8 Actionable Ways To Grow Your DTC Profit RIGHT NOW (With Mehtab Bhogal) transcript

probably the first time you do this you'll save anywhere from 10% to 30% on shipping we'll go to FedEx and say hey look you know we need to goti rates this is just not competitive relative to what else we're receiving quoteswise and we'll show them the rates were being quoted from another carrier whether there's laser ship or someone else and they'll just say no usually and they'll say okay great we're turning you off then and we will just turn them off and we don't lose money matab Bogle is one of my favorite thinkers in all of e-commerce a unique think thinker who is approaching a lot of issues with real insight Clarity and just absolute as he would say he's an absolute tactics monkey just wants to make businesses work better and therefore as the co-founder of card Adventures which uh has a majority stake in a couple of e-commerce Brands and a minority stake and a whole bunch more is seeing all kinds of great e-commerce uh wisdom being applied to his Brands and so he is on the show today to talk to you about how to do it for yours this is going to be an incredibly practical actionable episode you will you will in the middle of this episode at some point you will pause it and you will go do something that will save you money make you more profitable I promise you that like I mean it I promise you that you're going to like it so let's get in with matap Bogle co-founder of card Adventures right now hello matap how are you today good how are you good I am delighted to do this I actually am a bit embarrassed that we haven't done this so far you and I've talked a few times in the past we've always Leed it out yeah I know and uh and and I remember I hung up with you one time immediately called Taylor holiday and said have you seen this mayab Bogle fella he's like like five times smarter than most people that I come across so um yeah you're you're you're yeah you've actually been humbled about that one I've cited it in the past you're like I'm not sure I know anything I just work hard and care about uh profitable businesses so but but it's not true you actually are smarter than the vast majority of people that I've been around and I always feel like I hang up a conversation with you having learned a lot so um so it's ridiculous you haven't done this before we'll have to we'll have to make it happen so thanks for taking time I love the podcast I I think I've listened to like probably 80% of episodes that's that's really good um I you just have to tell me which 20% you're skipping at some point um yeah um yeah um yeah I'm always glad for that kind of feedback um okay give people the very quick overview before we get into your Tweet inspired list of how to make more money so um I mentioned it in the intro but you the co-founder of card Adventures you guys have some majority stakes and some Brands uh a bunch of minority stakes and Brands uh in the DDC space um but maybe just tell people a little bit more so they know kind of who you are what you what you do and also when they finish this episode and I tell them to go to C ventures.com that way they know who should be doing that yeah for sure so we've been investing in um DTC brands for God I I've been investing in DTC brands for probably six or seven years now um we've investing together as C of Ventures my co-founder and I for about six years so um we make flexible Investments across both either control or minority equity which means we don't control the company um as well as debt or Equity or a combination of both um lately it's been a lot of the combination of both bucket um and we we take pride in adding a lot of value very very quickly which is part of the reason I tweeted out what I did because I think a lot of investors say their value ad but um I think we really want to show how deep we go and how tactical we are um relative to most Equity investors you mentioned uh while we're chatting a second go that like your co-founder will get on a plane and help you cut your Opex by 30% like in a week right like something like that yeah he's the one who get stuck with all the boring operational works so he's implemented Le at a handful of our companies he goes on um painful sourcing trips Etc so most of what I'm telling you I just stole straight from him he's the smart one I just kind of sit around and just repost what he says that is uh I've I found drafting off of people smarter than me is a really good way to build a following so it works yeah well I mean it's funny though because this actually is a nice segue into this because um you know I I've mentioned in a few places recently that sort of like one of my one of my least favorite pieces of advice in e-commerce right now is test everything um I I actually think that people should have almost the exact opposite perspective which is learn from smart people who have already done it so you don't have to test everything testing everything is actually incredibly slow and costly and uh and really hard to arrive at good conclusions and so when you when you see a list like you you had tweeted the other day that is now something we can sort of jump off from and I will I will link the original tweet although I think we'll go quite quite a bit beyond it um you know there's there's just like so much to learn that you shouldn't test you should just go do you should just stop what you're doing right now and you should go do it like I said in the intro you should pause what you're doing pause the episode at some point in this and just go fix the things that we talk about so let's let's actually let's do the first one and in fact it was this first one that really grabbed my attention I'd never heard anybody say anything like it before but you talked about how to cut expenses on shipping and this is something I've really fascinated by I've I think everybody is sort of annoyed at paying the prices that they have to pay to shipping carriers and e-commerce but it's this part of the business that is it's to me has always felt inescapable these gigantic companies that you're dealing with u you know USPS FedEx UPS whatever um and you're trying to negotiate with them as this little nothing thing in their revenue pool you know you know even if you're a midsized e-commerce business you're still such a small thing to them um and so it's always felt like a really hard thing to tell people like here's how you actually cut shipping expenses besides get big enough to be by Coastal and you know ship to zone three instead of zone 5 you know so like talk to me about this strategy you have for how to get price reductions with vendors and particularly with your shipping carriers yes so we use shipping carriers as a good example um and we'll go through a handful of things tied to that um yeah so let's go through the shipping carriers first actually uh the big thing with vendors in general is that a lot of them will not take think you seriously unfortunately unless you're willing to turn them off completely and step away from them it's completely true with FedEx completely true with UPS especially over the last two three years where were you know they they're kind of in a position of power it's changing a little bit over last year but since 2020 they've been a lot less friendly um and what we found is you have to turn them off or you have to start moving volumes a lot of the smaller carriers um like there's there's a handful and based out of Texas like laser ship Etc uh that you can move some volume to or you can turn FedEx off completely and use a gray hat service like ship Haven to um basically they have accounts that you can ship off of so we use that whenever we want to cycle off a FedEx and get into negotiation mode and unfortunately this is what we found works best and this is across a variety of GEOS so one of our companies based in California another one's in Utah and then we obviously have a handful of other ones that are more um on on the east coast and we've always found you just have to turn them off unfortunately this won't take you seriously any other way so walk through walk through the actual order of operations here so step one you literally go to your 3pl or your I mean like just AB stop shipping with a certain shipping carrier right so let's say it's fed yeah I mean we'll we'll go to FedEx and say hey look you know we need to negotiate rates this is just not competitive relative to what else we're receiving quoteswise and we'll show them the rates we being quoted from another carrier whether there's lasers ship or someone else and they'll just say no usually and we'll say okay great we're turning you off then and we will just turn them off um and we don't lose money because we use ship Haven which basically beats their rates no matter what it's a great hat service um we haven't had any issues using them in four or five years I I don't have any relationship with them but yeah yeah um that that's how we do it so yeah okay and then once you do that they're willing to say like well hold on maybe we can the rep will come right back every time 100% of the time never fails the rep comes right back they're like oh no what can we do to win your business back blah blah blah and um just works every time with the shipping carriers unfortunately I mean like obviously I prefer not to do this all