If I Wanted to Scale An Online Store, Here's What I'd Do

You're about to meet Luis. He runs an online store that sells railing. Although he's doing $2 and half million dollars in revenue. The problem is that 81% of his customers are coming from a single source, which is Google Ads. If that changes or stops working, his business could be in very serious trouble. So, first, we're going to dive deep into the business, and then we're going to break down all the tactics that he and you can use to scale. And at the very end, we're going to check in with Luis one year later to see if those tactics actually helped him scale. Hi, Alex. My name is Luis Laura, the owner of Optimum Works, and we are a railing company. And we sell a variety of railings online. And who we help are homeowners, contractors, and designers. And here are some of the examples below of some of the products we make. Sweet. How much money do you make? Currently, we're doing 2.5 million in revenue, 384,000 in profit, and our net margins are 15%. And our LTV to CAC is 1:1. Okay. So, something's weird there, obviously. So, what do you want to have happen? I'm trying to build the best railing company in the US, and I want to 10x revenue growth and double profit. That is an ambitious goal. Uh, so how do you get customers? All right. Currently, we're getting them through paid ads, and 81% of our customers are coming from Google Ads, and we spend about 21,600 a month on Google, and we spent on Meta 4,500 a month. and we have a couple other sources of traffic below. So, what's the issue? What's the problem right now? We we spent over 300,000 in marketing last year. Our CAC is high and it actually doubled from last year and our conversions are too low. Got it. So, you have a conversion rate issue. So, any other problems that you're dealing with besides that? Another problem is that not enough customers are repeat buyers. It's only about 10% and we want to increase our LTV. So, you have a different customer mix. So, you've got DIY guys and you've got designers, you got contractors, but 70% of your business is DIY. Um, what percentage is custom versus like just normal off therackck stuff? 70% are just like handrails and like stuff that people buy directly on our website. And then 30% are custom orders. What percentage of sales are coming from people buying on the site versus a phone? Uh, the last time I checked, it's about like 10 to 20% on on the phone. All right. So many ways to make money here. So, I'm going to do this a little differently than I normally do. Um, I'm instead of giving you like a lot of different things, I would like to just give you like two or three things so that you have a high likelihood of actually doing it that have the highest impact on the business. But fundamentally, I think that we could probably fix a lot of this with like two things. Okay, great. All right. So, why don't you why don't you go over this way and then we'll uh we'll we'll do some live breakdowns. Let's pull up the meta ads. Okay. So, this is the only ad that's running right now. All right. Are you running these or somebody else running these? Um, I have a a marketing agency that that works that I work with and they're doing like the ads, but we've definitely like scaled down on on Meta and we're only spending like 1 to 2,000 a month right now. But, we actually use a post-purchase survey and over 90% of our customers are saying they found us on Google. Okay. Yeah. Got it. That's good to know. Yeah. Let's do Google real quick. Okay. So, CAC LTV there doesn't make sense cuz it says your LTV is lower than your CAC unless you're losing money, but it doesn't sound like you're losing money. So, something's wrong here. What I'm what I'm seeing here though is that like we have a clear data attribution issue. Mhm. For me to say, hey, let's uh spend more on Google or let's spend less on Google. It's like I have no idea. We don't have any data. So, we have numbers, but they're not useful. We have to get the attribution because you're at a business where like you are spending money on ads. You're making money, but you have no idea where it's really coming from besides your post purchase survey which says Google. But when we look at the Google stats, it says you're losing money. So like here's here's my red flags, right? So number one is uh you're showing LTV to CAC of 41 to one, which makes zero sense because that would means that every month you would just be actively losing money. And since 80% of your sales come from Google traffic, then I would say 80% of your revenue you should be losing money on, which you're not. So there is an alternative possibility, which is super, you know, is possible, which is that the agency that's doing this for you has no idea what they're doing and you're just getting a lot of referral traffic from people who've bought stuff from you in the past and you're actually just functionally blowing money out the back end and not really getting many more sales. Yeah, I would like if I wanted to get if I were if I wanted to be ballsy a ballsier person, I would consider looking at shutting off all the ads and seeing how sales change. I mean, yeah, that's the only way to find out. But I mean, but I don't want like again if we like like last year, you know, we spent, you know, uh like 21 like,000 a month average and this year we've been spending 40,000 and our and our revenue has doubled. that data of we spent more and we made more. Yeah. That tracks. But it's not being