Profits on Purpose

How Does Your Brand Stack Up? Download our FREE eCommerce Hidden Profit Audit Template here: https://www.futurereadycfo.com/hidden-profit-audit-free-template Carla Penn-Kahn is the co-founder and CEO of ProfitPeak, an operating platform that gives eCommerce brands real-time visibility across advertising spend, inventory, and contribution margin. In this episode, Carla shares research conducted alo...

Since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, online sellers can owe sales tax in any US state where they cross a revenue threshold — even without a physical presence. Most eCommerce founders either don't know their exposure exists or assume they're too small to be a target. In this episode, Nate sits down with Lahari Neelapareddy, CPA and Founder of TaxHero, to break down what's actually happening with sale...

How Does Your Brand Stack Up? Download our FREE eCommerce Hidden Profit Audit Template here: https://www.futurereadycfo.com/hidden-profit-audit-free-template Charles Brun co-founded Izipizi in 2010 with two friends from high school, no capital, and no formal business background. Sixteen years later the brand is in 80 countries, employs 250 people, and is B Corp certified — and Charles is asking th...

How Does Your Brand Stack Up? Download our FREE eCommerce Hidden Profit Audit Template here: https://www.futurereadycfo.com/hidden-profit-audit-free-template Kate Assaraf built dip into a brand sold in 400 to 500 independent stores without spending a cent on advertising, and she's said no to Amazon more than a hundred times. She started with $40,000 and still owns 100% of the business. In this epi...

How Does Your Brand Stack Up? Download our FREE eCommerce Hidden Profit Audit Template here: https://www.futurereadycfo.com/free-p... Jerrod Clancy built Kirra Iced Tea without venture capital, without grocery shelf space, and without a marketing budget — and turned a profit doing it. Instead of following the conventional CPG playbook, Jerrod went all in on food service, placing Kirra in restauran...

How Does Your Brand Stack Up? Download our FREE eCommerce Hidden Profit Audit Template here: https://www.futurereadycfo.com/hidden-profit-audit-free-template Most eCommerce founders set a price once and never touch it again. Meanwhile, they're running thousands of ad tests, tweaking landing pages, and obsessing over conversion rate — without ever questioning whether their price is actually right....

Most e-commerce founders accept a painful reality: the money needed to fund inventory has to be repaid long before that inventory generates a dollar of revenue. Ben Tregoe, Managing Partner of Elephant Herd Capital, argues this isn’t just uncomfortable — it’s structurally broken, and it’s the root cause of the debt spirals and cash crunches that derail otherwise healthy brands. In this episode, Be...

Holly Garrard spent nearly 25 years in media and podcasting before deciding to stop telling other brands' stories and build one of her own. The result is Fundae — a purpose-driven footwear brand built on plant-based materials, manufactured in Italy, and designed to prove that sustainable fashion and high style can coexist. In this episode, Holly gets into the financial realities of building with c...

What does it actually look like to build a business where the mission isn't layered on top of the product — it's the entire reason the product exists? Jess Haghani is the Founder and CEO of Lucille Health, a better-for-you nutrition brand built specifically for aging adults, a category that has received almost no meaningful innovation in decades. In this episode, Jess walks us through her journey...

If your inventory lives in one place and your financials live somewhere else, you already know the gap in between is where bad decisions get made. In this episode, Nate sits down with Pierre Goldie, Co-Founder and CGO of Fiskal, to talk about what it actually looks like to close that gap. Pierre breaks down when founders outgrow spreadsheets, how to evaluate and choose an inventory management syst...

Jack Davis and Jacob Tubis, co-founders of Byte'm Brownie Bites, have spent the past year doing something most emerging CPG brands avoid: going bodega to bodega, store to store, building nearly a thousand retail doors in New York City — fully bootstrapped. In this episode, they get candid about the real financial realities of scaling a physical food brand, from the cash drain of retail promotions...

Most e-commerce founders treat bookkeeping as a tax necessity and nothing more — until the day they realise they've built a million-dollar business with no idea whether it's actually profitable. Stephen Brown, Co-Founder and COO of LedgerGurus, has seen this story play out hundreds of times. In this episode, he and Nate dig into what good financial infrastructure actually looks like at different s...

