9Operators: Consumer Trends and DTC Decision Making

Introduction and Opening Remarks

0:00that you bring as a leader into those rooms into those conversations like do your people a favor and just create a notes a Google doc whatever you want force yourself to put it in there first sit on it and then decide is this worth bringing up because it is going to get attention it's going to pull them away from something you should not listen to anybody or whatever somebody says is working for them just run and do that it probably won't work for you don't be in such a hurry like to put that out there to put that slack out there to put that tweet out there it's like because a lot of times that's actually your emotional brain at work and your emotional brain is often times a hindrance to your success what is up everyone Welcome to

Meet the Panelists

0:44The Operators POD live from Sunny San Diego California my name is Jimmy Kim and I'm the founder sunley and we are here at Commerce Roundtable and I'm pleased to moderate this live podcast today all right so I want to start off by introducing everyone and I've got a little intro for everyone so first and foremost I've got Jason Panzer the man who makes spreadsheets sound exciting turning conversion rates to riviting stories he tells people on a weekly hot takes called Panzer isms he's the president of Hax clad a billion dooll cookware brand Jason welcome thanks Jimmy great to be here Awesome event thank you s lane for putting this event on and thank you for supporting our podcast your support has been incredibly valuable for us and really happy to be here all right and then I got Matthew brelli the man who lives and breathes sustainability with composable phone cases with Pila or home recycling with Lumi he's a category designer and lives at the intersection of waste Innovation and consumer technology he's a cown

1:43founder of both Pila and Lomi welcome thanks man yeah as I drink out of my plastic water bottle and last but not least a late edition here we got Aaron orov the man who puts the marketing in B2B known for hot takes and leads as an executive Wrangler at The Operators newsletter and he's also the VP of GR at Vermont oh delighted to be here as the poor man Sean Frank that's I will be signing head shot after this just not my own Sean would like to remind everyone to not eat crab cakes there you go unfortunately Shan couldn't join us from crab cakes and he had he actually got food poisoning last night Sean is supposed to be here to yell at everybody decided not to come so guys welcome to San Diego and thanks for letting me moderate this podcast I want to set the stage here I think regardless to whatever business any size there's a lot of things that are happening right now in the economy a lot

2:37of things that are happening in the market and I think you guys have a wealth of knowledge that you can discuss

State of the Consumer Economy

2:41and the first thing I want to talk about and it's a really broad topic but I want to talk about the state of consumer Jason I'm going to start with you because I think you've got a Panzer ISM ultimately of what you're thinking about what's going on so what do you think about the state of economy right now with consumer the the state the consumer is definitely different than it was in 23 and 22 and we're seeing that in our business and I thought it was worth talking about that with everyone here because you know we're all so many of us are really in we're just in it every day and our business has been a rocket ship for years since I joined in 2020 and this is the first year that I'm asking qu different questions and not just like windmill dunking right like it was I remember Sean saying hexads windmill dunking on everyone in the industry and that was really fun for 2 years and now as you grow obviously

3:39the law of large numbers kicks in and things get harder and our business is still crushing but it's just different and I'm I'm seeing the consumer behavior is different and Matt will speak to this because we're in a bunch of chats and I think there a lot of Brands out there that are they're just struggling a little bit more than usual due to the the climate and how consumer is spending and one of the things that I am hopeful and this a phenomenon that I've seen is that the consumer is sort of waiting for deals more than before and so I am hopeful that the consumer is going to show up big in Q4 and we've seen that too in terms of our Evergreen versus sale periods we did some really interesting things last we the biggest deal that we ever run we used to run it four five six times a year and last year we only ran it once and we only ran it for B bfcm and we basically were like we don't need to run

4:44this great deal too often we don't want to Discount too often you know there's always that that tension and so we didn't do it and we haven't done it this year and I I was saying to myself like a month ago you know 2024 is not like 23 or 22 it might be more like 2021 and maybe we should have maybe we should have done this deal that we know always crushes for us but I thought of it too late so like nothing to do right we're already going to be there and so that that's my message I I'm hopeful that the consumer is going to show up big in in Q4 doesn't mean you need to make all kinds of changes to your to the way you do things but that's just philosophically the way I'm looking at the market what do you think Matt I mean I was showing Jason this we're in a bunch of chat groups right you guys know that the podcast started in a jack group that's like the whole

