Podcasts about volusion

Can a laid-off Wall Street analyst turn a small vacuum cleaner parts store into a thriving e-commerce empire? Chad Rubin did just that, and in this episode, he shares his remarkable journey from the financial crisis of 2008 to becoming a pioneer in the world of Amazon selling. We explore how Chad's commitment to high-quality products and strategic pricing propelled his private-label business to success. Discover the pivotal moments that led to the birth of Skubana, a multi-marketplace management powerhouse, and his latest venture, Profasee, which revolutionizes dynamic pricing for sellers.   Chad's story is a testament to the power of continuous innovation in e-commerce. We discuss the relentless need for product iteration, the complexities of protecting intellectual property in China, and the creation of Skubana as a response to the inefficiencies in existing inventory management systems. From transitioning between platforms like Volusion, Magento, and Shopify to addressing the unique challenges of the e-commerce landscape, Chad provides invaluable insights that every entrepreneur can learn from.    But Chad's contributions go beyond his own businesses. Tune in to hear about the evolution of the Prosper Show conferences, a leading event for Amazon sellers co-founded by Chad to foster community and knowledge sharing. We also dive into the intricacies of dynamic pricing strategies with Profasee, comparing them to Uber's surge pricing and exploring their impact on profitability. Whether you're an e-commerce novice or a seasoned seller, Chad's expertise and passion for the industry will leave you inspired and armed with strategies to elevate your own Amazon business. In episode 410 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Chad discuss: 08:17 - Evolution of Aftermarket Parts Industry 11:09 - Constant Innovation in E-Commerce Business 13:39 - Challenges of Protecting Intellectual Property 18:47 - Evolution of Prosper Show Conferences 18:48 - Entrepreneur Launches Various Business Ventures 24:12 - Evolution of International Seller Conference 29:45 - The Truth About E-Commerce Conferences 35:10 - Advanced Pricing Strategies for E-Commerce Sellers 39:59 - Enhancing E-Commerce Pricing Strategies 40:43 - Effectiveness of Static Pricing Strategy 46:03 - More Strategies for E-Commerce Success 51:52 - Kevin King's Words Of Wisdom

So, you just ran a crowdfunding campaign and it was a HUGE success…but now what? Whether you are starting out after a successful campaign, or launching a new business from scratch, it's never too early to start planning for the future. If you are ready to unleash your product into the wild, then delve into the world of ecommerce with this episode of Crowdfunding Demystified.  In this article-style podcast, Salvador Briggman breaks down the 8 top-ranked ecommerce sites including Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and Volusion so you can choose the best platform to propel your business into the future. You will learn how to:  Take complete control of your brand and image Choose the features that best suit your product Incorporate these platforms into your existing site …and so much more.  PLUS, you will get Sal's expert advice on what he uses for his own highly-successful sites!  You have worked hard to make your business what it is, so don't compromise now. These ecommerce platforms make selling a breeze to help you get your product to customers and ethically impact the world.  Resources and Tools Mentioned on the Show Book a coaching call Subscribe for Weekly Crowdfunding Tips Fulfillrite: Kickstarter and crowdfunding reward fulfillment services. They come highly recommended! Download their free shipping and fulfillment checklist. Free Shopify Trial Host Your Websites with Bluehost Create a website without limits using Wix

https://youtu.be/LlBWS-yBgVY Jordan Gal is the Founder of Rally, a technology solution that creates a seamless checkout experience for customers. We discuss the benefits of building a unique business, ways to create a satisfactory store experience for your clients, and how the unbundling of marketplaces is redefining ecommerce.  --- Give Your Customers an ROI with Jordan Gal Our guest is Jordan Gal, the founder of Rally, a technology solution that creates a seamless checkout experience for customers. Jordan, you have a unique product and we'll get into uniqueness in a few minutes, but let's start at the beginning, at least the beginning of your company. How did you get to stumble upon this opportunity and what does Rally do and what kind of road leads you to that, to founding this business? Yeah, if I look back at the origin of the business, the business was started two years ago, but it has its origins like 10 years ago when I started an e-commerce company with my brothers. So we were merchants ourselves, we were selling physical products online. And in many ways, even though it's 10 years later and the tech, overall tech has gotten immensely better, in many ways, the things we're building now are a lot of the things that I wanted as a merchant 10 years ago. And it's sometimes surprising that it hasn't happened yet, but we can also get into why I think it hasn't happened. Okay, so tell me a little bit about your journey of getting there. So you said you had the previous e-commerce business, what happened to that? And then how did you come up with this idea? I get it that you wanted some of these solutions, when did you decide to go for it? So just give a little bit more detail if you can. Yeah, sure. So, so for me, it really goes back to growing up in an immigrant entrepreneur household. My parents moved this year from Israel when I was six. My dad was an entrepreneur and that, you know, when you grow up in that environment, you kind of get marinated in it and it ends up being the only thing that makes sense to you, at least in my case. So I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years, but I got into e-commerce with selling online. Being our own store, we built on Volusion, one of the early platforms that really allowed you a lot more control. We were originally on Yahoo stores, and that was very frustrating, because you couldn't change anything yourself. You always had to go to a developer or an agency. And moving over to Volusion was like revolutionary, because we were then directly in control. And that control is what got me very interested in conversion optimization. So when we ran our own e-commerce business, I was the one responsible for conversion. And that's what got me staring at a website and thinking, what can I do to this page that creates a scenario where a higher percentage of people take the actions that I want them to take and that being empowered in that way is really really interesting from like a marketer point of view. So that business grew pretty well but we we didn't like where it was going. We were selling products that were available elsewhere and so you're really competing on like thin margins and you and back then a lot of it was competing on you know being better at Google AdWords. And in an Amazon world, we didn't like where that was going. So we really faced the decision of either creating our own brand, that way you can only get it from us, or selling the business. We ended up selling the business, and it was a pretty good exit. Nothing crazy, but it got me my start in e-commerce. And after that, I started a software company focused on e-commerce merchants. That software company was called Cart Hook. We originally came out with a product called an abandoned cart app, which emails people that have abandoned the checkout process. After about two years of running that, we stumbled upon a much bigger idea, which was just replacing the checkout entirely.

Do you know an eCommerce platform that targets very small eCommerce startups, just like Wix or GoDaddy? Do you know an eCommerce platform that had recently filed chapter 11 to restructure its debt? Do you know an eCommerce platform that may not have as high a transaction fee similar to Shopify? Do you know an eCommerce platform that is based in Austin, TX? If you guessed Volusion, then you are right.In today's episode, we invited a panel of industry experts for a live discussion on LinkedIn to conduct an independent review of Volusion's capabilities. We covered its strengths such as not having as high transaction fees and its alignment with smaller businesses. Finally, we discussed its financial challenges and the problems users reported while using this platform.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe to your favorite podcasting platform.

Welcome to this Big Commerce episode of talk commerce. And I have Brent Bellm here, the CEO of Big Commerce. Brent, why don't you introduce yourself? Tell us your day-to-day role and maybe one of your passions in life. Great.So I'm CEO of Big Commerce. I took over for the founders about seven years ago.Big Commerce is a software as a service e-commerce platform where basically the software. Brands and retailers use to create beautiful, successful fast-growing e-commerce stores. We serve them all around the world. We're big, of course, in north America, but also Australia, New Zealand across EMEA, and very proudly have recently launched in Mexico with further expansion plans in south America.We power brands of all sizes. Brand new companies and startups who get going for $30 a month, all the way up to some of the world's very largest companies. For example, Proctor and gamble runs a vast majority of its brands on sites all over the world. I'm dead commerce, SC Johnson, Unilever other customers of ours, just to pick one category.We recently launched Ted Baker, a leading men's apparel and lifestyle brand. And we're one of the biggest software as a service. Platforms in the world. We IPO code two years ago and now trade as a public company on the NASDAQ. That's great.So we're at ShopTalk today. And you had a big announcement yesterday.Multi-store front. Why don't you tell us a little bit about a multi-store front for Big Commerce and what that looks like?Yes, multi-store front is the biggest and most complex product release in our history and arguably one of the most complex and biggest product releases of any e-commerce platform in history.What multi-store does is it lets any account or customer of ours, launch additional stores for additional brands,  additional customer segments and or additional geographies. All from a single account. These stores can have the same or different themes and designs, catalog, checkout experiences, integrations.The value of it though, is it's a scalable way for companies to expand how and where they sell, leveraging all the efficiencies of a single account. What is so powerful about this is that traditionally one could only get multi-store functionality from the most expensive large enterprise platforms, Magento enterprise, Salesforce, SAP, and what made it really complex to launch is our platform was originally designed for one account, one store.You could have multiple stores, but they each had to have their own account, their own infrastructure. You're basically duplicating all your effort to build multiple. Every component of our platform had to become, multi-store aware. Catalog had to know which store it's referencing, checkout, which store it's referencing tax.Every single component themes URLs had to be rewritten to understand which store am I talking about storefront for a given owner. And that rewrite took us three years. All while on a multi-tenant SaaS platform, meaning without disrupting the 60,000 roughly stores that are running every day, their stores keep running.And then at the end of this path, they suddenly have the ability to add more stores without  anything breaking on the stores that they had. Historically, that's really hard to do. Remember when Magento went from Magento one to Magento two, it was a rewrite. And a component of that was trying to significantly improve their multi-store front capabilities.They had the benefit of being on-premise software. They could just throw away Magento one, rewrite it as Magento two and say, Hey customers, if you want this set of improved capabilities, you have to migrate. It's a total migration. You throw away your Magento one. And now you start over on Magento two.You can't do that with multitenant. Software as a service multi-tenant means everybody's running on a single platform. And when you make changes, they have to not break the stores of everybody running. You can't tell them to version or upgrade or migrate. You have to fix it all while the train is running.And that is what we have done. So we're immensely proud of it. It truly makes us a full featured complete platform for even the world's largest enterprises. And it's a very big differentiator, for example, from Shopify who cannot do this.I want to back up just a little bit and just talk a little bit of a more more about SaaS as well and how much savings clients can realize in their SaaS offering virtues versus the on-prem.You did mention that the having to upgrade and some of those breaking things. The upgrade path in a on-prem version, you do have to shut down and start up and spend money on doing that. Where are the savings then met from Big Commerce for the client when they're on just the SaaS platform,when you're on SaaS a large portion of your software hosting and everything is included in.You don't have to pay separately for hosting. You don't have to have an army of software engineers to maintain your code. You don't have to worry about security and bug fixing. It's all included. That starts for as little as $30 a month, and believe it or not on Big Commerce, if you go start a store for $30 a month, you're running on the exact same platform that Proctor and gamble is and all of our largest and some of the biggest companies in the world they're running on the exact same.We're maintaining hosting, constantly improving performance speed each and every day. Our agency partners who are familiar with on-premise software in particular Magento often tell us that total cost of ownership of Big Commerce versus on-premise software can be anywhere from a 50% lower to 80% lower, depending on the nature of the customer.And the complexity of their site. So it's a dramatic saving. I've always believed that this was the best solution for most companies who are, if you're a retailer or a brand, you're usually not a technology company and don't have world-class software engineers and it professionals, I believe in this for 22 years.In fact, in the nineties, I was a retail consultant first, starting with retail stores, physical stores, and then going to. Internet stores. And when I cut the cord on consulting and said, I'm going to now bet my career on a single concept. What is the concept? I most believe in the world of e-commerce at the end of 99, I joined a company called escalate, which was one of the first SaaS e-commerce platforms back in the day.I remember there being three or so others, I could name Yahoo stores. Volusion, Blue Martini. We were number four. There might've been a few others around the world. They didn't even call it SaaS back then they called it ASP. But at the time, this is like 1999, 2000 companies were spending five to $10 million to cobble together the software and the infrastructure and the hosting for their stores.And Escalate came along and said, we'll do that for you, but only charge you 6% of your sales. But that scales and you don't have all the upfront costs. Incredible idea before it's time. That company didn't end up surviving and succeeding Yahoo stores and Volusion did, but they never really were able to modernize their tech stack as technology moved faster than they did.But today I came back into Big Commerce and into this industry in 2015 with a total conviction that in the year 2015, it's fundamentally broken if on-premise software, no matter how good. And I knew how good Magento was because I partnered with them when I was at PayPal. My boss ended up buying them into eBay.I was part of that evaluation in 2010. So I saw Magento taking off. I had all the respect in the world for what a great platform it was, but it was on-premise software. It burdened companies with having to license their software, then customize it, maintain it, secure it, host it. And most companies can't do that.They certainly don't like the versioning and the upgrading. And I said it is high time that a SaaS platform was really the solution for the world's complex businesses. We'd already grown to number two in the world for serving small business. Shopify was number one, they had a five-year headstart on us.And in the 2015, I said we're not going to catch them. We can't overcome their five-year headstart. They've already IPO. We have not. So we're going to do something they're not doing and nobody else is doing something that's new to the world. We're going to create what we call open SaaS. We're going to take a SaaS platform and open up every component and turn it into little microservices, catalog and checkout tax service, everything with our own API layer and SDK, so that the world's complex businesses.Can customize can modify can't extend when they don't like our native functionality use partner functionality. We're going to try to make SaaS as open and comparable to open source and on-premise as possible. And so that is our mission. It's been that for seven years bringing enterprise level openness and enterprise level functionality to a SaaS plan. So that the world's businesses can really optimize for whatever complexity or uniqueness they have, that's our vision for what Big Commerce is doing differently than any other company. It's religion for me. I think it's what a big portion of the world's companies need when they embark on the best path of e-commerce.I liked the concept open SaaS, maybe talk about some differentiators, especially around the checkout and the payment section, Big Commerce does offer a lot of savings as well in that area. And maybe against some of the competitors, what are they doing in checkout and what can't you do?Yeah. On some of the other platforms,when I came into Big Commerce Shopify was already offering Shopify payments and more or less shoving it down the throats of their merchants. If you're a small business, you can either use Shopify payments, their proprietary solution. Or if you want to use someone else, you better hope they're integrated because that's up to Shopify.And if you do, they surcharge you an extra 2% of all your sales. Now I come from a payments background too. I was doing internet payment gateways in the nineties. I was eight years at PayPal. I helped. Express checkout and build their whole merchant services business around PayPal Europe. For four years, I ran global product at PayPal.I know payments. And one of the things I know best is that there is no such thing as one size fits all in payments. The needs of a business in Mexico , I was there last week, are completely different when it comes to payments and the needs of one in the United States or Canada and a solution built by Shopify a white labeled solution for north America.Sorry. United States and Canada is not going to work in Mexico. Let alone pick any other country around the world. It's not going to work in B2B, but even for plain Jane credit card processing, there's real differentiation between a strike between a Braintree between CyberSource and Authorize.net.Chase go to Europe, Adyen checkout.com. All of these companies do something different and special. It's not one size fits all. And so rather than in the pursuit of trying to take as much money from our customers as we can, which, what happened if we had a proprietary payment solution, our strategy is the opposite.We go to each of these phenomenal payments players, and we say, let's partner, let's get you the single best integration into Big Commerce that you have with any platform in the world. So that if ever a business goes to you and says, Hey, we like your payments. Which platform can we best take advantage of it on, we want that to be Big Commerce.I believe that statement is true for PayPal and Braintree for Stripe, for Chase, for Adyen, you go on down the list. We give customers choice and we don't surcharge them if they don't use our own proprietary product, because we don't have a proprietary product. We believe the specialists in payments are far better.And especially with their diversity of. Then we would be, and that Shopify is by the way, if you want to know how you benefit from this, it's very straightforward. Just go to pricing on Shopify and compare that to pricing on Big Commerce. And you will see that you save a lot of money at all at the exact same size of merchant at every tier, you're saving a substantial amount of money using our payments players because our payments players compete against.Whereas Shopify says use us, or, and we'll charge you more at every level. And if you don't like it, we'll surcharge you 2% to use somebody else. Now let's go to checkout. So if Shopify is making let's call it 2.9% off a small business. When they process the payments if they don't use Shopify, they want to charge them the 2% surcharge.That means they have to control the checkout to. How much GMV, how much in sales of businesses getting so they can charge them that 2%. That is a core piece of the rationale around why at Shopify third-party checkouts are disallowed. You have to use Shopify checkout. They used to have third-party checkouts built by Bold, built by Bolt different companies, D versus T fast.Or merchant-specific ones and they said, no, we don't allow those any longer because we need to know every single piece of data, every single sale. Cause we're going to charge you 2% if you're not processing the payments through us. Okay. That's how they make money. And they're really good at making money.We, on the other hand, believe in our concept of open, which is that we do our best to make the best built-in checkout that way. But if you need to modify that checkout, you can do that. You can download the actual source code. I don't think this is possible. Any other SaaS platform you can download the source code that powers every single pixel in the Big Commerce checkout, modify it, re-upload it.Now you've got a custom checkout running on Big Commerce that you've modified that this still maintains PCI compliance. That's pretty cool. You can also use a third-party checkout. We support proudly Bold and Bolt. And Fast and anybody else who creates a custom checkout, we support checkouts that are different other countries around the world.You can have your own proprietary checkout. You can have a checkout modified for B2B and all the various B2B payment methods. We support that type of openness because businesses are complex businesses need to optimize for their geography and their customer and their use cases. And what we specialize in.Is instead of a one size fits all playbook, open SaaS, flexibility, the power to let a complex business optimize for its complexity. And win that way, 

The opportunity to work from home may be taken for granted a bit more within the last year and a half, but for years Rev.com has been providing opportunities for tens of thousands to work from home. Adri Nowell the VP of Marketing at Rev, came to our studios in Austin, Texas to talk about what it means to her to see so many people able to work from home with Rev.  Adri's experience as a marketer and a leader gives her a unique ability to serve both the Rev customer, as well as the tens of thousands of transcriptionists that Rev employs in a massive remote workforce. “We work with about 70,000 professionals who, some of which don't have great options for how to make money [because] they have an elderly parent or they're a primary caregiver for a child. When I connect with the Rev-ers in our community, it brings me so much joy. I've talked to mothers who have sick children in the hospital who are transcribing at the foot of a hospital bed. Being able to put your child first and be able to provide that type of love and compassion and care for your child while also being able to make a living. Those moments make me so proud.” Learning how Adri runs an ABM campaign, what skills she uses as a leader, and how she thinks about scaling her team will give you great insight into your own exciting growth and leadership. It was so great to speak with Adri in person about her experience in marketing and how they're growing at Rev. Get inspired with Adri, up next here on Marketing Trends. Main TakeawaysThe transition from Doer to Leader: When you're in the trenches doing the actual work, your actual day-to-day responsibilities are different from those of the leadership of your marketing team. Transitioning to leadership isn't for everyone; some really enjoy the work of making the campaigns happen. When you're the leader you have to rely on the savvy of the marketers on your team and give them the tools that you know work and watch them make it happen! Account-Based Marketing Challenges: One of the biggest challenges of running a successful Account-Based Marketing or ABM campaign is getting the structure of the accounts right. Define what a segment is, define who your tier one in the funnel is; define what an account is. If you go through this legwork and really take the time to build a good foundation, you'll have set yourself up for a great campaign. Working with Speed and Excellence as You Scale: When your company is experiencing massive growth it's tempting to just start moving really fast and being okay with things breaking. If you can take a little extra time to make sure that you don't go too fast and make needless mistakes, that is way more profitable in the long run.  You need to quickly automate whatever you can when you're in a high-growth environment so that you can leave that task with confidence as you go to solve the next big problem. Key Quotes“Now that we're going after [more] market segments the marketing responsibilities are going to shift around. We generally test everything that we can; learn quickly; fail quickly; fail cheaply, and for the things that work, invest in them. When you have that type of mindset, you get scrappy marketers that are willing to tackle new challenges, and test new channels or test new tactics.“People get really nervous [about transitioning to leadership]. It's an emotional thing. It's a natural, emotional reaction. And Molly Graham actually describes this really well. And she talks about this concept, this emotional rollercoaster that people go through during these transition periods as she uses the metaphor of building a LEGO tower and then giving away your LEGO tower, which is so relevant. You have all these smart marketers that can jump in and they can tackle a challenge. And they built up their Lego tower and made it successful and then they have to hand their LEGO to the next person coming in. It can be really nerve-wracking. ‘What if someone breaks the LEGO tower? What if they build it back up in the wrong way, or maybe they don't expand upon it in the right way?' And I've found her description of this to be really relevant and taken her advice to talk about it." “Marketing is never settled. You're never done in marketing. Consumer behaviors are always changing. You always want to go back and retest or test different variations. We measure [our success] by getting people to respond. ‘Are we getting them to the next action?' Whether that's actually converting into a paying customer or taking the next step with us in their journey… and when new channels work, we expand them; when they don't, we abandon them. [We're] constantly just exploring new outlets.”“We work with about 70,000 professionals who, some of which don't have great options for how to make money [because] they have an elderly parent or they're a primary caregiver for a child. When I connect with the Rev-ers in our community, it brings me so much joy. I've talked to mothers who have sick children in the hospital who are transcribing at the foot of a hospital bed. Being able to put your child first and be able to provide that type of love and compassion and care for your child while also being able to make a living. Those moments make me so proud.” “With any launch, you start all the way at the timeframe of ‘What's the problem that you're trying to solve?' My philosophy is to listen to the market. You should be talking to your customers; you should be talking to your prospects. You should be talking to people that want to do business with you should also be talking to people who don't want to do business with you.”“The most important thing with account-based marketing is in how you structure the accounts that you want to go after. How do you define what a segment is? What is an account? Who are the customers? Who do you want to reach? What are the contexts within each of those accounts? Who goes into your tier one bucket? And then who's kind of your catch-all for what you want your one-to-one for your tier one accounts. You want your tier one accounts to receive more of a personalized experience, but you don't want to overdo it. If you're going so extreme that it feels forced, people are going to reject the marketing material. There's definitely a place for it, but it's really about finding the right balance.”“Speed is tough and the thing that I've found the most difficult is balancing the speed at which you accelerate growth and operational excellence is it's not hard to go fast. It's hard to go fast and not break things. And so that is where we've found probably the biggest challenge is how can we continue to accelerate growth, but at the same time, establish a foundation that is going to scale. And so with marketing, that's incredibly important because you need the right operational pieces. It is acceptable for some period of time to do things manually, but you can't stay there. You have to put operational pieces in place so that you can scale. Finding the right balance is very challenging.”BioAdri Nowell is VP of Marketing at Rev.com. In this role, she serves as the executive leader accountable for the strategy and execution of marketing programs across all segments - individual users (B2C), Enterprise/Mid-market (B2B), and developers. She provides leadership and management oversight across Product Marketing, Performance Marketing, Email Marketing, Demand Marketing, Content Marketing, Web, Brand, and Creative for the company.Before joining Rev, Adri served as the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Bazaarvoice and before that as Director of Marketing at Volusion. Prior to that, Adri held a variety of roles at engineering technology provider National Instruments including Product Marketing Manager and Support Engineer. Adri began her career at the University of Oklahoma as a Software Developer in the Robotics Institute of Machine Learning. Adri holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from The University of Oklahoma, in Norman, OK.---Marketing Trends podcast is brought to you by Salesforce. Discover marketing built on the world's number one CRM: Salesforce. Put your customer at the center of every interaction. Automate engagement with each customer. And build your marketing strategy around the entire customer journey. Salesforce. We bring marketing and engagement together. Learn more at salesforce.com/marketing.

Key TakeawaysHosted vs. self-hosted is a lot like renting vs. buying. On the one hand, you can have 80% of your problems taken care of - you just need to worry about running your store and your business. But on the other, are the last 20% crucial to running your store or your business?The common self-hosted solutions are Shopify, Volusion, and Big Commerce. There is also Etsy, and the Amazon Marketplace, which are a lot closer to hosted than self-hosted solutions.The oldest self-hosted solution is Magento, but WooCommerce has gained considerable popularity in the last few years.To get a better understand of what you need, it's a good idea to start on a hosted solution. It lets you get up and running (and making money) as quickly as possible. Then as you outgrow the hosted solution, you can seek a self-hosted solution, like WooCommerce.WooCommerce is currently the number 1 self-hosted solution. There are lots of add-ons and resources, making it flexible enough to support just about any type of store you need (with the right amount of work).Another option Patrick mentions is a a hybrid approach. You have a self-hosted solution and you offload certain functions to SaaS products. Big Commerce does this with their WordPress plugin. Metorik does this with WooCommerce analytics.There are also self-hosted partners that offer managed eCommerce solutions - like Plesk's eCommerce Toolkit.One problem Patrick sees a lot is people wondering why their WooCommerce site is slow. We covered site speed and performance in a previous episode, but Patrick's advice: don't cheap out on hosting. Find some good hosting with a company that will make sure your site is up and running, and working well.

Beav Brodie is the founder of Tactical Baby Gear, an amazing brand that provides functional products for dads who want something different. Founded in 2013, they have more than 200.000 customers and an 8-figure annual revenue. They really know how to attract customers with their phenomenal and functional products, and are still keeping advertising and content creating in-house. Today we get into the story, the why and how to scale up your startup by bootstrapping. All this and much more, up next. Bullet points (00:48) Intro (04:08) The start as an entrepreneur (07:11) Launching Tactical Baby Gear in 2013 (11:51) How having products you like changes your mindset (13:25) &BAM (15:18) Transitioning from Volusion to Shopify (16:48) Bootstrapping, building inventory, Facebook ads and scaling (21:03) Finding the target customer and how to advertise (23:28) Getting engagement from ads (25:04) The top traffic channels (27:05) Advertising on Pinterest (29:53) Targeting on Pinterest (33:36) CPM and ROAS: Pinterest vs Facebook (34:57) Tracking on Pinterest (36:16) How ecommerce is changing (37:31) The benefits of keeping advertisement and content creation in-house (39:51) Where to find out more (40:43) Rapid fire question round (41:16) If you ever had to start again, how would you make your money? (42:10) What is the most common or biggest mistake that you see leaders making? (43:16) Who is the best leader ever (alive or dead) and why? (43:30) How do you hire top talent? (45:07) How do you evaluate a good business deal? (49:05) What is one of your proudest moments? (50:48) What is one interesting fact about you that not many people would know? (51:14) What daily routines do you have (morning or evening) that have helped make you successful? (56:18) What book (or books) changed your mindset or life? (59:26) What is the most exciting question you spend your time thinking about? (01:02:15) What advice would you give your younger self? (01:04:17) What unusual or underrated food or drink should more people try out? (01:04:44) What makes you happiest? (01:05:17) Any asks or requests for the audience?

