Today on the Winning with Shopify podcast.
This brand really came to life out of an actual like middle of
the night dream. Who has a dream and then starts
a business? Rock bottom's a different level
for everybody. It's very relative, but it's
when you're almost like, I have nothing else now.
Like I'm kind of done. I almost sort of look at it and
say, well actually you're a blank canvas now.
It all started to make sense to me and I got a deeper
understanding of like who I was and where I came from.
What works for cheekbone is maybe not the systems that are
aligned in the beauty industry norm.
Maybe what works for us is this organic content.
I was watching Harry Potter and my wife paused it and said, what
have you got so and so for Christmas?
And I said nothing. And they're like, what?
We're going to get them? And I looked at the screen and
saw a dragon. And I was like, obviously a Lego
dragon. Like, that's an easy one.
Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode Winning with
Shopify Podcast. If you've never tuned in before,
my name's Nick and I've been hosting the show.
It's nearly 2026. I can't believe where the time's
gone. It still was like 2010 in my
head, but less said about that the better.
If you've tuning for the first time, please hit the subscribe
button and leave us a comment if there's commenting on the
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check out my funky new studio, every week we're changing
something in the studio. I should start a spot the
difference. So if you spot something
different, send me an e-mail hello@winningwishful.com.
Be like Nick, this has changed and if I like what you said
enough, I will send you. I haven't got one to hand.
I've seen you a limited edition because I only bought 10 winning
with Shopify mugs. We got a few in the office.
I'll send you a I'll send you a mug if if we like what you have
to say or what you've spotted. So yeah, send in anything that's
going on. Feel free to also ask us
e-commerce questions. We are an e-commerce podcast.
I run a marketing agency just like that warm.
We spend millions of dollars and pounds every year on Google
advertising and SEO. Lots of other fun stuff as well.
I'm super excited for this week's episode because we've had
quite a few different people on the show recently and who we
unless things have gone in a different way, we're not.
I had a founder on for a little while, so I'm delighted to have
Jen from Cheekbone Beauty on the show.
So Jen, without further ado, welcome to the show.
How are you? I'm great.
Thank you so much for having me in.
It's wonderful to meet you. Amazing.
Well, it's so good to have you on the show, Jen.
And if people are listening, they're like a beauty brand.
Like, tell us a bit more about the business.
What do you guys sell? How did you get started?
What's your background before? Before starting?
And then we'll dig in some tangents afterwards.
I know we're possibly rewinding the clock here, but tell us
everything. So I am technically like 11
years in from like ideation. This brand really came to life
out of an actual like middle of the night like dream.
When, when I say this to people, they always think it's a little
bit humorous because who has a dream and then starts a
business? So I am like, it's 2015.
I sell seafood for a living. My entire career I'd been in the
food space, but for the, the, the, the eight years before
getting into the, this business, I was a seafood sales Rep.
And then in that, after that dream, I woke up and I wrote
down what I wanted to do. And first it was to figure out
how to make a lip gloss and then use a portion of the profits to
do something to support my Indigenous community.
At the time, I'd written start a scholarship fund in honor of my
grandmother, but to give you like a little bit.
And so the dream when people ask about it, like, what was it?
And all I remember is 3 like native little girls, SO3
Indigenous little girls, brown skin, rosy cheeks, giggling and
laughing. And then if I look at my life at
the time and what was going on in the world, this was when
Canada had finished this report called the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission report.
So it was this final report and it was all of this work done
over six years and it was just being like publicly announced
that, oh, wow, the systems, which I am 38 at the time when
this is happening, I had learned that both my grandparents went
to one of those kinds of schools.
And so unfortunately, when you're learning about that kind
of history, it all started to make sense to me and I got a
deeper understanding of like who I was and where I came from.
And honestly, many First Nations or Indigenous families here in
Canada, all of us had family members that had gone to these
schools. They're called residential.
And in the United States, they were called the boarding school
system, but nobody would talk about it.
And then as you learn and read these reports at that time or
you listen to stories of people that are survived those schools,
unfortunately, they weren't a wonderful experience.
And it created a lot of trauma. And, you know, they still in in
many ways impact our communities and our families today.
So I'm learning this and then Nick, the you know, the the
truth about my story was I myself had struggled with
alcoholism for many years. So I got sober November 26th,
2014. Congratulations.
Thank you. And yeah, this past year I
celebrated this past November, 11 years, but two months later
is when I have this dream. So like and what, and when I
describe it to people and I, when I look back now, I think,
wow, that is insane and crazy And why did no one stop you?
