Do you ever find that in your warehouse you have dead stock,
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And I've been there. I've run my own Shopify store
and had exactly that problem. But we've partnered up with
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And in seven days like me, you can become an inventory
management pro. Both links are in the
description. Enjoy.
Hello and welcome to another episode, the Winning with
Shopify podcast. For anyone that's not seen
before, my name is Nick and I believe this is the best Shopify
podcast in the entire world. The reason I say that is our
views are going up like crazy. Our subscribers are going up
like crazy and the feedback we're getting from you guys is
absolutely incredible. Not to mention our guests have
been absolutely phenomenal in the information they share, the
time they give up to come and record with us, and also
answering some of your questions and follow-ups afterwards as
well. If you're a brand that wants to
grow and you're facing challenges like all brands do,
then come and join the Growth Hub at wwspodcast.com.
The Growth Hub is an exclusive community just for Shopify
brands. We have round table sessions,
focus groups, feedback sessions, and ask an expert portal and
most importantly the community itself.
You can ask questions and see what other people are talking
about and you can also just follow other conversations and
see what conclusions people come to in terms of how to run their
business best. Today I'll caught up with McCoy,
who's the CMO of Portland Leather goods.
Mccoy's an absolute legend and he's been on the podcast before
two years ago. Two years ago he told us that
they've grown from 600,000 subscribers to 1.5 million
subscribers on their e-mail campaigns in just four months.
So in this episode we find out how much more have they grown
and how is the business running overall.
Couple of other topics that we do talk about.
We talk about Etsy, women that are engaged, Shopify startups,
shipping inefficiencies, lifetime value, e-mail, multi
channel, limiting your own beliefs, CRO, the army and
management. So today is not to be missed.
We covered a lot of ground in a very short space of time.
So if you haven't already, hit the subscribe button, sit back
and relax. And I hope you enjoyed today's
episode. McCoy, welcome back to the show.
How are you? Nick, I'm doing fantastic.
Thanks for having me back. I really appreciate it.
Well, it's a pleasure to have you back.
We've been desperate to get you back.
I know you have a very busy schedule, but we're delighted to
have you back with us today. For anyone that missed your
first episode, it was a couple of years ago.
Naturally, we've picked up loads of new subscribers since then.
And if you're not subscribe, hit the subscribe button everybody.
But tell us quickly, McCoy, a little bit about the business
you're part of and your role within Portland Leather Goods as
well. Perfect.
Yeah, Well, I'm McCoy. I'm the CMO of Portland Leather
Goods. I joined Portland Leather Goods
in March of 2018. Portland Leather Goods at the
time was very much an Etsy company, very small.
We focused on like your traditional Etsy crafts.
So obviously in the leather goods space.
So this is like makeup bags and journals and you could monogram
your name on it. That feels like a lifetime ago
and a whirled away from where we are now or now one of the
largest bag independent bag brands here in the United
States. And again, as I mentioned, my
role was the CMO. I run the all of the marketing
teams and the advertising teams and it's been a whirlwind.
Like I, I don't recognise the company today from where it was.
We've gone through several rebirths of who we thought we
were and where we thought we were going, leading us to where
we are now. We're on the cusp of some really
exciting things. Maybe we'll get into those
today. Some of those are top secret,
but well, I'll share as much as I possibly can.
Good, good. And yeah, I've asked McCoy for
permission to mention some of the stats and he said yes to all
of them so far. But as you said, there's always
going to be top secret things and every business has it's
secret sauce. And if you share it, it's no
longer secret sauce. And you've got to find another
one before you can pass this catch up.
So I completely understand. But yeah, as I say, it's so good
to have you back. Appreciate your introduction
there as well. You mentioned a lot of change.
Now, I said to you before we hit record, we're not going to stick
to the agenda at all. I'm going to leave the agenda
behind for now. We'll come back to it in a
minute. But you mentioned, and I don't
think you mentioned this last time actually you guys, you
started on Etsy. So that was the main place you
guys were selling when when you first joined the business, was
it? Yeah, that's correct.
Yeah, we were. We were doing about 3 1/2
million on Etsy, which is not a small Etsy company by any means.
We, Curt Curtis tells the story. Curtis is our founder.
He actually had to call Etsy headquarters in New York to get
the advertising daily capital limit lifted for the entire
platform. So he was spending, I think it
was a maybe $1000 a day. And he called New York and said,
I have to spend more. And they're like, no one spends
more than $1000. This is Etsy.
Like, excuse me, Sir, what are you talking about?
So we're one of the original reasons why Etsy actually lifted
their advertising capital $1000 a day.
They kind of shrug their shoulders and like, we'd
actually, we don't actually know why we limit it there, but
we'll, we'll lift it for you. So yes, very much an Etsy.
Company. How kind of them?
Yes, generous. But I mean, it's interesting you
started on Etsy then. So it was one of your first jobs
when you came in the door then was like, hey, McCoy, we need a
website or we've got a website. It's terrible, like get going.
And that was your first remit, was it?
Or did you start on Etsy and then kind of branch out?
Yeah, so I'm, I'm a recovering wedding photographer.
Like I just, I, that was my life.
And now I've left that behind. I'm so sick of, you know,
running around for 12 hours a day carrying tonnes of camera
gear. But when I started, my job was
very like undefined, I should say.
I saw a crazy ad on Craigslist and decided to, you know, just
walk in and try to join the team.
I know. So my original title was digital
media specialist. So when I walked in the door
that first day, they said, you know, high Report leather goods,
We have this Etsy company. And I was like, yeah, yeah,
yeah. I don't want anything to do with
that. I know how to run ads because I
run ads for my wedding photography business so I can
target engaged women. I know how to do that.
I've used, you know, interest in demo targeting on Facebook, and
that led me to start to try to advertise their makeup bags and
toiletry bags for that. They were, we were advertising
for bridesmaids and groomsmen at the time.
And I was like, I don't want nothing to do with
etsythislittle.com thing that's that's going to be my domain.
