An e-commerce consulting firm in Paraná had revenue of about R$ 130 thousand a month and watched its cash balance shrink month after month. The owner knew there was a problem, but only noticed it by looking at the bank statement. He didn't know where the operation was losing money, or how big the loss was.
It's the kind of situation in which the company keeps running, customers keep being served, and the problem grows quietly until it becomes urgent.
The challenge
Throughout 2025, the company burned cash. When the numbers were laid out, the explanation appeared: the product was priced below breakeven. The company wasn't even breaking even. And the main cause was structural: the operations team was too expensive for what the price could pay for.
The trigger to act was seeing the cash balance fall. But the first obstacle wasn't technical. It was the owner's difficulty in admitting he didn't know how to analyze or carry out a plan like this, and in asking for help sooner.
How Vispe worked
We took on the work side by side with the owner. The first step was to organize the finances in a basic spreadsheet, nothing sophisticated, but enough to see the operation clearly. That's when it became clear the problem was the combination of an expensive operations team and a price that didn't produce a positive net margin.
From that diagnosis, we tackled both fronts. Pricing was revised, with upsell, and each senior professional began handling more contracts. The team was reorganized into squads: the senior guides, the mid-level ensures execution and the junior learns and executes. It's a well-known concept, but one the market rarely applies on purpose, and it made it possible to spread the most expensive labor without losing delivery quality.
With the plan in place, it was put into action and closely monitored.
The results
The cash burn has already been reduced to a very small amount. The path wasn't linear: losing two large contracts hit the plan. But a contract signed early in the year already covered almost all of that impact, and the focus now is to close two more to reach the goal:
- EBITDA: from 16% to 28%.
- Cash generation: from negative to 13% of revenue.
The most immediate gain was clarity. Before, everything was hazy, with no sense of which way to go. Once the numbers were laid out, it was easy to point out the mistakes and plan the next steps.
What changed
Today the client sees what is happening in the company and can make projections that account for the real impact on cash. He raised funds to sustain cash for 15 months, but is working to use only two of those months. After that, the idea is to invest in sales and possibly acquire a smaller portfolio.
The valuation done in the project surprised in both directions: discovering the bottleneck was a shock, but the action plan and its results built so much trust that the client hired another Vispe service.