We give product founders the complete picture. Cash flow you can trust, a full P&L view, budgets and forecasts that hold, and margin analysis down to the unit. When you can see all of it, the decisions get easier.
See where yours hidesFollow one unit of your product from first forecast to final sale. Every stage has an operational job and a financial lever. We run the levers.
The one plan everything else keys off. Sales forecasts, raw material orders, production runs and finished good orders all flow from it. Call it too high and cash gets buried in slow moving and obsolete stock. Call it too low and you miss sales, stall your momentum and hand customers to a competitor. We replace the gut feel with a forecast the whole business runs on.
The supplier's invoice is not what a unit costs. Freight and everything else it takes to get stock to your door adds up fast, so if you price off the invoice, your margin is a guess. The cheapest quote is rarely the whole answer either. Quality, reliability, minimums and lead times all carry a cost of their own. We put the true number on every option, so supplier decisions get made on the full picture, not price alone.
Production is where cost hides in the detail. Waste, downtime and short runs quietly eat what a batch was meant to yield, and if rent, power and wages aren't built into the unit cost, every product looks profitable while the business might not be. We cost every run properly, so you know what a unit really costs to make, whether it's your line or someone else's.
Stock on hand is cash sitting on a shelf, and the shelf is not free. Every slow mover pays rent, whether in your own warehouse or a 3PL charging by the pallet, and the longer it sits, the less it comes back worth. Then the stocktake finds less than the system said, and if the valuation is off, so is your profit. We track what stock really costs to hold, value it properly, and keep it turning, by SKU and by site.
Getting product to the customer is usually the cost nobody has actually measured. Free delivery, carrier surcharges and 3PL pick and pack fees all come out of the same margin, and some orders cost more to reach than they earn. If freight isn't priced in or charged back, every sale quietly ships a little profit out with it. We measure the true cost to serve each order and channel, so delivery gets priced on purpose.
Revenue can grow while profit stands still. Discounts, rebates, promo deals and ad spend go out for good reason, but nobody measures the full cost and return. Sometimes your biggest customer is your least profitable one. We measure every SKU, customer and channel after the discounts and the spend, so you back the ones that actually pay.
Every return and credit undoes a sale you already paid to make. We work out what they cost, find the cause, and stop it happening again.
Real world stories of where it went wrong for Australian product businesses. Different products, same root cause. The numbers stopped being seen in time.
A December supply shortage left distributors with nothing to sell. Customers switched to rival brands and winning them back is proving hard. Net profit fell 5.8% and China label formula revenue dropped 33% in the half.
The streetwear label's drops sold out in minutes and put its co-founder on the Young Rich List. The sales were never the problem. The ATO put the company into administration and won a wind up order over $2.2m in alleged tax debts.
Myer's new automated distribution centre went live and promptly jammed. Stock sat trapped inside while stores and online missed sales. Half year profit fell 40%, the fix is costed at $32m, and a 3PL was hired to cover peak. The business trades on, but the warehouse decided its year.
Australia's biggest winemaker shipped to distributors faster than drinkers drank, in China and the US both. When the sell-through data forced the issue, guidance was scrapped, the dividend went, shares hit a decade low, and Penfolds orders to China were paused while 400,000 cases cleared.
The Bondi fashion institution cut its advertising to save money, which only sped up the revenue decline. The industry post-mortem was blunt. Businesses rarely die of poor sales, they die of poor cash management.
The online surf retailer went into administration carrying $13.28m in liabilities after Nike moved to wind it up over a $237,760 debt. Unsecured creditors were left expecting 4.73 cents in the dollar.
Malt, hops and energy costs jumped while excise rose twice a year, and deferred pandemic tax debts came due, with the ATO the biggest creditor in many collapses. Costs moved. Prices and plans didn't move with them.
Administrators found the fashion group may have been insolvent for around four years before its collapse, owing up to $392m including $195m to the factories that made its clothes. The numbers knew long before anyone acted.
