Welcome to our live show!

Uh, we were trying to get streamed live on LinkedIn. I'm hoping, uh, we've solved the issue of streaming. Uh, our expert, uh, Chris will figure it out for us in the future, our producer. But welcome to this Saturday morning. We're about 5 minutes late. I guess we were a couple minutes early. We thought we were streaming, but we're here. I want to actually welcome our guest, Matthew Stafford. e-commerce expert, and he's going to tell his story today. And we're excited to learn more about your journey, Matt.

So welcome. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.

And Adam, welcome again as the co-host. And Chris is our producer and I guess tri-host as well on Drink Up. So we're excited to get into it today. But before I move forward, I just want to call out a couple of our sponsors. Bev Assets, thank you very much. Alicia Vargo for sponsoring The podcast along with me. And then Adam, thanks for Alias Advising. And then I have to call out our friend Jay Williams. So Jay actually is the proprietor and owner and founder of Freebird Water. He actually sent us a few cases. So Adam, I'll certainly share with you, and Chris, you have to just drive up and come grab your water.

Yeah.

So I'll be enjoying this bevy today. As we get into the conversation. But with all that being said, Matt, so I know we were talking earlier and Adam, you might want to mute your line because it's kind of noisy. But tell us about your journey from concrete to e-commerce. I'm not sure how that ties together, but very interested to have you share that this morning.

Yeah, I don't think it does. It was quite a pivot. Uh, I was traveling. I was on the road about 200 days a year. We were pouring flatwork floors and parking lots for Home Depot, Nards, Lowe's, all these big box stores. And so about 200 days a year, I, I was in a hotel. And I went to a Tony Robbins event and he marketed a program that was like a monthly program where you get a DVD and a booklet, which kind of actually dates because I don't know when the last time people sold DVDs, but it was about probably 15 years ago. And it was the first time that I had actually even thought about people selling stuff online and making money that way. And so it very, very much intrigued me. And so I started playing around with that. I got into SEO, did that for about a year and didn't enjoy it. I felt like that was not the way that I wanted to pivot. And then a site came out called Teespring, which is where you could come up with a funny saying or a design, you put it on a t-shirt, and you run ads at it. And that worked really well for me. I actually had the very first shirt that I did, uh, was I was scraping people's names from Facebook IDs, and I used the name Schmidt. And so I came up with a shirt that said Schmidt Happens. And then I sold that to all the people.

Adam probably has that t-shirt, by the way, I'm sure.

And so it, it ended up, uh, it ended up doing about, I want to say, like $10 grand in net profit in about 48, 48 hours. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. And, uh, before, you know, I, I started figuring it out, that shirt ended up making me about $100 grand And I ended up doing about $15 million over the next 3 years selling t-shirts. And so I had sold my concrete business and the 2 salons that I owned and went into online business full-time.

Wait, wait a minute. So concrete salons to t-shirts to e-commerce.

Yeah.

You made $15 million in how many years?

It's about a little, just a hair over 3 years.

That's amazing. And was it just you doing the t-shirt business?

Uh, no, I had someone that would do the designs. I would come up with the ideas and then run the ads. Uh, so it was, it was actually, it was actually a really good— it was a fun time because it didn't require very much from us at all. We actually, uh, put our, our designs onto a platform. You'd sell them in a campaign. You could set the campaign length and when it would end. If you had sold more shirts, they would print them for less, so you would make more money.

Wow.

And if you didn't sell as many, you would pay more.

So, so no lie about this. I was in graphic arts in high school and the only places I got A's was in graphic arts and photography. Everybody else, I was a C student, to be perfectly fair, but graphic arts. And we actually did the screen printing and we made t-shirts.

Yeah. You know, and stuff.

Is that how you did it? You like to take these, screen print them and then put them down and make them?

Well, we didn't. They did. The platform printed and shipped them for us. So all we had to do was come up with the designs and run the ads to it. And then they would sell us. So if we would sell a shirt for $30, we'd have $10 in the shirt printing, and then we would have $10 in ads, and we'd make $10. That was the goal.

And holy cow, so the margin's incredible.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh man, that's, that's, uh, that's amazing.

It was kind of like a pre-sale, wasn't it?

Yeah, yep.

You pre-sold during the campaign, and if you sold more—

Yep, the more you sold, then the cheaper they would print them. And print them and ship them for you. So if you sold like 10, you know, it might cost you $14 a shirt and you'd cut those campaigns and go, yeah, it's not, it's not working and cut your loss. And, and the ones that were working, you'd scale them up.

Wow. So you could see really quick what's working.

That's probably your best client.

Yeah.

Well, you can see what's working out, but why, so why would you leave the successful business? 3 years, $15 million. Seems to me that's a great business. It's a great lifestyle business, obviously. I'm assuming you just reached a point where you couldn't— it wasn't scalable. Is that—

No, the, um, that, that platform made some poor decisions and it kind of, uh, they were growing and scaling and, uh, made some bad decisions and so it went away. Okay.

Oh, so you got into the fast lane, you had to pivot.

Yeah, but what I did is I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, and we built our own platform. And we allowed marketers to get on that. And so we basically, uh, continued that for another 4 years. And then we sold that platform, uh, to a company down in Texas. And then that was where I got my, I got my start in Shopify. The next year I bought a Shopify site and, and started on that.

