7 Lessons From Black Friday Cyber Monday 2023 transcript

Black Friday, Cyber Monday has come and gone and I've got takeaways. I've got lessons for you from what I saw this year. Unique relative to most of what I've seen in the past, unique relative to the buying method that I use right now. I want to drop some lessons on you and I'm going to pre-schedule the re-release of this episode about 11 months from now so that next year you and I can both be prepped for Black Friday.

Hello and welcome to the Andrew Farris Podcast. I'm Andrew Farris. Thanks so much for joining me today. Like I said, it is a Black Friday recap episode to talk about what are the biggest takeaways for me this year from Black Friday. What could I have done better for my clients? What could I have done worse for my clients? What I learned, what am I going to do again? All those things. Let's jump into it and talk about how to make Black Friday bigger next time.

So, Black Friday, Cyber Monday went well for me, I would say, on the whole. I've got a mix of clients. I was really looking at about six clients at a given time and that I was most deep into and those clients had a range of outcomes. Couple of, you know, a few that were just sort of like all-time great days, a few that were pretty good, and then really no disaster or disaster scenario type clients. You know, some some mistakes made here and there, but nothing that I'm I'm really going to worry too much about in the grand scheme of those businesses.

Things are moving along steadily at different paces depending on what's going on, but I learned a lot this year about what to do, what I could do better, and what to do worse, especially relative to ad accounts. This year I would say is the year that I've been most tied to the ad accounts and most disconnected from some of the other things that are happening for some of these brands. Um, definitely was advising on things like offers and, you know, emails, but sort of gave my sort of standard advice, you know, offers, push for high AOV, try to drive that value up, especially as you give away margin on discounting, you know, be conscious of your margins in general, that kind of thing.

And then, you know, email, send more. That was basically my advice to all of my clients, just send more email, send more SMS. Don't worry this week about sending too much, it's almost impossible to do. My baseline advice for people is to send 10 from Friday to Monday, to say nothing of whatever else you do, just email plus any SMS. That's three Friday, three Monday, and then two Saturday and Sunday. So, you know, those kinds of things were were sort of baseline stuff.

I wouldn't say anything really stood out to me on those that I would really change. If anything there, the one note that I that I thought about was, for your offer, you really do need to be thinking about where your margin is at and what your goals are. So, let's start there. That'll be that'll be lesson number one out of I think I have seven. I think I have seven lessons from it this year. Lesson number one is really understand where margin is in your offer.

I actually deleted an episode of this podcast that I was going to release basically on this, because I just didn't like how it turned out and it wasn't clear enough and it was not really any good. So, I just got rid of it, because I didn't think it was going to be very helpful. But, the point of it and the thing that I have really landed on after looking at all of my brands again this year is that the offer makes a huge difference for your performance, and certainly for your volume, but the offer really is tied to what is it that you are trying to accomplish and how much margin do you have to give away.

So, I have one client with massive massive massive margin. Actually a couple clients that really fit that bill. And those clients, like, because they have so much margin, they could really do a lot and make the moment really really big. And as it turns out, those are those are also a couple of my biggest holiday brands, brands that have the the biggest opportunity there. And and there's a couple things that all kind of fit together there.

They're medium to low LTV, you know, ranging on those kinds of things, very high margin, very high acquisition holiday focused. And for a brand like that, it's the offer and your plan and the margin, everything is really about maximize Black Friday Cyber Monday customer acquisition by getting the offer right by hammering away at it and leaving plenty of room so you can scale your ads. Because if you get to a point in Black Friday Cyber Monday where you really need like a three to one to be successful, but it's just really hard to actually be successful.

The auction is so competitive. It's so competitive that it's going to be really hard to make that moment work from an acquisition standpoint. Now, you may be able to make that work from a returning customer standpoint, okay? But you really need to know that if you want Black Friday to be big on the ad side of things, you really have to have enough margin or enough LTV or something to to make the moment really good. And I actually think one of the dangers that people get into here is that because they want to make the revenue number go up really big, they put a bigger offer than they need to.

This is actually not that great for their margin, and so they try and run up a big revenue number, but they're not really protecting margin and therefore protecting the bottom line. I want I want you to remember something crucial that should ground every discussion you have in e-commerce, honestly, including this one. The goal of your business from a financial perspective, and you know, forgetting lifestyle goals, all those things, right? is to maximize the enterprise value of the business, i.e. the valuation.