How to Run Effective Google Shopping Ads with Variant Product Pricing - Surge #103 Multiple customers have variant products. They always encounter the same issue when they're trying to run these Google Shopping campaigns. Suppose you have an eCommerce site on BigCommerce, Volusion, or Shopify. They show product options the same way. You sell this jacket with three sizes: small, medium, and large. The small one is $100, the medium is 120 and the larger one is 150.  With the eCommerce platform structure, you have only one page for that product. The price needs to dynamically change and your URL needs to reflect that. Otherwise, when you submit your product feed to Google, Google is going to look at your product page and say this product is $100. If a visitor goes to your site however, they will see different pricing. This leads to your data feed facing automatic rejection. Many people have learned about this dilemma the hard way. We're seeing this problem all the time. If you’re on BigCommerce, the platform has a direct integration with Google Shopping. However, their feed does not have the ability to differentiate the variants based on the products that you're selecting.  These eCommerce store owners are trying to run Google Shopping campaigns for the products that. To do so, they implement variant pricing with either variants, quantity thresholds, or bundled products. Google considers any factor that alters a price as misleading to those shoppers. Therefore, they're going to cut the feed.

How to Build an eCommerce SaaS Tool Or Add-On - Surge #96 If you're in the eCommerce space as a business owner or agency providing services for marketing or PR, you know everyone's trying to go 100% digital and eCommerce is a big part of this. Just look at the stocks of Amazon or any other public eCommerce company out there you're going to see that they have grown significantly because more and more people are now shopping online. Optimum7 a development and marketing department respectively. Initially a marketing agency, development has become a higher priority over the last seven years. Ninety percent of this development is eCommerce related. Team members have built APIS, SaaS solutions and add-ons. The add-ons include apps for Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, Magento, and WooCommerce. 

As two of the oldest eCommerce platforms, Shopify and Volusion have a lot in common. Their subtle but important differences, however, can tip the scales in favor of one over the other. Keep watching to learn more about each and to see which has the upper hand... Which eCommerce platform is the best? Which eCommerce platform should I use? We answer all these questions. Use our Shopify Referral code for a FREE 14-day trial period: ?ref=iwd-agency1 https://www.iwdagency.com/ - The eCommerce Experts Check out our Shopify vs Volusion Blog Post #ShopifyVsVolusion #eCommercePlatform #Shopify #Volusion #eCommerce   ============================================================== Other eCommerce Resources: Shopify vs Etsy Shopify vs Amazon Shopify vs WooCommerce Shopify vs BigCommerce Shopify vs Magento | Top 10 Differences What is Shopify? eCommerce for Dummies ============================================================== Subscribe to our channel   IWD Agency offers online business solutions that help maximize the retailer's consumer base with a professional website, online branding, marketing, and optimizing the overall customer retail experience. Discover the true value of your brand with professional solutions offered by experts in the online retail industry. IWD Agency YouTube channel is focused on providing quality content information, news, tips, tricks, and much more. On our YouTube channel, you'll find all the necessary information that you need to maximize your eCommerce biz. So, make sure to follow our content, share these videos, give us a thumbs up, and leave a comment below. ============================================================== Follow us on: Facebook Instagram Linkedin Pinterest Twitter  While you're at it, check out our blog ===========================================================

Did Volusion File For Bankruptcy? What This Means For eCommerce and For You If You Are On Volusion - Surge Session #86   Volusion filed for Bankruptcy on July 29, 2020. Learn what this means for eCommerce store owners on Volusion and how it effects the eCommerce industry at large.

In this episode, I am interviewing Andy Humphrey about his business, and how he came to decide whether to automate, delegate, or eliminate.  Andy is the owner and founder of SprinklerSupplyStore.com, as well as a sales consultant for Baseline Systems, Inc.  Give us some background about yourself and what your business is (01:50) Andy says he would describe his business as a passion mashup. His professional background started in the wholesale lawn and landscape industry.  He was trained to be a landscape architect and got involved in sales, design, and estimating for a landscape contractor in the Mid Atlantic.  He spent time in distribution, where he worked directly for manufacturers in regional sales management positions. During the course of his career, he has tried to master two things; one being the irrigation and wholesale lawn and landscape industry, and the second is eCommerce. Combining these two business models, he created SprinklerSupplyStore.com.  Essentially, what he is doing is building a B2C with B2B integration into the wholesale distribution model.  In terms of data automation, we ask three questions; where is the data now? Where does it need to go? And what happens to it in between? (09:08) Andy says they use Shopify to take orders, but they used Volusion in the beginning.  Once an order is received, it goes to a branch that is willing to ship it. They tapped into resources that generally don’t ship directly to the consumer, so they required services from their resources that weren’t necessarily typical for them.  He had to create an email containing details of the parts, as well as the shipping address. The receiver at the branch then entered the details into their ERP system, printed it, entered it as an order, and only then could he print the pick ticket in order to get the items and put it in the box before shipping it out.  This resulted in a lot of manual work and processes.  You said you were using Volusion, what did the automation process entail? (11:50) Andy says a number of third party pieces of software were used for the automation process. The first part is inventory; they need to be able to indicate the availability of a product online, and if it is indicated as available, it has to be available. With that in mind, he would receive a CSV file with a list of parts and quantities, and they would get that on an interval, and have it imported into the Volusion store. They would then automate and send orders again.  Roughly 10 years ago, they would send the wholesaler the orders with two digital files; one was the header of the orders, and one was the line items. They noticed a flaw with part number discrepancies. If a number was changed and they didn’t pick it up immediately, the order would be thrown out. Today, they use skew ID, so no matter how many times they change a part number, the skew ID won’t change.  Once they’ve sent the order, the wholesaler would use their shipping software to ship it out in their DPR system. However, numerous failures occurred during every syncing process because of how many times the data had to be exchanged. Finally, they deployed ShipStation. By using the shipping software, orders didn’t have to be synced backward because the software was connected to their eCommerce store. Once shipped, all the needed information would sync back to their system.  Did you try to delegate this process, or did you go straight to automation? (17:28) Andy says he did try to delegate; at the time, they were only two people doing this by hand. Delegation and automation can have the same outcome.  By this, he means that whether he has a computer doing all the work, or another person doing all the work, the point is that he won’t be doing it himself.  Having this free time means you can go sit on a beach, but more importantly, it means you can do something valuable with your time. If it costs him $25 to perform a task, but he can outsource that task for $25, it means that he can do something else worth $50 an hour, thus increasing performance and value.  How do you go about deciding when it’s time to eliminate within the company? (25:58) Andy says he thinks the one thing that cannot be replaced or replicated is phone communication. Clients need to be able to call the company, which builds a good customer relationship.  The negative side of allowing customer call-ins was that their phones were ringing non-stop. Determined not to eliminate phone calls completely, they shortened the hours in which customers can phone, thus eliminating unnecessary hours.  Freeing up hours means there is more time for projects and customer care emails.  He says that’s a good piece of advice he can give business owners; don’t eliminate call-ins completely, but set boundaries. You will still have the advantage of building relationships via phone calls, but you won’t waste unnecessary time.  Connect with Andy on LinkedIn   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this week’s show Patrick and Adam discuss the week’s security news, including: Coronavirus phishing lures are everywhere Czech hospital ransomwared during crisis Voatz mobile voting app destroyed by Trail of Bits audit We recap yesterday’s livestream Windows SMBv3 bug probably not such a big deal ALL the week’s news This week’s sponsor interview is with Sam Crowther, founder of Kasada. They do bot detection and mitigation and apparently they’re quite good at it. Sam joins the show to talk through the new greyhatter of anti-anti-bot. It’s actually a really fun conversation, that one, so stick around for it. Links to everything that we discussed are below and you can follow Patrick or Adam on Twitter if that’s your thing. Show notes State-sponsored hackers are now using coronavirus lures to infect their targets | ZDNet The Internet is drowning in COVID-19-related malware and phishing scams | Ars Technica undefined TA505 and Others Launch New Coronavirus Campaigns; Now the Largest Collection of Attack Types in Years | Proofpoint US Live Coronavirus Map Used to Spread Malware — Krebs on Security Czech hospital hit by cyberattack while in the midst of a COVID-19 outbreak | ZDNet High-Stakes Security Setups Are Making Remote Work Impossible | WIRED A Mobile Voting App That's Already in Use Is Filled With Critical Flaws - VICE Microsoft delivers emergency patch to fix wormable Windows 10 flaw | Ars Technica undefined undefined undefined undefined Medical Device Regulation: EU to give €100bn MedTech industry a security health check | The Daily Swig WordPress to add auto-update feature for themes and plugins | ZDNet undefined Tor team warns of Tor Browser bug that runs JavaScript on sites it shouldn't | ZDNet Avast disables JavaScript engine in its antivirus following major bug | ZDNet US is preparing to ban foreign-made drones from government use | TechCrunch Card data from the Volusion web skimmer incident surfaces on the dark web | ZDNet Intel CPUs vulnerable to new 'Snoop' attack | ZDNet Modern RAM used for computers, smartphones still vulnerable to Rowhammer attacks | ZDNet We Built a Database of Over 500 iPhones Cops Have Tried to Unlock - VICE The Web’s Bot Containment Unit Needs Your Help — Krebs on Security undefined Cyberattack Hits HHS During Coronavirus Response - Bloomberg Microsoft discontinues RDCMan app following security bug | ZDNet Google awards $100k to Dutch bug hunter for cutting-edge cloud security research | The Daily Swig #737140 Mass account takeovers using HTTP Request Smuggling on https://slackb.com/ to steal session cookies oracle chat on prem - Google Search Risky Business - Risky Business publications/voatz-securityreview.pdf at master · trailofbits/publications · GitHub publications/voatz-threatmodel.pdf at master · trailofbits/publications · GitHub Our Full Report on the Voatz Mobile Voting Platform | Trail of Bits Blog Securing a work from home workforce - YouTube

145. Hawk Packaging | Raine Mahdi is the founder and CEO of Hawk Packaging. He has over 15 years of experience in Sales, Marketing, and Business Development. The industries he was involved throughout his career were in Food, Manufacturing, and Importing.This Episode is Sponsored By:Gusto is making Payroll, Benefits, and HR easier for small businesses. In fact, 9 out of 10 customers say Gusto is easier to use than other payroll solutions. Gusto also saves you time – 72% of customers spend less than 5 minutes to run payroll. Get Three Months FREE by using this link: millionaire-interviews.com/gusto.Volusion is the easiest and fastest all-in-one E-commerce platform designed specifically for small businesses. With Volusion, you get stunning 100% free themes built from the ground-up with the best in-class design and seo. Get a free 14 day no-risk trial, no credit card required, and get 50% off on your first month plan with code: millionaire, just visit: millionaire-interviews.com/volusion.Ruby is a live virtual receptionist and 24/7 live chat service dedicated to helping small business owners grow their businesses. From answering and transferring calls to taking messages and answering FAQs, booking appointments and capturing leads and intake information, Ruby’s got your back. Try Ruby risk free with their 21 day money-back guarantee, just visit millionaire-interviews.com/callruby. Want to Support the Show? Well we'd love for you to join our Patreon Group!  What's in it for you?  Well you'll instantly get a scheduled call from Austin, where he'll help you with your current or future business... Sign-Up Now at millionaire-interviews.com/patreon.

TOMS Shoes Creditors to Take Over the Company, California’s Landmark Gig-Work Law Takes Effect Amid Controversy, California Consumer Privacy Act Officially Takes Effect, Fedex and UPS Raise Fees on Oversized Packages, Volusion Debuts SMB Financing, and more. You can see the full show notes for this episode at https://www.ecommercefuel.com/january-3-2020/ . The News Cart features industry news, community discussions, compelling job opportunities and interesting content around the web from the previous two weeks.

