9 Takeaways From Running Meta Ads For 8-Figure Brands In 2025 transcript

It's the end of the year. I'm getting reflective. I've got nine top observations on e-commerce and entrepreneurship this year. As we head into 2026, let's not waste any time and let's get right into my top nine observations of the year. My number one observation is alone worth this video. I think I think if all you did was watch or listen to this observation, you would be in really good shape if you just sort of really heard what I'm saying. for number one and you put it into practice, I think many many brands would go from having brands that don't really work to like good quality brands.

Now, uh so let me just say it and let me just say what the the observation is. Okay, number one, most brands I think are overspending on ads. I think most brands are overspending on ads and I'm going to give you a few specific ways in which they are doing this. I just see this over and over and over again. It's so rare that I see a brand that is not spending enough money on advertising. Almost every brand. And there there's a really obvious reason for this, which is that brands want to grow.

And so they spend ad dollars because they want to grow. Now, I want you to interrogate, and I'm going to come back to this in a little bit. I want you to interrogate the reason you want to grow. But before you do that, I just want to say that thought of in the most like in just the the simplest terms of what kind of return do you get on your dollars? And maybe let's just think about the idea of taking that same dollar and plowing it into the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ or whatever your ETF of choice is, okay, your index fund of choice.

Like if you just took the money you're spending on ads and took it out of your business and put it instead into one of those places, how would it return? What would the return be relative to the ad dollars in your business? I think for a lot of brands, it is literally the case that it would be a better return because your ad dollars are returning negative money. And there are a lot of ways it's doing this. So that the first place is just generally speaking.

Brands so often tell themselves all kinds of things about why it is a good idea for them to spend money that loses money. They work at too thin of a new customer rorowass. They work at too thin of an amme. They are spending all of this money and they're telling themselves, "Oh, we're because we want to grow or because we're learning or because we have to hit a certain percentage revenue, whatever." And it's just bad.

Like, it's just you're just spending money you shouldn't be spending. This happens across the board in your business. It happens on ad channels all the time. I've just talked to brands where they they're like Google ads accounts are just gigantic amounts of waste between branded search and then like what I've come to call Google soup ads like performance max and demand genen ads where where it's like it's sort of you think the ad is one thing but it's actually like a mix of display and search and shopping and video and all this kind of stuff in different places retargeting new customers existing customers whatever I'm very pro machine learning and algorithms to distribute your ad dollars but I just look over and over and I'm like there's so much wasted money here.

It's why I was so happy to take Zetto Marketing, the Google Ads Agency, as a sponsor for the month of December. They're not even sponsoring this episode specifically, but it's like because I I look so often at uh accounts on Google where there's just like tens of thousands of wasted dollars per year. Tens of thousands. It's like a lot of money, right, for seven or eight early figure brand or something like that. You just don't have to be spending that much for it to be a total waste.

I have a client right now that turned off their Google account and it's just like they're not generating more money than they were before, but they're definitely generating more contribution dollars than they were before. It just had no obvious impact on the business in terms of positive outcome and they turned it off after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in the previous year. Now, I don't think they're hundreds of thousands of dollars return no money or anything like that.

But I think what it did is that it produced a negative value when you looked at the actual incremental return. And that is part of the reason the incrementality idea is part of the reason why so many brands are are wasting money is because you you've never actually thought about is your spend generating incremental return. Now this is sometimes a simple question. If you have a really simple media mix you get this simply if you're just running on Facebook ads entirely then like it's fairly simple to see if that's where your new customers are coming from.

If you're not running Facebook, if you're running more than Facebook ads or if you have multiple channels like you have Amazon and DC, you start looking at things like this, it it becomes harder to answer this question, but it is incumbent on you to do it. You must do it. So, it's something increasingly in 2026, like I think it's going to be a major emphasis of AJF growth as an agency is to continue to help brands get real clarity around questions of incrementality, the actual contribution of their spend.

And third, not just increment incrementality. And of course, that word like it's important that we define it. By the way, what I mean is, does each dollar you spend, not just in platform reported rorowass, not just your triple whale rorowass, which lies to you just like everything else does, your northbeam rorowass, like none of these things are your MM, your MTAs, your inplatform, they are all telling you various stories that are various levels of believable and you you shouldn't just trust any of them.

So, incrementality is the way of saying like what is the actual incremental return? What is the actual dollar return on my dollars? How many customers bought from me because of my ad dollars that were not going to buy otherwise? whether they're new customers, existing customers, whatever, whatever the answer to that question is. So, the incrementality in general is a question, but there's actually another place where I think brands are uh oh, by the way, another one is creative testing.

Like, I've talked about this, beat this into the ground, but it's just another area that I think brands are way too comfortable spending money at a negative return. The reason I harp on this all the time is I just see these large line items of wasted dollars and you should put the burden of proof on any item, any line item in your business that shows a negative return. There should be a very strong burden of proof on that line item to on somebody spending that money for you to keep spending it.

They should be able to show you in a very clear way why it is necessary to spend that money if it looks like a negative return. And some of them are some of them are worth spending on still. Okay, but they should be able to make that really really clear. Okay, here's what I was saying though. I got a little distracted. Sorry. The return of marginal ad spend is another area where I think brands I've said this before, but it's a hard concept to understand correctly.

