Watch This If You Have An E-Commerce Business

In 2021, I sold my e-commerce company, Prestige Labs, with Gym Launch for $46.2 million. And six months ago, I broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest selling non-fiction book and generated over $16 million in a weekend just using a Shopify store. And so, in this video, I'm answering your questions about how to scale your e-commerce business. And for all these questions, I try to do my very best to make the solutions as tactical as humanly possible so that you watching from home can immediately use them. So, enjoy. Hey, Alex. Yes. My name is Max. I run Elevate Customs with my wife who's in the front row. It's uh we build Elevate Customs. Yep. Like custom Sorry. Um like uh home custom solutions. No, we build and sell like luxury gaming tables like pool tables, casino tables, manufacturers. Not what I was saying. Okay, got it. Yeah. Um that's cool. Like cool backlights and things like that. Yeah. Like any anything like one-off custom pieces. Sweet. Um we we're at around 2 and a half million revenue a year. We want to be around 10. How do you sell at least? Uh, mostly Google ads. So, e-commerce. Yeah, she sells. Yeah. Okay. So, invoices, phone calls. Okay. Got it. So, how do we increase our leads 2x, 3x without breaking the bank, basically? How do you increase your lead flow without breaking the bank? Well, I'll ask you for quality leads basically. So, what are you currently doing? You said Google ads. Yeah. Around 15 to 20k a month. Can you spend more? Why don't we do that? We've tried and we weren't generating the same quality leads or necessarily getting different keywords. We're not getting you more quality. Yeah, correct. This is probably a scale thing though. Like this is a media buying question. Um because I can promise you that at $20,000 a month, you haven't saturated the market for cool custom gaming stuff. Like you could probably get to like 2 million a month before you even get close to that. Um so I think it's probably just a like who does your media buying? We have a company. Okay. I would this is a keyword thing like this is this is three degrees down like super tactical like we're just buying the wrong words and there's just we like I would be how what's your margins right now? 20% 500k a year. So I you just have to see this as like we might burn $200,000 this year on bad keywords to find another six that we can scale up to $100,000 a month and by doing that we'll 5x the business. And so if you just see it like that of like, okay, we're going to spend $200,000 or $300,000 to take us from 2 whatever to 10. That's how I' that's how I'd think about it. Um, in general, we tend to be like scared to spend more money. And I would say the only thing that's really shifted for me is like from entrepreneur to investor, like kind of wearing both hats, is that I look so much stuff at just like return on capital and like what's the point? Like if I think we can get to 10, I would rather just get to 10 faster. And I see because I don't live off of that $500,000 a year. I just see all of that as my my fodder for putting back into the thing so that I can get to the next level, which side quest for everyone. If you're a service business and you have cash flow, some businesses are really obvious for where you do reinvestment. If you're brick and mortar, you save up your shekeles, you open another location. Very clear where your capex goes. If you're manufacturing, you buy another big machine, very clear where the capex goes, right? If you're a service business, you do accounts, you're have you have, you know, you have a law firm, you got uh legal people. What do you do with the extra money to quote reinvest in the business? So, there's two primary sources. Number one is going to be talent and culture. So, who am I going to hire? Uh, and how do I how do I uplevel the team? So, in service businesses in general, you can see how good you are and how advanced you are as a service provider by the by the price you're able to charge. And so over time your price should always go up because fundamentally you should have a virtuous cycle of we do good work that generates more demand. More demand means more than we have supply which means we can raise the price. With the extra cash we can then acquire better talent which means we get we do a better job which increases our reputation which increases our price which allows us to charge more so we can get better talent. And so the talent should always be going up and so should the price. And so if you're in a in a marketplace where you're like man we can't charge more than other people. It's because you aren't better than other people. So we have to beat them in order like we have to do better. That's point one. The second area is brand, right? It's like how do I spend some of that extra cash to solidify the brand of me? So this is not direct response ads. This is like kind of the big aspirational moments, these brand moments. Like we just did this launch this, you know, two weekends ago. It's like how do I how do I do these big demonstrations that might cost more and might not be the normal run of business? Like why would Red Bull have a guy jump from out of space down? It doesn't make any sense, but except it makes a ton of sense because I'm talking about it right now, right? And so you're probably more likely to drink a Red Bull