The twenty questions boards and investors ask, answered straight.

Revenue growth tells you nothing until contribution after marketing, fulfilment, returns and payment costs has been read alongside it, together with the working capital the growth is tying up. A channel growing fast on a falling contribution margin is a cash consumer with a good headline.

The question is answered from the order line up, never from the revenue line down.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through Ecommerce Commercial Diligence.

Usually the things management has stopped seeing: a paid-media dependency that has become structural, a platform contract with eighteen months to run and no exit terms, a returns rate netted off inside gross revenue, and an ecommerce team one resignation from stopping. None of these are hidden. They are simply not in the pack.

The buyer’s diligence can be rehearsed twelve to eighteen months before the window, which is cheaper than discovering it during the window.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Exit Readiness Read.

Ask for the share of revenue arriving through paid channels, then ask what the run rate was in the last month the spend was cut, because every business has had one. If nobody can find that month, the dependency has never been tested and the answer is unknown, which is itself the finding.

Paid dependency is a Channel Resilience question, read alongside marketplace and single-customer exposure, and reach that is not fragile is a precondition of a growth assumption.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Cat’s Whiskers: Channel Resilience.

The only way to know is to walk it the way a customer does, from the first search to the parcel and the return, and to score what you find against traffic, conversion, order value, margin and repeat. Management’s view of the site comes from inside the building; the buyer’s view will not.

A proposition nobody has walked from the outside in the last twelve months is a liability until proven otherwise.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Pre-LOI Read before the LOI and The Review after it.

Every growth assumption in an ecommerce plan rests on a small number of operating facts: acquisition cost, conversion, order value, repeat, and the capacity of the platform and the team to carry the volume. Each assumption can be marked Confirmed, At Risk or Unsupported against those facts, and the marking is more useful to an investment committee than the model sitting on top of it.

Every assumption gets marked, and the hundred-day plan is the list of the ones marked At Risk.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through Ecommerce Commercial Diligence.

Whichever one is the binding constraint, and it is rarely the platform. A replatform in the first hundred days is the most expensive way to discover that the proposition was the problem.

The plan is sequenced from the diagnosis, and a plan written before the diagnosis is a wish list with a budget.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Portfolio Review.

A replatform is warranted when the current platform is the binding constraint on a specific commercial outcome that can be named and measured, and when the business has already exhausted what the current platform can do. It is the agency talking when the case is made in features rather than in trading numbers, and when the firm making the case earns from the build.

Six questions a board should put to the agency before approving the spend are set out in Should we replatform, written from the chair that approved one.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through Should we replatform?, and the independent replatform assessment

An AI line is real when it names the process it changes, the cost or revenue it moves, and the data the business already holds to feed it. It is theatre when it is a percentage uplift applied to a revenue line with a vendor’s logo beside it.

The operating model can be scored inside-out across five foundations before the money is committed, naming where AI pays back and where it does not.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Barking Cat AI Diagnostic.

A channel that management can explain to a buyer in one sitting: where the revenue comes from, what it costs to acquire, what the platform contract commits the business to, who owns the accounts and the data, and what happens if the head of ecommerce leaves. Every one of those has a documentary answer in an exit-ready business and an anecdotal one in the rest.

Rehearse the buyer’s ecommerce diligence twelve to eighteen months before the window, so the answers are documentary by the time they are asked.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Exit Readiness Read.

If the need is weekly decisions, people and an owned outcome, the business needs an operator in the seat and no adviser will substitute. If the need is one decision made well, or a diagnosis before the decision, an adviser fits; if the same need recurs at every board, that is a non-executive.

If the honest answer is that you need a permanent operator, that is the advice you will get, and you will get it first.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through Who this is for and Independent, and the independent board adviser role.

Because traffic is the cheapest number to grow and the furthest from the P&L. Somewhere between the visit and the margin line, conversion, order value, returns, cost to serve or acquisition cost has moved against you, and the dashboard that reports traffic is not the one that shows which.

The answer is one number rather than five, and the job is finding which one is binding.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Review.

Only if the current platform is the binding constraint on a commercial outcome you can name, and only after the current platform has been made to do everything it can. Most replatform cases fail this test and are a proposition problem or a team problem with a technology invoice attached.

Six questions to put to the board and the agency before committing are in Should we replatform, from the chair that approved the spend.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through Should we replatform?, and the independent replatform assessment

Sometimes, and it is worth remembering that the agency is the one party in the room whose recommendation always contains its own fee. The fairer test is whether the agency is being asked to solve a problem the business has not yet defined, because no agency performs well against a brief that does not exist.

An independent read, from an advisor who does not earn from the build, is the only way to separate an agency that is underperforming from a business that has not told it what to do.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Review and Independent.

Five, read together: traffic, conversion, order value, contribution margin after marketing and fulfilment, and repeat rate. Everything else, including bounce rate and the channel attribution debate, is an operating measure that belongs with management.

A board pack showing revenue and traffic without contribution is reporting activity, and activity is what agencies report.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Board Briefing.

The binding constraint is the single point in the proposition or the operating model where improvement moves the P&L and improvement anywhere else does not, yet. You know it is the one when the evidence for it survives being read against the trading numbers by someone with no stake in the answer.

Both diagnostics resolve to one binding constraint, sequenced first, because a list of twelve findings is a way of choosing none.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Review and The Barking Cat AI Diagnostic.

It pays back where the business already has the data, the process discipline and the decision rights for the thing being automated, and it does not pay back where AI is being bought to compensate for the absence of those. Waiting is the right answer more often than the vendors suggest, and the wrong answer where a competitor’s agent is already answering the customer’s question.

The five foundations score exactly this, and the thirty-minute self-assessment gives a leadership team its first hypothesis without anything leaving the browser.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through the AI Diagnostic self-assessment.

In all likelihood, yes, and the only open question is where. The dashboard reports what the site did with the customers who arrived; it cannot show the search it was absent from, the product page that answered the wrong question, or the basket abandoned at the delivery estimate, and those are where the sales go.

The site is walked the way a customer walks it, first search to return, and reported back from the only side of the screen that spends money.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Review; the method is shown at scale in the Commercial Experience Index.

Whatever is not addressing the binding constraint, which in most businesses is the larger part of the discretionary ecommerce budget. The list usually includes at least one platform module nobody has switched on, a paid channel that has never been tested with the spend paused, and an agency retainer that has outlived the brief it was hired against.

The Review ends with what to do first and what not to spend money on, and the second list is usually the more valuable.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Review.

Ask which of the three every party in the room would benefit from it being, and discount accordingly. The technology team would like it to be data and the agency would like it to be the platform; the honest answer is arrived at by walking the proposition from the outside and the operating model from the inside, then reading both against the numbers.

This is the one question the practice exists to answer, and it is answered by diagnosis rather than by vote.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Review and The Barking Cat AI Diagnostic.

Usually not, because ecommerce grows faster than the decision rights around it, so the channel is run with the sign-offs and reporting built for a fraction of its current size. The symptoms are familiar: trading decisions made by whoever spoke last, and a head of ecommerce who is in every meeting and owns no number.

The Cat’s Whiskers scores Operational Excellence, internally ready before externally funded, because no amount of technology fixes an operating model that has not been redesigned since the last stage of growth.

Barking Cat’s view

Applied through The Cat’s Whiskers: Operational Excellence.