Building the dream team for an eCommerce

Despite the formal roles, let's say you have the email marketing specialist, you have the social media guy, you have the whatever. There are some, some other roles which must be covered. So you. The. According to this framework, there are the, the. The Belbin team of participants are nine different roles. So you have the resource investigator which is finding ideas, right? So he hunts for ideas. He's outgoing, he's enthusiastic and he's always coming up with ideas. Then you have the team worker, the one which is gluing the team together. He's making everyone. Okay, let's go through this direction. Then you have a coordinator in roles and by the way, every person. So a person can hold up to three to four roles out of these nine. But in order to have a team which is working, you need all these nine roles. Then you have the coordinator which is the one focusing on the objectives and draws everyone. He actually delegates and allocates responsibilities. Then you have someone as a role, that is the plant. So the one that is coming up with creativity and solving problems in unconventional ways. So, so the ones which are. This particular role is also important because he's feeding the team with new ways to fix problems. Then you have the monitor evaluator which is providing the logical eye. So he's the one which has the, let's say he's the cold blooded, which is looking at where we are, where we should be and he has this dispassionate way to judge what, what's going on. Welcome to the E Commerce Growth Stories podcast. If you worry about your growth, if the business model isn't working anymore, if you're running out of ways to optimize your E Commerce or if you're looking to get the E Commerce fundamentals right, then that's the show for you. Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode of E Commerce Growth Stories. I'm here with Dennis Yu, which is connecting from India. Namaste, Dennis. Wow. Fantastic. All right, so today's topic is about how an E Commerce manager, E Commerce owner should be crafting his or her team. What kind of roles, what kind of KPIs, how should he or she decide over which are the best roles to fill in according to how big or small is the company. So Denis, before we get it started, what's your golden nugget about? Not about the exact roles, but about how to choose the right people. First.

In choosing people, I see there's a sliding scale of flexibility. So the lowest level is you can hire freelancers. And this is coming on Fiverr on Upwork on any of the sort of job sites. Then you move into having full time people but they're remote. So it could be from onlinejobs, ph it could be your own virtual assistants. I'm here in India right now, I was in Pakistan two weeks ago and we're hiring a bunch of these people, $500 a month full time that are through our training. Next level up is the team that you actually have on staff that is in your office or that is not remote, that is not a virtual assistant. And then the last level is partner with an agency which is even more expensive. Every one of these is adding another layer and what I like to look at is the skill of your team should be based on the ROI that you're able to generate more margin you're able to generate the more you're able to reinvest in the company and especially in labor, especially in advertising. So I see the shifting not just from freelance all the way up to systems and processes but having more and more of it go into advertising which is how you're able to scale.

Yeah, I think an important aspect over here is to focus a bit on the fact that depending on the purpose and on the vision that you try to achieve, you can build the traditional org chart with full time employees and job descriptions or whatever or you can stay flexible. Exactly like you've said, you can go on upwork, you can let's say give and allocate all sorts of responsibilities. Now if we look towards the main roles that you should be surrounding yourself with as an let's focus on for first let's focus on an E commerce company which is like a startup, let's say you have a direct to consumer, you're a founder and what are the first roles that you should be looking to fill in from your perspective?

Dennis I like to look at four different roles especially for DTC E commerce. Now this is outside of operations or fulfillment or customer service. But the first one we like to look at is analytics. If you don't have the proper analytics, you don't have the proper measurement, you don't have the proper data, kind of doesn't matter outside of what you have up there. And that usually is going to be the founder because the founder is the most ROI focused, is the most accountable as opposed to, you know, someone in a role where they basically spending money. So analytics I see roles as like the first stage, up to $10,000 a month in gross, up to $100,000 a month and then a million dollars a month above that, so if, if you are only $10,000 a month, then you own that initial role of that analytics. Then as you start to have enough revenue that you hire someone else part time or hire that second person. I'd like to look at advertising. Advertising goes hand in hand with analytics because you're able to see what your CAC is everything we can teach about lpg, but you're able to get more out of what's also your teacher. So advertising. We see that second role that follows analytics. Third is content. And content can be like we said, you start out with a freelancer who's doing some stuff on fiverr upwork all the way up to being a whole team around that. And the last part. Yeah, go ahead.

