Podcasts

Talk-Commerce-Rick Elmore

What are you doing to build loyalty with Rick Elmore

One of the most effective strategies for building customer loyalty is sending handwritten notes. Handwritten notes show care and attention that any other medium cannot match. Handwritten notes are a powerful way to make a personal connection and can be used to thank your client for their business.

Handwritten notes can be sent as a thank you after a purchase, to celebrate a milestone, or to show appreciation for being a loyal client. The personal touch of a handwritten note will make your client feel like they are being acknowledged and valued.

Rick Elmore shows how to build loyalty and show appreciation to clients by connecting with them personally.

What you will learn

  • Rick Elmore is the founder and CEO of Simply Noted. He played college and professional sports, and then went on to work in corporate medical device sales and marketing until he had an itch that he just couldn’t scratch with what he was doing then.
  • Rick enjoys being outdoors and is training for a half marathon. He enjoys doing physical activity and has a three and a five-year-old now.
  • Quote from Rick “When I was in my sales career, it was really hard to stand out from the crowd, especially in the corporate world where there’s always a competitor in everything that you do. So I started writing handwritten notes to my customers to try and get their attention.“
  • Quote from Rick “When I was doing my MBA class, my professor said that handwritten notes still work. I had a classmate of mine and myself that got to work and sent out 500 handwritten notes that were written by a pen plotter and had a phenomenal response rate.“
  • Rick founded simply noted full-time and has been doing that for the last four and a half years. It’s a powerful tool that can be used in just so many different facets of business, not just sales.
  • Brent: I’ve had conversations with other entrepreneurs who say that handwritten notes are a lost art. One famous guy in the Twin Cities sends out 30 thank-you notes a day.
  • Ricks notest that they are a handwritten notes platform that helps companies automate sending thank you or handwritten thank you notes to their customers. By doing so, their customer lifetime value goes up; they’re gonna be happier, they’re gonna re-refer their friends, and they’re gonna write better reviews.
  • Rick: We’ve invested over $850,000 in the last almost two years developing our own handwriting robot. It’s a real three-access, a pantry-based system that’s auto-fed, and it helps realtors, mortgage professionals, e-commerce businesses, politicians, and nonprofits, to either automate it or scale it.
  • You can create your own handwriting style using our software, and we have a portfolio of about 900 handwriting styles. If you’re a person of influence, we can create a handwriting style for you, but there is a cost associated with that.
  • Rick describes the technology that goes into creating a genuine handwritten note, and how it compares to an e at the beginning of a word versus an e at the end of a word.
  • Rick: Our handwriting engine is Mach machine Learning right now, and it completely varies every single time it writes. So if you put a hundred custom messages into our handwriting software and you wrote out a hundred notes, it’s literally gonna look at 100% different every single time it’s written.
  • The real way to tell if it’s actually pen written or not is the smudge test. We actually built our own pen and developed a weighted pen insert, so when our motor lifts it, it actually lifts the pen, but when it goes down, it has a downward force.
  • Rick explains how his pen works and how he gets a nice little pen and dation plus it’s ink, so it’s gonna smear. However, people are starting to understand that this is a service that is out there and that simply noted is a good product. Rick: I’ve heard that getting handwritten notes has helped other companies get a better response rate on campaigns and outreach. Brent: First handwritten notes have a 99% open rate.
  • If you’re thinking about doing direct mail and you’re doing print, you might as well just throw seven out of every $10 in the trash, cuz it’s not gonna do anything. But if you can retain 5% more each year, you can grow your business.
  • When it comes down to it, it’s about building deeper relationships with your clients. If you have deeper, more loyal relationships, they’re gonna stick around, refer their friends and write better reviews, which really is gonna help you grow your business.
  • Rick: We have a luxury jewelry brand that uses us for customer complaints, but they don’t apologize to the customer. Instead, they automate the message and send hundreds of notes a week.
  • Brent: It’s interesting on the customer complaint, cuz it’s a little bit of a risk, especially if you automate it too much. Rick: I don’t know, I think you want to keep it super generic and give them the opportunity to reach back out to you.
  • Rick: If you’re trying to get super custom, give them the option to contact you again and talk.
  • Brent: I’ve heard that you can overdo handwritten notes, so we recommend sending them three to four times a year at the most, at least once or twice a year. Rick: You still gotta do everything else, too, like email, phone calls, social, etc.
  • Rick: We help you build that strong relationship on an automatic or scaled, you know, level, and we recommend sending something that is as personalized as possible, but short and sweet, because these clients have seven second attention spans.
  • Rick suggests sending three or four sentences, and putting yourself on the receiving end of the message. This is much more impactful than a thank you upsell, hard close, 150 word message, where they’re gonna start skim reading if you don’t have their attention within three seconds.
  • Rick: If you are gonna use email for sales or marketing, you gotta include three things: who you are, what company you’re with, what you can do for them, and how can you make their life better.
  • Rick: We’re primarily focused on helping companies do it, but we still want to help average realtors or mortgage professionals send a card. They can send their first card free so they can see what it’s like, touch it, get it in their mail.
  • Rick: I think it’s Rafiki, and his handwriting is terrible. He says he’ll send a handwritten note or two a day, but he’ll still use our system because his handwriting is so terrible. Rick Elmore’s handwriting style is not enjoyable to read, so he doesn’t want it on the website.
  • Rick says that customers should focus on the relationship rather than the product going into quarter one or just throughout for 2023. He wants to keep the people that have worked with him two years ago or last year. Rick says to get in front of clients early on every single year to get their loyalty stuck to you and your brand.
  • Rick says to stay in front of your clients, do something that others aren’t doing, and get their trust and loyalty. This will help you stay on top of mind 24 7 and get them 100% on your ship every single year.
  • Rick: I think that personal touch is a great way to stand out from the noise of generic social media and generic email. I used a podcasting service that sent me a video thanking me for being a client. Rick and Brent discuss using Zoom to record personal little video responses, and Brent gives everybody a chance to do a shameless plug.
  • Rick: If you go to our website and fill out the business page, we’ll send you a nice sample kit with writing samples, brochures, case studies, handwriting styles, um, basically everything. And usually what happens is that three to six months later a light bulb goes off and they contact us.

Transcript

[00:03:07] Brent: All right. Welcome to this episode, oft Commerce. Today I have Rick Elmore. Rick Elmore is the founder and c e o of simply noted Rick. Go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life. 

[00:03:23] Rick: Yeah, so, um, my name is Rick Elmore. I’m the owner of Simply Noted, um, it, that is a handwritten notes platform.

[00:03:29] Rick: We, we’ll kind of dive into what that is later, but my background is in athletics. I played college and professional sports. Played at the University of Arizona, which was a three year starter for Mike Stoops and then was drafted in 2010 in the NFL draft. Um, after that, um, was in corporate medical device sales and marketing.

[00:03:48] Rick: First year was Rookie of the year. Next, uh, six years was either top 1% or top five rep in the company. And then 2017 came around. I had an itch that I just couldn’t scratch with what I was doing then. So I went back and did my MBA and, and uh, that’s where the idea for simply Noted began. 

[00:04:06] Brent: That’s awesome.

[00:04:07] Brent: Um, and, um, so passion is still athletics are. playing football still. 

[00:04:14] Rick: Yeah. Oh yeah. I guess, yeah. Then, uh, my passions, you know, I’m a, an avid outdoorsman. Uh, I have a three and a five year old now, so I have to be a lot more calculated, um, in what I do with my time off. You know, I, I can’t do those three and four day adventures anymore, so I have to be a little bit, uh, you know, what’s closer to home.

[00:04:32] Rick: But yeah, I would say, you know, I’m doing a, a half marathon this upcoming weekend, so I, I still try to do a lot of physical activity. That’s what I enjoy doing most outside of work. 

[00:04:42] Brent: Awesome. That’s great. Um, I, I warned you in the green room that, uh, we’re doing this free joke project and you agreed to participate.

[00:04:50] Brent: So I’m just gonna tell you a joke and you can tell me if that joke should remain free or if we could charge for it. And, um, I’m just gonna preempt today that the joke I have found, I’m gonna guarantee your kids are gonna love or at some point. But anyways, here we go. Yesterday my doctor told me my chronic diarrhea is inherited.

[00:05:13] Brent: Runs in the family. 

[00:05:17] Rick: I would say that’s a good dad joke, but , let’s keep that one free . Yeah. 

[00:05:22] Brent: I, I, I agree with you. So . Yeah. Um, alright, so, uh, simply noted, you know, I’m, I’m a big, I’m a big believer in, in handwritten notes. Tell me a little bit about it. 

[00:05:34] Rick: Yeah, so, um, you know, when I was in my sales career, , you know, it was really hard, especially in the corporate, um, like infrastructure seemed to really stand out and, and be different because, you know, in the corporate world there’s always a competitor actually in everything that you do.

[00:05:52] Rick: There’s always competition. There’s a different option. Um, all the customers are being, you know, pulled in every direction by every vendor to try to get their attention. And when I was doing in my MBA class, I had a marketing professor, I was just talking about like success rates and market. and, um, everything was super marginal.

[00:06:11] Rick: Everything was like low single digit percentage, you know, email, cold call, print, direct mail, um, knocking on doors. And I had a professor that said handwritten notes, guys, like at the end, at the end of the lecture, he said, kind of half jokingly said, Hey guys, you know what still works is a good old fashioned handwritten note.

[00:06:28] Rick: Um, it gets opened almost 100% of the time, says it’s actually 99% and there’s just nothing like it. I don’t think he knew what he was doing then because the light bulb started going off and, uh, I had a classmate of mine and myself we got to work. We, uh, worked with the mailing house here in Phoenix, Arizona, flew some technology and from South America, China, and basically it was a pen potter.

[00:06:53] Rick: I, where’s that? I have a, usually have a pen plotter in here to show you. But, um, sent out some really bad handwritten notes that were written by this pen plotter. Uh, it took us about a month to write out 500 of them, and, uh, just had a phenomenal response rate. Just, you know, as a salesperson, having a client call you back.

[00:07:13] Rick: Right. That, that’s a big deal. And, um, what we really noticed, , you know, how powerful they can be, how powerful of a tool. It can be used in just so many other different facets of business, not just sales, um, you know, client retention, um, relationship building, you know, booking appointments, um, saying top of mind.

[00:07:34] Rick: You know, there’s just a bunch of ways that you can use this tool in a, in very valuable ways. But for me, what sparked the idea was outreach, booking appointments, and closing. So, um, had tremendous success in 2017 doing that 2018 and then, you know, the business kind of just grew organically in 2019. We founded, uh, simply noted full-time, and uh, that’s what we’ve been doing for the last four and a half years.

[00:07:58] Rick: That’s awesome. 

[00:07:58] Brent: Yeah, I, I definitely have had conversations with other entrepreneurs and business owners who, uh, especially people that are in an older generation who say, mm-hmm. , that, uh, that’s a lost art, is the, um, is a handwritten note. Um, I, I remember sitting through a meeting or a, you know, a panel with one of the, um, one of the more famous guys in the Twin Cities who had said, Uh, he picks 30 people a day out of his sales.

[00:08:29] Brent: He had a retail and he would send them a handwritten thank you note mm-hmm. , and he would hand write every single one of them. So, uh, I, I, I can certainly appreciate it. And, and so tell us a little bit about your system and how you’re not asking actually everybody to hand write it, like you mentioned 

[00:08:48] Rick: plotters and stuff.

[00:08:49] Rick: Yeah, so what’s simply noted as is we’re a handwritten notes platform. We help companies either automate it, so think of like a new client signs up. We can automate sending a thank you or handwritten thank you note or say it’s, um, after their fifth purchase we can set up some type of trigger using Zap.

[00:09:05] Rick: You’re an API integration of Web Hook. Um, once they hit that milestone to think then, or an anniversary or a birthday, um, we really like. , you know, kind of consult our clients on the relationship side of building, um, these hand uh, sending these notes on a relationship purpose because you know, they’re going, they’re gonna stick around a lot longer.

[00:09:26] Rick: The lifetime value’s gonna go up, they’re gonna be happier. They’re gonna re refer their friends, they’re gonna write better reviews. So we think, you know, the tool of sending a handwritten note should just be simply to thank somebody, um, because just saying thank you, it’s worth its weight in gold. Um, it’s gonna come back to you tenfold over.

[00:09:41] Rick: Um, it just takes time. Um, and all good things do take time. So simply noted. Helps you automate it or scale it. So, um, if you need to send one, if you have all the stuff we always tell our clients, like if you have handwritten notes or notes in your desk and you wanna send one-offs, um, we tell you to do it because, you know, there’s just nothing like a handwritten note from you, but, Just a tiny little speck below that’s simply noted.

[00:10:07] Rick: Everything we do is real genuine pen written. Um, we’ve invested over $850,000 in the last almost two years developing our own handwriting robot. Um, it’s a real. Three access, uh, you know, left, right up, down, uh, forward backwards, you know, three access, pantry based system that’s auto fed. Um, we’ve developed our own handwriting engine, our own software, our own mechanics.

[00:10:31] Rick: It’s, it’s pretty, it’s pretty awesome. Software integrations. So, yeah, so simply known as just a platform that helps, you know, realtors, mortgage professionals, e-commerce businesses, um, politicians, nonprofits, to either automate it or. . 

[00:10:48] Brent: Yeah. That’s awesome. I, I know that we’ve, I’ve talked to other people who’ve done something similar and so you, you have the ability to mimic somebody else’s handwriting and or use a general hand write handwriting to send the 

[00:11:02] Rick: note.

[00:11:03] Rick: Yeah, so we have about 32. Last time we checked 32 handwriting styles available on the website. Um, we have about a portfolio of about 900 handwriting styles. Um, it really becomes analysis paralysis, like if you like, start looking at tons and tons of these handwriting styles. Um, if you’re a person of influence where like, you know, your stuff’s gonna end up online, um, you, you’re a public figure and you want to do your own handwriting style, we absolutely can do that.

[00:11:32] Rick: Um, most people. because there’s a cost associated with that. But we don’t just create a font, we create a handwriting style. And what that means is like we’re actually pulling out like the characteristics of how you write, you know, You like when you write like, like the natural spacing, the kering, you know, of what an A next to a B looks like, an A next to a, you know, a c I mean, everything is like pulled out, you know, ligature styles.

[00:11:58] Rick: What do two T’s look like next to each other? Do you loop ’em? Do you connect ’em? You know, it’s what’s an e at the beginning of a word look like versus an e at the end of a word. I mean, it’s lit. It’s, it’s, it’s pretty intense. You know, the, what has gone into creating, uh, a genuine handwritten note.

[00:12:15] Rick: There’s tons of technology on the, on the back end that allows us to send a simple hand handwritten note on the front end. So it’s, it’s pretty, um, spectacular. 

[00:12:25] Brent: Um, I know ma, machine learning is such a, um, a buzzword right now. Uh, how does machine learning kind of play into this? And does it, and 

[00:12:35] Rick: so our soft, yeah.

[00:12:36] Rick: So it’s, I mean, I would say our, our handwriting engine is Mach machine Learning right now. Um, it completely varies every single time it writes. Um, I wouldn’t say that it’s, it’s a true, smart, like machine learning, but what it does is it, Constantly varies. Every single handwritten note. So if you plugged a hundred custom messages, you know, into our handwriting software and you wrote out a hundred notes and you put ’em all next to each other, it’s literally gonna look at, look 100% different every single time it’s written.

[00:13:05] Rick: So, um, we put a lot of thought in, in research and development to making sure that they look as real as possible. Cuz if not, I mean, there’s really no purpose of our, our service if you know the notes that we are. Don’t look the most authentic. 

[00:13:22] Brent: Yeah, I, I can say that I’ve gotten many realtor email or, uh, physical letters that is, that are clearly just printed out on a printer and mm-hmm.

[00:13:31] Brent: and have some font that, that sort of ties together some cursive . 

[00:13:35] Rick: Yeah. Um, Yeah, so the real way of telling that is the smudge test. You just lick your finger and just like try to smudge the ink. Um, a laser printed hand, like a laser printed font will not smudge, but like, since these are real pens, um, we actually had to build our own pen.

[00:13:50] Rick: Um, we can dive into because we write so many notes, but, um, . If you actually write it with a real pen and you try to smudge it, the will smear. So that’s like the number one way to tell if it’s actually pen written or not. 

[00:14:03] Brent: And you have some kind of, uh, it, it does a little indent on the paper as well. 

[00:14:07] Rick: Yep, yep.

[00:14:08] Rick: And that was another reason, you know, we had to develop room technology. So those actually drop machines. All they have is little lift motor and there’s no downward pressure force. So we actually, we did a weighted pen. Um, we actually developed this pen. Um, we developed our own pen insert. We’re writing capacity, so when our motor lifts it, it actually lifts the pen, but when it goes down, we actually have a right, like a downward force on it.

[00:14:33] Rick: So we actually have a, a spring force that actually pushes the pen into the paper as well. So, um, so you’re gonna get that nice little pen and dation plus it’s ink, so it’s gonna smear. So it really, it’s gonna be really hard, you know, I mean, you really, really have to try to. Some type of, you know, um, woody pattern in these when there, there isn’t, but.

[00:14:55] Rick: That’s, yeah. 

[00:14:57] Brent: Have you ever had anybody ask for Mount Blanc Black blue Ink? 

[00:15:01] Rick: Yeah, when we were like first getting started. That was really funny. Like the early customers would ask for like that crazy stuff. But no more, I think people are starting to understand that, you know, this is a service that is out there.

[00:15:12] Rick: Um, You know, there are a couple competitors out there. There’s really only maybe two serious players in this space. Um, but, uh, yeah, I think, you know, businesses now just want, you know, something that’s easy to use, efficient, um, authentic, a good product. And that’s what we’re trying to do for our clients that we here at simply noted.

[00:15:34] Rick: Do you 

[00:15:34] Brent: have some numbers that you could share that show sort of the uptick, uh, on, at the end of a sales cycle or response rate? I, I’ve heard that, you know, getting handwritten note has helped other companies, uh, get a better response rate on campaigns and. And, and just 

[00:15:49] Rick: outreach. Yeah. Well, first handwritten notes have a 99% open rate.

[00:15:55] Rick: That’s a 300% improvement over print mail. Um, so if you’re thinking about doing direct mail and you’re doing print, you might as well just throw seven out of every $10 in the trash, cuz it’s not gonna do anything. Um, this was actually an American Express study, but they found out that just, you know, this is a client, you know, a client experience, um, study.

[00:16:16] Rick: American Express did, but just a simple 5% improvement in client retention will increase profits year over year by 25 to 95%. They did that on business accounts, but just retaining 5% more each year is gonna help you grow your business or grow your sales by 25 to 95% year over year. For me, I mean, that makes complete sense.

[00:16:36] Rick: If we were able to, you know, keep our current business clients, you know, year over year, um, especially, you know, our, our larger accounts, it would be easier to grow your business. So that makes total sense. Um, also, there’s, you know, customers who feel appreciated, you know, five, they’re five times more likely to make a repeat purchase.

[00:16:53] Rick: So just saying thank you. You’re gonna increase your like repeat purchases from your clients, repeat business by 500%. That was also American Express study as well. So really when it comes down to, it’s like just building deeper relationships with your clients because when you have deeper, more loyal relationships, they’re gonna stick around.

[00:17:12] Rick: You know, they’re gonna refer their friends and they’re gonna write better reviews, which really is gonna help you grow your business. And that’s what we’re really trying to do. Um, yeah. Yeah, I’d say those are some good stats with simply. 

[00:17:24] Brent: Do you have some, um, sort of, you don’t have to say any client names, but, uh, any examples of situations, maybe retail or e-commerce or even just regular B2B type of outreach that have been very successful?

[00:17:40] Rick: Yeah, so we work with a luxury hat brand. Um, what they do is when somebody tries like their. Discounted hat. What they’ll do is they’ll automate a, um, handwritten note with a discount code to try their more expensive hat. So they’re trying to upsell them. So, I mean, they’ve been doing that for over a year.

[00:17:59] Rick: So I think if it was working, they, I mean, if it wasn’t working, they wouldn’t keep doing it. So that’s kind of a cool, unique, um, uh, kind of use case that we’ve seen in the e-com. Also, um, it’s, we have a, a luxury, um, uh, jewelry brand. And it’s really funny. It’s like, you know, their average sale probably is $3,000 or more, but what they use us for is when they get a customer complaint.

[00:18:26] Rick: So we see the, you know, somebody who didn’t have a good experience. We see that message get automated all the time. Um, it’s a global, global company and you know, they’re sending hundreds of notes a week. Um, but you would think, you know, , um, you know, using something like that to just apologize and get them back on board to, you know, get them to like the brand more, um, to try to get that loyalty back.

[00:18:50] Rick: Um, so yeah, we’ve seen them for upselling. We’ve seen them for saying sorry, to try to, you know, earn their trust back. So, yeah, there’s a bunch of ways to use it. 

[00:18:58] Brent: That’s interesting on the customer complaint, cuz it, it is a little bit of a risk, especially if you automate it too much. Is that something worse?

[00:19:05] Brent: Somebody would actually write out, hand write, not handwriting super, but type. I type it out and then it comes to your engine and then gets mailed out. 

[00:19:13] Rick: Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah, I don’t know. I, I think in something like that, you want to keep it super generic, you know, and give them the opportunity to reach back out to you.

[00:19:22] Rick: Um, that’s what this brand does. , um, they just say that they’re really sorry, you know, they’re apologizing for that experience. If you wanna talk, I’d love to talk to you more about it. And they put their a contact number for them so it actually looks, you know, as authentic as possible. They’re trying to be authentic, they’re trying to fix it.

[00:19:37] Rick: I think if you’re trying to get super custom and it’s just like a, um, a use case just to send it and forget it, I wouldn’t say that’s the best case. But if you’re giving them the option to then further contact you again and talk. The authenticity of something like that is, is something that’s extremely powerful.

[00:19:56] Brent: Um, I’ve heard. You can overdo handwritten notes as well, like the, it is something that should be spaced out over time and like, if, if you’re tagging somebody at the end of an e-commerce, uh, sale and you don’t wanna send ’em an handwritten note every week saying, Hey, thanks 

[00:20:13] Rick: for this. No, well, I mean, we would love it if, you know , I can’t send, you know, hundreds to each of their clients.

[00:20:20] Rick: But, um, yeah, we, we try to recommend to our, our, our businesses, you know, three to four times a year at the most, um, at least once or twice a year. You know, we’re in the holidays right now, so it’s our busiest time of the year. That’s when most of our businesses are using us. Um, but I would say, you know, maybe thank you for a purchase, maybe a birthday or an anniversary of a purchase, and then a holiday.

[00:20:42] Rick: You know, just stay top of mind, you know, simply note as just another tool in the belt. That’s what we try to tell ’em as well. You still gotta do everything else. You still gotta have great customer service or great product, email, you know, phone calls, social, I mean, you gotta have all the other elements to build a successful business.

[00:20:56] Rick: It’s just, What we do is help you just build that strong relationship on an automatic or scaled, you know, level. 

[00:21:05] Brent: Um, on the, um, on that, on that experience part and scale, I should say, um, our customers seeing some kind of, uh, um, or, or I should say, are merchants seeing a better uptick when it’s a little bit personalized or.

[00:21:27] Brent: Uh, are, is it, is it still effective if you’re sending out a nice note with a thank you and, and the person’s name at the end? 

[00:21:36] Rick: Well, we always recommend to, uh, personalize it. Um, that’s the power of all the technologies that’s out there right now. Um, you know, using platforms like Zapier, integr, Matt Mat, um, or make, you know, whatever they are now, um, integrate, you know, you can pull information automatically from your software and personalize.

[00:21:56] Rick: The message as much as possible. Um, we definitely don’t recommend just putting a generic message on there cuz it kind of, it can come off as impersonal. Um, when the product that we are trying to provide is a very high level touch personal. So, um, We would absolutely recommend sending something that is as personalized as possible, but short and sweet, you know, these, your clients have seven second attention spans.

[00:22:21] Rick: Three or four sentences. Respect their time. Don’t send them, you know, two paragraphs of a message. It’s just not real or authentic. Um, you know, try to put yourself in their shoes. Be on the receiving end of this. What would you like to receive? . You know, maybe a simple Thank you. We appreciate you so much.

[00:22:38] Rick: You know, you know, please let us know if we can do anything for you. You know, short, sweet to the point is gonna be much more impactful than a thank you upsell, hard close , you know, 150 word message where they’re gonna, you know, if you don’t, if they don’t. You know, I was just listening to a podcast yesterday actually, about something.

[00:22:57] Rick: If you don’t have them hooked within three seconds, they just start skim reading. Like if you don’t have their attention within that first sentence, you know, I was trying to listen to podcasts about developing stronger messaging, and there’s like within three seconds, if you don’t have ’em, they just start, they just start skim reading.

[00:23:11] Rick: So again, short and sweet to the point is what, uh, works the best, but make sure it’s personalized to them. . 

[00:23:17] Brent: And how about hooks in that message to get them to do some action? Is there, is there something in there that you’d, that sometimes you’d like them to do? Or is it some, is it just a, Hey, thanks for, for your 

[00:23:29] Rick: customer?

[00:23:30] Rick: So my, my background’s in sales and marketing, so I’m, we use it to, to grow our business. Um, um, But what I always try to tell people is just say thank you, but if you are gonna use it for like a sales or marketing tool to book more appointments or close more deals, I always say there’s three things you gotta include so you know who you are.

[00:23:52] Rick: Make a quick introduction, one sentence, who you are, what company you’re with. Um, you know, what’s your value proposition? So number two, like what, how can you help them? How are you gonna make their life better? And then just simple, make an ass, you know, um, can we get on the call? You know, can we buy you lunch?

[00:24:08] Rick: Something like that. Just really quick. And to the point, respect their time. If they’re interested, you know, they’ll call you back. But yeah, I would say make an introduction, value proposition, you know, and then they can. , 

[00:24:22] Brent: is there a crossover into the personal space? You know, sending birthday cards and Christmas cards and things like that?

[00:24:27] Brent: Are you primarily 

[00:24:29] Rick: commercial? So our website, simply noted.com, can send just one card for any reason. Um, but that our website was built on purpose. We had to the API first company. Um, so all of our orders, you know, they do go through our website, but they use software to. Um, but if anybody, you know, wants to go in and send a quick birthday card or a holiday card, um, you can do that on our website.

[00:24:57] Rick: Um, but we’re primarily focused on helping companies, um, do it because they have the technology and the resources put in place, you know, to leverage a system like this. But we still want to help, you know. Average realtor or mortgage professional, or just anybody who wants to send a card. It’s actually a good reason for a lot of people to just try us out as well.

[00:25:19] Rick: You know, they want to try before they buy, so they’ll go on there and we allow them to send their first card free so they can send it, see what it’s like, touch it, get it in their mail. Um, yeah. 

[00:25:30] Brent: Excellent. Um, do you have a font that is can’t read? So if my, nobody can read my handwriting. So do you have it so they’ll know that, Hey, this is coming from Brent, so Definit.

[00:25:41] Brent: I can’t even read it. . 

[00:25:43] Rick: Yeah. So, um, yeah, I think it’s Rafiki. It’s kind of like a, a doctor’s, I would call it scratch. I mean, it’s super dis disgusting. It’s really hard to read. But, um, I mean, I, you know, I’ll send a handwritten note or two a day just to, you know, people stay in touch or thank them for something they’ve done for me recently, and I’ll still use our system because, you know, if I wrote it, it, it, my handwriting is so terrible that I, I, I’ll write it out and then I’ll try to read ’em.

[00:26:13] Rick: Like, this is just terrible on the. Like, this isn’t even a nice reading experience. Like I’d rather use that handwriting style that we have on our website and put our message in online just to send one or two , because I just, my handwriting is terrible. So, um, there’s just something like that too. I’m trying to put myself in the recipient shoes as well.

[00:26:33] Rick: It’s like, do they wanna read my chicken scratch or they want to have some, you know, handwriting style that does. Like a handwriting style, but it’s actually enjoyable to read cuz mine like will literally hurt your eyes. . . It would be a lot. Sweet. So we can’t go, what is that? Yeah, 

[00:26:48] Brent: we can’t go onto the website and pick the Rick Elmore font.

[00:26:52] Rick: No, no, that, that will never be on the website cuz I don’t think anybody would choose it. 

[00:26:57] Brent: Um, if you had one nugget that you think. Customers should do going into quarter one or just throughout for 2023. What, what do you think is something that people could be doing in both customer experience and uh, and communication?

[00:27:13] Rick: So I would, what do you, you know, there’s a hundred different. You know, competitors to every service, it doesn’t matter. You know, we live in 2022, almost 2023. Um, competition’s so fierce across the board in everything that we do. Um, so what I try to do with my clients is give them 10 times more value, um, and appreciation.

[00:27:35] Rick: So no matter what, you know, they’re gonna be loyal to us, um, because I know they have the ability to go out there and, and shop around and try other people. So what I try to do is just focus on that relationship because I know our product is gonna get better and it’s always going to be improving. But I want the people that have worked with us two years ago or last year to stay with us and come with us and help us.