but it's the only that works so incredibly actionable I'm going to immediately turn around and reach out to my um to some of my clients and just say like go do this thing now because it is uh it is so awesome have you done this across the board with shipping carriers yeah probably we've probably done this like 20 or 30 times now um what do you how much money do you think that has resulted in Saving uh oh millions millions of dollars really oh that's millions of dollars like total but on average I'd say probably the first time you do this you'll save anywhere from 10% to 30% on shipping and that depends if you integrate other you should be integrating a lot of the smaller carriers too like lasers ship um they're great they totally work and it depends on where you are geographically because some of them will not service to you like for example DHL laser ship and a few of these other guys they won't operate in some of the smaller States so it does depend on where you are but it's definitely worth looking into and there's if you just Google it you'll find a bunch of them if you and if you're working with a 3pl um to to do this sort of thing are you like doing that in concert with your 3pl at all or are you just calling the ship carer directly well it depends on the three p and your relationship with the three p and if you know you're using your own postage accounts or their postage accounts Etc but the the same concept applies across vendors in general I found American vendors are better about this like they don't need to be turned off usually unless they are like a very strong Monopoly or a larger company that's where you typically have to do that but if it's a smaller 3p they tend to be more reasonable around negotiations um and I would really approach with 3pls were're we're more collaborative so we'd work with them to they redesign packaging Etc or just go and look at how they're picking and packing our products um yeah makes sense is um what about um let's let's take that out to that next level then vendors in general you have this piece of advice that you say just to cleare that you're going to pay them 3% less over the next 18 months like to tell me like this is a this is a bold move and I think a lot of people would feel nervous about doing this uh I I don't think you would but tell me tell me about uh this strategy yes there's no real downside to doing this it works best if you can send it from someone kind of authoritative like the CEO or the CFO I like the CFO because everyone just assumes CFO is kind of like you know tough um and it gives us someone to blame because usually like the CEO might be negotiating directly or working directly in product Dev with say a a manufacturer right so you can just kind of force that on the CFO and that way you don't torch the relationship but just sending out an email to all of your vendors saying that you're now paying 3% less and if anyone sends you an invoice without having I guess read that email you just subtract 3% and send it back and just remit that amount of money and say do you not read the email that we sent you and this works probably it'll probably work with 85 to 90% of your vendors when you say it works do you mean you have to get to the point where you just uh pay the 3% less like they won't actually uh or they or were they most times were they just invoice you 3% less I'd say probably 60% of them will invoice you 3% less the other ones will be surprised but that's just their fault for not checking their email that's so funny and uh I like the CFO move too it totally makes sense everybody just expects the CFO is just like some numbers monster sitting in a corner somewhere trying to trying to slash you know whatever you know that personality list like they don't you know whatever was a CEO I'm so sorry my CFOs like uh you know uh really holding me to it you know so yeah basically in any supply chain book you'll see they recommend separating out like the the purchaser from the relationship of like from from being the same person who negotiates if that makes sense so if your job was to be the person pulling the trigger on purchase orders I want someone else who negotiates because you can't help but build a relationship with whoever you're working with on the other side right yeah I easier this advice reminds me a little bit of I remember hearing Moy Ali say a long time ago a long time ago like everything is negotiable it's way more negotiable than you think and you just never try it and you should negotiate everything you can and every two and 3% you could possibly get you should take you know yeah the way we look at it is just like a lot of a lot of um suppliers will just declare a 3% price increase so why don't go the other way I mean I'll just declare a 3% decrease that's that's a great great way of framing it yeah um I love that um anything else on the on the base time on the Baseline uh like sort of vendor relationship stuff like you've got a note here about FaceTime with people like I'm curious to hear you talk about how that plays in and sort of um anything else big picture with like actionable ways to reduce costs with vendors yeah totally so a lot of dtoc Brands end up dealing with manufacturers that are overseas I think it's important to keep in mind that other cultures are much more FaceTime heavy and even in the US there's still like you show up they'll take you much more seriously they'll be much more willing to negotiate than if you didn't show up but overseas that that's probably like another three to four times is important so I think actually going on trips to China India Vietnam wherever you Source from is really really critical and then remembering that there is still there's like a bit of a big man culture in Asia and this is pervasive across a bunch of countries there where people don't like it if you're and even in the US right like people don't like it if they negotiate with you directly purely on cost they'll feel like they lost no one likes to feel like they lost a negotiation what we found works better is saying hey let's work on a new product together that cuts out a lot of the unnecessary things that our customers don't care about and re-engineer it together even if you are essentially just beating them down on price just phrasing it differently tends to help a lot or even pushing for something like terms where they don't realize like they don't think of it the same way as just a pure cash discount even though it functionally is right um and really diving into the the term side I think understanding the financing structure of whoever you're negotiating gamst is really really important uh keep in mind if you're an exporter you have access to State subsidized financing Almost 100% of the time pretty much every country offers some sort of State subsidized um financing function for exporters so uh in China for example the sinosure um in India there's a bunch of subsidies available and it's important just to take it doesn't take too long maybe a few hours just to Google around and see what's available to them and often the the counterparty won't realize that their cost of financing is exponentially lower than yours so if you're D Toc brand that's pretty small let's say 5 to 20 million you're probably paying for un for a debt that's not personally guaranteed you're probably paying anywhere from I want to say 10% to 18% in interest rate depending on again no pH depending on how large you are balance sheet looks like they're paying way less than that they're paying like in some cases they're paying like 3% or something just because State wants to subsidize exports so much so heavily um so if you work with them around that you can often find bigger price breaks that way around terms than just straight up cost um so so basically you're bringing that to them telling them that and saying hey can you finance this instead of me basically I'm going to pay a little bit less because you just have access to better rates than I I mean how are you actually leveraging that bit of information into the negotiation yeah that's totally it or or just getting them to do things like keep more inventory on hand because their cost of holding that inventory is much lower than yours right so you say look there's no risk for you because you're still holding the inventory there there's a little bit of risk it's not like they're shipping it to you and you have it and they don't right so you say hey why don't you guys hold more inventory in stocks that way there's less of a weight time between you placing a purchase order and getting your product still so there's still that same net benefit but they're just holding it on their balance does that Mak sense totally makes sense and then are you are you framing that at that point as this will help me grow which will help me generate more business for you and and by by sort of essentially I mean it's essentially a cash conversion cycle issue at that point right you you're now being able to reduce your lead time make smaller orders and then say to them at the same time like this is going to help fund my business's growth I'm therefore going to order more from you it's just this I need you to leverage your better terms than mine in order to make that happen and now everybody wins yeah exactly most of the time they're totally willing they just didn't