No, no, no. What's the, what's the fourth one? I'm just curious.

The last one is finance. And finance is the systems to be able to measure the money systems to, to operationally collect more content which then feeds back into the system so you have more analytics, so you have more content that you're able to produce. This often is an extension of operations where you have customer care, customer service. But as part of that grow, you're collecting, you're actually enabling the operational people to collect video or finding ways to do like inserts or building systems to be able to do marketing automation. Maybe you build a course, maybe you're there at events, maybe things that are deeper investments into building your brand. And a lot of people will look at it another way that I think is they initially start at the bottom of a funnel. So if you're under $100,000 then of course everything has to result in directly, you know, do super bowl ads. So that's where the analytics and the ads are. But once you move to the next layer, you can actually afford to invest in emails, afford in building customer relationships, doing webinars like mid funnel, you know, like text messaging or campaigns where you're able to collect more customer data but maybe it's not immediately monetized, still some kind of sales. And then the top level, you know, bottom of the funnel, middle of the funnel. The last part is the top of the funnel where you're able to invest in brand campaigns. And that's where you might do like a Harmon Brothers style video. You might invest in larger systems, you might have a team, you might have agencies, pr, maybe you're investing in a personal brand. Often there's a founder story. So you want to be able to tell that story in speaking or getting them verified on social media like articles about it. But that can only happen usually say a million dollars because already you already have the core engine where you have conversions. You know how to extend that by increasing the lifetime value by collecting more information from these users and being able to measure some basic journey. And then when you've done that at the very top level, more people that are helping your brand new systems, going across other channels, going into TikTok or having events or partnerships or affiliate. We see that last part as an extension of something that's all where the customer journey is already validated. Channel. The amazing thing is in the last 20 years I've seen so many e comm businesses go to one or two million dollars a year in sales off of just one channel. So there's one guy I remember, his thing is just that particular vitamin and his thing is SEO. He's so good at SEO. Like what St. John's words, is it healthy? What you know, all these things related to this particular vitamin. He scaled just off of SEO up until $1 million and then past 1 million. And I see a lot of these people, our friend Seeds of Life, you know, they're a client, they scaled primarily off of ppc but they didn't have email marketing, they didn't have social media, they didn't have advertising or other kinds of advertising besides ppc. So you know, bottom funnel, which is just getting by middle of funnel. Usually you just have $3 a year where you have just one channel. Amazing. Like you can have everything broken. But if, but if you can just get one channel to work, I've seen a lot of people make it to a million dollars, maybe even $5 million. But if you want to go beyond that, then you have to get into multiple channels.

Yeah, I think it's important to have.

More members because very rarely are you one channel. The minute you can do multiple channels, the team members do that then it's like well why would they work for you? Start their own business?

Yeah, it's pretty interesting because when I've started my own E commerce, we were focusing solely on SEO back In the days 2006, we were, let's say completely obsessed about rankings because the demand was starting to pick up on what we were selling. And once we got to master that, we expanded ourselves into PPC and social media. But those were nice to haves and I think form follows function. So I think it's also important if you, because the org chart that you're building so the people that you're getting are heavily, they must be close to your strategy. So basically you first need the vision and then you come up with the strategy and then with the execution. So, so the roles that you will surround yourself with are let's say coming after you have the strategy and another important aspect that I would be touching in how you create your. If you want to create the most fantastic e commerce company, let's say you need to understand that there are these three pillars. You need the sales and marketing, you need operations and you need the admin. Right Everything related to finance, HR and whatever. @ the beginning as a solo founder you, if you are a solo founder, that's very hard to start with. But you need to get ourself to get yourself out of the thinking that you, if you are a good developer, let's say you will end up tweaking the website and not making the demand happen. If you are coming from sourcing, let's say you know things with the products you will end up not taking care of about the website. So basically you need to talk yourself out of your own job let's say to, to do it to a bare minimum let's say and then to have to. To sort out the other pillars and if you don't have the skills, let's say to, to. To do operations you need either a partner, either someone that could handle the, the fulfillment and sourcing of the products and everything related to operations and you would be focusing on sales and marketing. Now we are of course Dennis, you and I, we are heavily biased towards sales and marketing because the other things like admin work and whatever, even though we run our own companies, it's clear that if we're here we, we are more attracted naturally towards sales and marketing, the sales and marketing pillars, but they all must work together. However at the beginning I think the most important is to, to capture the demand or to create demand. So sales and market, it's vital so you don't have to mess around with I don't know, processes and systems and too much admin work because without demand you don't have money and if you don't have money you don't have a cash flow and the oxygen to actually survive as a company. Now let's go a bit further after that. What kind of roles do we need into the growth team? Let's say we are a seven figure company. So we passed the $100,000 thousand dollars a month. What kind of rows do we need? Do we need over there? And not, not particular like job descriptions but which are the, the, the let's say the forces, you know the, the aspects that should be, should be covered except the ones that you, you, you, you covered. Like you need the analytics, you need the, because this is the, the, the basic of growth. Right. Without the correct measurement, how you verify that if you do something that's going to happen and it's going to be a good thing. Yeah.