[00:27:57] Rick: So I would say, you know, early on every single year is somehow get in front of your clients. It doesn’t matter if you’re gonna pick up the phone and call them and thank them for what they did for you last year. Um, do something to engage them in a way. that you’re getting their loyalty stuck to you and your brand.

[00:28:14] Rick: Like what are you doing, um, to build that loyalty on a consistent basis. Because, you know, like I, I’m, I’m a big tech guy and I have, you know, tech brands that I like to follow, but you know, there’s different options, but. I do have one brand that always somehow gets my attention and, um, they’re really good at staying on, on top of, on staying on top of mind.

[00:28:37] Rick: And actually, they, they called me after my last purchase and said, Hey, we saw you like you’re on your seventh purchase. Thank you so much. Like, that’s impactful. You know, what are you doing to stay in front, um, of your clients? Um, because you know that attention span, especially with ads and social and digital, um, it’s really.

[00:28:56] Rick: You know, to stay top of mind 24 7 when everybody, including your competitors, are fighting for that space. So I would say definitely figure out a way to, to get that trust, get that loyalty, you know, get them, you know, 100% on your, on your ship. Every single year. 

[00:29:13] Brent: Yeah, I mean, that’s a really good point.

[00:29:15] Brent: There’s so much noise out there nowadays and, and making sure that, uh, you’re kind of going above the fray. You have to do something that others aren’t doing. And I think that personal touch be it, be it a personal phone call or, uh, handwritten note is such a great way of making sure that you’re up above what everybody else is doing and trying to stay out of that noise of generic social media and generic email.

[00:29:40] Rick: um, Rick, somebody, you know Yeah, go ahead. I have another little nugget here. Somebody. I use a podcasting service, you know, to help us, um, with our outreach. And the owner of this company gave me a phone call and I didn’t answer cuz I didn’t know how it was. And then what he did was recorded a message on Zoom.

[00:29:59] Rick: Just thanking me for being a client on his platform. And he sent me an email and saying, Hey, just sent you this message. Just wanted to, whatever. And it was a video, like a three minute video thanking me of being a client, like , like, am I gonna be loyal to him or go try some different service? You know? So that was a cool, cool way.

[00:30:17] Rick: Somebody just got my attention recently as well. And that takes two or three minutes. You know, it’s really easy to do, you know, on a computer nowadays, everybody knows how to use Zoom and, and do that recording. 

[00:30:27] Brent: Yeah, I think Vineyard is a great tool to use just to give those personal little video responses.

[00:30:33] Brent: Um, Rick, as I close out the podcast, uh, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. You can plug anything you’d like. What would you like to plug today? 

[00:30:44] Rick: Yeah, so what we do is anybody who goes to our website, we’ll actually send them a nice sample kit. So we do a good job of putting together this big 10 by 13 folio, um, with writing samples, brochures, case studies, handwriting styles, um, basically everything.

[00:31:00] Rick: that you, I mean, after four and a half years of doing this, we know what questions people ask and we answer those questions in this sample kit. So if you went to simply noted.com, um, and just go to the business page and you can fill out your information. We’ll send you this nice sample kit. Um, and usually what happens, you know, people request it and then three to six months later, you know, a light bulb goes off and then they’ll contact us.

[00:31:23] Rick: So we highly recommend you just to go to simply no.com and go to the business page and let us send you a free sample. Okay? It’s on us. Um, and yeah, and just see, you know, how great this technology is and simply noted. Really just wants to help automate it and. Um, and you can see how we can do that with this sample kit.

[00:31:44] Brent: That’s awesome. Rick, thanks so much being here today. It’s been a pleasure. 

[00:31:49] Rick: Thank you so much, Brent. It’s great to be here.

Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Talk Commerce. Please rate this episode wherever you download your podcast. We are actively looking for people to participate in the Free Joke Project. Go to talk hyphen commerce.com and sign up for your free spot on the Free Joke Project. If you are a business, I will do a 32nd elevator.

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The Story of Socks, Socks, and More Socks with Mark Cronin

This week on our podcast, we will discuss the incredible story behind John’s Crazy Socks and our mission to spread happiness. We’ll explore how John, who has Down Syndrome, and his dad, Mark, started this business with a simple mission: to spread happiness.

We’ll talk about how their business has grown and evolved over the years and how they have impacted the lives of so many. Additionally, we’ll discuss the importance of inclusion and how John’s Crazy Socks has created a community of acceptance and respect.

Tune in to learn more about this inspiring story and how you can help make a difference!

What you will learn from this podcast

[00:04:22] Mark: dad.

  • Mark is a fan of Bob Dylan and recently embarked on a project to send out a Bob Dylan song of the day.

[00:05:20] John: son, 

  • Mark and I built a website and got a little inventory, and we were bootstrapping. The only marketing we did was set up a Facebook page.
  • Brent wants to get your feedback on a joke before we get into the regular content, so he’s gonna tell you a joke and then you’re gonna tell me a joke after that.

[00:09:33] Brent: Oof

  • Mark: I don’t know if you’ve ever had to participate in a mission statement writing exercise, but it drives everything we do. We’ve created a social enterprise that has both the social and the business purpose, and they feed off of each other.
  • Mark: It’s about giving back, supporting causes, and creating customer experiences. And so we’re spreading happiness.

[00:12:23] Brent: happiness.

  • Brent: Yeah, I’m a big believer in the entrepreneurial operating system, so we do mission statements and we set up our core values.
  • Mark: I’m familiar with E os and we have our five pillars, and everybody knows that, so if you walk around here and you say, what’s the mission, everybody will be able to tell you and they’ll be able to tell you why their job matters.
  • Mark: work. We have to make this a great place to work, and we can start by making sure people know why their job matters.
  • When you buy socks from us, you are helping us employ people with different abilities, give back, and spread happiness. You get a thank you note from John, and on the packing slip, you see the picture of the person who picked your on.
  • Brent: I agree that happiness has to start with the staff and then bring it out to the customers.

[00:15:51] Mark: happiness?

  • Mark: We believe in what we’re doing and we’re committed to making our customers happy, so we go the extra mile for them. We give things away, we refund money, we give a guarantee of happiness, and it’s good business.
  • Mark: We get happy employees, happy customers, and loyal customer. We have a great website, great selection, great products, and great service, so we frequently hear from new customers how surprised they were and how quickly they got their product.
  • Mark: We do better shipping than Amazon and Jeff Bezos over in Amazon, and we do it because we hire people with different abilities.
  • Brent: I think businesses overlook two of the five pillars, the social and the environmental, and also the community. Maybe you could touch a little bit on the community side of it?
  • Mark: we work with people with different abilities, and we make products that celebrate causes and raise money for those causes.

[00:19:39] Mark: You 

  • Mark: Socks raised money for the National Down Syndrome Society. We work with the local schools, we host school tours, we get involved in the local chamber of commerce, and it turns out to be good for business.
  • Brent: I get that, and I volunteer for a running organization that helps incarcerated, formerly incarcerated people start changing their lives through running. The community aspect is even more important than the running part, and you have to make sure that you’re maintaining that and being part of it.
  • Brent: Leaders should always try to serve others rather than getting something from them. Mark: Leaders should work for everybody else and give them what they need to succeed.
  • Mark said we were going to sell crazy socks, and John’s Crazy Socks became somewhat anachronistic, but it’s about the joy and the passion and the energy.
  • Mark: When you get tossed ass over heels, you got your north star, and your values help keep you on track. So when we got hit by a pandemic, we knew we had to take care of our colleagues’ health.
  • Mark: We moved our tours online, we made socks to say thank you to frontline workers, we sold masks to spread happiness, and we made healthcare superhero socks to raise $50,000 for the American Nurses Foundation.
  • Mark founded SOS to spread happiness and started a Facebook live show and a podcast. He says that if you know what you are really, you can adapt no matter what the circumstances are.
  • John and Mark are the owners of johns crazy socks, which makes great socks and helps people with different ability. By buying from them, you’re also helping them spread happiness.
  • Please rate this episode wherever you download your podcast and sign up for the Free Joke Project to help promote your business.

Transcript

[00:03:35] Brent: Welcome to Tak Commerce. Today I have John and Mark Cronan. They are, uh, the founders of the Crazy Sox. Anyways, John and Mark, why don’t you do an introduction Tell me, uh, a little bit about yourselves, one of your passions in life. Correct. Any of my mistakes, and tell me, uh, tell me everything. , you 

[00:03:55] Mark: wanna 

[00:03:55] John: introduce us?

[00:03:56] John: Um, my name is John. This my partner, my dad, mark Aswan. Uh, we are John and our mission is spreading 

[00:04:05] Mark: happiness spread and happiness. So we help bring a little happiness, friends passions. You got a lot of passions here. I do dancing. Is that one of them? I 

[00:04:14] John: can’t sing and I do. Um, I, I dancing and I, um, I I love my 

[00:04:22] Mark: dad.

[00:04:23] Mark: Well, that’s a passion of yours, so, okay, so what’s a passion of mine? Uh, completely non-business related. I am a fan of Bob Dylan. Fan is short for fanatic . Um, so I have recently. Well, not that recently embarked on one of the more absurd projects I’ve ever taken on Kevin’s son. I, I started selling out, sending out a Bob Dylan song of the day.

[00:04:54] Mark: Um, and I do a little write up, you know, but it frequently like a thousand words or so. 

[00:04:59] John: Um, he’s son about, 

[00:05:02] Mark: uh, uh, whatever Bob Dylan song comes to mind that day, and today I’m on day 211. and I suggest to people try to write something for 200 days in a row. ? . 

[00:05:18] Brent: Yeah. It’s not easy. He has 

[00:05:20] John: son, 

[00:05:21] Mark: right? I have sons, yes.

[00:05:23] Mark: What do you want me to say about my sons? He have son and wife. I have a wife too. Yes. I told them I’m talking about one thing. . Come on now. . So Brent wants to know about John’s Crazy Sox. Um, it’s named for you because it was your idea. Give my idea. Um, we started just over six years ago. We just celebrated our six anniversary.

[00:05:50] Mark: Um, born at an necessity. Right. John, you, where were you six years ago? Uh, 

[00:05:55] John: I was at high. . 

[00:05:58] Mark: He was in his last year of school trying to figure out, I’m last year, what do I do next? John has Down Syndrome. There just aren’t a lot of opportunities for people with Down Syndrome. We know you have a lot of entrepreneurs in the audience.

[00:06:12] Mark: John’s a natural entrepreneur. He couldn’t find anything he wanted. He couldn’t find a job. So what’d you say? I want quit. I wanna make one. I’ll make a job. 

[00:06:22] John: What’d you tell me? I told my dad I was gonna be with him. . 

[00:06:27] Mark: So ultimately we just, he suggested we sell socks. We had, he had won these crazy socks his whole life.

[00:06:36] Mark: We said, okay, let’s go test the idea. So we went the lean startup route. We built a website, got a little inventory. We were bootstrapping. Uh, we recently were talking to some students and they said, well, what does bootstrapping. It means you have no money, um, and you gotta make due with what you have. So the only marketing we did was set up a Facebook page.

[00:07:01] Mark: I would take out my cell phone and we made videos. And who was in those videos? I am, 

[00:07:07] John: I’m talking by socks. Socks on my sock. 

[00:07:10] Mark: And we opened on Friday, December 9th, 2016. Yes. Not knowing what to expect. We got 42 orders the first day. , we did home deliveries to people. Most of ’em were local. Um, and after two weeks, after that first month, or really two weeks, um, we had 452 waters and we knew we could, we could grow something today.

[00:07:38] Mark: How many different socks do we have? We 

[00:07:40] John: have 4,000 d. 

[00:07:44] Mark: 4,000 socks, which means John here owns the world’s largest sock store in terms of choice, right? Not, we’re not out selling Walmart and the like, um, but we just celebrate our six anniversary, just shipped our 400000th package. Um, we’ve been able to create 34 jobs.

[00:08:05] Mark: 22 of those are held by people with different abilities and, uh, giving back is a big part of what we do. And, and. We’ve now raised $600,000 for our charity partner. So, uh, uh, things have been good so far. 

[00:08:22] Brent: Yeah. That’s awesome. Um, uh, one of the things that, uh, that I prepped you with in the green room, and I noticed, uh, you, you have the banner in the background that’s spreading happiness.

[00:08:33] Brent: Um, I did say that I was gonna tell you a joke and I wanted to just get your feedback on the joke. So before we get into the regular content, I’m gonna tell you a. and then, uh, you just have to tell me if that joke should be free or not. And then as I understand it, you’re gonna tell me a joke as well after, after I tell you the joke.

[00:08:52] Brent: All right, let’s go Brent. So, um, I’m hoping I’m gonna spread some happiness. Um, alright, here we go. What does a building wear a dress?

[00:09:07] Mark: So you tell jokes like 

[00:09:08] Brent: John ? Yes. 

[00:09:11] Mark: I didn’t, 

[00:09:13] John: ah, I don’t think you can charge for that. 

[00:09:16] Mark: I’m not sure You can give 

[00:09:17] John: that 

[00:09:17] Mark: away. . 

[00:09:19] Brent: Well, we just gave it away. Should. Alright, should we do one more? Okay. All right. I’ll do one more. Since, since that one, that one was so successful. Um, a storm blew away 25% of my roof last.

[00:09:33] Brent: Oof

[00:09:36] Brent: I know. That was a, that was, that was even worse. 

[00:09:41] Mark: That is upon worthy of James Joyce, you know? Yes, absolutely. Do you have a joke you 

[00:09:47] John: want to tell? I do. That’s here. Why? Why is Don wear, why has thunder 

[00:09:54] Mark: wear, why does thunder wear. , why does underwear, underwear. Underwear. Okay. I’m not sure if I get it. You know, , sometimes I think you’re speaking a different language.

[00:10:11] Brent: All right. Let, let’s talk a little bit about spreading happiness. Um, tell us, tell us some of the background of that. And, and, and I mean, I, I can, I am, I’m also a believer in spreading happiness, but tell us a little bit about that. . 

[00:10:27] Mark: Well, we are believers that if you wanna lead an organization, you gotta know what you’re about.

[00:10:37] Mark: You gotta know what your purpose is about. Um, and ours is spreading happiness. And so, and how do you, what do you say are the keys to spreading 

[00:10:46] John: happiness? It’s gratitude for 

[00:10:48] Mark: others. Gratitude and do for others. And that drives through everything we. , um, I don’t know, Brent, if you’ve ever been, if you’ve ever had to participate in a mission statement writing exercise, I, I hope not.

[00:11:03] Mark: You know, you go away and you parse the language and you come back and people put it on the wall and no one pays any attention to it. We talk about this every day, and it drives our decision making. It drives our budget process. And it has to then infuse everything we do. So what we’ve done to make that happen is we’ve created a social enterprise.

[00:11:31] Mark: So it’s a slightly different type of business model. We have both the social and the business purpose, and they feed off of each other. And, and really the, the keys for us, it’s, it’s like John says, it’s have an attitude of gratitude and it’s due for others and for us. That’s really about showing what we can do, what, what people with different abilities can do.

[00:11:57] Mark: It’s about giving back, you know, supporting causes. Um, and it’s about making those connections with our customers, you know, so we’re always looking for relationships, not just transactions. We’re looking to create customer experiences. And so what we do all. our, we’re spreading happiness and our customers are spreading 

[00:12:23] Brent: happiness.

[00:12:25] Brent: Yeah, that’s great. I, I’m a, I’m a big believer in the entrepreneurial operating system, so as, as we do eos, it’s called, we have to do mission statements and we have to set up our core values, so absolutely. I’ve gone through that and I’m a big believer in living and working towards your core values and hiring for your core values.

[00:12:43] Brent: That, that’s awesome. Yes. So, 

[00:12:46] Mark: yes. Yeah, go ahead. It. I’m familiar with E os and you know, we, we gotta know our purpose. We have our five pillars. Um, everybody knows that, you know, if you walk around here and you say, what’s the mission? Everybody will be able to tell you and they’ll be able to tell you why their job matters and connects.

[00:13:07] Brent: Yeah, that’s good. So tell, tell me a little bit about, uh, the happiness part. What is it that, um, just, so what is it that you’re doing to promote happiness and how, and I’m assuming it’s happiness for employees and for customers, 

[00:13:20] Mark: for everybody. Right. Um, it was the old Milton Friedman line that, you know, companies and corporations only had an obligation as shareholders.

[00:13:31] Mark: Uh, we believe in a different, will we have an obligation to our colleagues, to our customers, to the community, to the environment, and to our shareholders. Um, you know, I mentioned the five pillars we have. What’s our, what are our five 

[00:13:48] John: pillars? Um, it’s present in hope. Give me back five prior, uh, five prior.

[00:13:54] John: You can love, make partner and make it clear to 

[00:13:58] Mark: work. So, you know, you ask how you do that happiness. Well, it’s gotta start here. It’s gotta start with our colleagues. We have to make this a great place to work, and we could dive into how we do that, but much of it is about making sure we offer people mission worthy of their commitment, making sure everybody knows why their job matters.

[00:14:19] Mark: Putting people in a position that succeed, recognizing what they do, um, making it personal. We sell online, but we’re always looking to create a personal connection with our customers. It’s, it’s exemplified by our packaging. What, what do you put in every 

[00:14:38] John: package? Every package Get, uh, taken there from me and Candy.

[00:14:43] Mark: So when you buy from us, right? You, you as a customer, you, you’re gonna get great socks. We’ve got 30,005 star reviews. But you are helping us employ people with different abilities. You help us give back. You help us spread happiness that’s embodied in the package. So when you get a package from us, you see John’s smiling face in the outside, you open it up, you get your socks, you get a thank you note from John.

[00:15:12] Mark: On the flip side of that is the story of John’s Crazy Socks. You get a package of candy and on the packing slip you see the picture and the. Of the person who picked your on. So you are not just getting socks, you’re getting this little dose of happiness. Right. That’s, that’s one, that’s one of the ways we do it.

[00:15:36] Brent: That’s good. I’m also a believer in that, uh, happiness has to start with the organization. It has to start with the staff and the staff then bring it out to the customers. It can’t happen the other way around if. A bunch of crabby staff, you’re, you’re never gonna have happy customers. Now how are we gonna 

[00:15:50] John: spread 

[00:15:51] Mark: happiness?

[00:15:51] Mark: Right. And it’s, and it relates, you know, we see it in the way people work here. Um, they believe in what we’re doing and they’re committed. So they go the extra distance for our customers, right? And it, and it frames the relationship. You know, you, you’ve heard the line, the customer is always right. Nonsense.

[00:16:14] Mark: The customer can be dead. , but we’re not in the business of being right. We’re in the business of making that customer happy, so we’ll do anything we can. We, the people that work directly with customers, their, their title is Happiness Creator. They know they can spend 200 hours on any customer for any reason at any.

[00:16:38] Mark: We give things away. We refund money. Um, we give a guarantee, a two year guarantee of happiness. You know, two years you’re happy with the socks. At any point, you’re not, you don’t have, we don’t want your socks back. We’ll make it up to you and, but here’s the thing. Here’s why it’s good business. What do we get out of that?

[00:16:59] Mark: We get happy employees. We get happy customers, we get loyal customer. and our return rate, our refund rate is less than 0.3 of 1%. Right. It’s good business. So they’re great stocks as well. Yeah, you have to, the social mission matters, you know, when people, frequently they want to talk to us about hiring people with different abilities or the giving back, but at its core we have to be at great e-commerce.

[00:17:34] Mark: You gotta have a great website, you gotta have great selection. The products have to be great, and the service has to be great. So we do same day shipping. An order comes in today, it’s going out today. You’re gonna get it right away. We frequently hear from new customers how surprised they were and how quickly they got their product.

[00:17:53] Mark: We do better shipping than Amazon and Jeff Bezos over in Amazon. He’s not putting a thank you note in candy in his packages. Right? It’s. And we do that in part cuz we want to show why it makes business sense to hire people with different abilities. So we’re able to achieve this because of whom we hire.

[00:18:16] Mark: Um, and we want, we want the world to see that. . 

[00:18:19] Brent: Yeah, I, you mentioned the five pillars, and I’m gonna just point out to ’em from that. Often businesses, I, I feel like businesses overlook at least two of them. The social and the environmental. Certainly there’s a lot of businesses that focus on environmental.

[00:18:32] Brent: I think there’s less businesses that’s focus on the social. And then you did, you mentioned community as well. I think a lot of businesses, especially business owners, tend to overlook the community side of it. Maybe you could touch a little bit. On the community side of it. And then, and we, if we have some time, we could talk a little bit about the environmental and the social.

[00:18:53] Brent: So social. Well 

[00:18:54] Mark: let’s talk about community and defining community. So part of our community are working with people with different abilities and so we’ll do that’s important to. So we make products that celebrate causes, raise awareness and raise money for those causes. And we, and, and that also drives our giving back.

[00:19:18] Mark: So in that community, we started by pledging 5% of our earnings to the Special Olympics. And, and why the Special 

[00:19:26] John: Olympics? I, I pick Athlete 

[00:19:29] Mark: John’s been doing Special Olympics for 21. No Special Olympics. There’s no Johns Crazy socks, but, but we have these awareness socks. What was the first awareness sock?

[00:19:39] Mark: You 

[00:19:40] John: created Down Awareness 

[00:19:42] Mark: Socks. And they raised money for the National Down Syndrome Society. So that’s part of the community. What can we do to advocate? What can we do to support them? But there’s also the local community and we’ve gotta be good. And we call it corporate citizens. So we work with the local schools.

[00:20:03] Mark: We host school tours coming through here in work groups. We’ve had more than a thousand students come through here on tours. You, we get involved in the local chamber of commerce. Um, we get involved in our local towns and the local community cuz we have a presence. This is where we live. And I, I think that’s important, uh, that, that you play that role.

[00:20:28] Mark: It comes back to spreading happiness. , what can we do for others? The more we do for others, the better off we are. And then, oh, by the way, it turns out to be good for business because people know us. So they order direct and we, we, we sell to other businesses. So we get companies calling us up because they want custom socks or they want to give packaging services.

[00:20:51] Mark: We offer, or we’ve created a a, uh, a charity fundraising program. Uh, it was great for, for nonprofits and so PTAs and special education PTAs like that. And I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sell stuff, but you were asking, you know, why do you do this? Um, that’s why it’s 

[00:21:12] Brent: all of a whole. , you know, I, I get that. Uh, I, I volunteer for a running organization that helps incarcerated, formerly incarcerated people, uh, start changing their lives through running.

[00:21:24] Brent: And one of the things that we’ve noticed is that the community aspect, the fact that you’re talking to somebody and sometimes you’re spending an hour or two hours with them, that that community is even more important than the running part. The running part is just a byproduct of the community. Right. Um, and I, I, I.

[00:21:43] Brent: Y you’re saying you’re, you’re telling the same story that the community is, is maybe as important as the business itself and, and making sure that you’re maintaining that and being part of it. You’re not just sitting there in your own little perch. 

[00:21:58] Mark: No. It’s our, our overall strategy is drive the mission that drives our brand and that drives sales.

[00:22:10] Mark: But it starts with that focus on, on others, you know, on what can we do for others, what can we do for you? If we have that focus, the business will follow and it’s more sustainable. 

[00:22:25] Brent: Um, I I, I just want to key on that. So what can I, what, what can we do for you? I think a lot of times, um, a, a lot of times business leaders often get that back.

[00:22:38] Brent: Especially with their own team, they’re saying to their team, what can you do for me? Right. As a, as a leader, I think the, the trajectory should be, as a leader, you’re always trying to serve others rather than trying to get something from others. It’s, 

[00:22:55] Mark: you know, you talk about servant leadership and if you, if you ask about our role, well, some of our role is to set the vision and the tone in the overall direction, but other.

[00:23:07] Mark: It’s to serve everybody else. I work for everybody else here. My job is to put them in a position to succeed and to give them what they need. Oh man. 

[00:23:20] Brent: That, yeah, I just, 

[00:23:21] Mark: yeah, go ahead. I think that’s the type of leadership we need. It’s, it’s not about self-aggrandizement. It’s not about beating your chest.

[00:23:31] Mark: It’s about what can I do for others because that multipl. The impact. And that’s really what lets us get things done. 

[00:23:41] Brent: Uh, talk, just take a few minutes and talk about just the name John’s Crazy Socks. Where did you come up with the name? I mean, I know John is sitting there. What your name? I’m 

[00:23:53] Mark: John. John. Um, he’s the one who came up with the name.

[00:23:57] Mark: He said, we’re gonna sell crazy socks. John’s Crazy Socks. Um, we have upon occasion, , we thought that a little bit because of negative mental health implications. But in the end, even if it says become somewhat anachronistic, it’s about the joy and the passion and the energy. Um, and it’s John, right? Yeah. Dad, I did suggest Mark’s Murray sauce for Mark Sirius socks, but that was going nowhere.

[00:24:33] Brent: Yeah. Mark Sirius socks doesn’t have the same ring, does it? Um, so if, if you have, um, if you had a little piece of nugget or some kind of advice, I hate the word, we don’t use the word advice usually in entrepreneurship or in our preneur group. We’d like to, we like to say we don’t should on people. We like to share experience.

[00:24:53] Brent: If you could share your experience on helping others understand why those five pillars are so important in your business. Is, is there anything that, that you could offer somebody to get started? 

[00:25:07] Mark: I, I do. I, you have to. I, I, I believe this. You have to know what you are about. You have to know what your purpose is.

[00:25:16] Mark: That becomes your north star and your values help keep you on track. So when you get tossed ass over heels, as you will be, you got your North star, you know where you’re going. Well, here’s a concrete example. So we roll into 2020, and then you may have heard, we get hit by a pandemic, right? It was awful.

[00:25:45] Mark: For our business, it cost us hundreds of thousands of times. What do you do? Well, as long as you know what you are about, you’re gonna be able to steer the weight. . So we knew first we had to take care of our colleagues. We could stay open, but we had to make sure we took care of everybody’s health, particularly because so many of our colleagues were vulnerable.

[00:26:09] Mark: Then you say, okay, how do we adapt to this? Well, we do a lot of speaking engagements. We moved those online. We moved our tours online. Turns out that opened the. . We now have student groups from around the world come and take tours. Um, we make socks. What could we do? Well, we made healthcare superhero socks to say thank you to frontline workers, and those raised over $50,000 to the American Nurses Foundation’s Covid 19 fund, because we knew what we were about.

[00:26:48] Mark: But then you also say, all right, well our mission is spreading happiness. How do we do. In a pandemic. Well, we did something new. We sold mask. But how do you spread happiness? So what do you do every Tuesday 

[00:27:03] John: afternoon? Uh, every Tuesday I hold, I dance, pray every, every Tuesday. Um, Is the time 

[00:27:11] Mark: he hosts an online dance party.

[00:27:13] Mark: Yes. What better way to spread happiness. And we started a Facebook live show. You know, a voter shut down. How can we reach people? How can we share some happiness? And that’s, we still do that. And that’s evolved also, we now have a podcast. Um, so you don’t immediately say you’re a sock company, you should have a dance party.

[00:27:36] Mark: But if you know what you are really. , then you can adapt no matter what the circumstances are. Right? And and for us, yes, we’re the world’s largest sos but at the end of the day, we’re not really a soman. The SOS become the physical manifestation for the mission and the story. 

[00:28:04] Brent: Yeah, I like that. Um, John and Mark, as, as we close out the podcast, they give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like.

[00:28:14] Brent: What would you like to plug today? 

[00:28:17] Mark: Well, where, ask for your support. Where can people find us? 

[00:28:22] John: I’ll go at john’s crazy 

[00:28:24] Mark: socks.com. Johns crazy socks.com. And here’s the thing, if you buy from us, you’re gonna get great sock. You’re gonna get whenever you want because we have such great choice. But more than that, you’re gonna help us hire people with different ability.

[00:28:43] Mark: You’re gonna help us get back and most of all, you’re gonna help us spread happiness. So that’s as shameless as we get. 

[00:28:51] Brent: That’s awesome. Thank you so much. Uh, John and Mark, I will put all these also in the show notes so they can find john’s crazy socks.com as a link as part of the podcast. And it has been a pleasure to speak to you today.

[00:29:06] Mark: Well, thank you very much. 

[00:29:08] John: Thank you so much.

Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Talk Commerce. Please rate this episode wherever you download your podcast. We are actively looking for people to participate in the Free Joke Project. Go to talk hyphen commerce.com and sign up for your free spot on the Free Joke Project. If you are a business, I will do a 32nd elevator.

In the spot to help promote your business. That’s talk hyphen commerce.com.

Forget Everything You Thought You Knew About Brand Collaboration with Scott Moore

Veteran Twin Cities marketer, Scott Moore thinks he’s found that most elusive of opportunities. A new way for businesses to reach the parts and touch the hearts of customers that the $300bn US ad industry simply cannot.

After a storied and successful career beginning at the legendary Fallon agency, rising to the top of marketing at Best Buy and then as CMO of Wynn Resorts, Scott has invested billions of dollars on every form of marketing and has seen every enduring and ephemeral 21st century trend.

Which makes his latest move one that we should all stand up and pay attention to.

Last year, bitten by the collab bug and smitten by the business opportunity, Scott left corporate marketing behind to launch Colaboratory with his co-founder Brian Bispala, formerly the CTO of Code 42.

