Happy Sunday!
If you're reading this, I hope you're sinking your butt into a couch with your feet up and a beverage in your hand. And because it's a long wknd, I hope you've got some sauce on your face from being halfway through a barbecue.
Because tomorrow is a holiday in the States, today's email will be a lighter (more fun, still insightful) read compared to the recent Sunday emails.
But before we get into that, did you listen to this week's Limited Supply episode? Moiz and I discussed an ADA Lawsuit I got and how I will find this ambulance-chasing waste of an attorney. Then we got into Shein and Shopify, selling Deliverr. Go to any podcast platform, and just look up Limited Supply!
Oh, also, did you get your ticket for MarketingLand? It’s coming up in October (book your flight and hotel now, if you can), and you’ll want to ensure you have a ticket. Get your ticket on the official website. Daniel Murray, another fantastic marketer, is putting this entire production on. You will probably make a minimum incremental lift of $25k in revenue from learnings at this event. Factor that “ROAS” your ticket.
Ok, let's get into today's quick read...
This past week, I enjoyed attending an all-day, off-the-books event in New York called Commerce Summit. In the room were, almost exclusively, brands with revenues over $50M/year and mostly bootstrapped (my favorite kind). The morning started with a keynote from Harley (Shopify President), two panels, and a bunch of very strategic breakout groups to solve problems, vent, explore others' businesses, and learn from each other.
At the end of the newsletter, I'll share two tricks to get the most out of conferences and single-day events. But for today's email, I will share nine nuggets from the event. I'll give context, but I won't share any names out of respect. Here we go:
Conduct monthly or bi-weekly audits of the business. This came from a founder generating about $500M a year.
Leave nothing up to "chance" when running on tight cash flow. Every expense, every subscription on the credit card, an employee's performance against their results, cash flow, and any vulnerabilities check it routinely. Someone also suggested canceling their virtual credit cards for subscriptions every quarter, except Q4, and it eliminates about 15-20% of expenses that recur with no usage.
Negotiate at every point of breaking the "barrier."
Every time you hit some new milestone, like 1k, 5k or 10k orders per day, or processing $500k/day in revenue or placing MOQs of higher quantity, use that as leverage to get better payment terms, better rates, or both. Most people just don't ask, so they never realize the savings or benefits. As you scale and hit new floors, negotiate with everyone. Contract manufacturers, shipping and trucking companies, payment processors, and BNPL solutions are all good places to start.
Weekly "What's keep you up at night" phone calls to your direct reports.
I asked a question to a panel about how to keep teams moving quickly without road bumps, and the best advice was to call all your direct reports for 4 minutes every week, and ask, "What's keeping you up at night?". As a team leader, or a founder, it's your job just to unblock things for the people below you.
This format is a 4 min phone call; by the end of the 4 minutes, you'll know what to work on. You don't need to have the answer right there, but just getting that data point sets you up to ensure your time has the biggest impact on your team's results.
Revenue is an irrelevant number to track.
He said the same thing if you listened to our Limited Supply episode with Ben Yahalom. Revenue is a worthless number to track, it's just a vanity metric. It's like celebrating raising money... great, now you have to pay back 10x what you raised to be a "success" as a funded company remotely.
Instead of revenue, you need to understand the impact of every dollar of income. For every order generated, how many CX tickets are created (even if it's 0.15 tickets per order), how much cost of labor, shipping, packaging, and team overhead were contributed to make that order a success? Once you have that number (from your finance team), measure everything toward that.
Another way to look at this is: costs out vs. profit in.
Hire remote talent for roles with little-to-no upward mobility.
For routine tasks that are hard to have roles with upward mobility (influencer outreach, report, and deck creation, cropping images, ad comment moderation, etc.), hire talent from overseas. You can use agencies like GrowthAssistant, or hire a recruiter like Support Shepherd.
Focus the internal team on as many non-routine things as possible. Strategic thinking, delegation, and innovation. Routine tasks or manual tasks that can be automated should be done overseas. It's a win-win situation for everyone.
Don't go omnichannel to become profitable.
This nugget came from a prolific investment banker in CPG. She said if you have to go into retail to "become profitable" as a business, then 9 times out of 10, it's not going to work.
To go into retail, you need economics already working for you as a real business. You shouldn't expect retail to build you a profitable business and be a solution.
When selling a business, look for cost-savings synergies & an angle.
