279: How to Scale Without Borrowing (or Breaking Your Business)

Are you wondering when you'll be ready to scale up your sales? Come join me because I'm going to share what you need to do before you step on the gas so you'll see if you're ready. And if you're not, you will learn what you need to do now that will get you there. I'll see you on the inside.

Welcome to the E Commerce Roadmap, the podcast for store owners who are growing their sales without spending a fortune on ads. Each week, you'll learn actionable strategies and tips that will fast track the growth and profitability of your E Commerce business. So buckle up and join your host, Susan Bradley, as we dive into the work that will grow your sales this year.

Hey there. Welcome back. I am here with the amazing Melissa Davies. She is a coach in the inner circle and she's a mentor and she is just really so smart and so connected to our members. And prompted by her, I asked a question in our inner circle last week and what I asked was in a post I said, if you could ask me anything, what could what would you ask me? And there were some amazing questions and I'm excited to be here with Melissa to answer one of them today because this is something that I think a lot of people think about, but so many of them get wrong that I know this is going to be really helpful. Hey, Melissa, welcome back.

Hi, Susan. It's good to be here. Thank you so much for having me back. And you prepared this question for us, which I thought was great. So this is from Alyssa Marie La Higgins and she asks when you're ready to scale, what are the top three strategic moves you recommend for building sustainable growth without borrowing money or risking financial stress?

It's such a good question because everybody in our industry talks about scaling, scaling, and everyone wants to do it. But very few people, I think are successful when they go when they start working on it. And one of the big symptoms I think that people find when they are trying to scale up is the financial stress part. I think, Alyssa, you have got that right hands down because what people don't realize is there is a cost attached to scaling your business. And so I want to talk about the one thing you have to do before you even get started with scaling your business first, because financial stress can literally paralyze you. And so many people just charge on ahead and scale up their ads and buy more inventory and hit the ground running without doing this first. And it's super simple. The first thing you have to do when you're ready to Grow your business is you need to get your finances in order. You have to get your finances in order. And here's what you need to do. You need to make sure that you're getting a monthly P and L profit and loss statement. You need to set up separate bank accounts for inventory, which is a cost of goods account, and profit. You need to do those things and you might wonder why you're doing them, but it's really so that you can see actually what's happening in your business financially as you start growing. Now, if you don't know what a P and L is, then you've got a lot of work to do before you start scaling. A P and L is a profit and loss statement is a snapshot of the transactions in your business for that month. And it really tells you whether you made money that month or you lost money that month. It'll bring in all your income and then it'll show all your expenses. And of course the bottom line is whether you made money or lost money. And for people like us, people who have product based businesses where we hold inventory, it's really important that you have a certain kind of P and L. And that is a P and L that has, is being done by accrual, the accrual accounting method. And what that means is that your sales and expenses are recorded when they actually happen in your business, not when the money changes hands. And so what people normally do, what most accountants, if you take your books to a CPA and you just give it to them to work on, most CPAs will do your books on a cash basis. And what that is just money in, money out. And for people like us, what happens when you do this is you'll see that you have some months where you lose a pile of money and some months where you make a pile of money. And that's basically because when you make a big purchase of inventory and so that's a big expense, your accountant is recording that whole expense, taking it off your expenses all at once. And so say Your sales were 30,000 that month, but you had a shipment that you paid $35,000 for. And so right from ground zero, before you have any other expenses, you're in the hole that month for $5,000. And what happens is you never get a clear picture of where you're at with your business, with your finances, like whether you're really profitable or not. And so accrual accounting would look differently. What would happen is say got that same $30,000 in sales and you got the same $35,000 expense where you had to pay for that all at once. What would happen is your accountant would put that $35,000 expense, that $35,000 worth of inventory on your balance sheet and that would stay there on your balance sheet and he or she would deduct the amount, the cost of goods that you for just the product you sold that month. So say you sold $30,000 that month and your cost of goods was, let's say it's 30% of your sales. And so you would find that $9,000 comes off of your balance sheet. So say that $35,000 is reduced by 9 and that's your cost of goods. And that gives you a clear picture of the actual cost of the product that you sold and the profit that you made on that. And if you're not doing accrual accounting, then you're, you never have a clear picture. Even at the end of the year, you don't have a clear picture of your profit because you have actually expensed all your inventory purchases and almost nobody has zero inventory at the end of the year. So you've expensed that and that's actually brought your profit down by the amount of inventory that you have. So it's really important to do a P and L every month and accrual accounting. Hey, Melissa, I'm just thinking, you had this happen in your business, didn't you?