I I've I've trying to illustrate this and I'll I'll give you a little like visual here. If you are uh if you are watching this to understand this concept a little bit more. If you're if you're just listening to it, that's okay. It's I think you're going to be able to get it either way. But um here here's the concept of your marginal ad spend. Okay, if you are spending $10,000 in a day, okay, you are not really spending $10,000 in a day.

What you are spending is multiple buckets of smaller spends. Okay? And I don't mean this at the campaign level. What I mean is everybody knows that if you spend more money on the same ads, in most cases, the efficiency of those ads is going to decline. Okay? So, it's going to hurt performance if you spend more. This, of course, is why you can't scale your spend forever, right? The reason you can't go from $1,000 a day in spend to $100,000 a day in spend, even if your $1,000 day spend is producing a 2 to1 rorowass and you're comfortable with two to1 rorowass, the reason you can't take it to $200,000 is that the more that you spend, the worse the return gets.

And so what that implies is, okay, that not all spend is created equal. In that scenario I just gave you, you didn't really spend $100,000. You spent 100 sets of $1,000. Okay? Uh or of course you could break it up even further than that if you want. Or, you know, a thousand sets of $100. Like all of all of those would be reasonable ways to say this. So you would actually have been able to spend that $1,000 is fine, which implies that the the 2 to1 rorowass that you got on that first $1,000 was real and you should spend that money.

Okay? And that's a good use of your dollars. But the rorowes that you get on dollars, you know, maybe n maybe 10,0001 through 100,000. Maybe that entire thing, maybe that is all bad spend. Like I I don't know. But here's the way I'm I'm visualing this. Okay. So, um so imagine that you are targeting a 1.5 rorowass. Okay. On a $10,000 per day spend, you're targeting a 1.5 rorowass for whether it's a good target or a bad target doesn't matter for this case.

Okay. What I want you to imagine is the way that that 1.5 actually works out in spend. So if you're targeting a 1.5 like or or let me put it a different way. If you have a 1.5 as the number at which you say when I acquire customers at a 1.5 it is a good use of my money. The return on that capital is good. Okay, let's say that's the situation for your business and could be uh whatever. Again, it doesn't matter if it's true or not.

Just just go with it. Okay, 1.5 is there. That actually means that you probably shouldn't be spending in fact almost certainly you should not be spending to a 1.5 rorowass in the ad account. Why? Because your rorowass in the ad account is an average and the average by definition has some dollars being spent under the average and some dollars being spent over the average. And often it's the case that they are wildly varying.

And so if a 1.5 is the bottom tier at which you can acquire customers and have it be a positive return on your money. Okay, if that's the case, then you should probably have an actual rorowass in in the account of I don't know 1.8 or two or whatever, something like that. Who knows? Okay, so here's one way I've illustrated this. This is not from any brand's particular data. This is just like a way of thinking about this.

Okay, imagine that $10,000 per day spend is averaging $15,000 in return. So 1.5. But now imagine you could perfectly see five buckets of that spend. Okay, the and and those buckets correspond to the first 20% of the money you spend, the next 20% of the money you spend, the next 20% of the money you spend, and so on. Okay, there's only so much precision you can get with this, but but here's the idea. Okay, in bucket one, that first 2000, if you're averaging a 1.5 at the end, perhaps bucket one gets you a 2.4.

Okay, perhaps bucket two gets you a 1.8. Perhaps bucket three gets you a 1.5, your number number, your your bottom end number. Perhaps bucket four is a 1.3. And maybe you even say at 1.3, I'll take it. It's like break evenish and I I'm happy to get the impressions in the marketplace and that's fine. Okay, that's fine. But bucket five now is at a 0.5. It's just like a massive drop off in efficiency. Okay, bucket five and maybe bucket four is what I am talking about as the marginal spend where there is huge amounts of wasted money happening.

I've run one incrementality test for a client that showed that their bucket five spend so to speak was producing like a 0.1 rorowass despite that their blended average rorowass was a 1.8. Now I don't believe that that 0.1 that 0.1 rorowass was always the case forever on all of their spend. It was one snapshot of one bucket of spend done via one pulse up incrementality study. And if you reran it, you might come up with some different numbers, but it was real bad.

Okay? And so we turned around and looked at that and said, "Wait a minute. We should actually be spending much more conservatively as a general rule because that last bucket of spend is producing a very, very, very poor return." And that's what I mean when saying there's a huge amount of wasted money and you're overspending because so few brands are actually thinking this way. They just pick their average return, 1.5, that's what we want.

And then they spend to 1.5, not realizing that there's like hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars in wasted ad dollars in your ad account. And to me, that's like a huge huge problem. And it's a huge problem because there's so much wasted money there. Okay. And then uh on top of that, there's another way that brands waste money all the time, which is that they fight their seasonality. So I'm going to show you one more screen share here.

Again, if you're just listening to this, you should be able to get this just fine. Okay. This is some anonymized data that I saw that so so just again this doesn't correspond to sort of any actual brand's uh performance because I took a real brand's performance and anonymized it in a bunch of different ways to illustrate this point. So um but so so it is sort of real in the sense that I've watched a brand actually do this and what it shows is it's a line graph with two lines okay and it's spend and rorowass and it's uh different times of year um on the line graph and what you would see if you were looking at this and if you're not looking at this uh if you're not looking it's okay but if you are looking at this what you see is that there are moments in the year where spend where the rorowass gets below like 1.5 1.4 four levels and spend declines some but the the spend picks up at some other moments where the rorowass goes up but not all the way to the highest number uh and in fact goes probably above a target that they care about.