So I very specifically didn't have an Etsy login, didn't know
how to access the platform, and I spent all my time focusing on
the website. Yeah.
And I find it amazing because I mean, so where where my business
is behind this Wolf spec. We get a lot of brands that come
to us and it's not so much Etsy. We find it's more like more
Amazon. It's like we're doing so much on
Amazon. We want to launch our own direct
to consumer. Now that comes with so many
challenges. Of course, I'm going to share in
a minute as well, just reference benefits, some stats that McCoy
shared with us a couple of years ago when he was on.
And we're going to find out if he's received the WhatsApp
message in time, what the stats now are as well.
And that that's part of the story as well, how connected or
disconnected he's getting with some of the micro stuff.
But yeah, we, we, we've been through that challenge with,
with so many different brands of trying to go, OK, we've got this
marketplace platform doing everything for us.
They take a massive Commission. We have very little control.
Obviously on Etsy at least you're still sending your own
products out. Whereas on Amazon, it's like if
we want to really harness Amazon, we've got to get and do
that. That's more cost as well.
But we offer an amazing service. But then if another company
comes along and Amazon likes them more than us, we're
bankrupt. We've lost everything.
So what were some of those early challenges of getting that
first? I assume Shopify was the
platform. Was it a platform before that?
What were some of those early challenges you guys started
with? Man, that's a great question.
Yeah, as as I mentioned, so we had this Etsy company and that
was only about 3 1/2 million. The website, it, it existed
there was kind of like a shell and a frame that that I had to
play with. We were doing somewhere in the
neighbourhood like $1600 a day on that website.
So Shopify was very much like the, the little side project no
one cared about. All of the company internally
was focused on etsy.com. And from there, like the way we,
we just, we focus on getting especially me, like the team at
the time was Curtis, who I shared a desk with, like with
our founder. And we had one other graphic
designer who was titled creative designer named Erica.
And every day I just would come in and try to focus on just
getting a little bit better. And that, oh, where is it this
way? When you're in the start of
phase, you, you care so much about, you value motion because
nothing exists. So the most valuable thing that
happens to you usually on a given day is not what eventually
you'll care about, you know, optimizations and, and trying to
get a little bit more out of that every day.
You care about somebody showing up in the door and making
something, just making anything because nothing exists.
So it's your primary metric for success.
Somebody shows up and they had an idea and they did it.
And now something exists in the corner and you can kind of use
it as a tool. And, and then eventually at some
point, the business transition where it's large enough to where
you, your primary value being motion or somebody willing to
show up and do something. You value the accuracy of that
motion or the calibration of that motion to really hone in on
what's most important at that time.
Because eventually you get to a point where the business has
more to lose with reckless motion than it does to gain.
But in the beginning, that's not true.
You just need things to exist. So I, when I think back to those
early days, I mean, problems were infinite, right?
There was no shortage of like, what can I do today to make the
business better? I remember 1, like really famous
example was I, I'm starting to hunt down optimizations on the
website and I look for, I start again.
I know nothing about Shopify at the time, I was a wedding
photographer. So I start hunting down all the
different stats in the dashboard and just try to find something
that I can lock in on and say, OK, this is not good and I'm
going to make it better. And one of the things at the
time was we had an incredibly high spread between the number
of people who reach checkout and the people who actually
converted. And again, I'm very new and I'm
like, OK, I don't know what that means, but I would like more
people to convert. So let me attack that particular
like subject. What's happening between when
you reach checkout to when you actually make the purchase?
And the thing I noticed was we had no concept whatsoever
because we were on Etsy and shipping was much more simple to
handle than trying to create custom rules or understand our
volumetric weight and things like that.
Where our shipping prices on Shopify where very, very, very,
very high. We didn't have any negotiated
rates with any carriers. We haven't even, you know,
attempted that relationship. And we were charging people 20
and $25.00 to ship a bag. Now that's what we thought it
cost. We just didn't know better.
And I remember going to the shipping team and I said, hey,
this seems, this seems really crazy.
Like I, I, I, I don't think we're going to be able to scale
this thing if we have to charge somebody $25.00 to ship them a
small bag. You know, this is Amazon.
They're used to free shipping. And I said, I believe we're
losing. And this was the, quote,
thousands of dollars per day. And I quite literally got
laughed at because we were a small company.
We didn't know. And they said, you think
thousands of dollars? Really.
We're losing thousands of dollars per day.
And I was like, yeah, but that was the scale of our mind at the
time. You know, we were doing $800 a
day. And here I was saying, I think
we're losing thousands. And that was just multiple times
our daily revenue. There's no way that could
possibly be true. So I think about stuff like
that. It's it's this hunt and kill of
inefficiency mode when you're in that start up phase to just make
everything a little bit better every single day.
And it's a little careless, it's a little reckless.
And that's kind of what you want is somebody hunting down the
lowest hanging fruit and just seeing if they can get you to a
little bit higher the next day and a little bit higher the next
day. And if you do that for 30 days
in a row, you'll be shocked at how much further you were you
are at now than when you started.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone said to me the day that
to walk 1000 kilometres you've got to take.
Was it a 100,000 steps so I was in the?
United States, the kilometres blows my mind, yeah.
It sounds right to me. Yeah, exactly.
And it's probably not those exact numbers.
So don't go out walking now and come back to me in a year's time
and say I've done 100,000 kilometres.
It wasn't, it was more steps than that, but you get the idea.
It's one step at a time equals a long distance.
And I I love that you focus on those things.
And sometimes I think something seems so obviously wrong or
obviously the wrong thing to look at until you start making a
difference. And I take it that that
particular story has the conclusion that like, yeah, we
lowered the shipping cost and suddenly more people were buying
stuff. You nailed it.
Yeah, it really, it's one of the great, like, tragedies of
business advice where it always sounds so simple.
And if you do enough of those simple, you hear simple things
like that, like, hey, it's probably a good idea to lower a
shipping price. And it sounds too simple.
