Your portfolio company reports strong ROAS. The EBITDA that drives your exit multiple does not agree.

But ROAS does not show up in EBITDA, and EBITDA is what your exit multiple is built on. So the business looks efficient on the marketing dashboard and murky in the financial model. That gap costs you money when you are building toward a sale.

The pain, in concrete terms

A portfolio company spends €30,000 a month on Meta Ads. It reports a 4.1 ROAS. The platform takes credit for €123,000 in revenue.

But that €123,000 is gross. It still has VAT, returns, and the cost of goods inside it. Strip those out. Strip out the ad spend. What is left is the contribution profit — and it can be a fraction of what the dashboard shows.

Now apply the EBITDA multiple you expect at exit. Every euro of real profit you cannot prove is several euros of valuation you leave on the table. Marketing spend that does not provably produce EBITDA is a cost centre wearing a growth-driver costume.

Lead-generation businesses have it worse. Someone clicks the ad, fills a form, and lands in the CRM — the system that tracks every deal. Three weeks later a salesperson closes them for €20,000. The ad platform never hears about that close. So it keeps buying cheap leads instead of buyers, and the cost per actual client — the number the CFO cares about — appears in no report at all.

Profit-first attribution at scale

This is a measurement problem before it is a marketing problem. The team has shipped conversion tracking for Volkswagen, Audi, KFC, and WizzAir — companies where the rule is simple: if you cannot trace a euro of spend to a euro of result, the number does not count. We run that same discipline across 10 Meta Ads accounts today.

The proof point that matters for a CFO: on one DTC account, fixing the measurement and rebuilding the campaigns on real sales data cut customer acquisition cost by 22% — same budget, same products, 90 days. That is the spread between a dashboard number and the cash the business actually banks.

The job inside a portfolio company is the same. An investment committee needs to know one thing about the marketing line in the P&L: is it generating EBITDA or consuming it? We trace the gap between reported ROAS and real contribution profit until that question has a clear answer.

How we connect a portfolio company’s paid acquisition to EBITDA

Step 1 — The diagnosis is free. We open the portfolio company’s ad accounts, analytics, and CRM — the system that tracks every deal. We work out the gap between what the ads report and the real contribution profit: revenue minus returns, VAT, cost of goods, and ad spend. Then we put that one number in front of the operating partner and the CFO.

Step 2 — Fix the measurement first. We send sales straight from the company’s servers to Meta, not through the browser the platform usually relies on. That way the algorithm sees nearly every sale, not the two-thirds a browser pixel happens to catch. We also wire the CRM back to the ad campaigns, so a deal marked won is fed back to Meta. Now every euro of ad spend has a path you can trace to margin.

Step 3 — Grow the profit, prove the growth. With the numbers honest, we run the Meta Ads, the funnel, and the conversion work against contribution profit — the same metric the investment thesis rests on. We are paid mostly on the profit we add. Our incentive and the EBITDA that drives your exit point the same direction.

For the investment committee

At exit, you need a clean line from marketing spend to the quality of the revenue it bought. Picture two portfolio companies in due diligence. In the first, the marketing director says: every euro of ad spend returned X euros of contribution margin, and you can trace it from the ad account to the financial statements. In the second, the CMO presents a ROAS slide. The first company is easier to value. The first company defends a higher multiple.