to you, carbon-neutral, every season."
Email offers 20% off the first refill while the website frames refills as never discounted. Pick one story before paid traffic hits either.
Email "Welcome. Here is 20% off your first refill, because the jar deserves a second season."
"Scent as memory" carries the brand on Meta, the site and email, but is absent from Google Ads and SEO, where buyers are actively searching. A cross-pollination candidate.
Meta Ads "Some rooms you walk into and time folds. That is what we are after."
This runs on every channel I can read before a dollar of spend goes out. It is a lens, not a product. You get the findings; the method stays behind the engagement.
One story told the same way everywhere, and a board you can open on, reconciled to the cent.
Every month, a verified report.
Up to eight tabs: what is working, what isn't, what is unclear, and what I would do next, signed by me. Your ads, your site, your bookings, the macro picture, your competitors, your industry, and one mental model applied to your exact situation. Every number re-pulled from source and checked before you see it.
May 2026 report
Best month on record. Trade search is the engine, and it still has headroom.
Ad Spend
Revenue
ROAS
Working
- Trade Workwear search: revenue up 28.4% on a 9.6% spend increase. The new ad-group split by trade (sparkies, chippies, plumbers) lifted CTR from 2.4% to 3.1%.
- UGC worksite creative on Meta is outperforming studio shots 3:1 on ROAS. Scaled it mid-month; no fatigue yet.
Not working
- PMax keeps leaning on brand queries. Brand exclusions tightened on the 18th; watch June for true incremental ROAS.
- Saturday spend converts 40% worse than weekdays. Dayparting adjustment queued for June 1.
What I'd do next
- Shift $1,500/mo from PMax into Trade Workwear search. The marginal dollar is worth more there.
- Brief two new UGC creators now. The current batch will fatigue inside six weeks at this spend.
The verification pipeline is the real one: numbers from source, reconciled, then the words are mine. Every client gets this, every month, signed off before you see it.
The board you open on.
Every engagement gets a private board. It opens on this: a read of how complete the picture is across the things that move money, and the headline numbers from your latest report, each with its trend. No spreadsheet archaeology.
Underneath it: the daily activity feed, the monthly report, the Observatory, and the margin engine above. This is what a private board looks like on day one.
Every day, the board updates.
A feed of every change I make to your account, synced from the ad platforms and analytics within the hour. You see the work as it happens, not in a monthly summary. Most consultants won't show you that. I default to it.
This week
- Google Ads Paused 3 search terms bleeding spend at 0 conversions. 2h ago
- Shopify Flagged "Refill wick 3-pack" as loss-making after fees: -13.8% net. 5h ago
- Meta Ads Shifted budget to the UGC worksite ad set; CPA 22% under target. Yesterday
- GA4 Fixed a broken purchase event dropping ~18% of conversions. Yesterday
Last week
- Website Shipped a faster product-page layout; LCP down from 3.1s to 1.8s. Wed, 10 Jun
- Strategy Re-pulled May numbers from source for the monthly report. All reconciled. Tue, 9 Jun
- Mailchimp Rewrote the refill flow subject lines; open rate +6.4pts on the resend. Mon, 8 Jun
2 weeks ago
- GitHub Deployed server-side conversion tracking; recovered ~12% of lost events. Thu, 5 Jun
- Reporting Published the May board report: eight tabs, signed off. Mon, 2 Jun
Silence on a given week means nothing needed touching, not that nothing was watched.
The same numbers, taken further: every order pulled apart, every product placed by real margin, the risks the average hides, and where the next dollar actually earns its keep.
Your best seller usually isn't your most profitable line.
Every product placed by real margin against real volume. The bubble is the monthly contribution it actually keeps. Four quadrants, and most portfolios are leaning into the wrong one.
- ◆ Aurora candle 220g 33% 540/mo Winner
- ◆ Ember diffuser set 40% 210/mo Winner
- ● Refill wick 3-pack -14% 880/mo Volume driver
- ● Travel tin trio -4% 320/mo Volume driver
- ▲ Gift bundle (deluxe) 42% 95/mo Potential
- ▽ Reed oil 100ml -22% 150/mo Underperformer
- ▲ Limited release No.7 39% 60/mo Potential
The median lines are the portfolio's own. A volume driver doing big numbers on a thin margin can quietly outweigh three winners. You can't fix what the dashboard averages away.
Every order, taken apart to the cent.
One $92.24 order. Before a dollar of profit, it pays cost of goods, then the selling costs the platforms quietly take, then the refunds. The engine tracks each line separately, because each one behaves differently when an order comes back.