Sometimes a business can go through the acquisition cycle once, twice, or even more. A deal that was pivotal to our development back 2011 came back through Quiet Light this year and our very own Brad Wayland is here talking to the buyer, Richard Bell, about his recent purchase of a business we originally sold 8 years ago. Throughout his career, Richard Bell has mostly been in the high tech world. He's worked in sales, product development, marketing, business development, and mergers and acquisitions. He stayed mainly on the strategic side of running a business before deciding to make a purchase of his own last year. He started off small, looking to take his breadth of behind-the-scenes knowledge to bat with YUGSTER, the e-commerce business he bought. While Richard's thorough due diligence process may have initially overwhelmed the seller, the two worked well together in the end. Richard did a lot of the work up front, showed the seller he was serious, and greatly reduced the risk for problems once the deal was done. Episode Highlights: How Richard went about the search process and decided to buy this business. Factors that made the purchase good a fit. Who YUGSTER sells to. How the office and staff structure has changed since Richard took over. Richard's SBA purchase choice and how he navigated the process. Advice for anyone considering an SBA purchase. The rebrand and other changes that Richard made with Yugster, now called Until Gone. Successes and growth he's seen since the changes to the site. The software and the technology he's using and how he's are taking advantage of modern applications and platforms. Ways shopify has become the go to e-commerce cart choice for vendors. The biggest challenge Richard has encountered since the acquisition. Words of advice for others looking to delve into the purchase process. Transcription: Mark: One of the darkest periods in the history of Quiet Light Brokerage happened around 2011. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with Quiet Light at that time. And due to some personal situations going on with health issues with a family member of mine I took my eye off the ball of Quiet Light for a little bit of time and found ourselves in a position where frankly we didn't have a lot of money coming in. We had a lot more money going out and not a lot of deal flow at the same time. It was at that point in time when a great listing, a great business literally just fell on my lap and I was able to get that listing on the market, get it sold within a few days or at least found a buyer within a few days and it really represented kind of a life vest for me which really helped in bringing Quiet Light Brokerage profits back off the brink of extinction. One of the great things about this business that I love is seeing some of the companies that we touch early on grow and sometimes come back to us. When I originally started Quiet Light Brokerage my previous company that I'd sold came back through Quiet Light. I sold it again. I actually ended up selling that company a total of three times which was pretty fascinating to do. Today we don't have Joe on the introduction. We have Brad because Brad talked to one of his previous clients; a buyer that just closed an acquisition and they bought the business that served as a life vest for me back in 2011. Brad, how was the conversation with Richard? Brad: You know it's really great. I didn't actually know that background. I think he sent me an email and said hey I've got a lot on my plate. This is a good listing. Do you want to take a peek at it and see if you can put a value on it and help them get it sold? So I didn't know that backstory I just knew that you had sold it once previously. So it's one of those situations where we had a guy that was in Richard the buyer; we had a guy that was looking for an investment. He had inquired on a little tiny listing that I had out at the time it's like a hundred thousand dollars and came to the conclusion that it wasn't a good fit. But I had picked up on that this guy was like a serious M&A guy. I could already tell from the get-go like why is this guy looking at a hundred thousand dollar listing? This guy supposed must be looking at much larger listings than this. So I was a little surprised and ended up floating in the details of this listing that we had for a daily deal site that kind of needed someone with the ability to kind of handle a lot of moving parts. I felt like he seemed like the perfect personality for it. And so I floated it his way and the next day he sent me an LOI and it was just really smooth sailing from there on out from his side of things. He just was a really great buyer to work with and so I wanted to bring him on the podcast. I think he's done several things that have been really interesting with that company. Mark: How is this due diligence process different than say your average buyer out there? Brad: Yes. So when we do these deals they always look a little bit different. After we get an LOI why we are involved sometimes a lot in the due diligence process. Sometimes we're not involved very much at all. We have kind of standard folders and things that people want to look at; bank statements or proofs out of PayPal or your credit card provider. Things like that where people can kind of verify the numbers. In the case with Richard I found out after he got under LOI he had done like 200 million dollars in acquisitions in the corporate world. He was a very seasoned and experienced M&A guy. I can't remember how many transactions he had done but he had been responsible for some very large deals for I think a publicly-traded company. And so he put his diligence request together and he said hey I'm working on my diligence request and I sent them over to the seller. I think the seller about passed out. It was just; there was nothing wrong with it. It was very thorough but when you get these really experienced guys sometimes you think that means it's going to be a piece of cake for the seller but it doesn't always mean that. Sometimes if you've got a seller that's really done it's kind of like hey I'm just ready to move on and I don't want to look at it anymore. It can be a little bit of a challenge. And so we definitely dealt with that a little bit on this one where we've got a really seasoned buyer who had a very nice thorough package of diligence information that he wanted gathered. And then we had a seller that was really ready to be finished. And when he got the packet I think he felt like oh my goodness I just put all this work into getting the listing ready now we're going to go through this diligence process that is way more exhausting than what I did whenever I bought it on the front end. But honestly it was two great guys; the seller was a great seller, the buyer was a great buyer and they worked very well together and I think they've continued to be friends post-transaction. Mark: That the seller that you worked with was the buyer when I sold this business, and he still remains one of my favorite people that I've worked with out at Quiet Light. He is a fantastic guy. I think people sometimes get intimidated especially in the sell-side when they see these really long due diligence lists. But I've learned over the years, and I don't know how you feel about this Brad, but I've learned over the years that a thorough due diligence list is a good sign. It's usually a sign that the buyer is extraordinarily serious because look you have to generate all the information the buyer has to digest that information and that's really tough. And it also reduces the risk after the sale. Because if they're doing a thorough due diligence the chances of something coming back on you after are pretty small because they've done their homework. Brad: Yeah I totally agree with that. I actually tell my sellers all the time if they are complaining about the due diligence process I always tell them the work you're putting in now is saving you headache later. If you're going to go ahead and give them all the things that they need today they're not going to be the type of buyer that's coming back to you and saying hey man I really need you to help me with this or that I need to take advantage of these hours that we carved into the APA and train me on these different things. And I definitely have seen the transactions where they don't ask for much and then I find out later that the buyers had to come back to the seller several times asking for things and it seems like it is a better situation to just kind of lay all the cards on the table and do the work upfront and kind of have the ability to be done with the business and kind of transition to your next thing. Mark: That's a lot of chitchat on our part let's go ahead and listen to the interview. Brad: Welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. I'm your host today Brad Wayland and we are joined today by Richard Bell. Hey Richard how are you today? Richard: I'm doing great, thanks. Nice to see you. Brad: Good. Yeah. So we've been doing this series of podcasts on folks that have bought something from Quiet Light and now we're kind of following up with them; seeing how things went, learning about why they bought, what they learned early on, what the challenges are and so today's kind of one of those profiles. And this one has a really unique kind of proposition that I want to kind of get into later but we usually start off by just getting some background. We don't do like these fancy intros. We let our guests kind of describe themselves. So Richard give the profile of what your career has looked like and tell me kind of where you've been. Richard: Sure, I'm happy to. I've done a variety of different roles which I think is one of the reasons that set me up well to do or set me up to do well with this job of running this business. I mostly worked in the high tech world with one particular company called Akamai Technologies. And within that company, I had spent time in sales roles, technical roles, product development, marketing, a lot of time in business development, and mergers and acquisitions with business development side and really partnership focused. And the roles I had after I left Akamai were very similar positions where I had a chance to really look at strategic issues, touch on a lot of different things across the whole breadth of running a business so it set me up well for the position I'm in now. Brad: Yeah that's great. I remember; I think you had inquired on another listing that I had. I think it was a pretty small listing and we got talking about it and you gave me some background I think in the time you told me like hey I ran M&A for a big corporation for a long time and gave me some pretty staggering numbers in terms of the dollars of deals you had helped close for your business. And when I heard it I was thinking about this potential listing it was coming up for this business called Yugster which I thought was the strangest name. I was not familiar with it even though we had sold it in the past but Yugster was Yours Until Gone and it was Yugster.com. And Mark Daoust the founder of Quiet Light called me and said hey we sold this business like years and years ago and now the guy that we sold it to is interested in selling it again and asked me if I would like to take a look at it. So when you started talking and I could hear your operational background I thought this might be a good fit for you and I think I just said hey I've got an idea I want to kind of float to you and I feel like that's kind of how we started it. Is that what you remember? Richard: Absolutely. I mean I started looking for a business probably six or nine months before you and I ever even touched base. Part of that was me doing homework on sort of what was out there and how to look at these businesses that were a lot smaller than the kinds of things that I'd looked at before where we're talking sale prices in the nine figures; so very large businesses, large multiples is in stack. And so I wasn't quite sure how to go about buying frankly a smaller business. And there's a lot of chat out there. I mean you know that and you know there's a lot of brokers out there who would just put a listing out for anything. So you end up learning quite a bit about what's really there and what's meaningful just by going through that process. And we did look at a business for another e-com site that you had posted up there and I think we had decided it was a little bit too seasonal for what we were doing. And then you threw the Yugster thing out there. I think it hadn't even gone public and I'm like Yugster? As a marketing guy that was like just you know what that is. But yeah that's exactly the story and so I think when I got my teeth around that one it actually made a lot of sense for me. I was kind of excited about it. Brad: Yeah. And correct me if I'm wrong but so the business model was it had been a drop shipping business I think since day one and it still had a very impressive; you're looking at it and I'm looking at the sign and I'm thinking this looks kind of antiquated. It looks a little bit like it's seen its better days. But when I looked at the results and we're talking about a low eight-figure business that was on some slightly declining trends and I could just tell that the light bulb kind of went off for you about like I think I might better inject some life into this and I clearly could see that you'd be able to handle the size of a business that was from what you had done before. But what specifically about Yugster was interesting to you? Like when you first looked at it what were you thinking like this is a good fit for me because of what? Richard: Like I said I went through this process where I started talking to some different brokers about a variety of different businesses to help me get educated about what's out there. There are a lot of businesses out there especially in the e-commerce space that are really it is an Amazon store. Somebody who is importing some private label from China and then they're essentially listing it on Amazon and having Amazon do fulfillment and so forth. It doesn't, and the issue I got to is that it doesn't really leverage my skills. There is not a lot of value that you can add to some of those kinds of businesses. Maybe you get a few more distribution channels or what have you. What I saw with Yugster was really interesting to me that it was a fully operating business. Yes, it was drop ship but they had relationships with a sizable number of vendors. They had a functioning platform. They were not dependent on other marketplaces like Amazon which could be all over the place or eBay or whatever. They had their own storefront. It had been established I think in 2005 or early 2006 when it went live. So it had a long life which is really important in terms of longevity and the brand and so forth. And the other thing that I; the two other things that I really looked at and I liked about it, one was it had a core staff. There were talented people that had a good resume and seem to know what they were doing. And it also had a really solid customer base. They had a loyalty program they've run for many years. These were customers that had been buying from Yugster repeatedly and they had it tiered up and they were kind of passionate about the business. And these sort of strong customer base, loyal customer base that's established, the staff is there and a technology platform that I thought I could really make a difference with because I do have a strong tech background; all of those things kind of came together for me and made me want to dive in with Yugster. Brad: Yeah that's interesting. So of course as just kind of a layperson when I go to the site I think of it as like a daily discount kind of idea. I see like maybe a generation ago iPad or MacBook or something like that. Is it retail-focused folks like me or is it more like small businesses that are like hey we need iPads for our production floor? We don't need the latest and greatest we need to get 10 of this. Is it a mix of those types of customers or who really is the customer that comes to this place? Richard: A really good question and it's changed a bit. So the business model just to kind of flesh that out a little bit more for the audience it is a daily deal site. And what that mostly involves is sort of inventory end so people might have a couple hundred or something left and they just want to get rid of it. It could be there's a lot of refurbished product out there that like you're saying is a year or two behind and for most people you need the latest and greatest Apple MacBook Pro or is one that's two or three years old is going to work just fine for you even the things like vacuums and what have you. And so there's a range of products but we get them; we typically really focus on running them for a period of a few days. We sell out the inventory and then we move on to the next product and cycle through it. Our customers have; we're historically very male. So 70, 80% male buyers; the profile would be sort of bargain hunters, people that are somewhat shopaholic shows up in the mix as well. Since we've moved the business over to; I took it over last year and we kind of modified the site and the product mix and we're actually closer to 50-50 male-female at this point because we have a lot more home goods than we used to. And one of the things so your point about selling to businesses I've actually noticed a significant increase in the number of orders from businesses. We really used to have only a small handful but now I've seen things like schools. I've seen a school order like 20 Chrome books from us. They're going to use them with smaller kids and they just don't need the latest and greatest. They just need a laptop. Ipads, as you suggested, is another great example, I've seen a bunch of those go out for businesses that are needing it but the latest and greatest current generation isn't required for what they're doing. They're doing order entry or checking people out kind of thing. Yeah but it's definitely shifted and I think some of that is the changes that we've made in the site and the business as well which I think we'll get into this. Brad: Yeah. You mentioned the staff I kind of want to jump to that. So from what I recall you're in Washington are you in the Seattle area? Richard: I am yeah. Brad: And then this business was in Salt Lake I believe and there was a physical office there. And how many employees were in that office? Richard: There was about nine. Brad: Okay, and so what have you done with that? Have you kept that office there, did you retain that staff, what have you done in terms of changing that since you bought the business? Richard: Great question; so because of my background being in tech most of my career the majority of the people that I manage were actually remote, some as far away as China or India in different roles that I have. And so I'm very personally very comfortable running a remote staff. And so one of the things that we did is actually close that office because it wasn't adding much in the way of value and home office everybody. So the whole organization now is based out of their own homes and we use a lot of EG Suite technologies or a lot of video meetings, audio calls, whatever, Slack to communicate and stay very, very highly interactive between us. But everybody just works from home in their jammies or sweats or whatever [inaudible 00:18:56.1] worked. So I think you asked about did we keep the staff and we kept 100% of the employees. We gave everybody a job offer as they came over because we wanted to really evaluate what they could do with different leadership and sort of reenergizing the business. And we made some with that some staffing turnover since people that pursued other opportunities or maybe weren't the right fit for us where we were going. But I'd say about 80% of the staff is the same as what it was when I acquired the business. Brad: Yeah that's really interesting you know at Quiet Light we run a distributed team as well and so we've got eight brokers in the States, we've got two overseas, but it is an interesting timeframe that we live in where I actually go to an office. If you see behind me my house is not behind me but I have five children at home so that can be challenging at the house. I choose to rent an office but I do think it is interesting in this day and age that remote works so well and I feel like as a general rule people are happier when they can choose where they go to work. Richard: And I will actually tell you that the last round of hiring we did was for some new buyers that we brought into the business and the ability for both of them to work from home was actually a big competitive advantage in getting them to come on board. Brad: Yeah, that's really interesting. So we don't really use this as like a sales pitch but as you're sitting there talking about what you guys do; I mean our listeners, we have a lot of listeners to this podcast and a lot of them are small entrepreneurial shops, some are like PE firms and you've got your like solo entrepreneurs so I'm just kind of curious where do our listeners kind of fit in to the kind of product mix that you guys offer at your business? Like what are the types of things that they might be most interested in that you sell on a daily basis now? Richard: Sure. I mean I would say for that kind of audience you're probably looking at mostly the technology and maybe some of the home goods for example. So on the tech side, we sell all kinds of computers; Windows and Macs, desktops, laptops, Chrome books, iPads, even phones. Obviously, that technology suite is something that just about every entrepreneur or business will need to some degree. If you're somebody who's looking for like I said the absolute latest and greatest it's not going to be on our side and I'll be upfront like we don't sell the latest Mac books at all. Almost all of our tech in that sense is refurbished and you pay for what you get. I mean if you're buying a refurbished laptop and you're buying 300 bucks for a Mac Book it's going to be older. But for an awful lot of people that are simply doing email that kind of thing that works just fine. And we also have a range where we go from let's say a Mac Book at 300 all the way up for a Mac Book at 1,200. So you get to choose sort of what level you want and what you really need. But there are generally some pretty good bargain prices in terms of the type of technology and look that people are after. On good side, I mean coffee bar if you've got a home office everybody needs coffee. You can't function without it. So one of our vendors; an awesome vendor is the exclusive factory refurbished provider for Ninja products. Ninja makes some incredible home appliances. There was this great little ninja coffee bar that's sort of a single serving fresh ground coffee maker and they sell like crazy. People love them. And so yeah I think there are some tech products and some home products that would be a good fit for any business person. Brad: Yeah that's great. I want to get into some of the changes that you've made but one thing I want to kind of back up to that kind of struck me and not something I've seen that often was your deal structure. I remember talking to you and kind of floating you the price and you said yeah I'm a cash buyer so we can leverage that; no problem. And then when we got to LOI and you called me and said hey I think I'm going to utilize some SBA on this and I'm going to put down way more than what they'll require but I've got an SBA lender that I want to tap into. I just kind of like for you to explain to our listeners kind of as much as you're willing to share about that process what you're thinking was and like basically how you kind of navigated that SBA process? Richard: Yeah actually that's a really good question because I guess it is a little bit unique. I did have the cash going in to pay 100% of it down, the issue for me really was just in one-word flexibility; being able to conserve my capital, put down enough to be meaningful so the SBA approval process was a no brainer. But not be running really tight on sort of the amount of down payment I did but keeping and a good chunk of reserve capital because there's always been sort of a possibility that I might acquire other businesses that I would add on to this as well and you want to have that flexibility in place. And I also wanted to make sure that once I had acquired the business I didn't want to have to use all the capital for the acquisition. Obviously, you need operating capital and you would build that into any plan. But I also wanted to be in a situation where I had enough investment capital inside the business that I could invest in the company and make the changes that I wanted. And so when I looked at the overall sort of combination of things it made a lot of sense to sort of mix us up a little bit and take; I would have to look at the paperwork again but I think we did something like 40% down cash and 60% finance. And what that essentially did for me is mean that within the business I had a good chunk of capital available to pay for all the technology changes and enhancements that I wanted to make to move the business forward because we knew we would need to do that going. Brad: Yeah I found it very interesting; so SBA we have just a massive number of people reaching out to us looking for SBA eligible businesses and wanting to talk to us about it. And I will say that one of the common pitfalls that I think that our buyers kind of find themselves in is trying to maximize the SBA situation for themselves. So a person thinks okay on the high-level point an SBA loan can be a 10% down kind of situation. That's in the absolute most ideal scenario would be a 10% down. So someone has $250,000 in capital that they can put down on a business and so their mind immediately goes to okay then I'll buy a 2 ½ million dollar business. And what I've kind of found over time doing these SBA deals is that those end up being a tough deal. If anything goes even remotely wrong then now all of a sudden the deal is falling apart; maybe the valuation doesn't come back high enough, maybe there's more inventory than was expected and SBA can't cover the inventory. So actually you were the first person that I've had to do that and I've had a couple of people do it since but you're the first person that came and said hey I can pay cash but I'm going to go ahead and use SBA. And honestly, I think SBA has a lot of advantages and a lot of disadvantages. The advantages are from a broker standpoint it really opens up our buying pool. We can offer something as an SBA. We really open up the number of buyers that can come in. But for the seller, SBA can be a grind to get through especially in these situations where people are putting down the minimum amount. I think with what you did was interesting because I never got a single phone call from the SBA lender in your deal. I never heard anything about it. You kept me updated on kind of where things are going and that is not typical for what we do with at Quiet Light. A lot of times we're introducing them to an SBA lender and then we're getting the play by play and we're delivering information back to the sellers about what's going on. In your case you said I'm going to use SBA. I thought you put down 50%; maybe you put down 40% I can't remember, but you put down a big chunk and just said I want the flexibility and I think that really proved to show just a really wise move on your part from a business decision and it didn't hold us up at all. We literally got that thing closed right on time where we were expecting in terms of timing at least the way that I'd kind of set the expectations for our seller. Richard: I would just add to that Brad. I think the advice I'd give anyone considering buying a business is get your house in order. One of the reasons the SBA process on our side went smoothly was because our finances and sort of our credit rating; everything was cleaned up so that there was nothing weird on our credit reports. It was all sort of looking pretty and accounts that needed to be closed or resolved were done. So when the bank looked at things; they look at your credit report, they look at your house, they look at your mortgage, your payment histories you want to be able to give them a very clean robust picture and be able to give it to them boom here it is. And then we also had a very clear picture of the financials and what we were going to do with the business. We gave them a 30-page business plan that essentially laid out here's the financials, here's what we're going to invest in, here's the changes we're going to make, here's the timeline, here's the results and they were conservative. They weren't sort of wild willy-nilly captain. And so between getting our own personal numbers kind of cleaned up; and this is everything just from credit numbers to even just having a nice clean resume. I mean you're applying to SBA and they want to see your business history and what you've done. So you can't take the resume that you use for your job five years ago and just slap it down. It's got to show the bank that you know how to run a business. And so there's a lot of little things that you can do to get ready and so we had those in place before you and I even got into this acquisition process. The other comment I would add about doing the sort of 10% down, I mean we could have gotten approved on a bigger deal at 10% down. I would never have done it in a million years. And part of this maybe comes from my M&A experience which is obviously a lot larger kind of mix. But one thing I learned is that no matter how good you are at diligence, no matter what you know about this particular industry, any business you have is going to have some surprises and it's going to have some ups and downs. And so one of the problems I see with people that would be doing sort of this 10% in sort of right on the bleeding edge you're not going to have enough capital to be really flexible. You're going to struggle with investments and here's, and this is maybe not something that people don't really think about that much but buying a business is stressful. You're running a new business. You're investing. This is potentially your whole income, your life, what you're doing, a good chunk of your personal assets are going to get tied up and it's stressful even if you have tons of money to play with. Putting yourself right on the edge where your finances are squeezed that tight where you're doing 10% down and that's everything that you've got it just adds to the stress level in a way that's not good for running the business. It's not good for you personally on a health basis. So I think if I can look back at it and say what's my advice to people to get through an acquisition process using SBA prepare; good credit cleaned up, get all your documentation in order, get your resume pretty and all that stuff but don't squeeze yourself so tight that you don't have flexibility, you don't have capital to invest, you're going to panic if you have any ups and downs. It's not worth it. That's too much stress when you really want to be thinking clearly, being able to make smart decisions with some perspective on it. You for sure know this Brad it's really hard to make perspective when you're tight on the finances and you're panicking. So all those things factored in sort of where I went to. But I would definitely encourage people to make sure they've got enough of a cushion and flexibility to run their business confidently. Brad: Now I totally share your thoughts on that. And in my operating days that is really exactly how we tried to run the business. If you don't have a good amount of cash on hand it just makes something that's already difficult to do running a business that much more difficult and puts additional strain on you whenever you get some of those unknown kinds of problems that come up. One of the things I remember about you; I actually don't refer to you by name I tell people one time I sold a business to this M&A guy that had done a lot of corporate deals and let me tell you something if you think that diligence folder that you saw today is involved I should show you his because I remember it was a thorough deck of information. You had that thing all laid out perfectly. It was like okay one of the things I think I learned there is the pros have seen everything. So when you laid out that diligence folder and I saw it I was like it was organized, it was great, there was nothing wrong with but it was lot. It was a lot of information. You're very thorough, very detailed, and it kind of makes sense to me that it's gone well for you doing this business. Okay, I want to get into; so I was thinking about doing some podcast episodes and I think I emailed you maybe a month ago and said hey I went to a Yugster and there's no more Yugster. So talk about the rebrand and then let's talk about some other changes that you made. Richard: Yugster had a cult following behind it. And cult followings are great. There's a lot of loyalty that goes into that. But it was not a brand that was going to work well to sort of reach out to a larger audience. And so we, the team; I got the leadership team that was in place one of the first things we did was restructure internally to kind of give them really clean roles and responsibilities in purchasing and marketing because it had all been sort of blurred before. And what we then took off and did is really sit down and think about the kinds of changes we wanted to make in the business. The brand was a big piece of it. And we did really dig in on the idea of keeping the extra brand but we also knew that we needed to give it a refresh, improve the look and feel of the website, and sort of get it to a healthier sort of message and make it more attractive to people. In the end, when we kind of dug through it Yugster as a brand itself wasn't going to scale for us. It wasn't going to bring in a larger audience that we were sort of now starting to pursue and chase. So we spent some time doing; figure out what brands you want to work with, see what domain names are out there. We knew we wanted a dot com. We also knew that we wanted to keep a little synergy with the Yugster. We didn't want to go too far away from it and so as you mentioned, in the beginning, Yugster had become Yours Until Gone and YUG would show up throughout the branding of the site. The loyalty program was called YUG points. There was a lot of YUG that showed up. And so we figured if we kept the Until Gone piece of it that would be a nice connection. And so it turned out that that brand or that domain was actually available for purchase. This is where we made some of our capital investment; it was actually buying that domain name. And it's worked out great. I would say that the marketing team did; it could be a case study frankly in the rebranding going from Yugster to Until Gone. I won't say everything was perfect but it was as good as I've ever seen it done. And what the team put together and it was fantastic. We had a few customers that didn't make it over but the vast majority did. And we went live with the new Until Gone site which we can talk about some of the software stuff we did here in a second on September 1st. And I can tell you, Brad, if I showed you the detailed financials you'll see them start to grow through December and then there's this inflection point September 1st where they just kicked up and you start seeing this nice steady growth curve. And I think a lot of it had to do with we made changes over the summer to the Yugster's site to clean it up, make it a little bit more polished, but there's only so much that we were able to do. Once we went to the new site which was a completely revamped look and feel and brand I think it; for all the customers that we were bringing in, it just gave them confidence. That look and feel was a lot more professional; a lot more polished than the old site had been. And while we lost some of the cult kinkiness that was tied in with Yugster I think the more professional side appealed to a much larger group who were more willing to buy and make purchases through the site. And that's why we see the growth and that's continued to accelerate as we came into 2019. Brad: Yeah when I saw it actually; so I was kind of going through my list of deals and I've closed 20 deals at Quiet Light since I've been here and so I was kind of just looking at it and trying to think about what would be good podcast episodes. So I'd gone through 14 of them or so when I hit Yugster and as soon as I hit it and I went to the site I was like I know there's a story here because I mean it looks fantastic. I remembered what the old site looked like. I see what the new one looks like. It's like I could totally get that you were very thoughtful about how you approached it and how you kind of kept that Until Gone. I think that was really smart. So I totally could see the thought process from a marketer's standpoint of what you were doing and it seems to me like it did go really well just from an optics standpoint on my part. So it doesn't surprise me that your trends are good. We're getting somewhat short on time let's get into the software a little bit. I want to know what kinds of changes you've made to the stack and just kind of go wherever you want with that but I kind of want to know what you've been doing there? Richard: You know we can make a podcast about that in and of itself. There were some really interesting lessons learned I guess but I'll try to keep it focused for the group because not everyone's a techie. But basically, we have replaced 100% of the stack at this point. The original plan had been to upgrade the existing stack and put a new front end on it the new Until Gone front end basically and then do a bunch of workarounds creating APIs. And what APIs are for anyone who's not familiar with it they are programmatic interfaces that allow third parties to engage with your site. And so, for example, we wanted our vendors, our partners who were doing shipping to be able to work with us via API rather than exchanging text file CSVs for example. And the reason for that is just sort of accuracy, the time to market, and so forth. And there were lots of opportunities to do that to help our vendor and ourselves frankly work better together. Once we got into the details and we started looking at the Until Gone site design and what we wanted to do it would have required too many changes to the existing platform that would have left behind, in all honesty, a lot of stuff that we still needed to change. And so I think we closed the deal the first week of May last year; May 7th, 2018, by the end of June we had made the decision to do a full stack replacement top to bottom. And so we sourced a company actually here in Seattle to do a new website front end design and to then actually do the implementation on Shopify. We're on Shopify plus because we're large enough that we need to be on the bigger platform with the capabilities that they give us. And then that meant that we had to build a new back end because with the number of vendors we work with, with the way we work, with the flexibility we wanted to do it would not have been possible for us to just rely on Shopify. Now that won't be the case for a lot of e-commerce vendors but we operate more like a marketplace and we need to process a lot of purchase orders out to our vendors and take products in and not every product goes on-site and so forth. So we had to have control over that back end and so essentially we built out a completely new platform stack that operates; there's an admin portal, there was a huge amount of infrastructure for integrating with Shopify and providing all the APIs that we essentially built out. And what we've done since then is build some custom APIs. We've integrated with ShipStation which is a shipping management tool that a lot of our vendors utilize. We've integrated with ChannelAdvisor. We've integrated with a great company called Quitch just similar to ChannelAdvisor but a little bit more technology-focused. We're finalizing an integration with Celera Cloud which is another one of these integrator platforms that a lot of vendors and suppliers utilize. And so that's given us just a huge amount of flexibility because it was sort of getting rid of a lot of the deadwood that had existed previously. We've been able to do things that we weren't able to do previously and really take advantage of technology to reach our customers better. And so some examples of that we actually built a little ad engine so that we could serve our own products as ads to our customers and notification emails. We've done things with targeting where we've essentially built kind of a; think of it as a mini CRM, customer relationship management platform where the marketing emails that we send to them are fully targeted to their interests, their likes, what they prefer. Each of these changes as we've gone into the stack had given us sort of an incremental growth and helped us improve that curve, show better metrics, and have better control. It's also allowed us to really tightly integrate with our vendors and we continue to invest in it. We have some new capabilities coming out this week frankly that we want to get in place before Q4 that will allow us to do some things that will really improve our shipping and our customer service related to that because that's always a big issue with customers. So I'm happy to get into more it detailed Brad but I don't want to take up the time just talking about coding and Google Cloud and what we did. That's not our focus here. Brad: No, I think you hit some great highlights there and actually it's been interesting to watch Shopify and it's kind of dominance really in the kind of hosted stores platform. I think WordPress as a CMS is now like 35% of the world's websites and I can tell you from my perspective of operating for many years and kind of coming from that custom website world where we built everything from scratch because it gave us more flexibility and then seeing the kind of out of the box solutions come on the scene and then seeing Shopify and Volusion and WiX and these other players come on the scene. But it really seems like Shopify has asserted some dominance in the space at this point or just I mean there's entire; I'll be speaking at an event in San Diego next month and at that event, it's Shopify sellers. I'm going on a podcast in two weeks. It's just Shopify folks that work with Shopify every day. And we find a lot of our sellers now when they have high margin products are really utilizing the Facebook Pixel for marketing and for some reason Shopify plus the Facebook Pixel is just the combo that everyone wants to use. It's just Shopify is just kind of become this I think of it became kind of like WordPress for the CMS. I feel like Shopify is kind of becoming the e-commerce shopping cart or store hosted platform for the e-com side. Did you have any struggle with choosing to go with Shopify? Was that a tough decision for you? Richard: No, not really I mean I think we really looked at Shopify and BigCommerce. They're really the sort of two that we were down to at that point. We did look at Magento which is both a platform that you can just open source and build your own but they also have a hosted option. That was much more complicated and had a tech stack that we weren't sure we really wanted to work with. So it really came down to Shopify versus BigCommerce. And honestly, it was a combination of the partner we ended up wanting to work with was more comfortable with Shopify. And we also looked at Shopify and felt like you were saying given their market share and their size it was a good fit and I think it made sense to do that. I will say I came from a platform world so I'm very comfortable with using these kinds of platforms and I will say there are tradeoffs. There are huge positives; as an example of a positive, when I wanted to implement Apple Pay on the site and our payment processor already supported it. So I did all the things I needed to do with Apple, I hooked it up with my payment processor, went into Shopify, one checkmark and it's live and ready to go. The Facebook Pixel is another one. You configure the Facebook stuff in Shopify, it's done like that. Google Analytics is the same thing and so there's a lot of functionality that's built into the platform that you don't have to customize; that you don't have to tweak but you can still change things like your notification emails to make them personalized for your look and feel. So I think there are some really great things there in working with a platform. The flip side there is some loss of control. You don't have necessarily quite the same flexibility. There was a feature we were talking about the other day in my management team's meeting. The reality was if it was on our platform we could do it in a minute. It's just on Shopify it's going to be difficult to get it live and implemented not because of anything I say it would be a real flaw with Shopify but just because when someone else is running a platform there's sort of some constraints that you get into it. But I'm comfortable with the Shopify decision. I think I'd make the same one again. I think given their size, given the number of big brands that are using them now it's a good solid fit. So yeah I would go there again. Brad: Okay. And one of the things I kind of wanted to at least ask was the biggest challenge; what's been the biggest unforeseen kind of thing that you have had to tackle at least that you're comfortable sharing? Richard: Sure. I mean there are always surprises in acquiring any business and challenges are going to come up. You end up having to do more of something than you expected and so forth and it kind of throws you. I would say in this case I was actually; probably the biggest challenge was the technology side. Not because it was inherently a bad decision or difficult to rebuild the platform and do what we did; it was absolutely the right decision. I guess the point I would make is we weren't expecting to make that decision for 12 months. It was kind of something we were looking at as a 2019 project and it ended up being a 2018 project. And so what I had actually hoped to do was use the existing platform and like I said give it a facelift; redo the front end, make it into Until Gone but rely on the same core operational platform and just maybe do a few extensions. And it didn't end up being possible to get where I knew that we needed to be. From a marketing; branding capability perspective we had to make the changes. And so basically from July through the end of September, it was heads down coding. I wrote more code in those two months than I think I had in the previous 10, 20 years. Brad: Wow. Richard: My career has not been as a coder I've been in sort of management but we had to build a completely new platform from scratch and so it was a lot of stuff that we were putting together to make it work. And that continued through Q4 and even into this year as we add new features. And like I said earlier now we're at a point where we're really adding some really unique distinctive capabilities. We've even thought about spinning out some businesses to take the stuff that we've built and Shopify has this huge app ecosystem; apps that you can plug into Shopify and extend its core capabilities. A lot of what we've now built are things that are unique and not available within that ecosystem and so we think there are some opportunities just to extend that and make that sort of additional part of the business. But I would say that was my number one sort of challenge or I guess surprise and sort of what we did. And at times it's taken me away from running the business in a way that I wanted to. But I think it's ended up like I said being in a good place at this point. Brad: And it's really interesting and I do think the Shopify kind of app marketplace is pretty vibrant. We had a lead come through a couple of weeks ago that we were discussing among the team, it was a collection of some apps and I think it was bringing in about $80,000 a month and recurring revenue from a group that had built several apps in the space. So I do think that there's a pretty large market there to tap into. Well, I really want to thank you for coming on the show today. It's really helpful to our audience. I hope it ends up being helpful to you. People reach out to me all the time when I'm on these podcasts so I hope that you get to make some good connections from coming on and giving us some of your time. Do you have any parting pieces of advice for those looking to buy or sell an online-based business? Richard: I guess since I haven't sold a business of this size I'll maybe not give advice on that just yet but as a buyer, I would say don't sit on the fence. It's one of the best things you can possibly do. Get out of your corporate life. Find a broker that you trust, that you like, that you can build a relationship with and tell them what you're looking for. Don't make stuff up or blow smoke or try to sound bigger than you are. Be honest with them. Tell the broker what you're looking for, what your strengths are, what kind of things would keep you engaged and challenged so that they have a good idea because their job is to connect you. So if you don't give them the honest picture they can't help you. But don't hesitate. Owning your own business, running your own destiny I think is something that's just fantastic. It's challenging. It can be scary at times but if you're thinking about it go for it. And I've definitely liked working with Brad. He was always a straight shooter and honest and I'm not saying this just because you're on. I'd say this to anybody but finding a broker that is a straight shooter that's honest and upfront that makes it easy; that's huge. And I loved working with Quiet Light and Brad and I would definitely do it again if I had another business to go after. Brad: I appreciate that and honestly, you were one of the easiest buyers that I've ever worked with. I mean you brought all this experience to the table and honestly that is what we do, we're matching people up a lot of times. That's the game that we're playing and we may or may not be helpful in the other aspects of it but really to do well as a business adviser in Quiet Light we really need to be able to listen to what people are telling us they want and then pair that up with things that we have that are for sale. And I don't know that I'd take a whole lot of credit for it but I do think that you were the perfect person to take over this business and I'm really glad to hear that it's going really well for you and I hope that you continue to have success in the future. Richard: Thank you, Brad. I think it was a good fit and I hope the improvement we're seeing continues. It's a great course we're on and I appreciate your help making this connection happen. Brad: Thanks a lot for coming on today Richard. We really appreciate it. For the listeners, we will see you the next time. Thank you. Links and Resources: Richard's Business

Hackers Breach Volusion and Start Collecting Card Details From Thousands of Sites, UPS Partners With Stamps.com, Snapchat Introduces Dynamic Ads, Walmart Spending at a Loss to Buy Grocery, e-Commerce Market Share, and more. You can see the full show notes for this episode at https://www.ecommercefuel.com/october-23-2019/ The News Cart features industry news, community discussions, compelling job opportunities and interesting content around the web from the previous two weeks.

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A daily look at the relevant information security news from overnight.Episode 170 - 09 October 2019Volusion breached - https://www.zdnet.com/article/hackers-breach-volusion-and-start-collecting-card-details-from-thousands-of-sites/LokiBot spear phish - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/microsoft-blocks-credential-theft-attack-targeting-dozens-of-orgs/Quiet Patch Tuesday - https://www.scmagazine.com/home/security-news/vulnerabilities/microsoft-repairs-59-software-bugs-on-a-quiet-patch-tuesday/Catalina patches - https://threatpost.com/apple-tackles-a-dozen-bugs-in-catalina/148988/Joomla zero-day - https://www.zdnet.com/article/zero-day-published-for-old-joomla-cms-versions/

Raine Mahdi is the founder and CEO of Hawk Packaging. He has over 15 years of experience in Sales, Marketing, and Business Development. The industries he was involved throughout his career were in Food, Manufacturing, and Importing. This Episode is Sponsored By: Gusto is making Payroll, Benefits, and HR easier for small businesses. In fact, 9 out of 10 customers say Gusto is easier to use than other payroll solutions. Gusto also saves you time – 72% of customers spend less than 5 minutes to run payroll. Get Three Months FREE by using this link: millionaire-interviews.com/gusto. Volusion is the easiest and fastest all-in-one E-commerce platform designed specifically for small businesses. With Volusion, you get stunning 100% free themes built from the ground-up with the best in-class design and seo. Get a free 14 day no-risk trial, no credit card required, and get 50% off on your first month plan with code: millionaire, just visit: millionaire-interviews.com/volusion. Ruby is a live virtual receptionist and 24/7 live chat service dedicated to helping small business owners grow their businesses. From answering and transferring calls to taking messages and answering FAQs, booking appointments and capturing leads and intake information, Ruby’s got your back. Try Ruby risk free with their 21 day money-back guarantee, just visit millionaire-interviews.com/callruby.   Want to Support the Show? Well we'd love for you to join our Patreon Group!  What's in it for you?  Well you'll instantly get a scheduled call from Austin, where he'll help you with your current or future business... Sign-Up Now at millionaire-interviews.com/patreon.