So I'm always loving talk. We love talking to founders. I have to ask. So you sold that business and I always talk about this. You, you test it, you build it, you scale it and you sell it. Yeah, everybody promotes a 10x at 5x. Did you 10x it and 5x to sell? How'd you do with that? How was that?

No, um, in all honesty, that was the first time I ever did anything like that, and I didn't have anyone to help me. So, uh, in hindsight, there was a lot that could have been done, uh, to be much better. But at the time, you know, I was, I was still riding the high of what I had just done. And was ready for the next venture. Got it.

So you just, you didn't know that the value, because we talked to a lot of like VCs and, and people that raise funds, and this is really important because we deal with beverages, right? But every beverage we deal with, right, Adam, is they want to, they want to eventually sell it, right? So they test it, they build it, they scale it, and they sell it, right? So your story about how you built that, you know, concrete business, you sold that, right?

Boom.

Then you went into, I think the t-shirt was the next one. And you built this business in 3 years, $15 million. So, I don't know what you did the next 4, but obviously it was successful. And then you just got the itch to do something else, which we find with so many founders that they build more than just one company. They build multiple companies, right? So, what's the drive to do that? Why not stick? Why don't— the concrete I get because you're traveling 200 days a year, right?

Yeah.

But like, what keeps— I mean, what's— I guess what keeps you going? What drove you to the next, the third company?

Probably life circumstances. You know, like, there's nothing ever— or you can plan a lot of things, but then life happens and changes. So for me, I've had partners, and a lot of times I feel like partnerships have a life cycle. They work well, you create something, and then— A lot of times success changes people. And so there's opportunities to, you know, cash in on what you did well together and move on.

Oh, that's interesting. Okay, so let's get into what you're doing now. So you made the transition from—

Before we do that, I do have a question that does not matter, but I'm going to be fascinated by the answer regardless of what it is. Did you grow up as a concrete guy who just happened to open salons, or did you grow up as a salon person who happened to get into— like, that combination, we didn't, we didn't talk anything about how the hell you got to those 2 in the first place. And I have to say, this is polar opposites.

I don't see a lot of concrete guys in salons. Yeah.

So, uh, yeah, my concrete business was in Michigan. And so in the winter, it's really not that easy to pour concrete because it gets super cold.

Right.

And, uh, I was, I was actually at church and my best friend's dad came up to me and said, he goes, you know, uh, you should buy our, our tanning salon from us. And 7 days later I ended up owning it. And, uh, over the winter I, I doubled, I doubled it in the first 12 months. And then the next year we doubled it again. And I was like, oh wow, this is pretty fun. Uh, it gives me something to do in the winter when we're all laid off. And so I ended up buying or buying into a franchise and building another large one down in Grand Rapids, Michigan. So I had, I had the concrete business and the 2 salons.

So it's a training salon.

Networking is how we got from concrete to salons.

Networking. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Literally. Yeah. And, and the fact that there was a slow period that, uh, I wasn't good at sitting idle. Sure.

No, I, that's like I said, I knew I was going to be fascinated by the answer regardless of what it was, but I had to ask. Yeah.

Yeah.

And so this is what's great about Adam is he is the thinker of the team and he'll just like, there, he's a great listener as well. And he's going to like, look, okay, let's go back and let's, can you replay that for me, Matt, and how you got there? Right. So you, so now you're in this e-commerce space and this seems to be You know, we talked to our brands about e-commerce, like to build a brand. Matter of fact, I was just on the Women in the Vine and Spirits with another e-commerce pro, and he was talking about that you can actually build a brand first e-commerce before you actually go into the real world with brands. Is that true?

Like, like, you mean before you go into retail?

Yeah.

Oh yeah, like the majority of the businesses that we work with, uh, are only online. They don't have a retail presence. We're just getting into a couple of— we have a couple of really large clients. They do about $80 million B2B and they're trying to break into the online world. And so it's a brand new education for them.

Yeah.

They don't really translate well back and forth, but they do help each other. So what they do in stores ends up driving a lot of visitors to their website, most of the time they're not good at optimizing their website because they don't understand online sales because all they do is, you know, they have reps and business representatives that sell into these different conglomerates and it doesn't translate well into D2C.

Yeah, from my standpoint, we work with a lot of small brands. I'm sure Adam will chime in here as well and correct us, but, but we have these brands that, you know, come to market, you know, Freebird or, or Even or whatever, name a brand, right? And they can't get like people like Walmart to even give them the time of day because they don't have the velocity to actually, you know, be considered, right? So because there's a fight for that shelf space. So I'm assuming that you could build that velocity through your expertise to build a story to actually go to Walmart with a brand.

Yeah, that's the goal. Yep. Our goal is— so average e-commerce converts around 2%.

Okay.