One of my clients, they grew from 6 million six years ago. They grew from 6 million to 60 million a year. And they're very high margin related to gun stuff and the product is low cost relatively and their marketing team is 50 people full time and I'll fly out and visit them. And the way they structure is what I see a lot of especially E commerce store performance related companies doing which is building a lot of these two shape marketers. So you have people that in marketing that are traditionally like ppc, SEO, website building operations, the kind of functions that you would typically see which initially is filled by one person but later can have a whole team like whole SEO team or whole PPC team or whole content team or whole video team. But the thing is that we got stuck at 1.3 years ago where we weren't, we had these silos. And you'll find this too once you get above maybe like 10 million where you have people that are really good at this one thing. Like they create content that ranks for Google on SEO because that's how they started. But they're not able to make the transition into social media. So maybe they hire these people to hire an agency. Right. Because they're big enough now to hire agents. But then the social media agency is doing something different than the internal team and there's a separate team that does video. Usually it's the internal videographer, but maybe becomes an external one. So those don't coordinate. And I've seen this happen so many companies above $10 million where you have a multi agency, multi consultant or multiple internal roles and these teams don't connect with each other, they argue. So the team that's in charge of the website will argue with the team that does SEO or the team that does PR or the team that does these other things. So to be able to break past that you're saying seven figures and above, you have to have these people that are called T shape marketers. So a T shape marketer. So the straight line in the T vertical line is their expertise. Their main expertise is PPC. Their main expertise is WordPress or SEO or whatever it is. But then the team cuts across. So if you have let's say three people in five different functions, you have 15 people. The leader of each of those teams has to be a T shaped marketer so they can coordinate across. They know enough about what the other functions do that they can coordinate across. This especially happens once you go above 10 people, whether it's in sales, marketing or any organization. When you get above 10 people, you need to have like one person can't manage, Right? Right. So that means you need a manager layer of people that coordinate, that manage their team. So if you're the leader, you're the owner, you have to have a mid level management team of managers. Each of these managers might have three people, right? So if you have five managers, each have three people, then you have a team of 15 people, right? Or maybe it's three managers or five people, whatever. The thing is that the key, once you have a certain amount of organizational scale and a people, you have to really, really depend upon that individual manager level. When the team is just you and four or five people, you can manage everyone directly. And there's a guy, Ronald Post, who won a Nobel Prize and it's called the Theory of the Firm, actually went to the school, I went to the London School of Economics, which said how many people do you need in a company for it to be able to scale successfully? Or as you grow from the initial team, that's just you getting up to $10,000 a month, then you hire some freelancers or maybe a couple solo people to $100,000 a month and then you start to hire teams at a million dollars a month. I see the biggest issue is an organizational challenge of just learning to put management in place so that you hear people talk about working on your business instead in your business. And the way you do that if you're heavy on sales and marketing is you have to put in place these T shape. So that way, yeah, you have three people to report you that are T shape managers and then they have people that are in charge of their functions. And what I saw another client, which I'm not allowed to say exactly what their data is, but they were organ initially they were organized by the, the traditional function. I said like ppc, SEO, content. Then I said, wait, you guys have a broad enough product mix. There's so much overlap between what you're doing, but you're sending out the same message. You're not organizing around the customer. So then at my recommendation I had them reorganize the marketing people to organize by the particular consumer. So that that's shifting from people that just use one tool or Just because if you do SEO, then there's certain functions and tools that you're used to. You do social media, there's tools that you're used to, but then you don't understand, you're so used to using this one tool or you're just, you just work on the website, all the website related things, you don't really understand all the different, so there's a different message or a different. For the students, for the moms, for the man who wants to protect his family, believes in, you know, military or like there's these different Personas and really get into those Personas and be able to therefore increase the conversion rate, be able to make sure there's tighter fit between those particular products and that consumer. If you have a broad mix, you need to start to organize around those different consumer journeys instead of just by the initial silo. So above 10 million, you'll see a lot of companies will often flip and organize by consumers so they can get tighter. So they have to hear of that particular Persona. And that's when, that's when you go hundreds of people. My friend Eric Ludwig, he ran marketing, arguably one of the biggest companies ever. So instead of relying just upon channels or retailers for distribution, they were actually selling direct. And we had a huge team and we were organizing those teams around, you know, we had a government segment, we had a direct to consumer segment that was organized by the different languages, that kind of thing. But that, that's what happened. Over 100 people. Then you have, you have P L leaders and P L leaders are by customer segment. Right. When you can move from silo to customers. If you hear all these people talk about being customer focused, what is that exactly? Yeah, it means having T shaped meeting of your silos, delighted and flipped so that these folks who are in charge of a segment, the Hispanic sequence segment, the urban segment, the student segment, you know, the retired military segment, whatever it might be, then each of those segments has a P and L, meaning they have revenue, they have cost, but they embody the functions. Each of the consumer tiers, the customer tiers then has, has to have people who carry each of the particular functions. T shape marketers are the only way to make that transition from people that just do one thing really well to either a having larger teams or being able to pivot into being customer focused.