I absolutely did.

I remember when we first talked about it and you said, yeah, this is exactly what's happening to me. I never know.

I never know. Yeah. And I was going to ask you but a follow up question which was like, how long does it take to switch from a cash based accounting system to an accrual system? Or like, how do you find someone who is well versed in this? So you actually recommended an accountant to me and she's also a member or a bookkeeper to me and she's a member of the inner circle and she has her own Shopify store with physical products. So she was very familiar. And that's been amazing because actually that's been my project for the past two years, is working on profitability and getting an accurate picture of my business.

Oh. And so worth doing.

It's changed everything. I just measure progress so much differently now because I have a better idea what's going on with my business. And I didn't learn it all right away. I've been working on it for two years.

Yeah. So to answer your question, how long it takes, obviously the very best time to do it is at the end of the year. At the end of the year, then you can count your inventory, you can put that on your balance sheet. I'm sure they have to make some sort of adjustment if you've expensed it already. But you could start out that way at the end of the year. But if you can't do it at the end of the year, you could do it at the end of a quarter, say. And it would involve taking a physical inventory, changing some of your entries in your existing bookkeeping and moving forward. But it's not always clean. It's going to take some time. And exactly what you said, Melissa, it's going to take several months of you looking at it and really understanding how it works. But what I would say is you need to find an accountant or a bookkeeper. Like I know you're working with a bookkeeper and that's really the most important part. It's how we record our transactions. And then you could send it to an accountant. But you really need to be very clear with that accountant that this is a accrual system. This has to be done. Your accounting has to be done on an accrual basis. And if they say no, then that's the wrong person, that's the wrong person. And you're actually further ahead probably to find someone who already works with a lot of product based business owners because they will understand that. But it's incredibly important to you that you do that. And you have to do that before you think about scaling your sales. Because if you think it's a mess now and you don't know, just wait. It only gets worse. Because if you're not profitable, did you find out that you weren't nearly as profitable as you thought you were or as you were guessing you were?

Yeah, I thought that profitability was going to be something I could tackle later on once I had my sales volume up. I thought then it would work itself out with just basically economies of scale. And I think maybe that's not. That's like the biggest misconception.

Yeah, it absolutely is. And I remember having a conversation with somebody who has a pretty high volume store and I kept hearing her say, when we become profitable, when we can become profitable. And finally said to her, hey, look, bottom line is you need to figure out how to be profitable now that this is not a startup. We are not in Silicon Valley. You do not have all sorts. This is your money you're putting into this business. You have great proof of concept. You know that this is a great. But if you're not profitable. Every time you grow your sales by and you're losing, say, I don't know, 20%. Every time you grow your sales by a hundred thousand dollars, you just lost 20 grand and everybody's getting paid but you. And so you have to figure out how to be profitable before you start scaling your sales. Because if you aren't profitable, your losses will scale with your sales and you'll be bankrupt, you'll go out of business. So it's really important to get a monthly P and L. And it has to be a accrual accounting P and L. And you should have separate bank accounts for inventory, which is replacing the inventory that you sell and some plus your taxes, plus your profit. And then there are some questions. So once you get there. So Melissa, this might be great for you if you're there. There are three questions I think that you need to yourself. The first question is, am I profitable right now, today, before I'm going to scale? And if you're not, your first job is to be profitable. And the other question I would say is are you paying yourself? Are you able to pay yourself every single month? Are you like, oh, I can pay myself 4,000 this month, but next month I can only pay myself 1500? No, you're not able to pay yourself regularly. Then you're not really ready to scale. Even if you say, okay, I'm only going to make $1,200 a month every month you want to be able to reliably take that paycheck. And then the next thing I would say is, are you tracking your inventory in Shopify? Is the correct cost of goods entered in Shopify and is your inventory reducing and are you adding in your inventory in Shopify? So is that talking to your accounting system?

So I think one thing that will emotionally that really helped me was from switching from accrual to or from cash based to accrual is the concept that your inventory has value, that it's a business asset, it's not an expense. And so that was actually, I know it's scary to look at my business and see is it profitable. But when I think about, no, I actually have value in this business because the inventory has value. That really changed things and that, that helped me make decisions about when to, what sort of offers to send out my mailing list or when to run sales or things like that. Because I'm like, this is value here and I can actually unlock it a lot faster and easier than I maybe I was thinking before.

Really good. Yeah.

And that Was, oh, no, I actually have built something here.

