Super Bowl Sunday baby! If you’re not watching… well that’s your issue.

Praying for the Eagles to pick up the dub today, have two childhood homies who are massive Eagles fans, and pulling for them big time. Philliefanatic546 was my boy Chris’ AIM screen name. After 30 years of being a miserable Jets fan, I’m watching Mahomes turn into Brady 2.0, so I’d like to see that end sooner than later.

Anyways, Sunday means we go back to war tomorrow and the work week is almost amongst us. Entrepreneurship is honestly so funny. It’s the only career where you literally just take punches left and right (besides an MMA fighter) and consider it normal.

Some days you’re on top of the world, the next you’re feeling so overwhelmed you feel like your chest is going to cave in. This life is 100% not for everyone but the concept of creating your own destiny, not being a corporate drone, and worst of all listening to a dumbass boss who doesn’t give a shit about you is worth all the struggles.

On the bright side, we have effectively moved all three of our warehouses to 3PL’s in the USA, Canada, and Australia. This was a massive lift from our operations team who have been busting their ass to make this happen after doing all of our own warehousings for the past four years.

Why’d we do it?

After digging into the financials it finally just made sense to relinquish the control. We were paying a couple thousand a month for a warehouse in Canada, $11,000+ for the one in California, and then the headcount required to run those bad boys daily. As a seasonal business in theory you need less inventory and space in your off months so our bill should be able to flex down and up based on our needs. Not something a fixed rent & headcount provides sadly.

As we lean out CROSSNET and get back to the basics I have been so shocked at how well plain text emails work. We’ve always been about sending world-class beautiful emails which are nice, but when I’m hitting customers with big news like a warehouse move the plain text like you’re receiving an email from a friend or colleague works best. This email ripped in the states for us this week.

Speaking of saving money. We actually just switched SMS providers after two years to Recart. Their team is badass and saving us roughly $10,000 annually. I hate getting pitches but when somebody says they can provide similar tech & cut your bill by 50% my ears perk up.

We’ve only just started with them but they cleaned our list (saved me $ from sending texts to fake or outdated numbers) and then rebuilt my entire welcome, abandoned and post-purchase flows. I thought this feature was also pretty sick showing exactly how much money I’m spending when I hit send.

My suggestion for everyone this year, less is more. Focus on doing one or two things really well instead of 20. You can’t do everything.

Our two things:

1. Retail

2. Making content that goes viral

Retail

Building our retail business is our #1 priority from January-April of this year. This is considered our offseason and myself, my brother Greg, and our head of sales are hitting the pavement to close as many deals as possible. This year alone we’re starting with Bass Pro Shop, Dillards, Nebraska Furniture Mart, True Value, Ace Hardware, and a bunch more Tier 1 & 2 accounts. This does not happen without putting in the time to outbound. These people are not always going to come to you!

You can thank Greg for this because he spent way too much time writing this Twitter thread but this is the exact way we’ve gotten into some of the world’s largest retailers. No tricks, no personal introductions, just good old fashion outbounding.

Read the thread here.

Don’t be a dick, give him a follow too.

Viral Content

This winter we are trying something different. Reducing our ad spend to efficiently zero. We haven’t been able to profitably spend for the past three years when its freezing out. Why would this year be any different?

So rather than looking ourselves in the mirror and saying “oh we’re growing the brand & our lead list”, we are now saying “no idiot, you’re losing money.” Spend less and create banging content that we can use when the weather warms up instead of just digging ourselves a hole to work out of it.

On the Good Sport side, we are blessed to have Youtuber Danny Duncan as our co-founder. Danny’s an OG in the space and has been creating weekly content for his near 20M followers for almost a decade. He did a shoot for Good Sport last weekend with Bubble Bash and the videos were unreal. They got picked up by almost every media network including my favorite Barstool Sports. Great for the brand, great for Danny, and some awesome traffic for Good Sport.

Kick off is in a few so I’ll leave you with these few things. Maybe you’ll like them. Maybe you won’t.

Things that have been making my life better lately:

1. Theo Von - This dude is legit the funniest human on the planet. His podcast is unreal and he’s just my perfect sense of humor. Listen to him the next time you’re working or on the treadmill

2. Charley Crocket - Amazing talent I can’t stop listening to

3. Working out in the middle of the day. If you can take a break at 1 or 2 o’clock, I’m finding the entire rest of my day is rejuvenated

4. Call your parents. You can never tell your mom or dad you love them enough. Time is precious

5. I wish I had a promo code or some shit but we’ve been using this Hungry Root meal delivery thing. The company is 100% going bankrupt cause they charge me like $100 + free shipping for 7 amazing meals a week, but it has to cost $50 to ship. Anyways Lynds and I are trying to “eat healthier” & not order UberEats every night and I’m feeling so much healthier. The coolest thing is that they tell you exactly how long it takes to cook (we order everything under 20mins to prep) so you don’t make the excuse oh we don’t have time for this

6. Spending less time on my phone. Lock that shit up. Put it away. Don’t go on walks with it. Keep it in the office.

Hope you all have a damn good rest of the night. Let’s go Eagles.

Onward & upward,

Chris