And so it's not usually where people go out and they like
focus their action because they're looking for the big hack
or the big next thing. But the, I mean, the real
tragedy is like, that's the truth.
If you do enough simple small wins and you stack them over
time, like that is how you get ahead.
So you're exactly right. You lower shipping price, guess
what happens? Conversion rate goes up.
Guess what happens? More money hits the bank
account. So you're, I didn't put a bull
on that story. So thank you for wrapping that
up for me. Correct.
That's good. I mean, we, we did a test with a
client that we I've only got the data back on it today.
They've increased their guarantee on the products.
So the product goes wrong, you can bring it back, it's
currently two years and they've done an AB test of making it
five years and they were like, surely it's going to have no
impact. And I was like, OK, but no
impact. It's still a good learning.
The customers don't care and they'd come back and they have
5% more sales when they do it. So it's a 5% uplift in total
revenue. So not unfortunately not a 5%
conversion rate uplift. That would be nice conversion
rate, but it was still like nought .3%.
I said, look, we find 10 of these things, we've over doubled
our conversion rate. Everyone clear?
Yeah, we've done one. We need 9 more now.
Let's go. And that could be changing the
colour of the button or something.
Let's, I could talk about the early days all day, but I want
to get on to some of these juicy numbers that we got last time.
So let's Fast forward. I mean a long, long time for
you. And certainly in this day and
age where people are moving every two or three years in
their roles. Let's Fast forward to two years
ago when you came on, you had 600,000 subscribers and then the
day we spoke to you was four months after that and you had
1.5 million subscribers. And as e-mail subscribers
receiving emails from you guys, it's a big part of your lifetime
value. Anyone listening to that is
like, Oh my gosh, how use retention.com and a whole series
of very complicated marketing tactics as well.
It wasn't as simple as just turning it on and bang, we're
making more money. Tell us a little bit about the
strategy to get from 600K to 1.5 million.
And then where are you today, two years on from that as well?
Yeah. I mean, we, we mentioned it last
time, like obviously we, we were introduced to the podcast by
retention.com and that was a software we were just starting
to use and that's been incredibly successful for us.
There's been a, definitely like an art to it, I should say, as
with anything like, I mean, marketing is the art of being
gentle and subtle, like not holding a gun to somebody's head
and, and asking them to buy, right.
And so from where we were, like, I remember the first time we
heard about, you know, technologies like retention.com
and this was early in our, our marketing team today.
Like up up until very recently, it was just myself and my
colleague Matt. So it was a very, very, very,
and we were at the 9 figure scale when that we were hitting
just two people. So it's been a very small as far
as like the actual paid media and advertising and e-mail and
SMS strategy. I remember when we first heard
about technologies like retention.com and the technology
was exciting. But what excited Matt and I the
most about is like what we could do with that extra scale of
volume inside of our accounts. Like we understand.
And so there's a finesse to it, which is like, OK, more e-mail
does not equal more revenue. It does not like it's plenty
possible to degrade your, the quality of your e-mail list.
It's plenty possible to degrade the quality of your segmentation
to really mess up and not nurture correct flows and to not
do the proper optimizations and AB testing on that.
But from what you mentioned, we, we started with 600K at the time
at the point of reference which in which we talked last and then
we were ending at about 1.5 million.
I am not going to, I'll, we'll edit in or I'll tell you later
the exact number because I don't want to misspeak on the actual
date and where we are now because I'm waiting for this to
load here on my corner screen to tell you the exact number of
number of e-mail subscribers. But I will share that with you.
But it's, I mean, it's exploded to, to put it lightly, we're
finishing on our second year over the 9 figure scale.
So we're now officially stabilised over the $100 million
mark, which we're very excited about.
But e-mail in general, again, I'm, I'm mostly focused on the
Meta and the paid ad sign e-mail is by far the domain of my
colleague Matt. But I'll just say that we have
adjusted how we look at e-mail, how we look at SMS and how we
look at the customer journey since then in a completely new
light. And I think that we're maturing
as the brand hits new, larger and larger scales.
And it's similar to the point I just mentioned before where you
start with motion and then you slowly work into a calibration
and accuracy of that motion. And I think that that's the
phase that we're currently into is really getting specific and
calibrated with our motion as it relates to ADS, emails, SMS,
segmentation, you know, really putting people where they belong
and not just trying to hammer a whole list like we used to do in
the days of MailChimp where it was like 1 e-mail to the whole
list. Go, go, go.
In two years we went from 1.5 million, we're now at 4.6
million active profiles on our Play View account.
So massive, massive growth. The growth hasn't slowed down.
It's only accelerated over the past few years.
And I mean, we, we, we didn't imagine we would get to there
this quick. We thought it would take many,
many more years than where we're sitting at today to get to that,
that total scale. I think it's amazing that the
way you talk about that actually the way you think about e-mail
and I, I think e-mail itself has changed as well, the way
customers perceive it, the way they receive emails, the way
spam philtres work. If if anyone's listening and and
hasn't signed up yet, definitely get involved in our community.
The William Shopify growth Hub it's called.
We had a round table only a few days ago, about two days before
we I'm filming this with McCoy right now. 2 days ago we had a
round table about e-mail and one of the biggest things we were
discussing actually is how Microsoft currently is giving
really bad spam scores to lots and lots of people on e-mail.
When we discussed actually how to come around that and
someone's has gone as far as changing the IP address that
emails are sent from. They're using a new e-mail
platform and they're now even sending changing the actual name
within the e-mail account that it's sending the emails out.
But even that's going to start with like e-mail nought .1% of
your audience, 1%, then e-mail 2%, then e-mail 5% and 10%.
So slowly ramp your way up. And I think e-mail has changed
so much, as you say, McCoy, from the days where we used to just
blast something out. I think the only time we blast
anything out these days when there's such a big announcement,
even then you send at least 4 versions of it to go, like which
one of the four was the most, you know, the most punchy.
Or do we change the language slightly to any segmentations
that we are aware of in our e-mail database?
