Frank Growth

Most owners can tell you last month's revenue but not which customers actually make them money. This episode gives you the math to find out.

For founders and operators—especially DTC brands—who suspect they're spending too much to acquire customers who never come back.

John Zdanowski is co-founder and CEO of Weekly Accounting and a Harvard MBA who describes himself as a sonar engineer applying signal-processing math to business data. He previously co-founded Assembled Brands, a $100M fund that has seen the financials of 3,000+ emerging consumer brands—the vantage point where his core thesis formed: most brands optimize for revenue growth and quietly lose money on customers who only buy once. In this episode he walks through his "fourth statement" (audience to first-time customer to repeat), the sets of books every business already has or still needs, and why he runs accounting on a weekly cadence instead of monthly. He gets specific: the lifetime-gross-profit-to-CAC ratio, why a 1.7 ratio means you're grinding the engine, and how he turns a quarterly goal of $189,000 for 6,100 customers into a weekly target of $14,500 and ~470 customers.

• The "fourth statement" framework: turning audience → first purchase → repeat into unit economics you can forecast growth and saturation from
• How to run the numbers weekly—divide a quarterly goal by 13, compare this week to the same week last year—for 52 feedback loops a year instead of 12
• The common mistake: optimizing for revenue growth and losing money on one-time buyers instead of optimizing for contribution
• The first number to calculate: lifetime gross profit (purchases per customer × average order value × gross margin) ÷ CAC, and why anything near 1.7 means you're overspending to acquire

• 00:00 — The fourth statement: audience, first purchase, repeat
• 01:16 — Why most owners are flying blind on customer profitability
• 02:44 — Assembled Brands, and optimizing for contribution over revenue
• 03:59 — The break-even math on a first-time DTC customer
• 05:22 — What bookkeepers actually deliver vs. what you need
• 07:07 — Two sets of books, then a third, then a fourth
• 08:05 — Weekly cadence: 52 feedback loops instead of 12
• 09:53 — Daily vs. weekly vs. monthly, and troubled to world-class
• 11:58 — The integrated financial model: weekly tied to the quarter
• 14:45 — Warning signs your accounting is broken
• 15:25 — Why accounting is a venture-scale opportunity
• 17:11 — Inside the Weekly Accounting platform
• 19:48 — The one number: lifetime gross profit to CAC
• 20:32 — Lightning round
• 21:59 — Takeaways and a 10-minute action

Guest
John Zdanowski — Co-founder & CEO, Weekly Accounting
Website
LinkedIn

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason

Most B2B companies fight to win one customer segment. WellHub has to win three at the same time.

For marketers and operators running multi-audience, marketplace, or multi-country growth.

Robin Izsak-Tseng is VP of global B2B marketing at WellHub, a corporate wellness platform serving over 40,000 companies across 18 countries. She runs a three-sided marketplace — HR buyers, fitness partners, and the employees who use it — through three distinct teams that report to one CMO. In this episode she breaks down how those teams stay aligned without becoming siloed, how acquisitions like Urban Sports Club buy instant brand recognition, and why pulling back GymPass paid search and web properties too early after the rebrand opened a door for a competitor in Brazil. She also names the simple mistake complex teams make: assuming the same level of market maturity everywhere, when a household name in one country still gets "what's WellHub?" at marketer dinners in another.

• How WellHub structures three marketing teams (B2B, partners, B2C) under one CMO and keeps them aligned around a single company story
• Using zip-code-level data to map partner supply down to individual neighborhoods, not just cities
• Why cutting GymPass search bids and web properties too soon let a competitor gain authority in Brazil
• When to put the product in employees' hands first (a SoulCycle class, 30 days on the diamond plan) so engagement opens the door to HR

• 00:00 — The market-maturity trap (cold open)
• 00:42 — The three-sided growth engine
• 02:46 — Inside WellHub's triple-sided marketplace
• 04:48 — Proving ROI on employee wellness
• 05:49 — Acquisitions and instant brand recognition
• 08:24 — The GymPass to WellHub rebrand
• 10:08 — Martech, HubSpot, and AI disruption
• 15:35 — Events and the product-led sell-through
• 20:11 — The biggest mistake: assuming market maturity
• 22:58 — Lightning round

Guest
Robin Izsak-Tseng — VP of Global B2B Marketing, WellHub
Website
LinkedIn

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois: Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason: Follow Jason on LinkedIn

How to decide which growth bets to fund when every idea on the table already looks good.

For marketing and growth leaders drowning in too many opportunities and a team that's too small to chase them all.

Seth Lowery is VP of Marketing at Octane, a fintech that has originated over $8 billion in consumer loans and runs both a lending arm (Roadrunner Financial) and an in-house SaaS layer—with close to 50% of the company in product and tech. On Seth's first day, his CEO handed him a single rule: a new initiative needs to clear $10 million in incremental originations to get approved. In this episode he breaks down why that number is a guideline rather than a hard rule, how it forces his team into P1/P2/P3 backlogs, his four-prong method for working with sales, and how he runs three different go-to-market motions—OEMs, dealers, and B2B2C—at the same time.

• The $10M incremental-originations bar, and why Seth treats it as a compass rather than a cage
• The four-prong method for sales and marketing: to sales, for sales, through sales, and in lieu of sales
• Why the hardest no's are the easy internal asks—a better-looking slide deck, an event t-shirt—and why he tells his team "let me be the bad guy"
• How he runs three GTM motions at once while deliberately keeping Octane's own brand in the background

• 00:00 — Cold open: the problem isn't too few ideas, it's too many
• 00:33 — Intro and the initiative-overload problem
• 02:35 — Lending company or tech company?
• 03:40 — Where the $10 million rule came from
• 05:13 — How the rule changes what to run and what to kill
• 06:30 — The hardest no's and "let me be the bad guy"
• 07:57 — Running a remote team to results, not hours
• 08:40 — The four-prong method for sales and marketing
• 11:21 — Hiring for B2B and channel marketing over fintech
• 12:15 — Octane's moat: the octane score and the soft pull
• 12:54 — Running three GTM motions at once
• 15:04 — The overlooked lever: loyalty
• 15:34 — The two biggest prioritization mistakes
• 16:33 — Lightning round
• 17:53 — Jason's top three takeaways

Guest
Seth Lowery — VP of Marketing, Octane
Website
Roadrunner Financial
LinkedIn

Frank Growth is a podcast about how companies actually grow—real operators, real constraints, real decisions. Hosted by Jason Shafton.

• Work with Winston Francois: Work with Winston Francois
• Subscribe / Follow Jason: Follow Jason on LinkedIn