A few months ago, I read a very interesting article in The Washington Post about a researcher who studied 400,000 knitters. She was learning about my favorite topic: how these women turned their hobby of knitting into a business. She discovered an interesting phenomenon that I’ve actually witnessed for years now through Business Boutique. Before I launched Business Boutique, I conducted my own research on women with businesses. I noticed an interesting theme: When it comes to turning your hobby into a business, a sense of community plays a key role in women doing it scared. When we have camaraderie and support, when we can lock arms with other women and do it together, we’re more likely to launch the business we’ve been dreaming about. Related: How to Face Your Fears and Do It Scared This woman’s research reiterated that reality. From the 403,168 individual knitters she studied from 2007 to 2014, the ones who joined a group to craft socially were 25% more likely to start a business.(1) When asked what it was that transformed these women from pattern makers to pattern sellers, the most common answer was that someone they knew had encouraged them to sell their work: Many had already been modifying patterns and designing their own yarn gnomes and cat costumes, but until they heard from others, they lacked the confidence to step out on their own.(2) I was blown away by this. Not because I had never heard of this phenomenon before (my own research proved it), but because this principle of needing community is still true in a specific industry like knitting and on a massive scale like a study of 400,000 people. There’s no doubt that entrepreneurship can be intimidating and lonely. But that’s where the power of building community comes in. I see this every single year at our Business Boutique events. When you bring 3,000 women together from all over the country who work in all types of industries and are in different stages of business, there is a special bond created. Here’s what happens: These women walk into the room with all kinds of feelings, fears and questions about their businesses, and they think they’re the only ones who feel that way. But once they hear the speakers on stage and connect with other women struggling with the same things, they realize, I’m not so crazy after all. Community opens our eyes to the truth, gives us the confidence and support we need to take the next step, and cultivates a place to belong. It’s everything we need to stop letting fear hold us back from making our dreams a reality. Related: How to Push Past Your Comfort Zone and Try Something New The Three Types of Community You Need  No matter what stage of business you’re in, if you don’t have a community around you, I want you to make building one or getting into one a top priority this month. You should be a part of three different types of communities: 1. People in Your Shoes This means people walking in the same shoes as you are or those in the same type of industry or business you’re in. When you come together, you feel a unique connection that you wouldn’t feel with someone in a completely different business. This will be your network of people who understand exactly what it’s like to do what you do. When you get together to knowledge-share with this group, you exchange very specific advice on things like: handling difficult customers best practices, policies to protect yourself and vendor recommendations marketing strategies specific to your target market managing the seasonality of your business 2. People in Other Shoes This is a group of people who have different perspectives from you because they work in different industries. It is so beneficial to have this community, because oftentimes, we get too close to our business. We can get so deep in the weeds that we truly can’t see the forest for the trees. But when you seek support from those completely outside your business, they bring in a fresh pair of eyes and diverse ideas. It’s hard to get out of the mindset that the way you’ve been doing things is the only way to do them. When you bring in an outsider, they’re able to step in without the blinders or boundaries that typically constrain you. They help get you off the ground to get a wider and higher view of your business. 3. People You Serve You need community for your personal and professional development. Well, the same is true for your customers. If you want them to feel connected with each other and with you, build a community where they can do so. A few years ago, we started a Business Boutique Facebook group. And with almost no effort from me—I don’t post content or do any Facebook lives there—it blew up. We continue to get hundreds of new members, because women want to feel surrounded by other women with a similar mission. They want a place to ask for advice, share their elevator pitch, and simply feel heard. I don’t even have to maintain this Facebook group, because the power of community is in the community. We have another Facebook community for the Business Boutique Academy. I jump in that group a lot for Facebook live videos and coaching sessions. It has created a different level of community because these women, as members of the Academy, are on the same track. They’re learning the same curriculum, working on the same homework, and receiving training on the same days. They’re able to take all of that to the next level by showing off their work and getting feedback from one another. I do want to warn you about something that will come up when you create a community for your customers. You will likely experience some fear that, by creating it and connecting them with each other, there won’t be a need for you anymore. While this is a normal thought, it is simply not true. That’s the scarcity mentality that is so detrimental to business. You are the initiator that introduced them to one another—the glue that keeps them together—so they will be that much more grateful to you for creating a place for their new community to thrive. Do what’s best for your customers. When you stop treating your customers only as individual transactions or one-on-one relationships, you create a movement. And a movement is what creates momentum, loyal customers and a community of people who rally around something. Related: Market Research: How to Know What Your Customers Want Building a community is one of my favorite topics to talk about, because I truly believe it’s the difference between winning in business and giving up too soon. This is why we created the Business Boutique Academy, my online business training group where I get in your business with you. In the Academy, I teach on a new topic weekly, host a live coaching session monthly, and connect you with other like-minded women who are winning in business. Building a Community from the Ground Up with Natalie Franke Natalie Franke started a wedding photography business when she was in college. While it quickly became successful in her local market, she felt lonely in the world of entrepreneurship. She was craving a sense of community. But when she sought it out, she couldn’t find one that fit her values of camaraderie and support. So, she took matters into her own hands and set out to create a place for creative entrepreneurs to gather. Natalie now leads the Rising Tide Society. She started this community by gathering creatives in her hometown of Annapolis, Maryland. Within months, the groups were spreading like wildfire around the country. Today, Rising Tide meetups happen across 400 cities around the world! It’s no wonder these groups have become so popular. Community is desperately needed in our world of business. Humans find fulfillment and thrive the most in relationships, and it’s no different in business. Entrepreneurship is a team sport. In this episode, Natalie and I talk about: having a student mindset in business why small business owners have to be in a community and where to find it getting rid of the scarcity mentality and moving into one of abundance the right way to handle competition how to build a community within your specific industry Don’t Be Anyone Else But You  Several years ago, when I was first named a personality for Ramsey Solutions, I had a consultation with a professional stylist. She was there to teach me how to look good on stage and on video. I’ll never forget the pictures she showed me on her phone. They were images of women she thought should be my inspiration. Every single photo was of a stiff, rigid, news anchor-looking woman with a bob and a navy suit. She kept telling me, “This is so you!” While I kept thinking, You’re so wrong.   She wanted me to dress and look like a woman who was nothing like me. In that moment, I had to make a decision: Either I was going to lean into what this professional stylist thought I should look like, or I was going to lean into what I thought I should look like. Related: How to Be More Confident Friends, you have to make the same decision when others invade your life to tell you “the right way” of doing things. You have to teach yourself to lean into what makes you you. That decision is up to you, but I want you to know there is no one in the world like you. No one can do what you can do the way you do it. I want to encourage you to love and embrace your unique qualities, because that is what God is going to use in you. So what are the things that make you you? I dare you to lean into them. Let your weird flag fly. #AskChristyWright  On today’s segment, we talk about: how to get your customers to stick with you when you change your product offerings how to get your products in stores what to do during your slow seasons in business If you have a question, give me a call on my toll-free line at 844.944.1074. You might hear your question on a future episode!  1:23 How to Build Community With Your Business 14:46 Building a Community From the Ground Up With Natalie Franke 35:30 #AskChristyWright 45:19 Encouragement: Don’t Be Anyone Else But You Resources We are opening enrollment for the Business Boutique Academy! It will be open for only a few days, and I’m telling you now because I want you to plan for it. The cost is $489 for the entire year to have me as your business coach and a tribe of women by your side every step of the way. Budget for it, mark your calendar, join the waitlist, and get in the Academy on March 18! Text the code ACADEMYWAITLIST to 33444 to sign up for the Business Boutique Academy Waitlist to be notified the moment enrollment opens! Sponsors Check out our friends at Volusion. You can set up your online store and start selling your products within minutes. It’s that easy. Sign up for your FREE 14 day trial at Volusion.com/BB. If you have a success story you would like to share with the Business Boutique community, email me at podcast@businessboutique.com. New podcast episodes are available every other week.

When I was pregnant with my first child, we were so excited to find out the gender. When we learned we were having a boy, we immediately started brainstorming cute boy names and colors and themes for his nursery. We even bought outfits­. There were so many things we could plan, build and create because of that one piece of information. Believe it or not, this same scenario is true for business too. There is one piece of information that can and does dictate every other decision you make: the problem you solve. Related: The One Thing All Businesses Must Have While knowing the problem you solve is crucial to success, too many companies operate for years before they ever figure it out. Many of you started your business from a hobby. It’s a great strategy. But when it’s a hobby, it only serves you. Once you turn your hobby into a business, it needs to solve a problem for someone else. Before I go any further, please don’t get intimidated by the word problem. Just because you create hair bows or paint canvases doesn’t mean you’re not solving a real issue. Too many people think that because they’re not doing something people need, they’re not solving an actual problem. Here’s the truth: No matter what you do, your product does solve an issue. You might just have to dig a little deeper to find the problem your business can solve. Related: How Jessica Turned Her Problem Into $70K For example, if you make hair bows, you’re solving a problem for parents who want their daughter’s hair accessories to match their outfits. You’re also solving a problem for the countless little girls who don’t grow hair until they’re toddlers. Their parents no longer need to clarify whether their baby is a boy or a girl because she’s wearing an adorable bow on her head. I know my mother was grateful for hair bows when I was a bald baby! That’s a real problem you solve! Or, in the other example, you create custom paintings. You’re solving a problem for people who don’t want to purchase art for their home from a big-box store. There are those who want a one-of-a-kind piece of art with a personal story behind it. And guess what? That’s what you offer. When you identify the problem you solve in your business, you learn so many other important pieces of information as well. 3 Things You Learn When You Identify the Problem Your Business Solves  1. Your Target Market Your target market is the group of people who have the problem you solve. You can’t identify that group if you don’t know their pain points, what they struggle with, and what they’re looking for. When you identify the problem you solve, you know exactly who to market your product or service to. You no longer waste time and money trying to sell to people who aren’t interested in what you have to offer! 2. Your Value Proposition Identifying the problem also gives you your basis for figuring out how much your product or service is worth. This is the foundation and justification for how much to charge. Why does your product or service cost that specific amount? Well, it’s because you solve this specific problem. Oh, and by the way, the problem you solve is the only thing your market cares about. The only reason they will pay you is because you solve a problem for them. 3. Your Marketing Language Your customers’ pain points should be exactly what you talk about in all of your messaging. Whether you’re writing marketing copy for your website, creating brochures for a trade show, or making connections at a networking event, the problem you solve should be the main thing you talk about because that’s all your customers care about. Related: The Basics of Building Your First Website If you’ve been running your business for a while, don’t think this exercise doesn’t apply to you. No matter how long you’ve been in business, I want you to take all of your marketing messaging and run it through this filter: Does this answer the question of what problem I solve? Take time this week to think about that question and I bet you’ll be amazed at how it can completely change and improve the trajectory of your business. How to Build a Business Around Solving a Problem With Laura Berens Laura Berens is proof of what happens when you first identify a problem and then build a business to solve it. Laura is the host of the Time To Be You Podcast and founder of Love and Fit, a line of activewear for pregnant and postpartum moms. When you land on her company’s website, you read “Activewear for Moms” alongside a photo of two moms nursing their babies in really cute activewear. It’s pretty clear what problem her company solves. When she was three months postpartum, Laura remembers trying to work out in the living room while her newborn napped. Too often her baby would wake up in the middle of her exercise routine. Her problem was that exercising in a nursing bra didn’t provide enough support, but working out in a sports bra made it difficult to stop and nurse her baby. After researching the market, she couldn’t find anything that was both supportive and moisture wicking. She couldn’t believe someone hadn’t thought of a product that would do both. Related: Market Research: How to Know What Your Customers Want Without any background in fashion or sewing, she hit the ground running. She had designs created and prototypes manufactured, and she would hand them out to her mom friends (her target market!) for feedback. By identifying a problem and coming up with a solution, Laura has been able to successfully market her products directly to the people who need them. In this episode, we talk about: Learning how to have a conversation with the marketplace to identify the problem you solve Navigating an industry you have no experience in Knowing what to do next when you start a business Creating specific personas in order to find your target market Your Responsibility as a Business Owner Growing up, I remember my mother always taking me to this amazing restaurant that was just down the street from her cake shop. They had the best sandwiches—one that I still attempt to recreate to this day. You know what’s sad? They closed up shop years ago, and I hate that I’ll never get to enjoy their sandwiches again. Have you ever thought about your business from the perspective of your customer? When you solve a problem for someone, do you see the deep level of responsibility you have as a business owner? It’s not just about you anymore. You have a responsibility to manage your money well, to earn a profit, and to steward your time, etc., in order to stay in business. Why? Because you don’t just a run a business. You’re solving a problem for people, and they need you to continue doing so. They need you to stay in business. Think about all your favorite places that have gone out of business over the years. Think about how disappointed your customers would be if you closed your company. Friends, you have the responsibility to stay in business because we need you to. This is why I’m so excited to share that we’re getting ready to open enrollment for the Academy! If you’re ready to gain the knowledge and skill set you need to stay in business, put the enrollment fee on your March budget and join the waitlist to get alerted when it opens. Academy membership is $489 for the entire year, and enrollment will only be open for four days starting March 18. You owe it to yourself to build this business you’ve been dreaming about. #AskChristyWright On today’s #AskChristyWright segment, we talk about how to market your business on Instagram and Pinterest and how to make your brand stand out from competition. If you have a question, give me a call on my toll-free line at 844.944.1074. You might hear your question on a future episode!  1:23 How to Identify the Problem Your Business Solves 14:46 How to Build a Business Around Solving a Problem With Laura Berens 35:30 #AskChristyWright 45:19 Encouragement to Stay in Business Resources Text the code ACADEMYWAITLIST to 33444 or fill out the form here to sign up for the Business Boutique Academy Waitlist to be notified the moment enrollment opens! Sponsors Check out our friends at Volusion. You can set up your online store and start selling your products within minutes. It’s that easy. Sign up for your FREE 14 day trial at Volusion.com/BB. If you have a success story you would like to share with the Business Boutique community, email me at podcast@businessboutique.com. New podcast episodes are available every other week.

Passion is so important in everything you do. When you’re passionate about something, you perform a million times better. This is true whether you’re working at your day job, cooking dinner for your family, or launching a side hustle. That’s why, today, we’re talking about how to find your passion. There’s no better time of year to discover this. A new year means a new you! You know that I’m passionate about helping women step into their God-given gifts and make money doing what they love. But before you start making money doing what you love, you have to discover what you love. So how do you do that? Three Strategies to Find Your Passion It’s not as scary as it seems. I actually have three different strategies you can walk through to help you find your passion. Here’s what’s great about a strategy: It isn’t a formula or a fancy equation to make a passion magically appear. It’s none of that. It’s simply an approach—and it’s a flexible one. Maybe one strategy works for you or maybe you’ll use a combination of all three. Dig deep into these strategies, and I bet you’ll discover something amazing. Related: How to Find Your Business Idea The Self-Focused Strategy This strategy takes a look inside—you guessed it—you! Now, this isn’t about self-centeredness. But it is about taking a good inventory of your past to discover what you’ve been uniquely created to contribute to the world. That inventory is usually a combination of your past, education and experiences. This is actually how Business Boutique was born. Before Business Boutique, I was a speaker at Ramsey Solutions. The company wanted to transition me into an official Ramsey Personality role, but before we could do that, we had to figure out what my focus should be. So, I sat in a boardroom with Dave Ramsey, my husband, and a ton of other leaders in the company. We spent hours going over my background to see how I could best serve the marketplace. In other words, what should my focus, market and message be? We looked in a few different places. First, we looked at my story growing up with a mother who was scrappy and built a successful business from scratch (a unique experience). Then we looked at my education: I studied business and marketing, and I’m a Certified Business Coach. We also looked at some of my other unique experiences, like how I started a couple of side businesses to help make ends meet. Finally, we looked at my strengths: My natural strengths are in speaking, teaching, writing and coaching people as they step into their God-given dreams. Can you spot the patterns? Business was all over my background, and when we looked at the marketplace at the time, we saw businesses launching at a crazy rate. The problem was that so many entrepreneurs didn’t actually know how to run a business. They just had great ideas. When we put that all together, here’s what we came up with: There’s a lot of people who need help with business. I am a really good teacher, and I have a background in business. So Business Boutique was born. Related: Recognizing Your Gifts Now we have a podcast, a book and an online business training academy. We’ve even created an amazing goal planner, a sold-out event and two courses. But it all started with an idea on what I uniquely brought to the table. If you take a deep look at your past, experiences and education, I have no doubt you can find something you’re passionate about. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to get started: What is your story? People are often passionate about something in their history because they’ve lived it. What are your strengths? What comes effortlessly to you? We are naturally more passionate about things we’re good at. What do you get really excited about? What do you get really mad about? When you pay attention to your emotions around an issue, it’s a good indicator you’re passionate about that one thing. Look for the intersection where your story, your strengths, and what you get excited about meet. People-Focused Strategy I believe most of your passions come from within you. But I also believe you can be passionate about just about anything if you choose to be. That’s right! It’s a choice. After all, the difference between something you have to do and something you get to do is just your attitude. For example, let’s say you have an idea for a business that you’re not sure you’re particularly passionate about. Say your business idea is refinishing furniture, but you wonder how you can be passionate about a table or a chair. Before you quit the idea to find something else, I want you to dig a little deeper. Why? Because I’m willing to bet you can find something within that idea you’re passionate about. It’s usually the people. On the other side of every business transaction is a person you’re serving. You’ve improved their life because of your business—yes, because of the table you refinished. When you focus on the person on the other side, the business is no longer about upcycling old furniture, but about helping people make memories with their families. When you look at your business through the lens of the impact you’re making, you can see that your passion is ignited by the people you get to serve. Related: Excuses Stopping You From Using Your Gifts Focus on the people. That’s why we go into business in the first place—to make a difference in people’s lives. God-Focused Strategy I know this might sound crazy but stay with me here! It doesn’t happen for everyone this way, but for some of us, finding our passion looks like praying about it—asking God or listening to hear what God is trying to tell you. I’ve heard thousands of stories of women who, on the surface, lacked the education, skills or experience to start a business, but they clearly heard God tell them to do it. So they did. It sounds crazy, but it’s also just the kind of thing God does. I love Christine Cain’s story of how she started A21. She was walking through an airport when she saw all these posters of women who were missing, likely abducted and forced into human trafficking. She recalls thinking to herself, Someone should do something about this. She quickly realized that someone was her. She was obedient to the voice she heard, and now thousands of women are being saved from human trafficking across the globe. Related: Use Your Gifts to Make a Difference God can use any of these three strategies to lead you to find your passion. But whichever strategy you use, I want you to know that God created you on purpose for a purpose, and I can’t wait to watch you step into that. Building a Business You Love with Amber Lilyestrom Amber Lilyestrom is a speaker, author, branding strategist, business coach and host of The Amber Lilyestrom Show. She is passionate about helping female entrepreneurs get clarity about who they are and then build businesses to support that message. Amber spent 10 years working in marketing at the University of New Hampshire. She loved that job and learned a ton, but after conquering one of the most difficult times in her life, she knew there was more to her story. A near-death experience helped her realize there was something missing from her life, which led her to start her own business. This new adventure ignited a fire in her to help other women realize their potential as well. In this episode, we talk about: Recognizing the signs you’re not working in your passions Living out the life you were created for Fighting for your truth Finding your passion and amplifying it with a business Leaving a corporate job to start your own business Turning Bad Experiences Into Good Ideas   Whatever you’re balancing right now, whether you’re working full-time in your business or working your side hustle with a full-time job, don’t be discouraged by bad experiences. I encounter at least one a week. Don’t we all? But here’s the thing: We don’t have to let them overcome us. Instead, I want to challenge you to take those bad experiences and turn them into great ideas. Take the time I tried to get a photo of my son with Santa at the mall. What was supposed to be a sweet memory turned into a nightmare that ended with me losing the photo I’d waited hours to get. Instead of allowing that experience to deter me from ever getting a photo with Santa again, I turned it into the now-annual “Shindig With Santa” at our house. I pay a little more to have Santa come to my house where I can invite all my friends and family over to bake cookies and take as many pictures with Santa as they desire. What bad experience can you turn into a great idea? #AskChristyWright On today’s #AskChristyWright segment, we talk about identifying a market for your new business and regaining momentum in your business after maternity leave. If you have a question, give me a call on my toll-free line at 844.944.1074. You might hear your question on a future episode!  1:18 The Three Strategies to Find Your Passion 19:04 Building a Business You Love With Amber Lilyestrom 57:00 #AskChristyWright 66:49 Challenge to Turn Your Bad Experiences Into Good Ideas Resources Use the code BOOTCAMP when you purchase Business Idea Bootcamp and get the Business Boutique audiobook completely free! Go to BusinessBoutique.com/Bootcamp. Sponsors Our friends at Infusionsoft help you manage your customers and your business all in one place. If you’re ready to organize your contacts, automate your emails, generate leads and turn those leads into sales, Infusionsoft can help you! Get started now with a free trial by visiting InfusionsoftNow.com/ChristyFree. Check out our friends at Volusion. You can set up your online store and start selling your products within minutes. It’s that easy. Sign up for your FREE 14 day trial at Volusion.com/BB. If you have a success story you would like to share with the Business Boutique community, email me at podcast@businessboutique.com. New podcast episodes are available every other week.

Here’s the truth about money: The more you have, the more impact you can make. So why wouldn’t you want to make a million dollars in your business? Well, for many of you, it boils down to what you believe. So much of what I teach you is to believe. Believe in yourself, believe that you can do the thing, and believe that God put that dream in your heart for a reason. Remember when you were a kid and you believed? Maybe you believed in Santa, the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny, even flying reindeer. You believed you could be anything you wanted to be. You believed anything was possible. Maybe you even believed you would be a millionaire when you grew up. But something has changed since then. Something happened as we grew up and became more reasonable and more logical—we stopped believing. At some point in your journey, whether you realized it or not, you stopped believing and you settled. You probably thought, Well, I’m not going to dream too big because I don’t want to end up disappointed. If you don’t believe something is possible, you’re never going to try. When you set goals for your business, you also create a plan to achieve them. It’s the same with being a millionaire. If you set a goal of becoming a millionaire, you have to create a plan to make it happen. It’s as easy as that. You have to be careful of the words you tell yourself. When you hear those negative thoughts in your head saying, I’m not enough, you just need to have a positive thought prepared to tell yourself, I am enough. I got this. Related: Ep. 58 — Perseverance in Your Business: How to Keep Going When You Want to Give Up Working Through All the Feelings About Wealth We all have perceptions of what we think it takes to be wealthy. We even have perceptions of what we think it means to be wealthy. Should I feel guilty for having money? No! Is it even okay to have wealth? Yes! Yes, it is okay to have wealth! Listen, when God blesses you with His resources, it is up to you to steward these resources well, and He will bless you with more. Imagine the impact you could make if you had an abundance of resources. The bottom line is that you need to be a good and faithful servant of God’s resources. Imagine being able to give like never before and change your family tree. Now that right there is what it’s all about. Building wealth in a smart way, slow and steady, for the right reasons is the way to go, and you can do this. Don’t get me wrong: It’s okay to enjoy nice things. There is nothing wrong with that. But the true joy in building your wealth comes from being able to give generously and leave a legacy for your family. Related: How to Set Prices How to Make a Million Dollars in Your Business with Chris Hogan Chris Hogan is the national best-selling author of Retire Inspired, host of The Chris Hogan Show, fellow team member here at Ramsey Solutions and last but not least, my good friend. So, before we get started, let me tell you a little about Chris. You know those people that walk in the room and just own it? The people that have everyone’s attention because you just feel their presence? That’s Chris Hogan. It’s more than his booming voice that commands attention. It’s his contagious passion to help people understand how to build wealth and live the life they’ve always wanted. To say he gets people fired up is a huge understatement. So, in this episode, Chris Hogan and I are going to get you to believe again. Because you may not realize it, but you already have exactly what you need to make a million dollars in your business. The Largest Study Ever Done on How to Make a Million Dollars Steve Jobs once said, “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”(1) But don’t just take Steve Jobs’ word for it—the research backs it up. In the largest study ever done on millionaires, Chris Hogan and his team found that 93% of millionaires say they got there from hard work. Millionaires have learned that hard work matters more than the size of your paycheck, where (or if!) you went to college and what kind of family you were born into. Y’all, this is exciting stuff. I can’t wait for you to hear exactly how to become a millionaire. You’re going to be blown away at just how attainable this really is! Remember, it doesn’t matter where you came from. It matters where you’re going. Regardless of the situation you were born into, regardless of the job you have, you can make the decision today to become a millionaire. If you’d like to get a quick look at where you stand today and what it will take for you to become a millionaire, check out Chris’s free net worth calculator. Chris Hogan is going to give you so much great information in this episode, and you can find out even more in his brand-new book Everyday Millionaires: How Ordinary People Built Wealth—and How You Can Too. In this episode, Chris Hogan and I will discuss: Building wealth and why it’s important Why it isn’t selfish to put money aside for your future—it’s smart Why becoming a millionaire feels impossible, and why that’s a myth The real traits, qualities and job titles of everyday millionaires The #1 thing everyday millionaires did to accumulate wealth How you can make a million dollars with your business And y’all, as business owners, you’re already ahead of the curve on this. 96% of millionaires say they enjoyed what they did as their career. Look at that! There really is something to this whole “make money doing what you love” thing. As an entrepreneur, there is really no limit to your earning potential, because you get to decide—with your efforts and your actions—how much you make! #AskChristyWright Chris Hogan is sticking around for our Q&A segment. He’ll answer questions about how to get your spouse on board with your business and how to get on the same financial page as your spouse to make a plan for your future. This man is full of wisdom and laughs, so you don’t want to miss it. By the end of this episode, you will be confident in your ability to make a million dollars with your business. Give me a call on my toll-free line at 844.944.1074. You might hear your question on a future episode! 1:22 Working Through All the Feelings About Wealth 14:42 How to Make a Million Dollars in Your Business with Chris Hogan 39:35 #AskChristyWright 51:25 Encouragement to Dream Big Resources Chris Hogan's new book, Everyday Millionaires: How Ordinary People Built Wealth—and How You Can Too is available now! Use the code BBWEALTH at checkout to receive a bonus Business Boutique podcast episode with Chris Hogan where we talk about 7 Mistakes That Could Keep You From Becoming a Millionaire. Order Everyday Millionaires at ChrisHogan360.com. Sponsors Our friends at Infusionsoft help you manage your customers and your business all in one place. If you’re ready to organize your contacts, automate your emails, generate leads and turn those leads into sales, Infusionsoft can help you! Get started now with a free trial by visiting InfusionsoftNow.com/ChristyFree. Check out our friends at Volusion. You can set up your online store and start selling your products within minutes. It’s that easy. Sign up for your FREE 14 day trial at Volusion.com/BB. If you have a success story you would like to share with the Business Boutique community, email me at podcast@businessboutique.com. New podcast episodes are available every other week.

