Commerce Operating Partners – Melbourne, AU
The force multiplier for growth-stage ecommerce and retail.
Embedded operating partners. Not consultants. Not agencies. In your business, not above it.
Most are running harder than the infrastructure can handle. The team is stretched, the channels are piling up, the data exists somewhere but nobody has time to act on it – and the commercial decisions keep coming anyway.
Some parts of the business are held together with genuine ingenuity. Others are held together with optimism and a prayer.
40:1 Commerce Partners deploys operating partners directly into ecommerce and retail businesses – embedded alongside management, not above them. The model is built on the private equity operating partner principle: experienced executives who work inside the business to identify where value is being left on the table, build the commercial infrastructure to capture it, and stay accountable to the outcomes.
Every engagement starts with an audit. We identify the highest-leverage opportunities before we commit to a plan.
Every growth stage demands a different focus – the wrong investment at the wrong stage destroys margin without moving the needle. We audit your commercial position, identify stage-specific constraints, and hand you prioritised strategies with measurable outcomes within weeks. Or we stay in and deliver them alongside you.
Retail media can become 10%+ of your business revenue – with a multiple flowing to EBITDA, because you're monetising an asset you've already paid for: your traffic. We assess the opportunity specific to your business and deliver a launch and monetisation plan within six weeks. Or we build it alongside you on a profit-share basis.
A well-run live show can generate the revenue of a major campaign in a single session. Done badly it's expensive noise. We pair businesses with trained presenters who combine product expertise, audience connection and commercial instinct – and analyse every show post-broadcast to compound performance across talent, structure, offers and sell-through.
Profitable customer growth isn't a loyalty program – it's a system. We build it across reach, frequency and impact: expanding contact methods in order of cost, deepening lifecycle and trigger communications that outperform broadcast, and layering cohort analytics to build the CAC-to-LTV ratios that let you acquire more aggressively than competitors.
Most businesses have more channel leverage than they're using. We identify where you're leaving revenue on the table across your existing channel mix, build the commercial case for expansion where it's warranted, and design the sequencing, margin model and infrastructure to make each channel pull its weight.
The commercial teams generating the most revenue per head aren't the biggest – they're the ones with AI embedded in how they operate. We design and implement GenAI systems across your commercial function – targeting, content, analytics, campaign operations, customer communications – that multiply output without multiplying headcount.
We don't offer retainers that produce reports. Every engagement is structured around commercial outcomes – with skin in the game where appropriate.
An operating partner working inside your business part-time – typically two to three days per week. Strategy ownership, commercial execution, team and agency management, and accountability to outcomes. Not a retainer. Not a report.
A fixed-scope engagement covering channel economics, unit economics, customer acquisition and retention performance, or go-to-market structure. Clear brief, defined timeframe, clean handover.
Ongoing strategic counsel at founder or board level. A senior commercial voice in the room for critical decisions, without a full engagement commitment. Typically a half-day per month plus availability when it counts.
Dan Ferguson
Founder & Principal, 40:1 Commerce Partners
The 40:1 model is built on a simple observation: the businesses that scale efficiently aren't the ones with the biggest teams. They're the ones with the most leverage – the right operator making the right commercial call at the right moment.
Most of the growth-stage businesses we work with have already figured out a lot. There's usually a founder with sharp instincts and one or two brilliant people who've grown with the business – resourceful, fast, genuinely talented. That combination gets businesses a long way. But there's a point where the hit rate on decisions starts to shift. The channels multiply. The options compete. The cost of a wrong call compounds faster than it used to. The questions stop being "how do we execute this" and start being "which of these four things should we be doing right now, and why." That specific juncture is where an operator who's navigated it at scale – across multiple business models, economic cycles, and stages of growth – changes the outcome.
Every engagement is led by an operator who has run P&Ls, presented to institutional investors, built new revenue divisions from zero, and made the exact decisions your business is facing now – inside PE-backed and ASX-listed businesses, not in a consulting firm.
We've operated through the ecommerce boom, the post-COVID unit economics reckoning, the cost-of-acquisition reset, and the AI-enabled rebuild currently underway. We know what each of those cycles demanded – and what destroyed margin when applied at the wrong moment.
Those lessons don't transfer cleanly between growth stages either. What works at $5M actively breaks things at $30M. The acquisition model that scales you from $30M to $80M often isn't the one that gets you to $150M profitably. Knowing which stage you're in – and which investments are stage-appropriate versus stage-dangerous – is one of the clearest advantages an embedded operator brings.
Tell us about your business and what you're trying to solve. We'll come back to you within 24 hours.