Build Your All Star Team

Well hello there! Writing to you from my new apartment office in Miami and I’m so damn happy. For the past five years I’ve been working from either my bed, a small desk crammed in the corner next to my girl’s yoga mat, or laying on the floor typing away (yes everyone who’s been on a Zoom with me, knows this Chris). I moved for a few different reasons, but I was kinda just going through the motions in my old neighborhood. Same people, same restaurants, same daily activities. It was time for a change. Also, the coolest thing is I finally have space to to create and host my brand new podcast! 

If you haven’t already heard early next month I’ll be hosting my own show on DTCX entitled "My Biggest Lessons" hosted by Gorgias. I’ll be sitting down with entrepreneurs of all different shapes & sizes and digging into their biggest lessons and mistakes they wish they could take back. The first few guests are looking incredible with Patrick Schwarzenegger, Nick the co-founder of Truff, Dylan the CEO of Brumate, and plenty more. I’m releasing one episode a week. Who should I have on? Can you make me an intro? 

This week I’m going to cover team building. I get asked a lot from founders "What’s the next thing I need to do?" My answer is always to build out a solid team to help you do the work. There’s only so much you can get done in a day, even if you're burning yourself out working 24 hours a day. You need people to put in the work and it's a scary concept investing your profits (yes your profits, the ones you worked so hard to make). I always recommend hiring for new areas to help your business, rather than taking things off your plate. For example, I needed that full-time graphic designer way more than I needed an assistant to answer my inbox. The three questions you need to make sure you answer when you hire are:

1. Is this person going to make me more money than they cost me? 

2. Am I hiring for my weakness? 

3. Do I have the budget for this over the next twelve months?

If the answers above are all a yes, then you have yourself a new job opening. Although I’ve only built one successful startup and there are a million different ways of doing things, I always cringe when I see small & mid-sized companies hiring 30 different positions at once. Onboarding, training, and getting your new hires set up with KPIs & goals is so important and takes a lot a lot of work. Take it from me we hired about 10 people in the span of three months last year and we’re still trying to undo all of our mistakes. We’ve had to cut positions we found out were not even needed, assigning real KPIs & goals almost eight months later, and lost a ton of money in the process. 

Go slow and figure out what you actually need. What is your biggest weakness? For us we lacked in performance marketing, finance, social media, and graphic design. We were so in the weeds running the day-to-day and hoping that our four-way volleyball net would sell itself, we actually neglected all of the little things that make up an entire brand and company in 2022. It was right around when we crossed two million in revenue did we finally take some money out to pay ourselves and hire the future of CROSSNET. Until then every single dollar went directly back into the business. Sell one net, buyback two more. Rinse and repeat until we were buying 2500 unit containers monthly. 

Next up, is to decide if the hire you need is full-time or part-time? In the early days, the following positions were all part-time hires hired via LinkedIn, referrals, or Freeup. 

Google/Bing PPC - $500 start-up cost to set up the account, three to five hours at $20/hr to manage the account

Shopify Developer - Fix the code, theme, site speed, apps, etc. - $30/hr 

Graphic Designer - We started paying one designer like $25/hr and eventually got to a point where we had our “good guy” and our “less good guy”, the good guy would be used for boxes, displays, billboards, etc. The less good guy would be for everyday social posts and quick things. 

Social Media Assistant - We offered college credit at first and then like $12/hr to just go through the DMs, outreach to people, make deals and step up our influencer game. He’d work roughly 2-4 hours a day just responding back to people. This has now evolved into a full-on community manager. We've actually had two social media assistants who received college credit for interning for our business. It's super simple, so if you have a friend or know somebody in college who's looking for some cool experience this could be an easy hire.

Now for the full-timers! Here's what I’m seeing in the industry and if I were to hit LinkedIn careers tomorrow I’d be looking for these roles and responsibilities. 

Social Media Manager - $42-55,000

• Experience, organization and creativity is everything in this role

• They need to be able to understand the brand’s look and feel across all platforms

• Tik Tok first mindset as that is the #1 platform rewarding new and exciting content

• Management experience is a plus as they may manage interns & assistants

• Look for somebody who is business savvy and has negotiation skills as they will be working with influencers who think they are worth $5000 for a selfie when its really worth $50 to your business 

Performance Manager - $75-100k

• Experienced with running & working with performance agencies across Facebook, Snap, Tik Tok, and Google 

• A good performance manager will pay for itself as they will save you the headache of overspending

• Data comes first for this person. They need to know the numbers inside and out. Our friends over at Triple Whale help this. If you're not already signed up with them, click this link and get yourself a free trial.

