Last Thursday, 4:17 p.m., I get an email from a prospect:
“Can you hop on real quick? I think something is broken. I think the dashboards are lying.”
Nope. Dashboards don’t lie. It just doesn’t care if you’re profitable.
They had just shut off all their Meta campaigns. Again. Panic pause. Third time this quarter.
Performance looked great—3.1x ROAS account-wide. But their cash flow was cratering. Profit was disappearing faster than Shopify would let them refresh their dashboard.
So we pulled up the spreadsheet. Ran the actual numbers. CAC. COGS. LTV. Refunds. Fulfillment. SaaS bloat. Their new “lifestyle ops manager.”
Their real breakeven CPA? $41.
Their actual CPA last month? $58.
That’s a $17 gap. Per order. Across 3,000 orders. That’s $51,000 gone—quietly, slowly, while dashboards were high-fiving each other.
That’s why we built a calculator.
The Business Model Calculator
We created the Business Model Calculator because too many people in this business are setting CPA goals with the same rigor they use to pick lunch.
They feel it out.
They read a Twitter thread. They watch a webinar. They guess.
And when it doesn’t work? They blame the algorithm.
But the real issue is almost always upstream. They’re scaling a campaign they never had the margin to scale in the first place.
This calculator shows you the ceiling before the ceiling shows you.
Plug in your numbers and it tells you the maximum CPA you can afford to still hit your profit goal.
It’s math. Not magic. But after enough sleepless nights watching CAC creep and cash disappear, math starts to feel like magic.
And to be honest... a lot of marketers are good at media buying.
Fewer are good at translating performance into a narrative that protects headcount during the next budget meeting.
That’s why we built this calculator—and 17 other tools just like it—into our new Modern Marketing Masterclass.
It’s 5 hours. It’s free.
You’ll get:
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Campaign frameworks rooted in P&L reality
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Reporting templates that actually make sense to your CFO
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Walkthroughs for Google, Meta, and AI-assisted creative
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And the tools we use inside the agency when a client says “we’re spending more, but making less”
You can grab the calculator in the full masterclass for free here:
👉 modernmarketinginstitute.com
Until next week,
Isaac
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