So like for example at one point in this graph the spend is going up and the rorowass is at a 3 to one and I just know like this brand probably has I don't know like a lot of brands 60 65% gross margin uh cont uh excuse me uh cost of delivery landed margin basically but net of all uh cost of delivery. Okay. Um and so if you're spending and you're at a 3 to one rorowass or at a two or a two and a half even if you're at your spend peak and you're at a two or you're at a two and a half rorowass and you have 65 points of of margin.

Okay. uh you're at a two and a half to three, your spend even though if even if it's at your highest that it has been all year probably should go higher unless what I said in the last segment here is true of your business in the sense that like you you are uh you know you'll just spend down your efficiency that's also possible okay but then at other times of year the spend comes down but actually the rorowass gets so low that almost certainly they are losing money during those low spend times and so what I'm saying is like the spend you know drops down to a couple hundred,000, a few hundred,000 here and goes up to like 1.4 million and that's a monthly spend.

Okay, that's a huge range of spend. And brands hate this. Every operator I've been around hates this. They get so frustrated during the low spend times of year. Okay, but u but what what your uh chart should probably look like here in in your spend is that rorowass basically ought to be constant throughout the year unless your margin profile changes materially, different products sell, something like that, the LTV of your customers varies wildly.

The red line on this graph should basically be flat. Uh you should let's say your 2 to1 is your target. It should be a two to one all year long all year long. And the the blue spend line is the thing that should be um really really variable even more variable than it often looks. But what brands do all the time is during their down seasons for whatever reason they just feel this need to keep spending ad dollars during their down seasons.

And during their peak seasons they let their AME and their rorowes get extra extra high when perhaps they shouldn't. And I'm really thinking here about rorowass, not just AMER, because it's possible there's delayed value from spend of yours to where it's going to make the AM go up or there's organic revenue that's going to make the AMR go up or whatever, right? All these different things, but the actual return on your spend ought to be pretty consistent and it ought to be pretty consistent because your margin profile probably doesn't change that much.

But what brands do so often is they overspend their low moments and they underspend their big moments. And then they spend a ton of time spinning their wheels trying to figure out how to make their low moments bigger because they're so frustrated to be in those low times of year. Listen, if you're going to try and make your level limits bigger, you can maybe do it with products. It's probably not worth your time, by the way.

But before you get there, at the very least, spend more during your peaks, spend less during your valleys. Limit the damage during the valley time and lean into the tailwind time, right? Don't fight headwinds. Go with tailwinds. That's the goal. And if you do that, you'll spend your money more efficiently. If you put together everything I just said, you will see why I'm belaboring this first point because it's sort of my number one point overall, which is that again, if brands are generally overspending and that they're setting targets that are too low for themselves just just to start, they're just they're just spending too much money on ads to begin with.

Okay. Secondly, they're not paying attention to incremental return. Third, they're not thinking about the marginal impact of their spend. Fourth, they are blowing money on creative testing and on things like Google ad branded search and Google soup ads and all of these different kinds of things. Okay? And fifth, if they are doing all of that while also thinking about their seasonality calendar wrong and yet still growing businesses that are pretty good because every business I've talked about so far actually is a good business on the whole.

Okay, then there is so much more money to be made for e-commerce businesses if they would just think smart about their ad spend. Another way of framing this whole thing, okay, is that for most brands, ad spend is the number one or number two line item on their books. It is often a larger line item. Your Facebook bill for many people watching or listening to this is a larger line item on your books than your COGS. And that's the thing fighting for number two.

And maybe you'd throw your COGS in with uh you know, shipping and things like that. But yeah, I mean for many many brands, many brands are spending 30 to 40% sometimes more of their revenue on ad dollars, which means making that 30 to 40% of your money. Let's just call it 35% of your money. Okay? If you could make that 10% better, it would add like three points to your bottom line or something like that. If you just made it 10% better, and I think a lot of brands can make it 20 to 25% better, if not more, it it can really open up the profitability of your business and can really make a huge difference.

I want you to be allergic to spending bad ad dollars, spending bad money in general, because there's other places it's happening, too. But I want you to hate it. I want you to make somebody justify these things in your business. Why are you spending the way they are? You don't need to rake them over the coals if they're making that mistake. Everybody makes this mistake. We're all lured into spending bad monies, but you should there should be accountability.

There should be clarity. You should find ways to to get clear about where the ad dollars are leaking out of your business. And then you should redirect them to the places where it's actually generating value. And even if all you do is just do that in this next year, you might shrink a little. It's true. But it it may well be a good kind of shrinking because it makes your business more sustainable, cash flow better, all these things because you open up profit in your business.

And that's really good. All right, there's nine more of these. I've already been talking for a long time, so we got to keep moving. But that is by far the biggest one. Like I said, the one that I wanted you to get to. Okay, none of the rest of these are going to take that long. Let's see. Number two related to that, we need a wider range of success stories. We just need a wider range of success stories in e-commerce.

I think if I were to answer the question, if somebody asked me why are brands overspending, I would say some of it is because it's confusing and hard, right? There's like it's a skill thing. It's really hard to see the the bucket five spend that you have the marginal impact of your spend though because many of us feel this need somewhere to just keep growing endlessly and really fast because you're listening to the wonderful operators marketing operators podcasts great people building great businesses who are really smart and you should learn from them.

