Grow Your Ecom Business From £1M - £10M With These Financial Insights
Scaling an ecommerce brand isn’t just about chasing sales – it’s about mastering your numbers. In this video, A2X’s Elspeth Cordray sits down with Frank Martin, co-founder of Triffin, to unpack the finance habits, metrics, and tech stack that help consumer brands grow from £1M to £10M in revenue.
00:00 Grow your ecom business from £1M - £10M with these financial insights
00:29 What Triffin does & who they help
01:48 The £1M → £10M challenge
02:17 #1 Habit: Budgeting
04:13 Spreadsheets vs. proper books
05:50 Daily reconciliation & automation tools
07:57 3 must-track metrics (CAC, contribution margin, repeat purchase rate)
11:18 Cash conversion cycle & working capital squeeze
13:37 Managing volatility as you add channels
16:10 One action to take this week
Book your free financial health-check with Triffin.
The information in this video is general in nature. Always consult a qualified professional for advice tailored to your specific circumstances.
Summary
1️⃣ #1 Habit: Budgeting
Frank calls budgeting the single strongest predictor of whether a £1M brand reaches £10M.
- Budget inventory and marketing spend in lock-step with an up-to-date P&L.
- Track cash flow weekly (or daily) so you can flex budgets fast when sales swing.
- Pro tip: Tight budgeting is impossible without real-time numbers – that’s why Triffin pairs live dashboards with outsourced bookkeeping support.
Non-Negotiable Foundation: Clean, Automated Bookkeeping
- Many multi-million-pound brands still run the books in spreadsheets – and it shows. Best-in-class operators:
- Use accrual accounting in tools like Xero or QuickBooks, with A2X automating channel-level revenue and fees.
- Reconcile daily to catch cash issues early.
- Rely on purchase orders and clear SKU-level COGS to keep margins honest.
- Getting this right removes stress, unlocks confident decision-making and attracts investors or lenders when you’re ready to scale.
3 Metrics to Review Every Week
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC) – know the fully-loaded cost, including agency fees and creative.
- Contribution margin – net sales minus COGS, fulfilment fees and marketing spend.
- Repeat purchase rate – because profitable growth depends on turning first-time buyers into loyal fans.
Cash Conversion Cycles: Why Growth Eats Cash
Scaling means buying more inventory and spending more on ads before revenue lands. Even healthy, profitable brands can run dry if they don’t model working capital needs against payout timelines for each channel (Amazon, Shopify, wholesale, etc.).
✅ One Action for This Week
Audit how your finance data is processed. If you’re still on cash accounting or can’t see true COGS and channel-level sales, fix it now – or find a partner who can.
Transcript
Elspeth Cordray (00:00)
Hi everyone. Today I’m joined by Frank Martin, co-founder of Triffin. Triffin is a UK-based accounting firm and FinTech platform that helps consumer-product brands see exactly what’s going on in their finances. It all happens in real time, all in one place. So hopefully that means fewer surprises, better decisions and the confidence to scale without running into cash-flow issues. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how your ecommerce brand is really performing,
Franklyn (00:05)
you
Thanks
Elspeth Cordray (00:29)
not just the sales but margins, cash position and forecasting, Triffin can help you. There’s a link in the description to book a free chat with one of their finance experts after this video. So welcome Frank, it’s great to have you here. Can you kick things off by telling us a bit more about Triffin and what you do?
Franklyn (00:40)
you
Thanks, Elspeth. Delighted to join you. And yeah, very well covered there in the introduction. So Triffin is a finance platform built specifically for consumer brands. So we support businesses in verticals like beauty, health and wellness, fashion, accessories, luxury, and other Ecom verticals, FMCG2. Where really we’re providing technology platform, which provides real-time finance information.
So more connected real-time P&L, balance-sheet, cash-flow information. And we combine that with both strategic and operational finance support, which covers everything from bookkeeping right through to strategic, FD and CFO support. So it’s really targeted towards brands in the early part of their life cycle. So all our customers are typically somewhere between zero and 20 million a year in annual sales. The majority of those are on that one to 10 million a year journey and very much looking to grow. platform and our service helps them do that.
