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ads.
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast.
I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today, man,
am I pumped about my guest. I have the one,
the only Andrew j Faris host of the Andrew Faris
podcast, CEO, founder of AJF Growth,
and just had the privilege of being on his podcast a couple of weeks ago talking
about YouTube. We hit it off.
I wanted to have him on the podcast to talk about p and l design and
forecasting,
and also why e-commerce brand owners should back off from the ledge if you find
yourself there because of all the craziness going on with tariffs and whatnot,
and so pumped to get into your story, Andrew,
but then also deliver some value for our guests. So welcome to the show, man,
and thanks for taking the time.
Yeah, thanks, Brett. You asked me how I like to be introduced,
and I think the one the only is good. That's all I.
Need. Just the one, the only, that's all we need.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So that was good. Thanks.
It's so funny, one time I was traveling with my team, three team members,
and I was not in first class, but it was just sitting in front of the plane.
They were in the back of the plane and they all separately walked by and they
touched me on the shoulder and they're like, are you the Brett Curry?
And the people sitting around were like, who is this guy?
Should we know this guy? The name doesn't ring a bell, but who is this guy?
And I'm like, it's my team. It's just being nuts. So anyway, huge deal.
Fun times. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, exactly. So dude pumped about this,
but for those that don't know you give us a little background.
I believe you told me you've held every seat in e-comm,
just about. And so talk us through that and then what are you doing now?
Yeah, well, what I just try to tell people is that in the e-commerce ecosystem,
at least on the marketing side,
I have been in just about every kind of organization in most of the seats.
So I started off working at klo,
selling silicone wedding rings on the internet as a media buyer. I was trained,
working directly, closely.
I was Taylor Holiday who had been a friend for a while at that point.
And so Taylor and I became good friends and crossed,
crossed paths over that time. Well, we were already friends,
but crossed paths or continued to work together in a bunch of different ways.
So I was working with Common Thread collective from there as a growth
strategist,
and then eventually the head of growth there led strategy at CTC for a while.
At some point, CTC spun off its own brands into an aggregator called Four Rifle,
400,
and I led growth there and then became the CEO promptly ran that
into the ground. I always try to clarify this.
It sounds like when you tell a story like this, it's like, wow,
look at my great career advancement where I'm only ever successful and it's just
not true.
I learned a lot. Never happens that way.
Never happens that way. We did some good things, 4, 400,
1 of those brands still is going Bamboo Earth and Bamboo Earth. Yeah,
it's profitable, but sold off all of 'em, but won. And I ended up leaving.
And I would just add, I learned,
especially the longer I've reflected on the experience,
I've learned a lot from my mistakes there. From there, now,
I've been running AJF Growth,
which is a boutique agency where we service right
now four brands,
and I've got a team of a few of us in the US and seven or eight more in the
Philippines and work together to do a great job as good of a job as
we can do servicing brands, really meta adss focused,
but we end up functioning sort of
almost like an outsourced mix of CMO CFO kind of
deal. CFO is too strong of a word. We're not forecasting somebody's cashflow,
but we do actually take on the forecasting of the full business in terms of DTC
cohort forecasting, that kind of stuff.
And then we ladder our media plan to that and then end up being in a lot of
conversations around marketing efforts and stuff like that.
Which is super, super interesting. Yeah, I love that.
And I've always been a believer, I've always,
always been a fan of infomercials and marketing that drives results,
and I've always believed that marketing should build your bottom line in
addition to your top line.
But now the trend is you're putting real legs behind
that where as a marketer,
you're helping run the forecast and you're helping manage the p and l,
not from a gap accounting perspective, but from a practical, helpful,
let's hit these profit targets lens and you're doing it and doing it well.
And so it's super, super exciting. And also, man,
I really appreciate you sharing, hey, not everything in business goes well,
right?
And there's one of these things I heard Alex Hormoz say recently where it's
like, Hey, you expect for entrepreneurship running a business to be hard,
but then you're discouraged because it's even way harder than you think, right?
You go in thinking this is hard is, but it's really, really hard.
And so you have to be ready for that. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I think some people, sometimes when I hear people,
you talk about people being talked off the ledge.
I actually think one of the things that happens in conversations about the ledge
in e-commerce is that sometimes people's expectation is just that it's going to
be easy the whole time or that.
Or.
That you should always grow prospect lifestyle each.
Stage up to the right.
Yeah.
I think if you thought that somebody was going to hand you millions of dollars
on the bottom line, that's not an e-commerce problem.
Just so anyway,
I think there is a real thing there where people need to expect that there's
going to be challenges along the way, and not every outcome is what you expect.
Dude, totally. I know you're a family man, I'm as well.
But it's almost one of those things where pre-kids,
you see a family from a distance and you see a kid acting out and you're like,
my kid will never do that. My family's never going to be like that.
And then you're like, you have no idea what you're talking about,
everything you want to avoid or not have happen.
It'll humble you for sure, but business is the same way. It's really,
really hard, but it's also rewarding and fun and exciting at the same time.
So let's talk about that a little bit.
You hosted a podcast or delivered a podcast recently where you said, Hey,
I'm still bullish on e-comm, and so we don't want to fully unpack that, right?
People just need to go listen that episode. But why did you say that?
And I agree with you by the way,
I've got a couple of things I want to add to this,
but why are you still bullish on?
Well, there's a lot of reasons, but at the end of the day,
I think there's more intelligence about how to operate an e-commerce business
now for a larger market of customers than there have ever been for e-commerce.
And I think most of the headwinds are more short term.
Most of the tailwinds are more long term. So tariffs being the biggest headwind.
And I just should clarify really quickly,
if your brand is existentially threatened by Chinese tariffs, I understand.
