This $100 Million Brand Released 1300 Products Last Year. Their CMO Explains How. (W/MacCoy Merkley) transcript

McCoy Mkeley is the CMO at Portland Leather Goods, a nine figure e-commerce business. He has been there since they were doing less than a million dollars in revenue. We're going to break down right now on this podcast how they grew from less than a million to nine figures. You're going to learn a lot from McCoy. There's going to be some ad account in there. There's going to be some product development in there. There's going to be some community in there.

There's a whole bunch of stuff. You're going to like this a lot. McCoy is a really brilliant dude. Let's get into it. McCoy, what's up, man? How you doing? Hey, I'm feeling good. I'm coming off of paternity leave and being a little sick. So, this is maybe not the best version of me, but we're gonna pull it together. We're going to rock it. Which means you've slept a combined three hours in the last week, probably. Exactly.

Um Yeah. So, this that's good. It could get a little unhinged. Um hey uh thanks so much for doing this. who were pointed out to me uh originally I think I've mentioned this story to you before by Nate Legos who said uh at e-commerce round table in San Diego. Nate said you know that brand Portland leather goods and McCoy that's like the smartest people in the room who are doing the most interesting things. They're the people I watch the most closely makes a lot of sense in his category especially to kind of look up to you guys because you guys are a stage or two past where they're where his brand is at and there's a lot of I think overlap in the ways to think about those businesses.

But it is a really impressive thing and you guys have done incredible stuff. There's there's a lot we could say about this. I mentioned it in the intro, but your nine figure e-commerce business. Um you guys are dropping huge numbers of products. You just referenced that you dropped 1300 variants in the last um year. You um have a Facebook group with what 150,000 members in it. Something like that. Yeah, a little more than that.

Yeah. Four or five full-time moderators whose entire job is to work with those people. There's there's just a lot you could say about Portland Other Goods and what makes it such a good business and what you guys have done there. Um, so what I want to do in this episode is just tell tell have people hear how you did it and think about how they can apply the same operational excellence and and I want to start with product.

Um, you you have been there from the beginning. Uh, sub sub seven figures, you're still in the same spot, nine figures, very different business over that time. And I'm curious to hear you talk a little bit about what Portland Leathergoods does at the level of product and what makes the product special. um so that people can kind of have a sense of of that and maybe how that relates to customers and and sort of their experience of the product.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's like kind of tackling like the the product market fit that we've uh found for our brand. Um so at our core of our business like uh we really look at ourselves as almost like a material like access business. Um if you look at brands like Coach or Kate Spade or any of these like major bag brands who've been around for you know 20 30 years things like that they at some point technology advanced and leather became really difficult.

It's always been really difficult to source at the scale that these brands wanted to operate at. And so when technology advanced and they could cover cover over leather with like plastics and oils, they left like the business model that we adopted for dead. They just leaned out the window of their Mercedes and waved goodbye, right? And so we were the brand who's been foolish enough to try to like pick up where they left off and source enough leather to, you know, generate a large brand and this really natural um what you think about when you think about leather, the feel, the the the smell, the touch, that's what we sell.

And so we decided to, you know, build a brand around that. Um we design our bags extremely simply so that the price can remain really affordable. Uh we don't lean on things like uh needless features or designer labels and things like that. And uh so at its core, when you pick up our bags, again, you're going to feel and sense that this is a real leather bag, but um it's simple. It's understandable. And we've allowed women to build a collection of purses that they can build they can have pride in that aren't on either side of the coin, right?

So they're not these like cheap mall bags cuz no one really has a sense of pride in those things. And they're not as out of touch and unreachable like a collection of designer bags. They're in those like $80 to $150 price point. And you can build a collection of them. You can have pride in them. And that's really been like our product market fit. And really what has been the key driver of our success and our growth is one that we just nailed product.

Um that makes my job extremely easy. I know that's kind of like not an executable tip that everyone can take and just oh god I have a great idea. Let's make a good product. Like you're already maybe in deep with your business but like focus on product. That's our number one. That's like I can't take credit for any of the success. Um yeah we we've done fun things to accelerate the brand but the product is king for us.

I'm interested to hear if you were in those early conversations about that targeting, you know, like it's sort of common advice that people would think about product between either it needs to be sort of a price focus. So you go sort of low market, try to figure out how to get as cheap as possible um or you know, I mean that cheap sounds derogatory. I mean affordable as possible, right? Um another way to approach this sort of game is the other way, right? which like build as much margin as possible, you know, sell to the 1%, that kind of idea.

It sounds like you guys have thought about this as somewhat more of a how do we offer an extremely high quality product at a sort of more middle price point. Um, and I'm curious if that was like something you like lucked into, like you started making the bags, price them, and that's where you ended up, or if that was like a conscious decision. And that may have not been a decision of yours, but if you're there that early, I suspect at some point you guys had a lot of conversations around that.

Uh I when I started the website was doing less than a million. Our Etsy business, we had an Etsy business was doing about three-ish million. Those two things were completely disconnected from each other. They had very little crossover. Um but that started as a consequence of our founder Curtis. Um if I mean when you go to start a business, especially today, most people think about sourcing a product. Maybe they think about drop shipping, but they think about buying, you know, a a batch of products from overseas.

But there's another way to do it, which is you make with your hands and then you sell what you have made, right? And so our founder Curtis went down to a little shop in Portland, Oregon called Oregon Leather and was buying raw leather hides off the rack. And so that fit that characteristics we're talking about, that like natural, real raw, rugged um leather feel, and then he was turning those into journals and then selling what he had on the shelf on Etsy that day.

So that's how that that started. And I think to a certain extent, we kind of lucked into the product market fit that's allowed us to scale to the nine figures. I don't know that that was like the original idea like hey there's this massive hole in the market all the way up. I think certainly that we looked into that. Um but it's it's carried us like more the more we've explored going up we realized how much more room there is to grow.

Um if you go buy a bag again if you go to Coach or Case B any of these bags you're not going to find a product that looks and feels like the one that we sell. So like with most good things it was a a pretty big stroke of luck. Um but the way that we approached you know making products in the beginning definitely like lent itself to that that future. In light of that um do you so so if product is the driver product market fit is the driver um do you think that the path from sub 1 million on your website you know a few million on Etsy but still that early in the ball game to a nine figure brand.

Do you think there's a through line of that besides sort of like great product? Like is there something you guys have done that said like along the way this is the core strategy that's powering that kind of growth? Um or do you think I'm sure there's this is a both and but or do you think about it more as like stage one was this, stage two was this, stage three was this? Do you know what I'm saying? Um yeah, you know h how do you guys think about that?