Colaboratory is a marketing automation platform that makes it easy for brands of all types and stripes, shapes and sizes to meet, match and execute brand x brand collabs to drive growth and enhance brand perception.

In today’s episode Scott explains how;

  • Brand collabs cut through the digital clutter to create impactful and effective marketing in an age when marketing has been increasingly commodified. 
  • Collabs will counter a cookie-less future promising less creativity and a return to “bigger-takes-all” message bombing.
  • How a “collab marketplace” solves many of the friction points stymying brands as they try to get in the game.
  • Collabs are now available to all brands not just a tool that has been mastered by culture-forward brands in Food, Fashion, Sports and Entertainment.
  • Collabs help brands, “share and square” their equity across platforms and touchpoints, dimensions and domains.
  • Brand collabs enable brands to divide the effort and multiply returns as they expand customer perception and accelerate new product and promotional opportunities.

Today’s show is an insider view on how the best marketing brains are developing this new muscle, and masterclass on how you can too.

Brand-to-brand CoLab and innovative partnerships go beyond just creating a funny ad, like you see in the Super Bowl. That’s creative, but that’s ephemeral. It’s art. 

These Colabs that are being built today are conceptually interesting. They’re not just visually arresting.You’re like, wait a minute. What’s that? It catches your attention. 

We interview Scott Moore who is building solutions where you don’t have to be Jay-Z or the CEO of Nike to do a collab.

You shouldn’t have to be the president of Ralph Lauren. All brands should be able to say, Hey, these are my customers. This is what I’m trying to do with them. Who can I partner with to grow my brand.  

Unlock and Unleash the power of Brand to Brand Colaborations 

The Talk Summary

  • Scott is co-founder and CEO of Collaboratory, a venture back startup that helps brands connect to brands to grow their market more efficiently, more effectively with their partners.
  • I’m a former marketer, started an advertise, was the COO of a marketing tech company, sold to private equity, and then was the CMO of wind resorts. I’m now the CEO of High Alpha, a new business with my partner Brian Bisk.
  • Scott: I hired the team, defined a big space where such that if you win, you really win, and then went build products and experiences that meet your customer’s needs.
  • Scott says that if someone slaps you at a high frequency, it hurts. Brent says that he used to say the joke in the preamble and have a little laugh track that goes on behind it, but then he decided to just start telling the joke to the listeners.
  • Scott: I worked for Win, Wind resorts, and Encore, and they’re all world class companies. Encore Boston Harbor is like a full on Vegas style hotel at wind level of execution, five minutes from downtown Boston.
  • Brent: I’m interested in the collaboration space and Andy Hel has been helping me get informed and learn about it. We could also talk about entrepreneurship and getting funded, and yesterday I was sat next to a venture capital backed company who is going for his second round of funding.
  • Brand partnerships are more than just having your JBL stereo in your Pontiac Sunfire. They can be as big as McDonald’s Monopoly and Best Buy. Scott: It came to light through proximity, existing relationships, or serendipity. I don’t know how Senator Serendipity works, but it doesn’t fit to a 21st century world or 21st century marketing in any way.
  • In the market for love, the way we solved it was meet your, best friend’s sister. In the market for jobs, the way we solved it is through Indeed, and in the market for collectibles, Etsy does the same thing.
  • Scott: I can do better segmentation to figure out should they target you or me, and then I’ve got amazing pipes into your life. But I don’t remember a single ad from today, and that’s an age old marketing problem.
  • Scott says that he’s never bought a Clinique product in his life, but he has bought a lot of Crayola, and he noticed that the two brands have a shared audience. He says that if you can find relevant audience connections, you can fill in the gaps.
  • Scott: We want to build solutions where you don’t have to be Jay-Z or the CEO of Nike to do a collab. We want to do it in a software data-driven, technology kind of way.
  • Scott: In the past, a lot of these collaborations have been incidental or by accident. But now, as social media matures, influencers are still pretty strong, and Adidas knows their business and they can do it.
  • Scott: A TicTacs on TikTok is on fire, so leave that alone. The maturation means you’re paying a CPM cost per thousand when you buy media.
  • A partnership between any two brands can be very interesting. You could pick ’em, and the other brand may have an equal set of assets, but they may have a different spin on the customer audience.
  • Scott: There’s a lot of brilliant, creative marketing people across all organizations of all sizes, and there are ways to bring data to this work. Brent: There are risks and rewards to collaborations, but the ones that are well constructed tend to perform better.
  • Scott: Those ones tend to outperform Who I happen to know from high school. Brand partnerships and collaborations are the way to grow strategically, and we’re saying just let us, let’s role play back. Scott: Sometimes we smarty pants people get over our skis with all the rational, and we need to go back to the local third grade classroom and see if they even understand our strategy.
  • Scott: Let’s go to the third grade class. They can vote on whether or not to partner with the Rolling Stones, Justin Bieber, or Athlete A. And there’s no math.
  • Scott: I think collaboration opportunities have always been there, but they’ve been viewed tactically and opportunistically, not strategically. I think collaboratory is uncovering these opportunities, and it’s emanating from culture leading categories like sport, music, culinary fashion of course.
  • In my past life I worked with a RUM brand that had a partnership with the Boston Red Sox. I think that was a strategic rather than opportunistic collaboration, and the Red Sox are very strategic in how they grow.
  • Scott: That doesn’t sound super strategic, although it’s intuitively right. The Red Sox are very analytics focused, and if they said, Hey, look at what’s happening in our audience, aside from the fact they we’re performing, and we have the trend you just talked about, the twins, that is also true.
  • Great commerce and digital properties do three things: they create demand, they capture demand, and they help brands grow. The Red Sox need to create demand, and they need to tell brands and partners what they’re interested in.
  • We have a tool called partner capture tool that gets put on in people’s emails, on their websites that says We’re open to co. partner with us. We take all this demand, capture it, organize it so they can go through it quickly.
  • Scott: I know I’ve seen more than my fair share of bad ideas, but I also know what to do with them. The good ones we just sort calmly off they go.
  • Scott: So we have demand creation, demand capture, and demand activation. Once we decide two brands, they have to meet, assess, agree this match, go do these things, and then go mobilize whatever they’re gonna do.
  • Scott: I don’t know who has what capabilities, but Coca-Cola can do something in stores better than I can, and Netflix probably has better content creation. We collaborate with agencies, design firms, TikTok, makers, email, but it’s more based on the customer’s needs.
  • Scott: The biggest advice I would give a CMO or a cro or a CEO who wants to get started in a collaborate collaboration is that it’s not to start with hey, our first collab should be the Rolling Stones or don’t start. Start one.
  • Scott: You can get started in Collaboratory with a quick start. You can use the marketplace to capture signal, find like-minded partners, and capture signal back from the partners and their customers, and you’re just gonna be smarter. Scott would like to plug his book, but I can’t tell if that was on Coth.
  • Scott says that he’s building a business that connects brands, but he also needs to build a community of collaborators. Scott: People who think this way, who care, are massive inveterate connectors, like I just connect people all the time. I don’t really worry about the payback we used once a year, but I would connect you in general.
  • Andy Hele is leading the cultivation of a community of collaborators. If you’re interested in this topic and want to play, reach out to us and let’s make match.com smarter so you can stop targeting supermodels and start finding people whose interests are more like yours.
  • Going back to the rules of marketing, Scott says measuring is one of the three big things you need to do. He also says there are thousands of potential collaborations, including Mrs. Meyers soap and some scrubbing, something.
  • I wanted to build a relationship with Brady for that other purpose, but I thought TB 12 should be at the wind. Two years later, I run into their leadership team and guy comes up, he’s sky, we’re at the wind.
  • Scott: I’d much rather be paid a commission, but I felt some inherent joy in saying, Hey, this is a good idea. Brent: I think we need to take this seriously, use data, use a platform, be pay it forward in this, and trust that you’re gonna meet more innovative people.

Leading a Culture of Trust with Laura Boyd

We are at a time when organizations are changing, and leadership is changing from a command control environment. Brent and Laura discuss the changing landscape of how leaders lead and how times are changing.

In this episode, we talk about accountability and how important it relates to communication in leadership. The leader has to be accountable to their team. Leaders can learn more about how a culture of trust is one of the most important aspects of today’s work culture.

Business leaders may think that all the recent layoffs are giving them opportunities for more hires, but the truth is that we are still seeing historically low employment. Now enjoy this episode of Talk Commerce with Laura Boyd.

What you will learn from this podcast

It’s about helping people with their resolutions, and it’s about having a culture where we’re helping one another and being accountable to one another.

  • Leadership is changing from a command control environment to a culture of trust.
  • Accountability is just as important as communication.
  • Technology allows for both good and bad connectivity.
  • Leaders need to have the confidence to be vulnerable.
  • Competence, compassion, integrity, and an emotional bank account are important for building trust.
  • Have open conversations and call each other out when needed.
  • External facilitators can help create a culture of accountability. Don’t burn bridges during exit interviews.
  • Use cultural assessments to gauge buy-in.
  • Have a Fresh Start program to help people with their resolutions.

Tweet about it.

Brent and Laura discuss how leadership is changing and how accountability is just as important as communication. #Leadership #Accountability @LeadershipLaura

Laura explains that to build trust, you need to have competence, compassion, integrity, and an emotional bank account. #Trust #Compassion @LeadershipLaura

Laura suggests holding a focus group to find out what is it that we’re doing well and what is it that we’re not. #FocusGroup #Feedback @LeadershipLaura

Laura: We want this open conversation, but you don’t have to be an ass, if I can say that. #Conversation #Culture @LeadershipLaura

Laura: We have a Fresh Start program that you can sign up for at the beginning of every year. #FreshStart @LeadershipLaura

Transcript

[00:00:00] Ruth: We are at a time that organizations are changing and leadership is changing from a command control enviroment. Brent and Laura discuss the changing landscape of how leaders lead and how times are changing. Brent what else did you talk about in this episode?

[00:00:12] Brent (2): Ruth, we talked about how accountibility is just as important as communication in leadership. The leader has to be accountable to their team.

[00:00:20] Ruth: Thanks Brent, I will add that in this episode leaders can learn more about how a culture of trust is one of the most important aspects in todays work culture. Business leaders may think that all the recent layoffs are giving them opprotunities for more hires but the truth is that we are still seeing historic low employeement. Now enjoy this episode of Talk Commerce with Laura Boyd.

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Improve your Google ranking and conversion rates and make your customers happy. Learn more@hyv.io. That’s H Y V a.io. My name is Brent Peterson and I’m your host. Please remember to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts and now talk commerce.

[00:02:52] Brent: Welcome to Talk Commerce. Today I have Laura Boyd. She is the CEO and founder of Leadership Delta. Laura, go ahead and give us a better introduction that I just gave and maybe one of your passions in.

[00:03:04] Laura: Excellent. Thank you Brent. I appreciate it. And I do have to say Brent is my brother’s name, so it should be easy for me to remember. So yes. My name is Laura Boyd, and I can give you a quick background. I have been in sales and marketing basically my whole career. Seven years ago, walked out and was trying to figure out what am I gonna be when I grow up?

[00:03:25] Laura: And what I realized is I have a really strong passion for growing organizations through leadership. And I am a strong believer in the fact that leaders make a difference in the organization and the culture. And so I wanted to build an organization for myself that could help other organizations thrive in a human centered culture.

[00:03:47] Laura: that would help them grow from the inside out. So that’s what we’ve been doing. Great. 

[00:03:53] Brent: Perfect. And one of you, you have a passion that you follow or, oh gosh, 

[00:03:57] Laura: When you own your own business, do you have time for passions? I don’t know. The only thing I could think of is I love working out and now I am a new empty nester.

[00:04:07] Laura: And so pickleball has become, Quite a phenomenon in, in with my husband and I. So I guess I’d say that’s my passion. I don’t know that. No, 

[00:04:16] Brent: that’s great. Yeah, pickleball. I I tried it a couple years ago and it was super fun. I haven’t en, I haven’t embraced it specifically, but I do enjoy playing pickleball.

[00:04:24] Brent: Laura, I know that we, in our green room, we had a quick talk about participating in the free joke project. So I’m just gonna tell you a joke and. And this one is it’s, we’re not going to, we’re gonna do this one as a, is this gonna help our work culture or is this going to lead into a worse work culture?

[00:04:41] Brent: And I found a specific joke just for this, so here we go. Excellent. I phoned my work this morning and said, sorry, boss, I can’t come in today. I have a we cough. He said, you have a, we cough. Really. Thanks, boss. See you next week.

[00:05:01] Laura: Oh, Brent. I’m trying to, I’m gonna see this one. It might hinder the culture. I think it might hinder it. I’m just saying 

[00:05:15] Brent: Yeah. Feel like we need we’ve Yeah, I think you’re right. And I, my, my delivery wasn’t the greatest. And and I think we could have used some kind of dramatic music around that one as well.

[00:05:24] Laura: maybe next time. Next time. The dramatic music. 

[00:05:27] Brent: I agree. All right, so let’s I know today we want to talk about a little bit about work culture and some topics around, around that. Why don’t you tell us your story, give us a little intro on your story and why this has become such a passion for you.

[00:05:41] Laura: , thank you this has become a passion for me because I think that we 

[00:05:46] Ruth: are in this transition of organizations leading from a command and control environment. 

[00:05:56] Laura: And I work with a lot of manufacturers, so I think that is how they have raised the generation of leaders that are there currently.

[00:06:04] Laura: It’s been very much a command and control type of scenario. Not negative or positive, but that’s just how it has been. But yet we have raised the next generations coming up in a different a transformational or more of a high performing type of generat. . So you’ve got leaders within organizations that have grown up in this command and control, and then you’ve got the new generation of leaders that are coming in from a high performing transformation type of background and how they’re raised and there’s a clash.

[00:06:39] Laura: And so it’s really interesting because you’ll have some people in this the current leadership who will call me and they’ll say, Hey, Laura, we have a problem with. Do you think you can come fix Bob? And I love that because we all know it’s never just usually, I shouldn’t say not never, but usually it’s not just Bob.

[00:07:03] Laura: It usually is the culture that has exuded and now there’s this clash. And so they don’t know how quite to deal with some of the consequences of bad behavior or desired behavior. . And so they build these cultures and they say, these are our values. These are the great things that we have in our organization.

[00:07:23] Laura: Oh, except for Bob. And so they don’t know how to reframe Bob and redirect him or say, this is not our desired culture anymore, and so you’re no longer the right fit. Now we can use it in a different capacity maybe, but not to lead other people. So that’s what we’re in is this transit. I got my master’s in organizational leadership in the late nineties, so I was like one of the first classes to get the organizational leadership bandwagon. And I love it because I think leadership hasn’t really changed that much to be honest. You could go back to, from my personal idea is you can go back biblically, right?

[00:08:01] Laura: I All the way. And it hasn’t really changed that much if you look at it. And so that was something that I was very passionate about, is how do you connect that human-centered leadership to move this transitional generation from here to here? That was a really long answer, but that is exactly what I love doing.

[00:08:23] Brent: So have two follow up on that. The first one is, do you think that there’s a, there’s gotta be some kind of a transformation in leading, in how we lead leaders, right? And that new leaders are going to be more in tuned with what the millennials, the people that are signing up for the great Reg resignation.

[00:08:40] Brent: The new leaders are gonna be more in tune to that. Do you think there’s a, there’s gonna be. Is there an issue with how the old guard is now bringing in the new leaders and how those new leaders are seeing what should be done and, but they’re not the original aren’t on board with that?

[00:08:57] Brent: Or do you think there’s a disparity in there? 

[00:09:01] Laura: I think this is the 

[00:09:03] Brent: question ahead. Okay. . 

[00:09:03] Laura: So here’s one thing I will say. So just because somebody has, I think you had said the old guard, but I think more of the command and control type of leaders, many of them are shifting so that transformation is happening.

[00:09:19] Laura: But there are still some that aren’t. And I think those are some of the leaders that the culture is trying to figure out, how do we change this? not possible. Or how do we get this person out? And so there are some transformational leaders within the current leader structure. And so I don’t know if that, if I answered that question the right way, is that what you’re asking me, Brent?

[00:09:46] Laura: Or is there a follow 

[00:09:47] Brent: up question on that? Yeah, I think a lot of times we look at how we’re leading and we look at the people where we are leading and that we don’t we discount the person who’s the leader because they’re, maybe they’re not in tune with the, I don’t know, the hierarchy of how the organization should happen, but I think the underlying thing that I heard in your, in what you’ve said earlier, , they’re not matching our culture and neither the culture changed or somebody hired him not to match the culture.

[00:10:16] Brent: I think that’s probably more of a root cause in that. . And how would you say to leaders that have that problem and is it a new problem or is it something recurring? 

[00:10:28] Laura: So I do think that every generation you’re gonna have a transformation or a transition technology. , as we all know, it transitions cultures and it transit transitions organizations.

[00:10:39] Laura: I do think that people forget about the culture when they are hiring, and especially today because we need people. And so sometimes wego ah, they don’t really fit, but close enough. And so then we hire ’em and they don’t fit at all. And then they end up leaving and they’re like, oh, why did they leave?

[00:10:59] Laura: I don’t understand. I do think that it is something that happens on a cyclical basis. I do think that cultures do change and the leaders have to change with it. And some of those leaders are able to do it, and some of ’em. One of the things I do want to bring up is that I’m talking more about the current leaders titled leaders, right?

[00:11:20] Laura: I think everybody can be leader, but the titled leaders, I’m talking more about them and we often say cuz they’ve always done it this way. They don’t want to change all of those kinds of things. The, I think part of the challenge is this next generation of leaders doesn’t give grace.

[00:11:38] Laura: They’re not very open to hearing, this is how we’ve done things. So there’s a little bit of a clash because we’ve raised them to push the envelope. Do this, do that. Be perfect. Focus on one thing, go after it. Whatever you want is yours. And a lot of times they don’t give enough grace, I think, to the current titled leaders.

[00:12:03] Laura: And that is a challenge too. And they have to know that too. 

[00:12:08] Brent: Yeah, no, that’s a really good point. On that. Maybe new leadership isn’t listening enough or it doesn’t have the concerns of the higher, I don’t know how to describe them, but the ones that are running the higher ups are setting the tone and there’s a shift, but maybe we need to have a more of a conciliatory view on how that shift is happening.

[00:12:28] Brent: Right, 

[00:12:29] Laura: absolutely. I agree with that 100%. I do call ’em titled leaders because I think you can be a leader wherever you’re at, doesn’t matter where you’re at in the organization, but these are the titled leaders. And so I, but I agree. Just as much as the titled leaders need to have compassion, the next generation of leaders need to have compassion.

[00:12:50] Laura: How do think help We forget about that. 

[00:12:52] Brent: Sorry. Yeah. How do you, no. How do you help people describe their culture? I think a lot of. The leader can’t even describe their culture. How do you get that into everybody? , so everybody is on the same page in terms of culture. 

[00:13:07] Laura: Yeah. So we actually, it’s interesting because when you have worked at an organization, let’s say 30 years, 20 years, 15 years, and you’re at this titled leader position, you see the culture differently than maybe somebody that comes in at more of a entry level position.

[00:13:23] Laura: And so what we do is we talk. if the more you can talk about culture and the more you can talk about desired behaviors, being part of that culture, the openness to doing it isn’t gonna make it be a taboo subject. If I continue to talk about culture and the, I’m working with an organization, we talk about the culture of accountability and leader.

[00:13:46] Laura: because accountability, I swear that comes up number one right next to communication as a challenge for organizations. And so this one organization I’m working with, we talk about culture of accountability and leadership. What does that mean to you? And so what we’ve done is we’ve taken we’re at about 450 employees from the leadership team all the way through frontline Super.

[00:14:13] Laura: and we’ve had that same conversation because we’re trying to create that. It’s not a taboo subject, let’s talk about it. It’s just culture. What is it that we want it to look like? How do we want to treat each other? What are our guiding principles? And so the more we can talk about it, the less taboo it feels and seems.

[00:14:32] Laura: And sorry, Brent, one more thing is there has to be consequences for people that are outside of a desired behavior. , there has to be consequences. Doesn’t mean it’s a termination, but something otherwise it’s not gonna matter. This particular organization, somebody came in and blew a gasket to five of his team members and in an appropriate way, and he actually was terminated and so that’s no longer how they wanted to operate in their culture.

[00:15:05] Laura: Now may it have, it maybe had worked 15 years ago, maybe. But not today. 

[00:15:10] Brent: Let’s just say the leader doesn’t, is talking the talk, but they’re not walking the walk. How do you get some accountability in leadership if they’re saying to be this way, but the leaders are demonstrating something different in a culture?

[00:15:23] Brent: Is that just that, is that just straight up toxic and it’s gonna lead to ruin ? 

[00:15:28] Laura: No, I don’t think it’s gonna lead to. I do think, this is why I think outside consultants or facilitators where there really isn’t any what’s the word I’m looking for? Not fear, but where it gives me the opportunity to say, is that really what you wanted to say?

[00:15:44] Laura: And I will call people on things in an appropriate manner, but I don’t have any skin in the game, so it’s easy enough for me to do. And that’s when we work with the leadership. throughout the process as we’re going from, top down across all of that. But working with that leadership team, cuz it has to start at the top.

[00:16:03] Laura: This is where the decisions get made at the titled leadership, but you have these centers of influence within it. So you’ve gotta figure out who are those people that are influencing either toxic or positive or, so you have to figure out from a social architect standpoint, what that looks like.

[00:16:24] Laura: So yes, I think it’s having those open conversations. I think it’s about the leadership team calling each other on things, and I am seeing that is happening and I think we’ve got a great group of current titled leaders. I think we’ve got a handful that aren’t amazing, but it really takes each person individually.

[00:16:47] Brent: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. We implemented e. Oh sure. About five, six years ago and having an implementer there was key to the success because nobody could push, or nobody could. It’s easy for a leader to not be accountable to something that they don’t want to be accountable to, cuz they’re the top of the food chain.

[00:17:04] Brent: It’s easy for that. If you’re talking about the culture, how do you not, how do you focus on the culture rather. focus on control of the culture. 

[00:17:17] Laura: Tell me more what you mean by that. 

[00:17:20] Brent: So you wanna make sure that you’re watching the culture, but you also don’t want to focus too much on control of the culture because the culture should be something.

[00:17:30] Brent: Built grassroots, right? Ideally your culture would come from the bottom up and the top down. . Is it a problem if leadership is trying to exert too much control over the culture and then in turn pushes a bunch of people out? 

[00:17:44] Laura: And that’s how you’ll know that leadership is trying to control it too much if people are leaving.

[00:17:49] Laura: I do believe though, when you look at high performing organiz. . There are five areas in the middle that they have direct control over, and the leadership team and the senior managers in that group, they actually own the strategy and the culture. It doesn’t mean that nobody has input and collaboration and all of that, but they own the strategy and the culture.

[00:18:11] Laura: That is what they’re responsible for. The rest of the organiz. Focuses on the structure, the systems, and the processes. And what they do is they bring that to the leaders and they allow them to make the choices. So they say, this isn’t working, this is working. Here’s how. It’s that kind of up and down, exactly what you said, but really the ownership for the strategy and the culture belong within the leadership teams. 

[00:18:42] Brent: Just going back to eos and EOS for the people who don’t know is entrepreneur operating system. So it’s a way of running your business or a systematic way. I one of the, it’s a systematic way and it is based on hiring people for their core values. And one thing that we do every quarter is working isn’t working.

[00:18:59] Brent: And I think one thing that maybe we miss out on, and I’ve heard you say this earlier, was how does that not working? tie in with the culture of the company, and then taking that one step further, how does it tie in with the core values? How do you help companies make sure that isn’t working ties in with culture, which should tie in your, to your core values?

[00:19:21] Laura: For one thing, and I know EOS has this too, I, I’m a firm believer that the entire strategy and the values and everything should be on one. , like there’s a focus area. This is how we do things. These are our guiding principles, right? And so I think if everybody has access to that and it’s communicated and there’s alignment and what that looks like, it’s easier to call someone out on something.

[00:19:47] Laura: If there is alignment, it’s been communicated. Then if you don’t really know or, Hey, I heard this is what our strategy is, or our culture is, but if you don’t have that and you’re not actually communicating it and have that alignment, doesn’t matter. So I think a leader’s role is really to set the vision, right?

[00:20:09] Laura: This is where we’re going build the alignment and then the execution. So those are the three pieces. And again, when I say leader, it could be anybody within the organiz. . But when we’re talking about vision, alignment, and execution, those are the three core pieces of top level leaders that need to address that.

[00:20:31] Laura: And again, I think it’s mostly Brent, it’s consequential challenges that people don’t want to deal with because so many people don’t like conflict and so they don’t, they just like what if I just ignore it? It’ll just go. Or they’re gonna retire in a couple years anyway. We’ve all heard this.

[00:20:48] Laura: So it’s that, and I know EOS has the same thing too. Let’s fix it right now. And if this is not the, get it, want a capacity to have it right. If this is not the right person in the right seat, then let’s find a different seat for this person. They’re very valuable, but maybe not today.

[00:21:04] Laura: And where we need them to. Maybe they were 15 years ago in this position, but not to date. We need their expertise to help us build this technical platform or whatever, to write out what the process is or whatever the situation is. 

[00:21:17] Brent: If a leader is struggling with a culture of trust, and you’d mentioned accountability and communication.

[00:21:24] Brent: How is there some simple steps that a leader could, or leadership team could start to assess that trust factor and then start working on building that trust? 

[00:21:38] Laura: ? Yeah, the, that’s a great question and because trust is a foundation of everything, every relationship you. Is the confidence. Trust is really, that’s the definition, right?

[00:21:49] Laura: Trust is my perception. Trust is the confidence you have in your relationship with others. That’s what trust is, the confidence I have in my relationship with you to do X or to do Y, and to break it down even further, when you talk about trust, it really has to start with me. I need to give trust first. As a leader, I have to be trust.

[00:22:16] Laura: And when you talk about trustworthiness, a lot of that comes from vulnerability, right? And I think that’s part of our challenge as leaders is, I know how we grew up. It was you don’t make a mistake and you just work 70 hours a week, 80 hours a week until it gets done. That’s not what we’re dealing with today.

[00:22:39] Laura: And so we have to have that opportunity to be trusting in our virtual environ. , there’s a lot of trust that has to be given. Like I know that this person is working because I trust that person. And so I think, the trust has to be given first and you have to be trustworthy. And I look at trust as in three areas.

[00:23:02] Laura: One is competence, can they do the job? And two is compassion. Do they have compassion for themselves and others? And giving grace And that type of. Competence, compassion, and integrity, right? Do you do what you say you’re gonna do? And then you have this emotional bank account component of it too. The more you can fill someone’s cup or fill up the emotional bank account, the more likely you can make a mistake and it’s gonna roll right off.

[00:23:35] Laura: But if you are in a negative deficit and you make a mistake or you do something, . It’s hard to build that trust back up. And when you talk about emotional bank account, we work on this, it’s just saying, Brent, thank you so much for a job well done. Or Brent, I really appreciate your expertise. Or Brent, I appreciate you giving me a hand when I needed it.

[00:23:55] Laura: Whatever it is, it’s the small things. It doesn’t have to be this grandiose. Here’s your, million dollars Brent for convers. . It could just be small things that add home. 

[00:24:05] Brent: And so that communication part of it you mentioned the company with 400 employees the leadership team can’t possibly talk to every single one of those employees, or they could, I suppose it would take some time.

[00:24:17] Brent: Is there methods in which that, or maybe you start with a one-on-one and then you move into a more of a scaled version of that. Is there ways to. Leadership, communicate some of those things to get feedback from their team? 

[00:24:32] Laura: I do think that it is important for them to have access to the leadership team, people the organization, to have access to ’em. Now, this one-on-one gets a little tricky because it’s just time. Time is of the essence, right? So I think when you do the connectivity, it could just be a town hall. , it could be that opportunity where I’m gonna, there’s three of us this month or this quarter, whatever.

[00:24:54] Laura: We’re gonna do a town hall meeting. Put your, send your questions in. That’s an option. Another one is when we go throughout the organization and build out the leadership development series, we have different leaders come in and do the introduction. So when they’re talking when they’re in front of the hundreds of people that are going through the program.

[00:25:14] Laura: They’re doing the introduction, they’re connecting with everybody at that level. I think that it is a challenge and an opportunity for the leadership team to look at focusing on the business, not in the business. And so when I say that, so many of our leaders tend to be technical experts, and that’s what they enjoy doing.

[00:25:36] Laura: So they like to just stay heads down instead of, that’s not your role anymore. Your role has shift. Where you need to be thinking about the organization as a whole and not just your area. So that’s a shift for some leaders also. But that, I do think that there’s a lot of opportunity. I Technology today has allowed for really nice connectivity and really bad connectivity too, cuz you can take everything out of context and you put your own story, thought or meaning behind something and it could blow up.

[00:26:07] Laura: And that’s oh, that’s not even what I meant. Technology’s good and bad, as always. Kurt Vank talks about that in his books in the fifties. But anyway, don’t get me started on that. 

[00:26:15] Brent: You mentioned a little bit about retention and, how we need to be attentive to the cultural needs.

[00:26:22] Brent: If there’s a high turnover. How do you get the new people involved in culture? 

