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DAY ONE

What whoever owns the whole machine needs on the first day.

Whoever owns growth, a new hire, an agency, or you on a Monday you’ve decided to start over, needs six things on day one. Without them, the first month goes on finding out what they should have been handed.

  1. An order-level exportEvery order with customer ID, date, net revenue, discount, products, shipping charged, refunds and sales channel. Not a dashboard; the rows.
  2. Real costs from financeProduct cost by item, pick and pack, shipping by zone, payment fees, return rates by category.
  3. Admin access to every channelStore, ad accounts, email and SMS platform, reviews, and the DNS records for the sending domain.
  4. The historyEvery offer, sale, price change and major site change of the last two years, as best anyone remembers. Gaps are findings.
  5. A payback ceilingFrom whoever manages cash, in months, so acquisition targets can be set in dollars from the first week.
  6. Authority over the whole pipeOne person who can change the offer, the flows and the media targets together, or each channel will keep optimizing its own joint.

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If this is your store

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Written by Andrew Lauchner, a growth and retention operator for consumer brands. The paid work is one ninety-day Sprint.

This is one chapter of The Whole Machine, which is free and readable in full on a single page with no form in front of it.