In this episode, Richard and Luke unpack a pattern they couldn’t ignore after running 224 sales call transcripts through an LLM:

The #1 issue mid-market ecommerce brands face isn’t that performance is down… it’s that they don’t know why performance is happening.

And when you don’t trust the numbers, you can’t trust the decisions.

Luke walks through a painfully familiar weekly business review scenario—multiple agencies, multiple dashboards, multiple “versions of the truth”—where 80% of the meeting is spent trying to figure out what’s actually going on, and almost none of it translates into confident action.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why brands don’t hire help because results are bad—they hire because clarity is missing

• The hidden cost of “dashboard chaos” (and why more stakeholders often makes it worse)

• The 3-step framework to go from confusion → clarity → action:

• Why incrementality (geo holdouts) is the gold standard when ROAS debates never end

• How to sanity-check your “real-time” metrics against your closed P&L (and what variance is acceptable)

They also tease what they’ve been building to solve this problem end-to-end: a higher-capacity operator role designed to reduce complexity and speed up decisions—so your team spends less time arguing about numbers and more time changing outcomes.

If you’re leading growth at a brand in the $10M–$100M range and your team spends more time debating performance than improving it, this one will hit home.

Show Notes:

• Axon is offering $5K ad credit when you spend $5K. Go to https://axon.ai/en/ctc to set up your first campaign.

• Explore the PROPHIT System: http://prophitsystem.com

• The Ecommerce Playbook mailbag is open — email us at podcast@commonthreadco.com to ask us any questions you might have