Cohort payback tells you what happened. This report answers "what if" — move three levers (how many clients, what each costs, how much therapy they buy) and read off the profit, the payback month, and whether it covers the bills.
Every month's profit-from-new-clients comes from the same little equation: how many clients we win (volume), what each one costs (CAC), and how much each goes on to spend (the engine). The report lets you pull each lever and watch the answer move.
All five are seeded from real data, so the page opens showing today's machine. Change any of them to ask a question.
Pick a real cohort (or the blend of all joined cohorts). This sets how fast money comes back and what a client is worth: its net-25 per session × its sessions per client.
How many we win in the month. Scales the answer up and down — but can't rescue a per-client loss.
Ads + placement-team shifts per client won. Comes straight off the margin of every single client.
Sessions per client by their first birthday. The engine lever — every 0.1 is ~£1.78 of value per client.
The burn CAC doesn't cover — salaries, tools, support shifts. Ads and rota are already inside CAC, so leave them out here.
Three different numbers all get called SDR, and mixing them up makes every report look wrong. They're the same measurement taken at different ages.
Sessions per client to date — the New clients report column. It grows every month a cohort is alive, so young cohorts always look low. It's an age curve, not a quality score.
Sessions per client at the same age — the fair comparison, in the engines table. April at 2.03 by M1 vs June at 1.85 is a real difference; 5.2 vs 1.4 "so far" is just age.
Where the cohort lands at 12 months if it follows the historical curve. This is the model's seed — a full-year number, so of course it beats every "so far".
The value-per-client estimate is actually quite tight. But margin is what's left after subtracting a fixed CAC — a thin slice off a big number — so a small wobble in value becomes a big wobble in profit.
−13% / +18% — the best and worst full-year curves real cohorts have followed.
Subtract the fixed £82 CAC and the modest band becomes −40% / +57%. Multiply by 212 clients → £4.9k to £12.9k.
A single cohort pays back once: spend ~£17k up front, get ~£26k back across 12 months, keep the difference. But we run one cohort every month — and once 12 are running at once, each month harvests slices from all of them that add up to exactly one cohort's full margin. So "projected cohort margin" doubles as "steady-state monthly profit before overheads".
So the report answers the breakeven question three ways, each holding the other levers still. At today's engine and CAC, £15k of overheads needs any one of:
At £82 CAC and SDR 6.8. Volume fixes it only while margin per client is positive.
At 212 clients and £82 CAC. Ambitious — but finished cohorts have hit 8–11 before.
At 212 clients and SDR 6.8. The cost ceiling the current volume and engine can afford.
The cohorts that have proven 6.8+ sessions were the smaller pre-ads ones. The big paid cohorts are tracking the same curve so far — the engines table (SDR @M1, @M2…) is where any slip shows first.
The model talks steady-state profit. Cash lags it: CAC is paid on day one, revenue drips for a year. Growing faster makes profit look better and the bank feel tighter.
The engine curves, multipliers and CAC are the exact figures from Cohort payback, Cohort LTV and New clients — one source underneath, reconciled to the penny.