Maximize the valuation. That's going to make everything better in your business. And the way to maximize your valuation right now in this present moment, this was not always true, but right now, the way to maximize the present enterprise value in this moment is with bottom line income, EBITDA. Profit at the bottom line of your business. Therefore, the goal of your Black Friday Cyber Monday sale ought to be to maximize your profit short and long term.

Really long term especially, right? And so all of your plans should be built around how to make that profit number as big as possible. That might mean a lower revenue day, but one where you get more bottom line income by keep protecting your margin in your offer. So, that's the basic idea. Understand how that all works, and and I you know, I just saw this play out in really different ways for different businesses. Again, brands with lots of margin to give that were really acquisition focused could and really holiday focused could do very, very well.

Go scale their ads been like crazy uh and do very, very well. Brands that had less margin to give away, not as holiday oriented, more LTV oriented, could do a great job on returning customer revenue, could generate a whole bunch of that, but had a harder time competing in the dynamics of the super, super competitive four plus dollar click universe that we're living in at Black Friday, right? Okay. Number two, bid caps.

Let's talk about this a little bit. Uh you've heard me talk a lot about how much I like bid caps. Bid caps were hard to manage on launch, but crucial in the long run. So, let's get into the weeds a little bit of what bid caps are, right? A bid cap is going to tell Meta ads, "Only acquire customer if you can acquire them at or under my target CAC." Okay? My target customer acquisition cost. That's what a bid cap says.

And then you give Meta carte blanche to spend as much money as possible as long as you're hitting that target within inventory constraints, okay? So, that seems like a great tool for Black Friday cuz what should happen is there should be a massive spike in the available amount of traffic on Black Friday and on Cyber Monday and to some degree on Saturday and Sunday as well. And of course some of the days around that if you're launching a longer sale.

You should be able to capture that moment as much as possible without the anxiety and insanity of trying to guess how much auto budget you need to be spending. But, consider how the mechanism works. Bid caps function by having an expected click-through rate on your ads and an expected conversion rate on your ads. And then it delivers at a CPM to a customer that the machine learning thinks can convert at your price assuming the CTR on your ads, click-through rate, and the conversion rate are in line with what its expectations are.

Because there's the price of the ad, the price of the impression, and then however many impressions you get there's a click-through rate that tells you your cost per click, and then of those clicks there's a number of purchases, and the click-through rate and conversion rate are the only two factors that go into your CAC. And so, bid caps have to have built into the system an expected click-through rate and conversion rate.

Okay? So, that's the way that it predicts when it enters you into auctions, that's the way it predicts what your CAC is going to be, and therefore decides whether or not you can spend on any given impression. That's the beauty of the tool. It's the whole thing that's awesome. And one of the things that is so awesome about this tool is that in an evergreen normal environment, your expected conversion rate on a given ad set should not fluctuate that much.

And therefore, the expected conversion rate is using, I assume, I don't have total clarification on this, but essentially Bayesian logic to forecast the value of any given click to you. And therefore, it's going to regress. Essentially, it's going to normalize conversions. So, here's what I mean. This is the example I always use. If you flip a coin 10 times, okay, and you get 10 heads or 10 tails, you know, and it's an and it's a normal coin, the next coin flip is just as likely to be heads as it is to be tails, no matter what the last 10 were, okay?

But, because you are a human and have a lizard brain like I do, you may predict that the next coin flip is going to be heads oh, because you just did 10 in a row, so of course you're going to get another one, or tails because oh, or maybe you even think that the coin is rigged or something like that, right? You start making up cockamamie theories as to why the coin is flipping the same way every time, even though it's just a normal coin.

Or maybe you say, oh, well, we know there's a 50/50 chance we just had 10 heads in a row, therefore, it's much more likely that it's going to be tails this next time because if it's 50/50 and we just did 10 heads, well, then come on, it's got to be getting towards tails soon, right? But actually, it's 50/50 every single time you flip a coin. And what uh bid cap should do in its expected conversion rate is basically recognize the reality of the coin without your bias.

