Scaling to £1m Per Day & Proper Financial Strategy - Seamus & Connor | The Midnight Pod Episode 79

Foreign.

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Let's fucking go.

Right, we're back with episode 80 of.

The Midnight Pod and we've got an eclectic mix of some of Britain and Northern Ireland's biggest, biggest hitters. It is part of Britain get cancer right at the start of this pod got Oliver Hudson carrying the Pod as usual. We got Seamus the finance wizard, who's behind a lot of the biggest brands on Twitter, including mine. And we've got Connor Martin, the richest man on Twitter, who's also here to join, which is your third time on the pod. Now, which is actually the most of any guest. You're gonna lead some Q and A esque type topics. I think today was the plan. Yeah.

I think we kick off with Seamus. Seamus is the only one here that's not been on multiple times. The dog is fuming that you've put him out the room.

Yeah.

Seamus, you work with us all independently, obviously. He's CFO for all three companies. So I guess it'd be good to start with a bit of an intro on yourself and your Background?

Sure, yeah.

And how you work with us and the other brands you work with.

Yeah, no problem. It's good to be here, I suppose. But yeah, we work with all of you, as you said. Background is international tax and finance. And we just kind of spotted a gap in the market for E commerce over the last few years. Just kind of roll with that. And we just kind of work with digital marketing agencies and E commerce brands around the world, mainly uk, Ireland and bit in the Middle east as well.

So.

Yeah. Is there anything specific you want to go through?

Subtitles?

Subtitles? Yeah, I guess.

Speak slower.

Yeah, subtitles, I guess.

Yeah. What's the. So you're kind of fractional cfo. What's your. From a brand perspective? Because I think that's more interesting. What's your normal, like, scope of work with the people you work with? How do you work with them? I guess that. But then also like, what, what pain points do people come to you with? Like, what's the, what's the thing you're solving? Like, why is it.

See of my business.

I think, I think in simple terms, like the way we describe it is like no matter whether you're a corner shop or Amazon, like there's. There's three main parts to any business. Sales and marketing, which Ali obviously handles a lot for a lot of brands. Then you've got operations like the operator, the founder, which would be Connor and Matt. And then you've got finance. So like sales and marketing, how you sell your product, how you bring it to the market, operations, product fulfillment, all that side of it. And then finance really is the glue that kind of marries it all together, making sure you get enough margins. Unit economics is right. Cash flow, forecasting, taxes, all that kind of stuff. I think finance, when used right, can actually be used as a lever for growth and for performance. And I think a lot of brand owners forget that or don't realize that. And it's almost the last thing that's thought about. And sometimes it's too late, you know, before they actually think about it or take it seriously. So we kind of come in and we do that. We take it off the founder's hands. We give them clarity, you know, we give them peace of mind, sleep easier at night, we look after it. So cash flow is everything. Making sure we have enough cash in the bank, enough Runway, raising debt or equity, whatever that may be, forecasting out, managing, all the books, all the taxation, entering new markets, what are the legal obligations, what are the tax obligations, supply chain, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, that's kind of what we do in a nutshell. On brand side, how do you go from.

Let's go into your background briefly. More corporate I guess. I want to talk about that. And then why and how did you pivot into kind of the entrepreneurial startup side of things and particularly E commerce?

That's a good question. So my background is. I went to college. I studied a law and accounting and ul. Very boring, but it's a good degree. Then I went into the whole copper thing for like eight years. Trained in a company called Delight, which is one of the largest consultancy firms in the world. And I was in the corporate international tax section. So like Amazon was on my portfolio for example, a few other big massive companies. I worked with Disney, few others, working all around the world, based in Dublin, but like having exposure around the world. Working with teams in the US like West coast with Amazon, Seattle, working with teams in Asia, etc. So we had that kind of international scope. And that's all I knew and all I learned. Became a chartered accountant and a chartered tax advisor. Then left Deloitte and went to work brandside for PLCs. The first one was Kerry Group, which is I think one of the largest, if not the largest food ingredient company in the world. Operations worldwide, doing M and A in the Middle east, different bits and pieces. Then went to work for a company called Arista again food manufacturing, looking after financing entities around the world like debt like in Malaysia, Australia, Malta, everywhere. Basically kind of financial control and group tax, like looking after worldwide taxation as well. Did that. Then Covid came. I knew I always wanted to do my own thing. Never actually set out to do ecom. I actually. Long story short, we did start a tech startup in the accounting space. Did that for about two years, got it to market, realized we needed about a million quid to really take it on. So we kind of just folded that ex business partner went to work for revenue which is like the Irish version of hmrc. I went on a different route. We built kind of an Instagram following like a pool of Irish businesses to launch that product too. People wanted to work with us, started working with people, moved to Marbella like Stola. We had had a car, BMW literally drove it to the airport. The guy that bought it off me took it the keys off me in the airport. Actually Dave, remember Dave at the wedding? Yeah. He actually bought it off me and just got a one way flight to Marbella. I didn't even tell the missus that we were moving to Marbella like until.

The Morning of two days before then.

Yeah, he's like, look, we're moving to Mar in two days. Just booked a oneway flight and then Airbnb and from there just started networking with people and yeah, took it from there really.

Who was the first client in the E commerce space?

The first big client was probably Carpy Omnia.

You're wearing the T shirt.

Wearing the T shirt. Yeah. So working with John and Michael knows, almost two years. So that's probably the first big brand that we started working with. And yeah, we've grown rapidly as well there. So I was kind of the first big brand. First really big brand name is probably Connor here to my right. So yeah, that was it really. Just networking. Just found a gap that like a lot of brands were working, let's say like a local accountant who was excellent at what they do. When you talk about international trading and cross border, they didn't really know or know the risks, you know, what Shopify was, etc. So we kind of fill that gap and look after all that and built a lot of close relationships with the likes of Wayflyer, other funders, other banks, just to keep players in the space really.

I think most importantly, a lot of accountants, good and bad, only focus on looking backwards. Whereas that doesn't really fit in with a tight cash flow. Well, not so much tight cash flow, but all of E commerce is a lot tighter on cash flow. And that's where you come in, where you're forward projecting more than anything else.

Yeah. Understanding that magic formula, you can take a hit on roas as long as your contribution margin's at a healthy level and just push that spend and getting that balance fine. Like traditional finance will always their gut reaction will be pull back, pull back, pull back and try to cut costs and save money. Whereas actually might be better off like pushing harder and just driving that top line. If your contribution margin is staying solid and just getting enough cash to cover your fixed and just scale it up from there and have a real plan. And because the unique thing with E Comm is like we have all this data, it's all there in front of us. Like you know, so using that really still.

Yeah. The businesses that we find thinking about, I have a lot of. I've had a lot of conversations with founders and CFOs recently, usually CMOs and CFOs or CEOs and CFOs and the businesses that a lot of like, it's usually really big brands. I've had a conversation with a few of them and the ones that you have the most productive relationship, we have the most productive relationships with is where you have like really strong alignment between the CFO and the cmo. Because the ones that don't have that, you'll find the CFOs like obsessed with like last click attribution or something. And for an example. And then they'll only spend on channels that show good last click contribution. But then to get to true scale you need like YouTube, etc. Where you just don't get that. So I think that and just understanding the e commerce market and ecosystems of CFO is like a big like difference from what I've encountered for sure. Yeah.

Like I'd never look at that. I'd always look at blended, like as long as you're blended targets, we're in a good space.

I think it is just that appreciation of each division and most accountants only look at the books literally in terms of, you know, money in money. And as you said, last click, you know, and it's like proof.

It's like cold hard data, isn't it? Where there's no like speculation. It's to it.

We're actually sitting down with Tick Tock on Thursday to actually go over that.

Yeah, that's a big thing I've been pushing Tick Tock on just. They just don't attribute and then it makes like they don't manage expectations very well as a business.

Yeah, I suppose we've only been able to spend quite a lot because of phosphor.

Yeah, yeah. Because Everybody goes onto TikTok and think it's gonna give you the same numbers out of the back end, out of the back of it as meta. You go on and think, oh, I can spend on it. It's gonna give you the same roas, same numbers, but it's so view through attribution that unless you have something that models in that view through attribution like phosphor, then you don't get. You don't get a true number for like cap. But then like TikTok need to be doing that job. We find it's on us all the time to provide that education. But a lot of people just tell us we're chatting shit, if we like to spend more money here, it's working. But they're not going to do that to like Tick Tock's team.

Yeah, but trying to explain that to a traditional CFO isn't going to be something that's an easy conversation.

It's like a business case. You have to put like A business case together, which is a task.

Yeah, but I suppose like that is kind of one thing we try to. Is like, like my main concern is like staying in the game. So, like, you know, if I'm chatting to anyone, any of you notice, like for chatting or anything we work with, like we're trying to do something like if it's gonna like, you know, the guardrails basically, like, is, is this gonna like wipe us out? You know? And that's, that's the biggest thing I always try to stay away from. It's about like taking risk, but taking calculated risk and managing that risk and, and testing thing and pushing it and then we get confidence it's gonna work, push harder.