I am not saying one single bad thing about them. I like learning from those guys. I call some of them friends. I am grateful for them. But if all you're listening to is the stories of the nine figure businesses, then there's going to be a thing that's going to happen in your soul. And I mean it in your soul. It's happening somewhere deeper down than your brain where you are going to feel the need to prove yourself and grow faster and be bigger, etc.

And it will get you into bad habits. It is this belief that you must grow more. And so actually one of my goals in 2026 on the podcast is to tell more success stories that are less obvious success stories. I just did an episode about, you know, this guy Henry Bulazar who who's listened to 200 of my podcast episodes, quit his job as a coder, is making more money now on his own app that he developed, is running the Facebook ads themselves, and is living his life that way while trying to grow his business.

Has he reached the mountaintop of a nine figure monster business? Does he have a unicorn app yet? No. Is he making more money than before working for himself and growing a business? Yes. Is that an awesome outcome? Yes. Is he gaining more skills than he was just as a coder? Yes. Like, there's all of this value to be had in stories like that. I'm probably going to bring on a seven figure guy, early seven figures, like just over a million in revenue, something like that, pretty soon.

Who is doing this as a side gig on that business and is pumping like 30% SDE on that business. 30% SDE on a million-doll business, in case you are not clear, is $300,000 a year. That's a good business, and it's a side gig for this guy. That's a really good outcome, and it will never be featured in these big huge things. So yeah, I just think we've got to get clarity to the fact that you can grow a great business and in fact that businesses are valued on their bottom line, not their top line.

Like it just that alone should make you want to go build a really highly profitable business. I'm not saying you shouldn't be ambitious. I'm not saying that at all. I I think it's great. I'm not saying you shouldn't strive for excellence and learn from the best. I think you should do all those things. In some ways, I'm challenging myself in those exact areas this year. Should I be a little more ambitious than I am? Should I be striving for a level of excellence that so far I've let myself off the hook on?

Should I be trying to grow a bigger business? You know, something all these things. But we just need more stories of success that are not insane monster stories because they're just really, really important because it is successful. Serious, thoughtful, profit-driven operators everywhere are using Intellig on-site split testing for their e-commerce brands. That's because Intellgeems is an amazing tool that is built for profit-driven, serious, and smart operators.

And it's built for that in a few different ways. One of them is that IntellJMS allows you to test way beyond the basics of split testing to do the things that really matter and really move the needle. Like before you go test that button color, go and test the shipping threshold, free shipping threshold on your website. Go test the price of products on your website. Go test how much you're charging for shipping on your website.

Go test things that really matter. Your your sitewide first new customer discount. Should it be a stacked offer? Get, you know, buy more, save more. Should it be a BOGO? Should it be a 10% off? Like, what should the offer be? Well, there's a way to answer that question is to test it. And you should be testing those kinds of things. With Intelligence, you can do that quickly and easily. It's a very fast install. You don't need a developer.

And of course, you can also use it to test all the little things as well, like headlines and and design and all of that kind of stuff. You can actually test now at the checkout flow in Shopify, which is awesome. And you can even test full Shopify theme test. So, if you're doing a site redesign, definitely definitely before you push that live, test it with Intelligjs, go do all that stuff. Merchandising on your site, menus, everything like that.

But get those big things first because those are the real needle movers that you probably have never tested. You've never tested your free shipping threshold, but it makes a real difference for how customers interact with your brand. So, go test it. Secondly, though, beyond testing beyond the basics, they also give you very easy and clear measurement for this with down to the level of profit. And this is a really critical point. you know, if you test your free shipping threshold, right, maybe you need to lower it and it's like, oh great, we converted more traffic, but also now we're not collecting for shipping anymore and it's actually hurting our margin and what's the net impact of those two things even with some tools that they're developing to start having you be able to analyze those things even relative to LTV, which is awesome.

So, there's a whole bunch there, but you really want to be able to test this down to the level of profit. Intelligence ties into your COGS data, your actual cost of goods data in your Shopify store to output the the value creation on every cell of every test that you run down to the level of profit. Really awesome tool. You can get 20% off of it your for your first three months. Intelliggeems.io. Multiple maybe all of my clients are using Intelligj.

Almost every client I've ever worked with does. Like it's just really awesome. Intelligjs.io. Ferris 20. FS20 get you 20% off the first three months. Get it going today. Start testing. Start testing smarter. Number three, media buying makes a huge difference. Don't believe people when they tell you otherwise. It has become a trope in the e-commerce space that media buying is dead. Media buying doesn't matter that much anymore for all kinds of reasons, whether it's automation or AI or machine learning or just like the reality of targeting in the present meta environment or something like that.

Like there's just this trope out there that media buying is dead and doesn't make that much of a difference. I I fully believe that's wrong. So many brands who are watching or listening to this video right now. So many people in agencies like who are watching listening to this video right now are wasting gigantic amounts of money in their media buying. And it's related to point number one. It's become a deeper conviction of mine.

First of all, I think it's really hard right now. Media buying is really hard. There's a lot of options thrown at you all the time. Secondly, for me as a as a person running manual bids, one of my big convictions in the last year related to this is that manual bids got sold as being really, really easy. you just set your cost cap or your bid cap or your target rows and you just kind of walk away and that's it. And it's just not it's just that's just not true.

It's actually pretty hard pretty hard to do it right. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that mostly related to how the future is unlike the past at different times and there's no way for machine learning to know that right away. There's also questions about financial clarity and a lot of the things I said in sort of point one here. The media buyers need to be on those because they're deploying the largest line item in your business.