[00:26:30] Laura: So if there is a high turnover, that’s a data. . So that is something where I think immediately some sort of focus group pulling out different people to have that conversation and finding out what is it, if we’ve got this culture laid out on our wall yet, we’re not living by it, we need to figure out what’s the gap.

[00:26:52] Laura: So what is it that we’re doing well and what is it that we’re not? . Right? So we talk a lot about what do you want us to stop doing? What do you want us to start doing, and what do you want us to continue to do? That’s a thousand years ago people have been talking about that, but it’s that ha that’s, it’s actually having that conversation.

[00:27:10] Laura: You’ll learn so much from the team members. But again, I think you need an outside person to come in and do it, because I think if you’ve got somebody from the inside and you’ve lost all these people, there’s a little bit. Fear paradigm they might be living in. I don’t know if I wanna share that. So is it’s easier to have somebody from the outside come in.

[00:27:30] Laura: Sorry, Brent. 

[00:27:31] Brent: No, it’s okay. Is there an easy way in an extra interview to get a leaving employee to talk about some of those? What’s not working? Okay. 

[00:27:41] Laura: So here’s how I think that most people see exit interviews. Most people, some people will share. a challenge, but don’t burn bridges. How often have we heard that?

[00:27:52] Laura: Don’t burn your bridges. Okay. So if that’s sitting in the back of your head, are you going to be truthful in what you wanna share? I don’t know. And quite honestly, the exit interview is passe we need to get in front of these people before they get to an exit interview, before they terminate and get to an exit interview.

[00:28:11] Laura: We need to get to connect with them ahead of. . 

[00:28:15] Brent: Yeah. That’s, that’s a really good point. Getting it before they quit. Is there something in the great resignation that has changed so much that maybe leaders aren’t understanding that?

[00:28:28] Laura: I think the great designation from everything I’ve read, I know that there are a lot of different opinions on it. I think the great resignation was a time when people. Reevaluated their life and what they wanted to be doing. And so a lot of times it wasn’t necessarily about the culture of the organization, but perhaps more about the role or that they wanted to do something different with their lives.

[00:28:58] Laura: Or they decided, I’m done. I’m retiring, we got enough money. This is how I wanna live. I. , I don’t wanna work anymore. It’s too stressful. Whatever the scenario is, I think people got the opportunity to take a step back and look at their lives and evaluate their lives. So that’s my take on it from everything I’ve read.

[00:29:17] Brent: I think that’s a really good point. I think that some leaders have now taken the opportunity as an excuse for high turn. and they just point to that the industry standard is now whatever it is, 60% turnover, some crazy high number . But I do feel as though there’s a place that we can find common ground.

[00:29:38] Brent: A as we, as you started out with, we can find common ground with the whole team to build a culture that. Do you think that we have to start shifting? I guess we, if everybody’s leaving, there has to be, there has to be a shift in culture. And if your attrition rate is so high that it’s affecting productivity.

[00:29:55] Brent: Cause I think also that pro productivity and retention are the two highest things that can lead to profitability. . So having some focus on that is gonna, one of the most important things a leadership team should examine. How would you say that

[00:30:11] Brent: you get feedback from the team and also you mentioned the in it’s too late in the exit interview, anonymizing some of these things. So the old idea of having. Little thing next to the time clock where people can put in their anonymous feedback. Is that a good idea? 

[00:30:30] Laura: I go back and forth on that because I would hope that people are in a culture where they can have those conversations, and that’s what I would say most people would wanna get to.

[00:30:42] Laura: I think this generation of leaders that’s coming. That is gonna be something that’s important to them, and they’re gonna build cultures out like that. I just think of my own kids who are in college and I just, I think they have such a different mindset that it will get to that point where they’re just speaking truth, right?

[00:31:01] Laura: They’re just speaking, but it’s about the delivery, which goes back to the emotional intelligence. It’s about delivery. So we want this open conversation, but you don’t have to be an ass, if I can say that. The air , you just don’t have to be that way. It’s about being curious. It’s about having connection.

[00:31:21] Laura: So I think that hopefully we’ll move to that point where we’re having more conversations and more open conversations where there isn’t that fear paradigm that necessarily living. 

[00:31:34] Brent: All right, we’re running out of time, but one last question is, I know back, going back to us as a people analyzer, it would be great to have a Culture Analyzer tool.

[00:31:44] Brent: Do you know of anything like that to say, so you could, somebody could objectively this isn’t working. How can we apply each of our core values to that not working and run it through the tool and come back with a number? ? 

[00:31:57] Laura: Yeah. What’d be great? There’s a, an analyzer, an assessment for everything, Brent, you know that to be true.

[00:32:03] Laura: So there’s one that, I think it’s university of Michigan I wanna say is working, there’s an Ohio, anyway, sorry. But they’re working on a cultural assessment. There are a lot of ’em out there. Actually, when I started the business seven years ago, I was thinking of going down this path with an organization that, that’s what they did was cultural assessments.

[00:32:24] Laura: They’ve been out there. I think the challenge that I have with that is that leadership component needs to be there if you don’t have buy-in. Cuz I’m this believer, like you have to have awareness of something like our culture’s not working or what we have on the wall is not what we’re seeing here.

[00:32:43] Laura: So you have to have that awareness and then you have to have the desire to change it. So if the leaders don’t have a desire to change, it doesn’t matter what kind of assessment comes. but you have to have the desire to change it. And then the commitment, what does that look like? So is it bringing people in, having focus groups.

[00:33:01] Laura: It’s not just the pinball machines anymore, it’s really about what’s true about the culture, and that’s the commitment and then practicing and failing. So it’s really pretty easy though. Pretty easy. I say that those four steps, awareness, desire, commitment, and practicing it. 

[00:33:16] Brent: That’s very Laura, as I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug.

[00:33:22] Brent: What would you like to plug today? 

[00:33:24] Laura: We have at the, at the beginning of every year, but it’s our Fresh Start program and it is just a micro version of you can sign up and it’s yours. It’s videos, it’s holding you on track. That’s something to consider. And you can go to leadership delta.com and it’s right there is the opportunity to sign up for that.

[00:33:48] Brent: Great. And I will put all those in the show notes. Laura, this has been a very fun conversation. Should I say enlightening is a good word. Fun and enlightening. How’s that? I. Very enjoyable to talk to you today. Thank you so much. 

[00:34:00] Laura: Thank you, Brent. Take care.

[00:34:03] Ruth: Listen, Brent works hard on this Podcast, he would really appreciate it if you could rate it where ever you download your podcasts. Don’t forget to go to Content Basis dot eye oh and sign up for the content creator beta program. It is a great opprotunity.

How to Cope with Grief as an Entrepreneur with Sherry Walling

Sherry helps smart people solve complex problems. Sherry Walling is the one you call when you’re in burnout, feeling isolated, need to make a difficult decision, embroiled in a messy situation, out of ideas, and in need of a fresh perspective.

Her superpower is bringing calm to crisis and insight to chaos. Sherry has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and two master’s degrees. Sherry has been an academic, researcher, psychotherapist, and best-selling author.

Win More Customers By Providing The Ultimate Post Purchase Experience with Irina Poddubnaia

Think about the last time you placed an order on an e-commerce site. You get a confirmation email, and what’s in it? Usually, only shipping and fulfillment information.

Most online stores provide limited information and miss an excellent opportunity to upsell customers when they are not expecting to be up-sold.

Irina Poddubnaia tells us how her solution helps store owners maximize their transactional emails and turn them into marketing contact points.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to Tak Commerce. Today I have Irina Pad. Please go ahead, introduce yourself. Pronounce your name the way it’s supposed to be pronounced. Tell us your day-to-day role and may be one of your passions in life. 

Irina: All right. Thank you Brent. My name is Irina Pad. I’m from Bulgaria and I’m the founder of Trackage Dot.

Irina: We help entrepreneurs with post-purchase customer experience. So basically everything that happens after the buy button is Preston in eCommerce store. And when it comes to passions right now it’s public speaking and everything that’s related speak, just speaking and speak and singing as well.

Irina: So that’s one of my passions right now. 

Brent: Oh, awesome. Are you gonna sing for us? . 

Irina: It depends. , we’ll do one thing here, . 

Brent: We’ll leave that, we’ll leave it right to the end. So I did warn you that I have a project called The Free Joke Project, and maybe we should, we could do the free song project next, but we’ll do the free Pro Joke project.

Brent: All I’m going to do is tell you a joke and you can tell me if that joke should be free or if it’s one that we could charge. And since you did mention singing, I found a joke that has at least some reference to singing in it. Here we go. Did you know Mortal Combat is based on an old Scandinavian church song?

Brent: It’s a Finn Hymn.

Irina: That’s a good one. I I don’t know about if you should charge for it, but that’s a good. 

Brent: All right I’ll just one more quick one. Why is Pavlov’s hair so soft? Because he conditions it. Yeah, I know. They’re all really bad. I apologize. All right. So wouldn’t say that 

Irina: they’re bad. I’m just saying that Yeah.

Irina: This is like the hi and intellectual humor. It’s not 

Brent: just like it’s only for sas. That’s, it has to be smart people. All right. So let’s talk about PO I, I’m very interested in post transactional data and how you can get people and we are a magenta agency. My day job is work running a magenta agency and we’ve done a lot of work where in the card after they check after they ac even after they pay.

Brent: We like sometimes would the customers would like to hold that transaction and get ’em to buy something more. So tell us a little bit about your. And how it helps people post transaction. 

Irina: So what we do is basically, so I can just start from the beginning. 

Irina: And why they do that, because the conversion is from five to 10% of extra sales just from looking at the order status. So we helped like we literally just took this functionality and made it available outside of Amazon. So you can plug it into your store. That’s built with Shopify Commerce.

Irina: Magenta is in the plans. We don’t have a direct. , but we do have an integration with Zapier. So it’s possible to pass the data. So what it creates is it creates a tracking page where customers can see additional products the actual information about where order and when it’s coming to them and also the brand and social media accounts and the delivery information, whatever you want to put on the page.

Irina: It’s 100% customiz. And you can change all the bits and pieces of it. So it’s a drag and drop builder where you can literally just customize everything. So one other thing that I didn’t mention is that also those pages, they have localization. So if a customer is from a different country or if you are shipping internationally you can just customize the page with specific language.

Irina: That’s that’s region. Because we support customized emails as well. So emails can be in their local language when the tracking page can be in local language. So the entire thing. So what Trackage does is we are helping the customers not only understand with the like the package is coming to them, but also to see additional products while we’re where.

Irina: Browsing for the information they were actually looking for. So that’s how we help e-commerce stores bridge the communication gap and also lower the customer support load because people don’t have to ask the the question, the fail the question, like, where is my order? Where is my package?

Irina: That overloads customer support and e-commerce, so they don’t have to ask because it’s already answered. . 

Brent: So tell us some numbers. Do you have some hard numbers that kind of show how successful this is in terms of, it brings a lift on post transactional purchases by 10% or 15 or whatever that number is?

Brent: Yeah. And then all the secondary part of that question is, do you rely on discounts or coupons or anything else to bring in or do people just buying. 

Irina: Okay. I can tell you about our numbers currently. First thing that we measured is the open rate for the post-purchase emails that talk about the status of the order.

Irina: So basically we’ve seen the open rates around 60%. So that’s way higher than any marketing emails that you. . Another thing is that like from those emails customers, they visit the tracking pages one or two times per day when they are actually actively waiting for the order. Instead of just going through the email every time they just save the link and they go and visit it one or two times.

Irina: So during that time various sliders so what we’ve seen that then the sliders were. The conversion rate wasn’t that high. It was around like four, 5%, like it was on the lower end, but when they made them animated and they started moving the conversion rate raised to around 12, 10, 10, 12%.

Irina: Customers were actually, when we are waiting for the order, they literally have nothing to do. And they want to get the package repair waiting. But they don’t know how to facilitate that process. So instead, they are li left with just some free time and they start browsing the product.

Irina: And if the products are interesting the customers are buying. So we’ve worked with this influencer. They are creating an animated series. And this katoon gathered a very passionate fan base with free million follow. . It’s called Metal Family. If you want, you can check it out.

Irina: Like very cooling. And they have remarkable sense of humor, , so I would say so, and this fan base they were like when they launched their first comic book they were not prepared to handle like the amount of orders they were going to get because they printed the whole batch of 10,000.

Irina: And it was sold instead of two months. How we were projecting it was sold in one week, and after that they had to fulfill everything and what they’ve seen. So from those 10,000 orders like originally, wasn’t there, but we joined in be middle of this process. So from those 10,000 orders we’ve seen around 7% extra sales.

Irina: So that result around like 700 or that’s exactly what it. And so 700 text orders from the tracking page directly, but then we don’t measure the indirect sales. Some of the customers we were going through the logo to the website, we were going through the social media and then back to the website.

Irina: So that’s like the indirect conversion. So maybe it’s around 15% or something like that because we didn’t have the detailed analytics at that point. And what happened then? , the customers were waiting and instead of writing to customer support like they previously did because metal family, they were overwhelmed with the amount of questions they got.

Irina: Because the customers, they were, again, you can imagine this is a Katoon series. What kind of immature customers were there? So very immature customers were sending messages to all the social media accounts. We knew five messages from one customer, like every. . So they had to ease that pain.

Irina: So we had to ease that pain for them because once the emails started get going out and people were getting proactive communication, they stopped asking the questions and the customer support just co I don’t know, side with relief because all that enormous I don’t know, like a ton of sta questions.

Irina: Like it just went. So after that happened and the last bit of functionality and what we also helped metal family with was getting reviews. So at the end of the purchasing experience when the customer actually gets the order they, they experience this I dunno, like burst of enden when they open the package and they finally see the thing that we ordered.

Irina: And it’s the perfect moment to ask for a review. Because in most cases with what I’ve seen with e-commerce stores, they use just timed automation. So in two weeks there is an email that goes out asking for review. But what if in two weeks your customer hasn’t received the order yet?

Irina: And that happened to me a couple of times when I ordered from China or sometime from us. Like it, literally, like it asked me for a review when I didn’t yet get the product and when I’m fighting with the customs to get it out of , outta the post office. The idea is, so what we did, we configured the automation, the standard one and it started asking for reviews and every fifth customer left the review around five stars.

Irina: So that was 2,150 reviews from 10,000. . That’s enormous, I would say. And those reviews they can be used on the product pages, on the, I mean on the store itself and on social media. So there are a lot of ways how you can capitalize on social proof. 

Brent: So the social is the, is that how you leverage other customers to bring in 

Irina: more customers?

Irina: Yes. And we have one feature that is like the killer feature, but it’s not yet. Then the customer review is four stars and more. I think we’re going to make it configurable so that you can adjust the threshold. So if review is positive we will ask the customer to share it on social media with reach media, for example like video or a photo of them interacting with the product.

Irina: So let’s going to probably get some sales from. I’ve seen some companies that were capitalizing just on oh, you were going to post review anyway. How about you get some like some money from the brand that you’re posting it for? So yeah, there are quite a few companies that are focusing on TikTok commerce.

Brent: Yeah. Are you focusing then on making are, so they get an email and then they go and open up the email to go to this, to, to the custom tracking page or? Custom tracking page that you’re generating automatically there right 

Irina: after checkout. The custom tracking page is going to be available the entire time how it’s set up like technically.

Irina: When the store signs up the trackage and they install one of the apps, or they just configuring integration with like the third party. . We will get the tracking page inside of Trackage and you can create multiple tracking pages. By the way if you are promoting different things or if you have different brands.

Irina: So you can configure tracking pages for every occasion. And the tracking page, it’s standalone. You can put it on your custom domain or you can use trackage domain and you can plug it in anywhere. It’s responsive, so on mobile and on desktop, which works seamlessly. The idea is that page is always there, but the content based on who is looking at that page changes.

Irina: So they can look by the order number or by the tracking number that they got. And if we don’t remember both, they can enter their email and they’re going to get an email from Trackage that’s going to send them their tracking page. So this way we. Just this is a security feature. Because if we were allowing them to just look up any email, that’s not a very secure 

Brent: feature.

Brent: Yeah, that makes sense. I’m interested in your own journey. In your bio that you moved to China without speaking Chinese, and you ran a fulfillment company and then you now. You’ve launched the SAS company remotely without any funding. Tell us a little bit about that journey.

Brent: Like how did you end up in China and then are you back in Bulgaria now? 

Irina: Yes. I’m back in Bulgaria for the last six years. And that journey to China, it started just by me feeling adventurous. I. Because at some point in my life I was just working in an office I was selling frozen berries in bulk.

Irina: So it wasn’t a very exciting job to tell you the, like to tell you the truth. And at that point I thought that I knew everything about commerce and how videos are done because I was selling the. , like ev, everything, like in trucks and even higher amounts. So we, we had never sold any ships, by the way, because that’s a lot but the trucks, yeah.

Irina: And I thought that I understood everything like with bills of lading how the deals are them, how to accept the payments, invoicing, everything. But that wasn’t, When they came to China we found the the variety of suppliers of everything you could imagine. There were literally plazas.

Irina: Those are skyscrapers of like full to the brim with goods of various kinds, like a plaza for smartphone accessories. That’s not an exaggeration where it is a whole city of like smartphone accessories. You could literally just find everything. What we realized at that point was that it’s not about the suppliers, it’s about the customers, because we didn’t have that many customers at that point.

Irina: When when we came to China and we found all the suppliers, we found how to work with them. We figured everything out. We still were forced to understand marketing, to reach out to customers, to do the prospecting selling, and that’s. and that’s how we were surviving. So we figured out the pay dads and it was the full experience because we had to survive based on how well the business performed.

Irina: We didn’t take any funding ever. We didn’t even know what was a possibility. That’s right. . So that’s how my like Chinese adventures came to an end when we lost one of our biggest customers. And then we felt like overwhelmed with all evaporations and like packaging the boxes. Because again, for two and a half years my main occupation was to go to a warehouse to accept the goods, to pack the goods, to ship it to the logistics company, to negotiate with suppliers check.

Irina: And I even stopped speaking English that much just because we were working with Europe and like it wasn’t necessary. And I, like all the time I was exposed to Chinese, so my English kind of went. . So yeah, at some point I realized that’s not what I want to do in life. I wasn’t born to package boxes.

Irina: That’s not something that I want to do. And that’s when this part of with Johnny ended and after that we moved back to Bulgaria. We. like we were. Yeah, at that point we were very discouraged because like we attempted to work, we attempted to create our own business. It wasn’t the next Amazon unfortunately, or even the next early express.

Irina: It wasn’t like. Yeah. And that’s when we realized that we could do something with the tools that we developed for ourselves while we were in. So everything from inventory, acceptance keeping track of all the shipments keeping track of all the orders and yeah, we just wanted to bring all the experience with Beca to a better cause and make it available for our e-commerce entrepreneurs to use.

Irina: So that’s how Trackage was born. And that’s how it’s still there . . 

Brent: Yeah. It’s interesting that a lot of these great there’s a lot of great tools that get developed in-house and then suddenly the entrepreneur who’s selling something realize that they have a great CRM or inventory management or whatever that tool is, that software tool, and suddenly they’ve decided their own, their old business is no good and here’s much better business.

Brent: Do you feel as though. Branching into a whole new culture helped you be more competitive. I just did working in China help you be a better entrepreneur when you went back to Bulgaria? 

Irina: You know what I definitely can say uh, happened is that I lost my like rose tinted glasses. So I started actually looking realistically at the world of business and.

Irina: it’s un like we, like at the beginning of a journey, we lost unfathomable amount of money. Like with just purchasing own goods or just, I dunno, like the logistics partner losing the packages and who knows what else. We experienced all the hardships of working with people that we didn’t know anything about.

Irina: And we didn’t have experience with all those different products that were ordered from us because we literally offered to buy anything from China, from us. And that’s that was probably a mistake right now I realize it was probably a mistake. We should have niche down. We should have just studied with niche, understood the quality requirements found with West suppliers, and then just scaled that.

Irina: But instead, we just went broad and developed the tools instead of developing the. . But again that’s a learning experience. I I will never say that. I’m not glad it happened. And after that I now realize how important that is to understand the customer before the supplier, because there are a lot of suppliers, but the customers, they are the backbone of a business.

Irina: And if you don’t have any sales, you don’t have a. That’s 

Brent: easy. One. One of my experiences with buying products from China is that documentation is often just Google translated. Do you find that same type of, did you find that, say I’m assuming you sold products to Bulgaria and it was maybe they put, they did a Google translate into Bul.

Brent: Into Bulgarian and nobody actually, no humid actually read. read the text. Is that something that is overlooked in China or is it something that that people just don’t think is important? I’m, and I’m just saying specifically language, like we, you get some products that are coming from China that are just translated into English, and it’s clear it was done through a machine.

Brent: It wasn’t nobody actually read it. Who’s an English? 

Irina: Yeah. In case of our deals I was translating everything, so that wasn’t the case. So yes, I did remember when we got some materials, they were very poorly translated. And I did have to, I did have to spend a lot of time to adjust, rewarding and to literally make something out of.

Irina: The cluster of words or keywords that I received as specification. So that was fixed by me, basically. And I remember how we were creating all the documents just because we were requirements of the customs, not because the suppliers provided them from the suppliers. We literally got big thank you and the goods

Irina: That’s all we got from it. So yeah I believe the problem literally exists. But I think with AI tools that are currently on the market, you can adjust that. And the translation tools were also getting better. Then we were in China communication was done just for the mobile phones.

Irina: We were writing in English and showing them some Chinese characters and they underst. I think right now it’s, it would be through Google Speech or something like I’m going to talk to the tool I dunno, Skype maybe. They introduced some on the fly translation. So I think right now it’s much easier to communicate anywhere in the world.

Irina: But at that point it was challenging. 

Brent: So your experience coming outta China and then into Track Ma and. I know one thing you’ve said about Trackage is it helps the merchant put their store more on autopilot. Just can you explain how it, how that works and how it, I know you’ve said that there’s less customer service involved, but it can’t always be a hundred percent autopilot.

Irina: That’s why we’re not saying that 100% of customer support requests are going to be automated because if the customer has a question about the size chart or about the customs clearance or something like something was shipped to wrong location, you still need to have customer support and you need to reply to those customers.

Irina: But all the repetitive questions, the ones that can be answered by robots, Like the, where is my order? The limo request. That that one can definitely be automated. And with automation, literally, nobody’s going to ask you that question because it’s not going to be an issue for the customer.

Irina: They are already going to know when, like, when the order is coming, where is it where is it coming from? I know what carrier it’s shipped through. And also they will have information about the delivery, very funds, whatever information you want to put on the tracking page because the more information you give to your customers will less likely they are going to reach out.

Irina: Whereas some illiterate people who are still going to go to customer support and ask a question, I I totally understand that there is going to be a percentage of people who are still going to not understand what’s going. But that percentage is going to be minuscule compared to the previous amount.

Irina: So that’s just like the customer support side. A lot of automation is also coming from operation side. So for example, with chi, with Chinese suppliers we had to deal with this interesting situation where the supplier is providing you with a tracking number or the information about the.

Irina: But then the tracking number doesn’t have any tracking information, so that means the tracking number is either incorrect or the product has not been shipped. And if for example, this situation is left unattended for a week or two, the customer is going to get anxious, we are going to start asking for very money back.

Irina: So we had to monitor all of that. And that’s how in Trackage we have two counters. They is an idle and they in. So days in I is counting until the package is actually moving. So until the status in transit appears on the package. And the other one days in transit is counting how many days it’s in transit whatever the package got lost in the post.

Irina: So this way the business can proactively reach out to those customers who were unfortunate enough to experience a deliver. And if it’s in the initial stage of communication with the supplier, they can reach out to the supplier and ask like, where is the package, when they’re going to ship it?

Irina: And if a supplier is unresponsive for where is an issue, they can even refund it and find an our supplier to buy product from. That’s specifically handy for a drop shipps for hours. It’s not we handy, but still you can poke your suppliers or even knock at where doors and. what package it should have been shipped three days ago.

Irina: What’s going on? 

Brent: Yeah, a really good point. A lot of ERPs will generate a tracking. They’ll generate, the package has been shipped even before it gets to the post office, or UPS picks it up and UPS doesn’t assign a tracking number until they’ve actually taken possession of the package.

Brent: So that’s a great feature right now, yeah. And if you were to offer some, bit of advice to a merchant going into the holidays right now what could they still do and what should they be doing after the holidays? 

Irina: The holiday season is rather challenging for commerce, so it just literally creates an overload of shipments and overload of everything like processing.

Irina: So I guess , my, like most straightforward advice ladies keep saying keep calm , because this is going to pass, but right now you need to operate at 100% efficiency, 100% capacity. So I guess that’s so that’s wise. But after the holiday season is. You can examine and do some postmortems for some of the problems that you experienced during the holiday season.

Irina: You can see which carriers failed which carriers you might want to replace with an alternative one. . I know that on social media, there are quite a few people who are talking about diversifying the shipment volume between not just FedEx, u Ps like the like the two major carriers.

Irina: You could try our ones and see if this improves your cost per shipment or the cost like the overall margin as well. So another thing would be to evaluate your customer support after the. And see where the customer support might have failed or might have failed the communication with the customers.

Irina: Because usually during holidays people want to buy presents and if they become very sensitive to the timelines of a shipment. So if a person is not going to get their Christmas socks, for example, we’re going to be very upset. And the customer support needs to handle that and be mentally prepared that we are going to be customers with delayed.

Irina: Yeah. And the most interesting part would be to evaluate your systems overall. So once the holiday season is over, once you see over weak points where the systems are not working as you expected them to, you can definitely I dunno. Start evaluating which systems are lacking in your tech stack.

Irina: Maybe tech majors lacking Yeah. Something of a similar fashion where you can see all the orders and all evaporations on one page and understand where you are still not efficient enough. So just basically do the fine tuning when it’s below season in January or in February.

Irina: It’s the best time. Start implementing some new changes because during the holiday season, you will not have the opportunity to do that. 

Brent: Yeah that’s really good advice. Never make changes during the holidays or after October, maybe. code lockdown for people who do on-prem software. Irina. When we close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like.

Brent: What would you like to plug? 

Irina: All right. I would like to gift the listeners of top Commerce Podcast the free resource. It’s called How to Get five to 10% Extra Sales from existing Customers without spending more money on ads or hiring more staff. In this book you can see like all the key ingredients for creating the best post-purchase experience for your customer.

Irina: And definitely you will understand what things are lacking in your current post-purchase experience. And you can either implement them yourself or maybe use Trackage for that purpose. Yeah. And you can find it at trackage.com, slash flywheel dash extra sales. And I hope that in the show notes you can also find.

Irina: . Yeah. 

Brent: Yeah. I’ll put all those I’ll put all the, all your links in the show notes how they can get in contact with you and and and of course track ma.com. Thank you, ARITA. Thank you so much for being here. It’s been such a pleasure. Thank you for staying up late. And thank you.

Brent: It’s my pleasure.

Irina: I love talking about e-commerce and what you can improve in your supply chain and post-purchase experience. Thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you to Podcagent for the wonderful guest!

Looking Forward in Finance with Alejandra Santos

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between an accountant and a finance person?

An accountant looks backward, and a finance person looks forward.

Alejandro Santos helps us to understand the complexities and the simplicities in accounting, why you should be looking forward more than you should be looking backward, and how vital that finance person is in your organization.

Transcript

[00:02:46] Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Alejandra Santos. Alejandra is the c e o and founder of Startup Tandem. Alejandra, go ahead, do an introduction better than I just did. Maybe tell us your day-to-day role in one of your passions in life. 

[00:03:03] Alejandra: Oh, thank you so much Brent, for the introduction and for having me here.

[00:03:06] Alejandra: I am very excited for today’s episode. So my day-to-day means a lot of meetings, talking to clients and steering them into good practices with their financial. And with the finances in their business, and taking long walks along the beach with my dog and , trying, if I have the opportunity to take a meeting to the beach, I will absolutely do that as well.

[00:03:27] Alejandra: And a passion of mine. I just, I have so many, but I’m gonna say since we’re talking about dogs, passion is to rescue all the ducks from the streets and put them in beautiful homes. . 

[00:03:36] Brent: That’s a, that is a great, that’s a great venture to do. All right, so Alejandra, I did warn you that I’m going to do this free joke project.

[00:03:43] Brent: I’m gonna tell you a joke and you could just tell me if you feel as though the joke should be continue to be free, or if you feel like we could charge for the joke at some point. Okay. Here we go. Never date a tennis player. Love means nothing to.

[00:04:01] Alejandra: I think that one’s free. Okay, , 

[00:04:04] Brent: thanks. Thank you so much. All right, so Startup Tandem. Tell us a little bit about how you started Startup Tandem, and why you started it. 

[00:04:13] Alejandra: Yeah, so thank you for that brand. Startup tandem. I’ve been doing accounting and finance for 15 plus years. I actually bred into it after I gra I graduated college, I did the wealth management, and then I went into corporations, big companies, nonprofits, and it was when I moved to California that I went into entrepreneurship as an employee.

[00:04:32] Alejandra: Internal employee is an external consultant working for. One of the competitors, not what it is now, a competitor of mine. And it was there that I realized a big gap that existed between the services that were provided, two entrepreneurs when they were building their businesses to exactly what, the price was for those services.