Yeah. My friend Sierra says, I want you to think about your inventory. She has a book called Inventory Genius. I want you to think about your inventory like dollar bills in boxes, on shelves, on hangers. Your inventory is dollar bills and treat it like that. Absolutely.

So I think the other thing I had. I know we're going to get questions about this. So I'm not a maker. I purchased my inventory at wholesale. So it's pretty straightforward. It's not always straightforward. It's pretty, pretty straightforward how much things are costing me and what I have an inventory. But what about people who are makers? So they're buying, like, raw materials. Like, we have someone who makes cups out of clay, and so she has to, like, just have a bunch of clay on hand, for example, and the slips and everything for that.

Yeah. People who have jewelry, who make jewelry, though, I think they're the same. So there is. There is a process, it's slow, for creating a cost of goods for all your items, and you can do it that way and then put your raw materials on your balance sheet. But also, I'm not sure what episode it is. It's a podcast episode with Sarah Schuerman, and she talks about someone who she's worked with who has a little course that is a perfect. It's a perfect little course for people who are makers to help them figure out their cost of goods and do their accounting. So I'm going to look up that podcast episode and we'll definitely put that in the show notes so that people can look if they're a maker. I think the one exception also to the accrual accounting is if you only drop ship, if you only drop ship, then you actually don't hold inventory and you don't pay for inventory until you've shipped it and until you're shipping it. So you wouldn't have to have it then. But if you have hold any inventory, you do need to have that. So the other thing I wanted to mention to you is that if you're not profitable now, and profit is actually more important than sales, I know we have someone who's a member of our mastermind who has a profit goal rather than a sales goal. And if you're not profitable now, I want you to go listen to podcast 167. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. This is about pricing to maximize your profit, and there are things that you can do to maximize your profit. I won't go down that rabbit hole now. But there's a huge difference between gross margin as a percentage and gross mar as dollars. And most store owners don't even know that they're really. They need to consider both when they're pricing their products. So that's the first thing. If you want to scale, you better make sure that you're profitable now. And if you're not, there are things you can do to become profitable. The second thing I think that's important is you need to know your numbers. You need to know what it costs you to acquire a customer, because now you're talking about scaling your sales. So you're going to need to go out and acquire more customers. And what does it cost you to get a customer? And what can you expect the lifetime value of that customer to be? What can you pay to get a customer? And in order to truly scale your business, you need to acquire new customers. And, and I want you to think of it this way. You want to sell the products that you have to more people. And what most people do when they want to grow their sales is they actually sell more products to the same people. Do you know what I'm talking about, Melissa?

100%. Yeah. We see it a lot, and I see it a lot in my marketing coaching where people treat a new product release as the marketing initiative. And I can see why, like they do get a short term, yes. Kind of lift in sales. They're able to sell to their returning customers. But just adding another product adds so much more overhead to your workload.

Yeah, it's more inventory, it's more decisions for people to make. And ultimately it's not sustainable. It won't, it's not a way to grow that's sustainable. Ultimately you will lose more customers than you gain and no matter what you do, your sales will stop shrinking. And you're right, it's such a heavy lift to launch a new product. Not only is it the cost of the product, but it's also your time. Right. Your time and your focus to develop that product. And so most people go the easy route. They go the, they go that I'll just launch something new and I'll get a bump in sales. And they don't think long term that unless I get more customers, this is just a short term fix. And so I would say that you need to figure out your cost of acquiring a customer. And I talk about this in podcast episode 187, so you can go and do that work. And then you also need to figure out your lifetime value. And I haven't Ever talked about that on a podcast. But basically it's if you looked at a period of a year, you add up your sales and you divide it by the number of customers you had that year. And that kind of gives you the 12 month lifetime value of a customer. If you have long term customers, like two or three years, you can use a longer period of time, but it's nice to know. Now, having said that, I never recommend that you pay so much to get a customer that you are reliant on that lifetime value. So say your, your cost to get a customer is $30 and your lifetime value of a customer is $98. I really don't think you want to pay $90 to get a customer. And so you have to make a good decision. And I guess the most important part is the exercise. If you never do this, you don't even know and you're just shooting blind. So figure out what it costs you to acquire a customer, figure out your lifetime value and then start tracking how many new customers every month. Just doing the marketing that you're doing now. See what your rate of getting new.

Customers is and the information to figure out your cost to acquire a customer. That's like looking at your ad spend.

Yeah.

Or anything you do.

Yeah.

And then your. But the lifetime value, that's information that's in Shopify. Like you can look up.

Oh, there you go.