understand that Dynamic and again maybe a lot of Brands don't understand the dynamic where it is cheaper for the vendor to hold the inventory on their books so yeah it's also 100% true if you say those things you know it's like this is like such a fundamental pain point for e-commerce brands that like and there's no markup right like for the for them it's just the cost of whatever their inputs where still say labor material cogs etc for you there's still the manufacturer markup right so like their cost the Baseline for what they're holding inventory is lower too plus the cost of financing so it's a win-win yep um all right let's jump over to anything else you want to say about vendors let me just make sure to give you a chance you you've got the yeah I think um most people do not they don't Source nearly enough vendors I think if I'm looking at one component um say packaging I want to talk to 20 to 25 vendors we probably start the list off with 50 and most brands will look at five to eight which is just not enough like you need way way way way way more to actually get somewhere um and then you need to make sure you're visiting Etc getting good samples blah but you need to run a really big process and make sure you actually truly shop the vendor don't just contact five and then three can't do it and then you're left with two and then you pick one that seem kind of okay don't don't do that you need to reach out to like 20 how do you do that relative to the time cost of and how do you sort of weigh that back and forth like I mean this is one of those things where like if you can shave your unit economics uh at all or like help your cash converion cycle it's so fundamental to making the business work better and e-commerce that it's if you're going to spend a lot of time on something it's worth it's one of the things worth spending lot of time on but do you like do you think about you know we could talk later about running really lean and the idea of like shopping 20 vendors like and maybe I'm just thinking this is going to take more time than it has I've certainly never shopped 20 vendors for something before including when I was running a company you know like um but like yeah am am I just thinking about that wrong is it not actually going to take that long or is it just time worth putting in no it definitely takes a little while but I think it's about coming up with a system that works whatever your Niche is um I'm not saying like you purely use Alibaba for sourcing but if you were you would just reach out to more people and I would probably like we have a team that's in China we have a team that's in India that does that so our cost of labor on sourcing those additional vendors is much much lower um so we have someone in China who's reaching out to say 20 vendors in China for packaging versus just one guy in the US yeah okay that yeah that's interesting that makes sense oh the trick we've learned there too by the way is often if you look up a larger company in your space um you can hire someone and I'm not saying like a direct competitor but someone just larger kind of an SL related you can hire someone that works in their supply chain team or on their supply chain team as like a part-time consultant and it's a very big 8020 because you can also piggyback on some of the PO volume um and kind of figure out how things work at a much much better level because they know what kind of Maximum discounts possible with Pacific vendors you heard it right here in the conversation you should be considering offshoring Talent in your e-commerce businesses because the value for all sides just makes so much sense I do that with my friends at more Staffing you can go to more now.co to work with them that's who I staff my business with in the Philippines you have heard lar gavar the CEO of more Staffing many times on this podcast and I am always glad to put her up here because more Staffing is awesome they they find you incredibly high quality talent in the Philippines people with deep e-commerce resumés uh who you can pay a high amount for relative to Philippines salaries but much lower than you would pay for that same talent in the US and find true Killers for your e-commerce business people who are awesome really understand what they're doing well well beyond just thinking about virtual assistance and $5 an hour type uh Filipino hiring so go do that right now go to more now.co if you want to begin to explore uh offshoring talent in the Philippines in your business you'll find incredible hardworking ethical people more Staffing will help you do all of it and they'll even give you a one-year guarantee so if that uh employee does not work out they will uh restaff the employee within one year although it is very very rare I've heard almost no examples of it from anybody I've sent to more Staffing but that's what you can do go check it out right now more now.co all right uh okay anything else on vendors anything else there that's that's another great to uh let me take a look at my little list here yeah do I'd say that's really yeah that's probably probably 8020 yeah that'll save you six to seven figures a year depending on your size like immediately that is so massive and and it will save you that but then of course like if you think about this the way I like you're not just going to put that on the bottom line what that allows you to do is now go acquire customers at a higher row ass or I mean a lower row ass excuse me uh you know on your ads whatever it is and that um allows you to generate more growth faster while just opening up more of your bottom line I've really watched I mean maybe not with these particular tactics but I have at least one brand that has like hammered away hammered hammered hammered away at their margins over time a few different ways including major product development overhauls and um and then also just like negotiating with vendors and getting cogs down and making sure the product was still really good none of this was at the cost the quality of the product um and I mean it ites just like it's just it's hard to really feel how important this is until you do it and you realize that like every couple points of margin that you get at the level of unit economics just makes it so much easier to grow high margin is one of the cheat codes of e-commerce uh running a high margin and so yeah if you can go make these things happen it's just it's just uh tremendously valuable in your business but a lot of times people don't know where to start so this is really practical so okay let's move more into my world go ahead one one more really good example is that I thought kind of broadly applicable and kind of cool we had one company where the cardboard they were using was standard size for all their shipping out um and using a bunch of edge Crush tests which are pretty easy we were able to get our cardboard thickness down quite substantially and Save A Lot on cardboard and cardboard for the company was some huge weird expenses like like half a percentage point or even a percentage point of Revenue was going to cardboard uh so that came down quite a bit and again floods reach to the bottom line just stuff like that right so working with your supplier to re-engineer the product so it makes more sense and cut out anything that's not value added for the customer because the value the customer only cares if the Box arrives like looking okay they don't care if it's you know like a little bit thinner it's not no one's going to notice that or pay attention to it so good uh so good um okay yeah people won't realize how much that half a point of margin matters until like you like model it on your p&l and you're like whoa that was that was $50,000 or you know what I mean or or much more you know it's crazy um and then of course if you actually do the multiple math on that at some point right the $50,000 times six or something like that it's like a huge amount of money um so um okay let's let's move more into a world that I know a little bit better which is the world of digital marketing um you you this is another thing I jumped out with your original tweet because it's something I probably need to say I probably just need to pre-schedule a monthly tweet about this um but it is the scourge of non-incremental branded search in uh your Google ads account which is happening right now in your Google ads account dear listener like it is it is definitely happening and by definitely I mean in 80 plus percent of the Google ads accounts that I look at um so talk through your Insight here and uh and then let's help people save some money on branded search yeah I think we're on the same page as far as our Crusade against branded search but uh the first thing I do is export the keywords that you're actually matching for and you'll be disturbed you'll look at it and you'll say holy I didn't believe this guy talking about branded search at first and I exported it looked at it and now I want to gge my eyes out um yeah ju just really fast just just to just to be really clear because this language is actually a little tricky uh what you want to export is the Search terms not the keywords right uh because the Search terms is actually where you see what words people have searched to uh to land on your ad so so keep going yeah exactly so you know you see what they're actually