There's no point in projecting a 12 million Q4 if you're not going to get to Q4. As funny as it is, quite a lot of brands do think that way. It's like, how do we get to Q4 to be able to do this? Whereas there's a lot of opportunities.

I don't know how like brand owners that don't have a finance person by their side, like, can make those decisions with confidence, you know, in terms of scaling and investing.

It was me, me three years ago, Spraying, praying. It always like when you're, when you're.

Doing your finances, when you're looking, when you're in your own meh, you're making changes based on today's data and that's. You push too hard and all of a sudden you run out of stock or you're not managing your operations just because you've got that dopamine hit of a really, really good day. Then you triple budgets and you're, you're dead by Friday.

Yeah, we've had a cash accounting just, oh, we've loads of cash in the bank, we're okay. Or we don't have much cash in the bank. We'd pull back. But like you might have loads of cash in the bank, but you could have a vapor coming up or a stop in and you. Or these hidden things can come out at you.

That's what nearly chinned me in 2021. December. We went so hard and the Black Friday done class. And then January's bat bill came and I was white as a sheep.

But the thing is there you were ways of sheep because you've never been through that before. But we've been in situations where someone can't afford. Yeah, but can't afford their medical, can't afford these things. And we always not moves. But there's always Things you can do. There always is. And think having someone that's been through it or can just put a hand in your shoulder and say, look, I've, you know, I've seen worse, I've been through worse.

Having someone can put. Yeah. Having someone that can have an awkward conversation.

Yeah.

Do you know, not many people are good at that. Not many people are good at it.

Yeah.

So hope that kind of clears up what we do in a nutshell.

So all really.

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Let's fucking go.

You mentioned through there. You mentioned obviously getting to Q4. So it's literally the start of Q4 today.

Yeah.

It'S like econ Christmas come early. I think it'd be good to chat through a bit of a Q1 to Q3 reflection in terms of everything really. I guess the market. It would be good to do it by business maybe and just how lessons taken. I think. I'm sure everybody's learned some bits and then probably look at Q4 as well. But I think he's probably. It'd be interesting for people to watch in, to maybe reflect there first. How do you think your. When you've spoken at least how do you think your Q1?

I've forgotten how to do these podcasts. How do I think Q1 to Q3 went?

Maybe break it into stages, maybe a.

Couple of summary and then Try and think back now. I mean lessons. The main thing I did in Q1 was just. We just pivoted from just obviously it's brand new brand so it's quite a good example of from what was brand new last year. So first eight months just fucking over. Not overspent but like our blended rise was like 1.7 or something and then in December we were like this is before you came in but I think Simon at the time was I should probably go for slightly better performance. So grew a bit slower but it was, it was way more efficient but obviously being a subscription heavy business started to get the benefit of subscribers and so on. So we started being very contribution profits profitable. Wasn't quite EBITDA profitable at the time. It's getting there and then yeah summer was pretty difficult I think for a lot of brands and well at least then it was easy for my brand. Trying to think about. I mean it's very simple business. We have like one product pretty much but yeah just been focused on. Did a lot of work making things more efficient. I think Q4 is going to be way bigger obviously for us as well as a lot of brands. Just getting a bit nervous about CAC recently but seems to have come down quite nicely in the past two weeks which is good to see. Finally correlating with other changes in the business. Yeah. And to start doing a shitload of work on Churn. I think I was only thinking about acquisition but kind of didn't really realize that especially being subscription business, keeping people on the subscription is as important, if not more important than acquiring new ones.

So what's more important? Isn't it because you don't have to worry about your kayak really.

Yeah. So we're a bit late to the party doing proper work on that but in the past month we started working with a data consultancy who have been expensive but good. Probably the best money I've spent all year to be honest, because it's already brought down Churn a lot. Oh yeah. Point's still valve. Yeah. But yeah, yeah, it's been an easy year basically. I think I probably launched a brand in a pretty terrible time arguably and that's having done it before and been fortunate enough to have people financially back the business. So I don't know how the people can do it. They haven't done it before. I mean the answer is they probably can't, especially in 2023. It's just not what it was five, six years ago in terms of easily launching a brand from bedroom because I feel Like I've got a good product and a good brand and it's still been difficult but I guess a lot of people would say it's doing really well for a new brand. I mean a lot of like venture capital investors to speak to say that and it's like I think it's doing shit because I've done bigger stuff in the past.

Well I think simply because you've found many copycats you've had already I think.

Think okay, you know, so. But yeah, obviously the ambition is still to. To 10 exit which would probably take three to five years. So. But yeah, all in all I say it's been a pretty positive year. Learned a lot though, very stressful. But I think next year the plan is to at least kind of 3x what we've done this year.

What would you say is the importance of. Importance of a good sort of surrounded structure in terms of the partners you work with has made a difference in that or is it other things?

What is in the people I work with? Yeah, I mean people always say like how big is your team? I'm like, I guess it's like five people core. But then we do, we do well with a lot of agencies and external resource I think. Yeah, a lot of people just only talk about that on Twitter. It's marketing agencies. How much you spending on ads? No one ever talks about product or supply chain or finance which are. Well probably but definitely are more important because without them you can't polish a turd, you can't market something shit. But there's this weird culture in D2C sphere of just let's just talk about marketing. But it's all the dropshippers that are doing no ship scams that are talking about it because the other things don't matter when you're doing that.

The zero to one in it like the marketing does a zero to one. But then once you're at like some sort of scale, I'd probably argue that the most impactful thing you can do for any brand is launch a good new product. Just have more things to sell to people. It's just like common sense, isn't it? Even if that's just another flavor that you've done, it's like opened you to another batch of consumers who wouldn't have bought from you previously and allows you to go after new angles. If you're doing a completely new sku.

Not even just that, it's also your best customers are going to be customers. So if you can find, if you can find ways to benefit their life then you know you've had a proper product. How many people are drinking space goods because of the benefits but don't like the flavor whereas now a portion of them are now enjoying the flavor and the benefits.

Yeah.

So they're more likely to tell friends, they're more likely to buy more, you know, become a little bit more elastic to price and sort of future jobs and stuff.

It's funny, everyone always says drinking space goods, I think I need to do, do some work and clarifying that. The product is called rainbow dust. Everyone always says I'm buying my morning space goods. Yeah, yeah. And it's like that's not the fucking product. So I'm obviously, would you rather they drink coffee rather than drink rainbow dust?

But yeah, I think that leads nicely into my point. I think the biggest thing I've seen is like that's it. 20, 20, 21, 22. You could get away with having a good product and really good marketing and coming from a corporate background, there's corporate structures are the way they are for a reason because you know everything has to be working whether it's your finance, marketing, supply chain operations, MPD and the brands now that are doing really well are the ones that are acknowledging that and putting the structures and systems in place across all the business units that need to be in place to be a successful business. And so trend now moving away from an E commerce business to let's say a business, you know.

Yeah.

Like we're seeing more brands now. Let's enter the B2B or the retail space because you know they can use that as leverage and it's going to diversify their channels. We're seeing more and more businesses invest in team and back end to build for the future. We're seeing more businesses like adjust their mindset in terms of growth as well, you know, and be a bit more realistic and play the long game. I think there's a bit of a consolidation in the market and I think it's going to continue. I think the brands with the strong fundamentals, the right product market, fish and the builders back end are the ones that are going to stay the course. That's probably the biggest lesson I've learned.

It's a channel, not a business, isn't it? Like DTC fundamentally is a channel. It's not a business type, direct to consumers, a channel. And then the best businesses are the ones or the most insulated businesses and the biggest businesses do other, other things as well.

This dog's tail, right? He agrees.

But yeah, I Think I agree. I still think, I think you can still get to, you can still start a business and get some great scale keeping it simple in D2C but you can't survive for the long run doing that. You've got to go for that transition point. He's definitely getting harder.

Just everything like rising interest rates, you know, market sentiment. Like again it all is a knock on effect. Like if interest rates are rising, people want to be paid more. People want to be paid more. Working the factories make you know, it's just all feeds in. So that's why it's getting more difficult, isn't it? And you need to have that back end tight and just work on everything. I think yeah. Product drops and NPD is definitely a massively underrated thing to bring CAC down.

It's hard to do innit in launching new products. It's a lot harder than making new ads or spending money on another platform.

It takes a lot more time intention longer term playoffs. You've shoots product, mpd, everything. Yeah.

In terms of your own business. What was this like internally? What's. How would you reflect on Q1's three?