5:32story for this well just yesterday as I'm flying here I'm in one group with Sean Jason's on in this one he's too big now but this is like mostly mid eight figure Brands and everybody was kind of doing a roll call like how's your September going and not a single person was down they were all down more than 12% year-over-year in September which I found surprising look I there there's lots of aggregated data out there I tend to ignore most of it even though I know it's like bigger data sets I just look at my friend group in my network and I'm like these are really really [ __ ] smart operators they know what they're doing and some of them are getting punished and it seems to be in that like mid eight figure range so it depends on kind of size right like a lot of the people we know that are in that high seven moving into the eights seem to be doing okay mid 8 right now is largely been a blood

6:30bath at least in September and then like a good chunk of q1 Q2 our September our September has been below expectations yeah and we have a very fast growing international business from on a percentage basis because it's just way smaller we started late and it's really helping our overall Topline growth rate which is strong but without International growth I think we'd be in a different place so I mean even I think we talked about this a few pods ago but like Sean was mentioning with Ridge that if you just took wallets right that's been a harder thing for them to grow because that's the more mature business for him and then if you look at like luggage and Rings he's crushing it P case this year January February we were up March April May June I felt like I couldn't do a single thing right like I just getting my ass kicked we were like the whole team we're just like what the [ __ ] is going on and then like mid June July August September

7:37has ripped so it's just been this weird seesaw of a year and I you think do you guys think that it has something to do with the state of consumer changing to a little bit like one of the things I've noticed is and I say this often is like you've got to start being where the consumer is less about like the single Channel I know Sean loves single Channel divers you know like going single Channel focus and Hyper focusing but do you think it's because you need to I ify a little bit more this year I mean do you think that's a challenge no I think

Challenges in Customer Acquisition

8:03I like I think acquiring new customers is harder this year I do believe like look we're in a lot of our groups like these are bigger companies there's a lot of repeat purchase that you can rely on yeah like I like be got 2 million customers we'll be fine no yeah Mak sense but acquiring new ones regardless a channel and like we spend heavy on meta Google YouTube like we're all over the place this is really true customer acquisition is just getting harder we had 22 and 23 our numbers were like upside down in terms of we would we were growing more and getting more efficient and everyone says you can't do that I don't necessarily agree with that I think that there's a brand flywheel that kicks in when your brand reaches a certain level and you know like in your post-purchase survey you should how much is Word of Mouth you know word of mouth is is the brand flywheel at work and we had a lot of that in 23 and so I do think you can defy the

9:10conventional wisdom that you need you just the more you grow the more you spend the less efficient you have to get but it it definitely is true for most brands until you reach scale but I agree with Matt you know customer acquisition you the the numbers are just not as good this year and so what does that mean retention you know being being really solid on retention being being more Nimble and then the next topic that I want to go over here is some things that we think people are doing wrong should we shift to that yeah on got a you said this is really interesting to me that you've got a major deal is the phrase that you use that you ran five times in the prev previous year and this year you're running it once over Black Friday we only but we only ran it once in 23 but in 22 and 21 and 20 we we roll that out four five six times a year cuz it one of the pieces and I think a word like deal

10:18is such a cuz yes there's price sensitivity there's still essentially more of the same when it comes to consumer confidence your expectations going into the holiday season and what they're going to spend but the inside of deal is there there's really three ideas of there are discounts there are offers and there are excuses and I love to think about framing whatever the event is around those three so like what you're describing right is a discount we're going to sell you the thing you normally pay at this price for a lower price so come get it now we're going to clear the funnel out right that's the the deal an offer is built all around the what is the value exchange between what I'm giving you versus what I'm getting so for example like Jones Road is a phenomenal example of a brand that despite everybody else in the industry who said we will never discount and then discounted still does not discount so their entire Q4 strategy is built around product drops so they're pushing