AOV ex-tax
Gross CM / order
Net CM / order
Break-even ROAS
- Supplier Cost of goods 39.0% -$36.00
- Freight Cost of goods 3.9% -$3.60
- Packaging Cost of goods 2.6% -$2.40
- Payment Selling costs 2.9% -$2.67
- Platform Selling costs 12.0% -$11.07
- Ship + pick/pack Selling costs 10.6% -$9.80
- Refund leak Refund leak 4.6% -$4.27
- Net CM kept Kept 24.3% $22.42
When an order comes back, the cash doesn't fully come with it.
Most calculators treat a refund as a clean reversal. It isn't: you eat the selling costs and only claw back part of the goods. That gap between gross and net contribution is where thin-margin lines quietly turn into losses.
A 3.0x ROAS campaign, modelled to the cent.
3.0x back on spend looks like a winner you scale. Then the COGS land, then the variable costs, then the ad cost per order. Here is where the dollar actually goes.
ROAS achieved
Break-even ROAS
Profit / order
Post-ad / month
Same engine as ProfitOS. The campaign clears its naive ROAS target and still loses $1,200 a month. That gap is invisible on every ad dashboard. Finding it is the job.
How much of the business is riding on one line?
Revenue share across the catalogue, scored the way a bank scores a loan book. One number, the HHI, says whether you're diversified or one stockout away from a bad quarter.
- Aurora candle 220g 27.1%
- Ember diffuser set 19.6%
- Refill wick 3-pack 16.5%
- Travel tin trio 12.3%
- Gift bundle (deluxe) 10.6%
- Limited release No.7 9.4%
- Reed oil 100ml 4.5%
The top line is 27% of revenue; the top three are 63%. That's moderate. Survivable, but it's the kind of quiet risk that only shows up the month a hero product goes out of stock.
Do the customers earn back what they cost to win?
Lifetime contribution against acquisition cost, blended across the whole book. Above 3:1 is healthy; under 1:1 means you're buying customers at a loss and hoping volume saves you.
Lifetime value
Acquisition cost
- $12.45 blended net CM / order
- 2.4 orders per customer
- 14 mo average lifespan
Even after repeat purchases, this book earns back $29.88 for every $30.57 it spends to acquire, a ratio of 0.98:1. The loss-making lines drag the blend under water. Fix the mix first, then the acquisition maths starts working for you.
Where should the next $1,000 go?
Not the line with the best average ROAS, but the one with the best marginal ROAS, the return on the next dollar after diminishing returns bite. The ghost tick is today's average; the bar is what the next thousand actually earns.
- 3.6x+$1,180
- 3.1x+$940
- 2.7x+$610
- 2.2x+$280
- 0.9x-$120
The next thousand into Ember diffuser set earns +$1,180 in contribution; the same thousand into Refill wick 3-pack sits below break-even and loses $120. Same budget, opposite outcome. The order is the whole decision.
The plan said one thing. The bank said another.
Every line of the month against what was modelled, scored by how far it drifted. Then the reconciliation that explains most of it: the ad platforms claimed credit for revenue the till never saw.
Reconciliation: platform-claimed vs banked
27.6% over-reported: $13,500 of claimed revenue that never hit the account.
Variance without reconciliation is just a list of misses. Tie each platform's claim back to the till and the real story appears: spend held, but the revenue behind it was 28% thinner than the dashboards said. That's the number the plan has to be rebuilt on.
Name the profit. The model names the path.
Set the number you actually want to clear, and the work runs backwards: every lever that reaches it, ranked by effort against impact. Some get you there on their own. One here can't, and the model says so rather than pretending.
Today
Target · Net profit after ad spend
- Lift conversion rate Start here +0.9 ptseffort · easy impact 78%
- Raise price +6.2%effort · easy impact 71%
- Cut selling fees -18%effort · moderate impact 55%
- Cut cost of goods -22%effort · hard impact 49%
- Increase ad budget
Scaling loses money: CPA exceeds margin
This is the conversation an engagement turns into: not a dashboard to read, a decision to make. The easiest feasible path first, the cost of each spelled out, the dead ends named.
Nine levers. One deterministic answer.
The scenario side isn't AI. It's nine dials and a lot of algebra: move price, fees, conversion, spend, and the outcome resolves the same way every time you ask it. Pure physics, not a guess. Switch between a few worked states below.
- Price
- Discount
- COGS
- Selling fees
- Shipping
- Refund rate
- Conversion
- CPC
- Ad budget
Net profit / mo
Net margin
Break-even ROAS
Same inputs, same answer, every time. That repeatability is the point: a decision you can interrogate, not a number that drifts when you look away.