But I guess to ask a question is a bit more as you say, kind of
in your field as opposed to what Matt's doing.
And Matt's great by the way, we did have him on the other
episode and a couple of he's going, he was fantastic in
talking about some of this. But your field then of Google
ads and Meta ads. How do how do you and Matt?
Work together or get those two mechanisms of advertising and
e-mail to work together? Like is it 1 brings the customer
in and then almost like a completely second thing kicks in
called e-mail? Or do you guys actually manage
to sync some of that up together?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
As I mentioned, like we're we're in the process of really trying
to mature in the way that we handle the, let's say, the
generation of revenue. So the first thing that we do,
and because that's how I'm going to attack this promise, like,
OK, we as a business need to generate revenue and we're going
to do it through the activities of one, acquisition and two,
retention where that that's how we conceptualise it too.
Matt is our Director of Marketing and now inside of his
team he has somebody who's focused on media buying, which
is shorthand for acquisition and he has somebody in the retention
marketing space. So for us when it comes to, so
I'll only make that point of clarification where is e-mail is
a is a piece of the retention effort, but it also shares
activities inside of the acquisition department.
But for us and just for all intents and purposes, we, we
tend to conceptualise that as much more involved in the
retention side of things then per SE the acquisition, although
that certainly is happening, it's just not dependable as
dependable of a platform to like if you're going to predict
future revenue or revenue for the next 30 days to depend on
e-mail necessarily to bring that in.
So in any case, we look at these two activities, which is
acquisition and retention. When it comes to acquisition,
there's no better platform on Earth than Meta.
Like that's just the way in the world we live in and we're no
different when it comes to Google.
We've kind of adjusted our perspective on Google.
Google also is one of the things that Matt runs very, very well
for our business. It's one of the reasons he got
brought on the team because I had no idea.
Again, I was a wedding photographer six years ago.
So I figured out Meta ads and I'm like, we had no Google ads
running. I'm like, I don't know how to do
it. Let's hire this guy.
He knows how to do it. And Matt, it's been phenomenal.
But when it comes to acquisition, right?
We focus now as a business and these are obviously hotly
debated topics online. I'm not interested in debating
it. I like to frame things through
the lens of like this is what Portland Leather Goods does and
this is how we steer the business.
And there's a lot of reasons that we act in a specific way.
I'm sure with anyone, there's a lot of extra conditions that
everyone, every business has to juggle that are not going to
appear, you know, like on the hottest Twitter thread on how
best to run your Med account. But in any case, we're moving to
a a much more mature way. And again, in my perspective of
how we handle the the pass off between acquisition and
retention. And so the biggest one of the
larger things that we focused on is the cost reduction of
returning customer revenue. Now what that means for us is to
not, not retarget, not not there we go not not retarget using
platforms like Google and Meta. We're certainly involved in
those activities, but to learn much more heavily on things like
e-mail and SMS and really carefully curated segmentation
and flows and optimization of all those things so that we can
bring in the well. And also and there's a whole
exercise so we can tackle it after this.
But on those using those things, emails and segmentation and
flows to put people where they belong inside of the returning
customer segment so that we can get the most amount of revenue
for the lowest possible cost. And it's really easy for your
returning customer revenue cost to run away from you if you're
involved in not segmenting or limiting your retargeting on
platforms like Meta. So e-mail is the primary
mechanism from which we we tend to facilitate retention, but
there's a whole other business strategy side that we we really
take into account when it comes to retention.
But that that may be a conversation for another day.
I'll leave it there as far as it relates to e-mail.
No, no, I love it. And you mentioned about, yeah,
about, about Matt knowing lots about Google Ads.
I've been running Google Ads for 17 years and I can vouch you
meet, there's some crazy people that know about Google Ads.
And we are a very weird and rare breed, I'm afraid.
And we're, some of us are difficult to work with, I'll say
that as well. Like we think Google is the only
thing and it's the best thing. But Matt's great.
And I think that integrated strategy guys is really, really
powerful. And we've certainly had, we've
had endless debates with clients about how much we spend on like
brand on Google, for example, knowing full well they're coming
to us anyway. And it's more an assessment of
like if we know someone's going to convert, we don't mind paying
a tiny bit just at the final point of conversion to stop them
going to a reseller of our products or a competitors
advertising on us. Even then, I, I was on a call
only 3-4 weeks ago with one of my clients and they're three
biggest competitors and I managed to get all of them on a
call together and say, can we all agree to a truce?
We had all each other's names as a negative, you know, count
wide. And they all said yes.
So I said, right, I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to
show you, I'm doing it on my client right now and you all
need to follow along. And we all did it.
And, and, and like the, the actual budget we're spending on
Google Now is means we've all added our own brands as a
negative as well. So if you search any of those
four main brands, none of our ads show, not even on our own
name, which means we're all getting it organically.
Everyone's slightly more profitable and the clients now
said like, can we just keep an eye on this because at some
point someone's going to crack and go.
Do you know? What I'm putting them all in,
Yeah, they'll hire a new Google agency who will change it.
But I do think, yeah, I mean, brand is one way of doing it.
Audience exclusions, There's quite a few ways to do it.
And I think you guys are very, very smart to do that.
And I think when brands are smaller, you don't need to worry
so much because every, almost every order is a new order
anyway because you're still trying to get your name out
there. But there's definitely a point
where that needs to change. As you say, what you don't want
to do is be paying Google or Meta like $40 per, per time a
customer comes in and purchases from you.
That's a terrible thing when you can send an e-mail to, you know,
thousand of them for like $1.00. And it's, it's, it's such a
better, better cost model. And so I completely agree with
that. Does your e-mail marketing suck?
Do you wish it converted better and integrated better with your
store? Well, there is a solution.
We've partnered with Saguno who are an e-mail platform that is
built into Shopify, which means you don't have to leave Shopify
to go and manage your e-mail campaigns.