And so, you might see 10 conversions coming on an ad set one day and start ramping the budget, and therefore, you go like, oh, this is great, like I'm doing so great, When in fact, that might just be statistical noise. It might just be a weird small sample thing where 10 people happen to all buy in a shorter time frame than they usually do, and so your ad set looks great. And a bid cap is going to work through all of that.

It's going to expect the conversion rate is not going to move as much based on those most recent 10 conversions the way that my brain does, or my biases towards a certain piece of creative or whatever. And so, that's great. That makes it awesome for an evergreen moment. But, when there is a massive and sudden change in the in the purchase environment, where that massive change to the environment is actually like bigger than usual and sudden and it's real, right?

So, that like, for example, if you go from Thanksgiving Day to Black Friday and suddenly conversion rates nearly double day-over-day, the bid cap is going to adjust to that more slowly than perhaps it ought to. Now, that's again a feature, not a bug, and generally that's the case. And so, what I saw happening was that bid caps on early in the day on Friday were sort of underspending the true potential value because they were taking a little while to catch up to the reality that its expected conversion rate calculation should be higher than usual.

Now, here's the thing. My response to that was to go raise my bid caps artificially high. And in two different accounts in which I did that, that led to somewhat of overspends. And so, while it is the case that I got initially an underspend, the moment I fiddled with the tool, I got an overspend. And so, what I would probably do in the future is just on Friday, and that's the only day I would do this. Just on Friday, I would go back in, and I would probably start the first few hours of the day about 20 to 25% above my true bid cap target that I would set.

And then, probably next year what I would like to do is do that, leave that for a few hours, and then bring it back down. Just to speed up Meta's learning process, feed it more conversions so that it speeds it up and then let the ECVR calculation adjust in bid caps so that then for the rest of the day I can just scale at will. Okay? That's probably what I would have done in the future, but doing that too late in the day, which is what I was doing and and as I started to get reactionary and started to fiddle, actually led to me overspending.

And so it's a really fine line. Not massively overspending, but a little bit a little bit overspending where I probably should have. Somewhat of the same thing is true on Cyber Monday where there's a sort of another increase in conversion rate relative to the other days. And so you could probably play that same game. Although that's tricky because Cyber Monday is backloaded in the day in terms of performance where, you know, so much of the purchase behavior happens in the afternoon and evening.

So you will get home from work as people, you know, take their last chance to make their purchases, etc. So, big credit here to and I don't even know his last name, @clickyRicky on Twitter and on X, Ricky, uh who's you know, a really smart and like I've interacted with Ricky a few times. Really smart, you know, ad thinker and e-commerce thinker. And I'm going to link to his tweet. He sent a long tweet saying there's some people who are not prepared, who are too reliant on bid caps and they're not prepared for how aggressive the auction dynamics are going to be on Friday and you're going to you're going to miss out on some volume if you're too lean if you're leaning too much on bid caps.

And I argued with him in that thread, but I would say we were both right in retrospect. I think he was right to push on this idea that bid caps would not be aggressive enough on a day when you really need to maximize every hour of the day. And on the other hand, I would say that actually they caught up faster than I thought they would and they learned faster than I thought they would. So the takeaway for me is like I said, boost bid caps a little bit higher in the day earlier in the day.

Don't do that for very long and then set them. And here's the thing that I will also say. Once they were set for the weekend, my clients that were all bid cap and that was getting that was getting through those spend and where um there's enough spend to make that tool really work, they did awesome. So especially some of my clients that really need to maximize that moment, I mean they threaded the needle almost perfectly between volume and efficiency.

And that's actually the hardest thing about media buying on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Uh you know, I remember in the old days when I was auto bidding everything and you know, these tools didn't even exist and you're just sitting there playing this game like, "Okay, I got a $10,000 budget. Should I ramp it to 15? Should I ramp it all the way to 20? Oh, should I come down a couple thousand? What happens? Like it looks really good, but if I try to put, you know, you're playing this guessing game." And so, I actually had a couple people sort of dunking on me when I was tweeting about like, "Hey, actually my bid caps aren't going as fast as I want.

You might need to keep an eye on these." I was tweeting about how this is a challenge with it and people who like to dunk on bid caps and that sort of thing were were going, you know, "Oh, you need to be auto bidding. Just auto bid on Black Friday. Why not just use that for this one day a year, you know?" And and they're saying those sorts of things. And my response to that is like, are you telling me that you with your auto bids perfectly walked the line between efficiency and volume?