searching for and you you just be really really alarmed it doesn't take long it takes literally I want to say even if you don't know what you're doing 15 minutes to do um and from there I wouldn't bother running a really fancy incrementality test I would just lower spend by 50% just see what happens and in most cases probably nothing and just see what happens over the course of two weeks and my guess is probably nothing and you'll just save a bunch of money I have um I think there are two elements of this uh strategy so the first is many if not most uh folks have in their Google ads accounts um some version of a branded search campaign setup right where it's like you're you're targeting branded keywords and and there's been a lot of ways to do this over time Google has changed a lot but basically some version of Rand search right so um so I'm wearing my wander Club hat here so it was for the wander club which is a client of mine they they um you know it would be some Search terms with or with the word The Wander wander club or wander company or whatever you know all the little VAR that people misspell and MPE right Wonder Club whatever so all those trigger your ads okay and that's great go ahead and set that up and maybe you run that at a really high R I'm just going to tell you right now especially if you don't have real competitors really bidding hard against your brand terms something like that that should be running probably at least at a 15 to one at least okay if you even have it at all uh I'm I'm comfortable with running it as long as you're at some kind of ridiculous Rass like that right but there's another thing that you're talking about here which is that when you go and look at your actual like non unbranded campaigns right people call them all kinds of things generic search categorical search non-brand search whatever and then go export your Search terms what inevitably is happening almost all the time you'll see like oh I got a two to one on this campaign or a three to one but when you go and actually export the Search terms what's happening and in fact you don't even have to really do an expert you could just you just pull it up in the Google ads dashboard just look up you know it'll it's under I think Insights search terms is where you see it if you um if you go pull that up what you will inevitably see if you have not been like um sort of diligent about this is that you will see some variation of these terms right so instead of the wander club like I said it'll be Wonder club and it's clearly somebody searching for your brand but you didn't exclude it from your non-brand campaign and that will be actually running at a 10 to one and all the rest of your categorical search will be running out a 0. five and it'll come out to a blended average number that you see at your campaign dashboard level of a two or three or whatever it is right depending on the volume um and so you have to go and ex exclude those Search terms and when you do this there is like real money to be saved in business like again thousands of dollars sometimes per month both in branded search that you're overpaying for and in categorical search that is actually not performing so it's just like a a low Ros campaign that you should be spending less money on Etc and and you can't see it so um that basic process uh gets you really far for just like marking out what is a complete and total nonv valuable cost center in your business um okay so say more anything else that that you want to add to that the other big giveaway is in North beam if you look at the average touch points to convert and time to convert you'll see that it's much faster and it's almost always just on desktop that's because people are going for mobile to go purchase on desktop and you'll notice that it's really bad for any brand with a high number of average items per order because people are more afraid of ordering something incorrectly on mobile or like if you have a complex ordering process where there's a lot of customization you'll see it way worse um and that's like a fun thing you can do in North beam so yeah that is uh makes a lot of sense people definitely forget about that uh like cross device conversion thing um it's it's a real thing the other way I manage this in an ongoing way as somebody who's really not great in Google ads but who um you know I've spent some time in the past I managed Google ads at points and can and um and what I always say to like clients about this is like I can't run your Google ads but I can definitely help you waste less money in your Google ads um and so like I you know I won't be the person to go scale an account for somebody but uh but just wasting less um in uh and the other thing to do the way I would just handle this is in your branded campaign um you just select search impression share as one of your columns and as long as you're ranking for 90 plus percent of the searches for your brand name uh you're ranking for plenty of them and then every day that I am still getting 90 plus percent of the searches for my brand name uh I just tick down my target CPA or tick up my target Roos or TI down my target CPC I don't really care how you B bid it um and until you get down to the point where your search impression share gets below that because what that's doing right it's telling you how often your uh ad is ranking relative to the search term that you're targeting and what I consistently see and smarter Google people than me have have more sophisticated ways of doing this um but what I consistently see is like you start at like okay a $25 Target CPA 95% search term uh search impr fres share right you can get that down to $ five sometimes and just keep going lower and lower and lower and it's just hundreds of dollars thousands of dollars per week depending on how big your brand is uh sometimes per day uh where it was just like Google just taking extra money from you they did you did not need to pay that much for your CPA to rank for those terms and you just it down every single day really unsophisticated way to do it but it works really really great and the other thing I would add to this same point is um this is something that I think is a dead giveaway that your Google ads agency is not doing a good job um is is if you're working with a Google ads agency and there are lots of brand terms floating into search and categorical shopping campaigns this is a very quick way to audit whether or not they actually care about your account or whether or not they're actually doing good work because this is so Google 101 that when a Google ads agency is not like just again being diligent about handling this some of them will even just have scripts that do it for you you know that just make make sure this happens um it for me is like pretty much grounds for firing them it's just like or at least for grounds that for having a very hard conversation and saying you owe me a bunch of money that you said you were not uh that you said you were uh you were you know uh keeping in campaign a versus campaign B and and you're overpaying for so um all of their reports are wrong if they if they've done this so to me it's a dead giveaway of a poorly managed Google ads account um okay anything else to add to to that that was a little bit of a tiid by me because no no nothing on it's a good crusade to be fighting yeah yeah it's again it's just fast um okay U merchandising and collection sort is another uh area that you want to talk about and I love this point because it's something I hear people talk a lot about but frankly don't feel particularly educated on and so guide me matab tell me tell me how to think about the value of how you sort your collections and what you're looking for and how you go do it so this is probably mostly applicable to anyone with a larger catalog um say apparel is always like a classic winner here um the the main thing is paying attention to which say you're sending to collections off of ads paying attention to how products are ranked and why they're ranked that way and having some sort of logic the gold standard is like gross profit per click from The Collection level um which you used to be able to do with another layer on top of Google ads but it's changed now and now it's way more complex to do in G4 probably need a de for that but I did I actually wrote like a really detailed blog on how to do this step by St totally free um but the the goal is like let's let's uh let's make sure to link that so that that uh uh merchandising blog post um uh is in the show notes of this episode so okay so keep going yeah so basically you want to make sure you don't have really low converting Products near the top you don't want to have if you're an apparel you don't want to do something like rank a product with really limited size coverage up top because it's super frustrating for the customer if say you sell shoes and you only have size six left or something uh you'll see like your your your efficiency with ads decline you'll wonder why and it's because you're sending people do a collection where the top few product the size coverage is really limited really bad and again you can expand this out this logic out to email to the way your menu is structured that's made a huge difference um and this a very very consistent way to increase aov primarily is what we've noticed um