Judith Hobdell

Judith Hobdell The eCommerce CFO. Build an eCommerce brand.a buyer would pay a premium for. Whether you exit or not. The eCommerce CFO & Certified Profit First Professional

19/08/2026

Your supplier terms are a credit line you never applied for.

A brand I work with just moved from paying a supplier in full before shipping, to thirty percent on order, twenty before it ships, and the balance sixty days after.

Nothing about the price changed.

But the cash now leaves after the stock has had a chance to sell, instead of months before.

That is the cash conversion cycle, and it is the difference between funding growth from your own sales and funding it from a lender.

Founders negotiate hard on unit cost and accept whatever terms are offered.

Terms are negotiable. They are usually easier to move than price, because they cost your supplier less to give.

And a business that funds its own inventory is worth more than one that borrows to.

When did you last ask for better terms instead of a better price?

18/08/2026

The riskiest month of your year is the one where the bank account looks best.

November lands. Cash arrives faster than it has all year.

And almost none of it is yours.

The GST on those sales is owed. The tax on the profit is owed. The stock was bought on terms falling due after the money lands, and the January restock needs funding before the next dollar arrives.

Then the refunds arrive in December.

The balance is not profit. It is a queue of payments that have not been made yet.

Founders who miss that take the win. A bonus. A heavy reinvestment.

Then January comes, the cash is gone, and the restock goes on debt.

That is how a good year starts a debt cycle.

And a January funded on debt is a pattern a buyer will price.

17/08/2026

Founders ask what a fractional CFO actually is.

Wrong question.

There are more of them every month. The title tells you almost nothing.

Ask "what kind of CFO are you?" instead.

Operational or theoretical. One has moved real numbers inside a business. The other works from frameworks.

Someone who shows up for a monthly call, or someone who has been deep in your numbers.

Built to scale or built to sell. Growing a business and making it saleable are not the same project.

And this one matters more than founders realise. Does the CFO understand marketing?

In eCommerce, finance and marketing are the same conversation.

A CFO who does not will cut the ad budget to protect profit, without knowing whether you make money on the first order, or where breakeven actually sits.

Cut the wrong campaign and you have not saved money. You have switched off acquisition.

The title is not the qualification.

Their experience defines the kind of CFO they are, and whether they fit your business.

What kind do you actually need?

16/08/2026

Founders call a CFO when cash is already the emergency.

By then the questions have changed.

It is no longer how do we improve margin or what should the next inventory buy be. It is whether the business can carry what it owes.

That is a much narrower set of options.

The work that would have prevented it is unglamorous.

Knowing true profit by month rather than by payment timing.

Cash ring-fenced for inventory, tax and debt before it gets spent.

A forecast that maps what is owed against what is coming.

None of that feels urgent when sales are growing.

All of it decides what happens when they stop.

The system that prevents a crisis is the same one that makes a business sale-ready.

Neither gets built in the month you need it.

The time to bring in a CFO is while it still feels unnecessary.

13/08/2026

Finding the profit and taking the profit are two different jobs.

Plenty of founders can tell me where the leak is. The supplier rate nobody has renegotiated. The SKU that has not earned its shelf space in a year. The discount that trained the customer to wait.

They know.

The forecast does not change anything. The dashboard does not change anything. A number only becomes money when somebody acts on it.

That is the gap where profit dies. Not in the analysis. In the fortnight after it.

And it is the same gap a buyer sees. A business that knows its problems and does not fix them is a business running on hope.

The work is not knowing. It never was.

What have you known about for a year and not fixed?

12/08/2026

Fit matters more than volume.

The work is exclusive to a small number of brands at a time.

That is not scarcity marketing. It is what the work requires. Knowing a business well enough to change its trajectory takes depth, and depth does not scale by adding names.

Here is who this suits.

You know your revenue and you cannot see your real profit. Your P&L says one thing and your bank account says another.

You want the numbers built to the standard a buyer demands, whether or not you ever sell.

And you are ready to implement what the numbers show, because finding the profit and acting on it are two different jobs.

That is not a filter to keep people out. It is what makes the work land.

11/08/2026

A bad CFO fit costs more than the fee.

Weeks go into setup. Hours go into cleaning up data that should have been right already.

The founder gets frustrated that the strategy is not landing fast enough. The CFO gets frustrated that nothing is being implemented.

Then someone ends it, and both sides have spent months getting nowhere.

Here is the part that is easy to miss.

That is time you did not spend building numbers a buyer would pay a premium for.

Sale-ready is not a project you start when an offer arrives. It is the standard you run at, and it takes time to reach.

The cost of the wrong fit is not the fee. It is the time.

What has the wrong fit already cost you?

10/08/2026

Founders shop for a CFO the way they shop for a bookkeeper.

Lowest price that ticks the boxes.

That is backwards, and it costs both sides.

A bookkeeper records what happened. A CFO is a different profession entirely, and the work is judged on what it returns, not what it costs.

If a strategic CFO cannot find several times their fee in recovered margin, better systems and mistakes avoided, they are not doing the job.

And the return does not stop at this year's profit. Defensible profit is what a buyer pays a multiple on.

Negotiating the fee down is a signal. It says the role you are buying is bookkeeping, not CFO work.

Which number are you actually looking at, the monthly cost or the annual return?

09/08/2026

A founder asked me whether to sell this year.

The answer was that we could not know yet.

Two numbers were missing.

The first was theirs. The accounts still carried distortions from an earlier arrangement, so nobody could state a clean EBITDA. Inventory costed inconsistently. Expenses sitting against the wrong entity.

The second was the market's. What are businesses like this actually changing hands for?

A comparable in the category had recently sold at around three times EBITDA.

Put those two numbers side by side and the answer stopped being a feeling.

Selling now would price years of work at a multiple they were not willing to accept.

So the plan changed to growth.

Sale-ready is what let them ask the question properly.

Are you deciding on numbers, or on a hunch?

Address

Sunshine Coast, QLD

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Judith Hobdell posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category