#066: How Matt Rosenfeld Grew CRUSH By Saying No

Yeah. So it started as I had my own brands that solely sold on Amazon and I was doing the— like an independent contractor working with brands to support growth as we were building up those brands. And then after about 3 or 4 months, I kind of took a step back and looked up and I was managing 4 or 5 brands and had a small team and that was doing more revenue than the products I was selling. And I was like, maybe that is the product or service I should be selling.

Matt Rosenfeld, founder and CEO of Crush, has built a unique Amazon-focused agency that's distinguishing itself in a crowded digital marketplace. With an eye for strategic growth and a commitment to transparency, Matt has led Crush to become a boutique agency dedicated to helping brands optimize their Amazon presence while prioritizing client relationships. In this episode, Matt delves into the nuances of running a service-oriented business including the importance of choosing the right clients and fostering trust through transparent communication. He shares how Crush has evolved from a solo venture into a team of 22, as well as the lessons learned from managing a lean, high-performing agency. Welcome back to Season 3, Episode 9 of the Turning Pro Podcast. Today we have Matt Rosenfeld, who's the founder and CEO of Crush. Thanks for joining us today, Matt.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

I think we should just jump right into the conversation we were having before we hit record.

Yeah, let's do it.

So we're talking about how you're now pushing customers out into Q1, which is like kind of a dream for any founder to be able to confidently say that's the best thing for the business, but maybe talk a little bit about what you're working on and why that's the case.

Yeah. So we're in a, we're in an interesting situation where we are like, the background is our like fee structure with clients is fixed fee plus incentive on revenue performance. And so Q4 is such a big time for us with a lot of our largest clients that the potential risk, right, of onboarding new clients and bandwidth getting in a little bit of a crunch through that period that could potentially negatively impact performance, like far outweighs the upside of bringing those clients on. And the interesting learning is we're talking to a client, very large established brand, wants to onboard, is going through this process of negotiating where they want to negotiate fee or they want to negotiate term. And like, it's, it's the first time we have ever been in a position to go back to them and say, hey, typically I'd be totally open to negotiating those terms. But given where we are right now as a business and the demand we have at full fee and full term, like we can't prioritize that and it makes them want you more. So they responded saying, what if we met those terms? And now I'm like, well, we're in a position where we said yes to another person.

Negotiation 101.

Yeah.

And I was bad at that. That's been a big learning for me is I'm bad at negotiating.

Being willing to walk away is the easiest tactic in negotiation.

I fully agree.

You come from a place of leverage.

Fully agree. I don't know how you get— like, I'm mentally very bad at that, like getting myself in a mental position to say Okay, I'm willing to walk away from this when I get probably overly excited about it.

I think it comes down to trust in yourself and your business that like if you stick to your core principles and operate the way that you know you should be operating at the expense of nothing or nobody, it ends up paying off in the long term. I think my personal anecdote on that is when we started, we were just saying yes to everyone in the early, early days, you know, because when someone's willing to pay you money to do the thing you say you're going to do, it's really cool and exciting. And then when you get down the line and realize there are probably people you shouldn't have said yes to, but you did, it actually hurts even more. Once you go through that a couple of times, you're willing to walk away from the wrong people, from the people who you know aren't good for your business.

Fully agree.

I think the— what happens a lot of the time when you do take on those folks that came in discounted or came in heavily negotiated or wanted to start before you were actually ready, a lot of the time, just based on experience, that maybe you will have that win of like from a revenue lens. Okay, we hit this target and now we're moving forward. We brought on this big new logo. but it always shoots your team in the leg. The minute that they get onboarded, it's stressing out them. It broke process. They wanted all these add-ons that you kind of gave way on. And I don't know if you've had that experience, but every single time that we've done that, it turns out like they were just a headache to work with.

Every time I've had that experience, it's, it's a big priority for me to try and identify. I think it's even a conversation we had earlier, like the flags that give you a little bit of a cue as to when that's going to happen.

100%. And I think increasingly, I think in a sales process, most teams appreciate the honesty of when you are not a good fit for them. And every time that, like, a year ago I've said like, hey guys, I want to work with you, but you are genuinely too early for us. And I don't think this is going to give you the performance that it needs. Every time I've been honest about it, they come back. And a lot of the time in a call where I'm not dishonest, but I'm like, we could probably tweak our product and do like a lightweight engagement and we could probably drive some results. Every time they were too early and they after like 3 or 4 months, they're like, hey, we like you guys, but I think we need to wait a year. And it's such a stronger position to just be completely straightforward. Yeah, like, you are not a good fit right now. When you are, I would absolutely love to work with you for these reasons.

Completely agree.

But that's because when you're seeking a service provider for anything, you come from a place of leverage on day zero because you're the one that's paying money for a service. So when someone who you offer your money to says, no, I'm good, Like, wait, what? Like, why did I just get rejected? I thought I'm the one who's supposed to have my decisions here.

100%.

Yeah.

Can you give me a little bit of background on the business itself?

Yeah. So I run an agency called Crush. We are a boutique, full-service kind of Amazon solution. I would say the way we position ourselves is we are for brands that care about brand. So we work primarily with established D2C and CPG brands who want to take more of a narrative, cohesive, story-driven approach to Amazon. Where 95% of our partners are premium price compared to market average. And the other core differentiator for us, just as background on Crush, is nobody comes from an agency. So we are all like in terms of background from P&L ownership operating.

Your team, you're saying?

The whole team. And so we've structured our offering in this agency space to be much more as like full scope outsourced operators than a traditional agency partner.

When you're in say I'm running a big brand and we want to work with you, or we at least want to launch our Amazon offering because maybe we haven't launched sales on that channel. What are the reasons that ultimately get me over the line to working with you guys versus— because I know there are a number of other agencies in the space.

Yeah. So that's a really interesting question. I think we have a different approach that is more flexible to different ways brands are defining success. So a brand could come to you in a situation we're in right now and their brand name is already being searched 15,000 times a month on Amazon. So we can go to them and basically say, hey, half of Amazon is demand capture, right? It's a net for the demand you're generating external to the platform. Right now, your competitors are taking that, customers are falling off, there's nothing there. This is a no-brainer win for you, and we can back into very easily what that revenue looks like. And if you're willing to reinvest, there's growth in the channel. The other side of it would be net new customer acquisition. A lot of agencies in my experience, there are a lot of really good agencies out there. When we hear about pitches that are going against us, a lot of them are super reliant on paid spend, heavy investment upfront, lack of profitability, push really hard in the platform for 6 or 8 months and just start that flywheel to get you going. What we have learned and where our approach differs is our equation for success is click-through rate times conversion rate times impression share. Equals revenue, which essentially boils down to we just have to show up in the right place at the right time on relevant searches, and we don't actually want to be everywhere. So where are we going to sell with the highest likelihood of getting that conversion? So we teach Amazon where to position us and we get to a place of profitability a lot more quickly. And I think given the ecosystem we're all operating in, that has been a much larger focus.