I'm not trying to make light, that sucks. I'm not trying to say it's.
A big, big.
Deal and no, obviously.
Even taring are currently they were super high and now they're low,
and who knows what they'll be with when this is recorded, but still volatile.
Exactly. Yeah, and I just think so anyway, so having said that,
there's a carve out there, but yeah,
I just think that the tools are also getting amazing.
This is something people will sit here and talk about how AI is
producing all of this value to make it so that the ad platforms are performing
better and delivering business results better.
And they're doing that in all kinds of ways,
and also creative is getting cheap to make at endless scale and all this stuff.
And then they won't take the next step and say, oh,
who does that accrue value to? It accrues values to meta it,
accrues values to Google it accrues values to chat GPT,
who's going to charge you to do it and all that stuff.
But it also cruises values to brands,
values to brands who reduce their opex meaningfully.
So if that's the future you believe in to where the distribution of your
ad creative is getting much, much cheaper,
the labor involved with things like customer service and all these things is
getting much, much cheaper. And then at the same time,
the production of your ad creative and of other creative assets in your
business, including copy on your website and social media and all those things,
that's all getting cheaper as well, drastically, phenomenally,
ridiculously cheaper. If that's all happening,
then that means you can run your business more efficiently at every level, And
that means it accrues value to you. So you can't,
it's just really hard to say both those things at the same time that now the
counter argument to that is that the barrier to entry is getting so low that all
of these people will do it, and there will be very few winners,
and I don't know quite what to make of that.
I think if there's still more winners ultimately,
and if it's very cheap to test the idea, then yeah,
there are going to be some losers, but, but anyway,
so the combination of all those things makes me still bullish and I just try
to tell people as far as putting my money where my mouth is here,
I'm starting a brand right now. I just got another sample, the sample yesterday.
Love it. So just like.
When will this brand be released? Will it be launched.
T by October? Hopefully.
That.
Would be,
but that means for sure later than that because that's how this kind of thing
goes. So.
Yeah, I fully agree with you.
I've invested in some retail and DTC brands even over the last
year. Yes, there headwinds.
We have an Amazon practice at OMG. Amazon is challenging.
There are always challenges there.
The game is always shifting a little bit there,
but people are going to buy in the future more online, not less online.
I'm very, very confident in that.
I do believe we're in a world where great products and great marketers will
win. And so it's difficult. It's challenging, yes,
if you're getting hammered by tariffs, sympathy to you,
empathy, all of those things.
But there are still big opportunities in this space.
And I was listening to the operators podcast recently, Mike Beckham,
co-founder of Simple Modern, and he imports everything from China,
or maybe he's actively working to not do that, but Currently's.
The case. Yeah, they stood up a manufacturing facility in Oklahoma City.
I've been there and it's really, really cool and awesome,
but when you hear them talk about it, it's a tremendous pain.
So it's really.
Difficult. Exactly. But he talked about on a recent episode, he is like, Hey,
this is chaotic,
but there's more surface area right now for me to make changes and pivots
and shake things up.
And I'm confident this is going to be going to create windfalls
for our business.
And so I think if we remind ourselves that during every time of uncertainty,
every economic downturn,
fortunes are made and people transform their business in a powerful
way, it's just a good mental reset.
That's right. Because.
Sometimes being an entrepreneur is lonely and we get down and discouraged and I
got to give myself a pep talk on occasion. And so I'm glad you did that.
Thanks for posting that episode. Everybody should go check that out.
Well, maybe I need to have you back on again, Brett,
because Taylor is one of the biggest critics of my e-commerce is a good business
mentality, and he said, you need to bring somebody on who agrees with you. Yeah,
yeah.
Yeah, I know he is. Yeah. Well,
because you tweeted recently with your friend fan,
I think that 50% of e-comm brands are worth nothing.
And Taylor tweeted back that it's like 95%.
95%.
And that is a good clarification because fans sample is brands that are trying
to exit, and so.
That.
Skews disproportionately towards brands that have some.
Value, a little bit, little bit of cherry pick there.
And I didn't mean,
I just didn't think about that when I proposed that I wasn't trying to be click
fatty or whatever, but it's a fair point. But yeah,
anyway, it's.
Still money to be made still success to be had. Road's not easy,
but still there. So I want to talk about this. We're going to get to p and Ls.
I want to talk about how to design it, and again,
not from an accounting perspective, but how to look at it as a marketer,
as a business owner to drive profits,
drive real business and finance outcomes.
But we were talking about something really interesting prior to hitting record.
You're a big baseball guy. I'm more of a basketball football guy,
but I love baseball too. We love the same movie,
and you were inspired more by the book,
but tell us about the book that maybe shaped you as a marketer
that will, I think, surprise people, but talk about it and why.
Yeah, Moneyball.
Moneyball I think shaped a lot of people in a lot of ways actually.
I think it did. It did. Reach was well beyond baseball fans.
For sure.
Because in my experience,
so I grew up playing baseball as a huge baseball fan,
and when I heard about analytics in baseball and the early stage,
I had the same reaction as a lot of people, which is like,
this is soulless and these nerds are,
they don't understand how baseball really works.
And then I read the book and was totally convinced that I was wrong about that.
A hundred percent.
Percent.
But what ended up happening is that that book exposed to
me, not so much just a statistical paradigm for baseball,
but it taught me how smart,
analytically minded people think about everything about the world.
So I'm a big Dodgers fan of wearing my Dodgers hat right now.
The guy who runs the Dodgers, the president of baseball operations,
his name is Andrew Friedman, he came from Wall Street. He was a traitor.