at the break. Real talk. Uh, and so anyways, it's like, how does this ladder back to selling more pool tables? Um, for you though, you're not in a service based business per se, but I thought it was a good offshoot for other people. Um, see all of the profit that you have, whatever you don't need to live on as your experimentation budget. And that budget is really like do not see it as I lost money. Like you can't think with that perspective. You will just lose. You have to think of that this is like I'm going to uh rigorously test keywords until I find more keywords that win. And these are just investments in finding money printing machines because keywords especially once you really find them, they kind of just print for you, which you guys are experiencing right now, right? You got to spend $250,000 a year to make a 2.2, right? You're getting 10 to1 on it. Now, obviously you have cost of goods for sure, but like profitable, right? And I'm sure when you found your first keyword and it started working, you were like, "Holy shit." It's like, "Great. We just need to find like another hundred." And they're there. They're there. And you might need bridge pages. So you've you may have heard of Eugene Schwarz. Uh so famous marketer. And so when you really want to scale ads to colder markets, um for those of you went through the hooks and the goated ads, anyone go through goated ads playbook? Okay. So this this will sound a little bit more familiar. So you have these levels of awareness that correspond with size of market. And so you've got your most aware customers here. And the reason that these levels are important is that it changes what the hook is and what the kind of click journey is for the customer. So at the very top you've got unaware, then you've got problem aware, you've got solution aware, you've got product aare, and then you've got most aware, which is usually your existing customers, right? And so if you want to expand, so right now I'll bet you most your keywords are targeting these people. If you want to go up market, which might have 10 times more clicks, we might have to have a bridge page after you have like the keyword might be more like home home projects or like uh accessor like I' I'd have to think that I'd use a keyword finder. And would you have like the same team work on that or hire a completely different marketing team to kind of a really good media buyer would know this? Um, but you'll likely just need to have keywords that are a little bit broader so you start competing against more people. But as long as you bring them to kind of like an advertorial type page and then they take the next step and then it basically mimics the same path as this. It's like you take them from product aare to then advertorial then to your sales page. That bridge the clicks here might also be like onetenth the price and there's an ocean of them. And then when you get from there it's like okay what's what's above that problem aware? Is your house boring? Right? Like, do you have an extra room that you don't know what to do with? Right? These are problem. They have a problem. They have no idea that you're going to sell them a pool table. But we have to start with where they're at and then lead them through the journey. Thank you. Appreciate it. 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, 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, brick-andmortar, 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. Uh, my name is Ethan. Uh, we sell direct response e-commerce products. We're all paid media. Uh we do about $3 million a year in revenue direct response e-commerce products. Okay. Like drop shipping stuff pretty much. Yeah. It's it's more branded than that, but essentially is. Yeah. So you have customers for doing that or you're doing that? We're doing that. Okay. Got it. And so you have a handful. How many SKs do you have? Uh four. Okay. Is it all the same brand? No. Okay. Yep. So we have uh we're doing it's like four months old. So, we're doing a run rate of like uh 3 million a year. Um we have, you know, background in like paid traffic affiliate. Um so, it's not the first rodeo with that. We're trying to get to like 15 million a year run rate. Um what's stopping us right now, you know, not entirely sure, but um basically like we have each step for everything that has to be done. We built out teams and systems for the main priorities and those things are working pretty well. I'm happy with uh our talent, what they're producing. Uh, but so far what I'm experiencing is that, you know, I'm left with this, you know, list of like random chores that somehow only I can do. A junk drawer. Yeah. But I'm not sure how to approach hiring for this cuz it ends up being like a very niche specific task, but I may I might only need them for like, you know, 20 minutes a week or something. So, it ends up being me, but with a million things. And your founder? Uh, yeah. Okay. Um, so let's start here. You want to get to 15 million. What stops you from spending more money? Uh, nothing right now. I mean, so we just hired a pretty robust funnel team and an operations guy, like a strategist. So kind of just waiting on those things to kick in really. Um, but I'm I'm fairly confident at least do it. Okay. So this is more a complaint than a constraint, right? No, I'm just making No, I'm This is me asking for clarity. So, we think