And that, and that's because you said you're working with like larger brands that are already being recognized.

For the most part.

So we—

you'd be surprised, like some brands we work with, again, 15,000 monthly searches. You launch, you're already selling a tremendous amount of volume. Then there are brands that are doing 25 or 30 million plus on Shopify. We launch on Amazon. There's no support from the brand. That's not the channel where people are looking. And so it's much more like building a brand up from scratch. And so there's a different approach for those two sides of the market.

What were the specific phases of the agency thus far? Because I'm running an agency. Ben started with an agency before it morphed into Platter. And so we both have been through the wringer of like kind of different phases or evolutions of it.

Yeah.

So it started as I had my own brands that solely sold on Amazon and I was doing the— like an independent contractor working with brands to support growth as we were building up those brands. And then after about 3 or 4 months, I kind of took a step back and looked up and I was managing 4 or 5 brands and had a small team and that was doing more revenue than the products I was selling. And I was like, maybe that is the product or service I should be selling. And so we started as independent contractor. We were operating just under my initials as, as Mar Partners with, with no plan, no website, nothing. For the first 6 months we didn't have a website, all referral. And then we decided to rebrand as Crush. And we've just been kind of on a growth journey ever since. So it went from that to me pulling almost exclusively from my network in the Amazon space to bring in high-quality operators and scale the offering that way.

So early days, it was essentially you with kind of like you as like a freelancer on steroids. Exactly. On a house with like a freelance team under you. Then you started to build a team, you rebranded, built a site. What evolution are you in right now?

Still about in that evolution. So building the team, we now have 22 people at Crush, which is really exciting, incredible talent. And we still have a website, which is great, that we have not updated once since we launched it. And we're now going through the thought process, as I think a lot like everyone does in this situation, of do we ever start to do outbound? Do we do marketing? Do we do sales? Do we develop collateral? That is kind of the phase of is that going to be a part of our growth journey or do we just keep doing what we're, what we're doing right now?

What are you leaning towards?

I'm leaning towards right now, I want to be in a position where if we ever need sales collateral and case studies, I have it before we need it. And so I think going into Q4 where we're consciously not onboarding, that's going to be a priority for me to get done for, for next year.

What is your broader philosophy on where you think the marketplace like landscape is headed? Call it 5, 10 years from now, right? There's this existential conversation around own your customers. So you should be focusing on Shopify. But then diversify to be omnichannel, to like make more money in multiple places. Then I know like Fair is considered to be a relatively newer marketplace as it relates to education. Yeah, there's obviously a handful of others beyond Amazon, but I'm curious, as someone who's focusing solely on Amazon, like where do you see the space going in 5 to 10 years?

So this is a really interesting question. I think Amazon will be a core part of all largely successful D2C brands. Moving forward. I think if it's not and you're successful without it in any sort of acquisition, the first thing that an acquirer will put in place is, is an Amazon strategy to unlock additional growth. I also think the conversation we have with a lot of brands is that the largest downside that comes with Amazon is that maybe you aren't wildly successful, right? That is legitimately the downside because every dollar you spend on Meta or every dollar you spend on TikTok is going to be incrementally more efficient just as a function of you being on Amazon. To catch the 3, 4, 5% of people that end up searching for your product there. So there really, at this point, is no downside, and they've made it so easy.

[Speaker] Then what about in terms of like when in your journey—

[Speaker] Yeah.

[Speaker] Are you supposed, when do you think you should be going on Amazon, and then does it matter what category you're in in terms of when in your life cycle you should do it?

[Speaker] In my personal opinion, if you are growing by investing a substantial amount of capital into paid acquisition, you should be on Amazon from the beginning because the efficiency of every dollar will be higher.

And that's because just searchability of like brand awareness, searchability, social proof.

People trust Amazon in a very interesting way as like a source of truth. And now the ability to integrate with Buy with Prime and make it just a more cohesive part of, I think, how customers are converting is going to be a larger part of the overall journey.

So for fast-growing brands right now, I don't know, maybe you've just hit like $20 million run rate and you're doing most of your sales through D2C, through like your own site. Are most folks not going to Amazon because they're just busy and slammed with the current business and they maybe don't have the right partner expertise to go in that direction?

Yeah. So bandwidth.

Yeah.

Or category in alignment with kind of like the ethos of the brand. So like a good example there is Athletic Greens, right? Like they are not on Amazon. Huge, solely subscription focused. It is probably not worth it for them to be on Amazon because Amazon is much more of a discovery channel. And for them, if people are going to subscribe anyway, they only want that to take place through their website. An interesting strategy that I pitch to a lot of brands that we talk to is I don't know why, for example, Athletic Greens doesn't put like a 5-satchet trial pack on Amazon because there's so much search volume to just lower the barrier to entry. So people try it on Amazon and then subscribe on your website and you can capture and track that data.

I feel like if you believe in your product and the quality of it, that there's no reason not to do what you're talking about. Because if the main goal is subscription, I totally understand why you're incentivized to drive them to your, your Shopify store to get them on the subscription where you own that customer. But from the perspective of like, I want more mouths to just taste my product, and if they like it, they're going to care enough to go look for like a longer-term relationship with the brand. Seems kind of like a no-brainer.

Completely agree. Like, I, I could not agree more.

I'm curious from an agency structuring lens. Again, we've been both very much been through this where I think even externally, whether you're doing content or not, you guys are more under the radar. You can kind of keep up a pretty appearance on the outside, but especially agencies, there's like fire drills going on every day, every week, hopefully not as often as you get bigger, but especially once you start doing volume of just like working with a lot of clients, it's just a lot of big numbers. Like something's going to go wrong eventually or something's going to fall apart and like you need to jump in and fix it. And so as you guys have scaled, what is the realities of running an agency kind of behind the scenes?

Yeah. So this is a really interesting question. And I think I'm very curious your opinion on this from, from both your like kind of the industries you operate in. We legitimately could not find a software provider that gave us the granularity in terms of data we wanted to view on a daily basis to run our business the way we wanted to. And so we ended up building our own. So the reality of the day to day is we've built our own dashboard internally that pulls in every metric we care about, refreshing almost every 2 hours. So we meet every morning for an hour and legitimately talk about the performance of every single brand, trailing 14 days, last day, what fluctuated up and down, what is the cause. And then there are notes attached to every week according to how that works. So for us, it's really been documenting and building like one foundation that allows us to consistently level up that, that offering.

Did that always exist or was that only like over time when you couldn't find that right source?

So that, that probably came into existence 6 months ago when it became a reality because we'd go into those meetings in the morning and we'd be talking high level, but we just couldn't efficiently look at the data in real time to, to back up what we were saying.