So you can run your marketing at the same place you run your
shop. To learn more, you can claim
your free customer analysis and strategy session and visit
saguno.com. Winning your in Shopify, that's
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merchants not marketers. I mean how do you guys report
internally I guess is one of the questions that I remember from
our last conversation. I loved what you said about
attribution. How do you report it?
Like how does Matt get credit for what's going on on Google?
What's happening within the e-mail, How you get reported
back on meta rads? Anyone else working on this?
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, like, so external
attribution hardly exists. So the truth is internal
attribution hardly exists, right.
So we, we're a blended team. And so we're all, you know,
working together in tandem to make sense of all this thing.
Just to touch off your previous point, you know, the, it's not
to say that we're, we're not involved in the retargeting, but
one of the anecdotes I hear a lot, and especially you're going
to hear from your meta Rep is like costs are always rising.
Costs are always rising. And I always say like, no, like
there has to be some sort of limiting factor to what right to
thousands of dollars per new customer, Like that can't be
true. So one of the things that I find
that is a problem inside of the industry or just inside of like
marketing and and acquisition retention in general is when
people say, OK, the cost of new customers are rising.
Usually I say, OK, well, how do you, how are you finding out the
cost of your new customer? And this is again, one of the
internal conversations we're having between these two teams.
Now. Our main focus is that they're
not warring against each other. They're working together to
create the best mix for the business.
So internal attribution is just basically like, hey, good job.
Hey, good job. Like let's let's monitor this as
best we can. We use information tools like
triple whale. We're not, we're not on North
beam or anything like that. We've used triple whale.
It's pretty much exclusively. It's worked great for us, but to
the point of the, the rising cost of new customers, I'll
usually ask people like, how are you calculating that?
Because if you're spending advertising dollars that you are
not sure are absolutely segmented towards the action of
new customer acquisition, then you don't actually know your new
customer acquisition cost. What I tend to find people do is
take the total blended ad spend and maybe there's a few
subtractions like they, they subtract out, let's say like
ASMS fee that they know they're sending to a return customer
where the segmentation is exactly clear.
But they're looking at this total pool of ad spend and then
saying, Oh my gosh, my, my new customer acquisition cost is
rising because they're just dividing the ad spend against
their total, you know, number of new customers that month, that
week, that year, whatever it is. And so for us, again, we
especially as it relates to platforms like Google met, it's
a little bit more simple to add inclusion and exclusion
criteria. And there's still leakage as
with anything, especially with new formats like ASE, which
we're not massively a fan of. But in any case, if we can't
cost segment and really point back internally and say this is
how much dollars we're spending on the activity of acquisition
and this is the amount of dollars we're spending on the
activity of retention, then we find that like we don't actually
know our NCPA for that month. We need to really hone in on it
and then make sense of it. And to put A to wrap that up,
it's basically like our goal is to create a stabilised revenue
generation engine for the business.
And one that is stabilised doesn't mean one that's not
changing, it means one that we can understand the best of our
ability. So if it goes up, because trend
lines go up sometimes that we understand why and how and when
and all of the factors surrounding it.
And when it goes down that we understand conversely just the
same factors. So in any case, it internally,
we're working together every single day still with that same
like scrappy mindset, like let's make small incremental changes
there. It, it looks less like, hey,
let's build this giant new, you know, product line or division
of the company. It's much more like, hey, let's
optimise these e-mail flows, Let's optimise these advertising
flows. Let's make sure that they match,
you know, the, the same message together and so that they're
more cohesive. And so the journey between their
what they buy on their first purchase and what they buy on
their third purchase makes sense to us.
But but internally, again, it's very cohesive as opposed to
let's say if you had two agencies and they're both
competing for the same pool of revenue and trying to take
attribution to prove their worth to you.
So we're in a fully internal team.
Yeah, yeah. And we, we've, we've been there
with that attribution model and we've got, we've got a couple of
clients where they run some things internally and
something's externally with us and they've got like one of them
is just bought trip away a win. And we look fantastic and the
internal team look awful. And fortunately it was that way
around because I think if we were the ones that looked
terrible, if we got the lower attribution that made it, we'd
be fired. And it's, it is hilarious.
It's the same situation either way.
It's just how the internal politics just just work.
It's just the nature of humans, I think internal, external.
But one of the things I obviously love, and you came
back to it anyway. I was going to come back to the,
the kind of, if you make a creative change on the website,
those micro things have let's change the colour of the button
or let's put a statement next to the title of this product.
Just saying like, you know, we believe this is we're happy to
be proven wrong, but this is the best product in the United
States of America right now so that you know, this is the best
leather bag you can buy in the US and we're happy to be proven
wrong. You put something like that and
suddenly your conversion rates go up.
And sometimes you find all the marketing guys are like, Oh yes,
haven't we done well this month? And as you said, if you don't
know what things have changed and when they changed, sometimes
it is just I think just looking at the bottom line and just
going like right conversion half to that day or double that day.
What do we change? And we need to keep a log of
that. And better still, if you're AB
testing, so you can go version B of the site and a, one of them's
gone up when it's clearly whatever we're testing or
actually they've both gone up. So it was nothing to do with the
tests we're running. It was something else.
And you can quite quickly drill down and find it because the
most important thing is if you know the things that have really
turned your customers on to want to convert, you do more of them.
It's nice and simple, but I do find, I don't know how much you
guys do when AB testing, but I find some brands I'm really, I'm
struggling with it a little bit. I'll be honest and say on the
podcast front of thousands of people and I do struggle with a
little bit and I'm like, we should they be test this?
The clients like it's obviously better just roll it out.
And I'm like, I don't know how much better it was.
Like we've done 10 things and we've improved, but we don't
know which of the 10 was the most important or what impact
each of the 10 had to then actually just rebalance our
content and go people really care about dimensions on this
product or the weights or especially for a bag.
How heavy is it? It's made of real leather.
Leather sounds heavy, you know, how heavy is it?
It's probably an important thing, but you might find it's
the third most important thing. Yeah, for sure.
I mean we are, I mean to answer your question, we are AB testing
like you would not believe. We it was always been a focus,
even when we were small to like we, we hired a kind of a
boutique freelance web developer sheet was fantastic.