And of course, the answer is no. Nobody is doing that better, but people just like to point a finger at a tool that they're not used to, I think, a lot of times and say, you know, "Oh, you shouldn't be doing it that way." Whatever, you know. That's what I would say is that actually in the long run it was great. I'll tell you what, I worked really hard on Black Friday. It was a long day. I was just sort of locked in, in the zone, doing my work, whatever.

And but then Saturday and Sunday and to some degree Monday, although with Monday there was a little bit more hands-on, Saturday and Sunday I it was really easy. And it's because my bid caps were doing the work for me. They were just set to go capture the volume that I could capture. My unit economic targets were set. It just worked really, really well. Uh this by the way is another element of understanding your margins deeply like if you have understood your margins deeply and set your bid caps with with clarity to what those margins are, man, it just makes your life so much easier in these competitive moments.

It's going to be the same thing throughout December for again some of these holiday brands where they still have a lot of volume in front of them. So, there's that. Number three, delayed attribution is crucial to understand. And I'm going to use this phrase delayed attribution, but I'm going to mark right here that I'm going to begin to go on a holy war of redefining in the public sphere this phrase delayed attribution.

I don't know if it even has a name relative to what most people say, but delayed attribution multiplier. And the reason why I'm going to change the phrase here is that it actually has nothing to do with attribution per se. But what I'm referring to here is the purchase behavior in which somebody clicks today and buys tomorrow. So it's time of impression versus time of purchase. And there's a gap between these things.

Everybody recognizes that there's a gap between those things. Everybody knows that there is a consumer journey for a lot of products. Of course, lots of people click and buy right now and that's great. But for many, many customers, there is actually a longer consideration cycle, even for products that don't have a super long consideration cycle necessarily. Most brands I've ever worked on have at least some at least a 30% increase between the time the purchases that happen on the day of impression and the purchases that happen in the next 27 days after that.

Facebook gives you a 28-day click window that you can measure these things on. It's a little bit confusing and I don't have time to get into the details here. But this gap, if you want to look at this, the simple thing to look at in your ad account, if you don't know what I'm talking about, is to go to your to go into your Meta Ads account, look at compare attribution settings in your columns menu, okay? Your columns drop-down menu.

Look at compare attribution settings. And when you do that, you can look at one-day click and 28-day click. Click those two, get rid of your view attribution. You should be getting rid of view attribution anyway. Look at those two and look at the gap between them. You can look at seven-day click as well if you want. It gives you those three options. One-day click, seven-day click, 28-day click. And the way to measure your delayed attribution, and I'll I'll talk about what I'm going to change that language to in a second.

The way to measure this is 28-day click revenue divided by one-day click revenue. And if you look at that, you will see that you can multiply your one-day click revenue by some number to get to your 28-day click revenue. And what that gap represents is consideration cycle for customers. It's not about LTV. It's not about LTV. It's about people who click today, think about it, get your emails, talk to their friends about it, read reviews, whatever.

And then they buy 14 days or 28 days later, whatever. And this is incredibly important to understand before Black Friday if you want to maximize your volume, especially because you and I both know that lots of customers do what you are doing and what I am doing, which is keeping a list of things starting on November 2nd or something like that of wait a minute, I'm going to wait till Black Friday to buy this. And so they click on November 2nd on your ad and they go, that's an interesting product.

I'm going to come back to their to their website on Black Friday, I'm going to look. And so that experience of delayed purchase behavior, okay, happens at a more pronounced level at about a 2x the normal level that it does at other times of year. Which is to say, if there's a 30% increase in the value of your customers from time of impression to time of purchase, one-day click to 28-day click through most of the year, it's very likely that from November 1st through November, you know, 23rd or whatever, that number is going to go to 60% and therefore you should be willing to pay more, do what looks like eating into your margin more for clicks from that period, from November 1 to November 23 or whatever, that the week leading up to Black Friday.

You should be willing to to quote-unquote overpay for those clicks because you know those clicks are going to create purchases a little bit later on, more so than they usually do. Understanding that customer behavior uniquely in your business is crucial to maximizing this moment. I can't believe how much time I spent with clients and with, you know, coaching clients talking through this issue with them. Really looking at that gap.