11:14everything up sooner right they've got the anniversary that they typically do they release a special kit I think it's like the Bobby kit 4.0 this year or something like that and all that comes down to is giving people a higher perception of value for something they can't get otherwise without introducing any sort of discount an excuse though is my favorite category especially with price sensitivity and anxiety being at a really high level with you know the political climate that we're in people are hedging their bets excuse is simply a reason that begins with why should I interact with your brand right now in a way that's different from the usual sop operations so like what Ridge did with the big giveaway right that's an example of it r large that's super hard to pull off and I think it was on it was on this pod he's like don't do it and his basic reason for don't do it was don't do it cuz it's really freaking hard logistically to do it and then you like

12:02the very next week roll out this giant contest as well related to Gordon Ramsey which is another one of those really hard to- do sort of things but these are like RIT large examples of this is an excuse that may lead to a purchase but it's definitely filling that sponge so that when that offer or the deal the true discount comes through you've got more addressable Market ready to buy from you the demand you've created to realize very soon and those excuse moments are the ones that I think we're rarely as creative or think as intentionally about versus the first two and that's sort of like I've Just Seen over and over again distinguish creating those excuses to interact with the brand whether it's attached to a specific cultural moment non-traditional holiday something you make up for your brand as long as it feels like a real because people will jump in yeah event mar Super insightful yeah like that's super insightful it's not always about like to me it's about the offer yep

12:59right and the offer comprises all these things that we're talking about in in my mind it's like what the excuse is to me it's it's almost like another offer but it is really about the offer and it is like sure it's just not all about when are we going on sale you know in our in our case it was just like we know what works what if you have a patterns are there for reason and and take advantage of patterns so I think the okay just back up for a second your your so when you talk about 2322 for hex right the thing that blew us away the last couple years like in our chat on the Pod was that very rarely do you see a brand be able to push scale and cack drop like everybody here if you spend money on ads like that's not super normal especially when you're pushing scale into the hundreds of millions of dollars like this is not a oh I'm going from a million to two like it's big big

14:00scale CAC typically does not go down when you start to hit the throttle and what you're saying is that in 24 it's harder to do that now correct that sucks I don't like it for the rest of us yeah that's my excuse and like I said I'm going I'm I'm resting on the fact that it seems to me cuz we've seen it already throughout the year that people are just sort of waiting for deals oh more excuses to to purchase and maybe we need to be better at it you know and that's why I'm at places like this to meet people like you to learn more do you think we're back in I'd be curious to hear both your thoughts on this and even your from your perspective are we just back to where consumer was pre pandemic so like you know every industry is kind of like just seesawed back to normal travel rebounded concerts kind of went bistic and now they're coming down back to their their normal State like retails kind of come

14:57back to its normal but if you were to like draw a line on overall you know e-commerce D Toc retail growth are we just now in an environment where it was it's it was like this in 2019 where you had to try like as a marketer as a brand you really had to try to punch through you couldn't just go on and like pour money in the machine and get money out super easily are we just back to normal are we just spoil Bratz I mean that so the tough thing about back to normal is from a consumer willingness to spend money where they're going to put their dollars Sheriff wallet year-over-year e-commerce D Toc growth yes all that's back to it's essentially the same trajectory if you wipe out 2020 2021 right it's just the same exact growth pattern that had this huge Spike and now it's back to where it was the shitty thing is that's then compounded by everybody who flooded into the market on e-commerce during that period yep and a

15:53degradation overall in marketing efficiency like it's never going to get cheaper to acquire customers than it is right now I don't mean that because it's what are we like September a I don't mean that like in a seasonal sort of way I mean it's just going to get it's never going to be less expensive to advertise right it's only going to get more expensive so you've got this like Wicked onew combination of yes it's the same and it's incredibly harder because it's the same given everything else that's changed outside of the consumers themselves but there's also

Macroeconomic Factors and Market Trends

16:23macroeconomic factors Matt which I think I think actually it's worse and I don't I don't mean to be negative I hate being negative I'm actually really positive person but you know we're in a we're in a different macroeconomic environment and we have been there has been a there's a pretty positive macroeconomic environment since the global financial crisis which most of the people in here probably weren't working at the time but I was I didn't get a paycheck for 14 months as an investment banker because like deals weren't happening and that's when interest rates went to basically an all-time low and stayed there for a historically historic amount of time and you're seeing it in the deal Market too I'm an m&a guy originally and you know private Equity there's a lot of dry powder because the Leverage is tough to do they're very very selective about where they want to invest their money and it it's because of the macroeconomics and the the rate environment you know we got a 50 basis