And so he had an ability to think about
statistical probabilities and some of those things and how you use data to
inform better quality decision making,
and to think about the world as a matter of bets that you place and things like
that. Working with him for a long time,
a guy who eventually ran the Giants eventually got fired and is now back as a
specialist of the Dodgers. His name is Dr. Farhan Idi, who has a PhD from MIT
and has never played serious baseball.
And there's teams that have various levels of those kinds of guys.
Some former players now are those kinds of guys or whatever.
So it's not only that,
but the point is those guys were not thinking about baseball first when they
developed those muscles,
they just took a set of muscles and applied them to baseball.
And what I did was the opposite direction.
Moneyball for me was the way that I learned how to think about how to look at a
set of numbers and think about what they mean and how to interpret them and what
they don't mean, which crucially, and I mean Brett, I'll just tell you,
I think I actually just tweeted about this today.
I think that people's inability to have a baseline
understanding of then the concept of probabilistic thinking about outcomes
and of the difference between signal and noise and how to make a distinction
between those two things
is a gigantic hole in their thinking, especially media buyers.
Media buyers are terrible at this hundred percent,
and they overreact to tiny samples. And just for the record, I am media buyer.
I am the person that we're talking about. So all of my thinking about how best
to optimize a lot of media buying approaches is like,
how do I get the machine to make the decisions for me because I am so bias prone
in all of my thinking. So anyway, Moneyball, for me,
the book really helped me to start working out those muscles and those
muscles then became transferable to other things eventually.
Also listening to the Freakonomics podcast helped me a lot with this.
Listening to the Planet Money podcast helped me a lot with this. Really,
Freakonomics I think was especially helpful as well because very similar thing,
right?
You've got guys who are sort of exploring the world through the lens of data and
what data can and can't tell you, and sort looking under the surface,
little taglines, exploring the hidden side of everything.
And the hidden side is how data creates incentives and some of that. So they
have all kinds of really fun things, outcomes of like, oh, look at that.
If you look at the numbers underneath this,
you see patterns and behaviors emerging. Yeah,
I just think a lot of people would do really well to, if you like baseball,
you have the best world for this because it's the place where a lot of this
stuff is the most publicly digestible. But if you're a basketball fan, Brett,
surely over the last bunch of years,
the thing you've noticed the most is the rise of the three pointer.
It is a simple calculation,
which is a three pointer is worth more than 50% of a two point. It's worth 50%.
It's worth 50%, right? More.
Yeah.
Sorry. It was worth more, which is 50% more than a two pointer,
and therefore there's a massive incentive unless you make it
essentially your shot doesn't have,
you can be a fairly amount less efficient at the level of the shot and
still be a more efficient use of your shot in that case. And.
So.
That kind of little tradeoff, it's like, oh, once you see that, that's good.
And by the way,
if anybody ever goes and plays pickup basketball and you're playing with ones
and twos as instead of twos and threes.
That's even crazier. It's not twice as much. You should shoot a two every time,
every time. If you're a drive to the bucket type of player.
You're doing.
It wrong. You can't play in a game, that's one versus two.
It's like you've got to develop that three point shot, which I don't have.
I grew up in an era where I was a post player,
we just pounded down low to take a close shot. That's all we did.
But I'm so glad you brought this up and we will talk p and l,
we will talk about e-commerce.
Yeah, whatever. We can talk whatever you want.
But I love that we got into this because people are not failing right now in
e-commerce or in any business for lack of data. That's not an issue right now.
It's not lack of data. It's understanding what does the data mean,
but more importantly, what does the data not mean?
And then based on what it means, where am I going to place bets and why?
And can I confidently say this,
why I'm going to place bets in this place and not in that place? And yeah,
dude, it is just so good. I love the movie Moneyball,
so many quotable things in that movie. And.
As it happens, I'm also a big Aaron Sorkin fan.
So once Moneyball became both Moneyball book and also written by Aaron Sorkin.
Was in.
He's.
One of the best, wait, what are some of the other Aaron Sorkin movies?
Well, there's a lot. I mean,
he wrote Charlie Chicago Seven is one that people liked a lot.
I think that won some.
Did he write Molly's game? The poker? He did, yeah. Just so good.
But the West Wing is maybe his still most famous thing in some ways because the
West Wings a lot of people and West Wing I love too. Yeah. So.
You'll be a better media buyer, better business operator,
better Econ Pro. If you watch or read Moneyball, go check it out.
That's awesome, man. So let's break down. P and Ls mentioned to you,
I actually love math. I excelled at math in schools. It was just fun for me.
I hated accounting class in college, slept through it, hated it.
I've never taken one, so that's fine.
Okay, I regretted it once I started a business. I was like, oh shoot,
I should have paid closer attention. So I've had to get better there.
There's some differences.
There's gap accounting principles which are useful and there's a reason for that
and there's a world for that.
But then there's p and ls that are useful for marketers and business owners.
And so talk to me about how you think about p and ls,
why it's important, and what function does that serve for you as a marketer?
So at the baseline level,
what I really think here is that many brands are dead on
arrival and don't realize it.
And the reason they don't realize it is that they have never done the work of
forecasting
every part of their p and l, the whole thing,
at least in large chunks.
So I am not saying you have to forecast your Shopify bill six months out or your
Klaviyo bill six months out or whatever, down to those details,
but maybe you should, but
I'll tell you this,
there are worse things to do with your time in e-commerce than to get that
detail in your forecast.
For sure.
But I think a lot of brands just don't have a
viable business or it's going to be really hard or they have filed business,
but they are strategically so turned around and don't
know it because they just haven't done the work of having a
goal. And then forecasting to that goal in a way that says,
here is what is actually likely or if they do the forecast is rooted in hope.
And that's not a forecast. Hope is not a forecast, it's not a plan,
but to have some reason for why they believe the future will be a certain way
and then to forecast their whole business through that lens.