I mean, I think the main reason for that is every business is slightly different. Yeah. So there might be service providers out there that can pitch you on like, oh, here's the data, here's the software tool to build your dashboard, but it's always gonna be slightly different than what you want and how you want it. Uh, I think for us it's been interesting because a lot of the data points that we're looking at, there's a lot of other factors that impact them, right? So my best example is conversion rate. Unlike your Shopify store, there's a lot of things we could be doing in terms of best practices and principles in terms of how we're architecting a storefront. But we have zero control over the quality of the product, the seasonality of the product, the pricing strategy, the discounting strategy, the ad spend. All of those things have a material impact on it. And so it's really hard for us to be able to like isolate it and track it in a way where we know nothing else across the entire business has been changed and thus we're the reason that something improved or didn't improve. So I think for that reason, I've realized that not only are there not any tools that we can use, but it's more for us specifically, it's more about the relationship with the brand that we have in terms of how those things are being impacted, that it's not really something that's worth spinning our wheels on right now.

Yeah, I mean, I think that ties into something I say like probably once a week on our weekly calls where I used to be— and maybe this is a function of I'm originally from the Bay Area, and so I was always looking around at tech startups and platforms and SaaS and apps. And I used to think that to start a successful business, you had to completely reinvent the wheel and have like a novel idea that no one was doing and go to market and really take advantage of that. And now I've come to the realization that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Amazon agencies offering a similar service to what we do. But to your point, like, I think the nurturing the relationship with the client, understanding what they want to see and offering the best service that aligns with the data they're looking at internally is enough of a differentiator to allow you to win.

I would argue that a very, very small percentage of successful businesses in today's day and age are like truly novel. I've never heard of that type of ideas.

Yeah.

Versus taking an efficiency and just making it better. I think Sam is a great example with Floss. She didn't like invent the idea of flossing your teeth. Yeah, it was just like, look how people are doing it. I could do it a little bit better and it then takes a life of its own.

Totally agree.

Nick Huber on Twitter talks about this a lot of like, you don't need to go create like a novel new like B2B SaaS or vertical SaaS company. You could start with agencies, then layer in software as you guys did, and you can do basically the exact same thing. What is it? Just like better, faster, or cheaper? And if you're doing one of those three things, then it usually tends to work. I think when you're, when you're focusing on that like better aspect or faster, then you can charge pretty premium prices.

I agree.

I think it's an inexperienced entrepreneur who falls into the trap of like, I can't do this, someone's already doing this. I remember like my 15-year-old self, like you want to think of something that no one's ever done before. I was like that kid who would like go talk to someone and be like, sign an NDA, I'm not telling you my idea. Totally. You're going to take it. They're going to take it from me. And then like you fast forward into getting into a real entrepreneur journey. I'm like, holy fuck, I cannot believe that's how I was operating. But you learn through trial and error, right?

Yeah.

I'm not doing anything now that's like novel. I'm building websites for brands. We're just doing it a slightly different way that I think is more efficient. That's the bottom line. Totally.

Sometimes in sales calls, it's funny. We'll get to like a final round and maybe I'm pitching to a CMO and their CEO will come in. Is how are you guys different? Oh, well, we're like writing articles and case studies for you guys. We're just really good at it and we do it really quickly and we can help you skip a lot of steps. And they're like, is that all? I'm like, mostly, yeah. I think we just do it like better and faster than a lot of other people or your in-house team. It's a little cheaper. Have you experienced that like in calls before?

So I was going to say this, like brands come to us and say, hey, our brand is super unique. We're different than everybody else on the market. What are you going to do that is different? Than everything else you've done? And the answer is there are only so many levers you can pull. Like Amazon is a walled garden, right? Like you only have so many things you can do to influence the platform. And the strategy for one unique brand in pet is not going to be different than one unique brand in beauty in terms of what that initial go-to-market looks like.

I think the differentiator at the end of the day is like trust. Yeah. Like if you as a service provider can build— like I think you've built a lot of your business on trust. Like you have this referral network of people who send other businesses do because they trust you. It's not because, like you said, you're writing articles. You're not like, you're not doing anything that no one's ever seen before. You just do one thing really well and you have results to show for it. And so other people have seen what you've done, so they want to work with you on it. You don't— like, I, I actually think if you try to get too fancy in a pitch and they still like opt in to do it, it's probably going to end really badly because they're expecting you to do some sort of magic. Like for you, a brand gives you that pitch, you're like, no, like I have a I have a big team of people who've just looked at data all day and they're going to do the same thing we've done very well for other people. Why do you need us to be unique? Like, put your ego aside. You just want it to work.

Yeah, I completely agree. That is exactly my response.

I'm curious in terms of people that you are learning from or you're taking their advice and implementing into your business, who, who do you usually go to or that you're learning from the most? Because like my experience has been usually people feel like early days in your career you want like a mentor and people people to kind of open the door for you. But after that point, I feel like talking to you guys, like, we're at very similar revenue stages, and like, literally, like, we're at like 23 people. It's like the exact same stages of this business. Conversations with you are way more helpful because sometimes I'll talk to— I was talking to like an agency owner, sold for a lot of money. He and I are good friends, and he's more of like a mentor. And I was talking about our sales process, and he was like, don't do that, just like double your prices, do this. And I'm like, brother, you have not signed a contract since like the economy tanked like a year and a half ago. Things are very, very different. And like their tactical advice, maybe around hiring and structuring is still useful. Like I'm not throwing it out the window, but for the most part it's like in real time how you think about BD for an early stage agency of our scale. I'm going to learn a lot more from you about how you structure your process versus like someone, even if they've been very successful 10 years ago.

Yeah, it's a— that's an interesting question. I would say I, I have a few people in my life that I look at as like mentors or advisors, but they are primarily focus on the bigger picture. So what are you doing to plan for any potential exit? How are you structuring the business? How are you hiring? What does that look like? I don't think to your point, it's as tactical in the day to day where I agree, like conversation with you, a conversation with— so I have a buddy named Bobby who runs an agency called Lilo, and Bobby and I talk all the time. And the info and insight I get from 1 hour with Bobby in terms of what is he doing to acquire new clients, what is the process, how is he going through that, that process with his team changes the trajectory of what I'm thinking about, what I'm implementing immediately in the business.

I think it's drawing a line between— because, you know, you want to read books and you want to listen to podcasts and you want to learn from people. And odds are the people that are actually surfacing on your feed are like the people who've made it already.

Yeah.