tracked. Right. And so that's so based on that I would be like, "All right, well something's working." And when you spend more money, you're making more. But we have no idea. And so it allows us to do zero optimization. And you're at the point in the business like you want to go from 3 to 10, 10 to 10 to 100. You have to know these data like the back of your hand. Yeah, definitely. I'm at that point where it's this data is the most important thing right now. Like you kind of have a blanket strategy of like, well, if more people find out about me, more people buy, which I'm all for. No, I mean like I'm game for that. But now we have to be more as you get to colder and colder audiences, um, we have to be more targeted with the spend. Totally. If we were to reimagine the business, I think that, and to be clear, I don't want to break the business. Obviously, it's making money. There's nothing wrong with the business, but I would probably optimize for DIY plus custom. And the reason I'm thinking that is for a number of things. So number one is you already have a strong fold in DIY. Number two is that they're less price sensitive than the other buyers, which means like even though the ticket and when can you pull up the uh customer data real quick? So, if you look here, right, the the average order value is not like so if you if contractors were like $20,000, I'd be like, "All right, well, maybe we should look harder at that." But you're you're you're you're really close in terms of average order value. And so, there's no real benefit to going to these highly price sensitive people who are clearly shopping you between a bunch of different sources versus the people who are like, I think this stuff's dope. I want to buy from them, which is, I'm guessing, what the DIY people are more similar to. Right. And so the basically like if we think about this from a strategy perspective, if you sell to the contractors and designers, you're going to be more and more of a commodity for them and then they're just going to be shopping you out between a bunch of other shops that do the assembly and whatnot. Whereas DIY, we can drive more gross profit because we could easily take the 873 and probably bump it to a,000 and we'd have the same average order, but our gross margin would be so much higher. And that's where I think the magic is. So it's like even if we have the same average order or close to it, we could sell way more of them and the gross margin on each might be double or triple because the margins are thinner in the business. Yeah, that's what I think that like the overall like if I own the business tomorrow, I would probably reorganize it so that it's just like this is the home for DIY railings and it's showing all the cool stuff you can do for custom and then people are just like basically opting in, booking a call and at the end of the call we can solicit the sale. Yeah. And I think you set that agenda at the very beginning which is like hey um we're going to go through like the you know these things. So it would look like this. So it would be you know custom they click the button this thing goes here they put in their you know form. Yeah. One step. Yeah. Form. And then we can have their calendar. Right. And this can be together right cuz the calendar can take the form. Then after this we have a post or preall but post opt-in uh video sales letter. And this is like hey this will give them price ranges. And then on the nurture which you'll do via SMS here. Is uh basically you ask for band which is budget authority need timing. Okay. And so that's just going to be like easy little text messages being like hey just making sure you're the person like does your wife need to be on the call? who else needs to be on the call to make a decision just because and I would just be like, "Listen, we're not a sales company, but I'm happy to hop on the call to uh figure out what you need so we can get so we can get your order in." And we're really framing it as like you're going to be buying on this call. So, this isn't like a long sales process. Like, I'm just making sure that no one's wasting anyone's time. And then on the call, that is a I think that is the worst phone I've ever drawn. I don't even really know what it is. Um, I'm going to I'm going to put an antenna there. And maybe we'll put a couple keys here. I don't know if this is making it better or not. U, but on the call here, I can draw this one really well. On the call, we'll have a nice There we go. We got our credit card. That one, that one I did. Okay. I can draw the money. All right. Uh, and so we'll get the card. And I think that will allow you to one like I could see a world where your DIY projects are 1,300,500. like no problem. And then also you probably have like CLA or a firm or one of those financing uh options. Oh yeah. Like to Shopify has like their own like financing. Yeah. Shop. Yeah. And so are you processing the custom orders through Shopify as well? Yeah. And so here it's like you can say cool do you want to pay like I would just do AB in terms of the close which is like hey do you want to use a credit card? Do you want to finance? Same to us same to you. Um you know which would you prefer? Yeah. And then that way you can just lock in on the call. And it's like and um and then like here you can also prep them saying, "Hey, um I give a $200 discount for people who move forward on the call." And that's just because it saves us an administrative headache for taking more