And, uh, when I got into the e-commerce world, I started a kitchen supply store that had like choppers and avocado tools and stuff like that. And I was selling 200, 300 sales a day and started scaling it up. And then I started adding like upsells and things to my store. And it got worse and worse. And so I went from being very profitable to some days I'd lose money, some days I'd break even, some days I would make a little bit and it wasn't working. But I had about $250 grand worth of tool, you know, kitchen tools in my warehouse. And so I was panicking and I'm like, I got to figure this out. A guy was selling a program I think it was $1,000 for 6 calls and he would go through your Google Analytics with you and teach you how to look at your analytics. And when I did that, by the end of the 6 weeks, I had found enough stuff in there that I changed my site and I was making about 400 sales a day and back to profitability.

So there's a scale. You had to hit a threshold to be profitable or whatever. I always think about the movie Joy, you know, the lady that made the mops, and it's actually— she built it through QFC or Home Shopping Network, and she did it. So I'm assuming e-commerce is that frontier where you can do like the— like I'm thinking like on our show, like live social selling, like that's the next— like how do you tie e-commerce to something like a show like this to actually bring brands to promote them, you know, to help brand? I don't know if that's the next adventure that you could be on with e-commerce. Does that tie in, or am I missing them?

Am I missing something? Um, that probably wouldn't be my specialty. Uh, my goal is, if you think about it, if average conversion's 2%, yeah, uh, most business owners are like, oh, okay, I need to buy another 100 visitors so I can make 2 more sales. Ah, and my thought process was, and because I was good at traffic, I was like, that feels broken. I had 100 people come to my website and only 2 people purchased. If I'm going to go get another 100 more, what about the 98 people that raised their hand and then left without buying something? If I get 2 more of them, I just doubled my business on the same ad spend.

Mm-hmm.

And I thought about Dan Kennedy's quote, uh, he who can spend the most to acquire a customer wins. And so if I'm making 4 sales per 100 and my competitor's making 2 sales per 100 on average, I can spend spend more, I can buy market share and I'm going to win. And so with that philosophy over the next 6, 8 months, I actually reached out to a couple of my friends that I had sold shirts with.

Yeah.

Who had went into e-commerce while I was building that platform.

Yeah.

And said, hey, I think I can help make your business do a lot better. And the first one that I helped was a friend of mine. He owned a site called Organifi. They sold a green juice. And so he had done just short of $3 million on his site the year before I started helping him. And in the next 90 days, we had him at a $9.2 million run rate, and he ended up doing $16 million that year. So I was like, okay, this works. Lightning didn't just strike me, and it wasn't a flash in the pan. So I reached out to another friend, and they were doing print on demand. Similar to the t-shirt business. They were doing about $400 grand a month. And over the next, uh, 6 months, we had them at $2.7 million a month. And so from that point forward, I had 2 really good case studies, 2 very good clients that started paying me. And that's how the agency at Build Grow Scale was built. And now that's what we do. We serve clients that do between, you know, a quarter million to $4 or $5 million a month. And we help them optimize their site and scale their business.

You're building big clients. You can't— like, my clients can't afford you, right? There's no way they can't come in and use your services, right? You're too expensive.

We have an 8-week program that— where we'll go in and put the best practices on their site so that they can grow. Okay.

I was being facetious, by the way, but I wanted to see how we— because we have brands we'd love to connect you with, by the way. They're starting out. So it's an 8-week program to explain it.

Yeah, that's an 8-week program where we go and just, we look through their website, do an audit, and then create a priority list with them, show them in their data where and why we want to make those changes, and then upgrade it so that that program pays for itself. And then it also, for me, I really love what I do. I come to work excited every day, and I don't want to work with people that I don't like. And so that 8-week program is kind of like a date before you get married. And we get to know them. They understand the cadence of how we operate. And if we can make it long-term, that's cool. And if not, they're going to go away and understand their website a lot better.

What's your conversion on that? Because we have a 90-day program that we do with clients. It's really reachable. Like, do they stick with you? Or like, what's the fall-off?

Like, I assume, like, what percentage actually stick with you after the 8-week Um, most of them, I would say not all of them qualify for the, for the full-on partnership just because they're not doing enough volume, but they'll, they'll keep using our services and do different things. Probably 70%, 65, 70% of them.

And Matt, what is that? I might be asking for somebody I know who's in this room with me. Uh, what does that 8-week program cost?

Uh, it's $15,000. We charge them $7,500 down and then $7,500 for 4 weeks and takes them through the entire 8 weeks.

Do you get actual ad spend in that 8 weeks or anything? Any—

Yeah, we don't buy ads. We make the ads work better. So if the more eyeballs that are seeing the site, the better we can work because we have, we use data. I'm very product agnostic. I don't care. what you're selling. What I care about is what the people are doing when they get on the website and how do we get them to take the action that you want them to take. And so we have a very systematic process where we go through the site. We actually start at the cart and the checkout because if I make your homepage work better, that just drives more people to your category page or your product page. That didn't make you more money yet. So I'm going to fix your— Checkout and your cart first, and then go to your product page, then go to your category page, then go to your homepage, which feels very backwards to the owner because they want their homepage to be the best. Yeah, but if we do it that way, then every page we fix creates more money.

Interesting. So this— does it tie into the— and I'll let you go, um, Adam, just one quick question. Um, yeah, the 100 and the 2 that come, but you're gonna go back and focus on the 98, does that help you find the 98 on the one ad spend if you do that work?