Or like how many entrepreneurs you think have listened to like an Alex Hormozy clip at one point or another? Whether he's legit or not, that's not— it doesn't matter. It's like he's built a distribution channel where he becomes the face that a lot of people will find online. But there becomes an element of like, how relevant is that listening to someone who already made it to try to tell you what to do versus, to your point, like using friends who are on that journey in the same moment as you? I think you have to have a filter for knowing like what type of inputs to take, because I think knowing how to get to where you want to go is important, but you're going to learn more from people who are enduring the same things you are. Because you're all constantly reinventing yourself. I think like sitting at a table with someone who's like a, you know, multibillionaire and sold 7 companies, be really cool to have a conversation with them. But I don't know how helpful they're going to be for me to like, you know, go from $2 million to $3 million in like revenue.

Yeah. Like us talking about how to go this revenue to this revenue. What are the main levers and inputs? Yeah, it's like you could actually talk about that stuff in real time. I was talking to a very experienced person that came from private equity. And really wanted to talk like early-stage founder life. And he was really inspirational from a directional lens. And I actually got really like quality insights out of it. But I was like, these are like annual goals that you were helping me move the needle on versus real time. I'm like, well, I'm going to do the same thing I did today and this isn't going to change it. But maybe when I do some reflection about annual planning, that may come into play.

Yeah, I've also— I don't know about either of you in your respective situations, but like, I don't have technically a co-founder.

On YouTube are both psycho and he doesn't either.

Yeah.

And that has been one— I would never do it again.

Nope.

I, I've tried to empower the leadership team within Crush to act as co-founders. Like, nothing you are going to say to me is ever going to be like— even though technically there's like this hierarchy, like, I'm never going to get angry at you for saying something like that is the pushback I need because otherwise I find that I do somewhat live inside my head on a lot of these decisions and overcomplicate a lot of things. I think to the root of what we're saying, there's a lot to be said. I got this feedback from someone who is in a similar position to we are, where what has worked is still working. There are a lot of these big ideas that you could go and implement and change, and maybe they do have a huge impact on your growth. But I try to simplify a lot of the things I say. What has worked for us this month? What worked for us last month? What can I do to just iterate slightly, 10, 15% on what I think actually moves the needle there and not add in all these other things that are going to take bandwidth or add stress to the team and just not really. And that's, I think, a lot of the reason why we haven't pushed on a lot of the marketing levers we could, because I just think it is going to complicate the structure we have.

This is interesting, though, because we're all in very similar points right now. I think ballpark revenue, my team is 24, so we're all within like 2 people. So I think we can actually use this as a real-time therapy session. Yeah. I'm curious what keeps you up at night right now.

I had never thought that I would get so concerned and there's no rationale behind it, but about making sure everyone at Crush is super happy, they're compensated well, and the payroll is going to go through every month, which is in reality not a concern at all. And we've got so much buffer for it. But that truly does, um, keep me up.

So what are the steps you're taking to combat that, like, concern that you have?

So I, I have tried to incentivize everybody that I think is like a crucial pillar to our success long term with ownership in the business. So I have gone out proactively and been like, you are truly moving the needle for us. Let's talk about what it looks like to get you involved.

So equity, equity, why equity versus profit share, rev share?

I found that equity is more meaningful, I think, in terms of the way you can convey it. And I think it also better aligns us towards whatever future goal we're looking to achieve. But candidly, could have maybe done profit share. Hadn't— didn't put a ton of thought into, into one way or the other.

You know what I learned is there's a difference in terms of what people value depending on their cultural background. Our offshore, uh, employees, they care more about cash than equity.

Totally.

And I don't know if it's just a cultural thing. It's like we've had some where like I've said it to them and they're like, okay, thanks. But you could tell they're like, I don't really care about this. Like they'd rather take like a bump in salary. It's not to say there's a right or wrong answer. It was really interesting for me to realize that not everyone— so I think in terms of how I think about how do you make sure people are happy, they're feeling like they're rewarded for their work, I've realized that I have to approach it on an individual basis, um, which I think is really unique versus just assuming a blanket strategy for everyone. Because every person's different, you don't know their own personal life, what's more important than— maybe they prefer more money today versus like this future hypothetical outcome, even if it could be more money. Yeah, uh, which has been a really important learning for me, I think, for two reasons. Number one, like, selfishly, why would I want to give up more equity to— in my business to someone where I'm gonna hypothetically make less money at the end, and they also don't even care about it. Yeah, right. So it's been— that's been a really interesting learning for me in terms of how do I think about making sure everyone is really happy. Understand what's important to them is like step one.

I agree.

I think to your point, I'm not worried. I don't have like the payroll concern because I, I don't know about you guys, I check our bank account every single morning. Yeah.

Oh, I know you do. And I've said multiple times a day Well, Adrian's like, yo, Ben, what's this $19 charge for this software? This software we're using to like edit our podcast. And I'm like, dude, don't you have a business to run? What the hell is going on?

My assistant goes through the credit card bills, not me. No, I do check my bank account every once in a while.

No, it's not a bad thing. I have a co-founder who's like that, which has allowed me to not have to focus on it. But I get a message at least once every 2 days from Mike. He's like, dude, what is this? And I was like—

But you don't— do you not check your bank account this week?

No, I do, but I'm not going through every single line item.

Oh no, I don't do that either.

I'm bad about that too.

If you're, if you're saying like open the bank account to like see how much cash is in there. Yeah, that takes me 4 seconds.

Yeah.

No, but he, but he's like, he's fine-tooth comb every single line item.

I did hear from a, from an agency founder who exited. He went through his P&L with a fine-tooth comb every single month to decrease costs.

Like my co-founder does that.

Yeah, that, that is something someone on the team doing it.

So talk about, talk about it being a solo founder versus having co-founders. I have two co-founders. I can very confidently tell you, look, I'm 28 years old. It's my first company. Fast forward 3, 5, 8 years from now, if we have a successful outcome and I made less money because I had less equity, because I had co-founders, will be more than okay with it because I've realized that not only has it improved my quality of life, I've also not had to lose sleep over the things I know I'm not good at and the things I don't enjoy. But there are people in place who I trust to do those things. So I do believe that there is an element of ego when it comes to this conversation of founder versus co-founder. Not in your instance where like you maybe just literally started the company by yourself and you fast forward, it's like, I don't have a co-founder because I don't have a co-founder. I actually have a friend who, you know, who I'm going to not name. I will tell you offline, he's in the process right now of actually making multiple of his employees co-founder title for two reasons. Number one, it'll be easier for them to close more deals because they will be treated as a higher-up person. And in his mind, he's like, financially, this is, this is actually a brilliant decision. But from an equity perspective, he's giving them like a little bit more equity. But by, you know, we're talking like orders of magnitude less than him. But for him, he's like, dude, I have no ego in this. At the end of the day, like, I know I'm the founder, I know I'm the CEO. If by giving other people the title of co-founder to be able to not only one, fulfill their journey of like, I've always wanted to start a company Number 2, to be able to go talk to more people and close deals where they feel important because they feel like they're talking to a founder. Because there's definitely an element of ego where like you don't want to be a CEO and you get put on the phone with like an entry-level sales rep, you're like, dude, fuck off. Like, so there's an optics piece and there's an ego piece. When he told me that, I was like, dude, that takes a lot of maturity for you to understand how much better off your business is going to be in however many years from now because you're willing to like take that ego off the table and give that title to people. So there's just something for you guys to think about. If there's like that one person in your business where you're like, I know I'm never letting them leave, like I'm going to give them the golden handcuffs from a comp perspective. But I also think if I gave them the title piece, it's going to push them a little bit further knowing that I don't need to let go of— like, I can let go of my ego that I now have a co-founder where I can still call myself the founder. I was like, I don't actually see the downside in this.

