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[E-commerce Education Vlog Intro (Introducing Fulfilled)]
Hello everybody! Welcome to Awakening the Entrepreneur Within. I'm Michael E Gerber speaking to you from Carlsbad, California in my little home office just dying to bring the knowledge, the wisdom, the passion the energy that's needed for you to grow beyond where you are to do things you in fact haven't even imagined you have the capability of doing. As always in awakening we have our guests and our guest here is quite astonishingly successful he's Justin Singletary and he's the founder of fulfillment dot-com. I don't know how in the world Justin you acquired the name fulfillment but maybe you can tell us the very beginning how you do that. Absolutely it's good to be on with you Michael. First off by God's grace is how we acquired that domain name. So I'll tell you a little bit of our story and that'll help fill in the gaps on how we got that wonderful domain name because it's opened so many doors for us. My story is I was brought up in Savannah, Georgia; beautiful Savannah Georgia by the way and I was brought here due to the fact the military station been here. I joined the army and became a ranger at 1st Ranger Battalion and became a sniper team leader so is it what it is. Justin, you join the army became a what it's an Army Ranger 1st Ranger Battalion now everybody doesn't get to become an Army Ranger right? They don't they don't there's this turn ring yeah they don't get to become and I mean you don't go to the Army's I want to join become an Army Ranger. So I'd love to just talk about that for a second here get on to fulfillment.com because becoming an Army Ranger in my mind has something to do with your enormous success. When you left the army to come on the street and go into business for yourself. mm-hmm. The two don't seem to fit but they absolutely do based on the conversation you and I were having just before we came on. Absolutely we get people to care. How do we get people to want to? How do we get people to desire to? How do we get people to do the impossible work that it takes to do? You become pre-eminently successful and you became an Army Ranger. So tell me what an Army Ranger is, tell all of our guests feel like. Well an Army Ranger is simply a glorified grunt. We the operation is really it used to be Airfield seizures but our mere agents. They're , it's a special operations unit and we just do a lot of great and creative missions and the people we work with are really high speed top-notch guys and that's what I probably miss the most about it is is the guys that we served with. So I mean it was just a joy to be able to be around comrades you know, that that have that went through kind of that sacrifice to get there the US Navy SEALs but in the armies and and we don't do a lot of swimming. And you're like the Top Gun pilots in the Air Force . I would I would say we're we're not at the top you know we're quiet professionals you know we have a good time doing what we're doing but we're very mission focused. But every time I speak to a Navy SEAL or every time I speak to a Top Gun guy he sort of downplays how extraordinary they are so I completely understand when you do that but I simply want people who are listening to us your that absolutely variance of working with the best guys on the planet. Absolutely. There was a lot of people that tried to be you know an Army Ranger and I'm not just saying graduating Rain Ranger school but being into a Ranger Battalion there's a lot of guys that tried to do it. The guys that made it were the guys that had a bigger y-you know, they they had a bigger purpose it wasn't that hey I'm gonna go try out for this. It's this is just one stepping stone in my journey of life that I'm gonna be an Army Ranger. That's just what I'm gonna do. There's no quit there so you tend to find guys that have that sort of attitude are the ones that actually make it through to become an Army Ranger. So it wasn't a little bit of a gap on, you know what it takes, you know it's it's some prayer and you know you know just being able to put one foot in front of the other and enjoy it. Yeah yeah yeah . But it's how you put that one foot in front of the other Justin, let's not diminish that because the same thing is the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. When they just in codes put one foot in front of another. It's not just that they put one foot in front of another. It's that they're on fire. That's where it's their ability to focus is what I think. Focus on the outcome you're looking for instead of the activities, you're focused on the outcome. So I think I learned that early on is really as where you put your focus that's where your Energy's gonna flow and if you put your focus on the pain that's where your energy's gonna go, that's that's what you're gonna be thinking about. If you put your focus on well this is this is what this is. My outcome that I'm going to achieve that's what you're thinking about you put your folks there it's a lot easier to achieve it and the way you speak about it sounds easy but understand no it isn't what that outcome is. Absolutely. It's seeing it you your business you see it before it ever happens you already know what's gonna happen and they they're just like I said put one foot in front of the other until you get there. No I got it, it's really hard to describe that to people and you you know more than most Michael, it's it's it's really first I feel like you got to work on the way that you see the world you know, the lens in which you see the world and if your lens is a negative type of lens then that's how your life usually turns out if your lens is always seeing that glass half-full then usually your life just turns out a little bit happier than the next guy and I think that really says a lot about the guys we served with. They were always more positive than the rest you know they focused on the good. I got it and of course we can then talk about Steve Jobs and we could then talk about Bill Gates and we could then talk about Ray Kroc and we could then everybody whose cup wasn't half full have whatever absolutely completely full bring their vision, their purpose, their mission the picture they have had an internalized in their minds eye as the outcome. They're there to produce. That's right. I think it's something I've been writing about, speaking about teaching about and doing all of my life and what I understand and what's so staggeringly painful to me is how difficult it is to get people to see it. Absolutely that mental preparation is one thing that people like to skip over, they just like to get into it. Well there's you've got to be mentally ready for what's to come or you know you're not gonna be prepared for it. Do you see a lot of these greats that they drop out of college because that vision is so it's they don't need college anymore it's it's already happened in their minds they know how to execute. Okay so we sort of get what is to be an Army about. Getting fulfillment time, okay so I started after the military a couple things happen. What's important to discuss is I jumped into internet sales of health and beauty products. I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I wanted to make money when I sleep because I had so many other goals and aspirations that were outside of money that I thought you know being an Internet retailer really helped me accomplish that so I did really well with that but I had a pain point to where I couldn't find a good fulfillment solution. The fulfillment solutions that we were using and I was back in 2011 they didn't really have the transparency I needed, they didn't have the follow-up, I need to have somebody I could talk to about if something went wrong there was a lot of issues I was dealing with so I decided to do my own fulfillment. Now wait a second because define for everybody what you mean by fulfillment. Absolutely, so fulfillment the way I'm defining it is is ecommerce order fulfillment. Let's say you have a product that you sell online and somebody orders your product. Well they buy from your website the information comes to a fulfillment center possibly like ourselves and then we ship it out to the customer that purchased the product and we send you back the information tracking number all excess so it's it's really we handle your product for you. You never even get you don't even have to touch your product, we receive it from a manufacturer and we ship it out to your customer. So we store, we pick pack and we ship your product. That's what the fulfillment that I'm talking about is defined as. Got it and the problem was as you began to sell stuff. Mm-hmm. You said you couldn't find a fulfillment capability that was too much neater. To be honest when he went to my standard we were doing our own fulfillment we're like okay we got to scale this thing. When we got to about fifty to hundred orders a day it was like okay well, let's have somebody else do this so we can focus on other areas of our business the marketing side of the house, customer service side of the house, there's so many relationships you know that we wanted to to entertain that we were busy packaging packages and you know and just dealing with the fulfillment and the poster side of the house that we're missing opportunities so at about 50 orders a day or so maybe maybe it was a hundred orders a day we said okay well it's time for us to outsource this. It was a good time for a sound source and when we did we searched around for a couple of good fulfillment centers. They were good for a couple of months and then you know we started having problems, people weren't getting their packages, there was mispacks, the packages were coming in late. There was numerous things and we couldn't, I couldn't really take one invoice and reconcile it to exactly what happened, what got shipped out it was really hard to see what we're paying for, so at the end of the day I decided you know what I see there's a void in the marketplace. There's this this isn't I don't know somebody other than Amazon that is doing a great job at fulfillment right now . This is something that we can really do a good job at. Well that's interesting when you said other than Amazon yeah this happens to be the biggest fulfillment center on the planet. For their own products. For their own products that's right right, so you decided you're gonna create a fulfillment center as excellent as Amazon's for other people's products for independent online retailers people that have their own website and they're they're not using Amazon and they're selling it amongst other means I mean right now we have 65 different ecommerce platforms that we support so there's a lot of different ways to sell products these days so really to make a long story short it was called at cost fulfillment right, so we charge less than all the competitors around and we got a large percentage of the marcus year i had eight hundred square feet above a pizza shop and and we were we had so much product in there i thought the floor was gonna cave in and going on top of the pizza shop. But it was were the good days man you know we were we were actually trying to figure out a way to have a shoot from the second-story out of the window into the delivery or the the USPS truck when it came everyday so it was a fun time but we really focused on. I had a ranger buddy of mine that actually become a developer and we spent many a nights you know working on our art technology so that we can add more value to internet retailers or our clients so we actually we're the cheapest guys on the block Michael and soon we figured you know we don't want to be cheapest guys. We want to spend more time and development. Spend more time developing this business out to where we were adding more value to our clients so we were like well this name act cost fulfillment isn't gonna fit anymore. So you didn't want to be the cheapest guys you want to be the best guys. That's right that's right. You know if we got into the game being the cheapest guys cuz honestly I didn't have the bankroll you know to build an Amazon or something that could compete with another large fulfillment center so we're like well let's just guys they just don't care you know where they care but they just they want the cheapest price on the block let's help them out and their friends so we'll know we'll take care of them and let's just grow this business how I like to say slow is smooth smooth is fast. Let's not grow it too fast to where we self implode let's not take on we have no debt still at this time so we just wanted to do it in a way that was methodical, in a way that we knew we can build a very strong foundation so the business can grow and still be strong at the end of the day. So you essentially utilized your determination to be in quotes the cheapest cars to make access readily available to folks who didn't understand the difference between the cheapest guys and the best guys. Yep they wanted the cheapest and they gave you an opportunity then to go to work on the systems through which one achieved the result that you wish to achieve on your way to becoming the best we are still supplying the same the same service or maybe in a better service because we didn't have that many clients at the time but with 800 square feet there you don't have a lot of bills, and when you have to or you know one two three four employees you know you don't have a lot of payroll so you can charge a lot less for your services. We're doing with that handful of people that handful of space . Yeah was figuring out the mechanics of it way that enabled you to rise above everyone else right because you were working on it the e-myth phrase that we continually use because we invented it what just doing it doing it doing it doing it that's right I was in the business every day I was in the business you know and try it trying to troubleshoot and trying to figure out what systems can we put in place so we can move to a new activity in the business and eventually you know so I can be working on the business. So I spent a lot of time working in the business and and there was some times where I probably should have outsourced where I didn't if I if I would have known what I know now I probably wouldn't be able to do it two or three times faster. Yeah but Justin when you speak about that I want to give you just an insight about it when you speak about it working in the business in my vernacular the way you were doing what you were doing was literally working on the business inventing the systems of the business . You're exactly right here never enable the systems to liberate you feeling it doing it doing it that's right. I had to be in the weeds listening to what the customers were the clients were saying you know seeing how all the operations were going in though is kind of in the trenches working on everything but you know you're right while I was working on everything you're also building systems to make those things and fix things forever and make things more efficient, faster for for future projects or future shipments and that's a very very very important thing for everybody listening in because that's really what the e-myth is all about when I talk about working on it not in it I mean not being the system yourself but inventing the system that's going to ultimately make you an ordinary person significantly more effective at what you produce which means you can then attract novices to do the work that needs to be done because it's already orchestrated and was system that produces that result that's right in people and attract people that are that are prepared to do what I need them to do that's they're at in their life cycle you know I mean maybe it's it's something that is very easy for them to do but that's what they want to do you know yeah so I absolutely that we were working I correct myself you know on the business it seemed like at the time we're in the business because you know everything's being thrown at us sure absolutely of course you were but you got to understand this language we're using yes we're literally designing a business to work that's right in a way that would make that business significantly more effective than the competition that's correct you were designing a role for your company in the world so that you would become fulfillment calm innards that's right when we felt like we had the right tools or we got to the point where we added enough value we decided that we didn't want to be the cheapest guys in the block anymore so it's it's hard to make money be the cheapest guys in the block unless you know it's at scale but we decided well we really want to change the way that fulfillments done we see a lot of things or we're anticipating things that are coming down the road where one facility is just not going to be enough so let me backup but based on the fact that we thought we had enough value it's like okay we got to change your name now at cost and film it isn't gonna work it work anymore for the for the well what we stand for then our name was at cost fulfillment then cost fulfillment which represented us perfectly at the time yeah so we found that um you know at the time I had a business partner and we talked about it we're like you know what what could be what's the best name out there that we you know swing for the fences on this you know and we found that eBay enterprises just I believe they acquired GSI commerce and brought along a domain name fulfillment coms so they're holding this domain name not really doing anything with it so we offered him $50,000 for the domain name and we didn't get a response from him so we went back to the drawing board I want this domain name how do we just get their attention you know I I mean we're we're thinking about throwing a blind you know bid not even having the money to figuring out how to get the money so we're excited ok what's the number where they'll get back in touch with us they'll call us back so we threw a number 500 thousand dollars for that domain name they called us right back and it we ended up doing the deal and I think you know I think at the end they said okay just as long as you don't sell the Amazon in the next 24 months we'll do the deal but it was funny how you know we got no response and then we got a call right back so I'm sure we overpaid for that domain name but it has paid us dividends based on the fact dollars come from all over the place the sofa you know grandma you know I mean we pulled it together we needed to get it , we got it but you know between me and a partner. That's right that's right so we had assets that we had a good internet , a good online nutraceutical business at the time so you know we found the money you know eventually and we paid for it and it was like okay now we've got to deliver on where fulfillment.com now . Now we have to be the best you know we're making ourselves be the best with that domain name. That's incredible I just absolutely love that I hope everybody heard that I hope everybody took that in, guy picks an impossible name finds out who's got it offers them an outrageous amount to buy it and they don't even respond so you develop ten times that amount no one you would get the response and they immediately call you. That's right that's right. There you are without $500,000 having offered $500,000 and I've seen amount of money for a name lady yes is mm-hmm because our Ranger knew that name would become who he was. Well I'm gonna tell you, you know in theirs I understand there's a lot of people that have different religious preferences but I like fulfillment.com Jesus fulfilled the Scriptures and I believe there was a lot of Prayer that helped us get that domain name. Wonderful okay so now I know you got the name now everybody knows how you got the name you bought the name. Absolutely. You've paid through the nose for the name. We did, it was we had big shoes to fill now if you google fulfillment I mean just the word fulfillment we would sometimes be above the dictionary the dictionary definition so as far as just the organic traffic from the search engines when people are searching for us it's helped us out tremendously, it's helped us in the beginning, it helped us seem like we're a much bigger company than what we actually were and it really. What's that of course, yeah. Does it attract an enormous number of leads of people who want your services? Let me say I think it's just the right amount because we've adjusted to the lead generation, we've adjusted the business to it and it's allowed us instead of to spend a lot of money on pay-per-click ads and you know social media and other marketing tactics that people just throw a lot of money at. It's allowed us to spend that money in kind of other directions on yeah I'm getting the know you have standards that you've already established yes signs of customers you will accept that's right we've got a target we tend to see a lot of people aren't truly ready for a fulfillment center it depends on your product of course we tend to see is about 50 orders a day when we have people that we used to you know our doors rope and we'll take anybody when people are ship one or two orders you know a day or they're shipping one or two orders a month you know we restored a lot of product here and we've got to charge them for that product so we feel like under about 50 orders they may not be a win-win for them we're actually developing out so we can widen our funnel to help those people that are not shipping 50 orders a day we're actually launching hopefully this year a program that's that's a posted printing platform so people can actually if they're at their office or in their garage they can go to film accom and print postage and then when they get to that 50 orders a day they're still in the same platform and they can use us for fulfillment maybe on the other side of the country that they're not on or they can use us for you know all of our locations so we're going to be expanding that funnel probably this time there sometime this year so does everyone who is shipping 50 a day get to use your fulfillment center we we've I would say we ship everything from pills in a bottle to beds in a box so we've got a very wide range of people well we've what we tend to look for is independent online retailers what that means is if somebody has a website and they've got a product a tangible product that they ship out and it's about 50 orders a day and they're connected to an e-commerce platform and even if they've got their own custom code we've got all restful API so we can really integrate with anything that's really our target market and do they have to fill out a questionnaire when they contact you we we like people to go through our request a quote on fulfilling comm it helps give us a little bit more information and see if there's the right fit but we tend to like to reach out to everybody at the end of the day we like to place them in places like or give them access to our education blog that we have on phone comm that'll help them maybe get to that 50 orders a day there's a lot of great vendors in that free education vlog that they talk about their services not only allowed vendors on there that are actually helping clients that we already have so I know they're legit so we try to try to help them in other ways they can get to that volume I got it so that's a critical part of your company yes I'm in short the way in which you move someone from here to there that's right understanding that it's not as easily done as I've just said moving somebody from here to there because in order for somebody to become in quotes a ranger to the qualify to become a ranger they have to go through a very very specific process that's right that enables them to do that Mike well I didn't do it on my own yes I'm saying the guys around it we helped each other right we helped each other get from A to B so starting out in an e-commerce I needed the help and it's not like who I knew it's it's I like to say it's not who you know it's who knows you so the network that I tried to establish or even in Ranger Battalion. That the guys that I hung out with were the guys that were gonna succeed those are the guys that I went to when I had a problem where I wanted to to talk through things with I made sure that the people that I hung around with especially in e-commerce were people that were successful that people that that knew what what to do now and not what to do five years ago because the landscape is changing so fast. No I got that but let me suggest another piece of this puzzle, then we're not really talking about that there is a very specific process one has to go through and there's a very specific process one has to go through to become a ranger to be kind of a US Navy SEAL even if I'm a Top Gun to become whatever a true entrepreneur absolutely epic set of skills and and systems that are critical for one to move through that process the Quran says somebody it's not just getting motivated and jacked up by somebody it's getting motivated and jacked up by somebody who's in fact paid the price of going through that very critical process and has the right system for you to follow that's right you've got it and so I'm going to that without even knowing because we haven't done a lot of work together you've only spoken a few times together um you were attracted to what we do and we were attracted by what you've done yeah and we ended up in this conversation together but what I really want to suggest is there is a significant way to go beyond where you are by in fact developing what it is you possess internally by developing that in people who haven't a clue what that is mm-hmm another sand they haven't a clue what that is because nobody's ever even suggested it to them there was no method to that madness so I'm gonna suggest not only do you Justin but to everybody listening in that's really the work we've been doing for the past 40 years that is truly determining what it is that transforms a company of one to a company of 1,000 what it truly takes to awaken the blessed entrepreneur within the Creator within to go beyond where he or she is and we love to say that um if we're born in the image of God as it said and I know you believe this if we're born in the image of God then we were born to create mm-hmm and if every single human being is born to create then the question that drives them to create what well to create a world fit for God mm-hmm and each of us are called to do that in one specific way mm-hmm so effectively you found your calling leaving the military coming to good earth planet USA you discovered your calling and began to be a US Ranger in the work that you set out to do mm-hmm but in your heart in your heart you know you were born to create you know you were born in the image of God you know that's what in fact your work is telling you to do and that's the great result that you're setting out to produce absolutely he wants us to do the best at whatever we do no matter what we no matter what we touch we need to have passion for it we need to do we need to do it our best and I'll be honest with you what I've seen people around me what I've seen successful entrepreneurs what I notice if somebody gives if somebody shows me their last 24 hours or a 24 hour period I can tell you or you can tell if somebody's gonna be successful based on where they spend their time they spend their time in educating themselves mentally preparing themselves you know those are the guys that are gonna or guys and gals that are gonna be successful the ones that spend their time wisely like I think it was Arnold Schwarzenegger said sleep faster you know I mean he said that he spends like six six hours of sleeping and if some people need eight sleep faster so I it's just like where do you spend your time if you're not spending your time in a program or if you're if you're not actively doing something you need to be preparing to do something and you know what this brings me to I read the e-myth your book after your your beautiful wife handed it to me at Board of Advisors I went on my honeymoon and I brought the book with me and I shouldn't have you know I shouldn't have read started reading a book because it led me on my honeymoon to start developing a new blueprint for the next three years of filming calm I was I was doing that on my honeymoon so I don't think my wife will be watching this I think what I was working on she knows now but you know it's it's really I learned a lot from reading your book Michael and exactly what you're saying there there's there's systems that I didn't think that I didn't think I was doing the things that I was doing in the beginning but when I read your book I realized I was doing those things and I realized there's more of those things need to be done in order for us to get more efficient more SOP we need to have a product that it that can be duplicated and can be improved upon so I just want to say you know that story as far as reading the book and then coming up with a new vision or more precise vision for the team was crucial and it's gonna be crucial for our next three years that's wonderful and understand while you say that it's going to be crucial for the next three years understand it will be crucial for the life of your company absolutely so today somebody who fires it and then of course it's up to them yep absolutely working on your business is tantamount to working on your life absolutely effectively Jason you are I'm Justin I'm sorry you are a born again entrepreneur working on your life and you do it persistently oh its consistency and I enjoy it you gotta enjoy it you gotta enjoy the hard road you know what I mean that the easy road gets hard and the hard road gets easy I have tended to my hard pass and I learned early on that I enjoy the outcome of the hard pass more than the outcome of the easy pass but folks on that as every single one of you to click on Justin's website Justin will you give everybody that absolutely is fulfillment com if and be honest we I'm really easily easy to reach I enjoy helping people and talking through strategy on things there's so many pieces of the puzzle when it comes to e-commerce so many pieces that people just don't know exist out there so it you know I'm my email address I'll I'll just give it out I don't know how many listeners are gonna be listen to this but my email address is Jay Singletary s ing le ta ry at fulfillment comm if somebody wants to chat they've got an idea we'll schedule some time and you know I'll you can bend my ear for a little bit and we'll see if I can help out adjust that's really really gracious of you I want to give everybody who's listening to us a gift and it's my latest book and you can get it free at free book dot Michael eager burr dot-com go to free book dot Michael Gerber dot-com and the name of that book is making it on your own in America or wherever you happen to live a joyous path to radical self-employment which effectively is what Jason did, Jason I'm sorry Jason my brother's name Jason - my mom does that all the time so don't worry about that Justin has done and is doing and every single one of you can do it - and it will then introduce you to radical you the only entrepreneurial development school on the planet online for every single one of you to enter into what we call the Eightfold Path that's the process by which you learn what Justin is practicing every single day of his life you get to do that too you get to and hear me it's a five-year school online for only four hundred and seventy nine dollars and 40 cents a freaking year how much does Wharton School of Business charge right how much does Harvard charge that's right yeah seventy thousand dollars a year that was Stanford charge $125,000 a year. Four hundred seventy nine dollars and forty cents to provide you with the 40 years of experience I've created working with over a hundred thousand students of ours and now it's available to you right now just do it! So Justin thank you thank you thank you very much for joining us. Thank you Michael I love talking to you and like I said if I can just comment on that please you need to be mentally prepared for for this game and and that round for you University will do that for you. Thanks and you know where to reach me that's Michael Gerber at Michael Gerber dot com or Michael at Michael Gerber dot com but you can find me. Let's find me I'm here love you all. Thank you all, see you again bye-bye.Thank you!
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Attention ecommerce store owners and advertisers! Are you tired of attending the same boring trade shows that never produced lasting relationships? Are you looking for a break from the computer you're staring at right now? Would you like to shoot an unlimited amount of ammo from some of the coolest guns you could ever imagine? Would you like to shoot ground targets from a helicopter? If you answered yes to any of those questions then stop what you are doing right now and register to attend the third annual ghosts and guns e-tailer appreciation event coming up on October 25th and 26th. Rub elbows and buttstocks with the other top selling ecommerce store owners and hang with the brightest e-commerce minds on the planet. Before we got here at ghosts and guns we had no idea what to expect. I was just happy about the free breakfast! So past that point I was like this is gonna be amazing and it has been a game-changer I mean Brittney how's it been for you? I never thought that I would get on a helicopter or ever shoot a gun from a helicopter, so I survived it was amazing yeah I'm like ready for another round. It's all-you-can-eat and all you can shoot. See how you stack up against your peers on the sniper range. Or test your skills while hanging out of a helicopter well engaging targets on the ground, or maybe you might like to shoot at night with the same night-vision equipment that our military special ops use. So if this is you then you don't want to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend the most unique networking event of all time. Doesn't that sound better than hanging around some boring hotel all day and listening to speakers drone on and on. You've worked hard to get to where you are you would deserve to check off some bucket list items. So if you're an e-tailer or e-commerce store owner that's currently selling more than a hundred physical products per day and you can prove it, request an RSVP right now before the last spots are taken by another lucky chap! Mike Calhoun here founder and CEO of Board of Advisors dot-com the world's greatest mastermind for entrepreneurs and CEOs. The experience with Mr.Justin Singletary's Ghosts and Guns engagement is far more than we expected our first time. It's fun, it's results-driven and it's designed to bring the top econ guys and girls together. The innovators in the industry to converse to collaborate to bond and just share a unique experience. Originally we were pumped just to come and shoot guns out of a helicopter and I mean who wouldn't be right and we learned that there was far more available, lots of options, and a wide variety for everybody really. My favorite personally was the long-distance sniper shoot where I got to pretend like I was a Mr. Singletary for a moment. The night of the reception, Justin before the event was personally connecting us with relevant meaningful relationships to our organization which I thought was pretty special and I I know the complexities of what it takes to actually do that based on what we do at Board of Advisors. Plus this is not just a Boy Scout meetup it's designed for everybody husband's bring your wives wives bring your husbands. And if you're looking to bring the team together and create a tighter bond and a special experience for your clients or maybe just have some quality time with the top ecom guys and girls in the industry, Justin Singletary's Ghosts and Guns is where it's at . Again my name is Mike Calhoun if you find yourself showing to Ghosts and Guns I'd love to meet you just come up introduce yourself and I'll show you around, I'll make you feel like family. Mike Calhoun Board of Advisors dot com. Love to see you there
[Music] Hey I'm Justin Singletary. Welcome to FDC's ecommerce education vlog. As a young entrepreneur I remember the challenges I faced trying to find mentors and experts to help me wade through the mountains of information about starting an e-commerce business. Sometimes the information I found was good but other times it wasn't so good. There's nothing more frustrating than investing time energy and even money into a fruitless idea. Let's face it, most people who offer business advice don't really care if you succeed or you fail. If they're interested at all they're in it to make a buck and that's all. I believe that it's our responsibility as influencers to pay it forward. A quote that resonates with me is by Sir Winston Churchill, "We make a living by what we get but we make a life by what we give". Our goal is to encourage and inspire new and determined entrepreneurs to reach their potentials by providing education and insight from top industry influencers. We will be sourcing short three to five minute videos from those who have done the hard work of becoming successful entrepreneurs. Each video will highlight a specific high-impact instructional point that can be implemented by the viewer right away and remember when you're green you grow and when you ripe you rot. This is Justin Singletary signing off. Stay green! [Music]
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We've all experienced life's roadblocks we've all had those moments when the future looked void of anything good Our Guest today reminds us that not only can you persevere through those Seasons but learn to see the good in everyday life again from perceived failure to the fourth fastest growing consumer product in America in that you have look at the experiences that you have what lights you up and then how do you take all of that and then bring God into it and expand the kingdom in some way he's lived it and you can too all right my friends welcome back to another episode of fulfilled it's truly an honor having one of my dear friends on with us today and Zach Wendall in addition to being one of the nicest guys on the planet and I really mean that Zach is an entrepreneur a speaker he's an author really has a heart for just helping others see the good in their everyday lives but more than anything there's a few people that I see really being a light for this generation and Zach is is up there in my books but brother I just want to say thank you so much for being with us today man thank you so much for having me on I swear your introductions I'm G to bring you everywhere from here on out uh just hire you to hang out with me just so that uh you can boost my ego and and uh and tell people about me yeah if that means we can travel together I'm in done deal so I know a lot about your story just one being a brother and just um knowing you reading your books too but um you got quite a story I know that you many years ago kind of went through a season where you were just kind of searching for answers and then you made this this journey to Australia so for people who don't know you don't know your story tell me a little bit about that and then just the transformation that took place like like on your way there and then after you kind of came back totally so I grew up in the church and I grew up seeing Miracle after Miracle uh my mom is a four-time cancer survivor and so just uh witnessing that and seeing God's goodness through it all for 15 18 years um really made an impact on who I am and and the way that I view the world um but then when I hit college and moved away I started falling away from my faith more and making my own uh decisions on things that might not be the best and I just started questioning a lot of things and when I was 24 I I hit a pretty low spot and I was like God I I know you're good and I know you're real but like prove to me that you're real like even more so now because I was struggling just with a lot of other Christians that I was surrounded by and just kind of with with who I was and what I wanted to believe and so I ended up moving out to Australia um to study in this program for nine months where it was like 12 hours a day six days a week so if we were studying Genesis for instance we would read Genesis five times in one week and that's like a 4-Hour read and then we would write our own commentary on it and so by the end of this program I had like 20 30 40 pages of notes and commentary on every single book of the Bible and my life was completely transformed I fell in love with scripture I fell in love with just the word and getting more people into it and I knew that a lot of people's lives would be transformed if they spent time studying the Bible but a lot of people that I knew aren't able to just get up and move across the world and so I started or I wrote this book called The Bible study and it basically holds your hand as you read through the entire Bible and uh it ended up doing really really well and growing into a pretty big product uh from there we created an uh e-commerce business publishing house uh that had a bunch of different products under it different books that I wrote and whatnot and we were just acquired about a year ago you had a transformative experience in Australia like you said you basically wrote your own commentary yeah and then you're like you probably had this idea like wow this could be really impactful for people you mentioned that like not everybody can come to Australia but we can probably create something that helps them in their walk so what was it like taking like having an idea but actually bringing it to life because I know that's a journey of itself totally I think my story has two different ways of approaching my story when people ask so we have the spiritual side of it but then we also have the entrepreneurial side of it so I started my first business when I was nine years old uh making shark tooth necklaces and selling them on the beach in Naples Florida and like crushing it as a nine-year-old and then like moving on I I had developed clothing lines and I co-owned a recording studio and I had written books and so I was doing all of that prior to Australia and so it was kind of just ingrained in me that if I saw a problem or a need for something I would find a solution to fulfill that that need and so uh it was just kind of a natural thing uh when I got back from Australia I was really praying about it figuring out what I should do if I should move back out there if I should teach or or whatnot and I God gave me a full-on vision for this book called The Bible study I like saw the logo the layout and I immediately knew like the plan of attack on how to approach it and so I spent the next nine months taking all my notes distilling them down uh writing them into what became the Bible study then I spent three months designing it and so by January of 2017 it was like ready to go but it was a file on my computer because I never published a book before successfully i' never like printed thousands of copies or anything and so I kind of just sat on it for a little bit and I started telling people about it and then people just started giving me money like here's $5,000 build a website here's 2500 bucks print some promotional copies like here's 200 here's 500 and I was like man I really might be on to something here and so we launched a kick starter campaign in June of 2017 and we ended up doing $24,000 in pre-orders in 30 days and I was like oh man we're going to print for sure and so I ordered a thousand copies I hadn't even thought about like working in shipping costs for all of the books that I just sold and so immediately I was losing money when we first came out with it and it was like you know those are just the things that you run into and figure out as you as you're starting a business and so uh launched that book officially and it didn't do really well right away and I was like man we just had this successful campaign why like what's the disconnect here and I felt like God was saying that my heart was in the wrong place with it and so I had this like come to Jesus moment essentially where I was like all right what do I actually feel called to do um what is my purpose in life and how can I how can I rethink and rework what I'm currently working on and when I made that switch when I made that realization that's when everything began to kind of take off and I ended up building out a team and over the course of four years um we grew substantially and we hit uh 63rd fastest growing business in America and number uh four fastest growing consumer product in America uh like in a non-Christian uh section like bro that blows my mind I can't even believe it like and yes we put in the work but I think God is the one that really uh pours on the water and makes the seed grow so it's it's our job to to sew the seed and it's his job to make it grow yeah that's crazy I had it down the 63rd fastest growing business in America you already mentioned fourth fastest growing consumer product and then third fastest in in Minnesota which just crazy numbers so yeah what tell me a little bit digging a little bit more so you kind of one of my questions was like what are some of the challenges you face and how did you push through but sounds like you like had this great idea you felt like it came from the Lord then you just launched it and like probably like crickets but how did you really dig in to to find out like what's really your calling because I think people whether they realize it or not we're constantly trying to figure out like what's our identity what are we what are we here for for yeah tell me a little bit about how you reach that and then just the fruit that came from yeah like finally stepping into your calling I think it's a combination of things and I think in the Christian space a lot of people get it wrong because they just say oh I'm just waiting on God to tell me what I'm supposed to do and then they sit on the couch and they're lazy and instead of actually going out and pursuing things that they're passionate about or that they feel like they can make an impact with and I think often times God is just saying I've given you the tools like get up and just do it and and so I think there's definitely that so look at uh what you're passionate about look at spiritual gifts that you have look at uh the experiences that you have what lights you up and then how do you take all of that and then bring God into it and expand the kingdom in some way and it doesn't have to mean that you're doing a Christian business or anything you could be selling toothbrush es but you could be selling the toothbrushes with Excellence you could have be having conversations with your co-workers there's ways to work in the Christian aspect of it uh it doesn't have to be you don't have to be a Christian toothbrush salesman you can just be a really good toothbrush salesman and I think that's also where a lot of people get it wrong they're like oh well I'm gonna be a plumber but I'm gonna be a Christian plumber and it's like no no no no just be a really good plumber and like you don't have to like push your faith on people people I think just by the way that you live your life uh they're going to be able to see that something's different with you and then allow them to ask questions about it and so when it comes to figuring out like yeah what your purpose what your calling is is like look at what you what lights you up look at how you can impact the world around you for Jesus and look at look at what God has already placed in your life because that's what's going to really uh build the kingdom but if I just made this whole podcast up just to like get a Consulting session with you that answer is like okay that's you know we talked earlier on a personal level of like you know I'm thinking about the next chapter in my life too but that that that's such a great encouragement for us of just like you know what are the things that you feel like really light you up I love that yeah yeah and if you're doing a toothbrush company I I go back to the first Home Alone where he's asking is this approved by the American Dental Association yeah just make sure that that's that's part of it right I love it yeah so uh a lot of the audience I think that is listening in are you know e-commerce owners so they're probably at various stages there's some that are like maybe not even launched yet some that are like a couple years in and some that are probably season doing really well but what would be your advice to share you know you've had a very God blessed very successful uh company that you built from scratch and and then kind of launched it tell me what some advice would be for those people I think knowing that everything takes much longer than you expect it to like I expected major success right away and that's and we all do because we see people on social media that are like oh they're an overnight success and it's like man if my business doesn't pop off after six months then maybe I'm supposed to be doing something different maybe God isn't behind it and I don't think that's the case at all I think there's like something really special in the um um in one step at a time doing something every single day and growing slow because that's going to have a much stronger Foundation than just a super rise to fame overnight um that's of often not sustainable and so focusing on that compound uh interest really of like okay I'm going to do a little bit every single day and I know that I'm working towards something really special and so sticking with it even through all of the hard times I mean there were there's been many many times dozens of times over the last 15 years where I've like wanted to give up or stop working on something and as an entrepreneur it's our tendency to want to jump to the next thing because it's like we're always wanting to be creative and I I think that that's a blessing and a curse because it often sets us back and we we don't continue uh on with something even though we should and so um I would say I would say that's uh one of the biggest things that I've been thinking about lately yeah that's so good I mean you could just right maybe that's your next book of just being a finisher yeah makes well I know that's that's probably one of the biggest struggles I face as a creative and a and a um entrepreneur is have a really great IDE get idea get really fired up and then you know you you deal with the struggle and it's really hard to to be a finish 100% And I think I dealt with that a lot last year where it was like man I just want to be creating new products I don't want to do all of the like day-to-day work and that's where it comes to hiring the right employees and so if you're just starting out in e-commerce hire people that are going to take off like whatever is taking up most of your time that's taking you away from new stuff like hire out those areas we had hired out five people over the years and our uh our last hire was a COO to run the entire organization um on my behalf essentially which allowed me to be creative and focus on the things that I really wanted to focus on but he also put our Reigns on me and pulled me back when I was going too far out too far left too far right and was able to remain focused on the task at hand and that was building the brand Sunday and so uh and then but now like we were acquired so so now it's I'm starting fresh so if you're just thinking through e-commerce ideas I feel you I'm in that mode right now where it's like you have all of these different ideas and quite frankly a lot of them could be really great ideas but until you actually just pick one and focus on it and spend all of your time and attention on one thing for an extended period of time you aren't going to be able to vet it out to see if it's actually going to work and be a success for you and so uh yeah I I get it tell me this really wasn't on my my list of questions but uh I'd like to hear just what the acquisition process was like because I think a lot of people obviously they're really passionate about something but they also like either have other ideas that they're working on and that's I feel like nobody really covers that maybe it's like a taboo conversation but yeah you know there's probably a lot of people listening there that have thought about that have no clue what it's like tell me just what your experience has been with it yeah I think it's so important to pick the right partners and so I had been working with uh Baker publishing as a distributor for the the previous year so uh they had sales channels that I didn't have access to so as an e-commerce business we built direct to Consumer for everything so it literally like pretty much one for one was like 90% of our sales and we didn't even do like any bulk orders and so we we were like man there's so many sales channels that we don't have access to so we need to pick the right team for that and so we chose the baker Bethany House team uh for helping distribute the book A year prior and built a great relationship with them and we really saw that that if we work together we could take this thing to a whole another level and so when it came down to it it was like who uh if if I wanted to jump into something different I wanted to open up uh to some new options and business was running smoothly at that point and so it was like man if if they uh purchased our assets so we did a asset purchase agreement so they uh they purchased um our assets as well as our IP for most of our products and then essentially um they take all of the products into the W their warehouse handle all the Fulfillment and then now I just create new products for them uh once or twice a year that will still be under name the brand Sunday um but I also have the flexibility to go out and do my own thing and uh but still like really great relationship with them there and so some people when you go through an acquisition uh it'll be a full acquisition where it's literally like buying your staplers and everything else like all inclusive and in that case most of the time all your staff will stay on you'll stay on as CEO for a few years um depending on what the contract ends up being uh but in my case it wasn't so you got to keep your stapler yes my stapler was mine it was probably like a special gift that someone bought you too there's pros and cons to to both sides both ways of doing everything I think so much of business is based on like what works best for you um what do you feel like can leave the greatest impact and that's really what it's about when you're an entrepreneur is how can I leave an impact on the world and as a Christian entrepreneur it's how can I leave an impact uh in regards to the kingdom and uh better the people around me yeah well and you definitely do that that's a great segue so I think you're human so I know you have bad days and I know you get frustrated like the rest of us but as I mentioned kind of early on you you're definitely one of those people that really light up the room that you're in the podcast that you're on the stage that you're speaking on the books the pages that you're filling up you cannot turn on any kind of like social media platform TV and just be overwhelmed with the bad news that's that's before us every single day there's Wars sure there's inflation and then for these business owners you know they're dealing with the same not only the external news but also just the things that you would face as running a business so tell tell us and tell uh the audience um how can we continue to see the good in our lives I think the biggest thing is if you focus on the bad the bad is going to grow in your life if you focus on the good the good is going to grow and so maybe that means you you do an audit on what you're consuming I'm a huge advocate for that is like man if every time that I log on social media I'm I leave feeling worse because of either the people's posts that I saw the news that I saw well you have the ability to unfollow people that's like the cool thing about us having choices you know and I feel like it's such a weird thing that most people just don't and they're like oh if I'm like I follow them so I'm going to just continue following them even if it makes me feel bad after looking at their posts why like set yourself up for Success from the beginning of the day to the end if there's things in your life that pull you away from God or make you upset or ruin your day then it should be your job or your goal to get rid of those and replace them with something that is more positive in your life and I understand that that's easier said than done for a lot of people's situations but I think if we start with the small stuff it really compounds into the bigger stuff as well and so if if in the morning uh you you get upset about one small thing I think it just grows and your mindset is going to be focused on the the small stuff throughout the day but if you start yourself out with uh in a very successful way then you're going to be good the rest of the day and so yeah realizing that a lot of bad things do happen in the world and not like neglecting that by any means but just coming to the understanding that yeah a lot of things in life are tough but what am I doing and how how is God using me to make things better and if you focus on that and and know that that's where your purpose is I think that's where you're going to feel really fulfilled in life perfect I was just about to talk about fulfillment so a big part of this podcast is is really you we do talk about e-commerce and fulfillment and all those things but it's really this this Mission and this heartbeat to help others um gravitate towards a life that is truly fulfilled so big big question but what is being fulfilled look like for you personally I feel like being used by God and knowing that you're leaving a positive Legacy behind so I've been thinking a lot about Legacy lately I never had before but I think it's really cool that you can leave something behind to your kids or or to the Next Generation and if you leave a positive impact on the world I think you can sleep better at night than uh than somebody that's just trying to take from the world and I think that God blesses us substantially in order to give more to others so if we if we're blessed we should be a blessing to others so if we can make the world a better place I think there's so much fulfillment in that and uh yeah I'm I'm a big advocate of figuring out what your purpose is how you can impact the world positively for uh for Jesus and from there your life is going to feel great so good so good love it man all right so if you we're kind of getting close to wrapping it up so a couple of fun questions I think so you've launched a wildly successful company you've authored some of the most life-giving books we've kind of been talking about around that message but see the good it's such a good book I love just how like I think you did a great job of just like I know Zach uh your personality in real life but I feel like it translates really well to the book so if people don't have that they should definitely pick that up but you're helping people grow in their Walk With Jesus um but I also know you can't help with coming up with new ideas so what is what's at this point what's the next chapter looking like for you personally 100% so I'm I'm pushing this course right now that I think would be an absolute Game Changer as I was starting out it's called learn the Bible in five weeks and it basically goes through the entire Bible from a big picture perspective over the course of five weeks like an hour a week uh split into like three to four videos so it's really easy uh to consume and if you have that your foundation is set up for any in the future so um uh really believeing that's going to impact a lot of lives right now and then in 2024 we're doing actually this might come out in 2024 but uh I'm I'm going to be walking people through reading the entire Bible um on like through social media so we're starting uh in January and February so we're starting January 6th we're going through I have a new Bible study coming out called New Testament Made Easy and it's a 60-day study through the New Testament so we're starting with that and then we're going to read the entire Old Testament over the course of the next uh nine months and then we're finishing December we're going to recap uh reading through Matthew for the whole month because I think if you really want to understand who Jesus is and what he said you have to um you have to understand the Old Testament and what he uh grew up uh being taught and so um that's that's my plan right now is is the course and then read through the entire Bible next year in a in a big uh hopefully with a with a big group of people yeah I love that yeah I'm just going to believe that the the people come the right ones come yes so thank you uh another fun question so U I know that I own a lot of domains I can't help it yeah yeah how many how many domains do you think that you own that's a man I think I only own like three right now but last night last night I was like oh I need to buy this domain really quick and so I need to do that this morning yeah it's funny because maybe I'm just the one with the problem I'll tell my wife about something and she's just like babe like you're never gonna use [Music] [Laughter] that that's so funny a $10 a $10 purchase is is not too bad yeah yeah and then you're set up you you locked it in it's security that's right at at least own it for a year yeah so all right another thing is social media I think is is still very intimidating for most business business owners one they probably don't have the time but I think you you've done a really good job of just managing it but I think where where I think you've done a phenomenal job is you just it always feels like it's you and it's your personality and it's very authentic and real which we know the the landscape of social media can often feel the opposite of that yeah so for for business owners that are just like that's another Another World all together what would be just some like advice on on the social media front man I think it's the most important thing that you could focus on we built our entire business through social media and today my entire business is built off of social media it's uh free access to the people that actually want your content which is like incredible you can't get free anywhere and so I think uh being able to provide value to your audience in a real and authentic way and not try to sell that's what makes people succeed quickly on social media uh but as an e-commerce business or or or any any business for that matter we're always focused on how can I promote a product how can I show people my product but like yo I'm not going to follow a toothbrush company and and like a picture of their new toothbrush but if a dentist was on saying how uh a certain toothbrush actually uh was better for your teeth or like here's three ways to take better care of your mouth that I might be interested in versus like I don't care if this toothbrush is taken in front of like a green screen like it's not that cool and and often as businesses we're always just trying to share what we're doing instead of really looking at the needs of the consumer and providing them value uh without asking for anything in return and I think we can definitely go through like Sprints of posts where we're posting uh and trying to sell but it shouldn't be our all the time thing it needs to be value value value at least every four post uh before you ever talk about your actual product that's such good wisdom too and I've I've I've been a business owner for about eight eight or nine years now and that was always my thing too like I don't I'm not I don't want to sell I think it's the best way to sell is not to sell at all yeah 100% totally and uh I remember there were some times too like I would I'm naturally I'm like a non-confrontational person and so I I'm always just trying to give people like the way a way out so I would have this like great pitch and then at the end was like but hey like if I'm not the right fit I'll introduce you to a team that like it would be the right fit and yeah yeah and I was like people used to give me a hard time but I was like I think that more often than not that was the reason why I got the job 100% they were just they were just like he's just he's not trying to sell me's just trying to help me out so totally and like we're all here for the same purpose to like make the world better for Jesus and so if we can focus on that it doesn't matter like that your product is doing better than others um I think it's so cool when like churches will will be like hey we have a Christmas service but here are 10 other churches in the city that we think are doing really great things as well so if we aren't right for you go check one of them out and it's really having that perspective of like man I just want you to grow I don't I don't care if necessarily if you're take if you're buying from me but you're actually growing yourself yeah man that's awesome that's some great great wisdom all right just two more um we haven't talked about this but I know that you're also a foodie yeah um and we are in the midst of the holiday season so what what's your go-to meal or dessert oh man my go-to meal or dessert so I make this I'm I'm cooking it on Wednesday so we have a small group coming over to our house on Wednesday at this new church that I'm part of and I'm cooking my favorite meal right now to cook I feel like it changes frequently but this is what I'm doing Tuesday night I'm beginning to make a cheesecake based off of uh of a cheesecake from New York that I think is incredible with this sponge crust and then I'm doing a French pureed potato with a flank steak uh asparagus wrapped in Pudo with a cowboy butter on top and I think it's gonna I think it's GNA be a a crowd pleaser but I'll I'll let you know on Thursday dang I hope people aren't listening to this around lunchtime kill them it's not even lunchtime and I could eat that right now I know man it sounds so good well you can tell you're passionate about that for sure I love it it's yeah I feel like food experiences really light me up so whether that's me cooking for friends and family or uh bringing somebody to a new restaurant and just watching their face light up when when they try something that I think is incredible that makes me happier than uh almost anything else yeah well it's so I honestly wasn't planning on talking about this but I uh there's an old you know old saying it's like a way to a man's heart as his stomach but yeah I I was always just so um you know observing of how many times like before Jesus or the disciples like shared the gospel that there was a a mill involved you know it's like always it's just yeah it's just so cool how that is and I think that's in and of itself an opportunity for Ministry and relationship too 100 per. yes I couldn't agree more so I uh I love I love you so much as a brother as a friend um and I I have no doubt that people like listening to this podcast are going to feel a connection feel that you really care so have I have no doubt that people are going to want to buy the book or just stay in touch with you in general so what's the best way for people to to stay in touch with Zack Wendall uh mainly Instagram and Tik Tok uh otherwise Zack wall.com got everything there uh if you DM me the word book on Instagram you'll get access to everything you'll uh find out where to buy it and I threw in some bonuses as well so start with that well brother man thank you so much for being on with us today and and for everybody listening thank for being a part of another episode on fulfilled and we just hope you have a blessed day thank you man it's an honor.