Because you knew nothing about the beauty industry.
Like again, I was selling fish to chefs and restaurateurs.
What the heck do I know about beauty?
But I woke up from that And I, I think that thing that happens to
many entrepreneurs is like, I just had this insatiable belief
that I could figure this out and do this.
And when I look back now, I think in many cases, was it my
sobriety? Was, was me overcoming
alcoholism 1 giving me clarity? Was it making me crazy to think
I could do this thing? Or did it give me this innate
belief in myself once again that something better is possible
and, and the world shifting as it was at that time?
Like I think historically that year and that Commission in
those reports really changed our country, Canada, because for
many years, no one ever admitted to sort of the wrongs that was
committed in the name of colonization in in this
continent. And so I think just having that
admission come, you know, since then, many and all of those
things have just helped our people, Indigenous people on
this path to healing. And I think I was on my own
personal healing and journey and I'm actually in the process of
writing a book about it and in our brand story and really
talking about how this brand and business is help me heal.
So then have that dream. I'm now in the beauty space.
I'm learning everything I possibly can.
So never been an entrepreneur, only I've ever worked for people
and organizations. And in two years, I read over
100 books on business and, and, and being indigenous, I was
trying to learn more about that as well at the same time as
like, how do I build a business with that being our brand
identity? Like I, when I talk about
cheekbone, I have always shared that we really, when I say
Indigenous roots, I wanted to go back to my ancestors of like
thousands of years of living in what pre not even called Canada
at the time. But this is how my family lived
and survived and thrived before all of that happened.
And the one thing that I know for certain is that indigenous
people have always been the keepers of land and cared about
this planet and all of the gifts that it provides.
And so how could we as businesses do a better job and,
and doing our part to take care of people on the planet?
And so I went back and that, you know, learning and research.
And finally in 2016, we then launched our e-commerce store.
So it was like a lot of learning up until that point, but like,
you name it, it was going every path of like, I don't know how
to write a business plan. I don't know what a financial, I
didn't know anything. I knew a little bit more about
marketing and I knew from my career in sales and seafood that
I really believed social media and every form of it was going
to be the future. Yeah, Yeah.
Thank you so much. I mean, just in terms of your
humility as well, just to share the the depth of that story.
And I mean, congratulations on some of the successes in it.
I, I think there's one of the things that's brought me to
which I'm going to go completely away from Shopify and e-commerce
for a SEC. We'll come back in a minute
everyone. So track with us.
I'm learning with the American phrases and Canadian phrases as
well, like tracking with us. I didn't know what that meant
till I watched the NFL and I thought, Oh yeah, that makes
sense. I started using it before I knew
what it meant and but I think like I read so many books as
well. I've been reading a lot of audio
books. I listen to podcasts.
I mostly do listening because I'm very I was joking with Jen
that Jen was trying to get her tech working and while she was
trying to get her tech working to get in this, I've reorganized
this desk and changed the lighting and other stuff.
So if you haven't emailed me and you say any of that, then you
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And but I think some of the, so many, so many of the things I
read the, the stories of some of the most successful businesses,
most successful people. And obviously success is a
measure in itself. Everyone's got the measure of
that. But actually the success comes
from when people hit what I describe as rock bottom.
And it's like actually rock bottom is a different level for
everybody. It's very relative.
But it's when you're almost like, I have nothing else now,
like I'm kind of done. And because I'm done, I always,
I almost sort of look at it and say, well, actually you're a
blank canvas Now you've kind of got rid of all the other stuff
because you, you know, you, you become so humble because you're
like, I'm, I basically, I'm rubbish at everything.
Everything I've done has failed. Everything I've known has been
ripped up underneath me or whatever situation you're in.
And suddenly it's like you're actually a blank canvas.
Like go and dream. You know, I mean, you, you
actually had a, a physical dream like at sleep one night, but go
and dream. What do you want to do next?
You know what is actually next for you and I find bringing it
back to e-commerce and how that I think relates actually to
what's happening. And you know this, I think this
is probably going to be the last episode we're posting this year.
There'll be 1 special 1 next week and I'm wearing an outfit,
but it won't be an interview. It'll be one of the Tuesday
ones. And guess what outfit I'll be
wearing? It's going to be itchy.
