7 Ideas You Need to Implement in Q4

Happy Halloween!

The older I get, the more I want to stay in. That's honestly the scariest thing I've thought about recently and coming to grips that there is nothing wrong with that.

Hell, I legit showed up as a "couch potato" this weekend for a costume party in a full on snuggy. So how will I be spending my Halloween? I'm going out to eat with one of my homies at Bartaco & then coming home to bang through this list of The Best Horror Movies on Amazon Prime. A little known fact about me, I actually went to film school to become a horror movie director.

If you're like me your mind is racing in two directions:

1) Black Friday is in 25 days. What else can I do to get ready?

2) Damn 2022 was challening. How can we end with a bang?

You're not alone. So let's get into it.

Practical Ideas to Implement in Q4

1) CREATE A FACEBOOK EVENT

Send paid & organic traffic to a Facebook event for your BFCM sale with the incentive of taking part of a giveaway. You'll have to giveaway some product, but in exchange when the sale launches, everyone who RSVPd will get a notification for the event.

2) Staff Up Your Customer Service

Turn your live chat into a profit center. Make sure you have around the clock customer support for the busiest season of the year. We use Freeup to hire all of our VA's, typically incredibly hardworking Philippines workers who constantly go above and beyond. As Twitter loves to say "Find things that don't scale" - well find a good VA for $5-10/hour & watch on the Gorgias dashboard as more deals are closed than ever.

3) Have The 2023 Payroll Conversation

We're in a tough economy. Growing a direct-to-consumer business is harder than ever. Don't make the same mistake I made this year and wait until Q2 to have difficult conversations and restructure. Go into January 1st with a plan. Do you need to turn your graphic designer into part time? Is there a position you realize you only need 4 months of the year? Although people may rely on you for their income, remember you are not a bad guy for doing what makes the most financial sense for your business.

4) Tik Tok Marketplace

We've cut down our negotiation time with content creators by hours this week by using the marketplace. If you're like us you have strict criteria for what makes a good creator (good looking, athletic, lives by the beach, has 4+ friends for content, etc.). Oh on top of that they also have to live in Australia, a place I've never been!

We've been using the marketplace to shop for creators all week and locked in some incredible deals for $50-150 for multiple videos.

5) 3PL vs. In-House Fulfillment

2022 was a monumental year for CROSSNET as we finally moved all of our fulfillment from in-house to a 3PL model. Why did we do this?

• Full time workers cost a ton of money

• Now have the ability to scale up & down the storage and space we use based off seasonality

• Managing workers & a warehouse take away from our primary focus of building the world's best backyard games company

Domestically we expect to save upwards of $130,000 next year for our 2023 model, while freeing our mind of daily headaches. I suggest you work with your finance team to run a full analysis.

6) Gift Guides

Each year about 60 days before BFCM, our team does a full court sprint to reach out to as many writers as possible for holiday gift guides. Here's how we do it:

A) Search the keywords to find the gift guides (eg. Best Christmas Games)

B) Find the authors name in the bio of the story

C) Contact them via LinkedIn or Email and shoot them a message like this:

Hey Sandra - Saw your article on 10 Best Chrismas games last year and loved #7, actually bought this for my cousin. I'm the founder of CROSSNET, the world's first four way volleyball game, and we're sold globally in over 4000 retail stores! We're actually Amazon's #1 volleyball net and I think it'd be a perfect addition for your 2022 gift guide or if you plan on updating your guide from 2021. Happy to send you one out if you'd like to check it yourself!

7) Read More!

Believe it or not, my best ideas come when I'm out of Shopify and reading a book or newsletter. Each week I'm going to start trying to share some of my favorite newsletters and things that I'm reading. I just got pre-approved for a rental property, so if you have any good reads on real estate and making money through rental properties please send it my way.

Stacked Marketer - The marketing newsletter that’s giving companies of all sizes an edge over the competition. Stacked Marketer delivers breaking news, hacks, tips & tricks needed to dominate the entire digital marketing landscape 一 from native ads and SEO to Facebook, Google, Snap, TikTok & everywhere in between. And the best part? It's totally free. Join over 33K professionals who read Stacked Marketer daily

Have you Heard of FinHub? 🐳 Quickbooks on Steroids, for a Fraction of the Cost

If you’re living under a rock and have never heard of Triple Whale, they launched an incredible app a little over a year ago that is now considered the most essential app for media buying. When your Facebook data shows this, Google shows that, and Shopify this, what numbers can you trust, especially with so much on the line? They built a platform that aggregates all of your cash in & cash out on a daily basis so you can truly see how your business is performing.

Well, they did it again with FinHub.

If you’re like me, you’re the smartest marketer & businessperson alive, but you struggle with the day to day finances and tracking your business's performance because you’re too busy in the weeds. You may either A) not be able to afford a CFO and are struggling through outdated Quickbooks or B) are embarrassed as hell that you’re constantly bugging your CFO and showing your financial illiteracy.

FinHub allows you to take back control and see a live snapshot of everything you should care about as an owner: inventory, cash on hand, outstanding invoices, and your balance sheet all in real-time.

What has FinHub helped me accomplish?

• Saving $300/month on outdated Quickbooks

• Having full access to my real-time P&L at any moment

• Provides clear insight on inventory levels, daily cash flow, and when our operations team should place a reorder

• Allows us to reduce our full-time headcount on the accounting side and would have delayed the need for a full-time CFO by at least 12 months

Below you’ll find a snapshot of our brand-new Australian market. My goal since 2017, was to get the business to a place where I could advertise to 365 days of sunshine. We are using FinHub to track bills, push off payments as long as possible, and actively track the cost of inventory & how much potential profit is available from our inventory.

We have strict returns we are targeting on ad spend & we are able to use FinHub to quickly calculate our EBITDA on a monthly basis. If we are not on track to hit our 15-20% goals then we can react in real-time to save the year. We can then pull levers such as: Do we decrease ad or influencer spend? Can we actually increase spend and sneak out more topline and net profit overall? Is there additional headcount that is only needed seasonally? Review all of our invoices & bills to cut out any wasted spend.

FinHub allows CROSSNET to act smarter, stay leaner, and is the trusted partner our finance team needs to make accurate decisions to grow our business year over year.

This is your chance to make sure your holiday season is as profitable as possible.

Get a demo of FinHub here now.

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See You Next Week

As always I hope you've found this helpful. I'll be glued to my laptop for the next few weeks so if you have a question, want to chat through some things, or want to send me some good real estate literature I'd be forever grateful.

I'm also hosting a massive ecommerce & founders dinner next Wednesday in Austin, Texas. It's 100% free and will be filled with 45 of the best entrepreneurs in ATX. If you're in the area you can sign up here or be a good friend and send the link to a homie. We have 7 spots left.

All the love in the world,

Chris