and again you can expand the same logic to things like suggested products that show up or other products that are linked within a certain product display page and it's usually really big lift it takes maybe a few hours to do if you want to do it a relatively unsophisticated Way by looking at something like um you know maybe page value or some other proxy but most of the time we come up with I don't want to call like an algorithm or anything just like a simple formula depending on the brand and kind of what we found works it's really easy to AB test which is really nice um in Shopify you can duplicate a collection and just change the sword order for one of them and just send some traffic to one LP not LP sorry well it do all but some traffic to one collection yeah and then the other one to the other one and doesn't take any Dev work super super simple don't need any tools even uh you can just do that in Facebook if you want and you'll have results fairly quickly uh that is so helpful I think the step-by-step guide will be really useful to people make sure to follow up on that you should like uh you know put an email address gating on that after before I put this in the show notes M to heaven and start building your list because I I like I would I would gladly give you an email address to get that piece of content it's uh it's uh it's something I hear a lot about but but is the details that you're giving even there are like more than I hear from a lot of people a lot of the time right so yeah um you know if I if I think about the notion of um uh like how to actually go what to Target how to think about split testing it all those kinds of things I think it's I think it's h it's hard to it's it sounds great like yeah get your highest profit per product um products at the top uh but like okay well how do I actually go about doing that you know so um okay let's see let's see we got a lot of list of help help here for people um let's jump to offshoring this is something you and I have have uh I think both again been fairly public about being valuable I'm a big fan of this talk to me about how you think about offshoring I would say uh to frame this up a little bit being able to run with a lean Opex is one of the fundamental things that both makes DDC a business model at all that's why I think DDC is more than just a channel I think it actually is a business model in in one respect and um and also I think one of the fundamental advantages of D Toc that it scales really well and you can run a very lean Opex um and and that only gets multiplied when you offshore uh so talk talk to me about how you think about offshoring yeah I think there's a lot of false narrative around you know if I hire staff in a different country there's going to be X problem y problem Etc and a lot of that's just because people run a really bad process um so there's a few ways around this you know you can build your own internal process which is what we do or you can Outsource that functionality to someone else like an agency or something to help you pick up those hires um our method is simple we use Jazz HR this goes for a US based tyring to just in general um we use an ATS like that to get around posting limitations on LinkedIn and indeed uh you post a bunch of title variations and that lets you get way more inbound applicants uh and again this applies to the us as well and from there we have like a test that's built into jazz HR that we structure just to get rid of like the bottom um people who are just spamming resumés Etc and then we follow like the process from the book who uh which kind of goes through how to hire people and it's really really good I'd highly recommend it um and and that's basically the gist of it and again if even if you need someone that say and and you're not comfortable hiring in like a totally separate continent or something Canada's still 25 maybe I'm biased because I'm Canadian but Canada's still 25 to 35% cheaper for a lot of roles because the job market isn't as competitive and are dollar is much weaker than US Dollar on top of that you don't have things like payroll taxes Etc to deal with so it what if we end up with a a low quality nothing employe like you you know from Canadian yeah just filthy Canadians were horrible yeah no I mean I think I think that point is so helpful right that like you just start by thinking about this I know the UK is drastically cheaper as well like uh um just talk I remember talking to uh to one uh operator there and he was telling me about like what salaries are and I was like what like I think if London is an extremely expensive city how come the salaries are so you know whatever um and so that sort of surprised me but um but yeah I think that candidate point is great I I think the other mistake people make is that they they believe that offshoring is a path only to like virtual assistant level help they just and I I really think part of this is because of things like accents and languages they they they just have this idea that there's like it's just a subconscious bias thing I don't think people are you know evil here I just think like you just assume when it's a little little harder to communicate with somebody or they're from a country that is you know less economically developed or something than the US which is like almost every country right like it's like they just get this idea that um that like that means you're gonna get a lower quality employee I've just found that's that's almost totally wrong and it's you know I I've been really public about this with with my relationship with more Staffing who is sponsoring this episode and who I've built my team with that's all in the Philippines people have deep e-commerce rumes and one of the things that people really underrate um is that uh is that by by paying above market rate in the country that you're hiring in you attract the best talent and so this is one of the ways to work against any like Talent drain issues and so um so you end up getting really good quality people with really good resumés and certainly that's been the case for me I've never uh let somebody go from that I've offshored um and on my team I have a team lead in the Philippines who is like incredible I hope she works with me forever and uh yeah I'm I'm trying to go deeper with that partnership all the time because I'm so impressed with what they what they bring um so yeah I I I'm a huge fan of this advice and think that basically if you're in office then you probably need to think a little differently about this but if you're not in office um and and I understand why someone would want to be in office there's some culture value there and some of those things but if you're not in office like it's just like you you should absolutely be thinking really broadly about remote it doesn't have to be the Philippines I I've got another good friend who who does some stuff in South America you've hired in Mexico a lot is that right one of our companies got rid of everyone and moved everything to Mexico entirely there's like two US employees left how did it work out totally fine it's great like the culture there's much better uh we're very laam heavy and now like that includes Columbia as well just because of the time zone overlap and then a few other things like if the opts for that company are in Mexico it's helpful if people speak Spanish so um y it's been great no real complaints and then the other thing too is like we have some team members in India for example who've been educated in Australia and then they moveed back to India because of immigration issues or whatever and now you have someone who went to school in Australia but is the price of in India so I mean it's incredible do you speak any other languages yeah I speak Spanish it's kind of mediocre very bad French it's mandatory here in Canada Punjabi which is like my my native language and then I speak a little bit of Hindi because they're really really similar and then just English so yeah okay yeah only five yeah that's it well a lot of them are really similar like they don't count no sure yeah it's good um are you communicating with over with offshore teams in English Prim primarily or in other languages oh yeah all English yeah this is another thing people I think underrate like just people all over the world grow up learning English so they English is awesome it's changed completely like my relatives um just because they grew up watching say YouTube videos in English now like it's it's changed completely it's like my relatives in India for example they all speak English and not because they made a conscious effort to learn it but because everyone's consuming American culture yeah yeah and I know like um in one of my first conversations with with uh the folks at more Staffing one of the things that there CEO is telling me her name is laara uh who's she's been on my show a few times and I've got a few sponsored episodes with them like those are not just like hard cells go listen to that and get a sense of what like those cultures are like but the um one of the things that she says is um is that yeah like you know her kids whatever like they all grow up speaking speaking English in school as well you know and then of course they're consuming content like you said and so like it's like English is not really a second language for for for a