How to Better Yourself & Your Team

Author

Chris Meade
March 18, 2022

How often do you get sales emails that actually make you stop, read, and be like oh shit that’s pretty cool? Well that happened this week when I got an email from Kathleen over at a company called TradesWell and I felt compelled to share it. 

Essentially Kathleen called out how my biggest pain point - dozens of damn spreadsheets!!! As I'm trying to track inventory, revenue, ad spend, finances, Amazon stock it is absolutely draining and I need a more comprehensive place for all of those things to live. Especially as I add more remote workers having a centralized hub that is affordable, compared to 20 spreadsheets per employee is much more manageable. Not only does TradesWell help with this but they actually provide real time insights into optimizing our revenue and profits. 

I respect a good sales email, so I'm testing TradesWell out for the next 30 days for free. You can too here or email the cold email wizard at [email protected]. 

It’s been a busy week for me as I just launched my first ever podcast, writing this newsletter, prepping for the launch of CROSSNET Soccer, and a massive announcement that will come later this summer. I wrote down a lot of notes in my note pad for this newsletter this week and this will be a mix of tips on how to motivate yourself, get the best out of your team and to improve your business. 

If you haven’t already listened to it, Episode 1 of my podcast, My Biggest Lessons officially dropped this Tuesday! The reception has been incredible so far and I’m so damn excited for you to learn from every one of the guests that I have on. The goal of the show is pretty simple. Find the best founders & entrepreneurs I know, give them the floor for 20 minutes and have them chat about their fuck ups and things they wish they could do over. It's hosted by the DTCX community so you can search for it that way or the links below.

Shoot Your Shot! 

Kathleen's cold email got me thinking about how important the grind of the cold outreach is vital to any business. In the early days I'd literally do nothing but cold outreach to prospects and overtime the revenue just simply compounds.

Make an excel sheet of 100 possible retailers, vendors, and marketplaces that you want to sell on. Each day send 3-5 very detail oriented cold emails and be amazed with the compounding effects at the end of each month. Think about all the ways your product can be played! For us its not only Target & Walmart, but Christian church camps, park & rec departments, beaches, hotels, AirBNBS, volleyball teams, physical education classrooms, corporate gifting, etc. I’d suggest making a similar list for press and if working on networking peers in the industry you want to connect with. 

Quick Pointers: 

  • Mention how you found their email. Did you get an intro from a friend? Did you hunt it down? 

  • Short and sweet. We all know what spam looks like

  • Use a link to your product but don’t send an attachment

  • Don’t mention price, don’t sell. Have a conversation!

  • Educate! Don’t ask for a meeting. If the email is compelling they will fall into your trap. 

I Have a Question For You?!

What would you do if the above situation happens to you? Click the photo and of course drop me a follow back, but there are almost 20 amazing responses on there that I will share next week. What would you do? Do you have any protocols where your fulfillment people are scanning daily to check for any big customer orders? 

Get the Most From Your Team

This week we had a company all hands and I immediately started the meeting to challenging each and every employee to think of one thing our company can improve at. It could be feedback from any department. I don’t care how negative, I want the honest truth. 

Here are some things we found:

  • Some folks felt that they didn’t have the proper tools or content to fully do their job 

  • Product roll outs felt rushed & not thought out from every department (eg. Marketing being siloed and not talking to logistics, etc.)

  • Employees not having visibility into inventory arrival dates and a global perspective of our inventory levels

  • Company adaption to our new system called Basecamp. Some people have decided to take longer to adapt it and are being left out in the cold. I’m guilty of this myself, I need to spend more time in the tool. I’m asking for shit and it’s in there. I just need to learn to use it better. I can’t ask my team to use a software if the founder’s not even using it. 

The majority of these solutions are obvious and start with better communication, centralized documentation, and better processes but one cool thing that we did 15 seconds after the call was have each and every department pin their most important 3-5 documents into their Slack channel. These life lines are so incredibly helpful and should be able to be found in a moment’s notice. 

How to Stay Motivated

Confidence comes from consistency, so the more you create small habits that help you tackle your goals, the more you’re going to attract what you want out of your life. Find out what makes you happy and make sure you do that each and every day. Here’s some things I live by that make me a better leader, friend, and future husband. 

  • Get off my laptop by 6pm (no I did not have the luxury of doing this in the early days)

  • Start each morning with a workout 

  • Sleep with your phone in the other room

  • Go for walks with your significant other. Leave your phone at home

  • Read. Read. Read. You can learn so much cool shit

  • Calendar in time for “working blocks”. If you know you need to get shit done and just can’t find the time, put the hour or so block on your calendar to do it and do absolutely nothing else during that time

  • Look for the little progress each and every day. You’re not going to go from 1 sale a day to 100 overnight. Be happy with small progress every day. As long as you’re doing your best to be better, you should be proud of that

Simply just a no brainer. I talked to Tim Shields, the founder of UBall, a company that I invested in over a year ago and we were talking about ways to improve his revenue and email marketing was #1 biggest area for improvement. 

Download Privy now. Find somebody to help manage your email marketing (have some awesome suggestions, just ask) and start collecting & sending emails. Klaviyo just announced some price changes so I'm very intrigued to see how many more people flock to a more affordable solution. 

  • Grow your email + SMS lists (pop ups, flyouts, onsite displays)

  • Automate your email marketing (abandoned cart email, customer winback, welcome email, etc) and send on-brand newsletters

  • Send broadcast and abandoned cart text messages.

Who’s going to Geek Out next week? I’m flying out to San Diego next Thursday to hang out with some of the biggest names in ecommerce and people simply looking to get 1% better. If you’re in the area, I have an extra ticket (like $3000+ value) so just let me know and I’ll send it to you! 

I hope you enjoyed this weeks send. The more material I put out into the world, I’m really starting to realize that my content is for the person with $1700 to their name, desperate to start a business and leave their job, but feel so terribly stuck. It’s an awful feeling and I used to be right there in 2017. I hope this helps. I really, really do. That’s who I’ll always try to write for. 

Sincerely,

Chris