I see this as, let's say, revolutionary way to build a team. Because if you migrate from product managers to let's say segment manager, customer segments manager, you will end up learning way much more about your own business than you should. So I think this is a fantastic insight, Dennis, because as you've said, let's say you have the clusters of retired people looking for buying the products from your website because of the fact they want more flexibility or because the immunity or whatever. And then having someone which is the specialist for that particular category and having that T shaped marketer will empower the whole organization to leverage that customer segment and to find out new markets, new ways to advertise to those new angles, new email see sequences, new ads and so on. However, I think we're talking with you through this episode. It's clear that we're not in the infancy stage in E commerce, but I think we've just passed the elementary school and those are things that should become the norm in the next few years for companies that are really willing to thrive. And you can't consider yourself a customer centric company if all you are doing is tweak products and ship products from A to B. Now I wanted to share something with our audience about the Belbin team of participants. It's a methodology that I do appreciate. I stumbled upon it and it made so much sense. Sense because in each team, despite the formal roles, let's say you have the email marketing specialist, you have the social media guy, you have the whatever. There are some other roles which must be covered. So according to this framework, there are the Belbin team of participants are nine different roles. So you have the resource investigator which is finding ideas, right. So he hunts for ideas, he's outgoing, he's enthusiast and he's always coming up with ideas. Then you have the team worker, the one which is gluing the team together. You know, he's making everyone. Okay, let's go through this direction. Then you have a coordinator in roles and by the way, every person. So a person can hold up to three to four roles out of these nine. But you need, in order to have a team which is working, you need all these nine roles. Then you have the coordinator which is the one focusing on the objectives and draws everyone and he actually delegates and allocates responsibilities. Then you have someone as a role that is is the plant. So the one that is coming up with creativity and solving problems in unconventional ways. So the ones which are, this particular role is also important because he's feeding the team with new ways to fix problems. Then you have the monitor evaluator which is providing the logical eye. So he's the one which has the, let's say he's the cold blooded which is looking at where we are, where we should be. And he has this dispassionate way to judge what's going on. Then we have a specialist which is coming up with in depth knowledge to the key area that the team is handling. Then you have the shaper, the one which is providing the drive. So the one which keeps the team moving and he's building momentum, he's making sure that the team is not losing focus or momentum. And the last roles are the implementer, so the one which is carrying out the, the strategy, right. So he's making sure that to turn ideas into actions. And last but not the least is the completer finisher. So he's coming up at the end and he's making sure to polish the tasks so that the quality is there and the job is done. Myself, for instance, I'm not that person, you know, I'm not covering the completer finisher. I'm not the monitor evaluator, I'm not the coordinator, you know, So I can't hold these nine roles. And you have to understand that nobody can hold all of them to be perfectly fit for all of them. And according to this, let's say point of view to Belbin's team of participants, you have to cover all of them in order to be productive. And one way to do it is to validate to look on your own team, on your own company as well, because this is applying to any business unit, but to the whole company as well. Look who's the team worker, who's the coordinator. And if you are missing out the participant, you need to cover that. So despite the roles in their, because otherwise the creative ones feel better with the other creative ones. But if you want to destroy a team, make sure that they have only creative people and nobody is actually finishing the job, focusing on the tasks and so on. So one way to judge if you have the right team is with this pair of lenses, with Belbin's methodology.