lot of those folks you know probably probably at home they still speak toolic but like they're very comfortable in English you know and and I know that's true across the world as well so um yeah and I think your point about Canadians is is a great Point like even Canada yeah you guys are great can Canadians are great everybody likes Canadians man um all right uh let's see okay we got a lot of other things we could go through some bigger ones and some smaller ones matab what are the what are the most important things left I like the cash can we do the cash one quick yeah let's do it yeah so first thing is get a 1we cash flow model rolling this is helpful just so you can see exactly how the cash dynamics of your business work you don't get caught um being low on cash than having to do something like take out a loan that you don't want to at like a really high rate or just going out of business right no one wants that to happen and a 13we cash flow model you don't have to be an accountant to learn how to run one it's not that hard it's it's painful very very painful timec consuming the first time you'll get exponentially faster it's totally worth doing there's a few good uh there's a few courses floating around online I don't know how good they are but uh and I know Andrew from EF posted a free guide so yeah or just go to my website uh and enter your email address in the footer or in the popup there uh I have like a four essentially Comm resources kind of thing for free um it doesn't I mean it doesn't have to be my resource it's fine but like uh if you go and you get my my little like lead magnet for for free Central e-commerce resources one of those is a a cash flow model it's just sort of templatized pre-built so you can just got to enter your numbers and there's some guidance on there as well so yeah go go go check that out but yeah okay so if you're not using 13 13 we cash flow you're running e-commerce business you got to do it go for it so that's that's number one and then what should people do with that yeah so from there you'll be able to understand the implication of what happens for example if you have better terms with vendors or you're better at managing your inventory so one of my favorite examples is learning how much how far your payables can be pushed back with certain vendors so for example Facebook will not turn you off until you're 22 days late or 24 days late to pay a bill if you're on net terms with them so you're not actually getting net 30 with them you're getting net 30 plus 22 days um which is obviously a much better deal so and there's no penalty or anything for that so you should test that but a good like understand how the m so you're saying if you use a Facebook line of credit yep is that right yeah do you find do you have some workaround way where you pay that line of credit with a credit card and push it out further people used to do this you could do something like with plastic I think but then they would charge you fees and like the math would be really bad like the E would be pretty high but um let me ask you let me ask you another question about that really fast um your credit card already has essentially net 45 terms depending on on average right that's essentially what what it what it works out to um uh but of course you also get the like cash back or the points or whatever it is like that what how do you weigh the trade-off between the uh say 52 day terms that you're deting with Facebook versus the uh versus the you know average of 45 plus the cash back with the credit card yeah we just look at the 13we cash model of the business and what their true e is like the effective interest rate that the business pays and what their credit availability is and what the whole liquidity stack looks like I show another blog on this because I'm a weird loser but it's totally free just details how to build your debt stack um and kind of walks through some of the pluses and minuses of using certain tools that is also I'm I'm going to declare right now LinkedIn the show notes uh you gotta you got to put an email capture on those matab come on I really should um you're never gonna be a big influencer if you don't you don't get those email addresses come on um yeah I think the really cool thing is when you actually go and you run the math so for example if you extend pay lables out say 30 days reduce inventory by 15 days then you reduce the year's costs for goods and services by 12% so that's like 30 plus5 yeah exactly but it just it's like it's pretty wild right like you don't think of it it's like okay how how hard is it to push some things back 30 days and then um you know manage your inventory tighter in a better way that reduces the amount you have to have on hand by 15 days it's not that hard it's totally doable for most businesses and it's a pretty big reduction in cost effectively yeah um how are you getting 30-day terms with uh with vendors or whatever ises that go back up to the first point that we talked about where you're just putting that into those negotiations yeah exactly getting on a plane going there just walking through how something like sinos share is just so much cheaper for them and like beneficial for both of us if they start using it Etc yeah the notion that you can have 12% less cash tied up in your business and for very cheap financing yeah this comes back to what we're talking about earlier but it's like man that is like a huge huge value for your ability to grow um and yeah it makes makes a ton of sense so again that your vendor should be happy about that their bill to you is just going to get bigger if they help you do that so that's good um yeah okay so we talked about that um what about um you you know you have another note Here sign off on every expense have managers walk through their quarterly expenses and justify each line item this is a really good piece of advice uh I I've heard some people like one thing people do is they'll turn off their credit cards every single year uh like just cancel them and get new ones and that way like a bunch of your sort of uh you know software that you subscribed to or whatever will hit uh oh your credit card couldn't process it'll kick you an email and then you will it will it will sort of force you to evaluate whether or not you still want that software and it's a really fast way to sort sort of automated way basically to reduce some software bloat in your business um you have this other one which is which is sign off on every expense uh it's it's slightly different than what I just said but uh but tell me about the logic here yeah you can do it either way but I think having people actually justify the expense and explain to you why it's needed um is really really critical because it creates the right kind of culture and the right kind of pace and going forward and I mean every expense like even if it's something that's like $100 they should explain it like hey why did we have to spend $100 keep mind it's not just $100 it's like how much revenue did you have to bring in to create the contribution dollars to cover that $100 right it's a lot more usually depending on what your margin structure is like right like it could be it like say you're running a business at like 20 30% contribution margin like that's a lot of Revenue you have to generate to cover for $100 it's not just $100 it's a lot of Revenue so I think when you walk people through that math and explain why you're doing it they really appreciate it and I we've never received push back against this people actually like it and they like saving the company money for them it turns into a game like it's fun to see where they can cut costs yeah I this is not my instinct I tend to be a little bit Loosey Goosey about this kind of thing if if it's like a price on a cost on that level um but I I think this is one of the things I'm just like my instinct is wrong about and the reason I think that is that I've just hear this from good well-run companies and CEOs for a long time did you ever read the I've mentioned this book before about the book The Outsiders about about CEOs yeah it's a good book The just Chronicles sort of the best performing Public Market CEOs over the last bunch of years and what was it what was what are they like and one of the like obvious through lines in that is that a lot of them are just cheap they just like they don't have giant private jets they're I'm honest with people I'm Indian I'm not I I can't pay that much in expense it's just I got to be cheap the way is that an Indian culture thing is that like totally totally yeah that's funny yeah all right um okay anything else um that you that you that you think is like crucial to hit U got some stuff on aov which is always a good topic anything else uh I like what do you think of the product line as a portfolio oh I love this point oh go go on that product line as a portfolio is is uh is so helpful I think too many SKS especially this is really really hard when you're running a brand with a lot of SKS like say apparel or something I think too often product lines and the SKS within those product lines and the child skews within those products um they just end up existing for no real reason and no one knows why they exist and there's no justification for why they exist and if you think of it as something like a portfolio of stocks