I mean for me it's been an exciting year. For the first time ever, let's get more sales. You know, it's. How can we make more benefit from the end sales? How can we improve our operations? How can we expand the quality, just quantity of the team? As you said Matt, it's, it's, it's exciting because you can calculate especially with yourself with forecast and stuff, you can calculate these changes and actually see that you know, if you change like for example we're changing a lot of the packaging at the minute and it's, it's due to Netflix 85, 86,000. But to get a net benefit of 86,000 you're talking about getting an extra 400 grand in sales. 300 grand sales. So ultimately now that is far easier than asking yourself Ollie, just get us another 400 grand sales. You know it's fundamentally there's a lot less to it. It's as simple as changing a box where asking you to do the sales. You're talking content structure and teams ideation a massive process to get that. Whereas it can be as simple as how do we use less void fill, how do we change the part we consume damage address, how do we improve the customer repeat purchase rate just by changing the offer and insert in the parcel. It's crazy that so many businesses you order from and they're not doing it because they went straight into thinking strand 11 with.

Just.

Bright and voidful and no insert because the 3 PL charges an extra 10p per order to send an insert, whereas if they had a simple insert they would increase their RCR by 8.9percent which is worth far more than that. Do you know what it's to me, yes, it's harder on acquisition but I don't actually think it's harder to build a brand. I think it's definitely going to be the easiest time and I is the easiest time to build a brand because now it's only going to be money. So you have to constantly look at.

These sort of things.

You know, it's definitely the hardest time to acquire customers.

Yeah. So I kind of agree with. I think there's more channels than ever to build brands on as well. There's more ways to do it. Look at the way there's a lot of good brands bringing up still some brands I speak to. I spoke to a guy the other like last Thursday who's doing 500k a month just through TikTok Shop.

Selling what?

Beauty products. Absolutely ridiculous. Just that channel. No, no, that's not taking any other. Just tik tok shops.

500K.

But that is D to C four years ago. When that Tik Tok shop turns off it's going to be that same scramble as.

It's just like there's. There's so many ch.

Yeah.

There's so many channels. I think if you. If you do it in the right way. Content marketing, short form content. So many ways to get like we've just started to build an organic profile for another brand. Followers are going on that really easily, really quickly. It's getting more challenging but still possible.

It's the whole argument that customers don't want to be customers, they want to be entertained first. It's no extension of that hook typically only talked about at the start of an ad, but it needs to. Customers want to be entertained first and then introduce a product. We have a lot of wild buyers to. You say Tok is comedy based because they want to be entertained first. They don't want to see a simple. Albeit it still works. You don't want to see a simple static ad on Facebook. There needs to be more depth. It needs to be a brand. I think the term brand has been overused for the last five years when they've just been a glorified response, glorified product that they sell. It's not a brand, you know, whereas most of the copycats that you see at the moment, it's just product. There is no like using space goods is a negative. I think it's a positive because.

You.

Know, because the space goods is the brand.

Yeah.

Someone else, they could have mushroom, you know, mushroom based chocolate drink and they're still calling it Space Kids whereas it's actually another brand, you know, kind of.

A bit like it. Well I guess it's not quite the same because it's AG1 but I hear quite a lot of people say AG1 and then it's after. But they also call it athletic screens like that. Yeah, yeah, true but not to the same. Obviously they're much closer than rainbow distance based goods.

Well I'd like, certainly like to be compared to a billion pound single SKU business. That's what I'm trying to do.

Seamus, in turn, what's your obviously you venture dcom reflectively what's been your business's kind of Q1 to Q3 journey and internally. What. What's that look like?

Yeah, so we actually, I actually partnered up with a guy called stu organ in Q1. Stu again very, very deep in the E comm space and we kind of co founded E Clarity then together kind of took what I'd built and learned and what he'd built and learned and kind of joined forces. He was a cfo. Rurocef scaled the out of them and then was working for the Growth Foundation. So we've done that and then we've hired a good few more people as well. Another person now starting tomorrow, Zach. And then we have a girl, Evie who's coming from Lussell stone. She was FC there. She's joining on the 1st of November. So I think our biggest challenge has just been finding people that have a good, maybe even just a basic understanding to be honest, of E commerce finance because it's so, it's so different to traditional finance and it's a completely different mindset. Same with marketing like it's night and day.

Same with hiring someone for marketing. Yeah, hiring someone who's marketed for like a Ted Baker and getting him to come work for an E comm run is just even running Facebook ads. It's just night and day different the way that you approach that things are.

So fast paced as well and you know you need to go against the grain and a lot, a lot of ways you're thinking like as I was saying earlier, sometimes you're better off spending more. We found that lesson out in August like didn't we? You know, sometimes you're off like spending more making sure your Contribution margin is staying at a good, a good, a good place and then just obviously managing the cash flow around that. What are the reflections? I think it's important for people to take it seriously really and just stay on top of the finances because a good finance person should actually save you money. There should not be a cost center like they really should over the course of a year, like and we generally say like people should be investing only 1 to 1.5%. Any 78 figure brand should only be investing like it's only 1 1/2% of Rev's going back into the finance function. That's more than sufficient. Whereas I said there's a lot of people out there investing less than 0.1% to be honest. Back into it, we were playing our.

Previous account in 198lbs a month to be precise. It's just probably, yeah, probably something we overlooked for a while.

But it's the point like you just want to focus on aggression. You want to focus on the sexy stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just natural.

It's just something I fucking hate looking at like deeply. I hate looking at the zero dashboard. Passion.

Just such a yuck.

Yeah, it's just like a horrible place to be.

Oh yeah.

But obviously it's like the most important place in your business. It's just like, yeah, it's like running.

Twitter ads for me. Like my like zero dashboard is probably your like Shopify or away. Like I love getting into someone's zero and just, it's just like dismantling. Dismantling. It just, just tells a story. Like it's really like reading a book and you can just spot things so quickly. It's like, you know, we know what their fulfillment cost as a percentage of should be. You know, know like we know what a product margin should be in a specific industry. Like we know these things and like we found like six figure VAT overpayments before. Like just paying too much for debt or using the wrong type of debt for the wrong, the wrong thing, you know, not matching it up. Every time we go in we just find something that can be improved on that's just bringing value back to the business. And like I don't like a company.

Came into my business, I thought what the is this?

Started sweeping up the floors like on a serious note. I don't know where I was going with that but like, oh, sorry, I'm not passionate about tax and accounting. It's boring. It really is boring. But like what I am passionate about is like helping people build Businesses and providing value. And I just think if you put enough value in the world, like, you're just going to get it back, aren't you?

Yeah, definitely.

Unless you run a podcast where you don't get any referral fees. Why are you looking at me?

Should you look at him?

Christ. That's why I've slowed down the pace of the podcast. It doesn't pay me enough. Put out so much value and people just complain about the quality of the video cameras. It's like, hell. Do they giving people a free MBA on this Internet channel. Your next topic.

I was, I was going to do a quick fire off the back of that biggest lesson from Q1 to Q3.

Oh, I got me politically correct here. I'll go first. Well, I don't. I mean, pretty obvious one. I've said it in my own videos. Just focus on the main thing. Too much fluff, like, do less fur.

Is like my biggest.

Basically everything is a waste of time. Find out what's not a waste of time and do more of that. Yeah, it's just like, it's a sad truth. It's also a very, very accurate reality.

I think that's a good one.

Make sure your contribution margin is at a sufficient level to cover your overhead. Yeah, well, like. But again, know your strategy. Like. Like, there's times like I'd never like scaling a brand at a loss, but you, if you scale a brand at break even, I think it's okay. You just need to understand what's your strategy like, are you trying to scale that top line and how do you manage that? Or are you trying to be profitable and sustainable? And I think founders just need to decide, well, what's the strategy now? And your strategy is going to change throughout the quarter, you know, throughout time. But just have a strategy really, and work to build a roadmap. I don't think I've ever come into a client or anyone work with. I think actually you do. But like most clients we start working with, they never had like a forecast or a plan. It's like, how do you know where you're going if you don't have a plan to get there? If you get me, we spend so.

Much time building those with people.

Yeah, I think I kind of had one. But yeah, more recently, obviously looking at raising bench capital and so on, which is kind of a different way of doing things. But yeah, I think, like, even I wasn't super clear, like, what the actual goal is. That I'll grow the business, make money. But, like, are you going for an exit. Are you trying to just have an EBITDA profitable business that's kind of a lifestyle business? Do you want to build the next heel? They're all very different paths and require different strategies.

It can be fluid as well. I think the key, the most productive businesses that we grow the fastest from an agency perspective are the ones that have real clarity on one North Star metric, whether that's ncpa, whether that's blended cpa, whether that's mer. Like one metric that guides all of the decision making from an acquisition perspective. And then probably the same like something similar. You kind of want that for every channel really, if you can. But like those are ones that I think having something to gauge.

What would you say is the. Is the most beneficial Northstar, from what you've just mentioned, the ones.

It depends on the. That's a good question. It depends on the. It depends on. It kind of depends on the business and the goal of the business.