I think the levers you have, it's like title, equity, base comp, and then like however you're structuring like profit share, rev share, bonuses, It could be monthly, it could be yearly. I think early stages when I started building the team, a lot of the teammates that we hired, especially at the exec level, came from startups or multiple startups. I think everyone on the exec team worked at multiple startups and none of the startups worked or they all died or like some are kind of still going. I've been there. And just have been burned by like, quote, equity promises again and again and again. But again, like if they haven't had that experience, like I do think about this sometimes. I don't know if we're ever going to exit or get acquired or if we will at that exit event. I do want them compensated, but like I own 100% of the business and so I always go back and forth of like, well, I don't need to do that because we're doing like serious revenue shares. Yeah, but at the same time, if that event does happen, I'd be like, well, I want, I want you guys to be part of this too. And so I do kind of like the equity component. But at the same time, if I joined a company, if I joined you guys as your, I don't know, head of BD or BDR or whatever it is, And if I joined you guys, on one level, I would want to know what I'd be making every single month because I've been in startups for a while and I understand how equity most of the time is worthless. I would love to just know, hey, every quarter I'm making X amount per deal or per revenue share based on top line.

Yeah, I mean, I think, again, it just comes down to understanding your people and understanding what is the best lever that you can pull to put people in a position to succeed and be excited about it.

Yeah, and where they are in their lives, which is a big point of conversation for me where most of my leadership team is at the point where they are— looking to start a family, buy a home, get something in the next couple of years that is like a step in adulthood. And I think for them in the conversations I've had is like they want to work towards a goal where they get some sort of larger compensation associated with whatever ends up happening.

For folks younger in their career, maybe not straight out of college because you don't have skill sets right away, but maybe a few years after that, would you recommend— or let's frame it like this— what are the pros and cons of running an agency? Agency? Because I have many thoughts on this matter.

Interesting. Well, first of all, it's funny because I never thought I'd run an agency.

Me neither.

That's what every agency owner says.

I never thought I'd be in this situation. I would say go narrow. Like the pros and cons of running an agency are you, you can build a really healthy business and I think more importantly, work with incredible people and build an incredible network as a function of that. I think those are early in your career, probably the two most valuable things that will help you in later stages. I think in order to do it successfully, and a lot of the operators within the agency space I've talked to, they went really narrow to start. And you always have the opportunity to expand, but trying to do too much too early on is not going to pan out for you, I think, especially at that early stage.

What are the cons? Deep breath.

So the cons are, again, I didn't have any idea about this. So all of us, we have between 22 and 24, 26 people. But when you think about total stakeholders involved with day-to-day operations, we say you're working with hypothetically 100 partners and each of those partners have 3 people. All of a sudden you're working with 330, right? Potential partners plus all of these internal people. That, that's been hard for me. Just like logistics and logistics management. And I also think there is no way and we've never tried to But everyone knows there really is the other hard thing is there's no way to enforce really your contracts unless you're really going to try to go after somebody, which we would never do. So when a client comes to you and it's not working and you're trying to project out what your revenue is going to look like, you are in a position where you kind of just say, hey, I understand. It happens. We're here to support you. And we're going to let you out. Or I understand you can't pay, or one of those things. But that early on was definitely a challenge.

I think for me, the number one con is that you are always at the— like, you're always on someone else's time whether you like it or not. In this— in the sense that, like, even when you're right, you might be wrong because they don't want to accept it. Because you're a service provider, people are unhappy with you, it's your job to, like, fix that relationship. And you're constantly just always having to be on, putting out fires, figuring out how to solve problems. And to your point, as you scale, if you get one message every other day from every single client, like That's a lot of shit to deal with.

Yeah.

When not 100% of them are always going to be like the happiest, most positive messages, like, hey, why did this break? Why isn't this working? What's going on here? And it could get exhausting when you're constantly just a service provider. I think that to me is probably the biggest challenge I saw from the agency perspective. And I'm also saying that as the one in our business that's not actually responsible for that function. Yeah. So I think I have empathy for the people on my team who do have to deal with that every single day.

But you do understand their perspective, which I was on the brand side before.

And yeah, I'm not, I'm not discounting the perspective at all.

I agree. But like, it's tough because I like, I empathize with that where they're like, hey, I'm paying you this much money. I haven't asked you. I don't care how busy you are right now. I haven't asked you for anything this month. I asked you for this in an hour. I expect it in an hour. There's no understanding that there's all these different things going on. It's everyone's in their own little universe and that That I agree with. That is very challenging.

I have a friend who has an automation on his Slack channel. It's a bot that basically just calculates their average. Every one of their clients has a Slack channel, which I think is a whole nother conversation. But he has a bot that averages out their, their response time.

Cyrus. Yeah.

It like he's like it needs to be under, I think, like I think it's like 7 minutes right now. Like they need at the minimum to acknowledge any message you get from someone like, hey, I'm confirming I saw this, like we'll come back to you on it. But every day they just get an update from the bot, like, you missed this one, you missed that one. And he, like, his philosophy is that customer service is the thing that wins at the end of the day. And so that's like one KPI that he tracks.

I love that.

Maniacally.

I love that too. I would implement that immediately.

Him to get the info on this.

Yeah, it's scary, but I think for internal purposes it's scary. I think it's really important, but I think it could stress a lot of people out on your team. But it might need— you might need to be able to do that.

I mean, maybe, but I, I've talked about that acknowledgement component probably 100 times where it doesn't matter if you have the answer to the question immediately, but letting, letting someone know you saw their message and you acknowledge it and you're going to work on it is 80% of what needs to be done.

Cyrus and I both agree that there's a direct correlation between quick response times and success.

Agreed. Text, calls, anything.

I think the most successful people in my life respond immediately to whatever it is that happens, uh, and if they don't, it's because they're very tied up or busy. Versus like reading something like, I'll get back to that in a couple of days.

How do you— I'm curious for both of you, how do you manage that professionally and socially? So like, I have definitely compromised on my response times to things not related to business over the past 5 or 6 months. And I consciously am now recognizing that where I'll go through my texts and I'll have 10 that need a response and 10 of those are just social life things related, unrelated to what needs to happen.

