Your Business Is Profitable. So Why Is There No Cash?
If you’re buying deeper on inventory to squeeze out a better gross margin, this episode will challenge that assumption.
In this episode of The Free to Grow CFO Podcast, Jon Blair sits down with Izzy Rosenzweig, founder and CEO of Portless, to work through one of the most common tensions in DTC: optimize for margin or optimize for cash flow? They break down why trading a bigger supplier discount for payment terms can unlock more free cash flow, how shrinking the capital tied up in inventory and turning it faster compounds your returns, and why a brand earning $1.3M in profit still watched its cash balance drop. Izzy also explains how storing inventory near the factory defers import duties, and shares creative ways brands move out-of-season stock, from Southern Hemisphere markets to aggressive wholesale.
If your P&L looks great but your bank account feels tight, this one’s for you.
Episode Links
Jon Blair - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathon-albert-blair/
Izzy Rosenzwig - https://www.linkedin.com/in/izzy-rosenzweig-13653846/
Free to Grow CFO - https://freetogrowcfo.com/
Portless - https://www.portless.com/
Key Takeaways
ROI improves when you shrink the capital deployed, not just when you grow profit, and turning inventory faster lets those returns compound more often.
Holding inventory in the country of origin defers duties until each order crosses the border, keeping tariffs that can add 30–40% to COGS in your bank until you’ve actually made the sale.
Profit sitting in inventory isn’t cash: one brand earned $1.3M, distributed only $500K, and still saw its bank balance fall $200K
Transcript
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00:44 Introduction
02:53 Margin vs. cash flow: framing the inventory decision
05:44 ROI and the velocity of compounding
09:38 Case study: $1.3M in profit, but cash went down
11:27 How less inventory funds your next winning product
15:30 Why EBITDA dollars matter more than EBITDA margin
16:50 Creative ways to move out-of-season inventory
21:21 Fuel costs, zone skipping, and regional carriers
23:43 How to test Portless without going all in
25:42 Final thoughts
Jon Blair (00:44)
All right, we are back and I'm super pumped because I've got my buddy Izzy Rosenzweig from Portless back on the show. Izzy, what's happening, man?
Izzy (00:54)
Thank you, Jon. Thanks for getting me back on the show. I love talking to anyone around that is passionate around cash flow and finance. And that is you and Jeff. So always happy back on the show. Thank you for having me on.
Jon Blair (01:05)
Yeah, man. So the last time we were talking was right after the the last Trump tariff fiasco happened. And I think it was like the week after those what are they Liberation Day? And so we are having a very, very timely conversation. today we're gonna talk about something that's not necessarily a headline in the news, but is no less important, incredibly important in the context of growing a DTC brand. And that's the kind of this
Izzy (01:17)
Yeah.
Jon Blair (01:35)
you know, do we optimize for margins or do we mar optimize for cash flow? It's a question that comes up all the time, especially in the context of inventory and supply chain. Before we dive into that, for those of our audience that didn't hear the first episode, can you give a quick background of who you are and what you do?
Izzy (01:52)
Yeah, my name is Izzy Rosenzweig, CEO and founder at Portless. At Portless, we take a different approach to supply chain. Instead of manufacturing, let's call it 10,000 t-shirts, putting on a boat, waiting two months, then getting it, then selling it. and let's say that's six months of inventory. At Portless, say, hey, take 30 days of inventory, store it near your factory in our massive facilities in China and Vietnam. And then when you get an order, we can pick back that order, send it to your customer five days on average.
Fully local experience. Their customer gets a very normal delivery. And but you as a merchant just went from six months of inventory to 30 days of inventory to waiting two months to get a single dollar out. You get it in 24 hours or 48 hours. We're near almost all the factories. And you also defer taxes. So you got to always pay taxes, but when do you pay it? Before you sold a t-shirt or after you sold a t-shirt. And yeah, that's what we do. We power hundreds of brands around the world, and we're just passionate about cash flow and how.
Cash flow is what keeps businesses alive. So that's my pre answer to your direction.