we can double if we just spend more money. I'm not spending more money because I'm waiting for this thing to happen. Once this thing happens, then I'm going to spend as much money as I can. Sure. Right. Um and in the meantime, I have stuff I don't feel like doing, you know? I'm like, this is me trying to translate back. Is that true? Is that like accurate? Yeah. But eventually, there's going to be enough of that stuff that like I will have to find some way to hire out for these things. Yeah. And then there'll be more stuff that you'll still do. You'll just do the more important valuable stuff and give the other stuff to somebody else. Yeah. But a lot of it ends up being fairly tedious. Like it's it doesn't feel like high leverage or high value at all. I mean, this is where like VAS and product project work can come really in handy. Like I'll give you an example. So when we made all the ads for the launch, right? I don't I didn't need the amount of editors that I had to spin up in order to because like I'm not going to be making 300 ads a week, you know, ongoing. I don't need to. But for the launch, I did. And I wasn't going to hire an extra 15 editors full-time because it's just like I don't need that. And so we spun up 15 editors that were contractors who would then just clip and we had one person just did QA on it to make sure that it was good and then we'd ship them, right? And so if we have something that's like one timeish work where it's sporadic, then I'm fine just having a suite or a bench of contractors that I can turn on and off. As long as they do decent work. We do similar things like with our with our video editors as well, but you know, some of the tasks are fairly specialized like No, I understand. I was just using as an example for editors, but I'm saying like if you have tedious work like this is where the fivers of the world like can come in handy and worst case you train a contractor or VA on how to do it and then they do it. Yeah. Just like someone that's high level enough in like Shopify work but we only use them for a few. There's tons of Shopify contractors like a boatload of them and they're not that expensive and some of them are really good. Yeah. I like I would just look at my list. What are the things I'm doing on a regular basis? Can I ship out most of these to a contractor who does a peace meal? Probably. And now you're trading 20 hours for two. And that's just you just keep making that trade until eventually you've managing a ton of people. And then it's like great, one person is managing all of these and you just trade all that time for you getting more because hopefully if you're doing that much work, then you should have the revenue to support um that role. Have you have you scaled e-commerce like this before? Okay. Are you are you just running paid ads? Uh yes. Okay. Do you have influencers who are doing stuff? No influencers who are looking to hire for that, but we we have three or four channels for paid at least. Yeah. I'll say this. How big do you want this to be? Uh I mean ultimately like the goal is we'd like to have a portfolio of call it four or five brands that we can then exit in a couple years. So, I have this conversation every week um with somebody who's doing e-commerce and it's almost always the same like I would like to have a portfolio of a handful of products that I could eventually sell someday. I have really yet to see anyone do that. Um and it's I think for two reasons. One is that as you continue to scale your CAC will continue to go up and your gross margins will shrink and that will get frustrating. You will then also have supply chain issues which would become a burden. You'll also have dupes if you start becoming really good that will undercut you in price and list on Amazon and all that stuff. Um do you have patent protection like for any of these products and so like you right now run a media arbitrage business and it works really well up to about 10 million. And then it will quickly stop working very well. Um and so I think to your point of like you can see a double that's probably true. You might even have a triple that's sitting there with a little bit optimization, more email follow-up, blah blah blah blah blah. Um, but you'll you'll probably get close to capping in that neighborhood, 10, maybe 12. Um, and then you're going to be like, well, we're doing a million dollar a month, but we have like almost no margin and our cash flow is [ __ ] Um, and so the what I think you want is that you want to build a brand that has a product that you really believe in that will allow you to recruit affiliates to your cause. When I say affiliates, I mean influencers, not traditional direct response uh, affiliates that are just mercenaries, but like people actually believe in it. Um, and when you do that, you will actually be able to build a brand because fundamentally like any one of the products can be big enough on their own to sell. And so rather than saying like why don't we try and build four totally different products and totally different brands at the same time, it's like why don't we just try to build one that we really like that we think has a chance at actually like really helping people for whatever the problem that the the product solves. Um, that's what will build what I think you want. It's just that most people who come from the direct response world just are