Reality. You're, you're building a business. I mean, you, you have to be able to prioritize. I think people around you to some degree have to be understanding of how you're operating. I think it's something I've learned is it becomes inevitable that you can't be there for everyone always, all the time.

Yeah.

Uh, the way that I operate in that regard, I've, I'm an inbox zero type person. Like I don't go to sleep until I've gone through my inbox. Typically that goes for my email and my texts. Any unread message in my phone has a, like, an action item. So I don't know if you knew this, I found this out 6 months ago and it changed everything, that you can filter on iMessage just to see unread messages.

I have no idea how to do that.

You need to show me how to do this after.

Yeah, because what would I— what would usually happen is like, oh, I'll open this when I can come to it, and you're like scrolling trying to— you're like, I know I have this message somewhere. There's a filter on iMessage where you can just see your unread messages. So I use that, and all the unreads are because I owe someone a response or I have to like do something that I don't have time to do this moment. But that is my filter for how I like try to manage my inbox.

Clear it out the same way you have an inbox zero, like your text.

Yes, but I'll go to sleep with like 10 unread messages because those are 10 things I need to do, but they're not urgent. They don't need to be done now.

It's a to-do list in a sense.

It's a to-do list.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think to one of your original questions about like the, the downside of agencies is that I feel like especially as you built a team, maybe you have less of the, you know, not when a client's upset, but like something didn't go as planned and they want to build a new strategy for it. Your team can handle most of that. But I feel like the only pings I get from clients now, it doesn't happen as often, but maybe once a month, once every 2 months. The only pings I get from clients or from my team is when something is fundamentally broken. I never get any of the fun stuff anymore. Like closing clients is all great on the BD front, but internally, once a client has been onboarded, it is only the not fun stuff. It's like, the team can't figure this thing out, this person is not performing, what are we going to do about it, do we need to let them go, do we need to put them on a PIP? Like, none of those are fun conversations. Yeah, if I get a ping from a client, it's usually like, hey man, I've been talking to the team, this thing isn't working, I need your input, jump on this call. And I'm like, okay, fine.

We have a, we have a Slack channel called Platter Love, so anytime there's like a compliment or like someone's posting about us on social or whatever, it, it gets screenshotted and put in that chat.

That's just our general channel.

We'll like tag Yeah, we do the same thing.

We, we have a scope. But to your point around, to your point around like you don't have any of the good conversations, like we have a channel that's solely dedicated to the good conversations or like the highlights that are happening. Because I mean Slack is just a nightmare when there's just so many different things happening. So having one place fully dedicated to positivity, I found to be like very good for the team.

I also proactively go out of my way to, at the end of every week, send a message to internal team members as well as external team members, just like hyping up things that were wins across accounts they're managing, things that went well, like actively getting involved in that way. And I think that's made a big difference. But I would also say I— not even in like a bragging way, like I receive maybe once every 3 weeks a text or a Slack from a client basically just saying like, hey, I just want to let you know I've loved working with your team. The team on the account's great. That makes my day for weeks. Like, I will screenshot those.

My compliment of the year.

I couldn't look at that.

I couldn't agree more, especially in instances where I did nothing but bring the lead through the door.

Exactly.

And then I'll get a message like, dude, the new site went live. It's fucking awesome. Thank you so much. I was like, I appreciate that. I did nothing. I'm going to send your message to the team of people who actually made this come to life.

Yeah.

You know, I think that's so important for, especially for agency owners or people operating agencies. Because agencies and service is such a thankless job, both sometimes on the internal side, on the client side, anyone involved in the business. The large majority of the time it's just a really thankless job. And so like when that stuff does happen, it's like, ah, this is great. This was like a win. And that can keep you going for a long time.

A very long time.

Yeah. Way better than closing a new deal or making a new hire. Just like, just one thing that went really well and like someone actually gave thanks for something. Yeah. I think anyone listening to this, if you were Working with a vendor or an agency, it means a lot.

It really does mean a lot.

You studied in China, right?

Yes.

I want to speak a little bit about your curiosity with like just the internationalization of business and like the unique advantage you have from doing that. So if I saw that, I was like, fuck, I really don't know any of this.

So it was a really interesting experience. So I studied in China, in Shanghai, for a summer, for 6 months, studying like international business in college. Uh, in college. And I wrote a paper. My essential, like, reason for being there was to look at what I had thought was called, like, the copycat economy in walled ecosystems. So, like, if you go to China, Amazon, right? They have JD.com, right? So they have all of these essentially meta. They have Weibo, right? They have all of these coming. I'm probably wrong now on some of this. I haven't looked into it in a fair bit of time, but Um, the innovation back then, I think full circle to what we talked about, I used to think you had to start something like that. Hugely innovative, huge tech platform. And how were these companies in China getting so successful? Basically taking ideas that were working in other globalized economies, but bringing them specifically to China, changing the form and function so that it was more applicable to that market and then scaling within that ecosystem. That was the majority of what I looked into. And then inadvertently, I had no interest of being in product. When I got into product, it was a lot easier to build on that time I'd spent in China to develop relationships with, with manufacturers.

How does business get done differently?

I mean, it's, it's very similar to agency. It's relationships. Like, the relationship is so, so, so important.

Even just with the manufacturer.

Even with the manufacturer. Like, if you go at, if to anyone in the product business, if you go to China and you meet your manufacturer in person and you bring them a gift and you go out to dinner and you have 2 or 3 really good days with them, you will get a discount. They will cut your price.

Like clockwork.

Like clockwork. Maybe not every year, or if you go every month, that would be amazing. But like, if you do that regularly, you will get an improved position on your economics with them as a partner. No question. And the interesting thing with China is I studied abroad twice. The second time I went to Copenhagen and studied entrepreneurship, and it is like it could not be more the polar opposite of like the ethos of what does entrepreneurship, manufacturing, innovation look like in China versus what does it look like in Denmark and what are people optimizing towards? And I think there really is a healthy balance you can find while trying to find something you can offer that has to make money. So it has to be productive for everyone involved, but it also can have a positive outcome, right? In whatever way on society, on end consumer, in some way on society that I think Denmark obviously does very well.

I think I've always been so fascinated. There are businesses that exist or like venture studios where the only model is look at what works in other markets and bring it here before anyone else.

Global Founders Capital.

I, I think that thesis is so brilliant, but you don't really understand why it's so hard to do until you actually get into it. Yeah, because it's relationships and it's culture. So like, if I want to go start my business in a different country, I would have to first spend 6 months meeting all the right people, right? Because we live in this little bubble in New York where I feel like we know everyone in the ecosystem that we operate in, which is great for like launching our business here, but it doesn't give me any leg to stand on if I get on a one-way ticket across the world to try to replicate what I'm doing here. So the defensibility on that model is brilliant.

Brilliant. And it sets you up really well for acquisition.

Yes.