It’s exciting to plan for the future, set fun goals, and dream big for your business, but you also need to figure out how you’ll reach those goals. If you don’t know where you are, it’s hard to know how to get to where you want to be. Today, I want to talk about how you can assess and evaluate where your business is right now so you can see the path to where you want to be in 2019. Make sense? Great! Let’s get started. End of the Year Business Review Organizing and evaluating the major projects you did in 2018 is a great first step toward planning for 2019. Start by creating four columns and sorting projects into these four categories: right, wrong, missing and confused. RIGHTWhat worked well? What was a huge success or helped you gain momentum? These are things that you want to maximize, amplify, and do more of next year. WRONGWhat didn’t work? Did you have a setback or a challenge? Did some of your results disappoint you? If so, it’s okay! Making mistakes shows you are taking risks and pushing the limits. The important thing is that you learn from your experiences and stop spending time on these things. MISSINGWhat opportunities were overlooked? Was there something you should have done, but didn’t? Maybe it was something you didn’t know you should do at the time, but you know now. These are things you are going to add. CONFUSEDWhat needs a little more explanation or better processes? Was there something you had to help customers or your team understand multiple times? These are the things you should clarify. This is a great exercise for your business as a whole, but I’d also recommend you do this for the main areas of your business: sales, marketing, operations, money, team and time management. Evaluating your business’s strengths and weaknesses will help you finish the year strong and start the new year even better that last year. Related: Ep 61: Learning From Failure: How to Dust Yourself Off and Move Forward How to Wrap Up the Year and Finish Strong with John Felkins John Felkins is one of our very own Entreleadership Executive Coaches here at Ramsey Solutions. John is on a mission to help business leaders reach their maximum potential. He guides leaders and small-business owners to cut through white noise and helps them make real progress on their journey to becoming the best, most accomplished version of themselves. John Felkins started his professional life as a project management engineer and realized his passion was actually coaching and consulting. After creating a consulting firm, he went to an Entreleadership event, fell in love with the principles, then quickly joined the Entreleadership team to help launch the highly successful Entreleadership coaching program. In this episode, John Felkins and I discuss how to work in your sweet spot and how to wrap up the year and finish strong. We talk about: Why it’s important to use your gifts with your work and not force yourself to do a job that doesn’t come naturally The main things you need to identify and assess in your business before the year ends Practical questions to ask yourself to end the year strong The metrics to know now in order to improve your business next year Knowing your business vitals and why that’s important for your profit and loss Identifying the actual cost of doing business, so you can make adjustments to improve in the future Why putting your phone down will help you avoid distractions and serve your customers better Related: How to Stay Focused and Eliminate Distractions in Your Business Get a Running Start on Your Year We all know the holidays are a crazy busy time of year. Before you know it, it’s January, and you aren’t sure how to start tackling all those New Year’s goals you set for your business. You still have a few days to get your plans in place, so figure out where you want to be and break down what you need to do to reach that goal. Don’t wait—get started now! #AskChristyWright One of my favorite parts of this podcast is hearing directly from you. Give me a call on my toll-free line at 844.944.1074. You might hear your question on a future episode! Staying Focused on Your Business When Life Happens and Guilt Creeps In Life happens. There’s no avoiding it. Medical bills come unexpectedly, your schedule fills up, and tasks become overwhelming. We’ve all felt the pain of balancing our passion for our business with our daily responsibilities. Even though we know it’s crazy, sometimes guilt creeps in. What is the pain point here? Is it that you have some debt to pay off and you feel guilty about quitting your full-time job to start your business? If you can make enough money to take care of your family, be available for them, and do work that allows you to use your gifts, that’s winning. Guilt be gone. Related: The Truth About Work-Life Balance Making Plans for Customer Relationship Management When leads come to us, we need to follow up with them in a timely manner, but doing this manually is exhausting. Finding a platform you trust to automate and manage your leads is crucial for you to grow and scale your business. Whether it’s email leads signing up for a free resource or a form where people are wanting to give you their information because they need your service, every lead deserves attention and managing those leads is critical. I can’t say it enough. We recommend Infusionsoft because we know them, we use them, and we trust them. No matter what customer relationship management platform you choose, make sure it is easy to understand and easy to use. You don’t need more headaches; you need help. Make customer relationship management a part of your 2019 planning. 1:23 End of Year Business Review 19:17 How to Wrap Up the Year and Finish Strong with John Felkins 52:51 #AskChristyWright 66:12 Challenge to Choose Your Focus Daily During the Holiday Season Resources Get Christy's Year-End Review Worksheet by filling out the form here! Order the new 2019 Business Boutique Goal Planner with the code BBPLANNER at BusinessBoutique.com/Planner and receive Christy’s Setting Goals video that you can watch right now! Sponsors Our friends at Infusionsoft help you manage your customers and your business all in one place. If you’re ready to organize your contacts, automate your emails, generate leads and turn those leads into sales, Infusionsoft can help you! Get started now with a free trial by visiting InfusionsoftNow.com/ChristyFree. Check out our friends at Volusion. You can set up your online store and start selling your products within minutes. It’s that easy. Sign up for your FREE 14 day trial at Volusion.com/BB. If you have a success story you would like to share with the Business Boutique community, email me at podcast@businessboutique.com. New podcast episodes are available every other week.

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Alright y’all. Let’s face it: Distractions are a fact of life. You’re going to face them in every area of your life and your business, and the honest truth is that if we don’t face them, they’re going to keep us from getting things done. I want you to reach your goals and achieve everything you want in the coming year. So let’s talk about how to stay focused and eliminate distractions. All human beings are wired to be curious. We naturally gravitate toward the new, even if that keeps us from doing the things we need to do. But not all distractions are created equal. Three Categories of Distractions Let’s think of distractions in the form of a stop light. STOP.Red Distractions: The distractions that you should ignore. STOP. Proceed with caution.Yellow Distractions: The distractions that cause you to slow down and think about. GO!Green Distractions: The distractions that demand your attention. Red Distractions Squirrels These types of distractions, like a squirrel zooming in front of you on a walk, divert you from your main task at hand. They might be new ideas, shiny objects, something more fun, or simply something that is going to help you procrastinate. For me, this is a normal occurrence. They steal my attention away from what I’m really supposed to be doing. I am working on one idea or objective, something new pops up, and I focus on that instead. It’s easy to get derailed by these types of distractions. But honestly, they are just squirrels. These go in the Red Distractions category because they are the types of distractions that you need to stop letting steal your focus. Technology You knew I was going to go here. I can’t talk about distractions without calling out the main culprit and source of distraction for so many of us. Technology notifications distract us all day long. It’s a text when you’re in the middle of a project or a quick browse on Facebook when you really should be writing marketing copy. Most types of technology distractions are examples of those that you can and should ignore. Those notifications come in 24/7, and they’re still going to be there when you get done with your task at hand. How Do You Handle Red Distractions? Red Distractions are the easiest distractions to avoid. You shut it out, put on blinders, and force yourself to focus. This is a matter of will and discipline. If you want to get anything done, set yourself up for success. You need to eliminate any possible chance for these distractions to come at you.  Put on noise-canceling headphones, go to a room or coffee shop by yourself, close all the tabs on your computer, hide your phone, and get to work. Force yourself to focus, and you’ll finally start finishing. Yellow Distractions There are no hard and fast rules for ignoring these distractions. Proceed with caution, like you would at a stoplight. Stop and think before you let them steal your focus. People Around You You’re going to encounter all kinds of people who have the potential to distract you—customers, team members, vendors, friends or family. When you have people in your life distracting you, you must stop and think before allowing them to steal your focus. Do their needs demand your attention, or can you set up a boundary until you have the space and time to address them? Related: How to Say No And Stand Your Ground Kids in Your Home Yes, kids are people, but we all know they present a different level of distraction than the other people in your life. Nothing can derail your plans like your kids. (Can I get an “Amen!”?) Let’s be honest. When your kids need you, it’s because they need one of two things: They want to play or they need help. Again, think about what is most important in that moment. Are you up against a deadline and you need to tell your kid you’ll play with them later? Or are you in a place where you can be present and seize a moment with them? Related: Look For Distractions Disappointing Your Children Let’s go ahead and call something else out too: Your child will be disappointed. How can I stay focused on my work at home and not disappoint my child? You can’t. I disappoint my boys in some way every day. They want cake for breakfast, and I say no. Disappointment. They want to drill their brother in the head with a plastic power drill, and I stop them. Disappointment. They want to play outside barefoot in 20-degree weather, and I make them wear shoes. Disappointment. As mothers, we are not strangers to disappointing our kids. This just feels harder because it feels optional. I get it. You’re often choosing between two things you love. If your work is important to you, it’s okay to focus on that sometimes. In fact, it’s healthy for your kids to see you excited about and focused on something other than them once in a while. You’re doing a good job with them, and sometimes, it’s okay to get back to work. Green Distractions This one is easy. Green means go. These types of distractions are the ones that require you to stop what you’re doing and deal with it. These trump whatever task you’re working on. These may start as a distraction but become a priority. These are urgent and important things, like a crisis, emergencies, anything that is the absolute most important thing. These categories are going to give you some guidelines and direction. They’ll help you determine whether you need to stay focused or pay attention to the distractions. Staying Focused and Eliminating Distractions with Curt Steinhorst Curt Steinhorst is the best-selling author of the book, Can I Have Your Attention?: Inspiring Better Work Habits, Focusing Your Team, and Getting Stuff Done in the Constantly Connected Workplace. Curt Steinhorst is no stranger to being distracted and was even diagnosed with ADD as a child. After spending years studying human behavior, Curt is on a mission to rescue us from our distracted selves. He founded Focuswise, where he coaches and equips organizations to overcome the challenges of being in a constantly connected workplace. His unique insight has helped executives, TV personalities and even well-known professional athletes effectively communicate and create focus while speaking, leading, and facing customers. In this episode, Curt Steinhorst and I discuss how to stay focused and eliminate distractions in your business. We cover: The theory behind distractions How much time we are wasting being distracted How to identify and react to the distractions in your life How to deal with different types of distractions, like phone calls, emails, kids, husbands, pets, TV, social media, etc. Practical ways to decrease distractions in your life right now Related: Stop Doing Everything Yourself Choosing Your Focus Daily During the Holiday Season We are in the thick of the Christmas season. I’ll be honest: It’s my favorite time of year, but it can also be the most stressful time of year. It’s busy. It’s crazy. It’s fun. It’s all the things. Instead of getting to December 26 and wondering where your time went, I have a simple challenge to help you focus on what is most important every day this season! Here’s my challenge: Choose to do one thing every day that would make you really proud. Sounds simple enough, but let’s talk about what that means. One day, it might look like getting caught up on emails. The next, you might get a manicure. And the next, maybe it’s snuggling with your kids and watching a Christmas movie. This gives you permission to change your mind and priorities every single day. You can balance productivity and rest. You can get things done in your business and enjoy yourself in the process. It’s your season, and you don’t want to miss these moments with the ones you love most. What would make you proudest today? #AskChristyWright One of my favorite parts of this podcast is hearing directly from you. Give me a call on my toll-free line at 844.944.1074. You might hear your question on a future episode! 1:26 Identifying the Three Categories of Distractions 20:08 Staying Focused and Eliminating Distractions with Curt Steinhorst 51:12 #AskChristyWright 59:50 Challenge to Choose Your Focus Daily During the Holiday Season Get Christy's 25 Ways to Protect Your Time by filling out the form here! Order the new 2019 Business Boutique Goal Planner with the code BBPLANNER at BusinessBoutique.com/Planner and receive Christy’s Setting Goals video that you can watch right now! Our friends at Infusionsoft help you manage your customers and your business all in one place. If you’re ready to organize your contacts, automate your emails, generate leads and turn those leads into sales, Infusionsoft can help you! Get started now with a free trial by visiting InfusionsoftNow.com/ChristyFree. Check out our friends at Volusion. You can set up your online store and start selling your products within minutes. It’s that easy. Sign up for your FREE 14 day trial at Volusion.com/BB. If you have a success story you would like to share with the Business Boutique community, email me at podcast@businessboutique.com. New podcast episodes are available every other week.

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It’s time to talk about learning from failure. I know. Learning from failure is no one’s favorite subject. No one gets excited about failure, but y’all, failure is a reality in life and business! We might as well just learn from it! I have had a lot of failures in my life . . . and in Business Boutique . . . and in speaking. So I’ve gotten a lot of practice. And today, I’m going to help you answer the question, “How do I learn from my failure?” Three Ways to Learn From Failure 1. Adjust on the Fly When it’s possible, adjust on the fly. A few years ago I was booked to speak at Catalyst, talking to women about life balance. Everything I wrote was directed at women and what we struggle with when it comes to life balance. I used stories that were relatable to women and I even pulled stories from the Bible, citing Scripture about women. On the day of the event, I stood at the back of the room and watched the room fill up with people, who were all men. Do you see the problem? I could have gone ahead and given the talk as if I were presenting to women. That would have been the safe route. Or I knew I could adjust on the fly to the failure. That’s what I did. I had notes from a previous talk and just scrapped the slides! It was exactly the talk I was supposed to give, and they only heard it because I was willing to think on my feet. The lesson? Don’t be afraid to think on your feet and make it up on the fly to save a misstep from becoming a complete failure! Related: How to Be More Confident 2. Deal With It If you make a mistake, drop the ball, or just fall flat on your face, deal with it. Back when I worked as the aquatic director at the YMCA, in the middle of a chaotic day, I made a big mistake. On the day of our mandatory annual aquatics safety training, my director called me to ask why my lifeguards were not in attendance. Luckily there were two options for sessions: 9 a.m. or 2 p.m. But I’d not only forgotten, I also hadn’t told a single person they needed to be there. You know what I did? I dealt with it. I went speed walking down the hall to the executive director’s office and opened the door. I looked her in the face and said, “I am sorry to bother you, but I need you to know that I have dropped a huge ball. I am taking care of it, but I just want you to know that I am aware of it and I am really sorry.” I explained what I’d forgotten and gave her my plan to fix it. Thankfully, I got almost 100% of my staff to the 2 p.m. training. I failed but I did three things to face my failure head on. Own it. It’s in our nature to hide, cover up, make excuses, and place blame. By owning it, you are doing the opposite of what most people choose, while demonstrating maturity, integrity and self-awareness. In the process, you’re also building trust. Apologize for it. Apologizing shows you’re coachable. It demonstrates humility instead of defensiveness, which makes others want to work with you more. Fix it. Doing your best to fix a mistake is proactive. People will respect your ability to try to repair a mishap when one happens. 3. Dust Yourself Off There’s no magic lesson with this one. But here’s the truth: You’re going to have experiences you would never want to relive. There are going to be times you fail so badly it stays with you for a while. Many years ago I had a speaking engagement that I try to forget, and it haunts me to the this day. But you know what? It hasn’t kept me from doing the thing I’m meant to do. I kept going. And you can too. Y’all, it’s totally possible to learn from failure with these three strategies. If you can adjust on the fly, you might avoid it all together. If you can’t avoid it, then deal with it. If you can’t deal with it, just dust yourself off and keep going. How to Learn From Failure with Kristen Hadeed Kristen Hadeed is the CEO and founder of Student Maid, a cleaning company that has employed thousands of students in the last decade. Kristen also helps organizations all over the world make a lasting and meaningful impact on people by creating environments in which they thrive. In addition to all of this, Kristen Hadeed is the author of the book, Permission to Screw Up: How I Learned to Lead by Doing (Almost) Everything. Kristen wants other leaders to know that their most challenging moments can become their biggest leadership lessons. In this episode, with topics like: Why failure is such a tough topic to take on, but so necessary How to move past fear and put yourself out there How to dust yourself off and try again What personal qualities, habits and beliefs you need to be able to push past fear and failure Why it’s important to share our own failure stories What small-business leaders can learn from failure How to Prioritize Your Time When Everything Feels Important I know it’s a crazy, busy season. But aren’t they all? Here’s a quick challenge to help you prioritize during this season! First of all, know that not all priorities are created equal. But when you have tons of responsibilities, you need to have priorities and determine what’s most important to you. You need to know what comes first and second and third—and fifteenth. That way, when two things compete for your attention, you can make a decision based on your priorities. When you know what your priorities are, decision-making becomes so much easier. So, determine what’s most important to you. It’s your life. You want to spend it on what’s most important to you! They’re your priorities, and it’s your time. You get to decide. #AskChristyWright One of my favorite parts of this podcast is hearing directly from you. Give me a call on my toll-free line at 844.944.1074. You might hear your question on a future episode! 1:16 Three Ways to Learn From Failure 17:18 How to Learn From Failure with Kristen Hadeeed 41:20 #AskChristyWright 51:05 Challenge to Prioritize Your Time Get Christy's Shame Off You download by filling out the form here! Order the new 2019 Business Boutique Goal Planner with the code BBPLANNER at BusinessBoutique.com/Planner and receive Christy’s Setting Goals video that you can watch right now! Our friends at Infusionsoft are giving you their free ebook, Your Strategic Game Plan! Text the word STRATEGY to 480-428-4150. Check out our friends at Volusion. You can set up your online store and start selling your products within minutes. It’s that easy. Sign up for your FREE 14 day trial at Volusion.com/BB. If you have a success story you would like to share with the Business Boutique community, email me at podcast@businessboutique.com. New podcast episodes are available every other week.

If you’ve been in business for any amount of time—heck, if you’ve been living for any amount of time—you’ve encountered fear. We always think of fear as a bad sign. But in truth, fear is not a sign that we’re doing something bad; it’s a sign we’re doing something bold. So many times in life fear can hold us back from doing the thing we’re really meant to do. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you don’t get scared. When Fear Makes You Doubt Your Ability I was 10 years old the first time I realized I was a good runner—at the skate center of all places. It gave me incredible confidence as a 10-year-old to discover something I was naturally good at. It was this realization that led me to join the track team in middle and high school. Despite my natural running ability and the fact that I loved running, the strangest thing happened before every race. I got scared. I’m not talking about the normal “prerace butterflies.” I mean, I was terrified. Being scared made me doubt my ability and made me want to quit. I would beg my coach to take me out of the race, and every time he made me go to the starting line. I love that about him. He made me do it anyway. You’d think that after running multiple events for multiple track meets over multiple years, I wouldn’t have gotten scared anymore. But I always did. Then my coach did something that helped me change my focus and interrupt my thought pattern. At one of the track meets, I was begging him to take me out of the race, he looked me in the eyes, exasperated, and said, “Christy, will you just tell me one thing you like about yourself?” Confused, I answered him: “My blue eyes.” “Great,” he said. “Focus on that. I don’t want you to think about the race, the other runners, or your time. Just focus on your blue eyes.” Changing my focus from what I was scared about to what I was confident in was just enough to distract the fear out of me. Related: The Fear or Wisdom Filter Changing Your Focus to Overcome Fear Whether you choose to think about what you’re scared of or what you’re proud of, what you focus on will become magnified in your life. Focusing on what you’re good at and what you’re proud of will encourage you to get better. Focusing on fear causes you to stay back, give up, or play small. I was a good runner, but fear made me doubt my training, my track record and my natural ability. It doesn’t matter how many accomplishments you’ve earned. The fear can get so loud in your head that it makes you doubt yourself. But here’s the good news: You get to choose what you focus on. The thoughts you allow to enter your mind will change your entire experience. My friend Melissa says, “Your mind is multimillion dollar real estate. Be very selective about what you allow to reside there.” Related: Ep. 31 — Is It Fear or Wisdom? Three Questions That Will Help You Face Your Fears Walking to any starting line is scary, and it makes you vulnerable. But before you let fear steal your opportunities and rob you of your potential, ask yourself a few questions. What’s something you like about yourself? What are you proud of? What’s going right in your life or business? And then, focus on those answers instead. It may just be enough to distract the fear right out of you and make you want to go for it. Overcoming Your Fears with Jessica Honegger Jessica Honegger is the founder and co-CEO of the socially conscious fashion brand, the Noonday Collection; author of the book, Imperfect Courage; and host of The Going Scared Podcast. As if that’s not impressive enough, she’s also the mom of three little ones. Jessica is passionate about encouraging others to leave their comfort zone, move forward even when you’re scared, and step into a life of impact. The path to success doesn’t always seem clear, but when you focus on what you are confident in—instead of what you are fearful of—moving forward doesn’t seem so overwhelming. Why fuel your fear when you can focus on what you’re uniquely positioned to do with your gifts? Jessica Honegger is incredibly successful, but she’s no stranger to feeling scared. While researching adoption and visiting East Africa, she was presented with an opportunity to help sell beautiful goods made by local artisans. Jessica was facing mounting debt, and she saw this as an opportunity to not only help her family adopt a child, but to also help vulnerable communities prosper. Facing lots of uncertainty and fear, the Noonday Collection was born as a fair-trade accessories brand created to provide meaningful job opportunities for people around the world. There is never a time you’ll feel you have the perfect resources, education or knowledge. You just go with your gut and go at it scared. You just do it! In this episode, Jessica Honegger and I discuss how to “face your fears and do it scared.” You don’t have to know the answers, but you have to ask the questions. Take advantage of the opportunities and key relationships that God places in front of you. Understand what it means to “go scared” and stick with it when you have a vision. Embrace being unqualified and have the courage to say “yes” before you know how. Separate your identity from the outcome—no matter what it is. Related: When It All Just Seems Too Big Overcoming the Fear of Missing Out This Christmas Season I know that we’re already in holiday craziness. Y’all, let’s be honest: Christmastime can get crazy with or without a business. I know that I can often enter this season with high expectations for rest and relationships and, instead, be met with the harsh reality of being run ragged. If we’re not careful, we’ll have fulfilled orders, but we’ll miss out on celebrating this season with the ones we love. With that in mind, I’ve got three steps to help you not miss out on Christmas and still run your business! Plan ahead. Set boundaries. Have a life. I know that Christmas is when many of you make most of your money. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a life. You get to decide. Make a plan today to set boundaries around work hours, orders, response time, cut off dates, and pricing. If you don’t think this through, you’ll be up at midnight on Christmas Eve rushing orders. You get to define what it looks like. I hope you make a plan that allows you to have a thriving business over the next six weeks while also enjoying the holiday—and having a life! And of course, one of my favorite parts of this podcast is hearing directly from you. Give me a call on my new toll-free line at 844.944.1074. You might hear your question on a future episode! 1:25 How to Face Your Fears and Do It Scared 10:32 Overcoming Your Fears with Jessica Honegger 48:28 #AskChristyWright 59:42 Encouragement: Overcoming the Fear of Missing Out This Christmas Season Get Christy's Fear or Wisdom Filter by filling out the form here! Order the new 2019 Business Boutique Goal Planner with the code BBPLANNER at BusinessBoutique.com/Planner and receive Christy’s Setting Goals video that you can watch right now! Our friends at Infusionsoft are giving you their free ebook, Your Strategic Game Plan! Text the word STRATEGY to 480-428-4150. Check out our friends at Volusion. You can set up your online store and start selling your products within minutes. It’s that easy. Sign up for your FREE 14 day trial at Volusion.com/BB. If you have a success story you would like to share with the Business Boutique community, email me at podcast@businessboutique.com. New podcast episodes are available every other week.