hey friends we're back with another episode of the fulfilled podcast this time we welcome Casey schultes the founder and front man of he would love first here how a simple answer to a famous question would birth a movement with today's generation stick around this is one episode you won't want to miss all right man before we get too uh too much into the details I know that you guys are expecting your first so tell me at this moment What's going through your head oh man very excited very nervous scared just um I think I'm I'm really close to my sister and brother-in-law and they have you know a I think almost two-year-old and we've got to be really close to them and so just seeing like how amazing having a child is like I don't I don't know if there's anything better so I'm super excited and you know a little backstory as well is we um actually went through a miscarriage um beginning of last year and so I think you know when you first find out that your wife's pregnant it's like what does this mean and I you can't even like wrap your mind around it and then I think that going through that type of loss was like I don't know it gave you a whole different perspective on like what it means when you know there's a little person growing in in your wife's womb and just craziness of of life so I'm so excited we're so thankful and pregnancy is hard not for me but for my my wife you know and so um it's been a long journey but like obviously especially like I said when you go through you know a miscarriage um you're so thankful for the all the Pains of pregnancy because it means that you know you're it's it's it's happening so super excited Super thankful and just yeah so excited what's the countdown we've got March 8th is the due date um gotta figure out a name okay baby boy so we had like three girl names ready ready to roll and then we I was a boy and we're just like I got nothing so we got we got to figure that out a lot of pressure I have issues you know ordering my coffee making a decision on that so picking a name is GNA be tricky well you just think about in the future when he orders his cup of coffee from Starbucks or whever what's gonna be the name on to see that's what I gotta think about those things that's right maybe just do some mockups and just see what what look right so exactly I I've I had the pleasure of knowing you for a little while uh I'm I'm I love your story I'm a big story guy and just to hear how you know God took you down this path probably unexpected path that you were kind of set out to do but for for those that haven't heard your story you are a founder of he would love first to tell me go go back to the beginning and just tell me um how that happened and where that took shape yeah crazy crazy it's almost seven eight years now um yeah I I played soccer Georgia State I had a lot of um friends from overseas obviously um a lot of soccer players come from you know different countries and stuff to play and so I remember a specific time in school you know as a Christian on a on a sports team in locker rooms and stuff you're always trying to work in conversations about the gospel and how do you do that and things like that um but I remember one specific week there were like some hate preachers on campus that were you know yelling at my teammates in between class and stuff and in the locker room they're all talking about it and what they were saying and just terrible things um and then that same week uh I was wearing a wwjd bracelet and one of the guys asked um what is my wwjd bracelet stand for and I grew up in the Bible Bell everyone knows what wwjd is so I was like caught off guard like stand for what would Jesus do you know and I could see his mind kind of churning like is that is that it you know like I don't know what you do you know and I thought he was gonna ask me what would what would Jesus do you know like keep going and uh so in my head I was like how do I just kind of lead in into the gospel like what Jesus did while we were still Sinners you know he loved us when we couldn't love him um he bridged that Gap sin separated us you know so I'm just trying to Quick you know what am I going to say he didn't ask the question but I kind of left like seems like I grew up my whole life hearing you know what would Jesus do or seeing that that bracelet or question whatever but it hasn't necessarily had anything um hasn't really been used to like maybe start a conversation about the people or with the people that don't necessarily know what Jesus did and what the cross is and what the cross means and while we were still sinners Christ died for us um because of his great love for us you know and so um we were like maybe we could start conversations with the people around us just with that simple you know reality and so we had a couple bracelets made and like started passing them out um teammates classmates things like that and we were actually able to like really start conversations you know like Point people back to the Cross um and it was super cool like all of a sudden we were getting these conversations that we would try and you know get into um were coming like more naturally and so we're like let's maybe we should get more bracelets you know and so we we ran with that a little bit and it just kind of kept you know progressing and so we kind of realized we had something to run with and so that's you know kind of turned it into make clothes you know so it's obviously on the mission to kind of start conversations through clothing and bracelets and things like that um to point people back to the cross and um so conversation and use what was a famous bracelet movement for you know in the of use that huge platform that's already there to just point people back to the cross and U talk about you know what he did while while we were Sinners so well that story never get crazy uh yeah it's been it's been a journey you know so but it's been fun so this is an assumption but I'm I'm guessing you're so you're play soccer at Georgia State right and I'm guessing at that point you had limited knowledge on the manufacturing process and then seven or eight years ago I mean now you could whatever you want you could go find it online on uh find a manufactur it's it's a a lot easier now to go and and Source the things that you need but tell me what was that like when you're like hey I have this idea to make this BRAC tell me yeah what was that like for you and how how hard was it to accomplish what you were looking for yeah um yeah and it's what's kind of cool about the stories too is like I was never or like I wasn't really like this is a good business idea and like let's go see what our margins are and what's our go to market strategy and things like that like I said it was like this would be really cool I don't know if anyone's ever used the bracelets like this you know what would it look like how much would it cost um and so yeah just started searching online funny story honestly I looked for 15 minutes excuse me and um couldn't find anyone and I was like cool whatever like this fun idea and um my mom my mom kept looking and find found a manufacturer that could customize these bracelets and so she found she's like hey let's talk to these people and I was like all right I guess I will do it so it would have been done 15 minutes in if my mom hadn't kept looking but yeah just kind of looked online you know just Googling like crazy for 15 minutes till my mom did it but um yeah no idea about any manufacturing and what that looks like um just Dr Goo searching around thank God for the moms right they don't give up on us exactly so well um this is random did are you have you switched manufacturers since that day um yeah well I think we have I think that it came to a point where we had to say like hey we need a little bit something different and they were like you know I mean maybe six months in they're like we know another manufacturer that does similar but can you know do what you're looking for but since then yeah we've been with the same manufacturer for the longest time sozy it's pretty crazy like I've been yeah with them for a while so I've been in the creative space that's been kind of my career path as you know graphic designer eventually become creative director and then owning a creative agency at one point um and it it's it J changes the the older that you get but you know when I see my work out in the public it's still is kind of like oh I think it's sweeter for me now as a dad I'm like hey Daddy got to work on that you know like there's we rebranded a big uh logistics company we'll be you know six hours away and I'll see that logo that I you know worked on painstakingly like driving down the interstate so it's really cool but um I I see your bracelets everywhere now like I I'm still I'm not just doing this for the podcast I rock mine here um but like going through like Chick-fil-A I'll see somebody rocking it and I think about you all the time tell me what is it like uh personally but even like spiritually um what is it like seeing seeing your stuff in the wild yeah I mean it's still it still has that like surreal feeling because I mean as you know like I was there when we were licking envelopes and like had no idea writing everyone's address and trying to figure out what it looks like to ship things and just from the very beginning um and so seeing it now I just like I still have that picture of the first the beginning and so it's still just like unreal you know like proof that like God has his hand in it because it's not like you pick some guys that are some marketing or business gurus like literally we had no idea so proof that we it wasn't like some skill or knowledge that we had we just kind of were available so just available for what guy wanted to do right yeah yeah so but yeah super super surreal still when I see it so um any big names that you know of rocker gear um I think Tim TBO wore it for a while we were pumped about that I'm a Georgia fan but I'm still AO fan but um I think I think Justin Bieber had the bracet on for a little bit we have a picture of that yeah um Lauren dagel I know she wore it for a little bit maybe still wears I don't know yeah but we've seen a couple a couple pop up you're like wow that's crazy pretty cool huh they came across it yeah so that's awesome so uh more on the business side as a e-commerce um founder business owner what would you say you know seven eight years in what's been the the most challenging part of running the business and what's been the most rewarding the most challenging part I would say I mean I guess just kind of like I said like we had we had no idea it's not like we were like okay here's what we have to do and then and just go do it all it was like you're figuring out what you have to do as you're doing it you know like I growing up you know I played soccer and I you know focused on school and so it was like I have to show up at this time and I have to run these Sprints I have to do this drill or I have to study this and it's all in front of you um and you you still have to apply yourself you know to Crazy levels and work really really hard but then if you just took out like you have to figure out what you have to do and now like figure it out and do it at a high level it was just like you know we lived in one of the guys like his parents let us like stay in their basement and like fulfill everything out of their house and so we're just like living in this basement paying minimal rent trying to figure out you know like what do we do how do we what's the next step just talking to people um and so I think just kind of working that out just being like we don't know what we're doing we don't even know what this next step is but we're gonna we're just going to figure it out um so that kind of unknown of like this could very easily fail like we have no idea that this is a sure thing that's going to work out um might need to get a job next month who knows you know um so just those times of like man we don't we don't know what we're doing um and Keeping the Faith and like believing in like I believe in this I want to do it I'm going to apply myself work really hard and having that faith that you know it'll it'll work out and just learning every day so and then most rewarding I mean I think the fact that I mean it was four of us that started it all you know really good friends and then another friend of ours runs our social media and we knew her in in college and she we literally in college we're like we don't we're not really good at social media do you want to run it and so now she has a social media agency she's like continued in that so just growing it um as a friend group and a family and learning like I said going through that whole process of you know when when you're working with people and you don't know if you're getting paid and you know how what we're gonna be doing next month you know you got to have a good Bond if you have disagreements you got to figure out how to get over those disagreements quickly and so like we've learned how to fail together you know like we've learned how to have disagreements together and know what um what hill to die on and when to say like okay you can you you decide on this I'll decide on this and so now we can have disagreements on whatever it is but it's not a falling out you know we've already had too many times too many ups and downs together to to let some little disagreement be bigger than it should be so just growing with with people and seeing God take it um just use our availability to to run with it that's probably the most rewarding is um just that whole process with friends and family that's awesome there's two things that I kind of really took from that I love that you mentioned the girl that you went to college with you guys went to college with how you saw um kind of a gifting in her and how like it kind of goes back to that you know 15 minutes in you couldn't find a manufacturer but if it wasn't from your mom seeing like this Vision in you and it may not be here same way with this this young lady too like if you hadn't asked her that would she have this I mean maybe God would have brought her there anyway but it's cool just the progression of like hey I see this and this person can they help and now they're not only like doing a good work for you but they're also like fulfilling that thing that God put in them like early on so I love that and then love the just realization especially with your buddies like you know you hear like never going into business with your friends because it doesn't end well yeah but the fact that you guys have have sent hey is this really worth you know destroying what we have and what we've worked for so I love that and that's a uh I think a good segue so if you could speak back to casy seven years ago so I'm really thinking about people that are starting a new e-commerce business uh maybe they're about to start just start or maybe a few years in what what wisdom what's what were some nuggets that you would share with them today yeah um I mean be available you're gonna have to learn a lot you know you have to every I mean still today it's like you have to have the mentality of like I could learn something today that will make a huge impact you know on what we're doing what we're trying to do in every uh facet of business and stuff like that so if you think like oh I'm not ready I need to learn more before I can start you know stepping into things like you're you're never going to be ready you know I mean you'll probably be more ready than I was but um yeah you're gonna you're not going to feel ready you just have to start like taking steps and learning and making mistakes and learning from mistakes um yeah and then I guess as far as like team wise like they say don't go into business with your friends I think I mean people ask me now like if you could do it again like how would you have done it and and is it do you would you go into business with your friends and I mean it's easy now I guess because we went through those hard times and now we're at the the other side of it it's like yeah of course you know but I mean I really do like if we had failed we would failed together we would we succeeded we succeeded together and and we were in business with people it's like you know I I wouldn't change it you know I would I went to battle I wanted them to succeed as much as I wanted myself to succeed I wanted you know all my guys to to be able to do it full-time and be successful as much as I did you know and their families I'm close to their families and so you know picking people that like you want to fight for and you're okay with failing with you know like having times where like this is really hard they're going to have my back I'm gonna have theirs and that you know compliment you there things that you know one of my business partners Jared that he has skills that if I was in charge of our warehouse like it would be a disaster you know and maybe he would say vice versa if he was in charge of more product stuff it might not be as well you know whatever but we all have skills that kind of like complement each other um and so I think picking a team like that that you know it doesn't have to be your friend and it doesn't I don't think it doesn't have to not be your friend just go find someone random but having people it's like they compliment you and we're on the same Mission you know we believe the same things um and you know we love the Lord and that's we're brothers you know so um those are probably two big things like you got to be willing to apply yourself maybe like you've never applied yourself before and learn every single day and for me you know having a support group and a support system around you that you know you can Bounce from bounce back from failures and succeed with um and kind of you know keep you levelheaded and stuff like that so that's great wisdom I remember my wife and I went into business together and then we you know the there's a multiplication thing you have one kid then when you had we blinked and we had fours and my wife was a little more limited and then yeah I was really like looking for a partner at that point and a few of my friends that I would approach about partnership I think they were hesitant because they didn't want me to give away something unnecessarily and one asked like why why do you want me to come on and I said I just need somebody to like fight and grind with because it's it's a lot and doing that alone is a lot so hearing you speak to just having someone that has your back that can go through the ups and downs together that's that's huge so that's great wisdom so uh so he would love first what's uh what's the future look like for you guys yeah I mean again like I said we're still learning still trying to figure out you know tons of stuff every day in the direction things like that I think the last two years has been like you know we're growing we're figuring out you know where we're at and what we're really trying to do and and nail down our strategy and a bunch of stuff that we feel like you know we've grown quickly and now we're just like okay let's figure figure out how we can you know have our model that's not you know necessarily has to grow at a certain rate um and you know who can we partner with who can we um Ministries that we can do you know more work with and then how can we expand and add some um you know other other brands alongside what we're doing you know we've gotten to a point we've been able to delegate a lot of roles to our warehouse managers and Warehouse team that just crush it um help us a ton so we're kind of like you know we've been doing this for seven years um are there kind of like sister brands that are similar but you know different um that we can we can step into and kind of grow um and then there are other people that we can help as well they're you know on the same Mission as us that we can kind of um give some of the you know Insight that we've learned if if there's like us seven years ago there's so many things that are just seem simple but you know we've just learned through trial and error that we could pass on to people who are in it right now so kind of Step stepping into you know maybe that coaching or not even coaching but just you know trying to help you know people in the same position that we were in that's another yeah great piece of wisdom there so that's awesome so we're getting closer to the end we have a big question that we like to ask everybody this is called the fulfilled podcast so what does uh being fulfilled look like for you I think um man that's a big question isn't it um I think being because what's hard about it is like sometimes you can feel not fulfilled because you want to grow and you want to learn and you have that mental you know all your life you're like today's the day I'm G to get better and all these things and also having that balance of like contentment like like I can look at where we are now and be like you know we could be doing this so much better and this so much better um but at the same time I can look back and be like gosh a year two years six years ago this would have been I wouldn't have been able to even imagine like how well this is going so having that perspective like contentment like Lord You've like provided for me in a way that I could I didn't even dream of um and balancing that like I'm I'm available and when it's time to step I want to step and I'm I'm I'm ready to work and you know put my nose down and but also having the balance of like if I never do anything else again and I have to give up and I just do something new with you and that's what you have for me I'm content with like how you've provided for me um I think that's a balance of you know fulfillment that I've had obviously just being able to do all that with family and and in community um but yeah sometimes it gets too lopsided you're like I'm ready to grind I'm ready to work I'm G to start five new things and the Lord will be like just slow down and realize how I've taken care of you but then if you get too content you know on the side of like he has something that he wants you to step into and you're not you know available kind of like the parable of the talents you know sometimes there's times that you're called to step and if if you're too lazy or whatever you want to call it then you might be missing out on you know something God has for you so I think having people in your life that um can speak into that and be like I think you know you you have the capacity to step into this or you need to pull back and you know spend more time you know with your family or whatever it may be um yeah that balance of just being like Lord search me know me tell me when to step and when to slow down um and just contentment and availability so that's so good and I resonate especially as a business owner entrepreneur I feel like I have five new ideas every day and as I've gotten older there's some Seasons where God's just like every door that I try he just shuts it down and thankfully he does before I get too far then yeah other Seasons it's just like he's just it's just like you can't move fast fast enough to you know exact exactly yeah to be that so and just I mean whether you're slowing down or speeding up like feeling like you're doing it with him and and you know being obedient like that's you know you could start something and fail but if you feel like you've done it with him and obedient um then you're GNA be fulfilled because that's the main thing so um you know for those that want to kind of keep up with he would love first and what you guys are doing what's what's the best way to do that um our Instagram is just at Hew would love first website is he first.com um and then my Instagram is Casey schultes 14 um so yeah those are the main the main ways awesome man well I know again as being in business you know how limited your time is um so I know you especially with the holidays you got a lot going on so just want to say thank you for being with us today opening up your heart and just sharing some goodness with us today dude thank you I always love talking to you so thanks for having me.
Trust me you don't want to miss this whether you're starting out or scaling up buckle up for a ride filled with wisdom Innovation and a dash of humor let's dive into the fulfilled podcast where we explore the world of e-commerce and Beyond welcome today to the fulfilled podcast today I'm excited to introduce Matthew moano which is he's a CEO and founder of connective CRM but also checkout Champs and today I want to focus a little bit more on checkout Champs because there's a lot of lot of talk on the street about what's going on with checkout Champs and I want to also introduce because he's a husband a father and a new new grandfather is that what we were talking about before tell me about this this grandbaby grandfather the second time remember when your wife gave birth to your little daughter yep I think my son gave birth like two days later to our first granddaughter but we just had our first grandson on on November 30th oh that's beautiful I was telling you I was like he doesn't look like a grandfather but Matt awesome man that those are going to be some uh uh some really I guess spoiled grandkids um your grandkids they're going to be well trained let me just tell you that's right they're going to know how to shoot for sure that's right but I also want to introduce that that you you have been a loyal friend for a long time you're somebody I can turn to in in in times of you know um times where where're we're trying to figure out what's the next best thing that that we should focus on um and personally and and business-wise so I want people to know that there there's somebody that I've depend you're somebody I've depended on in the past and you've G given great advice um so that that's meant a lot to me and you're also you're an innovator you're an innovator of sass technology you're an innovator in the field you're an innovator in e-commerce and I'm always interested to find out what you're working on next because that's something the industry is going to feel so I I just want to thank you for coming on today and um I want to ask you I'm G to ask you a couple questions because I know our listeners want to know more about you because most of them have heard of your technology um and they might not always know the man behind the scenes but Matthew I want to kick it off and just ask in check out Champs how do you guys make your money well our money is made it's very much performance-based if our clients obviously we have a we have a base monthly subscription fee which covers the cost of the technology but uh transactionally as we help our clients scale we get a small a little small piece of of that that volume like very tiny small piece y um and so their success very much relates to Our Success so we're we have a vested interest in really helping them build the best fastest highest converting checkouts and upsells and Order bumps and subscription billing models that the industry has ever seen so it's really our success is tied to their success that's right and I ask that because people sometimes wonder it's like well how is this person making money from me and a lot of times if it's tied to Performance then there's a cooperation there right that's right well you know you look at big big publicly traded companies and I hate to throw out names like just look at big Commerce I'm not telling you anything that you know out of school here you can just look at their numbers they have never ever been profitable you know so how does a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company that does essentially the same thing we do operate with with no profit there has to be profit so you can continue to hire and and build new technologies and things of that nature and we've just we've kind of figured out the right way to do it that's right so there's a big advantage to not having that red tape not having to to really answer to um I guess people that that aren't in the day-to-day but maybe not car care about the clients as much as as we might so I'm I'm speaking from the fulfillment.com side is is I love the fact that um we're not publicly traded I I love the fact that we're founder Le right now well let me let me also mention I know you gave me a great lead in here let me also mention to those that are watching Justin is Awesome Justin I met in San Francisco probably 12 13 years ago standing up in like a hallway and we just kind of bumped into each other said look there's there's opportunity here to to win business and win together and and I think you're probably going to ask these questions later on but I think that's a big part of the business you find people that are aligned with you you know not just on the business side but also on the personal side and and there are ways to win where it's not just you but everyone collectively Rises to the top that's right that's what I felt when we it wasn't it wasn't just us going out in trying to make money it was us trying we're trying to build something that gave back something that um we could show add enormous value to somebody we're we're transacting with so absolutely man when we met it was just like okay there's something here let's pursue this this is great and of course we had both had a military background so that helps as well sometimes we we talk the same lingo when others are like Alpha brao Delta Char what but let me ask you so in your Tech yeah what's that Dar one Dar two D that's right that's right like what so um I just like that commonality you know with with people as far as military wise and and we missed the camaraderie that we had so when we run into somebody else you know that had that as well um it's just we're we're on the same page as far as the the way we think think about a lot of ways so yeah I mean I i' I've enjoyed our relationship ever since and my my goal here today is um I want people to know the real checkout champ the real match I want people to understand there's some things I know we put advertisements out there sometimes but when people actually see who's behind the scenes who's developing who's allowing Those ads to go out who's behind the technology is that somebody I'm going to trust is that somebody that I want to do business with because this is all this is all discretionary income we're giving out to the different service providers based on what they're telling us and what we're hearing in the marketplace and I know that that I hear not just directly from what I hear on on just people talking at trade shows and those sort of things but we've got a bunch of e-commerce clients that that talk they talk about different Technologies and I know that that connective has been tried and true it's been a technology that has lasted the times and when Matt told me about checkout Champs and he and he explored and showed me actually behind the scenes in checkout champ um I wanted to I wanted to Showcase that I wanted to show others that what what really they could be um uh connected to to be able to push their business to the next level so let me ask you what else do you guys I know you get that you've explained how you actually make money what do you guys give away for free what do we gave away for free well in most cases we'll give the first month away for free because when people talk about the fees they're like well you know it's probably expensive a lot of these guys are you know they're small businesses many cases they're just starting off you know even if they're running a 50,000 $100,000 $250,000 a month company you know adding that one additional layer of expense it does affect the bottom line so you know I I know what our product can do so I'll say come on in I'm I'll wave your first month we're going to have you up and running in a couple of days and you'll see for yourself your conversion rates are going to double or triple you're going to make more money your upsells are going to go through the roof and you're never going to question dollar one that you'll ever pay me test drive right take it for a test drive got it man so now developing checkout Champs though why was it really created I know you you've got connect you've got a successful CRM but why checkout champ now you know that's interesting it actually ties back to one of your clients that we it was a mutual client and he said hey I'm I'm using a couple these these e-commerce platforms and they really just don't have all the features that connective does and I said what would you want it to do and this is probably going back five or six years Justin yeah um it was another funnel building platform I know you know what it is I'm not going to say it out loud uh but I said you know I bet you we can build something like that we have the team so we actually started hiring more people it took a couple years about two and a half years to build it but what we found is it doesn't just build the sales funnel it is a full repace replacement to most e-commerce you know these big CMS platforms that you've heard of it replaces the checkout entirely and the entire experience post cart so if you're going to a store let's say you go to I don't know a hunting or outdoor store you're putting you know gloves and hunting pants and hats and stuff in the cart once you click proceed to checkout it it does a complete handoff from that cart to the checkout page which you now have 100 100% control and customization of it's single step you can use any Merchant processor you want because we have Integrations over 200 gateways from around the world any currency and you can control the the pre- purchase order bump the postp purchase one click up cells and all the way to the thank you page so you're controlling that entire consumer and you know that customer experience so in the days of like the AMZ Juggernaut right where there's loss of control you're giving back these internet retailers more control of Their audience more control of how they check out those sort of things that's correct that's awesome and then you're showing the data to be able to so they can actually make adjustments in Scale based on all the different split testing that you provide that they're they're capable in that system is that right yeah absolutely it's split testing you hit the nail on the head there which a lot of companies don't split test but the companies that do they're usually just doing ab split testing but if you have a bunch of variants that you want to test to see which one's the winner going from going doing ab ab ab all the way down the line online it takes forever to get to that that final decision we built four-way split testing in our platform I don't know of any other platform that has it so you can do ABCD so you do four variants and you have a control and three variants you arrive at the conclusion much faster how competitive do you think the market places right now with with just uh internet retailers competing against themselves for for people I mean is this something where if you want to take it to the next level and you're really competing at that at that higher level with other internet retailers in the same space is this going to give you an advantage yeah well you think about the the product categories you know it could be kitchen wear could be Outdoor Equipment it could be survival gear nutritional supplements skin care whatever those categories are you know there's there's a limited number not a limited number of buyers but you know when you're looking at traffic what type of traffic can you generate for a certain product I have people that call me all the time just say hey I want to get into Ecom what product should I look at I don't know go look and see what the top selling products are on Amazon there's so there's thousands and thousands of them but you go and find a product category you're probably going to have a c a competitor in that category how do you beat that competitor well you have to have some type of competitive advantage that's right wow that's good so I'm going to jump a little bit and I want to ask you for our listeners what could be because we know they're competing with other people in that category in that space um what could be maybe some advice that you would give them um that maybe be able to take their business where they're doing well maybe they're doing a couple orders a day but how do you get to that 100 order a day 200 a thousand order of a day what's what's maybe the biggest lever that you would give them because you're seeing all kinds of different e-commerce retailers what advice would you give them well I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm going to talk about two things here the first thing I would tell you is you do not have to be the cheapest product cheapest does not always mean you're going to win yeah when I went to Market with some of the products that I've sold and Technology products I was never the cheapest you don't have to be the cheapest to win you just have to have a great brand and and a quality product if you have those two things then it goes to the second thing I was going to say people will come into this and they'll say oh well if I just do you know SEO or or paperclick through Google I'm gonna I'm going to drive new customers it doesn't do you have to have Facebook Google Tik Tok Snapchat you have to be doing email SMS you have to be you have to have a multi-prong marketing approach and you have to have every single one of them dialed in there are so many companies that I see Justin that maybe they're doing email great but they're not doing SMS or they're doing SMS but they're not doing great email follow-up sequences and I say that because we have companies that we work with that specialize in email and SMS and like look these guys when they start they set sign up with us we can generate them an extra 100,000 200 $500,000 a month depending on how much traffic they're coming in because they're just leaving all that money on the table and who would be somebody that for instance I know at fulfillment.com there's a there's a certain Avatar that we love to do business with and when we do business with them they love to do business with us who would be for checkout champ who would be that perfect client that be a m a mutual beneficial relationship there the type of client or you want a specific C the type of client just a type of client so if they're watching this they're like oh that's me and and that might be a good fit for me um I would say anyone who has a we're very good with nutritional supplement companies we have some of the biggest nutritional supplement companies in the world and they love our platform because our subscription billing platform is unlike anything else out there yeah it is powerful it's flexible and it has all the backend membership pieces that allow your customers to go to be able to manage their their memberships without ever having to pick up phone call so um I would say in the product of of nutritional supplement and health and beauty yep those are ideal for us but we also have a lot of clients that come to us that they could be apparel companies and apparel companies how do you set up a a a subscription well you could do a subscription box where you're sending out something that is hey we know you like this style we have your sizes let's let us send you a subscription box every month of different types of clothes and if you don't like it send it back that's one way to do it or the second way to do it if you don't have a product that you think is a natural subscription you can always do a VIP membership hey pay $9 a month and you're going to get discounts that no one else gets every time you come back to shop so you're saying it's like expanding the way you sell to a customer being more convenient for them so rather than you going in and buy you know spending $100 on a shirt if you're a member maybe come in maybe at 70 bucks yep yep so you're seeing the value by being a member I heard you're working on something called intelligent upsells um can you explain that and why that's a game changer yeah yes when you look when you look at the demographics of the of the customers that are visiting an Ecom store they're all different right different ages different Sexes different I don't economic socioeconomic right levels with it you know they may have more money to spend less money to spend it doesn't matter when you go to this site it's going to be and it could be my interest are different than yours when I'm going to this Ecom store so what the UPS the intelligent upsell product is going to do it's going to look at the items that you put into your C and based on what the system believes would be your customer profile it's going to deliver the most likely products that you would pick in your upsell flow that's awesome so it's j single has bought these products before Yep this is the product he's most likely going to say yes to is upsell one this is the product he's most likely going to say to upsell two and three and four all the way through you know however many upsells you have so that's something similar I think Amazon does right now but you're going to be able to do that with people not having to use Amazon on their own on their own pages on their own checkouts right that's correct that's awesome okay um thanks for explaining that so problem yeah so I want to also talk about um maybe some of the challenges you've had in with checkout Champs or you can even go far back as as connective and what was that moment because I know and when we create a business like what was it 12 years ago when did you create connect about 12 years ago yeah it was well 2010 a little little more than yeah and I know is creating a new business there comes a moment to where you're kind of I don't want to call it getting in the black but you become profitable you become this is actually people are paying for this uh for this value that I'm providing and this is a viable business model I'm we're actually helping and so when was that moment do you think that you you crossed over um into this is actually going to work this is something that that the that the industry loves when we started you know we had a couple of clients here and there and it was you know everyone was kind of working from home you know I built this company on my kitchen table there was was just me and one programmer you know now we have I know 45 47 programmers and a whole group a team of people but um once we hit 100 clients and they were sticking I was said you know this is it I think I think this is going to be a long-term product and then next thing we did we GRE to 205 500 and you know a th clients and became the you know I think the largest CRM and direct consumer on the DDC side of the business that there that was the moment when we hit a hundred clients I was I said yeah we have we really have something here get you know someone sells two or three accounts they like whoa It's Time to that's right I know there's a there's a moment that you're like this is real this is happening I mean the struggle is going to continue um but there is it's almost like a you you've peaked up right you've hit the top of the mountain you know this is going to work um but that's the point that I know in my business like I got to stay hungry still I still have to go out and see how do I provide more value to that 100 like you're saying how do I how do I start listening to them even deeper on what their needs maybe not what they are right now but what they they're gonna be tomorrow how do we get ahead of it you want to hear an interesting statistic yeah we now service over 117,000 storefronts on the platform oh my goodness that's a lot that's a lot i' I heard a long time ago that 71% of Statistics are made up think that's true that would be great 71% uh I hope I fall into that 29 but no but we just looked at we actually weit we just hit another interesting Benchmark on uh on Black Friday yeah we did over a million sales on checkout champ in one day net new sales through the platform one day wow so obviously people are seeing that that that's it's adding value and and these aren't just yeah these companies are do you see that these companies once they include checkout champ what's the common like what's the response from them is it over a couple of months they're like wow what happens what's the you know just with any business you're GNA get some people that come along and you know they they can't or they won't take the time to learn it but once someone digs in and they figure out how the platform works and we'll teach them yeah I know once you sign up you get a dedicated account manager who's going to teach you everything you need to know about this platform and how to use it to its its highest potential the people that take them the time to learn it and that's a great that's probably the vast majority you know you're going to have attrition anything but the people that they love it they'll never leave because you could do so much with it you know you get these these big Ecom stores Justin that have you know 50 products 5,000 product 50,000 whatever that it is our system is not just a checkout they're our clients are taking their top selling products I'm sorry I'm Italian I talk with my hands they're taking their top selling products and they're creating single product landing pages single product Landing you know where your your Ecom store is converting at what two or 3% a single product landing page to a targeted customer is going to convert at at 25 to 36% wow yeah so we have clients that'll have you know 200 websites running on one checkout champ that's amazing that's that's amazing and you can't that's hard to communicate that through if you decide hey I'm going to market for checkout Champs you know what I mean so that's why wanted to bring you on here is to demonstrate some of that value that doesn't really get talked about um unless somebody's asking you these sort of questions right well I'm G tell you the coolest statement that I've heard it was from a nutritional supplement company he said Matt I don't care if I'm paying you 40 or $50,000 a month to use this platform I'm making over $100,000 a day in additional income because of your oneclick upsells oo strong that's powerful yeah yeah so I'm going to switch gears on you and I I know people are going to check out check out Champs on their own um what's the easiest way they just go to checkout champs.com and and put their information in yeah singular checkout champ.com check out champ checkout champ.com yep and click the button talk to my people you know they'd love to talk to you whether you're a new store or you're you're a store that's you know doing millions of dollars a month we can help any one of you that's awesome so Switching gears now what do you think would be I I'm looking for something with your expertise something you see in the future like a marketing Trend something that people need to be paying attention to something that an Advertiser they're doing good but they need to be paying attention to this because it's coming marketing wise is there any anything that that you're seeing on the marketing side I think with the uh the new the latest iOS update it's going to be very difficult to to run Facebook ads just make sure you have a a thirdparty platform to do all of your your ad attribution for you because you're not going to be able to get that data I don't think and we use it we use Facebook too and I'm worried that we're not going to see our data in Facebook we may need a thirdparty pixel to do tracking a good one is everflow a lot of our clients will use everflow I'm not here to push everflow but they're a good one there's a handful of them to look at um I also think that these companies that are in the US selling product at a moderate level of success they need to look at Europe and I say that because Europe is usually always four to five years behind American Trends I think Europe is is an untapped market for a lot of these Brands and if they could figure out how to do cross border multicurrency I you know I they could triple the size of their company well that that's great advice and that actually leads into if if they want to cross border we've got facilities in Europe so um it we make it real easy on that side so you're right if they're doing something well in the US um I love the fact that you're pointing out that that they're a little bit behind us so it should work in Europe um you just go we've got to make it easy for them and a lot of times the hardest part is it's either payment processing and it's and it's the actual physical goods and and we can both make that easy for them look ladies and gentlemen Jus can help you with all of your product facilities and fulfillment overseas our platform does um Dynamic currency conversion based on the spot rate of any of any currency we have over 200 Banks from around the world so you don't have to use that that one that's embedded into your platform in most cases you're saving money if you're using a different if you're using a different product a system calculates that tax it it'll do everything for you and provides you the platform to scale in other markets that's good let me ask you a personal question if you could go to your younger self and Shake Yourself by the shoulders and say hey pay attention to this and starting this business what is there anything you would change or anything that you would tell your younger self to do or not do yeah and I hate to say it because some of our old friends are going to see it I probably would have avoided the the higher risk dtoc market and gone straight after Ecom back in 2010 that's good that's good I'm on the same page I would have gone straight after the brands the brands yeah let's just go after somebody that wants to create a legitimate brand and offer value so yeah I'm there man because that's I feel like that's exactly what we've strived to do so even just connecting with those people those relationships grow so let me ask you this also um where do you spend your time when you're not working on checkout champ you really want me to tell you oh yeah I want you to tell everybody H um so as you know I like to shoot yep I like long range shooting I love to hunt I love to fish I love to hike I just want to be outdoors uh it's always with my family that's right you know I drag my poor wife with me everywhere but thank God go she loves to do it um you know we just like to be outside doing stuff you we'll sit at the sit outside and in the summertime and I'll grab my fishing rod grab my boys we'll go I have a a pond on my property we'll go fishing you know we just want to be outdoors doing something so that's me I'm not want I don't want to you know we you're very humble man yeah there's a lot that you could have said there so the things that we thought were important you know back then I mean it's it's if I could shake my younger self um that's exactly that's the direction that that i' I'd like to to talk in right now is is I want to know a little bit behind the scenes is what do fulfillment really mean to you now like what does it mean if if if you were like if you had to paint a perfect picture of your life and you're like this is I'm fulfilled or if you are right now what do what does that mean when I ask you that question what does fulfillment mean to you oh well I don't have to be friends with everybody you know I it's it's nice to have relationships but but creating a core group of people that are loyal to me and I'm loyal to them um and I'm talking outside of family I think that's important right guys that would that would walk over broken glass through the the fires of hell for me because they know I would do for them those are the type of people I want around me yeah not these guys that are just sticking around because they think they're going to get something off of me one day right yeah I don't need that no one needs that in their life um just meaningful relationships people I enjoy being with people you know yeah people who make me fulfilled you know I that's right nothing makes me happier than seeing my family sitting around the table putting together a puzzle so the relationships the memories that sort of stuff is the stuff that makes you feel that you're doing what you need to be doing absolutely I mean that's your legacy you know what are people going to say about you not just the Next Generation but three generations from now I want people to say oh my gosh your great great-grandfather was the greatest man in the world yeah you know he did this this this right that's your legacy I wanted people to see the man behind the curtain you've done so much in the e-commerce space you've helped so many people um achieve their dreams whether it be one small tip or just kind of taking their hand because you believed in them so I want to thank you for for the contribution that that that you've made um in my life and and others that are are watching this and that you're still on it you're still pushing the envelope you're still being innovated you're still trying to figure out how do you add value to to e-commerce well let me just say that that I am blessed that you're my buddy thank you brother I really thank you for your time I know you've added value to people um today on what you're what the the advice you're giv is there anything else that you can give the audience on something that's coming down the pike that they need to be aware of so they can still continue to keep that competitive Advantage you know I would say don't buy into everything you know there's all these Guru courses and there's all these apps that's that promise you it's going to do so do your research you know talk to people who know I you could come and talk to us I don't care if you buy from us or not you don't have to be a client of ours you could be a you be a friend you could be a buddy um just talk to people who know they'll give you the best advice don't just don't be a follower yeah you don't have to follow every every Trend and every person that's doing oh this guy's doing this so I have to do that too be Innovative do something on your own that's going to effectuate change you don't be afraid to test something new go out there you know do something different that could shake things up that's my philosophy has always been disrupt everything disrupted yeah right this disrupt everything you never know what's going to happen you're blazing your own trail it seemed like you've been blazing your own trail for a long time well Matt well thank you so much for coming on the fulfilled podcast and I hope to have you on again soon and um guys go and check out checkout champ.com and uh see if what Matt's saying is true take him for a test test drive see if this technology is going to be able to take your business from good to great thank you guys when I do and when I do I want you to do an interview with me and tell the world how awesome we are that's how that's how we do things here thank you so much for being a part of the fulfilled family I hope you enjoy all of the clips and episodes coming your way join us on this journey towards a life that is truly fulfilled 7:34 NOW PLAYING Bitcoin can certainly 'replace or be alongside' gold as a store of value, says Anthony Scaramucci CNBC Television 23K views 4 hours ago New