I'm actually thinking about doing a whole podcast episode about it because I think it's so important to factor that into how you set your targets and how you set your spend goals, etc. And how you just maximize the moment. So, if you don't know what I'm talking about, the place to start is go look at that gap. One-day click to 28-day click, that's the place to start. Okay, my holy war is to change the name of that from delayed attribution.

Again, it has nothing to do with attribution to delayed purchase multiplier. That multiple, the number that you multiply one-day click revenue by to get your 28-day to take a I've typically called a delayed attribution multiplier. I'm going to change that name to a delayed purchase multiplier cuz that's what it really is. It's delayed purchases and a multiple of the value of your clicks that you're going to get over that time period, okay?

So, delayed purchase multiplier, so let it be written, so let it be done. That's the new name for this, okay? So, that's number three. Understand your delayed purchase multiplier deeply. Hey, if you're trying to build out your supply chain, you should do it with More Fractional Supply Chain. More Fractional Supply Chain is a fractional team in the Philippines loaded up with incredibly talented people who have deep, like years and years of supply chain experience and who will be significantly less costly than hiring those people in the US.

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Everybody wins. Use the code AJF20 to get 20% off your first 3 months. And tell them I sent you. Number four. Launching your sale early is effective, but diminishes your peaks uh on Friday and Monday. I actually think uh launching your sale early is mostly helpful, probably additive to your overall revenue, and everything everybody says about like having your best ads floating to the top of your ad account, you know, sort of warming people up to your offers, letting them know they're coming, just grabbing attention, all of those things, even just maximizing the moment by having the sale going for more days.

All those things definitely, I think, can make a big difference for maximizing the moment. And so, that's great. So, go ahead and launch your sale early. I'm not against it. You know, I know there's a lot of jokes about Black Friday month or you know, whatever. It's fine. Just know that it's likely that it's going to make Friday and Monday, the peaks on those days aren't going to be quite as crazy as if you condense the sale to those four days.

For sure, part of what's happening if you launch your sale the Monday before Black Friday, is it's going to cannibalize the peak of Friday a little bit. It's going to move some revenue forward, especially with your returning customer revenue. All right, those people aren't going to buy twice because you launched it on Monday versus Friday. And so, actually, one of the ways to maximize the moment is again, if you're a customer acquisition-oriented brand on Black Friday, where that's really going to be what's driving the value for you, then it may especially be in your best interest to launch your sale early.

It's going to get your ad account primed in all the ways that I just talked about, like I said. It's also going to just lower that peak. So, just set your expectations accordingly. Don't be disappointed if your peak isn't quite as high because you launch your sale early. It could still be very high, but I've just seen this where some brands have kind of gone like, we used to do Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday only, and now our peak is not quite as crazy.

But, that's actually because you just spread the revenue out a little over more days, not because you generated less total revenue. One other note here is, while it does, I think, help you to find your best ads early on, and maybe even iterate off those early, what I'm not sure it does help you to to is to get your bid caps locked in in a way that they're sort of primed for Friday. I think no matter what you do, that dynamic I mentioned earlier where your Friday conversion rate is going to spike so much that you're going to have to play with that bid cap a little bit to get this exactly right.

That's going to happen either way. It doesn't really matter when you launch your sale. It's just going to be a reality of how Black Friday works and therefore that maybe doesn't have quite that benefit that I'd hoped. Okay, number five. If you are running bid caps or cost caps or minimum ROAS and if acquisition is really the true bulk of this moment for you, if it's not really a returning customer moment, but it's more of an acquisition moment, my recommendation is that you don't change your offer from Friday to Monday in most cases.

There are probably exceptions to this rule, but I found this year that brands that had their bid caps by Sunday, when those caps were locked in, those bid caps actually did great on Monday and really helped scale the moment on the acquisition side. Brands that struggled a little bit more on Monday were brands that changed the offer on Monday and therefore had to relaunch all of its ads fresh on Monday and suddenly, uh, you know, you had to sort of the the machine learning had to re-kick in on each of these ad sets to figure out what ads were performing best and what was the expected CAC on it and all those kinds of things.