Like if you are doing that in European countries and you're able to grow market share and there's a larger competitor, a larger established player in the US, like that's a great business model.

I watched this play out when I was at GoPuff. All the rideshare delivery, instant delivery companies were just popping up in every, every country across the world. And then a lot of them tried to come to the US and it It didn't work.

Yeah.

So I'm moving to London in a month and we've already had a few. I think we've had like 3 or 4 London-based clients. And in some of the like investor— we don't have investors, but like friends updates that I send every month. I mentioned that I'm going in for the first time. I was like, hey guys, everyone on this list, I'm moving. If you know any great like early-stage investors in London, they're great referral partners for us. We can help their portfolio grow. Let me know. I think I got like 20 introductions to like a lot of like mapped most of the ecosystem already. Of like, hey, these are the major players, here's who you should know when you go, I'll make intros. And I think that— I think this is like to distill down the exciting part, not about agencies, but about business is how many new verticals and markets and industries there are to go after. Like even within e-commerce where you guys are right now, there's such a long tail globally and across different sub-verticals. Like you could just go heads down on food and bev or just beverage and better-for-you beverage. But long tail, not just the New York market across every single country. Like that is the fun part about business is what feels like a game. And even just like the initial mapping of a new territory, I felt like I was like playing Risk or Catan or something. I was like, oh wait, this is like a new board game, like different players, different styles of doing business. Like in London is a bit more old school, not like China, but every client we've worked with there, I've at some point been in London and we've gone out for drinks and gone out for dinner and had a few too many drinks together and like gotten to know each other. And then the next day you get the email, okay, let's work together. Yeah. And I don't know if that's for every single deal, but we're in the US. You can have one Zoom and just start working together because there's more trust baked in through LinkedIn or Twitter or through shared networks. But I don't know, I feel like that's like the fun ignites again when you're thinking about new territories.

I'm going to Australia in Q1.

And you're moving there?

No, I'm going to spend— I'm going to spend at least a couple of weeks there. Yeah, because the Shopify e-com market there is huge.

Interesting. I didn't know that.

So we, we— I don't even remember how it came about. We randomly got one client. There who just started introducing us to a bunch of other brands. And so we slowly just like built up a little bit of a presence there. Um, and then we met Jay, uh, this guy who has a company called eCommerce Equation. He has 2,000 brands in his, in his company, all Australia-based.

Wow.

Uh, and coincidentally, that one brand that I alluded to at the beginning, he happens to be a shareholder of because they acquired his old brand. So like all these pieces came together and I was thinking to myself, cuz my girlfriend wants to travel at the beginning of the year and like work remote. And I was like, okay, great. But naturally being an entrepreneur, I'm like, how can I like combine business and pleasure? And Australia's a place I've always wanted to go to. And I'm like, I have this guy who like sits at the top of the ladder with all these brands. I need to go out there and spend a couple weeks there. And my biggest thing to my girlfriend when we talked about where we're gonna travel to is time zone because I'm like, I can't be opposite time zones. And then I'm like, except if it's Australia, because there's actually a use case for me to be there. So I have full intention of going for like 2 to 4 weeks, uh, in Q1, and we'll see if I can do any damage there.

I love that. It's like planting a flag in a new territory.

Yeah, I mean, we have a little bit of a foot in with a couple brands. Would like— I can go there and meet every single one of our brands face to face, telling them, hey, I'm here for a month just trying to meet people. I could probably walk away with a fair bit of familiar face, like conversation with a lot of other people in the ecosystem.

100%. How have you guys thought about that in terms of potential, maybe not new geos, but new markets, new sub-verticals, different stages of businesses?

Yeah. So we, we think a lot. It's funny because we own domains for like crush insert marketplace.com. Like we have in the beginning, we thought a lot about does this mean Walmart? Does this mean Target? Does this mean Macy's? Is this retail media as a whole? My plan for this year was Q2 to expand to retail media as a whole.

Yeah, just a little expansion.

Just a little bit. Um, and then demand for Amazon just outpaced expectations. And I thought every month, I think it's going to be the last month where there is that level of demand for Amazon. So I think for us, it's really figure out how does that part of the business continue to operate and optimize. And then I am personally trying to free up bandwidth, I think, to do exactly what you're talking about, to go do personal projects, to vet should we be doing Macy's? Should we be running Criteo for Nordstrom? Um, how do we move upstream? But I think for us there's also the enterprise level clients.

There's a core distinction though between launching a new marketplace and then just maintaining our same operation and just a new geo.

Yeah, right.

Like you're— if you enter to a new marketplace, it's a full new operation. For me, it's just more people that we need to talk to at 6 AM or 9 PM. Yeah, but nothing about the actual business itself changes.

That's what's tricky is I kind of want to keep them segmented. Like, I don't want this new business vertical or test to impact our operations on the existing business, but I don't think that's feasible. I don't think that's actually like the reality of what's going to happen. And then the other thing I think about, which I'm very curious if you have experience here, is we have conversations with enterprise-level accounts and a lot of those conversations are really good. but the answer typically comes back to, hey, we love everything you're saying. We think you'd be a great partner for us, but leadership, we just can't go with somebody at your size. We have to go with one of the enterprise-level players in your space. And so I'm very curious personally how to overcome that and break into that part of the market.

I think it's just continued focus on, as you mentioned, like as narrow as you can go. Like we, This is similar to like the geo expansion of how big a business can be. Like sometimes I'll be hanging out with other friends and they're like, you should be doing SEO and social and email lifecycle. And I'm like, we could go do those things. Very different disciplines. Like there are amazing SEO shops that only do B2B SEO that I respect a lot. We could go do those things, but we mainly just work with like seed, Series A and Series B. And we really are just kind of in like B2B SaaS, commerce infrastructure, fintech, like a couple other adjacent verticals. That's like a tiny part of the market. Like we can be doing what we're doing. We're not, we're not talking to Meta or HubSpot or any major companies. And that, that is our market, like up and downstream and again, tweaking the model and building the team. But I feel like within your narrow focus, you can build such a massive business without expanding vertically or adjacent.

I'll give you my answer to your question of how to get into the enterprise. Yeah, it's social proof. Oh yeah, it's logos. I really don't think it's anything more than that. It's not, it's not like changing your operation. You just have more zeros attached to like whatever it is that you're dealing with.

Yeah.

I've noticed that the bigger, the larger the brand is that you're talking to, the more risk-averse they are, and thus they need more conviction and more proof that you've done it before because they don't want to be the first mover with this small agency and fuck up.

Yeah.

For us, over the last 2 months, we've signed more larger logos in the last 2 months in like a very condensed period of time than ever before by like orders of magnitude. And it's because other people saw who else we started to work with. And the downstream effect of that has been crazy. I really think that's the main, the main differentiator. Yeah, it's annoying because you have to find the first person who does say yes. It's like the chicken and the egg. Yeah, but I think getting one or two of those big accounts allows you to get onto a phone call with an enterprise. Like, totally understand your concerns, but like, look what we did for, you know, insert name here.

