w/ Drew Sanocki, Post Pilot
"It's just a hell of a lot easier to optimize a business than to start something from scratch."
Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/tbVh1J1sOEQ
Drew Sanocki has a knack for transforming struggling businesses into profitable ventures. In this episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, host Kurt Elster taps into Drew's extensive experience to uncover the strategies that have driven his success. With over two decades in e-commerce, Drew shares why he often opts to buy businesses rather than starting from scratch. He reveals how this approach allows him to leverage existing assets and customer bases for quick wins and sustainable growth. Drew also gives listeners a peek into the key tactics that have helped him revive and profit from these acquisitions. If you’re looking to shake up your marketing strategy or simply want a fresh perspective on growth, this conversation is for you.
(01:27):
Today on the unofficial Shopify podcast, we are going to discuss J Sinskis. Well, I, hold on, I had to write this one down. Big busted brand turnaround playbook, right? That's not what he calls it, but that's what I'm going with because Drew has 20 years of e-commerce experience doing just that, turning brands around, scaling brands, growing e-commerce businesses, and we had him on the past to talk about his experience in e-comm and leadership and what he learned, and that was a fan favorite. I got a lot of positive feedback about that. So when I saw in a recent newsletter, which he calls the Drew's letter, I always think is funny, he was sharing some of his lessons. I thought, you know what? It is time to bring this gentleman back. I want to hear what he thinks about brand turnarounds, what he could teach us about efficiently scaling an e-commerce business, and let's pick his brain on that 20 years of experience. So Mr. Drew Sinski, welcome back. Welcome to the show. Good to
Drew Sanocki (02:23):
Be here. Kurt,
Kurt Elster (02:24):
What are you working on these days?
Drew Sanocki (02:26):
I'm working on today I'm not doing as many turnarounds, not doing any, actually, I'm doing post pilot, which is a software company. We do direct mail for e-commerce, so if you haven't done direct mail, check us out. But yeah, my turnaround days, I don't know if they're behind me, but they're on pause right now. I haven't done a turnaround in a couple of years
Kurt Elster (02:46):
Post pilot, and now is the time where I must disclose. I invested in post pilot and I'm proud to have done so. Such an interesting and different tactic. What does post pilot do?
Drew Sanocki (02:57):
Post pilot direct mail for e-commerce brands. We make direct mail fast and easy, so unlocks a new profitable channel. You can use direct mail for retention, retargeting and prospecting, and it works really well. It's really relevant now as people are struggling with meta and other channels. So yeah, check us out post pilot.com.
Kurt Elster (03:21):
Alright, let's go back here. So do e-commerce 20 years, you said then you were doing turnarounds, you said not anymore. You're doing running post pilot. Looking back on it, do you think there's any key pivotal turning points, moments in that career that got you to where you are today? One or two things?
Drew Sanocki (03:43):
Yeah, I don't think I could have done what I'm doing today at post pilot without having run this turnaround gauntlet in the past because I think I got, it's more than turnarounds, it's just how to get a business profitable really quickly. So I mean if you're already profitable, I think the same lessons are relevant. It's just how to get more profitable quickly, and just the lessons that came out of three or four turnarounds like running a lean team, being very entrepreneurial, being scrappy, driving revenue, cutting costs, those things are all, that's sort of the mentality that we brought to post wasn't a turnaround, but we did acquire that business and put a team in place and we've been profitable since we started it.
Kurt Elster (04:26):
How'd you get involved in, you got in early?
Drew Sanocki (04:30):
I got in early. I started my first brand in 2000, maybe even 99. Yeah, 2000. I've lived through three recessions I think at this point during my professional career. So one was the dotcom bust, which was 2000. So I graduated from business school at that point. Everybody was going to dotcom 1.0, like pets.com. I village, I don't even know if these things exist anymore. eBay, we all graduate and six months after graduation, everybody's unemployed because there's this recession.com bust and I just went to the library. I think there was nothing, there was no Shopify, there was no podcasts on e-commerce. I got a book out on building a website and I built a website in Dreamweaver and I basically started what became dropshipping, but I was like, I can just put a store together. I want to learn about furniture. Maybe I'm going to start a furniture brand at some point and I'm just going to throw a site up.