And I think that basically the tool to do that with is a cohort-based forecast
for e-commerce brands where you're actually forecasting new and returning
customer revenue differently. And then depending on if you're omnichannel,
how you work those channels in as well, this gets more complex. But
basically having that kind of thing,
it sounds like ridiculous advice to say to people,
you need to forecast your business. Like duh, everybody knows that.
But I am telling you, I just see over and over that people do this again,
either they don't do it with any seriousness or they do it or they
do it with no or no connection to reality in terms of what's happened,
or they do it, like I said,
the Hope vibes forecast kind of thing where it's like, here,
we're just going to increase spend for forever every month,
and it's always going to be at the same roas and it's going to just be great,
or we're going to have all this revenue and there's no separation with no
understanding. It says return customers, new customers, whatever.
So that's the basic principle,
because if you can do this exercise well and disciplined and clearly,
and if you need help,
there are a lot of people who help you with this by the way.
But if you could do it well,
then what you end up with is a map and compass to the outcome that to the
treasure that you want.
And that is the key step for so many brands to do
because if you do the exercise and you get really realistic about it and the
outcome of that exercise is not some profit number and some growth number
that is satisfying to you,
then that gets shoved back in your face and you now have to deal with the
reality of, oh, this is not going to actually,
I actually don't have a business that works.
And then you could start trying to solve the problem.
And maybe I can break down at some point, I'll pause here in a second,
but break down what kinds of problem surfaces and what makes a good and bad
E-commerce p and l. But that basic thing,
I think a lot of people have not done the hard work of just doing that in a
disciplined and careful way.
Yeah,
it's so good because I think there's a lot of businesses that are in a scenario
where you can't get there from here where it's not just,
I'm going to work harder, I'm going to do more of this,
but you are doing the wrong things and the basis of your
business is flawed. The ratios in your business are flawed.
You are never going to get to those profit numbers that you want to hit based on
the way you're operating right now. And yeah, no amount of wishful thinking,
positivity,
new creatives on meta are going to get you there because it's fundamentally
broken. And I remember as an agency several years ago,
and we've always been profit actually every year we've been profitable.
We've had some struggles and we've gone through some issues and had to do
layoffs a little over a year ago and some other things. But I remember when we
started talking to some PE groups and they started talking to others and they
explained the way they look at agencies, the way they look at businesses,
I was like, oh wait, we've been kind of lazy in a couple of areas financially.
And it just forced me to think about the business in a totally different way.
And even though we never sold to PE and actually we're looking at acquiring
agencies right now,
that function of thinking about how would an outside finance
person look at my business, change the way I ran the business,
not in terms of personality, the way I care for people or anything like that,
but just the way I look at the numbers and the way I look at the ratios shifted
when I took that perspective. And I think really every business,
every e-comm business needs to look at that. How am I looking at my p and l?
How am I looking at my forecast and can I get there from here doing what I'm
doing now? So.
Really good stuff when you do that, Brett, for the agency,
the same exercise for an agency as it is for an e-commerce business.
It's just a question of the ratios are different, right?
Service business,
it's about marked up time and the cost of goods is people basically, right?
So do you have a framework through which you're trying to view
how at MG Commerce how much
margin you have per client or per head or something like that, as a percentage?
I'm just curious.
I think you do this if you talk through how you think about the agency,
then the same principle applies across to e-commerce.
Yeah, I think it's going to be really similar.
So the way we look at a good agency should be in the 20 to
25% EBITDA margin range, maybe a little bit higher.
And I think as AI becomes more prevalent,
there are other ways you could look at making that margin higher,
but that's a pretty good range. So to get there, what does that mean?
And I think if you look at the big buckets in an agency,
delivery is the biggest, right?
So these are the team members that deliver the service.
So what should that ratio be? You've got ops,
so that's SG and a basically. Actually not S, but anyways,
like the general operating opex and stuff like that. And then you've got growth.
And so growth, we put marketing and sales together.
That's just the way we do it to look at growth.
And so those ratios have to line up in a way that then gets
you to that 20 to 25%, or maybe it is aggressive,
you're looking at 30% EBITDA margins or whatever. So how are
you getting there? And so then you start forecasting, okay,
these are my team members in these departments and this is what we're investing
and I'm projected to get 8% margin. So then you begin to look at, okay,
where am I out of whack? How do we fix this?
Do we grow our way out of this because maybe we have a lot of bandwidth and we
can grow into it. Do we make cuts? Do we get more efficient?
There's a number of things to look at. So those are the areas we look at.
And then we break it. So we break it down in big buckets like that.
We look at a p and L on of course a monthly basis.
We update it all the time, multiple times a week,
but then we also break down into each department kind of p and l and look at how
that rolls up,
and then what does each department need to contribute to then get us to the
overall ratios that we need. And so yeah,
we're planning things out annually based on that. We also factor in things like,
okay, what is our pipeline? What percentage of deals are we're going to close?
What's our average deal value? So that's layered in.
We also factor in churn because even though we think we're great,
we've won awards and people love us and things like that, churn still.
Happens.
It happens more when tariffs are going on, stuff like that. So then how do we
factor in churn and look at that because you're never going to keep all your
clients. And so we spilled that model and it's like you're constantly adjusting,
you're constantly tweaking. We do a weekly flash,
the finance report that looks at, okay, what changed this week?
How are we looking at the rest of this month?
So that's kind of the base of breakdown.
And I think that exercise reflects there's a target profit number that you're
trying to get to. You just said 20 to 25%.
That could change depending on all kinds of things.
It could have changed depending on the way that businesses in your sector are
valued. It could change depending on your goals,
depending on the cash intensivity of the business, the cost of capital,
there's all kinds of things that could affect that.