calls after that. Okay? So I tell them before they get on the call. So it's like they know they're going to buy cuz I just want I don't want you on multiple calls. I think it's a waste of your time. And I think this process, we're just basically leaning into the people that are the least price sensitive that you already have the most of and actually just dialing in the sales process here. And this is where I think you want to like basically let them dream, which is I'd be like, "Hey, there's like there's 101 railings that you can that you can put into a house. If you have a modern house, this is might be the type of look you're looking for. If you have a this, this might be what you're looking for. If you have a this, this might and if you just have wild ideas, let me show you four different wild ideas." Yeah. And I'm sure that there's custom ones, but the reality is that there's like three or four that just are really sick, right? And then just show you can give the ranges here and be like, obviously it's going to depend like on shipping and whatnot. Like I think that if you literally just follow this process, you would probably be somewhere in the 50 to 60% close rate range and we would probably double the average value of each customer. So when we were talking earlier, you said you wanted a 10x. Mhm. Well, just from hypothetical math here, we could probably double the close rate and more than double the gross margin. Per customer. So, that's a 4x. Okay. So, for the VSSL overall, so short for video sales letter for anybody who's curious, is that we want to have basically a hook. Oops, two O's. Uh hook at the beginning. So, we go uh we we follow the same process for this as I do for like a YouTube video. So, we're going to have proof that we can help them. We have a promise and then a plan, which is like this is how what we're going to cover in this video. Okay? Right? And ideally have some sort of picture or road map that displays these things. That way there's a visual of like, okay, this is what's happening. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10stage road map from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business. What the constraint feels like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it. And then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh service businesses, brickandmortar, all of this. And it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap. Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you. All free. The hook is like, "Hey, have you ever wondered uh or like have you ever looked at your railing and be like, "Man, if I just change this, my whole house would look different." Um, and this is probably super high ROI from a from a home resale perspective. So, just changing the railings in a house, there's a recent report that came out that showed that like railings from an aesthetic perspective only cost a fraction of what they add in home value. And so, the way I think about it, railings are basically free. Wow. Right. What a Yeah. What a great What a great What a great anchor, right? Um, now you might be wondering like how do I, you know, how do I think about like buying a railing? And so it's like there's actually four steps, you know, to buying a railing. There's the, you know, the materials, there's the, you know, the number, there's the the hook into the wall, the whatever, you know, like you know, you know, whatever those steps are, right? And so you go for each of those. I'm going to show them up. There we go. Some cool people. Perfect. Yes. Yeah. And this looks great. This is awesome. So, this one is where I'd go like back and forth or how to choose a right-hand rail video. I have a bunch of Yeah. different videos. And so, at the end of this, so you're going to go through that whole process, right? And uh at the end, so we're put this this is still in the intro. Um I'll explain pricing cuz everyone's going to be like, "Oh my god." Cuz so that way it'll it'll keep them cuz they're like, "I want to know the pricing." I'll explain pricing and kind of like set expectations for delivery times and things like that, right? And so then you go through this, which is kind of like the meat of the video. And then we go into price ranges and expectations. And I would still say cover this here, which is like, hey, um, like obviously these things, uh, they are free in terms of the fact that they can add value to the house in excess of what they cost, but they obviously cost money, were made here in America or whatever it is. Um, so you know, come to the call knowing what your budget is cuz then that way like I don't waste your time with like making railings out of diamonds, which we can do by the way. Uh, you know, you can make a joke. Um, authority, which is like, okay, uh, if you have your wife or husband who needs to be on the call, um, I'd recommend you guys do it together cuz sometimes you got one person who has the taste, another person who handles the money, like you want both of you guys on the call. And then from a need perspective, um, they're here, so you don't have to cover that one. Um, they have pretty high intent watching railing videos. Uh, and then it's just timing. So, it's like, "Hey, and also I just want to know, um, basically what's your timeline in terms of, uh, getting it installed and if we were to, you know, get it get it shipped out to you, like how fast do you need it?" Right. And I like thinking like how fast do you need it because that way