I keep telling everyone, but the I think the interesting thing
with Shopify brands is Shopify's made it so easy to go like
right, new account name, e-mail, bang.
I've got an e-commerce store. No one's bought from me yet, but
I've got an e-commerce store and it's like the power suddenly the
people have of going like, do you know what?
I don't have to work for the I know, I know across the pond, a
lot of people call it with the man.
I don't have to work for the man anymore.
And you know, I can go and be my own boss and do my own thing.
Of course, there are some people that get sold this dream and get
kind of get sucked into it and it doesn't work out and money
gets lost and everything else. But there are so many businesses
that have come along like yourself, where when I first
just kind of heard the name Cheekbone Beauty, I was like,
cool, we're talking to a beauty brand.
Let's find out. But hearing your story, my first
question really, and I want to hear more about the roots in a
second of like the early days and everything.
But with everything you've just said, how do you bring that
across? And I ask a lot of guests this
and I get a whole multitude of answers.
How do you bring a lot of that across your backgrounds, your
ancestors, the dream you had, what you're trying to achieve of
the business, the giving back? How do you bring that across to
your customer base? How do you bring that across in
marketing? And I know it's not easy because
there's only so many pixels on screens and thanks to Apple and
and Android launching I iPhones and everything else, we have
less pixels on screen, so smaller screen.
How do you bring that across to your customer base?
That is a great question and I feel like we still don't know
for sure. The only thing I know for
certain is I just try to tell the story like I literally am
like whether it be the brand story, my personal story or our
product story, which we have. We like, we haven't even touched
on products yet, right, because you always assume.
Yeah, we'll get. That my career prior was a
salesperson and you're technically trying to always
give them that, you know, the, the like, how is this going to
make their life better or those features, advantages and
benefits that we always used to pursue.
And in the beginning I made the mistake of like trying to follow
that path. Like with cheekbone, I would be
like, no, we got to tell them exactly what it's going to do
and how it's going to solve their problem.
And yet in a way, we still have to do that.
But I've learned over the years that I think people really love
a story and to get to that, how it's going to help them.
But they definitely want the story.
And I feel very connected to storytelling.
I recognize that culturally, it's something that if you know
what Native American, Native Canadian people have been
notoriously popular for over generations is we have told our
stories and always orally that like you can, it is very hard.
Now in 2025, yeah, there's a lot more books written about, but
all of our teachings, whether no matter what tribe or nation we
come from, in the United States, they use more of the word tribe.
In Canada, we use the word nation.
So I am from the Ojibwa away nation, which is a group of
people. They were technically sort of
all around, maybe the Great Lake area, but again, sometimes
nomadic in many ways. But this is where we reside now.
And the stories from my culture, which we call ourselves the
Anishnabe people and I'm from again, the Ojibwe nation,
something in the sense that like, how do you define success?
And our then our community and our people, we have stories
about that would be shared and passed down.
We have one that we've included into the brand called the seven
generations teaching. And I'm sharing this one because
I know it's more popular and a lot of even non indigenous
brands use this in their marketing.
But the idea of what we do today and how it won't only impact the
next generation, but the next 7. So we have to think more
thoughtfully about the resources we take from the land and what
are we giving back to the land? And all of these things were
stories and teaching that have passed bound.
So the one thing I it's AI always say our our brand story,
it's big, there's a lot of pieces and facets of it.
But if we just continue down this path of trying to tell and
share those stories, I know that that's how we connect with a lot
of our community. And when I say that, I hear our
customers right. I love that.
And again, thank you so much for sharing that.
And one thing I love, I, I studied at school quite a lot
into Native Americans. I think it was more central and
South, like Aztecs and the Incas and things like that.
And it's fascinating. And the amount of things that
were going on that like someone 100 or 200 years ago was like,
I've invented this. It's like, no, you didn't.
We've found sketchings now on a cave somewhere actually in South
America that suggests otherwise. And it's I find it fascinating.
And so it's almost like that ecosystem is like, I'd almost
say it's almost like carbon offsetting And how funny that
like ancient tribes and nations were talking about exactly the
same thing. I find it fascinating.
And I guess, I guess the question I really want to ask
then is you mentioned products. What are your products and I
guess the products themselves, it's gonna, I know it's gonna be
beauty relate. Well, I assume it's gonna be
beauty relatedness. It's not because of the name
you've mentioned. But the other question I really
want to ask is given everything you've mentioned about the
history, what you're trying to do with, with the brand and the
business and giving back and, and your ancestry and, and
things like that, how did you choose the product range is
really the question. I want to know so you can tell
us what it is, but how did you come up with that product range
based on all those other factors?