You should get the best media buyers you possibly can for those line items because they have such an outsized impact on the growth and profitability of your business. And it's really really hard. Anytime anybody tells you media buying doesn't matter anymore, I I just think it's wrong. I'm watching what AF Growth is doing for clients right now and I'm like I'm just watching so many businesses and you know accounts I get my eyes on, not even necessarily from from people who are coming for me to audit because they want me to work with them or something like that because there's selection bias, right? the kind of brand that's looking at changing agencies is the kind of brand that probably has some underoptimization in the first place.

So, I don't want to just go off that experience because of that selection bias problem. But I I just am seeing it over and over. It's something I've, you know, heard Taylor Holidayiday say recently and from talking to him about what he's saying as well. It's it's as hard now as it has ever been. I don't think it's getting easier and I think you shouldn't listen when somebody tells you media buying is dead is not that important.

It's all about creative. It's all about the offer, etc. Nope. All important. It all matters to build a great business, especially once again if it is related to the largest line item in your business. It it matters. It matters how you distribute the money. It matters what you do. There's huge amounts of money wasted. There's huge amounts of money to be made doing it right. It really, really matters that you get it right for your bottom line and for your growth trajectory.

Number four, the reason that you are tempted to give too much of your life to work is not because of a boss who is standing over your shoulder or something like that. The reason you're attempted to give too much of your life to work is because you like your work. And that is the whole problem. the reason you're tempted to give too much time to work and not enough time to your kids. And I'm not talking here about you have to get down to 20 hours a work week to be a good dad.

Like I work a regular work week like other people do. I'm also not trying to generalize too much with my views of work versus other people's. Forget that for a second. I'm just saying that when you are tempted to give too much of your time in your life and wrap up too much of your identity in your work, it is because the work is joyful and pleasurable, right? And so the enjoyment of the work is a really big challenge. the pleasure in your work is a wonderful thing and like I love that I it's it's such a gift and such a privilege that I get to do work I like but and this is definitely getting at conversations I had with Olivia Corey a couple weeks ago on this podcast go check that out that we were discussing but something I've I've talked with a lot of people about like when I'm tempted to to sort of give too much of my life to my work it is because I like the work and because I find pleasure in it but there are times when it's just way easier to do that than it is to give my life to other things that are really important in my life that can be all kinds of things that can be fitness like just like staying healthy.

One of the reasons people don't work out is because they give too much of their lives to work and they just can't find the time. It can be my family. Like I said, you know, I've said this before, but I have a six-year-old and I have a three-year-old, soon to be four-year-old. It's just much easier to work on work problems than it is for me to like color with a six-year-old. Like, I don't really like coloring that much, to be honest with you, or whatever.

You can just come up with anything you want. And I don't have to color all the time with my six-year-old to be a good dad. That's not the point cuz And I love my six-year-old. That's not the problem either. It's just that like all of these different things. What about like time with friends, time in a community like like in a church or or something like that where there's like a real value to the involvement of these kinds of things.

All of these things that are really important. Your work can eat all of these things up. Time with your spouse obviously is a huge one. There's just a lot in life. And the problem is the work is really stimulating and enjoyable. So I say that because one of the great challenges that I feel in life is that I have desires that sometimes don't actually lead me to the best long-term outcomes. And dealing with that desire is the really hard thing.

So, I'll leave that there. But that is the hard thing about working too much. If you are working a whole lot and you have a sense that you should be working less, it might just be some weird guilt complex of yours that you should shut off. Okay, maybe you're doing fine. I have that. So, but it also might be that you recognize that this is this is the fundamental challenge for you. So, there's that. Okay, number five.

Apploving axon, whatever it is called, I don't really understand these days. Appleven is real and it will keep growing in impact. Get good at it. This is another 2026 initiative for AF growth. We are going to keep digging into app. I've now again run incrementality studies a couple times here. The most recent one I ran showed really really strong incrementality that was and we actually launched that incremental incrementality study.

What I should say by really really strong was the incrementality that we saw for a brand recently that was spending the most recent one I saw was for a brand where basically the 7-day click reported revenue in app in their ads manager okay in their dashboard was basically right on with the sort of relatively immediate term return the incremental return of the ad spend which is which is really good I mean that that means it's a really really strong number that was before we launched that test before Apple introduced the ability to target new customers only like prospecting only which is a really big change was one of the funamental problems with app 11 but as app 111 has shown repeatedly throughout this year it is still so early so the incrementality studies are showing up to be good I heard coms red collective who runs who's much more ad spend than we do right say it's the it was the number three channel for them this year black Friday cyber Monday behind meta and Google their incrementality studies they've said have looked good as well I've heard house say the incrementality incrementality studies look good so it's just it is real but the thing I would point out also is that that like the dashboard has gotten much much better this year they've introduced the ability to prospect which is a huge huge issue previously in AppL.

They've introduced some international targeting which is a big deal. They've made the the builder a lot easier to where you can do different end cards and different uh ads all in one like ad collection basically to where it gets easier. There's more machine learning involved. There's manual like all of these things are happening all the time. They're getting more advertisers on the platform which means to hear them tell it it's not just like oh no CPMs are going to go up.

It's they're going to get more data to optimize with and work with. Like I just am a big believer they have a whole bunch of users using AppL and playing mobile games. So, they have those kinds of things and they are delivering ads that sell products and whether or not it's ever going to rival Meta or something, I I don't know, probably not, right? But it's real. It's real and it can be a real value to your spend. So, get good at it, learn it, understand it, understand what good media buying looks like there.