17:26point cut which hopefully helps I will say that if you look at history 50 basis point Cuts preclude came before some further macroeconomic damage but then again it history doesn't always repeat itself so then we may be in a position now where that's actually a good thing and we just needed a little sort of juice to go going into Q4 but I think the consumer sort of started we started to feel last September Matt Y and then fortunately we had Q4 to kind of bail us out and then January February we okay and we sort of seen now I think we've been in like the trough since March and I think we come out of the trough when people start to launch American American Savings hit they went below negative in April of this year it's like broad-based like American bank accounts went negative in April yeah it's like all the co savings ran out in April and a perspective that I see that's really interesting this year is you know a lot of the Tik Tok

18:32and timus and all the things Rose and one thing we saw was consumers went to go spend money there right they don't care about brand they just care about what it does or what it what it that was a discount craze that was no different than the 2008 2009 it was like the Groupons and the the all the B what are those the deal sites that launched the like there was a bunch of them I can't remember I can't remember remember the names but basically they those companies popped up to binge on an over supply of inventory post 2008 2009 right there was a guilt group was the big one right is that part of the Playbook though like they all just showed up and just sucked up like dead stock discounted it by 80% built billion dollar businesses that were then worth zero two years later I think Tik Tok shops is absolute [ __ ] right now cuz like show me a [ __ ] brand who's doing it without discounting 70% yeah pick

19:27show me one yeah man like really like every example I get like oh yeah look I'm winning I'm like no homie you're you're capturing something okay you're giving me another so you're giving me another lead in to like the next topic what are Brands going wrong that's the same way I mean this is really like yeah what are people doing wrong and I'm going to start with something really General cuz I like to keep things at a high level I like to talk about things that I believe apply to everyone and it is happening at at our shop too people are very good at pointing out the what they're like What's oh numbers are down or efficiency is down or sales are down what what what but you they're really not thoughtful enough about the why you know I mean you got to constantly ask why just like you know Tik Tok shops every oh Tik Tok shops is great oh let's go do it let's jump on this fad let's jump on that fad

Understanding Consumer Behavior

20:25stop and ask yourself why what what's going on that's why we're talking about the consumer here I am trying to figure out live with all you guys you know what's going on and I'm like okay well consumer is probably 50 plus% of the pain and then what else is it what did we got to look at what did we change you got to look at what have you done differently and unfortunately like the model is complex because it's not like it's a holdout test where you're just just like holding one thing out and you can say we've there's been like seven different things that we've done this year all of which probably have some effect it's like doing a media mix model

The Importance of Asking 'Why'

21:08it's all these things all models are wrong you know but you got to at least ask yourself why collect the data and then try to apply good judgment to making these decisions and I'm trying to I'm constantly reminding our team that like we have a i my opinion is that hexl has built the best e-commerce team on the planet I really do but I'm still having remind these guys and girls that you're not asking why y enough you need to step back take some time go take a shower think and like he's obsessed with ask yourself like ask yourself why and so there's it's really easy to jump on the the Twitter bandwagon or the hype squad or whatever else ask yourself why and be thoughtful about it and then ask a bunch of people why and then try to use the best business judgment you can to help make good decisions no I love that Matt what do you think what is what do you see Brands doing wrong these days besides Tik Tok

22:21shop I don't hate on it it's going to be a great Channel I just every case study I've seen so far is mostly discount driven for I would say for us I like the why you ask why now a lot which I really like like why should I do that right now I think for us this year has been

Supply Chain Focus

22:41very much a focus on supply chain so like when we see that things are difficult on the demand side you know I love marketing it's great it's the most fun part of the business but it's not the only part of the business and we went nuts on every non-marketing part of our company this year in both Brands right in both in p sanomi and just went hard after contribution dollars and it was the impact of it has been insane like P case is negative cash conversion cycle now like fully negative it's it's we can lose money in a month and somehow the bank balance grows blows my mind yeah so I think supply chain probably is the place I find most companies that I look at they've done so much work on like customer acquisition and then immediately most people are like you should go work on retention I'm like no no no you should go fix the backup house like for sure you're probably bleeding out more cash in supply chain product Dev like