Goal of the business is to get to 50 million a year. Rev, what's the, what's your metric that you would have your nostalgia?

Again, it depends. It depends where they are in the journey. I think if you're a more mature brand. So for tev, for example, you'd look at your. You pace your acquisition off an NCPA number if you can. But then if you're like a subscription.

Business, I guess, yeah, I'd probably say subscribers, active subscribers, it's gonna be different probably.

But then why, why active subscribers over 200.

For you?

Well, because it's active subscribers and like net new subscribers is the combination of good retention and good acquisition for you.

You want to optimize off LTV to cart ratio.

Yeah, but yeah, you want your LTV.

To CART ratio to be as high as humanly possible because then you can.

Raise a shitload of cash and never have to be profitable.

You can raise a lot of money, but you can also. And like you, you want to move more further, you want to move more and more towards an LTV model as you get bigger because the confidence in that LTV number gets higher as the amount of people in that cohort gets bigger. So. And then. And it also becomes harder at scale to still acquire on first order profitability. So the more room you have to move that CAC target up, the better. But then that. Again, I'll do it. It really depends. But we have to work through that process, man. Most of the time, most of the people we on board just don't have a clue how much they should be paying to Acquire a customer based on the costs. Like not a Scooby. Might as well just lick the fingers. Licking the finger and put it in the air. Like we'll fancy a two row. Just like it doesn't matter, it's just which is interesting.

So but what's that, what does that confrontation period look like where you go to a brand, say, what do you want your North Star metric to be?

We walk them through like costs, we take them. We could get them to put it all into a spreadsheet which can take ages. Just like trying to get someone. Yeah, trying to get someone to pull their overheads and like that's weird. Yeah, yeah. Ideally you get Seamus doing it. It's like slinging the spreadsheet. Like fill this in for me chief, and then send it back.

I do think working out a break even riot is a pretty useful blended metric as well.

Yeah.

Like, because obviously CAC and everything, they're all kind of the same thing. But how low to the ground can you fly?

In theory there's a certain point at which that's like, I'd say that's like.

Because also those numbers change at scale. It's like I've done a lot of work realizing that if we can triple revenue, we can bring our roas way down. Exactly. The challenge is how do we get there in the next few months? Because then it's like chicken or egg. Do you scale to get to a lower roas or do you stay better roas at a smaller scale?

And yeah, yeah, we take people through that kind of process and then you want to ideally layer in some kind of form of like fuel profit. Like you need some extra profit above break even to fuel growth. Like if you just run at break even, you're going to get surely just going to get some massive cash flow problems. Unless you're investment capital.

See, that's why you need a model that will map all this out. So like if I got, if I just ask a founder in isolation, what would you rather a contribution margin of 25 or 15%? Probably going to say 25%.

Yeah.

What if I say you're doing 50k rev on 25 or 500k reven 15%, you could be making a bottom line loss on the 25% contribution.

Exactly.

But you could be making a profit on the 15%. And if you know your key inputs, if you know your ncpa, your let's say subscription brand, for example, if you know your ncpa, you know your, your churn rate or your churn rate target, you can model it out like and you can see where you're going to land. You hit your numbers and then if you don't hit your numbers you can see where you're behind. So if you're behind ncpa you might go well what's the creative endpoint? Or do we need to do some work there on the front end? Or if churn rate is higher than expected? Well like let's look at the retention strategies for, for the Monk Onboy and what didn't work, what worked and learned from that and get those feedback loops quicker and quicker. Because we sat down and went over that, didn't we? We identified what were the key levers and it's just doubles.

Right now we're at 5 million a month. What do we need to do to get to 50 million a month? That's the conversation we had last week.

Just get all in to spend more.

Yeah.

What was your obvious.

Quality team over quantity? I think for so long we were caring about how many staff we had and stuff like that. Whereas now I prefer half of the size and producing double output which I don't think is actually too much of an ask and a lot of things, even as much as Q3, you know, there's a lot more work to be done. There's always work to be done bottom, top rather than top down. In terms of acquisition, running some numbers and seeing some of the differences that we can make in the business just fuels profit. Whereas you know, you could drop that NC ROAS down 0.1 because of the improvements you can make everywhere else and grow the business so much more.

I think one last point alice was the Q1 to Q3 reflections. I think the one, if I was to pick one word for people to focus on like going forward, it would be efficiency. But I think too many people just get bogged down on like marketing efficiency. But there's other things you can look at throughout your business, whether it's, you know, supply chain like whilst it might sound counterintuitive like sometimes we've taken a slightly higher product cost for better credit terms because it's going to free up cash flow which is going to fuel acquisition and you can pump the business up quicker. Things about looking at efficiency throughout your whole business, throughout your whole P and L and try rinse as much of it as you can because that's going to put much more cash flow and inject more back into the business. It's gonna let you push on. I think it's gonna look at it like that perspective like what what efficiency can you eke out in every single part of your business?

Yeah.

I think E Comm is an awful trend of just looking at marketing and roas and just getting too focused on that need to take a step back. Like sometimes there's macro things going on you've no control over and you're just trying to fight against it. Which draw is gonna lose, you know.

Yeah.

There's so many places to do it as well. So like so many different areas to test and.

And you can think, how, how can I save money on buying these shoes from the prehistoric era?

What, my Birkenstock?

Your recession proof sandals? Wearing.

Uggs on.

Yeah. Slippers.

Yeah. My. Mine's just my reflection is still like. It's probably been this for like 12 months now. It's just one people. I think people are everything, but people are also nothing. If you get it wrong. Like. Like finding one really good person to bring into the business can comp. Like. Yeah, one, one really good person can. Can have an absolutely transformative effect on a business. But one really bad person could be an absolute nightmare.

It's a rotten egg effect, isn't it?

Yeah.

Remove that egg before it.

I think like at the size where the growth we've had has all been, the people within the team that have facilitated it and allowed me to do what I'm good at whilst they're better than me at other things. And I think that's the key and that's carried on this year. Hopefully it'll carry on next year.

Yeah, we're the same. The biggest change we've had is just bringing in great people. It just really allows you to push on.

So we've done our reflective piece. How is everyone shaping up for Q4? You ready? You ready for Q4?

We're about three days out from selling out of product, so we're not. That's a bit to the wire right now on stock and stuff. I'm sure it'll be fine. Yeah, I was thinking about this. I think Chris from Saw said to me, have you planned Black Friday? And I was like, oh yeah, forgot that.

I think it's a bit different when.

You have a very limited product offering. Because the challenge for me is that I actually, if I discount loads, it pisses off all our subscribers, which I found out last year. So I actually don't know what I'm gonna do for Black Friday.

I mean, Gifford purchases, surely there.

Yeah, stuff like that.

Adding value instead of discount, just giving extra shit. But I mean the goal will be just to acquire subscribers. That's like, in my opinion, that's the main goal for a business like mine.

Yeah.

And hit the targets, obviously, which we haven't been doing in recent months. But I think this month, well, given it's the first day of the month, it's already looking a lot, lot better.

So a lot of momentum.

Yeah, that was the problem, I think August we cut spend loads thinking that was a great idea because let's just be efficient. CAC ended up going up. Our new customer revenue tanked. We weren't testing any new shit, so our ad performance went to shit. Then we spent three out of four weeks of September catching up. So now the last week of September was way better. And now we finally have momentum again. So it's like don't kill momentum in ad spend because it's fucked.

You've just focused again as a business.

Yeah, that as well.

You're just taking space goods.

Focused on the one thing.

Overdosing on my own product.

It's not all bad though, because, you know, we tried it and now we know for definite that doesn't work like that strategy.

So, yeah, defoe some bad thing, you know, anything that doesn't work out is just something I learned with anything. Do you know?

Yeah, we got like two new SKUs coming in, Q4, which I feel like is probably too many because it's a lot of new shit to sort out. Another new flavor. Relaunching the nighttime product, which could actually be pretty sick.

I think that's.

I think the new flavor was, in hindsight, probably a bad idea, but whatever.

I think it's a good idea. It's limited edition, isn't it?

Yeah, but it's fucking too many. Too much of it, in my opinion. But it'll sell. It's fine.

I think it's a good product. I think it's perfect for the time of year you've launched it.

Another new product in January, then potentially retail products as well. There's a lot of new.

Exciting, exciting, exciting. So I think for us, Q4 compared to last year. Last year we ran out of stock like seven times.

Yeah. You kept.

This year we've got.

Telling me to turn off ads. It's so boring.

Yeah.

This year we've got what, 2 million bottles come in.

When do we sit? We said we sat down in like March, didn't we?

Two million bottles.

Serious numbers.

More than that, isn't it?

2.7 in terms of landing or when we're going to have landing. Yeah.

So we're very, very stocked, prepared For Holly's wrath. Spend.

We're gonna spend some money.

I remember we sat down, I think.