I think there's definitely a throughine. I mean, one of the kind of like funnier parts of our history is um I mean the the category of business we're all involved in here is called like direct to consumer this is a true story and it's kind of funny believe it or not uh most traditional businesses right you run cost times two is is wholesale and then wholesale times two equals like your traditional keystone that's your retail markup.

We at the beginning thought direct to consumer meant you couldn't mark it up four times. And so we said, "Okay, clearly we have to like it has to be a better deal than four times because what? That's not direct to consumer. That's like something else. That's just retail." And so we we've always run with a lower cost multiplier and delivered that to our customers. And I think that that has been a massive benefit to us.

Um our founder Curtis um is a marketing mind. I run the marketing department, but uh he's a marketing mind. He gets it. And so at the core of that has always just been like offering products at like an ridiculously good exceptional value. And again, that's kind of insulated us. Um if you look if we were to add that extra cost multiplier and that's still true today by the way like our cost multipliers are not you know four and five and six they're just not um leather is an extremely expensive material to work with and which is again a benefit to us um but if you if you started to add those traditional cost multipliers to us it would put some of our bags in the range where you could reasonably compare them to something like a coach or case bait or some other bag brand right where you have an $150 uh bag and $150 port and leather bag and this one has designer labels and this one has features and then we're I think it's our opinion that we're asking too much from the people who want to participate in our brand to try to justify why they would purchase from us over a legacy brand with the designer label with the notoriety with all the features compared to to what we it is we offer um which again we think has its own unique value to it but that's a true story somewhere along the lines we thought it meant you could only mark it up so much otherwise you were kind of like a phony right I that's obviously like silly now like most businesses you know require a higher markup But we didn't know that in the beginning.

We were making everything for Etsy and then online where uh at one point we're making everything to order and so the business has evolved along the way. But yeah, that that's definitely been a throughine all the way up. Um you see that reflected in our social proof. You see that reflected in the fanaticism of the people on our uh Facebook group. They're just shocked at the quality and the price point still remains obtainable to where they can make a collection of them.

So that's been the same all the way up and that's just been an accelerant to all of our marketing efforts in general. It's so funny. I remember those days of D TOC where where like the whole value proposition and certainly 2016 was those times where you'd see you'd see these infographs where it was like see in the old days there had to be a markup between the manufacturer and the retailer and then the retailer stood in between the manufacturer and the customer and now the value of DDC is that we eliminate the retailer and therefore bring it at a price to you.

Now, of course, the middleman is still there. His name is just Mark Zuckerberg now instead of you know Target or whatever. Um and uh and so so that ended up I think almost nobody talks about DDC that way anymore. In fact, people think about margin uh margin profile as this like extraordinary sort of cheat code in DTOC and I certainly have framed it that way a lot of times. But I'm really fascinated by this because when I actually look at a couple of the nine figure businesses that I've seen the most up close, one of the things that really strikes me about them is actually that they don't have that good of gross margins.

Um I I'm thinking of you guys and simple modern here both where actually the price of the product relative to the category uh you know Simple Modern's pricing is a little bit of a different strategy than yours but um the price of the product relative to the category is like really core to the growth mechanism of the business. In their case it's it was an Amazon first strategy where they were thinking about how to win on that particular platform with reach.

But there is a similar thing in them in that there is a a huge amount of reach possible by not targeting the very high end of the market um and by not targeting all of that margin. Instead giving some of that margin back to the customer instead reaching regular people of which there are very many who um who are there. Now of course very wealthy people may be buying your bags as well just like they may maybe buying simple modern also.

But as far as like who you're trying to reach is like and again similarly with simple modern, it's how do you like bring a really high level of quality that you would normally find in more expensive brands to to more people? Well, part of it is you just take less margin. Um, and instead you increase your TAM and you increase your ability to reach more people at those things. And so that that cost multiplier you mentioned, you know, I have I have I properly stated back to you what you said?

I I don't want to twist your words. No, no. We we talk about this all the time. like you every dollar you increase the the your product the the the amount that it's for sale even if it's worth it the customer has to have that corresponding amount of dollars in their pocket to participate in your brand and so even if the value prop is there even if the product is you know faithfully fulfilling all the promises you make the more expensive it is the less people can participate just as a matter of fact and that and so we think about that all the time and we've always gone for like this maximum amount of um customer volume you know obviously balancing all things considered One thing that's unique about our business is we own the manufacturer.

So now you talk about direct to consumer. We're we're about as direct to as it gets. We buy raw materials to start our production process. We own the manufacturer. We turn into bags. We sell it to them direct to consumer. Um but you're you're exactly right and you're exactly correct there. And we think about that too. You know, that middle market approach. It's a safe and comfortable place to be. um because our bags are not so expensive that even if you're lower on the income scale that you can't afford one but also during times of like economic um uncertainty or low customer sentiment there are a lot of people who may be buying more expensive bags who fall into our audience group there too.

So there's this constant, you know, punching up and punching down into the audiences that are happening that keep us, you know, a little bit more steady than if we were extremely expensive and our we had to be airtight every single day and then, you know, sentiment fell through the floor like what happens then. So it's helped keep us a little bit the boat a little bit more steady and insulated us from economic uncertainty at times.

I actually love the humility that you of the answer that you referenced earlier. This really jumped out to me when you said we don't have the legacy of these design or the designer label of these other brands. So, we're not going to pretend that we do and pretend that we can play with those guys. Like, they've built that up over a lot of years and a lot of marketing dollars and, you know, a lot of different stuff, right?

So, um, so it makes sense. They capitalize really differently. The distribution is really different, all those things. So, um, I think it's really helpful. Every time somebody compares themselves to Nike, um, on the internet, some brand says, "This is what Nike does, so why why don't we do it, too?" I'm like, "Yeah, you probably should not look at that business as your model for your $5 million e-commerce business." Exactly.

Exactly. If anything, you should look at that as like, "We probably can't do that because they're Nike and we're not. Um, we don't have LeBron on our payroll." Um, so the um Yeah, the Let's talk actually a little bit more tactically then. So, so if product and price are driving this, I think that is extremely important for people to understand. Um, and we can come back to products part of the tactics because 1300 variants is a lot of variance that I mentioned earlier.

And that's clearly a tactic in its own way. It means you've built an operational machine to to do everything involved with generating products, releasing those products, cycling out slow movers, you know, scaling up fast movers, all the things involved with that process. But before we get there, you did not go from releasing a few journals on Etsy to 1300 products overnight. Let's talk a little bit about that first stage of the business if you can.