And one of the things she introduced us to, and this is
back in 2019. So it's just about, you know,
again, I again, to re say this, I knew nothing walking in.
So she introduced us to the idea of AB testing.
I'm like, what is that? That sounds really interesting
because I'm on here making changes all the time and to the
point, like I think they're good.
I've certainly made mistakes. I've certainly made things that
I thought were good and and actually turned out to.
Be going up. Yeah, yeah.
Like, it looks good, right? You know, like who knows, but
she introduced this to the concept of AB testing.
And since then I personally have been like just mad as it comes
to CRO and AB testing and really focusing on all of those things
on the website. Because to your point, right
there is when you and this is something I say constantly about
advertising because again, the mass volume of conversation
around advertising is it's just as its planet sized compared to
the amount of conversation we're having around general business
optimizations. As advertisers, there's plenty
of people talking about in their own space, but as advertisers,
we're not talking about that sometimes.
And so to the point is like, you can go make the best ad and you
can write the best copy and you can put that in one campaign and
one ad set as of one single ad. And it by itself might do good.
And maybe it's enough, you know, momentum to lift, you know, rice
waters and lift all boats in your that ad set or maybe that
campaign if you're lucky, but it's pretty unlikely it's going
to do anything on the whole account level, right?
Conversely, if you make a good business decision, now that I
phrase it that way, because it can be a new product, it can be,
you know, a difference in the way that we're approaching
brand. It can be CRO decision.
You make one of those, you can lift the relative performance of
all of your creatives, all of your ad sets, all of your
campaigns, all of your whole accounts and all of your
channels all at the same time. And so I focus a lot of my
activity, again as the CMO is we have an advertising team, we
have an acquisition team, we have a retention team.
I focus a lot of my activity on that side of it, which is like,
how can I remove obstacles to raise the water level so that
these guys have more room to run?
Is that you can't do that through the activity of
advertising or even sometimes through the activity of
retention stopping, you know, bad decisions from coming to
fruition or making really good decisions that you know will
align with advertising retention activities.
And I think it's such a beautiful way to look at it.
I, I love the fact that you look at how can I support everybody?
And we, we used to, we used to joke years ago in, in my agency,
like between 1012 years ago, it's like some of these clients,
it's just so hard to sell this product.
It's so dry and boring. And these ones, oh, it's so fun.
And I think now I've matured a little bit and looking back at
those and also look at my client list now all clients have good
products that we can sell. We just need to find the way to
sell them and the way to mark, the way to position them, what
the real value add is to the customer.
And that's the thing that makes the difference.
And I, I, I think certainly some clients like we, we certainly
talk to them and say, like, have you guys got anything?
And they're like, whoa, it's International Men's day today.
And they're like, you just can't just pick something at random.
Like what is it that makes your customers want to convert?
You know, where's the customer feedback survey?
Where's their Microsoft Clarity data to tell us that, you know,
when we moved this on the page or, you know, we had a client
recently and we were looking at the Microsoft Clarity and
everyone was getting halfway down the product page and just
below the bit they stopped at and went back to the top was the
buy the buy one get one free offer.
And we were like, put that at the top of the page, make that
the first thing we did. Conversion almost doubled.
Like it was just shy of doubling.
And it was like such simple things.
And I think you're absolutely right that you make a, a change
to product or something that lifts all of the water.
It's so much better for everybody.
And but what you've just described, and I'm going to
transition this into the final thing I really want to talk
about because I think you've got some really good perspective on
this. And you, you've let go of
control from the days where you came in, you know, wedding
photography just behind you. And I love that you did that.
I've been to so many weddings. I used to DJ at weddings, which
I think I said a few weeks ago, one of the episodes like
weddings are great for a season. And then it's like, oh, now
we're doing this. It's a long day and I hit and
it's weekends as well a lot of the time.
So you just come out of that and you were doing everything you'd
free rein. You know, the website is Mccoy's
baby and McCoy can do it. Everyone's on the website.
You now have a team of people and you've obviously released
your team, possibly agencies, other suppliers to do stuff.
A lot of people listening will be like, I want to control
everything forever. And if they do that, there's
only so much that can happen and it's based in the capacity of
one person. How did you get to where you are
today? How do you release control?
And I guess the caveat question with that as well is, and I'm
assuming this is one of the most important things you've done, if
it's similar to me, is how do you empower people to own stuff,
to really put their heart and soul into it, but also to know
like, what good looks like. Yeah.
That, I mean, that's a great question.
That's really one of like the fundamental questions that I
that businesses need to answer if they are to scale.
Like going from the, the, you know, the small bootstrap, the
start up phase into the much larger business phase.
Like you get to a point where you can't possibly do all of the
work yourself. And so you know, one of the
things we talked about and I have a fantastic team.
One of the things we talked about with our my directors, who
are the heads of each of my individual clusters of
activities. So I have a graphic design with
social media, e-commerce, advertising and software
development now, which I'm really excited about that
department as well. One of the things we talked
about is like limiting beliefs. And the limiting belief is like,
oh, I don't have the permission to change that.
I don't have that permission to like manipulate that which I it,
we all have those. And you know, on one hand, it's
very reasonable, which is like somebody comes in your business
and they're talented, but they, there's things that they will do
and there's things that they won't do based on the
permissions they think that they have available to them.
And so for me, it's trying really hard to work with the
directors to lift their limiting beliefs and be like, you can
change that. You know how to change that.
I don't need to be involved in that decision.
But to answer, I mean, to answer the question more broadly, it's
like, OK, how do we give up control?
You have to build and you have to develop people.
So what what needs to happen in Portland Leather goods today is
more work than I could ever possibly do by myself.
And so when I shift the perspective from I want to do
everything, I want to be in control.