Total revenue, I think for the year. And also how many new customers you had that year.

Yeah.

How many total.

Yeah, you would do it with total customers for sure. And you could probably then do it in two years for Shopify, like a custom time period. And that's super important. An exercise that I did at our Mastermind retreat, which was, was really good and an eye opener. We ended up spending a lot of time on it. And I didn't mean to, but everyone was like, oh, we got to do this. And it was. How do you decide what's your most important thing to focus on now? You. Is your most important thing to focus on finding new customers or is your most important thing to focus on maximizing your lifetime value of a customer? And so when we went around the room, I think there were 22 store owners there. 22 or 23, something like that. As we went around the room, everybody wanted to talk it over what their most important thing was. And my feeling is that if you're, if your returning customer rate is like over 40, getting close to 50 or higher percent for the year, then your focus has to be getting new customers. And that's going to be the lifeblood that's going to be the most important thing for you to keep growing your sales or even maintaining your sales is that you need new customers. Because anything over 50% probably says that I am actually losing more customers than I'm gaining and that's problem. And so you really need to make sure that you decide what's right for your business right now. And one of our members is actually more than one, but one is really good at getting new customers. And she has a very low cost of acquiring a customer and she's got a really clear path to acquire a customer. And it's amazing. She's done a great job. But what we found out when we were talking about that is she has a very low for her kind of business returning customer rate. And so she could actually take her foot off the gas for a minute. And that's the person who could actually focus on getting more. Selling more stuff to the same people doesn't mean necessarily in her case that she has to add in more products, but she has to focus harder on getting people to buy more. And I think she introduced a little subscription and I think that has really helped with her returning customer rate. And so before you just jump out and say, ta da, today's the day I'm going to scale my business, these are all things I think that you should, you should consider and knowing your numbers that cost to acquiring a customer, that lifetime value and that, hey, where should I be focusing? Those things are really important. Before you make a decision.

How much data do you need? Is this after one year of sales or if you've been on Etsy and you're moving to Shopify?

I think if you've been. Yeah, so I'm a big fan of solving one problem at a time. So if you're moving from Etsy to Shopify, just do that, just do that because that's hard. And to get the replicate that success that you've had on Etsy, on Shopify, just focus on that. But if you really are at a place where you can scale, so maybe you've hit the $100,000 mark and now you really want to scale. That's, I think that's, I think when you want to focus on this. And now did I miss your original question?

Answering no, you got it all.

I got it. Good for me. But I think these are all things that nobody tells us we have to do and they just cheer us on or they tell us how amazingly wildly successful they'd been scaling their sales and it's really a slippery slope. If you don't do it right, you can. You risk losing a lot. You have a lot to lose because you've done the hard part. So then the last thing this is for you, Alyssa, this is you don't want to be. You don't want to be borrowing money. And so the last thing is, once you know all these things, once you know that you're profitable, once you know what it's going to cost you to acquire a customer, what you. What your lifetime value is like, what your tolerance is for that, and that's the right thing for you to focus on. Now, the last thing you need to look at is you have to calculate what it's going to cost you. What do you need to invest to grow and scale this business, because it's not free? And you have to say to yourself, this is money that I won't get back quickly. This is money I have to invest. Because, say you have a hundred thousand dollars in sales annually now, and you want to scale it up to 300,000 or 200,000, you're going to have to carry more inventory, you're going to have to do more marketing. You're going to. You're going to have to acquire more customers. And where I see people getting caught is they try and do it on cash flow. And what happens is, especially if you don't have those dedicated bank accounts that we talked about, is because you're busy and because you have a lot of balls in the air, and because you see opportunity everywhere. What happens, I've done it. Lots of people do it is you start using your expense money, the money that should be for paying your bills, paying your rent, paying your Shopify fee, like all those things that are your cost. I always call it the cost of waking up. That expense money, including your paycheck, maybe even your payroll, you start using that money to buy more product. And every month, you fall a little bit further and further behind because you're using more of that money and you're not able to put it back because you're growing and your expenses are growing with your sales. And so you have to say to yourself, okay, I'm ready to scale. And so maybe you only want to scale to 150. What does it cost me to acquire the number of customers I need to acquire to grow my business to 150? And it's all going to be a guess. But if you've done this work, it's an educated guess. And so maybe it's going to cost me $5,000 or $10,000. And where are you going to get that money? Because if you're trying to do it out of cash flow, you need to start socking that money away until you've got it. Like maybe you take 10%, then maybe that's your profit account that gets invested back into the business. Or maybe you borrow it from yourself and you set it up as a long term loan. But somewhere you're going to have to have an investment of capital to grow this business. It's money for your increased inventory, don't forget. It's also money for learning how to scale. Because you're probably going to need to spend money on ads or maybe collaborations or growing your email list. There's going to be money that you're going to need to spend to do this. And there's always a cost attached to learning that. How many people do you think do that, Melissa?