(05:32):
And I didn't see this happening, but at the same time, Google had come out and long tail search was a thing and AdWords came out maybe a year or two, basically around the same time. So all of a sudden there was this opportunity to optimize the long tail of products for terms like EAM Lounge or Blue dot bed, and we just did a really good job of that. The business took off, we sort of tabled the idea of starting our own furniture brand and we went with it. That was designed public, started in 2000 and sold that about 10 years later,
Kurt Elster (06:14):
Not bad.
Drew Sanocki (06:15):
And then that started my career in turnarounds because we sold to a private investment group and then I got married and had kids around there and really wanted your risk return appetite sort of changes or your calculus changes. And at the time I started working more and more with private equity and I knew I didn't want to work seven days a week like bootstrapping something myself. Private equity was interesting because they would buy a property and they'd bring me in to help turn it around or find the opportunities and it paid well. And so that became my career for the next, I don't know, my turnaround career was about another 10 years after that.
Kurt Elster (06:56):
And so if you had to estimate, how many brands do you think you've been involved with?
Drew Sanocki (07:01):
Probably 10 to 20. But involved is, it's different when you work in private equity, sometimes you do a lot of diligence on a deal, you see an opportunity and a lot of the work you're doing without even interacting really with the company or trying to figure out where the opportunities are, how you'd grow it. And nine times out of 10, the deal doesn't go through or someone else outbids you. So that work is for naugh. In other cases, the deal does go through auto anything is probably the most recent example that you know of Kurt, where we ended up getting that property. We did all the work ahead of time, we ended up getting the property and then I sort of go operational and in that case I became the CEO of that company and worked on the turnaround for a few years.
Kurt Elster (07:51):
And where'd that end up?
Drew Sanocki (07:54):
That one? It's like we did well until we didn't. I think the business was doing really well. I would say we turned it around, we got it profitable again and growing. We acquired three or four different properties. We were doing a rollup before Thio just within the category. It was working really well. The next, we had these great plans to bring private label, that was the next step. We had this huge audience of automotive enthusiasts who were going to introduce private label, but then Covid hit, COVID hit and really cut out the supply chain for the whole category. You couldn't get automotive gear for,
Kurt Elster (08:37):
Yeah, everybody had their supply chain problems, but aftermarket automotive got hit harder than
Drew Sanocki (08:42):
Most, especially hard, and you would read about it in the Wall Street Journal. It was not just us, it was GM and Ford and all the big companies too. So at the end of the day, we sold that asset off, but it wasn't a huge win that we all thought we were in for the early days.
Kurt Elster (09:00):
No one could have best laid plans, no one could have predicted the pandemic and then the resulting supply chain issues. From your experience here, what are a couple of the common missteps that can lead brands into say financial trouble?
Drew Sanocki (09:17):
Yeah, I mean it's really like they have too high a cost structure and they're not making enough money. It's pretty revenue and costs. And I think D two C gets in this situation and one of the biggest costs for D two C is customer acquisition costs where they lose track of low cost sources of new customers. They get mature, they staff up across the business often they're too heavy, they have legacy. I would say most of the turnarounds I've dealt with have a legacy tech stack. And they're not only the cost of maintaining this tech stack, but the direct cost, the software cost, but there's the personnel cost. Auto anything, had something like 10 to 15 engineers on staff just maintaining the website, think it is a hundred million dollars revenue brand, but still today you could put the whole thing on Shopify or BigCommerce or something off the shelf and take a lot of costs out of the business. So you see that a lot with these brands that were sort of built or they came out of the early two thousands because it was pre Shopify, pre Magento, pre off the shelf, everything's custom and they have a big bloated tech stack,
Kurt Elster (10:39):
A bloated tech stack, additional staffing that's going to increase expense. And you said fundamentally that is the issue here is expense outstripping our revenue. When you start looking at those expenses in a business, how do you deal with it? How do you decide this is what goes?
Drew Sanocki (10:56):
Yeah, that's tough because a lot of it has to be done before you acquire the business. So there's a bit of the outside looking in trying to figure this out. The problem is if you take over the business and then try to figure it out, it's almost too late. You'd rather hit the ground running, have your cost cuts in place often before you take over the business, certainly within the first few months. And I find that the wrong way to do it is to look at what's there and start figuring that you're going to take maybe 10% out of a department out of every department. Just sort of that incremental approach. It doesn't always work. I think what's better is to take a blank whiteboard and say, how would I build this business from the ground up today? Because you really need to rethink things like auto, anything today.