[00:04:50] Alejandra: And it just didn’t make any sense to me. So that’s why I created Startup Tandem. A startup Tandem is a supportive partner of four entrepreneurs in when they’re in their. To start a business and as a startups and all the growth level, that maturity, some clients are making 80 million in revenue.

[00:05:07] Alejandra: Some other ones are making one $50,000 in gross revenue. It just, it really doesn’t matter where you are in your journey. We are committed to become that partner that can set you up at least with a good infrastructure and take you all the way until you scale or until you’re ready to hire internally. So that’s exactly what we do.

[00:05:23] Alejandra: We set up entrepreneurs with the tools and the resources. to help them in their finance journey and not just, give them whatever service. It’s not a one size fits all. It’s customized to its company’s growth. 

[00:05:35] Brent: When you start with an entrepreneur or a new business, do you see them making common mistakes in, in, in their accounting practices or bookkeeping, things like 

[00:05:44] Alejandra: that?

[00:05:45] Alejandra: A hundred percent. So one of the biggest pitfalls that I see is that they’re not on top of, Just general bookkeeping. And they don’t have really good policies in place. By that means that there’s no AR policy or AP PO policy approval policies in place. There’s a lot of personal expenses go flowing through the company.

[00:06:03] Alejandra: And, They do their taxation, their taxes according to their bank statements rather than a financial statement. And it’s not really until they have the urge to bring an external investor, an external partner, or they’re trying to get into a very big line of credit or some kind of debt financing that actually puts them urgency.

[00:06:22] Alejandra: To, wow, I gotta clean my financials now because we’re gonna look at that. And at that time, at that moment, you’re really 10 years into the business or five years into the business, and you’re looking at a high cost. Just to go there backwards and then forward to clean those financials is a big mess and it takes a lot of money out of your pocket.

[00:06:42] Brent: Do you find that a lot of entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily versed in accounting and maybe they don’t underst. what payables are and what receivables are and even the sense that, hey, I’m suddenly, I’m amount of money, but I have a whole bunch of inventory to you. Help them with some of those 

[00:06:58] Alejandra: pieces.

[00:06:59] Alejandra: Oh, 100%. And yes, what we do, a big portion of what we do with our marketing and resources that we offer is education. Just because that is a thing that we do see in the industry. There is no urgency in. in financials, in financial management, in accounting, and knowing what your numbers are. So a lot of it goes with educational videos, educational resources, why you should do it, why it works, why you should, this is a big component of your business.

[00:07:27] Alejandra: We. Definitely focus on that as an early stage company. Even though you cannot afford, if you cannot afford a full service yourself, we definitely wanna set you up with the tools and infrastructure, the policies to help you get into a good regimen. And, if you wanna do it yourself, you can, do it yourself, but at least you have something to go buy.

[00:07:47] Alejandra: And then when it comes to inventory, that’s a big pitfall that I see, especially for e-commerce companies, startups, and businesses, is. They don’t have just with the basics, they don’t have a really good skew numbing clutcher. Which that means it’s like products. Some products don’t even have a skew, so it’s really hard to even track down what the levels of that skew is or that inventory product is if you don’t even have a good traceability on it.

[00:08:11] Alejandra: So yeah, there is a lot of things that I see pitfalls, but there is a lot of things that also systems and very low budget resources and tools can. Entrepreneurs gear to the right position. 

[00:08:24] Brent: You see a lot of entrepreneurs doing books or doing their bookkeeping as the last thing they wanna worry about, they just get it done.

[00:08:32] Brent: And I, you had mentioned that they just go off bank statements for reconciling they’re not doing cash flow reports and there’s so many more things that are involved in there. How do you educate ’em on some of those? . 

[00:08:42] Alejandra: So yeah, it’s really interesting. I get a lot of clients at the end of the year because they’re getting ready for tax season, and one of the big things that I get is, oh my God, my books are a mess.

[00:08:52] Alejandra: I don’t even have a set of accounts. Can you please help me out? Cuz the tax season is coming. And it’s great. Yes, we can definitely do that. However, When I asked them those questions that you just did, okay, so what is your cash burn? What is the biggest driver of your cash burn? What, those are the things that you have to know in order to make the right strategic decisions in your business.

[00:09:11] Alejandra: You gotta know all those drivers. You gotta know all those KPIs. So when I make those questions to them, it’s it goes like an. in the brain. Oof. Okay. I don’t know those things. Maybe I should know them. Yes, abso a hundred percent. And I try to get because in numbers it’s not for everybody, and especially when you are a business owner and you’re creating this amazing product, you’re very creative. You probably don’t wanna talk numbers. So when you’re very creative, I try to talk, in the level. Whoever is in front of me to educate them, okay, maybe you do need to know what’s causing that burn, because if you know that you can control that, you could probably put that money into this instead.

[00:09:50] Alejandra: Product development or a marketing expense, something that’s gonna drive revenue up, and that’s when they realize, okay, I do need to be more diligent with my financials. 

[00:10:02] Brent: are some, are there some basic from an educational standpoint that you help them with and say just in reporting balance sheet, p and l, cash flow statement, are there some just basics that every entrepreneur should know before they even start?

[00:10:15] Alejandra: Before they even start? Yeah, that’s a good one. . I even have friends that entrepreneurs, and I tell them all the time, get your stuff together before, please don’t give it to me like that. The first thing I say is try treat your business as a business. And your personal is your personal business.

[00:10:28] Alejandra: A business is basic. Don’t run your. Personal expenses through the business is just at the end of the day, you gotta look at the big picture. And if the big picture is, I’m gonna sell my company in five, six years, guess what? They’re gonna be looking at those ebitda. They’re gonna look at operational income and they’re gonna see what’s flowing down there.

[00:10:46] Alejandra: And if you put all their personal expenses flowing, it’s gonna destroy the valuation of your company. So I try, just keep the big picture, even if you don’t understand the technicality of it, just keep the big picture in mind as soon as you have a business. Go with the, goal. I’m gonna sell my business.

[00:11:01] Alejandra: I’m gonna go an I P O, and then work towards that since the beginning, from the beginning. And just that will give you a clear sense of what you should or should not do. And if you have a hesitation, then ask questions to someone that does. No 

[00:11:14] Brent: I think you mentioned how the banking system works and how they wanna look at your books.

[00:11:20] Brent: If you are gonna start, if you’re gonna try to get a loan it would also apply to, if you wanna sell your business or get investors how do you recommend somebody that maybe they’ve been in business for five, six years and suddenly they’re, they want to start making their books, is it a process to weed through the mess that a person may have made and then they, you need to get ’em on the, in the right.

[00:11:43] Alejandra: Yeah. So there is definitely a process, especially if you have been in business for a few years and you have done taxes according to your bank statements rather than what’s sitting on that, on those financials. There is definitely a process, especially because those years are already closed.

[00:11:57] Alejandra: I called them closed because. Taxes have been already filed. So it’s really how can I say? You have to talk to the person that file your taxes to, to see what kind of adjustments you have to put in those financials to match exactly what you did in your taxes. And let’s just say that most of the time, your taxes, the taxes that are done are show less revenue.

[00:12:15] Alejandra: Then what’s in the financials? And it’s just because it’s cash basis and there’s a lot more things that are happening on the financials that are happening in, the bank statements. Let’s just say that it’s, you have to go retroactively. So what we do is basically Reno talk to the tax attorney or tax prison that did those books and say, okay, this is where we are.

[00:12:35] Alejandra: this is a trial balance. Now what can we do to get it there and then go forward cleaning up the whole, financial set and make sure that everything that’s flushed out personal, from business is flushed out and there’s a differentiation on it. Because what happens is the banks will look at least two to three years, depending on the financial institution.

[00:12:55] Alejandra: To see, what, how much your gross revenue is. You’re gonna look at those numbers. So if we can make the financials as accurate as possible, and related to what was posted on the taxes and then moving forward as well, we can show some growth, then that can put in a better place, and that goes with investors as well.

[00:13:14] Alejandra: The same, they’re gonna ask for your, your financials. Most you don’t, you probably don’t wanna even share your tax return if it’s flowing through you with an investor it’s uncomfortable situation. So we would have to go back, clean it up, match it to that, and then go forward and show some kind of forecasting, increase in revenue.

[00:13:33] Brent: Yeah, I think that you brought up a really good point about how the tax how the bank statements won’t reflect your ar They won’t reflect your inventory, they wouldn’t reflect any depreciable assets that you have and how important those are for a business owner to know. And even for when you’re going to get a loan, the banker’s gonna want to know what your assets are outside of what the bank balance.

[00:13:56] Brent: maybe talk about some of those pitfalls that entrepreneurs fall into when they, maybe they’re not as educated around accounting as they should be. 

[00:14:05] Alejandra: Yeah, so that’s actually a good point, Brent. So there’s a lot of asset based financing and it’s very important to know that, especially if you are in e-commerce and you have inventory on the books So there is definitely platforms.

[00:14:18] Alejandra: I’m just gonna speak very, a few of them. I don’t endorse any of them by the way. There is a Shopify, there is PayPal capital there is Clear Bank. Those right there will finance against your cashflow revenue stream. But what some asset based institutions do, and you can do the traditional or the non-traditional way, which.

[00:14:37] Alejandra: Do you prefer the non-traditional way for small companies or startups because they’re a little bit riskier? They basically look at your inventory and see what the inventory turnover is and see exactly what the valuation on that in turnover is to finance against it. And what happens there is that if you don’t have.

[00:14:54] Alejandra: If you don’t have a clear, a clean inventory balance, meaning they’re gonna ask for warehouse reports, they’re gonna ask for, what’s sitting on the balance sheet ties into the warehouse and evaluation that’s sitting in the warehouse. Actually the same as in the books. And if you don’t have that really button up, you’re missing on a lot of money.

[00:15:12] Alejandra: And if you do get an untraditional institution, they, you’re probably missing on not right now, cuz there’s inflation. In the future you probably will be missing on lower, in a low cost of capital financing rather than going to a traditional institution. When they give you a term loan, which is gonna be really high with really bad.

[00:15:29] Alejandra: Payment terms. So there is a lot to unpack when it comes to the balance sheet financing. There’s your ar like if you have some really good contracts and clients and they’re valued at, let’s just put a number, 500,000. You can get some really good financing against that if you find a good institution that can give you good factor for that.

[00:15:47] Brent: On your website you list that you do services like bookkeeping and fractional cfo. Maybe explain to our listeners some of the differences, and if we started with the bookkeeper, you have a comptroller, there’s a fractional cfo, there’s a cpa. How there’s a lot of different roles that that a in financials that play.

[00:16:06] Brent: Tell us if you could just explain some of those differences and then maybe tell us what, how you help. Yeah, 

[00:16:13] Alejandra: no, thank you. So yeah, so bookkeeping is your, I’m gonna call like the very low level service. Very basic, can somebody coming in, making sure that your bills are there, your invoices are there, your payments are matching, your invoices very low level.

[00:16:28] Alejandra: I don’t like to really just offer that because I think the company does deserve a little bit more. Than just bookkeeping. I like the accounting, the whole accounting service for anybody honest. It doesn’t matter what your business growth is. And it’s because it not only makes sure that your books ar and AP are really up to par, but it’s also gives a little bit more insight on what your margins are and where you know, your, where your biggest drivers of expenses are.

[00:16:56] Alejandra: If it’s marketing or you. Probations or whichever one it is. So I like that one more. And each level, for us at least, we do have a CPA person and management, that manages the accounts and make sure that everything is up to par. We do have also staff and senior accountants that take care of the very.

[00:17:16] Alejandra: Low, low, the low budget task as well. And then when it comes to fractional, CFO is going forward, right? So one of the things that people need to understand is that accounting is, keeping the financials accurate to what’s going on right now. But cfo, f o means going forward. But in order to have a good forward overlook, you are gonna need accurate financials like the forward.

[00:17:40] Alejandra: journey is based on the actuality right now. A CFO person is somebody that will do those analysis for you, is gonna do an f p, and a analysis is gonna do a weekly cash flow. It’s gonna do some variance analysis, which is like budgets, forecast versus actuals, right? Where are you standing according to your forecast or your budget?

[00:17:59] Alejandra: And if we have to readjust the forecast to meet those numbers this person will help you navigate. What kind of KPIs you’re gonna need to reach, or what kind of KPIs you need in order to meet certain metrics or something like revenue goals. This person can identify, like I said, cash burn.

[00:18:16] Alejandra: Where is that cash burn coming from? If you are a company that’s bringing product from China or bringing, product from another country, what are your shipping costs? Is that like the main driver of your cash burn? What can we. To mitigate that cash burn. And it’s somebody that, when it comes to financial institutions, goes ahead and assess the risk of each loan or line of credit or any, o other kind of tool that you wanna get into.

[00:18:40] Alejandra: This is a person that will analyze and assess that risk that comes with it. And it’s a true apr, right? What exactly are the fees that my company’s gonna face on a yearly basis? Divide business with this company. It’s just, for all, anything that you need. There is, like I said, accounting is actual.

[00:18:55] Alejandra: So you need somebody that can make sure that every number in that book is actually, has a backup. If there’s traceability, there’s an a report. If somebody comes looking for answers, there’s something there. And then you, a fractional CFO is somebody going forward. How do we get to the next level?

[00:19:11] Brent: If somebody’s just starting let’s and they want, they, A year’s worth of books or two years worth of books, they’ve just done it on their own. How long would you expect somebody, like one of your team members to get them up to speed where it’s ready to. Start forecasting revenue, start for forecasting cash flow, things like 

[00:19:30] Alejandra: that.

[00:19:30] Alejandra: So it really depends. Let’s see, one year, two years, and they’ve done it all on their own. We would have to go and look at those books, make sure that, if there are any changes that we need to make. We do them in the current year. Talk to the tax accountant, like I said. And just honestly it takes a month or so to get the, to get us up to speed on like the accounting side.

[00:19:50] Alejandra: And then after that, because we need actual information, we need some really good, reliable information to do the forecasting. And then I would say like a few weeks after that, three weeks, we could probably have a model ready. We do models. Very differently than a lot of companies that I’ve worked for before.

[00:20:06] Alejandra: We don’t have a one size fits all kind of issue because everybody has, different business models and not also a different business growth as well. So there’s a lot of things that small companies don’t need and they probably find overwhelming. So we basically have standardized models already.

[00:20:23] Alejandra: We have a small model and we have a more complex model, and we adjust those models accordingly to the business. The, The business and the business model that we have. So with that being said, it doesn’t take as long to, to create something. But it does what could be that time delay would be the cleaning of the accounting and make sure that everything is reliable.

[00:20:45] Brent: What do you see from a mistake standpoint that entrepreneurs or business owners make when they are hiring somebody like you? and they want to try to cut costs at the same time. Is there places where you see people being cheap and maybe they should just spend the extra money on services to make sure that their books are right?

[00:21:07] Alejandra: Yeah, so I’ve seen different cases, so I’ve seen people. Hire full staff of marketing internal team, and overhead is one of those things that is the biggest driver of cost, especially for a small business. It’s one of the things that I look at. The first things that I look at are, do you have an office?

[00:21:26] Alejandra: How much are you paying for that? And how much people do you have in staff? Because you will be surprised. Fractional goes a long way when it comes to building a business. You just have to find the right partner. That’s what it goes with, everything, right? You just have to talk to people. getting a conversation.

[00:21:42] Alejandra: Go have coffee, vet them out, talk to their clients, talk to their partners, see how they’re reacting. But that would be one of the biggest pitfalls that I see is that these companies are spending a lot of money on employees, internal employees. With that comes and I don’t. Know if a lot of people are listening are in California, but if you are in California’s one of the worst states to have employees.

[00:22:04] Alejandra: It’s like the state is against you as an employer. There’s so many policies that you have to follow. It’s insane. So you could. , you could reduce that level of stress if you just go, find some agency or someone that does those services on the side and can be a good partner to you. The other one that I see is, like I said, if you are in e-commerce and you’re doing inventory is inventory wow.

[00:22:27] Alejandra: There is a, if you’ve. Find the wrong three PL company. Oh my goodness. There’s so much cost that goes with that. It’s just, and it’s a lot of cost to get out of it through PL and to get into another one. So research on the right three PL company is one of the biggest ones that I would suggest to do as well.

[00:22:44] Brent: As a business owner, do you recommend like a payroll service or do you recommend that the entrepreneur or business owner do their own? . 

[00:22:52] Alejandra: Oh, that’s a good one. So definitely a service, a payroll service. I honestly, I like everything. I’m not very techy. I like everything that’s very user friendly, user interface friendly to me.

[00:23:03] Alejandra: And I like the ones that are targeting startups because, they basically provide a lot of support and that companies do need and they’re not very bureaucratic, like older. Payroll software providers are but I’m not, I’m not here to recommend anything. But one of the big, one of the ones that we use is Gusto is very user-friendly.

[00:23:22] Alejandra: It connects with different softwares. And then I also hear that ADPs going and. Connecting, doing a thing with QuickBooks coming up soon. So that’s, that could be a good one as well. I just think that when you’re starting a company, you wanna be very e easy, make your life easy with a lot of techno technology tools, cuz it gets really complicated when you have so many at the same time.

[00:23:42] Brent: Is there a, is there an alternative to QuickBooks 

[00:23:44] Alejandra: as a small business? Oh my God, there is. There is, but is, you’ll be surprised how many people use QuickBooks. I think 90% of the population, I use QuickBooks, so there is, but QuickBooks is just makes it easy for small business owners because it’s very cost efficient, and for example, there’s NetSuite, NetID is a really good platform. , but it’s expensive. And that’s what I am saying, and they do have an in inventory management already capability in it, which makes it a fully RRP system. However, it is very costly, and this is when as a business owner, you have to make those decisions.

[00:24:21] Alejandra: It’s What is the value added for the software that I will be buying is if I’m spending $30,000 a year for the software, what is the value that I’m getting out of it? How many employees do I have that are you gonna be using it? And then from there determine if this is worth the investment or not.

[00:24:37] Alejandra: So that’s where we go with the companies that’s. Probably use QuickBooks online because it’s very cost efficient. You can connect it with other tools, but there’s ma As you grow your business, I, if it makes sense, go for it. If it doesn’t make sense to put those 20, 30 grand in a system, then don’t go for it.

[00:24:55] Alejandra: Just continue, using tools that work for you. 

[00:24:59] Brent: Is there, can you highlight challenges? So you mentioned e-commerce in selling a product. Is there challenges in selling a service as a, as a. . 

[00:25:08] Alejandra: Oh, always. There’s always challenges. . Oh my goodness. There’s so many challenges. Yes. One of the biggest challenges, it is credibility.

[00:25:15] Alejandra: Making sure, obviously when you’re, when I see it from a small business owner point of view, when you is your baby, Especially the finances. This is go to finances. Oh wow, somebody’s gonna handle my finances. You wanna make sure this person is really vetted and wonder what they’re speaking to.

[00:25:31] Alejandra: And I a hundred percent agree with that. Also marketing service is another one. That is, there’s presents a lot of challenges because marketing’s all about results. It’s not about the process. While the finance and the accounting is all about the process. , about the results.

[00:25:43] Alejandra: So you just have to, it is always, there’s always a challenge no matter what you sell. For me, the biggest challenge is people like me, they talk to me, they meet me, they’re like, oh she’s very pleasant. But I look very young. I’m not gonna lie. You’re looking at me right now.

[00:25:56] Alejandra: I look very young and people are like, oh my gosh. She has that much experience. How old was she when she graduated high school? And when they look at my experie, My experience will talk for itself. So if you do feel like there is a way to vet more of your service, providers, you can always ask for references for clients, for partners, for, just to see what they’re doing for other people.

[00:26:18] Alejandra: And, at the end of the day is, find a partner that has flexibility as well. on a contract. If you don’t like them, goodbye, there’s no oh my God, you, I have to pay this. I have to do that. I have no, it has to be somebody that’s easy because at the end of the day, you’re is your business and you wanna make sure you have the right partners in place.

[00:26:36] Brent: If you had a piece of advice going into this fourth quarter in these high interest rate times to a business owner, what would that be? 

[00:26:44] Alejandra: Start looking to cut costs. Right Now, look at the areas of like I, we just talked a few about overhead costs, right? Unfortunately there is a lot of people being laid off right now because of that reason.

[00:26:55] Alejandra: But. It shouldn’t be that way if you were vetting your costs at an early, earlier time this year, right? Because inflation has been coming for a long time already. So just be proactive look ahead. That would be my first advice. Look ahead, look at your cash burn. Start looking into those weekly cash flow models that I always, you know, monthly cash flow models will tell you so much, but if you look at a weekly standpoint and see exactly what’s driving the number in, you will see there is a lot of areas that you can, lower down those costs.

[00:27:23] Alejandra: The other one is, it was probably better back a few months ago to get into a line of credit, Kind of use that money now, the interest rate are so high, I don’t even recommend it. Just start initiating those conversations with a lot of financial institutions to see what they offer in the near future.

[00:27:42] Alejandra: Because the, the interest rates will come down. It’s, as the government continues to push, they will come down at some point. So the cost of capital will, will become cheaper. Just start initiating those conversations now and be, prepare, be proactive in this time. 

[00:27:56] Brent: Yeah, I’ve always heard that the best time to ask for cash from a bank is when you don’t need it at all.

[00:28:02] Brent: Exactly. , when you absolutely need it, that’s when they don’t want to give it to you. . Yeah. You, you mentioned weekly and monthly cash flow models and that’s how you can help cut expenses. Do you, so you recommend looking at the detail within that cash flow to help you see where that money’s going?

[00:28:15] Alejandra: Yeah. So this is the thing with the monthly one. So the monthly is a very undirect cash flow model. It takes the activity of the balance. Just to see what’s happening. But on a weekly basis, it is very direct. And you can monitor that on a weekly basis. Just to assess where you standing and when is It tells you by week when your cash is running out.

[00:28:34] Alejandra: If you’re running out of cash on January 3rd, that’s when you’re running out of cash with everything else that you’re being forecast, you’re meeting those forecast numbers and it helps you be proactive in your budget If you say, okay, I’m running out of cash on January 3rd. , that’s not a lot of runway.

[00:28:49] Alejandra: We don’t have, external capital coming. Let’s cut down what are the budget areas that we can minimize to bring it to February, at least one more month. That it helps you be really proactive in identifying those areas of opportunity. And then if you need to ask, do a fundraising round, then it gives you at least that lag time.

[00:29:08] Alejandra: Okay, two more months to get really out there and ask for. 

[00:29:13] Brent: Perfect. Alejandra, as we close up the podcast, I give the guests a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like. What would you like to plug today? 

[00:29:20] Alejandra: It is Black Friday coming up, so make sure that you have your inventory.

[00:29:27] Alejandra: If you’re using something like Shopify or e-commerce, make sure your inventories are set up correctly cuz that way you don’t have a future headaches in the, once everything is done, make sure that you have your follow ups correct, coming out to all those new customers, make sure that you have some retained strategy for the new customers coming in and purchasing your product.

[00:29:46] Alejandra: So I would just say there’s actually a blog from OK Kendo I can share it with you and I just head over. There is a few tips of coming from different experts on how to prepare for Black Friday, cyber Monday for you to make a lot of money and cut a lot of headaches. . 

[00:30:01] Brent: That’s awesome. Yeah, I appreciate that.

[00:30:03] Brent: We don’t often get different types of industries that you’re giving advice for. Thank you so much for that. Alejandro Sandro, Santo, sorry. is the CEO and founder of Startup Tandem. Thank you so much for being here today. 

[00:30:17] Alejandra: Thank you brand. This was so much fun. Mutual Gusto, .

Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Talk Commerce. Please rate this episode wherever you download your podcast. We are actively looking for people to participate in the Free Joke Project. Go to talk hyphen commerce.com and sign up for your free spot on the Free Joke Project. If you are a business, I will do a 32nd elevator.

In the spot to help promote your business. That’s talk hyphen commerce.com.

An Entrepreneurial Journey in Comic Books and Toilets with Alex Teller

Magento’s life as an ecommerce solution has been a roller coaster ride.

Alex Teller is more excited about the future of the platform than ever. Alex talks about the flexibility of Magento and how it powered his business for over a decade. He dives into marketing and social media topics and more.

Transcript

[00:03:00] Brent: Welcome to this magenta edition of Talk Commerce. Today I have Alex Teller. Alex is the CEO O of home. Perfect. Alex, go ahead, introduce yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in 

[00:03:13] Alex: life. Yep. My name is Alex Teller. I am the CEO O of Home. Perfect. We sell faucets and sinks brand name, luxury products.

[00:03:21] Alex: We’ve been in business for about 10. Business is on Magenta. I’ve been a magenta enthusiast for quite some time. And when I’m not in front of the computer breaking my head, trying to fix stuff, I like to collect old comic books. 

[00:03:36] Brent: Yeah. And I, we both met at Meet Magenta, New York and that was fascinating cuz my first experience in mag.

[00:03:43] Brent: With a client was on a comic book site and I can’t even remember the name now, but it’s been like 12 years. , you don’t remember the name? I know it’s not terrible. Yeah, that’s terrible. Anyways. did. I will look for it after the show and if I can find it, I’ll even put a link on the episode notes.

[00:03:58] Brent: So before we get into this what we’re gonna talk about, I do have an important project called the Free Joke Project. It’s hashtag free joke project. And I was, I’m gonna tell a joke to Alex. All I would like is just a reaction. The idea is, should these jokes be open source or are they like paywall?

[00:04:17] Brent: Okay, so they’re very short. Here we go. 

[00:04:20] Brent: Dude. I know. Geez. Yeah. Maybe we should open source. 

[00:04:23] Alex: This should be open source and patched and fixed for a decade. Before it’s stable, 

[00:04:27] Brent: we’re gonna have to do two.

[00:04:28] Brent: Now I’m gonna re, I’m gonna start, I’m gonna do my second joke. Ready. A ghost walks into a bar. The bartender says, sorry, we don’t serve spirits.

[00:04:40] Alex: That’s so 

[00:04:40] Brent: stupid. Yes. Very stupid

[00:04:45] Brent: All right. All right,

[00:04:50] Brent: I appreciate that. You gotta pay for a joke. That good? Yes. All right. So redo on the first one. The adjective from metal is metallic, but not so for iron, which is ironic.

[00:05:02] Brent: Yeah, I don’t know about that one. Yeah. Good thing I screwed it up to start with, but I feel 

[00:05:05] Alex: bad cuz it’s cuz the, I don’t know about that is like saying, oh, that should be open source. But I love 

[00:05:10] Brent: open source. Yeah. All right, good. I apologize. I could get a 

[00:05:13] Alex: tattoo. I would get the canoe public license across my back.

[00:05:17] Brent: There you go. Perfect. Yeah. Open source license 3.0. So yeah. Yeah. Alex, tell us a little bit about your journey. Commerce and how you started home. Perfect. 

[00:05:29] Alex: Yeah. I was always buying and selling on eBay. I would say eBay is my favorite to this day, still my favorite website ever. Because I do enjoy a, I do always have a collectible sort of nature to me.

[00:05:40] Alex: So I was buying, selling on eBay, and back then it might have been, I think I was like selling package software or DVDs. It, it was a while ago. It I’ve been buying and selling on eBay for so long that I was getting checks in the mail and I wasn’t even old enough to get a bank account. My parents needed to go in and sign me up so I could go deposit the checks and then PayPal came out and it was a game changer for me as I, I started to, just get the money straight to.

[00:06:07] Alex: So I was buying and selling on eBay, and then I knew I wanted to get into more e-commerce. And my father’s an architect and he put me in touch with some people that had access to some faucets and some sinks, and we hit the ground running and we’ve been in business ever since. . That’s 

[00:06:23] Brent: awesome.

[00:06:23] Brent: And so you got, you went from eBay to e-commerce? I know my wife had a business on eBay for a long time and a different type of business. So what, tell, just tell a little bit about what were you selling on eBay and how 

[00:06:34] Alex: to I’m still on eBay. My eBay username is comic pu. , ah, so 

[00:06:39] Brent: I understand what you’re selling.

[00:06:40] Brent: It’s not 

[00:06:40] Alex: Home Furniture. 89.8% positive feedback. One guy gave me negative 

[00:06:45] Brent: feedback. Oh, that’s frustrating. I’ll 

[00:06:47] Alex: say that I, it was for a heat sink that I forgot to include. It was a heat sink and fan that I forgot to include the backplate for, and it got shipped internationally. So the dude within I don’t know why this guy bought it from me, but I ripped it out of an old computer.

[00:06:59] Alex: I upgraded and I got 15 bucks. And the 15 bucks was not worth that one negative feedback to this 

[00:07:05] Brent: day. Yeah, no kidding. My, my experience, so I all, I had a, I used to have a retail computer store. I sold it. I ended up with a ton of inventory that everybody said was bad. I sold it all in eBay. It was amazing.

[00:07:17] Brent: And nothing came back. So anyways let’s keep moving. So e you sold it all on. I sold 

[00:07:23] Alex: everything. This is, you guys made more money on it for some of it. Yeah. This is a, you never 

[00:07:26] Brent: sold it for in the store. It was crazy. Yeah. This was in the nineties, but yeah, some of the 

[00:07:30] Alex: stuff, if you held onto it, it’s probably worth 10 times the amount, if it was like boxed computer games that are, like boxed Sierra games or something.