In a world where Innovation meets compassion join us as we welcome the Visionary behind Sun ovens trip Crites we're not just selling ovens we're changing lives we'll uncover The Untold Stories the challenges the triumphs that Sun Oven faced in their journey to truly change the way we cook it's not just about the product it's really about making a difference this isn't just a podcast it's a journey of impact inspiration where every meal made serves as a Beacon of Hope tuning in to the fulfilled podcast I have with us today trip KES he's the owner of sun ens but trip I want you to go into how did this business even come about well I guess about five or six years ago I was uh working down in Africa and we were out in the rural community setting up uh decentralized solar power uh internet Wi-Fi infrastructures and uh digital education and at that point we really saw the problems that people face on a daily basis out in these rural communities and we were already involved in trying to provide solutions for that when I was introduced uh in 2019 to Sun ofen and uh once I was introduced to Sun ofen they already had a uh 35y year uh track record and an established footprint on a global scale and so I could easily see how Sun Oven could be integrated with the uh passion that we had to solving problems out in rural communities and helping people uh to you know cook with have you had any experience with e-commerce in the past yes we've uh we've done e-commerce in the past and uh you know now being and that was another thing that really uh I was excited about with regards to Sun ofen was that it was an e-commerce company and there were even some more hurdles that we had to face uh once we acquired the company and being able to um really streamline everything so that we could scale at the time that we um acquired Sun Oven the uh ovens were being made in outside of Chicago Illinois in a place called Elburn and we had all kinds of issues with regards to uh the supply chain and getting enough of the product in also the Staffing and then you know of course when we everybody went through Co it became a real nightmare as far as Staffing and you know the supply chain and so you know thankfully we had already looked at that uh situation and addressed it earlier and decided that we need to actually move into more of a uh contract manufacturing standpoint to where we could just uh have our ovens made and then we bought a finished good and that way we didn't have the everyday concerns about the you know employment the Staffing and also uh bringing in all of the supplies that we use to actually build the sun ovens so that was already underway before uh you know the covid situation was full on so uh that allowed us the ability to scale meaning that you know we can now take orders for thousands of ovens and not really be concerned about being um you know handicapped with uh you know what we could uh produce uh on a weekly or monthly basis wow so it was important for you to make that shift and Outsource so you could focus on things that you wanted to do in your business or things you think you were best at is is that correct that's 100% correct yes and so by doing that we uh really uh were able to tap into the economies of scale and really harness um what you just said the expertise of a manufacturing uh partner where we could focus on what we do and that is the e-commerce side the marketing side and then providing the customer service and quality control and then helping to uh expand the brand uh so that more IND minies other than Preppers and homesteaders were familiar with what we had tell us the benefits of having a sun ofen I just want the audience to know know a little bit more about this product absolutely so Sun Oven if you think about it it's almost think about it in terms of a solar crock pot so what we have is a oven that has reflectors it opens up and it basically harnesses the power of the sun to heat up the inner chamber and the inner chamber uh then you can use or it functions just like a regular oven anything you cook in your regular oven you can cook inside of the Sun Oven so it has a glass that opens up you put your meal or whatever you want to cook inside of the inner chamber shut the glass and point it in the direction of the Sun and within uh 30 to 40 minutes it's already heated up to 300 325 degrees and then it just depends on how fast you want to cook your meal uh you can set it out in the sun leave it all day and nothing ever Burns or scorches or dries out in the sun oven because it really locks in the uh the Heat and the ambient temperature inside the oven prevents it from ever scorching or burning so literally you can just put your food in set it out and cook it all day and it uh retains the juicy uh you know moist uh texture so that's pretty pretty simple we've been making it the same way for 35 years when you're describing that I'm thinking of applications and I'm thinking because I I have a little farm um and and I'm away from many people but I'm thinking if this would be a critical item to have and then I'm taking it a step further and I'm thinking okay well if I wanted to cook my food on a fire well I'm kind of inviting everybody else to I'm cooking food and if you had a Sun Oven like this it seemed like a maybe a more covert way to to cook food I'm thinking of those sort of things as you're talking yeah you're 100% correct basically by starting a fire to cook you're just ringing a dinner bell everybody around is going to know hey I got something to cooking come on over for dinner but with a Sun Oven you just open it up and the sun the sun basically comes down and all you need all you need is enough sun to where you can see your Shadow and you can cook with a Sun Oven but not only can you cook with a Sun Oven but you can dehydrate as well and there's a lot of other uses other than just uh cooking so you know it's definitely something that uh in an off- grid situation people would definitely want to consider having what what do you see as far as advertising that's worked for you guys in that particular product well advertising is a uh is a real um uh delicate dance so we're big in the analytics side of it and so we want to basically uh collect every bit of data that we possibly can from any advertising marketing dollar that we spend so our particular um e-commerce is on the Shopify platform and the reason for that is because Shopify really just gives us the ability to uh for the analytics to go in and track every single keyword uh every you know every ad campaign that we do we can get real time information uh on how effective that particular ad spend is uh is doing for us and so you know from us for us continually uh analyzing uh that side of things and making sure that we're spending uh the dollars in the right place is is Paramount to uh to being effective so that's one way I can elaborate on a lot more just let me know well I'm curious because AI is of course a Hot Topic these days are you guys implementing AI in any of your marketing strategies yet not yet no we're uh we're in conversations about that but uh AI right now is not part of a marketing mix do you feel that a lot of the the people that have bought your sun ovens become Advocates is is that another way that you guys actually see that sales are coming in from people that have already purchased oh yeah and we uh we're and we have a lot of influencers out there as well so again we have the benefit of uh of having been in business for 35 years we've got um we're in 126 different countries all over the globe uh and we also have over 200,000 people that are on our mailing list and things like that so a lot of our people uh are are uh you know we've created a culture around uh the Sun Oven and so they love the Sun Oven the main thing I hear when we're out at events is the thing I love most about the sun ofen they say is that it actually works so they use it it works they tell people about it it's a quality product and you know people have been using them for 35 years but the influencer side if you want me to go into that is a big part of what we do as well for our for our organic uh side you know is basically you know the email list we have about 200,000 people like I said and we're constantly keeping uh the Sun Oven and other products in front of them and let me say this to you and the audience out there whenever I acquired the company in 2019 basically all we were doing was uh selling the the Sun Oven and we had a few other accessories like a uh uh like a a turkey rack and some things like that but you know the first question I asked was why is it that we've been in business for 35 years and we got hundreds of thousands of customers all over the planet and we don't have a cookbook with recipes in it that are actually designed to be cooked inside of the Sun ofen and so we started looking at what are other value added uh products that we could actually come up with to put into the hands of our of our customer base you know that of course would generate more sales but also help people be more effective with using the Sun ofen so a lot of times uh you know in business us as entrepreneurs and even on the e-commerce side we don't think about what else do we have or could we have that would enhance or provide more value to the core product they were actually selling so that was something that we did uh and it was very effective and we also introduced covers I mean we're like we got hundreds of thousands of people that own Sun ovens why would they not want to have a cover for their oven they could protect it and even you know extend the life of it and so it was really a no-brainer even we have a new product and I I can't say much about that right now but I'll just throw the teaser out that's going to basically uh turn the the Sun Oven into a uh I mean a Powerhouse and so it's something that can be easily integrated into an existing Sun Oven and you get much more benefit out of it so those are the things we started thinking about as a company that we could pass on value added products to our customer base let me talk more about maybe you behind the scenes I know there's um there's something that you guys have that's villager Sun Oven can you talk a little bit about that what you do with that and where you go the people that you help yeah would love to so a lot of our customer base they know us for the smaller ovens which are the All-American Sun ovens the ones we've been talking about and they really a lot of people don't know we have the big villager Sun Oven and the big villager Sun Oven is uh it looks like a small satellite fell out of the sky I mean it's a big item it's on the back of a uh trailer and um we put those in in rural communities and we can feed 1,200 people a day with that villager son of him we build Bakery Concepts around that so that you know people in uh rural communities can bake bread and then they can feed uh like at a school or an orphanage they can feed the the the people there and then the excess they can sell into the community to generate additional Revenue so it's really a sustainable business model that's built around the Villager son of it and so we've been doing that for uh years as well we we just sent uh two to Mala uh a few months ago and they set those up as uh two bakeries in different communities and already what it's done is create jobs for the uh for the women in the community and then it started to generate the income and there we partnered with a company out of uh Sweden a Solar Company that actually purchased those two big villag ovens and sent them down there so that's already started to uh to to transform the communities we also had uh some requests Outsourcing and Scaling from another country in Africa where you know the deforestation is a big issue they called us and they said hey look we need to get a hold of some of these villager ovens because our main cash crop is uh coffee and the wood that people have been cutting down for years and years has run out and now they're literally starting to cut down the coffee trees which are the cash crop just in order to cook a meal and so that can be devastating to the economy when you start using a c crop just to cook a meal that a villag or Sun Oven uh could be used for we've also had some requests and we're working now with um some people in morania uh that want to do a hundred of them up there to start putting in places to deal with some of the uh situations that you stationed there as well as in Morocco you know if they' had those for the earthquake and things they started to recognize for emergency and preparedness you know reasons that it can really um help to solve a lot of problems in an emergency is there a way for people to get involved to help you with those initiatives right there because that seems like a no-brainer uh for communities that don't have electricity or if there's something that happens um that's a way to be able to cook food um that's pretty amazing yeah you can go to villagers of.com and you can see a little a little bit about what we do there and if you want to get involved you can actually just send us an email let us know what your thoughts are what you're passionate about what area and uh I'll tell you in next year this is going to be I'll go ahead and share this with you and the audience so you know I'm excited about it we're going to be um uh com we're going to be partnering with a lot of uh missions organizations that are you know uh sending missionaries into areas and the missionaries you know traditionally go into an area they don't have the the revenue stream to continue to stay there and they're always coming back you know for months at a time to gain more support so they can go back and do you know the work so what we're doing now is starting to partner with a lot of missions organizations and sending us son of a villager son ofen into those areas ahead of the missionary so that they can literally use the Villager son ofen not only as a door opener but also as a revenue generating uh uh mechanism and so they can stay on the mission field they can solve really physical problems by providing you know bread for the community to eat gives them a real platform to you know preach the gospel and so we're starting to roll that out in uh a pretty a pretty aggressive uh way uh in 24 let me ask you this so what what is I mean for you um what is fulfillment and I asked this to all our guests what does fulfillment mean to you I mean what's the most important thing in your life well the most important thing in my life I'm going to be honest with you about it is to uh follow and be obedient uh to the plan of God for my life everybody's got a plan you know God has a plan for everybody's life and it's up to us to really uh dig in and find out what is it God that you specifically want me to do what is your calling what is your your your purpose for my life and then at that point is harnessing the ability and talents and anointings if you will that you have in order to move in that direction so the most important thing to me is one obeying what it is God told me to to to to do and then number two and I think this is where a lot of people miss it and and I try to stay focused on this is not trying to have it all figured out just really it's the fishing chips program literally taking what it is that God put in your hand and in our case it's the son of it and really saying okay God we've got this son ofen that you to entrust us with to make us stewards over and how do we take this thing that you put in our hand and give it to you so that you can bless it and multiply it to accomplish what your plan is so the real fulfillment for us comes from obeying God taking what we have putting it in his hands and watching him multiply it uh and do and change a lot of lives that's what makes us fulfilled it's not just buying a son of and when you buy a son of and you're supporting this initiative that trip is is speaking of so I'm really grateful that you came on today just to talk a little bit about Sun ovens what type of price point I I mean I I would I would spend a whole bunch for something like this but what type of price point are you at with these ovens well we we retail on our website at sun.com for $449 that's what we sell the uh the All-American Sun Oven for and then the big villager oven uh that takes over a 100 man hours to build and uh we we sell those the big ovens for $28,000 wow so those are in line with someone that would come to us and say hey we want to do a project we want to accomplish a certain mission in an area how can we utilize the Villager to accomplish that so the price Point's much higher on the Villager but our retail price on the smaller ovens are $4.49 yeah that that's amazing well I I I love I love your passion uh trip you know I know we're we're we're really trying to of course create a podcast that inspires people um it seems like you guys have a passion for what you do and and it's important people that like you said that are carrying the gospel for us so I'm excited to be able to talk to you um is there anything else you want to tell the audience today about your product or about you guys that I've missed I think we've covered quite a bit I mean I just want to say it's a real honor to have been on the podcast today and and I really trust and uh hope that something that we've said inspires or encourages uh other people other entrepreneurs out there and if I can ever be a help to anyone in any way to accomplish what God's called you to do uh I'm just an email away thank you so much for being a part of the fulfilled family I hope you enjoy all of the clips and episodes coming your way join us on this journey towards a life that is truly fulfilled
You may be wondering what does a Winnebago country music and confetti have in common well we're about to find out on the latest episode of fulfilled today we'll be sitting down with the founder of emergency confetti Gracie moer what would it look like to know that this is right for us you know and just like really being like if you're if you're ahead of us if you're going before us in this if this is something that you're calling me to then I'll be very excited about it but if not please show me I'm Kenny Morgan creative director at fulfillment.com and this is one episode you won't want to miss Gracie I just wanted to thank you so much for being on the fulfilled podcast with us today oh my goodness thank you for the kind words that was so so sweet and I'm so honored to be here it's been seven years ago which flying by but my wife and I Met You in Dallas Texas you and Steve were on uh one of the hometowns and campgrounds tours I think at that point you're still in the 68 Winne Bago oh goodness but you guys were doing this this is a tour where you would like literally go to people's backyards it was a very intimate setting I think I read that you were doing like 40 shows in 50 days you guys were just genuinely kind I remember not only with me but my wife and and just seeing you guys interact with other people you guys just made time for people and so where does that come from I have to say the Lord I mean I think it's just it's totally a gift from him and it's the Lord and then it's also gratitude so whenever we started this tour we were Newly Weds and we were so poor and I had started a company we were um hiring women who were coming off the street and teaching them how to make jewelry so they could have a job and so I started that like literally two weeks after we got married so and then Steve you know had a couple things that were like in the works for him that all fell through so I mean we like we got married I quit my full-time job to do this jewelry company and then we're like what did we do like how are we going to live and so um the lord gave Steve this vision of this tour he's like what if you you know he he pitched it to me like what if we you know bought a camper and like traveled across the country and you know maybe people would hire us to do a private show and I'm like okay let's try it you know like I'm an indr S so I'm like Adventure spontaneity um which Steve is actually not super that way but this tour I think really like brought that out of him so I was like 100% I'm in let's do it yeah so you know I think for us it was really gratitude for like I can't believe people would have us to their homes we're so thankful for this provision and for a chance to connect and then once we started doing it I think Steve just realized how much passion he found in it and just the way that he could connect with his audience and the way we could make genuine relationships was so special we kind of felt like we had stumbled upon this honey hole of like how is no one why is no one doing this like this is so cool so that's really I think where it comes from is you know obviously there's days where you're you're feeling a little bit off on the road and you're like I don't necessarily feel like you know being on or you know going into a scenario where you're like you know having to be very social and that's where the Lord really carries you through but most days like 95% of the time it's like it truly is just so fun so wonderful and just we're so grateful for the chance to do it typically when people start having kids it's kind of like okay one parent's gonna have to kind of hang back the other person's gonna have to go do the other thing but you guys just at least from outside looking in seem to have done a really good job of saying hey we're a family um and we're gonna we're gonna do things together talk about that a little bit yeah I mean I think we just from the EO been like you know we started off ever since we've been married like we both had dreams you know so we've both been pursuing them our whole marriage so I think it's just been that has helped it become a little more natural it's not like it's been the Steve show for you know five years and then I decided to try to do something but even more than that I mean he is truly the most supportive person I've ever met in my entire life and it's been cool because we've both had Seasons where our work's been busier than the other or you know like where it's like okay you need more support in this role or I need more support you know so it's gone back and forth and I just feel like we both are so excited for each other and each other's biggest cheerleader and it's just been that way from day one like we've never done it another way so we don't really know anything different I honestly like it'll be interesting to not have tour together you know because that's been our like combined joint effort so I'm curious to see what it's like you know now that I'm doing something and he'll be you know traveling but we won't be together so but even like two nights ago he's up with me till 10:30 at night packing boxes and taking them to UPS for me so I'm like We'll always you know be working together in behind the scenes roles so tell me what's the what's the brief breakdown on on your story okay my story wrapped up yeah so said from Memphis moved around a lot um landed in Nashville when I was 13 and so I've been in Nashville for oh gosh over 20 years which is wild so um yeah I I studied fashion merchandising and marketing so I I never thought itd actually work in those fields but I actually have I had a like I spoke on earlier the jewelry company I started um and I ran that for two years and then I sold it to a company in in um Nashville called AEL or they were called Li fashionable now they're called AEL so they've taken that and just like run with it and they've hired so many more women which is amazing so did that and then after that launched a clothing company where we were hand making t-shirts um our biggest customer was Eric Church so he wore them on the cover of billboard and rolling stone it was crazy we're like what is happening um so that was super fun and um I guess I never really knew I was an entrepreneur until I just was I guess and so I remember when Steve and I met we were like up late one night talking on the couch and he's like you know what do you dream about and I'm like I don't have dreams and he has all these dreams you know he's chasing them and I I truly feel like meeting him was such an amazing part of God bringing that out of me like I think I had them but I just didn't really know how to process them or how to like make them reality and so anyway it's just fun to look back and be like Steve's like oh you said you had no dreams here you are like fourth company you know like um just always like always dreaming I have to almost pump The Brak sometimes um so anyway so I did the jewelry company I did thread Co and then I still have a marketing company where we do marketing for small businesses we actually were just watching Home Videos at Thanksgiving but I always was like writing songs funny enough or like writing plays or making my brother you know act something out with me so I think I always had it in me um and my dad has run his own businesses as long as I can remember you know so it was definitely there and then I think there was a Ser like a a period where I just felt like I think I kind of was just trying to like not rock the boat and I just felt a little bit like not shy but just I don't know I wasn't really like tapping into that so but I remember as a child yeah feeling very like I loved being creative I loved dancing and Performing and all those things and so even now I feel like I'm like going back for that little girl and being like okay I'm coming for you like we're like getting back to that you know how have you managed to like have that run the business but also be a present mother which is very clear that you you are um so loving towards your family oh thank you I mean truly it's it's like I we were talking about earlier Steve and I just having that co-parenting supportive approach we have a pretty good system of like tag in tag out tag in you know I start working at 8 um Steve doesn't have to write till 10: so he takes the kids to school so we just have a system and then I try to be done by the time they're you know I pick them up so then we can play or you know run errands or whatever so it truly is just a little bit of it's a little bit of planning and a lot of just having conversations and figuring out how we can sport each other you know but it's a balance I mean I don't feel like we always do it well but we we always try y I'm sure you know how that feels it's an adventure it's an adventure yeah okay this is a fun question um because I'm Cur I'm always curious because I I I have a lot but how many domains do you think you own oh that is a fun question I think I own like 10 okay how many do you own I maybe less now I probably have like 40 you 40 that's awesome that's a great question yeah yeah my wife just rolls her eyes when I tell her I bought another domain are they for ideas you have that are kind of like cooking or is it what are they for it's funny they you say cook CU like one one is uh it's just it's probably more of a bad dad joke but I came up with this idea for a pizza company I'm I'm not a cook and then so I'll never do this but it was a pizza brand that was called in godwe crust love that um so I got I have that domain never use it oh my gosh yeah yeah Steve and I we like this is like six years ago we're like we started we got on a kick of making avocado toast again are we chefs absolutely not and we're like we could call it tosto and it' be all these like Gourmet so we got the Instagram handle you know that has never been used and it's just like why did we think we would ever have an avocado crust or toast truck or whatever we thought but we were very much on a kick for like two months but I didn't buy that domain maybe I should just in case it ever comes back around if we could just like package the idea up and sell that maybe we'd be on to something CU do you start thinking about like The Branding behind it what it could look like and then it's like you're Off to the Races I mean yeah it's it's it's a it's a a problem yeah is being a creative and I know you're a creative too like I'll think of the name and I'll automatically go ahead and lock in like all the social media accounts and I'll just I'll never use them I'll start sketching some stuff out and but you know what be awesome Steve and I are like it'd be awesome to find a place to sell those ideas you know what I mean it's like we package up okay here's the domain here's the Instagram I'm sure there is something like that but yeah just to be like hey here's like a fully developed idea who wants to run it you know because like obviously you can't run every idea that pops in your mind but yeah some people just want to run stuff and they probably have the cash flow so where could we sell our ideas that's our next project I guess that's our next project like a think tank brand launch.com something that yeah buy a brand.com let's get it that's right yeah we'll get you packaged up and you make it happen Okay okay I'm gonna look for that we get off The Zo that's right we're already coming up with another concept I love it classic speaking of concept emergency confetti so tell people what it is and then talk about where this idea came from okay so emergency confetti is a line of gift items that are all centered around helping celebrate good news and the idea came from a wine night I was having at a girlfriend's house and she told me this story she heard of this little boy in his mom's car and he's like hey Mom should I throw this confetti in my pocket and his mom's like no don't throw that but why do you have it and he was like it's my emergency confetti I case I carry it everywhere in case there's good news and I just was like oh my goodness that is the coolest idea like emergency confetti it just feels so easy to be prepared for bad but what if we were prepared for good you know and just believing that good news is on the horizon and for me you know of course like we're saying I'm kind of envisioning in my head okay it could look like this and you know all the ways that you could like use it and I think I didn't even really realize at the time but I think that also the reason the concept resonated so deeply with me was I had just come out of a a a probably fivey year stent where I was really struggling with a lot of anxiety and just like which again anxiety is agreeing with what if this went bad what if this what if this thing happens you know and so a huge part of my healing Journey with the Lord was like him saying but what if it went well like in envisioning those good things and like retraining my brain to be like I'm going to think what's the best thing that could happen right now what's the absolute best thing that could happen you know and that has transformed my life and so I think that's why also the emergency confetti resonated with me on like a soul level more than just like oh that'd be cool and fun you know and it's both like it's both things for me um so that's a little bit of where it came from and then you know it was one of those ideas that we Steve and I were like that'd be cool you know and we just kind of tucked it in our brand arsenal of things that we're not going to do but that'd be cool and then it just kind of kept coming back up it was that idea that just kept chasing me it just kept showing back up and showing back up so finally one day Steve and I were sitting on our porch and I'm like okay emergency confetti like that's actually a legit idea like let me look and see if the domain's available you know let me see if the Instagram's available so I start my hunt of like realizing can we do this you know yeah and it actually was kind of crazy because the domain was not available and the Instagram was not available and so I start like but they weren't taken like it was like the website was like parked but you know like the the thing popped up it's like this website's parked but it was not being used and so I'm like I'm very stubborn I guess in that way where I'm like well if it's not being used there's got to be a way to find it you know yeah and so as we were kind of brainstorming do we actually want to do this you know because we had two kids under two it's like and I have a job and Steve has a job so we were just trying to be really intentional with like are we supposed to do this like very prayerfully is this for us right now because if it's not we don't want to do it you know I don't want to just take something else on because my life is already very full you know and so kind of just started praying through okay just little things like not that you couldn't have emergency-c confetti.com but it's way better to have emergency confetti.com you know you're such like my soul sister I'm the same way yeah because if you tellone then they're gonna write emergency Dash confetti I'm like no no it's just h i it's just too confusing I'm like I wanted the straight up domain name you know and the Instagram so anyway just kind of started to pray through like okay Lord like what would it look like to know that this is right for us you know and just like really being like if you're if you're ahead of us if you're going before us in this if this is something that you're calling me to then I'll be very excited about it but if not please show me you know because I just I just don't want to take on something like this you know and how are we gonna pay for it and all those things so long story short ended up getting the domain it was like found a broker who found the person who owned it who sold it to me and then on Instagram I again I got emergency Dash confetti or or was that what it was I think that's what it was and I'm like oh this is so lame but so I was like on them I was kept searching for the Emergency confetti Instagram and it was private so I'm like I can't even see who she follows I'm like I'm like I'm searching Facebook like code words to see anybody who's posted about it I'm trying to figure out who owns this thing you know and Instagram ends up suggesting to me the girl's mom like it was the most random thing so anyway I end up figuring out the girl who owns this Instagram account and she had had a Blog in 2018 called emergency confetti so was not using it she had actually let the website go and I guess somebody picks it up you know and um so I end up finding her and messaging her and she messaged me back in like 10 minutes and just gives it to me just like hey I'll just transfer it over to you you can just have it and I was like I can you know so um so just little confirmations of like you know um we ended up yeah just figuring out all the ways to make it happen and then what was cool is you know Steve like obviously I want him to feel excited about it too because we're we took a home equity line to like fund this you know and it's it's we're we're all on this so Steve and I are really big on making sure like it's it's Works in wholeness for our whole family you know and so as we're praying about it we're like we kept say kept Steve said he kept saying okay Lord I'm laying it down I'm laying it down and he said one day he was ining his quiet time and God's like well pick it up pick it up and so that's been really helpful because in the hard times it's not like I just chose this and then it's like okay well I dragged our whole family into this big undertaking I you know Steve's like I was with I'm I'm with you you know and I felt confirmation too and so that's just been a really a really cool thing and there's so so much good in that it's so you I feel like it um everything you're saying is like things that I've gone through too especially like the uh the domain hunting and and then private messaging people on Instagram I have not been super successful with that okay I I I do the same thing but just to hear like those those glimpses of where God shows up and just says hey this is this is exactly where I want you to go um so I just love hear that that's and I think you have to really I know for me like I love Jesus and I I'm constantly coming up with ideas but I think what really stood out to me there was like Hey we're gonna really like pray and make sure that if this is what God wants us to do that he's very clear about it um and that you guys were doing it together as a couple that was huge well like we talked about earlier it's like life is so full it is such a balancing act of kids and being present as a wife as a mom as all these things as a friend so I'm like I just I'm I feel like we're at the point where it's like you have to just be kind of selective about what you're bringing on especially in that big of a capacity so for us we're like we just have to know this is like okay Lord is this what you're calling me to because if you are then great and if not let's just hand this idea off to somebody else you know let it pass through for someone I don't know so I uh know that you had some background in and like fashion and tex style things like that and then you have a marketing background too but that's those two components don't necessarily translate to okay I have this idea for emergency confetti but then I have to figure out how to manufacture it so what is what was that oh my gosh well like you were saying earlier or I don't know who were saying we loved Google I call myself a Google preneur because I'm like you can Google anything you can figure anything out on Google I I will go down on that Hill like any so I'm literally like Googling like what types of confetti are out there and then I found one that was small I'm like okay great that would fit in your pocket it needs to be like you know something you can transport and then you know um trying to figure out manufacturers there's a site called Alibaba which like helps you kind of link to like International suppliers and um so it really was just like Googling a ton of stuff and just like trial and error but it really was um I I love product development so I think just with the past of coat and Miriam I I know like what I want it to be like so I've done a little bit of manufacturing but that was all handmade which was also another reason why after I ended thread Co I was like I don't want to do another product based business I love it but I was handmaking everything so it's like when a big order comes in you like cheer and then you cry because you have to make it all you know so with this product I was like okay I want this to be something I can scale I just want to do it different this time you know I I enjoyed those for what they were and it just didn't feel sustainable for me for where I'm at like we said being a mom and just with my schedule so I just was like okay this has to be something that like I can scale I can manufacture you know that I'm not doing so I just Googled everything and it kind of ended up coming together I love your uh usage of Google um incredible Google anything so one one other thing before we move on to uh just some more things um your your brand aesthetic is so on point it's so good um and I'm a I'm a critical eye but it's so good I know you have not only background in in marketing but you do have a creative eye and creative abilities too so did you like do your own brand did you partner up with somebody I have some thoughts I have a secret weapon her name is Becca wz she is wonderful I don't know if you've heard of Matt wartz he's a singer he's like a singer songwriter it's his sister and she did my Miriam logo thread Co and emergency confetti and we just sink really well like I feel like we have a very seamless workflow and she's absolutely brilliant so whenever I came to her for this like the stuff she sent back I was just like geeking out I'm like after she sent the brand pack I'm like well now it has to happen like it's just like her branding is just too good we have to make this product exist so she is my secret weapon love that it's so cool too I think one thing I want to encourage like people in the e-commerce space or business ownership space I know me I my wife and I owned a creative agency we like that's what we did but there were times when it came to like our own stuff that I actually hired that out because I was like I'll if I work on it I'll never finish it and I'll never be happy and just to bring in other ideas and other mindset like you might have one thing in your head but someone else having another idea might actually like give you breakthrough you didn't know you need it or like give you a different outlook on it so I yeah I'm with you on that and then we're going to have a lot of business owners e-commerce um you know people tell me what you would say has been the biggest challenge with emergency confetti and then the biggest reward I mean I think for me I just I'm not as much a numbers person and so just figuring out cash flow and figuring out how to scale at a sustainable but also slightly aggressive pace so my goal for emergency confetti the whole time like wholesale is the name of the game for me I think it's our obviously our website is a great tool but I think with confetti it's something you find in a store it's a little bit more of a spontaneous purchase where you're like oh I do have a friend who has a birthday I should buy them this birthday celebration kit you know it's um so wholesale is definitely my game plan for emergency confetti and the whole time I've been wanting to sign with a Sales Group which is basically where you have a it's called like a rep group and so you have a team of salespeople that are all you know in this agency and then they'll take it out to stores for you so I've been hitting up stores by myself since we launched in January you know some success a lot of no responses you know and as I've talked to these sales groups the biggest feedback I was getting is we love your product we love your branding you need more products you need you need to have a fuller line like right now you're a product you need a brand and I'm like challenge accepted okay I will have more products you know so all year I feel like I've had my foot on the gas of like I need a full line sheet I need to have you know this full offering so that stores you know will have more options and then a sales group might consider me and so it actually was crazy because I got an offer from a sales group we launched in January I think I got the offer in March or April and I was like so excited I'm like oh my gosh this is crazy um and but there was this one sales group that I was like obsessed with and I just felt like if I could sign with them that would be like my absolute dream and um so I was about to sign with this other Sales Group and I did not feel peace about it like I just I was like crying and I'm like why am I crying like you just got an offer this is what you want and I just did not feel peace about it I felt the Holy Spirit nudge me that it was this other group and I'm like but they're not not answering me why how could it be this group like I have not heard back from them I've emailed them they're like non-responsive and so I turned down the deal just like okay if I don't feel peace it's not right and so for another six months did not have a sales group but have been working very very hard to get the product line ready and long story short made I mean 25 new products I feel like over this year made a catalog I can see what the other brands do that I respect and then I'm like okay I need that okay I need that so I was like they all have legit cataloges I'm going to look very legit if I can make a catalog so again pouring more money into it trying to be like is this the right thing I feel like it is um so I made a catalog I sent it to my dream Sales Group and two hours later they're like let's set up a zoom like and so I signed with them um and I signed with another Sales Group as a and so January 1 we'll have 37 States covered for sales territories so it's very exciting but it's also been like the biggest stressor this year of not of like growing at a pace that feels slightly unnatural but in the hopes that next year it really will set me up to have a big you know sales base will that like set you up for like boutiques and even like big box brands too like a Target exactly yes so like basic when you have these teams I'll have 32 sales reps so they'll be taking it to all their stores all their connections so it's just a lot easier to get into a store when they meet with them you know once a month and it's you know so um so I think that will be really great we just got our first big box order two weeks ago so we're like we're getting there you know but it will set us up to yeah like have those potentials and then we'll have showrooms in Atlanta and Dallas year round at those markets and then we'll pop up in Vegas so I think it'll just give us a lot of exposure and a lot of new connections and I'm excited to have a sales team I I I can do sales but it's not my favorite part so I'm excited people who like that's their thing you know and like just activate them to go do what they're great at and then I can kind of focus on the things I enjoy a little more yeah I remember in doing some research that one of your first jobs like post College was in sales yeah yeah it was was all right but it was not fine yeah like I can do it but it's not like I'm not like you know coming home on cloud n because of sales you know um I'm grateful to learn to do it and I feel like you have to hear yes and you have to hear no to really like grow and get some grit but now I will be happy to let somebody do that so so yeah that was the biggest challenge and then I mean I think the biggest reward was like having a goal and a dream and really going all in and then when it happened it was like euphoric I'm like I cannot believe this is like I mean not that anything ever goes to plan necessarily but just like this was kind of the this was I guess it was the plan and I'm like it's actually feels like it's kind of happening and that was like I mean that was very satisfying after all the risk it was like okay I feel like this is paying off well once again just hear heing you talk about uh kind of following like the voice of the Lord I think we I had kind of shared about closing our agency we had right before we closed we actually had an offer for someone to like buy into us and it was a great offer for the first couple hours you're like this is amazing and then that night when I went to like go to sleep I same same kind of situation that you had it was just like God was like no wow this is not it and so I just love you know it's it's hard I mean it's it's hard you should do it you know yeah but I I just you know I think we've both probably lived enough life to know that when we kind of go beyond that and still do the thing that we're maybe called not to do it it doesn't end very well and and so I just love talking about hey you know God you just trust what God's doing he's really gonna open up some amazing doors yeah yes and just believing that it's going to be better you know something on paper seems better but that's I'm like okay your ways are higher your thoughts are higher you know and so just submitting to that and being like okay I'm not gonna take the you know someone who wants to invest or I'm not gonna sign this deal and I believe that's my best case scenario scary but like yeah just trying to trust uh this is something that we really like to focus on as we kind of wrap up um start time with our guest but really just want to hear from you um what does it look like to be fulfilled what's look like to be fulfilled you know for me I think just getting to partner with the Lord on building a a business is so fulfilling like just getting to be his friend in that like I that I just it feels so like it makes me just feel so in line with my purpose and like why I'm here and um so I just I really enjoy that and getting to I mean getting to build a brand and chase a dream is like such a blessing and I'm so grateful for it and I just feel like in running a company I feel so much dependence on the Lord and because of that like he shows up and meets those needs and like just honestly blows my mind on a daily basis and that like that is so fulfilling to me like to have needs and then watch the Lord meet them like it's just kind of the coolest thing to me I feel so grateful for that and um yeah getting to run a business that like in so in line with a lot of my passions and um it's I don't know that feels very very fulfilling for me okay so for those um that have just fallen in love love with you which is not a surprise and just want to kind of stay up with emergency confetti what's the best way for them to do that so yeah you can follow emergency confetti as we've talked about it's at emergency confetti no dash that's right uh thank you Lord and uh and my Instagram is at Gracie mler so that's where we post most of the updates and then the web website is again the brand is just so good so yeah I'm just I'm a big fan and I just uh I know uh being business own owner uh mother and just life it's so busy but the fact that you would make time to be on this um podcast today just means a whole lot to me so I just want to say thank you of course thanks for having me this was so fun thank you so much for being a part of the fulfilled family we hope you enjoy all of the clips and episodes coming your way and until then join us on this e-commerce Journey towards a life that is truly fulfilled
