Well I wasn’t going to write this newsletter but I felt like I had too much shit on my mind to not just take 20 minutes before the Jets game and blast this off.

There are 54 days left to Black Friday and its more important to have your operation more dialed than ever. Each and every day you should be spending your 8-12 hour work day to get everything dialed.

This is no official “checklist” - I’m sure I’ll make a more polished one soon. This is just where my heads at on a Sunday night at 7PM with the Jets about to knock off the Chiefs and silence Swifties across the country.

Company Goals:

What’s the company goals over the next three months? Is it top line revenue? Is it pure profit? Are you sitting on a ton of inventory you want to move through? Do you need to bring in cash to pay off debts?

It’s one thing to “pick an answer” to my above question. It’s another to dial in on what exactly you need for your business and to put that plan into motion.

Last week I spent all Thursday & Friday building out two models of what Q4 looks like for us on Amazon. In one situation we spend 15% of our revenue on advertising and in another we spend 22% of our revenue on ads. In option one we make $70k more profit than option 2, but option 2 results in $100k more cash in the door.

Does the business need the cash or the pretty profit-to-revenue ratio for the P&L? What bills do we have coming up? Do we have enough inventory to burn through inventory with 22% ad spend?

This level of questioning and sophistication is things I WISH I knew years ago.

Founders Club:

During the first week of September, Aaron & I officially launched The Founders Club to a closed group of A list entrepreneurs and ecom founders. We interviewed hundreds of people and only took the best of the best. The goal was to build a close network of like minded people with the only motivation being leveling up and getting smarter than they were yesterday. Our only rules were no selling & no assholes.

We now have over 50 paying brands in The Founders Club and are accepting a few more in October. Just in time for BFCM.

If you’d like to join, take a second and apply here for an interview

Quick Wins:

1) I’m petrified of getting screwed this winter with shipping providers. Our products are heavy. If we get a bill that has an extra $4-6 charge per unit, our margins get destroyed. We spent the week getting dozens of quotes from shipping providers (besides the big ones like UPS/FedEx) and we just selected a new provider who claims they can cut our average shipping cost from $26/unit to $15. Major savings! Why did we wait until now?!

2) Go to the CROSSNET website. We just launched the sexiest popup on Amped. The one we were using before sucked and had a 3.5% opt in rate. We’re a week in and seeing over 11%. I know this isn’t sustainable but damn is it collecting more emails & numbers in a week than the old one did in a month.

3) If you’re the marketer on the team take the time and plan out the schedule, timing, and copy for all emails over the next three months. Start with the most important dates and work your way backwards to fill in the gaps. Get your copy dialed in and then have the graphic team get to work. Always more work to edit copy AFTER the design team spends their time on it.

4) I woke up to CROSSNET being played live on NFL Sunday Countdown for 20 seconds! All my friends texted me the video while I was the gym. Millions of people saw CROSSNET for free today thanks to one of our customers. Thinking about what media opportunities could work for you. Could you spend an afternoon outbounding to news reporters? Their job is to find stories. Pitch them a good one and help them. I remember our old PR agency got CROSSNET on the news in Utah and we got $20,000 of CROSSNET orders in 11 minutes. I thought some Mormon stole a credit card and just started swiping. Had to call every customer to confirm what was going on.

5) Financial model out your doomsday! You need to know as a business how low can you go spending on ads while still covering your overhead. My guy Sean from Ridge had an incredible tweet about this. This isn’t something you’re going to build out in an hour. My goal going into 2024 is really understanding the financial impact our spending has when we run ads at a 2.5 ROAS compared to a 2. Do we over-optimize for a 3 and slow down the sales and juice profits? This a tight rope I constantly walk.

Austin, LA, NYC:

I’m doing a lot of traveling over the next three weeks. Founders Club is hosting events on the following days and we’d love to have you. Click the links below and sign up if you’re in town. You’ll only be accepted if you own or manage a DTC brand.

• Austin - Oct 5th

• NYC - Oct 12th

• LA - Oct 16th

Goodnight!

Let’s be friends on social if we're not already.

Add me on IG at @chrismeade or Twitter here

Send me a response back if you got any questions or just wanna say hi. I’ll be yelling at my tv screen for the next 4 hours watching the Jets.

xoxox

Chris