What happens when your gut says yes and every financial data point says run? Meredith Mills-Merritt, Founder and CEO of The Original Southside, found out firsthand when she signed a six-figure Florida Panthers sponsorship just months after brick-and-mortar launch — no CFO, no full-time staff, and a friends-and-family round that had barely closed. In this episode, Meredith walks Nate through the fi...

Walid Nasserdeen is the founder of W.NDeen Advisory and a fractional demand planning and S&OP partner for high-growth CPG brands. In this conversation, Nate and Walid dig into one of the most overlooked financial problems in the CPG space — inventory. From the hidden cost of excess stock to the revenue lost from stockouts, Walid breaks down why most founders are operating without a real foreca...

William Quartner is a Partner at Prelude Growth Partners — one of the most active growth equity firms in consumer, with a $600M fund and exits including a $400M sale of Bachans. In this conversation, Nate and Will get into what investors at this level are actually looking for: how they screen founders, why they take a category-first approach to identifying opportunities, and what makes a brand sca...

Brian Bethke has done this before. He built and exited a music industry brand — Supro and Pigtronics — before pivoting into the beverage space with Bear Maple Farms, a clean soda brand now in nearly 1,000 retail stores and backed by a $2M seed round. But success on paper hasn't made the journey any easier. In this conversation, Brian shares the unfiltered story behind Bear Maple Farms: the BevNet...

Kevin Larkai and Monté Burrow are the co-founders of Black Leaf Vodka, the first French organic vodka company in the United States. Their journey from a chance meeting in Cognac, France to building an award- winning spirits brand is a masterclass in resourcefulness, strategic focus, and the power of complementary partnerships. In this episode, we dive deep into the realities of scaling a capital-i...

Michael Salman went from managing tours for Usher and LL Cool J to the cannabis industry, and now he's disrupting the fresh salsa category in major retailers. As Co-Founder and COO of Cali FoodStar, Inc., Michael has landed his fresh salsa brand in over 200 doors in just six months, with major chains on the horizon. In this episode, Michael pulls back the curtain on the real economics of retail ex...

After raising $300K and spending two years building a CPG brand called Misery & Mayhem, Scott Turner and Nick Lagonia made a bold decision: scrap everything and rebrand in seven weeks on a $2,500 budget. In this raw conversation, the Dawnbreaker Oats co-founders share expensive lessons about influencer marketing, the honest feedback that changed their company, and what it's really like to run...

Most founders think their bottleneck is marketing or sales. It's not. It's operations. Aveline Elfar spent six years managing franchise operations before discovering that online businesses were drowning in even more operational chaos. Now, as a fractional COO specializing in health and wellness brands, she helps six and seven-figure founders reclaim 10+ hours per week through strategic automation...

Andy Whitehead traded physics research for a technology company, sold that to Samsung, and then decided to jump into the food and beverage space with FigBrew - a coffee alternative made from roasted figs. Unlike most early-stage CPG founders who work with co-packers, Andy has invested over $1 million into building his own production facility. He's even started his own fig farm, creating a vertical...

Most founders avoid this question until it's too late: Should you still be the CEO of your own company? Mackie Swan was brought in by the three original founders of WOO More Play—a sexual wellness brand sold in Anthropologie, Nordstrom, and Revolve—to scale a business they realized they shouldn't be running day-to-day. Three years later, she's taken the business to profitability while navigating t...

In this episode of Profits on Purpose, host Nate Littlewood sits down with Tapasya Bali, a rare entrepreneur who speaks both Wall Street and Main Street. After 16 years navigating high-stakes finance at Credit Suisse, Tapasya made a bold pivot at the peak of her career to co-found Yogasmoga, an athletic apparel brand that scaled to a $74 million valuation and earned her recognition as one of Goldm...

In this episode of Profits On Purpose, host Nate Littlewood speaks with Bellamy Grindl, founder of Retailytics, about the intricacies of inventory management and supply chain operations for e-commerce and CPG founders. They discuss the evolution of operations as businesses grow, common inventory challenges, the importance of breaking down silos between departments, and strategies for effective pla...

In this episode of Profits on Purpose, host Nate Littlewood speaks with Kat Bwye, founder and CEO of Deus Marca, about the importance of branding for purpose-driven businesses. Kat shares her journey from art school to building a brand consultancy, emphasizing that branding is more than just visual design; it's a strategic advantage. They discuss the brand operating system, the ROI of investing in...