It’s time to talk about working smarter, not harder in order to increase your productivity. How to Be More Productive With Simple Changes Have you ever wondered how you can be more productive? The solution may be staring you in the face and easier than you think. Here’s an example straight from my closet. Every morning I woke up, walked into my closet, flipped on the light, and picked out clothes. And every morning I spent a ton of time just staring at my clothes—well, squinting at my clothes. After months and months, I realized I had a problem. My problem? My energy-saving light bulb. It took time to warm up and actually illuminate my clothes. And every morning I had to either wait for the lightbulb to heat up or squint. You know what I finally did? I put in a normal light bulb! Angels shone down from heaven and I could actually see my clothes when I picked them out. It’s funny to think about, but we do this in other areas of our lives, don’t we? We live with problems instead of actually fixing them. We’ve all been there. The sink has been leaking for years. And instead of fixing it, you clean up the puddle every time you use it. We just live with the problem and take extra time every day dealing with the consequences, not the source. You have one sad phone charger with a wire sticking out, and it’s on its last leg. Instead of getting multiple phone chargers and leaving them several places around the house, you just carry the one with you everywhere. You lose it or risk electrocution multiple times a day. We live with the broken phone charger instead of taking the time to find a solution. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. Our problems are not going to change until we bring solutions. I get it. We are tired, and solving the root of the problem requires thinking and energy and time. I want to challenge you to use some time and energy to get to the root of some of the problems holding you back. If you want a different result, you have to do something differently. If we’re going to work smarter, not harder, we’ve got to get rid of some of these problems. Three Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder 1. Stop Press pause on your crazy life for a second. Your brain is CONSTANLY in overdrive. It’s going 100 miles an hour all day, every day. If we’re going to think outside our problems, we have to stop. You can’t identify the root of your problems if there’s no margin in your brain. Stop and create some space to think. 2. Think Thinking . . . what’s that like? HA! Once you’ve stopped long enough to create space to think, you might be surprised what you can identify. Think through your day from start to finish, and ask yourself this question: What barriers or annoyances do you deal with? Identify areas that drive you crazy and keep you from getting things done. Things that steal your time but don’t have to. Problems that you accept but don’t have to. Annoyances you live with but don’t have to. It could be a small thing that is a drain on your mental or physical energy. Make a list. 3. Solution Take your list and write out to the side a solution for each of the problems you live with. Most of the “problems” in our lives have a very easy and obvious solution. We just haven’t come up with the solution, because we’ve never taken time to come up with it. You might need to get on Amazon and order several phone chargers, get a new light bulb, set out your clothes the night before, or buy yourself a jewelry case. The Difference Between Problems You Can Solve and Problems You Can’t Solve There are problems you can live with and problems you don’t have to live with. You probably have some problems that you might have to live with, but I’d be willing to bet that you also have a lot that you don’t. Stop. Think. Solution. Stop going 100 miles per hour. Think about what’s holding you back. And solution your list. I want you to get things done. In order to get more things done, you’ve got to solve the problems stopping you from getting things done. You’re not just buying a light bulb; you’re buying time and peace of mind! You’re making your life easier. Life is hard enough. Don’t live with problems you can solve. How to Become More Organized and Productive with April Perry April Perry is an organizational and productivity expert and founder of Learn Do Become, where she and her husband help people architect a life of excellence. She is also the host of the LearnDoBecome Radio Podcast.  She is no stranger to the Business Boutique Podcast, and has even spoken at Business Boutique events. April has helped millions of moms get organized, be productive, simplify, and get rid of the piles. Y’all, she helps people get rid of the piles in their house! April’s incredible program walks you through how to create a “command central” in your home, build structure, and live a thriving life while being able to give generously. These teachings don’t just apply to your personal life; they’re also applicable to your business. April didn’t set out to start a business. She loved being a mom but wanted a way to be more organized and productive, and that’s where she started. Her journey wasn’t always clear and easy, but she stuck with it, made smart decisions, and has been very successful. In this episode, April Perry and I discuss how to be more productive and work smarter, not harder. How business seems so hard, but it’s also not as hard as you think. The importance of being clear and confident in your sales pitch. This not only helps you, it helps they people your serve. How to build a simple organizational system that works specifically for you. The best way to get the most out of conferences and events. (If you’re going to the Business Boutique Event in Nashville, Nov 1–3, this is super helpful). Related: Why Planners Are More Successful How Do You Make the Most of Your Next Learning Opportunity Working smarter not harder is all about effectively utilizing of your resources and opportunities. I want to challenge you to make the most of your next learning opportunity. Whether it be a networking event, a seminar, or the Business Boutique 3-Day event, these three tips are going to help you take full advantage of the experience. 1. Walk In With Open Hands When you have open hands you position yourself to learn. You’re open to new ideas, and you’re ready to receive and grow. You put yourself in a posture of learning, gratitude, and humility. Opening your hands also sets you up to give. Even if you’re not an expert in the space you’re entering, you may still have something valuable to contribute. With open hands, you’re available to give, not just take. You’ll be more likely to share what’s working with you and connect with others, instead of keeping it to yourself. The marketplace is not a place of scarcity, and walking in with open hands helps you freely receive and generously give out to others. 2. Look for the Good As someone who has spoken at many events and put on several myself, I can assure you that no event you attend will ever be perfect. You get to choose what you’re going to look for when you attend event. Because here’s the deal: you’ll find what you’re looking for. If you go in looking for negative, you will find it. The speaker will run long, they won’t cover the topic you wanted, they won’t have good snacks at the vending machine, etc. Fortunately, the same is true about good things. If you look for the positive, you’ll find it. You’ll meet amazing people, you’ll glean incredible information, you’ll feel like you belong, etc. Regardless of the type of event or situation, go in looking for the good. It’s on you to look for the right things. 3. Meet New People Even if the idea of meeting a stranger scares you to death. Even if you’re an introvert. Even if you attend with your best friends. Meet new people. Every opportunity you will ever have in your life will come through meeting people. If you need a little help with this, check out my podcast, “Getting Outside Your Comfort Zone.” No man or woman is an island. When you’re in these types of environments, it’s a great opportunity to meet people who are in your exact shoes or even a little farther along. It’s on you to choose to build relationships. If you employ these three strategies, I know you’ll get the most of out of whatever learning opportunity comes your way! And of course, one of my favorite parts of this podcast is hearing directly from you. Give me a call on my new toll-free line at 844.944.1074. You might hear your question on a future episode! 1:25 Three Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder 13:10 How to Become More Organized and Productive with April Perry 47:44 #AskChristyWright 56:24 Challenge: Make the Most of Your Next Learning Opportunity Get the "Get the Most Out of Your Conference Notes" worksheet by filling out the form here! Preorder the new 2019 Business Boutique Goal Planner with the code BBPLANNER at BusinessBoutique.com/Planner and receive Christy’s Setting Goals video that you can watch right now! Our friends at Infusionsoft are giving you 25 of their email templates for free! Text the word MIGHTY to 480-428-4150. Check out our friends at Volusion. You can set up your online store and start selling your products within minutes. It's that easy. Sign up for your FREE 14 day trial at Volusion.com/BB. If you have a success story you would like to share with the Business Boutique community, email me at podcast@businessboutique.com. New podcast episodes are available every other week.

Episode 004: Choosing Shipping Carriers for Your Website   Episode Summary:  The eCommerce customer experience doesn't end when a package leaves our facility. Who we use for shipping carriers can matter greatly from both a customer experience perspective and for our bottom line. In this episode, Julie discusses the factors you should consider when choosing which shipping carriers to use for your website.   Episode Links: https://www.usps.com/ https://www.ups.com/ https://www.fedex.com/ http://www.dhl.com/ https://www.shopify.com/ https://www.shipstation.com/   Episode Transcript: Announcer: Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method, with your host, Julie Feickert.   Julie Feickert: Hello and welcome to Episode 4 of The Savvy Business Method podcast, where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills, so you can provide a better life for your family. Before we start today, a quick reminder that you can find links to resources I talk about here in the show in the show notes, along with the complete transcript of the show. I realize that sometimes you're going to need to go back and find a piece of information and a transcript can be really helpful for that. So let's talk about our topic for today, which is choosing shipping carriers for your website. If you are selling physical products, you're going to need to use someone to get those products to your customers, right? And who you choose ends up mattering for several reasons. First, your shipping carrier plays a real role in your customers experience. Yes, we want our customers to have a great experience on our website, we want them to find the products, be able to figure out what works best for them, buy the products smoothly, and then have the products start the shipping journey to them quickly, right? That's our job as website owners. But when we choose a shipping company to work with, we are then passing that responsibility for the customer to have a good experience to the shipping carrier. And luckily, most of the carriers do a pretty good job of this, right? But things happen. If you've ever ordered something online and had it get lost in transit, or just significantly delayed, or maybe you've had something arrive broken or even destroyed in transit. I mean, I've seen some crazy destroyed packages in my time. Let me tell you, it's amazing what can happen to a package. These are all factors that influence how the customer views they're shopping experience with you. The second reason why this matters is that shipping is one of the largest costs that we as a website owner have to take on. Getting our products to our customers is really expensive, and so we don't want to be taking any more costs than necessary, and we want to be getting to best experience for our customers and for ourselves for our money. And the third reason is that in the end, problems cost us time, money, and customer goodwill. If you've ever dealt with a package that's gone missing, or been destroyed in transit, you know how frustrating it is to have a customer who's upset who is getting a hold of you. That costs you time and money. You're trying to keep them happy and you typically going to end up having to reship that package, right? So that's costing you money. And meanwhile you're off trying to deal with the shipping carrier and file an insurance claim, that's costing you time. I mean this just starts to really eat away. It eats away at your productivity, it eats away at your budget, and it eats away at your customer goodwill. So let's walk through the factors that you need to be considering when you're choosing a shipping carrier to work with, or more than one shipping carrier to work with. Now, quick disclaimer here: I am not just going to tell you which shipping carriers are best. As we talked about in Episode Two, when we discussed optimizing your payment options on your website, I feel like I do all of you the service if I just say "Oh, you should do this, this, and this." Because you are going to have a unique circumstance. You are going to have changing circumstances. The providers that are available are probably going to change. The shipping market has been stable for a long time, but there's some signs that companies like Amazon might me coming in and offering some additional competition so some things are changing, right? Better to have all the information so that long-term you can make the best possible decision for your business. Also, today I am going to focus on shipping providers in the United States. This is my area of expertise; is shipping within the United States and that's the group I am most comfortable talking about. This included the United States Postal Service, UPS, FedEx, and to a lesser extent, DHL. They are a much smaller player in the United States these days. But if you are outside the United States, these same general factors that we're going to talk about really apply everywhere right? So stick around, you'll probably still get the information that you need, even if we don't talk about your specific country's options. Okay, so the first factor you need to consider when choosing a shipping carrier is which shipping carriers will integrate easily into the eCommerce platform that you're using, so in this case you're looking at the software that you are using to run your site. So this could be something like Shopify, or Volusion, or DemandWare, or Magento, but whatever it is you're using likely already has preferred providers, or carriers, so maybe like the Post Office and FedEx, or the Post Office and UPS, something like that where they're already integrated into the platform and this is going to make your life so much easier. That's not to say you can't consider a different provider but there may be more work involved and would just suggest that you put that into your calculations, right? Like, if you are going to need custom development work on your site in order to ship with, say, DHL, then that is something you need to give serious thought to. Okay, let's talk about cost. Cost is so near and dear to all of our hearts, right? Shipping is very expensive and the more we can get the cost down, the better. Without question, the average weight of your packages is going to be the biggest factor in determining how much they cost to send. Now, the shipping carriers are all constantly jockeying for position here and especially for low weight packages, packages under 2 pounds, there's this constant competition and switching around of services available, but if you are shipping things that are very lightweight, I just want to put a shout-out out there that you really should look at the Post Office. FedEx, and UPS, and DHL to a certain extent are all trying to compete for that business but the reality is that the Post Office, at least at this point, is still a less costly option for those smaller packages. One of the companies I used to have, our average package was, I think, like 6 ounces. We were shipping things that were very small and light. And so, the US Postal Service's First Class Mail actually was a great option for us. It was only a couple of dollars, it included tracking, First Class Mail in the United States, last time I checked, is being flown on FedEx airplanes so it's getting places pretty quickly, there's a lot of good things about First Class Mail. So, if you're in a position where you have things that are lightweight, don't forget about the Post Office. Another factor you should really be looking at when you're choosing your shipping carriers, and this kind of goes back to the platform integration we were talking about, is you want to be able to shop rates. And this means when you weigh the package in your system, and you put in the address, you really want to be able to see multiple shipping options. Sure, you could memorize the map and have a really good idea just looking at, you know, a two pound package is going 4 zones away, is it going to be a better price with this service or this service. You may have the ability to do that, most of us probably are not going to memorize a shipping table. So, I would just encourage you to be thoughtful when your choosing your systems and doing these integrations to make sure you don't lose the ability to price check. I really can't think of a situation where you would have the best shipping deal with only one carrier all the time, unless you are shipping one uniform package all the time. Another way you can potentially save money on shipping charges is to use a preferred provider through your eCommerce platform. So let me give you an example: My eCommerce site that I currently have is setup through Shopify. Shopify actually has negotiated rates with The Post Office and UPS. So if we ship through one of those two options, we get a fairly substantial discount, one I'm actually fairly happy with. So that's something to keep in mind too, sometimes using a preferred provider through your platform can save you money. The other way to get discounts on shipping costs is to be shipping a lot of stuff. Once you're shipping in volume companies like FedEx and UPS negotiate your rates with you. I'm not going to claim that that is any fun, I have done it many, many times, and I could happily go the rest of my life without having one of those conversations again, but just note, that as you grow, if you are shipping on your own account and not through, like, a platform like Shopify, you might eventually qualify for some discounts. Okay, so the next factor I really would encourage you to look at is how easily you are going to be able to work with the carrier's customer service department if something goes wrong. If you are shipping things that are perishable, or if your clients have very specific expectations when it comes to timeframe for delivery, then you really need to take that into consideration, and which shipping carriers are willing to make you those guarantees. And, if your package doesn't arrive in time, or if it arrives damaged, or if it gets lost, what does filing a claim look like? Does the shipping carrier offer as much insurance at an affordable cost as you're going to need to cover your product? What's the process for filing that claim? Is it very time consuming? Are claims generally paid out promptly? Is there an argument that's going to ensue? These are just the sorts of questions you want to be asking. Now, this might not matter at all if you're shipping very low value items, then this might not be the place to spend your time and money worrying. But if you're shipping costly items, particularly costly to you, then this something you need to give some serious thought to. So hopefully from today's discussion there are a few things that jump out at you that are most important for your business that you need to consider when you're choosing shipping carriers. I would encourage you when you're doing your research to reach out to local entrepreneurs and ask them who they use, and what their experience has been, because a part of your experience is going to be determined by the group that is picking up and handling your packages wherever you are. Also you can reach out to the companies themselves, especially if you are shipping a decent amount of product, you may be able to ask for a rep to be assigned to your account so you can ask these questions directly to a single person, have that single point of contact. So you've got some options here. Thanks for joining me today and geeking out over shipping options. I hope you had fun, and I hope that there are a few things now that you can think about and go apply to your own business. I'll be back in your feed in a few days with a new episode. If you haven't yet be sure to subscribe at that little button in iTunes and Stitcher and that way you'll be notified when the next episode is available. If you'd like to learn more about me, or The Savvy Business Method or you'd like to reach out and ask a question, or give me an idea for a future episode; I'd love to hear from you. You can find me a savvybusinessmethod.com as well as on Facebook and YouTube. Bye for now!   Announcer: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed todays episode please leave a review and subscribe, and for more great content and to stay up to date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com, and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 004: Choosing Shipping Carriers for Your Website

Episode 001: Six Ways to Grow Your Email List Using Your Website's Traffic   Episode Summary:  Your website is the source of your hottest leads so you need to collect as many email addresses as you can from visitors. In this episode, Julie walks you through small changes you can make to your existing website to give visitors multiple, well placed opportunities to sign up for your email marketing list.   Episode Links: https://www.shopify.com/  https://www.volusion.com/v2  https://www.bigcommerce.com/ https://magento.com/ https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/  https://savvybusinessmethod.com/  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAHt2LynOZylOjlIz878okg https://fb.me/savvybusinessmethod    Episode Transcript: Announcer Are you looking to take your online business to the next level? Well, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Business Method with your host Julie Feickert. Julie Feickert Hello, and welcome to the first official episode of The Savvy Business Method Podcast where we talk about how to plan, start, and grow your business online. I'm Julie Feickert, and my goal is to help you build practical business skills so you can provide a better life for your family. Our topic today is six ways to get more email signups on your website. Now, if you've been around eCommerce for a while, you've probably heard that it's really important to do email marketing. You may have even set up an email list and maybe collected some emails, but how one earth do you get from the three people on your email list, because you know it's you, your mom, and your best friend in the beginning, right? We all have to start our list somewhere. How do you get from those three people to a list of 10,000 subscribers, 50,000, 100,000, half a million? When we build an email list, we are looking for sustainable and significant revenue stream for our businesses, and so unfortunately, you do need those bigger numbers. Now, no question, there are many ways to collect email addresses and to build your list, but I want to talk today about the method that tends to be most effective for the least amount of cost, and that is collecting as many email addresses as possibilities from visitors to your website. Your website visitors are already on your website. They are familiar with your brand. They've seen your products, your information. They're going to be far easier to convince to part with their email addresses than random people on the Internet. Let's talk through how we optimize our websites and make small changes so that we can convince as many of our visitors as possible to give us their email address and start really building our email list. Now, the first method I want to talk about today is by far the most effective, and that is to have a popup that pops up when people enter your website, generally about two to five seconds after a visitor lands on your website. Of course, I'm sure you're very familiar with these. In the last few years, sites big and small have employed this technology, and they employ it because it's incredibly effective. Six years ago or so when I first put a popup on my website, I just felt like a terrible person. Here I was interrupting my visitors' experience. They had to stop and figure out whether to give me their email address. Popups were fairly popular at that point, but they still weren't everywhere like they are now. I really fought this idea. I had a few people who I really trusted say, "No. Nope, Julie, seriously, you have to do this," and I did, and you know what, I grew my email list drastically through having that popup. Popups are great because you can really test and figure out what works best for your website visitors. You can use different graphics, different wording, you can even have different offers. You could offer, say, a booklet of recipes, or you can offer a 10% off coupon or free shipping or something like that, and you can just keep testing and figure out what is the most effective way of convincing people to hand you their email address. Now, along those same lines, I'd also encourage you to put an exit intent popup on your website. This is very similar. It's generally a box or a page overlay that comes up, but this one is going to be triggered when it looks like someone is getting ready to leave your website. Generally, that is when their mouse cursor goes up over the URL bar or up into that top part of your site. That's how the system triggers as, "Oh, this person's about to leave. Let's show them the popup." Exit intent popups are really useful for a couple of things. One, of course, they're giving us another opportunity to collect an email address, which is the goal. We want as many email addresses as possible. The other nice thing about an exit intent popup is it can sometimes be another opportunity to help convince someone to purchase something, because as much as we want their email address, we'll get that if they buy something too. Buying something is always our top priority. With an exit intent popup, we might want to tailor our offers a little bit and say maybe free shipping or 10% off or something that could help a customer say, "Oh, wait. I was going to leave, but you know what, I think I'm going to stick around. I think I'm going to actually buy that thing." That would be the ideal outcome, right? We want to do that. Now, both these exit and entry popups might sound a little bit intimidating if you're not fairly tech-savvy, so let's just talk about this for a few minutes. You're really fortunate because the technology that's available now for website owners is so much easier to use than it was 5 or 10 years ago. Odds are good that the ecommerce software that underlies your website, so this would be Shopify, Volusion, BigCommerce, Magento, whatever you're using to run your website, generally speaking, there is probably some popup functionality built into your software. Now, whether it will be exactly what you want is a different matter entirely, but you probably have the built-in ability to do this. If you don't, or it's really not the level of functionality you need, then there are generally apps and plugins. This is a very popular marketing method, so there are actually a ton of options. You want to make sure you pick a system that does both entry and exit popups for sure. Other things that are really nice if you can find one are systems that allow you to do A/B testing, which is split testing, so that's where you create two separate popups, and you change one thing. Maybe you change the picture or you change what you're offering them. Then you run them both randomly to people. Everybody sees one random option, and then you can see which one performs better. That's a great feature if you could find a popup system that's affordable that allows you to do that. Another feature to look for when you're shopping for a popup system is if you can do any sort of strategic targeting. For example, can you put a different popup up for someone who's on a certain category page versus another category page? Let me give you a practical example of how this works, and I have personally see this work amazingly well for one of my businesses. Let's say you're running a camera equipment website, and you want to give people who are looking at buying camera bodies a booklet on comparing different types of cameras for different projects. You could set your system up to show them a popup that offers them that specific ebook in exchange for their email address if they're sitting on a product page that has to do with camera bodies. Then you could have a completely different offer for people who are visiting pages for camera accessories like tripods. Maybe you could offer them a handout that goes through the six pieces of equipment every beginning photographer needs, something like that. This can be incredibly effective because you're meeting people where they're at. Instead of giving them some random that you're hoping appeals to most people, you're giving them an offer that appeals to people in their much more specific circumstance. It is great option if you can do that with your popup system. Another way I see this used really effectively is to change the offers on the exit intent popups based on whether or not someone has something in their cart and even the value of their shopping cart. If they have something in their cart, you might want to offer them free shipping. If they have something, maybe they have hundreds of dollars in their cart, you may want to offer them free shipping plus 10% off, maybe a little bit better incentive. Again, if you have an ability to test and split-test your offers, you could potentially really dial in what works for different groups of people. You've probably caught on to the fact that I love popups. I think they are one of the most effective ways to build an email list using people who are already visiting my websites, so why wouldn't we just use popups? Well, I mean, there's some practical realities. Not everybody is ready to give you their email address the exact time that a popup appears. When they see that first popup come when they're on the site, maybe they really want to look around a bit. Maybe they want to make sure you're legitimate and that your products are what they're looking for before they give you their email address. There's another reason. There's that little evil thing called popup blocker, and a lot of people are running popup-blocking software these days. We need to be thinking about what are ways that we can capture email addresses from people who are possibly running some sort of popup-blocking software. Now, let's go through a couple of other ways that you would need to optimize your website so you can collect as many email addresses as possible, and none of these ways that I'm about to go through are going to collect as many as the popups. I mean, they're probably always going to be your best performers, but it is well worth your time to put at least some of these other options in place so that your customers have every possible opportunity to give you their email address. Let's look at a floating opt-in. Now, a floating opt-in is generally a shape or a bar sitting at the bottom of the screen. That's very common on mobile websites. This has some sort of offer on it: sign up for our newsletter, free ebook, get recipes, something like that, and it just sits in the same place on the website, even if someone is scrolling. Like on one of my ecommerce sites, I have a floating box that sits up on the upper right-hand corner, and even when you scroll through the site, it's always there, and it just says free ebook. If you click on it, you go to a landing page where you can enter your email address for the free ebook. Generally speaking, these floating opt-ins, in my experience, are like my number three most popular way to collect email addresses from visitors, and that's really just because it appears on every page and it's always there. But there's a couple of other options too. One is to add a static opt-in box to your content pages. When I'm talking about content pages, I am talking about pages that are there to support your product. Back to the camera example. If you have a camera equipment website, you might have a page that compares different types of cameras or different types of tripods, and it could be really useful on the side of the page to put some sort of static box that just sits there and collects email addresses. Now, if you're running a website that has more of a blog-style template, this can be really easy because you can just use one of the spaces that's normally dedicated through pushing through ads. You could just use one of those square boxes and put your collection information in there. Just having that on every content page is just yet another reinforcement of this idea of, "Hey, join our community, get this offer," whatever it is you're offering your customers so they can sign up for your email address. Also, in terms of your content pages, and this is the fifth way to make a minor change to your website, I would encourage you to put calls to action one every content page. This can be some messaging around "if you like our information," or "if you like our recipes, get more by signing up," and you can put that information in the middle of an article or at the end of the article, or both. If it's a long article, you could probably get away with putting it two or three times. Again, you're just reinforcing that idea of joining your community of getting more information from you. When people are reading your content pages, especially if they're getting half, three-quarters, all the way through that content, odds are good that they see your content just being valuable, so this can be a great time in that moment to really collect that email address. Number six on the ways that we can make small changes to our website so we can collect more email addresses is to link in the header or the footer of your website, or both. This could just be a link that says, "Sign up for our newsletter," or, "Get 10% off," or, "Free shipping," or, "Free ebook," or whatever your offer is. You could put it up in your header near your account information in your shopping cart, or you can stick it down in your footer near the About Me page and the link to your frequently asked questions, those sorts of things. That's six different ways that you can make small changes to your website. None of these are very difficult. Most of you will be able to accomplish these on your own over the next few days. These can make a big difference in the number of email addresses that you're able to collect. Now, when I'm talking to entrepreneurs in person, and I'm telling them that they need to do these six things on their website so they can collect more email addresses from visitors, I generally hear the same couple of objections over and over again. Let's talk about them briefly. The biggest objection I hear is that you're going to annoy your customers or seem really pushy. This is an objection that tends to keep people from doing any of these things, especially the popups because they feel more intrusive. Let's first step back and really think logically about this. None of these six things that we've talked about today is an uncommon thing to see on a large ecommerce website. This is simply good marketing practices. I'm willing to bet that most of your customers visit other ecommerce websites, and probably big ones, on a regular basis, and so none of these things are out of the ordinary or considered to be black hat tricks. This is all out there in the open, commonly used. But if these ideas are still giving you heartburn, never fear. You have an option. Hopefully, you have something like Google Analytics installed on your website. It's a system that helps you see the statistics of your visitors' behavior when they're on your website, and what you can do is you can put one or two of these things in place at a time, and then look at your numbers. Watch your numbers for a few days. You want to look and see, are your visitors leaving your website more quickly, are they still visiting the same number of pages per website, are they bouncing at a higher rate, and when we talk about bouncing, we're talking about people who visit our website, land on that one page, and then leave the website without going to any other pages. If those numbers are not changing, then you're probably not annoying any of your customers, or enough of your customers, I should say, to a point where this is going to be a problem for you. No joke. You're probably going to hear from one or two of them. Some people really hate marketing in all forms, but you want to look at the broader numbers. We never want to make decisions based on the complaints of one or two customers. We want to step back, look at the broader numbers. Is the behavior of most customers on my site changing? If it's not, that's great. Am I collecting more email addresses? If I am, great. Then it sounds like you're doing something that is working well for your website. All right, so one more thing before you run out and start making changes to your website. It is really important to stay up to date on any legal changes that happen concerning how we as website owners collect and use email addresses. Now, you may be aware that there was just a major change in the legal situation in the European Union when it comes to email marketing, and odds are good. There's probably going to be some changes in other parts of the world, including the United States in the foreseeable future. This is just something you really need to be aware of and keep up to date on. It's always nice to have a small business attorney handy to to ask questions so that you can make sure that you are staying well within the bounds of the law. But beyond that, I would really encourage you to use this opportunity to treat other people's information the same way that you would want your information treated. That means that when we send email, we want to be sending email only to people who knowingly signed up for our email list, who knew what they were signing up for, and we are sending them the information that they expected to receive. If you do that, it goes a long way. Thanks for listening. I am hopeful that you're all going to run out and start making changes to your website and collecting more email addresses today. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to hit that little subscribe button so you can be notified with each new episode, and if you are excited about what you learned today, I would really appreciate kind reviews and five-star ratings. I promise I will read every single review, and those ratings and reviews really do help other people find this podcast. If you have ideas for topics for future episodes, or you just want to get to know me better, visit me at savvybusinessmethod.com or on my Facebook page or YouTube channel. I would love to hear from you. Until next time. Announcer Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Savvy Business Method with Julie Feickert. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a review and subscribe, and for more great content and to stay up to date, visit savvybusinessmethod.com and Savvy Business Method on Facebook. We'll catch you next time.   Episode 001: Six Ways to Grow Your Email List Using Your Website's Traffic  

