Every month we pay to win a group of new clients. This report tracks how fast each group pays that money back — and what's left over. Scan this page once and the report should never need explaining again.
Everyone who became a client in the same month is a cohort. We pay for them once, up front. Then they pay us back a bit each month. The report watches the race between those two numbers.
Each bar is the running total one client has earned back. The dashed line is what that client cost. The month the bar clears the line, the row turns green — that's the whole visual language of the report.
Left to right, the same story every time: what they cost, how the payback is going, and where it will probably end up.
What one client cost to win that month. The finish line for the whole row.
Running total earned back per client. It accumulates — M2 includes M1. Blue until it crosses CAC.
Where the total stands today, and how old the cohort is. Keeps working after a cohort outgrows the M1–M6 window.
How much of the cost is back. 100% = break even. Anything above is margin.
£ beyond (green) or still short of (red) the cost, per client, so far.
The same thing × every client in the group. The money number.
The month the money came back. "accruing" = hasn't crossed yet — normal for young cohorts.
Where the row will likely be at one year old, with a likely range. Explained below.
Winning a client takes ad money and people's time on placement calls. CAC is both, split across everyone who became a client that month.
We don't guess the future. We look at the 2025 cohorts that have already lived a full year, measure how much they grew from each age to month 12, and apply that same growth to today's cohorts.
The small range under each projection is simply the smallest and biggest growth actually seen among those 2025 cohorts. A one-month-old cohort could still go lots of ways, so its range is wide. It narrows by itself every month.
Wide range → the +£701 to +£20,387 cohort margin. Not a broken number — honest uncertainty about a young cohort.
Five months of real data → a tight range. Come back in two months and June's will look like this.
Every row's last cell is the current month, part-way through. It rises until month end — don't read it as final.
It's money back beyond the cost of winning the client. Overheads, support shifts and everything else sit outside it.
The same cohort figures appear in the Cohort LTV and New clients reports — checked to the penny, same source underneath.