Elspeth Cordray (01:48)
brilliant. So that segues really well into the topic for this video. We’re going to be chatting all things, scaling your business from 1 million to 10 million. So we’ll talk hopefully not just about the theory. Frank has a lot of practical experience. So we’ll be talking about the numbers and things that you can do to actually make
So we’ll jump straight in. Imagine we have two ecommerce brands, both are at the 1 million mark. One is heading for 10 million and the other is hitting the ceiling. So in your experience, Frank, what’s the one finance habit that would best predict which path they’ll take?
Franklyn (02:17)
Okay.
Yeah,
I think there are so many things that go into that. for one, you can’t really go on that journey with success without being really good at managing the finance of your business. If I was just going to pick out one habit, and the thing which I think causes a lot of stress for founders in particular, but for businesses on that journey, it’s the budgeting side of things.
To budget effectively, and when I’m talking about budgeting, it’s things like how much to budget for inventory purchasing and production, how much to budget for marketing and new customer acquisition. But to do that, you really have to understand your P&L and your margins in good detail, and you really have to be on top of your cash flow. So I’d say that budgeting is the habit which done well can have a really positive impact on that growth trajectory, but you really need to have some underlying fundamentals to enable that.
Elspeth Cordray (03:14)
So Frank, you’ve mentioned how important budgeting is for businesses. Can you tell us how businesses would go about having a really solid budget to project forward?
Franklyn (03:26)
Yeah, so I think the first thing comes from having really well processed finance information and being able to understand the P&L and various margin calculations in a lot of detail. And then also be very much on top of the bookkeeping to have an accurate view of cash and cash flow. That’s probably the key thing when it comes to budgeting. Small businesses, you know, they need to be agile. They suffer a lot of volatility. They need to be able to flex
based on the varying trading performance of the business and actually work to smaller budgeting cycles than larger businesses would. So really being very much on top of the transaction processing, the bookkeeping, the financial management is key to effective budgeting.
Elspeth Cordray (04:07)
Yeah, that makes loads of sense. So here at A2X, We do still meet multi-million pound brands that manage their books in spreadsheets. I do think that tells us a couple of things. Firstly, bookkeeping isn’t always seen as a priority by these brands. And the second is that some of these businesses will still see it as a cost rather than an investment in their business. So.
We’ve got a two part question for you, Frank, that we thought might be helpful. The first is, have you come across that mindset when you’re dealing with customers yourself? And the second is, Why is upgrading to proper bookkeeping and reporting basically a non-negotiable for businesses that want to scale?
Franklyn (04:46)
Yeah, so I think the first point is probably that many of the founders that start ecommerce are not from a finance background. They’ll be marketers,
product specialists, industry specialists that either see a gap in the market or have a passion project which turns into a business and can grow quite quickly. But in the beginning, finance can often be an afterthought. And it’s only really when things become challenging and maybe some of the lack of finance fundamentals in the business start to become damaging that they then try to solve them retrospectively, which is quite painful to do so. I see this a lot across the industry.
Really in order to manage even the early stages of growth well and effectively, you really need to be on top of the bookkeeping and broader financial management of the business. It will certainly remove a lot of stress from that journey. It will actually help improve performance, both from a growth point of view, but also help optimize profits, manage cash flow, all these things which are obviously critical to growth.
Elspeth Cordray (05:46)
Okay, so just in terms of what good bookkeeping looks like at Triffin, what practices and tools do you use to make sure your ecommerce clients have clean and reliable data?
Franklyn (05:57)
Yeah, so I think there’s a few things that go into best practice bookkeeping. The first one be related to systems and automation and the correct setup and management of accounting systems like Xero and QuickBooks, but then other systems like A2X that actually really automate important processes and process transactions effectively and in the correct way, which really, really help businesses manage.
their finances and really stay on top of things like profitability and margins in particular. The other things would be, I’d say, the frequency of reconciliations. So brands, particularly in the early parts of their journey, often work with, let’s say, less frequent reconciliation cycles. that can also become quite challenging in terms of just staying on top of everything. mean, one thing that businesses struggle with
in the early part of their journey of volatility. They can have volatile sales, they can have volatile costs, and the frequency of reconciliations is super important. So daily reconciliations, I’m talking about here in terms of staying on top of everything is really what the best brands do and what we provide to our customers. And the next one I’d say is around good hygiene when it comes to the use of purchase orders but broader invoice bills and purchase order management. And again, businesses or founders that maybe aren’t from…
finance backgrounds, come into this without some of these foundational habits. But these things can really, again, provide the foundation which can scale quickly and effectively.