Thanks so much for all the Information you share. Even a bigger Thank you for not trying to sell me something. The best part of your show is when you talk about your family... Thanks I do have a question. I have been selling online with Amazon/eBay for 3 years now. I initially started selling a school item and other small items..  after the 4th qtr the first year, I gravitated towards Toys. I had a good supplier with a Mattel liquidation store in my area. The first 2 years, had doubled up on sales and had amazing 4th qtr with the toys. I used my website as just a landing page to show a business, and when suppliers wanted to see it. The page never was advertised or used for any sales. I have switched from Volusion to a Shopify store, to generate sales on the site.  I have watched and read so much on selling online with eBay, Amazon and Shopify stores. Since the toys have dried up with competition and store closures, I have totality lost direction. I am so Lost and cannot seem to focus on a niche or product to sell. I have re-done my website about 5 or 6 times...  from toys- to gadgets, to shirts. Every time I hear another digital marketer explain or push an idea, I just get further lost. Have you ever just got so overwhelmed or lost with direction and ideas?  I seem to have all this knowledge and nowhere to go with it. Any Ideas on how to re-focus and get back on track? Thanks Darren   This is an amazing question sent if from Darren The most important thing is to focus on one task at a time and be persistent and take it until the end. By starting tasks and following the shiny new thing, we will lose track of the old and not so shiny thing that was ready to blossom. When you have new ideas, write them down, but don't attack them until you are done with the old ones  

In this week’s episode, we’re joined by special guest, Jason Lewis, from Painfully Honest Tech! Subscribe to Jason: https://www.youtube.com/user/thejasontlewis Sponsored by Volusion: http://volusion.com // X Cloud: http://internxt.com FIND THE SHOW: iTunes: https://gofpt.link/itunes // Google Play: https://gofpt.link/googleplay

This is the last episode of shopping cart month, where we talk about some other contenders, even if they're not the biggest ones on the scene. We cover Bigcommerce, Volusion, and Americommerce and compare and contrast their various strengths and weaknesses. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: http://bit.ly/2mTNDap

La Piattaforma di Ecommerce deve costare massimo il 15/20% del tuo budget. stop.Ci sono 4 categorie di Piattaforme Ecommerce:- Marketplace: Ebay e Amazon e Booking Turismo / Etsy per artigianato esteroVantaggi: Facile, Rapido, Traffico/clienti già esistenti, No conoscenze informaticheSvantaggi: No funzionalità, Limitazioni sui prodotti, sei anonimo, commissioni, concorrenza diretta, no strategie di marketing avanzate, no sito web tuoCosti: molto di gestione ridotti , solo su vendutoQuando e per Chi? Singoli individui, piccoli artigiani, test o canale aggiuntivo per ecommerce tuo- Piattaforme Online Saas (shopify, Bigcommerce, Volusion), Webnode, WixStore e 1and1 e StoredenVantaggi: Facile, Rapido, No tecnica, hai un tuo sitoSvantaggi: Limitazioni sulle funzionalità e personalizzazioni,, sei vincolato (sei in affitto)Costi: molto ridotti più commissioni Quando e per Chi? piccoli ecommerce con un catalogo non ampio- CMS e Piattaforme scaricabiliVantaggi: Hai un sito completo con minime limitazioni di funzionalità, Piattaforme gratuite e addons per nuove funzioni, ecommerce completoSvantaggi: Nessun costo, commissioni, un minimo di conoscenze tecniche da apparendere o affiancamento da un programmatoreCosti: mediamente meno di 5000€Quando e per Chi? Per PMI, quando volete fare ecommerce seriamente- Piattaforme ad hocVantaggi: Ecommerce completo e nessun limiteSvantaggi: Costi alti, tempi alti per avvio e sviluppoCosti: mediamente più di 10000€ (più funzioni più costi)Quando e per Chi? Solo per medio-grandi impreseScarica gli Ebook Gratuiti di SCUOLAECOMMERCE.COM ►http://www.scuolaecommerce.com/ebook-gratis/

La Piattaforma di Ecommerce deve costare massimo il 15/20% del tuo budget. stop.Ci sono 4 categorie di Piattaforme Ecommerce:- Marketplace: Ebay e Amazon e Booking Turismo / Etsy per artigianato esteroVantaggi: Facile, Rapido, Traffico/clienti già esistenti, No conoscenze informaticheSvantaggi: No funzionalità, Limitazioni sui prodotti, sei anonimo, commissioni, concorrenza diretta, no strategie di marketing avanzate, no sito web tuoCosti: molto di gestione ridotti , solo su vendutoQuando e per Chi? Singoli individui, piccoli artigiani, test o canale aggiuntivo per ecommerce tuo- Piattaforme Online Saas (shopify, Bigcommerce, Volusion), Webnode, WixStore e 1and1 e StoredenVantaggi: Facile, Rapido, No tecnica, hai un tuo sitoSvantaggi: Limitazioni sulle funzionalità e personalizzazioni,, sei vincolato (sei in affitto)Costi: molto ridotti più commissioni Quando e per Chi? piccoli ecommerce con un catalogo non ampio- CMS e Piattaforme scaricabiliVantaggi: Hai un sito completo con minime limitazioni di funzionalità, Piattaforme gratuite e addons per nuove funzioni, ecommerce completoSvantaggi: Nessun costo, commissioni, un minimo di conoscenze tecniche da apparendere o affiancamento da un programmatoreCosti: mediamente meno di 5000€Quando e per Chi? Per PMI, quando volete fare ecommerce seriamente- Piattaforme ad hocVantaggi: Ecommerce completo e nessun limiteSvantaggi: Costi alti, tempi alti per avvio e sviluppoCosti: mediamente più di 10000€ (più funzioni più costi)Quando e per Chi? Solo per medio-grandi impreseScarica gli Ebook Gratuiti di SCUOLAECOMMERCE.COM ►http://www.scuolaecommerce.com/ebook-gratis/

In an era when many ecommerce platforms are migrating to large enterprise clients, Volusion is doing the opposite. It's focused on smaller and mid size companies, even startups. To discuss it all, we're joined by Volusion's founder and longtime C.E.O., Kevin Sproles.

SHOW NOTES Gal is an award-winning technology veteran. He is the co-founder and CEO of ShopSnap, a modern e-commerce platform and the founder and CEO of Inverted Software, a software consulting firm in Los Angeles CA. With over twenty years of software experience, his designs are responsible for powering fortune 500 companies in multiple industries. Gal led international teams on major financial, media and entertainment, gaming and e-commerce projects. Some of his projects include Microsofts Windows 8 download manager, the Volusion ecosystem, Rockstar Games online store and ShoppingCart.NET, which he wrote as a pet project and was the most downloaded .NET shopping cart on the Microsoft App Gallery. Gal is also an open source community supporter and contributor with projects ranging in capacity from parallel workflow processing frameworks to extensible caching systems. He is an avid blogger and enjoys passing his extensive software knowledge on to upcoming talent. Listen and Learn: Why friendship leads to trust Why trust creates good communication Discover Gal's 6 key pieces of leadership Why determination is key to success How content marketing can elevate a brand TO LEARN MORE ABOUT SHOPSNAP, CLICK HERE.  TO FIND GAL ON LINKEDIN, CLICK HERE.

Cristina Cordova, first Business Development hire at Stripe and former Head of Business Development at Pulse (acquired by LinkedIn), talks at length about a career in Business Development in Tech. As part of Stripe, Cristina has led complex deals to rapidly expand Stripe’s business through partnerships with companies including Apple, Facebook, Freshbooks, GoDaddy, Intuit, OpenTable, Pinterest, Twitter, Volusion and Xero. At Pulse, Cristina sourced and closed partnerships with hundreds of media organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, Reuters, Bloomberg & BBC News. Cristina has a Bachelors in Political Science from Stanford University. Some of the areas that Cristina touches upon in this episode include: 1. What is business development and how is it different from Sales 2. Examples of projects she has worked on, such as getting Pulse app pre-loaded on Kindle Fire 3. How BD deals can vary from product partnerships to simple cross-marketing/distribution deals 4. Stages in a typical project 5. How outreach to potential partners can happen through investors' networks, company's network and your own network. 6. How a small startup or a company looking for very specific deals, might look for a hire who is already very well networked 7. Why good BD people tend to be generalists 8. Interesting and challenging aspects of the job 9. How this can be a high-stakes job, with high highs and low lows 10. How this is a very external facing role, and so you need to be comfortable with working with people with a variety of different working styles 11. How a candidate's resume should ideally indicate whether they have worked with product or engineering in the past, prior deal experience and impact of those deals 12. Recommended resources 13. How you should join a company that has a negotiating style similar to yours and where you can learn from the people around you Thank you for listening!! Follow the show on Twitter @LED_Curator Website www.learneducatediscover.com/ Like us on FaceBook at www.facebook.com/learneducatediscover/ Email us at hello@learneducatediscover. We will reply!! Subscribe to the show on iTunes itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/learn…d1049159321?mt=2

At Shopify Unite, we heard that Shopify is advancing their checkout process by adding new features like Shopify Pay. Advancement in the checkout process is great for merchants, and especially important for Shopify. It's important because the Shopify checkout process is tightly controlled. There's limited customization options, and unless you're on Shopify Plus, you're not given access to edit the checkout process. This brings us to a controversial point: is it not being able to edit that checkout process good or bad? And if we wanted to edit it, how could we do it? Then, what would do to improve the checkout process for the better? Joining me on the show to discuss it is Jordan Gal. Jordan is the Cofounder and CEO of CartHook, a software company that offers products that make your ecommerce business more successful. — Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via Email Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on iTunes Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast on Stitcher Subscribe to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast via RSS Join The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group Work with Kurt — Learn: The coming battle for your Shopify checkout The arguments for and against replacing your Shopify checkout Customizations to consider that may improve conversion at checkout The one trend in ecommerce you need to know about The power of free plus shipping offers The strategy used by the most sophisticated Shopify store owners to dramatically increase ROI on ad spend Links Mentioned: CartHook Bold Apps Cashier (Beta) Zipify One Click Upsell Shopify Pay Address Auto Completion ClickFunnels Free Guide I want to send you a sample chapter of Ecommerce Bootcamp, absolutely free. Tell me where to send your sample at ecommerce-bootcamp.com Transcript Kurt: One of the interesting and perhaps blessed things that happen in Shopify is that unless you're on plus you can't mess with the checkout, and even on plus you can mess with it a little bit but totally rewriting the thing just probably isn't a great idea. The reason I say I like this about Shopify is the Shopify checkout is based on millions of data points, so in theory they're always optimizing this thing and we know it works well. I've seen really optimized stores with conversion rates at 3% and 5% and those that really juice their traffic to the store, conversion rates in the low double digits, so we know the checkout works. We've certainly seen it work a number of times, but that doesn't mean there aren't ways to improve it, and not just in terms of conversion rate but there are other features maybe we would like to add to the checkout which would be cool. There's a controversial practice that happens and we'll go into why, but it's replacing the checkout. If you've ever used a subscription app, Bold app's recurring orders is a wonderful way to do subscription. It actually when someone goes through the checkout to place their subscription, it entirely circumvents the Shopify checkout, replaces it with Bold's that is just a duplicate. They have remade the standard Shopify checkout so that they can do their own payment processing, and then just funnels all that stuff back into your Shopify store via the API. It's kind of crazy and early on we were like, "Oh damn, that's how they solved that? That's nuts." And now we're seeing more people do it. You've probably heard about Ezra Firestone's Zipify, his company Zipify. Zipify's one click upsell. Bold Apps has one in beta. I've seen it enough places now I'm comfortable mentioning it, that we got a replacement called Bold Apps Cashier that's designed to try and pull all these things together, add a bunch of features to the checkout. And of course we have heard from him before. Jordan Gal from CartHook, who joins me today to talk about what's going on in this space, why and how it's heating up, and why it's controversial, what the trends are and what's going on. It's a more high level discussion but I think this should be very interesting. Jordan, welcome. Jordan: Thank you very much, Kurt. Thanks for having me on. I had to bite my tongue through the intro because I have a lot of interjections to make. Not disagreements but adding to the richness of the debate. How about that? I think we can get into it. I think it's a good, good topic. Kurt: I don't even know where I fall on this, so we'll see if you sway me. You probably will. You're a charismatic gentleman. Jordan: I don't even know if it's about swaying. It's a laissez faire argument. The checkout on Shopify right now is good. It converts well. Once people get into the checkout, it converts and it's standardized and it looks great on mobile and it's super stable and super fast, so there's not an argument to be made about how Shopify's checkout is terrible. That's not the argument. The argument is, should the eCommerce merchant have control over their checkout? And if so, then why? What are people trying to do with the checkout? And we saw the first rumblings of it with the subscription apps, and now it's starting to blossom a little bit in that space and we've got a few different companies playing in that space. Our company, CartHook, has a one page checkout and post purchase upsell app, and then Ezra's got OCU and then Bold's coming out, so it's getting interesting and my only argument is to let the merchant do what they want with their store. Kurt: When you phrase it like that then it's hard to argue with it. I'll play devil's advocate. The argument against it would be, protect people from themselves. If the checkout is based on ... It works and it's got these millions of data points, then lock it down. It's so important. Don't let people mess with it. But then I have said that and we've heard that on the show, but then I've also said if you want to add predictable, recurring revenue to your store, you should try selling subscriptions, in which case you got to replace the damn checkout. Jordan: And it may not even be like that forever. This very well may be a temporary period where things are in transition around the checkout. That's one of the things that we keep an eye on. We say to ourselves, how long does this last? This period where Shopify's checkout is locked down and then people are replacing it. Maybe there's something that we're transitioning into with some of Shopify's new APIs that allow for more features to be built into the Shopify checkout instead of replacing. I think it's a very fluid thing. To back up a touch, our product, it originated years ago when I ran an eCommerce business on Volusion where I ran the company with my three brothers. One brother was in charge of getting traffic to the store. I was in charge of converting that traffic into sales, and my other brother was in charge of everything that happened after the sale, from customer service to shipping, inventory, and so forth. So I spent my days staring at, okay, how do I convert more of this traffic into sales? The truth is I spent a considerable amount of my time on the checkout process or the cart page and the checkout page and trust symbols and error notifications and as everyone knows, every little tweak can make a difference. Sometimes you don't know which tweak makes a difference so you start off with your best practices and you make it super simple, and then you start to work from there and a lot of unexpected things happen. That's where it originated and now what we're really doing is we're bringing that same mindset and that same situation into Shopify. We're saying what works for one store may not be optimal for another store, so let's give control over to the merchant to experiment. Kurt: If we hand control over to the merchant, what are the things that people are going to do? What are they missing out on now that they could be doing if they had access to this checkout, or swap it to one of these other replacements such as CartHook? Jordan: We're seeing it happen in two different ways. The first is on the checkout page itself, and the second is what's happening after the checkout. I don't even know where we should focus first. I guess the first one's almost easier. Kurt: We'll do it in order. Jordan: Sure. I think it's more straightforward too and then the second part that the upsells after the purchase go deeper, so we can go deeper into that side. The first part is the checkout page itself. Shopify has a three step checkout and it's debatable whether or not that is the right way to go compared to a one page checkout. These days with more and more traffic and more and more conversions happening on mobile, you want it to be as fast as possible. Again, it's not straightforward that a one page checkout is faster and easier and converts better, but you can't tell without experimentation. What our customers are doing is they're trying to match up their checkout page with their brand so that it's on their own domain and it has trust symbols, testimonials, images, design that match the rest of the company's site so that there's a consistency from the product page to the cart page to the checkout page and then that consistency is generally understood to help conversions. Kurt: So the first is we want access to design for two reasons. One to make it match the store so you have a cohesive experience. You don't have this jarring, suddenly I'm on a different domain name with a different feel, a different look entirely. That's usually the first objection is listen, I just want this thing to look the same. Okay, cool. Then the second would be, all right, you're asking a lot saying to a stranger, "Hey, give me your credit card details and your home address, buddy." That's a big ask, so you want to add some psychological triggers in there like social proof, trust indicators. Even just, "Hey, if you have questions call us. Here's our toll free number." That kind of thing. Then of course remove all the friction. Make it as easy to use as possible. Add fancy features like address auto-completion would be a not atypical customization we see. Jordan: Yeah, and along with that just the desire to experiment with whether or not one page checkout will convert better for you than the multistep, and it's not straightforward. Kurt: It really does depend on the audience, because before we hitched our cart and did only Shopify, and obviously this was years ago so things have changed wildly, but we saw situations where some stores did better where you gave people the option to register as customers versus be guests. Some stores did better when you did one page checkout versus multistep. It really was dependent on the audience. Jordan: Yeah, it makes sense and that's what we're seeing too. It is not a straightforward, the second you add a one page checkout it converts better. It's not straightforward like that, so it's an experimentation piece. Kurt: And the end goal there to have those options, to have those features, is to increase the conversion rate. We make it as easy as possible, remove all those barriers, all that friction and we just make it easier for people to buy, and in theory our purchased rate goes up, right? Jordan: Yes, and one of the interesting things that we have an eye on is it's my opinion that the thumbprint wins. That's where I think everything is going on checkout. What I say is that my ideal is that 12 months from today, our default checkout page has no fields. Like the cart summary where you don't see the cart summary until you click on it and then it opens up and extends the cart summary. My hope is that the fields are hidden and you have to click on it to open up the fields to put your name and address in, because the thumbprint purchase will be that prevalent. That's what I hope things get to for merchants, because once ... There are a few different options. Apple Pay, Android Pay, some type of a Shopify Pay, Stripe. Whatever comes out over the next year I think the thumbprint is the thing that wins. Kurt: We see that with Apple Pay now and really I've only used it in maybe two or three situations and it was absolutely magical. Like oh my gosh, this is the easiest thing ever. How long has it been around? A year? And it's stunning to see how few ... This is not a criticism of just Shopify stores. Of just eCommerce and mobile in general that just don't use Apple Pay and that confuses me. Jordan: I think these things happen all at once. They grow and then all of a sudden you look at it and you say, "Whoa,". It wasn't that big last year and it's bigger this year and it's anticipated to be big, and the next thing you know it's huge and then everyone adopts it all at once. Over a 12 month period everyone will add it. That's my ... It's just inefficient, man. To be on a phone and punch in all those buttons when you're just using the credit card that you already have in your wallet and then you will eventually have inside your phone. It seems inevitable to me. Kurt: Absolutely. I'm confused as to why it didn't happen sooner. Jordan: I agree. Kurt: That's our dream as we get to, I want to check out. I just tap my thumb and it's like, "Hey, you want to pay with this card and send it to this address, right?" Yeah. Done. Send. No more thinking about it. It's done. It's over. It's one step. It works on our mobile devices and soon we'll see touch ID on everything. Jordan: It's a bit scary, isn't it? Kurt: A little bit. Jordan: The fact that the entire Internet will be as easy to purchase from as Amazon is scary. Kurt: Yeah. I ... It's a total rabbit hole here. I don't keep Amazon on my phone to prevent impulse purchases. When I need to shop on Amazon, I download the app and then I have to log in, make a purchase, then delete it. Jordan: Wow, good for you. Kurt: Because it's too easy. Jordan: If I were a Shopify merchant, that's what I would want. I want it to be too damn easy to buy from my store. Kurt: Right and fundamentally, with conversion rate optimization, that's the end goal is it is too damn easy to buy from this store. That's number one is, give me access to design so I can optimize this thing tailored to my specific audience. Then the pushback against that would be, "Well, if we do that we're giving you enough rope to hang yourself or you could mess it up and make it harder to use." In theory you're sophisticated enough. You can test it. You would know that your conversion rate goes down. Jordan: Yes. Like all business. I have plenty of rope to hang myself with in my business, just like you do and just like everyone else does. Kurt: There are other places I could through things up like uploading 12 meg PNGs to my carousel slider and that kind of thing. Then the other is this post purchase stuff, which I think is really exciting and is an untapped opportunity. Talk to me about that. Jordan: I think it's fascinating, and I have really enjoyed my job for the past year working in this space because it's just genuinely interesting and new. Once again, let's back up two steps. Here's what I see that happened over the past year or two. What's happening is that the marketers, the army of marketers that move around the web and identify opportunities, they have been moving from digital products to physical products en masse. Just a gigantic trend. It was not kicked off but accelerated by ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels brought marketing innovation in their platform. They basically said, "Okay, Leadpages, you guys have awesome landing pages, but people don't build landing pages on their own. They build them together in a funnel." So ClickFunnels just put that concept into play and said, "Now instead of building standalone landing pages, we're going to help you build landing pages that connect in a funnel," and then on top of that they provided a ton of education around how to use that. How to sell both digital and physical products through a funnel, and one of the key components of the funnel is the post purchase upsell. It's not just an opportunity to add something to someone's order. It is an opportunity to completely change the way you actually sell. The strategy from the starting point can be changed because of the fact that the post purchase upsell exists. A popular example is the free plus shipping offer. The free plus shipping offer, the way it works is what you want to do is offer something on the front end on your checkout page that's really low, low price. Ideally it's free. It's, "Hey, I just wrote a book. Buy my new book. I'll give it to you for free. All you need to do is pay for shipping." So the book is free, $0, and the shipping is call it $6.95, hence the free plus shipping nomenclature. Kurt: If you want to see this in action, if you've ever seen ads ... Clearly Facebook has considered me an info-marketer because I see ads for this stuff all the time. I got ads continuously for Russell Brunson, the owner, creator, of ClickFunnels, for his book DotCom Secrets, which was offered to me as free plus shipping and sure enough, after seeing enough ads, I did end up buying it for free plus shipping and it was like $7. Jordan: Right. And now after- Kurt: Then it worked on me a second time. He just came out with another book. Did it again. Jordan: That's right. So look, it works. It's a great offer, and so what that does is it gets the person into your funnel. All of a sudden your checkout page, what you're selling on the front end becomes an entryway. It's not the point. It is the beginning of the point. Once you put in your credit card information to pay $6.95 in shipping, what happens is that payment token can then be used again, which means ... Kurt, when you bought that book, what happened after you made the purchase? Kurt: Immediately afterward it's like, thanks. That's great. You purchased it. By the way, one time offer. You'll never be able to get this again. For $150 or something, add this extra package of just amazing value and it had a video and it was it's own amazing landing splash page and I said no thanks. But I also made sure to not read it because I'm sure it was very compelling and I might have bought it, and then when I said no thanks, it offered me another different thing. Jordan: A downsell. Kurt: A downsell, which is always going to be cheaper than the first thing it offered me. It always seemed way cheaper because I was just price anchored to the other thing. Jordan: Right. So if you had decided to purchase, in order to purchase all you would've had to do is click on the button that said, "Yes, I want to purchase." You would not have needed to reenter your credit card again. The credit card would have been stored in the payment token stored from the checkout page. That became very, very popular in the ClickFunnels world, and then the next phase what happened is a lot of people on ClickFunnels started selling physical products in this way. They'd say, "Okay, here's one unit of skin cream," and then after the purchase it's, "Hey, do you want to buy another one for a different price?" And, "Hey, do you want to subscribe and just save and get it every month without you having to do anything?" So then it started to creep into the physical product world. People started making a lot of money being really successful in the physical product world, and then what do they realize, Kurt? They realize, "Oh man, I really want to use Shopify to do the order management because it's really good at it." Then you had this strange gap where you said, "Okay, I want to sell like ClickFunnels but I want to manage like Shopify," and that's really what's happening in the market right now. You have a ton of these marketers coming into Shopify and they're introducing all these marketing concepts and now they're slowly seeping into the regular retailer world, not just the marketer world, and now there's this crazy [crosspollinization 00:19:30] around post purchase upsells are ... It's a legitimate strategy. It works. Kurt: Right. Initially, as soon as I think retailers and eCommerce folk in general hear info-marketer, they're like, "Oh, it's sleazy. I don't want to do it." Then over time they open their mind to it. It works for them for reasons, and a lot of the stuff is based on 50, 100 year old direct response marketing ideas. We've seen that with the power of landing pages and people's desires to rather than just have a product page, make these much more sophisticated, compelling landing pages for their Shopify store that are borrowed straight out of this info-marketing world. Jordan: Yes, and I actually want to make sure we talk about the landing page thing. That's probably the biggest insight I can give to your audience based on what we're seeing, so let's put a marker on that. I just wrote that down as a note. The process of normalization. I remember three years ago when we first launched our abandoned cart application, CartHook started off as an abandoned cart email app. We used to get people who saw our site and email us in such anger. Just, "I cannot believe what you guys are doing, that you are horrible, evil people who do this," and it's because we're sending emails to people after they abandon their cart. Do you know anyone who thinks that's a horrible, controversial, sleazy practice? No, it's normal. It works. It's inevitable. You need to do it in a tasteful way. It's always in the way you do it. Kurt: Yeah. Don't damn the tools. It's what you do with them. Jordan: Exactly right. I think there is now a process of normalization around upsells. I think within a year, basically not every single time but most of the time you buy something online you will have a post purchase upsell, and people will start to learn about it and be conditioned to it and understand that they're going to get certain offers and then they'll start to try to game it to see what kind of offers they get after the purchase. It's just a totally normal process. Kurt: I had not thought of it that way but yeah, we're already doing that as a standard practice in email marketing automation. You've got to be doing an upsell after the fact to extend customer lifetime value. Even the previous episode to this one that's literally what we discussed. Like a third of the emphasis was devoted to those post purchase sequences. At no point did we think it was strange, sleazy, or anything like that. Jordan: No, it's just a normal part of retail. Anyway, so that's the second piece. The first piece is the checkout. The second piece is what happens after the checkout. Now there's this amazing experimentation. What can you do ... If it's helpful I can give you what a typical post purchase funnel looks like. Kurt: I love examples. Really solidify it, picture it, so lay it on me brother. Jordan: Yeah, let's do it. Let's say you are selling flip flops. Okay. You sell flip flops from Brazil, so it's cool. You've got a brand going. A typical post purchase upsell funnel would look something like this. Visitor puts a pair of your flip flops in the cart, goes to the checkout page, fills out the forms, puts in their payment information, and clicks "complete purchase." After that checkout page the first page they would see would be an offer for more of the same. Meaning, the product you just bought, I'm going to offer you the same thing but for a better deal. Basically say, "You want to get a second pair of flip flops for 20% less?" And it's positioned as a one time offer because literally on the site publicly, it's offered for call it $40, but because you just purchased it, it's a thank you to someone who just purchased it. It's a one time offer. Add a second pair for you, for your spouse, for safekeeping, whatever. You get it for $30. Then, if they accept it, let's not get into downsells because that gets complicated, so let's just say three upsells in a row. Let's say they have two pairs of flip flops and they got a good deal on the second one and they're happy. The second would be for a complimentary product. What goes along with your flip flops? It is your flip flop cleaning kit. Then again you can say a one time offer, publicly or it may not even be available publicly on the website, or on the website the cleaning kit is available for $10 but now you can add it to your order for $5. So upsell number one is more of the same. Upsell number two is complimentary. Then what some people do, upsell number three is expedited shipping. What you're doing is you're saying, "This person is really interested. They just purchased. Maybe they want to get their product faster," and so instead of trying to convert them to upgraded shipping on the checkout page which creates friction, you can add an upsell as the third upsell for expedited shipping. Basically offering the same type of upgrade in shipping that you would've on the checkout page but this time you're not adding the friction up front. You're making an offer after the fact, then they can decide whether they want expedited shipping or not. That would be a typical post purchase upsell. More of the same, complimentary product, expedited shipping. Kurt: I love it. I love it and I can't do it right now. Jordan: Right. The point of this is really to change your average order value. Kurt: Right, obviously you're increase customer lifetime value but we're doing it in a much faster way. Where normally it'd be they make the purchase and then you email them their upsell offers, versus now we're doing it like, they have already committed to the first purchase, and in that same transaction now we're increasing that average order value, I think in theory extending their customer lifetime value through these upsells. Jordan: Right and the whole theory is, because these offers come after the checkout they don't interfere with the conversion rate on the front end. Kurt: Right and that's the risk. Right now if I want to do something similar I would use an app like Bold Apps Product Upsell [inaudible 00:25:51] pops up in the cart based on what's in the cart and offers me additional items. It's like, "Oh, you bought this beach towel. Did you also want to buy this suntan lotion?" So it pops this thing up. But they haven't bought the first item yet, so there's always the fear that this is going to increase bounce rate on the cart page. It's going to impact that conversion rate. Jordan: You got it. So it should be the same math on the front end. If you spend $10,000 a month in advertising and that usually results in let's just say 100 orders and the average order value is $100, that makes you $10,000 in revenue. Cool. Now, if you add post purchase upsells, that doesn't change at all. It's still the same spend, the same conversion rate, the same revenue but now 20% of those 100 purchases also add an additional average of $10, so now you've just made an extra $200. It shouldn't change the math on the front end at all on the conversion rate. Now what you're doing is just X% of customers are also taking an upsell, so you spend the exact same amount on ads but you make more revenue as a result. Kurt: So I'm getting a higher ... My initial order, my customer value goes way up but my cost per acquisition of customers doesn't change in the slightest. Jordan: Right. Shouldn't change, but the average order value goes up, and what does that allow you to do? It allows you to spend more on ads, and then you can make more money, and then spend more on ads, and make more money. Kurt: Right, you step on the gas and just keep this ... which I learned from you in a previous episode. If you get a funnel that works, it's profitable, step on the gas. See what you can do. Jordan: Yeah, step on the gas. Kurt: See how far you can scale it. That's a good example of how one might use upsells in eCommerce. Can I do this in Shopify right now? Jordan: You can do it in Shopify right now and there are a few options for merchants. Between ourselves and Ezra's OCU, there's starting to be some innovation in the space. Bold just came out with their Cashier. That's in beta, so the features there, we don't know what they're going to do but right now in the market you can use our product, CartHook Checkout or you can use Zipify OCU and people are doing it. We are getting a healthy amount of demand and we are kind of quiet. We don't really do any advertising and marketing, and we're just getting a wave of people who are talking about it in Facebook and then wanting to try it. It's starting to grow very organically and I think it's going to tip at some point over the next few months where it's just going to be more standard practice as opposed to the innovators on the marketing side. We're already talking to some really well known merchants that I don't want to mention, so it's already seeping into the ... The mean. The one standard deviation away from the normal. It's already creeping into the norm for them. Kurt: Right. Once we have these big ... You have some hero stores. Some stores that you aspire to be like. Very large, work in public Shopify stores. A good example would be [Beer Brand 00:29:18] or I always reference [Everest Bands 00:29:19] on here where you hear a lot about them and you're just like man, I want a store like that. Once you see those people, because we perceive they're successful and therefore when we see them adopting these things we go, "Well, they must know what they're doing." Everybody has that thought, even if they're just experimenting. That's what's going to normalize this and we're going to see more demand for it, and then we'll see more education about it, more people talking about it in Facebook groups, and you're right about that. I start seeing more and more mentions, especially in the Shopify Plus Facebook group. See mentions like, "Hey, how do I do this?" Then, "How do I do upsells? How do I do this?" And you hear people like, "Oh, check out CartHook. Check out OCU. Have you heard about this new thing from Bold?" I keep seeing this in the last month this conversation keep happening. Jordan: I think it's a great thing for Shopify merchants. I think it's a good thing for our market specifically. I expect more competition. Ezra and I are in touch and we're both supporting what the other person's doing and I think it's good for everybody. Kurt: That's one of the wonderful things about this community in general. Everybody works together for the greater good. Jordan: Yeah, and it's big enough. It's all good. Kurt: There's 400,000 Shopify stores. Jordan: That's wild. Kurt: It's all good, man. Jordan: Kurt, how we doing on time? I want to get to this one thing that we see that I don't want to leave out. Kurt: Right. We're at 30 minutes recording so I do want to wrap it up after this, but give me that one hit. Give me the tremendous value. Lay it on me. Jordan: All right, here's what we're seeing. People who are heavy into Facebook advertising, the people who really, really care about their ROI every single day for every dollar spent. What they are doing is they are first figuring out which product on their store sells, and then they are no longer sending the traffic to the product page. They are building a landing page and sending the traffic there and they are getting much more success from it. In theory you and I know that works. We know that a landing page converts better than a homepage let's say, but it is being put into practice in a big way in the Shopify world. People will figure out which of their products sell best and then they will do more work on the page to sell. Instead of just sending to a standard page where there's some photos on the left and then on the right there's some bullet points and a description, they'll put together a full blown landing page that does away with the navigation, keeps a super focus on the product, and does a lot more work with videos, additional testimonials, additional images, more copy, and they are being rewarded for going that next step in effort beyond just the standard page on the Shopify store. Kurt: I'm totally with you. I absolutely believe it. Just to give the crash course in Shopify landing pages, imagine a more purposeful product page. Often that is how we do it is if you've got access to a front end designer developer, we make a longer form version of the product page where we've got longer sales copy. We go through the whole pain, dream, fix format. We include social proof. Maybe we include urgency on there, scarcity. We'll do little hacks with that stuff ... And you can't do this for every product, right? So either you sell a few products, you could do it for all of them. Do it for your flagship product or use the 80/20 rule. Figure out, this is the big bad boy. Do it on just this one. Then take that same page, make a version of it where you just throw in some extra style tags and hide, display none, all the extraneous links that would get someone to leave the page. The fundamental thing that makes a landing page is in theory, it only has one call to action. Generally that means you got to strip out your navigation from your header/footer, so there you go. There's the easy crash course in Shopify product landing pages. Jordan: Just to plug my own product a little bit, what they're doing from there is they're using ... This is what our most successful merchants are doing. They're using what we call product funnels. In CartHook you can build something called a product funnel which links up directly to one specific product in your Shopify store and then provides you with a URL that goes right to a checkout page that has that product preloaded. They don't go from the landing page to the cart. They go directly from the landing page, they put the funnel URL from the CartHook product funnel, and then they go straight from landing page into the checkout page with that product preloaded, and then all the post purchase upsells after it and because you know exactly where the traffic is coming from, that one landing page, you know which product they bought so you can put testimonials that are specific to that product on the checkout page and then you can have a post purchase upsell sequence that's very specific to that product. It's a super, super focused funnel that you have full control over. You have control of the landing page, checkout page, upsell pages, thank you page. That's where our most successful merchants are dialing in their ad spend. Kurt: Just thinking out loud, if you are just starting out with a Shopify store, is this something you want to worry about or is this once you've got where your processes, your product validated, dialed in, then you want to start exploring this stuff? At what point do I start doing this, I think is my question. Jordan: I'm going to say that this is not something you should do as one of the first things. There are so many other foundational elements to your store that you need to get right, between the positioning and copy, navigation, and so on. I would work on that first. This is an optimization. This is, okay, how do I make things better? I think maybe eventually it will get to the point where, okay, I need an email app. I need a cart abandonment app. I need an exit intent popup app, and I need a checkout app. That's where I hope it gets to where every single person that starts a store just grabs these few fundamental apps that they need to add. I don't think it's quite there yet. I think this is a bit more advanced. Kurt: I want to wrap this up but now I got more questions. You rattled off here's the four apps you need to have. Do you have a preferred one or recommendation for an exit intent popup app? Jordan: No. I don't know. I don't know. I know OptinMonster. I know OptiMonk. I know Bounce Exchange for bigger stores, but I'm not as familiar with the app ecosystem to recommend exactly what to use. We partner with certain apps like ReCharge Apps on the subscription billing so people can sell subscription products inside the funnel and so on, but beyond the larger market, I'm not the right person to make those recommendations. Kurt: Okay. All good. I'll throw in my recommendation. I really like OptiMonk, but I've also heard fantastic things about Justuno but I have not personally played with it. I think in theory the thing I'd like to do and I never get around to because these other exit intent popup builders are so convenient, would be just coding our own using Ouibounce which is just an open source JavaScript snippet. It's O-U-I bounce, Ouibounce. I will throw those into the notes, the links mentioned. Jordan, where can people go to learn more about you? Jordan: Go to CartHook.com/checkout and you'll see more about the products, and then we interact with our customers and people on the site a lot so if you have questions just click on that chat button in the bottom right or hit us up at support@CartHook.com and if you are feeling podcasty, check out BootstrappedWeb.com which is my weekly podcast. Kurt: Who do you host that with? Jordan: Brian Casel. Kurt: He is a good dude. Jordan: My man. Kurt: Wonderful man. I will not go down any more rabbit holes as I was about to do. No, this is good. We're going to wrap it up here. Jordan: Cool. Kurt: Thank you, Jordan. I greatly, greatly appreciate it. I think that's all for us today at the Unofficial Shopify Podcast. And to our listeners, I would love to hear your thoughts on what you've heard come out of this discussion, so join our Facebook group. Just search the Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders. You'll find it. Apply to join. I will approve you, and come talk to us. I post every episode there. Or, you can always sign up for my newsletter at KurtElster.com. Shoot me an email. Either way, you'll be notified when a new episode goes live. And of course if you want to work with me, I'd love to have you. Go apply at Ethercycle.com. That's my consultancy. As always, thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.

