How to Optimize Your Entrepreneurial Mindset With Valentin Radu of Omniconvert

Hello everyone. Guillaume as well here, host of the E Commerce Wizards POD podcast where I feature top leaders in E commerce and business. Today's guest is Valentin Radu, CEO of OmniConvert. And today we'll be talking about the mindset optimization for E Commerce CEO and probably lots of other things. So Valentin has built a suite of software that he'll tell us a little bit about in a moment and has a very ambitious goal and realistic goal, I believe. I mean to go with an ipo, an initial public offering. So best of luck in that goal. Ambitious goal. I guess it must be inspiring for your employees to go toward that. Especially built such a nice suite of software. Many software at this point. So just before we get started, our sponsorship message this episode is brought to you by Mage Montreal. If your business wants a powerful E commerce online store that will increase their sales, or to move piled up dormant inventory to free up cash reserves, or to automate business processes to gain efficiencies and reduce human processing error, our company Mage Montreal can do that. We've been helping E Commerce stores for over a decade. Here's the catch. We're specialized and only work on the Adobe Magento E Commerce platform. We do everything Magento. If you know someone who needs design, development, maintenance, training, support, we got their back. Email our team supportagemontreal.com or go to magemontreal.com that's M A G E montreal.com. all right. So Valentin, I'm happy to have you here today.

Hey there, Guillaume. And hello everyone. I'm really excited to get this going.

Yeah. And to start here, can you please tell us a little bit about your entrepreneurship journey and the software that you've built here?

Yeah, sure. I've started as an export kid from Bucharest, Romania. I was struggling to make the cut. I was making something like US$1,000 per year. And that was back in 2000. I've started to play Starcraft to understand strategy. Then I've built a network to play Starcraft with my neighbors. Then it was Battle Net and we wanted to, I don't know, to compare our skills with the big world to play on the Battle Net. And we started to get broadband connection over there. Some neighbors stated that they need to get in touch with their relatives from abroad. And we turned that into a business quickly. In three years, we got from four clients to 4,000 clients, subscribers to our broadband connection Internet service provider. And we. At that moment, I've understood the power of entrepreneurship and how cool it is to be like a rock star. Because entrepreneurship if you do it well, you're like the next rock stars, right? You attract a lot of attention. You have a lot of people that are recognizing your, your skills, abilities and the way you help them. And then I've, I've said, okay, let's do the next, let's do the next company failed miserably. Got to go back to my father's apartment. I had to choose between keeping the, the office or going back to my father's apartment. And to hear him saying you wanted to build companies, who wants to do that, whatever. So fortunately I, I've built an agency. At that moment, it was 2005. Nobody wanted the website at, at that moment it was, it was really hard to do it. However, I've identified an opportunity together with one of our customers. They were selling online car insurance and we teamed up. I was very good at looking at data patterns, identifying trends. I was spotting this as a great opportunity because it was a blue ocean and I've built this together with him. We invested something like $700 back in 2013 after doing a lot of stuff there, handling website marketing campaigns, viral guerrilla marketing, whatever, everything that you can imagine for that e commerce company. We got to 14 million in turnover. And I've said it's time to go to share this knowledge and to build a company that is doing software and is helping other e commerce entrepreneurs. Like I was struggling to make the cut because we were investing something like US$1 million in Google Ads and Facebook ads and we were only breaking even and it was so frustrating. So at that moment I realized how important it is to do conversion rate optimization. I was using a software that we produced internally. We had the team of 12 people building software for our own needs. And I decided that this is a great opportunity. That's when I started OmniConvert with the purpose of helping other e commerce companies thrive without over investing in acquisition, in demand generation. After that we got a lot of attention, we grew the company, we started to sustain a lot of brands from all over the world. At this moment we decided to focus completely on customer value optimization. I'm a strong believer in life cycle marketing. After two decades of acquisition marketing, I think it's time to take care about the customer retention and customer lifetime value. That was something that helped me do the exit from my former e commerce company. And at this moment we are doing this kind of tools, a tool for doing AB testing, for doing surveys, to do customer segmentation so that we empower other companies to become data driven and customer centric. We Also do trainings for other agencies. We have an academy where we train other people to do customer value optimization. So pretty much we do a lot of stuff which has to do with the total life cycle of the customers from e commerce companies.

Thank you for that beautiful summary and journey of entrepreneurship. I can relate to some of those things that you said there, for sure. Well, big Starcraft fan, myself as well, was playing nations versus nations for Team Canada with, I guess, other countries.

Yeah.

So love that game. Spent way too many hours on it when I was a teenager.

What's your favorite race?