100%. Yeah, we make ads work better. We make 4 or 5 convert out of 100 instead of 3.

Right.

So in the long run, I'm paying you $15,000, but the reality is I don't have to buy another ad spend because I'm going to work the ad I bought more effectively.

Yeah, your ads will be more profitable so you can actually scale them or actually even drive traffic from more sites, more different, more platforms.

Adam, you had a question?

Yeah, yeah, so, so kind of to play off of Sam's question, it's one I ask everybody. And before I get to it, and I'm prone to doing this as well, I just want to call out, reiterate some of the things you've said, right? You know, 3 years, $15 million. I can't tell you how many brand owners I talk to who are in the idea phase, let's put it that way. And I'll say like, what's your goal? And they'll say, well, my goal is to, you know, exit and sell the brand. I'll say, okay, what's the timeline you're imagining that's going to happen on? And they go, But like 5 years. Don't get me wrong, every industry is different, but the average in CPG is like 12.

Yeah.

If you're good, right? If you're really good. Now, if you're Ghost or somebody, you do it in 8, awesome. But 3 to 5 is almost unheard of. But I love the additional callout you made of like, it was my first exit and I didn't really know what I had. I think that's something else a lot of people don't consider. is they think, yeah, I'm going to grow this and then somebody's just going to offer me a shitload of money. No, you have to tell them what it's worth, right?

Yeah. Selling a business, there's a whole business in selling businesses. Totally. And the more times that you exit, you get better and better at it. You learn. I learned the lessons the hard way because I didn't get a mentor and I'm just rockheaded like that sometimes.

No, but I mean, I think it's— and Sam and I have talked about this and I've made posts about it on LinkedIn before. For as much as I love and I applaud people when I see the LinkedIn taglines that, you know, 3 times exit or, you know, founder or whatever, cool. That's only half of the story. Tell me how many times you fell on your face, right? That's what I want to hear.

That's where all the lessons are learned is in the mistakes. Yeah, we don't— I just finished my second dark retreat, which is where you spend 4 or 5 days in complete darkness and silence. I got out of that and did a temazcal, which is a Mexican sweat lodge. And so what I realized after that, because I journaled for the next 2 days once I was done with those experiences, is that all of the growth happens in the struggle. It's not in the celebration.

Totally.

And so when we're going through those things, being aware enough to question our assumptions and not let our ego get in the way is where we can advance and grow a lot more and a lot faster.

But that is so powerful.

No, I love it. That's— that could be the clip of the day right there.

That's the clip of the entire 3 years I've been doing this, by the way, Adam. I'm gonna go find a sweat lodge, and Matt, I'm coming up to find you, and we're gonna go do this together so I can journal, and I'll leave ChatGPT behind and actually journal.

Yeah, it's amazing. Uh, for me, I realized that our mind is so determined to keep us safe that at the first hint of struggle, it tries to claim that that's your, your limit. And when you go through an experience like those You realize that there is several gears beyond what you thought was possible. And the moment you see that, you can't unsee it. And for me, over the last 6 months, our business has grown over 60%. And I believe before the end of the year, it'll more than double just because of the change in the mindset from the learning that you get in the struggle.

Is that manifesting a little bit to learn how to manifest? If you believe it, you achieve it. it already happened. Is that part of it? Like, you have to push your mind beyond the limits of what's possible.

Um, that's not how it's worked for me. Um, I'm not saying that some people that wouldn't be their discovery. For me, it's just been, uh, when I say I'm gonna do something now and I don't feel like it, I still do it. Uh, so, you know, the having 100% integrity with yourself And being willing to understand that when your mind says, oh, I don't feel like it, uh, that's not an excuse to not do it.

Right.

Right.

Um, so it reminds me very much, and I'm pulling them up because I'd read the book a while ago, but it reminds me of, um, The Four Agreements, which I'm sure you're familiar with.

Yeah.

Um, great book, real short for anybody who's not familiar. Good book. Um, Um, so the question, uh, that comes to that entirely long preface— that was super insightful what you shared— is, so let's say, because again, it's a lot of who I talk to, and I know it's a lot of who Sam talks to, like, I think an 8-week course for, you know, $15,000, big picture, is a drop in the bucket when you think about the, you know, the numbers you're sharing and the value you're getting out of it, the insights and understanding how to read your data. Like, that is a perfectly Valid and valuable spend, right? That said, my question is for brands hyper small like the ones I often get into conversations with who maybe they have a website. If they do, it's probably not set up great. It's not probably; it's definitely not set up great. They probably don't even have one yet. It's in the process of being built. Like, would you recommend that that eight-week course is something that they budget for, or is there something they need to do? first to get there? And what does that look like?

Yeah, I would say we also do an audit. It's like $1,500. And so we can go through an audit and give them a 10-12 page document, and they can go through and make those changes. And that's going to help them get to a point, hopefully, where they can buy ads and make some money, and then get to that. And then there's all kinds of free resources on our site. We share, we We literally share our very best stuff on podcasts, on everything, and then we actually embed them right into our website. Because the goal is for us, we realized that, um, just because we give you our best stuff doesn't mean that you wouldn't want us to implement it for you because we're better at it than you are. You can go, wow, that's a really good idea.