This is from the same investment banker. When selling a business, don't just think about what company would benefit from your customer list; that's thinking too small. If you look at a company like P&G, they have 4 brands that sell the same product to different customers. They don't care about your existing customer list for their other brands; that's not where they will have an advantage. Instead, look for cost-saving synergies.
Does your brand produce a product (like a powder) that can be manufactured in an existing plant, cutting the COGS by 60%? That's a huge win for a strategic!
In addition, your pitch needs an angle. For an early DTC brand sale, this banker told a Unilever executive that he has no idea who his customers are... only Walmart, Costco, and Target do. This was the angle that sold Dollar Shave Club, even when first it was an absolute NO from Unilever. Figuring out what's in it for them makes it their idea that it's a good decision.
Build your own factory in China after hitting $20M/year in sales.
I met an entrepreneur who spent just over 7 figures to build a factory in China, and it provides him with savings of about 35-50% compared to using an external manufacturing partner in the same area. I didn't realize there was such a cushy margin built in for these factories, but $2M for a fully-functional factory to get lifetime 50% savings is a no-brainer.
Everyone is facing the same problems... get over it.
No one is facing wildly different problems than others. It all revolves around hiring, cash flow, advertising headwinds, etc. Instead of seeing them as "problems", just realize it's a part of the job. Removing the negative stigma in your own head gets you to solutions much quicker.
2 common things I heard were group chats for exchanging solutions (because everyone has experienced it before or is actively experiencing it) and doing routine lunches or get-togethers as a founder group. I used to do this with a few other growth marketers six years ago... every month, I'd come back with ideas that led to six figures of additional revenue from a single lunch.
See? Quick read and you can still go out and see the sunset. But first, let's get on to some fun stuff...
Vendor of the Week:
Bloomreach — The on-site search partner you should be using
I have to admit, one of the most overlooked pieces to an eCommerce site is on-site search. However, every time I go to the Best Buy or Apple website, the first place I go is the search bar. Their site search tools are so powerful... they catch spelling mistakes and tags similar to what I'm looking for and ultimately help me find what I need.
On most eCommerce sites, site search is an afterthought... it's always saved for when everything else is working. Truth is, nothing will ever be set. But not having a good site search can jeopardize the traffic you're already spending money on. The benefits of a good site search, whether you realize them now or later, are enough to impact your business.
In the near term, you benefit from a conversion rate increase, a better customer experience, and fewer customer service inquiries. In the long term, site search can develop to be its own "channel" of revenue, you'll generate a plethora of shopper data (what searches lead to which AOVs or LTVs) and the benefits of product discovery within search.
You can learn more about what goes into a seamless site search with this 21-minute, in-depth paper from Bloomreach. Even if you skim it, I promise you'll learn two really useful things about optimizing your customer journey.
LP of the Week:
This week's LP of the week is from a brand whose product I've personally won a lot with... it's Nettie Pickleball.
What's interesting about this page? Well, do you see that beautiful Buy With Prime button underneath the shop section? HOOX now has a partnership with Amazon to allow all our big merchants to sell through Buy With Prime on their conversion-optimized landing pages.
On average, a HOOX page doubles conversion rate for our clients. That means their CPA is cut in half... from just their first landing page (of course, that's because our team combs through a pretty robust page strategy). But why haven't you booked a call with Dillon on our team? Click here to book a time with Dillon. 15 minutes and you'll know if you're a good fit for us to help you increase your conversion rate.
That's all for this week
I hope you found an applicable nugget in today's email. I wanted also to share a conference hack I've learned that most people don't do. Whenever I get to a conference, summit, or event, I figure out how to get people to know I'm there. I'll do it one of 2 ways, depending on the size of the event.
If it's a big event, I'll go to Twitter and see who's tweeting, posting or interacting around the event's Twitter presence. This might be a dedicated hashtag the event uses, or just people tweeting that they're here, or tweeting live quotes from the event. This is an instant hack to see who's there and to just like/reply with something valuable.
The second, for smaller events, is to ask questions. Most panels or talks have a Q&A portion. Make sure your hand goes up first, and ask something that inspires the type of people you want to connect with at that event. The way I got the first nugget in this newsletter was by asking someone a question... then during the break, not only did people come and say, "I didn't know you were here!" but they also said, "That was a great question," and I met at least 5 incredible people.
Ok, that's all... I hope you're doing something exciting today. I am going to go get some Kolkata Chai in New York City and I'll see you next Sunday!!