I played a moment. Yeah. Okay. All right. So there was that. And I can relate also, you know, you failed. You say your first. Well, your second business. That. That didn't go. I never had one go under. I never failed one. But I remember, like, my. I used to be a professional visual artist and then did the transition to entrepreneur, and my father said, you're a great visual artist. You're a terrible businessman. When I was starting, you know, so. And then it's like fun to laugh about it now, like more or less 15 years later and with the success we've had, like, yeah, well, I had to learn at first and there was some struggle, and now it's great, you know, so that's an interesting thing that almost everybody in the entrepreneurship journey will typically need to live at one point. There's the learning curve and there's people around. You believe in what you're doing or not or how it's tough or like. But no, hey, we. We made it, actually. We made it. You know, that's great.

Yeah. The best thing is when you pass the messy middle. I think in entrepreneurship, when you pass the initial spike of enthusiasm, when you're really excited, I'm gonna start this, I'm going to do this. And then you have the messy middle. Like Seth Godin says, nobody talks about those struggles. Nobody talks about the show, which is struggling to make the cut and to pay his employees and to find out what's all about. Yeah. And then when you got out of this messy middle and you start to actually realize what it's all about, and you start to systemize things and to put in place the processes and the right people at the right place, then you can look back and you can say, you know what? I made it. But it's so hard to do it at some moments. And I think this journey has a lot to do with resilience. If it's something that you need to build up as an entrepreneur, maybe we have entrepreneurs in the audience, I think resilience is something which is so underrated. And everybody talks about creativity, about networking skills and whatever, but at the end of the day, it's not a sprint, it's not a marathon, it's an ultra marathon. It's like Ironman and you need to prepare yourself for a long run.

I totally agree. And I had another guest here, Vinnie Fisher, also built an almost nine figure business and he says that the number one tip or rule for him for success is just don't quit, you know, just keep going, you know, because yes, there's, there's so much difficulties when you start and when you build this and it's very different when you start from nothing, like we've both done. Then if you, you build something that's already there, big foundation, and then you grow it to the next, the next level, it's very different ball game. So you can see it sometime in generational entrepreneurship. But the first generation took the father like everything just to get, I don't know, maybe 5 million. Like we hear Gary Vee or stuff like that. I don't remember if it's exactly 5 million, then next generation comes in just like, boom, 60 million. Nobody started from that 5 million baseline from the father. So yeah, it's interesting.

Like Trump said, at some point I got no help from anyone. You know, my father gave me $1 million. I mean, UMF.

Yeah, yeah, it's funny. But more than that, his father owns so many, so much real estate, so many doors, as they say. Yeah. So his father was already a multi, multi millionaire. Of course you get the contact, the credibility, maybe even an endorsement nobody knows about.

Who knows the winner's advantage? Because your mindset is not like you are struggling to survive. I mean, the baseline, I was actually not running towards prosperity. I was running out of poverty. You know, I wasn't running towards a goal. I was running from the fears. And it's kind of different when you're, you're, you're running because of that. You're, you're, you're not aspiring to do some fantastic stuff. You just want to get out of poverty. I couldn't afford to buy a pretzel when I was in high school. You know, I still remember those feelings and fortunately, looking back right now, I think that was an immense motivation agent for me. So I'm really happy that it turned out to be this way.

Yeah. So for sure, you know, grit, resilience and then a lot of mindset optimization because sometimes you're creating that pain yourself in A way by putting too much resistance in the wrong direction. Maybe you need to pivot a little bit here and try to surf the wave a little bit more, not row the ocean. So sometimes you need to have that mindset adjustment. And what do you have here in mind actually, about mindset optimization for CEO or E Commerce? CEO?

