BCP 56: She halved her MER in a week, here's how.

Most founders think cutting their ad spend means cutting their revenue.

Wrong.

One of my ECOM Grow members, let's call her Margaret (not her real name, but she knows who she is, and so do the 11 other people on the call), runs a premium accessories brand in the fashion space. Beautiful product. High AOV, $400 to $500 a pop. And for months, she was sitting at a 50% MER.

Fifty percent.

For every dollar of revenue she was making, fifty cents was going back into Meta.

I told her last week: we have to fix this. Anyone spending over 25 to 30% on Meta is burning money. Full stop.

Her response? "But what if my sales drop?"

That's the fear that keeps founders stuck. The belief that the only thing standing between them and zero revenue is their ad spend.

So we ran the experiment.

Here's what Margaret did. She cut her Meta spend back hard. She added $20 a day on TikTok. Packing videos. Her click-through rate on one of them is 37%. People love watching a $400 product get packed. They're not always buying it, but they're watching. Two cent CPC. A thousand people a day landing on her site for twenty bucks.

That's it. That was the whole change.

One week later, her MER was at 25%.

She halved it.

Revenue? 97% of forecast. Essentially flat.

The $20 a day on TikTok had nothing to do with the MER improvement, by the way. That's brand awareness. The attribution on TikTok shows nothing. At $10 to $20 a day, that's not moving the revenue needle. But it's building reach, and that compounds.

The MER improvement came entirely from pulling back on Meta.

That's the only thing that changed.

Here's the part founders miss.

Margaret wasn't under-spending on Meta before. She was overspending. There's a difference.

Underspending means you're leaving sales on the table. Overspending means you're paying for sales that would have happened anyway, or paying for sales that aren't worth the cost. You're bidding against yourself. You're funding Meta's bottom line, not yours.

At 50% MER, she was working herself into the ground to hand half her revenue to an algorithm.

And when she stopped?

The revenue held. Because the demand was already there. The customers were already looking for her. Meta was just taking credit, and taking cash.

Overspending on Meta will drain your bank faster than anything else in your business. I've said it before. I'll keep saying it until it sticks.

Now, 25% isn't the finish line. The goal is to budget at 30% next month and see if we can hold it or push it lower. But going from 50% to 25% in a week, while maintaining 97% of forecast revenue?

That is an enormous win.

And it came from doing less, not more.

No new strategy. No new creative. No agency. No shiny new channel.

Just pulling back on what was bleeding her dry.

When did you last audit your Meta spend properly?

Not just check the ROAS on the campaign manager. Actually ask: is this spend producing revenue that wouldn't exist without it?

If you don't know the answer, that's your answer.

If you want me to do this with you, book a time here.

Swing the axe.

Until next week, Paul

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