pure performance marketers. And I say this being someone who comes from that world. And I had to learn the hard way that you will run into the wall that there's a there's a great article you can read called the direct response doom loop which you might have read. But basically you just do this revenue goes up, margins compress, margins compressed until you're eventually here. And then you have to keep selling in order to maintain your team. And then you just run a very large very high high liability nonprofit and it sucks. And cash flow is a huge constraint. and you've got all the supply chain [ __ ] And then you're like, "This sucks." And then you'd have another conversation, come back here, and be like, "Hey, we're doing 12 million with 7% margins." And I would say, "Okay, of the four products you have, which one is the the one that's the the clear winner? That's the one that's carrying all the other losers." And you'd be like, "Well, it's this one." And then I'd say, "Okay, cool. Why don't we just get rid of these three and then put all of your effort on this? Do you think you'd be able to win that?" You'd be like, "Oh my god, for sure." And be like, "Great. So, like, why don't we do that?" And then actually invest in building the brand. Around it. We we definitely have uh you know we're we're paid traffic affiliates so like we're data people like uh but so one of the things that I've thought about is like you know our our biggest skew it it's good but it's not like it's not that good like I know a good campaign when I see it. So like part of the purpose of building out like uh you know our research and funnel teams is well eventually we're going to find something where the market is just like 10 times better you know so it's like do we keep chugging along with like the one that's like a six out of 10 or do we find go find the nine and then go all in on that. The skill set that you guys are deficient in is going to be brand and that's what you have to learn how to do and the brand is also completed with the product right? So like that's what completes the brand loop. Like we make this amazing promise, we have all these great associations. People then make the purchase and then the product either reinforces the brand or destroys the brand. And if it reinforces the brand, then the loop continues and becomes a virtuous cycle. And that's how you go from an e-commerce store that does media arbitrage into a household name that you can sell for not just 50 million, but maybe 500 million. And so it's just that like I have this conversation literally every week. And so I know that you're coming at this from a math perspective. It's just that it will not work at scale. And so I would rather you spend as little as you can on all of these different things to find a product that you guys really think is legit and has some level of defensibility if you can because if you don't have a defensible product, the only thing that you have is the brand to differentiate you. That's the only differentiator. And so if you're competing because like just played out the next step, right? Like let's say you find your nine out of 10. No one's buying that. Like private equity investor not buying it because they know the game. They buy brands. They don't buy products and so you get your nine out of 10 and then the dupes flood because they see that you're killing it and then they undercut you on all this stuff and then your rorowes goes down and then you leak everything to your competitors. So either you have some sort of patent that you can actually protect and you have a legal team that can enforce it or you build a brand. So like that's the long-term play. The rest of this is just making money until you figure that out. I'm being super real with you. I just rather save you a couple years. But like that is where this leads. Okay. I I mean so how do you build a brand? Yeah. Right. Yeah. How do how do I do that? But um you know we are working on like the legal defensibility of it. You know I I didn't mean to say like I would lead with brand rather than making legal. Because legal you have to like it's still tough to like it's it's better to be big and then win with legal than try and be small and win with legal because you'll just get drowned in fees. And it's it's it's better to just have the coolest brand and have the coolest people promoting the thing and then people just want to buy from you even though they see the cheaper knockoffs. But that's like that's what you have to do if you really want to go where you want to go. Otherwise, you're just going to be cycling through SKs and you're going to say you have a portfolio and it'll sound impressive to people who don't know what you're talking about, but like margins will do this, cash flow get [ __ ] and you have co-founders and it'll be like this is so much work. This sucks. I wish we had one product that we all really believed in that we could like build a business around. And that's what you want to do. Yeah. You bet. Hi, my name is Samantha Harrison. I own a hair extension company in Australia. Amazing. I have a salon and an e-commerce business. Oh, what? In e-commerce? Sorry. Sorry. I wholesale. Wholesale and e-commerce. So, direct to consumer and wholesale. Um, sorry. I'm like so nervous. I have terrible fear of public speaking. have a panic attack and then just ask a question. You're good. I