Yeah. I think it's an inner game which is so much. It's so tricky, Guillaume, because if you think about it, we live inside our minds the whole time. We have this interaction with the outside world. We have these objectives towards, I don't know, to make this, this figure or to reach a certain step. But at the end of the day, you're with yourself all the time and you have this inner talk. You know, I have been optimized the way that I'm talk. I'm talking with myself for more than a decade. You know, I've been starting from, I don't know, talking very bad with me just to say it's soft, you know, when I failed on, on some particular things like doing that, achieving that, that result and whatever. And I, I've studied so hard. And I think this mindset optimization, it should be prioritized by, by a lot of entrepreneurs, but also not only about entrepreneurs, any high achiever. Because if you're here and you're listening for, to this, it's clear that you want to learn and you want to level up your game and your understanding about life. And I think the first thing would be to, to fix the, the mindset that you have. Are you a winner or are you a loser? Are you trying or are you doing it? So those type of nuances are so important because if you craft your own, your, your inner character, let's say if you, if you write your own story, you have to make sure that you're not, let's say, stopping yourself from, from evolving, you know, because you can be your worst enemy and you can be your, your, your biggest ally. And I think the, the idea would be here to, to optimize continuously the mindset. And there are a certain tools for that. I've been, I've been doing this journaling, you know, to state to have a somehow objective way to see what's important for me and how, how do I interpret the reality? Because your mind can be so tricky. You know, when you're an entrepreneur, you are working on so many projects at the same time. You have to take care of that. You need to hire another person. You have that client, you have that perspective. You have the P and L The budget. You are working on so many different levels at the same time. And it's like in StarCraft, right? You need to take care about that, that battle over here. You need to build to have the resources. You have to, to, to, to work on so many different levels at the same time. And what I found throughout my entire journey is that observing the way I interpret the reality is the trick. So it's like adding a distance between what I think is happening and how I look at myself that thinks that this is happening. And journaling was a great instrument because dumping your thoughts over there allows you to gain clarity and to prioritize what's important. Because you can get so easy trapped into a thinking that you know what you can outsource, that you can delegate that to other people. Because once you can fire yourself from being the single employee and you have the first follower, the first individual which is following in your dream and it's your first employee, you think that, yeah, I should do that. And I think delegating, it's a tricky tool because you can't delegate certain aspects. For instance, learning about your business model, learning about how to thrive. If you're the visionary, you have to always learn. And you can't delegate, you can't outsource this to an agency or to a professional or to a freelancer or whatever. You need to learn continuously about how to over deliver to your clients. And that means to do research. That means to be there at the forefront of innovation in your industry, in your particular business. And I'm not speaking here only about outstanding innovative companies. You can even sell donuts and you can innovate in that front. You can come up with different recipes, you can do a different customer experience, you can package those donuts differently. And it's all about being different and respecting this principle of under promise and over deliver. But it's all coming from having the right mindset and continuously learning about what you're doing.

You touch on a lot of important topics. So one of those I like you say to have some kind of distance to, okay, you're living an emotion, you're living a hard situation, but instead of like feeling it and being lost in it, you're sort of conscious, okay, this is happening. And, and you can take a step back and sort of look at it in a more detached way to have so, so that, that attitude of being detached, I believe is, is one of the really, really great skill set and I call it like being responsible but detached. So you do what is just what is right. And you're responsible. You're, you're not, you're not sloppy, you're not lacking on any of your responsibilities, but you're more detached in the mindset, you know, almost like I love, almost like a computer would handle the situation in a very rational way. Also, let's say talking about that too, let's say here in Canada and Quebec, the professional order of psychologists, they recommend mindfulness meditation, which is totally separate from the kind of spiritual or religious practice, just, you know, mindfulness and really helps with, with this stuff. If somebody wants to go a bit further, then you have the people who will have a spiritual view on this will add another layer on top of it, like Eckhart Tolle or Michael Singer. That will really, really help with the, you know, the mindset and improving yourself over time to, to handle difficult situation in a more and more serene way as time goes and your skill increase.

Yeah. And is this thin line between what's happening on the outside and what's happening on the inside and in this game, I think it was a saying that the only way out is in. And I think it's so crucially important to always focus on the inside because if something goes wrong in your business, you have to go to open a door, to go to the bathroom, to look in the mirror, and you're going to find who's responsible for the fact that you are experiencing something bad in your business. And I think the trap is to come up and blame the external conditions, your employees and whatever. But who decided to do this business? Who decided to get those employees and not the others? Then it's such a, let's say, liberating thought when you realize that you're actually responsible because together with this realization, it's also coming the power to play around and to turn around the situation. And it's so crazy how you are, let's say, deforming the reality and just a single event that's occurring. Let's say you have a client which is not there for you, they give up on you, or you have an employee which is letting you down before an important deadline. So there are many things that are happening in, in the life of an entrepreneur, but the, the trick is not to fall into the trap of, let's say, blaming the whole, the whole cookie, you know, the whole, the whole pancake, because you are doing a lot of cool stuff. And this is just a single aspect is not everything. So if you can detach yourself from this, if you can look at this objectively, if you can't if you can gain this distance, you'll be, you'll be in a better position to come up with the inspired decisions. And all that you are crafting in the, at the end of the day is how you make inspired decisions. Right. How you are improving your decision making system. And I think why the entrepreneurs are having so much success in, in the professional life is that they have a sample size of many decisions for the same time unit. You know, in a single year is like you're making thousands of decisions big and small, but you're making them fast. And eventually you, you come up to train how to make decisions because you, you had so many bad decisions and myself, including, you know, I, I've made so, so, so huge mistakes that I've, but I've learned from that. And the, the, the beauty of it is that you can risk and you can make some conscious, take some conscious risk which are not putting, endangering the whole, the whole company, the whole, the whole system. And I think that's what we're after and that's what I call mindset optimization. To look at yourself, to continuously journal if you like this. I think it's a great instrument because having that is giving you an objective perspective over how you are thinking.