It could change just because of what you want in life. And that's fine. Totally.
When I talk about this, to me,
it's not about me saying necessarily what I think good is in this case because
it's just going to change for different people depending on goals.
I could tell you what I think how these brands are valued in the m and a market.
I have thoughts about that,
but then even how much you care about that is your own question and when you
want to sell and all those things. So there's all of these other factors that do
that, but then you just kind of work back from there.
Here's the profit number we're trying to hit to.
Maybe you have for yourself some kind of a revenue goal that ladders down to a
profit goal that ladders down to your take home that you want or a valuation
that you want or something like that. So you say, okay,
I need to hit this profit number,
which means I need to get to this revenue number. And then from there,
you just add in your costs. And this is the thing for e-commerce brands,
you have to play that exact same game. And I'll say for most of them,
that EBITDA number probably ought to be at least 10 to 20%.
Now, again, with the caveat of everything I just said,
which is in some ways it's up to you, but for it to be valued highly,
if that's what you're aiming at, if enterprise value is your goal,
probably somewhere around there while the business is growing,
and then now you've got to think about how you break down your costs,
very similar to what you just did, Brett, for the agency.
So I don't know if you want me to go sort of section by section and talk about
what I think the costs ought to be, then we could talk about it.
But this is where it varies a lot in.
Categories. I love that, and I did skip a very important step. It's like, okay,
we have very specific goals about what do we want our total profits to be for
this year, and as we grow and as we do some acquisitions,
what do we want the overall OMG platform to look at?
So you do start there and top line goals,
and then you back into all those get all percentages. But yeah,
let's break it down. So what should this look like for an e-commerce brand?
How am I structuring my p and l?
Yeah, so the starting point for this conversation is if you
think about the notion,
Taylor Holiday four quarter accounting is a helpful way of framing this.
There are four sections after revenue on your p and l.
So it's cost of delivery, CAC and opex,
and then profit. Those are the four sections of your p and l, okay?
Cost of delivery includes every variable cost associated with getting your
product to a customer.
CAC is every ad dollar or marketing dollar that gets deployed.
OPEX is every fixed cost in your business,
which is mostly people and an e-commerce business.
And then profit is left leftover. So let's work backwards. Okay,
so profit obviously the number you're trying to aim at.
So one of the things that should be happening in e-commerce business,
basically no matter your sector,
and I think this is the thing that is the most true across every category,
is that your opex is a percentage of your revenue should be pretty low.
And it is amazing to me how high this number still is.
But one of the fundamental advantages of e-commerce is that it scales really
well relative the number of heads you have and even cost of those heads.
Opposite of agencies. But yes, it's very true for e-commerce.
Opposite of agencies. So as a simple heuristic here,
your total fixed costs is the percentage of your revenue as you grow in
particular ought to be less than 15%.
So essentially that means if you have a million dollars in revenue,
your total cost of all opex including salaries ought to be $150,000 or less.
Now at a million dollars,
it's pretty hard to hit that number because you have not actually scaled yet.
But the more you scale,
the more you obviously that percentage come down because,
and the simple reality that happens in every part of an e-commerce business,
the illustration I use all the time is that it costs basically, well,
it costs the exact same amount of money to design an email that you send to a
thousand people versus that you send to a million people.
The design costs are literally dollar for dollar the same.
You got to pay Klaviyo a little more money between those two, but otherwise,
all of the other costs are pretty much exactly the same.
And so that means that the percentage of your cost of people goes down a whole
bunch. If you add in the ability with AI now and with offshoring,
which I'm a huge believer and proponent in my team,
I mentioned there's seven or eight of us in the Philippines,
they're incredible contributors to my team.
I don't think of them as separate or something like that.
Totally. They're pure team members.
And they are killers,
and I can get access very high quality talent in the Philippines
for much less money than I can access that talent in the US equivalent talent
because of the differences in the economies and some of those things.
It's a win-win. So if you add those two things together,
now you have talked about shrinking your opex even more,
and you can be really best in class here and get that number under 10% and maybe
even lower. I've heard about,
I think Zach Stocks has talked about publicly somewhere that,
or maybe that maybe I heard Marketing.
Operators, what brand does he run?
Hollo socks, Zach, some people know him and he had started Homestead agency,
some other.
Brands as well. Great agency. Yeah.
So Zach was talking,
I think on marketing operators that his brand is like five or 6 million in
revenue per head, which is crazy. That's wild. That is a very,
very lean opex. So that is the number one thing.
And I think a lot of brands actually are still sucking.
They're just paying too much money for people.
I recently had Ben Perkins on from Ann Call on my podcast.
He was at $15 million in revenue and was drowning in debt.
He had taken some inventory based loans,
was paying $65,000 a week in loan repayments and trying to figure out how
to stay afloat.
He had $3 million in debt against 10 million in revenue at one point,
which is not really workable in a lot of e-commerce brands.
So he started smashing all of the costs that he could in his business.
He ended up cutting half of his labor and discovered something which was that
the business did not change.
Nothing happened, right?
If anything, it got smoother.
And Ben is clear and gracious to say that's not necessarily because those people
were either bad or not working hard.
Part of it's because managing people is very hard and he.
Wasn't.
Great at managing them hundred percent. And so he had made bad hires,
he had not managed them well, all those things.
But he found that by being leaner,
and I just think so many brands can be leaner. So that's number's number one's.
Also software of analogy on this that I think it hits.
It's like is meta or YouTube incremental for your business? Well, it should be,
but you could be screwing it up and if you're screwing it up,
it might not be incremental at all.
That's right. That's.
Right. I think it's the same with people. They're not bad people.