I think it's still early enough that nobody really knows the answer to that question yet. I've seen some whisperings here and there about a few things, but yeah, that's that's a conviction of mine. I think there's going to be real value there. App is real. Invest in it and get good at it. Something we're doing as well. Okay, it is time to get serious about your supply chain in 2026. So many brands are so underoptimized here and it's crazy.

And the thing is I have a solution for you for this problem of paying too much in COGS, of having too high ofQS, of having vendors who are hard to work with, of having too long of lead times, of having bad payment terms. The solution to that problem is my friends at Move Supply Chain. Move supply chain is a supply chain agency just like I have a growth agency that works for and with your brand bringing specific expertise around supply chain to your business so that they can help you solve all the things I just talked about which are really tricky sourcing new vendors and getting better relationships and negotiating deals.

It's hard and time inensive work. And the beauty of move supply chain is they bring many many years of experience in supply chains in e-commerce supply chains specifically to your business. They can look at your supply chain, tell you what's wrong with it, and then they can also help you do the work of optimizing it. And on top of that, they are based in the Philippines, which is really advantageous for you in a couple different ways.

One of them is that it's it's affordable. So, because they're based in the Philippines, they have people with deep experience who where your dollars just go really far to attract great quality supply chain talent on your team. I know because I'm building my own e-commerce brands supply chain with their help. And they have been awesome. They know so much more than I do about supply chains. Okay. But secondly, on top of that, it's a very, very short flight and easy flight to both China and Vietnam where so much manufacturing happens in the world.

So they are there a lot and can get there on behalf of your team without you having to take, you know, a 15- hour flight or whatever it is. So it's really, really valuable. What you should do is if you have this lingering idea in your head that your supply chain could be better, that your cogs could be cheaper, that things get through faster, all those kinds of things, you should go to moveupchain.com, schedule an intake call, tell them your situation, and see if they can help you.

Just see if they can help you. See what they might say. Bet you they can and they are really awesome. I'm a huge fan of Move. I've been working with them in some capacity or another for years now at this point off of originally they were an offshoot of their sister company, More Staffing. So go check it out today. Get on a call. Movesupplychain.com. Get your supply chain dialed in. Your whole business will work better if you have a better supply chain.

Great operators care about the supply chain. You should be one of them. Moveupchain.com. Number six. All right. Arguably my most controversial take here, but I'm I'm ready to say it. Okay. Ready? Don't believe the lie that freedom is the goal. Entrepreneurs regularly say this. They say freedom is what I'm trying to get to more than I even want to be rich. I want to be free. I don't want to have any constraint around money in my life.

Now obviously there is a sense in which this is a wonderful thing to have your needs provided for financially. That is really really nice to not be thinking about money. Okay. Um and this is a distinction I make all the time, right? That is a very different place to be than like filthy filthy rich. And I think it's it's fair to say that that level of freedom is really nice. But a lot of people what they mean by freedom is that they mean they want the total elimination of constraints wherever possible in their life.

And here is my theory. The total elimination of constraints when that is meant by freedom isn't actually good for you and does not produce the most joy in your life. Not worrying about money is nice but like so many of the greatest constraints in your life are actually the sources of the greatest joy in your life. Let me give you a couple of examples. One of them is a spouse. A spouse is a constraint. When you get married, you say, in most cases, you say, "I am only choosing you.

I'm only choosing this one person." That is a constraint. And it is overtly a constraint on your freedom to go and pursue a whole bunch of other relationships. And I think it's just demonstrabably the case, partly from studies and other things, that taking on that constraint instead of living a much freer quote unquote lifestyle is a path to more joy. And now of course marriages go wrong in all kinds of ways. I understand that.

I understand. I understand. I understand. But the notion of that constraint is that it actually is part of what love looks like in somebody's life. And so that's the reason why the constraint is worthwhile. Another one is kids. Kids are a massive limitation on your freedom. Overwhelming limitation on your freedom. Even more than than marriage in a lot of ways. Kids just they just really constrain your freedom to do things.

And yet it is worth it. It is worth it because the expansion of love in your life is the actual pathway to joy. I've been thinking so much, you know, you've heard me use the phrase optimize for joy. I've been thinking so much about this, including how this works in my business. For me, like taking on a business partner this year is going to create a constraint for me. But I believe that the constraint of having a business partner with whom I now have to get the time this is released, I'm now going to have to have his approval to do anything big in our business.

Having that business partner that could the constraint of having somebody else I believe is going to be good for me even though it materially reduces my freedom and I believe that because I think it's going to make me work with another person develop relationship with another person be self-sacrificial be thinking about somebody else in my life and that will develop character in me I also just value the input and so I think he'll make me better Patrick will make me better as a as an operator by being in those decisions and and by making me accountable to things accountability in general I think is something that generally creates more joy by committing yourself to something and having some accountability, you reduce freedom.

You add a constraint. And yet that constraint also tends to build character in certain ways. And so so many people are building their lives around this idea that someday they're going to have freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want. I mean, working in general is a constraint, right? The idea that you have to go spend a bunch of time each day doing something to go make money or something. And I think removing those constraints for sort of unbridled complete freedom is it's just not obvious to me at all that it's something that's going to bring joy to anybody.