Jon Blair (02:53)
But yeah, no, no. So perfect segue into the topic. So as a CFO for DTC brands, we are constantly advising on inventory purchasing decisions, right? And we constantly get brought this scenario where it's like, hey, if I purchase X, I can get a quantity discount, right? And what what what is the analysis from a finance perspective? It isn't just
the PL impact of the unit economic change. It's it's, hey, we've got a balance sheet impact, a cash flow impact by choosing to purchase more inventory. And so brands oftentimes find themselves kind of at odds with these decisions. They're like, so do I improve my margin at the expense of cash flow? Do I optimize for cash flow and trash my margins? So I want to talk through that a little bit. What I we can go in a number of dire
different directions, but what is kind of your high level framework for helping a brand think through do we optimize for margin? Do we optimize for cash flow? Or is there a balance between the two?
Izzy (03:54)
Yeah.
Izzy (04:01)
Yeah. I think like everything in life, there's always a balance. Like you still need gross margin, you need free crash flow, you need access to cash. Cash is, you know, in in all over your business in different areas. I had a another podcast called different colors is green in the bank and it's an inventory or it's on the water. It there's always a balance. But one thing I would say, not everything is gross margin. Not everything is your is is PL. And the reason why, because let's give an example. Let's just say you could get a
Call it 10% discount if you could put all your money up front, pay your factory all up front day one. So no terms, no casual benefits, and you buy 10,000 shirts. But now you got to lose that money, you got to wait to get your product and then you sell it. Versus what if you said, hey, factory, why not instead of give me a 10% discount, give me a 5% discount, give me 90 days. And all of a sudden you have all that cash that just opened up. Could you take that cash, do more marketing or do marketing in the right places in the right countries?
Jon Blair (04:44)
Mm-hmm.
Jon Blair (04:57)
Mm-hmm.
Izzy (05:01)
And generate more free cash flow. So, yes, maybe your gross margin went down by 5%, but you unlocked 90 days of cash, which means you could put that to work better. And now you're generating what would have been, let's say, I can know $100,000 of free cash flow. Now it's $300,000 of free cash flow, maybe on a blended lower gross margin, but you opened up more free cash flow. And that's what really matters. So obviously you need a good gross margin, negotiate a way to what you gotta do to get that good gross margin, but
Cash flow is what keeps you in business. It's your oxygen. It's what plays your employees. It's what allows you to make any movements. And not only that, you could drive more revenue. So maybe at a slightly lower gross margin, but drive more revenue, which equals more free cash flow into your business.
Jon Blair (05:44)
Yeah, okay. So there's a bunch of things that I'm thinking about one of them is this this finance concept of like the velocity of the your compounding, right? Compounding, compounding returns, compound interest. That's like a a foundational concept within within capital allocation. But one thing people don't think about is the velocity of that compounding. I I like to actually think of it
Izzy (05:57)
Yeah.
Izzy (06:09)
Yep.
Jon Blair (06:12)
Th is hardly talked about in the e-com world, because everyone is so P&L centric, I feel like. And compounding, you have to have a capital th there's a denominator in this calculation of ROI where it's like the capital deployed, right? And so we're talking about, if you think about it, the ROI calculation, right, in simplest terms, is profitability divided by the capital it took, right? To
Izzy (06:17)
Right. Yeah.
Jon Blair (06:41)
produce said profitability. How do you improve that? How do you improve the results of that equation? Well, one, you can increase profit and hold, you know, capital allocated fixed, right? That's a purely PL centric approach. But what's the other way to do it? Hold profit constant and shrink the capital allocated. In in reality, when you were talking about there's a balance, there's some balance in maybe
Izzy (06:51)
Hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Izzy (07:03)
Yes.
Jon Blair (07:09)
Shrinking profit to a point, but shrinking the capital allocated, right? Even more, which can result in a higher ROI. But then add to that the velocity of reinvestment, right? Which is like I like kind of think about it as compounding velocity. Cause you can compound once a year, right? You can also compound daily, right? And and you can compound daily at a much lower daily return.