forgot what my question was. Fine. Um, read what I wrote down if that's okay. Okay. So, to make either business truly sellable at high valuation, it would take me years of operational restructuring, recruitment, reducing owner dependence, and building systems. And even then the multiple would be low because service based product businesses don't scale without heavy ongoing input. I want to move into SAS. You think you think this is hard and so you're like you know what I could do something harder. And so I guess that was the point of me coming to this seminar cuz I know you talk a lot about like the women in the red dress. Yeah. Or men in the tuxedo, you know, whatever works. Um, obviously I'm fearful cuz it's not my niche and it's not what I specialize in, but I obviously being in the industry, I definitely see a lack in the market and education. So, what is the SAS that you're trying to build or that you It's an online booking system for well, the niche is for salons, but it can be used for service- based businesses. There's so many of those. It's got AI built into it. And the the difference between mine and say everybody else's is it's essentially bridging the gap between revenue and profit. So giving like more of like a pull data rather than push. Um having the AI built in as more as like a motivational business coach which will give you the real time analytics on your team, on your services, on your numbers, on your margins, like everything like that. Like for me personally, I spend every week calculating every single team member's revenue, cost of product. You own a salon, too? But the So the salon and the wholesale run without me. The salon does about So the salon does about say 900,000 with 50% margin and I'm happy with like what like I don't really want to scale the salon. The wholesale year, well this year has grown 100% but it's about 30% month on month. What was the revenue of the wholesale? Um I think I'm just at 2.6. Okay. So far. and you have 30% margins on that. Great. So the financial overview for this SAS, so it's $500,000 build, 120 grand a year to maintain, but it's serving my same audience, right? The the stockists are already salon owners. They already buy from me. They already trust me. It's something that they want use, have already subscribed to like the founders. Don't look at me like that. Believe in me. I do. I do. I'm just trying to figure out which you believe in. I'd only need 150 subscribers to maintain costs, which I've already got. So, if I had 2,000 of my weekly stockers that already buy from me, subscribe, there's 2 million a year. It's fine, right? Tell me it's a good idea, please. There's so much pain. You sound like Ed. I've been sulking all day. So, one of the difficulties that I have like this is a is a perfect scenario of um telling someone what they want to hear versus telling them what I think. And I uh I'm always it's very fine line because like I always want everyone to leave happy. Um but I also feel like I have integrity. Tough, right? Um, and so, um, I I what I will do is I will give you a sorting question. You can pick what side you want. Okay? I can assume your position and then tell you what I would do, although I disagree with it, or I can tell you what I think you should do. Which one would you like? Tell me what I should do. Okay, great. Um, I think that I'm going I think you getting into SAS as somebody who has never built a software product and doing it where you're going to self-fund it. Um, and just because you have a distribution base does not mean that you should sell every single thing that that distrib distribution base can buy. What if I've already paid for it? That's called sunk cost fallacy. Okay, for real. So, I just give up. I don't try. Just walk. Some of the best money you ever spend is deciding to stop spending bad money. Um, and I say this only having done it myself. Um, so I'm gonna I'm I'm gonna hit from a couple angles. So the first one is who here is organic as their primary method of getting customers like making content, etc. And it gets bigger and bigger every time. It's just the way it's it's the way the world's roving. Um, so one of the big mistakes that people who have organic audiences make is that you grow an audience and then you sell a product and then people buy the product and you make money and that's a very reinforcing event. And so then but they already bought the product. So then you think well [ __ ] I should make another product and so you make another product and then within two or three years all of a sudden you have four mini businesses that serve the same pool of customers when the real constraint of the business is you needed to grow your audience. And so the invisible be or sorry not the extensions whatever it is that you sell right the the hair extensions that you sell uh you're doing you know 2.6 and what's the what's the e-commerce side doing in revenue? Yeah it's like 900 900 that's what it's doing. Sorry. Sorry. The the salon is 900. The online is 2.6. So, okay. So, there is no you said e-commerce at some point. Yeah. So, e e-commerce I'm selling online is the wholesaling. Okay. Got it. It's B2B. I also sell to retail wholesale and retail. So, anyone can buy, but I do have stockist. The vast majority is other stylist buying. Right. So, can buy from me, but also hair extension salon owners can register for a trade account. And