Yeah, it was. You know, I've I've said this
many times recently in particular, if I knew what I
knew now back then, I probably would have started in skin care,
not color. So we're in the category that
people call color cosmetics. So anything for lips, eyes and
face, lipsticks, glosses, oils, balms, faces, complexion
products, whether that's we call ours a unified pencil, which
really does foundation concealing and contouring all in
one. We'd make everything with this
whole concept of like it should be multi purpose and multi use,
but that's a more part of the brand story is that idea of
being more sustainable. And then of course, blush,
eyeshadow, eyeliner, mascara. So all of the things in the
color makeup category. Here's the facts.
And what I know now is that color is such an expensive brand
to start in the sense that skew line, you need multiple shades,
especially if you're going to touch complexion.
Because you can imagine. I mean, there's 8 billion.
Yeah. Yeah, more than 8 billion.
So shade range is always an issue.
Color lips. Like so you need such a wide.
Range like there's so many order for you is we need.
To order so many like maybe small volumes initially but load
a wide range of. Skews and then when you when
you're growing and you want to work with better partners
because we're talking people that have much higher Moqs and
so it's very expensive and So what I know now I would have
definitely started in the skin care space just because I could
have launched 3 SKUs versus the 75 that we carry now Yeah,
exactly. And so, but it that's all about
learning and, and then I've also recognized, oh, wow, OK.
You know, as and as I've gone on the journey, Nick, it's really
interesting. I started the brand out very
differently than where we are now.
I didn't know anything about this space since founding it.
We moved from buying from other manufacturers to actually us
learning how to formulate our own formulations in our own lab
that we built at our headquarters and hired chemists
and other scientists to work with to actually figure out and
what I want to, to learn, which is not the normal way either
that people watch beauty usually I, I just really wanted to learn
how everything was made and I wanted to understand why did we
have to use this ingredient and is there another option?
And a lot of times if you're working with a contract
manufacturer, they're going to tell you, no, there isn't
another option And they're going to think they're going to try to
explain to you why. However, I want to prove it to
myself. I want to try to make that
lipstick and I want to use that more naturally derived
ingredient. And if it doesn't work, I wanted
to know why. But what we've learned is that
we man our own formulations with more naturally derived
ingredients that are more biodegradable and that they can
work and they do work very well. And whatever the contract
manufacturers were telling us, we're in fact them just wanting
to regurgitate the same lipstick that every other makeup brand is
putting into the market. But I was completely went
against the path and said no, we're going to figure out these
things on our own. So with with our lab, we've now
made color, but I'm sure we're moving into the skin care
category because we have learned how to make formulas and what
can be better for us and the planet.
And are you, if you don't mind me, just interrupting for a say,
are you the face of the brand as well then?
Are you the main person that does the social channels and
talks to customers? Sadly and say sadly, I mean, but
I think what you've done is exactly the right thing.
So actually it's not sadly, I think it's perfect that you're
the right person to do it because you understand the
products enough. I mean, comparatively, I have it
here with the agency where my team are like, Nick, do you, why
do you want to come to this client call?
You know, they don't spend much. There's more.
I'm like, I do all the pitching, I do the podcast, I do all the
events that we do. I come up with what our branding
is. I decide which case studies end
up on the website. I decide how to, how do we put a
proposal and plan together for somebody.
So if I don't know what's working, how on earth can I do
all the other things? And it it's exactly the same for
you. And I think that there are some
founders I talked to like, yeah, I've got 7 or 8 e-commerce
stores and it's like, it's fine. But as long as you're not the
face of any of them, unless you do have a proper vested
interest, I think to know what's going on because otherwise, how
do you make marketing decisions? How do you jump on TikTok and
have a video conversation slightly one way, but telling
customers about what's going on? You can't really do that if you
don't really know the skews and the best products and things
because people must buy into you and customers must buy into
like, oh, I saw Jen was doing this.
Do you ever find that in your warehouse?
You have dead stock. You can't sell it, no one wants
to buy it and you can't get a refund on it.
Or alternatively, you're missing inventory in your warehouse that
you need, you've got sales coming in and you're low on
stock and you haven't ordered more stock in time.
All these things hit profit. And I've been there.