Izzy (07:14)
Yes.
Izzy (07:22)
Hmm. Yep.
Izzy (07:32)
Yes.
Jon Blair (07:38)
And it can a add up to an annual like average compound growth over a three hundred and sixty-five day period that is much higher. From a finance standpoint, that's really the essence of what we're getting at here, right?
Izzy (07:52)
And I'll tell you, like I actually ran a brand for 10 years. And the first couple of years, I ran a traditional. I only had a certain amount of capital. I had to put it in for six months' inventory, wait, wait, wait, and slowly sell my inventory until I had enough money to buy again. So my gross margins were great. I just could barely move capital fast enough for the business to grow. And then I moved to what today is the portless model, and I had much less capital working. I was buying instead of six months at a time, called two to four weeks at a time, but it was a washing machine.
Jon Blair (08:12)
Yeah.
Izzy (08:21)
Was money in, money out, money in, money out. So even though it may have been slightly less the gross margin because I was buying lower MOQ, I was turning that like a washing machine, money in, money out. And I scaled, we scale like it was like 200,000 of revenue to two and half million, where usually I would have hit some level of cash constraints. But no, not on this, not at least in the portless model. Cause what I was able to unlock how fast I could take capital, a lower capital, put it in, take it out, and reinvest it many, many, many times versus.
little higher gross margin, but six months at a time, which I'm constant which is so slow. So yeah, I I live that. And and it it was game changing. And I think the brands that figure it out, and you know, portless is one way. I'm sure there's other ways to figure out how to use less capital, use it faster. those brands crush, they're crushing the future of e com.
Jon Blair (08:52)
Exactly.
Jon Blair (09:10)
Well, so here's what's interesting is that if you compound the use a simple example. Let's say you com you have a ten percent c you know, compound interest or return once a year. If you actually compound return two and a half percent four times a year, the annual return is higher than ten percent. That exactly. Exactly. Yeah, and so that that again is another just simple numerical
Izzy (09:32)
'Cause you compound it on on the two and a half percent.
Jon Blair (09:38)
Example of what we're talking about. There I want to bring up a very specific example. I was talking to a brand yesterday about this. If you looked at their profit on a trailing 12-month basis, they're quite profitable. They were turning a $1.3 million profit. So $1.3 million, I mean over $100K a month in profit dollars, right? But they were like, we feel tight on cash. And I went and looked over that same 12 month period and their inventory built by a increased by a
Izzy (09:56)
Right.
Izzy (10:01)
Yeah.
Jon Blair (10:08)
One million. So there was only just factoring in inventory only, there was only 300 K of that profit left at the end of that same 12 month period. But how much did they pay themselves in the form of distributions? Another balance sheet item. They paid themselves 500K. So cash went down $200,000 and they only paid themselves less than half of the profit that they made in that period. And where was the rest of it? It was an inventory, right? And so when you think about
Izzy (10:16)
That's crazy.
Izzy (10:25)
So they're out of cash.
Izzy (10:32)
Yeah.
Izzy (10:36)
That's a lot of money be sitting in inventory at a time.
Jon Blair (10:40)
Totally. And when you think about the cash available to invest in the next dollar of growth, well, where do you get it from? Right. And so the the founder, in a very practical example, the founder's going, I made 1.3 million. I didn't, I only paid myself 500K, and I don't see where the cash is to invest in the next dollar of growth or pay myself a single penny more. Something seems wrong here, right? So let let's talk about. Can you give me a practical example of where you've seen
Izzy (11:04)
Yeah.
Jon Blair (11:09)
going the portless model of direct fulfillment from China at a higher fulfillment cost. So a lower margin, right? And maybe, maybe a maybe a higher cost of goods sold because you're ordering lower MOQs, but that translating into the ability to actually drive more cash flow.
Izzy (11:13)
Hundred percent.