Mm-hmm.

I want to do that. And then when you sit there and try to implement it, You might need help, you'll call us. If you don't need our help, you'll implement it, you'll make some wins, and your brand will do better. You'll tell other people about us. And it's just literally been our strategy. I don't buy ads for our company. We literally do podcasts and referral, word of mouth. And that has built a business, you know, that does between, you know, a couple million dollars a year.

That's what we were talking about a few weeks ago. Remember that now? Thanks for sparking when we were talking about you don't, you just go on podcasts.

Yeah, yeah, and just share our very best stuff.

Love it.

Yeah, and we talk about lead magnets because we, you know, always put lead magnets out there and just give it away for free.

Yep.

You know, every day give something that they maybe would pay us for, but I just give it away for free because you know what? They're not gonna, 90% of them aren't gonna implement it anyway. But, and if they do, they're gonna say, man, you should go talk to this person or talk to Matt, right? Sorry, Adam, you had a question?

No, no, no, you're, you're, you're buzzing the same way I am. And I love— what am I trying to say? My wife, if she was here, would tell you how much I ramble about what I'm about to say, right? Uh, but I bring that up because I, I think it and I feel it, and I've felt it for a long time being in this industry. But it's always nice to hear people like you who have had far, you know, even just looking at the numbers, right, comparison to another. Like, my bills are paid. I don't have a $15 million business, right? But like somebody who's done a bit more, to put it, you know, nicely.

Sure.

Um, to echo the same points, right? And the, the— what I'm getting at is like, I talk to a lot of consultants and I talk to a lot of friends in the industry who'll be like, oh well, we have to charge X or we can't work with these people if they're not— if they can't meet us here. here, or if they, they don't have this done. And I'm like, you know, you talk about the 2 and the 100. I'm like, if that's your perspective, you're immediately shutting the door on 80% of the world. Like, and it makes no fucking sense to me. So like, instead of doing that, like, I'm not saying devalue yourself. I'm not saying do $15,000 worth of work for $1,500. I'm saying get hyper-focused in what you offer for $1,500. And Let them take it or leave it, but at least then you're meeting people where they are. Yeah, and every—

we want them to grow up and be able to use us as a— become a client.

And that's— everybody hears me say that and they're like, really? And I'm like, again, I spend all day, all day, every week either talking to tiny brands asking how they can get bigger, or large support partners, vendors, consultants, whoever, going, how do I work with tiny brands? And when I tell them, charge them $200 for an hour-long phone call, start there, right? And they go, really? Why? Why would I do that? Like, how the hell else do you think anybody who's got an idea is going to become the next Celsius? Somebody has to take them by the hand and educate them.

Well, think about our friend, uh, in, in, uh, you know, France. We haven't charged him $1, but you took him for a week.

10 days.

2 days, right? But you gave him all this like information to help him move forward. And plus we introduced him to like other, um, folks that we know out there. And, uh, he'll be back. He'll be back to you, Adam, and stuff.

And, and he's texting me this morning.

Oh, there you go. Yeah, right.

No, he's—

we're—

yeah, we're in it. He's texting me this morning. Um, so no, Matt, I mean, the point I'm getting at is I, I really— I, I'm very much enjoying this conversation and your insights. Because it's just further solidifying a lot of stuff that I feel. But it's always nice to hear somebody who's done it a few more times go, no, that's really the way it is, right?

Yeah.

Um, so, so I'm poking around on the website while we're talking, and I guess to, to get back into it a little bit, because this is a lot of what Sam and I do here, who are you? Like, if you can, if you can paraphrase it, and I know that's probably difficult, but Who are you looking to get introduced to most, right? Like, yeah, what type of brand, what size of brand, whatever the answer is to that question.

Yeah, uh, so I will say that, uh, for the last 9 years, or for the first 9 years, we kind of pigeonholed ourselves in the physical product space. So it was physical products. Uh, in the last 24 months, we've actually started helping people who have digital carts too for information. And I, I've realized that I probably hurt the, hurt the growth of my business by not understanding that what I did would help those brands as well. And I'll just give you an example. Um, I have a friend who owns a company and they do about $60 million a year, or they did about $60 million a year. And he asked me if I could help him fix their data. And I did. It took us a couple weeks. And then I said, can I run a test for you? Because I think I can improve your percentage of conversions. They're like, sure. And so we ran a test for them. I put a question on their thank you page that said, what was the one thing that almost made you not buy? So we asked the people who had just purchased what was the thing that almost made them not buy, and we got about 600 responses in 7 days. 560 of them were the video was too long. And so when I told the owner, he's like, yeah, we can't shorten the video. Like, every time we do, it hurts conversions. Like, we've tried, uh, multiple versions. And so I thought about it for about an And I text him back, I said, how many videos do you watch on 1x speed? And he goes, none, why? And I said, why don't you give them the option to watch it at 1.25 or 1.5?

Brilliant.

We got a 10% lift. So for them, that's a $6 million win.

Holy cow.

From that test. And now they do over $100 million. They're the largest education in their, in their market. And, uh, yeah, so it, it really is being able to think differently and understand that the consumer is telling you what will work and what won't work if you, if you look at the data. And if you don't look at the data, then you'll never find it.