we can try and push the urgency in the sale. Uh, to get them to buy. But it basically this is it. So, it's like we have our we have our hook at the beginning, we have our proof promise plan, and then we set our expectation to open loop to the end. We have how you pick the handrailing, and then we say, "Cool, now that you like that." Um, if you're like if you're like, "I'm not sure." Sure. It's like that's why we have the call because listen, it's an important decision. It's going to, you know, change the way your house looks and uh I've done this a lot of times and I and I tend to, you know, I can I can shepher you through this process really well. And that's it. And this video probably you could be looking at, you know, 5 to 7 minutes. Doesn't have to be a long video. And that's it. And then we just have our have our text um our texts that we're sending afterwards, which we're really just looking for uh personal info again. and then reaffirming these which is like hey just to make sure what did you say your budget was um you know are you gonna have your your spouse on the call or whoever makes the decisions and in terms of timelines where are you looking for okay cool so looking forward to call later today u and yeah we'll move forward at the end of that call I honestly only want to give you this because I I think that's the only thing that matters cuz I could like I said like I could I could give you 20 more things but I'll give you one more okay I'll give you one more. This is all this all I'm going to do. We give you one more. Um which is uh the long-term nurture. I think you It's probably worth building this out. How big is your email list? Uh like 10,000. All right. So, uh if you have basically a 10,000 person list you as you had the original problem that you're dealing with, which is that you don't have a lot of repeat purchases, right? Yeah. I don't think that there's like there's like I don't want to force continuity in this business. I don't think that's I don't think that's really the play. Um I think that what we can do is try and consistently market so that the next time they do an expansion were the first ones they look for. But the only way that we can do that is just through consistent long-term And I think that will compound like a snowball. Like it'll just keep building up. And I'll bet you like you have I mean you're doing two and a half million. How how old is the business? Um, it's uh 5 years old and like I barely went full-time two years ago. Yeah. Okay. So, if it's 5 years old and you have a 10,000 person list, you're doing $2.5 million. Like that list is probably a very good list. Cuz that's a really small list relative to the revenue. And so, um, basically, I would like you to just commit to it two times per week, sending an email to the whole list. And I just wanted you to do one is a before and after. And the other is cool Yep. And if you want to have a third, which you can rotate like you know this could be the the next week you do this one is an FAQ which is what are the most common questions that people ask that don't buy. So it's like these are like bait and then this is like overcoming the concern that you immediately have because you're like oh I do want that but you're like h but who's doing the install or like how how much is shipping? How like just these normal random questions that people you already know the 20 questions people ask. Just take all 20 questions and just rotate them. Um throughout the year just like kind of kind of rotating them consistently. Yeah, you could do that. But that's it. Like if we just do this and then every email I would structure. So we got our subject that should be an E. There we go. Um and then underneath we're going to have some sort of immediate reward. So, um, if we can I like to do really cool quotes. Um, what do you think? Like something immediately like that would be sweet just like an image. Well, for like a new email. Yeah. Yeah. For like following this this this framework like rail transformation. Okay, cool. So, we would just do probably a picture here. So, be like check this out. Because the thing is is people who are like want to improve their home, it's kind of like porn for them. Like they're just like they get super obsessive with it. They love it. Yeah. No, exactly. So, it's like check this out. We point to this thing and then I would just have my like CTA uh or FAQ about this linked here. But the point is that we want to give them a link and then a PS you know um discount or joke just something that's like you know friendly fun whatever it is and I think that you can basically model this as the structure that we use in the emails because these people they're going if if they love this stuff then they're going to open it up just to see you know what's going on and and then that like that's what's going to bring people back in. Awesome. So, so 80% of people are like, you know, purchasing directly on the website and like, you know, they're just uh filling out the the checkout and like their card info and, you know, proceeding with the order. And the other um 20% that we're doing like custom railing orders, is like they fill out like a custom order form and like they put all that info. Yeah. Once they fill that out, you know, we make sure like if they have all the correct info, then we'll proceed with the quote and like we'll we'll get like an email that that they filled it out with all their information. Yeah. And then we'll send them the