Yeah, I don't personally journal, but I do believe that all your planning should be done in writing and not in your mind. It will give you another added level of clarity even if you first thought it was already clear in your mind. That is for sure for me. And you're talking about also accountability. Basically. As a CEO, you're accountable for everything. Of course, some things you haven't even done yourself, but if you have not put in place a proper system to prevent that from happening. So you're always accountable for everything. And that's tough. Sometimes you have a bunch of problems just explode and we're there and say oh crap, I didn't see that coming. And then you have to handle all this and say, well, I'm accountable for it. But if you beat yourself over it, that's not going to be good for your mental health or the success of the company or the morals of the troop or whatever. And then it comes back to your idea of being detached and some things that could help with this. I have two concepts in mind. There's one that is shared by Michael Singer that he says, you know, all that chatter in your mind like oh, what will that person think? Is my email goodness a quote good enough? How would that go? And all that anxiety, blah, blah, blah, and that Chatter in your mind. He just calls it the crazy roommate. So this is your crazy roommate. And you can sort of detach yourself from the crazy roommate and just observe the situation and say, no, no, none of that. You know, so that's an interesting concept. And the other one is concept of ego. Like, I have a slightly wider definition of the ego, human ego, than most people. The first level is people say, oh, an ego. Like someone who is very pretentious. Maybe he's driving around the Ferrari thinking somebody else, whatever. And they say, that's the ego. But to me, the ego is way more than that. It's not necessarily that much about being pretentious. Like, okay, somebody says something and you're feeling hurt. Well, are you hurt? I mean, you're not bleeding, you're not hurt. What's hurt? Okay, it's your mental conception of yourself. It's your ego that is feeling hurt. So, okay, so that thing is bothering me. That's happening in my business. But what's bothered, really, it's like my ego. Things are not going as I wanted them to go, but I can detach myself again from this. And it always comes back, that exercise of getting out of your own way. I had heard that quote before many times. I said, well, okay, there's a few bad habits to improve. Maybe there's this with Tony Robbins, the, the to do list. But there's also the stop doing list. Like, okay, stop going to bed so late with Empire next morning. Okay, eventually, eventually that that was solved after stopping playing Starcraft, you know, but, you know, so you have to stop doing this. Sure, you have the to do list, the things to improve on, but then it goes further than that. And it's so much a personal journey. Entrepreneurship. You're always like, you're seeing, learning and improving yourself because life is challenging you in so many ways and you have to get out of your own way. And I believe that your own way is mostly your ego, actually. That is working against you in many ways. And if you can get your ego totally out of the way, like, things improve in amazing ways.

That's right. That's right. I think I'm on an underrated activity is to. To see how much progress have you done so far. And an important aspect is that you can identify yourself with the character that you're playing. If you have this approach to put some distance between who you are, then your external results, because you are not your external results. You are not your plans, you're not your future expectations. Those are yours. But you are not Theirs. So when you, when you put this, this distance, you, you come up to a place where it's so serene, you know, it's so. It's so it's silence. And you, you can consciously decide to, to get into the characters, whatever crazy mental noise or you can stay over here when where you consciously decide to play this character. I. I got to so into so many difficult situations from this perspective. I mean my character got into so many crazy situations, but having this, this mental game, you know, to, to put some distance and to always understand that today is a new day. And I. It's like I'm being teleported in today where I have a lot of things to. To tackle. For instance, yesterday I had the crazy day. So I, we were doing some full management day. I got two workshops to do in the. During the breakup instead of eating. And then afterwards I do. I did another webinar live. And then I got with my. To a friend's anniversary. Then I realized I had the news that my. My kid has a broken finger giant finger from basketball, got to a radiography, got home, realized that someone messed up a podcast and instead of being at 1pm was it at 1am so I got to sleep for two hours. I got awake at 1am Maybe webinar, got in the morning awake again. And it's so much roller coaster sometimes you have this rollercoaster life and the idea is not to identify and not to fall into the trap of feeling overwhelmed, but of course to try to avoid these type of things. But some things you can't predict everything. You can't predict that your kid is going to have an accident. So you need to adapt to what it is as it is not to stay fixed into your rigid mindset that the future should be like this because it's like, like a painter. But you're not the only one who's painting your reality. You know, you have other, other factors which are affecting your, your picture.

