From Search4Hurt to Search4scale. The Adam McDonald Story.

Foreign welcome to E Commerce Growth Stories. This is your hostess with the mostest, Juliana Jackson, aka the CLV lady. And also I am the Chief Evangelist for OmniConvert.

And this is Derek, Chief e Commerce Technologist at EcoMmerceTech IO. And we're here again for a new episode of E Commerce Growth Stories.

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I have coffee. I have coffee. It's so good.

I love that cup.

Show us the cup again. Why did he say on it? Because I didn't see coffee.

Coffee love.

Oh yeah, I miss, I miss being able to drink coffee because I cannot do it right now. So if you're joining us from video or audio, Adam here is an ecompreneur, that's how he's calling himself and he's currently the founder of Pet Colors which is an Australian brand that sells pet colors. But he's also created the event brands like Ms. Mari I think was the name Sly Palooza, Rumble Run and He also ran 40 plus large scale events across all Australia. And also the fact that drives me most nuts is that Adam had a show called Search for Hurt that he sold the rights to Disney and Disney used it for their global sports network espn and then he came into E Commerce. The scope of this episode today is to learn more about Adam's story and why does Marmite suck so bad? That's it. So Adam, tell us how did you get into E Commerce?

Kind of by default. My super awesome mother in law. She's listening. She had, she actually started personalized pet collars which is the business that we have In Ecom at the moment she wanted to retire and had the business up for sale but for whatever reason couldn't find someone to buy the business. At the time I had a big had the events company which had Ms. Muddy and Slider Palooza and Rumble Run and we used to send out a lot of merch and we had a factory set up. We had space that we could take on Pet Collars and I'd always joked around with Julie mum in law that she should be doing a lot more online and a lot more digital marketing but they were very markets like selling at markets and selling at shopping center pop up stalls and stuff like that. So anyway, just so she could retire I kind of did a bit of a solid and bought it and bought it into what we were doing with the event company and something for my wife to do as well because the kids had started going to school and yeah, so we, we had grand plans for it but not long after we bought it I got sick, I got diabetes and then ended up with cancer. So we didn't really do anything with Pet Collars for maybe the first two or three years that we had it. And then once I got better I didn't want to sit behind a desk anymore because I've been sitting behind a desk for 10 years and teamed up with a mate of mine to do some building. So Pet Collars just stayed a very much a lifestyle business for my wife and her friend Dale. And they, you know, drop the kids off at school, go and do a workout at the gym and then rock in at 10 o' clock and then leave at 2:30 to go and pick the kids up. So there was never any marketing done to it, there was never really anything. So I'd sort of cruised around, was maybe only doing 15-20k a month but it was good, it was what they wanted for it. And then after a couple of years of building we had sort of scaled to as big as we could get as a building company which kind of rendered me a little bit useless in the, in the partnership and it was just a good time to change, to make a change. So I jumped into Pet Collars at April last year, April 2020. And yeah, and just sort of jumped in deep dived into E Commerce which was good timing. Around Covid we had COVID lockdowns pretty much straight away and then the knock on effect with that was, you know, we were doing a lot of marketing so the business was picking up. Plus people were starting to adopt shopping online more with COVID like Everyone's seen across the board with E commerce and over here, people the, the uptake of dogs in families like breeders were just couldn't keep up with the demand. Adoption agencies were getting rid of all their rescue dogs. People just were stuck at home and it was a good time to get a pet. So all it was the perfect storm. You know, we started marketing. I teared through the website and and rebuilt it around optimize like a bit doing UX and optimization and there was more people with dogs and there was more people shopping online. So it was the perfect storm to grow it probably about anywhere between 4 and 6x in 2020. So it's been awesome.

Okay. You just glossed over something here that I want to go back to. You just kind of optimized it. So this site, I think you said the site converts it like 8% right now. Is that.

Yeah. And that's. We bounce. We bounce between probably 7 and a half and 10% in Q4. So I find that we. When we're advertising to a cold audience. So if we're doing a very broad advertising campaign, the. Our rate will go down towards more like the 7.7.5. But in Q4, see, I only advertise when the CPMs make it nice to do so. So Q4 we were just not in. We were just not advertising to co. We're just retargeting and that was it. And our conversion rate went up to closer to 10% because everybody that was coming in were kind of warmed up. I've got a bit of a theory as to why we do so well. And it is a combination. Like I spend a lot of time testing books, button colors and call to action. You know what we have as our call to action and even our. We have a marketing message on our landing page. You know, I adjust that all the time and test it. And we use Google Optimize as a bit of a tool for testing stuff. And for me it's just, it's user experience. So I, you know, every quarter I've got an alarm set in my calendar. I go on and purchase our products. So I go through the whole experience of jumping on our website, working out how easy it is to find a particular item. I order it, I get into the email flows and every time that I do it, I'm forever thinking of a better way to do it. So that's something that I kind of implement into my plan to just deliver a website that is a good experience and gives people the information that they need. There is one change One thing I've noticed we use heat maps quite a bit and one thing that we notice, well, that's a kind of a bounce point for our website is people not knowing the size collar that they need. So we've got a collar designer so people will see what color collar they want and they'll put their name in and their number and get to see exactly what it looks like. But when they get to the point where they've got to select their size, they go, oh, I don't know what size Charlie's neck is. And so we're working on a kind of like a guide which is either gonna, it should get my conversion rates up closer to 15% and.

Oh my God.

