It’s Tuesday and I’m in the worst pain of my entire life. Imagine you are hanging from a third floor balcony and your hand slips and you fall. You’re legs don’t snap, but they come painfully close. That’s exactly how I feel after completing my first and last marathon.

But….

I did it baby! And I did it in under 4 hours.

If you’ve been reading this weekly, then you know I’ve been training relentlessly over the past five months for my first marathon and this past Sunday was game day. Logically as someone who never ran more than six miles in his entire life until December 2023, I decided a marathon was the perfect challenge for my 2024 misogi and having to run each mile under 9 minutes.

Each year, I pick one hard thing to do and apparently putting my body in the most physical pain its ever been through was this year’s challenge.

Lucky for you, I had just under four hours with nothing but my thoughts and I gotta be honest a good chunk of my time was spent thinking about how I can make this the best newsletter yet.

$100M Call Invite

Before we get into this week’s newsletter I want to invite you to a 100% free event tomorrow that I’m co-hosting at 3PM EST. Anne Mahlum, the CEO & Founder of Solidcore, is joining the Founders Club for an hour Q&A.

If you’re not familiar with Solidcore, living under a rock, or not an east coaster, Solidcore is HUGE and one of the biggest workout studios in the entire country. She sold her business for over $100M and opened up hundreds of locations. I don’t have many business heroes, but Anne is 100% on my Mount Rushmore.

She normally charges thousands to speak to audiences but she said she’s down to talk to the squad tomorrow for free!

This is going to be one of the best calls of the year and we’re opening it to the public for free. Click the button above or send me an email back and I’ll get you added to the call. 

You Can Do Anything

Think fast. What’s the #1 thing you want this year? Are you going to achieve it?

If not, why?

As I chomp down on the third chocolate chip cookie of the night I tell you my #2 goal of getting ripped six pack abs isn’t happening if I keep this shit up.

So during the run I was thinking about life, my goals, and all the shit that I want to accomplish. It got me thinking why isn’t some of this stuff happening sooner? Kids, buying a house, selling my business, getting the Founders Club to 500 members. Honestly, good things take time. That’s why you don’t see too many twenty year olds living in a mansion.

There are a few things in my life that I wish I would have done sooner.

Smart Hiring:

In my experience, there are two ways to quickly blow up your company:

1) Overspending on product or marketing

2) Overhiring

You can’t be scared tho because hiring the right people, at the right time, is the unlock for massive growth. 

Think about your business now. Is there a clear position where you could spend $5000/month on a person and they return $20,000? If so, go hire that person now and stop reading this email. In a product-based business like CROSSNET, I made the mistake of thinking that the return that that hire has to bring is was $10,000 to just break even. I then made that mistake for 20 hires straight. You can see where this is going hahahha So here’s the math for my hiring folks!

Ecommerce Based Business (CROSSNET) - If you sell $10k of shit you’re lucky walk away with $2K of profit

That means this new rockstar needs to sell $25k of shit to just pay for themselves 

If not you’re just lighting money on fire

Events & Digital Business (Founders Club) - We sell memberships to an awesome ecommerce community that we’ve build from the ground up. Margins are like 80% and memberships range from $1000-5000+. I can hire a sales person tomorrow for $5K a month, as long as they bring back like $7000 in memberships they are paying for themselves. 

Same concept, different overheads required. Know your numbers. 

I should have hired for this salesperson months ago. I’m an idiot. If you’re in the job market, love sales, know how to have conversations, dig e-commerce, and aren’t weird on the phone hit me up.

Refinancing Debt

I paid $200k to go to film school. I was too busy taking drama and camera classes to sign up for a single finance class. The amount of financial illiteracy I see from people in my life is disgusting and to be honest I wasn’t much better until a few years ago. Taking out credit cards from Victoria Secret because they are in a pinch, signing up for a loan with 50% interest, and only making the minimum payments while they continue to blow money on $8 coffees. 

Not all debt is bad debt, but if the interest on the debt is more than you can make in the market, your only goal should be to pay it off as soon as possible. 

Go through your bills tonight. For both the company & your personal. 

Types of debt:

Credit card debt: I personally pay off weekly because interest is like 29% or some shit. 

My car payment: 2.3% - This is basically free and my payments are $300 a month. It would be irresponsible for me to pay off this debt faster because every dollar after the $300 minimum, I can put into the market and make a comfortable 6% aka DOUBLE my interest on the car payment

Business loan: We took out a fat three year loan for the business at 16% interest. We were in desperate need and the company needed it. As CROSSNET becomes healthier and healthier, we are now doing everything we can to refinance all of the debt or at least a portion of it to make a difference.

Real life example: 16% interest on $2M of debt is like $26k a month of interest. Refinance half of that debt at 8% and your monthly interest drops to like $19k. A significant difference just by being smart, working the numbers and exploring other banking options. 

I already did the math above for you that I’d have to sell upwards of $30k in product to make $6K in cash to cover this interest, instead I’m just swapping out banks. Work smarter, not harder. 

Getting Free Money Back 

If you’re selling on Amazon read this!

Last month I met a guy on Twitter named Joel who claimed he could get me back thousands from all my Amazon shipments.

If you haven’t read the fine print, Amazon perpetually overcharges almost every seller and he created a solution called TrueOps to get you money back on your FBA shipments. Everything from shipments being scanned in incorrectly, inventory damaged in transit, lost inventory and everything in between.

Joel and his team are Amazon ninjas and are currently working on getting me back $145,000!!!! This isn’t a rounding error, this is legit money that I’m leaving on the table and if he didn’t hit me up on Twitter I would have never reclaimed.

So here’s how it works in legit 30 seconds.

1) Go to TrueOps and link your Amazon account.

2) Enter code crossedcommerce

3) TrueOps will audit your account and request certain shipping proof & various information

4) Receive your refund

It’s that damn simple!

As you can imagine, TrueOps makes money on a % of money they recover for you. Joel has been nice enough to offer every single reader free reimbursement for the first $10,000 recovered when you use code crossedcommerce

Do yourself a favor and see if you can get some free money back or hit Joel up at [email protected] with any questions.

Remember me when your wire hits.

Onward & Upward

I hope you guys enjoyed this! Seriously thank you so much for your support each and every week. It’s the motivation for me to continuing to write this week over week.

I’m in NYC until Thursday morning, so if you’re around hit me up!

Talk soon,

Chris