I've run my own Shopify store and had exactly that problem.
But we've partnered up with Inventory Planner, who have the
most incredible app to help you manage that and forecast exactly
what products, what skews even down to what colour of products
you need to order in advance to make sure stock levels remain
consistent throughout. They're also running a seven day
boot camp and if you want to go and sign up to that, it's 7
emails every seven days and it takes the same amount of time as
your morning coffee. And in seven days, like me, you
can become an inventory management pro.
Both links are in the description.
Enjoy. You must get customer service
emails saying I saw Jen put something over here like what is
that product? How do I get it?
When's it coming out? Yeah, one of our favorite tools
and you know, having it, it is timing is everything.
When I think back and when you just think about Shopify, like
if that didn't exist, this wouldn't, I couldn't even, I
wouldn't have never been able to do this.
But then the tool we have at our checkout is we constantly ask
people where they found out about the brand.
So every week it could be from Jen talking on social media to a
news article to to ATV segment that we were on or something
like that. So we just want to know exactly
where people are finding us. And so we and that tool into the
checkout, right? That's cool.
Do you I, I have this problem at the moment.
So we, we've gone so data heavy in our agency.
It's like if you can't prove it with data, it goes in the like
10% bucket of like we're going to try this and see what
happens. The 90% has to be like we've
seen this in the data set says we should do this and that's
going to grow revenue. And the reason I love that
approach is it leads to the question, The first question, I
thought when you said we asked people how they found us.
And I sort of thought, you probably know that on GA 4
because you can see the sources and things.
But I think what's interesting, and I haven't done this for a
brand, I think I might need to do this in an ear now, now that
you've mentioned it, now you mentioned I thought of it, it'd
be amazing to overlay what the customer said versus GA 4.
Because if they say, oh, I saw Jen on TikTok, for example, or
on an Instagram video and then you go, but hang on a minute,
You clicked on one of our paid ads.
But what paid ad was it? What keyword did you use?
Oh, you searched our brand and clicked on a paid ad.
So we've paid for you to click on our own brand when we didn't
really need to. No one competes with us.
Do you see the equation of like we're wasting money anyway?
That's what we discovered is like people, whether whatever
we're learning from Google is not necessarily the actual facts
or part of the story is literally no.
It took this one community member 20 touch points till they
actually converted, but it was all part of the system.
And we've learned that because that's asking them actually is.
And honestly, I am blown away because I I never do this.
I never even respond to a survey.
I don't know what customer who does this.
And I'm grateful because we get so much feedback from them.
But they will give a whole story as to like I was watching this
show and then yeah, so we get a lot of information by just.
Asking yeah, yeah, yeah. I filled one out the other day
and I said, how did you find this?
I said, I was watching Harry Potter and my wife paused it and
said, what have you got so and so for Christmas?
And I said nothing. And they're like, what are we
going to get them? And I looked at the screen and
saw a dragon and I was like, obviously a Lego dragon.
Like that's an easy one. And it's like, right, Lego
dragon. I just bought a dragon from, I
think it was Amazon. It's like next day delivery,
like right, wrap that, let's go. So that was resources.
Let's talk about some of the challenges then from a business
perspective. So you've given us incredible
background to how you started it, what you sell, who you guys
are, what you stand for. What have been some of the
challenges you guys have faced then with growth?
Like we always have, dark days in business.
I can vouch for that. I've had more than I'd like to
watch. So we're talking 11 years and
for honestly the first, like if I'm being very transparent and
truthful, I would say for seven of these years, I really didn't
know what I was doing in so many factors of the business.
I feel like I'm like, well, no, I and I don't.
There's a lot still to learn, but I finally, it's this past
year, it's our first year being profitable.
It's the first. Congratulations.
Thank you. Last year we were $700,000 in
the red. So to turn the company around
and finally, it's been, there's been a lot of disasters and that
was a calculated risk, though, like even last year we went
heavy and we're like, we're going to pay big influencer and
see what happens. We're going to do this licensing
collaboration and see what happens.
We're going to work with this big agency.
We're going to hire a sales team to grow our Sephora business in
Canada. And it all freaking failed or
everyone lied to us and didn't do and say what they're going to
do. And influencers, big influencers
don't necessarily work for small brands.
And that I had to to learn that. And at least now I have the data
to say no. What works for Cheekbone is
maybe not the systems that are aligned in the beauty industry
norm. Maybe what works for us is this
organic content is us being transparent about formulations
and product and how it works and and those sorts of things.