Yeah. And if. But what I think the side effect will be is that because we'll be making suggestions off dog breeds and the weight of the dog versus now we say you measure their neck because that's the best way to get the perfect fitting collar. If we start making suggestions about, you know, just because all breeds are different, there's, you know, it's, there's going to be a lot of variables. So I expect that our returns are going to go up a bit. But I'm just sitting there doing the sums to see if the, you know, having it where they don't have to disappear from the site to measure their dog's neck and then life happens and.

You know, and then just drop off moment.

Yeah. And it's up to our flows and our retargeting to try to remind them to come back in. But if they don't, that's obviously affecting our conversion rate and our bounce rates and stuff like that. So we are working with our web developers on coming up with a cool tool, which is when it comes. We've been looking at customer service bots but basically just to answer the question of do you want us to give you some idea on your sizing based on your breed and the weight of your dog?

Yeah, I love it. That's amazing. There's a lot to talk about here. I mean the idea of converting at like 8, 8%, 10% or even upwards of 15%, it's absolutely insane and incredible. And I think everybody should be certain points of scale using a tool like Google Optimize to split test. Why do you think you're running split tests and testing your site? A lot of merchants aren't doing this. Why do you think you adopted split testing for this business? This was like direction you decided to go personally. Right. You have complete freedom over this. Why do you think you adopted split testing? What is it that got you into doing this and what was it like maybe in the very beginning, did you think it was going to be a big deal? Did you just know from the past that like split testing was what you needed to do? What like walk me through that.

I, I, the thing I love about E commerce is the data. So I had a very busy last decade with setting up and scaling some pretty big businesses, but they were all, you couldn't test anything. And that for me the thing about E commerce that is just mind blowing is that I can adjust some marketing over here and be watching my Google Analytics over here and see instant results of traffic to my site. And like there's not, there's, there's no other industry that I've ever been involved with that's so specifically data driven. So for me I just, I'm obsessed with the fact that, or even Google analyze, like I can test having a red color call to action button against a teal color. Like where else do you get to do that in any other business? So I, it's, it's just, it's a tool that it's at our disposal. It's free. It's amazing. Like, I can't understand that any e comm owners wouldn't be doing it because you know, if you, you know, the difference for me might have been like when I started working on the website, our conversion rate was usually around 2% and it's the only reason that we've got, it's not that I'm any kind of genius, it's just that I'm testing different options and the data is telling me which one works better. And so we, we adopt that. We mess around with marketing messages all the time and between that and we have a lot of people, we produce a really quality product which most ecompreneurs would probably think is a bad thing because our customer lifetime value is poor compared to probably everybody else out there.

Because they don't need to reorder.

And we get messages of people that have had their collars the whole life of their pet. So 13, 14 years.

Tell me more about that, Adam. So you, you have this thing that you call lifetime value fans. So that's how you know, I got to click with you because you said the right words. And I'm also secretly tagging and looking at everyone that says lifetime value on LinkedIn. But you, you're calling your customers your lifetime value fans. And I know you have a super high quality product that you know, lasts for 10 years and I, I know because we both looked at your data. Even if so you still have a great retention rate given the fact that you have products that don't have such a high frequency but you still have a better retention rate than people that sell consumables. So how is that possible? And tell me, how are you actively working on developing relationships with your customers and maintaining their interest in you even if your product doesn't have a frequency?

Well, it's pretty easy. I kind of put it down to nobody in life likes the friend that only rings when they want something. Like I've got some mates that love them to death. Known them since I was at school but when my phone rings and it's them on the id, I know that they're going to want something because the only time they ever call me is when they want something and no one likes that. So it's sort of a commonsensical approach to to commerce let alone e commerce where we communicate with our we build a good community. I've always between search for herd and between our events business I've always had a knack of building and nurturing a community and that's what we do with pet collars. We produce a magazine called Hooman magazine which I just produced it as a value add to our our customer base. It's just a short form. It's designed for mobile phones so it's beautiful to read on mobile phones and it is just full of short form articles of tips and tricks about being a pet owner and that was something that we designed just as a community gift more so but it's turned out to be one of our best lead generators that we could have because we offer a free subscription to all pet owners for it and then obviously once they subscribe they become part of our email flow and part of our community. But when I'm contacting my I'll only ever email our database if we've got something to add value to their life. So it's either when we've got a new issue of the magazine dropped if we've had a couple of good blogs because I think a lot of people get stuck in the kind of the social media trap. Everybody assumes that everybody's on social media. We have quite an older demographic and a lot of them aren't on social media. So if we've had a couple of blog posts that have really blown up and in particular we had one I wrote an article about things you can do in Byron Bay which is a really popular travel spot here And Shopify sent me a notification saying, oh, your blog is getting the highest views of all the blogs in Shopify. And it was cool news. So we, you know, it made me think that there's a lot of people that aren't on. We only promoted it through social media. So we dropped an email and just said, hey, for all you guys on social media, I apologize. I, you know, we kind of got caught in the trap that we thought everybody was on socials. If you haven't been here, some cool things that have happened in the past six months and the response we had back from that, like so many people replied to that email just saying, oh, thanks so much for thinking of us. Yeah, I'm not on any social media so I know that I miss out a bit. But you know, they're just, they haven't adopted social media because they are a bit of an older demographic. And so, yeah, most of the times. And the other time is if we're having a sale, which for me is a, it's a customer service letting them know that we've got a promotion on and that if they're getting, you know, they don't really need a new collar. But if they're getting sick of looking at the same color, now would be a good time to buy because we've got a 25% off cyber black Friday, Cyber Monday sale or something like that. So we, I very rarely do campaigns through our emails. Like we've got Omnisend set up, but it's purely for flows.