23:43everything than you will ever recover on the front end no that's that's really good Insight on thinking differently than the typical way that you might go after this right yep eron I know you're

Leadership and Decision Making

23:53on the other side of this thing and I'd love to hear your take on this what are Brands doing wrong these days I mean I love the way that Jason you talked about asking the why not examining only the what but the why and answering that question of if it's a new channel if it's a new product if it's a new product feature why are we doing this and it's the you know the the two biggest answers at the end of the day usually are pure pressure because I'm seeing everybody else do it and talk about it and I'm seeing some outlier successes of the people that actually made it work so that's coloring my survivorship bias whatever it is that I'm seeing out there or the second reason is like people who have leaders who are very creative one of the best things you can do for your people is keep your ideas to yourself and what I mean by that is as a leader especially executive when you jump into a slack Channel because you

24:51had an idea and for you it's a throwaway concept of what should we be doing with AI and out bound not that this has come up at formont right this is like it's not it Absolut that message comes in and what you've just done is at least committed the switching cost of now I have to think about this the 15 to 30 minutes are even longer if I do think about this and maybe researching the link that you just dropped into the channel as well and one of the things I did very early on with our CEO is I just went to him directly and I'm like when you drop one of these messages what is your expectation he's like I need an expectation bar whenever you share an idea and just from one of the people that's in the trenches like no no what we need to do is make our homepage [ __ ] like that is what has to happen and we've got a lot of nuts and bolts that we got to iron out with the life cycle

25:47process and we got to hammer our email list a lot more and a lot more personalization what we don't need to do is figure out a new Avenue into outbound that is driven by AI because you listen to a podcast and saw a new tool but the weight that you bring as a leader into those rooms into those conversations like do your people a favor and just create a notes a Google doc whatever you want force yourself to put it in there first sit on it and then decide is this worth bringing up because it is going to get their attention and it's going to pull them away from something that's so good that good that was great that's so good dude do you listen so we were talking I I don't actually know if you were on that pod we were so like I have this document just called Alysa did you hear this so I have a doc Alyssa is my EA and I just dump [ __ ] into this notion do like I

26:38just I I'll screenshot crap any Jason sends me a text I'm like I'll screenshot it I'll just throw it in this notion Dock and her job is once a week is to we sit down and we go through this notion dock just to figure out of all The Dumping Ground that I've put in the dock like all this like vomit what is useful and what needs to be brought to the team now cuz I used to slack bomb people I do I like I so do it it's such a great call out I used to do it yeah love that yeah and actually it applies across so many different areas of your business and your life that's also a really like Shan Shan thing to say living up expectations like the thing that Shawn would tell everybody right now like if he was going to sit here and yell at you he yells at us he would tell you not to listen to us like don't listen to anybody that is he's honest he's honest

27:32all the time like you should not listen to anybody or whatever somebody says is working for them you should not just run and do that it probably won't work for you he's screaming at us all the time yeah there's a but this this goes back to something that I was thinking about as like don't be in such a hurry like to to put that out there to put that slack out there to put that tweet out there it's like don't because a lot of times that's actually your emotional brain at work and your emotional brain is often times a hindrance to your success in business and so I feel like it's really important to just definitely take a step back breathe a little bit I love how you dump into the dock go through it be like because I like I was in a meeting a few months back and I think there was like a lot of negative social media chatter about something and and I said to some of our people like at this

28:30team meeting hey don't be afraid to jump in there and like defend that and actually that was wrong you know that was wrong it was like we should have just not no we should just like let it go it's going to die down it's it's always something right the bigger you are there's something coming at you someone coming at you and I reacted emotionally for some reason because it was an emotional thing and so taking that taking that extra time time because you will send people off like on a on a mission it's going to cost it that costs is there's a lot of cost talk about costs and like yeah what's the value of or how do we eliminate waste yeah especially you think about like the crew that you just talked about assembling right I don't oh when you get the right people in the room the last thing you want to do is what is what is the like maybe this is the Sha thing the Sha thing is like what okay don't listen to

29:25us and go keep getting better at yeah that's like the that's what you no that is there's so much more value in the thing that's driving the most value that you haven't realized yet before you cross into any other new territory you