[00:07:36] Brent: I wish I, I also had a retail store called CD Rom City, so I’m dating myself now. 

[00:07:42] Alex: I update yourself. It’s all good, man. I was there, I was clipping the coupon for Comp U USA on Saturdays going on my gosh, Sundays getting the mail-in. I love that I paid 90 bucks for EDOs, 16 gigs of Ram, and I loved it,

[00:07:55] Brent: So we won’t go into let’s keep moving forward instead. thought it was the best deal. I was so excited. So tell us a little bit about your current Your current store and what you’re doing and is it a hundred percent commerce, e-commerce, I should 

[00:08:07] Alex: say? Yep. It’s a hundred percent e-commerce.

[00:08:10] Alex: Home Perfect is b2c. We have a large database. We have about 250,000 s skews and we have so many different product attributes cuz we have so many different product types. If it’s something like a toilet has a one piece toilet and a two piece toilet, and they might have required accessories that are different.

[00:08:29] Alex: One might chip LTL freight, one might chip X ground. There’s so many different elongated toilets, round toilets. There’s so many different product attributes and attribute sets that cuz of just the breadth of product mix. I felt like I almost had no choice to, to be on Magento. I think Magento has been a good fit for me because of that.

[00:08:49] Brent: Yep. When you were evaluating platforms, did you look at other ones to try to do your store on? 

[00:08:55] Alex: Yeah, so back in 2012, we were on something called the Venda platform. It was software as a service before it was cool, right? Back when it just sucked when it didn’t work. Now Venda was okay, but it got acquired by NetSuite, I think.

[00:09:11] Alex: And at the time we we knew we needed to move to Magenta, so we did. And Magenta one worked very well for us for many years. When it came time to migrating to two, I did debate on whether or not I should move to another option. I had a layout, right? I was like, maybe I’ll go to Shopify, or maybe WooCommerce were the two that I was bouncing around on.

[00:09:33] Alex: But I felt the number of SKUs and the attributes would’ve been an issue on Shopify for me and commerce. I just, as much as I like geeking out I was familiar enough with Magenta that, I have a business to run, at the end of the. I’m the ceo, right? Not cto, right? So as much as I love technology, I need to sell faucets on the internet and toilets, right?

[00:09:51] Alex: How can I just keep the business running while, upgrading the software? I took the plunge to two. It was a little bit rocky at first. I would say the performance for large databases wasn’t there until maybe for me personally, I saw the improvements at two 40 or maybe two 40.

[00:10:08] Alex: But now it is very stable for me. I’m very happy being on it and I’m really finally getting to enjoy all the new technology and new benefits I have of being on it. And I’m having fun with it. So I’m glad now that I made that switch 

[00:10:20] Brent: and I think you’re in a particular market space that has a lot of, like you had mentioned attributes and those are just parts of a product that can ide be identified.

[00:10:30] Brent: And in Magento’s case, they worked also to make configurables and child products. So if you think about on Amazon that left. When you’re navigating, that’s your attributes. Just for our listeners who aren’t under don’t understand the concept the, your particular market is very attuned to having very complicated products that can balloon your skew count.

[00:10:55] Brent: Maybe talk about the challenges of having so many SKUs and. How you’ve worked as a merchant to make customers be able to find the right product when they need to. Yeah. 

[00:11:06] Alex: In short Brent, it sucks. Let’s take for example, the lighting industry. The lighting industry will create, new products and they’ll already have a skew count of 2000 codes, and then they’ll just discontinue on a whim the next year.

[00:11:17] Alex: They might not have even produced some of these things. They just keep throwing stuff out there and put it on. And sometimes the information is so bare from the vendor, but at the same time, we have the information when we when we go on their website. So at the end of the day, I think our customers know what they want.

[00:11:36] Alex: We’re not really looking for the customer who is oh I wanna redo my bathroom or kitchen, but I don’t know what I want. We’re very much looking for people that come into us, the Brandon part. . And when they do, we wanna at least be able to have that brand at part number, that image and offer, ideally a compelling price for them.

[00:11:51] Alex: And we really want them to come to us, not just for one item, but for a whole list. Because we have salespeople that will walk them through a quote and make sure it’s compelling enough. Or we have a members only price club that uses the magenta cart rules to, if they log in a lot of the prices might be heavily discounted and make it compelling for them to use us.

[00:12:08] Alex: So that’s where. We want you to go to a maybe showroom first or maybe discover the product that you want somewhere else, but then come to us for the best deal. Yeah. You mentioned 

[00:12:18] Brent: price rules. Do you have ways to get your average cart value up in, in terms of when they’re navigating through your site, you wanna recommend other products, things like 

[00:12:27] Alex: that?

[00:12:28] Alex: I would say that’s 1000000% credit is given where credit is due to our recommendations, our AI-driven recomme. We analyzed years of sales history and we started with maybe maybe a more dumb AI, if you would call it, right? Just saying, which products were most often purchased with these products.

[00:12:44] Alex: But now that we’ve gotten more information and every sale makes trains that and gets that smarter, we’re now able to maybe use the category data to boost and optimize which related products we show. . It really helps, it, sometimes a customer might come in and say, oh, I, I didn’t know I needed this in-wall tank carrier for this toilet.

[00:13:02] Alex: I don’t know if we personally want that customer, but at least we show it or we show the seat that goes with the toilet or we show maybe a sink and faucet that other customer had purchased. So it’s definitely very detail oriented for us. It needs to be exact and. And we’re not selling a pair of sneakers.

[00:13:19] Alex: Somebody’s not just swapping out their faucet cuz they like a black one one day and a gold one tomorrow. They’re making that investment for a while. 

[00:13:27] Brent: Yeah. And I think recommendations is something that really scales especially as you grow your traffic and as more people, as you start collecting that information for what other customers are doing, that’s where it really comes into play.

[00:13:40] Brent: Do you mind telling us which recommendation engineer you’re using for, you mentioned ai, so are you using a outbound Outbranded one. 

[00:13:49] Alex: Oh, yeah. I’m. I really value the close relationship I have with my host and provider cloud machines.io. I think they specialize in large databases and and large catalogs.

[00:13:59] Alex: And I think in particular they developed the they developed a software called computer ai, which is like product information management and also AI recommendations. I think I was like an alpha partner and now they’re going to market pretty soon.

[00:14:14] Alex: And adding some new clients. So I’m really excited about what they’ve done with me and for them to be able to offer that to other customers. 

[00:14:22] Brent: What would, if you, if somebody were to come to you and say, I’m so afraid of machine learning how would you get, how would you encourage another merchant to embrace the idea of machine learning?

[00:14:33] Alex: I can really say it comes down to cost for us merchants, some solutions are just too costly and I personally can’t sign a contract. I, I. Spend crazy amounts on budget. I have to allocate a certain amount towards ads and I have to stay profitable. I’m not a company that’s looking for I, I looked into you, Brent you said something about how, like you had loss of leaders at your software store, but we’re looking to make money on every order.

[00:15:01] Alex: And, I’m not saying we’re gouging our customers. We’re we’re delivering a competitive price, but we can’t give away these items. We need to we need to make. And if we start spending a lot on very expensive features, we could just kill our whole budget. If somebody is scared about the concept of ai, me personally, if I were to, as somebody who’s probably more computer geek than most business path sorts of people, I would just show them the price and tell them that they have nothing to lose if it’s priced well enough and if it if there’s really no.

[00:15:32] Brent: Yeah, I think I’ve talked to a number of different, say, fraud providers and they use AI to help help with the transactions to make sure, hey, is this a fraudulent transaction, non fraudulent? And always give the example of a client that we had in Mexico who had a call center that would call every single merchant to make sure that it’s the right merchant, right?

[00:15:52] Brent: And at some point that just doesn’t scale anymore. , like you want to fulfill that item. And I think anything that has to do where machine learning can help you as a merchant scale your business, that’s where it works. And Adobe has a sensei, which it’s, it sounds is very similar to what you had in, in your competitor.

[00:16:13] Brent: Do ai. There are so many computer AI or competing to win computers already. . Yes. Computer . Sorry about that computer. Yeah, there’s just so many different places where you can get wins and I think people need to embrace it more. And the other thing is that it has to learn, like it needs to be there.

[00:16:29] Brent: It has to start collecting data, and it has to learn from it, but it 

[00:16:32] Alex: needs, but cost is so prohibitive. Just to use your example of fraud, there’s so many and I see the I see the potential and I see why there’s fraud, fraud companies out there. But me personally, just to, shed some light on what I use for fraud.

[00:16:44] Alex: I have max mine filters, right? And I pay them a very nominal fee per transaction to, allocate thresholds that I’ll then review. And I’ll am I self-insured? Yes. But if I, went with a company that insures me on those frauds too, the cost would just be completely not make sense.

[00:17:01] Alex: So that’s the solution that I did and I put a lot of faith in MaxMind to, to machine learning and catch the frauds for me. But I’ve been very fortunate and very observant and and I like the software and I think that it does work for me, so I was able to keep costs down by doing that.

[00:17:16] Brent: As a medium sized merchant how do you find competing against the big stores like Home Depot or Lowe’s or something like that? Do you find that because you’re so targeted in what you’re doing, that you’re getting, you’re offering a much better value for what the clients are getting, getting?

[00:17:30] Brent: think Home Depot, 

[00:17:30] Alex: Maybe is better for a lot of things. If you came to me and you were like, Hey, I want a new toilet, Alex, and I’m in California. And I’m like, okay, Brent, what toilet do you want? And you’re like, oh, I saw this one at Home Depot. It’s 150 bucks. I would say, go to Home Depot, definitely go to Home Depot and while you’re there, pick off Faucet because that toilet for me to ship to you.

[00:17:50] Alex: If I wasn’t, shipping directly from a west coast fulfillment center, which I can do with Magenta with msi, it’s so expensive to ship something like. I almost don’t even want the sale. It might get damaged and it’s not really a luxury toilet. If you take, for example, the total nere, which is really cool, and it has a integrated heated Bday seat, and I tell everyone, you’re aple.

[00:18:09] Alex: If you don’t have a bday, you gotta have one. That $150 boy doesn’t have that. And it doesn’t have an autoclose lid promised air de odor. It doesn’t have a concealed connection, so you don’t even see the wires. But that total nearest toilet costs 3000 bucks, so it’s different customers and for us, we’re trying to give them the best possible product at a good price.

[00:18:31] Brent: So the niche part of it or the specific market segment that you’re serving serves you well because you’re working on being a targeted, you’re targeting certain types of clients and what you’re doing, and that’s been successful as that’s a good representation. 

[00:18:46] Alex: Yeah. I, all the time and even my father will be like I gotta, I need a new light fixture for a rental place in Brooklyn, and I’ll be like, , let’s go to Home Depot,

[00:18:55] Alex: Let’s go do it, man, this is 150 bucks. They do a great job with lighting, so everyone and or let’s go on Amazon and let’s, let’s find something that, whatever it is, there’s just different customers, like different things, and there’s enough of a market that what we offer is really more granted, luxury.

[00:19:13] Brent: What do you think is the most exciting thing right now in the e-commerce space? What’s getting you 

[00:19:18] Alex: excited about it? I would say personally the amount of ai in terms of recommendations and ways to retarget customers. But I think the costs have finally gotten to the point where it makes sense for someone like me a couple years ago, even something like email marketing platforms.

[00:19:34] Alex: They were so expensive for what you got. And then, value added services of recommendations. It just put me, it’s gonna rock in a hard place cause I value software and I truly understand why it costs that. But I personally, if I just started, buying the best I wouldn’t be able to stay in business how I do it.

[00:19:53] Alex: So I think we’re at like an exciting stage. . Certain things have gotten more complex to pull off, but certain things are also more possible to pull off for less money. So I’m excited to delve deep into that and make it work for me.

[00:20:04] Brent: So you’d mentioned you mentioned email marketing. I’m in a business group and our topic, one of the topics that came up on Tuesday was, people think that social media is gonna be your savior as a merchant. How do you determine how much I should do on Google ads, on, on social media, on, on just an email or a blog post or whatever?

[00:20:24] Brent: How do you break out 

[00:20:25] Alex: different that like a good buddy of mine has silver age comics.com, a site that we helped make on. It’s still on Magenta one, but it works for. And he does a lot of sales on Instagram. We’re selling vintage comics on Instagram and we’ll go live and we’ll have a couple drinks and sell.

[00:20:39] Alex: We sold like a $25,000 low grade copy of the first appearance of the flash on Instagram, which is crazy, and we’ll sell a ton of a hundred dollars books and $50 books, but you get a $25,000 sale on Instagram is nuts. And for him something like social is more important for. , A lot of our customers aren’t really on it that much.

[00:20:58] Alex: They’ll be like, they don’t even really know how to use a computer that well sometimes, or they don’t care, like they just, they know what they want and they want a good price and they know they’re gonna get a tracking number in an email and, so while for this particular business, certain things aren’t embraced in terms of allocating marketing budgets, I would say yeah, there’s more budgeted on Google, right?

[00:21:18] Alex: Or. , but but on other businesses it could be everything.

[00:21:25] Brent: Yeah. Yeah you took the answer out of my mouth. It is specific to businesses and I think as you’re even getting into B2B more, the social aspect of it isn’t as important as. Some of the other channels you have to help market your business. I think that one thing I know Gary Vi always says is, if it’s there, try it.

[00:21:44] Brent: Don’t and test it. Don’t, please don’t. I, 

[00:21:46] Alex: what do you do for testing some? I was talking to ca at the meet magenta after party right before I talked to you, and he was like, Hey man you know who you remind me of, dude? Like you remind me of. And I was like, bro, like I, I please, I’m not, like I’m my own person.

[00:22:01] Alex: And he’s nah, but you probably go to the flea markets and stuff. I’m like yeah. I go to the flea markets and you probably buy a bunch of things. I’m like yeah, I do that. But I just I don’t know. I’m not really the, I very much get a thrill from a from an actual sale, but I’m not gonna like say something more broad.

[00:22:15] Alex: I’m very specific and maybe that just comes. Having more of a technical background as well, 

[00:22:19] Brent: yeah, no I, so what I was gonna say is that testing things and trying things out are always important and I guess going back to social media, how much do you test on those social platforms to see if it’s gonna. Cr if it’s going to bring you some business from those, are they gonna convert to a sale if you did 

[00:22:38] Alex: videos on?

[00:22:39] Alex: Yeah. Probably not for the $4,000 toilet, but maybe for the $300 washlet seat. The thing is you never want to get too comfortable just doing one thing, and you always want to try everything. But sometimes that fear of missing out You get grounded when it’s a grounding feeling when before you know it, you have no more money left than your bank account.

[00:22:57] Alex: So it’s it’s a humbling feeling to be like I have no money to do this. Or and I’m not saying we don’t have the money to do it, I’m just saying, you always need to think from the perspective of maintaining, a profit line. 

[00:23:09] Brent: Yeah. So fear of missing out is a great, it’s a great example.

[00:23:13] Brent: And then also the capacity and the bandwidth to do all those different things you’d like to try. That’s 

[00:23:16] Alex: amazing too, Brent. It’s amazing to not get off the, just to say social media is incredible. The fact that we could go on Instagram at midnight from my friend’s com shop in Queens and get, 200 people in a stream, a hundred people in a stream and have people just buy is such an amazing sort.

[00:23:33] Alex: Feeling like it’s so empowering to be like we just made our own home shopping network, like feeling it with our own, we’re, we’re probably a little bit, we’re cracking jokes and we’re being a little bit Wayne’s worldy, but it’s but the customer likes it too, and that creates like a personal relationship, like I ran into a guy after we did that show, and he was like, yo, man, like you’re the guy.

[00:23:50] Alex: Drinking, like your cup was like it looked like you were drinking a cup of pee, bro. And I’m like, what are you talking about, dude? It was like I think it was like Gatorade , but it’s but the guy was watching, like you had a captive audience and he remembered and he came up to you and it’s and that didn’t cost anything, it was free and it was sincere and it was memorable.

[00:24:06] Alex: So it, depending on what you’re doing, it could be the most important thing. 

[00:24:12] Brent: Do you think as we’re going into the future for content and conversational content the content that’s wrapped around each piece of your products like is if you have a skew that’s one of that $3,000 five toilet writing, $5,000 toilet, sorry.

[00:24:27] Brent: Are, is that content around that? Say you’re writing blog posts or social or whatever, or, yeah, maybe more blog posts that, that’s pointing to that content. Educating people on why that, what’s about that and the features and breaking that content into larger content. It’s totally important. Is that more important now, 

[00:24:43] Alex: what’d you say?

[00:24:44] Alex: It’s totally important. Is that more? Yeah. Yeah. It’s also not our own brand, right? If I had my own private label Washlet, I would be doing even more, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, I have thousands of codes and I get information from vendors and then I can use like a software like computer to get more information from vendors.

[00:25:05] Alex: But I can’t, like I, there’s only so many hours in a day and I can keep going and I can keep adding. And maybe some good reviews help, but I’m a B2C and I’m selling something that people can get in a lot of different places. I think what’s compelling about me is they’re getting a great deal.

[00:25:19] Brent: You mentioned you mentioned having you mentioned b2c. You and you mentioned having the email earlier. And we always hear email is dying or email is dead. Your email list, are they still bringing in good Yes. Returns and do you see email going into the future? 

[00:25:36] Alex: Yes, they’re bringing traffic.

[00:25:38] Alex: I think, you get so many emails every day that they all board together to be like nothing. But you do see traffic and you see like an interesting, sometimes I’ll look at Google Analytics and I’ll be like, man, I sent this email like three months ago. This guy just bought this and it if the more you do, the more you get.

[00:25:54] Alex: Are our emails a little bit spammy? We’re throwing a lot of coupon codes, and are they targeted to an extent? Somebody renovates their house once every few years, ideally you’re trying to get some contractors maybe, or some architects or designers and give them, some sort of incentive to to work with you directly in bulk.

[00:26:09] Alex: But I don’t think it’s going away. . Do you think it’s going away, 

[00:26:12] Brent: Brent? No. I think email’s gonna remain strong. I saw a tweet the other day that we need a spam folder for texting though. And I would say that texting can get super annoying. And I’ve signed up for a couple of different brands for, they say, we’ll text you every once in a while to send you a coupon and then all of a sudden I’m getting a text twice a week.

[00:26:30] Alex: Yeah, I get a text from a gun range. Me and my wife she’s from Texas. We go to near her house’s, like a, there’s an archery range on the second floor and a gun range on the first floor. And we just did archery there like once, and they send me texts. They’re like come to Valentine’s Day at Saddle River Range.

[00:26:46] Alex: Like extra ammo is half price. And I’m like, I like it, but it’s, it’s lost on me. I’m in Brooklyn. Yeah. I’m not going to Saddle River Ranch for 

[00:26:53] Brent: Valentine’s Day. . Maybe that’d be something that you should try this year. 

[00:26:58] Alex: I would definitely do it if I was there. Just shout out to Saddle River Rage guys.

[00:27:02] Alex: The texting’s working guys 

[00:27:03] Brent: keep texting me. Yeah, I read it. I guess the point on the points I’m trying to make is that there is a tipping point email. We don’t want texting to turn, like people say, my texting inbox is something that I, everybody reads the text at some point. 

[00:27:16] Alex: Yeah. Unless it’s five or eight prints from high school.

[00:27:19] Alex: Yeah. . 

[00:27:19] Brent: There you go. The text group that goes around and around. Yeah. I hear ya. Yeah. If you had some kind of nugget to tell a merchant that in it that they should be doing, maybe what they could still do for Black Friday, but then what’s, what they should be doing as they’re planning into quarter one of next year, what would that be?

[00:27:38] Alex: Yeah, so I never do any code upgrades. Right around now I just because, especially with Magento, I’m just like, oh God, I might not realize something else went wrong, for another month. And then it’s a trickle down effect. And then I’m breaking my head on, who knows where, Christmas dinner or Thanksgiving dinner, right?

[00:27:54] Alex: Like just fixing something, which has happened. But like I, I think. , for Black Friday, you just want to get organized and say, what are you doing? What am I gonna do? What are my sales gonna be? Am I offering coupon codes? Make sure the, for us Google promotions are really important.

[00:28:07] Alex: Google ads are really important. Submitting, leaking the coupons and just making sure you know you’re ready because there’s so many things to switch. Weeding up to Black Friday only to then switch it all. , right? Like you’re like, man, I have coupon codes and I’m lowering prices and then I’m activating this and it’s only for this day and then this day and then like once Black Friday’s over, oh my god, cyber Monday.

[00:28:28] Alex: And then, everyone should know Cyber Monday is gonna be extended to Cyber Tuesday, but come that Wednesday, you’re stuck reverting a lot of stuff back. And if you don’t, all your marketing efforts might get mixed up and might cause a trickle down effect of a headache. Just be organized.

[00:28:41] Alex: Yeah. It’s 

[00:28:42] Brent: a plan. Organized, make sure I like that. I I think a lot of people don’t think about the fact that maybe they didn’t turn off their coupon codes after a certain time. And certainly magenta, it’s easy to just make the coupon codes stop working on the day after Cyber Monday or whatever, whenever you want to stop it.

[00:28:56] Brent: Yeah, it 

[00:28:57] Alex: is. But if you don’t do it right it’s like somebody’s adding that extra 5% on something where you only had or it’s just like, oh no and then it’s like, what do you do, as the years go on, it becomes more difficult to like, reach out to the customer and explain to them what you 

[00:29:07] Brent: did.

[00:29:07] Brent: Right. Alex, as I close out, as we finish out the podcast, to give everybody an opportunity to do a shameless plug about anything you’d like to plug. It could be your business or any, anything, your school or something a anything you’d like to plug. What would you like to plug today? 

[00:29:22] Alex: Sure. If you happened to acquired any comic books that’s say 10 cent or 12 cents on the cover price.

[00:29:28] Alex: Maybe some 15. None of that new stuff. Don’t, hit me up and be like, oh, I got these, nineties books. I don’t want ’em one or two of them, but not all of them hit me up. You could even email Alex home perfect.com, Instagram Web seven nyc. I’m born and raised in Manhattan or on eBay at comment palooza.

[00:29:46] Alex: I’m always buying, I’m paying cash for your collectibles. And in particular 1960s Marvel books. I can give you a good deal and I’d love to buy bulk and I buy collections. I buy inheritances. I’ll go anywhere and I’ll come to you. And let’s just, let’s buy these books. I like to keep some of them for myself.

[00:30:02] Alex: I am a collector too, but I do also sell. 

[00:30:05] Brent: Awesome. It sounds like you should also have a online comic. . 

[00:30:11] Alex: Maybe I do. . 

[00:30:13] Brent: That’s awesome. . Alex, thanks so much for being here today. It’s been an enjoyable conversation and I wish you all the best on your your B F C M as they like to say nowadays. 

[00:30:22] Alex: Yeah, but it’s B F C M ct.

[00:30:25] Alex: What is the ct? Black Friday? Cyber Monday. Cyber Tuesday. Extended. 

[00:30:30] Brent: Extended. There you go. And then we’ll call it Christmas in July soon. Yeah. 

[00:30:36] Alex: God. I don’t, I think it’ll just be year round. Honestly, with us it’s always year round. If you join our perfect Members only Price Club and you sign into your account, all the prices are cut in half.

[00:30:44] Alex: So every day is Black Friday at home. Perfect. We’re just trying to get you the best possible deal on your full renovation. 

[00:30:50] Brent: Awesome. I will put all these links into the show notes and I appreciate you being here today. Thank you, Alex. 

[00:30:56] Alex: Thank you, Brent.

The Drop-Ship Breakthrough with Ben Knegendorf

Ben Knegendorf is the co-founder of DropShipBreakThru.com, where he teaches people to start an e-commerce business in the next 30 days for $500 or less.

Transcript

[00:02:40] Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Ben Korf. He’s a co-founder of drop Ship breakthrough. But I’m gonna let Ben introduce himself. Tell us what your day-to-day role is, and maybe one of your passions.

[00:02:56] Ben: Yeah. Of the co-founder of drop ship breakthrough.com, where we teach people just like you to start an e-commerce business in the next 30 days, usually for around $500 or less. That that’s a big, bold statement. I hope to back up here. But to our passion, I saw the Minnesota on your wall.

[00:03:08] Ben: I am just over the border and I’m the absolute Minnesota twins junkie. Baseball runs through my blades for sure, runs through my veins. 

[00:03:17] Brent: That’s awesome. I just interviewed somebody who helped with, she was a teacher in the seventies, and she had a bunch of the early twins in her class. And it was, not early twins.

[00:03:29] Brent: The twins kids in their class before baseball got big money and people stuck around. So Tony Oliva still lives in the Twin Cities. Anybody’s baseball fans would know that. Rod crew, we might be back. I don’t know. Anyways Ben I know I warned you before we get started that I’m just gonna tell you a joke and you’re gonna tell me if that joke should be free or if we should charge for it.

[00:03:50] Brent: So here we go. Losing my hair made me sad. So I bought a cheap wig. It was a small price to.

[00:03:59] Ben: I think you should not charge for that one. . Okay. 

[00:04:03] Brent: I agree. That was a stretchy. All right. I’ll agree with you. Okay. So can I throw one back 

at 

[00:04:07] Ben: you then since we’re here? Yeah, go. Let’s do it. Tell me, how do mermaids wash their fins?

[00:04:12] Ben: How tied ? 

[00:04:14] Brent: Let’s see. That’s a good one. I like that. I’ll, I might reuse it. , actually, we’ll publish that one. Good. All right. Nice. Yeah. Free joke project. All right. Alright, so today we’re gonna drop, we’re gonna talk about drop shipping. We in our green room, I mentioned that, we’re a magenta partner and for 13 years now and all of our clients have done drop shipping, but I think you have some ways to get people into the business.

[00:04:36] Brent: So tell us a little bit about your story and why you decided to do that or this. 

[00:04:41] Ben: Yeah, I mean it all started quite a few years back, right? I was working at a Walmart distribution center and the holy grail, there was first shift, like your whole goal was to just get the first shift. It took me seven years to get there in this building, and I got there and I remember walking in and just everyone looked dead inside and I was like, oh my God, I’m 29.

[00:04:57] Ben: I’ve. Quote unquote made it at this job. Maybe I’ll become a coach again, cuz we’re all a team. Give me a w. But there’s, this was it. And I was very disappointed with what I saw. I was disappointed in how everyone looked around me and I knew there had to be a better way. And so that’s when I started looking for.

[00:05:11] Ben: A way to get outta there. And honestly, at the time I was working at a warehouse. My wife was a cna. My dad worked at a warehouse and my mom was a cna and like that, that, that’s all I knew, right? And so I had lived up to the box that was built around me and it took a little effort to look around at other ideas and start experimenting.

[00:05:27] Ben: Some of those were like going to clearance aisles. and flipping that stuff on eBay or Amazon, going to garage sales, things like that. Just trying to understand how to, make money while you sleep if you will or make money on the side. I just, I didn’t know anything other than go work at a warehouse.

[00:05:39] Ben: And my first pure a into this was flipping things or finding the arbitrage between clearance aisles and Amazon or fba or eBay. And then eventually I stumbled on the term drop shipping, which I’m sure many of the listeners have seen. The latest guru talking about drop shipping. I immediately was turned off by the low ticket stuff shipped from China.

[00:05:56] Ben: Stuff that really wasn’t big back then. But I did hear about high ticket drop shipping, which is basically how Wayfair got started. They had hundreds of different stores that they were selling, niche, high ticket, e-commerce, drop shipping stores that they brought together into Wayfair.

[00:06:09] Ben: And when I understood that, I was like, oh, this is, you’re building a real business here. You’re becoming a retailer. You’re selling brands people have heard of from companies within your country. And at that moment I realized, all right, this is what I want to do. This makes too much. . Yeah. 

[00:06:22] Brent: Do you think you had a little bit of that entrepreneurial spirit in you to drive you to do that?

[00:06:27] Brent: Or was it just you’re so sick of working at Walmart that you wanted to just get out of there? 

[00:06:32] Ben: Yeah, I think in hindsight I did, but I didn’t have anyone around me to spot that. So if I look back at my childhood I didn’t do, I didn’t pay attention in class, but I knew all the answers. Math was a good one.

[00:06:41] Ben: Like they would, here’s how you do complicated math. I’d have the answer in my head, and then they’d be like, you didn’t do the work this way. And I, I don’t understand why we need to do the work your way. I got the answer for you. And I was told I w wasn’t quote unquote normal. And I got told a lot of things as a kid that I think were just signs of, I’m an entrepreneur and I’m constantly questioning things and I’m unsatiable curious around everything.

[00:06:59] Ben: And I think in school they try to fit you into this little box. So in hindsight I think I saw the signs, but I don’t really think I noticed it until my mid twenties. I was big UFC fan and Joe Rogan, when somebody would get knocked out, he’d be like, oh, he got hit right on the button. So I started on the button fi gear.

[00:07:13] Ben: That was my first business I ever. Don’t ever, don’t sell clothing. People, whoever’s listening to this, don’t start a clothing line. It didn’t go super, super well, but that was, that, that was fun. Even though it sucked, it was fun. And then, realizing it didn’t work was a big l and that kind of, pushed me back down for a little bit.