Yeah, totally. When you look at the scale of the universe, like it's almost like an ant trying to predict what the weather will be or something. It's like we need to be a little bit more humble in some way. Like where we would maybe prefer it goes that way. But we have to live with a lot of acceptance here of that. Hey, it's not going to go always the way you want. Like look at the scale of the planet, the solar system, the universe, whatever. It's like, come on, you want everything to go your way. Really. If everybody had a vote on if it's going to rain. It's always going to rain on somebody's birthday, you know, so, like some things, you just got to accept it and that's that, you know, so, so that, that's, that's one part I can see in what you're saying. Yeah, very interesting conversation about mindset.

Yeah, it's. We could talk for days and not even scratch the surface of what's really going on.

And I have another idea from what you said earlier, that you are not the result. And I've seen this in my earlier career as a visual artist and I've seen this with some musician as well. People who are totally passionate and driven into their craft and they associate themselves too much with their output. So if the painting or the music was crap, well, they feel like crap and they believe they are not worthy and so on. So it's very important to detach yourself during the process of learning and, well, you made an artwork. And so what if it's not that great? Okay, maybe your career would be better if it was great, but, you know, worst case, it'll be something else. So the detachment is important there too.

And many times there are a lot of blessings in these guys. I got so many moments when I got moments when I've said, I have to sell this business, I have to do an exit. And I got some interesting offers and eventually the deals were off and I felt so frustrated about it. And afterwards I realized that deep down I wasn't ready to sell. I wanted to actually build this as. Because it's like in life you can decide about your business. It's like you want to do a masterpiece or you want to have 20 startups which are making some, I don't know, 1, 2, 3, 12 million. But at the end of the day, if you want to build something sustainable, if you want to admire the life that you've crafted for yourself, I think there are these moments when you need to. To look at the reality and understand that it's actually better for your future not to, I don't know, do the exit, make that new deal or get that new employee or whatever, because that's also coming with age. I think accepting what it is as it is and quickly adapting, not spending more than a few seconds to. To regret something that is not in your control anymore. And that has a lot to do with the fact that accepting what it is as it is, it's also qualifying you for a better future. Because you're not spending your time in the past. You should spend your full energy in present and in future, glimpsing the future and crafting it from the present. And one aspect that I wanted to also touch here, Guillaume, it's about the continuous learning thing. I learned so much. Sometimes self learning, sometimes you learn by doing and by suffering. I don't think that you're so happy when you're encountering some barriers, but you're actually learning ways of not to do this anymore. And also you can, let's say, hack your way, hack your learning by constantly looking at getting the shortcuts from other people. And I think as an entrepreneur, you have to be a learner and you have to do this continuously.

Yeah. You cannot reinvent the wheel. You have to stand on the shoulder of giants who came before you. And it's so critical. You see it with many people. I'm having a bit of a memory blank on which scientist it was, was Faraday or another one. But basically, you know, top world scientists. But he was the apprentice of the previous top world scientists, you know, so that's often how it goes. You don't want to reinvent and rediscover all the knowledge of humanity. It's way faster to just get up to speed if you have a master teaching you. And then you can go to the next level and keep pushing the knowledge of humanity. So for sure, don't do it alone. Continuous learning is a. Is a must. And I see it. I have sometimes phases up and down like that and depends what works for best for you. Some people's books, for me it's audiobooks because then I just travel, drive around and, and I know my, my audiobooks, they're. They're getting done one after another. Each time I'm taking the car 15 minutes, there's an audiobook, or I'm just doing the dishes or whatever, something, you know, it's like I have my audiobook, so I'm always learning. And those ideas are so precious.

Yeah, that's right.

They stack up over time. Yeah.

And also that's another way to learn. For me, it helped a lot to teach others. I've invented a few concepts, I've invented a few things in this new category that we're crafting, customer value optimization. And I started first by doing a workshop with one of our first clients, early adopters, let's say our guinea pigs. They accepted to test out on them and it went okay. And then I've started to do these workshops and then I've started to do. To train my own team. And then I've said, let's build a course, but I'm lacking some knowledge. And then I teamed up with other professionals in the space and that's how we crafted the CVO Academy. And I think if you're an expert on some specific topic, you know, if you choose your niche and if you're the best in that, you can team up with a lot of fantastic teachers which are going to support you. And I think that's another phase of learning when you are, if you want to learn something, you can be able to teach and to explain it to others because there are these steps of learning, but the best is to learn by applying it, by experimenting it, and then to teach the others how to do it.