Well, you answered the question. The problem was the video was too long, and then they're like, well, we can't fix the video. I'm like, okay, then speed up the video.

Yeah, they totally dismissed it as, well, we can't fix that because we'll lose money. And instead they won $6 million more.

Well, that's because you went up into the hut and did the journaling.

Yeah, yeah.

So your mind was able to push through. I'm clearly seeing this now. I need to do the same thing. How about the services industry? So, you know, Adam and I and many of our friends, we offer services, right? So we, we provide a service to help help, like we help find distribution and customers. Adam does the same thing plus operations, and he'll take it from like, you know, get it in the can and the whole bit. Like, is there, is there, can we do something with e-commerce with our services?

I mean, yeah, lead gen, same, because really that's what you're doing. You're looking for leads that you can talk to and sell. So yeah, uh, really the website is your conversation with your potential client, uh, before before they get a hold of you. So making that clear and work well is always going to net a better result.

I'll take that a step further, Sam, and it's something that I've not— between trade show schedules and I had a boo-boo I made that I caught last night that I was having a panic attack about until about 1 AM. But at some point here in the next couple of weeks, I have time blocked. I have a couple of times blocked to work But, but like from my perspective, there's that— sorry, I don't know what's causing this white noise.

It's okay, it's not too bad. You're okay, keep on going.

Okay, so like on my site, and again, ops is obviously a little bit different than sales, but like I've started playing around because a buddy helped me build a very basic Square site and he works for e-commerce, that's his job. And so it's a little nicer than the average bear, but there's a section where you You can put, and I'm not gonna say any of this correctly, but basically you can put a, like a cost of goods spreadsheet that I would put together for someone, right? I've built it out and I'm still working on making it better, but I've built it out in a way where there's instructions like put this number here, put that number there. And then when you do, the formulas are there, the conditional formatting's there. And so you follow the instructions, but that's behind a paywall. So it's like, hey, if you wanna pay me to actually kind of like the $1,500, $15 grand thing, like if you want to pay me to actually do it, let's talk, and that'll be a little bit bigger number and we'll take some time. But if you've already got all the information and you just want a spreadsheet that captures it all and you need a template that somebody's made before that's done it, pay me a few hundred bucks, pay me a grand, whatever. Like, it's behind a paywall, but it's yours. Take it and do with it what you want. You can change it, so on. And I want to do that with like 4 or 5 or 6 other documents and then get into like a video series thing, just like I used to do with my Lab Learning videos where some are free, but they're shorter. Some are more long form, but they're maybe paid for. And I see Matt nodding along. I'm assuming, Matt, that's the kind of stuff when you talk about non-physical products that you could help a lot with.

Yeah, 100%. Uh, where they can, uh, make sales for digital information or videos or papers, whatever. Yep. So it's basically just e-commerce for a digital product. And what we realized that was so cool about that Is with physical products, when we make your site convert better, a lot of times that creates other problems. Now you need more distribution, you need more manufacturing, you need more customer service. Where with digital products, you can scale it up infinitely fast and you can double, triple, 100x a business in a year. And it doesn't take any more other than a couple of admin. And so we We realized that there's a lot more potential there to grow faster and a lot bigger numbers with the same service that we're doing. Yeah.

So that came from a buddy who shall remain nameless because he's asked me to for now. He's still working a day job that he doesn't want to know that he's moonlighting. But that was his whole point. How are you making money? Because he does e-commerce, he works in conversions for a larger company. And I was like, well, it's word of mouth, it's friends, it's referrals, and it's working. Like, again, bills are paid. He goes, have you ever thought about, you know, just like paid online? You know, you have a video explaining something, and if it's 2 o'clock in the morning, people want to educate themselves, they can go find it. I'm like, no. He goes, you should. Okay, like, that tracks. It makes Makes perfect sense to me, but I never thought about it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I got— so, so a couple questions getting into it. So what would you want to like— so you're here, you obviously have built your business by coming on podcasts like us, right? So thank you first of all for joining us and the information that we're sharing and your journey has been incredible. But for your business, um, what would you want to like convey to folks here today that are, you know, about your business? What do you want them to know about e-commerce? And what, you know, obviously scrub the website, you actually, you know, activate, you know, that ad spend to make it more effective so they can actually get more, I guess, you know, more people to show up. But what other things do you want to convey to folks here this morning?

Um, I think it's the greatest time. I think we're living in the greatest era ever for business and online business. I feel like e-commerce is Probably, if you liken it to a baseball game, we're probably in the 3rd inning and things are just going to continue to get better. I mean, before COVID less than 10% of sales were made online. During COVID it went all the way up to 33%. And then now it's back down to like 27%, 28%.

Wow.

So we know that the people who buy online right now are still early adopters. And it's just going to get exponentially better. It's also going to get exponentially more competitive. So I would say there's no time like now to get started.

Right.

So get, get in now. Yeah.

And you can use AI to make your team way more effective. So I have friends and companies that we work with that instead of needing 30 team members to do $3 million a month. They're doing that with 15. One company, they have about 15 employees, they're doing about $5 million a month.