Imagine walking away from a successful career in pursuit of something else at the age of 33 and then finding out that this leap of faith has led you to your true calling well that's exactly what our guest today has lived out from musical Acclaim to the founding of the number one most requested hair extension method in the industry please join us in welcoming McKenzie turly the creator of invisible bead extensions and Goldilocks thank you was so excited to be here I'm so grateful uh just for your time and excited to get into your story but I've covered a little bit of your story in the intro um but I'd love for you just to tell people um a little bit about your journey and how you've navigated this stretch um you know from the music industry initially now to a life of business ownership oh man I mean how much time do we have I'll give you in a nutshell it's been it's been a whirlwind really I could have never thought even just you know know 10 years ago that this would be where my life would take me um but when you you know when you kind of are intent on being led and you kind of listen and allow yourself to have that intuition on where you should go it's crazy what life will open up to you so yeah I went from being a professional musician and kind of having this like strange call if you will to to do something different and um I do feel like the two played into each other I I've always loved the idea of you know being creative and before I was using my creativity through music through you know singing performance writing arranging things like that and then you know I was able to use that in just a different way with a different medium and hair became you know that medium for me to express my creativity so although it seems like it was just a complete 180 and it kind of was there were a lot of similarities that I feel like like you know allowed it to be a place where I felt comfortable even though it was so new and I will say I did find some old music and you have an amazing voice not just saying that but you're very talented on on that side of things but I I toured for a little bit I was on the Vans Warp Tour for summer most people may not even remember that but um I know that go like the the the touring industry is can be a bit brutal um it can be a little bit like being refined by the fire but like you were saying um I do think that the industry can help prepare you for you know your career path beyond that so just talk a little bit more specifically about you know maybe what you learned from your journey in the music industry and how it's kind of helped prepare you for what you're in now you know I think part of being a entrepreneur and I guess a successful one at that is you have to learn to show up even when you maybe don't feel like it right I feel like that's what separates Ates the true successful business owners from maybe the rest is we learn to show up consistently regardless of our emotions and so that's something that I feel like I learned through being a performer is you know a lot of times you don't want to be on stage a lot of times you know you're you're tired you're worn out you got a bum audience you know whatever it might be but you learn to show up and deliver because you don't have a choice so I think that's one of the huge things that I've taken with me into you know being a successful entrepreneur is that concept right there I love that and yes the the bum audiences sometimes can make it hard to perform but I think that's man the bum audience still exists the business world yeah because they're still out there they're just not in front of you you know either clapping or booing but they're on the internet you know sharing their opinions and so it's the exact same thing learning how to deal with that you know the feedback whether it's good or bad and not letting it slow you down when it is something that's negative is is huge so what I love about a lot of your story but you know I saw some other podcasts read some stories too but you you know you transitioned from the music industry over to a New Passion um you were again a sought-after um hair stylist and you kind of ran into a problem with some of the current um extension methods and I saw that they were very painful um damaging to the hair difficult to hide but what I love is you know not really having a ton of experience you just did research um you just kind of figured it out because you I felt like you genuinely wanted to come up with a solution for the people that you were serving and so my question is you you mentioned it earlier like being led but where do you think this like push to you know you you face a robot with this push to like go beyond that to create something that now is is really like one of the best products on the market you know I've always been driven by the why in life like really strongly heavily even from you know when I was a little girl I always needed and wanted to know why things were happening what the insides looked like I would you know I would break open rocks for hours and hours because I needed to know what was inside like even from a little girl when I was eight years old and so I do feel like that is something that is car with me again all the way through to creating invisible bead extensions is I you know I studied all of these methods I was certified I was educated in but nobody could tell me why I was doing specific things well why am I making the section size the side why if there is damage what would be the cause for it to happen and so for me you know driven by that need to really understand why I was doing something it wasn't enough to just go to a a 4-Hour class and then walk out with the certificate it I was like wait I I don't know what I'm doing I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing and so for me that was kind of the driving force behind it is again like I never I never set out to create anything that I would teach anyone and so I do feel like that authenticity of me just trying to figure out why I was doing something for myself and then for my clients translated really well to those who kind of were watching my journey because they realized I was creating something not just to sell it you know not just to like put myself up here and say look what I did it was more of just hey I'm I'm genuinely trying to figure something out that works for the guests in my chair and let me show you how I did it I love that well you talked about I love the story about breaking Rocks open as a young girl just trying to figure out what's inside this wasn't one of my questions but can now that you you are in this industry and and you seem like you're just constantly innovating new things because that's just who you are can you you ever like look back at when you were a young girl and even see more like confirmation back then that this was kind of the path way that you would be on today does that make sense oh totally makes sense and you know I you kind of get stuck with these labels throughout your life that you that you stick with and for me I was the I was the singer and so I never leaned in a whole lot to this part of myself because I was always just I was labeled as the singer the performer that's what I did that's you know maybe what I was known for in my small community or what not but as I have kind of shed those those labels and really been able to like lean into who I am I realize this is who I've always been I'm just channeling her in a different way now that's so good yeah I think those moments are like even me I'm a I'm more of on the creative industry side but there were things when I was a you know a young boy that I'm just like wow if I had if I had just it was like a preview of what's to come I just had no clue that it was coming so I love that about you yeah so you know this EP this uh this podcast is called fulfilled and we're gonna kind of cover a lot of things about that but I actually found this awesome quote where you say hair extension not only transforms the way you look but also the way that you feel about yourself um being able to provide this service to other women and watching as they leave your chair feeling empowered and more confident they than they did before is so fulfilling there's nothing like it so um I think this kind of encapsulates you know what that means but um how do you feel like your business is making uh a good impact on the people that that you serve oh you know I think from an outside perspective you could look at the beauty industry and just see it at like a real surface value right you think hair extensions it's it's fake this fake that I get those comments all the time in fact literally this morning I opened up my Instagram and there was a woman who was sounding off about you know how I had built something based off this concept of being fake and you know I didn't get into it with her I would love to have a conversation with her and what I would tell her is that you know until you have something happen where you lose your sense of like self-confidence as a woman and you you regain that that feeling of of having that confidence is incredible but what's even better is being able to give that to somebody else and that's you know these hair stylists that are that are doing these incredible Transformations Behind the Chair like at a surface level it's just about you know adding inches to their guest hair it's so much more than that these women walk out of the salon with you know a whole new Swagger they are ready to to take on the day and it it's like a Pay It Forward effect I mean when you're happy when you feel good about yourself you act you show up differently and so you know for us to be able to provide that and give that to to another woman I feel like is just like the greatest gift that you can give to someone else I often think about the times when I just got my haircut I know it's a different industry alog together but I always like tell the um the lady cutting my hair I was like I should I need to pay you like double this amount like I feel like you should be a certified counselor because one I'm just like dumping all of my daily problems on you and and I leave like feeling good like physically because I'm you know I got a new haircut but I also just feel like yeah you know I just release something so I I I totally agree that people see as a very superficial industry but I think it's completely the opposite of that yeah I mean we are dealing with women who have lost their hair because of chemo they are dealing with health issues with you know disorders that way and so it is so much more than just hey I want to become a mermaid today most of the time it is not that most of the time you are trying to restore you know a woman's you know the thickness or whatever because she has been through it and for us it is the crown that we never take off and so it means a lot so one thing that I resonate with you a lot is I can I can just tell that you are a true creative and being a creative myself like I it's hard for me sometimes to stay locked in on a single task um my wife gives me a hard time because I probably own like a hundred domains because I'm always thinking of the next best idea oh my gosh that we do the same thing yeah I was one of our questions was gonna be like to ask you like how many domains do you think that you that you own um I yeah there quite a few quite a few for that exact same reason right there it's like oh man you think of something and you're like someone's gonna really want this name someday and I'm gonna own it yeah and five years later it's still just sitting there kind of collecting dust in your GoDaddy account yeah but I have a question I think a lot of us like entrepreneurs do come from a creative background and so my question for you is how do you find that balance of giving space for creativity because I think as a creative you have to have that but also being able to see something through to completion you know this has been difficult for me because of that strong strong drive to create and I mean that's what got me here in the first place but there have been times throughout the past four years where I've realized that my creativity was really being stifled because I was like having to go over into the management and like the organization of the business and for me I don't I don't Thrive there at all that's where I start to feel claustrophobic and I start to feel like my creativity is just like flatlined because that was something that doesn't like call to me and so the creation of building teams where you bring in people that excel at those specific things so that it frees you up to continue being the creative that got everybody there in the first place so that's a huge thing that I've realized over the past four years is you know as a strong creative be really aware when you start to feel that drawing back and usually it's because you are you're having to do things that don't necessarily speak to that strength that you have and so as soon as I started bringing in people who could you know handle the management handle you know certain aspects and I was freed up again emotionally and mentally to be able to create that's when all of a sudden like the engine goes again yeah I imagine you probably just felt like wow I missed this it's feel so good to be back in this spot again yeah and it's it's hard as an entrepreneur you know we forget what got us to where we you know wanted to be in the first place and it was that creative entrepreneurial spirit all of a sudden you get drowned in running a company and you're like this is not what I thought this was going to look like I thought I was just going to be able to you know dream and create and build forever but it's not always you know rainbows and butterflies and so to bring in people and build teams that can um you know that can kind of help you do that is really the move yeah no that's huge and that's it's it's a journey I know for me I struggle with that like how do how do I even get to that point and it's it's not even just like the financial resources to be able to hire out but to me was like how do I even I don't even know how to delegate or how to to to send some of these things onto the next person so I love that you've been able to kind of get to that place because I think not only you're in a better spot but the recipients of your products are in a better position because they're getting your best yeah it definitely took me a while I mean that is not the head space that I lived in the first I would say yeah between like the first two years I was trying to do everything thing and just you know I was burnt out yeah I've been there too so another thing uh you're married and I also feel like you're my soul sister because I also am a father of four too um okay and you are a mother of four y so tell me uh I know there's a lot of probably parents that are listening um or ones that have you know a good bit of kids so are there any specific practices that have helped you stay focused uh on being able to to thrive in your professional setting but also like be present in the Prof in the personal side of things too oh this is this is a tricky one when you you know are so busy and you're in the trenches I think one of the things for me that has been helpful for both my kids and I is I involve them in the business so they when I first started this on Sundays they were my packing crew I mean I had my little four-year-old was packing extension beads and little plastic jars every Sunday we would line the kitchen table and I'd be like okay we have to have you know we have got 25 stylists this week we have to pack their their starter kits for and so my kids have been you know throughout this journey with me really right kind of by my side even still my my daughters went in and helped me pack orders after Black Friday just you know a couple weeks ago yeah and so they're very aware and involved and they I think you know that's very helpful because your kids actually can can understand what you're going through if you let them and so they know a lot they know the struggles um a lot of the hardships that I have faced have been through you know dealing with with haters on social media and so I'm very open with my teenagers about social media and I feel like you know I I can teach them a lot we can kind of go through a lot of things together because I'm experiencing it and so that's one of the things I would recommend is just involving your kids no matter how young or small I mean now my oldest is 18 and we started when my youngest was just four and she's nine now so they all know what's up what Mom does and what she deals with I kind of felt the same when my he's my oldest my oldest is 10 but some of the things that would come out of his mou mouth I remember one time we were playing with with some toys and he he said that he designed this toy for good and I was like what did you just say like you just you designed this for good and you know that that ended up being like one of the tag lines for our company so I've also found like just surrounding yourself with your family it's it's very lifegiving too oh yeah absolutely nothing's more gratifying I mean my my daughter for fun she will start businesses you know my 13-year-old she'll like have an idea and then she'll she'll get on canva and create you know some advertising and I'm like oh what have I done like my poor kids for fun they're starting businesses but you know I don't think that's a bad thing they've learned to be independent they've learned how to think on their own and I feel like that's one of the best gifts that we can give to our children is that gift of you know Forward Thinking and Independence no I think it's an Incredible Gift so one thing I also see is U I think this has really been from the start I think it's because you're so you're truly passionate about what you do but you have not only created um Innovative products but you also do a really good job of just like putting content out there that's like hey here's the problems that you face here's how to use uh certain um products um and I know this even this industry too like it's probably continuing to innovate just like you innovated back you know few years ago so tell me how do you stay up with the changing Trends in your industry oh yeah the hair man the hair extension industry the beauty industry in general is always shape-shifting so it it is you know tricky I'm going to tell you though I I want to be the trend Setter I want to be the one who's ahead of the curve and so although I do pay attention you know to Trends and stuff like that I don't pay too much attention if that makes sense because I feel like if you are following Trends you are already steps behind because someone's already said that and so I think if you're only focusing that way and building your business and trying to grow you're always just copying somebody else's move and to me that's never felt exciting to just do what someone else has already done and so I like to just I like to just try to listen more to The Stylist I listen to the industry and then I choose how we are going to respond with my companies and you know sometimes we we begin and we start the trend and other times it's like oh well that didn't hit like we thought it was going to but that's you know that's part of that's part of running companies is trying to figure out what works what doesn't yeah no it's so true yeah the ones sometimes the ones that you're like this is going to be a home run they fall flat and then the ones they like it's it's okay it's like the home run right yep yep exactly if you you had to like narrow it down to like some key lessons that you've learned along the way that have contributed to your success what would be some of those lessons oh you know I I would think one of the things that I've learned that has been you know really helpful for me is just to not be afraid to fail I that's something that I can say I'm super grateful that I am in that mindset and I I do feel like that's attributed greatly to my success is I just I'm not afraid to mess up I think what's the worst that could possibly happen you know oh people are going to talk about you guess what they do anyway people are going to judge you they are anyway you know so what for me I live in the head space of not what if I fail but what if I don't try that's what keeps me up at night that's what fuels me is what if I don't give this a chance to me there's a much greater cost of not starting versus maybe you know making a few wrong steps along the way and I think that's something that successful entrepreneurs have in common is they're not afraid to to fail to make mistakes that just shows that you know they're blazing Trails they're trying to do something different unique and that's usually when those results are worth it yeah yeah there's I feel like there's one of my favorite podcast is how I built built this and it just seems like the same story it's it's like most of the entrepreneurs who we now look at as like the heroes in the space they were like I feel like a night away from just throwing the towel but they just kept on failing and then they found found that like pocket of gold and then here they are now so yeah absolutely okay so another thing again I'm just singing your praises today but I do feel like you and your team do a really good job on the social media front um and I know this is this is like a beast it's never ending like you said it has its you know you have your it's a creative outlet but then you also have um the voices that are that are non-stop as well but I know a lot of people listening in some may not even be in the social game some may be kind of like a tow in but what's what's your advice for just how to do it how to do it well and what's the potential like Roi for something like this I think the success that we've had with our social media platforms is a fact that I've always looked at it as my home so this is kind of with with my personal social media I am always like if somebody comes to the door and and comes up to your door number one you have a choice whether you want to answer it or not so if you got haters that are coming you know coming and knocking you do not have to let them in you do not have to respond they do not have to be there their negative comments don't you know they they don't have to live there you have a right to do whatever you want with that but also if somebody comes and is you know introducing themselves to you whether it's through DMs comments or even a follow it I always like to respond back and be like hey how are you you know happy to have you here appreciate you being here what's up you know so if you remember that social media is a way to communicate it's a place to engage it's a place to connect and I think the brands that are able to do that do really well the brands that forget about that and they start going my gosh my landscapers are here can you hear that noise person here too so we're in the same boat they're literally blowing leaves right outside my window right now yeah I can't hear it and I you can't hear it I hope she doesn't hear like the bathtub running in the back okay I'm like bro I'm literally doing a podcast um this is real life right okay real life um so yeah I do feel like the social media accounts that just start to use it as a um as a lookbook or a billboard I feel like those are the ones that lose connection with their followers and so on all of our accounts we've really tried to stay connected to our followers and it's just as simple as a response back to a comment or a say hello if you get a follow that's what I think can really Drive growth and a loyal following yeah well I I will say you know I've I'm I'm a guy from you know rural Tennessee but I've been really blessed to I told you we've we've had some really amazing guests on the podcast before so I just I feel you know just really fortunate but even you know with you like my wife loves your products I have other people that I know that I I've told them hey I'm gonna have um a McKenzie on they're like I love I love her stuff and uh but I remember just reaching out and I'm like you know yes I do have I do have some people under my belt that are you know of a certain name but you know you um you got back to me and you were super kind and even if you had said no like I you know it still would have been so gracious so I I can attest that you you do the things that you say you do and then it's let us have this conversation today ah well you came in so kind and So Graceful not everybody enters my DMs in quite such a fashion so when it does I am like hey another nice person what's up that's right yeah we gota we gotta hang tough together so right so kind of a big question but it really is the kind of the center point of of this podcast so we do cover things about e-commerce Trends and fulfillment but we're really trying to kind of go past that and say well what is what does it mean to live a life that's truly fulfilled and for everybody it looks a little different so it's a big question but when you reflect on your own life professionally and personally what is what does it mean to you to be fulfilled oh such a loaded question um I think first you know what comes to my mind is I I feel the most fulfilled when I am when I'm helping people and I'm so fortunate that you know for what I do in this career it's it's truly changing lives not only the stylists who you know learn the method and use the products but also you know they are able to pay it forward to their clients so for me that fulfillment comes from from just knowing that I'm I'm doing something good in the world I'm helping others to be able to you know be solid financially to have freedom in their careers all the things that we want but are you know often hard to obtain I I just feel super grateful that we've been able to create a program a product that has done this for thousands of you know of women I just I I feel super fulfilled that way and I you know I love to work I love to stay busy fulfillment for me Isn't kicking back my feet and like chilling that's not I'm I'm always like I I want something to do I want to have a task I want to help somebody I want to have you know something like that going so maybe I'll change my mind when I hit my you know 70s or something I don't know but for now film is is staying busy and staying productive and finding you know continuing to find ways where I can help um give back yeah that's such a good answer I love that and you uh always look for those moments when someone's kind of sitting on the edge of their chair like it's just you just you find that pocket and you're like they are really passionate about that like you that's exactly what you did when I asked that question and you found your groove and you're like I just want to keep keep doing the things that are going to make an impact on other people so yeah that all right few more questions but one again this wasn't on my my list of questions but I just keep going back to this image of of you breaking open a rock to see what's in there and then I think about you know you you know not in a bad way but you got labeled you were very talented and you got pushed in not pushed in you got you were in the music industry for a while um and then you were like it's time for something new um is there something that you haven't done yet that you're like I want to do that before I hit my 70s have you thought about that um you know I do feel like a cat like I've got nine lives and I am just like always kind of I always have this fire like this this fire of what is next like what else could I try um but I'm so locked in with what I'm doing now that I you know I think I think something I've always wanted to do is like create some kind of Foundation or charity where I can really turn my efforts and focus on on helping you know in it even different way um so that's something that I do have my my mindset on and I feel like that you know that would unlock a whole new level of becoming fulfilled um you know if I could if I could find a a way to do something like that so watch watch for that maybe here in the next the next year or two that sounds great we we'll get the second in when that goes live yeah yeah well kind of a good segue too and and that's uh I think it's perfectly align with the next question was you I since I've been following you and following um the businesses it seems like every week you guys are just pushing out something new so tell me like what's for those like my wife and others listening that are are big F fans of you and and the brands um what's what's coming down the pipeline if you can share anything with us oh my my gosh um let me think let me kind of separate I mean for Goldilocks we I've got some products that I am so excited about that we have been working on for over a year that we are going to be launching um kind of probably the first quarter of next year okay um so always with Goldilocks we are innovating and creating you know new hair products that way and there there is a system that we've created that I'm super excited about it's like a restorative system for hair that will blow everybody's Minds new technology new science behind it that the industry hasn't seen um so that's coming for for Goldilocks a lot of growth there and for invisible bead extensions we just are continuing to to create the best education that we can we are redoing our master's program so we have a continued education program program for those who become certified and want to go on and learn kind of more intensely some of the finer you know Arts of hair extensions coloring cutting the business aspect of it and we are bringing in a brand new round of Educators refilm all of that that's going to be going out next year so we're I I mean it's always unfortunately I feel like I'm always living like six months to a year ahead because I'm always like you know you have to kind of be forecasting and planning for growth and it takes a long time I mean what you see on social media and on the internet has taken you know sometimes up over a year to create on the back end yeah so you know it's it's a crazy process and the wheels are always turning and everything's always going and then it's like you see it out here but there's there's been a lot of planning on the back end which you know is exciting and I think when you are you know when you are a Creator or entrepreneur you own your own business you understand what I'm saying it's it's like the the celebration happens on the internet but the work has happened for so many you know countless hours beforehand yeah yeah well I've been seeing some of the some you guys have been doing some like video production stuff and I loved I got to see just a little snippet of your personality you guys shared some of like the bloopers and like behind the scenes stuff but it just looked like you're having a lot of fun and I love that yeah I we try to have a good time I mean other wise there's so much you know I again I've got to stay in that creative mindset and if I'm not having fun then my creativity like goes again to a zero so yeah as soon as the camera starts rolling I'm gonna be messing up saying the wrong things and yeah it's it's all captured on film so sometimes it surfaces and we have a good laugh yeah well you're brave so I usually like to be behind the camera or be on the one side of the camera not the the one with the lens so right I like that part too but I I have gotten to the point where I feel a little bit more comfortable being in front I mean the very first videos that we filmed I think it took me a good 45 minutes just to give a 15-second intro I could not say my name I didn't know how to hold my body I felt so awkward and you know I've grown into that yeah yeah I think that's that's one of the sweetest things too as a business owner or even just across all spectrums of life being able to you know you mentioned like learning just to be okay with failure because it's just an opportunity for growth but you can actually look back and and say wow like I've it's not even like you're you're downplaying what you've done in the past but it's like that was what it was in that time but just look how much I've grown since then and I think you're just nailing that I appreciate that so much it's it's been a ride that's for sure well it has been um an amazing time with you again you have uh from the day that I reached out to you um um to today you've just been incredibly kind and um you are every bit of what you say you are and so I just am really grateful for your time but um for those that um that know of you or your companies or maybe they haven't and they're just now coming into your story what's the best way for them to kind of stay in touch with you um I mean my personal Instagram is hair. extension. Queen and we also have the invisible bead extensions Instagram and website and also Goldilocks dcom for my product line and get Goldilocks is our Instagram handle there so yeah come say hi crawl into my DMs again you come in happy I will love to connect and and I love you know I love that part of my story yeah it's so true well McKenzie thank you so much again for being on with us today it really means a lot absolutely thank you
Fellow entrepreneurs this is Justin Singletary from fulfillment.com we're back with another great episode of fulfilled in this next segment I sit down with the founder and CEO of build grow scale Matthew Stafford so for all those looking to step up their e-commerce game this is where you need to be guys welcome to the fulfilled podcast I want to introduce today a man named Matt Stafford he's a a dear friend um he's been a mentor to so many people but he's the founder and CEO of a company called Bill grow scale and the company does exactly what his name says um so I want to talk to him a little bit about about Bill grow scale but I want to get behind the curtains on who who Matthew is as a person um so you know who you're doing business with so thank you for coming on Matthew thank you so much and and can you tell me a little bit more about Bill grow scale what do you guys do there yeah essentially what we do is we help uh store owners or website owners um optimize the C customer Journey on their website uh basically uh make it a lot more understandable easy you know works really well so that they get more sales from the same amount of traffic so increase their profitability create more custom optimization so focusing on on their websites you know that asset they put so much time and effort into um you help them as far as not not just the what what do you call Revenue optimization I heard that term used yeah a lot of people um call it conversion rate optimization and for me I just I figured that's kind of a vanity metric so I can get your conversion rate to go up by lowering your price or running sales and in the end uh really the reason why all of us do business is make more money and so the the real goal is not how much your top line is but how much you take home and so we you know coin the ter Revenue optimization because we're trying to optimize your site to actually give you good profitable Revenue because then at that point you can buy more traffic than your competitors can and grow your business at the rate that you want to and so for me that was always the uh that was the kicker not just the vanity metric of oh my conversion rate went up because we can get your conversion rate to go up and you don't make any more money that's good so it's almost like you're you're improving the relationship between the the consumer and the seller but I want to talk about relationships that you have with your tribe because I attended a trade show which is not really the right term for it uh preco but I I went out we went out to Reno and um just really saw what you guys um how you guys gathered but it it's a tribe it's like a following of people that really believe in what you guys are doing and and you were giving out Awards tell me about some of the awards that you guys were giving out yeah so we have um we have an award where a seven figure and then a eight figure we have both uh because when they hit that million doll Mark we consider that's you know that's a huge milestone for a lot of people in their business and so we've given uh over I want to say 130 137 uh million dollar Awards and then we've given like 23 or 24 of the $10 million Awards and there's lots of you know lots of people that have ended up you know doing that multiple times and so earlier on when you and I were discussing that if you look at our stats over the last eight years or so um we've had about just under a thousand members and we know about 18 to 20% of them uh have all hit that million dollar or above Mark so if you look at that compared to the average e-commerce store owner you know about 3,000 Shopify stores are opened every day and they say that um out of 200,000 about three of them make a sale doesn't mean mean they're successful they just make a sale and so when you look at uh what the percentage rates of success would be in e-commerce compared to our thousand members and over 20% of them hitting that million dollar Mark lots of them you know lower than that uh it's astronomically better when you have someone that's in the business doing uh e-commerce every single day at a high level to to Mentor you and teach you that's awesome how do you guys you guys are making others a lot of money how do you guys make your money um yeah so there's two different ways uh one we either partner with the store and it's got to be a decent sized store because we put about five different people on it in order to optimize that customer Journey we have a friend on dev a back on dev the rro a Google analytics um scientist and a bug Checker and so we take care of everything on their website split test um improve it they take care of everything else we don't run traffic we don't do any of that all we do is make their website work better and make more sales and then uh the people that obviously don't have that size store they can join our community which is like a 397 a month and then they get to be with other people who are in the trenches doing the same thing they are uh where we teach them what we do every day so what we teach them is live what we're going through not something that we did years ago so you've built a community of people that are trying to just grow their their their their businesses to Brands right you're you're people that are really serious about about this space not somebody that's just in it for the money somebody that's actually trying to control their audience somebody's really trying to um really take it to the next level yeah I felt that when I was there yeah I I would say and for me um you know we've got to work with some of the really big companies like Discovery uh Channel we worked with scientific America uh fantasy football with the SPN and I actually those guys are kind of a pain in the butt um I actually much rather work with the smaller companies who are building up to that and when you make a difference for them on their site um you can feel it you can know that it makes a difference it's not just another number for you know a report and so that has always fueled me to not get stagnant or to like rest on what I'm doing because I know that like for these people it's their dream you know either to get rid of their job or to you know provide a different life for their kids and uh so for me yeah I take it very serious and I really enjoy it well we feel that you do and and I want to ask you what kind of change are you seeing well let's just say this the stuff that worked yesterday do you see in your community that people are pushing the envelope and continuing to share those sort of things do you see that that the marketing techniques and the way that people are advertising the way that people are displaying things on their site are those things changing are those evolving and how fast do they change yeah they are changing a lot and and and I really think there's probably some more changes coming early in the next year that are going to make it even harder uh just with audiences and attribution to track and so being able to buy media and know what's working and what's not working is getting harder and harder and we don't buy media but obviously that affects our clients um because they do and and that's such a big part of driving traffic to their site so if they don't know what part of their money is being spent well and what isn't a lot of it's wasted and so for sure we're working very hard even on our end on you know I'm playing with a lot of stuff at the AI trying to make the stores better for the the people and also try to uh create like these gpts that will help them build more traffic you know essentially they got little worker bees helping them on their store 247 so yeah it is it is definitely harder the competition's a lot better than it used to be and so uh it just what we teach matters more not less so I'm I'm trying to compare this like to retail how much does Best Buy spend on the experience when you go in the store where the placement are is for for the different products whether their eye level whether their knee level um that experience they spend a lot of money on ads but they also spend a lot of money on presentation when you get in the store I see that as almost like U the storefront the e Commerce site how much do we how much time should we really spend on optimizing I think that's that's your main focus and I don't think we spend enough time on our websites we don't see that it's important because we're almost like emotionally attached to what we think it should look like is that true yeah it's very true and um again the store owner is typically looking at their store as how do I make more sales which is understandable that's that's the entire reason why they do it but they don't realize that that actually costs them sales because people don't like to be sold they like to be like leted Along on a journey and so I I've always said that your website is your conversation with your client um and so if your website isn't good at communication you're not going to have a very good relationship with them and they're not going to keep coming back and buying and so what we see is as we clean up that journey and they like and trust you and they can find what they're looking for they remember all the other sites they went to that were bad and so when they have a good experience you'll see your repeat customer rate go up a lot like to the point where like we know the metrics of where you can spend more money and things like that so yeah 100% I think it matters a lot and uh people have a good experience on a lot of sites now so if you don't have one it you used to be able to get away with it because people didn't know where to find stuff now you have plenty of competition that's doing a good job so if you're not um you're G to you're just GNA they're going to eat your lunch what are you working on that you want to tell people about that you're working on maybe you're launching soon something that's coming down the pipe it's definitely in the AI and uh I would say probably that'd be a better question ask me in about 30 days just because uh as fast as things are changing uh I think that the tools that we're going to be able to create and then provide to our members are going to make a big difference uh we find most of the members that we have you know their team is like 10 people or less and so now um you can use AI to actually like supercharge each of your employees which will give you the ability to do a much better job with your site and e-commerce really is it it's evolving and growing and uh it's becoming uh it's becoming a business that has multiple areas that require um specific expertise like I don't know how to buy ads anymore I used to I spent millions of dollars on Facebook back in the day was great at it I wouldn't even know how to log in there they need someone that's really good at ads um they need someone that optimizes that Journey they need really good customer service because if you don't have good customer service um you know fulfillment you guys know that uh there's a definite difference between how some companies fulfill and others and that's a lot of the experience that the customer gets and that's what they remember like if their first experience when they get the package is terrible um you know i' I've been on the end of that like where the boxes smashed and a bunch of other stuff you're just like man I thought I bought quality but it doesn't feel like that that's what you remember and so um yeah each one of those areas really has to be top notot you can't get away with kind of being okay anymore that's right what I really love about what you guys do is you provide a community to where you can people are bouncing ideas off of each other there's really real relationships that to friendships that are formed inside the community and they're you're all working toward the same goal trying to figure out you know what what is going to help that consumer experience um so I I really enjoy that you guys have created that that Community together and it's it I think it goes beyond just e-commerce I think it just goes beyond business especially when I got to be physically in front of people and see the love that they had for there's a lot of you guys actually put together a lot of people um that developed friendships long friendships yep I tell people that uh you know we put out so much information for free and it is our best stuff like we don't like hide what our best stuff is uh the information isn't the isn't the game Cher anymore um what we say the game Cher is the community uh the community so information is a commodity now the community you can't replicate that um by getting more information but to have a bunch of other people with a United goal like they all have a dream to have a successful e-commerce store and for whatever whatever their definition of success is for some it's you know they want to give their kids a better life or for some they want to you know quit their job and be able to run this business full-time and so all of those different people helping each other hit their goals and US providing information that makes that a little bit easier uh yeah it does it really does form uh lifelong friendships for sure well I'm going to ask you the big question in a second and this is the first uh podcast where where I'm going to answer it uh for myself as well and because I heard it a long time ago somebody asked me and says what is success to you like what is fulfillment and and I've heard somebody say this a long time ago and it's stuck so it's not mine usually nothing is mine I usually hear something I grab on to it and love it but um he said it's it's knowing what the father's doing and doing it with him and to me I was just blown away I'm like what is more important in my life than than having a cause that's beyond myself um so I want to ask you what is what makes you feel fulfilled what is assess to you um yeah so i' I've uh actually explored that a lot over the last couple years as we've been refining because e-commerce is changing our business has went through some ups and downs and it's changing in and uh my question that I asked was all right if if I'm going to like continue doing this uh what is something that I'm gonna love to do and it really did go back down to I don't remember if it was this conversation or one that you and I had before uh I actually really enjoy working with people and helping them hit their goals like that's just for me uh being a problem solver they have they have this issue and they're struggling with it they message me and I'm like hey let's jump on a call and we kind of talk it out and they go do it and then they give you that feedback uh for me that's super fulfilling um I like to solve problems that's just how my brain works how do we take all these different pieces and put them together and so I I really enjoy doing that and to me that feels very successful uh not every one of those people pays me tons of money uh but overall like when you put that good out constantly it always takes care of itself yeah I you're knowing you for such a long I I feel like you take complex problems and you make them simple and you simplify things um and I think that's what's needed in e-commerce there's so many directions to go um it's like okay so what is everybody doing right now that that that's working and then who can I trust that I can lean on when the next problem happens yeah well thank you I appreciate that absolutely well Matt I just want to thank you for for being such an inspiration and helping people in e-commerce there's a lot of people that like you said are fulfilling their own dreams um because you're helping them solve those problems those those things that that they can instead of trip on they're stepping over so I thank you for all the work you've done for the the e-commerce uh field and um I want to continue this friendship and I want to ask you you know one one last question what is something that if you could tell yourself and you can grab Yourself by the shoulders when you were first starting out in business just in business alone and you can tell yourself something hey make sure you do this or you don't do this to help some of our listeners out that are starting out what would you what would you have told yourself ah man I think uh EV every single person has that same story that they tell themselves that they're not good enough uh and for whatever reason that is where they feel inside like everybody else has it figured out but they don't that uh you don't have to have it figured out like you are good enough is if you just show up every single day and just keep going most people quit uh when they're right at the edge of being successful and that's the that's the probably the saddest thing that I see you know that they're on the right path and then they give up and so just that if they would believe them if they would believe in themselves as much as everybody else believes in them and has that story that they know they're good enough that you know I think so many more people would make a a Mark that would encourage others that's wonderful we're fed so many lies that to to actually know the truth that we we we can actually do these things we can accomplish these things man I'd love to just expound on that I I think of it like this is where there's a seed that's planted and it's growing the seeds it's growing it's growing and growing and people stop before they ever see it come through the surface is they quit and they didn't they didn't see it yet so if we could just keep persevering like you're saying through the hard times but but it's a lot easier when you have people that you can go to like a community you can go to people you can lean on people that will motivate you um and that's why I see you man if if I know if I need to get motivated or I need to call somebody you're in my R ofex because I know you're you're not it's not gonna be lies it's going to be truth on top of the lies so thanks for inspiring listeners I appreciate yeah I I appreciate that too um the other thing that I would tell people uh because I've spent a lot of time obviously you and I have been friends for quite a while uh helping and mentoring men uh in the last couple years and what I've noticed is most men think their feelings instead of feel their feelings and so what happens is that story we have this unconscious story that again goes back to I'm not good enough because or because of that a lot of the things that we're doing are working but we don't see it because we can't feel it we're trying to to figure it out in our head instead of have faith or trust in you know in the process two my favorite words that's awesome man thank you so much uh and I I just want to tell our listeners please reach out to to Matthew Stafford go to Bill gross scale.com and um honest take them for a test drive I don't know if you if you guys have an opportunity like you said you can they can get in the community for a monthly fee and just see is that a place that they see that there's value being added to their life and I can tell you we have a 90day trial where they can try it for 90 days and then if they want to they can you know extend the membership monthly after that that's great man thank you so much well thanks guys for tuning in to another episode of fulfilled and uh please visit Matt Stafford if you want to build and grow and scale your e-commerce business thanks guys thank you Matt thank you so much for being a part of the fulfilled family I hope you enjoy all of the clips and episodes coming your way join us on this e-commerce Journey towards a life that is is truly fulfilled
Justin (05:13.856)
All right, guys, we're at another episode of Fulfilled. And today I'm excited to announce Mr. Jed Morley. He is actually the owner of a company called Platinum Payments. And I've known Jed for a while, and I'm really excited to really hear about what he's doing right now. And for you just to meet who Jed is behind the scenes. But Jed, thank you for coming on so much.
Jed Morley (05:34.378)
Hey Justin, it's always a pleasure to be with you and I've loved our association over the years, you and your wife and your family. Just been awesome to watch what you've done with fulfillment.com, so thank you.
Justin (05:44.88)
Awesome. Well, I mean just kick it on before we get into the business your family is Inspirational to many people. Can you tell me a little bit more about your family?
Jed Morley (05:52.97)
Yeah, so I'm number eight of 13 kids. And so when you think about that, it blows people's mind when I talk about like, hey, we talk numbers. So there's 227 people in my immediate family. And that's because every month for 30, sorry, every week for 35 years, so we're now over 3,200 newsletters. My dad has written our family history and he starts like, hey, here's what's happening in the world.
kind of what's going on at economics and whatever. Here's all the birthdays, anniversaries, and all that kind of stuff. And then here's kind of some faith-based things that I think you should focus on. And he sends it out to all of us. And so we have this enormous family, really close-knit group of people because family is the focus.
Justin (06:37.824)
Wow, and before we even get into e-commerce, what do you think has been the attribute or the value or something maybe that has tied you guys together? What has maybe helped you guys keep that family together? Is there something in particular?
Jed Morley (06:51.146)
Yeah, it's the family value, right? We have a mission statement and we have a family plan. We have a 100 year family plan. We own farms together and all kinds of things as you plan and prepare. So I think if you focus, whatever you focus on you can measure, you're gonna have more success. And that's really what it is. I have a spiritual balance sheet that we work on every month as a family and we talk about what are the things that we do. So there's a lot of things that when you focus on and you can measure, you can see success. And I think the same goes with your family.
Justin (07:18.712)
Well, that's great. I've heard where your focus goes, energy flows. So that's great, man. So, okay, onto platinum payments. So I'm just curious, if you could name, who does platinum payments, who do they serve? Who's like your favorite client to add value to? What types of people should be contacting you?
Jed Morley (07:22.439)
Exactly, exactly.
Jed Morley (07:38.354)
You know, I've always said that we are the OGs in the direct response so if you look at this and say if you've got a Launch of any kind so some kind of a product and a newsletter a book whatever we are experts at understanding how you can take an ecommerce brand and really blow it up but by looking at the risk associated with the launch model and How do I create the most value? Looking at all of the metrics so looking at that and saying hey guess what?
I have to convert, how do I convert, still have some risk and chargebacks, but really understand what are the metrics that I'm looking at, from the billing cycle to the onboarding, the ease of customer experience and use. And so that's probably the biggest thing is we've done this for so long. We've got 50 different banks that we work with. We've got an unbelievable platform. And so really just knowing that you have someone that's been here in the trenches that gets this space better than anyone else, that's kind of what we've.
been really good at for a long time is that direct response e-commerce launch model.
Justin (08:40.547)
Wow, so it's a lot different than just signing on with the merchant processor by clicking a button. You're saying they've got somebody in their corner that they can turn to on all kinds of different subjects. What are some things that you think that would be important for them to have somebody in their corner? What situations do you think they could run into? It's like, man, I'm glad I didn't just click the button and have a merchant processor. I'm glad I signed up with Platinum Payments.
Jed Morley (09:04.478)
I think the biggest thing is, you know, it's easy to get with the big nameless faceless companies, right? They make that onboarding super simple. So you click, but you have no relationship. And so when do you actually talk to that person? And the irony is when you need them most, they're not there. So everybody can provide the same service. It's like, hey, can I take a payment? Yes. But what do I do to know what happens when a chargeback happens or a refund or, you know, a bad author, I have a form that is not
set up correctly. So now the fraudsters are hammering me and I'm getting hit with all these fees. So we deal with all of this stuff and so we educate our people on what you should do or how you can do it because we've seen everything and we're really available to walk you through that as kind of a payment partner.
Justin (09:48.388)
Wow, that's awesome. And people like doing business with people they like. And that's why you're on today, man. I love you so much. And I know that your family is just, you've got such a large family. I know you're a faith-based man, you're a God-fearing man. And so to know that that's behind Platinum Payments is I think it was important for me to make sure that I show the viewers up front. Let me ask you this. What are you guys maybe working on? What are you guys pushing the envelope on as far as technology in Platinum Payments?
Jed Morley (10:18.082)
So that's a great question and thanks for asking that one because it's been really fun over the last few years to build some amazing tech and to be a partner in this. So I can tell you confidently, we have the best payment platform in the world. And I mean that from start to finish and this is why, because we're directly integrated to banks where I can say, okay, for an e-commerce platform to say, you wanna run ACH, I can put you directly to the bank where.
Now ACH is tied directly into your merchant account. So you can do both with real time accounting in FreshBooks, Xero, QuickBooks, whatever. So you have a daily account balance. It's tied right into your credit card processing and into your QuickBooks. So you've got one view to see it all. I can do text to pay invoicing, whatever you want. And it's a true surcharge. So if you said, hey, guess what? I've got a small book I wanna sell. Add that.
service fee on top of the book or have them do ACH. So the profitability comes back to the merchant in massive amounts, but the same thing is, you get all of the goodies that you say, okay, how can I serve my customers by giving them the most flexible payment terms? And it really works great. So for continuity, it works amazing. If it's a monthly subscription, it works awesome. And if it's just truly selling a product, and again, it's the right kind of products that you're gonna add a service base fee on kind of thing. And so we have all of that.
not to mention our fraud analytics are unbelievable. I mean, we have 4000 different bits that we get from the bank that literally when you go to re you know, rebuild and a lot of guys subscribe to like recurly and all that stuff. Well, what they do is they just keep hitting the same thing without going back to the root of the problem saying, hey, their recurring billing is failing for this one thing, I fixed that I didn't just get 30 bad recharges, I fixed it. And so we get a
much, much higher percentage of conversion than our competitors.