Izzy (11:27)
100%. So I think your example is actually a great example, but we have hundreds of brands that do something similar. We always encourage, don't go for the highest MOQ, right? You could, but then your money's locked up. And A, you can't pay yourself or you can't invest into the next SKU that matters. Because I think for e-com, I mean, and you actually break it down really well. There's different types of e-com. There's CPG, which is great, cosmetics, you're you're flying. There's hard goods, which maybe it's a water bottle, you got one or two SKUs and you got apparel, which you gotta go for for L TV.
Jon Blair (11:44)
Yeah.
Izzy (11:57)
But end of the day, no matter what business you're in, excuse me, you do have to invest. You have to find the next winner. You have to open up. So not only do you need cash to run your business, you also want, excuse me, cash to grow your next opportunity. So what someone like with the brands that that we work with in a similar scenario, they wouldn't have a million dollars in inventory. They'd have 200k in inventory, which means they'd be 800 or and that scenario is 1.3 million.
So let's say they'd have two, three hundred grand of inventory, they have a million dollars of cash, pay themselves a half a million dollars, and they'd have a half a million in the bank. Now, let's pretend they lost 10% gross margin than that. Okay, they have 400 grand in the bank. But now what you could do is you could test 10 new products, especially in the Portless Mill, you do it really quickly, because we're near a factory, which then unlocked one winner, let's just say, go really conservative, which then generated your next million dollars of profit while also lowering your inventory.
Jon Blair (12:40)
For sure.
Jon Blair (12:56)
Yeah.
Izzy (12:56)
So not having money is not only you can't operate properly, you can't even build your next winner. You're so tied up to your history, you don't have the cash to invest in your future. So, and and even in that scenario, you drop 5% gross margin, 10% gross margin, you're doing great. Why? Most importantly, you got cash. And cash is operating, it's paying yourself and investing. Or you could live, you know, inventory rich, cash poor, and then you're not paying yourself anything. You can invest into your future. And really what you're doing is just holding inventory, which isn't moving yet.
Jon Blair (13:14)
Yeah.
Izzy (13:27)
So
Jon Blair (13:27)
Well and and then you you just have this really nice gross margin on paper. Not not in not not in cash not not on cash paper, right? Like on on P and L P Yeah. Well, okay, so there's something else you mentioned. The the SKU catalog, I I think about it of like re reallocating capital across your SKU catalog.
Izzy (13:31)
Exactly. Yeah. PL looks pretty. It's easy to understand. Yeah. PL percentage looks great, but it's not getting the job done.
Jon Blair (13:49)
I straight up see this issue nine out of ten times when I'm doing CFO audits with prospects. And I actually see it ten out of ten times with apparel brands. And the and the the struggle with apparel specifically is you can't just go blow out winter, you know, overstocked inventory positions of winter clothing in the spring. People I mean, ev even at a really steep discount, people are like, I don't
Izzy (13:59)
Yeah.
Jon Blair (14:16)
I don't need that clothes I I need spring, I need spring and summer clothes. You have to wait till the following winter usually and hope that that thing is not out of style, right? And so you have capital tied up for a really, really long time. What is that costing? What is that costing in the form of holding costs, the opportunity cost of capital? Like usually almost every time when when when an apparel brand is too long.
Izzy (14:17)
Bad timing.
Izzy (14:31)
Yeah.
Jon Blair (14:42)
on what something that I call seasonally seasonally obsolete. It's obsolete until the next season, the same season next year. almost always they're understocked on what they need for right now. And so what's the opportunity cost of that? Right. And so if you could even just move money across your SKU catalog faster at a lower margin, I'm 100% positive it's gonna unlock massive amounts of profitability for lots of different brands. And there's this
Izzy (15:09)
Yeah.
Jon Blair (15:10)
There's this other concept you keep bringing up that I want to like dive into a little bit more, which is I look, whether we're talking about gross margin or not, someone asked me this the other day about EBITDA margin. Like, hey, I want to sell my business one day. What should my EBITDA margin be? And I was like, I want you to stop I want you to stop like worrying about EBITDA margin. And I want you to worry about EBITDA dollars, margin dollars. Because EBITDA dollars, margin dollars.
