A BTS Breakdown of the Spacegoods Team Structure as an £8m run-rate Brand - Doc The Journey Ep 60

Back with episode 60 of Dr. Journey and I thought I'd do a different one for once. Not sad and solemn and moaning about shit like a lot of my recent videos, but I guess more like behind the scenes shit. I actually work on day to day and what stuff looks like. I feel like sometimes my stuff is just a bit reflective and I also never film in the daytime. I'm filming Saturday morning right now. So yeah, I feel like actually showing some shit that might be more relevant to people building brands and want to build brands, etc. Thought we dive into like the team set up. I think most a lot of people don't share this and either because a lot of people are dropshipping or selling courses and stuff, maybe it's a bit different. But yeah, I think before I dive into this, which you can already see on screen really depends what sort of business you're trying to build in terms of how much effort you should put into hiring the team and removing yourself and investing in a good team. Because hiring a team is expensive. Hiring a good team is even more expensive. I mean back in the day when I was dropshipping like way, way back originally it was like me and 2V. So me doing everything, BA's doing the rest. It's like customer service and shit. And then kind of in between was when I had my two other brands, Midnight City and Neon beach. That was kind of still very much like, I guess, freelancer, entrepreneur mindset and you know, had a few freelancers working for me as well as VAs, but it was never like a core proper team. And yeah, I guess with this business the intention is to build a much more longer term brand. I'm actually gonna move towards having an office in the next month or two, which may well make a video about that behind the scenes. Cause it's something I wanna for many years and I've decided that's the route I want to go. I don't want to be fully remote, don't want to be fully freelancer, fully remote team anymore. So yeah, it's a gradual transition but I thought I'd just give an update on where we're at as like an 8 million pound run rate business now, roughly growing very quick in the past few months. And this year we're trying to pretty much triple what we did last year. So yeah, it's a lot, it's a lot of growth. Especially for D2C when you're holding stock, making your own product supply chain's a real challenge. But yeah, anyway, I'm rambling as usual. So this is the current team. It's a mix between freelance, full time employee and agency right now. I mean when I say core team I'm referring to freelance and full time employee. I do have a mix of them now and then agency still part of the team but obviously they're agencies isn't like the core team. So yeah, I'll walk you through each one. Obviously me founder, maybe I'll walk through an order of when they joined roughly in terms of core team and then I'll go on to agencies and me obviously founder. Brad and Lucy have worked with me. Brad, Lucy and Flo have worked with me pretty much since day one. If they're watching this video, shout out to that. I appreciate the loyalty. Lucy actually hired her off Twitter. She came to me background in hsbc, banking, corporate Karen, I should say herself. Very, very organized and she started doing a bit of. Well I guess originally it was a bit of UGC compilation work and all that stuff and now she manages all our content. So I guess primarily UGC sourcing content from agencies, creators, et cetera, et cetera, working with the ads agency and really I don't touch that side of the business anymore. It's been completely systemized which is really fucking good. So she leads all that. Brad is a creative genius that I worked with in both my previous businesses known for years. He makes all the 80s movies, the brand website movies, you'll see anything that's like high production also as well as a lot of our original ads for Facebook and Instagram. He's not in all of them now because it's kind of hard to scale around with just one face. But he still does a lot of our best ads. So yeah he does I guess broadly creative. I'm not a fan of giving like really specific job titles. It's just content creative. And Flo Florian joined me about a week after I launched the brand. Originally I think again came from the YouTube or Twitter. Started doing customer service and that became more and now he just leads all operations. So supply chain ordering, dealing with manufacturers, dealing with the 3 PL lead led customer service until recently as well. We just had new customer experience manager join girl called Jess. So I call it customer experience rather than customer service. I think it's deeper than just ticket answering, social media, DM answering. It's the whole customer experience which is partly customer service but also it's relevant to like retention, unboxing experience, post, click, post, purchase, all that shit. So she leads that Seamus you might have seen on Twitter, fractional But I guess finance director leads all our we have an accountant separately which isn't on here obviously for standard filings and shit but Seamus and his team to be fair but mainly Seamus do our management accounts, our financial model, day to day finance shit basically and obviously super, super important part of the business. Other hires yes, I literally hired a head of growth last week, 9 days ago Leo joined us. Important role, the most expensive role in the business right now I guess. But yeah I think that that's a huge one because I've really spent the past nearly two years or year and a bit being head of growth, head of products, head of everything and growth is a huge important part but I don't necessarily feel like I'm the most skilled to lead it anymore. So yeah hired him and basically his job is I guess to hit revenue spend and revenue targets and keep CAC on target. I mean super, super important. Easier said than done but that is what he leads. Then I'll go on to other hires who are currently hiring for a social media manager. We've had a few freelance ones over the years. Don't actually have anyone doing this right now. Doing this myself which is a fucking shit show to be honest. Cause yeah basically the brand is. I feel like we've done really well with paid and performance marketing, performance content, all this shit. But we just left so much money on the table I think and so much brand credibility on the table with not really doing anything to do with organic collabs, brand stuff, influencer stuff. So this person will lead on all that. I've been interviewing in the past past week or so for this. So super important and then get on to agencies and I hope some of these agencies don't watch because I've said some of them should be replaced with in house people. But yeah, ads agency we use Saw. They're probably going to