How many people set aside the money for learning? None of us.

Nobody. And they only see it as a waste, right? They see it as they wasted money on something.

I have a formula for my own business. So because I needed to build in the learning. So mine is, I think it's 5 or 6% of my ad spend is for learning.

Learning. Yeah, that's really good. And in the beginning, that's probably not enough. Your experience. Yeah, in the beginning. And so I see this all the time in the inner circle. I see, I see people feeling like they wasted that money instead of looking at it. Like they, that what did they learn from that experience? And Sarah Stenshorn, who's just so smart and really good at so much, a coach and our program manager, she said it to me really well once that it probably cost her to learn how to run ads. She does very well with her ads in her own business. To learn how to run ads, it probably cost her 20 to $30,000 to learn like that learning phase. And so it's not a waste. It's the cost of. It's the cost of doing. It's a business expense really. But if you can change your mindset from wasting the money to learning, that's very helpful. But more importantly, you have to put that money aside. You can't take it. You can't rob Peter to pay pa. You have to understand that money's not coming back to you quickly. So if you borrow it from yourself, set it up like a real loan. So if you borrow $10,000 from yourself to scale your business, then you have to say, okay, I'm going to pay myself $200 a month until it's all paid off. And then that goes in your expense line.

And you tell your bookkeeper that this is what you're doing, and she'll set it up for you and also your.

Partner if it's from your.

If it's happy home life or something.

Yeah, happy home life. But it's important to understand that. And you talked about that inventory now as an asset, it's grow. Acquiring these customers is. You're acquiring an asset. You're making your business more valuable. But you can expect to have it always. You can't always expect. It's not a. It's not a slot machine. It's not a put money in, expect money out kind of thing. It is. It's an investment in your business. And I've done lots of episodes on debt. And what's a capital cost and what's an expense. And this is a capital cost really growing your business. So that's really important for everyone to do. And the last thing that I think is important for anyone who wants to scale their business is that instead of just scaling your business by acquiring customers, I am a firm believer in just choosing one product or one collection to scale your sales, not your whole catalog. When you go out to acquire new customers, or if you are trying to even maximize your lifetime value of a customer, choose a product that is. Or a collection, a very small collection, and only promote that. Only promote that product. Make that your first product that you're choosing to scale. And the reason you want to do that is it will keep your cost of inventory so much lower. It'll be so much more efficient, and it'll make you more profitable quicker. Because if you think about this, think about the cost and efficiency of scaling your entire catalog, all the products you have, versus scaling a product or a collection. And this. This was really important to me when I started scaling my sales. I don't know if I would even have called that scaling when I did it at we squeak. But I got a real lift in scales or in scales in sales when I. It was when I went back and I really cut back my catalog. So I looked at maybe the top 20 top 20 products that I had, and it was a shoe business. So it was. There were a lot of SKUs, so we'd have the styles, and then there were colors and sizes. And no matter how hard I tried, my stuff was all imported from overseas. No matter how hard I tried, I would always run out of some SKUs of some of the products and it was almost always the best sellers and I had to cut back my catalog because I literally could not afford to keep all the inventory in stock all the time. And so I think it was the top 20. I looked at the top 20 products, not SKUs, so the top 20 styles, and promised myself that I would never run out of those products. I would always keep them in stock. And what that meant is on the bottom half, I had to cut out a lot of SKUs and a lot of products and just say, hey, we're not going to, we're not going to replenish those. And that's a great marketing opportunity to get rid of that. But what that did for me in the business is it stopped me from having to order so often, stopped me from disappointing customers because I didn't have it, and allowed me to get a much more clear picture of where the profit was in my business. It made me more profitable and my sales grew. And that's the goal for all of us, right? To be as profitable as possible and grow our sales without blowing it on having a warehouse full of inventory. And so when you're there, choose one product or one small collection to scale. Really helpful. So anything else we should add to this?

Melissa, I looked up the podcast episode that you mentioned before for Sarah. So it is. So this is for makers. It is called what to do when you have more time than money in your business. And this is episode 262.

