The Time I Stole Back My Own Inventory

Hola my friends!

To the dozens of you who have reached out in the past few days about my safety, seriously thank you. This hurricane is crazy and sadly the worst part about living in Florida. Luckily I am safe and sound in Miami and should avoid anything worse than a blackout, some crazy rain, and high winds. My family (mom, brother, and sister-in-law) up in Tampa and St. Pete on the other hand aren’t as lucky. They evacuated yesterday and are safe and sound waiting for tomorrow’s madness.

Well, there’s no way I’m going to turn a story about hurricanes into some connection with us achieving a 4x return on our Facebook ad spend…. but it did really get thinking about the concept of love and partnerships.

Regardless if you have friends or family in the storm in Florida, send somebody you love a text and let them know. I lost my dad way too early and there’s a million things that I wish I could have said. Send the text. Make the call. You can never tell somebody you love them enough. Especially if they are family.

Scary times like this with a category five on the way make you think about all the people in your life. There’s no greater life principle that I live by than just being authentic to myself. Treat the people in your life with love, help them, and just go the extra mile if you can - especially when they do the same for you.

Regardless of what industry you’re in, and I know we have a bunch of e-commerce readers on this newsletter (hi to all 3000 new readers this week!), we all know one bad vendor can legit make or break your business. It’s important to give constructive feedback and even more important to celebrate the wins.

I’ve found that the hardest thing about being a boss and running a virtual company is trust. One of the funniest days in CROSSNET history was when I did a random spur-of-the-moment trip to our warehouse in Vista, California. I was so proud of that warehouse and I was excited to show my mom our brand new 12,000 square feet of property. When I showed up, I walked in to find our warehouse manager and five of our day laborers on the couch watching soccer on their iPhones and having a pizza party. When I asked them about the work they were supposed to be doing, they said “they didn’t have any today.”

As you can imagine my reaction was:

“SO WHY AM I HIRING FIVE DAY LABORERS TO EAT PIZZA AND WATCH SOCCER IF THERE WAS NO WORK TO BE DONE?!?”

These crazy expenses that I sadly couldn’t sniff out from my Miami bedroom, paired with expensive managerial overhead ($70k salaries), paired with warehouse supplies and expensive rent (we were paying $12k a month) ended up becoming just too much for our small business. We needed to make a change and we needed to do so quick.

I went online and sadly fell victim to one of the BIG NAME 3PL’s that you all know and they promised me the moon and stars. They SUCKED. It was the worst decision of my life. They made every process so complicated. They sucked me for money every time I opened and email. Worst of all, they essentially refused to ship retail orders, and almost cost me a $1M/annual account.

It got SO BAD that I basically had to go full dark ops mode and send in a fleet of movers and UHauls in the middle of the night to break in and steal back my inventory.

With no place to turn to, with retailers beyond pissed off, I got a recommendation from a friend about his friend who was one of the first members at Aviator Nation and he was going off to start his own boutique 3PL. His goal was to only serve a few clients, ship retail & Shopify orders super timely and feel like an internal 3PL, but for a fraction of the cost. That 3PL ended up becoming Rackd and they’ve been the best fulfillment center we’ve ever worked with.

When I analyze our P&L over the years, here’s why they’ve been so good:

• Retail chargebacks brought down from $250k annually to sub $15k

• Storage costs cut by over 50% compared to that devil 3PL

• Same day shipping on all Shopify & Amazon orders

• Rackd has operational freelancers who can help ship your retail orders compliantly, we used to have a warehouse manager and then operational lead (both $70k+ hires) and now we use their in-house freelance who is $30ish

• Cheaper shipping rates than I’ve ever seen in my life

As I think about the past seven years of CROSSNET there are Harry Potter novels worth of things I’d do differently, but the #1 thing I’d be doing is interview 3PL’s until I found the one who can handle your order volume and style. Luckily I’ve done that heavy lifting for you and why you subscribe to this.

Just like any business, you want to get away from things that are not your core competency. The CROSSNET founders were never experts in supply chain & operations, so the sooner we could get away from running our own warehouse the better.

Today they hit me up with massive news that they are moving to a new state-of-the-art facility at the end of the month. They have room for probably 3 or 4 more customers in their new warehouse and if you onboard with them before November 1st, they’ll pay for all your moving costs. Legit could be tens of thousands of dollars in savings. Think about how many packages you’ll ship this holiday. If you can save a buck or two on each one, so much money back in your pocket.

Reach out to Ian directly here - [email protected] or let me know if you want an intro before somebody else takes one of the three spots.

Remember go text somebody you love and say hi. Time to go eat.

Pray for Florida and I’ll talk to you guys soon if I don’t lose power 🙂 

All the love in the world and thanks for supporting,

Chris Meade