get loads of clients off me sharing this. I'm still waiting for my referral fee but we'll see. They do our obviously all our paid ads so Google TikTok meta which is the only ones we're spending on right now but they also do our SMS and Klaviyo stuff which I think works really well to have that under one roof. We have a content agency we use Hamby Media again I think they're going to get loads of clients from me saying this because people ask me all the time who do I use. So we used to just do Lucy and Brad for lucy working with UGC creators etc. We use a platform called Incense and Brad doing all his own stuff. So there were our two content pillars before we found if we started to scale, that wasn't really enough. So now we use an agency to fill in the gaps. We have three content streams, the agency, what Lucy's doing and what brands are doing internally. So that works really well. And I really feel like performance, content and media buying in general is the one part of the business that I've just very much delegated quite well and it works very well. I'm still on top of the numbers and shit day to day, but I really don't touch the creative process. So that's been good. I try to go through in the order that they came into the business Data agency again. I think a lot of people are going to ask me about this and they're probably going to get a lot of clients because I mention them because people do ask me this all the time. Use an agency called Charlie Oscar. Data agency is probably not the right term, but they do a lot of stuff. But we brought them in like six months ago to start doing a lot of work on like cohort analysis, churn, et cetera. Because being a subscription first business, like 90% of our revenue is subscription on order now. So just modeling churn where our cat can be. Cohort analysis, LTV analysis, all this shit, all the stuff I never really thought about much, but that's been very, very useful. So they do a lot of work there. We then start working with Charlie Oscar as well on influencer stuff. This is as of last month. I put these ones in red. I probably should have vetted this before I put it on the Internet, but honestly these are things that I think potentially would be better to hire someone in house. The ones I haven't highlighted actually think work really well as pink. So yeah, we started doing some influencer stuff. So they joined the start of January CRO agency using conversion wise, probably seeing them on Twitter again. This might help get a few people through their doors. I mean I think they've been good. Only worked with them for like six months. Six months, six weeks. But we literally did no CRO stuff at all for nearly the first two years of the business. Which is fucking crazy in hindsight, but already seeing some pretty big wins there because 90% of our paid traffic goes to the same landing page right now. So optimizing that and going deep definitely helps. And then yeah, two others that I hope they don't watch this. I've got an Amazon agency. I'm not convinced using an agency for Amazon is the Best route in general. So this isn't personal to them. But yeah, they do our Amazon stuff. Amazon's a pretty small channel for us to be honest. It's like 10% of monthly revenue. I'd like to grow it, but struggling right now, to be honest. And then retail agency again. I'm not convinced using a retail agency is the best route. We're not huge on retail. We did like 100 grand last year. Our model this year is to do like 6 to 700k in retail, which I still feel is quite punchy given what's currently there in our retail setup. But yeah, I guess these three I feel like could probably hire someone full time in house to be honest, and maybe get more out of them. Haven't done that yet. It's not initially on the horizon. But yeah, I do think that would be good. So currently 14, I guess if you count an agency as one person, which it effectively is, you know, if I was to replace them it would be one person, so 14, including myself, which has actually grown quite a lot recently. And then I guess like ones I'm thinking about. This is going to sound really fluffy without context. Future high product manager, I guess MPD manager, slash designer. Because all the product stuff I do myself right now, packaging design, dealing with our contract manufacturer who does all the nutritional stuff. But like the actual leading of that I still do. I don't mind doing it but I don't think it's particularly sustainable and then sustainability and stuff. I'll speak more about why this is on here, maybe a later video because I've just realized that probably has no context and seems super weird. But yeah, I mean like I said, I'm gradually pivoting away from fully freelance, fully agency, which I've kind of done in the past. Now we've got a few like full time PAYE employees. We've also got freelancers still that are in the core team. And then on top of that, like I've said, obviously purple is core team, if you hadn't guessed. Pink is agency and then red is agency that I think I could replace. Yellow is hiring, black is future hiring. So yeah, that's the current team right now it works pretty well. I think like I said, over time I'd like to replace some of the agencies within house. I think it gets to the point where agency fees to start with get a bit ridiculous depending on what deal you've got as you grow. A lot of them are relative to scale and then also I just think it'd be more enjoyable from like a business culture perspective, team vibes perspective, and probably more effective long term to have some agencies replaced with full time people who are 100% on the brand and could be in the same room a few days a week. So yeah, that's the current setup. I mean, feel free to shoot me a DM or a comment with questions or whatever, but I don't know if this is the right setup, the wrong setup. It's what I've got right now seems to be working pretty well. I still feel like I'm micromanaging and not delegating enough, to be honest, even though we do have a great team. But yeah, I'm working on that. I mean, there's always something you feel like when you start hiring people, you can probably delegate and you have loads of free time as a founder, but it's just bullshit because there's always the next thing. And as more scale comes, more potential problem comes, problems come, they definitely do. And then, you know, you need to hire more people. So I'll hire this person. Then I'll probably realize I need to hire someone over here or over here or over here. And yeah, it's a constant process. It's a bit of a shit show. It's always chaotic. But that's the current team. Yeah. Hope that was interesting. I'm not going to ramble too much in this video, even though it's probably been 10 minutes plus already. And yeah, subscribe to the pod. More coming. Catch you soon. Cheers for watching. Peace. Sam.