Yeah. And in there Sarah talks about I should really connect with her, someone that she worked with that is just for makers to help her with the finance part. Really good. But I think should we just recap before you're ready to scale. So before you're ready to scale, job one is to get your accounting straightened out. You need a monthly P and L. You need separate bank accounts for at least inventory, which is your cost of goods so that every time you sell something, you put the money to replace it back in. You need it for taxes because don't be spending that tax money on inventory because the government doesn't like to wait. It's expensive to make them wait and it'll cause stress, sleepless nights. And then an account for profit, just an account so that you are putting some money away for profit.

And the easiest way is to find someone who does accrual based bookkeeping and outsource this.

Actually, would you say it's easy or would you say it's mandatory?

For me it's mandatory. Yeah. And I'm not going to do it myself.

Yeah.

Good point.

I think for most people it's mandatory because that's not what we started our businesses to do. And it'll be the thing that we do. It'll be the last thing we do. It'll be on our last nerve when we're doing it. We'll be exhausted, and it'll be the first thing that we say, hey, I'm going to do that next week. And before you know it, you'll be three months behind and you won't have a clue what's going on in your business. So not only do you need to outsource it, you need to review it. You need to ask for it on a certain date, and you need to review it in real time. Right. Do that.

I also just check my bank accounts. Kind of first thing before I start my workday, I go and look at the bank account. And not necessarily to make a decision or anything, but I think it helps train my mind to be focused and to understand the ebb and flow. So that was a pretty simple change. Just look at my bank account without judgment.

Without judgment. So that's job one, accrual accounting. Get a professional. Job two is ask yourself. Find out if you are profitable now, you need to be profitable now. And you need to be in a position where you can pay yourself regularly, whatever that amount is. You also need to. You also need to know your numbers. You need to know what it costs you to acquire a customer and what the lifetime value of a customer is. And then you need to make a decision. You need to decide, hey, is my next best step to acquire more customers, which means I have a pretty high returning customer rate, or is my next best step to maximize the lifetime value of these people I've already paid for that are in here? And I think that 40, 50% returning customer percentage over the course of a year is a really good indication which way you need to go. Then you need to think about what it's going to cost you. You need to invest. And Alyssa says she doesn't want to borrow money and she doesn't want financial stress. Now, I agree with you about the financial stress. Sometimes I think it's absolutely fine to borrow money if it's for a certain thing and you have a plan to pay it back over time, I think it's fine. But you need to decide how much. And then you need to set your goal based on what you're financially able to do.

And that goal is based on past information. So if you sold 100 units last year, can you bump that up by 10%. What's it going to cost to increase that by 10%? Okay.

And then the last thing is that you need to choose one product or one collection to scale your sales. And I actually did an episode about this. It's episode 165. It's just called how to scale your sales. And the difference between scaling your sales by choosing one collection or one product and then the whole and against just going out there and acquiring customers for whatever they want to buy is massive. The profit difference is massive. And the time and the drag on yourself and any employees you have, it's absolutely worth considering. But the bottom line for all of this, Alyssa, this is a great question. Thank you so much for asking. It is that you need to slow down before you speed up. Slow down, get it right, you'll have a much better chance of being successful. So that's it. Hey, Melissa, thank you so much for all you contributed.

Thank you, Susan. That was an amazing masterclass in how to scale profitably for all of us little e commerce businesses out here. We can't just borrow money and run the ads machine over and over.

I just, I want to thank you for sharing your experience too, because what I think sometimes we get in our own heads and we think that I should have known this or just not good at this or whatever it is, but that's not true. Right? Like you've had, you've been successful for years and you had cash accounting. I think we don't know what we don't know and it's totally okay. Everything is just a problem to solve. And it might not be solved as quickly as you want it to, but if you pay attention, you will get it. You will get this and you will reach your goals. So that's it, guys. Thank you so much for your time and attention. We'll put all the podcast episodes we mentioned it links in the show notes and I'll look forward to seeing you next week. Hey, if your sales are slower than you want them to be and you're not sure what to do next to reach your sales goals, I want you to head on over to the Show Notes and grab a link to get your copy of my new course, Conversion School. It's absolutely free and inside the lessons you will learn our step by step process to grow your sales without spending a fortune on risky ad strategies and without discounting your products. The strategy that you will learn in Conversion School works for e commerce stores of all stages. You'll use your store's data so if you're starting out, you'll learn how to get consistent sales every day. And if you're an established store looking to really scale your sales, you'll use your data to learn how to to achieve significant sales growth every month, month over month. So head on over to the Show Notes. Grab the link and get your copy now.