Um, so what got you guys to 10, 15 million, some of that stage when you think about that stage of business? I know it's was a different world. 2016 is a while ago, but I'm just curious if you can reflect back on that a little bit for people there. Like do you even remember those days? Does it feel like an eternity ago? Um, can you think about what what helped you get to that first stage of growth? Yeah, that I mean the going 0 to 15 for us again, we had nailed product market fit even in the small stages.

Um, a lot of that was what most people what we spend a lot of time talking about. It's your traditional like marketing tactics and advertising tactics. It's amplifying the business. Um, we were not, you're correct, we were not releasing, 1300 variants a year back when we were doing, you know, one in five and 10 million. Um, we were doing our best to release good new products. Um, you know, that's very important. You know, not to not limit yourself in experimenting with new products even at that stage, I think is extremely important. um the products you have now may be the worst products you ever release and you know 10 years from now like that person's like begging you to release your next new hit product today.

So it it's a little it's a little of both, you know, maintaining an openness to experimenting with new products and launching new variants and things like that. But really in those early stages for us, it was getting um tight on amplification and advertising. In those days, that team up until I'm going to butcher I try to always speak with like pinpoint accuracy on the numbers and the time. So I think it's not helpful if I I butcher it, but for the number of years up until uh 2020, it was just me on on that team on the website team.

We had one other graphic artist who was doing ads for both the Etsy side um helping out with some of the website, but the advertising team was basically me. And starting way back in the day, I used to have to get written permission to spend $20 a day, right? Now we're doing, you know, 10 and 20 and 30 and 40 50 million a year, right, in advertising. Um, but in those early days, you know, you you start by running Facebook ads essentially.

And as long as you're not doing it like the stupidest way imaginable, which most people probably aren't if they're listening to podcast, I'm sure that they're they're a layer above your average, you know, starting an e-commerce, running their first Facebook ad. But in any case, um, once you've got some amplification going in the form of any advertisement, period, whether it's Google, whatever it is, where I focus most of my time was on the business optimization.

So, I'll give you like a really tactical example. Um, I was sitting there one day running my Facebook ads and things may be going good or bad. I can't remember. But I remember looking like the business has a hole and going why why how could I help more people convert? And most people maybe sit in their corner and they just maybe make a new ad or they maybe try to build a landing page. And instead I identified was like our shipping cost was too high.

Like we hadn't negotiated rates. Our rates were terrible and we were charging customers $15 and $16 to ship a bag. And I identified that as like okay this is that's causing a lot of pain. Let's look at our conversion rate funnel here. People are adding to cart. They're reaching checkout. Massive gap to the people who are actually purchasing. So, one of the things we set out to do was like tackle shipping rates. Okay, that's not like what a traditional media buyer or traditional advertiser is going to do with their time.

Um, but that in that stage at that layer or that level of business, that's the type of decisions that you should be consumed with, the types of uh business optimization decisions which are going to make you more attractive overall. and then the amplification goes further, right? If it doesn't cost $16 to ship a bag and instead we negotiated down to 12, which was still high at the time, um, that's better. And we saw an increase.

I remember literally going to the shipping team. I said, "Why are our shipping rates so high? I think that we're leaving thousands of dollars on the table." And I I got laughed at, right? Cuz they literally said, "Thousands? You think we're we're missing thousands of dollars?" Because, keep in mind, we were doing like, you know, $1,300 a day. And I'm like, "Yeah, look at this. We're we lost, you know, 50 60 checkouts a day." And uh lo and behold, we started to optimize those things and things started to get better.

So a lot of that, you know, it's easy to get consumed. It's easy to hop on like Twitter or X or LinkedIn or whatever and just get inundated with like landing pages and ad structures and creative testing, all those things. And those things all have a place. Absolutely. Um but business optimization, I think, is more important arguably at almost any stage of business than like marketing optimization. So again, you have to be in a position of power where you can influence those things.

Fortunately, I was, you know, I was dedicated to the website. there wasn't many other people helping me and we have a marketing-minded founder. So, I had a lot of leverage to change those things. But that that was the that's how we grew. That's how we you know we made our amplification in the form of advertising go further every day. The way I like to think about this is that like the core functions of what you do as a business are going to drive the main part of the growth and then something like tactical excellence with Facebook ads ends up amplifying all of those decisions that you make.

Right. So the moment you fix your checkout friction like you just described related to shipping, all of your ads work better and you can spend more and you're going to be more primed to take advantage of that moment if you also have a really good machine of Facebook ads on the background, right? But it but but the there's this like thing that all the ads are driving to and everybody kind of intuitively understands this when they when they talk about like CRO or something like that and they say, you know, if I could convert, you know, 5% more customers or whatever, it would make all my ads perform 5% better.

I think what people don't understand is the way that stacking those wins on first of all that there's actually more opportunities than 5% and they probably shouldn't do things at that stage of business that are just 5% wins. You should be looking for bigger wins than that. But um which which I think is part of the way you you cycle through the noise of of that you just described, right? There's all this advice coming all the time.

And the thing you got to ask yourself is what moves the needle for real in this business versus what gives me like a little step forward. But if you can actually build like a tactical machine on the just really on the Facebook ad side especially up through about 50 million in revenue in my view that machine will then amplify every good decision you just described making including the price of the product relative to the quality which you talked about a lot earlier including fixing your shipping costs all the you know everything you just described gets better every product you release on the way from zero to 1300 or you know or uh yeah all of those different all of those different things get better when you have some so the tactical excellence really matters.

It really matters. It matters a lot. Um and it's part of how you do that stuff really well. It's just that like uh it works in service of larger strategic initiatives that you talked about which is like business optimization type things with that checkout optimization. Um do you think that um was the main win there uh like actually going to the USPS? Do you remember like this is a while ago I know but uh like going to USPS and negotiating your shipping rates or like do you have any memory of like sort of how you accomplished that problem and how much you're able to save.

I don't remember exactly where like eventually we did negotiate lower rates. I know that as a for a certainty. I don't know which came first whether it was like the test to see you know like hey I convinced them like let's let's eat a couple bucks and see what happens or if it it came in the form of negotiated rates. But um did you actually use a tool to split test it or was it too No. This is this was this was way I was I had no idea what I was doing at the time.

So I think it was, you know, basically just lowering the price and seeing what happens. Um, but either way, right now, right now you could like actually run that test with Intelligence, sponsor of this podcast precisely for this reason because these are the kind of decisions they're making. Like that like, you know, just imagine a McCoy Mer Mkeley from those days like being able to actually go like stop. Let's not argue over it.

