Hey,

Five founders said a version of the same sentence to me in one week.

"It's the lowest the bank account's ever been, but we're not going backwards. We're just kind of hovering."

A board game brand said it more plainly. He'd gone too aggressive on stock, and the money for anything else was simply gone.

A jewelry brand widened it out. "People stopped shopping. It wasn't just us, it was everywhere."

Then the line I keep coming back to, from that same founder:

"I keep constantly spending more, spending more, spending more. It doesn't work. If the customers are not there, you can't spend."

Five brands. Different categories, different countries, different sizes. All in the last week of September.

If that's roughly where you're sitting right now, you're in a very ordinary place. And it has a shape.

 

The pre-Q4 cash trough

Here's how it forms.

You bought Q4 inventory in July and August, because that's when you have to. Lead times don't care about your cash flow.

Then September came in under forecast. Possibly well under.

So the stock is paid for. The quarter that pays for your year is six weeks out. And the money you'd use to go after it is sitting on a shelf.

That's the trough. It's seasonal and structural, and almost every founder experiences it as a personal failure.

It isn't one. But you do have to work it in the right order.

 

First: whose problem is this?

Before you touch the ad account, answer one question.

Is demand down, or is your acquisition down?

Those two look nearly identical on a dashboard. They need opposite responses.

Check three things from outside your ad account. What your category did in September. What your organic and direct traffic did. What your returning-customer revenue did.

If all three softened together, demand moved. Your ads are probably fine, and spending into a soft market just raises your cost per customer.

If paid new customers fell while organic and returning held steady, that one's yours.

The difference matters more than almost anything else you'll decide this month. One version says hold your nerve. The other says go fix your acquisition.

The founder who told me "if the customers are not there, you can't spend" had already worked this out. It saved him a quarter of wasted budget.

 

Second: find where the cash actually is

This is the step most people skip.

Pull your stock on hand by variant. Put a 90-day sell-through rate next to every line.

You'll usually find something uncomfortable. A large share of your retail value is sitting in a small number of variants that barely move.

Sizes nobody picks. The third colorway. The bundle that made sense in a planning meeting.

That stock is your Q4 war chest, held in the wrong shape.

I looked at an account recently where roughly a quarter of the stock value sat in lines doing almost no volume. The founder had been describing himself as out of cash.

He was carrying it. Just not in a form he could spend.

Liquidating slow variants below full margin feels like losing. Run the arithmetic anyway.

Cash at 60% of retail, in hand inside two weeks, beats full margin you collect in March. Especially now, when that cash buys inventory turns during your highest-demand window.

And a discount is only one of your levers here.

Bundle slow variants with the fast ones, so the fast one carries the deal and your headline price never moves. Use them as a gift above an order threshold, which shifts units and lifts average order value at the same time. For a genuinely stuck block, a wholesale or sample-sale route clears it without your DTC pricing ever seeing it.

The goal is to turn shelf value into spendable cash. How elegantly you do it matters less than how fast.

 

Third: size a bet you can actually afford

The instinct in a trough is to go quiet and wait for December.

That's how brands arrive at their best month with no creative, no warm audience and no data.

What you want is a floor.

Work out the smallest daily spend that keeps your account learning and your retargeting pools alive. For most brands at this size it's a lot less than they fear.

In practice that means two things. Enough daily conversions that your best ad sets don't go into a cold start. And enough traffic that your 30-day audiences still have people in them when you want them.

It's also the whole difference between entering November warm or cold.

Then hold back a defined amount for the two weeks that actually matter. Decide that number now, while you're thinking clearly, and write it down.

Trough decisions made in late November are panic decisions.

 

Why this keeps happening

One more thing, because the trough is predictable and most brands still get caught by it.

Your inventory buy and your growth budget come out of the same pot, and they're needed four months apart. Nothing about that changes next year.

So the fix is boring. In your two strongest months, ring-fence a percentage of contribution margin as a Q4 acquisition reserve, before the stock order goes out.

A tenth of contribution margin from your two best months is usually enough to fund a floor through a soft September. You'll never notice it leaving in July.

The brands that never feel this trough decided back in June what August was allowed to spend.

 

Your action step this week

Three columns, one spreadsheet, about an hour.

One. Your category's September, your organic and direct, your returning revenue. That tells you whether this is you or the market.

Two. Stock on hand by variant with 90-day sell-through. Flag every line under 20%. That's your liquidation list, and it's your cash.

Three. Your floor spend and your reserved November number. Both written down, both dated.

Do that and the trough stops being a mood. It becomes three numbers you can act on.

 

Say you're past $1M a year and spending $30K a month or more on ads. If you'd rather have a second pair of eyes on which of those three is really your constraint, I keep a few free 30-minute calls open each week.

And if the cash genuinely isn't there this month, book it for after your Q4 money lands. I'd rather have that conversation when you can act on it.

Talk soon,
Andrej

PS: Reply "stock" and I'll send you the variant sell-through sheet I use for step two. It's the same one I run on client accounts.

PPS: What the warehouse is really offering you →