So just learning, even though those were big failures.
And then I focused for the last two years on two of the buckets
of really important buckets of business that I was never very
comfortable with, which is finance and OPS and we now have
built like when you're. In the Boring.
Stuff, Oh my goodness. But when you're a CPG business
that literally has to know, like I meet founders and I, my heart
aches for them because they don't get it yet or they don't
want to and then the business will not succeed.
And I want to tell them that. And it's so hard that if you I
know exactly how many AKI, which is our best selling red
lipstick, we have to order and sell in the month it's
forecasted and we will and, and then be sitting on that perfect
level so that we still have enough to give if it like, it's
just such a big important piece of the business is understanding
the operations portion and as understanding your cash flow on
a weekly basis. Sometimes when you're in tough
points, right, of like what you can and cannot do.
But I learned, I took the last two years to like really teach
myself and make sure my team knew exactly what we're in.
We're super small team, like we're only 6 full time
employees. The rest is all contracts sort
of and subcontract work that supports us.
But this internal team like we are super functional and like
just have hustled to get to where where we are, but had to
learn the hard things and had to learn it like from the ground up
with not and originally I and there's so many schools of
thought out there because people are like, well, hire for the
things you don't know. I did that and it didn't work
either. Right, like I was counting on.
But here's why I disagree. With that statement, I know a
lot of people say hire the stuff you don't know or bring in
expertise where you don't know. What I've started doing is
finding the like individual, one person, like band sort of thing.
Say like, right, you're a contractor, you're a freelancer.
I don't like I'd say 10 years ago I was looking at my accounts
going, I'm working really hard, revenue's good.
I don't, I couldn't tell you how much profit we've got.
So I sat down with a freelance accountant and said, look, I
don't need an accountant. Can I pay you for like a day or
two of your time? Can you explain what EBITDA
means? Can you explain what, what are
the advantages I could take of VAT?
What can I and can't I expense? How does the HMRC system work?
Like HMRC is where we pay our tax.
Like is it Inland Revenue in the USI don't know what Canada have,
but so yeah. So I sat down and learnt all
those things. My philosophy is the opposite of
hire people to do things you don't know how to do.
My philosophy is starting yourself, get it working well
and then hire someone to expand it.
Because the conversation I can have with anyone in my team, and
I think I mean, yeah, we so we hire a lot of junior people here
and train them. So we hire them based on their,
their culture, their personality, their drive.
They're they're, they're not too ambitious to the right level of
ambitious for us. We ask questions in interviews
of things like, are you aware of your limitations, your failures?
When you know, when you're kind of in your depth, out of your
depth. And if we get anything but an
answer, that's like, OK, we do trust them.
That sounds legitimate. It's like you're a junior.
We're hiring someone without experience day one, you're out
of your depth, you're beyond your limits.
You're going to fail at everything.
But that's part of this. So if that's not your culture,
don't come here. Like, and we don't want you to
come here because it's it's going to be horrible.
We've made that mistake. I love that I say that as well.
It's like, this is a horrible job, but yeah, here's all the
things that and if you love that world, then please come join us.
One of one of my team, I have one to ones on my team every two
or three months and I was still in the end of year ones over the
last couple of weeks. And one of my teams said to me,
like, how would you not want to work here?
And I said, well, there's people with personalities that they
like shouting. They like, let's just do stuff
at the deadline. They get a real driving kick out
of that. I don't it's my business, so I'm
hiring A-Team. I only hire a team of people
that I like working with because otherwise it's all going to fall
apart. Like, if I don't like it, you're
all stuffed. Like, and it's, I think I've had
to learn to be selfish to then help people by hiring them,
training them, giving them a career and giving them a chance
to give the right person a chance to go and do stuff.
I feel like I. Think.
Talk about this. Stuff for hours just because I
like. So when you said that, I learned
I didn't ask these so-called experts that I hired the right
questions because I didn't know what to ask them.
I was just expecting them to understand.
And it turned out to be epic failures in most of the cases,
right? So we to let everyone into a
little secret. I know there's agencies that
listen to this as well, so please don't steal this too
much. The last three pitches we've
won, we haven't write written a slide deck.
We've not written a proposal, which is what an agency normally
does. You come in and say, Hey, look
how amazing the world, which is probably what you had, like look
how amazing the world's going to be and you're like, great sign
off, let's go. We most of our PPC proposals now
are just a spreadsheet. And it's just that we don't even
talk about the ad copy and we agree the process and stuff with
the client like in the first couple of weeks when we start,
because that that's all stuff that we can change.