I don't have to convince any of you. We'll just run the test and see what happens. You know, it's like crazy. Absolutely. Yeah. We talk about that a lot. The cost of our opinions. People don't realize that one of the largest cost centers in their business is actually their opinions. their the cost of holding certain opinions over the other. But to double back to your earlier point, like if I was going to write an e-commerce scaling book, I would write, you know, maybe chapter number one or two, who cares?

It'd be two word two words. It' say meta works, right? You can just stop arguing about it. It works, right? Like for unless you're the extreme outlier or you're trying to, you know, sell something that's not like legal to advertise, it's a safer baseline assumption to assume that it works. At least currently, you know, today is 2025, you know, it's March. Um, so in fact, it's only gotten better over time, which is contrary to everybody's opinion about it.

Uh, all the CPMs are up, etc. No, it's gotten better over time because they're getting better at matching customer with with ad. So, anyway, I agree 100%. Yeah. So, but basically, like, stop wasting your time speculating that it's the boogeyman. It's likely, you know, some sort of business efficiency problem that's making your business not attractive to amplification. That's probably what's holding you back. It's probably not the boogeyman in the black box.

That is meta. That's that's my my I'll say my piece on it, but You just heard me say that if you wanted to do what McCoy did and test your free shipping threshold, which as he said can make a huge impact on your business, you can and should do that with my friends at Intelligence. Intelligence is the best CRO software I know of in e-commerce. And it's because it's not really just CRO software. Yes, it can do the simple basic things of sort of being the Google Optimize placement, simple AB testing, use it for landing page testing, etc.

But what they really care about, and I can just tell you that from talking to Intel gems, what they're building the tool for, what they've built everything around is profit optimization for brands that are thinking about operational excellence all the way through the business exactly the way McCoy is. So if I wanted to do exactly what McCoy said for my business, and I have actually done this with brands of mine, uh, clients of mine, uh, I think all of them use Intelligjs right now.

Uh, uh, all but one, yes, all but one use intelligence right now. and they have run this exact test that McCoy talked about which is what happens if you change your free shipping threshold what happens if you change the price per shipping um the price you're charging for shipping all of those things make changes very close to the impact point of purchase for a customer you do the same thing with price testing which I think is a is a huge lever that people don't realize again this came up in this particular conversation right now which is that the price of the product has a major impact on the reach of the product and who the customer is you can test that with intelligence it's really awesome Everything you are trying to do to optimize your website experience for your customers and generate more profit per visit which is the golden metric for everything with Intelligjam can be done in an affordable way in an incredibly technically easy way.

This is crucial for me too. I am not technical with websites. You will not find any of that in my past content because I'm bad at it. But uh the intelligence install is extremely fast and easy. You can be up and going really fast and actually run live split tests on all kinds of things that are real needle movers for your customers experience on your website. Go check it out right now. If you're serious about growing a good quality e-commerce business, go to intellgeems.io intelliggeems.io and use the code ferris 20 f to get 20% off your first three months at intelliggeems.

It is awesome software. You're going to love it. Intelligjs.io. Ferris 20. F20. No, it's really helpful, I think, because because again, it reinforces that same thing like just go get good at meta. You need to do it. It's an important thing and it works and it's going to be what I always tell people especially founders who are too early and they want to get an agency too fast. One of the things I tell them is just like you need to run it yourself for a while because for as long as this business exists probably it's going to be I mean maybe not as long as it exists but for a very long time it's going to be your number one or number two cost line item on your books.

Um you know it's either your product or meta ads. Those are going to that's one of those two depending on the dynamics of your business and um and and so like you just have to get good at it for exactly the reason you said precisely because it does work. You should understand how it works and how to do it well. And then and then once that machine is going make sure it's going and make sure you're devote you know continue to give resources to it because it's the amplification machine that is the highest return on every next dollar you spend for a very long time.

And then after that, now you figure out how to feed that machine or let that machine feed your business, however you want to look at it, you know. So, yeah, I I I think you're you're thinking about it exactly right. It makes sense to me. Um, let's talk about the next stage of business from there. So, you solve these big problems like, you know, checkout rates and and I love the way you're thinking about that, which is like a problem that is like expensive, very close to purchase, very close to the thing the customer cares about most, which is the offer, the product, and the price, right?

So you solve that problem. It makes a disproportionate impact on the business because it's extremely close to the purchase um event. So um so so what about there 50 to let's call it 40 50 million something like that you know how how do you take that next stage because I think a lot of founders are getting there now to that 10 $15 million business and it's like okay what do I do from here? Yeah, I think I've been talking about this a lot recently.

Um the one you you you mentioned it which is identifying areas of like the largest throughput, right? So um mentioned in the context of CRO, right? You make one good CRO decision that's different from making a new good ad wherein like you maybe you affect the performance of an ad in a adset in a campaign like this. You make a good CRO decision, it affects every ad's performance in every adsets and every campaign across all advertising channels, across all social channels, across all organic channels.

So that's a good investment, right? there's a very like high amount of throughput. But once you get to that like mid 8 figure scales and above, I think that for for me personally, I think that it's really uh a good time to get serious about retention. And I think that retention has been wildly misunderstood in the e-commerce community for a long time. And I think that it's uh one of the larger differentiators between this era of business that is e-commerce where it's extremely data driven versus like your traditional like the the the businesses that have existed for hundreds of years.

Um you know, the large very established businesses have a good sense of this compared to like your mid-market businesses, but we're we can be small and even mid-market and have an extremely intense um data perspective on our customers. So, what I mean by this is you're it's it's likely if you're in the mid- eight figures, if you're a traditional or or an average consumer brand, that you're going to make the super majority of your profit from returning customer purchases.

Um, and there's a good reason for that. It's because you're not paying hopefully the very expensive acquisition tax on a purchase. So hopefully you can save that 20 30 40 whatever percent whatever your aim percentage is on the purchases that come from returning customers. Now when it comes to retention I believe um you know in a similar vein I believe it's Taylor Holliday mentioned it that the most of your retention stats come from the genetic makeup of your product.

I think that if you're going to get deep into optimizing retention you're probably optimizing a small percentage on top of what's natively going to happen based on what your product is. Like if you buy if you sell a shoe it's going to wear out eventually. Maybe we convince them to buy another one of our shoes once those things happen. You sell a product that never breaks, you may have a harder time with retention. But in any case, what comes first in I think almost every business is acquisition.

We start with a and people need to bring customers into their business. And for a long time, retention gets ignored. Um but I think if it gets ignored for too long, it's really hard to generate the amount of profit necessary um to continue to grow and scale the business without being like high overly dependent on things like debt. And I think that it dictates for us, you know, retention and what we expect on a forecast as far as returning customer revenue and the margin from that revenue compared to the efficiency of uh new customer revenue dictates like our maximum rate of growth per year.