That's interesting. And any other sort of life experience or tips that comes top of mind on CEO mindset or entrepreneurs journey mindset.

Well, what can I say? I think it's another angle which is important is this concept of, let's say, having the right people, you know, to surround yourself with the right people on the right seat. It's. I've been experiencing this at the beginning of my last this company because we are exploring something that was never done before and we, we are inventing things, we are using some models, some ways to segment the audiences and so on. So I had at the beginning, when you have a startup, you have a lot of generalities. You have people, the jack of all trades, which is doing this, that and the other. But it comes a point and you need to understand when is that point where you have a strong bond with that person that was with you from the very beginning. Maybe you made the leap and you've became a better CEO, a better founder, but maybe that individual has not made the leap and he's not specialized in a particular thing. And you need to have the heart. It's an act of love is not attachment. Because that's what I've struggled with. I had to let go a few people after we made our fundraise and we were in a better position to hire more professional people, specialized people. And I had to come to terms with myself on letting go of the first employees that were with me, but they weren't fit anymore. I haven't found any seat for them because they were good at a lot of things, but they weren't fantastically good at specific things. And there's a book here, I recommend it to you and to whoever is listening. The On Purpose Business Person. I think it's a fantastic book. I think the Everest for an entrepreneur is to come out to constantly chase opportunities for his employees, his or her employees to thrive and to evolve and to realize when they are not fit anymore and to come up with a way to find out the new job for them, to scout for opportunities for them where they should be going next from your company. And I think that's a fantastic step and I, I'm looking forward to, to come out to, to get into that position to, to, to easily spot who's not fit and to come up with a plan so that we can, I can help them make progress in their careers because maybe it's not the right place here, but maybe they are fantastic in some friend's company or some other clients company. Maybe they are better in larger companies where they could be working on some aspect with their pace. Maybe our, our pace is too, too fast for them and they are not fit here. But it's not about, I don't know, throwing them out of the train. It's about helping them make progress as well. And I think that that's an important aspect for whoever is running a company. And at the end, on the other hand, you can't continue to make this kind of trade offs. So if you've identified someone which is not the right person, if you don't have, I don't know, top level people on your key positions, you need to do this to simply replace them. Because as a CEO, as a manager, actually not only as a CEO, you have three main tools. You can hire, you can find, fire and or you can train or coach people. These are your tools. And you need to know exactly for all the people that you have in your, in your team that maybe you should fire them or maybe you should train them because, or you should just step out of their way. You just need to help them thrive without being so much in their life just to, to actually have this approach where you are helping them make progress. Because if they make progress, your company is going to make progress as well.

Yeah, right. This is difficult, right? Person. Right. Seed. And when a company grows over many years, the person has the responsibility to keep growing as well and to follow you in that growth that they've done their part of continuous learning, of working on themselves and so on. I remember one employee had been with us for seven years and it was difficult. You know, it's like, hey, you need to keep growing. You cannot stay on the level of where we were. And that was very annoying, but it was required. So I understand what you mean. There's very, it's very important.

That's right.

Yeah. Very interesting sharing of leadership lessons there and it's challenging to find those people very often and need to invest time and very often let's say especially when you, you go from a startup phase and you move up like now we have two person at HR for so hiring is not too hard and it's not as hard as it was before. It's always difficult finding top talent. But you know, at least I have two person doing the scouting, the validating and now I can just do the final interview. But it takes time to get there and that was very, very, very challenging. But I can remember even the early days of the company and those concepts are still true today. Bigger like okay, what's holding you back to go to the next level? Let's say I hired a part time administrative assistant. You would do 20 hours a week. But instead of having me to personally come in and do all the billing first thing in the morning to be sure we had the cash flow, well then she was trained. Took a while, maybe a year, year and a half and then I was totally out of that role and it actually saved me like at first 20 hours a week and eventually even more than that. And then each role that you can totally train yourself out of a job each time, it always bring amazing growth for the company. So sometimes the best growth strategy is not even like oh, the new pay per click campaign technique of the month or something like that. But it's actually hiring one person is going to take away a lot of responsibilities from you. So you can train yourself out of a job in that specific seat and put someone in charge, is accountable and has a vision. And also another things people will work differently to achieve the results. We have to be careful about telling people how to do their job. Yes, we want to have standard operating procedures to scale up the company, but those are more people will just like execute the proven procedure. If we're hiring like higher level managers, then it's more about giving them objectives that are clear. What, what do we want to achieve and how do we know that it is done? Like you know, definition of done that. Exactly. How do we know we've achieved the goal and does it meet yes or no this way? And then it's just measurement, it just supervision by metrics. Like are you hitting the metrics? But to really step out of the way. It's like you do it whatever way you want. I'm not going to tell you how to do it even though we had a way to do it before. You can change everything if you want as long as you hit the metrics and you're well in progress to go hit that goal.

