Hey friends!

I wish I had an affiliate code but I just got done with an exhausting three day planning session for The Founders Club and the Big Ass Calendar legit changed the way I’ve been planning my life. 

It was legit an amazing experience. In under 72 hours my entire business calendar is planned for the next 365 days. I know where I’ll be, when my downtime will be, when I can schedule vacations, see friends, and sneak in a few concerts and sporting events. My 31 years on this earth have always been planned with just maybe 30-60 days of visibility. Occasionally a few landmark events that I’ll make sure to plan for, but NEVER 12 months out. Nowhere close. I feel like one of those personal closest organizers just came in and rearranged my entire life. 

Not only am I so happy I just did this, but I’ve never felt more energized about what we’re building. When you map it out, it becomes extremely clear how you are going to hit your goals. There is truly magic in visualizing the end of the story and working towards it. 

This year we’ll be hosting 62 events in 17 cities while working to grow the Founders Club to 500 members. All while juggling one of the fastest-growing backyard games in the country and launching into Target & TJ Maxx. 

Through this crazy thing called personal branding, my entire life has turned into one incredible flywheel. The secret is that anybody can do it. It’s not hard. It just takes a shit ton of effort and consistency. The magic really looks like this.

• I tried to get a new job so I built out a LinkedIn portfolio

• LinkedIn helped create personal brand.

• Good storytelling attracted retail buyers and customers

• Retail stores & record-setting sales months led to good stories

• Good stories led to a newsletter & social media following

• Newsletter led to being able to host events 

• Events led us to create a rapidly growing entrepreneurship community 

• The Founders Club inspires me to create amazing content and I’m back to writing this newsletter

One massive flywheel. All working together. If one spoke is messed up the machine slows down. But when things are cranking, the wheel rotates so fast racking up wins. 

As I just left the most inspiring three days I’ve ever spent with teammates, I wanted to take you behind the scenes of how we approached it and how it was different from what I’ve done in the past. 

If you’re thinking about 2025 planning this will be a must-read.

Before I get into it, I want to give a quick thank you to Portless for saving my entire Black Friday. We’re planning on launching LED glow-in-the-dark CROSSNET’s & volleyballs for the holidays. This is our new hero product and we think it’s going to crush for the backyard. The only bad thing is that our supplier was delayed, shipping was delayed, and there was no way we were going to get these in time for Christmas to customers. Sound familiar?

My friend told me about Portless, a company he uses for his baby company Vonu, that allows him to now run Facebook ads in like 20+ new countries. Essentially all you have to do is ship your inventory to one of Portless’ local shipping centers in Asia (avoid the 30+ days of sea shipping) and then they will ship anywhere in the world super affordably and fast. Essentially I am cutting out the middle man and it’s perfect for lightweight products. 

More on them later, but they are saving Black Friday and are going to allow us to launch a product that we normally would have had to wait until next summer. 

The Outline:

The team went to war for 72 hours this weekend planning out every detail on how we’re going to grow this community to be the strongest entrepreneurship chapter in North America. We first tasked every employee to prepare one slide for what we call “Ugly Deck, Sexy Business.” 

Each teammate is tasked with documenting their biggest goals, projects, and roadblocks for 2025. It’s meant to start a conversation and we emphasize that this should be bullet points, not a Harry Potter novel. Of course, everybody goes and uses 4 point font to cram everything in. 

The Plan:

We then mapped out in Notion all of the team’s projects for the next 14 months (Nov-Dec + 2025). We then drafted what ones are considered “open” AKA get them done this year, versus what ones were “projects” meant for 2025.

After 8 hours (no exaggeration) we were down to 36 projects for the year. 

The team then went through each of them and made a draft of what was physically possible given our staff, money, and resources to boil it down to our top ten. Only these ten made it onto our war map. The emphasis was on having a massive focus on 6 core cities (NYC, Miami, Austin, Vancouver, LA, and Toronto) with at least a quarterly event in each of them. 

The Expenses

Earlier in the week I asked every team member to prepare an excell that accounts for every dollar they currently spend on a monthly & annual basis. Things like Slack, Zoom, G-Suite are what are requested. Variable expenses like Meta and Google Spend are not a part of this chat. 

We then review each person’s spending and see what items we can cut. 

Coming into the weekend we were hovering near $55k a month in just overhead expenses (not salaries) and we found a few great ways to save $10k annually just with a 60-minute focused conversation.

The Target

I believe as a leader having radical financial candor is super important. We are all pushing the same ball up hill and keeping things secret doesn’t help the team. We win as a team or we fail as a team. We started with an annual financial reflection of 2024. Where did we come up short? How can we save the last two months of the year? What last-minute things can we do to hit our target? 

We then map out our goal for the following and create bench and stretch goals for each.

• Membership revenue

• Membership renewals

• Event revenue

• Sponsorship revenue

• Affiliate Revenue 

• Newsletter revenue 

We’ve locked in an aggressive 3x year over year revenue target for The Founders Club and have the roadmap dialed in to hit this with limited additional hires and marketing spend required.

Expanding to New Markets with Portless

Speaking of revenue goals, if you follow e-commerce Twitter or LinkedIn, then you know the big conversation lately has been all around international expansion. For us at CROSSNET, getting to 365 days of sunshine has been essential to building a profitable seasonal business that can thrive year-round.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with Ryan from Portless to help us expand to new countries that we never thought was possible. Rather than spending the time to set up a local 3PL, import containers to a country you have no idea if you have demand with, you can test your demand in a dozen markets in just a few weeks. We plan to roll out this strategy in South America, Mexico, and Africa with their help.

Essentially, Portless is a next-gen 3PL that works with your Chinese or Vietnamese manufacturer to help stock your product and then have crazy fast shipping times to customers across the world (6 days to the USA & 5 to Europe).

There are a million logical reasons to work with Portless but a few of my favorites have been:

• Improve Margins - Any order that has a value under a certain amount (e.g. $800 in the US) is imported duty-free if it is shipped directly to the customer.

• Inventory flexibility - You can be more agile with inventory, allowing you to test new SKUs, make custom SKUs, and react instantly to the actual demand, avoiding both overstock and out-of-stock scenarios.

• Cash flow - Lead time to ship directly to the customer is days instead of weeks/months.

• Simplify Globalization - Portless ships to 55+ countries, all with a local experience, and some of them are even cheaper for us to ship to than the US.

This video does an incredible job of breaking down how the entire offering works.

Best of all, they are hooking up EVERY SINGLE READER with 6 FREE MONTHS OF STORAGE if you use code FOUNDER on their site.

This is a legit crazy offer as we’re paying nearly $7000/month for storage in Australia, $3000/month in Canada, and sometimes $10k+ in the States.

Book a meeting here or skip the line and email [email protected] to have a free 30-minute shipping audit to see if Portless could make sense for you.

Marching Forward

I hope you loved this week’s edition. I’m hosting a virtual 2025 annual planning session in late December and would love to have as many of you join as possible! Send me an email back to get on the waiting list as we’ll probably cap this at 100 attendees.

As always, if you have a question or want more info on The Founders Club or Portless shoot me a message. Both are no-brainers for e-commerce founders in 2024.

Talk soon!

Chris