How Every Man Jack Unified Finance, Sales, and Planning with Confido

About

Every Man Jack is one of the fastest-growing men's personal care brands in the United States. The Carlyle-backed company sells natural, accessible grooming products through Target, Costco, Walmart, and other major channels, and it has grown at roughly an 18% CAGR since 2021, more than doubling in size in five years. That growth brought scale and complexity in equal measure. By the time Steve Fox joined as CFO in 2021, the finance team was absorbing more than triple its previous transaction volume with fewer people. Steve set a clear standard from day one: at this pace of growth, nothing can fall through the cracks. Building the financial infrastructure to match the brand's ambition meant getting ahead of the deductions, trade spend, and planning complexity that come with thousands of SKUs and heavy promotional activity across a growing roster of retailers.

Challenge

Retail finance and planning that had to scale as fast as the brand.

The sharpest pain was deductions. In men's personal care, retailers, SKUs, and high volume of promotional activity produce a constant stream of deductions that are easy to lose track of without the right systems. Before Steve arrived, Every Man Jack was not yet filing disputes on retailer deductions, so real margin was walking out the door. The question he kept returning to was whether the team could tie every deduction back to the promotion that drove it, and in most months the honest answer was no. There was no clear trail established yet. 

Capacity was a moving target. Trade spend started as something one person handled on the side, then moved to a dedicated specialist, then to a trained team of five full-time equivalents in India. Each step added throughput, but none of it scaled, and none of it moved the team toward leveraging operating expense to drive EBITDA. Planning had the same fault line. Trade promotion plans lived in Google Sheets, where a single mistyped item number could throw off the whole system and cost the sales team's trust. Sales, finance, and operations each worked from their own numbers, and the reconciliation tax fell on everyone. There was no single source of truth.

Solution

One AI platform for cash application, deductions, trade promotion, and planning.

Rather than stitch together a Frankenstein of point solutions, Steve chose one platform that could handle several objectives at once, and ran the rollout as a named, cross-functional initiative called Project Apollo, with himself as executive sponsor and CEO buy-in. Along the way, Every Man Jack migrated its ERP from SAP Business One to NetSuite, which opened the door to AI and agentic workflows across the stack. With Confido, the team put three things in place:

• Automated cash application and deductions: A Walmart cash receipt that used to take almost a full day now takes about five minutes, and disputes are filed automatically.
• Trade promotion management with real-time visibility: Promotions are planned in one environment with lift informed by past performance, and reps can see how much they have left to spend against any promotion, turning trade spend into a managed number.
• Connected sales forecasting and demand planning: Operations gets an independent but connected view of the truth where every difference in assumptions is traceable, feeding the company's first full S&OP cycle from a consensus demand plan into NetSuite Planning and Budgeting.

"I love software, and if software could be a best friend, I think I would want Confido to be my best friend." Steve Fox, Chief Financial Officer, Every Man Jack

Results

Scaling insight and speed, not headcount.

• 4,000+ hours saved per year, worth roughly $325,000 in people and direct expense, so Confido paid for itself with ROI in year one.
• Cash application went from five FTEs to one, and a departed trade spend specialist did not need to be backfilled, all while finance handles triple the transaction volume with a smaller footprint.
• Month-end close moved from seven days toward six, with a zero-day close as the corporate goal.
• The year-end audit closed about three weeks earlier than prior years, during a year that ran two ERP systems in parallel.
• A single source of truth built board-level confidence, letting finance stand behind the numbers in monthly investor readouts and freeing sales, finance, and operations to make decisions instead of reconciling them.

Want to learn how Confido can unify your finance, trade, and planning? Book a demo today.

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