And in terms of the metrics, I think here, Guillaume, I can plug in something really important for people which are in E Commerce. I think what's happening right now in the market is that the E Commerce is transforming so much because we are not playing the same game that we used to in E Commerce. Up until this moment we were doing acquisition and we were guiding ourselves by traffic, by revenue, by things like conversion rate. And I think this formula, the E Commerce growth formula, I think it must be updated as well. So we have traffic multiplied by the conversion rate, multiplied by the aov. And that's happening because average order value.

Aov.

Yeah, average order value. But what's happening is that we need to take into account the customer lifetime value as well and our initial investment. A few mistakes that E Commerce companies are doing, at least the seven figure ones are doing a lot, is that they are not focusing on the future revenue coming from the initial customers and they are not calculating the CAC payback. You know, in how many months or days am I going to break even by investing in acquiring the customer? Because if you know these figures, the customer lifetime value versus the customer acquisition cost, if you have a healthy ratio between those two, then you can scale like crazy. Because the one who's going to win in E Commerce, Jeff Bezos, said that as well, who's winning in the market is that player which can afford to pay the most to acquire a customer. Because that means speed, that company can acquire most of the customers and that's going to quickly get them into a position where they can control the market. And that's why I've been so obsessed with customer lifetime value. Because nobody is actually teaching those things. Everybody is teaching about roas, cookies, whatever, ctr, cpcs, because Facebook and Google Ads, they have their vested interest in teaching people around those advertising methods, you know, because that's their way to do customer value optimization for them, you know, because they want to make you as a company keep spending money to acquire new customers. But what about the existing customers? What about the customer experience? What about ways to improve the revenue that you're getting, the value that you're getting from your customers? And that has a lot to do with the a structured way and a methodology towards that. And that's why I'm so passionate about these things.

Yeah, because you're talking like conversion rate optimization, stuff like that. Those are tactics. And Google will click through rates, CTR and stuff like that, but they make you Focus on tactics. Then you're talking like no, you as a CEO, bring back the thinking to the strategic level, higher level and okay, what's my global game plan to grow the E commerce company here? And I see a lot of those companies, seven or eight figure businesses there, especially lower eight figure businesses that say hey, let's just acquire all customers sort of at cost and then we'll make money on the second order purchase, you know, and that's their growth strategy. And some are doing it more like more or less gut feeling rough numbers. Some are very precise and sophisticated in their method that they have exactly costing with proper software and all that. And of course proper numbering on this will allow you to grow faster, safer, with less anxiety and with much better performance than the gut feeling approach there.

That's right. And many business owners right now there is such a crowded space in E commerce. All the traditional retailers got to online. We have 41% of the total E commerce companies being launched post pandemic. So there are four out of 10 players haven't been around for more than two years. And that means the competition is higher and you need to differentiate yourself and I think the customer experience is the next arena to differentiate yourself because at the end of the day the consumers are so powerful. I mean if you want to change the place from where you are buying clothes or groceries or whatever, it's like you simply do an alt tab on your desktop or you simply open up another app or another tab in your mobile browser. So that means you as a company you need to do conscious efforts to realize if what you're selling is satisfying your customers, are your customers happy? And that means tracking nps. Are you doing the right job? Are you making your customers activating what we call as the second eCommerce growth flywheel? When you are making as a company, you are making your customers so delighted that they are coming back to buy again and that they achieve the network effect. They talk to their relatives and you have the word of mouth effect. So that's the second E Commerce growth flywheel when you are relying on customers that come back and talk about your business. And not only the first E Commerce growth flywheel which means betting on SEO, playing the acquisition game so that you acquire customers that never come back because that's not sustainable and a lot of verticals are highly dependent on future orders from their first time customer.

