Jonathon Blair

DTC Brand Fractional CFO | Follower of Jesus | Husband | Father of 3 | Fractional CFO | Leadership, Strategy & Productivity Nerd

www.FreeToGrowCFO.com

👇 GET ACCESS TO OUR FREE CASH FLOW 101 COURSE
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🧔‍♂️ WHO IS FREE TO GROW CFO 
Outsourced CFO and Bookkeeping services for profit-focused DTC brands.   

Scaling a DTC brand is stressful. 

With messy books and no CFO on your team you run the risk of…  
-Hiring too quickly  
-Buying too much inventory 
-Scaling ad spend unprofitably 
-Running out of cash  

And that leads to stressful, sleepless nights. We don’t want that for you.  

Free to Grow CFO has given hundreds of DTC brands a plan for scaling alongside healthy profit and cash flow. Our plan will work for you too.

Fast, Insightful Reporting.  Proactive Strategic Advice.  From DTC Finance Experts.  
-M&A -Debt & Equity Funding 
-Accurate Financials by the 15th 
-Planning, Forecasting, Budgeting 
-Financial Dashboards and KPI Tracking   

All delivered through our proven, ready-to-implement “Free to Grow CFO Process”.

📈 WANT TO INCREASE PROFIT AND CASH FLOW AS YOU SCALE?
Book a Call Now → https://freetogrowcfo.com/book-a-call

🤝 CONNECT WITH JON BLAIR ON LINKEDIN
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathon-albert-blair/

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Founder | Fractional CFO

www.freetogrowcfo.com

Fractional CFOs for High Growth Direct-to-Consumer Brands

Outsourced, part-time CFO services for high growth D2C brands, designed to help you scale your business with confidence.

You don't have to suffer through another sleepless night worrying about making difficult business decisions alone.  Hire a Free to Grow CFO and get the financial insights you need to make fast, effective business decisions with confidence.

Get access to the CFO you need to scale your business without the full-time salary:
-Strategic Planning
-Forecasting & Projections
-Cash Strategy & Fundraising
-Financial Statement Analysis

Jon Blair

Your books don’t fail quietly—they fail when you need them most.
 
A lender says no.  
Cash gets tight out of nowhere.  
Margins suddenly “don’t make sense.”

The problem usually isn’t revenue.  
It’s a handful of balance sheet blind spots no one taught them to watch for.

Here are the places we see books break most often in growing DTC brands:
• Cash that doesn’t actually tie  
• Inventory that’s missing, frozen, or wildly wrong  
• Merchant clearing accounts that don’t exist  
• AP at zero, so working capital is unknowable 
  
If you’ve ever said, “The P&L looks fine, but I still feel uneasy,” this is why.
 
None of this shows up clearly on a surface-level P&L.  
All of it lives on the balance sheet.

In this week’s episode of the Free to Grow CFO Podcast, AJ Stockwell, founder of Climb CFO, and I walk through exactly where books break as brands scale—and how to fix the right things without overpaying for cleanup.

If you’re growing and your numbers don’t fully make sense, this episode will help you figure out why.

🎧 Episode is live.

Building a profitable, cash-rich brand at scale doesn’t happen by accident.

It happens through intentional planning and improvement over a long period of time.

One of the many reasons why fast growing, cash flowing brands all have a badass CFO.

Do you have one?

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Why "hope for an exit" is not a strategy" 👇
  
Building a brand solely to exit is speculation.  

Building a brand that throws off cash, compounds profit, and strengthens over time is strategic investing.
  
Ironically, the second approach is far more attractive to buyers—but that’s not the point.
  
The point is control.
  
Control over your cash.  
Control over your risk.  
Control over your timeline.  
Control over your personal wealth creation.
Control over your destiny.

Want more control?

Hiring an expert DTC CFO may be just the thing you need to take back control of your destiny.

Why so many DTC brands struggled in 2025  👇
  
Many brands didn’t fail because they were bad operators.  

They failed because they optimized for the wrong scoreboard.
  
When capital was cheap during the COVID-era brands could:  
• Lose money on new customer acquisition    
• Over-invest in inventory    
• Ignore cash flow timing    
• Assume future scale would fix today’s losses  
  
That only works when someone else is willing to subsidize your mistakes.
  
Today, no one is.
  
Rising CACs, tighter capital, slower consumer demand, and more rational buyers mean that profitability is no longer optional—it’s the price of admission.
  
And not just “profitable someday.”
  
Profitable at the order level.  

Profitable at the contribution margin level.  

Profitable in cash, not just on paper.

--
  
Hi, I'm Jon Blair founder of the DTC Finance and Accounting firm Free to Grow CFO.
  
Want more tips on scaling a profitable DTC brand? 
  
Give me a follow.
  
Want to learn more about how Free to Grow's Accountants and CFO's can help you increase profit and cash flow as you scale?
  
Shoot me a DM.
  
Until next time, scale on!

The most important conversations about scaling in 2026 won’t happen on LinkedIn.

They’ll happen in smaller rooms—where founders can talk honestly about what’s working, what’s bending, and what they’re rethinking before the year really gets going.
 
That’s why Free to Grow CFO is teaming up with Vintti to host a small, in-person founder dinner in Austin to kick off 2026.
 
This isn’t a networking event.  
No panels.  No pitch decks.  No “networking event” energy.
 