It dictates a lot of our financial decisions. Um, and once you start to get into that mid 8 figure scales, like the financial systems start to get very very big and heavy and start to really become a giant hammer to to crush a lot of other systems in the business. and for very very good reason. You have a big thing that's worth not or that's that's uh worth not messing up anymore. Um, and so you need to really get good at forecasting.

And along with that, I think comes returning customer revenue and retention is your best friend to predict profit and to predict things like acquisition targets and and all of those things. All of those metrics in my opinion are contextualized by the returning customer activity. And there is some I know people say, "Oh, it's not significant for a business." It doesn't matter. Whatever is happening in your business from a returning customer perspective is likely much more profitable than anything that's happening on the acquisition side.

Even the best businesses who say we are first purchase profitable. We are first purchase profitable. But we're talking like we're talking like this. We're talking we're talking an economic shift could wipe that out. What allows us to keep operating day on day is our customer journeys and how profitable they are after 12 months. That's what keeps us running even if meta shifts in performance 10 to 15% in a day or a week or a month.

And it does. Um so that I think that's where eight mid eight figures like you've got to be focused on retention. you've got to start letting it um guide the businesses going forward because again most of your profit is probably coming from those returning customer purchases if you're an average consumer brand in my opinion. So think about this then as a marketer as a marketer tasked with improving retention recognizing everything you said about the genetic makeup of the brand which I agree with.

Retention for a subscription supplement brand is going to be really different than an apparel brand uh which you guys are probably more like an apparel brand in the way you function um in terms of product releases. It's going to be really different than a lot of other kinds of businesses. So, u maybe you're thinking about this in your category specifically, which is just fine, but um but think about this for a second.

So, so granting that the base rate of retention is going to be different in different categories. Uh what um what have you done to do that at Portland leather goods? What have been the key things to generate, you know, steady or increasing retention over time? Yeah, for sure. So, what's if let's say you're in that mid eight figures, um you have a lot of data to play with um depending on your advertising strategy. I I'll speak through purely the lens of port and leather good.

So um at some point we decided to hone down and only advertise the fewest number of products which we believe drove the best results for our business and along in that consideration was those products which in their genetic makeup lend themselves to the best retention rates. So we therefore we could really dial in what we knew to be our acquisition targets. we really understood the behavior of what happens after they purchase their products over the next 12 months and we honed in away from selling everything which at one point we did um down now it's a little different with DPA ads that's a big caveat here but in any case we used to have dedicated campaigns and adsets for almost every product right we want to launch a new product we wanted to make it successful let's throw some money at it and we went all the way down to basically two products uh however those two products still only represented a fraction of our new customer revenue so what we noticed is that what what makes up the rest of it.

So today that that number is 30%. The three main bags that we advertise only represent 30% of our new customer revenue. So the other 70% of it is comprised of the entire rest of the catalog combined. That's funny because it's it's it's both a very large percentage for three bags, but then also only 30% of your total revenue. So it's an interesting trade-off. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Those that's the majority of what people are seeing when they log on Meta or Instagram and they look at our ads.

They're seeing those three bags. So in any case, when you start to dissect that and you look at okay, like returning customers are purchasing today, what are they purchasing? And what we really started to do was create and and create containers for the consciousness of our returning customer revenue and behavior and what products they were buying and when and why and how and our new customers and how they behave differently and started to assemble that journey in our head.

Um because the danger of of letting those two things blend together is you may think what returning customers want is what new customers want and that's not true. It's not true for your brand. Most of for most brands most brands they go through like a progression of product at least for brands like ours like an apparel brand. Um, if you're a supplement brand, that's obviously different or something like that on subscription.

But returning customers, they behave dramatically different from your new customers. So, in reverse, it's even more dramatic. So, I use this analogy all the time. I say like you might look out at your returning customer segment of data and you might say, and a lot of people do this sometimes because the returning customer data can be overwhelming, right? It's a lot of the feedback you're getting in your groups and in your post-purchase surveys and in your emails, whatever it is, your customer service.

And they might look out and they might survey that group of people uh in in order to identify like trends or patterns or behaviors of what customers want from them. And they might look out and go, "Oh my god, everybody in this crowd loves red and blue. That's not what the next new customer want. You're looking at a football stadium and that's the home team's colors." And so you take the wrong conclusion away from overwhelming data and then you start to let these things mush together and you create like an improper strategy and an improper handoff between what a new customer wants and then eventually what the returning customer behavior will look like.

So for us that looks like a very small number of bags are attractive to new customers. Um as we mentioned 30% of our sales are consolidated on those three bags. Again, the super majority of them are not those bags, but for the most part, when we advertise those three bags, those are the three bags that can take the heat, that can take hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars of advertising spend behind them and maintain performance.

But those are three hero products. And what we know is those new customers come in and they buy the traditional browns. They buy your brown and your your really rich um traditional standard leather colors. However, once they go to their second or third purchase, they start to go bananas. they go haywire. They start to buy purples and pinks and greens and all of the other things. And so we have to keep that data and that process and that journey straight for us to make sure that we're not take drawing the wrong conclusion and putting purple bags in front of new customers or vice versa that we're not trying to constantly shove brown bags down a returning customer's throats.

Um and you that pairs I'm running on here, but that pairs a lot with what blends into our our product strategy and how we think about new products and new variants. Your supply chain is the most underoptimized part of your business. I know that because I talk to brand founders, brand operators all the time. And it does not have to be that way. Dialing in the supply chain is the key to making great products at scale. That means dialing it in at the level of quality, cost, turnaround times, etc.

And if product movement, as McCoyy's talked about in this episode, is going to be an important part of the strategy of your business's growth, there's almost nothing more important in your business that you can do to operationalize that than to get your supply chain dialed. And you can do that with help from my friends at Move Supply Chain. Move Supply Chain is a Philippines-based uh ecommerce deep expertise supply chain agency that can help you um negotiate rates, find new vendors and manufacturers.

I have mentioned before, I'm starting a brand right now. I'm working on it on the side, hoping to get things launched in the next few months here. Um, I have built my supply chain entirely with help from move. Uh, and that has meant they had uh reached out to um or at least researched and found 60 manufacturers to start, reached out to 45 of them. We paired it down from there. My product is going to come going to come in at under my proposed cost.

I talked to another friend recently who used Move in their business. They shaved like 20 or 30% off their margin. And they also redesigned their 3PL relationships to sh save a dollar on every order and ful at the level of fulfillment. Like there's just all kinds of things that your product touches before it ever gets to the customer. And all of that is stuff that Move can help you with at an extremely affordable rate.