The Brisbane EV charger maker listed in the US at a valuation over a billion dollars, but the cost of making each unit outran what units earned. Administrators were appointed barely two years later.
In every one of these stories, the warning signs were sitting in the numbers first. Seen early, they are decisions. Seen late, they are headlines. We give you full visibility of your finances, so you make the decisions before you become the headline.
Every product business needs clean numbers coming in and someone senior making them work. We deliver either, or both, scaled to the size of your business and the problem in front of it.
This is where good data and reporting begins. Done correctly and reported in a way that means something, it keeps the business compliant and gives the CFO work above it clean foundations, so decisions get made quickly, efficiently and accurately instead of waiting on the numbers.
Senior finance leadership without the salary. Strategy, structure and a steady hand in the room where the decisions get made.
Engagements flex to fit. Some clients hand us the entire finance function. Others take a few hours a month. Start where the pain is and scale from there. No lock in, stop any month.
Book a discovery callCash flow is the biggest killer of product businesses. Growth soaks cash into stock months before sales give it back, which is why so many of these stories end the same way. The cash ran out before the problem got fixed. It is one of the first questions we answer for every client, and we keep a rolling cash forecast live in your business, broken down by week and forecast out at least 12 months, because seeing trouble early only matters if there's still time to arrange the fix.
Cash flow, budgets and margins are where product businesses win or lose. Every engagement runs on one conviction. You cannot manage what you have not costed, and the truth lives per unit, per SKU, per channel.
It starts with knowing what each product actually earns. Not gross margin by guesswork, but true contribution by product:
Product A wins every number a dashboard loves. Product B makes more actual profit on a third of the revenue.
High volume and high margin is the destination. Every product on your list has a next move.
Sale price down to contribution, per unit, by SKU and by channel. The owners making the best decisions can answer it line by line. If you can't yet, that is exactly what we build. Costing, data and reporting that turn gut feel into informed calls.
Book a discovery callMore than ten years in the finance teams of Australian product businesses, across beverage, apparel and FMCG.
I grew up on a macadamia farm in Northern NSW, where the family holidays depended on rainfall, crop prices, yield, pest damage, equipment breakdowns and when the factory paid. Nothing about that living was certain, so proper budgeting and cash flow planning were essential, and they forged a lasting love for businesses that make and sell real product.
Since then I've spent more than ten years in finance and accounting across craft beverage, apparel and FMCG, with brands that run their own production lines, brands that design the product and have it made offshore, and brands that buy it finished and sell it well. Today Avilla Advisory runs finance functions and fractional CFO engagements for product led businesses of every shape.
Our mark is a macadamia, cracked open along its natural seam to show the gold inside. That is how we see every product business. The value is already in there, in the costing, the margins and the cash. The job is to crack it open.
Free, thirty minutes.
We discuss what you do, where the numbers stand today, what is urgent versus noise, and give an honest read on whether we can help.
Foundations, fast.
Data and systems cleaned up, a cash flow and P&L forecast built or tuned up, and SKU and channel costings underway.
Month in, month out.
Month end closed and reported on time, a deck worth reading, and a monthly meeting where the calls get made.
Engagements scale up, scale down or stop any month.Book a discovery call
A short note is enough. You'll hear back within two business days so we can schedule a discovery call and give you an honest read on whether and how we can help.
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Prefer email? harry@avillaadvisory.com
No. Your tax accountant stays exactly where they are, and if you have a bookkeeper you like, keep them. We work alongside both, review the data coming through, and build on top of it.
Product businesses from idea through to established brands. Engagements start at a few hours a month, so you do not need a finance department sized problem to start, just numbers you want to trust.
Our clients work across a number of different systems we're familiar with, such as Xero, Shopify, Cin7, NetSuite and Microsoft. Whatever you're currently on, we can work with it and talk it through on the call.
A few hours a month covers a board pack, P&L and balance sheet, and an hour together running through what it means and what to do next. Plenty of clients start exactly there. A few more hours can add some bookkeeping and data tidy up, so the numbers we're working from are accurate.