In March and planned Black Friday. Did you just sit there with the. You puts a hood on, he goes to the computer, like does a warm up of his wrists and stuff and doesn't move.

Answer to zero.

This keeps his eyes open.

Obviously.

Our brand's very, very structured around it. A very good November. I think for Black Friday. What we want is a men pine day. She must have looked at me as saying, I wasn't supposed to say that. But yeah, we hit half of that last year and it was still our best of our day. But we can do a lot more. I think we had you on a leash last year, didn't we?

Yeah, we turned ads off on the Sunday of Black Friday.

Saturday, Saturday, Black Friday 850.

How much would you spend on Black Friday to do a million pound a day?

Too much. Shameless.

It's not driven, it's not massively. It won't be entirely driven by spend.

It's more.

The More the structure of the planning up until that point to build the enough awareness to allow us.

But still, how much would you spend on Black Friday to hit a million pound?

A decent amount, I think for us.

Black Friday started in February. Do you know, the discussion in March about February was about how many new customers we acquired that are naturally going to buy gifts in November.

Yeah, we've gone really heavy on new customers. New customer acquisition for seven or eight months. And then we've also. We've also done a lot of work on Churn rate and like 60 day churn rate and both of those are heading in the right direction.

Do you have subscriptions?

No, but like Churn from a. From a, like a customer list perspective, like people who buy again within 60 days of buying just measure it in a different way and just count Churn as a different number. Yeah, both of those have been on a really good trend. And then we're layering in a lot more awareness. The thing for us going into next. Well, the biggest thing for me for Q4 is I want to come out the end of Q4 with three profitable brands. Not what? Yeah, like that's the journey we want to go on and then offer. Like have the operations set for that launch period of brands. So we've got another one going live in October.

Why?

It's gonna be a whack.

I'm too autistic to have more than one brand.

This is really exciting, this brand called Liquid London. It's going to Be a pheromone based brand. Brand. So we're going to launch with three fragrances for him, for her and for everyone.

And for him, for her and for them.

For everyone.

Them's a nightmare in like, for them. I think you see that as being like ostracizing. Seen a lot of brands, a lot of hate for doing that.

What do you mean?

Scene is like using that as like a revenue generation source. I'm not actually standing for it, so you just want to be kind of careful with that.

But yeah, it's a very exciting brand. The whole point of the fragrance is that it smells different on everyone. So if I spray for him and Ollie sprays for him on us, it's going to smell different on me than Ollie. It hasn't really been done well in the UK or anywhere apart from Eccentric Molecule. They do it well, but their market is a bit nice.

They're all B2B, really on. Yeah, that raises a good point.

Like, you know, we're talking about Q4. Like, we've been planning, planning Q4 since the start of the year, like, so.

It'S like, am I the only one that hasn't even thought about it?

But like, you know, like, a lot of brands will make the bulk of their profit in Q4 and it's like your strategy is like, how heavy do you want to go on acquisition in the start of the year and managing stock and cash flow and then invest more in acquisition in Q1 through Q3 to get that back in Q4 and get those profits back? And that's why forecasts and planning and strategy is so important and not just taking it month by month, like having already a full year plan and working towards it.

Yes.

The thing we've been really trying to like, I've been spending loads of time going deep into YouTube for the last two months to try and spend a lot of money on there. It's starting to work really well, which is great. Never really done a lot of YouTube performance.

It's interesting you say that because the data guys we're working with, they did some really complicated attribution model thing. They presented it on the call that you weren't on on Friday to Chris and so on. And they said YouTube's a big opportunity.

It is, but it costs a lot of money to do. You need to take big swing tests, you need to go in and spend at least 2k a day to get enough data through. They'll have done last click attribution modeling up to your boom impressions probably, which.

Is what we use and tick tock starting to seem pretty good.

Was that through the same model?

I think so, yeah.

They will use. They used. Do they use the same. So we use a platform called Phosphor which is like mmm modeling. So what that does is it takes.

Like mixed media marketing something.

Yeah it takes like your last click attribution for each platform and then models it up to your like to your platforms. So when we plugged in, when we've plugged in platforms to that it's it massively so. It traditionally most attribution models will downweigh things that are very reliant on view through attribution but as you go further up the funnel so as you go to TikTok it's more view through. As you go to YouTube it's even more view through. So you're going to end up with like our in platform ROAS on YouTube is going to be like 0.5 but then you need to find some sources of truth that validate it to be like oh this is actually working. So we like ours is post purchase surveys and phosphorus and it's like well actually it's not 0.5, it's this. So now I've got a bit of confidence to go and spend some money into it.

Important thing about YouTube is it's very hard to catch up. So even for brands like yourself got a lot of copycats, we get a lot of copycats. We going there because for them to catch up with us it's going to cost them quite a lot of money. So it's almost like a further level of brand protection.

It's a lot harder to execute on.

Yeah yeah. We became the fragrance brand of. We became the TikTok fragrance brand but now we can become the YouTube fragrance brand. Very very.

Is that like a long form YouTube ad?

YouTube's generally, it's not shorts. YouTube's generally higher, higher production. So it's going to be harder to emulate that sort of style of video.

Yeah we're doing a lot of hybrid doing high prod YouTube pre roll and then we are, we are running some shots because we've got so much ugc it's like. But that's a different like you will you layer that into the campaign so you kind of want to cover as many video placements as possible and then we're spending a decent, decent amount on there and just trying to scale. I see that as being like the, the channel for us like at certain scales you have to. You need more top of funnel trying to really push that. But that I think that'll help a lot into Q4.

Have you done affiliate on like Square Dance before I started looking at it. I've been doing a tiny bit of it which I keep forgetting to put into our budgets that it's. I always spend a five grand more market and I thought seems pretty scalable really. It feels like you could do a dirty chance affiliates. So Square Dance is the platform. You just. I just like the fact it's fixed cpa like you only pay if they. If they. You only pay that per customer.

So it's a really scalable channel.

Yeah. I spoke to the founder. He said like mud water. Bunch of my competitors are scaling hard on it. On it.

Are scaling hard on it's the said.

They spend 200 grand a day on it. Yeah. On it.

On it. On it, on it. I've got a lot of people. It's just people who will take your product and market it for you. You just pay them if they get a cpa.

Yeah. I think the risk is like them cannibalizing your key market. So I would only do it in a market we're not running in.

Probably also the brand kind of like. Like are they going to be on brand? I guess something you want to consider. But it's what. What you want.

Yeah.

Depends what you want to do. But affiliates is a channel.

I've seen.

I've seen a lot of brands, just some volume for affiliates. Affiliates have their own customers as well. It's a big channel.

Yeah.

We're going to do more and more of that and it's very scalable. So I think. Is that the. Yeah. So I think my personal aim for Jack is to try and get. Not just. It's more focused on what we're trying to build as well group and get the other brands really moving. I also think Q4 is like holistically treated as like Black Friday, Cyber Monday only. But there's actually quite a lot of other things in the period.

Yeah. Like Halloween, Christmas, Prime Day.

Halfway through October. We've done some really good prime day activations for people surprisingly well. There's a singles day in there somewhere.

Yeah.

I remember what day that is as well. I think that that would work really well. It's like Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving falls at such an awkward time though. If you're a US. If you've got a US market. It's like what, two days before Black Friday time. Monday.

I think January as well. January probably bigger for us than.

Yeah.

You must get the new November, December.

I think New Year, new me crowd.

CAC was the lowest all year in January. I mean, Granny, we've only done one year, so.

Because I guess when you get to the end of November, you're very much in the mindset of what am I buying for other people? As much as you buy for yourself, probably for those couple of days you do a bit of both. But like you're in gifting season, aren't you?

Yeah.

Whereas I feel like you get to January, people become very like New Year, goal orientated and I feel like your product aligns really heavily with that. Yeah, same with back. I still think you do. You could coordinate a really good campaign around Baxter University.

Kind of missed the boat there, haven't we?

Yeah, as in like one for like next year. Like, I think that's a prime time. So like you could do some really good messaging around it.

Yeah.

Our giant quarter last year was the strongest, wasn't it?

Yeah, I think so.

So, yeah, just goes to show, just.

Going to spend 5 million on Instagram ads in January. I don't know, just get, just get a ridiculous amount of credit lines and.

Just hope for the best problem.

Now just pass on the problem, fix it.

Yeah.

Looking forward, looking to 2024. What do you think the year will be like? Do you see any headwinds, any challenges? I thought September was interesting because middle of September was challenging for a lot of people. For a lot of brands we work.

With, it's always comforting when you realize that everyone else is shitting themselves as well, not just you.

But it's fundamentally a bad month. You're coming into the period where this is the first time of year where people are thinking, oh fuck, Christmas is so close. How they're looking at their paydays. They've only got three paydays to Christmas. They, they're starting to set aside money. Like, I'm sure pot noodle sales skyrocket in September because they're looking to save money and what they're, they're eating do you know? So fundamentally people like, I hate looking on Twitter and saying, oh, MET has itself this month. It's September. It's a five week month. It's September. People have no money back to school. All their free money's going on their kids.