These are my favorite e-commerce supply chain experts that I know of. Um they've been working on e-commerce supply chains for a very very long time. They're also in the Philippines which is a real advantage to you because they're a short flight from China, much closer time zone wise. So, if you're manufacturing there, it can help. Though, they actually work on supply chains outside of that. My business will be manufacturing in the US.

They help us find that manufacturer. Um, it's really good. So, if you're trying to shorten lead times, um, uh, lowerQ's, save costs, think about financing differently, forecast. There's all these different elements. Think about your shipping, your 3PL relationships, you should at least get on a call with them and see if move supply chain is right for you. Go to moveupplychain.com. I trust them with my business. You should trust them with yours.

Moveuplychain.com. Well, so so your answer to the question then is very clearly about product, right? Uh which is which is I think a really fascinating thing, right? Because people want retention to be tactics and it's just not um it's it's just not. It's so much about product. Again, notwithstanding the possibility that you have like a subscription business where like you know optimizing sort of subscription funnels can be its own thing and reducing churn and all that and there's some definitely some tactics there.

Um, but the what you what you just answered that question with was like the answer to our retention problem was was uh purple bags or or whatever, you know, like and obviously that's it's more complicated than that, but it's like, you know, that really strikes me as as a helpful answer. I wonder do you know the answer of that 30 those three bags that represent 30% of your sales? If you only do new customer sales, do you know what percentage they represent?

Yeah, so that is they of new customer revenue, they only represent 30% of new customers. Oh, interesting. So people So then that means people are even if that's where the the majority of your ads are coming in on, right? People are clicking on that bag and then buying something else. Exactly. So that's how from an acquisition point, that's how we look at it. So like we know that those three bags are the three that can take the heat of the advertising.

However, we we're we want a large catalog. We want a large catalog stuffed full of good performing products. Yeah. That doesn't mean we have to advertise them. That means they need to exist on the website merchandise responsibly and their proper high or low attention allocations on the collection page on the whatever it is and help overall lift the boats of the website performance and not be a takeaway. So we actually monitor like this is a little bit like just my ADHD behavior here and OCD behavior.

We monitor the conversion rate of every product page, right? How many how much attention is this product getting? How is it performing? And then we try to edit the catalog as a whole for the sake of acquisition to eliminate low performing products and add as many as many I should say that like I I will if there if we end up with 2,000 bags I don't care maybe that's a little much but you get the idea of products who like raise the waterline right so with with the KPI there being conversion rate on the page or maybe RPC on the page or something like that like you got to triangulate it a little bit that's like just one dimension but yeah in general like there's also like the PETA factor like is this product just a giant pain in the ass like is does this product take a lot of material and is straining the production side?

So, there's a bit of triangulation, but that is one of the ways to look at it. Absolutely. Theoretically though, you could measure that as like essentially um because you may want to bake in order like if you do CVR, it's going to disproportionately be higher for lower price products, etc. You know, so you you would probably want to work in like like I said, RPC might be a better metric or or or even like to factor in what you just said, you know, profit per per click basically, right?

LTVs, all of those things. Cohort, we do all up and down cohort analysis of everything. Yeah. But I mean I think in your category this makes all the sense in the world which is that essentially it's a merchandising problem where you have to say like how do you figure out how we make it so that like the total collection performs better and like you said raises the waterline sum of the whole thing and the way you do that is by like you know snuffing out your losers and and amplifying your winners um you know in in a bunch of different ways.

So um I love that answer. It's a very product driven answer. Let's talk a little bit more about product. Maybe maybe we go towards this question of um sort of the next stage from there then. Um uh well yeah let's do it. Um so we only have so much time. I I have a lot of questions about that but uh we only have so much time. Um let's think about then the path from let's say 50 to nine figures and now where you guys are at now.

Um if you've sort of solved a couple of the big things the way that we've talked about it, right? Like get the website humming, your meta ads machine is firing as part of that. You've got clear preferences for products. You're thinking about retention at the level of product. You're starting to release products. Okay. Now you've got the machine really going all the way around. What gets you to the next stage after that?

Yeah. That I mean like you're you're approaching a a big business like by the time you hit the nine figure stage. So I mean like your dependency on like it's going to it's not as fun for the marketing guys. when you're going from, you know, 0 to one or zero to whatever it is, like a lot of the you're a lot of the engine and then once you get to this other stage, like you're moving a ton of physical product all around the planet and you're you're dependent on like a very tight and complex financial systems.

So, it's not as exciting for the marketing people, but like the business as as a whole needs to really really get tight everywhere. Um, which is where we've invested a lot of our time this past year. So this past year um from 23 to 24 we didn't increase in revenue dramatically. However, we like tripled profit. So we focused all of our effort internally to get those systems really tight because what we identified um and because of you know some scary, you know, uh near misses in 2023 was like you have a big business and it doesn't take from that point, you know, it doesn't take two three years for you to go out of business.

You can mess it up for three months in a row and you can be out of business, right? Like these financial systems have to be tight. your operations need to be tight. You're playing with a big big engine here. Um, so it's it's not as satisfying for the marketing guys, but like everywhere the business needs to make sure that it's caught up to where you're at in that nine figure scale, again, you're probably unless you're talking about an extremely high price point item, you're probably talking about millions of items at this point and orders and all these things.

So getting really tight there. And then once you have that that clarity and you have the confidence that like you have good sure footing, I to me it's getting really good at forecasting. It's getting really good at trying to predict the future. It's it's not trying to break it from here forward. It's trying to make a prediction about what the future is going to look like and then holding yourself to that prediction because you won't get as much brownie points anymore.

If you overshoot the prediction, in fact, you'll probably cause much more problems. And so, it's it's creating forecasts. It's getting sophisticated about predicting the future, getting as close as you can to that, and then having clear goals to walk yourself forward predictably up from there because you have a big thing that's definitely worth protecting at this point, which is not as fun, not as satisfying, especially this is this is the environment that we're in, right?

Like money's not free anymore. We don't have zero interest capital. You need to be a little bit more careful with it. And under or overshooting your predictions is a is a really bad thing in this environment. You need to make sure that your models are tight. So that that's not an exciting answer. I think that it's an honest answer according to the climate right now to be perfectly honest with you. It it comes back to the thing you said earlier which is sort of like operational excellence as as like becomes the key and but but one thing I think that might sound scary if you're a smaller business about that is that your business is so volatile at an earlier stage that the error bars on your predictions are by definition going to be wider um in general and because there's like you know if you're at $7 million in revenue you still are at a phase where probably an ad can hit and like dramatically improve your performance.