Just a table of founders having real conversations about:
• How growth is actually being financed right now
• Where money quietly gets burned (especially ads and headcount)
• How teams are being built—or rebuilt—for 2026
• And which decisions founders are actively rethinking heading into the year

I’ll be sharing what we’re seeing across scaling DTC brands on the finance side.

We’ll also be joined by:
 
• Dean Brennan (Heart & Soil) on using brand as a real growth lever—not just a marketing expense
• Agustín Morrone (Vintti) on how founders are approaching hiring A-players in 2026 without becoming the bottleneck
 
We’re keeping the table intentionally small so the conversation stays high-signal and useful for everyone in the room.

If you’re a DTC founder in and around the Austin area and this sounds like a room you’d want to be part of, you can 𝗿𝗲𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗮 𝘀𝗽𝗼𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲: 
👉 https://lnkd.in/eGnmE3Nf
 
If you can’t make it or Austin isn't the cards this time, be sure to join my weekly newsletter and I’ll share the key themes and insights that come out of the dinner.

Sign up for my newsletter here --> https://lnkd.in/eWt3KhpR

Centric Software

Senior AI/ML Engineer

Global Max Labs

Nike

Senior Innovation Engineer

AWM Smart Shelf

Full Stack Software Engineer

Danson Development

BuildFire

Business Development Manager

Coastline Real Estate

Realtor

Morgan Skenderian

As an associate at Morgan Skenderian, I specialize in selling apartment buildings as investments. I compile highly detailed proposals for dispositions, including financial models for rent roll, income and expenses, ROI matrix analysis based on multiple options for sales price, 1031 exchange benefit comparisons, and return on equity models. 

In order to better serve sellers, I consistently assemble Comparative Market Analysis reports for apartment buildings, which includes working regularly with CoStar, Loopnet, and MLS—always verifying accuracy on the provided comps. I am consistently in connection with local apartment owners and property managers conducting rental Market Surveys; this information allows me to better advise clients.

Each week, I consult face-to-face with 2 to 5 new property owners on creative ways they can increase their NOI. I also regularly assist buyers with their due diligence on new acquisitions. I work hard to identify key investments – both on and off market – tailored to my buyer’s specific goals. 

At Morgan Skenderian, I created opportunities for technology advances company-wide. I also invented and established a unique system to double my productivity for database compilation using outsourcing and automation software.

Associate

Fitzpatrick + Prince

As a Realtor at Fitzpatrick + Prince, I earned success in residential single family sales, short sales, and luxury deals in over 5 counties up and down California’s coast, frequently managing up to 40 listings at one time. In 2012 alone, I successfully closed 30 deals. To add value to the properties, I coordinated professional photography, HD video tours, property websites, and property brochures. 

To add value to the brokerage as a whole, I strategically created $10M in additional deal flow by focusing on commercial and income property analysis.  During my time at Fitzpatrick + Prince, I gained a meticulous knowledge of real estate contracts and real estate law and was able to efficiently coordinate closings on my own transactions.

As a Resident Relations Specialist, I supported the company’s marketing by posting ads, touring prospects, and answering inquiries over the phone. I approved prospects, prepared leases, and managed all administration. I actively followed up with all resident and prospective resident inquiries in an apartment community of 264 apartments and over 500 residents. I ensured resident satisfaction by promptly addressing resident complaints, preparing service requests, and coordinating with the maintenance team to confirm that maintenance issues were handled professionally. In my time there, I also successfully completed two five-star customer service training courses which furthered my expertise in the field. 

Not only was I able to serve residents well at UDR, but I also played an integral part of increasing the company’s revenue. I regularly conducted market research to make sure we had the most competitive pricing, while still ensuring the largest profit.  I also increased revenue by over $30K a year by suggesting we stop waiving fees for applications and begin charging pet rent. I continually negotiated renewals over market value, while still leaving residents satisfied with their renewal rate, increasing revenue by over $40K a year.

Resident Relations Specialist

As a Senior Innovation Engineer at Nike, I spent years refining my skills in the full innovation process, from ideation all the way to large scale production, with a particular focus on AI and machine learning.

I have worked on and lead projects across several domains including Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning for Audio Processing, and Time Series predictions. I'm also well versed in both supervised and unsupervised learning pipelines, real-time inference apis, and have worked with GAN models for audio, images, and text. 

An important part of my approach to these technologies is to not just stay at a high level but to go into the low-level details to understand how things work from first principals. Diving into things like model architectures, the underlying math, and optimization techniques which I find both fascinating and intuition building. This helps build a clearer understanding of what these models can be capable of, and what is needed to create valuable outcomes.

There are a number of projects that I've worked on that are confidential due to NDAs. However, some of the work I can discuss includes a computer vision IoT-based proof of concept that I co-developed with a fellow engineer and was featured on Fox News during the NRF conference. I've also deployed machine learning at scale for training pipelines and real-time inference on Nike App's Visual Search. In addition, I developed a novel way for live stream hosts to interact with their audience, irrespective of the size of the audience. For this, I architected, developed, and deployed a scalable NLP real-time semantic search capable of handling live feedback from 100,000 concurrent viewers on SNKRS Live. Lastly, my team and I built a solution for an ongoing time series data pipeline for machine learning predictions at massive global scale, resulting in significant financial & time savings in operations.

I’m a big proponent of Outcome Driven Innovation, and I’ve started to partner with companies with $1M+ in gross revenue a year. So if your company is looking to leverage AI to create valuable outcomes for your existing customers, send me a message and let’s connect!

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