(11:55):
How would I build that from the ground up? Okay, it's on Shopify. How many people do I need to maintain this? How are we going to update the catalog? What system do we need there? How many do we need in marketing? It's almost like you build your perfect team and then you look at what they have now and say, okay, how am I going to get from here to there? So that exercise I think is a lot easier and usually more fruitful than just sort of an incremental approach. Okay, take 10% off of everything because it's not as efficient if you do that. And you really do have to rethink some of these businesses.
Kurt Elster (12:30):
And so you create how it works, you paint a vision for this is the dream of how it should work and then work backwards until you get to a point where you go, alright, now we have the plan for how we're going to achieve that vision.
Drew Sanocki (12:49):
And it's easier said than done. And I say this having done the wrong thing several times where we go in and it's like, we'll get in there, we're going to figure it out, we're going to size up the team. But then you end up falling in love with the team and it's just like, it's really hard to cut the team at that point and make the tough decisions. And you hear all the nuances of like, well, this is why we never went to Shopify. What about these 10 considerations? And you're going to lose these vendors and this vendor's a friend of the CEOs and it's just like it's easier to do that thinking with a blank slate ahead of time. That would be my recommendation going forward. And in many of the cases I wish we had done that. I'm thinking back to my first turnaround was Carlo, where I was the CMO and it was a fashion apparel brand and it was very much like we got in there and then tried to figure things out rather than, okay, let's blue sky this, whatever the year was, 2010, 2011, let's figure out what this thing should look like today and then go execute on it.
Kurt Elster (13:53):
You were talking about team and falling in love with the team. That sounds to me like some of that is culture. How important is culture setting? Culture understanding it
Drew Sanocki (14:03):
It, it's everything. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, which I think Drucker said, right? So it's like you could have a great strategy for your business, but at the end of the day, culture is what allows you to execute on that strategy. And so in many ways, setting the culture is like the first thing we can do to affect change at a company. And for me it's always been like, I would say nine times out of 10, you need your own management team at a turnaround. It's hard to work with the existing team. There's just so much legacy thinking and occasionally there are exceptions. You do find the people can who were part of the original brand went into the decline with the brand and could change their thinking to try to reinvent the brand, but they're probably like 10, 20% of the management team and the rest, I think you almost have to bring in some outside thinking.
Kurt Elster (15:04):
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(16:37):
A takeover like that where you're making a lot of changes, especially in the first 90 days. How do you got to move quickly? You want to create urgency, but you don't want people to panic and freak out. Is that inevitable? Are there ways to go about this?
Drew Sanocki (16:54):
I think everybody's freaking out and you got to realize everybody's probably interviewing elsewhere. These are businesses that have been in decline, so I don't want to see that they see the writing on the wall. Most of the people, the employees at these companies know that the business has been for sale. They know that they're struggling. They know that there's a new team coming in here. So they're probably all thinking, I would be thinking just like, Hey, I don't know how long I am for this place. I'm going to go interview. That's all reasonable. And I think I just like to take it head on. I go in and I say that the first day, Hey, I know this is probably your fifth ownership group and you're all worried about your jobs and this, that and the other, but here's why. Here's my plan's, here's why I think you should follow me and give me a shot. But obviously it's up to you if you want to talk about it. I think there are ways to handle it, but you hit the nail on the head addressing that you got to get the win quickly because otherwise people sort of lose faith. So I often go in with a message of give me 90 days.
(18:08):
At this point I'm talking to the people who I want on my team for 90 days, but give me 90 days. We're going to try this stuff. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out, but you've given me 90 days.
Kurt Elster (18:21):
No one wants to have to lay people off. What advice do you have for someone who's got to get a lay team members off?
Drew Sanocki (18:30):
A couple things. I mean, the first thing you can do is you want to make the seller do that. If you're buying a company and it's not profitable and a big part of your thesis, I need to take costs out of that business. You want the seller to take the cost out of the business. I mean, you negotiate that as part of your package. It's like, Hey, we're going to take over the business on May 1st, but that last week of April, you need to execute these cost cuts because you want that on them. You don't want it on you. And that's typical in private equity, but I would say if you're inexperienced, you might not think about that and you might take over the business and then one or two weeks in realize you've got to be the bad guy. But man, put it on the management team that got 'em into this trouble that they need to take the cost out of the business. So that would be the first thing. The second thing I learned from Irv Beck, who is an entrepreneurship professor at Stanford who always would say, go once, go deep. It's like anytime you're going to have layoffs, it's such a traumatic thing to the business that you want to do it once.