At a 100 million, that's just not really true anymore. Like it's not that, you know, one ad is not going to drastically change the behavior of the whole ad account in the same way, especially in your category. I think I will say I think that one of the as you approach the nine figure scale, one of the one of the the realities that starts maybe this is a little unexpected. One of the realities that starts to present itself compared to a lot of the other milestones is um labor as a percentage of your your total revenue starts to starts to make sense, right?

And so if you're I g again I grew up with a business when was doing less than a million into the 100 million. So like a really good rhetorical question to ask myself is like okay what makes me qualified as somebody who you know just a few years ago had no experience running even a $1 million company. How can I stay qualified as a $100 million CMO? And it, you know, it's it's difficult. So, it's difficult enough if you're in a company or if you're running a company like this to get good at the thing, to get good at your area.

Maybe the CEO, maybe you're the CMO, whatever it is. You got to get good and own expertise in your area. And then at some point, if you're going to remain on top of, let's say, like your your wing of the org chart, you not only have to be good at the thing, you have to be good at executive management, executive problem solving. because at some point the business is going to require you to get more work done than you can do with your own two physical hands, which means you're going to start hiring, you're going to start employing, and you're going to start leading people.

Um, and once you hit the nine figure mark, you have a little bit more ammo to hire really competent people to help you solve some of these problems, whether that comes in the form of agencies, whether that comes in the form of um, you know, individual contributors with lots of talent. Um, that can be one of the growing po pain pains of going, you know, from the 50 on up is a lot of those people need to fight hard to stay qualified to exist in their roles as the business gets bigger and bigger and as the demands increase.

And sometimes that can creep up on people. I've certainly gone through seasons where I needed to, you know, kick myself in the ass and catch up and other times where I'm, you know, like waiting around for other people to kind of see the big picture here, too. But that's one of the the kind of the really weird ones is, you know, from a from an executive standpoint or a leadership standpoint, like you can start to hire in some really competent, talented people.

Um, and the I mean, you're you're a company, which is a collection of people doing things, right? That's what it is. And so, you want to really make sure you have a company staff full of really great people, whether that be agencies or individual contributors. But that's kind of an unexpected one. I think that like comes around at the nine figure mark. I don't know if you hear my dog going crazy here, but nonetheless, um, that that's that's a big shift and one that I don't think it's talked about enough from like a leadership or an executive.

Yeah. I mean, it makes all the sense in the world, too. Just that you have a thing where you you really are um thinking about the organizational setup and its impact on the whole thing really differently at that stage than you are at at a smaller stage. It makes makes all sense in the world. Do you um uh let's talk a little bit about some sort of semi-tactical things here al along those ways. We can kind of rapid fire these a little bit.

Um at what point did you guys if at all um get serious about channel expansion for advertising beyond meta? I describe myself as channel phobic, right? So like I we hired somebody um he deserves a shout out here. He's been my partner in crime since 2021 I think as a Matt. Um Matt came in to fill you know the gap of what I didn't know which was Google. like I was heads down focused on actually, believe it or not, Pinterest and Meta at the time.

Um, but for the most part, like I actually we're we're not spending any money on Tik Tok. Um, we're spending very little money on any on most other platforms besides Google and Meta. Um, there's a big reason for that. I I I like to keep as much of our eggs in the same basket as possible. You know, as much as people talk about diversification of channels, like you you still and and most of the channels are fantastic, right? like the machine learning algorithms are great, but you still at the end of the day like there's a lot of human intervention loading money into it, making decisions on whether to put more or less or keep it or pull it, whatever it is.

And um I've our team has been extremely lean. Matt and I spent every dollar up into the nine figure mark, just him and I. Like no other outside agency help or anything for any media buying. Um and so we tried to keep it like really lean, really tight. And frankly, I just don't feel like I've squeezed all the juice out of Meta anyways. mostly again because I look at it as just an amplification tool and most of the burden is on us to ampl or to increase the business efficiency and be a more attractive business and then I see that as a throughput in my meta performance.

I haven't felt the need to take the team to channels like Tik Tok. We did a little bit of experiment with app 11. Um but for the most part again going back to my two-word chapter meta works unless you're an extreme exception. You can probably take Meta all the way to the nine figure scale without hitting an, you know, a ton of diminishing returns. If your business can support that blueprint anyways, Meta is probably your channel.

You're probably not going to gain as much as you think you will by expanding into all of these channels. They're probably all together aggregate not going to equal 20% of your meta budget. I'd focus on getting 20% better at Meta or 10% better at meta. That's my opinion. Exceptionally good advice. I think the the I think channel diversification is a bad idea for a lot of brands for a very very long time and for all the reasons you said including the lack of focus.

Um I I like the way you just framed it. Get 20% better at meta instead of add 20% of your budget in these other places. I imagine Google for you guys is search and shopping in your category. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Um okay. Um let's talk about um product release tactics. Um, so what I mean by that is when you guys release new products at this point, um, how often are you releasing new products and um, is there anything you're doing in the release with email, SMS, website, anything at all to get you to like, um, you know, the Facebook group we've mentioned to get you to, um, have those be successful.

Yeah. So, when we release new products, we're looking at them. They're they're either going to fall in one or two camps. either we think that this could be the next new hero product, the next new product that's worthy of throwing advertising dollars behind. It can bring the next new customer to the website. Um, we have started that in full force this year and had really good success. We are trying to prospect into categories like such as the sling like sling bags.

We we have some sling bags, but we think that that can be a net new category with a net new audience. It may come with different efficiency metrics, but nonetheless. So, when we release those products, they're few and far between. We're only going to take four to six swings at that per year and expect maybe two to three of them to be successful at maximum. Um, so 50% hit rate. Who knows? Um, and those are getting like the full meal deal treatment.

Like what always happens when we release a new product, and this is going to play into the second bucket, is that product is heavily patronized by returning customers for the first 7 to 30 days. They're they're the people who are already on the website. They're already dedicated fans. Maybe they have some loyalty points saved up, whatever it is. So when you launch that product, that's what we expect. this huge bell curve mostly to be patronized by returning customers.

So, but in any case for hero products, we're trying to release those with enough stock to survive the initial rush from returning customers and then see if we can immediately put advertising dollars behind those and see how the math maths, right? What is the cost per acquisition? We're going to slowly watch over time the cohort analysis to see what like the LTVs and the behaviors look like for this particular product, but that's about four to six swings per year. the majority of the 1300 variants or 91 new products which is um you know one almost two a week when it comes to variants that's five per day I believe is that right yeah um a lot right the majority of those fall into this other camp which is this is bait for the returning customers this is your retention fuel for the fire right and so this is looks like an existing product we have new products and the variants included in those new products are also included in that 1300 number but for the most part we're talking about an existing product, let's say like our circle bag or our mini tote, some a product that customers already love and we're releasing a limited edition color into that.