Amazing. So if you're a brand or a service, you know, or a digital company, I would say, you know, get into e-commerce now. Take advantage of services like what Matt offers. What's the— when you have a— if I have a brand, let's say I have a tequila brand, Out of about $159 to $179, and we— they want to get started in Houston. Is it good to get started e-commerce versus physical? Do you do e-commerce first? Do you do physical? You do it at the same time? What's the best approach for a brand that's coming to market?

Yeah, I would do the market research and see how many people are searching for tequila online. And then figure out what they type in to do that. And then what I will say right now, there is a huge shift. In fact, over the last 24 months, Google has lost about 30% of their search volume because now people are typing the searches into the large language models rather than Google. And so a new, an entirely new industry has emerged called AEO instead of SEO. And where all of these big legacy brands have dominated the market because they've been putting out content for 30 years, a brand new upstart can literally be talked about on Reddit threads and, you know, a couple of other areas, forums that the large language models scrub for their data. And now when someone searches for that, They show up on the artificial engine operate operate ah yeah AEO instead of SEO and so literally we're working in that neighborhood already and it's really funny how they're the large language models are recommending articles that we've written that are on these threads that people have shared so now the large language models are giving us out. So yeah, a very small startup can put their money in the right place and they can compete with these huge legacy brands and win.

So wait, wait a minute. So, so my, uh, Alicia, I'm sure you're listening. Uh, John, you should grab John if he's not listening. So John does SEO, right? He's always saying, okay, you need to put an article on Tuesday and Thursday on our website, and then And then you need to have the backlinks to go do whatever he does, right? And then you also have to optimize it with the keywords, right?

Yeah.

But now you're talking about AEO, and I'm fascinated because I spend a lot of— I love, um, this. So how do you get into AEO? Can I just do it?

Yeah, SEMrush just did a really good article. They did a deep dive. It's about a 15-minute read. Um, I can send you the link to it. You can post it in the show notes, or you can just go Google SEMrush AEO. And they'll talk about the large language models and the amount of traffic that they've taken from Google and why everybody's doing that. In fact, Google realized they needed to do something really quick. And so now they're, they're actually defaulting to Gemini's large language model as answers because they realized people were leaving. The large language models just gives you a much better answer, more targeted to what you're looking for rather than 50 options that you got to go do the research on.

That's amazing you said that, because now I'll like do searches like, you know, what's the difference between this drug and this drug or whatever. I'm on some medications and the Gemini comes up and it says— so it's AI that's telling me. It's not— it doesn't— that's the first thing that comes up is the AI. It's not the searches or whatever.

Yeah, it's not the white papers on the drugs you're using, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's been— that just recently happened, by the way. This is like Really fairly, um, soon. There's a couple of people we want to take that have made some comments, Adam. Alicia made a comment and then, uh, Robert.

Yeah, no, it's funny. It was just, I get so involved in talking. I was like, oh shit, I forgot to check comments. Um, so Alicia said Organifi was built by some of the edgiest podcasters. Organifi advertised through them. Was that part of your strategy, Matt?

Uh, we didn't do any of the traffic, so that was all Drew and his team. All we did was essentially they were running a lot of traffic to a funnel, which would, you buy a can of green juice and then it would upsell you 3 more or 6 more or whatever. And anybody that didn't want to buy all of that later on, or if they bought it and then needed more, they would go to their website. You wouldn't find that funnel again through an ad. And so we cleaned up the website. the numbers that I was talking about were just the website numbers. He was doing a lot more volume through the funnels than he ever did the website. And so it was kind of like the funnels drove the business and then the website batted cleanup for him, which we've ended up doing with a lot of other brands where their funnels drive the new customer acquisition and then the— store itself actually, uh, creates the brand because it's a place that they can go back and buy again and again.

So I wanna, I wanna repeat that for the, the uninitiated among us and for anybody that's, that's listening. By funnels, you mean the ad funnels, right?

Yeah. And, and they had landing pages on, I think it was at the time it was like a site called Unbounce. So it would be like shop.organify, whatever. Whatever name they gave it, and you would see an ad, you'd go to this funnel and it would choreograph it. Those typically will convert much higher because you don't have a whole bunch of different options. You go to their website and they have probiotics and gummies and green juice and red juice and yellow juice, and, and so people get the paradox of choice and conversions are lower than a funnel.

No, it's— again, there's been a lot of good snippets from this chat, and I'm excited to go back and share them with some of the brands I work with. But again, speaking on behalf of the smaller folks, so many of them will be like, yeah, I'm going to build my website, or I'm going to do my ads. I'm like, okay, but do you have any idea what you're actually doing? Again, I'm married to a woman who spent 15 years in marketing. I know I don't know what I'm doing.

Right.

But the problem remains. So the comment from Robert before we run out of time, he said, me too. I think this is when we were talking about podcasting and kind of growing business by word of mouth. He said, me too. I just go on podcasts and tell the story. That's it. Get the brand on the shelf and let nature take its course. It happened this past week. But the business model being discussed is based on the opposite approach. Invest in engagement and pay to play. That's the poppy model. Works for hype, but longevity grows I still like the organic steps needed to prove a brand can actually exist and then pay to play. So I'm wondering how that resonates with you.