how many of the sales are trade accounts? It's about 50% at the moment. is interesting. Okay. So, um anyways, back to this point which is that that business is not not sellable. I just want to be like you you said like ready you started you're like it's not sellable. It's operation blah blah. It's like that's I mean not necessarily true kind of at all. Yeah. Um, you just need to get more customers and extensions are a reoccurring product. Like people buy them every 8 whatever the weeks are, you know, whatever the you know it better than I do, but I know I've seen the bill. So, it's not one time. I think I'm sure about that. So, so all that to say like all we have to do is just like we you have now encountered the big hairy problem that I talked about at the beginning of today which is that you encountered something that you didn't know how to solve and then are thinking okay well there's greener pasture over here there's a girl in a redder dress and if I go here surely this grass will not be fertilized with [ __ ] um but it is indeed full of [ __ ] and significantly more [ __ ] than what your current business is the current business is actually way more chill than the business that you're trying to get into and the business you currently have is way more cash positive than the one you want to get into the business that you want to get into, you will not make money from for many years, if you ever make money from it. So, if you want to win at software, you have to commit to making no money for basically seven years. Zero. And the people you're competing against don't have two other businesses. I guess like my limiting belief around like I've got a very lean business. So, I built a property a couple of years ago. I ended up moving out and I run the wholesale and the salon from that house. So, my expense for the salon and the wholesale is 500 bucks a week. So, it's very lean. Yeah. So good. I'm like obviously on the extension side. You mean Yeah. Like my margins are too small for me to be able to scale at the margins that So why don't we just do that? I'm like if I can because you thought starting a software company. I well I thought that having like a risk uh sorry a reoccurring you have a reoccurring business based product that I would use as well so reoccurring and recurring right have the same value what we need to demonstrate is revenue retention I would just like to make money online while I sleep and I don't want to work anymore that's fine software companies is certainly not the way to do it probably the worst way to try and do okay um like we just need to confront the business that you have right now, you need to improve the margins and you need to go get more acquisition. So that probably means like making more content, running ads to attract uh stylists, having some sort of offset front end to get them integrated. How can you run some sort of play within their you know salons? um trying to use your your vernacular um to you know basically make them more money using your extensions and then by doing that then they get converted because they make more money selling extensions than cutting color and so it's very likely they'll keep selling it and then you have basically you have a hunter and a farmer the hunter is the one that basically closes the deal and gets them to kind of activate their base of of um ladies I guess I maybe there's guy it's just like the constraint of the wholesale is the production time and the capital um And again, like my logic was, well, if I was to invest the same $500,000 into the wholesale, that's a $150,000 margin. Whereas I thought, well, if I invested it into subscriptions, you would just lose all of it. Maybe that's your limiting belief. I've built more software companies to a billion than you have. Fair. Okay. Right. Two can play that game. Do you want my help? Take my advice. Cool. I should do it. My name is Sasha. Um I sell designer bags and sunglasses and uh we do about 6 million a month. No, sorry. A year. Sorry. 6 million a year. So cool. Um and I would like to do 38 million precise. Yeah. 38 million. Um and what's stopping me is recruiting. Why 38? Um just because I figured, you know, 100,000 a day, something like that. Round up, down, something like that. Just a roundabout. Um and um I mean, obviously more. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But I was thinking 38 would be fair. Yeah, that works. and it is just recruiting. Um recruit Oh, recruiting is the bottom line as you're saying? Okay, got Um, my house cleaner was my uh first employee and she just and because I consumed yours and Leila's content so much that I was like, I'm going to be these two people in one. That's me. I'm going be these two people. And as a result, I have um a great team, a really great team. And it's just a matter of being militant in the um the recruiting process. the we do sell on whatnot quite a bit. So, who do you have what's stopping you? So you make money $6 million a year selling handbags and sunglasses. And sunglasses. For you to sell more handbags and sunglasses, you need more people to do that. Yes. Because we u we only go live for about 5 hours a day because we get tired. It's just me and Well, me and um I have three sales people, but um it's just we get tired. We could if we were live more often, we could create more. You're going live on like your Instagram page or your what? On whatnot. Okay, got it. And do you have like a big following there? 