Do you think brands are overdoing it with sales emails and transactional emails? Because I, I feel like some brands are really overdoing the phone call from the friend that always has something to ask you.

I think most are. I, I think everything I'm signed up for is like, it's relentless. It's relentless. And a lot of. I'm signed up to a lot of newsletters because when I went deep diving into E commerce, that's how I was learning. You know, it's the email marketers, it's Derek's tech, like everything. I just, I jumped onto pretty much every newsletter that I could. And for instance, like, I like Derek's stuff because Derek's is, it's very much informational about a new product or tech piece that's out. It's not always buy my program, buy my this.

I don't even have anything to sell.

Yeah, well, man. And that's, that's why I'm your biggest fan.

Makes it easy. But I mean, thank you so Much. I, I really appreciate that. You know, I'm, I'm trying to help people just kind of like discover tools and stay on top of them, you know, but, and, and it sounds like that we were talking before we started, you don't have a lot of tools that you use yourself. You're achieving a high conversion rate without like any bells, whistles, tools. So I mean, in my mind I'm thinking you've broken the Internet. You're just absolutely, you must be a beast. The conversion rate optimization beast. On the flip side, part of me is thinking, I wonder what would happen if we installed one of these conversion rate optimization tools. How much further can we go? So, so there could be something left on the table. But what I love the most is that I know that if there, if you found an opportunity, you would test it and prove the roi. And I think that's everyone's biggest takeaway for today, is to do that now really quick. What would you recommend to people that are thinking about testing, starting to run tests? When should they start? From a website traffic? I literally right before this I had a call with a merchant and they had about 15,000 visitors a month. And I was like, okay, that's right about the point where I think testing becomes valuable. But maybe you have a different way to look at it than I do.

No, I'm pretty similar. I, I have a lot of conversation, I'm in a lot of groups and because I've got the conversion rate that we've got, I get asked to do a lot of website teardowns, which are we, I love doing it, but everyone suffers from the same, you know, they, they're not testing. Like a lot of them won't have a message. You know, for me it's not, people don't buy the cheapest or the best product, they buy the one they understand the quickest. And if you go by the stats, you've only really got maybe seven seconds on your landing page to do that. And so for me, I jump on a website just to help them out. First thing I get is a pop up that blocks the marketing message. If there is a marketing message, most of them don't or they'll have a slider of all these images that doesn't tell me anything. It's just, it's busy. There's a spinning wheel, pop, slide out coming from the side. And I'm like, and I kind of just say to them, if you walked into a bricks and mortar store and the sales assistant ran into you, like ran up to you as soon as you walked in going, give me your email address. I'll give you 15% off. It's not a nice experience. You just sort of sit there and go, hey, hey, wait a minute. I'll just. I've been two seconds in the door. I just want to look around to see if this is the right place for me and that you've got. That you solve my problem. So I very much communicate that you've got to, you know, you've just got to really assess your site, make it as. Use it like a nice user experience and as frictionless as possible. And knowing that you've only got that seven seconds, the first thing I want to do is have a beautiful hero image with a nice, a good headline and a really short paragraph of text on how you solve their problem and not have it interrupted and have it. So when it lands, a lot of people have got menu boxes up the top that are a third of the landing page, which means that your hero image then sits off your hero image, which should be your selling piece, is underneath the fold or halfway through the fold. So, yeah, so I, you know, I sort of tell them the basics of what to do, but which hero image is the best? Google Optimize. Which call to action button works best? Google Optimize. What colors should I use for my call to action buttons? Google Optimize. Like, and it's. And it's not. And like I said, it's the data that's available to all ecom sites that just, it's. It, it's. It's too easy, but people just don't utilize it.

But Adam. Sorry. Sorry, Derek, because I'm conflicted ever since I met Adam. So how do you jump from sports and extreme trainings on ESPN and to a B testing? Like, did you knew all of this before or did you just learn this on your own? Because a lot of people that are in E commerce, a lot of brands and you know, merchants, when they do not know stuff like this, they tend to h someone. But you said, no, I'm gonna learn this on my own. And this is a lot of, you know, like, it's a lot of time invested because you could speak like you would work for an agency right now. So how, you know, how do you go from, I don't know, extreme triathlon and all that crazy sports? Because I've been watching on YouTube the, the show and it's like I was tired only by looking at it, I'm told. But like, how do you talk about AB testing when you were just in the gym with Terry Crews, you know, like, explain was.