Yeah, I agree. And I think it's— it pains me because I have so many unique stories and case studies and wins I want to highlight that I have maybe not the bandwidth to do, but also consciously decided not to do because it, it's very hard for me to separate, I think, who I am personally from who I am professionally. So like I don't do social media, so it's very hard for me to then go and be like, hey, I'm going to be loud on LinkedIn and post all these things because it just isn't who I am. Like, I'm not going to engage with the comments, or maybe I will, but I feel like I'm forcing myself to do that, even going out and generating social proof and doing all these things. I'm happy to talk about it, but like, I'm just—

it's a strange thing for me that I have a really good B2B content agency if you're looking for one.

Okay.

It's called Verbatim.

It's called Verbatim.

We should, we should, we should hit them up.

You got— I don't think you need to post on socials, man. I think you guys should just build case studies internally and put them on your site.

That's what— so that's what we're going to do. We're— I was like, I was also thinking about just no-brainer building 12 case studies. And posting one a month for all of next year.

That's all.

Or you should make it a password-protected site. When you get on a prospect call, you give them the password. And like, here we have them. We just don't show people because we're that good and we don't need to. But you seem like you want to see one.

Yeah, but I do think it does come back to the biggest way we've won is just giving out free value, which I think is something a lot of people don't do. The other day we had someone on our team spent like hundreds of hours putting together this analysis sheet for the number one question we get asked on Amazon, which is how do we tell if this is incremental versus what our brand would have done anyway? We have a full sheet now that just does this for you and you can drop in keywords. It will segment the difference and it will literally show you visually and like in the data however you want what is happening and what's incremental. And in my head I'm like, wow, that is so big for us. It's going to leak no matter what. If I share it with clients, it's going to get around. So do I do a LinkedIn post being like, hey, we built this, this is how we're using it, run with it.

So my advice to you as someone who just screams on LinkedIn every day, uh, would be to post like a preview of it and just say like, if you're interested in us doing analysis for you for free, just drop your email here.

Interesting. And use it just to get leads. Yeah, if you get on a call, you can—

you the same way that you look on, uh, Amazon search to test the strength of a product. Yeah, you can test the strength of your own product. What happens if you have 300 people hit you up? You're like, fuck, this is like a product in and of itself. It's interesting because worst case scenario is you generate all these leads, you don't do anything with it. It's an internal metric for you to know how valuable is the tool. You might find out there's a ton of brands feeling the pain point where they're asking that question and no one's answering it for them. And now they're like, wait, you're telling me that like I can just get this question answered for me? Something we do that has worked really well is we do a 30-page audit of a website pro bono that we come to a prospect call with. Interesting. So we'll show up and say, hey, here's a full breakdown of your conversion funnel. At a minimum, you can take all this information away and do whatever you want with it. At a maximum, maybe we work together because you realize we know what we're talking about, but we go into it knowing that it's just a free thing that we're willing to part ways with.

Yeah, we do the same thing in our ads. We give a ton of data away.

Take it for—

even signed, even for the sign. Take it, use the day with your current agency, take everything. And we share a lot of sheets that we've built that I think are good. But I agree with you, that is— I'm probably gonna do that like in the next week or two.

I think for a lot of founder-led sales, sometimes as demand gets like higher and higher and faster and faster, you kind of forget the basics that led you to close deals. And the basics that lead to close deals is hang out in person like as often as possible. I feel like the art of just like hanging out has been lost, especially in the sales pipeline. And then two, just do as much free work as possible.

Yeah.

Anytime that maybe like, you know, we have, I don't know about you guys, but we have like a couple slow months. Like June is usually a little slower just 'cause people are traveling and aren't ramping back up. And then December is a little slower and then they want to ramp in January. And in those months, anytime it slows down, this happens every year, I'm like, what am I doing? Do I need to do different things in the process? And then it always comes back to, like I've kind of just forgotten to do some of this stuff because things are moving and people are closing and I don't have time to think about it. And then it gets drilled back into me, like do free work as much as possible. Yeah, hang out in person, get to know them, be honest with them if they're going to be a good fit. And then it starts to work again and then I ultimately forget it or get busy and then it comes back around.

Yeah.

So looking back at your journey, what would you say is the biggest turning pro moment that you've experienced thus far?

It's a very interesting question. The biggest turning pro moment, I would say, I think really is for me, relationship management.

So I love that answer. That, that I think is actually one of the best answers we've gotten on this podcast.

I love that. I'm happy to hear that. I think for a while I was operating maybe not at a level much less than this when the brands we operated were our own. But I think what I've gotten, or basically the mindset, mindset shift was you can operate as well as you want if you're not good at communicating it to clients, maintaining that relationship, setting up an environment where we can have a super candid conversation. You can say anything you want to me. I'm not going to be offended, right? We'll give you the truth of what we're seeing. We're not going to sugarcoat it. We're not in this for endless revenue. Figuring out how to build that environment for clients and internally at Crush to feel comfortable has completely changed the dynamic of how we operate.

What would you say are the biggest, like, minor tweaks you've made in terms of the relationship management that have made it easier for you to do? How do you do it?

Like fully transparent communication. So like there is legitimately, except for one thing, nothing we look at to run a business that we're partnered with that they don't have full access to.

Mm-hmm.

We don't hide any data. They see everything. We have change logs built out. So like we are so transparent to the degree that I know no clients actually look at it. There's no way.

Mm-hmm.

There's, they're not doing it, but it allows us to basically say like, hey, there is nothing behind the curtain here. And I also think I've come to the realization that in a previous life we have a team overseas, right? We have a full team built out, an office. They are full-time employees of Crush. We don't contract to anything. I used to not give them airtime with the clients just because of communication, culture, anything like that. It's now gotten to a point where this team, I have a call with them almost every other day. I enjoy the relationship so much. They are such A-players. That I think we've opened up everything, like open kimono at Crush to give access to clients where they feel like there is nothing they don't know. There's never a surprise, um, that would catch them off guard.

That's because you believe in what you're building and it works.

I think so too.

Yeah, you're hiding shit. It's because you're like, it's not actually doing what we're saying it is, so we can't let people know the truth.

Yeah, so real. That was fucking great. That's the best answer I think we've gotten on that question.

That's all I got.

That's all I got. Talking to that camera on the left, tell people where they find you and Crush?

Yeah, so crushamazon.com, super simple. Um, email me, I'm matt@crushamazon.com, so super easy. And that's pretty much the only place you will find us. We're nowhere else.

Thanks for coming on today.

Coming soon on LinkedIn.

Yeah, coming soon on LinkedIn.

There we go. Thanks, brother. This was great.

Thanks for having me. This was awesome.