Elspeth Cordray (07:24)
Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you on the purchase order side as well. It’s really important to have a good process for that.
Okay, so we’ll assume now that our clients are working with clean books, they’re using A2X for reconciliation, Triffin’s handling the reporting in nearly real time, so they have good numbers, and they’ve got accurate up-to-date financial reporting. So to scale from 1 million to 10 million, what would you say are the three main financial metrics that founders should be reviewing regularly?
Franklyn (07:57)
Yeah, of course. There’s actually, Yeah, there’s quite a lot of metrics. It’d be quite easy to expand the number beyond three. I’m going to just pick three for the sake of this conversation. I think if you do really, really well, will certainly go a long way to enabling success.
But the three that I would pick out would be
cost of requiring customers, sometimes called CAC. It would be contribution margin, which is essentially the margin you make after your product costs, after delivery transaction fees, warehousing fees, and your marketing costs. And the last one would be repeat purchase rate. So if you’re really good at those three things, then it will certainly go a long way to enabling success on that journey from one to 10 million.
So on screen here is really a simple visualization of a consumer brand financial model. So regardless of the sales channels you sell across, you’ll have a number of new and returning customers which drive a number of units orders, which have an inventory requirement, but essentially generate revenue. And we started to look at the structure of P&L. You have revenue across different sales channels. You have cost of goods.
marketing costs, operating expenses, all of this obviously feed into your P&L balance sheet and cash flow. The thing is they’re all very, very much connected. The three metrics that I’ve pulled out as I think been really, really key on the journey from 1 million to 10 million is the cost of acquiring new customers. Obviously with that kind of growth, you do need to be acquiring new customers whichever channels you’re selling across.
And actually I think people don’t realize the impact that that can have on cash flow. So a lot of businesses struggle with cash flow on that particular journey and often the cash flow challenges or the really kind of, let’s say, stressful cash flow periods can be a combination of managing some of the inventory, production and purchasing, but also just the effectiveness of acquiring new customers.
The other one I’ve mentioned is contribution margin. So actually I’ll just jump to more of a kind of table format here, which will help explain this. But as you work down the P&L, you’ll see here that product margin being net sales less cost of goods sold, gross margin being product margin less warehousing delivering transaction fees. So when working across or selling across platforms like Amazon and Shopify, obviously you’re incurring.
costs associated with that transaction. So it’s a really, really important thing to be on top of this gross margin figure, because that will determine how much you can afford to spend on marketing and acquiring new customers. So product margin less, those fees gets us to the gross margin figure. Contribution margin would be the gross margin less online and offline marketing costs. This is absolutely key. And one of the things that
think this is a struggle with is actually understanding what we’d call a fully loaded cost of acquiring customers. And that means not just taking into account the ad spend, but also taking into account things like agency fees and photo shoots and branding and other things. So it’s really understanding how much contribution you’re driving in the business is absolutely essential, again, in that particular stage of the journey.
Elspeth Cordray (11:03)
That’s really interesting, Frank, so your customers can see that on your platform on a daily basis.
Franklyn (11:09)
Absolutely, yeah. We’ll show all margins down to net profit, but contribution margin by sales channel on a daily basis.
Elspeth Cordray (11:18)
Right and in terms of the cash flow cycle how does that play into businesses as they’re growing between one and ten million?
Franklyn (11:27)
It’s really key. So I think the main driver of that is to sell more and to generate more revenue, you have to buy more products and you have to increase your marketing spend. Therefore, you’re naturally in this situation where the more products you buy, the more you spend on marketing, the more pressure it puts on your cash flow. So as you grow, you just have to be more on top of that.
it’s even more important to manage that because cash flow, as you know very well, is the number one killer of small businesses.
Elspeth Cordray (11:54)
Absolutely.