110,000. Ton of And so you're just selling to that same base and if you just sold for longer, you would make more. A lot more. I could do 100 grand in the show. Okay. So you just need like two more sales people who go on camera. Mhm. But yeah. Mhm. And then the recruiting as well. Recruiting for what? uh packing because we we do a lot of um you do your own 3PL or not third party but like you do your own logistics. H why why do we do it ourselves? I didn't I didn't know you could have other people do it. Boy oh boy. Yeah. Step inside. Uh yes. So so functionally like because of the nature of the business that you're in um we have to think like we have to we have to consolidate resources. I'm not normally somebody who's like, uh, let's let's cut, you know, parts of the business out, but unless your shipping is some key differentiator that you have, uh, like Amazon shipping became a competitive advantage, right? Um, but unless that's like some differentiator, then shipping for the most part is pretty commoditized. And there are people who all day long they think about like saving 15 cents on cardboard boxes and tape and packing peanuts and all that [ __ ] Um, and I think that that you having to like think about that and run a functionally a warehouse at the same time as running a marketing and sales and talent business/media. That's not where the value is. The value is in the distribution and the sales. And so I would say like can we outsource this so that can we outsource this the the logistics part so that you can just go all in because all we had to do is you get two more sales people and you get to 100,000 a day. We should do that. So um we have to physically show the product like No, I'm not saying you don't have like some product on hand. You just don't need a warehouse. No, we do need it cuz it's like go go go go speed. We run probably about So you're like we sold this item to this person is how you do it. So um Got it. It is kind of like a warehouse. It's Okay, that's fine. Um All right. So you just need to hire more people. So what's stopping you from hiring more people? The talent. Um the talent to hire more people. Well, I'm I'm learning now. That's why I'm here. No, no, you're good. You're good. Um, so I'm saying like you have two sets of roles. You've got warehouse folks and you've got people who can get on camera, right? So what are you currently doing to get each of those people? Well, we had ads on Indeed. But I didn't realize how militant I had to be until I came here. It's it makes a lot of sense, right? I didn't know that there's that many interviews that were required. Um, and that's more for the warehouse side, correct? both because sales is I think that you'd be able to find salespeople like I would probably look at Amazon affiliates. How much would you pay them? Percentage. Well, that's the thing now. So, okay. So, it takes skill to do what we do. It takes skill. Like Agreed. Like um for example, my girl is better than me. She's better than me. And it's like not only is it motor skills, it's um presentation and entertainment. I I get it. I understand. I did a live for 3 days. I got it. Um so finding and training that um that's definitely a process and takes time. Yeah. The question is whether you want to buy or build. Do you want to buy the town or build the town? Building the town is cheaper, takes longer, harder. Buying the town is faster, more expensive. Which one do you Which one feels right for you? So, when it comes to the So, we have um we're not always So, we are profitable per show. Yes. Profitable per show. But sometimes what ends up happening is like let's just say it's a a Wednesday, right? Are you on cash based accounting or acrruel? Probably cash. Yeah. So you might like if basically if you run a physical products business which you do here you're like okay we made money now let's take all of that profit gross profit that we had and go buy more [ __ ] so we can sell more [ __ ] right right so this is where like you probably have what's your like what's your financial the financial side of the business the financial ops look like my accountant handles it your who my accountant oh your accountant does it okay you will need to have soon a relatively strong finance person uh who can give you better forecasting so that you can it's not just like how much cash we have in the bank account, let's go buy more [ __ ] It's like we can only afford to buy this much given this growth rate that we want to have. Mhm. Um otherwise you will get into these probably cash crunches that you're feeling right now. It's not that the business isn't profitable cuz I'm guessing the headcount's not super. So, so our so our shows will make anywhere from like 5 to 7,000 in profit depending on like the volume that we did that day. So, we know the profit like per show. However, um that's where the skill comes into play. Like if a show is not going well, we need to have that person trained to be able to do the do the thing and and so that's why not knowing how much to pay them is the Well, I mean, I think doing a percentage would make sense. Percentage of profit. Yeah. Like a salesperson. Okay. And so you can buy or build that, right? So you buy it as I would just go to many micro influencers who are already like on Amazon hawking stuff and be like, "Well, they