Maybe they're working really hard, maybe they care, maybe all those things,
but maybe you've just got the structure incorrect or you're managing 'em
incorrectly or you just don't need 'em. And so they're busting their tails,
but actually it's not writing incremental value to you. And so yeah,
Ben talked about that.
His solution to the problem was to create a personal p and l for every one of
his.
Employees.
So basically to answer this question,
is this person generating incremental value in the business and here's how we're
going to measure it.
And he said some of them did not want to partake in the exercise,
so he offered them a gracious severance and they left.
And then the other ones who were willing to participate,
it turns out they were driving a whole bunch of value as measured on a p and l,
so he did the exact thing he.
Just said. Interesting.
Yeah, I thought it was brilliant.
So we're driving down our opex. Can't underscore that enough,
especially in e-commerce. Drive down that opex, okay, what's.
Next?
It's so fundamental to what makes make an e-commerce business work and people
need to be really clear about that.
Software bloat is the other thing to watch out for. There.
Typically.
Not as expensive as people, but it can get expensive.
People just have too many things to the chasing shiny object syndrome.
You don't need to do that for a while.
So opex should be shrinking as a percentage of revenue. Again,
in a forecast you should see as my revenue now.
So if you forecast up 1 million to 5 million to 10 million in revenue,
whatever that growth rate is,
you should be seeing that you're hiring is not going linearly with that,
but that people are now able to create, again,
have operating leverage in their people,
which is to say they generate additional value,
not just the same amount of value as before. And so you got to keep hiring them.
Again, very different than an agency to service the revenue.
You have to keep hiring. Okay, exactly.
So that's the starting point. Okay. Then you get into CAC and cost of delivery.
Now this is where you're going to have more variation across different
industries.
So apparel businesses are going to function in both of these regards really
differently than supplement businesses, than beauty businesses,
than food and Bev.
All of these things are going to have just home goods, whatever.
And so this is where you get to all kinds of different setups.
What I will say about this is more that, so if you want to say best in class,
let you just want a heuristic here.
If you say 15% opex or lower,
30% CAC or lower in your business, so your total spend is 30%.
So I'm spending a third of my revenue basically on marketing or on customer
acquisition.
Correct? On.
Marketing.
30% In cost of goods, okay, cost of delivery,
totally delivered to the customer. Right? Now you've got.
That's cogs, that's shipping, that's cost of fulfillment.
Costs, merchant account fees.
Refunds, all.
Those things. The 3% you have to pay Shopify and credit card companies,
everything in there.
The dollar 50 or three PL is going to charge you for fulfillment costs per
order, plus any pick and pack. There's all of these little things that come up.
The cost of ordering the product,
getting it from essentially from your manufacturer to the customer.
That whole journey represents all these costs.
If you can get that to 30% as well, now you've got 30% COD,
cost of delivery, 30% cac, that's 60% of our money is going out there,
15% opex, and now you have 15% leftover. Did I do that right now?
Now you have 25% leftover, you did 5% leftover.
That would be super best in class, be amazing, 25% left.
The reality is most businesses do not have that much margin at
30% total, and they're not running their CAC at 30%,
but if you want to know why there are so many supplement businesses in because
they can do both of those things,
they uniquely are able to do this. Their CAC shrinks as a percentage of their
revenue over time because customers come back so much that returning customers
make up a larger and larger percentage of their revenue pool. By the way,
there's some similar dynamics in skincare. The product beauty,
the cost of creating the product is very cheap.
The cost of shipping the product is cheap.
All of those things come together and you can charge a good amount of money and
get AOVs to 70 or a hundred dollars or whatever it is,
which can be helpful as well.
You put all that together and you can run a really high margin business.
The truth is for most brands,
they're going to actually be spending more somewhere. And the question is where,
so for a lot of brands, if you can get even two 60 points,
or if you add 10 more points of cost to your cost of
delivery, 30% to 40%,
that's probably more realistic for where a lot of brands end up in a lot of
cases.
And now you've got 15% profit margin and that's still a really healthy business,
something like that.
Still a great business.
Or you have someone like Sean from the Ridge who I think he said he spends about
40% on cac, right? So then this.
I going to points.
To.
That side. This is another way to do it,
which is I have a brand that does something very similar,
which is they have extremely high margin and they want to grow.
So what do they do?
They turn around and they plow money into ads and they're like, We are just
going to push our growth really hard on ads, and by doing that,
we're going to be really profitable and by staying lean at the same time with
our team, we're going to be really, really profitable. So now, yeah,
they run like 40% cac, 30% or less cost of delivery and yeah,
15% or less opex, and they're running it like a 15% margin as well.
If everything goes awesome, still a great business. If everything is awesome,
then there's some places where they can find some help on all of those.
They're hammering away out their cost of delivery all the time.
In any of those cases, you can have a strategy. Now,
there's exceptions to those rules too. We mentioned simple,
modern earlier as an example of this, and simple,
modern did not start off first of all to DTC brand.
They started off as an Amazon brand.
Amazon brand, and that's important. We've seen so many of those, by the way,
so many born on Amazon brands, and when they try to make that transition to DTC,
it's so hard because the math is all different.
Amazon is a demand capture platform and it's razor thin margins,
but all the traffic is there and that sets what you're capitalizing on.
It's not really demand gen proposition there. And so it makes it very.
Difficult and in competitive categories on Amazon,
being able to be priced cheaper is a really big advantage.
That's basically a marketing play, right? There is usually.
Price.
So the simple modern guys tested five different products when they launched on
Amazon, all within trends that they thought were taking off.
It is super genius when you listen to what they started with.
They're brilliant dudes. Brian Porter alongside Mike Beckham. Brian is there.
I know Brian well, and you admire Mike. Yeah, he's great.
