About Judith
A CFO that actually gets eCommerce
Learned in a garage before it was learned on a balance sheet.
Four brands built. Twenty years in the numbers.
It started in a garage
Not a metaphor. An actual garage, in the years before Shopify, before Meta ads, before anyone had written the playbook. My husband had a product, we had a garage, and I was the one packing the orders.
I learned what a stockout costs by running out. I learned what freight does to a margin by paying it. I learned that the number on the invoice is not the landed cost, and I learned it the hard way, the way you do when the money is yours.
That garage business became our first multi-seven-figure brand. Then there were three more.
This is the part that matters. When a founder tells me their best month felt terrible, or that their bank balance and their ad platform disagree, or that they are frightened of the next reorder, I am not sympathising from the outside. I have stood exactly there, with my own money on the line, in a garage, with the boxes.
This is the part that matters. When a founder tells me their best month felt terrible, or that their bank balance and their ad platform disagree, or that they are frightened of the next reorder, I am not sympathising from the outside. I have stood exactly there, with my own money on the line, in a garage, with the boxes.
Then I ran the marketing side
For years I owned a digital marketing agency. Founders would hand my team a revenue target, we would build the campaign, and the campaign would work. The ads did what they were asked to do.
And then the money still would not appear.
So I went into the books. Every time, the target had been set against a margin that was never real. Nobody was lying. The number on the platform simply did not carry freight, or returns, or the true cost of winning that customer.
Marketing was not the problem. The number the marketing was aimed at was the problem.
That is the room almost nobody sits in. Marketers do not read a balance sheet. Finance people do not read an ad account. Sitting in both is the whole reason this works.
And before all of it, pensions
My career started in the actuarial world in 2006, in the UK, advising pension trustees on liabilities running thirty and forty years out.
It is not a glamorous origin story. It is the reason I think the way I do. In that world you never explain a decision after the fact. You model it first, you stress it, and you know what happens in the bad version before anyone commits.
Bring that habit to an inventory business and everything changes. The reorder stops being a Friday judgement. The price increase gets tested before it gets sent. The channel bet has a number attached to it before the money moves.
The Profit First chapter
Profit First is Mike Michalowicz's system for a truth most founders learn too late: every dollar needs a job before it gets spent. I trained in it properly. I am a former certified Profit First Professional, and Mike has been generous enough to endorse my work.
The system I run today is my own, built for eCommerce, because no benchmark percentage fits every brand. A subscription supplement brand and a seasonal fashion brand should not be steered toward the same targets. What stayed is the discipline underneath it: profit is a decision you make first, and cash gets separated by purpose before the month has a chance to spend it.
What I believe
Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity.
More sales will not fix a profit problem. It will make the leak bigger and the founder busier.
You cannot scale chaos either. A system built for a smaller business does not fail loudly. It quietly stops telling you the truth, and you keep making good decisions against bad numbers until the gap gets big enough to hurt.
Clarity is the edge. Not more revenue, not another dashboard, not a better bookkeeper. A system you can actually read.
Away from the spreadsheets
My family comes first, which is the actual reason my calendar looks the way it does. I train Muay Thai, which is where I got comfortable with the idea that you learn more from the rounds you lose than the ones you win, and where I learned what it means to have someone in your corner who tells you the truth between rounds rather than what you want to hear.
I have been alcohol-free for five years. It is the single best decision I have made for how clearly I think, and I mention it because founders write to me about it more than they write to me about margin.
My profile says INTJ-A and my DISC comes back D/C, which is a formal way of saying I will tell you what the numbers say in the first meeting, and I will have thought about it properly before I do.
The Financial Clarity System
Three pillars hold everything up
01
Owner-First Financial Architecture
Financials rebuilt around the founder rather than the accountant. Cash separated by purpose before it gets spent by accident. Structure that hands you control and visibility instead of a report you cannot use.
02
Margin and cash flow intelligence
Contribution margin by SKU after ad spend, returns and freight. Landed cost known before the invoice lands. Channel profit per dollar of revenue rather than per order. A 13-week cash position you can read without opening the bank.
03
Operational resilience
Dependencies and risk audited. A founder operating system rather than a founder holding everything together. The structure to carry seasonality, a supply chain shock and a growth year at the same time.
2006
In Finance since
2013
In eCommerce since
4
Brands co-founded
300+
Founders served
Former Certified Profit First Professional. A2X integration expert. A US LLC, working with founders across the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.
Build an eCommerce brand a buyer would pay a premium for
Whether you exit or not
Numbers built to the standard a buyer will demand, so when you sell, you sell for more. And if you never sell, you run on clarity instead of chaos.