Justin (12:10.692)
That's awesome. As far as looking into the future and you're seeing the trends that are happening, merchant processing, is there anything that you want to tell the internet retailers that you see coming in the future? Something that you think people should be prepared for? Is there anything that pops to your mind, maybe a tip for somebody on things to watch out for that's coming?
Jed Morley (12:33.878)
Yeah, for sure. So obviously the FedNow thing started in 2020 and they really implemented it just this year, right, in June, and it goes into full effect November of 2025, right, where they'll track every single thing. And I think, as a faith-based person, I don't really want the government to know every single person that I buy from, use, whatever. But that's really what the FedNow is. It's a blanket system that goes over everything where they'll see who I'm buying from, my credit score, my...
carbon footprint, all of those things, right? So what can you do that's different? I think you have to have true redundancy and the redundancy today, right, is how can I have a bank account here and a bank account here or a merchant account here where you have redundancy and then you're saying, okay, which one can I trust? Which one can I use? And it's gonna be kind of the small regional banks that you wanna work with because the big ones have all bought into this system. And again, right now everything's in the Visa rails and all that kind of stuff. So we're working, you know,
quite a bit right now in the blockchain. We've got our platform is agnostic. We're working on some amazing tech with a wallet that no one has that's gonna push some availability out for e-commerce and some amazing stuff we're working on that I can just tell you I've never been more excited. And if you want Justin, we could give everybody a quick link, either a QR code or a dropdown that would be, here's some of the products that we're showing and working off.
so that people could see exactly what we're doing. But all kinds of things. But again, knowing that the federal government is really focused right now on control of the banking platform and all of our communication, the focus to me right now is to create redundancy that gives you guys the ability to process no matter what. So when an SVB or the next regional goes down, you've got good solid solutions behind you.
Justin (14:26.276)
Good. So people sometimes wonder and it's like, how do you as a merchant processor, how do you guys make your money? How do you explain that to somebody? How is it that you provide a value, but how do you get compensated on this?
Jed Morley (14:37.782)
Yeah, so of that 3%, we'll just use it super simple, round it up, you know, of the same, that Stripe, you know, anybody else that charges, we make a fraction of a percent. So just like a home mortgage, you know, where you go out and you say, hey, I have my basis points and I've got my costs to go and borrow that money. And then there's a little spread that the mortgage lender makes. We make a little fraction of a percent on every monthly transaction. And that's really it. And then,
For us, the advantage that we have, right, is because we've got such a massive portfolio and all the relationships, we have a lot of power to come back and say, hey, I need to be able to take care of these merchants because I've got a personal direct relationship and it's because I've got a big block of buying power, if that makes sense, it allows me to work with a little better rates or better terms and, you know, that kind of thing. Because when you look at this, the things that you look at is, do I have a reserve? What happens if my merchant account gets shut down or they put me on a hold?
Who do I call? All of those things become massive issues when they pop up. And so one of my favorite and worst calls are, hey buddy, I've known you forever. I'm with such and such and they're holding my money. What do I do? And I said, hey guys, I would rather, like before it becomes an issue, set up the accounts, walk it through. We do a free audit. Literally, you send us your statements and it's not to look at it and say, hey, how can I price you? It's really.
What are the ways that you're taking money that I can show you the safest, quickest way to one, get settlement. And, um, and again, here's the risk factors. This is the thing that most people don't understand. When you go to set up a merchant account, the only factors that we have to set it up is I can hold a reserve, I can charge you a certain fee, or it's when they fund you.
Right? So it's like next day, two day funding. The funding cycle is also a risk parameter. So what we have is because we've got Intel and we're direct with the bank. If you're set up through our bank, I can literally do seven second funding. Well, we don't tell that to everyone because again, most people don't qualify unless they really are a straight up good merchant. We got all stuff. So it really kind of looks at a lot of those things. And that's really what we focus on is, is all of those risk factors explaining to you
Jed Morley (16:52.778)
If you have good credit, good business history, you control end-to-end solution from fulfillment or they're using you guys, somebody that's vetted really good, there's just a lot of those risk factors that we look at that we help you understand how you can get better terms and rates.
Justin (17:09.796)
That's awesome. Now I know you're around a lot of shakers and movers and I'm just curious, if you could pick somebody in the e-commerce space that you admire, somebody for their work ethic or their business, just something that you admire about them, who would you pick? Somebody that maybe that we could have on this podcast next, who would be somebody you respect in the e-commerce space?
Jed Morley (17:35.682)
So I think you probably know Matthew Stafford, right? Bill Grosscale. And I love him because you look at what they've built is a great brand that they've worked really hard at taking and saying, listen, to the average, you know, like guy building his store. Instead of just dumping more money, and this is the, it kind of goes against the common stuff. It's like, hey, I'm gonna go dump a bunch of money to buy more leads. Why don't we just fix our conversion process, right? So that we can actually convert more.
Justin (17:38.977)
Hmm.
Jed Morley (18:04.55)
make more money. And then when we buy more leads, we convert higher our profitability is better. So I just love that model because I don't see that as often as you know, most guys come in and they're just burning churn, get you know, up and going. And so I really like working with Matthew because he's got a great system and a great team.
Justin (18:21.632)
Man, he's got a great team. So yeah, we're gonna go after Matthew. We wanna see if we can get him on here as well. Great guy. So just off the, I'm just curious, what are some of the things you do when you're not working, when you're not doing e-commerce, or not helping people set up mids and just facilitating that? What are some things, some hobbies, some things that you find of interest?
Jed Morley (18:43.438)
So, you know, I don't know if people see it or not, but you know, I got my boots behind me. And so people are like, are you in a western store? Well, the funny thing is, is for me, you know, obviously we talked about family. That's a big part of it, right? I've got five kids and now five and a half grandkids, which is an absolute blast. And so, but you know, you look at this, I have a horse ranch. And so I team rope and I ranch sort and I do a lot of that stuff. I take a lot of friends out in the mountains and we ride. And so we're up in God's country and you're literally...
up there by yourself, away from your phones, and you have the best conversations, you know, you're talking about the things you're doing. And so those campfire settings where you kind of get to bury your soul and say, hey man, what am I working on? Or what's going, what's working good for you? That kind of stuff. So I love that because it really recharges me and it gets me one-on-one with, you know, people.
Justin (19:29.988)
That's awesome. Now, if I were to ask you, what is fulfillment, like true fulfillment mean to you? I mean, you're fulfilled. Maybe even, let's just say you're on your deathbed and you're looking back at your life. You're like, I'm glad that I did that. I was a part of that. I accomplished that. Or I paid attention to that. What do you think true fulfillment means to you?
Jed Morley (19:50.21)
Man, that is such a good question and I love it, the way you worded that, because you know, you think about what is gonna, like today, there's so many people that wanna be influencers, right? And I'm like, okay, that's cool, but really I wanna impact people. I wanna have an impact in someone's life. And so I think I've told you this story back, you know, Justin, a long time ago, but it started when I was in my, you know, late 20s. I had my first kids, we had a few kids and.
We went down to Mexico for a Christmas. And again, I'll be honest, we didn't have a lot of money. It was like where I was doing real estate full time. We took a snowmobile trailer down. We slept on a floor and I speak Spanish, you know, and I was, we had a lot of fun. There were three families. We sent all this money down. And again, it wasn't a ton of money, but to us it felt like it. And we went into this place and we assembled boxes to feed families. And we ended up with 883 boxes to feed a family of four for a month. And...
because of the way I speak Spanish, we lined up the kids, gave them all these presents and stuff. After doing that for a few weeks, my little girl came up to me and she doesn't speak Spanish, she doesn't know the kids, but we're in this little home and I'll never forget, it was like a 12 by 12 room, and she comes up, pulls my sleeve and says, "'Dad, can I give her my shoes?' And I said, "'You wanna give her your shoes?' And she said, "'Yeah.'" And so she knelt down and took off her own shoes and gave her this little girl.
And I'll never forget what that meant to me because I'm like, man, you know, this little kid realizes we got a garage full of stuff. We got dirt bikes at home and all this stuff. But just that little act of like, hey, that matters more. And so from then we've always, every Christmas, every year we go and do something and do these projects because I want my kids to know that like, hey, what really matters the most is to serve someone else. And so Plat Pay has Plat Gives. And so we donate a percentage of what we make to.
orphanages into all kinds of products and you know and things and so we have so many fun things and stories to tell but Yeah, that was probably the first one so I could look back and say doing that with my kids has meant more than anything else I've done
Justin (21:53.788)
Oh man, that's amazing. Thank you. I realized long ago that it's all his and you can't out give him. He's just waiting. He's like, I've given this to you. What are you gonna do with it? So we're just servants of that. So that's an awesome story. So let me ask you this. I know you're a believer. I've had great conversations with you about it. I wanna ask you frankly, like who is the Messiah? Who is the son of the living God? Who is he to you?
Jed Morley (21:59.042)
100%. Yes, yes.
Jed Morley (22:23.074)
Oh, you know that I want to be like him so much. So he's my friend. And it's really the goal I have is to say, look, I'm nothing by myself, but with him, I'm everything. I can do all things, you know? And I look at that and I think, okay, so how then if I'm really insignificant, but I want to have this relationship with my savior Jesus Christ. So everything I do is like, okay.
I want to see people the way he sees them. And I hope that when they see me, that they see him in me, because if that's the case, then I'm at least 1% better, and I'm trying every day to become a little bit better. And you know, I'll share this story, Justin. You know how much I love you in case, right? And I think you guys are awesome. Well, one of the things that's cool is this morning, as I got out and said my prayers, and I said, hey, I really wanna know what should I do today? And you sent me a text, and I saw you're fulfilled,
This is exactly the thing. And so again, if we can share the word with anyone, that's the most important thing that I can do today.
Justin (23:28.76)
Man, I know that's gonna touch so many. Because we've got a platform now that we can talk about business, but we can also talk about real fulfillment. Like what does it mean to truly be fulfilled? And I'm hearing the same story in a lot of cases that it's to have him inside of us, right? And like you said, for us to reflect his light. So I'm super excited that you're able to share that. Is there a time in your life that you saw that there was a shift to where...
Jed Morley (23:47.308)
Mm-hmm.
Justin (23:57.548)
you know, you felt his love or something to where you decide, I don't know if you grew up loving, you know, Jesus, or if it's something where it clicked with you one day, is there any sort of testimony that you want to share?
Jed Morley (24:10.27)
Yeah, so the funny thing is, is I grew up, you know, with a really strong Christian family, you know, and I, and I grew up that way, because again, faith based, you know, number eight of 13 every single morning, and I'll say this, this is the, this is the gold, okay, guys, if you if you want to solve the life hacks, it's seriously simple. Make a plan, be consistent and measure it. That's it.
Because again, whatever that is, you don't have to fight. Am I gonna go get in shape? Am I gonna work out? If you make the decision, go do it. If you're gonna do this, go be that. So what we did as a family, and this is simple, every single morning at six o'clock, we got up and read scriptures, every morning. And we would sing, pray, and read every morning. So my dad was like, hey, you gotta put the armor of God on before you go out. So if the kids are going to school, you gotta have some stuff. And again, I'll be honest, guys, I...
never got up when they were singing. I hate singing in the morning. So I wait till the singing was done. And then I get into kind of half of sleep, be there for the reading, and then go on, right. But it formed those habits of like hearing the stories of and knowing who they are. And it was important to me, you know, so when I had to make those decisions on my own, it was really important, you know, they became like an important part. But I got to sell share this one thing. I told my mom, I said, you know, I don't believe I'm a teenager, I'm screwing around and having a like,
just messing around. And it has happened three different times. One time, I'm playing sports, I love football, and you kind of think you're a big deal and stuff. And so I waited for one of these big games and I was at a party with all my friends. And I can see this today as vivid as it was yesterday. And we're sitting in this room and we're smoking cloves and drinking beer and doing their stupid crap. And I'm sitting there, that tells you how old I am based on the stuff I just said.
But we're sitting there and I'm sitting next to some girls on this couch and I had an out-of-body experience. It was literally this I Felt myself leave and look around the room and what it was I had this personal interview Tomorrow morning you're gonna wake up all the fun's over Everything that you were looking for it's done. You're gonna look yourself in the mirror and then what? What's important to you? And I really thought I had this happen to me three different times and then I realized
Jed Morley (26:27.642)
God's trying to reach me and say, hey bud, you know what? The things that you put value on don't have any value. They will come and go. It's wealth, it's success, it's whatever. And I learned that and I realized at that point, man, I really do need to just try and serve him and worship him. And so when I listened, it really changed my life and that helped me go to do my two-year mission and all kinds of things that I've done. It's just been really fun. But yeah, that was probably the most personal thing for me.
Justin (26:57.224)
Yeah, so I'm hearing like first meeting of the day, right? To have it with him. It seemed like that's what your family was really in, and I say enforcing, hey, we're gonna meet with him first. We're gonna do those things. And I tell you, it just seems like when you're evaluating, where do I want, where's my life at now where I want it to be? And you're truly evaluating it for the things that are important. I'm thinking of the verse, seek the kingdom first and all these things will be added to you. Well, what things? Probably the things that he knows that are good.
Jed Morley (27:01.)
Mm-hmm.
Justin (27:25.856)
Not the things that we think that we put value on. So man, what a great story. Thank you so much. I'm also thinking, I used to not sing at all. Like I'm the guy behind my back, an old ranger guy. There's no singing that's coming out of me. As I leaned in and as he showed his love for me more and more and more, my hands just started going up. You know what I mean? And he loved me more and more and more. And then my hands are up and I'm praising and I'm hallelujah. I couldn't hold it in when he really just allowed me to get close to him.
Jed Morley (27:26.082)
Mm-hmm.
Justin (27:56.064)
And that's just because it's seeking, you know, it's just seek him seek him seek him and never give so anyways I love your testimony. I love the things you're saying I love the family because I really think you can gauge a lot from somebody by their fruits or by what's what are they doing? In their family, how is their family? Impacted like that. Is there a little girl that goes and gives her shoes based on you know, the environment that she's in So thank you for sharing all that today. Is there anything else that?
Jed Morley (28:12.686)
I'm gonna go.
Justin (28:21.036)
these internet retails, any other words of wisdom you want to give them, so maybe they can either go to the next level in e-commerce or something they need to be focused on that's personal, anything that's maybe the Holy Spirit's triggering in you right now.
Jed Morley (28:34.335)
Yeah, so I would highly recommend and this is the key for all of us. Serve the people so they really feel valued. You got to hear your customers, right? Whatever they are. So one of the things I got to tell you and this is unique to what we do at Platinum and it's been super fun is I own several different companies. We do a lot of things that are fun. And I think one of the things that I started my own kind of competitor and e-commerce is one of them, right? So it's called E-Pipe. And we build.
funnels and a platform in minutes, not days, not, you know. So I love Russell Brunson, he's one of my favorite guys. You look at that, but they've made it so complicated, so we simplified all that. And what I've done is we make it to where you have a video marketing page and you can put any button and you click any link and I have all the stats and analytics and tracking. So listen to your people, what they want, because when I would go to all these big groups, we're talking to them and they're saying, hey, I got all this time and money into this stuff and it takes me so long and I've got all these teams. I'm like, yeah, but.
80% of the market just needs a simple lead capture and a simple form and a simple follow-up, you know? And so we built something that makes it easy. So we have a lot of groups that use our systems and it's fun, we built that. The last thing I would share with you, Justin, and I've lived this myself. So for those of them that watch this, you know, I've built a Valiant CEO magazine. If you go online, I challenge anybody to do this. It's actually awesome. So go in there and look at Valiant CEO.
I've interviewed over 5,000 CEOs. What I think is brilliant is you go in, take the search bar, type in anything you want, and I've got endless content. I interviewed 780 CEOs last month alone. When you look at this, we're talking billionaires, Glenn Stern and the EXP president. I mean, I'm excited because next month Kathy Ireland's magazine's coming out. If you don't know who she is, she's sold over $3 billion on Home Shopping Network. She has multiple brands in, you know,
the e-commerce world. And so when you look at this, I get to talk to the people that are crushing it at all levels. But you know what Kathy and I talked about 60% of the time? God. It was awesome. And so when you look at this, you say, okay, if I'm successful, what's the substance behind me? You know, and so we have a quote in our home, no success can compensate for failure in the home. So I look at that and I go, hey, you know what? It doesn't matter how much money or how much influence or how many people, if I'm screwing up at my own house.
Justin (30:39.725)
Yes.
Jed Morley (30:58.614)
keeping track and I think that's really the goal. So focus on that you can control that matters the most and then the rest of the stuff will come.
Justin (31:07.384)
So good so many nuggets there. I just like can I you mind if I bless you real quick? I pray us out of here. Thank you so much Father we thank you so much for mr. Jed and his family We ask for blessings on his family and then you continue to give him words of wisdom so he can guide people Closer to Jesus and we ask these things in Jesus name in Yeshua's name. We pray amen Hello Thank you brother, we'll talk soon
Jed Morley (31:12.71)
Oh, please do, man. That'd be awesome.
Jed Morley (31:26.662)
Amen. Thank you so much, bud. Sure appreciate it.
Okay, awesome, thanks, see ya.
Justin (31:32.96)
Thanks. Alright guys, thank you for another episode of Fulfilled. Catch us next time. Maybe it'll be Matthew Stafford from Bill Gross Scale. Take care.
[Music] Hello and welcome to Fulfillment dot com's educational vlog. My name is Adam Pifko and I'm the Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at DFO Global Performance Commerce. We're one of the world's leading performance marketing companies, delivering superior ecommerce software marketing and brands to the world. I want to focus this vlog on how to build and scale your brand while maintaining a high level of marketing compliance it can be done and it's easier than many people believe it to be. It requires a marathon mindset not just short-lived money. The ability to reduce your exposure to risk via false and misleading claims and the ability to view your content from your customer's perspective. The not so secret secret is, if you care about your customers and if you make one of your goals to improve the lives around you, you'll find the results you're looking for. Revenue is critical but we'll explore a bit here today it shouldn't come at the cost of negligent compliance. In simple terms, marketing compliance is the rules and regulations that protect consumers from being lied to or misled or having their privacy violated. It also governs how consumer data can be used. There are a few things that harm businesses more than compliance violations, fines and other monetary penalties while they may be steep are the least of your worries here it's the brand equity and damage that's scarring in an information rich world like ours it can happen at lightning speed what's really lost in this scenario is trust the goodwill you've built with your customers your potential customers, your employees, your business partners, your stakeholders , all of it evaporates instantly it ties up cash flow, funding, sales, hiring and it's a difficult situation to recover from. So let's spend a moment on content itself content refers to the actual collateral and tactics used in marketing namely ads images descriptions testing and scientific claims urgency widgets testimonials terms and conditions privacy statements and your website as a whole often if something in this realm looks or feels funny you should ask yourself: can i substantiate this claim, this future, this feature, this comment or this review depending on what your answer is you should be prepared to go back to the drawing board and ask yourself again at the end of the day if you've made a great product done the research and applied critical thinking to your marketing there is no need to lie to your consumers they'll convert good advertising pushes boundaries but does so responsibly the most common mistake we make in the performance marketing industry are typically related to deceptive advertising or inert inauthentic product information these may include scarcity claims you've seen those countdown timers and limited time tickers these are fine to use if they're real and authentic free shipping promises these require that customers are informed of any shipping cost in advance of making purchases and that there are no hidden or disguised fees product origin and quality if something is not stainless steel you can't market it as such in the same realm if it's manufactured in italy your marketing can't say it was made in the united states inauthentic founder or inventor claims again just stick with what you can substantiate if you can prove it and it's real great it should be good for marketing testimonials and endorsements this is a huge one and you see it misused a lot this is one many companies just don't take seriously enough marketing that gets portrayed is often not typical experience of a user testimonials should be comments from real people not that hard if you just want to be compliant so let's talk about scaling and scaling while maintaining compliance believe it or not it's possible in order to make a lots of sales brands need brands and products need to be seen by lots of people this is where ad platforms come into play and regarding compliance dfo's chief commercial officer said it best so let me just read it traffic and ad platforms like Google and Facebook have built their own compliance technology and hired armies of staff to enforce their standards legislation and law making still play a role but they can't keep up due to the volume and speed at which e-commerce moves this is the reason why it's so important for brands and companies to police themselves in this area it's easy to get caught up in the e-commerce whirlwind especially when using affiliates to scale speaking of affiliates they're a great way to help drive volume to your product portfolio and something we use for our own efforts as well at dfo there are a number of steps brands can take to ensure compliance with these independent media buyers like establishing your kyc or know your custom know your clients know your customers guidelines for all new partner relationships keep in mind those brand equity issues we talked about earlier ensure brand guidelines are crystal clear and disseminated immediately upon establishing a new relationship and lastly ensure your company's internal compliance team is set up to monitor not only your own marketing but that of your partners this includes all marketing assets like ads pre-sales interstitials checkout pages and more we can even take it a step further when scaling globally when doing so keep these points in mind compliance needs to be deeply embraced both vertically and horizontally across your organization if project managers sales people customer service and everybody understands what's appropriate as well as the writers and creatives you'll be better off and anyone should be able to or be enabled to spot and catch compliance issues ensure your company and teams are up to date with the latest regulations and standards laws and practices change very quickly and what is mandated by countries that are not the United States often require jumping over a few hurdles or extra steps. Let's quickly recap the most important things to remember: marketing compliance is crucial and often has longer lasting equity effects than just fines and penalties. Since content is king make sure it's compliant, avoid common mistakes by ensuring everything you're showing and saying can be substantiated. Understanding how ad platforms work and ensure media buying partners have clear brand guidelines that's huge there are great untapped markets outside of the United States but they require know-how and understanding of domestic regulatory laws and requirements in order to be successful. That's it DFO is not only an affiliate network and a performance marketing agency but we are an advertiser of our own products and brands too. This puts us in a unique position to talk shop, share insights, and be helpful team that you can discuss your challenges with or bounce ideas off of. I'm personally happy to talk to just about anybody up or down the ecommerce value chain so please don't hesitate to reach out to me on your preferred medium. Thanks for listening hope this benefits you, your organization and the industry as a whole. Compliance is not that hard so gear up for the fight and you'll be and you'll do just fine. Thanks, have a great one. Bye! [Music]
[Music] Hello there and welcome to Fulfillment.com ecommerce education vlog. My name is AJ Yeager with Praxismetrics.com and I'm going to be your host today. So over the next five minutes I want to go over what is I believe is to be the number one mistake that 90 percent of e-commerce brands are making when they're tracking their revenue online. I've worked with a lot of brands uh in the world over 150 different brands in e-commerce and their data so I'm coming from a lot of experience here and this continues to come up like 99% of the time. So marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed I hope you agree with me on that we can't steer the ship if we don't know our numbers so today I'm going to go over three things. One is the actual biggest mistake when it comes to tracking e-commerce data . Number two is exactly what utms are and how they can take your marketing data to the next level and how to build a utm link in the most effective way so you can utilize them in your business. So one of the biggest mistakes is assuming that everything is tracking in your business. Okay what I mean is that all these different applications you're using um are are not tracking exactly what you may need and I mean that by out-of-the-box software limitations. Some of the apps like Shopify what you may be using are yes tracking certain things automatically but there are other softwares out there that are not tracking the fields that you need ultimately to answer your business questions the technology is just not set up properly. SOPs may not have been followed by your team when setting these up and getting all the extra custom values filled out and also some of these platforms are lacking uids which are unique identifiers. Email's a big one, address, phone number you know exact name we need something to make sure we tell the whole story of the data and many of these don't don't tie it together and they don't work together. Google analytics I mean I know many of you probably use it, some of you may hate it, some of you may love it but it is one of the best free tools out there. It does not come set up the right way, putting code on your website does not handle everything you need most people think it's set it and forget it meaning they they set it, they install it and they're like oh good i don't have to deal with it. I feel like they never have to log in there now. I don't recommend logging in there because it's not actually a really good dashboard unless you are trained to use it it does not work the way that you want to especially for business owners and marketing teams it's too complicated. Now this is all about ROI I want to make sure that you can get ROI out of this training and what you're going to, what I'm going to teach you. Now the number one mistake is not properly using organized utms for all of your marketing efforts online. Okay we've got to be able to prove ROI from all the different channels we're using and that is super important and this is very very um detailed and I think many companies get lazy and or don't follow a certain structure. UTMs stand for urchin tracking mechan or module uh I won't go into the history but it's a very simple term, it's a free link that you can create all it is is a parameter it is a encoded suffix that you append and add to your url and it can be quite long and made up of various various parameters but basically it's providing very specific information about where that link is coming from and by stringing these parameters together you're able to track online marketing campaigns with a tremendous amount of detail and granularity. So uh this is it may seem simple uh you might have heard about these before but it is literally one of the most powerful ways to track your marketing sales and any activity you're doing online and I highly recommend you listen to this so here's an example my buddy justin goff is doing a promotion for us he sent out an email to his list and if they click there or where the other red arrow is it would be the link was actually this one now it's long it's ugly but here's what it means it tells us six different things one the url two the source three the medium for the campaign name five the content and then last not least the term now i'm going to break these down for you real quick url is very simple that's where you're driving them to usually going to be your e-commerce domain campaign source this is where the clicks are coming from is it a search engine is it another specific site is it from maybe even a newsletter that was sent out for you this could be a lot of different things campaign medium is how the link was presented to them uh search end results pay-per-click ad email affiliate link whatever that may be this is a very important part social media you there's a lot of different um ways that you can add in medium but uh it's really different for each business campaign name here let me move my my video up here campaign name is the marketing campaign that the link belongs to traditionally this is done in succession of campaigns like a black friday sale campaign content is the specific part of a marketing campaign that got them to take action this is very optional you don't have to use it but it's good for testing sometimes ad copy a b split test between emails or other things campaign term the keyword used in paper click advertisements that generate the click and the substance subsequent visitor or what specific words were clicked in an email this is again optional you can make this whatever you want to i'll show you how i did it next is uh so so basically ours was the one above is is was justin goff so we know who it was he was an affiliate the campaign that he was specifically sending out that week and again that was justin goff email that way we just made sure but this is very simple because we know the affiliate and we know what relationship it is and how he sent it out now there are different ones he sent and the campaign term we changed later to include email one email two email three email four et cetera so um the website url is simply the website we're tracking right the campaign source examples for you for to use in the future are google facebook twitter the affiliate or affiliate name being adroll etc you can you can change that however you want to so these are examples for source here's some examples for medium cpc you know cost per click email um social post affiliate referral and you're going to come up with your own structure i don't have time to go through all that today but this is just some quick examples campaign summer sales social and then the date up the specific name of the product or a promo code uh also content email subject lines controller variation content a content b for term multiple links inside of an email different actual number of links you can put link number one link number two actual keywords or other further things that you could use to describe what you're doing that marketing activity so when you should not use utms let me move my face again this is not using what you should not do never put a utm tag or a campaign variable on an internal link you're not doing this on your website this is all external outside driving to you do not use utms when creating internal links on your own internal website i just said that if you start using utms to link to various parts of your website you can artificially multiply session counts this means that you're going to double up or triple up the traffic coming through google analytics and you do not want to corrupt any of your data we do not want bad data so to wrap up and give you a few action steps the only way you can know the true roi of your online marketing activities is by using utms on every single specific online activity you're doing it doesn't cost anything it doesn't matter uh just it's just a matter of taking the time to do it so there is a cost internally to pay somebody to do this but it is so worth it and you're going to have to make mistakes along the way and figure out a system that works for your company there is a way to go ahead and use these you can use track funnels.com or you can just go create these inside of google's tool by itself sit down with your team and map out your hierarchy have a whiteboarding session to get very clear on each of those six different uh parameters how you're going to use it in the future with your marketing channels determine a way to stay organized keep it in a spreadsheet or use something like trackfunnels.com that we created for free or choose one campaign i want you to just choose one campaign right now and begin immediately okay utms can take your marketing to a whole new level all the channels analytics tools out there work with utms for the most part 95 90 of them will pass utms through um and you can use utms to have better data in your all of your marketing campaigns and you can use this data to track return on investment for anything and everything you're doing i hope you enjoyed today's video if you have any questions go ahead and let me know and i'll go ahead and answer anything in the comments thank you so much you
[Music] Welcome to the FDC education blog. I'm Vinnie Fisher the CEO of Fully Accountable and I want to talk to you today about you the business leader the top executive in the company and your financial fluency. See I am a leader in a business and I resonate with titles like CEO, founder and I was really and I am really good at actually growing enterprises from six to seven to eight figures. One of problems I always had and half the battle against is giving a lot of the dollars back. I naturally with lean towards growing more gross revenue a marketer and a salesperson it's where I live probably I lacked just enough financial fluency to understand the elements of the business to keep more I learned one day it's not about how much you bring at the top it's how much you keep at the bottom. While that might sound very basic to you I want to help you with three tips to really improve your financial fluency as the leader of the business. One what I would like to talk to you about is this mindset, the mindset of running your business what it took what it actually takes for you to go from six figures to seven figures or two totally different mindsets they were from seven to eight. The gun-slinging things you do to get into seven figures are necessary but those are also the things that are not going to help you when amateur operation and grow into an eight-figure business with better cash flow profit margin and net asset value. And so first and foremost your mind has to change, there are six operational elements then departments to a company. One of them is your back-office and when you always have an attitude of growing the top-line and not winning on the bottom line the first issue for me then will be for you is starting with your mindset. My number two tip is there is mature operations in every company I wrote a book about this call the CEOs mindset and it's yours if you want just write us to a we care and fully accountable and we'll send you a copy of the book but I care about mindset so much I made it the first chapter in the title of the book but additionally I talked about an operational mindset to a 7 and 8-figure leader, how you can run a back office and run it like a profit Center so that you can actually win margin will have more cash flow and actually build your net worth in your business. And finally my third tip sits around this idea of looking to maturity and how you are taking that profit center to build your networks. One of the problems we have as leaders is we start with this mindset of us, everything that flows through to us, where we save taxes maximize cash, that comes to us and we don't really defend the margin of the company. If we look to investing in our back office and have the financial fluency to understand what key indicators to watch what production of expertise you want in those areas you'll start to clearly see where you will have a problem in the profit of your company so for example I had a health supplement company before while we were at the ending stage of building fully accountable and I found out that I was making eight percent profit margin when in reality I should have been making twenty percent. Well with this idea I started to say oh my gosh I'm losing twelve percent monthly! So quickly I started having a profit center mindset. I'll promise you that if you do that you will build your cash you will have more margin and you'll build up your net asset value faster than ever. Reality is it takes these three things to build your financial fluency and I started thinking about how to invest in a back office so that I'm manages from my 1040 backwards because the real savings starts with your business and having the mature act aspect of running it that way will immediately lead to doubling your profit margin. Financial fluency is the key to leader truly building your network so those three tips and the gifts along go with you I'm Vinnie Fischer from Fully Accountable. Hope that option [Music]
[Music] Hi welcome to FDC education vlog my name is Damon Wright, I'm the head of the advertising an e-commerce practice group at the law firm of Gordon Ries. You want to build a company that's gonna be around for a long time that you also can enjoy. You can enjoy your success, you can sleep better at night, your employees can feel better because they know their jobs are secure. So to that end it's important to protect yourself from forces that can be disruptive to your business so I want to talk about some simple, easy things you can do to accomplish that. First let me talk about the Federal Trade Commission and how to prevent getting in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is enforcing a law very aggressively called rasca, ROSC, a it applies to businesses that sell products and services on a subscription billing model so it could be subscription boxes, it could be flowers, it could be health and beauty dietary supplements, informational products. The FTC goes after companies that violate rasca with a vengeance. They will have receivers, appointed temporary restraining orders entered freeze assets it's not much fun. It's much more fun as a lawyer to help companies avoid all that in the first place and it's really easy to do. rasca requires three things. So imagine your checkout page first thing is on the checkout page you need to have clear and conspicuous disclosure of the billing terms and cancellation terms. How much are people going to pay each month? And then the second is you need to make sure the consumer is agreeing to those terms, they've elected to subscribe as opposed to buying the astrayed sale. So if you're selling a product via straight sale or there's a subscribe and save option the consumer can check one box where they can check another box they've thereby agreed that they want to subscribe. And the third thing Russell requires that there be is that there'd be an easy way to cancel. That people can send an email to cancel or they can call a toll-free number. If they're calling in, they don't have to wait I'll hold for a long time. So if you comply with rosca if you don't have deceptive advertising like fake testimonials and of course if you keep consumer complaints low it's very likely you'll never hear from the FTC. Let me talk about another force that could really be bad for your business and that is consumer class-action lawyers and serial plaintiffs. There are folks that spend their waking hours surfing the internet trying to find companies that are selling products that don't have some magic language on their site because those are companies that are really vulnerable. You don't wanna be one of those. The magic language really easy again on your checkout page I agree to terms of sale hyperlink and the terms of sale of course are a contract by checking the box the consumers agreeing to the contract and in that contract in the terms of sale two key provisions class action waiver language and mandatory arbitration language. This means that the consumers are knowing that if they want to see you they can't do it in court, they can't bring a class action it has to be a single claimant arbitration. If you had this on your website it's very likely that you will never face a class action or if you do you'll quickly be able to get the case kicked in favor of a single person arbitration. In five minutes of fixing this site here your site to add this you can literally have saved yourself millions of dollars so I can't emphasize enough how important that is. Last thing that could be really disruptive to your business is when you have a dispute with another business. Maybe it's a service provider or maybe either some type of revenue sharing agreement you have. You need to have clarity in your contracts . You know Pennywise pound-foolish made sense 200 years ago it's still true today make sure your contracts are tight and make sure you're protected focus on these types of provisions representations and warranties. You want the other side to make representations and warranties to you, for instance they will comply with advertising law and other applicable law limitations of liability you want to make sure that your liability is limited the other side not so much you want to be able to get full relief from them if you have to sue them and then indemnity patient if they do something that causes you harm you get sued because of social media that you have the ability to go to them and say you have to pay my damages again. Having a sharp clear contract will prevent confusion disruption and disputes down the road and you know actually save you a lot of money in attorneys fees so with that you'll be on your way to having a stronger brand, becoming more valuable, having a place that your company's employees again feel secure working that and again enjoying your success and sleeping better at night. It's a pleasure to talk with you Thank you very much take [Music] you
[Music] Welcome to FDC's ecom educational vlog. My name is John Maddox I'm the marketing director here at Engine Commerce. If you're like me you consume a mountain of content on the latest strategies, tips and tactics that you can use in 2018 to grow and scale your store. There's a lot of really sexy things that are tossed around influencer marketing Facebook Ads Google arbitrage all of these things but what I want to share with you today are two really unsexy pillars of e-commerce marketing that are staples that the largest brands in the world use to continue to scale and grow their revenues year every year. Those two tactics are abandoned cart flows as well as basic behavioral cascades. A recent study by Omni sense shows that targeted abandoned cart emails are opened 20% more than any other type of email, not only that but they convert at 5% making them the best type of email you can send within your cascade. Let's say that you had a thousand abandoned carts a day, now sending these automated flows if you were able to bring back 5% of those abandoned carts at an average order value of about $80 that equals out to a $4,000 increase per day in revenue. To get you started I want to share with you one of our most successful cart abandonment flows and what that looks like broken out into days. Now the first day that they abandon that cart you're gonna wait two to four hours and then you're gonna send them an email reminding them of what they left with beautiful imagery and persuasive copy asking them to come back and you've saved that cart just for them. A day later you might add in other products, other curated sets things of that nature to increase the average order value as well as show the different styles and how it would look on them if they purchased it that day. On day three we want to help them really pull out that credit card by offering either free shipping or a percentage off if they go ahead and purchase it in the next 24 hours and then if they haven't purchased from there we're gonna put them on that behavioral email cascade based on the creative and based on the products that they looked at and we're going to nurture them throughout that sequence and then rotate them into our daily newsletter. If you're looking for more sequences you're looking for some inspiration on this I highly encourage you to look at your favorite brands whatever they be. Barkbox is a great example, go through their email lists abandoned cart and see how they retarget you over the next week, take that, model it for your own store and implement those changes. [Music]
[Music] Hi welcome to the FDC ecomm education online. I'm Joe Burton CEO and founder of our lay marketplace and today we're going to talk about the top three reason you're hoping to be buying native marketing. First and foremost what is native marketing? lead up marketing you probably see it every single day of your life is content built right into news articles and pages on major news sites that's meant to look and feel like it's part of the actual news site when I'll have to ally it's actually an advertisement. Normally is a small headline with a graphic and image or a video that directly leads to a third party web page major companies doing this today are companies like tabbouleh. I'll brain you know I would jam and a handful of others so but top three reason is this is beneficial for your business. Reason number one it allows you to directly tell the story that you want to consumers to understand about your product or service and here's what I mean by that let's say you've got a certain health product of item and it's got a certain aspect and a helps out in your daily life that gives you more energy or it helps with anti-aging fatigue or it helps with you know hair loss or something along those lines you can write a content piece that you would actually control the content for that tells that story exactly how you want it to be told. that's extremely powerful for obviously potential customers here's the example I always used for new clients Anderson windows is a big window retailer in the u.s. they can run a simple banner ad on a page and says Andersen windows you know click here for more details right but probably get some leads that way and that's phenomenal however they can write a content piece about like Anderson Windows can use the cause of eating your own like 15% and also raise develop your home by 25% and here's the reasons why then they can take that article directly link it to their lead form and drive a much more targeted user that way and it's hugely powerful and hugely beneficial and so you can't do with search or Facebook and their kind of marketing out there. Reason number two that this is probably the coolest thing about it you can actually customize exactly where you want your ads to show up so you can hand pick sites that meet your target demographics and only serve your ads on sites that meet those target demographics so if you know your audience skews 50 plus you can handpick sites and audiences that show up on sites there are 50 plus maybe that's a long time maybe that's not enough Sun com maybe that's the smaller sites that you know you know where it's gonna fit for you and get hugely powerful and a great marketing tactic you can use to make sure you're spending your dollars is about official as possible. Reason number three it's a great alternative to Facebook and Google owned any marketing plan probably has Facebook and Google and in some capacity at this point in time however you can't rely solely on Facebook and Google for every dollar you want to spend online Facebook and Google are constantly changing their rules and regulations if they're constantly updating their policies and if you're putting all of your eggs in one basket at some point in time it's going to be an issue for them. I can almost guarantee it's going to happen so maybe there was a great way to diversify your portfolio a little bit and offer massive scale that you simply cannot get install their news channels it's greatly beneficial for clients looking for even small campaigns but also in a large scale so that's the top three reasons I think you coming to you by native marketing. Any questions or comments feel free to reach out to our marketplace. Thanks! [Music]
[Music] Welcome to FDC's Ecomm education block my name is Chad Bacchanal and I'm the Director of an alert set why might CRM today I want to share with you som thoughts on a topic that is often controversial in our industry. It's one of those topics that I know some of you will agree with me on and some of you will discourage rarely do I find a consensus agreement on this topic but the hope is that when the video is over you'll have a stronger understanding of the subject. What is this controversial subject? How to calculate customer lock on value. I'll cover three methods including the one that we found to be the most accurate and recommend for our clients. Why is this controversial? Well first there are many ways to calculate CLTV and the results you get can vary dramatically with each method. Second no business is the same, this obviously complicates things when we're trying to use a single measurement to evaluate businesses with widely variant attributes. With that let's jump into the topic: there are three different popular methods for calculating CLTV. Method one is the method we use to calculate CLTV outline and is widely used by businesses that have high customer turnover or churn. This method leverages gross revenue and cogs to determine gross profit and divides that by the unique customers. A unique customer is most often identified by a unique email address. For example if I have 1 million dollars in gross revenue and [ __ ] of $40,000 returning a gross profit of nine hundred and sixty thousand dollars. I have eight thousand unique customers and therefore the CLTV is a hundred and twenty dollars. It's a pretty straightforward calculation but can be criticized for simplicity. Method two has been around a long time and it's used quite a bit with several industries but it's not widely accepted by the subscription industry because of its reliance on churn ratio. Churn ratio is a useful measurement but the common argument is that churn ratio has no place in the CLTV calculation because it adds in variability to a measurement and ultimately muddies up the CLTV calculation. This method uses the returning average order or our AO / the turn ratio. For example let's say your RAO is $80 and your truth is 40%, this method is going to calculate your CLTV to be $200. So this method is also very straightforward but like method 1 it also is often criticized for being too simplistic. Method 3 is very popular it is widely used across many different industries but it's really meant for companies that are cross them throughout the customer lifecycle. Let's run through this calculation once again we start with our AO multiply gross margin with an $80 our AO and a gross margin to 40% we get a net REO of $48 then we consider a 40% churn in a discount rate of 0% this method leverages growth rate to arrive at the same $120 of method wah so then we are comparing apples to apples as much as possible across all three methods. Growth rate refers to the customers growth rate during the lifetime as a customer. If you're growing a customer's value over time this is an important number inside of the CLTV calculation the criticism of this method is that it is too complex and it leverages growth rate which is speculative it can water down the CL TV calculation. Now that we've reviewed all three methods let's talk about why we use method 1 at Lime Light and why we think this is the right approach for advertisers and subscription businesses. Method 1 is straightforward and while it can be criticized for its simplicity it gets praised for hosts customer lifetime analysis, accuracy mean that when we analyze customers after that they have cancelled the calculation often proves to be more accurate we have analysed our entire global transaction database millions of as actions over more than 10 years and we still have found method one to be the most accurate method for calculating CLTV. My goal and my life's goal is to stay on top of the industry and provide advertisers and e-commerce merchants the best analytics and revenue maximization tools for their businesses. My priority is to stay up-to-date on the best metrics and calculations specifically for CLTV. I'm always looking for various CL TV calculations and analyzing and considering their merit for Limelight's clients so don't be surprised if in the future we offer multiple methods to calculate CL TV keeping a handle on all the data and metrics of your business is complex. Leveraging is sophisticated and intelligent but relevant analytics is how you can not only compete but scale. If you watch this video to this point you've been bitten by the bug and are most likely a data junkie like me. This curiosity is are you all what do you think will happen if you can't get a quick handle on where your business is at at a moment's notice. I've been there and it's scary it's a very scary thought that's where a solid analytics package comes in. Whether you are using the solution that we developed at limelight or you have your own homegrown bi solution stay curious and continue to fight the good fight my goal and Limelight's goal is to equip our clients with the best features integrations and revenue maximization tools and of course analytics to not only stay on top of the industry but to help you succeed that's why we continue to work hard to build a flexible and reliable CRM solution so you have all of the information you need to make the right decisions for your business. I'm Chad Bucknam, Director of Analytics at one I wish you the best of luck growing your business and achieving your dreams [Music]