Yeah,
both fantastic people and just killers and the softest,
gentlest, kindest killers met. Yes, gentle killers. But Brian,
he talks about the early days and it's really helpful to think about this
through a p and l lens because what they did was they said like, okay,
we're going to price cheaper with drinkware,
with stainless insulated drinkware than other people are,
and we're going to create more variant options than what is currently available.
Because if you think about the legacy players in that space,
the Yeti Hydro flask, they built for mass retail,
and so their business was tuned for mass retail first,
and that meant pricing strategy, product skew strategy.
All these things were built for that.
Black, white and blue and maybe red. That's all I can afford to do.
I got to send that everywhere in retail.
Right? And so they said, we can create more options.
People like to accessorize with their water bottles,
and so I can create more options at a lower price and a really great product.
The net result of that,
and this is the p and l implication that I think is helpful to think about is
that they have, and they've been public about this,
but I don't mind saying it like 30% margin. So at a DTC level,
it's like 60 to 70%,
I think closer to 70% of their revenue immediately goes out the door.
Maybe 65% of their revenue immediately goes out the door to product costs and
cost of delivery, getting it to the customer.
So they only have 35 points of margin leftover,
which blows up the entire paradigm I just told you about, right?
Right.
Yeah. But it's because it was a channel strategy,
which was to start Amazon first and then DTC came in after that.
And this is why, like you said, some brands really struggle to go the other way,
and this is where sometimes there is an issue here with product channel or
product business model fit, Where you have the right idea,
but you're just in the wrong channel for it,
and you need to change the whole business model to match the channel that you
are in. And I think this is actually a problem.
I operated a business like the SE four 400 where we just needed to be a mass
retail business because the math didn't work very well for us. We had low LTV,
it was very expensive to ship,
and it was just really hard for us to make the math work as a DTC brand. Now,
eventually,
simple modern of course now has a really good DTC business as well because
they're really big.
And so they've been able to generate so much awareness and all those things that
they can make it work, but it wasn't their lead channel.
And I just think it's helpful to understand that there's reasons for that. And
when they went and launched a hydration pack brand,
they're doing that DTC first with a potential mass retail output eventually
because that product makes way more sense on the channel in
all of the things that I just laid out before.
And so brands need to get really serious about, wait a minute,
if I have low margin,
let's say I end up with 50% margin leftover after my cost
of delivery or 45% my cost of delivery, gosh,
DTC is going to be an uphill slog.
There better be a reason that I think I can do it. And there may be,
may be because you have some pricing strategy that gives you some unique
advantage of, I don't know. But there would be ways to do it. But yeah,
I think that's the thing that people need to get really clear about is how is
their approach to their margin profile fitting with the channel? And if so,
because my friend Kelsey Lyric and I have debated about this,
but I think it changes the whole model of the business. The business model,
if you don't have product channel fit in quite that way and you have to think it
very differently about nearly all of it. The moment you go to mass retail,
the amount of heads you have and the amount your shipping works,
all that stuff changes.
So sales commissions and all these different kinds of things.
Your margin profile has to fit your core channel or channels.
That's really important.
I think that's something that not a lot of people think about in the early days
especially, but it's something you need to think about as you're grown,
as you scale. So let's do this, Andrew.
Let's talk about how are we projecting,
how are we predicting, how are we pivoting along the way as we go?
So we've kind of talked about these numbers. Obviously if we're out of whack,
there better be a reason for it.
We'll be able to make that work on our channels. If not,
we're going to need to start making some adjustments, some cuts,
things like that.
And you may have another note there before we talk about projections. Yeah.
Okay, cool. So then how are we looking at projections?
And again, to use the Moneyball example, how are we taking data,
this p and l that we're looking at and using it to make decisions and
operate our business so that we actually hit those profit targets?
So what ends up happening, if you do this exercise,
if you forecast all of the parts of the p and l that I just said over a period
of months or years or whatever it is, something will happen,
which is that the numbers will be thrown in your face in a way that will tell
you if you are somewhere or not.
And then their question is if you are close or if you're somewhere,
let's say you get that and you're like, Ooh, we're at 5%,
and if things go wrong, 5% profit, and if that goes wrong,
that takes us down to zero, that takes us down to whatever.
Then you have to start thinking about what is the solution to this problem?
Do I need to just grow faster so that my opex becomes lower as percentage of
revenue? Do I need to fire people? Do I need to go negotiate my manufacturing?
I have a little theory right now,
which is the supply chains are the most underoptimized part of e-commerce
businesses.
Totally agree. Nobody got to in the past, didn't need to,
didn't feel like we needed.
To. And it's a lot to do. It's hard.
There's a lot to do.
Exactly.
Somebody like me gets on a podcast like this and tells you another thing to
think about and listen, there's 70 podcasts like this that are new.
There's probably way more than that. There's probably 500 podcasts like this,
all of 'em with people telling you what to do,
it becomes really challenging to stay on top of all of it.
And so anyway,
we went through I think the marketing revolution in e-commerce where people got
really early on, that was a big part of the thing.
Finance revolution has been happening.
More and more brands recognize they need to be profitable.
They can't just try to blitz scale. They recognize their business is worthless,
it's not profitable.
They're listening to the finance operators and following mates have and Drew and
Taylor Holiday and people like that on X,
and they're getting their feet wet with how to think about forecasting their
business and some of the things I'm talking about. But there's another step
next, which is like now, okay,
how do you actually go negotiate a supply chain and build your supply chain out
and do those things in a way that is actually good for the business?
And I do think there's a lot of bigger wins there than people realize just by
talking to more manufacturers, negotiating with your three pl,
there's just a lot there. I have brands who've done this,
shout out to my friends at Move Supply Chain, who they've worked with
on this where it was like, wait a minute.