(19:47):
And when you're going through, you go through the headcount and you're trying to figure out who you need to lay off. And to be clear, this is not a layoff for performance. This is what's called a riff or reduction in force. It's a layoff because the business is not profitable. It's very different legally. It's not like these people screwed up at all. It's like, Hey, we need to just cut costs because if we don't, we're going out of business. So in the case of Arif, do it once be, I would say aggressive in how deep you go because you don't want to be in a situation where you're like, ah, let's only cut 5% and hope that things get better. And you do it and then two weeks later things haven't gotten better and you have to do another 5% and then two weeks in another 5% because then you just create, you can't get out of that trap and you create this culture where there's no trust. Everybody's looking for jobs somewhere else. So go once, go deep. If you want to cut 20%, maybe cut 25 cut. And then your message to the people who are left is like, Hey, I went once. Don't intend to do this again. This is now the plan to grow. We're profitable. We can pay you now. I think it's just like you can be positive after that one cut.
Kurt Elster (21:16):
Have you ever renegotiated people's compensation as opposed to letting them go? Is that a possibility?
Drew Sanocki (21:23):
Does that work? I haven't ever found it that, I mean a couple times I've seen it where it's like, Hey, you're making 200 K and we can only afford a hundred K, something like that. But I've never actually successfully done that. Yeah, no,
Kurt Elster (21:48):
I think one of the tough things in business is to not become emotionally involved, and that is easier said than done. And so you want to stay detached. Do you want to stay emotionally detached from it as best you can? And would you agree? Do you have any advice there? Certainly you've dealt with this.
Drew Sanocki (22:12):
It's tough because I think the best leaders think of it almost like a puzzle. They can be dispassionate, they can step back and say, I need to make these tough decisions to get this business profitable. But then on the other hand, you don't give up your humanity. And I don't want to run a business where you let people go via email or I've seen memos or whatever. You got to look people in the eye and explain what's going on. And I don't think you can lose that humanity because that's ultimately what builds up trust and people respect that and follow you. So no, I've always, I don't know how dispassionate I've been about these things. It's hard and there's no way to make it easy. And by nature, nobody wants to cut personnel or have layoffs. It's hard, but you got to do it. You got to keep your eye on the big reason why you're doing it. I mean, it's just so everybody else can. So the company can survive
Kurt Elster (23:21):
In e-commerce especially, you get a lot of people who become obsessed with the idea that everything must be data driven or tested after the fact to validate the decision. And I think it leads to scenarios where there is just endless hand wringing over analysis, over testing. And the worst the scenario gets for the business, the more they want to lean into these things so that they don't make another dreadful decision. And I think that it could be counterproductive. Have you seen this? Have you experienced this?
Drew Sanocki (24:01):
Yeah, and I think here's really interesting. It's a difference between a mature growing successful business and a turnaround. I think at those mature businesses, you can test all you want. I mean, it's a good situation to do that, whereas a turnaround, you are on the clock. You need to turn around a business. Typically you've got 90 days to do it because I mean, investors invest for, they invest for three or five years, but realistically, if you're not showing progress in 90 days, you are on the hot seat with the board. So I think a lot of the initial decisions you make in those first 90 days are probably half based on data, but the other half is gut instinct. I don't need that many people to run this business or we really a business this size should be on Shopify. I could look, do all the analysis.
(25:00):
It could take me six months of pros and cons of trying to figure out cost out what a migration project is going to cost me and the SEO impact. But at the end of the day, I know it needs to be on Shopify. I'm going to get it on Shopify. Let's just make that call and move on. And there's always a handful of those decisions that could make or break you as the CEO. Fortunately, I think I've gotten a lot of those. But those things, if you get 'em wrong, that's the downside. That's probably your job. You made the wrong call, but there's so many big rocks in a turnaround that you don't want to get focused on the weeds. And AB testing is something I harp on like, look, this is just bad UI or the site's bad, or the product page is screwy here. Let's just make this change and don't tell me we need to test it because I know in my 20 years that this is a bad homepage. We're just going to do these five things to make it better. And if conversions go down, it's my fault, but let's just save the time and go straight there and we don't need to test it.