[Music] Hey welcome to fulfillment dot coms online educational vlog my name is Jay Mack I'm the president of Six Division. We are a marketing automation company that helps entrepreneurs and their teams get more out of their market automation to create more predictable revenue in their business. I want to talk to you today about the top three mistakes that entrepreneurs make with marketing automation. The first one is the word marketing. The second one is the word automation, and the third one is blimp lamentation which I'll talk to you more about in a moment. So what's the problem with marketing, when it comes to marketing automation most people assume that market animation is solely for marketing and they think of things like funnels and marketing campaigns and ad spend and lead acquisition and marketing automation is much much more than that marketing automation is a different way to think about ultimately your client journey which I'll talk more about in a minute. The second thing is the word automation so a lot of people assume that because automation is in the word marketing automation they think that it's set it and forget it and that it is building a machine that is gonna run itself in perpetuity without any maintenance and so forth and a lot of times that can take the human element out of it as well and the benefit of marketing automation is to automate the mundane things it's to automate the experience that you want your clients to have so that they have a consistent experience and they've got the experience that you actually have design essentially you're creating the best day your sales rep or the best day that's your marketer or the best day that you can create for your clients you're repeating that over and over and over again so when you automate those mundane things it leaves space in margin for you to create very personal experiences for your clients so rather than automating everything you can actually automate somebody to remind some of your company to do something personal like a handwritten note or send a t-shirt or whatever that is. So automation is what creates space for personalization that's actually more meaningful and it'll be able to leave a lasting impression for your clients and so forth and the third thing is this word we called blimp lamentation which is the blend of blueprinting and implementing at the same time imagine a team of contractors trying to build a home and everybody showed up at once with no blueprint and the concrete guys are trying to lay concrete and the plumbers are trying to do the plumbing and the drywalled and framer guys are trying to do their thing and so forth you would end up with a mess in an unstable house and something that wouldn't be very good and most people start their market automation by getting into a tool get into their campaign builder of whatever that is and they start trying to design while they're actually implementing and they end up with a mess. They end up with a lack of visibility and lack of reporting they end up with unstable campaigns that create an unpredictable and often under lightful customer or lead experience for people so we want to plan first and then blueprint so the solution to all this is having a clear plan creating a strategic plan of what you're trying to do so you know where you're going secondly its to get really clear on what the journey of your leads prospects and clients are by mapping that out before you start to blue in blueprint and then implement and to do that this is I think the the secret sauce pro tip here is to do that from the perspective of your clients marketing automation is about creating a journey and journeys are ultimate about experience which is getting them to know the things they need to know to believe what they need to believe to take the action that you want them to take and so you create that language and you create that journey to be as effortless and seamless as possible so that they have a great experience to do what you need them to do and tell their friends and keep coming back for more. So hope that's helpful if we can ever help you at Six Division please reach out to us and let us know how we can help you with your marketing automation in your company, to grow your sales, to save you time, and amaze your clients. Good luck! [Music]
[Music] It's Tanner Larsen, I am the CEO of Build Gross Scale and this video is the first in a vlog series of videos that I'll be doing for all you awesome peeps over at fulfillment dot com. Now I've got a ton of cool training and education and you know tips and tricks and all kinds of stuff to share with you guys but this video is going to be kind of an intro, a quick who are we, why should we listen to you and maybe if you should listen to me kind of thing. First okay so while bragging about how awesome we are and how cool we are over at BGS and how just amazing we are. I promise to also share some pretty cool tips and tricks along the way that will make this video valuable for you and make sure you get something cool out of it. All right? Now again, my name is Tanner Larsen I'm the CEO of Build Gross Scale and I've been doing direct response style, ecommerce stores, funnels things like that since early 2001. Ok? I'm basically a dinosaur in the world of online marketing and e-commerce. There's you know very few people out there that are but have been doing it longer than I have and this kind of stuff and that makes me an old man right? But at the same time I also learned a few things I learned all the crazy stuff not to do I did everything wrong but along the way I also learned a few things that worked really really well alright and I also wrote a book. I wrote the e-commerce evolved, this has basically become the Bible of e-commerce books out there. I wrote this in 2016 and it still is as true now as it was then. We've also learned some really cool stuff since then but this book is awesome. So if you need a way to put yourself to sleep at night, I highly recommend you read it or get it becasue it'll definitely put you to sleep and then if it doesn't you can always you know use it as a doorstop or something to whack you on the side of the head and to really knock yourself out. Alright now with that book okay that kind of set the stage for what we do at Build Gross Scale. Now what do we do exactly all right well we do this thing called data-driven ecommerce. Okay now that doesn't really mean much. We're a data-driven optimization company that really doesn't mean much okay but what we do is we focus on taking stores that are good and making them great. We can start with stores that are a little bit less but are real you know special zone is taken a good store and scaling them to be great . Okay now the way we do that is by making data backed decisions okay so we analyze and interpret all the data that these stores have most of these stores don't even realize they have this data or how to use it they may collect it but they don't know what to do with it. Right well that's where we come in we make sure they're collecting it the right way that the data is accurate and then we make all kinds of data back decisions using that data okay now to do this it's not just me it's not just my partner Matt we actually have 12 full-time revenue optimization experts that we're all internally trained by us that do nothing but analyze data all day long make interpretations run split tests on all these different sites okay we also have 18 full-time developers a combination of front-end back in you know GA and all these other different kinds of developers that we have in programmers that but combined with our staff their entire job is to work across a network of 12 sites running split tests and crazy tests like page layouts and functionality user testing all this different stuff all to basically help us dial into these stores and which we have basically a network of over two dozen eight-figure almost one almost nine figure stores that are all you know leveraging our team to manage their data figure out the optimizations using that data interpret the data and then create wins and stuff along the way now as a result of that you know we have roughly a thousand man-hours a week okay a thousand man-hours a week of nothing but revenue optimization data interpretation to make data back decisions the amount of data that we collect off of our stores in one week is more accurate and usable data than a normal store will probably ever accumulated in a lifetime and even if they did accumulate it most of them wouldn't know what to do with it all right now the result of this is that we've kind of become men by we I mean Bill Gross scale has become the 800-pound gorilla in the e-commerce optimization space and we work with some of the biggest clients in the world including Guffey ranker Men's Health, Discovery Channel, Scientific American, Wild Turkey whiskey and more. Okay a lot of these bigger brands we look with the smaller brands too but the big guys come to us as well because we're really the only ones who are any good at this okay and really the only ones doing it right now the secret sauce that we have that bgs so special and all of our ro spend all the time doing is a process that we developed called revenue optimization now when I say revenue optimization what people actually hear and what they think about is conversion rate optimization all right now conversion rate optimization while similar tends to really focus on like the name says the conversion rate okay and now conversion rates they're important but it's not a real truly telling metric and when you focus on CRO and the conversion rate becomes the all-important metric that you're trying to optimize for you get this kind of tunnel vision and you don't see anything outside of this tunnel. Okay but it's everything out here that's where the magic happens. Okay this is where all the really important stuff happens in a business it's outside of that tunnel vision so revenue optimization is a systematic process for optimizing the entire customer journey. Okay they land on the site, they browse the site, they make the sale and then they continue on into the back end. Okay right we optimize the entire process from start to finish, end to end okay and it's all about: presenting the right information to the user at the right time and only the right information okay because too often people focus on what they think is delivering all the information or the right information but it's actually the wrong information and they presented at the wrong time which creates roadblocks. Which creates disconnects and anytime there's a disconnect or a roadblock in a site or the buying journey you create exit points where people bounce or leave and you know just disappear from your site so our job as revenue optimization experts is to smooth that road out so it's a nice smooth racetrack and allows your business to pick up speed and grow crazy fast right. So why is revenue optimization magic? I thought I told you how. It's our process we coined the term all that stuff but why does it really matter? Okay well the best way I can describe it is to talk about something completely unrelated. Okay so this author Gary Keller he wrote a book called The One Thing. He's one of my favorite authors I'd specifically love this book the one thing now the book really is just about the simple truth behind extraordinary results okay and how everything in life really falls under there's these principles okay and it boils the book itself in he and Gary specifically boils this book down to what's the one thing that you can do such that by doing it everything else in your life or around that result becomes easier okay so what's the one thing you can focus on that makes everything else easier now in fitness and health people go to the gym they work out they diet they or they try to die they do fad diets they buy pills they do all this thing but they really focus on even they focus on new workout clothes or the newest workout routine and cardio interval training all these things right but when it comes to health and fitness the one thing that makes everything else better and creates that chain reaction of Awesomeness is diet but nobody wants to focus on diet because diet is hard now an e-commerce revenue optimization is the one thing everything your traffic your sales your retention supply chains growth and scale all of it becomes easier when you focus on just revenue optimization people go oh I got a traffic problem I just need more traffic no you have a revenue optimization problem because you can't afford to buy all the traffic that's already out there okay traffic is not your problem the problems on your site okay what happens after the click so an example all right we see thousands and thousands and thousands of brands and different ecommerce stores every single year on all kinds of platforms they're not all Shopify just all over the place now everyone like I said thinks they have a traffic problem if I could just get more traffic if I could just get my ads perform better everything would be better okay but the reality of that is you're probably already better at traffic generation then you need to be because you're working with a broken behind process that may is not optimized and if you're able to get that to work with the traffic you're already doing you're way better at traffic than you truly need to be there is an infinite amount of traffic out there but trying to hyper optimize or over optimize almost like micro manage your traffic is what you're trying to do okay and that's not helping alright because the problem isn't getting the click you can get the click the problem is converting that click into a sale that's where your problem is your problem is in the buyers journey what happens after the click once they land on your site to the time they leave your site that's where you're failing okay the real issue is that what needs to be focused on is not traffic if you focus on everything that happens after the click first traffic becomes easy it's a non-issue you can buy all the traffic that you want if you focus on after my optimizing what happens after the click first let me give you a visual to drive this home ok this is I always do better with visuals so think of your e-commerce business as a bucket okay so in this metal bucket right here now think of the traffic that that comes into your bucket as water so we're filling up our we got our bucket here we're filling up our bucket with water coming out of the hose right so all the traffic that you're saying your site's coming out of this hose into the bucket now the water that stays inside the bucket those are your sales the water that falls out that's your lost sales okay now in a perfect world we turn on the hose keep opening it up and the bucket fills up we just keep pouring more water into it and hopefully we can just keep getting a bigger bucket right it's not how the world works right it's not reality in the real world the way reality works is that your bucket your business is full of holes it's like Swiss cheese all right holes of things are that like bounce rate browse abandoned scarred abandonment issues browser segments underperforming pages tech stack issues lack of clarity and about a dozen other issues okay every single leak reduces the amount of water that stays in your bucket right you got a bucket and you poke all these holes in it okay you're still pouring traffic into it but as you're pouring traffic into it all this water it lost sales is pouring out of the bucket and the sales the one that stays in the bucket keeps dropping. Okay, so what most people do instead of fixing the bucket and sealing all the leaks, they don't do that right you don't do that what you do instead of fixing it is you try to turn up the flow. Okay let's switch from a garden hose to a fire hose let's turn up the traffic thinking that it will fill up the bucket faster then your bucket can leak okay and you just get more sales that'll solve it I'll just get more traffic well the problem is that's not how it works it's the opposite that occurs okay just like in the real world when you have a hole in something or erosion happens things like that right the more force more pressure the more water you put into the bucket the holes just get bigger the more traffic you get to your store the bigger the leaks get and the more money you ultimately lose whereas with revenue optimization you actually will stop those leaks you fix those leaks so that your bucket now they're never gonna be a perfect bucket but the idea is to patch it as much as much as possible and seal it up so that you keep more sales and lose less right so if you focus we're on revenue optimization well that stops the leak so you focus on patching those leaks so more sales say in the bucket right beat that dead horse enough right okay now the magic of doing this is without spending any more money on traffic than you already do your and your ads burn stays the same but you will make exponentially more money simply by focusing on revenue optimization and patching the leaks that means more money from the exact same traffic you're already paying for okay no increase in ad spend now most of our clients honestly they double or triple their revenue within 90 days of switching their focus from this tunnel vision or this I got to get more traffic focus to just revenue optimization so double or triple their revenue within 90 days from just switching into the focus making the one thing they focus on revenue optimization and that's all without massively scaling their ad spend. All right now to wrap this up I don't want to keep make this video any longer than it needs to be right. The secret behind being able to scale a business is maximizing revenue so that you have the cash on hand to scale now we've all heard the same right, he who could spend the most to acquire a customer wins right if you can outspend your competitor doesn't mean you have to but the ability to means you can go out there and buy more traffic that other people can't afford because your site your store is optimized. All right it's a hundred percent true this is not true no fluff but the way to do that two way to be able to actually afford that more expensive traffic is by using revenue optimization to first stop your business from losing and bleeding money. Alright so I encourage you take a step back start looking for areas in your business where you're currently leaking instead of looking for ways to keep bumping up ad spend. Fix the leaks first the ad spend will take care of itself I promise you that. Now guys I've got a lot more training promised and prepared for you guys we've got a whole bunch of videos I'm gonna make for you, Justin and I've been talking we know what we're gonna map out for you guys but this was just a real quick intro to get things going. The new videos for you guys are gonna help you implement revenue optimization in your business but for now let's wrap this intro up I hope you enjoyed this little video my name is Tanner Larsen I really enjoyed talking to you today and I'll see you in the next video! [Music]
[Music] Welcome to FDCs econ vlog my name is Chris Hibbs and I'm one of the Head Accountants at Easier Account. I'm here to share with you my experience on accounting of bookkeeping in the e-commerce industry to help you learn more so that you can earn more. Some of the most common deductions for e-commerce business are banking and merchant fees, home office, subscription cost, shipping costs, a good soul expose, the list goes on and on. Using a cloud-based accounting software makes it easier to track these expenses so that you can maximize your deductions at your end people who start an e-commerce business usually don't love accounting but have the desire to make additional income or to replace their full-time job. The number one problem that I have seen in e-commerce companies is that they don't know where their books are at on a monthly basis using a cloud-based accounting software is a great way to allow you to know how your business is doing throughout the year and streamline your account one of the most user-friendly softwares that we have found as a company called 0x e ro there are others such as wave or QuickBooks Online also GoDaddy as bookkeeping software available all of these are solutions to keep you in a great position to be able to file taxes on time and claim all the deductions that you can all of these solutions can most major bank accounts credit card companies and PayPal. One of the reasons that 0 is our preference is because it allows you to connect to your accounting solution with the other systems you are currently using such as your CRM, inventory, point-of-sale, shopping cart, invoices, billing and so much more. Monthly bookkeeping is more important than you may think because it allows you to know your numbers. Being able to make an informed decision is paramount to running a business. Jeff Bezos certainly doesn't run Amazon without having a good grasp of where the financials are. If you want to achieve success knowing your numbers is the first step bottom line to be able to reach your goals and to pay the least amount of taxes you have to know where you currently are, track progress, identify problems and make adjustments so that you can adapt and plan throughout the year. We wish you the best of luck on all your ventures. This is Chris Hibbs signing off staggering [Music]
[Music] Hello and welcome to FDC's ecommerce education vlog my name is Justin Christensen the co-founder and president of Convergent Fanatics and the number one best-selling author of Conversion Fanatic: How to double your customer sales and profits with a be testing. And today we are going to discuss the benefits of conversion rate optimization so in my 15 year career in digital marketing the only thing that I have really found to help companies get and keep a competitive advantage is conversion optimization and the only thing that I see in the marketplace is everybody screams that you need to just get more eyeballs. You need to get more traffic you know traffic is a sexier topic than getting more out of your traffic through optimization. Now the benefits of optimization are more than just improving your conversion rate. You can some of the byproducts of that are reduction in your cost per acquisition, making traffic and your paid advertising spend more effective you can get increases in average order value you're gonna lead to happier customers, less refunds, less chargebacks, and better engagement overall on your site. Now what we look for in conversion optimization is really how your visitors interact with your brand and your marketing message so we're gonna go in and measure what elements on every step of the process hold the most weight, you know? What button colors, what headlines, what layout, what images, what structure number of steps in the checkout process, the number of cross sell items, how you cross sell items ,abandoned cart issues, all of these things can be addressed with optimization instead of just pouring more ad dollars on it. Imagine if you were spending twenty thousand dollars a month on advertising or and you got say a 1 percent conversion rate. But what happens if you increase that to a 1.1 percent conversion rate on the same exact advertising dollars but your cost per acquisition goes down by 10 percent and your average order value goes up by 15 percent . How much more benefit to your business will that have? How much bigger of an impact will it have for your business? You know you can spend more to acquire customers you can spend more on traffic it becomes easier to scale your marketing campaigns versus just pouring more ad dollars on it. You know a good example of this was a company that grew very well recently and we took their conversion rate initially from 2% to 3% but then they turned on 70% more traffic and it reduced their conversion rate back down to about 2.1 percent but they had 70 percent more traffic converting at a higher rate than what they were initially and that resulted in helping the company grow over 300% in revenue over the course of the year and compounding conversions takes effect in that way. Perry Marshall the great author of you know many great books including the definitive guide to Google AdWords and the 80/20 rule of marketing, he states that optimization is the only true way to get exponential growth and we've seen it by helping over 80 companies over the last four years improve their marketing results so if you have an e-commerce company and an e-commerce store and you want to exponentially increase your results, you need to ploy the need to deploy effective conversion rate optimisation practices. Don't let a day go by that you're not actively testing something to learn and we're not just testing random things here either we're actually going out to be strategic and we're trying to find out the answer to the question, why? Why are we testing those certain things instead of oh yeah a green button converts better than an orange button, but why is that does it have better contrast to the remaining color of the pages? Does it help lead the visitors down that path of least resistance to the end goal that you want achieved? Does it lead to better engagement? And you want to figure out what those bottlenecks are and then test every possible combination and element to better understand your visitors as a result your traffic is going to become more effective your customers are going to spend more with you they're gonna be happier they're gonna convert at a higher rate you're gonna make more money and it'll lead to exponential growth in your business so don't let a day go by that you're not actively testing and figuring out and answering that question why it's the only way to get and keep a competitive advantage in today's noisy digital world so again this is Justin Christensen the co-founder and president of Conversion Fanatics and you are watching FDCs ecommerce education vlog we'll talk to you again on another video. Hope you enjoyed it, thanks! [Music]
[Music] Welcome to FDC's ecom education vlog. My name is Mike Fleming and I am the founder of Michael J Fleming & Associates. We also are known as sales tax and more and what I'd like to share with you today are some sales tax basics and why the most recent Supreme Court case this South Dakota verse Wayfair that was decided on Thursday June 21st. Why it has such an impact not only on the sales tax world but for e-commerce sellers as well I'm going to use a term called Nexus you may have heard of this before and when we use this term we simply mean some sort of link or connection with the state and it's the linker connection that has to be present before state can require you to collected sales tax or pay its income taxes and for the last 50 years when we're talking about sales tax there's got to be some sort of physical component to this linker connection so we've disagreed as to what exactly a physical component is but you know people have been protected sellers have been protected that a state just can't go out and say okay you know you need to collect our sales tax because of this. There's had to be that physical component of this linker connection now this case overturned national Bella's Hess which is a 1967 case that introduced the concept of physical presence and then quill in 1992 reaffirmed the need for physical presence you know this court didn't overturn just overturn those two cases I mean they eviscerated the whole concept of physical presence they said that the court should have never introduced it. It's an artificial construct it's it's a it actually creates problems rather than solves problems so the court erred when introducing it now what this opens up the way for is what we call an economic Nexus in other word you can have a link with a state now just by making sales into it you know and that is an absolute nightmare you could now have a responsibility to potentially collect tax in all 45 states that charge a sales tax plus Washington DC the state of South Dakota which was you know going after wayfarer and utilizing this economic Nexus they had a threshold of a hundred thousand dollars or two hundred trees actions now a hundred thousand dollars of sales in South Dakota that's a lot of money but 200 transactions that that could be a very small amount of money let's say you're selling $5 items that's only a thousand dollars so you know this can. You can see how this could get very disturbing now some people out there are saying you know the Supreme Court is going to step in unfortunately we don't have time to go into all the reasons why I don't believe this is going to happen it may happen but I just think the deck is stacked against ecommerce sellers and we will not get any movement from Congress or at least any movement that's going to appreciably help ecommerce sellers. We can you know for the Amazon sellers that can wait for Amazon but that's not going to happen overnight I think that that's a three to five year process for again a number of different reasons we can go into when we have more time. At this point there really aren't any good solutions so I think we have to start resigning ourselves that sales tax is going to be a bigger part of our lives and that we need to start planning and putting it into our budgets and into our business models one of the first things that you want to do right now is evaluate your sales by state. Second thing you want to do is start counting the number of transactions that you have and then the third thing is look at those states out there that already have thresholds in place. By the way there's only about 23 states that we need to look at right now pretty much all the states are going to start implementing this but it's going to take them you know some of them maybe 30 days but some of them may be a good 12 - 14 months. So this is going to be constantly evolving over time it's nothing to panic about there are ways forward we got to use common sense when we're looking at this in the case I mentioned earlier if you're 200 transactions only equals a thousand dollars you know who cares what the state says if it doesn't make good business sense than why do it. We have to use common sense when we're doing this. However I think the states are going to be very aggressive enforcing not only this but all the other types of neck is Nexus that are still out there and if your sales are material in any state your exposure is material then I suggest you take some action and start protecting yourself. Thanks very much I appreciate your time and look forward to sharing again soon. [Music]
[Music] What I'd like to share with you today, what fulfillment dot com asked me to come and share with you today are two revolutionary things that can change your business instantaneously and put more money in your bottom line and that's what I want to do with you I want to make you more money so we have a rebate program that we're gonna facilitate with you and we also have an issuing platform that you can take advantage of okay now I'm gonna go ahead and explain these through my stick figure drawings and hopefully you can follow along if not just watch this video again and again and again and just get my face and plant it into your brain. So you know what goes where to go back and take advantage of these programs. Number one the merchant you you have a store, now this is an e-commerce store that you guys are selling whatever it is that you're selling there there's there's an interchange cost that's associated with taking credit cards and everyone has to use a credit card because that's the only way that you can take payments online so you go ahead and generate a cost this goes to the pay certify gateway and because of the fact that we're so large and we aggravate these volumes what we actually do is we have a virtual card platform that allows us to give a rebate back to you as the merchant now this is a very exclusive program this program you have to be doing at least thirty million dollars a month in order to qualify. Now you probably don't do you thirty million dollars a month but because the fact that you deal with pay certified we're able to aggregate all of our volume and give at least give you guys the ability to participate in this program. Now what we do is we generate a virtual card that generates an interchange value of about 2.7 percent now you paid about two percent on the front end okay goes to the pay certified gateway we automatically issue this this virtual card which the consumer doesn't know about the generate it's a virtual card and we paid the third-party suppliers and we pay the third-party supplier. This interchange is generated now because you paid two percent on the front end what we're gonna do because you're such a good client we're gonna give you a portion of this rebate there's two point seven percent back to cover that initial cost so if your first if your front line cost is two percent and we're giving you two percent back we just eliminated 100 percent of your costs even if we're giving you one and a half or 1.7%. If your frontline cost is two-and-a-half to three percent we're still taking a big chunk of that problem that monetary problem at the end of the month away from you and we're adding padding massive amounts of money to your bottom line it's a very very cool program nobody else has it you only find it here at Pace certified and you can get it as soon as you click into our funnel. The other platform is our issuing platform now this is revolutionary as well we built this for the travel space but this is also built for e-commerce stores so anyone that's selling a product online like you can take advantage of this particular solution. So this guy right here is me when I wake up in the morning and what I do when I wake up in the morning is I go buy Starbucks and let's just say I'm buying Starbucks online okay or whatever it is I'm hiding online and buying it online I'm making this purchase now when I make this purchase I'd go through the gate a certified gateway which is connected while all these shopping carts out there yours included what we do is we we instantly offer a reward subsidy okay so because I'm a shopping consumer online and I'm spending of $500 or $1,000 or whatever that number is I can instantly generate generate a reward subsidy. Now we have back in channel partners that allow us to instantly pool kyc an offer and a make an offer to a consumer so at the checkout page and this doesn't affect consumer checkout or the experience of the consumers so they can take advantage of the offer or they don't have to take advantage of the offer but if your consumer and you're building up a checkout page of $1,000 okay and I'm offering you two hundred two hundred dollars off that purchase most consumers will take advantage of that now the advantage to you is because you're still getting your full thousand dollars. That subsidy is covering that discount that we're giving to them and why would they do that? Because they want that consumer as a customer to continue to spend money so we offer this discount at the purchase and when we offer this discount the purchase and convert that customer to a to now a customer of the the issuer we're generating affiliate Commission. That affiliate Commission is in split up between pay certify and you so not only are we adding value on the front end by giving your consumers a discount we're also giving them incentives to come back to your store and continue to spend money and you make a piece of that spend that the consumer does you also make a piece of that funding affiliate commissions. So if you're doing thousands of transactions a day we'll be converting about 25% of those into discounts which in which results in about twenty-five to forty dollars to you and per consumer so you can do the math and if you can you can look at your own statistics and see how much money you're actually generating as an ecommerce store then you can decide if this program is a fit for you but what I can tell you is that if you're looking to pad additional revenue and you want consumers to continue to shop at your location and spend more money day after day, month after month this is a solution that's going to put this into high gear for you and put more money in your pocket guaranteed. [Music]
[Music] Everybody welcome to FDC's Ecomm education vlog. My name is Dan Stewart and I'm the founder Happy Grasshopper. We write and deliver emails every single day of the week and I've got three tips for you they're gonna make all of your emails better. First and this is super super important make absolutely sure that you know your purpose for sending the email there's a big difference between a first touch and a message that's going to someone that's weeks deep in your sales call. So be very clear about who's reading the message and why and know what your number one outcome for that messages and you'll get a much better result. Second you've got to know your audience understand their pain why is it that they've reached out to you in the first place? Why is it that they've raised their hand and out of all the places they could go in the internet they're looking at you? If you can speak to that conversation that they're already having you're gonna win with your email so know your audience and finally and this is super important keep your message short. You want to make sure that every single message you send is easy to read on a mobile phone. That's where most emails are consumed today, so keep your message brief. Boil it down to one specific point, be absolutely clear what your goal is and by that I mean what is your most desired action on their part what is the thing you want them to do. Structure emails to where it will achieve that thing and nothing else and you'll get a much better response from myristic so enjoy the vlog. [Music]
[Music] Years ago I was asked to represent a line of cleaning products on a national network and it was the first time anybody had seen these cleaning products before. They they've never experimented with them, it didn't have a big following, it wasn't a brand anybody recognized but the products really worked well. However I told the vendor I was working with this package is not going to sell and he said to me, why it's a great product it, works well. I said yes you're right we have great demonstrations, we have good testimonials, but it's not gonna sell regardless of how good it works and he said why? I said because it's too complicated when we came out on the air at the beginning of our presentation and we were trying to tell people what they were going to get when they ordered it it was a cleaning product that came in a bottle of concentrate and could be diluted into three different mixtures one for light duty medium duty or heavy duty each one would make a different number of bottles it also came with a sponge it came with a microfiber cloth it came with two different sprayers one that would spray inverted 300 180 degrees one that would foam when you sprayed it it also came in four different flavors you could choose like Abba lavender scented or the Apple scented or all these different things. Oh my gosh there's no customer on the planet that's going to do the mental calisthenics to try and figure out which one they want to buy! Nobody would! They will tune out, they will walk away rather than do the mental work. You need to make your offer very easy to understand the moment it becomes complicated you've lost just about everybody because they don't want to work hard they want it to be easy. Now what he was offering might have made sense if he was doing a big event and it was going to be shown all day long and he had a very well-established brand and he really didn't need to educate people on who he was or what the product was about it all just made sense he had an enormous following I mean if selling vacuum cleaners and he is Dyson it can be about as complicated as he needs it to be it doesn't really matter it's Dyson, right? Well it was a problem with this new brand and if you're trying to draw in new customers if you're trying to draw in people who are gonna use your product or service for the first time but your offers are not really easy to understand you're shooting yourself in the foot. Make your offer extremely easy for your customer to interpret make it so that they can choose the one they want in ten seconds flat here I have a cleaner it comes in this bottle you can choose this one or this one pick the one you want BAM done. We would have sold a million of them. We didn't sell a million of them as a matter of fact no matter how many warnings I gave that particular manufacturer before we went on air with his product it didn't matter he wouldn't change the offer and the offer went through the floor but guess what it was brought back later with a very simple offer and it's skyrocketed. I have to get myself a little pat on the back for that one. Make sure your offer is simple it'll mean a huge escalation in your sales. [Music]
[Music] Follow the FDC's ecom education blog. My name is Katherine I'm an office administrator here at Avensis. Partnering with the right call center is critical because it's likely the only physical real-time contact your customers will have with your brand. Unfortunately you don't have the time or resources to run your online business and build out a high functioning call center. That is why so many successful online and traditional businesses partner with boutique domestic BPOs to engage their customers. Follow these eight steps when partnering with the call center to achieve consistent high-quality user experience that will differentiate your business. Step one: create a culture of trust. For your feedback to be successful your customer service Account Manager and your internal auditing team must be on the same page before beginning examine your company's core values as well as the bodies of the team you're using to communicate on behalf of your brand to the whole world. How do they influence your culture and guide behavior? Our team members focused on other successes as well as their own is your Account Manager rewarded for helping your business grow professionally in a recent study by Paul Jay Zack a Harvard researcher, he discovered that compared to people at low trust companies, people at high trust companies report seventy-four percent less stress and 40% less burnout. High quality support starts with high quality employees. So creating a culture of trust is key to any outsource to customer service model. Step two: defined quality. Including your new team and conversation that that defined quality creates a shared understanding. Use real life call examples to generate discussion. For example, if everyone agrees that empathy and listening are important, how to call responses , demonstrate empathy and listening if the customer shares an experience or an emotion, does the team member responding to the customer reflect that emotion? Does the team member create a rapport with the customer? Step 3: create rubrics and determine benchmarks. Create rubrics and weigh the criteria according to your values. If you have decided in steps one and two that professionalism is important add this to your rubric determine if it is more important than correctness or empathy for example rubrics work best when there are no more than four to five criteria some of the best rubrics we see include correctness is the response correct completeness did the team member answer the customers questions empathy the team member or personalized their response it acknowledged the customers feelings and professionalism. Did the team member demonstrate good email etiquette? Find a range of customer responses that you can use as benchmarks, as a group evaluate the responses based on the rubric you created this benchmarking exercise generates a second discussion of quality and gives team members practice using the rubric. Step four: make your team reflect on their own customer responses. Research in the fields of business and education has demonstrated the importance of reflection and learning in your article why you should make time for self reflection even if you hate doing it Jennifer Porter asserts that reflection allows us to pause, sort through all of our experiences and observations and create. Meaning which then becomes learning. Researchers found that call centres demonstrated that employees who spent 15 minutes the end of each day reflecting about lessons learned performed 23 percent better after 10 days than those who did not reflect making time for reflection in the peer review process prepares team members to learn. Step 5: make sure your account manager trains your team on how to provide feedback. Make sure your account manager knows what good effective feedback looks like sharing specific examples. Good feedback should focus on what their team member did what the effect was and what steps they could take next feedback should be specific and in the case of criticism it should include suggestions for improvement here's a couple of examples when you told the customer that they were having an issue they immediately became defensive. Next time consider placing the blame on the device rather than the customer which diffuses the situation when you share your personal experience with the customer you reduce the tension. Great work. Step 6: begin your review and share feedback you or your own Quality Assurance team should be proactive in defining quality and giving your contact center the opportunity to reflect on their own responses. By doing this we avoid surprises in the feedback process team members know how their calls will be evaluated beforehand. Once your review process is done it's best to make sure your team is afforded a second opportunity for reflection that captures what they learned during the peer review process. How did the call centers self-assessment compare to your assessment? Use this reflection to guide goal setting as well as training for Optimax a prototype optics manufacturer with revenues of 30 million dollars the answer is team based performance reviews. They avoid potential pitfalls by giving the reviewers clear guidelines and by contrasting the employees self review with peer reviews so they can compare self perception with team perception that also helps the reviewers to stay objective in the process they act as coaches relaying information step 7 provide training based on the results of their review it may seem like common sense but I can't tell you how many contact centers drop the ball on this. Use your feedback to train and retrain your call center team tying their training to your review process demonstrates the relevancy of the quality assurance process collecting data enables you to offer training opportunities to a whole team if for example we see patterns that indicate that more training is needed on the etiquette alternatively individual team members can pursue training to strengthen specific areas based on feedback from their peers. Tracking this data over time demonstrates growth for both teams and individuals. In conclusion remember to repeat steps four through seven as often as possible you're creating your own well loyal customer service machine you'll find that by doing this that you're consulting your rubrics and your benchmark standards that you already created less and less off well MPs ratings might be great rubrics it doesn't really answer the ultimate question that you as an entrepreneur need to answer is your customer service up to your business's standards by partnering with the right customer contact term by holding them accountable in the right way you're gonna keep these bells ringing and your customers happy all the time. Thank you so much for joining Aventis today at FDC University we're really happy to have you and share some of our knowledge with you. [Music]
[Music] Hey welcome to FDC's ecom education vlog. My name is Tom Suckman and I'm the Business Development Manager here at Clickbank. Today I'm gonna share with you the top three questions I get when I'm helping new clients and new entrepreneurs get spun up on Clickbank in the direct response space so that I can help you learn more so you can earn more. So first question I get almost all the time even if I'm out on the road or from you or come across from this is like hey is my product a good fit for Clickbank? Is my product a good fit for affiliate marketing? Is it a you know is it gonna convert well with your affiliates? And my answers also is almost always yes like yeah it's a via the products great right there's very few people out there who really make bad products, if you believe in something and you believe it can help people it's gonna be a good product. Like I have no doubt the issue is is that it's not about the product it's about the pain points your product is solving for the customer and how you're marketing that product. Okay it could be a shed like I don't care like it's like a diesel shed and direct-response you can't get a good copywriter, what are those pain points for it? Okay so it's about the copywriting it's about the front-end sales page that's gonna drive that cold traffic to a conversion. The next one is usually, what commission do I need to pay an affiliate? That's a great question like it sits I wouldn't know to answer that you know three years ago before I kind of got on board here at Clickbank. So what commission do you need to pay? It's also the wrong question. Okay because it's a big variable that changes a lot. What I at my short answer to this is get comfortable paying up to a hundred percent of your margin. The reason for that is competition, quote unquote, is different for any niche and even some you know sub niches are different so that guy might be paying forty five bucks but your product might be so unique and address such a different pain point that this affiliates gonna email for both of you and it's not gonna compete with one another in his pipelin, okay? But but if you are a weight loss offer going up against a weight loss offer both are talking to keto and very specific in similar ways then yeah you might need to bump your commission up ten more percent to get your average cart value or to get the average cart value to the affiliate higher so the Phillies wanting mail for you more versus this guy over here, right? So it's variable but be comfortable going up to hundred percent. Next thing and final question is kind of like do you know any affiliates? Will test my offer? Hey, you have put all this money into copywriting and put all this money into or you know Ries time and energy into copywriting or whatever it might be and building out this funnel. Do you know any affiliates who can mail for me? Who can test it? Yeah I know a lot of affiliates like any big network or anyone working in a big network or who's in the space for wellzyn. I know some big affiliates to test it I don't want an intro a big affiliate or even a new affiliate to an offer that hasn't been tested already though, right? When you give someone a referral to an offer you should know and if it's your offer you should have a very high degree of confidence that if they've got a decent audience for it and they can be the judge of that right but if they have a good audience for it it's going to convert because you've done your part you've done your testing. Okay so it's I don't want to burn any bridges for myself and I don't want to I certainly don't wanna burn any bridges for you and making connection to an unproven offer that's not gonna convert well and then that affiliates gonna go off and he's never gonna promote you again or that would suck so how do you get affiliates the test and how do you get traffic to test if you don't have a traffic source already Network get out there go to traffic and conversion and go to affiliates summits go to all these industry events once I click Bank hosts and other platforms host meet affiliates meet vendors and offer owners with similar lists to yours or similar audiences to yours right and help them first so they'll help you later okay there's gonna be knowledge you have that you can impart or do something that you can do for them that's gonna unlock something and they'll be happy to send for you and happy to test traffic for you so those are the questions I get most commonly but I would love to hear from you and what questions you have so leave a comment below let me know what questions you have about affiliate marketing it can be as beginner or as advanced as you wanted to be I'll go cut my teeth on them yeah it's been great, it's been real, it's been real great. I'm Thomas, stay green. [Music]
Reading the book, you got an amazing quote that I think fits so if you take everything you're talking about now, it's just a theory, if I gave it to someone, their business would fail, but you immediately continue with all these specific things, and I I think the first thing I learned from the book was to understand that I was at the beginning of my journey, I was a technician who had an entrepreneurial fit, and I was not an entrepreneur, so explain to these guys what you mean by this list of each business owner and those, who is our technical manager and entrepreneur - these are three personalities, but when you realize that most people going into business are not really entrepreneurs, they don't have a dream, they don't have a vision, they don't have a goal, I don't have a mission, they want to get a job, they want to be self-employed, so they want to get rid of the boss so get rid of the boss and create your own, everyone knows what I'm talking about, because you believe you know how to do the job, meaning your photographer, so I can get rid of the boss and become a photographer, open my own establishment and take pictures, and you know how to accept photos, so it's obvious that you are a photographer, you open your doors, but what you didn't realize is that you are a photographer, a technician suffering from an entrepreneurial fit, but you have no idea that there are all these other functions of this photographic business called manager, marketing, sales, money the problem of most small businesses is that the founder of the business - a technician suffering from an entrepreneurial fit, and that's why most small businesses fail for that very reason, so we need to develop manager skills, and we need to develop odd skills, if my business is not here to do something for someone else that is important to someone else, then this is the wrong business.