and think of yourself as like a hedge fund manager or something would you keep a stock around in your portfolio if it's just languishing and not doing much and tie up that Capital because keep in mind for every dollar that's not productive you're basically losing that money and throwing it away You're lighting it on fire right um and it's actively hurting your business especially if you have to hold the inventory somewhere physical you're paying for all that and it it's a huge drag on productivity brain power everywhere Etc like Ops Ops really feels it especially if you're on your own manufacturing or fulfillment operations um so I think getting really aggressive about looking at it like it's a portfolio looking at what's earning the highest return what about the lowest return um and obviously there's other considerations right like you might have certain skews that are like the milk and bread um for your company like you know how grocery stores they'll price Staples really low to bring people in and make money off of ancillary things like seasonings right um like you know why is this why is this bottle of seasoning $7 feel like Andrew in shopping at Whole Foods that's what happen get not shopping Whole Foods I'm not shopping at Whole Foods and then um so so the stuff like that or or what ancillary support does each skew require right so certain SKS maybe you can only source it from a specific vendor but now you're creating a whole vendor relationship that has to be managed for a skew that maybe you're not ordering that much of or it's not generating that much and contribution dollars doesn't turn over very quickly or maybe it's just a total pain in the ass to fulfill and it causes a lot of drag on Ops right um I think talking to the people actually managing the day-to-day in your Ops in your Warehouse if you're doing that is really helpful here if you were like hey what what are 10 products just cause the most problems for you they'll tell you and you'll like oh I didn't realize that was happening um or you can there's a lot of ways to do this right like you can look at reviews call the ones that are bringing in the worst reviews have the highest breakage and Transit Etc um and then even looking at things like okay with these specific vendors for these skes what are terms like how flexible are they how are they to work with are they total pay and should we even carry these um and it'll again it'll be different for every company there'll be a bunch of factors that you want to rank that by but I just think having a approach and doing something on a regular basis helps you get somewhere and it will improve the efficiency of your company a lot because keep in mind in in e-commerce we're taxed on things like inventory right um you don't you don't get threat that off as an expense you get dist destroyed when you grow and your inventory keeps growing your cash position can get annihilated if you're not careful so watching that your inventory is an asset not a liability right so like it's like it yeah when you that cost goes out the door yeah is not a write off it's the opposite of a write off actually brutal so yeah you have to be really really careful and watch that closely and you'll find that has an outsized impact on your ability to grow because of the net cash available in your business um and it's it's really the main failure point for any business right is in in eCommerce at least is bad inventory and and ordering the wrong things the wrong time running into supplier troubles Etc the more you can mitigate that that's probably 70% of the risk in any inventory based business yeah this is a a really helpful point I think what people sort of forget uh is that like uh that sort of how your company holds and sells products is the whole company in DDC like it's like it's just basically is the business right like everything supports that basic thing and if you get that wrong you are in in like real real trouble and I once you start thinking about products this way it I just think it generally leads to all kinds of good insights um one one thing I've done sometimes for clients is I've I've uh factored in the unit economic and LTV profile plus the cost of advertising and actually built like you know a row ass Target but then actually turned that Ras Target into a return on invested Capital calculation so you know you see a brand with extremely high LTV and it's like oh you get 100 % return on invested capital in a year compare that to and it's actually better than that because of the timing of inventory payments but it's just too annoying to do the math of sort of when all that would happen so um so if you actually annualize though the the the costs of when the inventory goes out the door and um and you start to do that and you start to really see the difference between advertising product a versus product B because of the LTV profile or getting a subscriber versus a non-subscriber or something like that and and it becomes the justification to really think differently about where you put your advertising efforts and those sorts of things because you're just thinking about your you're this way right and the the comparison I always use right is if if let's let's say that I mean 100% is Extreme right but even if you get 50% return on invested Capital that's very very very good and um and if you can uh do that a lot of times in a year it's even better uh but the uh you know compare that to your index fund portfolio right you're GNA get eight to 10% or something on your on your index fund so like it becomes a justification to go oh how do I make sure to spend more money against this product and move it faster because it's really high margin or high LTV or whatever it is and that really helps the other thing I would say uh I'm actually curious if you've done this in some of your negotiations is when you start to realize really what your hero products are um you can move away from a sort of blanket strategy about how much inventory to keep versus not and when to reorder um and even in negotiations you can start to think about like hey I don't need you to give me terms on everything I just need you to give me terms on product a because that's actually the one that I'm going to stock the most that's going to help me grow the fastest whatever I got these other ones that make up 20% of my business that's fine but if you could just help me here you can actually sort of like uh maybe potentially um uh Target the sort of areas of efficiencies in your business around the things that have outsized influence on your total performance now as you're saying you may actually want to cut the other 20% anyway you know um that that may be the the ultimate implication of it but um in my experience by like if you start to think about getting certain products right as opposed to getting the whole thing right it can actually help you hone in on the more specific places where you can generate better outcomes in your bus yeah and that really goes into the last point there which is the quality of Revenue um I think product Le growth is always the healthiest type of growth you can have and most sustainable type of growth so for example if you're selling something like if you're doubling down on a product line that's tyon LTV you know that the statisfaction for customers is higher because they're coming back and ordering more right and that's a higher quality of Revenue um than something that's just one off they're not really returning because you don't have to reacquire that well sort to do sometimes but you don't have to theoretically reacquire that customer gain and less it's going to fluctuate less there'll be more stability there and the more stability there is in the in the business around Revenue that comes in the easier it is to plan the easier it is to hit inventory for casting Etc so it all Cascades and it creates much more net profit you can be accurate with things like that yep that's awesome people ask me with some regularity what I use to do all of my event tracking website tracking for my Facebook ads they wonder what third party pixel I am using and I am using Billy b. a b. that's because Billy has an incredible combination for a serers side tracking Tool uh pixel integration for your Facebook ads of incredible quality your event match quality score will definitely go up if you switch to Billy especially from the Native Shopify Facebook integration uh it will go up and is also incredibly easy to install and use uh like within 3 minutes you will probably have Billy working and used as your pixel on your website it's also incredibly affordable most brands that I am talking to will need to sell I don't know between two and four more items per month uh with Billy's pixel uh to make it worth the cost and the first month is actually only $1 so you can try it out for yourself essentially for free and uh and it is really really awesome uh serers side tracking lightning fast easy setup that works as well or better than any tool that I know of in the market my clients use it if you are looking to upgrade your Facebook ads pixel you should go do that at Billy b.