It just sort of throws away all the information you've gained from Friday through Sunday. And so I just recommend that if you are going to make acquisition a big part of your strategy, you give yourself a little advantage and less work, by the way, by keeping that offer the same. Again, that's especially if you're acquisition oriented. If you're more acquisition oriented than returning customer revenue oriented in this moment anyway, then it actually doesn't matter if you change your offer right because you know, you're you're not counting on returning customer revenue to be as big of a part of the revenue chunk.

What you need is new customers and they the new customers don't care if the offer changes. They have seen it or they haven't and there's going to be more volume to get on Monday that you didn't get on Friday and that's just kind of that. So, don't change your offer if you are a highly acquisition oriented brand. If you are more returning customer revenue oriented, you may want to change your offer from Friday to Monday because you may be able to squeeze by changing up the offer, you may be able to reach into different parts of your list that were not responsive to your first offer, but are to your second.

Maybe a BOGO really appeals to customer A, but a 30% off, or whatever, appeals to customer B. Who knows? But yeah, there's all kinds of ways you can think about that. But that's the way I would think about it if you're acquisition-oriented in particular. Okay, number six. Let's talk about creative for a second on the Meta ad side. My biggest takeaway this year on the creative side is that it is, as always, all about creative diversity.

Whether my brands did well or not, or better or worse, my brands that had lots and lots of creative diversity were getting spend across tons of different assets. And there's there's sort of the the big picture here first, which is evergreen ads versus BFCM ads. It's sort of famously a thing that at BFCM, many times, your ads are actually your evergreen ads sometimes outperform your sale ads. This happens to lots and lots of brands.

It can be actually frustrating cuz you go to all this effort to go create all these Black Friday ads, and then like Facebook barely spends on them, or whatever, you know. That was a mixed bag for me this year. Some of my Black Friday ads really really outperformed my evergreen ads. Sometimes my evergreen ads really outperformed my Black Friday ads. So I I don't have like a a strong like this is the takeaway here. It's all over the place in terms of what worked best and what didn't.

That said, what definitely was the case is that all of my accounts that performed well, and really all my accounts in general, had lots and lots of different ads getting spent. And it was also lots of different types of ads. So like one account I had that really performed over Black Friday in particular, the top spending ad spent less than 10% of the total revenue. And if you think like during a lot of the rest of the year, you know, it's your top spending ad spending 40% of your dollars, or 30% of your dollars, or whatever it is.

And that's just wild. I mean that you know, there were brands that did that that had sort of some hero ads that were just like mowing everything else down, and no other ads in the account could beat them. But, you know, very high spending accounts had lots and lots of creative diversity. And so that matters. And the types of creative are all over the place. I mean, the top five ads for one account was long-form explainer, like 2 minutes long, going through all the details of the product, showing it up close, talking head with captions, going through a clear process, you know, hook, body, CTA or offer validation.

Hey, look, you know, 30-day money-back guarantee, clear offer, all those kinds of things, you know, really long drawn-out detailed thing. It's kind of ad that I'm a big believer in for direct-response advertising. It works really, really well. So, there's that, right? And then right next to that, the number two spending ad is a still image that somebody put put together that was incredibly simple, beautifully designed.

And then the third ad was like a post-it note ad. And yes, I ran post-it note ads this year because they work. And so, that's fine. And then the fourth ad was like something completely different as well, like an unboxing ad. And it's just crazy how much that is the case, that those ads, different pieces of creative, appeal to different kinds of customers. And so, the more creative diversity you can generate, the better.

And I would really think in your Black Friday ad approach about generating not just lots of ads, but diverse types of ads. Really take different kinds of swings across your ad account. Make it so that your ads feel really different from one another, and that will allow you to maximize your reach, okay? Number seven. And this is so important. This is our last one, and I think it's the most important thing to some degree.

As best as you can know your brand and manage your expectations, you are best set up for success. I have watched over and over different clients have too high and too low of expectations for this moment because they don't understand how their brand relates to the holiday moment. Look, not every brand is a great gifting brand. It's going to be really hard for you to compete. I have two clients who spent 5x the amount of money in November that they did in October. 5x.

They spent that much more money because they are so holiday oriented. That's just two of my tiny little portfolio of brands. I just promise you, there are many other brands that are highly holiday oriented or or even not the highly holiday oriented that are 3x or whatever, to say nothing of the ones that are 10x, you know, just because people are so crazy good at this, right? So, like that makes the world of Facebook ads really, really competitive.