Why me, and why you can check.
I don't ask you to take any of this on faith. The methods are published, with the code that runs them. Two papers, free to read: one on the margin engine, one on the system that runs the rest. There are even basic, free versions of some of these tools and I encourage you to use them before paying me anything.
And, at risk of sounding performative:
I have no desire to waste your cash, because I know what it's like to have
none of it. I was booted out of home at fifteen, a stretch with nowhere to
live, then spent ten years in the Air Force EOD. You learn to weigh the variables,
ignore the shiny shit, and that panic is just an expensive way to die. You
also learn early that money is oxygen. I still run businesses the same way,
and I compete like it.
Working with Chris has been one of the best decisions we’ve made as a brand... He brings both expertise and heart, and we couldn’t imagine doing this without him.
Sophie McGrath Bed Intentions
We are getting an extra 10+ leads on average per week and we’ve only been working together for 2 months. Communication is second to none.
Dexter Caines Best at Pests
Working with Chris is a breath of fresh air. It truly feels like a partnership. We challenge each other on thoughts, ideas, and concepts.
Chris Henry Real Estate Director & Thought Leader
It’s rare to find someone who is both technically skilled and genuinely collaborative. Chris is both, and more.
Wanda Chin Extra Shiny Developments
Absolute game changer. Leads have doubled at least. Not just the forms, the phone’s been going off. First week after Chris switched everything on, I had Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday booked out. Eleven enquiries from email and calls alone. It’s like someone turned on a tap. Already paid for itself.
Eren Bulus Prominent Glass
Chris has that rare mix of insight and grounded thinking that makes progress feel easy. Working with him has been a game changer.
Andy Brownhill River Realty
Chris gave me visibility I just didn’t have before, real numbers instead of guesswork on what was actually working. It’s made decisions on where to spend feel a lot less like rolling the dice.
Zachary McCusker NUUN
Chris is fast, no BS, and approaches systems and business infrastructure with a level of discretion that’s frustratingly hard to find. An instant recommendation to our clientele.
Black Glass Development Black Glass Development
Chris is an exceptional marketing consultant and a pleasure to work with. He took the time to truly understand our brand and consistently delivers innovative, high-impact marketing strategies that have made a measurable difference to our business. We highly recommend him.
Danica Kerr JettProof
Chris has been a godsend for my startup. He hasn’t just taught me how to create and run Meta and Google ads, he’s offered strategic, proactive advice that’s made my brand and messaging 10x better. He’s the go-to for ad management and conversion.
Georgia Craig Petrichor
What it costs.
Transparent. Starting prices, all excluding GST. Not everyone needs everything; some people need nothing, and I will say so. Toggle what fits and watch the cost update.
Other ways to work together
Beyond the core ladder above. Some teams want a workshop, a readiness check, a talk, or the whole system run under their own brand.
The Margin Workshop
From $6,500 + GSTHalf a day with your leadership team, your real numbers live in the margin engine. Everyone leaves reading the P&L the same way.
Should you run ads yet?
From $3,500 + GST (per session)For founders itching to switch on ads before the economics hold. A session to pressure-test readiness before you spend.
Speaking
By arrangementTalks and workshops on unit economics, attribution, and the systems under a business. See the speaking page.
Citadel, white-label
$25,000/month + GST (by request)The whole intelligence system, operated, with your clients on the boards and your brand on the glass. For agencies and businesses running their own books. By request.
Common questions
- What if I don't need any of this?
- Then I'll tell you, on the consultation, and you will still leave with a clear picture. I don't sell work that doesn't pay for itself.
- Am I locked in?
- No. The retainer runs month to month. The consultation fee is credited if you proceed, and the insight is yours to keep either way.
- Where do I start?
- The paid consultation. Always. A couple of hours: I learn your business, you learn what I would actually do with it.
- Is this just AI?
- No. The system uses automation to gather and check data so I can spend my time on your numbers instead of spreadsheets. The free tools run zero AI; they are maths. The thinking on your account is mine, by hand, with my name on it.
- How much does it cost?
- Starting prices: paid consultation $1,500; margin modelling from $6,500; conversion mapping from $7,500; attribution & tracking $1,250 (or from $5,500 for a full build); acquisition + economics from $3,500/month; the margin workshop from $6,500; the whole system white-label $25,000/month by request. All prices exclude GST.
- Do you work outside Melbourne?
- Yes. The work is the same wherever you are.