So for me, that's another one of the things I've been getting clear about. about this year in my own thinking in the e-commerce and entrepreneurial world. Number seven, so many people are still not investing in their supply chain and it is crazy to me. I've said for a while supply chain is the most underoptimized place in e-commerce. I might think CAC is actually that at the same time despite how much just because again it's the largest line item for so many businesses.

But the other one is supply chain. And the best operators that I see, this is a really striking thing to me. I noticed it a lot this year. A couple of the very very best operators that I've been around are like supply chain monsters. Okay? They just really really care about and understand it deeply. Roman Khan who's been on this podcast talking about things like Bill's material and why they deploy so many people in China on the ground in factories and around factories to hammer away at their supply chains.

Matab Bogle just a killer operator who is so smart and so detail- oriented and so thoughtful about so many things. Matab is one of those guys where you look at it and he just has a lot of thoughts about how to build a great supply chain and cares about it a lot and you know talks about it a lot because he sees I think the value in doing that really really well. I've been to Simple Modern's headquarters and can show you been to specifically the manufacturing facility they built in the US for part of their business.

Like they have really invested in supply chain in that business to care a lot about doing that really well. Now I don't know how much of their total inventory it produces or whatever but obviously that's a major supply chain investment. There's just so many people who don't really know how their products get made. They haven't shopped vendors. They haven't done a lot of little things. They've never really negotiated terms.

They haven't thought aboutQS. They haven't thought about new product development. Seriously, I just think lots of people, especially earlier in the business, like sort of sub four or five million. Many brands haven't thought very hard about this. It's a weird thing. When you're earlier in your business, you typically have bigger gains you can make in your supply chain kind of all at once. It's less like incremental marginal stuff, but at the same time, you have less negotiating power.

So to me, if you're early mid7 figures, it's probably the place where you have the biggest opportunity here. If you're around 3 million, I bet you your supply chain can get a major overhaul and a major upgrade. I had another client a while back who did this where they had they had worked with an initial manufacturer who was like a smaller manufacturer who got them up to five or eight million or something like that in revenue.

And they had so much loyalty to them because that manufacturer had been so good to them. But you know what happened when they brought on a real supply chain expert to go help them look at their vendors? Well, a much larger vendor could just work faster and cheaper than the small manufacturer. And just as much as they wanted to be loyal to the smaller one, they had to recognize the smaller one only had a place maybe in new product development or something like that, but they couldn't really be the main manufacturer and it was just hurting too much in their cogs.

All it took was for them to go invest in it and look at it and think rationally and objectively about it. Once they did that, it became very very clear they needed to go make a new kind of investment. And so they did. So just come back to it again. You need to be thinking about your supply chain. Many people have too high ofQS. They're paying too much in COGS. They have too long of terms. They have not shopped enough manufacturers.

They can get better quality. They can get it here faster. Like all of those, you know, cut down lead time. All those things. I watch it happen over and over and over again. I always think back to my conversation with Laura Gavara, CEO of Move Supply Chain, telling me about what it is like when she gets on discovery calls with potential clients to them as a supply chain agency where she says that operator will be talking to her, especially like early seven figure, early, you know, mid-seigure operators. be talking to her about what their supply chain is like.

She's asking them questions to try to get a feel for it. And internally, she's just giggling because she knows, oh my goodness, in a few months, we can make a really big impact really, really fast for this business because they're so underoptimized. I think it's a lot of businesses in that early seven figure space. Go work on it. I Yeah, I just give you story after story like this. If you haven't done that yet and you're in that stage, it's really worth your time.

It's a large project. You're going to have to work hard at it, but it can really make a big difference. I see it over and over and over again, especially in that stage of business. Number eight, AI requires deep time investment to be useful. Well, to be seriously useful, pretty useful right away, you know, even if you're not building incredible prompts or whatever. But all of the best, most impressive uses of AI I've seen have required huge amounts of hours on the front end to be like really really powerful tools for people.

They they've required kind of coder level thinking, engineering style thinking for them to work. Certainly Prometheus, our creative coowwriter that we have at AF Growth, that is an amazing tool that produces incredible ad scripts very fast and also works within our whole notion setup to publish those ad scripts into a process that's repeatable over time. That has taken up like hundreds of hours of Patrick's time to build it.

And so there was no sort of fast way to get AI just kind of do all of it for us. It required way too much deep thought work over time. I saw somebody say the other day on on uh on X, it was something like maybe it was Cody Bloffker saying something like most of the great AI use cases he sees right now are technical people using AI really well. And basically, you know, I think that's right. Some level, not necessarily that you have to be a true coder, but you have to be able to think sort of technically to make it do the thing you want it to do and think like a coder a little bit because that's where the real value creation actually is.

Otherwise, you get stuck in ruts, you get hallucinations, you get sort of limited usefulness, all these things. But to really make it a core part of things that are actually having a big impact, it requires time and effort. So the the takeaway is put in the time and effort where it really matters, right? Think in terms of what kinds of efforts can I make that are actually going to create very very large impacts. Don't get distracted by small little optimizations because if it really requires deep time and effort, then you should be putting in deep time and effort for very large and impactful things.

If you could do that, then it becomes a really, really, really good use of your time. It also is a good reminder to not believe the lie that somebody tells you that this new AI tool is going to change everything for you overnight in one click and that's that. It's just not true. I haven't seen it. If it is true, maybe it'll be true soon, but I haven't seen it yet. And so, right now, I'm just not believing it until here otherwise.