already do live streams and they already do sell [ __ ] and I bet I could teach them to do this for me." That is a buy version because you already know it's already proven. You're just saying, "Hey, do it under my umbrella." The build version is that you have to kiss a lot more toads and try and look for who has already built in a bunch of soft skills. Mhm. And then you can hire for the smallest skilled efficiency that you know how to train. Okay. So, Amazon affiliates. Well, you can do either, but like Yeah. I mean, obviously this is going to be a lower risk thing and then you just have to have some agreement that they're going to only sell for you for x period of time. Mhm. Like a contract. Yeah. Like a contract. But I would but big picture because I want to make sure that you're good. Um the indeed warehouse stuff that's just like commoditized. I mean you have a warehouse, maybe you have to have it for your business, but like I don't see that as like that's not a core differentiator. You might h you're not different because you have a warehouse behind you. That's not special. So the roles that you have there, it's like they need to be like have a pulse, have a good leader there, let them just deal with it. Your your star factor is going to be your ability to train people to sell. And so that's like where is your what is like what is the true pinpoint of where the most value gets created for you as the founder, the entrepreneur is that you need to be able to take somebody and teach them to sell. I Yeah. Um my and you have to break it down in in terms of the most concrete language you possibly can. And so think of everything purely in terms of behavior and do do not use any amorphous words. So and like I need you to have higher energy. That means nothing. I need you to raise your voice. I need you to talk faster. I need you to have your shoulders back. You have to describe things that people can see and then other people will describe them as having high energy, having charisma, having confidence. And so if you want to teach someone to present, you have to tell them what to do with their body and their voice and it will be far faster for you. And what you'll find is the training lap, the reason it takes so long for people to train or they can or they can't train sales people or presentation people is because they literally do not use words that other people understand. Like this is the problem. This is why most companies cannot teach people to do [ __ ] because they say have more charisma and then the person listens and it's like I'll translate that into what I think charisma means which who [ __ ] knows what they think it means right and then we're just playing this telephone game where no one agreed on what are the behaviors I want you to do that will compress the amount of time that it will take you to get some one up to speed and two long term if you can develop this sales training then you can have a stable of stallions that are on 247 for you working in your in your barn So that I don't know why it's animals now, but let's go with it. So that that's actually that brings up the a good point. So I I I have um so my girl, like I said, she's my house cleaner, shows up at my my door one day. She's she's like, "Hey, I want to be you." And she's like, "I'm a copy and paste of you." And she became me. Now there's a little bit like a little bit of a how can I cuz obviously I had to learn the care part like from Leila. Um, so I learned to care a part. Um, and um, now I have it, but then I've seen her I mean I've seen situations kind of like not go the way they should because she's too she's a copy and paste of me from yesterday. Uhhuh. So um, I'm starting to see those. What's the problem? Human put her in front of the camera, have her sell, and get her out of the building if like if she can sell. So let her sell. Don't have her manage people, have her sell. Got it. Understood. Thank you. This is good talk. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Real quick, I have a gift for you. This is the $100 million scaling road map. It's something that my team and I put 200 plus hours into building and breaking the stages of scaling into 10 steps. All right. And so what we did is we broke down everything that got us basically got us stuck and what we did to break free at each level of the business. And if you'd like to know what product, marketing, sales, customer service, IT, recruiting, human uh resources, and finance look like at the stage that you're currently at, this is a free gift. So all you have to do is go to aquis.com/romap. You can plug in your business information. And if you want our help, you want my help to help you break through whatever level of scaling you're at. This is not a promise. I'm just saying I'd love to help. Um on the thank you page, you can book a call. Uh every month we have a workshop out here at my headquarters. She actually talked to my real team that does does our marketing, does our emails, does our ads, does our copy, does our does our does our sales, does our finance, does our recruiting. The real people are doing this at a very high level. And what's really cool about that is that they can typically find and spot what the constraints are in a business like that. And so it's one of the most valuable things that I could possibly do. 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