[00:07:27] Ben: But look, that was my first adventure in entrepreneurship and it was fun. Like being able to solve my own problems choose my own path was fun. Yeah. 

[00:07:35] Brent: And I think, so I just wanna make a distinguish because my wife had a eBay business back. Nineties, early two thousands, and she actually had a warehouse, and I think what you’re talking about is not having an manage a large warehouse full of stuff.

[00:07:48] Brent: She did Wayfair, like every, there’s all those returns, right? There’s such a huge market for that return business. And she would get truckloads of. Stuff from where Wayfair and Fingerhut and put it onto eBay. You’re, it sounds like, just explain a little bit more about your, the model that you’re proposing and how that differs from what I just described.

[00:08:08] Ben: I actually had a buddy who did the exact same thing you just described, but did it for Golf Galaxy. And so he would go get all the trade-ins and then he would pay, pennies on the dollar and then he would flip them as well. So that’s interesting. The model I’m speaking of. So I’m sitting down currently, but I’m sitting at an Apex standing desk and so I was part of a company called Standing destination.com, which is a good example of what we teach.

[00:08:26] Ben: And we would sell these apex desks and we would. I can work through this whole process, but essentially we’d work out an agreement with Apex to become a retailer for their brand. We would go run Google, we would go acquire the customer, sell the product, then go to Apex and say, we need you to drop ship this product to our customer.

[00:08:41] Ben: And then they would charge our credit card and we would keep the arbitrage in between basically high ticket drop shipping. In a nutshell, it’s a marketing, it’s a customer acquisition and customer service business at the end of the day. Okay. Yeah. So 

[00:08:51] Brent: you’re Handl. So you’re working in effect, like a salesperson for that manufacturer and you’re, they’re, you’re arranging the sales and they’re doing the drop 

[00:09:00] Ben: shipping, correct?

[00:09:01] Ben: Yeah. But in the meantime, you’re building a real business. So I’ve referenced Wayfair. I’ll reference another one. That’s hopefully nationwide. I know it’s local to us here. Re e I is a good example. They’re very niche focused on outdoors people. And so that’s what we’re trying to build to.

[00:09:12] Ben: We’re trying to build a focused. Retail store on the internet that is not only just being a salesman for the other brands, but being a destination for anyone who’s interested in that type of product. So if you go to a standing destination, there’s articles on standing desk benefits there’s all sorts of content around the benefits of standing desk and around the brands and reviewing the brands.

[00:09:31] Ben: a destination on the internet for you to look at standing desk products versus just us being out there trying to be salesman for the brand. . 

[00:09:39] Brent: And so you’ve mentioned high ticket. How do you get started or why would you start on high ticket rather than just commodity items or lower ticket items?

[00:09:50] Ben: Yeah, I think this is what turned me on most to this business model was simple math, right? I also have a a brand myself, a pet supplements. And so I understand like the low end market, but if I want to make let’s just use $30,000 in revenue next month, and I’m selling a $30 product, I need to sell a thousand items versus if I’m selling a high ticket product that is $3,000, I need to sell 10.

[00:10:10] Ben: And you can imagine with 10 orders versus a thousand, you’re gonna need much less employees. You’re gonna have less damages in returns, you’re gonna have less overhead in general. The business model seemed to make a lot more sense for me. You could, we’ve, I have, and I have students who have grown a business as a solo operation to a seven figure business without needing the help of VAs or team members.

[00:10:29] Ben: And to me that was intriguing, especially when I was first starting out and wondering I, I didn’t know what I was doing as far as hiring a team or really doing anything. And the idea that I could work by myself and not be overwhelmed with orders or inventory or things like that was very intriguing.

[00:10:44] Brent: how do you differentiate then? Like the pluses versus having your own warehouse? I guess setting aside the fact that you don’t have to own it all. , do you have to, do you have to take back returns or do the re I’m assuming the returns go right back to the place 

they 

[00:10:58] Ben: were shipped from. Yeah, so that can vary, right?

[00:11:01] Ben: That’s gonna depend on the relationship you have with each brand that you are associated with. Everyone has their own rules. Some of ’em. Wildly creative restocking fees, we’ll just call it that. Others are like more generous than others. They’re happy to take it back. Other brands, there’s nothing you can do about it.

[00:11:16] Ben: Like it’s going back to you and you’re gonna eat that cost. And certainly I would say the, that is one part of this business model that’s a little bit out of your control. It’s like having a three pl, right? When you have a three pl, you hope they do good by you. They charge you all sorts of fees.

[00:11:27] Ben: You don’t really know what’s going on with your product. You hope it’s getting packaged well. And the only way you find out it wasn’t packaged well is when the customer complains to you. And It is a, I don’t wanna call it a downside but it’s certainly something that isn’t always fun when you’re dealing with this because it’s out of 

[00:11:40] Brent: your hands.

[00:11:41] Brent: And what about price point to get started? What do you recommend a user has or a person that wants to get started in this sort of thing? What does the pricing . 

[00:11:50] Ben: So again, I think that is one of the most appealing parts of this business model. Let’s imagine you wanted to open a franchise Taco Bell would fit right in, in your area.

[00:11:58] Ben: That’s gonna cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to get set up and running on a Taco Bell. Or if you wanna launch your own brand, likely it’s gonna cost you thousands of dollars as well. To do the research, get the samples, place a big money. Order launch Hope people enjoy your product. I prefer cash flow, and that’s why starting this model for less than 500, which I’m happy to outline here.

[00:12:14] Ben: And also everything is cash flow in the beginning makes so much sense to me. So you’re gonna need a domain, right? That’s $12. I’d like to use name chief, you can use whatever you. , you’re gonna need Shopify. I know you’re a Magiano guy, Brent, but I’m gonna say Shopify’s the way to go here for sure. $29 a month for that.

[00:12:29] Ben: You might want a paid theme. You might want to, have something customized. You definitely don’t need one. But if you do, it’s 180 to, I think they’re up to $400 now. We give Superstore from out of the sandbox. We give that to every student of our course because we do believe a paid theme is important.

[00:12:42] Ben: You’re gonna need Google Workspace so that you have Brent at your new e-commerce domain.com. Not Brent Brents Commerce store a Gmail. That’s just not super professional. You’re gonna need an 800 phone number, so I would recommend Grasshopper. That’s $40. You might need a little branding. So fiber’s a pretty easy place to go get a logo done and get some homepage images and branding and things like that for your website.

[00:13:03] Ben: And then the biggest expense you’re going to have is Google Ads. That’s where we’re gonna acquire most of our customers. Google likes to give you a coupon. Spend one 50, get one 50 or spend 500. Get 500. Definitely look for the ladder if you’re gonna start this model. And within that first, Thousand dollars of ad spend on Google.

[00:13:19] Ben: You should have acquired one customer or multiple customers where you can then roll that cash flow back into, get the snowball moving and acquire more customers. outside of that, your biggest expense is time. Like you’re gonna have to put in the sweat equity. You’re gonna have to understand how to build your site, upload products, contact the brands.

[00:13:36] Ben: In the process you’re gonna learn Google ads, a little seo, a little conversion rate optimization, a little copywriting a little how to code a little bit in the back end of shop. But hopefully you’re doing all of this while making sales, while getting paid, rather than, paying a college a hundred thousand dollars to go learn something and hope you get a job.

[00:13:51] Brent: There’s a step before that though. It’s choosing what is the product that you want to sell. And there must be, I think getting the website is a big investment and certainly even Doing the theming part is even, is gonna be more time consuming. How? How do you choose which product 

[00:14:06] Ben: you wanna sell?

[00:14:07] Ben: So this is interesting. I think too often the world of e-commerce is focused on the product. . And the reality is you should be focused on the human behind the screen. So a good thing we always talk about like 2% is the average conversion rate. What about those other 98 people? Those were 98 people raising their hands saying, I’m interested in your product and you didn’t serve them, and you’re just letting ’em leave your website.

[00:14:27] Ben: That’s wild to me. So John and I, John’s my co-founder here we try to get you to focus on the human. Who is the human that you want to market to every day that you want to deal with in customer service? Ideally it’s you, right? If you have a passion ideal. Whatever you’re passionate about has products that are $800 and above, and you are going to be able to sell to that person better than anyone because it’s you.

[00:14:47] Ben: So we like to focus on the who first and then find the products that they buy. And if you get the who wrong, it can be a nightmare. I bought one of my consulting clients businesses, saw the opportunity, enjoyed the marketing, but the who behind it was an older. Less fortunate human being and they were awful to deal, literally awful to deal with.

[00:15:04] Ben: I got more chargebacks in the first three months of that business than I have anywhere else. And I ate my own dog food there of Hey, focus on the who rather than the products and the marketing. Who do I want to serve every day? Whereas I, the biggest company I was part of that we went 1 million to 11 million in two years that was serving the golf industry.

[00:15:18] Ben: I’m a golfer. I knew the pain the customer behind the screen had. I knew. How to speak to them. I knew the language they used, I knew the places they hung out online. I knew exactly how to write a headline that would hook them in because all they cared about was getting one more stroke. That was much, much easier than talking to a different who that I didn’t have any relation with.

[00:15:33] Brent: And I’m just gonna put a plug in here for Big Commerce. They have the exact same plans as Shopify. Nice. I’ll just do that my, cuz we’re a big commerce partner as well. and I, there’s no differentiator. Your checkout if you ever wanted to do, to customize your checkout. Big commerce is open source where Shopify’s lockdown anyways, so that’s beside the point.

[00:15:56] Brent: So I think, you’ve chosen something, you’ve built out a store. Google ads can be a money suck if you don’t do it right in your course. You give some sort of. Help around that. Even if you’re, and $500 goes nowhere, especially like if you’re gonna compete against I would imagine that you’re going to some, sometimes compete against the actual manufacturers that you drop shipping for at times in Google Ads.

[00:16:20] Brent: Yeah. I think 

[00:16:21] Ben: this is where we are different than anyone else who’s. Teaching something similar or really anywhere you go for Google ads. Once Google bought the Chinese Go AI and brought it into their system and started doing smart everything that’s where everything fell apart in Google.

[00:16:35] Ben: My ads back in the day. You’d have to build everything and do everything yourself, and there was a very specific way that you should do this. We still teach that, so rather than doing performance, or smart shopping or whatever you’re on currently we do use like smart list that makes sense. But most of the, like Google do it for you is a very bad idea, especially for high ticket products.

[00:16:52] Ben: And I’ll say that because again, I sell glucosamine for dogs. If somebody’s searching glucosamine for dogs, they actually might buy this, right? That’s generic. But also like they’re willing to probably spend 30 bucks and see if their dog can stop limping. If somebody’s searching infrared sauna, they are so far from buying, it’s not even funny.

[00:17:08] Ben: And so if Google. Buy all that traffic for you and show you tiny price clicks cuz they’re serving you for infrared sauna. No one’s gonna buy from you, right? And you’re just gonna burn all your cash. So there’s a way to set up a manual shopping campaign and choose your priority. And anyone listening to this might understand that you can choose high, medium, or low priority.

[00:17:27] Ben: And if you set everything up as a high and seg segment, the brands by ed groups. Duplicate that and set it up as medium. The only thing that can go to medium priority is when you put a negative keyword in high, so all your junk, everything will go to high, right? And then you can pull out your semi-important keywords and move them to medium, and then you can segment your most valuable keywords and segment them to low.

[00:17:46] Ben: So now all your junk’s flowing into high where you’re bidding 10 cents, 25 cents, something like that, your branded terms likely your middle of the funnel terms, you’re paying a little bit more in medium. And then those exact match bottom of the funnel, people looking for this exact product terms you can pay more for and low and you’re not getting you’re not getting si, your cash isn’t getting siphoned away, which is what, Google’s very good at that, if I’m honest with you.

[00:18:04] Ben: I’m not a huge fan of everything they’re moving to do. I understand they’re trying to hit the bell curve, right? That, 80% of people just want this. But I’m not in that 80%. I’m, I’m at the other end of the bell curve. I wanna be optimized. I wanna be bringing the right traffic to my business, to the right pages.

[00:18:17] Ben: And so I, we definitely teach a method that I don’t think has taught much anymore out in the universe. 

[00:18:22] Brent: And you mentioned high ticket and. So I’m assuming no high ticket items like high ticket clothing or shoes or something like that. 

[00:18:31] Ben: Cowboy boots. Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t recommend apparel. That’s a return nightmare.

[00:18:35] Ben: But I’ve sold everything from 3D printers to tiny house products, to standing desk products to golf products. I’ve literally been all over the place and I’ve coached hundreds of students and whatever the first thoughts come into your mind. If you’re thinking about doing this, don’t do those.

[00:18:47] Ben: Those are the ones everyone thinks of. Spend some time writing in a notebook, gathering some ideas, and once you like point your reticular activation system at looking for things above a thousand bucks, you’ll start seeing them everywhere. And it honestly the list is endless. And there’s just so many things that you can build a business around and the Internet’s made it even more possible to really niche down and still find all of that audience looking for what you.

[00:19:08] Ben: How 

[00:19:08] Brent: about doing FBA fulfilled by Amazon? Is that the same type of model that you’re talking about? 

[00:19:14] Ben: Yeah, with fba. My pet supplements here on fba. I wouldn’t recommend selling someone else’s products. Via fba. I don’t If you have your own FBA brand, I’m sure they’ve been you’ve had people reach out to you that said we wanna ride your listing just in case Amazon cancels you.

[00:19:26] Ben: I’m not a big fan of that, and I don’t think selling high ticket products is a good idea. So again, I sell pet supplements on there every single day. I open my email and it says, refund initiated for this refund, initiated for that. Amazon is in total control. And I can eat that on these 20, 30, $40 products.

[00:19:41] Ben: But if that’s gonna happen on 800 to $10,000 products, the I’m in for a world of hurt because Amazon’s always gonna side with the customer. 

[00:19:49] Brent: Yeah. So you talked about you talked about Amazon and the price points. Is there a highest price point that you would recommend? You’re not gonna do a car, right?

[00:20:00] Ben: I think where you’ll run into issues is actually with Shopify itself, with the payment processor itself they’ll start wondering, who are you making these big sales? I knew some people that were selling 15 to $20,000 things and quickly Shopify payments shut them down. They went around the backside, just went to Stripe, who Shopify’s using and Stripe had no issue.

[00:20:18] Ben: But that’s where you’re gonna run into issues is. That’s a lot of money to be moving around without being questioned, why you’re moving that kind of money around. So I tend to stick in the two to eight range. I think that’s the sweet spot. The lower you get, the more you’re just eating your margins with shipping.

[00:20:31] Ben: So if you’re selling an $800 product where you have 25% margins rough math, that’s 200 bucks. You have to acquire the customer. You have to pay the 3% credit card fees when you take their credit card and you have to pay for shipping. And oh, by the way, you’re a business, you’re trying to make profit on the back end.

[00:20:43] Ben: So really anything below 800 doesn’t make a lot of sense. But if you’re selling a $5,000 product with 25% margins and it costs you $250 to ship, now you have a thousand dollars in arbitrage there that you can go acquire the customer. That seems to make a little more sense the higher you get. Got 

[00:20:58] Brent: it.

[00:20:58] Brent: You had mention. Alley Express no nonsense, no Alley Express nine. Explain that. What does that mean? 

[00:21:05] Ben: So that’s been the hot thing for drop shipping over the last, I don’t know, three to five years. And it is simply go find the hottest trending product. Go find it on Alley Express. Set up your store.

[00:21:16] Ben: It’s a turn and burn website, right? You’re gonna drive traffic and hopes you can convert a ton of people. On your website selling a, honestly, it’s gonna be a terrible product. It’s gonna ship from China, show up 40 days later in a heavily tape box. And you’re gonna have a bunch of disappointed customers who aren’t gonna reach you to tell you they’re disappointed cuz you’ve already turned and burned that website.

[00:21:31] Ben: So if you’re out there for a cash grab, maybe this makes sense, but I don’t know, my ethics and my integrity aren’t going to allow me to sell a terrible product with a terrible experience attached to that person. . 

[00:21:43] Brent: So that would be a, an example of that would be can 95 masks when the, when they got all sucked up in the pandemic and all of a sudden people got ahold of them.

[00:21:50] Brent: They’re gonna sell ’em on a quickly made up website, and then by the time they, they land in your doorstep, you’re they may not, it might be PA post pandemic. 

[00:22:00] Ben: The one I think of is there was I was flicking through TikTok. It’s like a girl on a beach and then he zooms out and it’s supposed to be this like monocle that can zoom, thousands of yards away.

[00:22:11] Ben: I can imagine who they’re trying to target. I’m a dude, so I understand why they were targeting dudes with that. I actually bought that cause I wanted to see the experience, so I bought it again 40 days later, heavily tape box the thing. You can’t see anything out of it. It does not work. And so it, yeah, you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment.

[00:22:24] Ben: Now, on the other hand, if you’re using this to judge demand, and go sell, I dunno, 50 of something, and see if your audience is into that. And then you’re gonna turn it around and actually make the product better and serve it to your audience as part of your brand. Maybe that makes sense. But the folks who were out there teaching turn and burn websites and just, destroying all customer trust, I, I can’t get behind that.

[00:22:43] Brent: Tell us a little bit about your course. You’ve mentioned that a few times that you’re teaching, you have a course on this te tell us a little bit about. 

[00:22:49] Ben: Yeah, so the beginning part of the course is, and we just did a podcast on this, so I might have the numbers actually. Yeah. So the beginning part is like 68 videos long.

[00:22:55] Ben: And that is simply how to get started, right? This is gonna help you choose your market. This is gonna help you identify the suppliers inside, upload products, build out your website, and actually have an over the shoulder look of John building all of this stuff in real time so that you can follow along.

[00:23:09] Ben: And then the backside of that. Something we’re continuing to grow. It has 150 plus videos currently, and that’s everything John and I have learned over the last eight years of doing this personally. And both John and I have taken stores to eight figures. And so there’s a lot of learnings in there that we wanted to put inside the course.

[00:23:23] Ben: And so that half of the course continues to grow as we continue to learn more as we continue to network with other experts who we can bring in and create some videos for us. And . Yeah. It’s an over the shoulder look like this model isn’t that difficult to understand. To me, it’s pretty simple.

[00:23:35] Ben: The work is hard. You have to do like hard work. That’s business. But the model of, it’s pretty simple. So we give that all away on our podcast, drop ship podcast. And if you want someone to hold your hand and walk you through it, that’s what our course is for. 

[00:23:47] Brent: What is your biggest win in terms of a product in the.

[00:23:51] Ben: The biggest one, I have two months left on a non-disclosure agreement, so I will say it’s in the Gulf industry. But we, yeah I coached two gentlemen. They brought me on as a consultant. I coached ’em to a quarter million in the first three months. We remained friends for the rest of the year as they were in Wisconsin.

[00:24:04] Ben: We would just rib each other on slack basically. And then they asked me to come on board and we went, they did 1 million in revenue in their first year. Two, two years later we did 11 million. And by far that was the biggest business I was part of growth wise and just big. And they bought me out about a week before the world shut down for Covid.

[00:24:18] Ben: And I can only imagine what they went on to do after that with everything shut down. Yeah, it was a good time. 

[00:24:23] Brent: And what was the biggest lose? . 

[00:24:26] Ben: Yeah, that one. Like I said, it was serving an older demographic. It would be like mobility products. The sales came in, but again, the chargebacks came in.

[00:24:33] Ben: There’s just, that’s not an audience of people I want, without bashing that type of audience. They’re just, they’re very difficult to deal with from a customer service front. A lot of handholding, a lot of walking them through the buttons to click on the website, like there’s just. It’s not a group of people I would like to serve personally.

[00:24:51] Ben: Whereas I would say middle-aged men who are trying or who are passionate about something, is the ideal audience. If that’s who you wanna serve and you have products that fit that is the ideal audience. Cuz men just lay in bed and will buy it on the phone. They won’t think twice about it.

[00:25:04] Ben: Whereas, women take a little longer in the buying cycle to make decisions. They also buy differently. They wanna see things on sale. Where men, I don’t think really care. They just, if they want something, they’re gonna buy it. And yeah. More on the, who there it’s the definitely.

[00:25:15] Ben: Middle-aged affluent men that are wonderful to serve. 

[00:25:19] Brent: You’ve mentioned a who quite a few times. Tell us how you as a business owner determine who is the best, who for you. 

[00:25:28] Ben: Trial and error, I think. But I’ll go back to what I said, like if it’s you, that’s gonna be the best. Like whatever you are passionate about, if you can build a business around that.

[00:25:37] Ben: you are going to wake up and wanna work on that business more than I’m gonna wanna work on the business I’m not passionate about, right? So every day work needs to be done. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward. That statement is definitely true. And so if you’re passionate about it and you’re consuming content late at night about it, and then you wake up and you get to work on your business that is driving more content into the world or driving more people into the passion you’re just gonna work way harder than me.

[00:25:57] Ben: And so that, that’s what I recommend. Go find whatever you are into and build a business. 

[00:26:01] Brent: If you have a one kind of nugget of advice for somebody that’s wanting to start on this besides taking your course, what would you say to them? 

[00:26:10] Ben: Yeah, and just the kind of, I don’t think you need to take our, if you want to, great.

[00:26:13] Ben: We’d love to have you, but I think we have quite a few students in our Facebook group who have only listened to our podcast and they’ve built a real business that’s making decent money and That’s amazing. My goal is to. Help people change their life through e-commerce. The same way e-commerce changed my life.

[00:26:26] Ben: And so my advice would be just start you’re gonna learn. So I don’t understand why people are afraid to get going. If Brent, if you’ve never golfed in your entire life and you decided you’re gonna, you’re gonna go be a golfer, would you sit like months on end going, oh, what if I suck at this?

[00:26:40] Ben: What if I fail a call? Think no. You just go out there and you’d shank the ball around and it wouldn’t be fun, but you’d have a good time and you’d slowly get better. This is the same way you should treat business. So stop. Think. You are a failure. If it doesn’t work, first off, the business can be a failure, and the entrepreneur itself is not a failure, right?

[00:26:53] Ben: And so go in there, set up a Shopify store, start screwing around, run some ads, maybe make some sales, and then you might understand, oh, I, I kinda like serving this person versus this person. I kinda like selling these products versus these products. I kinda like working on big commerce over Shopify or whatever it is.

[00:27:06] Ben: Like you’re gonna learn a lot by doing. And if, yeah, my only advice would be just start, just get moving and iterate. 

[00:27:13] Brent: Yeah. And I just want to point out that my golf score and my bowling score are identical. You guys can take which one is good or bad. . Yeah. From a learning standpoint, I know that doing it for me there’s all kinds of different ways of learning, but I’m a big, I’m a big advocate of learning and doing at the same time, and I think that, You’ve hit it right on the nail right on the head, where that type of learning helps you to really see how it’s gonna ha what, what’s gonna happen in that, how you’re gonna get it done and how it’s gonna come out in the end.

[00:27:44] Brent: Last question in terms of this was I know that we, in the magenta world, we work a lot on say, firearms. Products that that aren’t like Google ads can’t serve up. Is there any model where that would work? Cbd, those type of products that say Google won’t work with or even sometimes PayPal won’t work with.

[00:28:05] Brent: Do you have any recommendations on those or just you’re clear 

[00:28:08] Ben: of them? Yeah, I think with what specifically I’m teaching, I would tell you to steer clear. On the other hand, the biggest revenue driver in any business is not gonna be your ads. So what we teach ads are definitely gonna get you started.

[00:28:20] Ben: You have to go acquire that customer first off. But if you aren’t like building SEO from day one, you’re doing yourself a disservice. And so whether you’re in CBD or firearms or wherever else which God only knows if Google suppresses that stuff too you have to get out there and create content.

[00:28:34] Ben: Now, I’m a big fan of seo. I think you should do it on your website. In this like retail environment when we’re, when we become a retailer, I take a drop show. You’re a retailer of brands. Creating collections that rank for a brand name is quite easy. You have a cluster built for you. The brand is the collection page, the products are the cluster content around it.

[00:28:49] Ben: And so it’s actually quite easy to do good SEO in an e-commerce store. Above and beyond that, you’re gonna want to also be someone who’s putting out best articles cuz you’re selling all the brands. So if you can put out the best standing desks of 2022, that’s gonna rank really well too. And then. Just loads of supporting content, right?

[00:29:05] Ben: Go to answer the public.com, put in your generic word standing desk and go look at all the questions everyone’s asking. Now. Go answer those on your blog. Go build content around that. Once that ball is rolling, it really turns into something amazing over time. But again, maybe you’re not a writer.

[00:29:20] Ben: Maybe you prefer like me to be behind a microphone or on camera, right? Gary V says, this salon, this is a world of content and so whether you want to. Or speak or be on camera, you’re gonna have to do one of those things to grow your business, in my opinion, or hire someone to do one of those things.

[00:29:33] Ben: And I don’t think it matters what in industry you’re in, that’s gonna be the biggest driver of traffic in your business versus ads. And so you should get started immediately. 

[00:29:41] Brent: Yeah. And I’ll just, I’ll second that, that we at Woto started a content Around magenta at the time, but Adobe Commerce now, five years ago and it, within the first year it took about a year to, for our SEO to start catching up.

[00:29:55] Brent: And it is a very competitive space. And, but that does work. And I know in WordPress they called Cornerstone content and HubSpot, they call it pillar content. But I think what you’re saying is that you have your product, then you start writing about that product and pointing all that content to that product.

[00:30:13] Brent: and I can test that. Yes. That, that SEO works. And we, one of our longtime clients was a gun seller down in South Carolina. The, if you are in that space, you’re all, nobody else can be using Google Ads. And so you are in, if you can do better at writing those articles, , you are gonna win it writing that.

[00:30:32] Brent: So that’s great advice. I 

[00:30:34] Ben: just pulled up a really good example of it if you don’t mind me sharing, so yeah, go for it. One business I was part of that, we worked on this the first year. The site got 7% of its traffic, 7,000 users via SEL for $0 revenue. In year number two, 27% of the users, 76,000 people came for $854,000 in revenue.

[00:30:55] Ben: Year three. As we continue to compound here, 43% of the users now came from seo, which was almost a quarter million people that resulted in 2.27 million in revenue. And so it just continues to grow and grow as you put the time in and do things right. Don’t do things crappy. Don’t go buy bad links, put out really good content and play the long game here and I promise you it’ll pay dividends.

[00:31:17] Brent: Yeah, and I think you, I think earlier you also mentioned just testing it, making sure that your con what whatever you have on that page, your product display. Maybe doing some eBay AB testing on that. And even in Google you could do AB testing on those things. There’s so many things that you as a user, that as you dig in and especially if it turns into your for full-time job, like you said if you’re not moving forward you’re moving backwards.

[00:31:41] Brent: That’s a good good advice there. Ben, as we close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug. What would you like to plug? 

[00:31:49] Ben: Yeah, I think if you’re listening to this, you’re a podcast junkie, as am I. So just go check out our podcast. Like I I think you’ll enjoy the banter between myself and my Australian partner, John.

[00:31:57] Ben: I like to make fun of the words. He says he likes to make fun of the big orange guy in this country. And maybe you’ll enjoy that, but we literally give away the entire business model. You started episode one. It’s what is drop shipping? What is high ticket drop shipping, high ticket versus low ticket?

[00:32:07] Ben: If you start at episode one, you’re gonna learn this entire business model from us. And then if you decide. Work with us further. Obviously the information’s in there, but I would just say start with the podcast. It’s called Drop Shit Podcast and you can find it on any of your favorite players.

[00:32:19] Brent: Great. Now, we’ll put all those links in the show notes today. Ben, thanks for being here. It’s been a great conversation. Yeah, thanks for having me. 

Learning about Buy with Prime with Andrew Maff

Why would I list my product on Buy with Prime by Amazon?

Listing your product on Buy with Prime by Amazon allows your product to be seen by millions of Amazon Prime members. This is a great way to boost your visibility and sales on Amazon.

You’ll also benefit from Amazon’s Prime shipping benefits, which include free two-day shipping and reduced shipping times. Additionally, since Buy with Prime is a program exclusive to Amazon Prime members, you’ll benefit from the increased loyalty of the Prime membership base.

This can help increase sales and build long-term customer relationships. Andrew is the Founder of BlueTuskr, a full-service marketing company for e-commerce sellers. With over 13 years of experience, he has proved himself to be a leader in the field.

Andrew’s entrepreneurial knowledge and success allow him to excel in his industry and help others grow theirs. His knowledge in branding, social media, SEO, web design, graphic design, email marketing, and more, providing exceptional results consistently.

Highlights

  • Andrew started his journey in e-commerce marketing 15 years ago, when his dad acquired a company selling car shocks and suspension stuff. 
  • He was interested in the creative side of marketing and was drawn to the immediacy of digital marketing. 
  • He started his own agency while in college to promote his band and other bands and venues. 
  • He pivoted to retail when the music business got ugly and partnered with a family member before getting bought out. 
  • He then started Blue Tusker in early 2020, the name is derived from his love of elephants and his high school colors. 
  • The biggest mistake Andrew sees e-commerce sellers making is being too reliant on Amazon and not knowing where their customers are. 
  • Sellers need to understand that Amazon and off-Amazon are different beasts and that launching a website with a random theme will not bring in sales. 
  • They should test individual areas and have an understanding of where their customers are before investing. 
  • Sellers should not just assume they need to be everywhere on social media and other channels just because they heard about it on a podcast.
Some notable time stamps

[00:16:04] Brent: Suggest creating a strategy and roadmap to pick off the low-hanging fruit first and test what’s working or not.