Fantastic. Well, I find that most people when they're starting out, they, like you said, they're really passionate about one thing. Like one friend of mine sells wedding products and he's so into the experience and the content and the artistry around that, that when it comes to the administration, when it comes to, to finance, when it comes to operations, those are all separate things. So he grew his business to that initial million dollar stage by hiring several other people that were just like him. But it wasn't until hire an integrator and then hire an engineer, those other things that were outside of his Area he was able to delegate out. That's absolutely the case. And I had dinner a few nights ago with the CG CEO of Rocket. You know, Rocket's the German company that basically copies everyone else's. Yeah, right. Huge multi billion dollars. And I thought, wow, this is crazy. Here's the guy who has to do the engineering across every one of those companies that they own. And the guy is an amazing integrator. He's an amazing engineer. Right. But he's not going to be. I was about to say he's not intelligent, but he's. He's not like the creative person. Right. You can't be an artist and also be a really good, you know, accountant. I mean, that's the kind of person.

Accountant.

Yeah, yeah. Or someone who's a really good engineer but has like the certain product taste and the creative and the soft skills. I know I'm stereotyping, but it absolutely is the case. It's like left brain, right brain. You know, as Valentin was saying, where you have these nine different roles and each of us are going to lean towards one area or the other. So it's interesting. You have to hire the exact opposite of what you are so that way you can cover everything in the organization.

Yeah. And if you think of it, Denis, it's so amazing that you are, let's say, so stubborn to believe that. At the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I thought that, yeah, I can, I can do it all. And then I hired people and then I always compare them with me and I was so. Because I was young and stupid, of course I always compare them with me and I haven't empowered them to finish their job. I haven't documented what should be repeated. Because a business is a repeatable system. Right. You need to systemize things and you need to find out the right people to repeat the things that are working. So unless you have a minimum, repeatable, repeatable system, you don't have a business. So and, and another aspect here is that you have to know your strengths as an entrepreneur, as an e commerce manager, whatever you are, you have to know your strengths. Because if you don't know your strengths, you will end up being unhappy, unproductive and living a miserable life going towards your vision. And I think also about this vision thing, we, we are all being fooled into this mechanisms of, I don't know, 20 years plan, 10 years vision, whatever. First of all, you need to, you need to make sure that you have a business which is working right. You need to make money so that you can Survive and you need to feed your family because otherwise you'll be the delusional entrepreneur chasing for big dreams but without having the ground, the fundamental ground so that you can build on those aspects. And once you have that, of course it's all about having a fantastic vision. But as you see, we are leaning as, as a species, you know, as in the economy. Vision is everything and no, no, it's execution without execution. Screw vision. And, but I think of course you need both of them and in order to, to build the org chart that you need, you, you, you have to look at where you are at this moment and you need to look at yourself because if you're a manager out there and you are still struggling to make it happen, most probably you have a people problem or a process problem, right? So it should be one of those. So you either don't have the system in place, you either don't have the right people on the right seats in place. And the fantastic framework on realizing what kind of seats do you need to be covered and what kind of people you need to fill in is traction from Gino Wickman. I think it's a fantastic book and I can't recommend it enough to companies willing to have a systematic approach to growth. However, how you find the right people. Now Dennis, let's say we decided those are the seats, right? Let's say we are a 7, 8 figure E commerce company. We figured out the participants role. We know in theory what's the model. Let's say we envisioned the model, we trained ourselves, we know in theory how we attract the right talent and how we are making sure that we've hired the right people on the right seat.