Kurt Elster (26:15):
And you mentioned this is the stuff that falls on the shoulders of the CEO. I think a lot of people with small businesses have the title CEO to you. What is that job description? What is the CEO's purpose?
Drew Sanocki (26:31):
I think the CEO is the only person at the company who deals with everything outside the company. So first of all, you deal with the board, you deal with maybe the CFO too, but you're typically the one who's dealing with the board with investors strategic partnerships. I think the CEO is also the chief rainmaker. So your job is also to, you're always looking for new sources of business and often new sources of cheap customers. You can hire a growth hacker. In my experience, the Growth Hacker is really good at optimizing what you already have less good at, rethinking the business, knowing the industry and figuring out how am I going to pivot this whole thing to go fishing in a new pond for customers. And then internally, you're putting the team in place. I mean, you've got the vision, you're putting your management team in place, you're getting them all aligned. So I would say it's as big picture as you can be the external, the sources of new customers, and then putting the right team in place. And those are probably the big three for a CEO.
Kurt Elster (27:52):
And so with your CEO, you mentioned a strong team. You have a long time business partner, Michael Epstein, who is the Steen, and he's CMO, right?
Drew Sanocki (28:05):
He wasn't Otto anything. I mean at copilot, which is atypical to have two, I wouldn't recommend it. I mean, it's not like for most people I wouldn't recommend it. For us, it works because I've worked with the guy for 15 years, but I think in most situations you want a unified chain of command. You want to know who is in charge because then you can't shirk responsibility. You can't say, oh, the other CEO is supposed to deal with that, or that was Mike's job, not my job. I think in most situations you do want one person in charge of the business. It works again with Mike and I because we've been working together for so long and in this case it was a unique situation. We bought the business together and we debated do we want to alternate CEOs like six months every year we swap? Should we do more of the traction thing with one of us is the visionary and one of us is more the integrator. I really like that model, but he's as much of a visionary for the business as I am. So it's like we just settled on this CO CEO thing.
Kurt Elster (29:17):
If you have to hire A CMO, what are you looking for?
Drew Sanocki (29:21):
Yeah, in a turnaround, CMOs are critical. He or she is the one who is going to really focus on that revenue line in as much as your C ffo focus on costs. And the two of them constantly have to be working together, one driving revenue, the other cutting costs the CEOs in particular at a turnaround, you're by nature lean. So you're trying to save money, you're trying to cut take costs out of the business. General rule of thumb is I don't like having pure managers and other words, somebody who just, whose only job is to manage other people. I like manager doers. Somebody who can not only manage the marketing team but also in a pinch, build a landing page or fix a Klaviyo flow or come up with a subject line for an email. So I go, I like to promote and I look for scrappy.
(30:24):
I look for people who have been entrepreneurs in the past. I think people who have built a business up to one or 2 million in revenue and maybe tapped out and are getting burned out at running their own business. I think that's a great quality for A CMO. I mean that was Steen. That was me with Design Public because they're just hungry. They get it. They can roll up their sleeves, they can do as well as manage. I think what you don't want to do is go, a lot of brands think that they're going to go get some secret sauce by getting the Harvard or the Stanford NBA from a big company from p and g or L'Oreal or Estee Lauder to come in and that's going to be my CMO. And they're going to cost $300,000 a year base salary and they're just going to sprinkle fairy dust and magic sauce all over my business and it's going to work. But I've seen so many people waste a lot of money with that. And obviously there's exceptions out there, but those people are going to want to come in, they're going to want to build a team around them. They're used to having a lot of resources and that's the one thing that's in short supply at a turnaround. So I would warn against that.
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Drew Sanocki (33:34):
To step back? I think you're right. Most turnarounds if not all in D two C have had a problem with discounting. When you look at the price and the financials, their average price, you just see this big line item for discounts. And usually it's as the business goes into decline, the team starts to discount to try to stem the decline to get revenue up. But what don't, it's a short game. It's not a long game. What they're going to do is they're attracting customers who only want to buy on discount. And so as they go farther and farther down, more and more discounts, you're attracting more and more customers who only buy on discount six months in or a year in. You realize you're at this point where I have to discount or no one's going to buy. So it's what you want to do when you acquire the business is like, okay, we got to wean the customers from discounts.