I always tell people that you don't have a brand if you can't turn off your ads and still make sales. All you have is a good idea. You're taking sales and driving them to the brand or to the store to make sales. The way that you create a brand is you make sales.

So you don't have a brand if you can't turn off your ads and still make sales. That's just, that's gold.

Because really, a brand is, what a brand is, is it's a symbol of something that you trust, that you know, like and trust them, and you'll go buy from them. Not because they gave you an ad.

Sure. Amazing. Read the sign behind Matt's head, by the way. Chris, take that one. Read that. Oh, muted, by the way, Chris.

You're muted.

You're muted. You have to unmute yourself. I muted you.

Yeah, the feedback was happening from her mic to his. Yeah.

Was it nothing changes, nothing changes?

Nothing changes if nothing changes. Ah, yeah, yeah.

Tell us a little bit about that.

I had a question.

Oh, go ahead, go ahead, Chris.

Go ahead.

Matt, you had said, um, the numbers, uh, with people shopping e-commerce, that seemed really low to me. You said something like 33%?

Yep.

That seems incredibly low to me after, um, COVID and everything. Everyone I know is shopping online, and whether it's groceries and getting other things, you know, delivered I hate going into a store anymore. Brick and mortar just drives me crazy. I'm— and that is everyone around me. That number just to me stands out.

Yeah. So you can, you can certainly Google it and you can put it in the large language models and actually even look at what, you know, Amazon is over 50% of e-commerce. It's like 52% of online sales. And When you watch the interviews with Jeff Bezos, because people are saying, oh, they have a monopoly, he's still— Amazon is less than 5% of sales. So people just have this thought process that everybody does what we do. And it's just not true. If it was true, then all of these, you know, different brick-and-mortar establishments wouldn't even exist.

It's fascinating to me. It's fascinating. Thank you.

Amazing.

All right. So we got a few minutes left. We always ask everybody that comes on the show, Matt, maybe I didn't prepare you for it, but I did ask you a few weeks ago and you've kind of answered the question I'm about to ask you. I know you're going to have a solid answer for this and there's no right or wrong answer, but we always ask every founder this question. What is the difference between success and failure?

I think that that's different for every person. Uh, some people, it depends on what you value in your life, and you're not gonna feel successful if you're looking for something outside of yourself to feel that. I think, uh, you know, I deal with a, a lot of coaching entrepreneurs to get their head out of their head, get their head in the game, and In the right place. I always tell all of them that there is no business problems, there's people problems. And what I mean by that is whatever business they're in, I can go find a competitor that's 5x bigger than they are doing just fine. So it's not a problem with the business, it's a problem with the people and the belief systems that are operating the business. And so I would just say Success means where you find the place that makes you happy, uh, not based off of what other people are doing, but what you choose is right for you.

That's amazing. Thank you so much. It's something that I'll go back and play that over and over again, plus all the snippets that you shared. So we just want to have some closing comments, so we'll just go around the, the group here. Um, we'll go with Karas. Adam, and then Matt, you can wrap up and I'll close it down from there. And I'll ask you all to stay on the line when we shut down.

I, for one, feel like I need to dip my toes into e-commerce and kind of, you know, build my next adventure from there. You've really, really given me some new goals. It's been Rewarding talking to you, Matthew. I've really learned a lot. Thank you.

Thank you.

Uh, yeah, I'll second that. It's been a really fun conversation. I appreciate the time. Um, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go back to even for myself, right? Like, I'm not, I'm not running any ads at the moment, but if I think about like, you know, if I was to stop, you know, the shameless promotion of myself to my friends and others with within earshot, you know, would, would, would business still come my way? And I think, I mean, sometimes it would a little bit, right? So maybe there's a little bit of like an actual business or a brand that I have, but, uh, it's definitely a question worth marinating on and figuring out how to, you know, have a more confident answer to it. So I think that's my biggest takeaway.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Matt, what would you like to leave everybody with? Any closing thoughts from you and about your journey, about your business? Please share.

Yeah, I would just say, uh, never give up. Uh, you know, like we were talking about earlier, the struggle is where you learn the lesson, and there's no such thing as failure if you use it as feedback. You're trying something and it's giving you feedback that it's not working, so you can iterate and then try again and iterate and try again That's how you get some traction and success leaves clues. So don't try to reinvent the wheel. Find people that are doing it and model them to an extent that you can create the success for yourself.

Man, you need to write a book, by the way, if you haven't already, in terms of the information shared here is so powerful. And then if you are coaching entrepreneurs, good for you because you've been on that journey. And just the knowledge you bring, and something that rung true with me is the fact is that your mind will limit you if you let it, right? So you can push much further than you know. So like you said, don't give up. This has been a wonderful discussion. Um, we'll make sure that Caress connects with you so we can— we actually do put this on Apple and, and, uh, YouTube, our all our social channels that you can find us. We'll actually put how they get in contact with you and your business for sure. But thank you everyone this Saturday for joining us at Drink Up. We really appreciate those that join us in the chat. Alicia and Robert, thank you for your questions this morning. Greatly, greatly appreciated. We always appreciate participation here. And Matt, Adam, and Chris, thank Thank you as well.

Thank you. Super fun.

Thank you.