I. I don't know, I just, I adapt to my, I'm like a chameleon. I just adapt to my environment. And, and you know, with TV was an interesting thing. I had a, the reason I got into TV was that I had a sports advertising company, you would call it. But we had a big, we used to do a lot of signage for all the major stadiums and leagues around the place. And obviously I had too much money because I started doing some angel investing. And one of the, one of the opportunities that we got was to invest in an ex triathlete based in Australia running around and doing all these. It was at the time where Tough Muddo, like we filmed the first ever Tough Mudder event in Australia. There was a lot of sky running where these guys just run up like stupid mountains and all this sort of stuff. And, and so we, we stuck Matt, his name was in a, in a camper with his wife. And as they were driving around to all these crazy events, I would use my clients, which was all the major sporting teams in Australia, and he would stop in and train with the elite athletes as well. And it's just, it's utilizing the opportunity like I had the opportunity to invest in a film project which turned out to be different to what I was pitched originally. They were going to go to the US and wake up in a different town every morning and train a different. Like whether it was seal fit or crossfit or. But for me that was a big Groundhog Day and it was super expensive. So I said, why don't we do something local to test the waters. We produced a sizzle reel, they call it in the, in the industry, put it up on Twitter and just happened to snag it. Ended up in the feed of another Australian actually called Jason Bennett. And he was living in Bristol at the time working for espn and he had a show called Aussies Abroad and he saw our sizzle reel and DM me straight away and said, man, give me a call. We got to talk about this. So we thought it was going to be a documentary, but as it turned out we edited it up for a 10 part series. And I think I might be wrong, but I don't think I'm wrong. It was the first ever time that ESPN had run a series because they were always live sport and documentary. So we kind of created a new category within ESPN and it's just opportunities and it's the same with my event business or grew on an opportunity that I had and I just, I, I don't know, I just run the numbers, I do the due diligence and if it works, I'm not afraid to press the go button. And, and it's meant that I've had three or four massive businesses in the last decade and then. But you have. I always have an exit strategy. The event business. The exit strategy was a bit different because I got sick and you don't want to really be. Events is a very high stress. Lots of travel, lots of eating in restaurants, lots of, you know, so it wasn't the best business for me to be in based on my health. So, you know, and that's why I took the opportunity to go and build houses for a couple of years and get sweaty and hang out with the boys and cuss and swear and do all those things that builders and tradies do. But yeah, it's just long, long, long answer. But it's, it's just taking advantage of opportunities that you're presented with.

So that's such a. It's so much like diversity in what you've accomplished in your life. And it's really interesting to think that you landed here. I want to go back though, to the conversion rate. 8%. Most people are converting at 2 or 3%. I think that's, that's very common. What was the first test you ran in Google Optimize? Maybe give me the first test, the biggest failure test, the biggest success test that you've ever run with Google Optimize.

The first test was pretty basic. It was just testing a few different hero images on the landing page. And I probably nearly walked away from Optimize after that because it was even Steven's. It was both images kind of ranked the same. So at the end of it, I was more confused than what I was at the start. At the start, I knew what image I liked the best, but I'm like, let's test this thing. And then it came out like 50, 50. It was, it was like people were.

Indifferent between two dogs, basically.

Right, I know, I know. And so that was, that was my first experience. My best experience was when we put, put a marketing message over, like overlaid onto the hero image. We tested what we had beforehand, which was no, you know, like. And it's. And it's pretty.

You.

Do you see it out there a lot? It's the selling, the free shipping, selling the, the fact that you've got afterpay. Woohoo. You know, it's all that. It's selling the Wrong thing. And it's not. So it's not selling the fact that you solve a problem for someone who might land on your page. So the test that we ran on, I think it would have been, it might have been Test 2 or Test 3 that we ran through Optimize was having what we had and then putting a headline with a marketing message. And the first one I think was two paragraphs long. But the one with the marketing message just blew the other one out of the water. And I think that was really the start of our conversion rate getting to the levels that we're at. And then from there we tested the long winded marketing message which basically told everything that someone would need to know with a more abbreviated version which was like a two line. And the shorter one did rate a little better. But at the moment we're at that level where if I can get a 0.1% increase in what we're doing, I take it, and you know, most people when they first start testing and optimizing, we'll see massive gains like we did. I think, I think when we put our, our headline and our marketing message on our landing page, we jumped from like 2 to 5% over, over six, not even six months, probably three months. And it's, and it's going back to that. It's letting people understand exactly what the product is. So we don't say that we're the cheapest because we're not the cheapest. We're probably the most expensive option out there. We don't say that we're the best. We don't say that we're this or we're that we have a tiny little slider bar up the top that if someone cares to look that says that you get free shipping over 60 bucks, quick turnaround and that we're, we're, we're an Australian produced product and yeah and the rest of it is just a beautiful image of Harry with his collar on looking all happy. And it says like peace of mind. For pet owners, our collars are the best form of id. It allows someone, if who finds your pet to call, like to be able to calm them by name and call you as soon as they find them. And that's all pet owners want. The fear of if their pet gets out, that someone's going to be able to find them and read it. And the traditional, our biggest competition as a product is the traditional small dog tags that put on collars. But the reason that our whole business started with Julie back 18 years ago was that she Had a dog that the kids left the side gate open. The dog got out, and then she noticed that the tag had snapped off the collar and was in the backyard. So she knew that her dog was out in the community. But no, even if someone found them, they had no way of contacting. And luckily they drove around for hours and eventually located her. But she just knew that collars rust, they're hard to read. If you've got a. You might have a pit bull that's running around and it's out, no one's going to want to get that close that they can read a dog tag to a pit bull's face without fear of getting mauled. So you can read out the collars that we produce from a safe distance where you're not adding stress to an already stressful situation for the dog and for whoever finds your dog. So. And that's what we have to communicate in two lines of tech. So, yeah, there's lot and there's lots of different ways to do it. And like I said, every quarter I'll test a different version of that marketing message and see if it ranks a little bit better. And for me, I'm just grabbing the little crumbs. If there's 0.1% here, I'll take it. If there's 0.2% here, I'll take it. But it's led to having, you know, a really, a really good conversion rate when people visit us the first time. And then, you know, but still everyone applauds me for my conversion rate. I still look at it that there's 90 to 92 people out of every hundred that leave my website without purchasing anything.

Yeah.