(34:29):
We got to start, forget about just raising prices, but we just need to charge a full margin for more of our inventory. You got to realize you can't turn on a dime. You can't start day one full markup on everything or revenue's going to go to zero because basically you have to flush out all the old customers and replace them with new customers who will not buy on discount. And that's a long process. And it takes things like building up a little bit of a brand, differentiating yourself in the market, explaining why they should buy on full discount, sorry, at full margin instead of on discount attracting customers elsewhere, take down your spin the wheel on the website and everything else that attracts like the discount shopper. So it's a lot harder than going in day one and raising prices, but one thing you can't do day one is just start to do a little bit more lifecycle marketing.
(35:33):
So if you're going to discount, reserve those discounts for the customers who truly need one to buy. I mentioned the spin the wheel. You have so many customers coming to your site right now, credit card in hand, ready to buy. And what kills me is that they see a popup that says like 20% off, and of course they're going to take it, but that's a hidden cost. A lot of businesses don't see, it's called a subsidy cost. The costs the business spent to acquire a customer who would've bought it full margin happens all the time. And so one quick way to test that is like, stop with the 10 to 15, the 20% pop up instead, maybe make that an exit popup. Give that customer time to come on and purchase at full margin before you give her 20% off. Another thing you could do is just create a reason to sign up for your newsletter.
(36:28):
That's not a discount. Like, Hey, we're going to show you new fashion. We're going to show you how to pimp out your car with these five products, whatever, and then engage them via email or via direct mail. And if they don't buy, then you can start discounting again. But at least maybe widen the gap between the first experience the customer has with you and when you're starting to discount. So I guess that sort of answers your question about pricing before I would even bother raising prices, I think would be throttling back on the discounts and trying to only use them when necessary.
Kurt Elster (37:08):
Smart. Yeah. No, I hadn't even, I had not thought of it that way. But yeah, the number of sites that's just become table stakes. It seems like the expectation, you land on the site and it's like, all right, there's our prices, but here's the actual price you're going to pay.
Drew Sanocki (37:22):
Right?
Kurt Elster (37:23):
It's always that well could pop
Drew Sanocki (37:25):
Up. You don't have to. Maybe you do for some, but at least change it to an exit popup or something. There are customers who show up to your site, credit card in hand, ready to buy. They know the product, they want it, they saw it on Instagram or something. Give that person a chance to spend full margin on the product.
Kurt Elster (37:47):
No, absolutely. Okay. With your experience and the fact that you are co CEO at post pilot, let's talk about direct mail a little bit here. Certainly direct mail, beneficial channel. How should we be in the context of a Shopify store? How should we be thinking about direct mail? It's 2024. This is still relevant.
Drew Sanocki (38:11):
It's still relevant, man. It's a hundred year old channel. It's becoming more relevant because everybody's frustrated with the rising costs of meta, for example. There's limited meta ad inventory, there's an increasing number of brands bidding, which just means your costs are always going to go up. And I think smart marketers realize they want to diversify away from that. They want to build a resilient business. They can have multiple channels working, not just beholden to meta. I would say we learned that lesson in 21 with iOS 14 that made it very hard to do. Meta on brands got whacked overnight because their meta went to zero on mobile. So the role for direct mail is really to diversify your marketing. It's not for every brand. I would say the brand should get up there in size, probably like three 5 million or more. It starts to be like the level where it can move the needle, and then it works a lot like email on retention.
(39:14):
You basically want to do anything that's working on email. You could do in direct mail, you send a Black Friday campaign to previous buyers. You could flip that into direct mail. You do a win back in Klaviyo. You flip that into direct mail and you're doing that because when you look at the data, typically it's a very rich audience, your previous buyers. But when you look at the data, only about 10% are actively on your list. So that leaves like 90% of your previous buyers, you can't contact through email. So flip it into direct mail. You don't need the opt-in direct mails opt out, not, and you can send campaigns to everybody on retargeting. And on prospecting, it's more like meta. So you put a pixel on your site, retargeting, we can correlate 30 40% of your cold traffic to a physical address and drop a card or a catalog. So it's like high intent prospecting because the potential customer is already on your site. And then prospecting, we do lookalike, so do
Kurt Elster (40:18):
Alike with mail.
Drew Sanocki (40:19):
Yeah, you give us your best customers. We could do a lookalike, just like with meta, we do a lookalike off your best customers, come up with a brand new audience that is statistically similar to your old audience and then you can prospect to that. So those are the core use cases for direct mail retention, retargeting and prospecting. There's a lot of other things you can do with it from handwriting to driving people to store to purchase if you have a brick and mortar store. But I think it's a channel that's not going anywhere. It's big. It works. It's the only channel that virtually guarantees you can contact with everybody you're mailing because deliverability is like 99%, right? So check it out.