The Value of Patience in Business

29:39know just on this patience thing I was so every year my one of my co-founders well all three co-founders we get together and we do like an annual postmortem and it's like a little therapy session we sit down we pour some tequila and it's like how did the year go how are we showing up for each other I feel like I'm it's like it's a these are important relationships right it's like your wife you're going to spend as much time with your business partner as you are with your wife or husband you should probably treat it that way so we were in this thing and I was going through I had like taken a bunch of notes out of our big dogs chat and I was just going through some thought thoughts I had and my partner Brad asked he's like well what's what is if you picked one thing one thing in common of all these companies like so we have a chat where like the group of people in this chat do me like the aggregate total

30:26gmv is like in the billion right she a really there's 11 people and it's like in the many billions and the thing I came up with like the only word I could come up with was patience like almost you're the youngest company the fastest growing in the youngest company but everybody else in this chat has been building a long time and if you look at social media particularly Tik Tok The Narrative has nothing to do with that it is like fastest path to outcome and I'm not saying don't go fast and none of that [ __ ] no no no that's absolutely hustle work your ass off but I will say like dude that the thing that I've noticed the most is that everybody just has this like slow down we're in this for a long time you want to build a big company you're going to need to go a long way going long all

Future Opportunities and Data Analytics

31:19right so as we wrap this thing up I I wanted to ask you guys an opportunity that you should be thinking about like if you guys give advice general advice what's the thing that you should be thinking thinking about that you're seeing into the future as we look into 2025 big picture big I'll go while you think cuz usually these guys put me on the spot on the Pod and I'm really not ready this is one where I'm actually ready so I think that your data it's amazing that a lot of the sponsors of the operators pod or have something to do with data and this is one thing that I wish we would have done sooner is to have a better hold on all the data in our company and we sort of started a data analytics project earlier this year and we're so big now it's a lot harder to get it done and we're working with this great business called Sarah analytics and they're they're really really good and they actually they work

32:10with smaller Brands too and they work with big Brands small Brands they've got like more sort of off the-shelf stuff for smaller Brands and then more like bespoke like data data science right everyone's talking about everyone's people been talking about data science for a while I think you can take data science seriously from day one I would say take data science seriously from day one U people at people at our business we're we're always talking about like understanding our customer how do we understand our customer better there's lots of tools out there I only mentioned one of them but we've had millions of purchases and there are there are Trends in that data right we have multiple sales channels that we need to Aggregate and get a view of there you know you you need to pay if you pay attention to that early it's sort of like the people who don't do their financial statements right from the beginning this is something that I used to go on and on about at the pod on the Pod early on

33:01it's like have good numbers know your numbers be ready because one day someone might ask you for your financials and time kills all deals and if you're like a a month late you just can't do it or you just you just totally lose credibility I think that there is a cheat code out there for really understanding your the data in your company and that's why like stuff like MTA and mmm you know North beam and and de like that that that stuff's all really important but there's so much more data inside your company and you it's one of those things where you do not know what you're missing until you go and like sniff around so in my view there's and and Matt has a big data science background and and and they do a lot of data science there we've been a little bit late to the game on that and fortunately it's one of those things where it's the why like why do it now that's why I always say like well when

33:59you're kicking ass it's like ah whatever it's fine we don't need to look look what we're doing and now I'm like wow you know we could have been we could we could keep the trajectory if we focus on this stuff so I think understanding your data having a great data warehouse having dashboards analytics things like that doesn't matter how small or big you are this will say this will make you money think about that like Sean is always you know ripping on SAS business business I was a tech Banker you know I used to sell SAS business for a living there's a reason why SAS businesses tend to be way bigger than retail businesses on average because they do really add value the right ones s lane like they really do add value but you have to sometimes you have to take a little bit of a like like a lot of the things we do in business is using our gut and making decisions based on that and I had this gut feeling that our internal data

34:53understanding our customer understanding what what SKS are selling and you know you can flip up shop flip open Shopify you you can have stuff in spreadsheets we've got spreadsheets all over the place and I'm like I have to ask 10 different people to get a piece of data as the president I don't want to go log into 10 different platforms I want the data like give me the numbers and so set that up as early as you can and realize that that actually will make you money you're not spending money you're investing to make money just like you're investing and product development invest in the infrastructure of your organization and understanding your data and having analytics on your data is a big part of that yeah financial literacy I mean that's basically what you're saying you got to start stepping up and learning your data Matt what do you got here so my we're doing like forward looking yeah forward looking what what's the opportunity right now that you're thinking about so my at the beginning of