And I'm comfortable not being the first mover there. If somebody else finds that at some point an ad maker gets out there that can make endless creative that's awesome, you know, with the click of a button, fine. I will be in the middle percentage of people who discover it and start using it. I'm not going to be the first mover there because I've just been oversold too many times now. So, the boy has cried wolf too much.

So, there's that. And finally, there is value in pursuing excellence. Another big observation of mine this year, you know, I am somebody who thinks about my work in light of God in those kinds of terms. And so in that case, if I'm trying to work in as somebody who believes that life in some way everything we do ladders to to a creator who made us to be certain ways and who calls us to behave certain ways, then then I want to work as if to please him.

But even if somebody even if you are not religious, like even if you're not thinking about your life in those particular terms, then there's something to be said about just excellence for its own sake. So like this kind of comes back to a couple things I said earlier. Like I take a lot of pleasure in my work. I take a lot of joy in my work and I also recognize that there's value in some levels of ambition even if I'm not trying to create unconstrained freedom for myself.

But like I think what I'm trying to get at is that there is value in pursuing excellence in and of itself even aside from the potential impacts of it. Like for example money even aside from the fact that I think doing an excellent job at building an agency is going to create more economic value for me and my family. I think it will. But even aside from that, there is something about the work of just saying this is the task in front of me.

This is where I am right now. Again, for me, this is where God has me right now in my life. In that case, I'm going to do this as best as I possibly can. And if I do that, if I apply myself to my work with that kind of mentality, then very likely I will be formed into the kind of person who does things better. I will learn skills that are better. I will just be prder of the work that I do. There's something an end in itself in the work quality.

My clients will receive better from me. My employees will receive better from me. Excellence will attract better talent into my organization. People like being a part of something excellent. It's a good feeling. For all of these reasons, I just think there's a ton of value in excellence, including into forming the kind of person forming me into being the kind of person who not only has a lot to offer in my work right now with my clients and employees and all those things, but also to form me into the kind of person who has more to offer to the world in the long term.

Let's say that my work has absolutely no deep meaning in and of itself. the growing e-commerce business is just like a pure money play or something like that, right? Even if that's true, by disciplining myself to solve hard problems and work on hard problems and and work through all those things, when I go at some point and decide, you know what, if I have a midlife crisis and think e-commerce doesn't matter at all, I'm going to throw all this off.

When I go to some other charity organization and get on their board or go work for them or something and I give my life to some other cause like this, the work I will have done in pursuing excellence now will make me better in those places also because I will develop mental skills and work ethic skills and coping skills and people skills and all these things that translate into other areas of potential impact in my life.

I'm 41 years old right now. My goal is to be a person who has something to contribute to the world for a long time. And that's where again a lot of joy is to be found. That includes with my boys and with my wife and with my friends and with my church community and all these different places that I that I'm sort of show up as a person in the world. And the more that I can pursue excellence in my work without having it take over or something like that, the more value that I will be be able to create, not only in that work itself, which is its own good, but also in the other things beyond that.

I've been thinking and talking a lot this year about sort of purpose and meaning in work. Maybe that is because I'm 41. Maybe because I found other people in our space who want to do that sort of thing. For me, it's just one of those conclusions I've come to. I want to hold myself to excellence. I want accountability to excellence. I want to pursue excellence. Patrick and I have put that, you know, a pursuit of excellence in our sort of formational documents and vision kind of documents as we've rethought AJF growth as he's coming on as a partner.

Thought about sort of an EOS perspective on these things where where you're forced into that kind of work. And excellence has continued to be a word that I really want to pursue. We want to be great because it will do all kinds of good things not only now for us and our clients. And I believe that we are going to be an incredible agency. We're already, I think, a best-in-class agency right now. I think we're only going to be better all the time as we pursue that excellence.

If you want to work with us, you should let me know. Go to afgrowth.com right now and do it. The more excellence, holding myself to that standard is going to make better output now. And it's going to also make me into a kind of person who can do more, contribute more to the world in the long term. It's a constraint. Yeah, it is a constraint. Um, but I think it will create the most joy. All right, that's it. I hope those end of the year observations were helpful to you.

What ones would you add? What have you been what's been top of your mind this year and what are you thinking about the most in 226? Drop it in the comments. I'd love to hear about it because I really do want to know. You can also email me podcastfgrowth.com if you have any other thoughts on this episode. If you want to work with me at Ajfgrowth as we pursue excellence, you should come be part of it. So, email me or even better fill out the intake form on my website afgrowth.com.

Tell me a little bit about your business so I can understand it a little bit better, what problems you're facing, etc. And let me know uh if you want to work with me, I'll get an email. I'll respond to you there. And of course, follow up with my amazing sponsors. I love the sponsors for this podcast. Pretty much all of them are renewing in the next year because it's been a great relationship. So that's move supplychain.

So you can invest in that supply chain. Like I said, moveupplychain.com is a place to go there. Intelligence for great operators really focusing on driving profit in their business. Intelligjs.io with the code Ferris 20. F A R I S20 to get 20% off your first three months. Go check it all out right now. Subscriber if you're watching or listening. Stay tuned. Great episodes coming up, including a huge brand founder soon.

Maybe I'm not listening to my own advice about success stories, Curtis Masco, but I actually have some other ones coming as well that are a wider range. So, uh, Curtis Masco from Portland is coming soon. You're not going to want to miss that. Subscribe wherever you are watching or listening so you don't.