And in a way, when you're sitting, you know, higher on the
organisation chart, you have to understand like you, you are in
still in control, but the way that you're getting that work
done is through somebody else. So you have to recruit amazing
talent and then you have to teach them what the metrics to
success are. And then you have to like
nurture their skills and you have to observe and you have to
measure and you have to realign. And so one of my favourite
quotes in this, I try to use this in my leadership a lot,
which is the difference between a laser that can cut through
steel and A street light is not the output of the bulb.
They have relatively similar voltages or output.
It's the area in which that light is concentrated at.
And so for me, it's running back and forth between 5 directors.
And we got a bunch of new exciting things that we're
working on and working with those team leaders to running
back and forth and trying to focus like a mirror all of their
effort in the exact same place. And you would be surprised you
don't, you probably don't even need to do much more than you're
doing today. You probably have way more
misalignment problems than you might believe.
And so for us, the key to scaling has always been removing
the obstacle to what's next. We are very fortunate because we
have a fantastic product and I have had to try for a very small
number of months to actually honestly generate demand for our
product. We have almost always been an
exclusively the mode of how do we remove limits in production
so that we get more products to sell.
But demand's been really easy for us.
So going from, as you mentioned, being the person to now my team,
I think on the marketing team specifically is about 24 people
inside of those different departments.
We have agencies very little. We tend to, you know, keep
things close to the chest for that sake of alignment to make
sure that we're all again firing at the same direction.
It's harder when you have a lot of agencies, especially if
they're warring with each other. But it's running around and
it's, it's getting people aligned.
And again, the metric of success for me is like, I know I can't
do this work. So the way I approach problems
is not, or with any new, new thing I need to tackle, it's
like, how do I accomplish X? The method for me is pretty
simple. I'm going to go find somebody
who knows how to do it very, very well.
I'm going to bring them into my team.
I'm going to put them under some great leaders and then I'm going
to line them at the target that I need to shoot them at.
It's not, it's no longer about, you know, McCoy or Matt or any
of these, you know, individual people focusing on the problem
themselves and trying to just put their nose down and grind
it. It's get great talent, assemble
A-Team and align them at the goal that you actually want to,
you know, shoot at. And so it's gone.
It's, it's come a long way for in the past few years,
especially in the past two years where we really built out our
proper middle management suite, which is our director level.
And I'm, I'm excited about what all the new challenges we're
about to tackle in the upcoming year.
So. I think, I mean, it's such a
good answer and the, the thing you reminded me of when you said
about that finding someone and going, I know I can't do this.
Let's get someone in who can. It reminds me of I was reading a
book by an old military general, a British military general.
And he said that one of the big things when they launched the
SAS in during the war, during the World War, was that he, they
actually said like we we're going to stop telling our
soldiers like do this, then this, then this and this.
They just said in that compound over there are five of our
soldiers and they're currently taken hostage.
Go and get them back and tell us what you need.
And they'd go right, I need a helicopter, a tank and, or
actually we just need a load of camouflage gear and give us 2,
give us a week and we'll monitor it for six days and we'll go in
on the 7th day. Just that's what we're going to
do. And they went all right, that
achieves my goal. And I think you're absolutely
right. And I, I've certainly had it
before and I've, I've, you know, hired quite a few people, the
whole team in them behind us soon.
One of the biggest challenges I've found with, with hiring,
when you select hiring great talent and finding the right
people. I've definitely learnt and seen
people that haven't worked out here and gone somewhere.
Where I've been really successful, I've learned it's
never like it's never the wrong person, it's the right person
for us. And that's, I think that's a
really key distinction of, and sometimes it is just yourself
you go, who works well with McCoy?
What, what are the personalities here do I like and what do I not
like? Therefore, what do I need to do
in my interview process to, to weed out the ones that it won't
work for them here because I'm going to be a problem to them as
much as they're going to be a problem to me.
But I think giving people that goal and saying, look, look,
guys, this statistic here, this, it's not high enough and I'm
tasking you three with improving it.
So firstly, I'll give you 24 hours.
Come back to me and tell me what's wrong and tell me what
you need. What do you need from me to make
that better? And if you think it's the wrong
statistic or it's not going to achieve the total company goal
that you're, as you say, you're also aware of, everyone knows
where we're trying to go with this thing.
Then come back and tell me that we're focusing on the wrong
thing. And now these people, they're
empowered. They're like, we can, it's
almost exciting and you can get creative and all that stuff we
spoke about earlier about changing the website, running AV
tests all starts to create creative hypotheses.
So if you guys say actually our return rates are way too high,
too many customers are sending products back, I'm tasking you
or you guys with fixing that. Go and find out what we need to
know and say, do you know what the number one return reason is
this? And we found that from the
customer service team or talking to customers that return stuff.
So we're just going to change the web copy to say this and
we'll see what happens. And it's like, fantastic, that's
a great output. But if you said to them, talk to
customers, then do this and just they would miss opportunities in
that process, they'd come out and go.
Actually, what you were saying, McCoy, was not what we need to
do to fix the problem at all. The problem's right or actually
the problem's slightly bigger or smaller or different to what you
think it is. This is the solution we think we
need to go after. If it doesn't work, we'll find
another one. And it's it's a much more
creative way of working at that empowerment I.
Usually like you can, you can kind of evaluate that through
like the, it called the how versus the what, right?
So when you like, for instance, you give somebody that top level
task, which is just like, I want you to, for in the military
example, go rescue those hostages.
Or for us, let's say like, let's start at the, the largest goal
that the marketing team is tasked with, which is just to
say, make me a, give me $100 million worth of revenue at the
door. And then I go, OK, sounds good,
like, and then I break that down into what needs to happen to do
that. But I find when you're working
with whether it's a leader or you're, it's an individual
contributor on a team, if you start hearing questions like, or
to me or what do you want me to do?
I'm butchered that. So it's to say what, what do you
want me to do? I want you to generate $100
million worth of revenue for the business.
If you start getting a lot of like, how do I do that
questions. Well, how do I do that?
How do I do that? And then you find yourself in
the incrementalism of like Step 1, you know, turn on your
computer, Step 2, load up Facebook.
Step 3, find something clever to sell, right.