• It’s important they are in sync with finance and truly understand the numbers inside and out. How much do we need to spend to create the revenue necessary to meet our overhead? How little can I spend to squeak out that profit? Is there enough ability to spend more if the returns are looking beautiful?

• We use Triple Whale and a custom-built excel sheet that tracks spending across every channel. Every Monday morning we are pulling spend across all platforms versus our revenue and see if we are at the acceptable MER we are looking for. Internally we’re shooting to bring in $4 for every $1 we spend. Triple Whale does an excellent job of tracking this on a daily basis and allows me to get these numbers at a glance. 

• Everyone runs their company differently but visibility is super important to me across the org. Everybody certainly doesn’t need to know what everybody else is getting paid, but I do believe they should have a firm grasp of what daily revenue looks like, our business expenses & overhead, and big deals that come through. The more aware everyone is of situations (in good times & bad) the better we can react and grow. 

Here's a snapchat of what I wake up to every morning from the previous day in my Slack channel from Triple Whale. Rather than having to compile all of my data and all of my spend it does it all for me. We just launched Australia a few months ago so its exciting to see the orders come in, even if its just a few right now. Some days are better than others and this allows me to help measure what's working and what's not.  

Chief Financial Officer ($100k+)  or Accountant ($52-75k)

• If you ask me CROSSNET’s biggest weakness two years ago I would have said finances. We had no systems. We had no organization. We had payments outstanding from vendors almost over a year past due. We were too busy in the grind and the heat of the moment to go back and collect checks from months ago. 

• Our CFO was our first over $100k hire and I’ll tell you damn that one stung. You mean we’re gonna pay somebody $100k when that money can go into my personal bank account??! That was a tough pill to swallow and I’ll tell you I fought tooth and nail of the price of this when we first brought our guy on. 

• Our finance team allows us to scale. Allows us to prepare. Allows us to understand and carefully plan everything that is going on in the organization. My marketing and sales team are so heads down worrying about the next 24 hours or the next month. If I didn’t have finance planning how things look six months or a year out, we wouldn’t be able to make the difficult decisions far enough in advance, purchase inventory or tighten up budgets when needed to make it through the rainy days. 

• Get a good finance person. Especially if you’re business requires getting vendors to pay on time. 

• They got our company set up on Divvy, which was massive. We started saving so much money in rewards. They have by far the best points & rewards system, and gave my young business an amazing credit line to help grow. If you want to see how big of a credit line you can get hit up my boy Ty here - [email protected]

• Also funny, but not so funny anecdote. If you’re a new business make sure you collect sales tax! For the first few years in business, we weren’t compliant and collecting in the states that we were supposed to. In the states that we were collecting, we weren’t saving this money and were either spending it on AirBNBS or new marketing expenses. At one point we were like over $200,000 in past due sales tax. As I said, a good finance person will pay for themselves.

Fortunately for us, our Co-Founder & COO handled all of the manufacturing and logistics in the early days. If we didn’t have him, we would have 100% had to hire a supply chain person sooner than later to handle all of the inbound and outdoor shipments. Being in stock is so vital and you can’t make money if you don’t have product. 

As I've been spending more and more time writing these lately, I've been finding it super helpful to join more communities and sign up for newsletters to get some different perspectives. Some of my favorites have been of course Nik Sharma's & a new one by Cody Plofker that specializes on paid ad performance. However, I just learned about Utopia via Twitter and it's pretty amazing. 

Utopia was created by @wizofecom, a community of 3000+ advanced marketers, some of them rolling 9 figures per year. And you can join it for the price of a large pizza.

E-commerce, agency, paid media, conversion rate, SEO, email marketing. Maybe you need consulting or a question answered on the fly. 

Turn to Utopia, and get an expert to answer it. Seriously.

Just like this newsletter if you’re just starting out or looking to connect to more people in the space, you can get a roadmap from people who were in the same spot you were just a few years ago. 

And there’s way more in Utopia:

• 3333+ battlefield tested strategies. You can copy/paste them right away to start getting sales.

• 33+ courses on mastering any marketing skill. If you wanted to buy these courses singularly, you’d have to shell out thousands of dollars.

• Bi-weekly live calls with 7,8,9 figure brand owners.

I hope this helps. I know this won’t be relevant to everyone reading, but not every one of my posts will be. Go slow. Figure out exactly what hire you need to improve your business. Get them on board, perfect it, and go on to the next one. 

Onwards & upwards.

Catch you next week,

Chris