We had this product that was costing us $5 per unit to make.
Now we got it down to two.
And no customer has ever said a word about it being different.
It's still good product.
They just did a bunch of stuff to go work somewhere else in the world and.
Make 60% reduction in cogs. Huge.
Gigantic impact on the business. Massive.
And so there's a bunch of stories like that.
So yeah, I just think that could be where it is, where you go like, oh,
we have to go manufacture something different. I'll tell you from my brand,
my brand is in a category where the
packaging is more expensive than the product, than the actual.
Product. Interesting, interesting.
And so we are going to launch with prices that we think are pretty decent at the
level of cost of delivery, but right away, I'm right away thinking, shopping.
Additional manufacturers that actually worked with that same company might move
supply chain. They started with 60, so
a 60 on product and 20 on packaging. So
we already are somewhere on that. We looked at a lot of manufacturers.
But immediately I'm thinking about, okay,
at what level do I get a price break by ordering more of these?
Do I need to go actually redesign the packaging, the most expensive part of it?
If I could shave two bucks off of this, it's probably worth doing.
There's a lot of questions like that that come in because I know that everything
in the business will get smoother if I have more Martian.
It's just a superpower. Totally. And so anyway,
so you can play that out in your business wherever it is. What are those giant
costs that are just killing you? They're somewhere in your business probably.
And you just start by saying, okay, what is the place that I try to go to next?
Look at it with somebody smart, got a coach. If you need some input,
somebody can probably look at that with you and say,
if you've been in your business for four years and you're like,
I have had ideas, then you can do those things.
But people will have ways to go and say, Hey, have you looked into this?
Have you considered that? Have you thought about, Hey,
your air shipping stuff all the time?
Stop doing that because your forecasting is bad. You're behind.
You need to get back to ocean freight. That's a big whatever, whatever.
There's all kinds of things like that in every business because it's hard.
And so you could start kind of hammering away doing that forecasting exercise.
We'll start to surface those things for you.
I love it.
And it's one of those things too that with all the tariff madness that's going
on right now at the time of recording,
it's forcing people to look at different locations for manufacturing,
different factories, different ways of getting the product here.
And I think in that process,
even though that's painful and not something any of us want to be doing,
you're going to find opportunities in there and you maybe going to shave off,
you're going to find five or 10 points or 20 points or something like that.
That would.
Be, it could be a game changer for your business or maybe you're not.
Maybe it's going to be a terrible experience,
but you work towards that for sure.
I have a theory really fast, Brett,
that the upside of this whole thing is that tariffs will be a forcing function
for better supply chain creation for people because they're just going to have
to, and that it'll be, and that win for some brands, not all brands. Totally.
For some way.
Yeah, it sort of relates.
But if you look at the iOS 14 and just all the madness that happened there,
it forced us to be better markers. We had to.
And so I think it's going to do something similar here with supply chain.
And I want to be mindful of time, so you lemme know if we need to wrap up,
but I want to look at cohorts and LTV and
composition of new customers and returning customers and how you forecast that
and how that informs this process. So do I have time to get into that or do we.
Wrap up? Yeah, this is good. This's going to be the last question.
So that's, there's a lot there. Best, best, yeah. I'll tell you what to do,
honestly, go to my website,
put your email address in the email popup or in the footer.
Either one will work. You get my four free essential e-commerce resources.
It's going to sign you up for my newsletter as well. I don't spam you,
I promise. AJF growth.com. Go there, sign up for my newsletter.
One of the things I will send you is from some lovely venture capitalists at
Lightspeed Venture Partners put together a whole prebuilt like
custom spreadsheet that helps you and walks you through how to
forecast returning customer cohorts off customer data. It's hard work.
Another recommendation I say to people is Dave Ook, CXL class.
So the CXL course,
he talks you through how heat forecast businesses. He's a really smart guy.
I worked with him really closely for a long time. At four 400,
he still runs Bamboo Earth, but if you do that,
it will give you a whole prebuilt spreadsheet for how to do it.
And I basically had at one point common thread collective took the
Lightspeed model and built it a little bit for themselves.
I've since tweaked it a little bit for myself and I will send you mine for free
so you can do that. And that's probably I think the way to do it.
But if you can just see historical returning customer behavior over months after
purchasing and then put that into a spreadsheet that will tell you, okay,
what does that mean for the customers that acquired today in six months?
How much are they worth? You can pile all those cores on top of each other.
You can get a really good revenue forecast. That's surprisingly reliable.
They're more reliable than people think.
And then you can look at, okay,
my new customer acquisition activities are underperforming or overperforming,
and what does that do to my projections? That's right.
And then you can understand, okay,
I need to make some pivots now because this is going to have a real material
impact to my business in 2, 3, 4, 5 months, things like that.
So awesome resource, a big job.
But if you commit to it, it's a big job. You can do it in a day.
It's not that of a job, but if you commit to it, then
I always say my best clients live and die by that spreadsheet.
Yep. And it's one of those things that once you start down this path,
it will transform the way you run your business and things will never be the
same.
And you can unlock a different level of performance and profitability that will
never happen for you if you're not looking at your business this way.
So I agree. Andrew, this is fantastic. I know you got a jet.
What's your website one more time? So we want to check.
Out that resource. Yeah, AJF, like my initials, AJF growth.com.
And if people can find you on.
Everything there, podcast there, everything. Yep. X at Andrew j Faris.
Yep. And Andrew Faris podcast. Check it out. Andrew,
this has been fantastic, man. Super, super fun.
Look forward to the next go round and thanks for taking the time, man.
Thanks Brett.
And thank you for tuning in. So we'd love to hear from you.
What would you like to hear more of on the podcast? Let us know. And with that,
until next time, thank you for listening.