Think of that. Yeah, that's true.

I think it's, I think it's definitely like, I think like macro. Yeah, macro.

Macro, yeah. Easy to think the algorithm has changed. It's like, no, just look at the fucking reality of the world.

Well, I'm sure Like one hits the other. Meta is going to shit itself because there's so many different triggers because of all this. They're not spending, they're not clicking through, they're not adding the cart. Then all of a sudden Meta's algorithms fuck up because there's such a vast difference. So it does lead to Meta shit in itself. Like a lot of people saying cost caps are gone. Anyone that's got. Got an ad account based on cost caps is not spending. Obviously the customers aren't there. That's what you want cost caps for.

It's just an element of like consumer confidence, isn't it? Like, how much are people willing to spend money in that time period? And then you, you always see it with the. For those months that are in the middle of the month, you always have a really good payday. Which even like validates the point, validates it even more. Like, you see, we saw a massive uplift for most of the brands across our portfolio from about Thursday afternoon onwards. People just started spending again.

Yeah, we did as well.

We don't got his payday in months.

Yeah, way better. Way better. And it preceded a less efficient like 10 days. Probably the least efficient. 10 days without even.

I think when you have a challenging one like that, sometimes you're not zooming out and not looking at monthly performance. But look at quarterly. Com. Yeah, at the last quarter's performance compared to the same quarter last year year or the quarter previous to that. And zoom out a little bit, you know, because even, even the way the weekends like lie, like, you know, you might get two activations in one month and then none the next month, only one, the next one. So then one month's performance would be over inflated. So zoom out a little bit and look at performance on a quarterly basis too. It can be useful.

Yeah, I think, like, be interesting to see what 2024 is like. Obviously there was a lot of talk about recession this year. I think it's been more challenging. But I still think like, if you've approached it in the right way, people have been able to effectively grow.

Still, at the end of the day, people still buy products that are good. Like consumers is the biggest. I think someone said it's the biggest market in the world, but everyone says our consumers fucked. People buy products. At the end of the day, people.

Spend their disposable income.

Yeah, exactly.

All the time.

I think like, you know, cream always rises to the top, doesn't it? So like, if you have a good product and a good brand and a good business focus, on the controllables and you're always going to make money. There's always going to be a market out there for you.

Yeah, definitely.

What's your macro plan for next year? Other than releasing 50 products and hitting five in the month? Personally and business.

This is like an end of the year podcast.

Maybe we're going too far into.

I'd like to 3x what we've done this year, next year. I think it's challenging, but would be doable. Would be a good result. Yeah, that's probably like the main thing.

It's pretty far. Pretty doable, though, I think.

But I just think when you're in this, in this early stage, you should be 3x in every year. I think you should triple for like three years from the start. I think I read somewhere that the best business is triple, triple, triple, double, double. That's a generally good metric.

Yeah. I was looking at.

So, like, 1, 3, 9, 18, 36 would be like a great five years.

The number one ecommerce brand on Sunday Times list. Only 324 over three years.

Yeah. I looked at Lululemon. I've been looking at, like. I've just been reading into it loads because it's just my business.

His audible is really good.

Yeah. That's why I started reading into it. But they've grown 37% on average. 37% a year for 18 years to one point.

And it's literally. It's the. The smoothest line ever.

It's like a really consistent, efficient growth. Year on year, on year, on year for 18 years.

How big is it now? Bigger than that now.

$1.3 billion. It did last year.

I thought it was like 10 billion.

No, maybe valuation.

Oh, maybe valuation. Right.

But I think they did 1.3 billion revenue last year, which is pretty much.

Sure. I swear it's bigger than that because Gymshark's like half a billion and they've got to be way bigger than gymshark.

Well, 1.4 is way bigger. Yeah.

It's only three times bigger. Maybe I thought they're 10 times bigger. I could be wrong. Just clearly search that.

I thought. I did think they were bigger than that.

Maybe I've got that.

I think they're closer to 8 billion revenue.

Maybe.

Where did it.

Maybe I did get that one. Yeah, it's 8.1. You were right.

That just goes back to the point.

Like, where did I get that number from?

A sustainable business model that can take that growth. There is a thing like if you go to the banks, like, and it's kind of again, counterintuitive. Their biggest fear is over trip. Well, not their biggest fear, but one thing they will look at and they're like, are you over trading? Are you pushing too much? Oh, are you buying too much stock? Are you investing too much in acquisition? Then it's over trading and then the wheels can come off.

You know, I must have got that wrong. I must have got that brand completely wrong. The market cap's 48 billion, so absolutely miles off.

I did a 1.4 in the 1.4 in leggings alone.

Let's.

Let's change the brand.

Yeah. Sounds more realistic.

I haven't got a clue what brand it was, but there was a brand that I looked at that had done. It was. It was like primarily ecom.

Was.

It was the smooth. That was.

It was like it had done like 37% growth.

It was definitely doing illness in it.

Yeah. Really consistently since 2002 or something.

Yeah.

Which is nuts. I think 3.3x is reasonable challenge.

Yeah. Keep it simple, really. That's probably the goal. Keep it simple.

8020 rule. What? 20% of efforts or activities will bring 80% of the value back in.

Yeah. Basically just spend more on a good ad to a good landing page with a good product. That's literally it.

I think until you do 10 mil a year. Definitely at least 10 milli. Yeah. Then you can. One channel or two channels can do that.

I think one thing that's not thought geographies. I think a lot of like brands will go too broad too early.

Yeah.

And try to take over the world. Whereas, like, if you're born in the UK or you're born in Ireland, you know the market. So what are you trying to sell into, like some random place like, I don't know, Bulgaria. We have no idea.

Yeah.

The market norms or market sentiment.

Everyone needs their fragrance chief.

I mean, early days. What's the biggest thing you're doing differently now compared to, let's say three years.

Ago or four years ago?

I don't actually know. I feel like I do the same. I wake up, go to my computer, have my same routine. I suppose it's probably just slightly more refined in terms of what I'm doing. Definitely. Maybe planning more. Whereas I used to this Chad scale, which is a bad idea. It's brought the loud crinkly chicken. Yeah. I don't know. I think I was trying to over complicate recently, like past few months. And then it comes back to just at the end of the day, as a founder, you're just like some cunt with a mad idea that just has to build a business and be a bit fucking gritty with it. Especially at this like small scale that we're still at as a new brand. Yeah, it's just me sat there.

Not a bad place to be sat with this.

Yeah, no, it's nice. I can't really complain. I suppose the thing I'm trying to do is like, think like, how could I be running this brand in 10 years, not like two years. It sounds a bit ridiculous to say that when it's fucking 17 months old. But ultimately if you want to build something really valuable, it probably is 10 years.

That makes more sense because again, it's easier to grow 30% per year over 10 years than 3x for 3 years. You know, especially from a financial point of view, from a MPD point of view, from a branding point of view, like imagine that subscriber list at the current rate in 10 years time. So like why would you give, if you're profitable now, why would you give VCs that extra chunk? If your plan is the 10 year plan with that current subscriber rate, what's that going to be? With the current NCBA, what's that, what's that going to look like in 10 years? It's going to be like massive, you know, of course.

Well, I'd still rather do it in three years though. What? Post I Saw My soul.

Good to see you. No, but I think the number, like the main priority for every founder should be just like staying in the game, not taking those big risks that could.

Like, you think I learned that early on? Like I, I generally think if I sold, if I sold my brand, the first thing I do would be all my money against the wall trying to get the brand again. So I'm happy with where I'm at, I'm happy with my day, I'm happy with what I do. And I just want the do that for the rest of my life. That is appease. I go on nice holidays, I go to nice places. If I do that for the rest of my life, I'm happy.

You know, that's the first question I ask any founder. I start working with them like, well, what is the goal? And there's really three main goals. Like it's, do you want a cash flow business, like lifestyle business? Are you trying to build a brand bigger than you that's going to like outlast your lifetime or are you building for an exit? And I don't think many founders actually ask them that question, ask themselves that question and are honest enough with themselves to know what business they're building. Because every decision is going to actually be based off that.

It was interesting. It was a YouTube video I watched and it was like people on death's door. So people, when they're about to die and every single one of them talked about how that they wish they'd done things sooner and they wish they, you know, they, they enjoyed basically the whole thing was that they wish they enjoyed the journey from the day to day of what they've done work rather than just building den exit and selling. Because realistically it's like retiring. You just go up and up and up and then you realize that everything that you've done is what you enjoy. Not getting that, that retirement fee or, or then sitting in the house doing nothing, you know, and I think that was, that was a big key point where I turned around, went like, right, I want to enjoy the day to day, you know?

Yeah, process over outcome, you know.