The thing that we need to work out is like, right, how much you
spending, how much you making? What are the economics?
And when you talk about the numbers as well, and I want to
say thank you as well. Thank you for being so honest
about it. Making a 750K loss last year
compared to this year, you're now in profit.
I think, you know, I think it's amazing part of the journey.
And if anyone's seen that or something similar in the title
of this episode, don't be surprised like I've written it
down and gone this incredible. I think with the economics, like
we, we sit with brands and we ask, you'd be amazed, some of
the big kind of global corporations we work with down
to like some small but very quickly scaling Shopify stores.
And we asked them like, what's your best selling product and
then where do people land on your site to buy that product?
It's like, well, we don't know. And it's like, fine, you're
going to hire us to look at that.
And actually, when we normally try to like optimize a whole
site or do marketing for a whole business, we're going to apply
the 8020 rule and go, we're going to spend 80% of our time
on 20% of the pie. But it's 20% of the pie that
makes when we come back to where we started, the 80% of your
revenue. And I think it's looking at the
economics and things like that. It's so important.
I, I've been calling it economics more and more over the
last sort of six months. And we're certainly doubling
down on that next year of our clients saying, let's just
let's, let's pull the layers off the onion for a second and go,
where is your revenue actually coming from?
What are people actually buying? Why are they buying it?
And then let's do more of that. The amount of brands that said,
we've got a new range. And then we like, we launched a
new brand on our store and we're like, why?
And they're like, because we could, because we could get hold
of it. It's like that's your, I mean,
you mentioned business, business plans earlier.
I'm done with business plans like just, it's talk to your
customer and go like we, we talk to our clients and say, what's
the biggest thing you need from us this year?
And they'll say, as an organization, we're only like 3%
profitable and we need to get to 5.
And we say, right, we can make like a 6% profitability increase
this year, which will massively, you know, we drive 50% of all
your revenue on Google Ads. We could massively help you turn
that ship pretty quickly and that's actually an easier brief
than what we were probably trying to achieve in the 1st
place. But that's the company goal and
we can overhit that pretty quick.
How do you guys approach like I know, I know last year to this
year was probably quite easy, but how do you guys approach
like KPIs, metrics, what do you measure?
Like what's what the success? What do you look at in the
morning when you get up that makes you happy and not happy in
the data that you're looking at on a daily basis?
Yeah. And that has changed
dramatically over these last like 9 years of selling first.
Yeah, so I have worked so even our our HR company is contract
and one of the main jobs, you know, we've worked with them for
quite a few years, always very happy.
And I was like while we were going through this whole new
building OPS process, there was a lot of things happening in the
background and it really did change people's job
descriptions. And So what we did is now in
each job description, we built KPIs based on the six people
that work for me and have to do a lot of things.
Now there's like 5610K PIS surrounding each of them that
they're responsible for. And we've embedded that now even
into the job description. So I'm completely drawing a
blank here, but whether it's your wholesale manager and also
acts as my EA, which is Melanie. So if she's the wholesale
manager, that means she's responsible for all small
independent business that we bring on.
So boutiques that would be selling cheekbone and we want to
bring on at least five a month and that has to add up to a
certain amount of revenue each year.
And obviously her KPIs are going to surround that, whether it's
from how many cold calls she's making based on how many, like
following the 8020 rules. So she's got to make 100 cold
calls a week and transfer that into five accounts that actually
on board within the month kind of thing.
And then that's the sales funnel process.
But then her KP is on her job description are all based on
that. And so we do that for every
individual now within the organization, which is like game
changing, right? And then I have a CEO dashboard
that they take all of the insights and have to put that
information in every Monday for our in our team meeting that
happens every Tuesday. Yeah, yeah, we, we've got some
clients now. We, we've used Google, look, a
studio and a couple of alternatives where we basically
people like, oh, sorry, I'm never available on Monday
morning. And sometimes we're like, it's
been an interesting weekend. Sometimes it's been a hard
weekend, a good weekend. And we e-mail clients like by
9:00 AM Monday, like we're emailing clients saying, have
you seen, you know, I'm assuming you've seen the stats this
weekend. I'm already changing budgets
according accordingly or pivoting to, to this because
that range for some reason has exploded over the weekend.