Like that's, that's a horror story for me as a traditional entrepreneur, because if I had a shop, if I had a shop that I had 100 people come in, but I could only sell eight of them, well, I'm doing something very, very wrong. So I still feel that conversion rates, as a general rule have got a long way to be improved for all of E commerce. Like having a 1 to 2% average conversion rate in an industry I think is terrible. But everybody's just got to adopt different things and test it and just see what works.

Yeah. And by the way, for those listening, the website is petcallers.com au and can see right here this, this tagline, peace of mind for pet owners apparently over doubled the conversion rate. I'm sure somebody is right now going, oh, my God, like, I've got like a slider or I've got Like a. You know I, I've. I haven't really attested this my. My their homepage so I think somebody might be doubling their conversion rate right now.

I'm.

I have a feeling you tested a few other taglines. Give me just for fun. Well give me a tagline that failed instead of peace of mind for pet owners if you've got one.

We. To be honest we haven't changed the that's the first headline that I tested with it. We are. I am looking for a different version to test at the moment. I just had like for me I'm all about. I have a love hate relationship with agencies as if anyone follows me on social would. Would realize and only because I like. I like working with experts experts to get strategy but when it comes to implementation I'd like to do it myself if I can. I'm the first to admit if there's something that's above my pay grade I'm happy for you guys to do it. But what I find really hard to get is like a specialist service that you know I love teardowns. I still even my own website. I get guys to tear down my website because everybody's got a different opinion on things and, and the last tear down that I got was one thing that they said was maybe try a different headline that isn't just all about the collars. If you look at my landing page it's very focused on one product but we do sell other products and their recommendation was to maybe introduce the fact that we've got a range of products into the headline. I just haven't come up with a headline that I've been happy with that says anything like that. But that'll be the next thing that I'm testing. But yeah that peace of mind for pet owners came across. I was doing webinars for my friends when COVID lockdown first hit and a lot of them were suffering really badly with their business. So every Wednesday at lunchtime I had a bit of a group going where all my mates that had businesses would jump on to zoom and I'd pick a topic that they need to be working on and just kind of wax lyrical about what they should be doing. And and one of the weeks was it was called Luscious One Liners and and we just worked through kind of a worksheet of. Of different headlines that you could use. And and for me that was one that we got super early and and I tested it and it tested really well and we haven't actually changed it but we've changed the text underneath maybe half a dozen times. Like nearly every month. I think we change that to test it, but unfortunately, mate, I haven't got any other headlines that we've tested against to see if they rank better. But next time we chat, I will, because that's, that's what I'm working on now. I just haven't come up with one that, that does it.

Yeah, it is quite a challenge. What tests are running right now? I'm curious.

I haven't got a test running at the minute. We've just come off, we just come off our last test. So I, I, I, I don't like, I tend to get, no, I wouldn't say fatigue, but I like focusing on one thing, diving right in, maybe spending a month on that. And then I know that's pretty cool and I won't go back to it for maybe like every quarter is probably a good, a good range for me. So I'll leave what we've got now that's just tested well to run for a few months and then I'll jump back in and do my thing and change a few things up and test that. But I'll probably, I think now because we are converting quite well, we'll probably move to just, yeah, every, every quarter we'll, we'll run a test to change a few things and, and then let that test run for a while and then implement it and then let it sit for three months before we go back to it again. Because it's just, you get to, I think you can get over, you can overwork something and just, and it causes frustration and it's, then, then it's not fun. So I like my work to be fun. That's why we like working in the dog industry, because we like dogs and yeah, yeah. So every quarter, I think is a, is a good, good thing when you, when you're building it like to the point where you get to the 8%. It was, I was in changing stuff all the time, but I think we've got to that plateau level now where it's, it's good enough that we can just play with it every two or three months.

Awesome.

So Derek and Adam, our sponsor Videx, sent me a question for you. Adam? Yeah, thank you for watching. So our sponsor is asking you the following question. Given all the diversity in your, you know, in your history and, you know, jumping from TV to E Commerce, what was the best decision that you took with your, with your business? But what was the worst one?

Let me start with the Worst one, because that's really, really easy. Don't vendor finance the sale of any of your businesses ever. So we, I jumped out of the events game super quick because of my health and probably, you know, sat down with. We split our brands up. We had Ms. Muddy, which was the female obstacle course, which was a cool, fun thing that. So being it was a charity and being they wanted to, you know, they wanted to do the. The brief was good. What they wanted to do with the business was exactly where I wanted to see a brand that we started from scratch go to. So we were probably a little soft on the terms of the sale just to get the deal done and know that it was going to the right people or that's what we thought. And then the slide business was the same. We sold it to some guys up in Brisbane that had an existing festival and it kind of fit in with them really well. But both deals just to get the deals done and me be able to focus on my health. We, we, we took some cash like we got most, most cash. But we did have some vendor financing terms.

And both explain vendor financing really quick to people that might not know.

So it's where I fund. So say we've agreed to a sale price of a million dollars for one of my brands. They may give me $600,000 upfront, but then I finance the other 400,000 by letting them pay it off over a specific amount of time, which all sounds good until the company that buys your stuff goes bankrupt and then you become a creditor for the amount that you've given them and you lose your business. And. Yeah, so we had that happen. The charity that we thought was going to be awesome for the brand turned out to be a little shonky. And they basically just took all the customer lists, all of our. We were like the number one outdoor event in the country. And they took all our procedures manuals and they took everything and basically just sunk the company. And people had tickets that they bought for this company too. So it was kind of a. People got let down because they'd spent $60 on a ticket and then this guy didn't run event and, and it was a bit messy. So that's, that's my first tip. If someone can't afford to buy your business off the. The either they don't like if they don't have the savings or they can't get financed based on your figures, then don't sell it because vendor financing is a nightmare.

