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Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:

After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.

The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.

“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”

Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.

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Every small business carries something that has stopped earning its place. A service you still offer because you always have. A client you keep because dropping them feels disloyal. A product line that made sense three years ago and has not made money since. None of these announce themselves as problems. They just sit there, absorbing time, attention, and resources that could go somewhere more productive.

The difficulty is that stopping something feels like failure, even when continuing it is the actual mistake. Most owners respond by giving the thing another quarter, adjusting the approach, or deciding the timing was wrong. Sometimes that is the right call. Often it is not. The question worth asking is not whether the thing can be saved, but whether saving it is the best use of what you have.

Before anything else, look at what the thing actually costs to deliver versus what it returns. Not the gross revenue it generates, but the net contribution after your time, your staff's time, materials, overhead, and the customer service it requires are accounted for. Many owners who do this exercise for the first time find that their lowest-revenue offerings are not their least profitable ones, and that some of their oldest, most comfortable relationships cost more to maintain than the revenue they produce.

The number that matters is the margin after full cost allocation. If a service line is generating revenue but consuming a disproportionate share of your capacity relative to what it returns, it is limiting your ability to do more of whatever is actually working. That is the cost that rarely appears on any report.

Some clients have been with you since the beginning, and that history carries weight. Loyalty runs in both directions, and long relationships are important. But a client who pays below your current market rate, requires more management than the work itself, escalates every small issue, or occupies time you could spend on clients who are growing with you is a client worth examining honestly.

The conversation about ending or restructuring a client relationship is one most owners avoid until it becomes unavoidable. Raising the rates to market level is usually the right first step, and it resolves the situation in one of two ways: the client accepts the new rate and the relationship becomes worth keeping, or they leave and the capacity opens up for something better. Either outcome is preferable to continuing a relationship that costs more than it contributes.

Markets shift. What your customers needed five years ago may not be what they need now, and a product or service built for a different moment can persist long after its usefulness has faded, supported only by inertia and the reluctance to admit the window has closed.

The signal is usually in the sales effort required to close it. A product that fits the market sells with reasonable effort. One that no longer fits requires progressively more work to move the same volume, and that ratio tends to get worse over time. If you are spending more energy explaining and justifying something than delivering it, the market may be telling you something worth hearing.

Our earlier article The Pivot Playbook: Market-Driven Shifts addresses what to do when the signal points toward changing direction. The decision to stop is different: it is not about finding a better version of the thing, but about whether the resources behind it would produce more value somewhere else entirely.

Three questions are worth working through before you stop anything. First, if you were starting fresh today with no history and no sunk cost, would you add this client, this service, or this product to your business? Second, what would you do with the time and capacity if this were no longer on your plate? Third, is the reluctance to stop driven by genuine business logic or by the discomfort of the conversation required to end it?

The answers are usually clear. The hesitation is almost never about the analysis. It is about the moment of actually doing it, telling the client, discontinuing the line, making the change real.

Removing something that is not earning its place doesn’t just recover the resources it was consuming. It changes the character of the business. Time that was going to a low-margin service goes to a high-margin one. Attention that was going to a difficult client goes to one who values the work. Energy that was going to a product the market has moved past goes to something the market actually wants.

Change is good.

Comment: Excellent article (The Personal Guarantee You Likely Signed Without Reading).  As small business owners for over 20 years, my business partner and I were often presented with these personal guarantee clauses in vendor and supplier contracts.  We were able to delete every single one.  If these cross outs were questioned, which only happened half the time at most, our reply was, "The company’s legal Operating Agreement prohibits individuals (i.e., Members) from assuming any such liability."  The only time this didn't work was on an SBA loan.

Reply: Thank you for sharing this. Twenty years of firsthand experience makes this the kind of advice we can’t improve on! One thing worth adding: make sure any deletion is acknowledged in writing by the other party before you rely on it, and as you noted, do not expect this to work with institutional lenders. Great advice, this is as practical as it gets.

The Co. Letter is not your attorney. This column is for general informational purposes only. Consult a licensed attorney before taking any legal action or modifying any contract.

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