That is the million dollar question. I have sat down with so many entrepreneurs where the biggest pain they deal with this. How do I find the right people? Because if you're hiring someone to do SEO, for example and you don't know how to do SEO, how are you going to really tell if they're any good? Maybe they are good or you have a bad process or you have bad measurements and you can't integrate. So we call this people, process and platform. Even if you have great people individually, it's not a process to tie together the workflows and teams and it doesn't matter. And then platform is automation. Maybe they're tools or systems that be able to put the people together. So one thing that we like to look at is people are scaling their teams, is never hire a person because that can hold you hostage. Then you're dependent upon one person's skill. Stuck in tribal knowledge. Only hire people when you have a process. We're training behind it. So that job role. So we like to hire people into roles because a role is an ongoing function. A role has accountability. A role is well defined. A role is something where you can, you already know how to hold them accountable, an existing model. So if someone's, if you're hiring people for a role which is not just a job description, behind that has to be training some kind of qualification, some, some way that you can determine whether they're actually competent in that particular area. So the, the chicken and the egg is that you have entrepreneurs that are scaling quickly and they need to, they. So they just hire an agency because they don't really know, right? Oh, I don't really know how to build websites. I'm going to hire an agency. I really need to, you know, do this one part of this, build a particular system. I'm just going to hire an agent, agency or contractor. The thing is, when you hire, even if you hire an agency or contractor that's really skilled, you're hiring someone for a project, right? A project has a start again, which is good. It's okay to hire. Like you could hire us to come in and set up your analytics and we'll have a defined project which, you know, here's a set of deliverables and here's a certain end date. But most entrepreneurs, they just, they. And most agencies don't know any better. So it just becomes a retainer. So you're paying, you're paying money to people on the outside which are going to cost more, always cost more to hire externally. But then they're in, they're into a function. So you always want to keep internal things as a function, hire externally or have a consultant, have that be a project. We like to say that projects cost too much because they're delayed because it's doing something that, you know, building something that there before. So it's cost and processes make you money, right? Projects make you money and process. I'm sorry, projects cost you money, processes make you money. So always.

Yeah.

And you could have projects initially just to get stuff going, right. A lot of companies hire us to get their advertising going or get the video production production going. But I strongly, strongly believe even if you're under a million dollars, you need to build every. You need to pull everything in house. You get some help initially, you need to pull everything in house. That means when you hire employees, it could be virtual assistants, it could be full Time staff that you have, they need to fit into existing job roles that have training behind them. Where if, when you bring in, let's say, let's say you have two people, someone does Google Ads and another one does social media ads, for example, then they can replace each other because if anyone is gone, you're not, your business isn't dependent upon that one person. So if you have one person who's in charge of, you know, operations and you lose that person, which is usually what happens when you're under a million dollars a year, that could kill your business because you're so dependent upon this one person. I would look at every single role you have in the company, every single person you have in the company, and if anyone, one of them, if you were to remove that, it would crush your business, then you don't have enough process and you don't have enough organizational strength so that it can continue. We look at everyone in our company and everyone and everyone else's companies, we look at them and we say, okay, I know you have some star performers or you have some people really good, and while they like to do their one thing, maybe they're a lone ranger. Make sure that you build processes so that you have a least two people in any particular, you can do any particular role. So if one person goes on vacation or you have a scale issue where there's more work than that one person can handle, you always have someone else who can do that. I think that's the biggest challenge I see for entrepreneurs that are above step and figures, not completely dependent upon them and they're trying to scale, is they, whatever got them to the point of where they are is not going to get them further because it's too dependent upon them and they're already maxed out trying to do 50 other things at the same time. But the entrepreneurs that can scale up, maybe they implement the traction system, maybe it's eos, maybe it's one of, maybe it's based on one of the personality things like Myers Briggs or Enneagram or whatnot. Every single person that's gone above a million has implemented some type of system so that they is the owner, founder, cheerleader, visionary, isn't. It's not. The business is not dependent upon them to be there. And the measure this is if you were to leave your business for one month, would it fall apart? Right? Let's say you had to do, your parents were sick or you need to go on this vacation in remote, you know, Antarctica for a month, would your business.