So you want it clear. You want a clear break when you sell a car?

Yeah, yeah. And a lot of it. I'm surprised. I've built and sold a lot of businesses and vendor financing is always bought up but it's just nothing that I would consider now. Like, you know, you feel like you're, you're being nice to sort of allow them to do something and. But if they get into trouble, you just end up being owed a lot of money and not being able to get it.

You're basically still in business with them like because your, your, your money is dependent on their business being successful, which is a big risk. So yeah, yeah, I would want a lot more money if I was taking that risk with somebody.

For sure I'd avoid that. But what it did do. So yes, I probably lost, I reckon I probably lost about half a million through bad vendor financing. But it allowed me to get out and concentrate on my health which. What price do you put on your health? So, so that was good. Best thing. What's the best thing? I just think it's the data. I having been in all sort of industries, you know, the TV side of things was excellent because you're, you know, something that you've been working on. I can go and sit with my kids, turn on the TV at 8 o' clock on a Wednesday night and see Daddy's show on TV. Like that was, that was it. That was really nice and a big buzz. But I don't, you know, you don't know how many people are watching it. You don't know how many people are enjoying it. You're not really getting a lot of feedback. So with e commerce I just, I love the fact that everything's live. Like I can track my website now on analytics and see how many people are in my website, you know. So I think data is my favorite thing and yeah, it's why I love e commerce so much.

Do you use any like data analytics tools? Google Analytics, Google Optimize, you've got your Shopify native analytics. Is that enough or is there something that sometimes is missing from that?

No, I think we use reveals being good in that it gives you a bit more data around the customer. Specific stuff. Juliana likes that one OmniConvert reveal for.

Those that don't know.

But I must say I am very. I use Reveal for completely different reasons than most people would. I use the data to find customers that I want to create lookalike audiences for for my advertising. I don't actually because for me the metrics around lifetime value are flawed. For me because every customer is as important as the next one. Because the value in my customer base is not how much money they spend themselves, it's how much exposure they give our product within their dog community. And you know, because our product lasts such a long time, the person that has a collar for 10 years, that means they've only spent $40 with us in 10 years. So in the metrics column, they're, you know, all the data saying you shouldn't even bother talking to this person. But that person, because they've had our collars for 10 years, is the one that's at the dog beaches and the dog parks telling any other pet owner that will listen just how good our collars are. I've had this one for 10 years. So those people go, oh, and this is probably what helps our conversion rate as well is that old mate who's at the bottom of my customer lifetime value metrics is talking about us in such a positive way that he's sending people to our website pre warned. They already know that they want the product. All they want to do is get in there and work out what colors they can get and pick their size and off they go. So for me, CLV is a very different thing to most because the person who has a customer lifetime value of $30 to me might be my best customer. Where the person who buys every year because they just get sick of looking at the same collar probably isn't talking about our brand the same way as old mate at the bottom of my metrics table is. So, yeah, so we just treat everybody the same. We just treat everybody as if they're our most valuable customer. Whether they buy once in 10 years or 10 in one year, I love it.

And I think that speaks to the virality nature of the product and leads us into a perfect question here from Lorenzo. I mean, so it's great that they can be such a advocate of the brand, but you've got to be thinking about new products to sell to these existing customers. Is there anything in the pipeline to increase that, track them actually coming back and buying something different or new. And how do you approach that as well?

Well, see, the good thing with having such evangelistic fans, you might call them, is that whatever we do in the same vertical. So my play is I've only been in pet collars fixing it up for maybe six months. So it's only, I think we're at a point now where I can start looking at other businesses in the same vertical where we can utilize our good relationships and our database and, and, and so we've we trialed a subscription box at Christmas. We did a limited run of a special Christmas box and it went really well. Sold out within about a week. We had I think 500 boxes and we just did one email blast just saying hey guys, looking for a cool Christmas present. Don't want to hit the shopping centers. We will send this out to you and it and it did awesomely well. So my plan is to launch so we've got Pet Sub Box as as and there's a landing page up on there now that we, we set up for Christmas. So that'll be our next venture is into like a monthly subscription box model and because it's got our name behind it I feel that it'll do very well. But I've spoken on a couple of webinars with someone who's got a pet sub box business in Ireland and he's built up a subscription box community that they got me to come and do a few side audits and talk about conversion rates and all that sort of stuff. So I've had him, he's told me all the things to do and not do. He's tested everything. So he's been in business for quite a while and he's, he's got about eight and a half thousand subscribers but he says based on and he started from scratch he didn't have an existing client base but he thinks that 10,000 subscription for us is, is a no brainer and but what I'm going to do differently to him is because we've got the magazine and if once we've launched the sub business I want to act as like a, a sales and promotion tool for smaller brands where we can sample within the box. So you know, if you Derek have started a pigsy snack business so you're selling pig's ears, you might be called pigsies. We'll talk to you and say we're going to sample your product to 10,000 people that are Sub Box members. We're going to tell your story to them, we're going to give them a direct link back to your website to reorder if their dogs liked what they tested. And plus just build your brand up by you know, being able to do some cool things in our newsletters, put them in the magazine. So we come it's sort of a twofold business. It's a subscription box for pet owners but it's like a marketing agency for smaller Aussie brands in the pet industry as well. So whether it's toys, treats, nose balms, poo bags, anything that shampoo, anything that can use. We can help brands basically build their business off the back of our subscription box.