Yeah, especially if you're not playing that more advanced, sophisticated game there. You're not competitive because your competitor there knows that he can spend, let's Say three times more than you to acquire one new customer because he knows his lifetime value and he has maybe even also the classic it's nothing new. It's been around like 20 years ago. It was still there 15 years ago. Whatever. That you have a backend funnel of additional orders. Perhaps you have additional emails going out. And he knows that he can make more lifetime value out of one customer and he can think in lifetime value and not just like okay, how much it cost me to get one visitor to come to my website and to get one order out of that one PPC pay per click ad campaign there. So there's a bigger game. Another thing that's important to keep in mind is there are cycles in the market like you just said, I didn't know that stats. But I'm not surprised at all with COVID that something like 4 out of 10 business e commerce were not there 2 years ago. Totally makes sense. We had a lot of clients coming to us or potential clients say either I go E commerce or I die right now with COVID because the store is closed by federal order. Exactly. So say okay, so for sure there's a lot of competition happening and there's a lot of things that you just cannot foresee them. So then can be next big Google algorithm change that, you know, drop some big competitor. And it's been seen horror stories like this in the past. Like okay, they bought a lot of inventory, they are able to turn over let's say a million dollar a month or something like that and then they lose their Google ranking. They're bad update for them and then they're stuck with like $2 million of inventory they cannot sell. They lost the rankings of for sure. There's a question of diversification and to think about the risk management there. But there's more than that. There are cycles. So even though you may have a competitor that's like dominating the market. Okay, but what's the next battleground? I can go to to start preparing to think more in cycles of a few years. Not just like okay, this year we're doing let's say average in the market, whatever. But okay, look at what I'm preparing for. The next battleground where I can take them ahead in the curve.

Yeah, that's right. You have this free horizon of your projects. You have the immediate three months horizon, you have the one to three years horizon. And the best companies out there can have three to ten years horizons where you invest right now into the future. The idea is that few companies are having the luxury to invest in the future. And for instance, we've been lucky to identify a new trend and to identify what our customers going to need. And I've been drying my mouth talking about customer value optimization and now we have 500 students which are certified with these systems. And mainly I think this is going to be the next wave in e commerce for agencies as well, to come up with ways to actually make their customers not only survive, but also thrive. And the data driven agencies, I think are the ones that are going to win the game. And the e commerce companies as well, which are using data and patterns and anomalies and they're easily spotting trends so that they can make decisions based on data, not on, let's say, assumptions.

Exactly. This is an amazing conversation. Valentin, we're coming on top of the hour. Do you have anything else top of mind that you'd like to share before we finish this episode?

I think what I want to share with our audience is that we have these free courses in our CVO academy. Customer behavior is one of them. There's another one, it's a mini course around customer lifetime value optimization. I invite them all, anyone that wants to level up their e commerce game to get it. It's completely free. And as the last thought, I think it's crucially important to believe in your North Star metric. So if you're an entrepreneur, if you're an employee, if you determine what's your North Star and envision your, your best future, your brightest future, and I can guarantee that if you make efforts toward that bright future and if you believe in it, if you make efforts towards it, if you learn how to tackle it, I think you're going to get there. But I think a few people are so determined to keep the eyes on the prize. Right? Where do you want to go if you don't have that? Maybe it's time to, to realize where you want to go. If you have a company, where do you want to go with that company? And this is. This stuff works. I mean, I can tell you I'm a former poor kid from Bucharest. I had no money to buy a pretzel. I've been building four companies now. We have a lot of contracts with big companies coming to us and we help them with those advanced things around data driven growth for them. And I've seen this on my own skin that this stuff works. So that being said, that was it from. From Migio.

Yeah. And just to go with what you just said here about having that North Star vision and all that, it's Becoming more important than ever. People have been talking about this in business also forever before, but now people are demanding it in the employment market, the new generation coming in or with COVID There was that great resignation of a lot of people questioning their life choices, reorganizing their lives and working from home. And there's a big shuffle happening in the workspace. And people want to have a meaningful cause to work for and to have clear declaration of values from companies like, okay, what do you stand for? Tell me clearly and it's not better not be some dusty thing printed on a wall. I want to see that the company is living those values. Hiring, firing, rewarding and reviewing based on the values. And where are we going? What's the company's mission?

And.

And not everything has to be a big mission like Elon Musk. Let's bring mankind on Mars and be a multi planetary species. Okay, that's. That's the craziest of all vision. And worse, he might actually pull it off. But you need to declare a clear vision and mission statement for the company and it makes a difference in the alignment of the whole team, performance of the whole team. And anyway, it's going to be more and more just the table stake of the game because a lot of employers are clarifying this right now. And it's not just like greenwashing or anything like this. It has to become authentic values that live with a clear North Star of what's your company's mission?

That's right.

Well, Valentin, this is a very enjoyable discussion on CEO mindset. Thank you for being here. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way?

I'm a LinkedIn person, so you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm almost daily there and if you think I can help you out, just shoot me a message.

Awesome. Thank you, Valentin.

Thank you, Guillaume. And thanks everyone for watching or listening to us today. Sam.