I think I heard it a bit cheesy, but I heard a good quote, I think it was from Jim Rohn. It was like, aim to become a millionaire not to make a million, but in order to become the person required to make a million and then give it all away. That makes sense.

It's cheesy.

It makes sense. Like, like strive for it. Not, not for the, the monetary value but the person you'd have to become and the skills you'd have to acquire to get there. Yeah, that was an interesting perspective to think about.

I do also genuinely want to build a massive brand though. It's not even about just the personal gain.

Yeah, it's good fun.

It's like way cooler to have a brand doing 100 mil a year than have one that's doing five. I feel like it's probably the same amount of stress.

No stress either way.

Depends how you build it.

I think your girl depends how you get there. Do you want to get the 100 million a year but work with blood sucking VCs that want every hour of your day?

I think if that's what, if that's what it takes to get there, then yeah.

But then you won't enjoy your day because you've got such and such barking down the fact that you're out in a Ferrari during the day.

Oh, definitely not though right now there's.

A lot of companies that have, I guess when you answer into someone, the.

Whole point of the fact that you've done this is to not answer to someone. So why Answer to someone to get to where you think you want to be but still answer to someone.

I think it has to be there. You have to be aligned with the person you take the money off. There's a lot of companies that have died because they've been a slave to then growth that's really hard to hit. I think it's different when you're not as that's usually much bigger companies where they take money at a larger scale and then have to grow to something that they can't or don't have the means to do.

Now personally we were on a call where we with a financial body looking to take money from them and I. We ended the call early cuz he was a comment I, I don't, I don't want to have to listen to any of. I, I don't want to be on another call with you. I don't want it that much. So no, go away. You know.

Yeah, depends. Depends who they are.

The only people I have to answer to is oh Polly and Seamus and that's already too much, you know.

And your wife.

Yeah.

I was going to ask about organic strategy because it's something I'm going deep into at the moment. I know you've just had some success with it on TikTok. I think it's for us somewhere where we're doing a bit of a rework at the moment and it's something that I think is undervalued right now because of. It's probably easier to grow organic profiles than it has been in a long time. What did you do there? Did you just change to. You've changed to quite an entertainment LED format haven't you? Like just basically asking people in cameras.

Yeah, we did that. I thought that the funniest one, it wasn't my idea but Mums on mushrooms. It's just middle aged women drinking rainbow dust painting in a affluent house. I know if people want to watch the next episode and it's an episode series.

Who orchestrated that?

This agency we're working with are pretty good. Like these guys in their early 20s. I was just like just do shit that gets used. I don't care what it is. It literally was the roof and now I want to get the massive mushroom and start doing stuff with that more often because I've got a massive mushroom in my bedroom in a box the six meters tall but we don't have a generator that's strong enough to fucking inflate it so I need to find one.

You blow up if you've Got big ones.

Yeah.

That could be a video.

How long does it take to.

Yeah, I've just been lazy with that. I think, like doing shit like that would just slap because no one else is doing it.

There's a really good business called Mini Katano.

Yeah, I've seen that.

He does 1.3 billion views. I think it was 1.3 billion views. I'm now questioning every number I say because of that Lululemon incident.

Just mix them up.

Yeah.

A billion views a month.

I think it was like over a billion views a month just off, like, because he couldn't run it because it's a sword. He couldn't run it on. Couldn't run ads on.

He sells swords on the Internet.

Literally a weapon. He couldn't run it. So he was like, oh, I'm just gonna make. I'm just gonna grow it via content. He grown a fat business through just like really entertaining Mini Katana content with swords.

Some of the stuff.

You seen the video of the guy chopping a bullet in arm?

Yeah.

Mad.

Some of the content he makes is nuts. So he just gets. So it built such a massive following. But then I think if you're. If you're always. If you're making. I think that's the most important thing for any brand is just making really good content on any channel. It's like, if you can't do that, you're fucked at this point. You have to be laser focused on that.

That comes down to knowing who you are as a brand though, doesn't it? First and foremost.

Yeah. And why people buy from you, which most people don't fucking know. They don't know what problem they're solving. They don't know why someone likes buying the product.

Again, goes into brand of a product. You know, a lot of brands are just products, you know, Whereas people enjoy a brand because again, it enjoys them. Boundaries. Curious. They like the brand story. But a lot of people just have products that they just tend to sell.

Yeah. I mean, I don't feel like I have a brand yet. I think I have a nice aesthetic. I have a color scheme and a product kind of. I think most people, when they say brand like on Twitter, that they just mean a visual identity. They don't mean a brand because the brand is like about emotion.

It's still a brand. Like What? There's like 10 copycats that.

Yeah.

The colorway and the gradient. The gradient and the, the. The flavors, they're still. Again, it's going back to the fact that I called it. I'M drinking space because I mean your brand.

Do you know?

It's like Hoover. You're Hoover on the floor.

It's.

It's that brand aesthetic.

It's Hoover brand.

Hoover's a brand. Yeah.

I thought, I thought it was just a word.

It's not. Look at the dictionary. It's a vacuum. I was done it for years as well. Hoover's not a real word.

It's like Google something. Same thing, right?

Yeah.

Have a space goods. Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's not a bad thing.

Yeah, true Space goods.

Playing that.

Same thing though.

Yeah, that's cool. Anything to add?

I'm just trying to. Yeah, well, we've kind of done organic like, but we've just not done it as well as I think. I think like the more we, the more we want to. We want to do like. I think it becomes a bigger channel, the bigger you get as well. I think that kind of percentage of revenue coming from organic, you want it to be growing as much as possible. As you get larger prevents you having to pay to acquire more the same customers over and over again.

I just feel like you can't rely on organic to scale a business, though.

No, you can't.

Feels like a nice like sprinkle on top because they'll always change the algorithm and make you pay. Used to get how many.

How many customers from acquisitions go on to these channels to see what the.

Brand that holds people. I think you can definitely make organics something that people come back to you for other reasons than just to see the products.

It's the same thing. It's like, how do you improve? The big thing is just keeping customers on site for as long as possible. Naturally. Not always, but naturally. That sort of is parallel. The longer they're on site, the more chance they are to buy, you know, and that counts to that organic strategy. If they're on Instagram, they like the visualization, they like the information that you're given. And then they're on TikTok. They're entertained, they're more likely to buy. They're on your page over other people's pages.

You know, it's about touch points, isn't it? You want like some people might need one touch point on your product or your brand to buy, others might need 10.

Yeah, they said it's like the average. So I've seen a TikTok on it. It's like the average five years ago was seven touch points that someone did it with your brand and now it's something like 12 or 13.

So much content these days. Yeah, some people, some people. Some of my mates went on a holiday. I didn't go on it and they were all like one of the guys on holiday, it was on holiday. He spent nine hours in a day on TikTok. Serious addiction. Serious dopamine addiction. I think when I use TikTok my general attention span decreases increase like very quickly.

Yeah. It's a big psyop from China to ruin every western brain.

I haven't used TikTok ing months. I don't go on it. Other than the ads manager.

Yeah I was the convict. 9 hours on TikTok the only place.

I view TikToks is a 4 player ads dashboard of best performers and motion. But the app itself is just like just awful. Awful for you like mentally I find.

Would you have an ideal target like of rev organic versus paid?

It's just not something I've ever done in depth organic marketing it quite. It's quite fun. I think it's quite naturally more creative. I feel like you're not as whereas like I find paid making content for paid is quite like data driven and formulaic. Making content for organic is like how do we be entertaining by default and make it fit our brand? I think it but in terms of like rev target I haven't got a clue. I think that will differ massively by brand and how they've grown previously. Whether they're more heavy like influencer versus paid, how strong the profile is. I think you just probably. I just think the bigger you get, probably the more percentage you want like it's obviously favorable for that percentage to grow.

I was going to say that like as each year that passes you want more percentage of rev coming from organic each year to passes as the brand matures.

Yeah, I'd say so because you should have a stronger word of mouth repeat etc.

I'm still. I still think you can slam a community and do really well for it. People love it.

Yeah.

I haven't got around to as touch.

Points as a kaidu increase. Touch points? Yeah. With custom with people that are closer to that funnel of terms of buying, you know, community naturally they've heard of your brand, they know what you're about, they know what you're selling. What are they, what are they there for? They want right. If they join a community they want reasons to buy. They want reasons to be entertained. They want reasons to ultimately buy more products. How to use your product better especially for years like community would be amazing for like a recipe book or something similar to that where they Want other ways to use your product.

Yeah, true because we spoke about this.

The last day with the team about like the customer journey. Like you know, if everything's on point, like you know, someone goes on buys on your site seamless. You say you're going to deliver within 24, 48 hours to get the product. Product is banging. They have a customer service query. It's addressed to it. Well they're going to shout about your product from rooftops to other people. That's organic. That's getting sales through a non paid source. So there's those things as well. We should be laser focused on and just have really, really like high ambitions and high performance or high standards across the whole customer journey. And it doesn't stop when you convert. It never stops.