I, I Personally see this happening on, on so many entrepreneurs, you know, that they don't have this redundancy and besides that there are, there is this enthusiasm that they have, you know, at least at the beginning, in the first two, three years, they are also enthusiastic about it. I can handle that. I will cover that. That, I will cover that. And in this case I will cover that. So basically it's an interesting approach to think ahead because at one end you have this energy, let's make things happen. And on the other hand you are not too cautious about, but you need both courage and caution as well. You need both of those things. And that's why I love this yin yang approach on things. It's not or that or that. It's both of them and integrated and let's say in synergy so that you'll be able to make it through no matter what happens. And nowadays we are seeing this recession coming, we are seeing a lot of people being laid off, we are seeing the demand dropping, we are seeing these new consumption trends. And in E commerce, what I think it's crucially important right now to have, it's to come out with an immediate strategy, but also with the midterm strategy because otherwise you will end up restructuring, cutting up the cost and let's say getting behind of the game. And I personally see that this is a huge opportunity as many companies will cut the costs, will get rid of talented people that they should be keeping. That's going to be a good, let's say opportunity to get talented people in your organization, in your teams. So basically it's all, all a matter of the opportunity that, that's out there. And if you don't do this type of rethinking because the, the, the thinking hat is very important right now. You know, we have this and I'm from Europe, in America we see this, let's act, let's go there, let's do things. And then they think oh yeah, that that wasn't working. But the, the beauty of this, of this approach is that you learn faster because you hit the wall faster. In the other extreme here in Europe, I see this. Let's think, let's think, let's think ahead. And many times you, you, you think so much that you waste the opportunity. And it's, it's so funny if you look at these two, two models because it's the middle way, the Buddhist way, you know, the, maybe it's the, the balance between those two which is working. And basically in this economic environment, I think you have to Think ahead. And to have this, let's say adaptive models, right, you need more models, you need what? If this, then that, if this, then that. And to look at your cash flow, to look at your bank account, to look at the oxygen levels, you know, but also seek for opportunity because the opportunity is there. And we are seeing a lot of. We will see more and more companies being, getting bankrupt and being left behind. And that means that the demand that they were covering can be yours to take if you move.

Well, yeah, the storm is coming. In the last 10 years, it's been very easy to make a lot of money in E commerce because the traffic has been cheap. We've had a lot of data. There's a lot of these different tools. There's not as much competition in particular niches, but we know that things are not always easy. Every few years there's going to be a shift where the economy takes time. And I think it's going to happen in the next year. I think that there's going to be either a war or a major depression or some kind of economic shock. We don't know what's going to cause it otherwise, you know, Wall street and everyone else will know. But I think for sure, and I talk to my friends who are many, many, many levels of success beyond me, and they think something bad is going to happen in the next year. And that means that because when it's easy and the sun is out and anyone who can open, open their mouth making money and anyone who can breathe is making money, you can't assume that's going to continue. So what that means is implement lifetime value so that you know exactly where your revenue is coming from, you know exactly how you can scale up and scale down. So for example, if all of a sudden you had a rich uncle who said, hey, I can give, I can double your budget, I can give you twice as much money. You know exactly where to put that money and you have an estimate of exactly how your business would perform. You don't have that, then you don't have enough systems and processes and analytics. What we were talking about before, where you're the solo entrepreneur initially selling your stuff, then he started to hire up a team that you're able to manage directly up until you have managers with other people. Once you get above 15 or so people, when you can't watch every single person, keep them accountable, or every single consultant or everyone there, you end up having the cynicism of that person isn't working hard enough. I don't know if that person is really competent, you start to doubt. I wonder if that person is really creating value or if they're just charging me a lot of money. Maybe they're lazy. Maybe, you know, they say they're working hard, but how do I really know? And I can't watch everybody. The eye of Zoron is, you know, is only watching one thing at a time. You know, the Lord of the Rings Eye of Zoron is like watching, right. When people know the eye of Zorons on them. Right. But when the eyes not watching, when the cat's not watching. So to get past that, you have to build these P and L managers. So if you're the owner and the buck stops with you and you're looking at revenue and and cost, to look at what the overall profit or the margin is that you're generating in E comm, that's very easy to tell. Have the data to determine that. Do you have other people who have P L accountability? And remember we're talking about before about moving from a cost basis, silo basis where you have people are functionally driven, SEO and PPC and content and operations, customer care and whatever. Those are just cost, cost, cost, cost, cost. Right. But if you want to shift to a customer centric model or product model where you have like this is our product for people who are fitness moms, very busy. This is our product for students, this is our product for people that are athletes. These are product where you really focus on these customers, then that forces. If you've implemented a customer centric company and you have these different customer segments, then the leader of those segments has to have P and L accountability. That means everything has to be organized around the revenue and the cost to support the that one particular customer which shared. There's shared costs for it. There's some shared cost like finance or whatever, but you can still look at the direct profitability. And I think that before the storm happens, all of us, whether we're less than seven figures or above seven figures, needs to create intrapreneurs. Have you heard this, Valentin? My favorite.