Gal Ratner is an award winning technology veteran. He is the co-founder and CEO of ShopSnap, a modern e-commerce platform and the founder and CEO of Inverted Software, a software consulting firm in Los Angeles. With over 20 years of software experience, his designs are responsible for powering Fortune 500 companies in multiple industries. Gal led international teams on major financial, media and entertainment, gaming and e-commerce projects. Some of his projects include Microsoft’s Windows 8 download manager, the Volusion eco system, Rockstar Games’s online store, and ShoppingCart.NET, which he wrote as a pet project and was the most downloaded .NET shopping cart on the Microsoft App Gallery. Gal is also an open source community supporter and contributor with projects ranging in capacity from parallel workflow processing frameworks to extensible caching systems. He is an avid blogger and enjoys passing his extensive software knowledge on to upcoming talent. What you'll learn about in this episode Gal's background ShopSnap, Gal's modern e-commerce platform Why conversion rate and security are the two most important things in e-commerce Gal's visualization technique Gal's seven daily habits that keep him focused and on track What Gal learned from Perry Marshall that changed the way he does business Why you need to get great minds in a room every week and work on strategy Why you need to carve your own path Why you need to calculate risks Why you need to plan, plan, and plan again Why you need to look at your customer's world through their eyes Why you need to be flexible How best to connect with Gal: LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/galratner Website: shopsnap.io Website: invertedsoftware.com

Dealing with difficult team members is the first thing Omar Sayyed (SIGHYEED) mentioned when asked about his lowest point in business. Omar is the Co-founder and CEO of Ties.com | Scarves.com | and Alynn.com (ALAN) that started in 2000. The company started off literally fulfilling orders out of a co-founder's living room. They have managed to grow into the world's largest online men's and women's accessories retailer. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: [0:09] Jeremy’s introduction of Omar Sayyed. [1:04] Why looking at Omar makes Jeremy want to up his game. [1:48] Omar’s lowest professional moment: Dealing with difficult people. [9:50] The proudest business moments Omar has experienced. [16:16] The timeline for acquiring Allyn.com - beginning to end. [22:55] How to connect with Omar. [24:40[ The story behind Sock Genius. [27:54] A business idea Omar has that someone else is invited to steal: An app that allows you to insert memes. In this episode… One of the most difficult parts of leading any business is the task of dealing with difficult people that inevitably wind up on the team. For Omar Sayyed, he inherited some key team members when he moved into a leadership position and quickly became aware of areas where he and the team member were not in alignment. It was an issue he knew he had to deal with immediately. What does it look like to deal with a difficult team member? Much of how to approach it has to do with the personalities involved and the issues that are revealing the need for a chat. Omar Sayyed believes that alignment is vital to a smooth working team and on this episode he tells the story of how he addressed some alignment issues with a team member early on in his leadership of his company. The savvy and wisdom  you need to broach a difficult subject with an important team member is not something you are able to learn quickly - it takes a lot of understanding of human nature and the dynamics of relationships. But one thing is certain, the longer you delay the more needful that conversation will become. Don’t wait until it’s too late. On this episode of Inspired Insider Omar Sayyed is going to share his lowest moment in business and it had to do with how he dealt with difficult people on his team. You’ll learn a lot from this revealing peek into the inner workings of the leadership of a successful online ecommerce company. Resources Mentioned on this episode www.Ties.com www.Scarves.com www.Alynn.com www.iawareables.com Angela Duckworth TED talk about Grit BOOK: Grit www.Volusion.com www.Shopify.com www.BigCommerce.com

Company culture is a vital part of the way Travis Romine build his companies. Travis is the Founder of Sharp Commerce. His company is  a group of e commerce ninja's helping with customer engagement, retention and advanced marketing. He Took sales from $100/day to $15,000+/day over 10 year period at Paradise Fibers that he cofounded which grew to one of the top performing businesses in the needlecraft industry.  Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:   [0:15] Jeremy’s introduction to Travis Romine, today’s guest. [9:01] How Travis got started in ecommerce alongside his Dad. [14:11] Why Travis moved to Magento. [17:00] People want deals but they also want entertainment, a careful balance. [21:00] Using software properly so you get the biggest use of it. [37:57] Staff growth over the years: how it happened and why. [50:10] How the company had an $80K day of sales. [53:20] Failures along the way. [58:31] The decisions Travis and company had to make about phone systems. [1:07:03] The support and skill of Travis’ wife in the growth of the businesses. [1:13:23] The big mistakes ecommerce businesses are making. [1:18:12] What you can do when your sales plateau. [1:21:21] The types of clients Travis works with. [1:30:25] Software that Travis finds essential for his e commerce businesses. [1:32:40] The things Travis looks for in his software decisions. [1:38:21] Why employees make your business. [1:39:15] How Travis gives ownership of the business to employees. [1:45:40] The software showdown: Travis’ comparisons of major platforms. In this episode… There has been a lot written and said in recent years about the importance of building a healthy company culture. And the larger the company gets the more difficult it is to establish and maintain. One of the most obvious takeaways from this conversation with Travis Romine is the huge success he’s had building successful companies that scale while at the same time keeping the company culture not only healthy, but incredibly strong. All you need to see to believe it is to take a look employee and customer comments from the time frame when Travis was in charge of things. His name is mentioned repeatedly in glowing terms and the way people felt about working for him is obviously positive. Travis prefers not to think that employees are working for him, but alongside him - and that’s a huge reason why the culture of the companies he’s run has been so outstanding. But company culture is not the only thing you’ll hear on this episode. Travis has so much experience and skill in the e commerce space that the interview would be incomplete without tapping into his know-how. Travis generously shares a significant amount of wisdom about what it takes to not only build a strong company culture but to also grow and e commerce business successfully, including the software and packages that make the most sense to keep an e commerce business profitable and running smoothly.   The conversation wraps up with what Jeremy calls “The Software Showdown” where he asks Travis to give his opinion about the big players in the e commerce software space, including their strong and weak points, areas where improvement is needed, and how each works in a practical, function way in real life scenarios. If you’ve been looking for the right e commerce solution and haven’t made up your mind yet, you need to listen to this conversation before you do. Resources Mentioned on this episode www.Skubana.com www.SharpCommerce.com www.ParadiseFibers.com www.Volusion.com www.Magento.com www.Bronto.com www.DotMailer.com www.Kayako.com www.Shopify.com www.Asana.com www.ListTrack.com www.SweetTooth.com www.ZenDesk.com BOOK: Drive www.BigCommerce.com

Jordan Gal is founder of Carthook, a cart abandonment software solution that recovers lost revenue by following up with potential customers who don’t complete the checkout process.  Jordan previously ran a successful ecommerce business that was acquired.   Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: [0:15] Jeremy’s introduction of Jordan Gal, ecommerce software developer. [1:28] The most important thing Jordan did: found a good Volusion developer. [6:03] Mistakes made on the checkout page. [7:25] The most common reasons people abandon a cart. [9:06] The power of a live chat functionality that tracks user activity on the site. [12:19] Why people abandon SaaS purchases. [14:28] Observations from working with ecommerce vendors. [20:05] A story that illustrates the importance of phone contact with prospects and customers. [24:50] The good and difficult parts of scaling an ecommerce business. [28:34] Mistakes ecommerce builders should avoid. [31:37] The major skillsets Jordan had that he would never pass to someone else. [37:00] Mistakes Jordan made building an ecommerce business. [42:01] Platforms Jordan recommends - and know that no platform is perfect. [44:38] The power of reviews on your ecommerce site. [46:00] The type of software you must have for effective ecommerce. [55:49] Best time frames for follow up of abandoned carts. [58:00] Email sequence recommendations. [1:03:51] Things Jordan has implemented because of customer feedback. [1:10:04] Things ecommerce people need to check in their business. [1:14:23] Jordan’s typical schedule to balance work and life. [1:17:30] Jordan’s journey from Israel to the U.S. and his family life. [1:25:27] Things Jordan learned from his Dad’s direct response business. [1:33:28] The highest priority step ecommerce owners should do now. In this episode… Cart abandonment is a big issue in the ecommerce space. If you can close that loop you’ll significantly increase your revenue and build a more effective follow up sequence with your customers. This episode is about helping you make cart abandonment a thing of the past. Instead of hitting on the generalities of ecommerce, this episode drills down into some of the most important aspects of how you can optimize your process to convert more shoppers on your website into paying customers.   Today’s guest, Jordan Gal has a wealth of experience in direct response sales, the creation and operation of his own successful ecommerce business, and now as a software entrepreneur for Carthook, one of the best shopping cart abandonment solutions in existence. If you want to increase your revenue through capitalizing on the customers that are already visiting your ecommerce site, this episode is for you. Jordan Gal shares best practices for on page optimization, checkout page improvements, and follow up sequences for those who have abandoned the cart on your site. If you’re ready to make cart abandonment a thing of the past on your ecommerce site, this episode with Jordan Gal can move you a long way toward making sure it’s a reality. Don’t miss this one. Resources Mentioned on this episode www.Skubana.com Carthook Jordan on Twitter: @JordanGal Jordan’s blog post: The 10 Foot Test Good Morning America: How to Find and Use Online Coupon Codes GetDrip Grasshopper SiteTuners Google Docs www.GardenGnomes.com Shopify LemonStand WooCommerce Yotpo review software HelpScout Groove AdWords AutoResponder Max Magento BOOK: Startup Nation

Today we have Travis Romine, Founder of Sharp Commerce. His company is a group of ecommerce ninjas helping with customer engagement, retention and advanced marketing. He took sales from $100/day to $15,000+/day over 10-year period at Paradise Fibers that he cofounded, which grew to one of the top performing businesses in the needle-craft industry. Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: [0:45] Jeremy’s introduction of Travis Romine, founder of Sharp Commerce. [1:24] Advantages and disadvantages of various ecommerce platforms. [5:23] What level would someone have to be at for you to tell them to try Magento? [7:00] Other ecommerce platforms to consider. [9:11] The main differences between BigCommerce and Volusion. [11:05] Why would you recommend BigCommerce over Volusion? [12:38] Travis discusses Shopify. [17:45] At what level would it be a no brainer to choose Magento? [19:36] Travis compares the major ecommece platforms, discussing the pros and cons of each. [22:30] What is it about Magento that makes it a worthwhile investment? [24:04] The role of reporting in ecommerce platforms. [28:19] Comparison shopping engines and other tips. [31:01] How to connect with Travis. In this episode… With over a decade of experience in the ecommerce industry, it’s clear Travis is a guru. He’s the go to guy for insight into the business, tips on selecting the right platform, and so much more. In this chat with Jeremy, Travis offers insight into the top ecommerce platforms, including how to choose the right one for your budget. When it’s time to select an ecommerce platform and you aren’t sure which way to go, there’s no better guy to ask than Travis. As an innovator in the field, Travis has a comprehensive understanding of the pros and cons of each platform, including (perhaps most importantly) which one is best for your budget. He shares tips on his top 3 platforms - Magento, BigCommerce, and Volusion - including what’s great and not so great about each one. Travis starts with an in-depth analysis of Magento, including why it’s not the right choice for fledgling businesses with a smaller budget. He also shares insight into some of the things that make Magento stand out from other ecommerce platforms in terms of ease of use, functionality, and versatility. Travis goes on to share the main issue with Magento: an absence of scalability. The solution? Take a look at BigCommerce and Volusion. When comparing BigCommerce and Volusion, it’s clear that some of the things that make Magento great are missing. But what’s also clear is that these are 2 great options for smaller businesses without a monster budget. Travis discusses the pros and cons of each platform, in order to simplify the selection process for companies in search of the right platform. Travis closes by offering tips on reporting, search, and other essential functions - including how each platform performs. Resources Mentioned on this episode Sharp Commerce Magento BigCommerce Volusion

Shoplösungen für Kleinunternehmer sind zur Zeit sehr angesagt. In den USA/Kanada bereitet Shopify einen Börsengang vor, der ca. 100 Mio. $ bei über einer Mrd. $ Bewertung einbringen soll. Mit 120.000 aktiven Shops und 5 Mrd. $ Außenumsatz seit 2006 spielt Shopify in einer Liga mit Volusion (17 Mrd. $ Außenumsatz kumuliert, 40.000 Shops) und Bigcommerce (5 Mrd. $ Außenumsatz kumuliert, 60.000 Shops). Im Schnitt dürften alle genannten Lösungen aktuell zwischen 1-4 Mrd. $ Umsatz pro Jahr Außenumsatz aufweisen. Muss Shopware in Deutschland nun Angst haben? Nein, Shopware, Magento & Co. sind Lösungen die sich (in der Regel) an professionelle Händler richten, mit entsprechenden E-Commerce Umsätzen und Know How. Den Zusammenhang habe ich in meinem Artikel “Shopsysteme 2014” ausführlich erklärt. Viel spannender ist in Deutschland der Vergleich mit epages aus Hamburg, die mit 120.000 aktiven Shops mit großem Abstand der europäische Marktführer in diesem Segment sind. http://www.kassenzone.de/2015/01/17/shopify-vs-volusion-vs-interview-mit-epages-gruender-wilfried-beeck/

Kevin_Sproles What, exactly, makes for a high-performing ecommerce site? We asked this question to Kevin Sproles, the founder and CEO of Volusion, a hosted shopping cart firm that boasts over 10,000 clients. Sproles is an ecommerce pioneer, having founded Volusion in 1999. It is now a leader in ecommerce solutions, and Spoles has seen thousands of ecommerce sites over the years. He is also Volusion’s Chief Software Architect and he speaks here with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.

Volusion is an early day hosted shopping cart platform that has grown to represent 18,000 online stores. The company has recently upgraded its platform and to explain those upgrades, among other ecommerce topics, we are joined by Volusion’s chief operating officer, Clay Olivier. He speaks with Practical Ecommerce’s Kerry Murdock.

Many people in the horse business are very artsy and have items they would like to offer to the horse world, this is a simple easy way to do that. Listen in...Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=87421)