Yeah, we don't hear from them. And then when we eventually
after a few months of getting to know the client or a couple of
years and we say, what are you doing on a Monday?
Like we send you these emails being like, guess what?
And there's like, just dead. And then you.
Know first thing Tuesday oh sorry, I guess great thanks for
doing that. Or like, oh please don't put the
budget up. And it's like yeah, we spent
quite a bit yes. I mean we've have caps.
We have like we won't go over that without permission.
And but we started creating these dashboards because they
were like, we're just putting all this information into a
trading meeting. And it's like we got half a day
back. And then we slightly jokingly,
but slightly say to the client, can you spend that half day then
like approving content we need from you?
Or can you get this for us that we need or can you get this sign
off over here so we can start that campaign, like trying to
utilise that that free time we've got back to them.
But I mean, a lot of organizations, it used to be
like, yeah, Monday was just kind of trading meetings for
everybody across all clients. And it was like Monday was like
a ghost town at the agency world.
And it was like, this is bizarre.
Like we have the Internet is they're not graphs.
I think your dash is fantastic to have.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that.
And let's let's come in to land on this last point then.
And you mentioned right at the start, you mentioned it.
I've written it down because I love this.
You said, you said about if, if I could go back and say some
things to myself when I started, like what would I say?
I want to rephrase that as a question very slightly to say
hearing, hearing your story is probably going to inspire some
people. And there's definitely going to
be people listening to this who are on that kind of journey.
What advice would you give to these guys who are thinking of
starting out? They've just started out like,
yeah, what would you say? Oh, wow.
So like, there's so many things, but I think the most important,
yeah, the one area which is so ridiculous, how am I in a?
So if you're in food or beauty, it, it is not like a tech
business. You can't just toss out your MVP
and expect that iterations can happen.
If I tasted something and it tastes like garbage, that is I'm
never going back. The brand like it's gone, it's
done. If you've used a beauty product
and it doesn't work, it's done. So we're in a category where my
product had to be at. It's sort of that product
market, never mind fit, love phase right off the hop.
And that's the biggest mistake I made is that I went and I
entered this industry really unknowledgeable and didn't
understand product and how important it was.
And so, and my, my issue was I was actually reading a lot of
tech based books that said, just throw out what you have.
And then this is like a catch. This is like like a catch 22
because I obviously I didn't even have a choice though I had
no money. I didn't like when I said I
started with $500 that I, it wasn't like I could go and spend
10,100 thousand on building the perfect product either.
So my story is I had to start the way I did.
But if I had a choice, maybe I and I just, I just know even if
I went to go look for investors, no one was ever going to give me
money. I knew I wasn't a celebrity
influencer. I didn't come from the beauty
industry and have a 10 year at Lake L'Oreal, Estee Lauder or
one of the big like I had none of that.
I was selling fish and knew nothing about beauty.
So who in their right mind would give me money to do that?
So maybe my story is the way it is and has to stay that way.
But if it doesn't, if you have money, you get that product
perfect, especially in beauty and food before you put it into
the world. Amazing.
Thank you so much. I mean, today's been great.
I've written a whole page of notes.
I'm not. I'm going to keep writing notes
after we after we finish the recording.
But yeah, I want to say a massive thank you, Jen.
And if people want to reach out and hear more about the story,
engage in the business science and newsletter, buy products.
What's the website URL? What are the social handles?
How can people get in touch? Yeah, we're cheekbonebeauty.com
and I'm Cheekbone Jen on most of the other platforms or Jen
Harper on LinkedIn. Amazing.
Well, yeah, thank you again,
Jen. It's been so good to have you.
And yeah, sorry for the technical issues at the start.
And but yeah, thank you. SO.
Much for joining us and yeah, all good.
Thank you. Amazing.
Well, if you guys have enjoyed today's episode, as I said at
the start, please hit the subscribe button, leave us a
comment wherever you're listening to it.
And if you wanted to join our newsletter, we're announcing
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It's not super exciting, but yeah, it should be live yet and
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kick. And if I don't hear from any of
you guys, have an amazing Christmas, make sure you tune in
on Tuesday as well. We're going to have a little bit
of a laugh on the show. And I don't know if there's an
outtake reel this year. I genuinely don't know, but I am
a bit nervous because no one said anything when I asked, so
keep an eye out for that. Thank you so much for being part
of the journey this year. And yeah, we hope you guys can
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