Two minutes, your real numbers, and the one figure that decides how much you can spend on ads: your fully-loaded customer acquisition cost, and what it can afford.
Step 1 of 2: your CAC
Your fully-loaded CAC
$300
That is ads only. Add agency, sales, and tools to see the number that actually matters.
Whether $300 is good depends on one more number.
The formula is one line. Getting it honest is the work.
Take everything you spent to win customers in a period and divide by the customers you won. Ad spend alone gives you the number your ad platform shows. That number is almost always wrong.
Agency fees, sales salaries and commissions, tools, referral payouts: if a cost's job is getting customers, it belongs in the numerator. Leave it out and every number downstream inherits the error.
A $12,000 annual deal billed monthly is $1,000 of cash in the first 30 days. Growth runs on cash timing, so the report asks what a customer actually pays you in their first month.
You cannot know your feasible ad spend until you know two numbers: what a customer costs, and what they pay you back in 30 days. When the second is at least twice the first, one customer funds the next. That ratio, not your budget, sets how fast you can grow.
A worked example
$3,000 in ads, $1,000 to the agency, $200 in tools, 10 new customers: CAC is $420, not the $300 the ad platform reports. If a new customer pays $900 in the first 30 days and costs $300 to serve, the 30-day gross profit is $600. That is 1.4 times CAC: solvent, but not self-funding. Get it to $840 and each customer pays for the next.
On the page the moment you finish step 2, and a copy in your inbox.
What a customer returns in their first 30 days against what they cost, graded against the 2.0 line that lets one customer pay for the next.
The most you can pay per new customer and still self-fund, your headroom against today's CAC, and what that means as a monthly budget.
Which single number is holding growth back, plus what a 20% price move, a 20% CAC drop, or a point-of-sale upsell would each do to your ratio.
Because the platform number leaves out everything whose job is getting customers: agency fees, sales salaries and commissions, tools, and referral payouts. If those are missing, every number downstream inherits the error.
Enter the money you spend to find customers: sales time at what an hour is worth, referral fees, directory listings, tools. CAC exists for every business; ads are just one way to pay it.
Yes. Leave the recurring fields at zero. Payback and lifetime value then rest on the first sale alone, which is exactly the case where the 30-day number matters most.
They are stored with your lead record so the report can be emailed to you and, if you buy the audit, so it can start from what you already entered. They are never shared or published.
Want the numbers done for you, by channel, with the offer stack that fixes them? The Money Model Audit is $495.