Izzy (15:22)
Hmm.
Izzy (15:32)
Interesting, yeah.
Jon Blair (15:40)
That's actually what grows your business. That's actually what pays you as the owner. And if you want to sell one day, the the acquirer is giving you a multiple of your margin dollars, not a multiple of your margin percentage. And so
Izzy (15:53)
Hmm. Okay, that's actually a good point. I don't know if people realize that. So it's not a percentage. Like who gives a crap? I mean, percentage look pretty, but how much dollars in the bank and or g gonna generate and I'll give you multiple on that.
Jon Blair (16:04)
Exactly. And so it's it it it's the same thing with gross margin. It's like at the end of the day, gross margin dollars are what you can invest in the other PL or balance sheet line items in the business. It's not you can't buy inventory with a percentage. You buy it with a dollar, right? So just the fact that you can turn you can turn in dollars faster at a lower margin.
Izzy (16:06)
Hmm.
Izzy (16:10)
Yeah.
Izzy (16:14)
Yeah.
Izzy (16:19)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jon Blair (16:29)
may allow your brand to actually produce more margin dollars and ultimately more EBITDA dollars, even though the the the percentage, which is really an efficiency ratio, even though the efficiency as a percentage of revenue goes down, you can still produce more dollars. And at the end of the day, that generally ends up being what matters the most.
Izzy (16:50)
Cash is gonna feed you, it's gonna keep your future, it keeps your the ability to invent, to discover, to test new product. I can't agree more. And another interesting thing you said, by the way, which is we've seen portless brands be really creative here. You know, you talk about seasonality, right? So portless is largest business the US. We do you know millions of shipments to the US a year. But we have a ton of business in the southern hemisphere. You know, you talk about Australia and New Zealand and South America.
And like, hey, that summer thing that now is winter, well, you could sell it there. And when it's our winter, it's their summer. and just another creative way. We found people do really creative ways to sell their excess inventory out of season. Another one, a really interesting one we've seen recently is let's say a brand doesn't want to hurt their pricing, which I'm against. And I think we've talked about it. Like, do what you gotta do to get cash out. But one of their creative ideas was they got very aggressive on the wholesale to retail.
Jon Blair (17:24)
For sure.
Jon Blair (17:40)
Yeah.
Izzy (17:48)
To get into the store, not necessarily to make money, but to get the cash out. But the MSRP is still good. So the retailer is like, great gross margin. I love you guys, right? In the meantime, you got cash out and you actually, you know, price protected, you know, not that far. I thought that was really creative. Yeah. So I've seen some brands, you know, Southern Hemisphere, wholesale, but getting that cash out, and you know, we spoke before is equally as important to have a strategy prior to getting in. And I think these frameworks are gonna be the difference between
Jon Blair (17:57)
Yeah, yeah.
Jon Blair (18:13)
Totally.
Izzy (18:17)
you know, surviving a miscalculation, or or really just going bankrupt on it if you if you don't think about it today.
Jon Blair (18:25)
Okay, so I wanna talk about something you mentioned at the very beginning of the episode. We dove into this a bit on our last episode we did together a year or more ago, which is the the deferred taxes. Explain that concept and why that is advantageous to brands.
Izzy (18:34)
Mm-hmm.
Izzy (18:40)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Again, traditional supply chain has been around, let's call it manufacture Southeast Asia since the 80s, since containers. So I understand most businesses run this way. And if you're retail, you have no choice. But for e-commerce, I think it's it's crazy not to be educated beyond it, which is let's pretend you're back into the t shirt business and you're bringing a million dollars, you took a million bucks, so much money.
And you're putting it into inventory and you haven't sold a single t-shirt in your new season that's coming up, comes to the border, and now you got to write a check, you know, to the Trump Association, right? For $350,000, right? You still haven't sold a single t-shirt, right? So your cog, you gotta add about 30 to 40% on top of your cog to lay out just to get your money in your facility in let's say Vegas, Atlanta, or wherever it is, to then sell your first t-shirt.