Really interested to see who does. Did you see the Mark Zuckerberg Lex Freeman Metaverse interview they did? No, it's pretty jokes. They just both stood there really awkwardly having a conversation in the metaverse for three hours on an interview. But they look like exactly like each other in real life. I wonder which bra how that's gonna. Because when that apple headset comes out so it surely what brand's gonna be the first to do it. It's gonna be somewhat a brand with like a really affluent audience. I just, I just think that's gonna be really fun. Funny. There's going to be some cringe stuff that happens.

How the can we get perfume to work in the metaverse?

Yeah, send them a little smell in the nose.

But it's funny obviously communities, if you have that community base it brings you closer to your customer. It was funny. One of our competitors, their community is all about is nothing to what they want it to be. They use it as a basically an ebay. They buy each other's products they don't like off each other on. On their community. But in turn that keeps their returns rate so low for some reason that they just don't want to return it. They do offer 30 days returns but they still want to buy it to each other. They want to inverse with other fragrance heads. You know that was until they removed me because they found out who it.

Was.

A niche for everything isn't there.

But you just don't know there's a niche until you're in the space.

There's people, people have. There's a subset of people who are fascinated with something like everything. There's so many weird little like cults on Reddit and stuff that like got an obsession with this.

I'm in a sausage dog walking WhatsApp group and I've never, I've never once been to one of them. I've been in the group for two years and some of the chat in there is just absurd.

You heard that I think.

And like there's a few brands we work with, like they're in that kind of niche area and just, they just have like a discord and like you know, thousands of people and they just do a drop straight into the discord and just set out.

Yeah.

I met a guy in a GeekArt event in San Diego who ran a lot of the. He ran a lot of. He was. He runs an agency that focuses on like rappers fashion lines and he used to just run up discord groups and drop and do like 500k a day and then just do another drop the next month. Just do that over and over and over again. It would just get bigger and bigger and bigger. These hype streetwear brands in America down to a perfect science. It was nuts. It's like all these nuts. Community driven things. Don't really know how to phrase this. I wanted to discuss like roles in businesses. Obviously like you two kind of have the same role. We all have different roles in the different organizations we're involved in. It's like how has that role developed over time? Where do you, where do you see it going? Where do you like, how is your responsibilities? Because I feel like my responsibilities from an age perspective is to give context to. This has changed a lot in the last like 24 months and it changes quite rapidly every like six months after I found. So you go from like when first started, obviously doing a lot of the legwork. Then it was like building processes, operations and hiring. And then it was more like developing senior team, still hiring. And now it's kind of like very much like top from an age perspective, very top level strategy with a couple of key hires but more like setting a vision of the company to the people who work for you. And I think that's a big, very underappreciated things like how do you keep your team like bought into what you're building and going.

The journey.

The journey. The journey. That's something I'm trying to get better at is like setting that from the top down. Yeah. And I've seen that like very tangible change in what my role over the last like 18 months from that size and same in Jack really. It's like probably going to change as we grow that team out more and more.

I think for me over definitely obviously similar to you or you're almost doing everything to building that team. I think for the last six months, the last 12 months, that's what I focus on is putting the right people in the right positions, whether it be hr, operations, finance yourself, Ollie, obviously building your team. But now it's actually went down. It's almost full circle where I want to be more involved on shop floor change the things right at the bottom because are the. The things that make the most impact, whether it be things that just I simply enjoy. I love, you know, obviously owning three fragrance brands. I love fragrance. I want to be involved more in the NPD side. I want to be involved more in the customer experience because that's what I think lacks in the fragrance world. So it goes full circle. But I think at the same time you always sort of slink into the. The thing that's underperforming, whether it be innocence. So, you know, if say, I don't know, say operations is failing, I want to drop myself in there, improve things. If I enjoy it, we'll keep at it. If I don't get the best person that can do it in and do it like we're in a really good position where we've sort of attracted poached some of the best talent in that. I think in the uk, you know, whether from the HR point of view, recruitment point of view, finance point of view, strategy point of view, graphic design, that we've got one of the best graphic designers I've ever, ever, ever worked with. Copyright as well. Like we're, you know, nine out of 10 times we hire the right person for that right role and I think that's the most important thing. It's funny how you seem to go full circle.

Well, you're only as strong as your bottleneck, aren't you? Identifying that, fixing that and go on to the next one. There's always going to be a weakest link in the chain.

Always.

I think as a founder or like an MD or whatever you want to call it, it's about identifying them and, you know, fixing or optimizing that and.

Moving on to the next time. Last year I was just stock troll every three months.

Yeah.

You know, because he sold too much.

I don't have enough bottles. Turn off the ads. Where do you want to position yourself? Because I think that's what you. That's what you started to try and do this year and you just got it wrong.

Yeah, it just it up.

I think that's like a lesson in it, like.

It up. You just.

I'd probably like to just do product. Yeah, product and brand. But I just have to be like across everything for a long time. Like I'm decent at a lot of things, but I think I'm not a world class growth marketer. But I obviously understand how to fucking scale an account. I could put my hood on and get in the, get in the weeds if I needed to. But yeah, I do think I'm strongest at just like products and shit is coming up with new shit. That's what I like doing the most.

Creativity.

Yeah. But the sad reality is you can't be very creative 99% of the time because you got to deal with fucking running out of stock and you need.

A lot of money.

Loads of shit.

Just need cash, don't you?

Yeah.

Becomes easier at scale.

So yeah, it'd be nice to get to a point where I've got a nice polished concrete floor product design studio and we've got rainbow dust version 51 and it's one scoop, makes you float, but we're not quite there. But yeah, I'd probably say that. Generally I have no interest in being a CEO in this bullshit. I find it horrendously cringe when you get 16 year old dropshipping founders that have like CEO as they usernames. You literally have no employees and you're in a basement. Like founder is way cooler anyway. In my opinion, it's like the rebellious creator rather than the fucking corporate suit. Why would you want to be a CEO? It's like become this. People have it on there like car number plates.

It was pretty funny calling yourself like an MD or something and then just walking in and anything but I said yeah, most.

Most CEOs of big companies are hired into the business as well.

Yeah, exactly.

CEO got fired in the last. Fire is the right word. But I worked for a list, a company listed on a exchange with a couple of billion. The CEOs no longer there when I left.

Really?

So was it the CEO of Prayer Works from Barista Up?

Yeah, I think so. It's all over LinkedIn.

There's another one. Is it Fitness First? No, it was Itsu.

Oh no. Is it the same guy?

There was one in America, some sort of fitness brand that the same happened. The person worked from behind the counter up the business and they just fired them. Anytime Fitness.

Yeah.

Which is interesting.

I think so.

Yeah. I think like most, there's a lot of egotistical CEOs out there as well. 100 that I've come across.

I think that's where most founders become unstuck though is relinquishing control and handing the reins over to other people because they feel like no one can do better than them. When in reality if you find the right person, they probably can.

It's not that no one can do it better than them, it's that no one will. It's understanding that it's very hard to find someone that cares as much as you do about the rounds the game. Lucky enough to have.

You know, one.

Person that cares more about each brand than me, which is. It's very, very hard to complex believe.

It's a really complex thing hiring someone at that level. I think you've got to find the right culture fit and you've got to incentivize them in the right way. And then even I think even harder is onboarding them in the right way. Like it's so complex to onboard. Surely not done it but I was reading this. Someone gave away this.

This.

You can get it. It's called a guy called Matt McConaughey or something. If you search Matt Maconi, Y Combinator CEO Consulting. If you got. If you search that and go to his website he consulted like Sam Altman and about 50 other.

Oh I've seen him 50 other CEOs.

Of like billion dollar companies. And if you. There's. There's a downloadable link to a Google Doc on his website that gives away his free full coaching course and implementation strategies of how to become like the best CEO you can possibly be in a business. It's just fascinating, really interesting. It's like how to have better one to ones, how to manage people, how to fire people, how to hire people, how to build processes. So, so good. I would recommend you read it. I'm like halfway through it trying to implement as much as it can. It's got a lot of. It's like. I also think a lot of it. Certain scale becomes a reflection of your personality. So a lot of it's like. Like more like personal development stuff as well but really high level stuff. Find it really fascinating. It's a good download. It's a good read to link it. Bit of a nugget. I don't have any more questions. I'm spent.

I guess on that bombshell. We'll wrap it up. It's been a very eclectic mixed musings of different topics. Where can they find your website? E Clarity. That's the new one. We'll link it down below. Don't take too many new clients though because I need your help.

Don't worry, we're hiring more people.

I need more and more help. As always, subscribe to the pod. We'll link everyone down in the description and we'll see you next week in episode 81, when hopefully it'll be a bit more succinct and organized because I was off the ball this week due to my pending man flu. But chat to you in the next episode. Peace.