If you find that you're, you're constantly answering like how do
I do that questions with your team.
It's a good, it's a good point of reflection and it's not
always on them. Sometimes it's on you as the
leader. 1 you might not have the right people in the right seat.
2, you might not have grown and nurtured them in advance of
where they need to be at the point where you come to a new
Inflexion point and it's time to change our objectives or three,
like you just haven't built the correct system right?
So it's, it's you don't, you shouldn't expect everyone to
come into your business and at every level and an individual
contributor level all the way to your executives to be
entrepreneurial geniuses. There is some work on behalf of
the leadership team, whether that's you all the way up to the
executive team to like build a system that makes sense, that
makes success likely as opposed to, you know, breaking down and
you get everyone. Because I, I'm guilt.
I do the same thing too. I, I'm an executive and I still
end up having to go, how do I do this?
And that's not in a comfortable position for anyone to operate
in you much. You're much better off when you
can give direction or you can set goals and you have the
correct structure and team where you say they say, just what do
you want me to do? Oh, you can.
You want me to generate $100 million worth of revenue?
I know how to do that. I know how to break that into
the millions and millions of micro actions of sending emails
and running ads and making sure the website looks good and
making sure that everything is hitting, you know, the inventory
at the correct time in order to make that happen.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
And yeah, I love what you say to you about the if you suddenly
find yourself going, how do I do this?
I, I guess what I mean, one thing we do ask people in
interviews now and we don't ask them this, but we we ask a set
of questions where we want to hear the answer.
I would work it out. I'd go on Google and I'd search
stuff and I would work it out because that's part of the
empowerment. I think what what you don't want
is someone coming back, going here is the bulletproof plan to
make $100 million, but I don't know how to do any of it.
It's like, well. There's a pointless plan, isn't
it like, OK, how do we get to the, how do we get to the first
dollar and then we'll work on 10, then 100, then 1000.
You know, you can always sort of break say to people, can you
break it down then into those little steps and we'll see where
we get to. But goes back to what you were
saying about limiting beliefs, I think about making sure everyone
believes like we can actually achieve anything here.
We just need to set out and get on with it and actually start
making some, making some mistakes.
You know, we'll learn from those mistakes as we go.
Yeah, appointment an important form frame of reference for us
is like we we went through a season where we were doubling in
doubling revenue every year. And so like if we if we today
look at our goals for two years from now and we say OK, like we
want to be at X amount of revenue.
And then you start to imagine that company in your head that
what, what is it going to take to get to this point.
And as far as you can stretch your imagination to the future,
the more beneficial be for you, especially as a leader, but not
only that, as a, as a, as a worker, as a professional
trying, you know, to move up in your career.
And if you look ahead and you're like, let's say there's a huge
Inflexion point in the next two years where you're like, I am,
I'm doing currently doing $10 million in my business and I
want to do $100 million in revenue.
And this is the title or this is the position or the
responsibility I hold. Could I go today interview for
the same position at a $100 million company?
And if the answer is no, I don't think that I'm qualified, then
you have you've measured your runway and you get to work at
that figurative person being that figurative person every
single day until you hit that point.
And the key is to just constantly be setting these
goals in the future. So that one day, worst thing,
worse yet would be as if you don't grow.
And we're, you know, collectively as individuals and
as leaders, the reason why the company can't grow because we're
not the people who who have the skills and the ability to make
it grow. And that's a real tragedy.
So I'm constantly trying to think in advance and go like,
OK, if we're going to hit this amount of revenue and let's say
that we want our company to be worth this relative, you know,
speculative valuation about what does the CMO of that company
look like? Am I that person today?
And the answer is no. And so every day I'm trying to
grow myself and grow my team and grow the people who work for us
into those people so that one of the opportunities doesn't pass
me or them by. But worse yet that I'm not the
reason or the catalyst that we're holding the company back
because we don't actually have the skills to go where we're
going. So I use that frame of reference
quite a bit. Yeah, yeah.
And I obviously love that. And I think certainly looking
back at our growth as a business, I used to sit there
and go like, oh, I'm going to make an agency of like 1000
people, let's go for it. And I had that realisation about
seven or eight years ago where I sat there and went 1000 staff.
What a nightmare. What?
Absolutely. I'm not looking after all of
those guys. And, and, but then it was like,
OK, if I had 10 people, what would I need to do?
Right? Well, let's get to 10 first.
And I need to actually learn a lot, change a lot, do a lot.
And I think it's a really important path as well.
And certainly in e-commerce. And I, I've probably mentioned
this before for people that listen all the time, but I used
to run a bamboo sunglasses business on Shopify.
And one of the reasons I shut that down is I did my sums and
said, OK, for me to take 50,000 lbs or dollars in a single year
from this business, how many units per day do we need to sell
on our current model and what changes can we make to get
there? And it was crazy the amount of
work I would need to do. And I thought, and what do I
need to do to make a £50,000 more in my agency?
Two or three new clients, right? Let's go and get two or three
new clients. It was, it was that kind of, it
wasn't just about the money, but it was the actually there's a
hell of a lot of work that's going to be required here.
But look, McCoy, I've just seen the time.
We'll draw things down to a close.
But thank you so much for joining us today.
It's great to have in the show and such a pleasure to have you
back. Nick, it's been great talking to
you. I really appreciate it.
Hopefully we'll see you again soon.
Great stuff. Well, thanks so much for joining
us and for everyone listening at home.
Thank you so much for tuning in, guys.
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Thanks for tuning in. Do you want to up your
influencer marketing game? Do you want to meet more
influencers, have a better working relationship with
influencers? You might even be struggling to
talk to them in the first place or you can get them to talk
about your product and post to their audiences without winning.
With Shopify, we have teamed up with Affluencer which is an app
you can install on Shopify and it comes with a 30 day trial and
even in those first 30 days you can meet a load of influencers
and start promoting your product.
So there's no excuse. Go and install the app, start
the 30 day trial and give it a go yourself and see how you get
on.