So of course, I love this. We need to talk more later because I was the director of growth and acquisition at boxycharm. Literally the exact same thing you just described, except for the beauty industry. So we, we. I have so many things to tell you about the discovery platform and how to. I literally had to build an internal marketing agency and start connecting that with the brands and the unique selling proposition components. I could, I could talk to you about all of it for days. And I love it. I love that transition. Or maybe it'll be that, you know, two now you'll be. I mean you're already spinning a lot of plates, but now you're spinning two companies, you know, at the same time. So. And I. It will be mutually insured success. They. They will actually play off each other really well. That, I mean that's absolutely amazing.

Yeah. And I'm looking forward to it. It's a, it's a new shiny toy to play with, which I like. I kind of. My M.O. is that I, I love the due diligence and I love the setup and the launching. But I do get to a point and this is why I've built and sold business so many businesses in the past decade. I do get to a point where every, when everything's humming and it's just the day to day stuff, that's. That's when I got to look for something else, you know, so. And Pet Collars is getting to. The Pet Collars is getting to that point. It's, you know, it's converting. Well, we've got all the systems in place. We've got a great team. You know, I'm probably more of a hindrance because I'm snooping around looking for ways that I can improve efficiencies. But my time's probably better spent building something new off the same vertical and, and having that, you know, having that fan base and having customers that just know that we produce a quality product will make it a lot easier to sell them on the next thing. And I think that's where the churn and burn. There's a lot of churn and burn companies out there where they, you know, and they're big on. Well, they're not actually big on lifetime value. They're. They're big on. They might be playing in a market where there's 20 million people that they've got to sell to. So they don't really care if they get another sale from the same person. They just ramp their advertising up. You know, they're not making much margin because they're spending so much on ads and they don't care about customer service because if someone doesn't come back and buy from again, they're usually selling a cheap product that's going to fall apart. Yeah, that's, you know, that's very opposite to what we do. We, we build fans. Which allows me to launch new businesses within that same vertical.

Yeah, brilliant.

I love it.

Talking about your brand name Petcolors because it's like pretty self explanatory. Right. I have a question from the audience from John. Thank you John for being here. He's asking you what percentage of your traffic comes organically from Google Search given your domain name. Because it's a very smart domain name.

Yeah, we do Google Search is very good to us. But we also work with an SEO agency up until recently. But I love writing. That's another reason why we got the magazine. So I'm forever pulling keyword reports, making sure that we're putting the right keywords into all of our blogs. And the magazine actually acts as a bit of a content pillar for us. You know, we write the short form articles which we're launching a podcast in the pet industry around pet stuff because it's so popular, the magazine it'll, it'll be all of the articles that are in the magazine are very concise. So the podcast will be able to expand on a lot of stuff that I can't put in the, in in the magazine because I keep it to an 800 word limit per article. So and also too I can break the, the magazine up and it becomes my blog post for the month. So for the time and money invested in the magazine, which isn't a lot actually it's probably every two months. It might cost me somewhere between 500 and $1,000 to put together Hooman magazine and that's having someone else design it for us.

That's so cheap.

But it just provides the knock on effect from it as our content pillar. It gives me all my blog content, it gives me topics that I've researched to write a short article to then expand upon when we've recorded a couple of episodes of the podcast. But I want to get a nice bank up of episodes before we launch. And yeah, so it's the content pillar and that I think we do as good as we can with SEO without going super agency technical sort of, you know, like I'm sure there's things that we could prove it. I have. If I SEO guy went and did a tear down about SEO, they'd write me a list of all the stuff that we could be doing better, which is what I'm trying to find actually at the moment. But. But yeah, but I think just the basics we get right and, and probably we wouldn't get as much organic as what we do through paid, but it would be somewhere I could look at my analytics. Actually, I think the last time we looked at was somewhere around 22% of our traffic was coming from organic search.

I was wondering because usually, you know, most brands in, in, in E Commerce have another brand on the site. We have any side brands besides petcolors or you're working on other, you know, sightings?

No, just. Just. Well, kinda. But it's a bit. I've been talking with an American brand that's doing really well to become their Australian distributor.

Yeah.

But yeah, so we're in conv. I can't sort of divulge too much on what it is at the moment but, but hopefully next time we talk I'll be able to share, share the experience. But we're just, we're down to kind of the nitty gritty little lawyer bits and pieces at the moment. But it's a good outdoor product. It's not in pets. So it'll be my first venture in E commerce outside of pets. But it's also a play that's E commerce and wholesale. So I'd be looking to get it into some bricks and mortar outlets and stuff as well. But we're kind of in the final stages of either saying, yep, let's do it or no, let's pass. And then it's just the pet sub box. That'll be, that'll be the, the next big thing. Although I did just order a massive water slide for my kids, which I put some, I put some posts up. It's a big inflatable water slide that's like 30 meters down our driveway into a pool. And I put, I put some pictures of it. I got it built in China and they took some photos of it assembled and I stuck it up on Facebook and I've got about 20 mates that want to buy the same slide. So I might, I might have by.

Design company.

Somewhere in Australia. It's not like here in Romania where it's like, I don't know, zero or minus 1 degrees or for you, Derek, 20 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's so bad and well, I.