[Music] Welcome to FDC's ecom education blog. I'm Nikki Peraltas Senior Account Manager here at Aventis. Today I'm going to go over three hints that every merchant needs to know in order to optimize their relationship with their customer contact center. This will help you learn more so you can earn more those three hints are scripting and deployment, technology integration and taking the partnership seriously. First to talk about scripting and appointment let's get with Scotland. Hey how are you? Good, how are you? Good, so why don't you tell me a little bit about the importance of scripting for our e-commerce clients. Yeah so it's really important three C's customized, consistency and compliance. So when we talk about customization it's really important that it's based on the product, it's based on a client and specifically, you're able to make adjustments for a conversation so it's not about just reading it, it's about being able to use transitional phrases, it's about being able to customize everything based on what the product does, what it looks like everything you're able to do there. So when we talk about consistency we want to make sure that all of the agents regardless of the location they're in are telling the customer exactly the same information. You don't want all different information being made up or anything going out there that's not the message that you want for your brand in fact that when we talk about compliance you don't want rogue agents out there talking about all different things you want terms and conditions in the script so that everyone's saying exactly the same thing. Wow that was some really good stuff let's go with Brain Pharaoh and talk about technological integration hey ray miss pross hi sorry I'm doing very well thank you, have a seat. We were just talking to Scott about the importance of scripting for our e-commerce entrepreneurs that's some good stuff definitely and we wanted to give the importance of technological integration. Well that's excellent that's excellent that we came to buy today's ecommerce entrepreneurs need that call center is integrated as possible with all their vendors that includes CRMs, fulfillment centers, even manufacturers to KPIs you have to look at when you're integrating with the call center is integration in optimization. 1. Can your agents integrate with your existing platform? 2. Can they improve upon the status quo? If your agents are worried about anything else like trying to learn a new piece of technology but your business has already been using you're already behind the eight ball you need to make sure your contact center works in partnership with all your other major vendors and can do that in concert whether it's verifying addresses for the fulfillment provider or going in and programming these SKUs in their CRM your contact center should be there for you to help you every step of the way. Wow those are some really informative points thanks. Right would you stop my enjoining me in the conference room so we can talk about our third and final point which is taking the partnership seriously absolutely for our third point and our most important point I wanted to talk to you guys about taking the partnership seriously. What do you think from our experience is most critical between a client and its call center? I think calibration is probably one of the most important pieces because you want your contact center to be an extension of your brand. Scott's 100% right and Nikki you do bring up a great point that that is the most important thing finding the synergy between client and call center. Ken that call center can that contact center being extension of your brand do they know in your business model can they integrate with all your vendors and actually be that ambassador that extra extension of who you are was actually on the front lines fighting with the customers the people providing you with that revenue that's the most important point to look for when you're looking for a contact center remember everyone companies that have figured out how to delight their customers but their service are winning in the marketplace so keep empowering keep challenging and keep innovating because when you're green you grow and when you're ripe you rock. This is Nikki Peralta signing off. Stay green! [Music]
[Music] [Music] So it's really really important here is like so many people right now running traffic fall under this little cool growing leaf that I've so beautifully illustrated here everyone's focus is I got a product I'm gonna drive my ads to my product page and I'm just gonna keep hitting people buy my product buy my product go here by this and that's the bubble that they they live in right just driving traffic to product page. Hopefully they buy and they don't going to retarget out of them until they either say it's unhelpful my fruit my brother and score goes on to to or until they buy. The problem is that already had a problem before what happened with Facebook and last we can have it is getting more and more expensive to run. Facebook traffic it's an auction-based platform and as all of you know we take an economics class in college or high school; supply and demand right supply on facebook on the ad side has remained pretty constant fix rule hasn't grown that much. Newsfeed inventory has been saturated for a while now Facebook's basically like hey can't serve any more ads without ruining user experience we're capping it demands kept going up demand keeps going up and up and up that's why the holidays you see ad cost spike and so ad costs have gone up. CPAs are gone, ops got more expensive and so driving people to a product page,it's just it's too expensive to work. That coupled the fact that if you don't have a brand, if you're not Apple or Coke or Nike or Pepsi,Under Armor, people don't know your brand they don't know who you are then although you're selling and they're buying a solution to a problem at that point unless your Nike or Apple when it comes with oh wait in line to buy your new iPhone which I do every time luckily I got a business right now so I don't do any lines anymore but I used to. People are don't care about your Aliexpress product they don't care about that print-on-demand t-shirt people are buying solutions to problems, right? I think we all get a little too focused on the platform like Facebook is an app platform you can do dynamic product ads and you can pixel and you can do manual bidding all the stuff at the end of the day Facebook's a medium it's a way for brands and businesses to get a message to people and to nurture and sell those people right so whether it's direct mail TV billboards which Billie Jean still runs billboard you use the billboards works right Facebook there's a way to do that. So you need to be able to actually agitate problems you need to actually educate consumers they need to know that they're looking for your solution and that your product is just a solution they don't carry a product at the point because the problems been agitated so effectively that they see your product, hey that's the solution this guy's been nurturing you with content he's gonna hit me videos with articles and at the point now where I'm actively looking for a solution and there's our product. [Music] Thank you
[Music] Welcome to FDCs ecom education blog. My name's Oliver Kenyon and I'm the co-founder a landing page guys calm and today I want to share with you our top five tips on how to build high converting landing pages. Let's get straight into it okay so you're joining me on my screen and I'm going to break down the five most important that we feel most important conversion tips to increase your conversion rates on your landing pages this is five of many over here the landing page guys but these are the five that we feel you can get some quick wins with and and you will see some results very quickly we'll jump straight into it. Number one is page speed I'm going to read this stat one second increase in load speed is a two percent up the lift in conversions so what that means is for every second your website loads quicker or landing page blows quicker you'll see a - it's actually we've tested this two to seven percent up lifting conversion which is crazy really really quick way of upping your conversions how do you do it head to GT metrics common input your landing page URL it's going to spit out how quickly your page loads and then going to break down how you can increase those speeds it's that simple. Number two responsiveness now responsiveness is nothing new obviously mobile and tablet has been around for a long time now however we're not just talking about making your landing page adapted to mobile and tablet resolutions we're also talking about making adapted to all screen resolutions so making sure that it looks good on all different sized screens whether that's an iMac 11 inch or 21 inch screen any size monitor make sure that your page is adaptive to to those screens the other thing here is we're not just talking about responsiveness we're talking about actually optimizing your mobile version so if you've got a mobile version of your website that or landing page make sure it's actually optimized for the mobile experience. You can do this by kind of breaking down hiding elements and making sure the user experience on the mobile and tablet is as good if not better than your desktop don't just make it don't just make it responsive make it optimized responsive for mobile and tablet. Number three cross browser compatibility and this is one we see a loss of our clients to get make sure that your landing page is cross-browser compatible make sure it looks good on all of the all of the browsers in front of you on this picture. 71% of users still use so I use Chrome and that's probably a little higher now but the rest use these other browsers so make sure that your page loads good on all of these browsers test it yourself download all these browsers. But another thing you can do is Google browser shots use that tool it's a really good tool you again like GT metrics put in your landing page URL and it's gonna spit out how your landing page looks across all these different browsers we've had clients come to us especially target the older generation and who still use the dreaded Internet Explorer and stuff like that and their buttons call to actions forms everything are missing from those browsers so always double-check number for positioning making sure your value proposition is very very strong 84% of your visitors won't scroll further unless you're above the fold proposition is strong. So what this means is you need to get across above the fold is exactly what you do hit hard hit home make it obvious don't put any distractions and pique their interest now speaking on this I'm going to take you to the next slide because this feeds in but making sure that value proposition is strong is crucial otherwise people don't scroll down. ADA principle now this one is one of our favorites is probably the the one that we feel is most important. Now to use a psychology and user journey flowing them through that page to that call to action whether that's at the top at the bottom you should always repeat that call to action what's this stands for attention interest desire action and I'm going to quickly run through these attention making sure you have that strong value proposition. Look at our example this is our old website. Increase your business sales and conversions so people come into the landing page guys want to increase their sales through landing pages that convert we've already got that attention by having that clear you know title at the top then we pick their interest with the features and benefits and you want to focus more on benefits and features. Yes show your features that's great what your product does but always talk about benefits to the user we've outlined them and we get their desire how do we do this while using trust and social proof so for us it's a portfolio, it's testimonials. When it comes to testimonials always use all organic testimonials get real people people, real persons and you don't want real quotes, no stock photos nothing like that and use this trust and social proof to lead people down to that strong call to action we've got them now we want them to take action let's give this the them the easiest route to do whatever it is. Click a button to buy a product, a form to submit, whatever it is give them the easiest route to do it and call to action and that's the ADA principle and you should definitely be using this in your landing pages so that's five of a lot of tips that we can give you to increase your conversion rates on your landing pages. Thank you for listening please get in touch. Thanks to fulfillment dot com and always stay green and I'll speak to you soon. Thank you [Music]
[Music] welcome to FDC's ecomm blog. My name is Chris Hibbs and I am one of the Head Accountants here at Easier accounting. I am here to share with you my experience on accounting and bookkeeping in the e-commerce industry to help you learn more so that you can earn more. After 26 years the Supreme Court has ruled on June 21st, 2018 that States can impose sales tax on ecommerce sellers the vote was a five to four decision that was in favor of brick-and-mortar businesses who have long complained at the disadvantages of having to charge sales tax while most online retailers haven't had to those who will feel the biggest pinch are the small to medium detailers instead of the big companies who have been paying sales tax because of their warehouses and stores in almost every state. This is how it can affect you for example if you are located in California and sell a product to someone in this state of Utah you then would be required to make sure that the state of Utah gets the sales tax for the product you sold just so you're aware there are five states that don't have any sales tax Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon. All other states will have some sort of sales tax and each state could be a different amount, this is what makes it hard to track it by yourself or in a spreadsheet. Don't panic there are several software companies that are available if you plan on tracking it yourself. The three main software providers are tax jar, tax a five and a Valero tax jars built for small to medium sized companies and we have found it to be a better software for our e-commerce clients tax. If I and a valera are built to support the larger companies and with that said also have a larger price tag to go with it if the thought of tracking your own sales tax is too daunting or you just don't have the time to do so we would recommend the use an accounting firm that you feel the most comfortable with that specializes in sales tax like all things in the e-commerce industry sales tax laws will continue to evolve and it is important as an ecommerce entrepreneur to keep up to date on the new rulings and laws. We hope that this helps you put in place a system that works for you. This is Chris Hibbs signing off staggering [Music]
[Music] Welcome to FDCs ecommerce education blog. Hi my name's Richie Hale and I'm the Chief Innovation Officer. I've touched CR in this video I'd like to share a patent-pending process to significantly reduce, well actually eliminate chargebacks. That's right is eliminate chargebacks. As we all know chargebacks are the digital poison of any e-commerce company. You generate a lead, convert them to a customer and ship the product then days or weeks later actually up to six months your customers that decide that they didn't want the product in the first place so rather than call your company and ask for a refund which you gladly and cheerfully fulfill. Your customer calls their bank and disavows any knowledge of the transaction taking place in the first place. Of course the bank sides with their customer and immediately issues a charge back to the merchant, you and exceed the 1% threshold when you have a digital target on your back but what if theres a way to change the chargeback game. Well if there's a way to stop charge backs at the source before they ever leave your customers bank. Well I'm happy to say there is, by using a technique well known to the industry and applying it properly to the front end transactions we can actually eliminate charge backs. The secret is simple: two-factor authentication Two-factor authentication is a method of confirming a user's identity by utilizing a combination of two different factors, the first factor something they know; the password credit-card details, their address; the second factor is something unique to the transaction in this case a six digit code sent to their mobile phone that the answers have verified their identity. So let's review the process as part of your order form be sure to require the customers mobile phone number this is critical to the process then when the customer proceeds to the next step they fill in their credit card details and select the Pay Now button then the fun begins the customer receives an SMS message on their mobile phone with a six digit authentication code they're asked to enter this code on the checkout screen which now contains a pop-up like this the customer enters the six digit verification code and they're done of course you can gamify this process if you like buffering a free gift exciting information a contest and so on once entered the confirmation page appears and the transaction is complete. Congratulations you've just processed a credit card transaction validating the customer's identity using two-factor authentication. Now to be clear this will not eliminate true fraud and the credit card stolen. However what this process does is prevent the customer who made the purchase from committing a fraudulent act by filing a false filing. A false claim in other words the bank knows this is a two-factor authentication transaction therefore if the customer calls the bank with no knowledge of the transaction the bank has a fiduciary responsibility not to allow the customer to file a false claim nor can the bank so the bank will most likely suggest that the customer call your company and ask for a full refund. Of course this is a simple quick overview of the process if you'd like more details on how to use this for your company please contact us at info at touchier. Thank you very much. [Music]
[Music] - Jeremy Adams here co-founder of Unicorn Innovations and co-founder of Unicorn IQ which is the hat I'm wearing. And today I want to talk about one of our favorite subjects to talk about it's how we live our lives and how all the people we have partnerships with a new consulting with and do training for it's something we stress all the time and that's customer lifetime value and to really just break down customer lifetime value into three steps you know and I'm gonna share those three steps but actually let me backtrack you know customer lifetime value if you don't know is pretty self-explanatory but it's either in depending on how you calculate it at different businesses are different the amount of profit made over the lifetime of a customer or the amount of revenue which could be one purchase it could be three months it could be three years business models vary but it's the lifetime value either profit or revenue that customer will give you and focusing on the lifetime value is what typically separates the eight and multiple a figure businesses and above and the six and seven figure business is an actually shooting this with like a crazy storm going on right now so three steps. Number one: stop worrying so much about your initial cost acquire customer you can't be looking at random Facebook ads and things seeing these four or five X returns and you're at a two X return and you're super mad about you can't scale your campaigns at four X just we do a lot of like high-level paid traffic consulting and you know our most successful customers sometimes only are only making a little bit of money around a break-even sometimes even losing money on that initial purchase but that's okay because you want to pay a little more to get a quality customer so don't worry so much about your initial cost to acquire customer and that leads them to number two which is the reason you don't have to worry about it that much is because you have your long-term game. Your long-term game figure it out now, we spent weeks and weeks just for our unicorn cube rain coming up with a year-plus automation of upsells for affiliate products that we use internally and for service providers that we use and you know it's very value focused this isn't just selling. Selling its we put videos on how we use them in our business and how they've been able to help us know we have a super long term focus you know if you have a product of any kind you know if there's a continuity option put a continuity option in place or upsell the continuity right if you didn't get it on that initial purchase if there are higher priced items you can solve that customer that you offer great if there's Christmas specials if there's Easter specials break. You know this is an opportunity to build out your long-term game if there's strategic partnerships you can make with companies that offer other products that sell to the same type of client you have, great you know, figure out your long-term game so you can make money off that customer for for hopefully years to come and then again you're not so much worried about the the initial costs to acquire that customer. Number three and this one is is a very important one and it's one of the the hardest ones that even sometimes personally I've had challenges with the last couple years have been different and it's been huge in our success and businesses value things like brand equity and quality word of mouth in your industry even though you may be breakeven on that that that front end and you you know may not be making as much as you want long term yet you're still trying to test things. You know when people are seeing your ads when people are telling their friends about how good your product or services there's so much value to that and eventually that's gonna snowball to additional opportunities for example we run a lot of traffic to our unicorn IQ Academy to our Facebook. Of course there are days when we are not profitable and we're really mad you know we're not like we don't print goal here we do very well we've had a lot success and we're scaling really nicely now but we're not perfect but from that brand equity people will reach out and say hey we saw your ads we did some research would you like to partner up in this company of ours or hey would you you know we're uh you know twenty million dollar company we're looking to scale 250 million would you like to partner with us and help us so there's there's so many things outside of your initial offer so many benefits you know we've actually brought on some of our team members because they loved our mission they reached out do you have any opportunities and we hired them and they're great team members because they just love their mission a level we were doing so just value things like your reputation and brand equity and all those things that you really can't put on a profit and loss statement. So hopefully this was helpful definitely reach out to me if you want to connect any anybody with fulfillment dot com is awesome so we were always looking to connect with people in that community and thanks for watching! [Music]
[Music] Welcome to FDCs ecomm education vlog, my name is Justin Christensen the Co-founder and President of Conversion Fanatics and the number one best-selling author of Conversion Fanatic: How to double your customer sales and profits with a/b testing and today I wanted to talk about the anatomy breakdown of what goes into creating an effective product page on your ecommerce store. Now we're in the world of Shopify and we're in the world of all of these other elements but a few of the key things that you need to pay attention to are first, very high quality professionally taken product images and the more the better. So the problem we have with e-commerce is that we don't have the luxury of people coming in and trying on our product or touching and feeling it and holding it and experiencing it before they make that buying decision. So we need to take the best approach that we can to let them experience it through the images so show the image or, show the product from all angles, show comparison size of the product, show people you know wearing the product or using the product the more that you can provide that to them the better off you're gonna be. The next step is do a clear and concise title of the product, don't give be gimmicky or you know sales are you're tricky just tell them exactly what this product is next is if you have reviews on the page be sure to highlight those reviews up near the title. You know a star rating usually in gold, take a page out of Amazon things like that but then move on to a very short description and don't talk about too much of the features of the product but tell exactly what that product is going to do leading with the benefits of those products, then make sure we have a very simple and easy to consume and easy to digest and easy to use selection option so if you have size and color breakdowns and things like that don't be tricky in that process you know make it very simple for your visitors to select and know that they need to make that selection next or first before they can move on to the next step. Another thing that you can do is or one thing you should be doing is make sure that you have a very strong contrasting big bold call-to-action button that helps lead that visitor down the next path you can also leverage things like your guarantee shipping times you know, security , you know satisfaction guarantee, made in the USA all of these other things but leverage them as icons because people on the product pages don't necessarily read so the shorter breakdowns that you can have on your paragraphs and the imagery and things like that the better off you're gonna be. Next below on for a little bit further down on the page make sure that you are recommending additional products. Another way to really ramp up your average order value is to actually create bundles you know take a page right out of Amazon and say frequently bought together you can actually create bundles on that specific page and we've seen up to 30 or 40 percent increase in average order value, just by giving them an additional complimentary product for sale directly on that page. So hey buy the bundle you want to buy this product but why don't you just buy this bundle instead and save 10% or whatever you can do to incentivize them to push them down but next break it down a little bit further by your product description and features and you know maybe a little bit more about your guarantee and anything you can do and then have your reviews break down further on the page then on mobile one thing that people don't pay attention to is they have a mobile responsive site so they just think they're good. Well in fact you're not good the way things stack up specifically on stores like Shopify is the theme doesn't always stack things in the right order so on mobile make sure that you have your title and your reviews above the image. Chances are that will help increase your results. Show the images, have an easy breakdown on mobile with a carousel the image not too big allow them to zoom, mouse over zoom, something incredibly effective versus a click to zoom and then make sure your call-to-action and your and stuff is up higher on the page so it's a very easy to see if you can get it above the fold the better off you're gonna be there. So that's just a few tips that I have to make an effective product detail page. Be sure that you're testing those elements and not just making the changes and if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me. Myself and my team are happy to help and help you get more results out of your product detail pages. Thanks for watching [Music]
I discovered years ago before I started my company in 1977 - yes that's how old I am - that businesses don't work, the people who own them do. Get this again businesses don't work the people who own them do and unfortunately the people who own them are doing the wrong work. Yes, you. Please don't take this personally unless you would truly like to have the circumstances of your business and your life completely transformed. Now I don't speak about this again academically I speak about this from the street we have worked with over 75,000 small business clients in 134 countries, my books have been read by over 8 million readers - not nearly the same as pastor Rick but the fascinating part about that is that Pastor Rick read my book and Pastor Rick was the first to tell me that when he introduced me last year to TEDx and said I wanted to introduce you to the man who wrote the book I built my church on. Well he built his church on another book but if you're going to build a church that's got to work in the world there is no more important book to read than my book. Now hear me please when I say this, I'm a wandering jew. Pastor Rick did say this in a meeting that i can fix that but when I say that by reading my book you can transform your business I don't mean that sort of I mean that absolutely. People come up to me and said I read your book it changed my life I read your book had changed my life. When business people come up to me and say this please I'm not selling books, if you understand this is not to sell a book if you didn't know the e-myth when you came here and all of you owned a business then you really have a problem. What I'm really saying is that the book speaks about very specific point of view that in fact will alter the way you think about your business from this day forward. My intent here in the hour that I have is that you will walk out of this room if I never meet you again with the most powerful idea you have ever heard that in fact is more than an idea it's an absolute fact and is at the core of every great company in the face of this earth. Core of McDonald's the cola core of Walmart, the caller core of Starbucks, the core of every extraordinary company in the face of this earth and you might say yeah but I'm not in the hamburger business, I'm not a retail store, I don't sell coffee, I don't sell tea yeah but none of them do either so this is what I want you to write down, please write this down every single one of you. If you're seriously here for a serious reason - seriously understand in fact what it is that enabled Pastor Rick from a word old perspective to build the most extraordinary church in this country this is the expression go to work on it not in it please write that down go to work on it capital o n not in it. I've been saying this for years, I implore you to hear it, go to work on it not in it [Music]
[Music] [Music] E-comm Education Blog my name is Ben and I'm the marketing director at No Issue. Today we're gonna talk a little bit about custom packaging. So what is custom packaging, what different types and methods there are of using custom packaging and finally how custom packaging can help you. So first things first let's talk about what custom packaging actually is so, ordinarily a box will arrive at your doorstep it'll look something like what, that's a regular brown box. What you want is something a little bit more special, something that says a little bit more to your customer. Looks something like this, a custom box isn't necessary for your brand but it does say a lot about what your brand represents it gives your customer something special, something a little bit extra and it makes it almost like a little surprise when it comes to the doorstep they'll be happy to get it. What are some different packaging types? Let's see, you've got tissue, stickers, boxes, tape, ribbons, a personalized note, packing peanuts or styrofoam. Pretty much anything that goes into that box when it's on its way to the customer, including the box that's the type of packaging. With all those different options for packaging there are a few more variables you're gonna have to consider when it comes time to making a decision on what you want your custom packaging to be. The first one is always gonna be cost because you're printing something customized and special for your brand it's gonna cost more than just a regular brown box package or plain tissue paper. The next thing you have to think about is the time so it takes a little bit more time to print on a box especially when that's a custom printed item for you and that means they have to make a new dye line and ship it to you so that's always gonna take a bit longer than a typical brown box and last but not least you've got to think about the quantities of the packaging that you're ordering. So this will influence both the cost of what you're finally gonna go with and your choices as to what packaging you use. For instance a box might come in a minimum order quantity of a thousand boxes. That's a lot of boxes, especially considering that a box can cost up to five dollars per unit, with that whole order you're paying about $5,000 just for your packaging. On the flip side you could go with ribbons which obviously cost a lot less but they don't really cover your entire product so trying to wrap something in a ribbon isn't really practical. Tissue on the other hand is a great little middle ground where what you get is something that can wrap your entire product at a low cost. Your minimum order quantities are important to think about because if you can get something at 250 units that can end up influencing what you go with in your packaging decisions. One last thing to consider is the environmental impact that your packaging has. Now this is just a note but there's a lot of plastic in current packaging and if you can reduce the amount of plastic you're using or in some way use recycled materials or anything else that has a positive environmental impact can be beneficial for your brand and for the Earth. And that brings us to the last point which is what can custom packaging do for your brand? Well the first thing is your customer is going to get an amazing unboxing experience. That's when they get the package, they open it up and it fosters a sense of curiosity and care that you've put into your packaging. In a dot-com distribution study this actually proved to increase customer loyalty as well as repeat purchases and those repeat purchases as you know are always going to be better than trying to go out and find a new customer. I bring this to our next point which is that people are gonna share it on social media any time you see someone having an unboxing video on YouTube that's because they've gotten a package that's amazing and looks great and they want to share that with their friends. Now the last point is that as a brand when you send out a custom packaged item you're actually making your brand seem more upscale. You're impressing people with the thought and the time that you've put into their experience and that's always gonna be beneficial and look good when it comes to your brand. Hopefully you've learned a little bit more about custom packaging, what it is, what to think about when you're ordering it, what different types there are and ultimately how it can help your business. From us at No issue that's a wrap! [Music]
[Music] Welcome to Fulfillment dot coms ecomm education blog my che for the sales whisperer. Today let's talk about the five proven steps to make every sale. As you can see here I have the traditional looking funnel, this is something we have all seen if we've been in sales for any amount of time. The funnel is obviously wider at the top, it's more narrow at the bottom. Now in traditional selling, you cast the net wide you have a big open funnel at the top because like they say you throw enough stuff against the wall something's bound to stick, same thing with fishing you throw this big wide net it increases the chances you'll catch something the problem is when you go out into open waters sometimes what you catch along with the fish include tires, plastic bottles, license plates, things you don't really necessarily want or need but as you notice here with this traditional funnel it's top down it's one directional. Yeah at the bottom you might be able to get some referrals and testimonials or whatnot but traditional companies, traditional salespeople, are not looking for that they're thinking about the sale and that's it. Throwing enough stuff in the top not even patching the holes in the leaks that come through the funnel along the same lines you'll see a lot of times people talk about a pipeline, I equate this to dating because everyone has either been on a date, been asked out on the date, told someone know they're going on a date or been told no going out on the date but you can relate. But this is literally how I met my wife 24 years ago, at a country bar we made eye contact I asked her to dance, asked for her snapchat I was very advanced back then I knew snapchat was gonna be a thing and buy them a dinner right go on dates too, you meet the family figure out range attire or not. There's a process there just like with the funnel, you have stages, you have steps. There's a natural progression that you try to follow to make sure that the deal you're working on is on task, it's on it's on time, it's moving along the way that it should. Now there's not a right or wrong in so far as how many steps that you need but in general the the kiss process applies to, keep it simple stupid, right? You need just enough steps and know more to ensure that you're tracking things as you should. Being from the south I like to keep things simple I call it ABCDE. You attract, you attract people to your place of business, to your storefront, to your website, to your to your trade show booth, you want them coming to you but it's not enough just to get a visitor you need them to identify themselves so you offer them something you know a free dinner on your birthday, get our free report, free samples whatever, as long as they opt in, as long as they provide you their phone number, their email, their address something to help you stay in touch with them from there you can bond with these prospects. Preferably it's multimedia, multi step, don't assume just because they ask for something that they really wanted it or that they have time to read it or that they understand what it is you've given them or that they're taking action which brings us to the next step the conversion, the close , decline at the cash rookie sales people think this is the end goal. Get the money and run. That's why their rookie, amateur sales people. Professionals know to to think beyond the sale, deliver that Wow experience, delight to the upside. I'm getting into it right now with a guy I've known for many years, he's been my mechanic, we spent three thousand dollars fixing a car with him the radiator busted on my daughter's old car it took them multiple trips to get it right I never even looked at it. I'm finally helping her replace a light bulb you know a headlamp and I look this has been after over a month I really two months of working on it at least five times and there's radiator fluid you know just residue all over the engine so after paying this guy $3,000 he couldn't be bothered with hosing down the engines you know the engine compartment now he's probably gonna lose a customer and there's obviously other things that go on there but we've been a customer for 14 years probably referred 20 or 30 families to him all with multiple cars probably he's probably worked on a hundred cars because of our referrals, but he didn't delight, he didn't deliver a WoW experience, took him multiple times to fix the car that's fine he stuck with it but it couldn't be bothered to spend 18 cents throwing some goop on the engine and hosing it down. Okay think beyond the sale. That's where you adhere yourself to your customers, that's where they now are in love with you and they are singing your praises but even though I have this in a pipeline going left to right, the reality is it's a cycle, it's a circle. Okay the hip bones connected to the leg bone, everything's connected . That's why I say to make any sale you have to make every sale. How do you attract business to you? How do you bond and stay in touch? What's the sale like, the actual closing process, the transaction, the handing over of money? How do you make them feel? Buyer's remorse is a big thing, just because somebody gives you money doesn't mean they're happy about it. What do you do to ensure that they're happy? What are you insure? What do you do to ensure that they're thrilled, they're delighted, they're overwhelmed in a great way? So now you endear yourself to them, now they're giving you five star reviews on Yelp, they're they're singing your praises on Facebook. Somebody's asking you know for a mechanic, or chiropractor, for a dentist, for a roof or whatever. And they're like you got to go see Joe, you got to go see Mary, they're the best. Now you're back to attracting, now that business comes to you just about free and they don't need three quotes, they don't need to think it over because three of their friends, 10 of their friends said you got to go see them so the business comes easier, it comes faster, it comes at a higher price, higher margins because these people are happy. Okay so think through this look at your business and do you have a system? Do you have processes?Can you boil it down to these five simple steps? And of course you see in here I have multiple steps within the five steps but in the overarching picture you know where you are. You're in the attraction phase, you're in the bonding phase. Okay do you have this down to a system, to a process that everybody understands and can execute? Because if you can measure it, you can improve it. Alright this is how you improve your sales attract bond convert the liver in deer. Thanks for watching, now go sell something! [Music]
[Music] You [Music] All right with no further ado please hit this isn't real for Mr. Berg! Give him a round of applause as well he's been called the man behind the brand's the chief brand accelerator and the six billion dollar man . Burne Coleman is one of the world's leading experts in brand development management licensing and business acceleration trusted by iconic moguls and CEOs such as Donna Karan Daymond, John Russell Simmons, Eddie Lampert Kevin, Harrington and Tommy Hilfiger having created collections for the Rolling Stones, Steven Tyler and American Idol. Mr. Ulman is the go-to man to skyrocket business growth and shatter yearly projections his astonishing achievements include launching the Adam Levine and Nicki Minaj brands for Sears Holdings earning over 200 million in annual sales as president of fast fashions he propelled retail sales from 80 million to 800 million as CEO of mesh he developed a Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony collections for 1,100 Kohl's stores the largest celebrity brand deal in history worth 3.5 billion and as president of booboo international he drove yearly revenue from 100 million to four hundred million dollars. I want to acknowledge my buddy here burnt almond who was my company from 100 million to 4 the man in the genius this guy foul out as the CEO and co-founder of celebrity lifestyle brands Mr. Ulman employs digital marketing and social media to incite massive well through the power of brand equity. Berndt is also passionate about helping entrepreneurs utilize the same tactics that have launched a billion dollar businesses his mentorship quickly uncovers the story and strategy behind a brand to transform followers into devoted ambassadors proficient marketing lucrative licensing and distribution savvy product development. No one understands how to grow compelling and authentic lifestyle brands better than burnt almond and now mr. Ulman is ready to share his wealth creation blueprints with you so you can supercharge your business build an empire and leave a legacy a customer they may forget what you say they may even forget what you do they will never forget how you make him feel ladies and gentlemen please welcome the chief Business Accelerator himself burnt almond [Music] All right thank you good morning good morning thank you Nate, Thank You Franklin, Thank You Cory Bergeron. Okay guys so before we get into it, hey you know what makes our fulfillment company unique? The fact that I've been in your shoes looking for an excellent fulfillment center. That's right I had a successful online business when my company started to grow I went searching for a fulfillment center that could meet my high but very fair expectations you know what I found? That that was very very hard to find all I wanted was a fulfillment center that could ship the right product to the right address at the right time at the right price should be easy right it wasn't I couldn't buy what I needed so I built it fulfillment com not just for me but for thousands of other businesses just like yours hey we can't help you if we don't talk to you so we're not going to take too much your time just a short call to gather some information so that we can delight you that's right its fulfillment dot coms goal to delight all of our clients. Book a call today with Fulfillment dot com because we get ship done [Music] They already pick up on the fact that I speak with an accent so I'm gonna try to take it slow so you can follow and even though I work in New York City my accent is not from Brooklyn. I am actually from Norway and I know what you're thinking I'm supposed to be tall and blond but that didn't really happen for me. However as you all know as entrepreneurs, it can be tough and when I started out early on before my journey in entrepreneurship I was actually six foot five blond with blue eyes and I have a picture to prove it so this is before and here you have the result after. Okay let's get into it what's a brand right? So a brand is named the sign a symbol anything that distinguishes a product from the rivals in the eyes of the consumer that's a brand, okay? Why does it matter? Because what we're going to talk about today is of course the seven steps of brand building which ultimately leaves leads to wealth creation the creation so what's the power what's the difference so here it says what makes a consumer willing to pay more for the same item it's a basic white t-shirt right and in the example on the bottom it's the haints 3-pack the Hanes 3-pack you can buy for $8.50. Nautica it's a brand a little more elevated they have a basic white tee for 1950 Ralph Lauren higher level bren 3 or 3950 up to 55 and lastly John Varvatos at the sign a t-shirt yes $98 to $148 dollars basic white tee. So what makes people willing to pay more for in essence the same product? Well it's brand equity. Brand equity is the value of your brand in the mind of the consumer and that is a folks is how you make them feel about your brand. when we now start on the seven steps: why? why did I create the 7 steps ? what's the value in having a brand and brand equity? well if you don't have anything that sets your product or your services apart from the competition, what are you left to compete on? That's right price. Your only left to compete on price and if all you have to compete on this price you will find yourself in what I like to say or call a death spiral race to the bottom because there's always someone out there that's willing to work on a lower price or lower margin. So that's why we brand. step one : one this one mission one brand so first start with a mission statement. it's the company's core purpose it's what we do it is what problem do we solve you focus on what's important it identify core markets and communicate corporate direction to all stakeholders and here's a good example. Google to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful clear mission everyone can rally around that now let's go to division so the vision is your aspirational description of your objectives it's what you're aspired to do it's to what end why and of course if your why is to become filthy rich quick that's good and your mom might like it but you are often and I always find you're better off when you're providing a service or a value for others here's a good example Ford to become the world's leading consumer company for automotive products and services make sure though that you make the vision statement realistic because vision without execution as you all know is hallucination. So we were talking about the Harley earlier, well that's another great brand and what are the most important aspects of great brands they have to be authentic credible and aspirational. Here are a couple of very successful brands I bring them up primarily because as we are all here as entrepreneurs I want to remind you these are some of the most successful brands of our times so Nike for instance it was founded by a college athletes and his coach that college athlete was Phil Knights it was back in 1964 they had an idea for an athletic brand their market cap today is somewhere between 120 - 130 billion dollars depending on what day you check with the market turbulence. McDonald's Ray Kroc he was a milkshake mixer salesman but one day he got an order for multiple mixers to one location he thought that was odd anyone to check it out as they say the rest is history and McDonald's has a market cap of 130 billion dollars, if we go to the tech space Apple , Steve Jobs have they've topped a trillion and of course Jeff Bezos and Amazon they're hovering somewhere between eight hundred and seventy five and again to eight hundred seventy five billion to one trillion dollar market cap so the point is these were individuals these were entrepreneurs no different than any of you in the room they had an idea they had a vision and this is the end result so if you can dream it you can achieve it. Step 2: Concentration dominates. You have to analyze strengths and weaknesses of your business people. Don't plan to fail, they fail to plan and hope is never a strategy. You have to do your planning so the SWOT analysis is start by looking at your strengths. what is your unfair competitive advantage? Maybe it is your brand. Maybe it's an algorithm maybe it's unique product you should identify it to optimize your business weaknesses. Well for instance if you are selling apparel online the return rate typically hovers somewhere between 30 to 35 percent; in the brick and mortar, return rates are somewhere around 8%. That would be one thing to look at, how do you mitigate that? There are new technology sales opportunities. Are there opportunities in new markets new products . what about voice search and lastly what are some of the threats again if you're importing products from China come January if nothing changes there will be tariffs slapped on of 25% what will that do to your business so these are the things that you have to look at. so we have a little bit of a system where we said does your brand pass? So first we look at product quality. we anticipate customer needs, we obviously wants to have superior distribution, we want to optimize the distribution and lastly strategic pricing and it comes to strategic pricing I always like to institute a treat here to price strategy does not does no matter what product what level it can be luxury it can be open end I always do three tiers good better best. So for instance let me give you an example show of hands how many people thinks $128 dollars for a pair of jeans is expensive? Yeah I'm getting hands yes $128 dollars that's pretty expensive now I'm gonna assume that I know the answer to this how many people thinks 498 dollars for a pair of jeans is expensive there you go so it is expensive what did we do when we wanted to sell 128 dollar coogee jeans all day long we created coogee Lux and we priced the Coogee Lux gene at four hundred ninety eight dollars and then we took every coogee customer and we walked them past the Coogee Lux gene and each and every buyer had to hear that this is the Coogee luck gene for four hundred and ninety-eight dollars by the time they got to the Coogee gene and they were ready to make a purchase the hundred and twenty eight dollars sounded outright cheap and we sold a ton of jeans business jumped out to over 100 million dollars in less than one and a half years. Okay brand the feeling so these are the initial components of building a compelling brand so brand DNA so the brand DNA is in essence what makes your brand unique so you tried to identify what sets the brand apart what makes it special what are the aspects I once you may have seen in the video I was part of doing the largest celebrity deal ever done three and a half billion dollars for Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony would Kohl's and I once spent two days locked in Jennifer Lopez's closets it was quite exciting it was all for the purposes of identify what was the brand DNA what was unique about the brand and what determine what it was supposed to look like and I have no fair her closet is larger than the room that I'm staying in and and it's catered to 24/7. So we look at when we look at brand DNA we look at product design for D then brand name and lastly the brand assets DNA first here's an example of what we do with the design so we might just mentioned coochy coochy was originally a sweater a multicolored multicolored highly patterned sweater here models died by Dr. Huxtable so when we now created the street where Brad we captured dose the movement we captured a color and this is what coogee streets were looked like and as I said it worked and we built a hundred million brand literally in 18 months. when you're looking at product name please make it simple make it clear make it work . I ran Phat fashion's Phat farm and baby phats and once upon a time when Russell Simmons formed the founded Phat farm. Phat was the coolest thing you could ever be that you could ever say because Phat stood for pretty hot and tempting Phats so this was pretty hot and tempting and it came from the farm that's where you grow stuff.However by the time the brand hit mainstream, by the time you were ready to go into every single department store there wasn't a kid out there that used to term phats so the only thing that happened was aid the brand now dated or the name dated the brand and number two no one used to term anymore and the reality is too mainstream buyers from the large national retailers retailers originally thought we were coming with some formal weight loss products. Another example, who in here has heard of Justin Timberlake? Almost everybody right okay good. Who in here has heard of william rests william rests ic0 hence william rests is Justin Timberlake's clothing collection. it is what happens when you over think it's so william r ass it's the middle name of justin's and his partner's grandfathers names so it's so cool that nobody knows the connection and they're getting none of the benefits from Justin's very large following and fame so keep the name simple and straightforward. Lastly Brant acid packaging so I always say nothing sells products as well as product. However you need more than just product if it was true that you only needed the product cereal would be sitting in the clear plastic bags you could just see the product but as we all know that's not true is it so packages packaging is important and in the Director consumer space it is specifically important because you actually have to sell your product twice. First you're selling it when you make the emotional connection and they're on your website or they're interacting with a brand the first time and they make a purchase then the product gets shipped out by now they've had a fight with their spouse it's raining outside and the other shitty day at work and your product arrives and it needs to sell itself one more time it needs to look unique it leads to look appealing so you can rekindle that emotion so that's packaging emotions they matter emotions make decision nobody needs some other products so we're buying because of the feeling your products creates have a Coke and a smile or Apple think difference which was a play on IB ends think so or Amazon the world's most consumer centric Brent these are all emotional statements that you can connect with so as you heard me say in the video it says here to your customer will always remember how you make them feel I'll take that a little further and say they may remember what you say they may even remember what you do they will never forget how you make them feel okay master to touch so this is about brand consistency strong and powerful brand maintain consistency throughout so for physical its logo its signage letterhead and business cards products shop concept events and experiences and all of these attributes says something about you and about your brand so I brought our celebrity lifestyle brands business card and this is what our car does so not so unique not so special however it sets us apart it says something about us and our business you need to of course maintain brand consistency also in the digital space your website ecommerce apps social media and even the smaller things like the email signature I just mentioned our company celebrity lifestyle brands and here you see how we sign off and the reality is consistency in brands should permeate everything that you do and it includes you it includes your brand ambassadors it it includes every single consumer touchpoints alright innovates communicates so you've all heard if you build it they will come but I've added really because the reality is in this cluttered marketplace if you build it and you don't tell them about it nobody