[00:16:14] Andrew: Guide sellers through testing the waters to diversify away from Amazon safely without spending an arm and a leg.

[00:16:26] Andrew: Create a storefront on Amazon, run ads to the storefront, add a landing page and track the button to see if it converts.

[00:16:49] Andrew: Add a “Buy Now” button and incentives for first time customers to grow the audience list.

[00:17:05] Andrew: Add “Buy with Prime” button to increase conversion rate and credibility.

[00:17:29] Andrew: Test off Amazon traffic before building a website to ensure it converts.

[00:17:44] Andrew: Investment in the beginning is limited to advertising spend and a semi-decent landing page.

[00:18:09] Brent: Benefits of having “Buy with Prime” button is it builds credibility and increases conversion rate.

[00:18:59] Andrew: Building a brand on Amazon is difficult because it’s a pay-to-play platform, but registering a brand

Transcript

[00:02:42] Brent: Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Andrew Math tone. Andrew, go ahead introduce yourself. Tell us your day-to-day and maybe one of your passions in life. 

[00:02:54] Andrew: Yeah, thanks for having me, Brent. Appreciate it. So I am the founder and and CEO of Blue Tusker. We are a full service digital marketing company for e-commerce.

[00:03:03] Andrew: We essentially act as like an outsource marketing department for the most part. I’m also the host of the e-com show, so I also have my own fun little podcast where I interview other e-commerce sellers. My day-to-day is talking to awesome people like yourself, and then herding cats. At least that’s how it feels.

[00:03:18] Andrew: And then let’s see, one of my passions in life, that’s an interesting one, obviously. I’m, I do this as a job, but I also do this as a hobby. Like I really love doing what I. The difference will be like, on the weekends, I’ll do something that I really wanted to do during the week that I couldn’t get done.

[00:03:33] Andrew: But I know that’s a cop out answer. I’m also a drummer so if I got time I’m, I work outta my house. I work outta my basement, so I’m next to my kit all the time. So I’ll usually walk over and play for a little while, which the neighbors love. And then I got a gold retriever and a Corgi who are my two best friends that I play with all the time.

[00:03:50] Andrew: And my wife, I’m sure my wife’s gonna yell at me for her being laughed, . 

[00:03:53] Brent: Yeah. Okay, so you’re my second drummer this week for an interview, which is awesome. There we go. I play piano. I, and my, I used to be in a bedroom in our house from my office. There was a guitar behind me and I always. , oh play piano, but I just can’t get the grand piano on the wall.

[00:04:09] Brent: . Anyways and then it’s hard. I have two dogs as well, so I have a hound, like a lab hound mix. Who’s 13. We uh, we still run together. And then I have a two year old Jack Russell Terrier. So both ends of the energy spectrum. One sleeps 20 hours a day and one is energetic. 20 hours a. . Nice.

[00:04:27] Brent: Before we dive into our content, and I know we’re gonna have some, we’re gonna talk about marketing and e-commerce marketing specifically, and I’m excited to talk about that. I have a little project that I’m working on right now, it’s called The Free Joke Project than I believe there should be more free jokes out there.

[00:04:43] Brent: So I’m gonna tell you a joke, and all you have to do is say, do you think this joke is free? Or do you think we could put it behind a paywall from the, from a software standpoint, is this an open source joke or is this a closed loop joke? Anyways, ready? I’m gonna tell you this joke. You just tell me your feed feedback on it.

[00:05:02] Brent: All right? A dog was drowning in a lake and a German man swam out and pulled it to safety. I asked the man, are you a vet? The man. Am I a vet? I’m soaking

[00:05:15] Andrew: Oh man. It depends on what you’re gonna charge for it. . Wow. I would think that could be free . Yeah, I’d get that. Hook ’em in. 

[00:05:24] Brent: Yeah. And I realized that my, my pitch so far is should it be free or should I be charged for it? And it is the free joke. So the goal is to have all these jokes free and let’s be honest, there’s an open ap, there’s an API you can get for dad.

[00:05:38] Brent: If you’re so inclined. Of course there as a developer, you can call an API and you get a dad joke anytime you want. That’s 

[00:05:43] Andrew: amazing. Thank you developers for doing doing the hard 

[00:05:46] Brent: work, . Absolutely. Andrew, you mentioned herding cats and I am old enough to go, remember going to Comdex in Las Vegas. and a not a now defunct technology company had a fully produced herding cats commercial that they showed on the big screen.

[00:06:05] Brent: That was so funny. It was cats running everywhere and some guy and a cowboy trying to herd cats together. Do you think that herding cats sometimes for business owners, that’s how they see marketing. Like they don’t even know where to. . 

[00:06:21] Andrew: Yeah, that’s actually a very interesting way to put that.

[00:06:24] Andrew: Maybe that’s why I feel that way. And it’s a really good point. Depends on like the direction you’re, it depends on your business and all these other 10 different things, but that’s usually the biggest problem, especially if they’re first starting off, is like there’s so much you can do between like email and then social.

[00:06:39] Andrew: And then which social platform are you on in paid ads? Which paid advertising platform are you on? What content are you gonna run? What keywords are you gonna target? Should you do seo? How should you do seo? Should you try influencer marketing affiliate like it. It’s exhausting even trying to do that as a bit.

[00:06:50] Andrew: But yeah, I would imagine that’s gotta be a very similar feeling. 

[00:06:54] Brent: If, I just of gave away my age, actually I didn’t, if people don’t know what convicts was then they don’t even actually know how old I am. I’m in my, I’m in my early twenties and I have a 27 year old daughter, so that kind of gives you my age.

[00:07:05] Brent: Interesting. How did you get started in marketing and what made you interested in it? . 

[00:07:09] Andrew: So I started in marketing, specifically in e-commerce marketing actually a little over 15 years ago, which is always insane to tell someone cuz they’re like, that was it a thing 15 years ago. But it was, so my dad actually acquired a they sold like shocks car shocks and suspension stuff and it was some small, like nothing company, I think they were.

[00:07:30] Andrew: Maybe might even be clearing six figures a year if that. But they were all just like local and they’d go to like car dealerships and stuff. And my dad was involved in like cars.com and all this fun stuff years and years ago. And so he wanted to buy this company and put it online. And so I ended up, I always knew I wanted to be in marketing.

[00:07:49] Andrew: I don’t really know why. It was really more specific like advertising. And so I, once he bought this company, I was like, I want to, I wanna learn how to do this stuff. And he goes, okay, I need help in the warehouse. If you do that, I will also teach you how to do the marketing side. So I had help in the warehouse during the, like beginning of the day and kind of help with prepping orders and stuff.

[00:08:08] Andrew: But then I would work in the office and I’d work with some of the marketing team. They were actually one of the first companies to get offered to sell on Amazon besides books. So right when they started getting away from books, they were one of the first ones. and that was where it was Rick.

[00:08:23] Andrew: He said, by the way, he said no. Which is like my favorite thing to make fun of him for. But that, it started back then and it was really interesting cause I always wanted to get into advertising. I thought it was really creative and really fun. But then when I got into more on the digital side, it was really interesting how it was almost like a game to me.

[00:08:39] Andrew: Cuz it was like immediate. You would do something and it would more or less be immediate, especially back then. It would more or less be like immediate results or you would start doing something and within a short period of. You would see results to me, like even seeing paid ad dollars going up or ROI going up or anything like that.

[00:08:54] Andrew: It was just like points to me like it was some kind of video game or something, which is ironic cause I’m not a big video game guy. But then in college, starting my own agency, I was in a band, I was a drummer and we all had our own role outside of the instrument that we played. And so my role was promoting the shows and basically the marketing side of things.

[00:09:12] Andrew: And so I guess I, I did decent with it. I had a bunch of other bands asking me to help them with it. I then started having venues asking me to help them with it. So I started my own agency and it was mainly on the music promotion side, but then the music business got ugly and so I pivoted it, kept the venues, but then also was able to go retail, which then got me back into e-commerce cuz by then e-commerce was picking up a little bit.

[00:09:33] Andrew: I ended up partnering with a family member, which I will never do again. Ended up getting bought out of. went in-house to an e-commerce company for a little while. They were a little over te eight figures. It was just me running the marketing. And then I met someone there where we ended up starting another agency that was specifically e-commerce focused.

[00:09:53] Andrew: We exited that in late 2019, and then in early 2020, I started Blue Tusker and now I’m here on this. Full circle. 

[00:10:02] Brent: Wow. Cool. Let’s tell us a little bit about the name Tusker. How did you come up with Blue Tusker? 

[00:10:07] Andrew: I love this question cuz it’s always interesting to answer it. There’s really not any logic ish behind it.

[00:10:13] Andrew: When I first started the company, I knew I wanted to have something that was a little bit off the wall because a lot of agencies I find. Power Digital and like growth marketing, digital and like they have all these boring names that are impossible to find when you search for ’em. So I was like, I wanna build a brand and I wanna build a name that you can find me no matter what, that you’ll remember.

[00:10:33] Andrew: So I’m just gonna come up with something. I’ve always been a big fan of elephants. . They, there’s a little bit of theory behind that of like how they all kind of work together. And in marketing it’s the same thing and they don’t forget stuff and then you just like tracking data and I don’t know, I pulled that one out of a hat but didn’t want to be called like Elephant something.

[00:10:48] Andrew: I liked Tusker, I thought it sounded cool. And then my wife and I met in high school and our high school colors were blue and silver. And so I knew that Tusker was probably gonna be like an elephant color of. And so I stuck with Blue Tusker, and then I took the E out because the company that acquired our last agency rebranded changed their name and took the E out of their name, and they drove me crazy.

[00:11:11] Andrew: So as a little bit of a nod to them, I took the E outta Tusker too. Wow. But 

[00:11:17] Brent: it’s fine. , that’s a great story. I can recall I was also working as a contractor inside of a e-commerce company and the president of Magento at the time was just super, he is super encouraging and got me to start a digital agency.

[00:11:32] Brent: Not on the marketing side, but on the technical side. , how do you keep so talking a little bit about maybe your podcast, how do you keep it more interesting when it comes to e-commerce? Do you focus on the marketing side of things? What I found, my, my podcast is called Talk Commerce and you’re on it right now.

[00:11:53] Brent: Thanks for 

[00:11:54] Andrew: having me, Bob. Yeah, 

[00:11:55] Brent: you’re welcome. But what I’ve found is that people sometimes aren’t that interested in the technology. They’re more interested in the stories about what solutions that people have solved. Yeah. 

[00:12:06] Andrew: So our podcast, it’s, I would say it’s 90% e-commerce sellers.

[00:12:11] Andrew: Every now and then I’ll have someone that’s, a CEO or CMO or something in that’s in a vendor space. But I like to speak to other seller. And really to me it’s a little bit more about honestly, it’s more for me than it is for our listeners because I’m really interested in how people run their business and why they do what they do and what their logic was for doing it.

[00:12:31] Andrew: So it’s very much like what was the story? What were some of the issues you got through? Everyone that we interview is at least cleared seven figures annually, so I try to figure out like, what was it that got you over that t. Because I know for a lot of e-commerce sellers when they’re first starting off, like that’s one of the hardest things to get over, at least in the beginning there.

[00:12:49] Andrew: So we go through what was your process for going through that? What were some of the hardships you went through past year or two? We’ve talked a lot about like how they’ve helped with or how they’ve solved like any supply chain issues or stuff like that. I obviously tend to cater towards marketing just because it’s outta habit.

[00:13:03] Andrew: But otherwise it’s mostly like trying to get inside of their story and then a little bit of like hacks that they figured out that helped them get over certain thresholds. 

[00:13:12] Brent: Yeah, I think the I’ve had the same experience. I interviewed A person who had a candy store and I was focusing really on big commerce cuz that was their platform.

[00:13:20] Brent: And 10 minutes in, I’m really, wow, this is super dry and let’s talk about your business. And when we started talking about candy and freeze dry skittles, that was a game changer. So freeze dried Skittles, it smell delicious. They are really good. And you sent me some bulk candy store.com.

[00:13:36] Brent: I should have a little pre-recorded button that I can push for a commercial right there. the mistakes you’re seeing, like in some, like you see, you must see tons of e-commerce sellers. Is there a common mistake that people are making over and over again, or is it run the gamut on what they’re trying to do?

[00:13:56] Andrew: Kind of depends. Really. It depends on the situation of the business, but like the common mistakes I. are sellers that are so painfully reliant on Amazon. You’ll never, chances are they’ll never make as much money off Amazon as they will on Amazon. But I’m a big believer in not being so reliant on one channel and diversifying.

[00:14:18] Andrew: Plus, I know that building a brand outside of Amazon and actually having a community or a big email list, you get a significantly higher multiple than if you’re just an FBA seller pumping out product. I find that a lot of sellers make that big mistake of not wanting to do anything else outside of Amazon, but then also when they do wanna do it, they just go, they jump into creating, they throw together some horrible website that they just grabbed some random th theme and threw up some pictures, and then they don’t know what to do with it.

[00:14:49] Andrew: They don’t always realize that Amazon versus off Amazon is a wildly different beast. . So you really have to know like where your customer is and how are you gonna reach them. And then testing individual areas instead of just coming off of Amazon, creating a website that they probably got done off of fiber for nothing, and then expecting it to all of a sudden bring on sales like it, this isn’t 2000 and.

[00:15:13] Andrew: 10 anymore. You can’t just launch a website and start making money or you can’t launch a social platform and then all of a sudden, or social profile I should say, and all of a sudden have thousands and thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. Like it just doesn’t work that way anymore. You actually have to try now.

[00:15:29] Andrew: And most of them I find, don’t realize that. So the biggest mistakes I always see are basically half-assing leaving. Or not knowing who their actual customer is, probably because they were on Amazon, they don’t really tell you. And then just assuming that you have to be everywhere okay, I’m, I have to be on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and email and doing sms and just because you heard it on a podcast like this doesn’t mean that your business needs it.

[00:15:57] Andrew: So to me it, the biggest mistake is not really knowing what you’re getting into and not knowing where your customers are actually. , 

[00:16:04] Brent: do you often say to them, back up, let’s create a strategy and let’s make a roadmap and let’s pick off the low-hanging fruit first and let’s keep growing as we’re going.

[00:16:14] Brent: And I think one of the things that I see is people aren’t testing what they’re trying and they don’t really know if it’s working or not. They’re just doing it because they heard about it on a podcast. 

[00:16:26] Andrew: Yeah. So I, funny enough, I actually do it’s like the one thing I talk about the most is like, how.

[00:16:32] Andrew: Diversify away from Amazon safely without spending an arm and a leg. And I actually just spoke at helium Ten’s conference about this whole thing, and I’ll give you like a brief synopsis on it cause it’s long. But essentially what I do is I walk sellers through how to test the waters.

[00:16:49] Andrew: Like basically dip your toe off of Amazon before jumping into the pool. And usually the problem is they, when they do a horrible website, it’s like jumping into the shallow ends because you’re not going. But basically it’s creating a nice storefront on Amazon, run ads to the storefront, make sure the storefront converts.

[00:17:05] Andrew: Once you’ve done that, start running ads from off Amazon to just the storefront. So now you’re testing that off Amazon traffic to see if that storefront will still convert. Once you do that, then you create a landing page that still sends people to. But you want to track the button on a, on that landing page so you can see okay, can I send them somewhere else now that still showcases the same product line, but still let them go and convert on Amazon.

[00:17:29] Andrew: Plus, at that point you can get email, all that fun stuff. Then you start adding okay, let me just add a buy now button and see if I can keep ’em on there. Then you add all your bells and whistles of, popups for first time customers, some kind of incentive newsletter, something like that to start growing the audience list a little bit.

[00:17:44] Andrew: But now you’re testing can I. Pur get people to purchase off Amazon, then my logic is just sit there and do that for a while. I wouldn’t do it for your full product line. Maybe do it for one product that you can go after and then maybe you wanna replicate that same concept for other products, but then start to generate more capital that you got off Amazon so that you can justify not half-assing your website.

[00:18:06] Andrew: When you do that, then you go in, build the website, and I’m a big fan, especially when you first start a new. Of adding let’s say underneath the buy now button, having a button that says available on Amazon. Or you can use, now Amazon is already caught onto this, so they have the Buy with Prime button, and what you can do is you can add a conversion tracking code to that so you can still see how many people are you sending to Amazon that may or may not be actually converting.

[00:18:29] Andrew: And if you use like Amazon attribution or something like that, you can actually see if they converted. But the problem is when you first launch a new. , you don’t have a lot of reviews on there. So sometimes people will be like, I don’t really know if this is a new brand and whatever. So if you allow them to go to Amazon, not only is it actually proven that having those marketplace buttons on there can increase conversion rates on the site, but it’ll also increase credibility cuz they may go to Amazon C, that you actually have reviews and either A, they’re gonna buy from you, Amazon, or B, they’re gonna buy from your website.

[00:18:59] Andrew: So it’s like letting your customer shop where they’re a little bit more comfortable, but for that whole transition. . Really the only investment you have to make in the beginning to test the waters is the advertising spend for off Amazon stuff, and you’re still driving traffic to Amazon, which is what all Amazon sellers care about, is that their Amazon business growing and then a semi-decent landing page that’ll probably cost you anywhere, if you do it right, anywhere from a thousand, 2000.

[00:19:25] Andrew: So that’s all you need to start testing off Amazon before you jump into creating some horrible website that’s not gonna convert. And then you blame all of your other marketing because the one place that all of your marketing’s being sent to looks horrible. 

[00:19:39] Brent: That, that buy with Prime thing. I saw that at the Big Commerce Summit, I think, and they, that I’m always a little bit weary about why a customer would want to have buy with Prime on their.

[00:19:53] Brent: and it’s going to tell them they’re gonna pay with pay on Amazon. . And it also, tells ’em that they’re they’re available on Amazon as well. But you answered that question. Is there a reluctance though, in that, to put that by with Prime on for some clients? Oh, 

[00:20:09] Andrew: all the time. All the time.

[00:20:11] Andrew: Because there’s, you obviously are gonna get hit from the margin side of things and they don’t love that. There’s, at the end of the day, that comes down to the business owner and what, what they think is best for their. What I know from a marketing standpoint is a, that there is studies done that even we’ve done that are, when you have those available on Amazon, available on Walmart, eBay, wherever you’re available, having them on there actually builds credibility and will actually improve the conversion rate of your website.

[00:20:37] Andrew: So sometimes they get worried about oh, I don’t wanna send them there. But if you take a page outta Amazon’s. and you cater to providing value to the customer and focusing on what the cust like, making sure that they’re having a good experience. They can shop easily. They are comfortable with the purchase they’re making.

[00:20:56] Andrew: Having that makes a lot more sense to me than complaining about the little bit of margin that you’re probably gonna lose. Because I would also say that doesn’t mean you don’t want to have every bell and whistle on your website to make sure that they stay on the site. But you can also, what we do is we’ll add like a conversion tracking code to each of those buttons.

[00:21:14] Andrew: We’ll then know, okay, here’s a big list of everyone who clicked the button in the past 30. Let’s run and add to them with a nice size discount to shop on the site. And so now they’re gonna come back to the site anyway. So eventually you start to phase it away and then if you test like wanting to get rid of those buttons, you can do that kind of thing as well.

[00:21:32] Andrew: But everything’s about testing. 

[00:21:34] Brent: Yeah. I’ve seen customers who are excited about being on Amazon and then I’ve seen customers who are very excited about getting off of Amazon. Is there an ebb and flow that kind of goes back and forth? 

[00:21:46] Andrew: Yeah, I mean it, it depends. It’s really difficult. I know there’s gonna be sellers out there that are gonna be like, this guy’s wrong, but they’re, it’s really difficult to build a brand on Amazon because you can’t showcase your product without spending an arm and a leg on advertising.

[00:22:01] Andrew: It’s a complete 100% pay to play platform. So building a brand solely on Amazon where you don’t have any other marketplace is very challenging. Most of the sellers that we’ve worked with over the years were, they’re private label and they have their own. They’re still paying for product specific terms, not brand specific terms.

[00:22:21] Andrew: And that’s the other thing is if you start to build it off Amazon, people start searching for your brand name, which you’re gonna get a crazy great conversion for conversion rate for, which means you’re always gonna outrank your competitors, which means your cost per click’s gonna be lower. So it actually reduces your advertising costs on Amazon.

[00:22:36] Andrew: But then in the reverse of the people who are really excited to get on. They also don’t entirely understand sometimes that, okay, it’s like starting somewhere new because you don’t have any reviews. You’ve got no traction on these listings. They’re gonna be brand new. The benefit to that is if you do have an off Amazon business, You can then, which is what we cater in, is basically taking your marketing strategy and pointing the traffic wherever you want it, right?

[00:23:01] Andrew: So if we were to launch a new product on Amazon and the seller was really excited to finally get on Amazon, we would actually take their full email list, maybe even like some, run some ads to like a warm audience and offer them like some kind of discount to go shop on Amazon and just offer it to them the one time and let that listing start to get its snowball effect and then stop doing that because obviously you’re gonna hurt your.

[00:23:22] Andrew: I think that it’s really smart to have your product available wherever your customer is, whether you run ads on that platform or not, or different. Sometimes we have sellers who have a really nice size brand. They have all their products available on Amazon, but they don’t run ads because they know people are just gonna search their brand name and they’re gonna purchase their.

[00:23:42] Andrew: Sometimes we’ll do what we just refer to as like brand defensive ads where we’ll run ads, but only on their brand name at a really low cost so that they keep the ranking. But outside of that’s it. So it kind of depends on the brand and where they’re at 

[00:23:54] Brent: when you’re on Amazon. I’ve also heard that it’s very important to have a brand, and if you don’t have a brand, if you’re just selling some kind of a commodity item, that it’s much more difficult to succeed on.

[00:24:09] Andrew: Yeah. There’s a lot of, like if you, so if you get your brand registered, so if you you have a trademark, you go to Amazon, you get it registered with them, it takes a day, I think maybe a week for them to approve it. There’s a ton of stuff that you get when you have a brand so that you don’t get, if you don’t have one.

[00:24:25] Andrew: So there’s the a plus content, so it’s essentially. I, the layman’s term to me is it’s like a landing page in the middle of your listing. For the most part. It’s like a big, when they’re done right, they’re a big, well-designed area that really showcases the brand as well as more about the product. Then you also get your storefront, so you can actually have like your own Amazon website more or less that you can control, like what’s on there and how people purchase and all that fun stuff.

[00:24:50] Andrew: And then you also have sponsored brand ads, which is right at the very top of any. You’ll see like a picture of someone’s logo and then three pictures of like different products that they sell, and that main link will link over to their storefront. So you can really take like more generalized keyword traffic to your storefront.

[00:25:11] Andrew: And so building a brand on Amazon is still incredibly difficult because it’s expensive, but. Not having your brand registered and having all those bells and whistles, you’re already going up against people that already have that stuff. So you pretty much have to build a brand on there. Now, 

[00:25:27] Brent: if we look into next year what do you think the landscape of e-commerce looks like?

[00:25:33] Andrew: Oh, next year. It’s gonna be interesting if we end up in a recession, it’s gonna end. sep separating the men from the boys a little bit. There’s gonna, it’s unfortunately, know, a lot of people are probably not gonna make it through. So competition may get smaller. I don’t really know.

[00:25:49] Andrew: But I think that definitely customers are gonna get a little bit more like price centric. So they’re gonna want to make sure they’re getting a deal. They’re only spending money on like the right stuff. Now is the time, although it might be a little late depending on when this starts to happen more and more, but now is the time to actually have a quality brand and a community and focus on selling to your existing customers as much as possible and focus on retention.

[00:26:17] Andrew: Then worrying so much about acquiring new customers, cuz that’s always gonna be your most expensive thing anyway. So having a great experience, building a brand, building a community, keeping conversation going around your. That’s gonna be a big focus. I think in the next, like probably even further down the line, I’m starting to see these little niche marketplaces show up.

[00:26:37] Andrew: So you have Amazon, which is really like the Walmart of the internet, that Walmart was. Way back when, and then you obviously have Walmart now. But I’m finding like these tiny little marketplaces that like solely focus on fishing, solely focus on golf stuff and solely focus on pets, so obviously Chewy.

[00:26:53] Andrew: So what they’ve done is they’ve built these great communities around specific things that people are interested in. And so when you go to buy stuff, you immediately go to them. Like I’m obviously, I love my dogs. I don’t even think about going to Amazon when I need pet stuff. I go to Chewy. If Chewy doesn’t have it, then it doesn’t exist and I’m just not getting it.

[00:27:11] Andrew: So like by starting to segment out those different marketplaces, I think that’s gonna be really interesting because I think a lot of e-commerce sellers are gonna end up on these like smaller marketplaces and really start to hone in on their audience instead of the spray and pray approach that everyone’s trying to do.

[00:27:26] Brent: Yeah, I interviewed a lady last week who has a hair care brand and she’s on a specific streaming marketplace, so it’s similar to QVC, but only for these types of sustainable products. , skincare hair care products, and it’s all about, you would get an hour live livestream. You sell on that specific.

[00:27:48] Brent: That’s very interesting. The other one that I heard the CEO of of vtech, which is another platform, he was big on conversational commerce, where you may not have a platform there at all. You would just have, you would be you would go on to TikTok or WhatsApp or, and you’re talking to a salesperson who’s then going to enter that order for you directly.

[00:28:09] Brent: They might push you a. A payment gateway through the platform. But you’re going to skip no, I guess no UX commerce, right? That’s what it’s called. 

[00:28:19] Andrew: Yeah. I’ve poked around in that a little bit. It’s really interesting. I find it to be really challenging cuz you’re so reli. It’s like turning e-commerce into a service business, which is very difficult to scale.

[00:28:30] Andrew: But there is definitely something to be said about people like to buy from a person, not from a. So even when you think about especially on the service side of the world, which is why you and I do podcasts like people want to know who’s the person behind the business and do I want to work with them even if they don’t actually talk to them.

[00:28:48] Andrew: If they’re still buying their products or using their service, they never actually talk to the owner or anything like that. They always want to know who are they working with and who runs that business. And so I find that whole. Let’s say you’re going through WhatsApp, you’re almost working with like just a sales rep the entire time.

[00:29:01] Andrew: I find that to be very interesting. I think that there’s a nice way that e-commerce sellers can still have their cake and eat it too, sort of thing, and not have to solely rely on that. But it does make a lot of sense to me. It’s taking customer service and really focusing on it hard to the point where it’s like a c.

[00:29:20] Brent: Yeah I I spoke to a person who just started a company that’s doing video from, it’s like a plugin, I think it’s specifically for Shopify, but they, it is a one-to-one video, so to help people purchase that product. So he gave an example of high-end cowboy boots. You can go on to the store and then they will direct you to.

[00:29:43] Brent: Expert who is gonna help you pick out your boots. 

[00:29:47] Andrew: That’s genius. I love that. Yeah. I think there’s a certain customer profile that would really like that, and there’s a certain customer profile that would be scared out of their minds. But I think that it’s really no different than if you had a retail store and someone was a sales.

[00:30:04] Andrew: But the nice thing is that the salesperson will sometimes come up to you when you don’t want help, and they won’t leave you alone. In this case, you just hit X and they go away. I like that. I’ll have to look into that. 

[00:30:13] Brent: Yeah. The funny part too is he gave that one and I asked him what, like what is on your roadmap?

[00:30:17] Brent: And he said that they have retail on the roadmap and he gave the example of being at a Best Buy and you’re standing in front of this tv. Very specific technology things and there’s a QR code next to it and you scan it and then you get a person who is an expert on that device that you can talk to directly in their, in the Best Buy store.

[00:30:38] Brent: And then you could even check out and pay right there and then pick it up as you leave . Huh? So anyways, 

[00:30:47] Andrew: look at that. I like that idea. Yeah. For complicated products, that makes a lot of. 

[00:30:52] Brent: Yeah. Good. So Andrew we’re running out of time here towards the end of the podcast. I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug.

[00:30:59] Brent: What would you like to plug today? 

[00:31:02] Andrew: Oh gee, let’s do, all right. We’ll do e-comm show, we’ll do my podcast. Oh, however, only if you stay listening to Talk Commerce. I’m not trying to steal any listeners right now, , but check out our podcast. You can listen to both at different times. It’ll be totally fine.

[00:31:19] Andrew: But we interview e-commerce sellers. Just head over to the e-commerce show.com. You’ll see all of our past episodes we’re on, I think every podcast platform available as far as I know. And our YouTube channel, which is, we also record ’em like this. But yeah, I’ll plug. 

[00:31:32] Brent: Excellent, Andrew. Thank you.

[00:31:34] Brent: I I applaud you for also shopping at Chewy’s, a big employer here in Minneapolis. And I have a lot of their wares going to the job fairs. Not me looking for a job, but trying to hire people. And I wish you all the best this week. 

[00:31:48] Andrew: Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Talk Commerce

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