Jon Blair (19:17)
Yeah.
Izzy (19:36)
That is just so much money out the door before you had an opportunity to do it once sale. Versus what Portless does is like, hey, keep it in the country of origin. You don't need a million, all your shirts day one. First of all, don't put a million dollars in inventory. Put 200 grand in inventory, put a fraction of that. And on that less money, don't pay import tax when you haven't sold anything. You only need to do that if you store your goods locally. But if you store your goods out of the country, you gotta pay your taxes, but only once the parcel crosses the border. At that point, you pay your taxes.
So yeah, you could you could defer. So it's not saving, it's deferral. call it 35% on top of your COG, which is hundreds of thousands of dollars, before you had a chance to make a single transaction. So yeah, we're we're huge promoters of that, right? That this is just another advantage, again, of opening cash and putting in your bank until you need to pay it.
Jon Blair (20:27)
There's another there's another incremental cost difference that needs to be factored in here that's really important, which is that you're also paying for the freight an additional freight move, right? By cause you're you're freighting it in, let's say, through C container and then maybe putting on a train or last mile trucking to get it to your three PL. You're you're outlaying that cost.
before and and then it goes and sits in a three pl and then you pay again for the fulfillment. So you're actually if you go direct to a D to C customer from this factory in China, yeah, there is a freight move from the factory to that three PL, but it should be very cheap, right? Because not only is it in China, but it's you're right there from geographically. And so you're kind of cutting out a a pretty large freight move. And you know, right now
Izzy (21:08)
Very affordable in China. Yeah.
Right there. Yeah.
Jon Blair (21:21)
I and this I want to go to like a little bit of like a current current event take from you. Like right now with the cost of oil going up and and I mean, you know, one big risk for brands in terms of margin compression is the cost of freight in general, regardless of the the transit method, because of the cost of oil. What are you seeing? What are you seeing in that regard?
Izzy (21:45)
Yeah, so it hasn't hit us massively yet. I mean, cost about those go up and prices go up. We haven't changed prices in our customers. Because when you look at on a per order level, and the example I give, think about if you're in the jewelry business or a t-shirt business, like how many sealed t-shirts go in a palette? Thousands. How many earrings? Hundreds of thousands. So when you're paying the the cost, you're paying it on a per order level, the cost stuff isn't that much, right? Like on a on an earring, honestly a couple pennies per earring on a palette. Versus a t-shirt, maybe it's 40 cents.
Jon Blair (22:02)
For sure.
Izzy (22:14)
So, yeah, there's sometimes the fuel surcharge maybe go to 44 cents, but the largest part of your cost is actually gonna be your last mile. It's gonna actually be two-thirds. Now, what do we do for last mile? We zone skip, right? So if you're gonna be in L in San Diego, I'm not gonna fly to New York, I'll fly to LA. So you do LA, Chicago, New York, or Dallas, and Miami. So we're always zone one, zone two, which are already saving you money. Now, what's really fascinating on the on the carrier side, which I'm a huge fan of, is
There's a massive shift happening with regional carriers, right? So in the old days, like I'll use UPS FedEx. Well, that's a lot of money. All right, I'll use USPS. Great. USPS also is a lot of money compared to regional carriers like Uni Uni, like GoFo, like V Vio or Jitsu. And these are many different types of products, and you got to go deep to understand them. But at a high level, you can have faster delivery, picture on delivery, and literally save dollars, not cents. And that is another. So while fuel costs are going up, the the modern last small.
Jon Blair (22:44)
Yeah.
Izzy (23:11)
Carrier business is getting more sophisticated. So we have not changed prices during this fuel surcharge. Q4, everyone has to raise it a little bit. but we haven't seen massive impact yet. But it is a part of fluctuation, you got to be aware of. Like, like next year, if USPS raises the prices, big portion of our business is USPS. We'll have to raise the prices accordingly. But but usually a brand, like again, back to inflationary, you might need to raise your prices a little bit or take a slight hitting gross margin because you're talking about like cost versus retail. But yeah, it's something we always keep an eye on.