Kurt Elster (41:07):
It is pretty good. It's pretty sweet. I think people just sleep on it because they're like, well, it's not digital. Well, it's the point.
Drew Sanocki (41:14):
It's hard. I mean, it's been hard, right? I mean, it was part of my turnaround turnaround toolkit. I would go into these brands and I would implement direct mail and I'd get another 10, 20% on revenue and profits within 90 days. And all I'm doing is extending whatever's working on marketing to a bigger audience. It's that audience that's not subscribed to my email list. I would just expand it, but it was a pain. And you'd have to find paper, you'd have to find a printer. Attribution's a big question mark. And so like, ah, it's messy. So what we just tried to do a post pilot, there's the genesis of post pilot was we've got to make this as easy as email. It's got to be Klaviyo for postcards fast and easy. Sign up today, your campaigns could go out tomorrow. That was just the vision when we put it together. And I think we've got that. I think we're close. So it's a lot easier than you think. We built the direct mail platform that a digital marketer would love.
Kurt Elster (42:17):
I still love, and you can't use it officially, but Klaviyo for direct mail is great. Maybe, and there's branding people who hate that, but I don't care. Yeah, three words succinctly describes it.
Drew Sanocki (42:29):
It certainly described it for the first year when we just did retention. I mean, now we do prospecting. So I think the analogy is not really as relevant, but it's certainly like, okay. People understand it though.
Kurt Elster (42:40):
Yeah, it gives you the idea. Okay. The time machine, the DeLorean has arrived. You go back 20 years, it is now 2004. What advice do you give Drew?
Drew Sanocki (42:52):
Man, I ask myself all the time because I feel like I'm having success now in my fifties that I wish it's like, man, to just be 20 years younger. That expression like youth is wasted on the young. It's totally true. If I could run businesses, then I know now how to do things. I would just be orders of magnitude more successful. One big lesson was buy versus build. So I bought post pilot, I learned private equity along the way. I probably would've just bought early on versus started my own thing because then you get customers, you get revenue. I think it's just easier to optimize an existing business than starting from scratch. You could pay yourself right out of the gates, which is great. You're just, you're fast tracking two years of bootstrapping. If you could buy a business and then the bigger the better, the bigger businesses, it's just a hell of a lot easier to optimize a business than to start something from scratch. So that'd probably be my number one piece of advice is just to consider buying a business.
Kurt Elster (44:02):
Of course, the issue is getting the money to buy the business. I think that's why we see a lot of people are like, all right, I'm going to start a business at Bootstrap it. It's like, because that's the accessible, realistic thing.
Drew Sanocki (44:14):
But there's a lot out there on getting small business loans, and I bought post pilot for 50 K.
Kurt Elster (44:20):
Whoa.
Drew Sanocki (44:21):
It's not, and we have a hundred people now, and our revenue's bigger now. Yeah, the revenue's in the, call it the eight figure range after three years. I mean, that's an exception. I don't know. I'm not guaranteeing that to anybody, but it's like, it didn't hurt me to buy it. It can be done
Kurt Elster (44:47):
For sure. No, that's good advice. This has all been good advice, and thank you for sharing with us. Drew Sunki post pilot, where can we go to learn more about you?
Drew Sanocki (44:55):
Post pilot.com is where I hang out right now. Drew Post Pilot, shoot me an email, I blog there, send out a newsletter there. I'm also on LinkedIn a lot,
Kurt Elster (45:07):
And I've got
Drew Sanocki (45:08):
Me
Kurt Elster (45:09):
Excellent. And I'll put that stuff in the show notes along with your Linked In. Drew, thank you so much. Always a delight.
Drew Sanocki (45:18):
Yeah, it was awesome, Kurt. Good seeing you again. Good luck. Enjoy listening to the podcast. I could send you a, I think we put the turnaround tips into a PDF that I can send you the link to.
Kurt Elster (45:32):
Oh yeah, please do. I'll put that in the show notes.
Drew Sanocki (45:34):
Cool. Yeah, good seeing you, man.
Kurt Elster (45:36):
We'll end it there. Thanks sir. Alright.