will come not one single soul they don't care there's too much information so and in this group you're all sophisticated so you know you need to deploy all of these resources video viral campaigns consumer engagements social media blogs editorial paid and targeted ad campaigns Facebook everything you can think of guerilla marketing all of the above way back when before we had all these social media I launched my first business back in the mid eighties and it was Scandinavia's first home delivery of pizza so it didn't exist until I launched my business and I thought I had corner tomorrow kids when I got the write up on the cover of the business section of the weekend paper and the phone started ringing as soon as people picked up their for their papers by early morning even though we didn't open little tooth until 3:00 by early morning my phone system had broken down and later in the afternoon one of the pizza trucks broke down we ended up delivering soggy cold pizzas three to four hours after people called for him it was a disastrous way to launch a business and if it wasn't for the fact that the idea was so good we would have been out of business before we ever started so you only get one shot at making a first impression you might as well make it a good one this was a terrible launch on to a couple of really powerful launches this thing is amazing so this is referred to as the hangman hangman ad and this is how the Tommy Hilfiger brand actually launched this is a billboard from New York Times Square and as you can see it says the four great American designers from n R and then you have the R and L and everyone knows Ralph Lauren the next one you may not know that's Perry Ellis Calvin Klein and then no one knew what the T&H was so that's how the Tommy Hilfiger brand launched and it got instant credibility by approximation the neighborhood of those other leading designers led to an affirmation of the brand now it pissed them all off but they got over it and the Tommy Hilfiger brand is today a brand that enjoys seven and a half billion dollars in annual sales another great launch was the launch of Daymond John's FUBU so as Damon said in his book the power of broke they had no money so they had to be really creative when it came to promoting the brand back in Hollis Queens where they are originally from there are metal gates in front of all of the stores the FUBU guys offered to clean and paint all the gates in return for putting their logo on the gates a lot of the store opener owners agreed and at nights this start of brand FUBU would have his logo on every single storefront all over Queens but that wasn't the launch Damon then spoke to his friend LL Cool J. LL Cool J became a brand ambassador and then they did two things they went to a trade show called magic and they had six salespeople and they told every single one of those guys to call every single one of their buyers and invite them all to come to the booth at nine o'clock in the morning on the first day of the show and every single one of those salespeople said can't do that they won't work but of course they did and fear is a phenomenal motivator so every other buyer that hadn't gotten the call came in to the trade show and so this one booth completely mobbed and surrounded by buyers and they were all petrified of losing out and that was part of the launch the second part of the launch was the gap commercial yes gap commercial a 30 million dollar gap commercial and gap reached out to the FUBU spokesman LL Cool J had asked if he would appear in a commercial forum they did not had a headwear on the time and ll asked could he bring his own hats so I'm gonna play that commercial for you I want you to look out for LLS hats and I think you will be able to see F beyond the hats and then I want you to listen to the lyrics because foo BER is an acronym and it stands for for us by us so listen for for us buyers on the low in the middle of a 30 million dollar gap commercial yes so as it says the price goes to innovative I will take it one step further innovate or die a 30 million dollar FUBU commercial launched a brand even though sponsored by the Gap okay step 6 cover your assets this is important because as you start building your business and building your brand you don't want it to be all for naught so there are trademarks you used ads for brands logos slogans etc copyrights for all the creative work books lyrics and then patents for innovations processes this is what can happen if you run afoul of it so Jennifer decided that she wanted to launch a fragrance with Cody a million dollar multi-million dollar company in the space and they wanted to call it glow it was glow by j.lo and they were so set on it that even when they found out there's a company out there called glow industries they went ahead anyway well glow industry file filed the suits they blocked the launch of Jennifer and Cody's fragrance they held him up tied him up for over a year and glow industries a tiny company had their biggest payday when they collected millions of dollars before Jennifer and Cody were able to launch don't let that happen to you ok we're at step 7 pedal to the metal so we talked about brand equity quick reminder it's the intangible asset that gives a branding for mental value in the mind of the consumer and it's of course created through implementing the branding process now here's a quiz so why show hence it says which comes with a premium price thanks to brand equity the wants to think hits the green box show hands I see no hand soap here in delights the grey box show ends I got half ahem purple box no okay how about the turquoise box okay I'm getting a lot of hints that's right so Tiffany the high-end jewelry company has in essence made their turquoise color cinnamons with their brand so it's a powerful message known by by discerning consumers everywhere so strong brand equity this is why we love it that is a profit faucet do we all want a profit faucet of course we do we get it through strong brands so what does a strong brand and brand equity allow you premium pricing increase cash flow it lowers customer acquisition costs and the asset can be sold or licensed so that's what's so powerful about brands I have the utmost or respect for anyone that builds a business anyone that is in business is wonderful but if you have no brand and if you have nothing else as we talked about you're forced to compete on price not only that you have to reinvent your business over and over and over again and you're just as strong as your last transaction with a brand not only do you get to benefit from the business you build a today you are creating an assets fad fashions - remember I said I ran fat farm and baby fat the company was sold no I take that back the company wasn't sold the IP the intellectual property only was sold for a hundred and forty million dollars to a company called Kel woods and Kel wood had to put a hundred and forty millions on their books as an assets under goodwill that's the power of building a brand that's what Russell Simmons did I am NOT working closely with Bethenny Frankel one of the original housewives from Housewives of New York she has created a brand called skinny girl skinny cocktail Skinnygirl margarita maybe some of you heard of it she gave birth to that brand while on the TV show and a couple of years later only a couple of years later she sold the alcoholic beverage rights only again just the IP there was no company she just sold the alcoholic beverage rights to Bheem Centauri for a hundred million dollars that's the power of brand and brand equity now the brand equity can be enhanced how step one with celebrity endorsements target the right celebrity influencer structured optimal deal leverage their fan base every celebrity worth their salt has now a massive social media following top right that's Gigi Hadid Gigi Hadid has around 45 million followers on the Instagram alone she did a partnership with Tommy Hilfiger they created the Tommy Gigi collection we heard earlier Tommy Hilfiger was mentioned that's one of the format's Tintin for most influential men's collections or men's designers was never asked relevant with women went out and did the deal with Gigi and overnights they had instant credibility they blew the business up now this may sound complicated but we are here to help have no affair so celebrity lifestyle brands our company we have a booth outside if anyone is interested in working with celebrities please see Greg Ryder my partner or myself outside and we can help you with that and it does a lot hey what are other ways you can put this brand equity on steroids and blow up your business with licensing two ways well if you are one of those guys that I would forced to compete in price get yourself a license you can license a strong brand name and all of a sudden as you could see you can charge a lot more for your products or your service if you have built a brand or if you have a brand well sign licenses these are brand extension you grant another company the rights to manufacture their product but on your own brand name and they pay you a royalty of fee so there are product licenses their territory licenses this is what you can do if you sell apparel you can add other items add fragrance bags shoes for instance when I took over fat farm and baby fats the company was actually losing a couple of million dollars a year I changed the operating model to 100% licensed and overnight. literally we went from losing a couple of millions to having between 40 and 50 million dollars in annual royalty revenue licensing. why do we love it? it's easy it's fast its cost-effective and its profitable so the last way to put your brand equity on steroids simple get yourself a board of advisers they provide non-binding strategic advice and they leverage their rolodex for your benefits as we often often say your network is your net worth it's informal it's flexible and it's a revenue multiplier let me give you one other example a lot of people have sought out tommy's Hilfiger's advice over the years Michael Kors legendary designer came to Tommy back in early two-thousands not for advice on how to grow his business no for how he could seamlessly actually end it all go out of business Tommy said not so fast firstly I think you should do this this and that to your business which entail focusing more on eye on accessories secondarily he leveraged his rolodex he called two of his former backers Lawrence troll and Silas chow he got them involved they deployed the necessary capital and michael kors have gone from being on the verge of going out of business in early 2000 to having a market cap of nine and a half billion dollars today so that's the power of having a good or strong Board of Advisors so on that note we have gone through the seven steps and my timer here in front of me is now blinking red so I will leave you with just one final time one final thought hmm I had wanted actually to add for another thing and that is just I went through the licensing part a little quickly I want to say if any of you are interested in talking to us about that we can help with that as well and then on to the last final thought and the final thought is really very simple: build a brand, create wealth, leave a legacy. Thank you [Music]
[Music] [Music] Alright alright alright how are you guys doing? Mr. Franklin Cruz everybody! He and I go way back so he likes to make fun of me it's okay! So uh let's just get into it huh let me take a pulse of the room, okay I thought I was getting some feedback. Raise your hand if you consider yourself a beginner marketer? You're kind of just getting started getting your feet wet haven't really got it going. Okay okay, because this presentation can go a few ways I want it to be as valuable as possible. If you consider yourself intermediate, you got going, you have some traction, you feel like you're getting the hang of things but you know you can go further. Okay, advanced marketers, you're crushing it, you're taking names and you want to take it to another level. Okay perfect! So it's a it's a good blend. I promise you there is something here for everybody. Okay i'm a little bit about me how does this work, okay so today we're going to be talking about what I consider the future of marketing and we're gonna cover three quantum leaps that you can make to your marketing and we're actually going to divide it in three kind of stages according to the question I just asked. If you're a beginner there's a quantum leap there's some quantum leaps you can make if you're at that stage, intermediate, advanced there's something here for everybody. Um okay so a little bit about what we do, a little bit about me. So what we do my company which is ten-minute funnels, it's an alternative to click funnels that's why he was making fun of me. It's an alternative to click funnels but it takes things to in other levels and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about so what my company does is we make marketing simple. We build technology that helps you turn a great idea into a successful online business and we do that through a software called ten-minute funnels which is basically a do-it-yourself easy-to-use sales funnel builder. So this is actually the first screenshots of the new version that we're gonna be releasing starting next month so this is I've never showed this to anybody but this is basically it, we provide a catalog of pre-built marketing funnels that you can just drop into your business and get results immediately. Now what makes it unique is, it takes the picture in your mind about what you want your marketing to look like, how you want it to flow and you can literally drag and drop it, connect it in the flow you want it to - how you want it to behave and it will just execute it for you automatically. Hey I'm Justin Singletary. You know what makes our fulfillment company unique? The fact that I've been in your shoes looking for an excellent fulfillment center. That's right I had a successful online business, when my company started to grow I went searching for a fulfillment center that could meet my high but very fair expectations. You know what I found, that that was very very hard to find. All I wanted was a fulfillment center that could ship the right product to the right address at the right time at the right price. Should be easy, right? It wasn't. I couldn't buy what I needed so I built it Fulfillment dot com not just for me but for thousands of other businesses just like yours. Hey we can't help you if we don't talk to you. So we're not going to take too much your time just a short call to gather some information so that we can delight you. That's right its Fulfillment dot coms goal to delight all of our clients. Book a call today with Fulfillment dot com because we get ship done [Music] mission two that we provide you with pre-built funnels for all different kinds of industry niches. Everyone has been proven in real markets with real dollar values so you know whatever you use is going to produce a lot of value for you so this is the drag-and-drop funnel builder and then of course you have a drag-and-drop ready, easy to use, what you see is what you get page builder. Okay so it's very very simple way to get powerful marketing techniques in in in a very short period of time and what we're about to release and you're the first audience I've shown this to, takes it to a level which no one has seen and I'll get into all of that today. Okay so a little bit about me, who am I? I am your typical geek turned marketer but I'm a I'm like I'm like a geek of geeks I've been programming since I was eight years old. If you if you slice my wrists ones and zeros would pop out, that's who I am at my at my core. When I was eight years old my dad introduced me to one of those super old computers with the green words on the screen and I just fell in love so while everybody was playing at playing sports and stuff I was hacking away at a computer and that's who I've been and you haven't been able to pull me off of it since. Now I fell into the world of marketing and online marketing through through web design so around '94 the world wide web kind of came onto the scene and my dad said hey why don't you try to figure this thing out people might be wanting to get on there so I started to build websites for people and I was like twelve years old and the money at that time was really really good so the whole appeal of like working for someone trading time for it never appealed for me to me because of how lucrative it was at that age so I pretty much been doing that ever since. So around the time I went into college is how I kind of put myself through college I had a couple of clients and they were asking me certain questions about hey can I, how can I get in there and do things myself how can I get in there and and and edit my website all by myself? Now I was in a pretty intense engineering program so I couldn't be as available as I wanted to be so one spring break I spent the time basically building a software that would help people get in and edit their website themselves now this is back at like 2001 2002 so there was no WordPress there was no anything and so I built what at least I consider based on what I saw was the first drag and drop visual page builder so all the stuff that you see right now. You know not to brag cause I don't know one day someone will prove me wrong but I think we had the very first drag and drop page building technology and I just kind of gave it to my clients and said here's a way you can do it and I gave him a little PayPal link and then left it alone and it just boomed into this thing that is basically what we are today it just took on a life of its own and that's kind of how I fell into the world. Well the next question was okay I can build my site I can get in there and do it, well how do I make it work? How do I make it succeed? And so that's where we were basically forced as a company to really learn online marketing and so through that we built a product called 10 minute pages and that was all about marketing and then that product evolved into what we are today which is ten-minute funnels which is all about giving powerful proven marketing funnels to people easily easily. So it's built, we've built over 275,000 landing pages about a hundred thousand funnels for almost 40,000 clients and through that we collect a lot of data obviously so we have certain insights that most people don't and so we've observed certain patterns about marketing that seemed to work and a lot of those patterns aren't necessarily what the Guru's tell you is the right thing to do. So everything I share with you is based on real world data this is stuff that we've seen and we have a huge data set to to to tell you this. So would you like to know some of what these are? These are very actionable things that you can do in your business. So I'm gonna share three quantum leaps you can make in the next 90 days based on our observations if you just take I'm gonna be going through a lot of them and you might not be able to take in everything but if you just take a few just like anything that jumps out at you and just make a note I'm gonna implement this it will help you these are these are fairly Universal they're not unique to individual situations. Okay so these are powerful, okay so the first quantum leap is just all about the funnel okay so I'm talking to beginners but if you have if you have a funnel pay attention because we're gonna get extreme in advanced really really quick okay a funnel we've seen can three to 10x your business when you do it right okay and some of these strategies are some of the better strategies we've seen and easily approachable strategy. Okay so we have a unique way we view funnels it's not doesn't follow the the typical paradigm and so I'm gonna give you kind of a top-level overview of how we look at funnels so you can approach it the right way so instead of specific little tactics hey put this on your page put that on your page it's better if you approach it strategically first and then of course I'll give you a few tactics. Okay so first off understand it's gonna sound basic but we're gonna build up the goal in any marketing campaign is to influence behavior. That's really what we're trying to do, someone gets to our sales page or our hour order page they're either ready to buy or they're not so they either take that behavior of buying or they don't so we're trying to influence that behavior always. Okay funnel marketing is a structured way of how we influence behavior okay we're starting real basic but we're gonna build up now behaviors are a reaction to someone's belief system. Okay what do they believe at the time if someone does not buy when you want them to buy it's because they did not believe whatever it need whatever they needed to in order to buy so every single marketing campaign in every single business anytime you want someone to do something it's based on this. Okay, customer journey is basically a representation of different beliefs at different times. Someone who goes through your entire marketing process has to go through a sequence of belief changes in order to be ready to buy, opt in ,etc and that's why we have you know an opt-in page where I put my email that's why a lot of the stuff the speaker was just talking about with SMS and stuff it's all about trying to change someone's belief to get to to to to take the action you need them to take. Okay so your customer journey is the journey they take on the way to arriving at the belief you need them to have, a funnel is just a map of how we intend to influence that behavior that's all. It is so in a little I'm going to show you some funnels and they might seem a little complicated and I'm doing this on purpose because the funnels is just a map of the different ways we're influencing different behaviors that they have at different times. Now most people have a very simple funnel and nothing's wrong with that they do very very well and it's basically a linear a journey you want your customers to take in order to buy and maybe buy again and those are great however if you want to go to the next level you want to track or or or take inventory of the different belief systems they have in the customer journey and then you'll create what I call little micro funnels to influence each behavior. I'll give you examples so here's how we design a funnel I'll probably have to breeze through and if we have some time at the end I can do a deeper dive but this is the foundation, this is how you construct the funnel okay so we start out with what is the primary belief that they need to have before they buy then we go backwards what do they need to believe before this and just keep repeating so if you can map out the belief system sequence that they need to have and you design little micro funnels to counteract each belief or to produce each belief you will see results you've not seen before. Okay so we're setting up this foundation now once we have the belief mapped out we need to ask ourselves what can we say or provide to bring about that belief? The absolute best way that I've seen to change a change belief there's many ways to do it is to provide proof okay some proof you need them to believe that your product is better than the show proof okay so I talked about micro funnels which is how will we influence this belief so every behavior that someone takes on your site or on that customer journey there is a micro funnel framework to influence that behavior and what I've seen is the funnels that do mediocre versus the funnels that absolutely kick butt it's how many of these little micro funnels that they're using to change these beliefs because if you think about it why doesn't someone buy why doesn't someone take action it's because they don't believe they don't they're not there yet and so if you have a little microphone to influence that belief and and every belief they can have now you have a you know a funnel. So a couple examples let's say someone lines at your shopping cart your checkout page and then they don't buy okay most checkout pages 10% at best 90% of them leave, why? Well we can ask them and once we know we can have what we call an abandoned cart micro funnel that will change that belief okay let's say at the beginning of the funnel you have people they have an urgent problem something's wrong, that's why we have a lead capture funnel, okay because we're gonna deliver some value to fix their urgent problem and that will get them through the funnel. Okay if they're ready to buy we have a shopping cart funnel, let's say they want it you they've been with you for a while but they're just not taking action. I we have what we call a Rainmaker funnel which is basically a flash sale where you just say hey there's now no reason not to buy let's just get you in there. And these work extremely extremely well. So here's a couple these are screenshots of our software of some of these micro funnels that you just get with you know one-click so we have the lead funnel sales funnel you know there's dozens of them, upsell funnel, fulfillment funnel, event funnels. There were tons of them but basically every single belief system or behavior that you want to change there is a micro funnel that can do that. Okay so this is the part we're gonna have to speed through but this is the this is the process these are the steps so you can take a picture and if there's time just shout it out I'll go through this in more detail but this is the structure we follow to bring about a change of belief. Okay we find the problem we produce a promise and we then we give a little offer and then we could go and you see the proof of how to do that and then what you see here you don't it's not about what it's doing it's the structure okay we're basically taking people through different belief changes. Okay so to get the sale we have to change you know beliefs and underneath each one is how you bring about that change. I'm happy to give these slides to you but basically that this is this is how you do it the best funnels follow this strategy. Okay then of course there's ongoing optimization this is a little acronym grow how you grow you gather insight and ideas so that's talking to your customers putting feedback mechanism so you can see why they're taking certain behaviors. You do your research on that calling them up on the phone, you go on surveys and see why are they doing that, you look at your data, your analytics okay then you validate your ideas of how to do it. So what microphone is am I going to introduce and then what works you scale as in widen and what doesn't work you suppress it's simple it is simple you follow this process you get extraordinary results. Okay so here are a few tactical things that you can do take any of these and drop it in your in your funnel right now and you will see results you will see results the great thing about this and everything I'm about to go through is these are all additives why by that I mean by putting these on your page and on your funnel you can't hurt sales it's very very hard I should say to hurt sales by doing these. Okay so by adding retargeting it's very hard for that for you to lose by doing that, by putting an upsell after someone has already bought something it's very hard it's impossible for you to lose so just adding these alone will grow your business. How well you do that is another story but it's if you don't have it you need to do so follow retargeting upsells having a proof bar out I can show you that. Daily emails if you're not sending emails it's an absolute must okay and bimonthly rainmakers you can expect $20 per open so just do the math on that and these are these are things you can do at this stage. Okay hopefully that was a little bit valuable if you have a funnel and you do these things you will you will see growth let's take it up a notch because this is what excites me okay this is where we get into the world of automation okay done right I've seen three to 10x growth on top of everything we've we've already talked about in the first step. This is all about influencing more behaviors okay this is about taking inventory of more behaviors that are people are doing and influencing them in other creative ways. Okay so a few tricks for this for this stage we can trigger various sequences or campaigns based on video watch time someone who watches 10% of a sales video is very different from someone who watches 90% of a sales video you should be communicating with them very very differently so triggering different micro funnels or campaigns based on that we'll always help okay an abandoned cart sequence lots and lots of people are getting to your buy page your checkout page and they're leaving what are you doing about that okay adding more mechanisms of communication that last presentation touched on this webinars SMS a call center Direct Mail wingless voicemail these are all things that you can use to communicate the the sales element to change that change those behaviors okay we can go through any of those here's some examples this is a campaign by a marketer a very smart marketer he's out in Australia and he had he had a an event like this right and he did over two hundred thousand dollars in two weeks with this funnel this is a screenshot of our software I've actually printed this out and if you want a copy of this just go to the back where you did the checkout and and you can have one of these but basically this funnel is an example of what we're talking about you can see he's bringing traffic in a few different traffic sources and they're going to a sales page typical funnel behavior however he is basically segmenting his list based on how they respond so for example he might send out an email that's that that has one angle of why they should attend his event the people that click on that email will receive a different message on the sales page then the next email he might send out which is another reason they should attend the event so essentially he's segmenting people based on who they are and what they are all about so one might be we're gonna talk about paid advertising the people that click on that email are different from the people who click on the one about e-commerce marketing or something else you get what I'm saying this is very very powerful in two weeks with a local segment of his list he did over two hundred thousand dollars here's another one that illustrates this this is my buddy Jason Hornick this is an 800 percent ROI a campaign very very powerful what he does is he has again he's segmented his audience and he's sending out different communications so these are blog posts he's sending about in different categories of who his customer is and he's sending Facebook ads to each one so essentially he's attracting different types or different segments of his prospect audience and he's sending them through the funnel for different communication uses so using retargeting he's able to send them back through the funnel with with a messaging based on who they are so it's like a conversation for each person very very powerful and then if you follow it he basically takes them through a sequence of upsells step one step two then he has a webinar step one step two and that's it it's not complicated it really isn't so even though there's a lot of pictures on the screen what it is is different behaviors different beliefs and different little micro funnels to bring about that last one is Ryan Levesque super smart guy he's doing way better even now but this is a campaign that does one hundred and fifty thousand leads per day okay very simple funnel he takes them through he asks them certain questions are you a male or are you a female in many markets this a big difference if you're a female that the conversation is very different if you're a male different so there's a process of uncovering what are the different segments of your audience and you want to basically bring different communication sequences different customer journeys for each segment this is how you take a a mediocre performing funnel to an advanced high level and I'm not talking about little bumps I'm talking about two three four X growth of a typical marketing funnels this is a quick funnel that we did super super powerful it's a it's it's modeled after a friend of mine and I'll tell you his numbers this campaign is basically four videos that goes out okay and he's selling a product for four for $2,000 okay he found that if people get through and watched the fourth video ninety percent of them zero percent of them will buy okay I've never seen conversions like that at all okay the way he's able to get 90% conversions buying a two thousand dollar product is by sending these follow-up emails based on video watch time simple if someone watches 10 percent of the video these are the sequence of emails that happen if someone gets through 90 percent these are the sequence so all he's doing is if you didn't finish the video he sends two follow-up email saying hey go back and watch go back and watch go back and watch by the time they get so he gets a lot of people to watch all his videos and that triggers that 90 percent conversion rate I hope you're seeing this is this is unheard of this is very very powerful and also not not complicated okay is this making sense making sense are you ready to take it up a notch because what I'm about to share nobody's doing nobody's doing so where we're at in the marketing space at least how we see it is what I just talked about is the peak or the extremes of marketing okay where we have sophisticated automation happening based on what people are doing on and off your website and this can this can explode your business where we're going now as a market is to the next level and this we've seen we're starting to see the results this will catapult your business again and this is where we use intelligence by intelligence I mean artificial intelligence and I know that word might sound scary but it's not as scary as it sounds is that yeah okay to me this is the holy grail of marketing because all we've been trying to do as online marketers is we're trying to replicate what we know works the best at scale what works the best is when I'm talking to someone face to face and I can mirror everything I can see what they're doing every eye twitch everybody move I can adapt my presentation to them based on what I'm seeing okay a lot of you are might be sales and coaching and so you get high conversions that way it's not uncommon that three out of four people you talk to on a one-on-one basis we'll do business with you okay and that's because it's one-on-one adaptive marketing all we've been doing since the internet began is trying to find a way to replicate that at scale and what I've seen in the research and the testing that we've done is that I think we're finally here or really really close and this is extremely powerful this is where we can adapt to the behaviors people are exhibiting in real time okay so it show your funnel is just is just like a conversation so in the last quantum leap we talked about how you can predict you can document the different behaviors that people are taking with this is you can detect the behaviors that you see happening and the intelligent system can automatically adapt to it I'll give you some examples Amazon Prime there are trillion-dollar Amazon is a trillion dollar company what right now and I think it's enlarged Lee in part to what I'm talking about they've been doing this for many years and they've exploded as a result in 2013 five years ago they were getting seventy five percent conversion rates thirty five percent of all their sales came from what I'm talking about intelligent adaptive funnels so they will look at your browsing patterns of what pages you're seeing how long you stay on the page and they will basically give product recommendations based on that they will look at I remember and I flipped out when I saw it I was in the market for a television and I was browsing a couple then I started getting emails about that television that I was just looking at checking out and what did I do I ended up buying the television this is extremely powerful because it's talking to me and only me based on what I'm doing intelligent adaptive predictive funnels give you a couple examples we can watch the mouse movements that your prospects are taking through your funnel we can see people who are little who are hesitating they're exhibiting the behaviors of a buyer or a non buyer and based on algorithms you can say hey this is that we classify this person as a non buyer let's introduce a behavior microphone will change okay a little pop-up window says hey you might so you may have seen things like call them exit Papas where the mouse is moving to leave the screen and something comes up and that works really well this takes it to a whole other level where someone can just be scrolling down the page doing what they're doing behaving the way they normally behave and the system can pick it up because exceeds what everyone else has done and says hey this is this is someone who's getting ready to leave when you do things like that it's just it's insane okay for example how many of you know that your landing page speed is a direct correlation with your conversions the faster your pages load the higher your conversions okay well what if you could predict click behavior so you can look at your funnel and see what pages are people likely to click on next and what if you could preload that page in the background so you get instant page speeds instant so our technology we have what looks to be there like some of the fastest page speeds on the planet because we're able to predict what people are gonna do next so just by taking an existing campaign that might be on a different technology and using something like ours you can get conversion increases email look-alikes this is powerful a lookalike audience on like Facebook is where you can upload a list of your customers and using its network it's always its intelligence more artificial intelligence using its network it will find other customer other people who are like that and you and if any of you have experimented with that it's very powerful well you can do that yourself with your email you can say here are my customers who are the people who I want to find others like and so now you can send emails to those people who are likely to be customers before they're actually customers another one LTV prediction this is also very powerful based on behavior matching you can predict the lifetime value with a good level of accuracy it's not perfect but it doesn't need to what their lifetime value is gonna be if you do any of this stuff you know how powerful that is it takes many many months to know what the lifetime value of a customer is well you can predict that and so your marketing changes if some if a brand new person comes in and they are matching the behavior characteristics of someone who who spends ten thousand dollars with me I'm gonna market to them differently I can take more risks with that person so this stuff is extremely powerful I could go into more detail but there's lots and lots of things that you can do to start to get to that holy grail of that one-on-one marketing and what we're seeing is that there is quantum leaps improvements with each of these which each of these categories of things that you can do when you do these things so in summary I'm gonna just summarize all this and show you guys how you can get some of this technology the minimum cost to do this yourself is like a hundred thousand dollars because a lot of this technology is brand new it's just coming onto the market and there's just a few providers to do it we've built tech we spent all this here building tech and testing to do all of this stuff for you automatically and we're starting to see results that are you know they're they're very very very powerful and so where we're at in our phase because we're gonna be launching this in 2019 is we're trying to do case studies to validate the results that we're seeing okay so if you'd like to have this done for you we're doing the case studies because we need to prove the numbers that we're seeing okay so I'm just gonna go through because Nate asked me to a couple of ways that we can work together if you're interested so if you want everything we're working with a few people one on one to produce case studies with what I've been talking about because this is this is where we do all the work for you so we've been doing case studies all this year and we're at the final leg and we have a few more spots if you're interested basically to qualify you need to have a hundred thousand transactions of some kind orders email us because that's where you get the maximum value okay and so in this we build out and launch a campaign that will beat your best marketing campaign over the last six months by 50% or more that's basically what we're what we're trying to do for you okay if this is you and you're interested it's simple just text me and we'll see if it's a fit or not okay quantum leap one and two this is advanced funnels and extreme automation so this is where you use our technology and then we work closely to help you reach success so we're doing a pre-release of our Xtreme automation software the first week of November official launch is January but like I said we need we're looking for case studies so if you wanted it's 497 a month but Nate asked me to offer a special deal for add some people and so basically for the price of 10 months you'll have it for 16 months we've never done a deal like that so basically if you do that you won't see a renewal payment until March 2020 so 10 months up front you get it to March 2020 I've got the link down there it's not going to be a big pitch but basically if you're interested if this is something that could be a value for you there's an opportunity to get it no one else has it this is right now because we're launching next year if you want quantum leap number one which is just a funnel building part this is where you do the work we still help and there's just basic funnels it's not automation but it still can get you great results it's 197 a month but also same deal applies price of 10 months you have it for 16 months so if you're interested simple go to that URL down there 10 minute funnels comm slash event if you're interested in us actually working hands-on with you we're not an agency but we're doing just a couple of case studies before the end of the year text me we're only gonna do it for probably about five more people so it's kind of first-come first-served if it's interest you can text me my things right there a couple bonuses if you're interested we've got pre-built funnels 1.3 million dollars of pre-built funnels in there at any level if you get these are plug-and-play funnels that have worked in our businesses that you can just plug in yours we're doing a five-week funnel building workshop where we go into detail on this stuff and this is the first time that I'm offering myself for one-on-one assistance because again the goal is getting these case studies in place for what we're trying to do next year okay personal guarantee is six takes sixty days to try an ROI 100% risk-free money back the goal isn't to pitch or to get a bunch of sales that's not what we're trying to do my personal selfish goal is I want to prove this out I want to really prove that the numbers we've seen we are seeing are as good as we're saying they are and no one would believe us unless we can show real hard evidence we've been doing it for three quarters so far this year and so we're on the last leg if this is of interest to you just let me know okay and that's it I'm out of time but if you've got any questions I'd be happy to answer one or two maybe one one [Music] you [Music]
[Music] Hey guys it's Brit Lane with Ingenious Marketing and today on FDCs EECOM education blog we're going to talk about is SEO and e-commerce. So I will bring to your attention three tools that will help you rank your site and get it to be much faster so you can have the opportunity for ranking for more keywords at Google so the first tool is called SEM rush com. This tool is really cool in that they will enable you to conduct an SEO audit for your website which will give you detailed information as to what you can do to get your site to be optimized. You're going to have 30 to 50 different data points as to what you can do. I highly suggest running the tool, getting the information and then fixing what it says to fix and then rerunning the tool to see how high your score has become. The second tool is Google's page insight tool, now this tool will enable you to see how fast your website is to users on desktop applications and mobile phones. Google is gonna enable you to put in a URL. You hit the submit button and within literally thirty seconds you're gonna get a lot of really good information as to how you can get your site to be faster in the eyes of Google. Why is this important? It's important because Google now says for your site to be able to rank you have to be able to have a better user experience and if you have a site that is fast you're giving consumers a better user experience, so at the end of the day faster is better for Google's users.The third is called GT metrics. GT metrics dot com, this tool is also another site speed tool that will enable your users to get to content that much quicker which also makes your site look even better in Google's eyes so if you look at using these three tools in conjunction with one another you're gonna have a site that is architectural sound. It's gonna be way faster when a user visits it via a desktop browser or a mobile phone application so I highly recommend using those three tools, spending a good amount of time to implement the changes that they recommend and then rerunning the tools to see how much better your scores have increased. This is Brit Lane from Ingenious Marketing. It's been a pleasure providing you with this information and I look forward to creating new videos for you guys in the future [Music]
One of my biggest concerns when seeking a fulfillment service provider was the ability to implement domestically but also scaling for international. My name is Michael Gardner I am the founder and CEO of Thin Energy, a health and wellness brand . I was in need of a company that can handle a to z customer service delivery domestically but also with the ability to scale international. One of the things that attracted me to Fulfillment.com was not only could they go to b2c but also they can actually help implement my brand into the fba amazon platform. One of the things that i was very impressed with was that the staff was very helpful from walking me through dashboard to implementation to fba for amazon very user-friendly and understanding that everything's a process so it's good to be part of another team that can actually enhance and amplify the success that we're seeking. From the setup to the billing, expectations were set very clearly and for me that meant something. Beyond just the services but also the integrity of the company which was really important for me in choosing a service provider. I would recommend Fulfillment.com to anyone that's looking to grow their business and also more importantly maintain their customer service at a high level and be able to set those expectations for themselves. The amount of success that we've had in a short period of time has been tremendous with Fulfillment.com I now have a true fulfillment partner.
My name is James lingk, I live in Los Angeles, California. Working the e-commerce space operating about 70-80 small websites some of the problems that led me to Fulfillment.com were my previous providers lacked in communication, their CRM integration lacked with me in kitty with our CRM samba comm was the second or third I reached out to and ultimately after speaking with their team and organization it was kind of a no-brainer at that point I'd say the process getting started with them was actually pretty easy I mean it just filled out their online inquiry and they reached out to me within 24 hours we did apples for apples comparison of my current fulfillment invoice and worked on pricing together to make it work and from there I was able to have an easy person to make a decision I think what stood out the most is their web presence and their user interface is extremely friendly very simple to use for a business owner and I can always see where my shipments are and if there's any issues kind of where to look and what to do my dream outcome was to get a solid team behind me to have any issues should arise to be able to solve them together quickly efficiently and try to get my cost down and I saw the infrastructure in place that I don't have to be constantly monitoring all my shipments that's what I'm able to do is become calm and the lifesaver for me everything all around been pretty solved I would highly recommend Finland [Music]
The logistical issues that we had had revolved primarily around speed of delivery of products, maintaining how quickly we can get a product out the door and managing all of the information so that we can actually be a more data driven company. My name is Michael Cantrell, I own a company called Next-Gen Mobile; we provide premium car care products. The main reason or problem that we made the move to Fulfillment.com was that we were growing at such an exponential rate our current fulfillment house was unable to keep up with the order magnitude we were bringing in and we were able to work with Fulfillment.com in such a way that now we are not having an eclipse which is term issues in our previous set up it was really just shifts the product and wait for it to arrive. Now with Fulfillment.com we're able to ship products, track products, we're able to see warehouse inventory management in real time. Those are all things that we were looking for is a company continue to grow the thing that goes well beyond what I anticipated is that Fulfillment.com has been able to allow us to grow in a way it does not matter how fast these. We started with one warehouse with Fulfillment.com we're now in - by the end of May we'll be in a third warehouse and I imagine by the end of summer, we'll be in a fourth warehouse so I know that from the top down Fulfillment.com has invested in their clients. They are invested in our success. I believe that a large part of our success as the company has come from partnered with a fella back home. [Music]
When there would be an increase in orders something would always have to give, and it was typically the time with my family which made it more difficult. My name is Dan Baer, I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. On a daily basis I'm either writing for my blog or thinking of new product ideas that use duty war military fatigues that allow me to give back to the veteran community and creative and sustainable ways. Before I found Fulfillment.com I had historically always done everything myself I was having a really hard time managing my time across combat flags the corporate job is my family when things got to the breaking point I ran a couple google searches and found a couple of other companies but they weren't as responsive as Fulfillment.com and I felt like Fulfillment.com was able to really kind of address each of my pain points and actually answer my questions without talking around an answer. Once I decided to move forward with Fulfillment.com it was remarkably easy. There was a hand off during the onboarding I met my account rep and now things are running extremely smoothly I just launched a new product last week and I sold I had a couple hundred orders come off a little in a few hours I knew that I didn't have to do anything Fulfillment.com had the product and they had everything mapped and ready to go and most of them are arriving today. So it's been really great I would say Fulfillment.com is perfect for anybody who's running an e-commerce business. Having them take the daily weight and stress of having to constantly fulfill and watch orders off of my plate, off of my shoulders has been amazing. I highly recommend looking into Fulfillment.com because it is well worth the investment to get that mental and physical energy back so that you're able to adequately put it back into your business. Fulfillment.com has definitely exceeded my expectations it's nothing short of awesome! [Music]
So I just got done with my second dive. Getting dive certified here in Bali and as a business owner if you don't have things automated it can be hard to break away. So one of the ways that I've been able to fully automate a section of my business is by using Fulfillment.com and what I mean by that is, it's really hard to manage inventory levels while selling online, as well as outgoing orders and I actually used to do all of that stuff in-house, managing employees and it also took a lot of my time to manage myself . So it simply switched over to them it was about two years back I've been able to work with an Account Manager that does everything for me. I'm able to break away for 16 days at a time and not have to worry about my outgoing orders. I have to worry about returns and not have to worry about label printing and inventory levels so thank you guys. Thank You Fred,my Account Manager over there and I just wanted to shoot this quick video and just say thanks, appreciate y'all!
We have an explosive business we can't handle this on our own and we needed somebody who can execute better than we could. My name is Matt Silver, I live in New York City and I own a health brand. I was expanding off of Amazon and I needed a 3pl with killer logistics with a killer interface and also we're looking for a fulfillment facility that can expand with our brand worldwide. We had problem fulfilling volume we have problem with logistics we had probable shipping and we needed a platform and a company that had all the pieces in one place for us to execute our orders. I had met Justin through general Boston I came highly recommended and fulfilment come work for us in flying colors he had a very good onboarding process, give us an account manager and worked with my team to get everything in place it was a pretty seamless process with a Fulfillment.com. We're better organized and we're postured for worldwide expansion. We're already available in twenty eight markets around the world I think Fulfillment.com is perfect for any aggressively growing e-commerce brand. I would recommend Fulfillment.com to any of my e-commerce friends and I already have and well Justin has a hell of reputation in the e-commerce world is also veteran. For my end is no better person to run logistics than Jewish military veterans. We're very happy with Fulfillment.com and the attention to detail that is company gifts to our company. We're happy with the service 100%!
We were shipping all sorts of stuff out of his garage we have no idea how to figure out and optimize different shipping costs and it was challenging to say the least. My name is Chaz Shively, I live in Denver, Colorado. I'm an entrepreneur and I own a couple of companies. One of them is Legendary Ventures which creates and sells health supplements and the other company is Prosper Wellness which creates health products. Back when we got started seven or eight years ago I started fulfilling my own products in my house with my two-year-old and four-year-old son in my life after awhile we grew to where we had so many products that wouldn't fit in a garage and luckily I had met somebody from Fulfiolment.com at a conference and the rest is history. At the time we started doing less than a million dollars a year in business and now we're roughly around ten million dollars a year so it's grown a lot. As a bit of a non control freak I did have some concerns about outsourcing a core component of our business and make sure that it worked well but it integrated so quickly and easily and out of all of our vendors, out of all the years that we've been in business well Fulfillment.com has never been a concern. Don't worry being an entrepreneur for twenty five years and just realize how things work and the things break and there are always issues and with Fulfillment.com it seems like there are never issues. Once you outsource to them everything is taken care of you don't have to worry about it. There's no question Fulfillment.com has fulfilled all the expectations that I had and exceeded them.
We're taking time away from saving a dog and saving a hero's life by shipping these materials out across the country. My name is David Sharpe, Founder and CEO of Companions for Heroes. We are a charity that saves shelter dogs and has them adopted by wounded veterans, active duty military spouses, gold star families and first responders across the country. We started selling apparel about two years ago and the process was convoluted to say the least. We had to get all these orders together at once, we had a very difficult time of sending that out and taking up a lot of our resources so now with our partnership we are now able to do that through Fulfillment.com's network. They take care of all the processing, our team doesn't have to worry about shipping out the order that's being done by Fulfillment.coms team now and our team is more focused on their job which is to save a dog and to save a hero from taking their lives or being killed. The process was simple and structured their welcome packet laid out step by step what we need to do and getting our product shipped out and spend tremendous Fulfillment.com is perfect for any scale business for the first time in the charity's 10 year running we're prepared for any type of orders that come our way thanks to Fulfillment.com