Ai and if you're not looking to upgrade your Facebook's ads pixel you are missing out particularly as I said if you are using the Shopify uh Native integration for your Facebook ads go to Billy b. and go look into it explore it today okay let's see we're running out of time here anything else that you think is really important I would love to hear you talk at some point we should just do a whole other episode on management I I've heard you talk a lot about EOS and scaling up and and what's been useful to you there but maybe that can be a subject for the next one um because there's probably more to say about how to approach that than than elsewhere and I would say somebody as tactical as you is often rarely in my experience also the person who is uh as interested in uh thinking carefully about operations and and some of those things but this is another like solved problem so I think it's a a good topic for a future episode else like yeah maybe the easy product expansion one when do you think of that yeah talk about that sure so um one of our favorite things to do is post purchase surveys which I'm sure a lot of you are running I don't have a recommended app uh we use fairing um I'm sure the other ones are just as good but the first question you should you should change the first question in there to be something like do you want to take a survey to potentially win a $500 gift card and you'll see that your resp I learned this from a random slack someone posted it the response rate went up like probably 8X to 12x what we were getting so we're getting a huge amount of responses in that postp purchase survey and it's amazing for General data but our favorite one for product expansion is ask and a $500 gift card costs you like $100 for right yeah yeah exactly and you can do that giveaway away once a month or something but anyways so um what we like to do is ask what their budget was for the purchase so let's say they come to your website your aov is $80 but people are coming to your website and they actually had a budget of 120 so you're leaving all this money on the table and that's a very bad thing uh it's a good thing for you because it means there's room to grow but it means that you know obviously you're failing to capture that value and I'd say probably 80% of the time that's what happens very rarely do we see it inverse in which case it means uh you're probably have a really strong or something but um it means you're leaving cash on the table you need to figure out what else it is that they would be willing to pay for so you want to then pull those customers that replied that way and Survey them deeper call them text them we have someone manually texting people in the Philippines to drill down and get that data because we find the response rates much higher do like a manual survey that way not expensive um and the math totally works out so you want to think like a hotel right so if you're booking a hotel when's the last time you went to a hotel website there's only one option never there always six to 10 options right and they impressed tremendously like say the base room's like 400 a night and then the max option will be like two grand a night and the reason for that is to Value like to get as much value capture out of the customer as possible and you want to do the same thing you want to figure out you know what's the good better best framework for that product line or that offer and how do I capture the maximum amount of value that is so helpful and thoughtful it gets to a a side point that uh that I don't want to be too distracted on but I've always thought people using post purchase surveys for attribution as the main goal is um is silly uh both because I don't think they're very helpful for attribution but also uh even more than that there's just such better questions you can ask like one we used to ask for for one of my uh Brands when I was at 4400 was is this a gift and that helped us so much because first of all you could tag people differently in your in your follow-up marketing if you wanted to give purchasers are really different than not- purchasers um but even more than that it was just like incredibly helpful to think about for advertising uh and you could see during different times of the year of course like oh look 80% of these purchases are gift oh that helped us realize we're a gift brand and what does that mean for how we think about marketing and for how we think about like how we're talking to our customers whatever your question is incredibly helpful the idea that you would actually think about how to merchandise your product line to to generate uh you know basically capture as much of that uh wallet as somebody is is coming ready to spend on your business and um and especially especially especially if you are like a good operator building good quality products that you're proud of right like you're going to Delight the customer more as they as they find the right thing for them by giving them what they're looking for at the budget that they have to to pay it's like it's there's nothing mercenary about it's like great it's it's a great way to like serve your customer really well and get them the things that they're looking for and add a little Delight to their life so U you know one of the things I've actually appreciated about you on that on that front really fast is just like the occasional photos of wood flowers uh for which is one of your businesses of just like like pride in the product right where it's like you're not just like trying you know just meticulously figuring out how to get the money from somebody it's like so many people I I talked to in e-commerce are thinking about that right they they love their product they care about it they care about their customers all you're doing is just finding a way to like um you know sort of find the interaction between your product and the customer in the exact right spot and the same at the same time kind of deliver on the value they want at the end of the day products like 90% of it right you can do whatever you want marketing but it doesn't really matter if the product sucks you can't you can only do so much and I'm sure you've run across all like a few companies where they're growing just at a crazy rate with really good cash flow and the products just totally doing all the work right like they don't even have turned anything like that and they're just crushing it you're like oh my God if I add just a bit of marketing Secret Sauce here it'll explode but um it's cool to see when product like pmf really crashes it and rips yes yep all right um we're out of time that was a great one to end on um this is so helpful I think this is a great episode I think people are going to love this we'll definitely have to have you back for something else in the future whenever you got time um so um so any let's let's make sure to send people to you you have money that you would like to put into e-commerce business bu if I understand correctly talk about that and talk about what kind of people should reach out to you to not only get your money but your brain working on their business actually adding value as an investor um tell people what where to go and and uh and what they should be looking for from you cool if you go to Cav ventures.com Ka RTA and then ventures.com L the show notes yep yep we're um we're always looking for D Toc brand and doesn't mean you can't have holesale some of our brands are 60% wholesale 70% wholesale um but predominantly like d Toc heavy or it's a main feature of the company um we're happy to look at deals where you want to sell minority Equity interest or control um and we do a lot of structured Equity deals too so that means you get to sell less equity and there's a debt component to it that's all um we used to do more peer debt but I'd say now we're heavier on structured Equity minority equity and control in that order so we're super flexible always happy to work a deal out um and we have fun looking at businesses so don't be shy reach out we're not we're not very formal and we get excited about looking at businesses where we can a lot of value so if you're Manufacturing in house especially that's super fun for us um I'll send my co-founder down and he'll he'll add all the value and I'll I'll sit back and on podcast reap the financial rewards and yeah podcast yeah great great uh I know that's not true you're one of the hardest working guys in e-commerce and it is shows and it pays off so that's awesome you're also recently married congratulations about that that's awesome uh and uh and so yeah man uh thanks thanks matab uh we will send people there all of the links from this episode are in the show notes go chase them down uh and go work with myab thank you just one of my absolute favorite people in e-commerce so stimulating to talk to so I hope you love that as much as I did uh I would love for you to subscribe wherever you're watching or listening to this episode of the show that would be great share it with somebody who will get some value from it and uh and of course don't forget to follow up with my sponsors more Staffing if you uh are looking to Offshore some Talent like we talked about in this episode that would be great and Billy b l y. go to more now.co and b. a for uh to follow up with them uh that's it for this episode thanks as always for watching for listening you can email me podcast a.com if you've got anything you'd like to say and go find everything including the resources I mentioned at my website hf.com I'll will talk to you next time [Music]