Franklyn (11:55)
So on screen here, I’ve got just a typical cash conversion cycle. even in highly profitable businesses, consumer brands have the challenge of having to pay for inventory and marketing before they receive revenue from sales. So if you are not profitable on first transaction, if you’re paying a lot to acquire customers on first transaction, essentially what you’re doing is you’re extending the timeline.
extending your cash conversion cycle. And again, if you’re not well capitalized, which many early stage brands are not, you really, really have to be on top of both the inventory purchasing and the amount of money you have to, for example, if you’re expanding your sales channels to things like wholesale and retail, the payment terms will be different. So you’ll have just some complexity to manage there.
really on the direct to consumer channels and marketplaces. It’s really important to be on top of margins in relation to how much you can afford to pay to acquire a customer. think the challenge which a lot of founders face and a lot of business faces is that these things change on a daily basis. So volatility in sales, volatility in supply.
volatility in operational costs and factors. All this volatility is really, hard to stay on top of. In later stage companies, they typically have teams of people dedicated to this on a full time basis, which obviously helps them manage that. again, when you’re an early stage brand and very, very lean team, it’s a hard thing to do, which is really why we exist. We’ve built both the technology and the service to help brands stay on top of this and manage this.
Elspeth Cordray (13:37)
Yeah, that’s really
helpful.
Franklyn (13:39)
this is really just a very simple visualization of a cash at bank chart. And it tends to be something we see quite frequently where businesses can go through working capital cycles where they have cash in the bank, they pay for inventory, they pay for marketing, cash goes low, they sell products, cash goes high. Obviously, as you’re growing, and particularly growing from one to 10 million, if you start adding in different sales channels, you start to have varying cash cycles.
and this would be based on, let’s say, the kind payment terms you might have with a wholesale or retail partner. But ultimately, this complexity can lead to just volatility and ultimately can lead to quite challenging cash flow situations. So that’s something we see quite frequently. A lot of customers that come to us in the first place do so because they struggle managing cash flow. But ultimately,
in order to do or to manage that kind of, let’s say, one to 10 million journey and be on top of cash flow. A lot of the foundations of processing information correctly, reconciling transactions on regular basis, making sure that all your systems like Xero, QuickBooks, A2X have been set up and configured correctly, is super important to make that journey less stressful.
Elspeth Cordray (14:52)
Frank, I know that at Triffin you help businesses to do this all the time to scale up. Can you share a real life story of one of your clients that you worked with to grow?
Franklyn (15:01)
Yeah. So, so we actually.
released a case study with one of our customers, Nidhya, quite recently. It’s a female health and wellness brand. they were in a typical situation that many brands find themselves in, where, know, plastering around the one million mark a couple of years ago. And I think the business was maybe doing what lots of similar stage businesses do and maybe don’t spend enough on marketing and customer acquisition. The business had great underlying fundamentals, very profitable.
great repeat purchase rates. just really, and it comes back to the budgeting point we’ve discussed earlier, but actually sometimes, you know, being free to actually invest in growth, invest in marketing and customer acquisition as a result of having a really good understanding of your margins, your profitability is a key to actually being able to then go out and acquire more customers and to grow.
Elspeth Cordray (15:50)
Okay, so we’ve talked about why accurate bookkeeping is fundamental if you want meaningful financial insights into your business and how those insights can help you to grow. We’ve talked about the three key growth metrics that can make a difference that Frank suggested. Those are the customer acquisition cost, contribution margin, and repeat purchase rate.
So my final question for you, Frank, is just what’s one action that viewers can take this week if they want to start their journey towards that?
10 million pounds milestone.
Franklyn (16:22)
I would really review how you’re processing information, your finance information and your accounting system. we see this so often across the industry that businesses will be working on a cash accounting basis rather than an accrual basis and not really understanding what the true P&L looks like, not understanding what the actual cost of goods are, not breaking out sales across their sales channels. These kinds of things are really limiting when it comes to
basically managing and optimizing the finances of your business. So I would be looking at this and if you are not managing it as you should be, I would address that immediately and find a partner that can. Obviously that’s something that we can help with. So please get in touch. We’ll happily chat to anyone and provide recommendations, but you can’t ignore that. think it’s something which a lot of founders come to a little bit later in the journey and it can be quite painful to unravel. So the sooner you can get on top of that, the better really.
Elspeth Cordray (17:16)
Absolutely. Thanks so much for joining us, Frank. For everybody that’s watching this video, if you’re looking to grow your business and want a clear review of the numbers that matter, the team at Triffin can help you. Click on the link in the description to book your free consultation. Thanks for watching, everyone.
Franklyn (17:34)
Thank you. Thanks, Elspeth.