Jon Blair (23:13)
Yeah.
Jon Blair (23:18)
Yep.
Jon Blair (23:28)
For sure.
Izzy (23:40)
But it hasn't been a massive impact yet.
Jon Blair (23:43)
So what is the if you if there's a there's a brand founder who's listening right now and they're interested in this portless model of fulfillment, but they're a little bit nervous, what's your advice for kind of like taking a small step to test this out without going all in on it to see if it works for that brand?
Izzy (24:02)
Yeah. We we we've seen a couple, I would say two three eight, how you could approach it. And we're always crawl, walk, run. We first send you a sample of a portless t-shirt, see how that goes. But in general, if it's a very big brand and ready has a lot of business in global markets, you'd be like, all right, why don't you start with global markets with us? We do five days to to UK, six days to Australia, starting at five bucks. Like we will beat your global price. that's one way people do it. if the core market, let's say is the US, okay, how about one new collection?
One new skew and let's do some order routing. Let's see how that experience goes. and and essentially almost always a brand does that, and we usually keep evolving with us. Cause once you you have the ability to taste better cash flow, it's hard to run a business outside of that once you discover it. But yeah, we're a crawl hook run. Yeah, it's a bit of an addiction, I'm not gonna lie, but it it's hopefully a healthy addiction for your business.
Jon Blair (24:48)
Ha ha.
Jon Blair (24:54)
It's one of those things that w once you see it you can't unsee it, right?
Izzy (24:57)
Can't on it to you. And that's what I say. Like I am in the education game. Like we when we do marketing, we're not doing ads. We're educating them, coming on podcasts with you. There is a better way to run this business that is today, five-day delivery to the US, starting at five bucks, fully local experience to customer. Now we're not for everyone. Your furniture business, not for us. Big products, not for us. If you're under five pounds, three and a half pounds, either will be similar pricing. If you're very light, we might even save you money through zone skipping. yeah, get educated. And and we're
You come, reach out, we're nice people, we'll have conversation. We will encourage you not to use those if it's not a good fit. Like we're not here to convince anyone if it's not good for your business.
Jon Blair (25:32)
For sure.
So this has been a fascinating conversation. Izzy, what's your final thought that you want to leave our listeners with on this topic of cash flow versus margin?
Izzy (25:44)
Yeah, I would say two macro thoughts, let's say, as e-commerce keeps evolving. One, I came from a great conference called Beanstalks, where I was listing some of the best e-commerce that exist today. We live in a world you must be profitable and you must be smart. It's never been easier to start a business, but it's very easy to go bankrupt if you know what you're doing. Work with your team, understand frameworks as you scale. if it's apparel, if it's hard goods, if it's CPG, there's different strategies. And then B,
Do what you need to do to make sure you unlock cash. 5% gross margin will not put you into bankruptcy. Not having cash in your bank will put you under. And most brands will go bankrupt because of cash flow. So we say there's better models out there, be educated, you know, work with finance people and operations people and educate yourself. And if you do, you could grow a healthy business. Demand keeps increasing. Shopify consumers love it. It's never been easy. Now just learn how to do that in a healthy way with cash flow and be educated.
And you can build an incredible business, people running massive, massive profile businesses in this space.
Jon Blair (26:48)
I love it. Izzy, where can people find more information about you and Portless?
Izzy (26:53)
Portless.com, we've got tons of case studies, content, videos, podcasts. myself, it could be on LinkedIn or Twitter or X. it's your Rosen Swag. I post content a lot on cash flow and how to run supply chain in in a new way.
Jon Blair (27:07)
Awesome. Izzy, thank you again for coming back on. I'm excited for this one to get out to our audience, and I look forward to hopefully having you on for a three-peat in the not so distant future.
Izzy (27:14)
Looking forward to the hat trick, but thank you for having me on a second time. Always have a great time. Thank you.
Jon Blair (27:19)
Thanks, Izzy.