Was driving, I was, I was thinking about that when I was, when I was driving into the office this morning and it was 6 o' clock in the morning and 20 degrees C. So beaut. Beautiful weather.

That's like 60 Fahrenheit almost.

Yeah, yeah.

So we're approaching the end of this episode so I want to ask you one question. Maybe Derek has his last one too. But my last question for you is this how you know, based on all the, that happened in 2020, everything, everything that we've seen in this industry that has just, you know, exploded in 2020, what do you see from a brand perspective, from a founder perspective to happen in 2021?

I, I think it's going to be tougher. I think 2020, if you didn't make money in e commerce in 2020, sell your business because the conditions were just insane. And I think it, I think it's. We've looked at a few businesses to buy on Flippa and places like that and there's some pretty unrealistic multiple expectations out there. So I think 2021 is going to be a challenging one and we're already seeing it with this iOS 14 rollout. I don't know if anyone else out there is doing some broad advertising in Facebook but it's just fallen over of the last couple of days since they've started rolling it out. So we've stopped advertising again like we did in Q4 and probably focusing a bit more on Google shopping. We're getting quite a good CPA and roas through Google shopping ads. You know, nearly double digit roas which is good. But the only problem with Google shopping ads versus as Facebook is you can't scale it the same. So you know, based on the roas that I'm getting with Google Ads, I'm like I want to spend $10,000 a day and. But it'll still only spend like I think at the moment it's spending $80 and that's maxing it out. So, so yeah, but I, I think, you know, we are quite reliant for traffic from a lot of external sources. So I think that's going to affect owners. I think building, I think a really smart thing to do is, is start building your customer list because if all of our advertising CPMs blow out to worse than what Q4 was last year, you really going to want a good email base to do email marketing. If you haven't set up flows in your email flows in your business, you are missing out big time. I think our, our spend on Omnisend is only, I think it's under $400 a month. But it can, it banks like amazingly like I think last month we, we banked about 10k off a $400 spend. So you're not getting that kind of return on any advertising for traffic. So look at my, my tips would be, you know, the magazine for us, even though it wasn't designed as a lead generator, it is insane. We, we probably get about 2,000 people Sign up for the free subscription to it and they're people that weren't in our database beforehand. So once they sign up they obviously then become part of our flow system and that converts really well. We're going to look at start doing some. We've never really done giveaways or promotions in that, you know, to capture emails, but it's something we're definitely going to look at building our west but we're probably sitting close to about 35, 40,000 email database. But I would love to see that up around 50, 60,000 by sort of midpoint of this year. And, and just in case that we need that database. Like I said, I don't really sell to them very often. But you know, if I get up, you know, if we get put into a position where we need to because the traditional Google Ads and Facebook ads aren't working anymore, well then we'll have to pivot and start leaning on our list a little bit more. But Yeah, I think 2021 is going to be a bit more challenging than 2020. The good thing will be is that people are used to online shopping now. Covid probably fast forward ecom 10 years so people feel a lot more comfortable buying online. But yeah, I just think that everybody's marketing's probably got to be pivot from the traditional just throw money into Facebook ads and Google Ads and get your traffic in. So yeah, email flows always do Retargeting. That's one thing I, that's another tip for me is that it doesn't matter how bad my CPMs are if someone's been to my website. Like if they've. If they've wanted to know enough that they jumped onto our website, I want to be popping up in their feed if they didn't purchase. So retargeting ads is something that I never switch off despite how bad the CPMs are. But trying to pitch to cold audience I think is going to be tougher in 2021.

I absolutely agree with you and I think what you're we're saying retention is the new acquisition if as if people forgot. But yeah, I think it was always true. And, and I think it's. This is now is the time to really be paying attention to, to retention. And as Lorenzo said in chat as well, starting a publishing arm is also probably the future for business, being your own media company. And that goes straight to retention because you're owning that relationship. And I also really loved how you said that it doesn't matter if they spent $40 with us 10 years ago. They are treated the same as everybody else on the email list because they are probably telling 10 other people about our brand. So how you know that I think is the perfect form of retention. It doesn't have to be always transactional. It's about advocacy for the life of the customer and in your case, the life of the customer and their pets. You want those pets to basically be your number one fans for their lives.

For a business like his that has a low frequency, because if you have a high frequency, then you have to do their best to mix transactional and value. But for you, I think it's the best approach. Approach that you can do. And I think, you know, I just want to say for the record that I announced that Detention is the new acquisition two years ago, but just, no, I just, just, just wanted to, you know, make sure, you know, I say that I, I was planning to use the horn like Cartelster, but I didn't unlock my phone that fast. So it's, it's over. The moment is gone. But I feel you so, so much, Adam, for being here today. We have reached the end of this episode. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, everyone that's watching. Wow, what a story. So this episode with Adam was really, really amazing. I mean, from battling cancer and diabetes and switching from so many industries or another, like, from sports to events to doing E Commerce, just. And, you know, like, I love Adam's resilience and I love his, you know, do it yourself attitude. And I think this is what we need to see more from founders. This hunger to just, you know, learn and unlearn stuff and just, you know, the fact that he's so focused on data blew my mind. So I'm really excited to hear your opinion about this episode. So whatever you're listening this from, let me know your thoughts. This is Juliana Jackson, the CLV lady, and I'll see you next week with another amazing E Commerce founder. This podcast was brought to you by Vitex. Vitex is the first and only fully integrated E commerce marketplace and OMS solution that offers fastest time to revenue and no upgrades ever. So go ahead, check them out. Vtex.com.