We know that they want this color. It's a pebbly blue. It's rich and beautiful and then we're trying to predict and uh release enough of that product to basically sell out in that 7 to 13-day window and then we move on. We've kind of squeezed the juice. We know that if we leave that product, we overproduce, new returning customers are going to patronize it. new customers probably aren't going to want it if if we're just based on statistics and probable odds.

They want a brown if they they don't want a pebbly blue. So release as many of those and higher frequency as we can. We built, you know, an operational flywheel to support that so they come in, they rush to buy and every Tuesday, Thursday, we're able to produce like Black Friday level hours at 11:00 a.m. when we launch our new variants. So you always release on Tuesday and Thursday at 11. Yeah, it's that's part of the the operational flywheel is it's just too much to genuinely release five variants per day.

So, every Tuesday and Thursday we we release like net new products on Wednesday, but Tuesday, Thursday at 11:00 a.m. usually there's this mad rush to the website. We're dropping, you know, anywhere from 5 to 20 customers know this at this point. They know it. Yeah, it's it's predictable. So, yeah, I mean that's predictable for the customer. It's it creates a drop culture. It's it's also so much easier for you guys probably in the sense of like you know exactly then how you know if it's going to be a Tuesday at 11 a.m. release that means you got to work backwards with this many weeks of lead time and like it makes it a lot easier to operationalize if you have something like that.

Um that's really awesome. Okay, very last question McCoy. Um sales um how do you guys think about discounting and sales in your business and how are those uh working in through it? Yeah, for sure. Uh we talk about this a lot like so one of the things that we do with our brand that I think it's like a bad rap in DDC culture in general is like we we have things like a loyalty system right and so I I I hear the topic of sales and I think there's a lot of myth around discounting in general.

I don't think it's right for every brand and I'll caveat that there. If you like if you figured out and you've done the math I'm not here to change your mind. Um but let's talk about like loyalty point system for for instance as it relates to discounts. Okay. Well the whole system is designed to give away margin. The whole thing is designed to give customers additional discounts. So, I understand the argument that people say that these are not profitable systems.

And I'm like, well, no If you're if you're not digging deep enough, a a system that's only designed to give away more money should not look profitable. So, how do we make those profitable? And the way that we make those profitable is through the manipulation of customer behavior. That's what marketing is, right? And so, the question is not are we giving away more margin per sale, is it how frequently are these people coming back and purchasing?

Have we substantially manipulated their behavior in order for it to be incremental? So when it comes to it's always a trade-off, right? Like this is always the trade-off. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't understand like the argument. I think people are just like putting their blinders on. So when it comes to discounts, um when it comes to, you know, things like sales, we try to run sales like at least once a month to clear out our funnel.

And our kind of our cadence is like 228. So we know that, you know, for 22 days, we tend to run everyone has a welcome offer, everyone. But for some reason, everyone's like, "Hey, you can get 20% off if you sign up for emails now." But for some reason, they're scared to say that like their products are 20% off. We're not in any case. So, we try to run like normal advertising for like 22-ish days uh a a month and then for about eight days we tend to run an additional sale.

What that does is it clears out the funnel and we've done this predictably for long enough um that we know that we that's incremental for us. Giving away more money, more discounts is incremental for us. Our loyalty system um when we inst pre and post when we instituted this, our repurchase rates are substantially better. This is an incremental system for us. So, I I think people are a little too hesitant of it. I think that like there's maybe a little bit of ego about it.

I think that even the biggest brands, the best brands, Nike, Apple, like you know, even the luxury brands have outlet stores. That's absolutely a form of discount, a way to access the brand for, you know, a much a lower price. I I just don't think people have their head on straight when it comes to discounts. I get it. If you want to hold your brand as a premium, that's fine. I'm not here to change your mind. But for us, like we've absolutely proved that out over years and years to be incremental and positive for our brand.

Yeah, I am with you. I think uh I have been too nervous about it at different times with different brands I've worked on in the past. I think it's interesting that you do that 228 cycle. I think that's a clever way to do it. Again, operationalizing. It's one of the things I hear in a lot of your answers is like here is how we um operationalize these ideas. McCoy, we're out of time. I would uh I would love to talk to you about many more things.

This has been a fantastic conversation, and I really mean that. That's something you say to guests on a conversation like this, but I swear to you, I mean it. Um lots here. Um uh everybody who is watching or listening to this ought to go follow up with McCoy. Um, you could do that at LinkedIn or on X. Both of the links for those are in the show notes to this episode, so go do that. Um, I feel like you've been more active recently on X than you used to be.

Like somebody called you out of the darkness of lurking on X and now we're there. But I know I know you're even more active on LinkedIn, so um, go check that out. Get more from get more from McCoy there. Um, uh, you're sick and you have a new baby, man. Get some sleep. Yeah, I appreciate it, Andrew. Thanks so much. It's been great. Yeah. All right. I loved that conversation so much with McCoy. Really brilliant dude. Um, I'm sure you got a lot out of that, too.

If you're still watching or listening at this point, you should subscribe uh because I'm having a bunch more conversations like that soon. Very soon, I'm going to be doing a convers a series of conversations called Profit Monsters with a bunch of people like McCoy who have built meaningfully large businesses at massive profit numbers. I actually loved hearing that they had slowed down their growth and tripled their profit in New York.

That's like incredible sign. Um, so subscribe wherever you're watching, listening. You will not want to miss that series. It's going to be really, really good. Don't forget to follow up with my friends at Intelliggeems by going to intelliggeems.io io and using the code ferris 20 for 20% off your first three months. And also uh move supply chain uh to dial in your supply chain today. moveupplychain.com is where to find them and tell them that I sent you.

Uh I have all kinds of great interviews coming up including that profit monsters series and a bunch of other solo episodes as well. I've got Shireen Aar coming very soon. Alex Cooper talking about ads. Brett Curry talking about YouTube ads after people listened to my Olivia Cory episode. Um and love that episode. I wanted to do some more tactical stuff on that. So, a bunch of a bunch of different stuff coming that you're going to like.

Don't don't miss that. You can, of course, reach out to me at podcastfgrowth.com or on xanderjer. I'd love to hear from you in either of those places. And you can see everything I'm doing at ajfgrowth.com, including if you want to work with me, sign up for my newsletter, that sort of thing. Thanks so much for watching or listening. I'll talk to you next time. [Music]