My Sunday learnings from a week in LA ☀️

Hey y’all,

Writing this from a few thousand feet up as I head back to Miami from a nice three days in Los Angeles. I headed out west to check out the GROW conference and to also host another incredible founders’ dinner… our biggest one yet with over 60 attendees! These events are picking up steam and selling out (they are free) within a day or so. The next one is in Chicago on March 15th, so if you’re out there or have a friend there let them know!

I’m working on building something where we have a community, that’s not just another Slack group, and we have several meet-ups, dinners, and one or two large events throughout the year. For founders, by founders, without having to worry about getting pitched or some other BS.

One thing I realize from these dinners is that I learn so much even in a twenty-minute conversation with somebody who is a few years ahead of me in their career. But crazy enough I can actually teach them a thing or two and that’s been super gratifying. I need to find a way to build on this momentum and continue to put awesome people in the same room and not just in 160 characters on Twitter.

Speaking of learnings….

My general takeaway this week is there are basically only three types of companies right now:

1. One’s that are absolutely crushing it (not many out there)

2. One’s that are burning to the ground and fast

3. One’s that are slowly growing, have a small crew and their operations under control and are building a nice, lean business

I’ve been all three of these over the past three years and damn has it led to a million different emotions. One day you’re the king of the world with your best friend flashing the Shopify store to girls at the casino, next you’re on your hands and knees wondering how you’re going to make payroll on Tuesday. Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart and if you’re running a business pat yourself on the back for even just getting in the ring. This shit is hard. Much harder than just being an employee at a company and not taking on all this risk. No disrespect, it’s just my truth.

So what have we done recently?

Eliminated Nearly All Facebook Spend:

• There’s no point in making money if you’re losing money while doing it

• We have Amazon & Google PPC on, but have reduced our ad spend nearly 90% and will scale it back up slowly as we see contribution margin increase for the business

Rely Purely on Email, SMS, and Organic:

• Our marketing team has had to work double to create high-quality emails that just don’t feel like spam in the middle of Winter. To be honest, we’re probably exhausting our list, but we need to make money without spending a ton

• Doubling our SMS output with Recart. I personally hate getting texted from a brand so I’m trying to find ways to make it interesting like sending product idea submissions, flash sales for like 30 minutes, and product back-in-stock texts.

• The books aren’t closed but it looks like it may be our first profitable February (not by much) in two years

Reduced Headcount:

• There’s nothing worse than looking at your team in the face and saying we let you down, but we can’t support your role anymore

• If you’ve thought about firing somebody, that’s your sign to actually do it. It’s funny every time I have thought about it and waited I wish I did it way sooner

• Just like the COVID days - keeping only the essential workers. Who are the people who can make more money, get orders out, get inventory in and make sure your retail vendors don’t leave you?

• Unless you’re swimming in cash and growing rapidly month over month, I’d much rather have a cash reserve than playing cute and growing the team by double digits

Do you Really Need that Agency?

• If things are getting difficult I’d be looking at agencies as the first things I cut before my own people

• Do you have the competency to do the job? I’m a damn good writer, but I don’t know the first thing about the Amazon or Facebook ad manager. I’ve used two agencies for the past few few years who have been incredible to me so rather than giving up on them, we work through creative financing options that make sense for our seasonal business. If you need an intro to an Amazon PPC or FB person let me know

• If you’re selling on Amazon without working with an Amazon PPC agency or ad buyer you’re making a big mistake if you can’t handle this in-house, so much money being left on the table

Relentlessly Outbounding

• Where else can you sell your products? If you were building in the 1990s where would you be selling? CROSSNET is in the B2B space and retail accounts are king for us

• The team has busted our ass putting in the reps and now we have 6 or 7 accounts that are on the fringe of closing that could change our entire year. None of that happens if we don’t make the outbound effort and aren’t distracted by shiny things

This newsletter is up to tens of thousands of weekly readers and it’s so damn cool. I’d love to hear from you guys! What have you done when your backs up against the wall? Any creative ways for building revenue or growing email & sms lists? I’m going to share a few of my favorites next week!

Finally, I want to give a massive shout out to the team at Retention.com for sponsoring this newsletter and last week’s dinner. If you’re looking for a new way to add revenue to your store Retention has been a killer for CROSSNET. They’ve helped us 3-4x our email list and make us thousands of dollars a week extra from our welcome & abandoned email flows. They are one of the only softwares we decided to keep in 2023 because its so damn ROI positive. Where else can you spend $5000 and make $75,000 back?

Let me know if you’d like an intro to the team or book a demo here.

Talk soon!

Chris