My friend guaranteed that this subject line would get over a 50% open rate.

Anyways! Happy Monday!

So I’m not sure how I should feel about this, but I did something I haven’t done in over 15 years yesterday. I bought and built a hundred dollar Harry Potter LEGO set from Target.

I’m just a big nerd at heart and was feeling pretty nostalgic walking thru the aisles apparently.

Super rare fact, but Lego is actually a family business that’s been passed down for generations. As a marketer, I just constantly see the collabs they are doing and the recent Nintendo one won me over. If you have a minute read this story on the family business of LEGO, super interesting.

Outside of nerding out with some LEGOS I actually took a beautiful two hour ride up to Naples, Florida to visit my childhood best friend. Sure the ride sucked, but I got to meet his brand newborn daughter Olivia who was the cutest baby ever. I know DTC Twitter has been obsessed with this stupid ass expression of “touching grass” but it really is important to just disconnect, get offline and spend time in the moment with friends who don’t care about how your Shopify business is doing and love you for you.

On that note, I’ve been trying to make the extra mile and making some real life friends down here in Miami. As we get older it feels impossible to make new friends and it’s easy to just make excuses and say fuck it I got enough friends. I’ve been putting the reps in, and evolving the coffee chats into lunches, to tennis matches, to dinners, etc. You never know who you could meet and change your life, putting yourself out there is the first step.

Anyways, I want to give a massive shout out to the homies at minisocial who are sponsoring the newsletter now for the second time. They have crushed it lately at sourcing content for us. Last year we went away with our social media manager so now we struggle with finding the time to scout and negotiate with influencers. We come to them with a detailed brief and then they match us with the perfect creators and we receive content back in just a few weeks.

ESSENTIAL MEETINGS:

Look at your calendar right now. How many bullshit meetings do you have scheduled this week? How many of them can you cancel?

My advice? Every Sunday I go through my weekly calendar and cancel every meeting I don’t need to be in. Here are the only four reoccurring ones I care about and I suggest implementing them.

Meeting 1: Monday Morning Fulfillment

• One hour touch base on all outstanding B2B orders that need to go out to retailers during the week. If our retail orders don’t go out in time then our cash flow is messed up.

• We just pushed a $250,000 order from DICKS from late February into March, this will disrupt our cashflow projections by a few weeks because they pay on Net-60 payment terms from the moment you ship the order

• What orders are problematic or need to be pushed back?

• Are there any important DTC orders that need to go out or be adjusted?

Meeting 2: Wednesday Sales Huddle

• 50% of our revenue comes from brick & mortar stores, adding one or two massive whales is our priority each quarter. Closing an account like a Target or Leslie’s could add an additional $1M+ of business in 2023

• Review any problem accounts, areas for potential account expansion, and sell through data

• Review our sales pipeline and how we’re progressing to goal (96% as of last week)

Meeting 3: Friday Morning Replenishment

• Ops team comes prepared with our current inventory for each SKU at our 3PL & Amazon

• Sales & marketing team then comes with projections over the next 90 days (our safe lead time) and we see what inventory need to be reordered and what inventory can be ignored

• Our goal is to run a “just in time” system where inventory is being turned over and replenished at the perfect time so we’re not sitting on extra inventory (aka cash)

• If you struggle with being sold out, I suggest you put one of these meetings on the calendar immediately

Meeting 4: Founders Huddle

• Take a step back and address what are the leaky buckets. What needs to be fixed? Review finances, cash on hand, and payables over the next 12 weeks.

• Strategic conversations - This week we are working on improving our payment terms with our factory. Peep this small section of the request.

  

OpEx Q1 Review

A few months ago I shared a screenshot from our annual OpEx dashboard. First off, for those just starting off OpEx is short for operating expenses and its a list of all the expenses a business occurs throughout the year. When you’re building a financial model you take your OpEx & your salaries, and compare incoming revenue to make sure your expenses are less than your profit.

This month we’re reviewing all of our numbers and doing the two exercises:

1) Are the projected recurring monthly costs of each expense more or less than what we planned for? For example, we had Klaviyo down for $700. We have exceeded our planned email volume due to the success of Retention.com and now are paying $1100. We’ve since updated the OpEx to account for this $400 difference.

2) Are there any expenses we can eliminate or change to save money? When we put together this report late last year we were paying $900 for Postscript. We’ve since switched to Recart for SMS and are only paying $500. That’s nearly $5000 in annual savings

We typically refresh these numbers once a quarter and it allows us not to get to the end of the year being like oh damn we waited too long to do anything.

Want this OpEx spreadsheet? I got you. Just email me back and I’ll send it over.

REVAMPING YOUR CREATIVE

I saw a quote this week that spending the time to create new creative is going to be 90% more effective than just simply updating your website in an attempt to increase conversion. Content & good products sell, not because this button was placed a bit higher up on the page.

When you’re writing ad copy, focus on just sucking them up with a good hook within the first 2 seconds. Just like a cold email that I disqualify in a blink of an eye, your customers are doing the same with your videos.

Focus on benefits! Not features!

CROSSNET is the world’s first four way volleyball game…BLAH BLAH BLAH

That’s boring, thats a feature.

Stuck inside and can’t wait for Spring? We’ve created the best beach game!

I’ve been getting over the Tik Tok cringe of doing selfie videos and gonna go all in on it. Why? Because I see people half as good looking as me doing it and getting millions of views. Gotta work for your boy. Follow me here.

HOMIES FOR HIRE

I have two incredible friends who are looking to take on a few more brands in March. One is our email agency that I’ve worked with for the past year who crushes it for some of my closest friends. The second is a boutique performance marketer (Facebook & Google specialist) who also excels at landing page development and product launches.

Want an intro to them? They will get booked quick.

MINISOCIAL

In my world, user generated content performs 100% better than any highly produced ad. We’ve wasted thousands on beautiful content, when the iPhone footage from the mom in Nebraska at her Sunday BBQ works a million times better. People don’t want to be sold to. They want things to feel authentic.

We just got the craziest videos of people playing SmashNet (our new game) and I even got one from Alaska that I showed off on my TikTok here.

If you’re in need of sourcing new content but don’t have a week to do so you need to work with the Minisocial team. They pair brands with micro influencers who are hungry to create fully-licensed UGC. Some of the biggest brands that we all look up to like Native, Super Coffee, Harry’s all use it and the coolest thing is that you can get creators that are niche for specific channels. For example I want 2 pieces of UGC that are perfect for Tik Tok and then 3 that are more fit for Facebook.

The process is super easy. Upload a brief, get paired up and ship the goods. You won’t be disappointed and is 100% worth a try if you’re in need of new content for the spring.

Try Minisocial here and get a 15% off discount.

If you’d like a personal introduction to our account rep let me know!

Well thats all I got boys & girls. I hope you enjoyed this and can take 1 or 2 things away to make your company a bit stronger as we wrap up Q1.

If you’re in Chicago on the 15th I’m hosting a massive founders & marketers dinner and have room for a few more heads. Next stops are Toronto (April 27th) and Montreal (May 3rd) right after.

Take some time for yourself this week. Go outside, go for a walk, sleep with your phone outside the bedroom. Getting recharged does more for your business than you could ever imagine.

Talk soon,

Chris