Most brands look to marketing to improve performance. They optimize media spend, test creative, and push harder on CAC efficiency. And those things matter. But some of the most meaningful EBITDA gains I’ve seen weren’t found in marketing at all. They were sitting inside operations. When EBITDA is under pressure, the default moves are predictable. Teams reduce media spend, push for higher ROAS, and look for ways to improve conversion. These are important levers, but they are also the most visible and often the most saturated.
Across nearly every DTC business I’ve worked with, from early-stage brands to Private Equity-backed businesses, the pattern is consistent. There is a heavy focus on acquisition, incremental gains in conversion, and constant pressure on media efficiency. Meanwhile, operational infrastructure is quietly treated as fixed. Fulfillment, shipping logic, and tech stack decisions are rarely revisited with the same rigor, even though they have a direct impact on margin.
It took me a while in my career to fully understand what EBITDA meant and why it mattered. Not because it wasn’t important, but because it wasn’t consistently communicated across all levels of the organization. Most teams are focused on growth, channel performance, and hitting revenue targets. EBITDA tends to sit at a different altitude.
I really started to understand its importance when I was at Algenist, where our primary investor was a Private Equity firm. How the business performed, and how it compared to others, was directly tied to EBITDA. It wasn’t just a finance metric. It was how value was measured.
At the time, my focus was still largely on topline growth and operational execution. But over time, as I’ve led more teams and navigated increasing pressure on CAC, ROAS, and overall efficiency, that perspective shifted. In many cases, you can’t simply spend less to hit EBITDA targets, and you can’t always grow your way out of margin pressure. At some point, you have to look at how the business is actually running.
That is where this example comes in.
What this looked like in practice
At one brand, the DTC business was growing. On paper, everything looked healthy. Revenue was up, demand was steady, and performance metrics appeared strong. But nothing in the core performance metrics explained what was happening to margin. Margins were tightening, and the cause was not immediately clear.
We weren’t initially looking at this through an EBITDA lens. We were reevaluating our fulfillment strategy, specifically transitioning from internally managed warehouses to an external partner. As part of that work, we went deeper into our breakeven analysis to understand the true cost structure of the business. That is when something did not line up. The number of orders being fulfilled was significantly higher than the number of orders being placed. In some cases, it was nearly double.
As we dug in, the issue became clear. Orders were being split across multiple warehouses, creating multiple shipments for a single customer order. It was not visible in top-line reporting, but the downstream impact was significant. Shipping costs were inflated, margins were quietly eroding, and the customer experience was inconsistent. What stood out most was not just the inefficiency itself, but how long it had likely been happening without being fully understood.
We did not change media strategy or pricing. Instead, we focused on fixing the operational logic behind fulfillment. By restructuring how orders were routed and how inventory was allocated, we were able to consolidate shipments more effectively. Shipping costs came down, delivery became more consistent, and the overall cost per order improved. The result was a meaningful improvement in EBITDA without increasing demand.
More importantly, it was a reminder that some of the biggest opportunities are not always the ones you set out to find. If we had surfaced this earlier, the impact would have compounded over time.
This was not a case of optimizing EBITDA directly. It was a case of uncovering how the business was actually operating and what it was costing us.
Why this matters even more now
Acquisition costs are rising, efficiency is harder to find, and growth alone is no longer enough to protect margin. For a long time, brands could rely on demand to carry performance. That margin for error is gone.
Improving EBITDA today is not just about driving more revenue. It is about running a better business. The advantage increasingly comes from understanding how marketing, operations, and data work together, not in isolation.
At the same time, advances in data and AI are making it easier to surface these kinds of inefficiencies, giving teams more visibility into how the business is actually running.
How to think about EBITDA when it’s under pressure
When EBITDA becomes a focus, most teams naturally look to the most immediate and visible levers. Media efficiency, CAC, conversion, and cost reduction are often the first areas to be evaluated. Those are important, but they are also the most optimized, most measured, and often the most constrained. The next layer of opportunity usually comes from stepping back and looking at the business more holistically.
That starts with understanding your true cost structure, not just at a high level, but how costs behave at the order level and across the full customer journey. From there, it becomes important to examine where assumptions have been made. Many areas of the business are treated as fixed, whether it is fulfillment strategy, shipping logic, vendor relationships, or technology decisions, even though they were often set at a very different stage of growth.
As companies scale, these decisions are not always revisited with the same level of scrutiny. At the same time, different parts of the business tend to operate in silos. Marketing, operations, and finance are each optimizing for their own goals, which can make it difficult to see how one decision impacts another across the system.
The real opportunity often lies in identifying where there is misalignment between what the business is trying to optimize for and how it is actually structured to perform. Trade-offs between speed and cost, growth and efficiency, or customer experience and margin are not always intentional, but they are always present.
In many cases, EBITDA is not constrained by a lack of effort. It is constrained by how the business is designed to run.
At Fujo, this is where we focus our work. Not just optimizing individual channels, but understanding how the full system operates across data, operations, and growth. Real performance does not come from a single lever. It comes from alignment.
If something in your business feels off but is difficult to pinpoint, it is often not in the most obvious places.
If you’re seeing margin pressure but can’t clearly identify where it’s coming from, that’s often where we start.
We work with brands to identify where performance is being lost across the system and uncover opportunities that do not show up in standard reporting.
If you are interested, we are always open to a conversation.
A quick note on EBITDA
EBITDA (pronounced ee-bit-dah) is one of the primary ways businesses measure profitability.
At a high level, it looks at how the business is performing from an operational standpoint, before things like financing decisions, taxes, and accounting adjustments come into play.
In simple terms, it shows how efficiently the business is actually running day to day.
Formula: Net Income + Interest + Taxes + Depreciation + Amortization
It’s also one of the key metrics investors and Private Equity firms use to evaluate a company. It helps them compare performance across businesses and determine how much a company is worth. Because of that, EBITDA often becomes a central focus as companies grow, especially when profitability and long-term value are priorities.