35:52the year this year the call I made on the Pod was that by the end of 24 we're going to see AI like really insert itself into the creation of ads I think we're getting close like everybody's sort of seeing that now like it's it's happening so I think that's like great and then I think but what I want to talk about is I think 22 and 23 like 2022 2023 the message because the market shifted was largely about companies going to the gym and getting fit small teams more efficient go after profitability yada yada yada I think that's likely going to like everything it's going to go too far and I think that if I'm looking at 2025 with everything that's happening and particularly the AI thing right now I think what you're going to see is we're going to have to return back somewhat to how do we lead through people how do we build if it's going to be a small team how does it be an incredible small team

36:49yeah I think companies are going to start to realize that like you're overpaying most of your people and you're underpaying a very select few people that are like high high high leverage folks that was fire that and I think that like it's not2 oh yeah I think 2025 is going to be the okay now I have a small team y how do you lead how do you like actually scale up through people again even in a world of AI like people aren't going anywhere in the software side I think what's interesting is people are spending up three5 million businesses with one two people right now with the leverage of AI these days and I think like it it's just opening up A New Path right totally yeah yeah eron I'm going to give it to you here what do you see

Effective Communication Strategies

37:30you said big I'm going to actually get really small granular tactical micro and I want to say like the the most unrealized opportunity is there's probably two three maybe like maybe two handfuls of folks in here that are messaging emailing texting your current subscribers and or customers enough you are the vast majority of us are not emailing enough so email more email more two is send more clicked but didn't purchase texts right now you can do this inside of virtually any platform right and I've heard you have been like an evangelist for this and not enough freaking people pay attention because yes you should go send more emails the the cost of that is incredibly low compared to the payoff the churn is not going to be as bad as you think it is because most people don't pay attention to what you're doing anyway way they just need that excuse that reason to come up and it needs to come up more often for them to act click but

38:33didn't purchase means 24 48 hours after sending a large campaign segment that based on the people who clicked but didn't purchase in that 24 to 48 hours and before you send another new text that is going to cost you money send the same freaking text or even just one SMS of you showed interest in this the thing is ending this is the last chance whatever that it's just like a reminder and oh good gravy pay attention to your emojis in your text messages some of you are burning and dud you're burning thousands of dollars depending on the size of your list by using emoji and it doesn't effing matter like okay so that send less emoji and more then gosh oh okay this is the last one I want to on because and so I am also practicing what I preach with this okay so we do these like events where we try to like build up the email list at forat Let's Build It Up build it up build it up and

39:25then like I kid you not the running Joker right now with my life cycle manager she does the emails that sort of thing is like all right now the goal is we're going to grind this list into the ground until they either unsubscribe or book a freaking demo that's it if they're qualified that's the only reason they're on this list is to buy from us at some point this list exists for no other purpose than that so yeah send more emails and stop using emoji and your text Aon thank you for reading all my tweets for the last like six months just talking about sending more email man like that's exactly right it's not just about just a simple idea of sending email it's about getting better at it and uiz utilizing the channel that's obviously printing money still and no one remembers anything you ever said on the internet unless you're like an outlier who gets canceled for something bad and you're a celebrity and none of us are that right so like if

40:15you're oh can I say the same thing yes you can use the same subject line the same C like you don't have to overthink it no one is paying more attention to your marketing than you just like he's on he's on fire here today I love it it seems like Aaron needs to be a regular guest on the Yes sounds like Aaron's just there in a spot there all right we

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

40:35are at the top of the hour so I'm going to wrap this thing up guys Jason Matt Aaron I want to thank you guys for joining us here in San Diego it's been an honor to be your moderator here today and joining us for the second time here on stage at Commerce round thank you guys very much guys if you haven't heard the operators pod I highly recommend it go jump on Spotify Apple music wherever YouTube and go watch these guys they are talking about this stuff each and every day thank you gentlemen n operator.com n operator.com Go sign up for email we will send you a ton yes yes eron's got the newsletter thank you guys