Yeah, yeah.

When you create these entrepreneurs, then these are people inside your company. But they're basically like. It's like, it's like moving from like you owning a store to you owning a mall, right? I would much rather own the mall because then I'm more like a landlord and I'm supervising across multiple stores that are in my mall. Instead of me being the store owner and me being the store clerk, you're talking to each customer comes into my particular store or manufacturing the product. I like to view us as, when you move up, that you own the mall, even though it's one company, you own the mall and you have people that are in charge of each of these particular areas. But then each of these particular areas you need to make sure that you have competency because then that person who owns that store in the mall has to know about all the different siloed functions, the cost centers, in order to be able to look at the revenue and look at it like basically manage that as like getting people who can manage your store or manage that customer segment is so hard because it means you have to step away from the P L. That means you have to be willing to delegate to people that you trust who are actually competent enough to not just have that micro, that business within your business, be able to tank, be able to think strategically. Right. So that the strategic version isn't important on you. But I think that when the economy takes a, which a lot of us in the next year, you better get those managers and leaders in place. And I don't mean a manager isn't like a project manager or a manager is someone who's like the boss trying to discipline people and watch. I mean a manager as someone who is looking out for the company as like an owner who can look at the psl. Yeah, that's your. It's like Warren Buffett's model. Right. I mean you don't have to have multi billion dollar companies. You can do this. Like basically once you get to about a million dollars a year, start to implement this kind of model, you have a couple people or maybe even three people and each of them has their P L. And so you're basically supervising among these business leaders, but you're not having to be as involved in every single refund and every single customer, just every. Or the design on the box or what's in the insert or what's in the email copy or like you don't have to do that because those business leaders know and they're in tune with that customer service so much, that customer segment so much that you can't try to be the expert in every single customer segment. They're able to handle it for you. Unless you're able to own the business more like a shareholder, like a major shareholder than being like a worker in the fact.

Yeah, I, I think we could, we can spend way more time on this, on these topics, Dennis, but we need to, to. To wrap it up. I will, I will just add this one more thing. It was like, I don't know if you know this old series, Colombo. It was that, that private investigator and he, he always catched the. The bad guys. When he was about to leave, he said one more thing. So I'll, I'll add one more thing which is. Which is about carving out time to think without doing, you know, working on the business, not in the business. Because during this next chapters of our economic life, we will see some things changing. And I think modeling and planning ahead and doing if this, then that, if this, then that scenarios, and then having the decisiveness to go into those scenarios is the way to do it right now in E Commerce. So, that being said, Dennis, enjoy India and Taj Mahal. I'm not going to say that I envy you. I'm just going to say that I appreciate that you're there and hopefully I'll get there sometime in the future.

And I'll see you in Bucharest soon.

Hopefully, yes. All right, then. Thanks, everyone, for being with us today. We'll see each other in two weeks from now. And that's a wrap. Bye.

Bye. Bye, guys.