And it is so crucial for every brand owner to be realistic and rational about what the expectations are for their business. Now, my own expectations across my portfolio of clients were mixed. I would say I generally over forecasted for them. Now, I was working off of pretty narrow data sets. Almost all of them actually had Black Fridays in the past that were essentially irrelevant to planning for this year's Black Friday.

The data was just so completely different because there's so much growth or the product changed or or the brand basically didn't exist last year or whatever, right? What if the brand changed hands? Like just new owner completely, completely different team. So, we just really didn't know what to expect. And I would say I generally over forecasted some of my brands based on some of my experience, even though they all did well.

They all did well. And so, that element of expectations, understanding your seasonality, understanding whether or not you truly are primed to be a holiday brand, understanding whether you're generally trying to win on returning versus new customer revenue, etc. Those things are really, really important to get right and they will save you from from disappointment. It's Sometimes, you know, the Twitter victory laps are sort of hard to watch if your brand is not really as well suited for having a really big moment.

Yeah, all of those things are easier to manage if you can be really crystal clear about your expectations for the moment, your forecast for the moment, and to try to be as rational as possible about what happened and what happened, what went right and what went wrong, and analyze it in the cold light of day without pointing fingers at people. And all of those things all really matter. To try to be as realistic and rational as possible.

It's an emotional moment and I understand why. I mean, it's a really big moment and even for brands that don't have crazy moments, it's typically really good still. You still have a really good few revenue days. So, the question is like how are you going to relate to that revenue? And so much of that is about your expectations. As much as you can be clear-headed about your expectations, you can uh feel really good about where you got to as long as you executed as well as you possibly could, and you can also build your strategy in the best possible ways.

So, that's the last thing. Know your expectations, understand what you're trying to get out of the moment, and perform and analyze according to all of those. All right, thanks for joining me. I did not have an episode. I think I took a 2-week delay, maybe. Like I said, one of the episodes that I was trying to do was it wasn't good, so I got rid of it. Um not going to feed you bad content. And then number two, it just was overwhelming.

Black Friday was just really, really busy, and therefore uh I had to put more time into client work and those kinds of things. So, thanks for your patience with that. I have tons of great stuff coming up, including a Bid Cap AMA that uh I was asked to do on Twitter, and so I'm I'm going to do that episode really, really soon. That'll probably be my last Bid Cap episode for a while. I think I've beat that horse to death, potentially.

Is that beat a dead horse? Anyway, I got that analogy wrong, but I didn't I didn't beat any horses to death, I promise. But you get the idea. That that I'm going to do that and then kind of leave that aside. That's coming soon. I have a really good opening the books episode coming soon. All kinds of stuff coming up, including two amazing interviews coming up. One with Ju Rhee Yoo from Chiru Cosmetics, who had a massive, massive exit.

We're going to talk about that, how she got there, post-exit life, all those things. Also got an interview coming up with Fanjoy, who is an aggregator, founder, and sees in a given year, I think he sees he told me like 50 businesses a week or something like that. Like tons and tons looks and tons looks at tons and tons of businesses to possibly consider acquiring them. So, he has a he has a really clear perspective on the current market and things.

Fanjoy and I hung out recently and I said, "Hey, come on my podcast, please. Let's talk about this because uh he's got awesome things to say." So, tons of great stuff coming up. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. Make sure you leave a review if you're able to do that. that'd be a huge help to me. I hope you love this podcast. If not, why don't you send me an email? Tell me what you don't like about it. But at podcast@ajjeffroat.com or DM me on Twitter @AndrewJJeffroat and don't forget that if you're expanding your team, you should be doing it in the Philippines with my friends at More Fractional Supply Chain, especially to build out your supply chain team.

It's going to be really helpful to you to get incredible talent from the Philippines who have deep experience and who are significantly less costly than hiring those same folks in the US. And don't forget to use the code AJF20. Anyway, tell them I sent you. They'll give you a discount. That's the point. And you'll do really well there. All right, that's it. You know how to subscribe to podcasts. Subscribe to my podcast.

That's really the point. I will see you next time. I hope all went great for you in your Black Friday. Let's talk next time. And I say get out. I know the script WITH MY HIGH SCHOOL OH. And I say that's all. Let's see little sister in the