quote within like 24 hours. So, where's the custom quote thing? Yeah. Custom order. It's so small. And we have it. So, where we actually get also a good amount is that we have it on our on our most popular railing. Yeah. Let me see. Let me see. It's in the same project. Yeah, that one. Like that one. But it So it's Yeah, it's underneath. Is that on all of them? That is on the the best sellers. That's Any reason to not put it on all of them? No, we should put them on all of them, dude. Let's put this on all of them. All right. So, in order to do this, I'm going to make this kind of like up here. All rails have the custom custom flow. And so this custom order should then lead to here. Now this little click thing is basically a right because this is one source of getting those clicks. Can you scroll up, Michael? All right. One of the other things I want is so can you scroll all the way to the top again? So there was a banner that I saw. It said free something and then it disappeared. Okay. Free shipping in the USA. Um, I would have a banner across the top that has um, uh, custom designs. Available. And make it sticky. So the the one that you have currently disappears. Like let's keep it sticky across the top. Which one is the Google are the Google ads linking to this one? Yeah. The Google shopping ads are going to that one and that's what you're spending your money on. Yeah. Most of my money. Yeah. On on those. Yeah. Okay. So, it's just going direct. Mhm. Direct to the listing. Yeah. I love these little testimonial things at the bottom. That's really nice. Okay. Um I honestly like this is all I want you to do. I don't think you need to do anything else because if we like if we just do this right you're probably looking at like a three or 4x. Okay. Like I like I don't I don't want to over complicate this. Like you have this you have this the right customer. Like the reason this is so straightforward to me is because everything is aligned. You have the best customer that you have the most of that's the least price sensitive. Um that you have that is the most obsessed with this type of product which leans itself towards custom anyways. And so it's like cool. Let's And this also from Okay. Okay. Does this work for long-term strategy? Yes. Because if you can do more custom stuff and we know it's not that custom. it's enough your neighbor down the street. And of course, like they would be so horrified of that, but who gives a But somebody else might. Nobody who's into railings would. Um but and then we add the nurture in so we can bring customers back. That's it. That's all we would do in terms of doing this in order. Um I would set this up first. I put these on second because basically it's like we have to have the system in place. Then we drive traffic to it. We already talked about this is this is still the video. Then you use this script. Then we add in our lead our our long-term nurture because now we're getting more leads through and we're converting more people. But this gives us more long-term follow-up. And I think this you just run in parallel cuz this is the stuff you're going to do. This is just somebody else. You're going to write a check and you're going to get somebody else to do it. Awesome. All right. Got it. Rock and roll. Perfect. Boom. Easy peasy. So, it's been almost a year since we filmed this episode with Luis. My team jumped on a call to check in on his progress. And I'm going to watch it live. So, from the time we shot that episode of Cash Cows, it was April 2025, and we are currently doing 2.5 billion in revenue with 384,000 in profit. Right now to this day in March 2026, for the past 12 months, we've done 3.6 million with 540,000 in profit. So we've grown our revenue by 44%. Out of all the changes we discussed that had the biggest impact on profit, it was optimizing for custom orders. That has become now a big way bigger part of our business and it's become 50% of our business. So once we fix attribution, we discovered we had campaigns that were breaking even. So what we did is that we took the money out of the losers and put it into the winners. So once we raised prices, our close rate is currently at 20% and we have triple the amount of leads/custom orders submitted. The advice that made the biggest difference was optimizing for custom orders and improving the custom orders page and improving the sales process when it came to taking those custom orders. Alex, thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your help and wisdom. You've completely changed my business and you got me out of the swamp. So, I commend you for that and I know it's only up from here. So, thank you and I wish you well. So, first off, that was awesome. I love hearing the 44% increase in a year. That's badass. Um, and to be clear, this is all because of Louis actually, you know, taking action on this. It's not because of me or some sort of magic. Um, you know, we we looked at the the orders that were making the most money. we put more resources towards those ones. One of his differentiators that he had this custom thing that a lot of other uh people in his space don't have that ability to do. We double down on those things, served higher customers on a higher level. Um and obviously he reaped the profits. So, you know, kudos to you, Luis. Appreciate you. And yeah, so you follow the steps and the stuff actually works. So, yeah, go go go do that. Go do what you just saw in this video and hopefully you reap what Luis did and even