Dollar Beard Club's co-founder on building brands with solid foundations.
Alex Brown has been launching e-commerce companies for over 5 years, starting with multiple successful crowdfunding campaigns (like Coolbox which ended up on ABC’s Shark). He is best known as CoFounder of the viral hit Dollar Beard Club. DBC hit $10M in their first year with no performance marketing or affiliate help, and has gone on to become a scalable and globally known brand with over 300M video views.
You'll learn:
Since exiting Beard Club, Alex has been advising multiple companies and speaking around the world on branding and content marketing. He currently runs the first e-commerce brand accelerator program for brands on pace for 8+ figures, and is an advisor to NGO’s helping building entrepreneurial ecosystems.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
8/11/2020
Kurt Elster: Today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are talking to the co-founder of Dollar Beard Club, Alex Brown, who’s been launching eCommerce companies for over five years, starting with multiple successful crowdfunding campaigns like Coolbox, which you may recognize from ABC’s Shark Tank. Dollar Beard Club hit $10 million in their first year with no performance marketing or affiliate help and has gone on to become a scalable and globally known brand with over 300 million video views.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Since exiting Beard Club, Alex has been advising companies and speaking around the world on branding and content marketing. He currently runs the first eCommerce brand accelerator program for brands on pace to do eight or more figures. That is a lot of figures. Now, what’s interesting about Alex is he has some atypical views on branding and stories and their absolute importance to growing. This is going to be a good episode. We’re gonna walk through his journey and then pick his brain on what goes into a successful brand. Alex, thank you for joining us.
Alex Brown: It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Kurt Elster: Oh no. The pleasure is all mine, because I… This is my continuing education. I am going to pick your brain, take notes, and then get all of the value out of you. Mr. Alex, how did you get your start? Where’d you come from? Who are you? What’s going on here?
Alex Brown: Well, like many children, I was born, and then fast forward about 25 years, I’m actually from close to Toronto is the simplest way of saying it. Just north of Toronto. And I was introduced to my former business partner in Beard Club and a number of ventures, Chris, through a mutual friend, and he was living in California at the time, and so I went and visited him. He had all these amazing little projects on the go, and just was super passionate about ideas, and launching businesses, and that was really in the crowdfunding space at the time, so I didn’t even know really what crowdfunding was at the time, but saw that he had this idea, sold a bunch of products, and then I kind of came on board and helped him figure out how to fulfill them, and how to put together sort of like the follow-up campaigns and stuff like that.
He’s a really amazing sort of visionary person and highly creative person. And I’m really good at being a hybrid of creativity, but then taking that and breaking it into 10 steps, so we just hit it off and worked really well together. Got a work visa, moved to California very quickly, and just kind of dove into the world of eCommerce, sort of through the lens initially of crowdfunding and launch campaigns. We kind of created this formula over the course of doing it a couple times with a couple different products, and doing this sort of big launch campaign, and then fulfilling the products, and deciding if we wanted to actually pursue the business or not, and most of the time, the answer was no. But we did actually, like I said, find this knack and system for doing really great creative work, and branding and messaging, and positioning, and everything like that, so like most people when they’re looking to create some side income and fund the dream, we started an agency and we were helping other people do that sort of stuff, and tap into our expertise and our network.
And it was going fairly well. It was still super tight. There was a point where we were Airbnbing our rooms and kind of sleeping in the garage or in the back yard to keep the dream alive, which is kind of fun looking back on. At the time, it really sucked. But you know, we launched another product at that time called Coolbox, and that did really well. It did half a million dollars in our campaign, and then we went to Shark Tank with it. I wasn’t really good on camera at that time, so it was my business partner Chris and one of our other partners that went on, and that just really exploded our credibility, and our network, and confidence, and all these things. It was still a very technical product and extremely expensive one. The unit economics just weren’t there for it to be a long-term project, but… under our control, anyways, so we were able to license that product out. We fulfilled all the units, which was a monstrous project, and at the same time, we’re developing this idea of doing the Beard Club.
And we saw the success Dollar Shave Club had had, and all these subscription boxes had had. We at the time were probably a group of five guys now. We were all growing massive beards and trying to do out of the box entrepreneurship living, and just saying no to chemicals, and eating super healthy, and super clean and organic, and all the beard products were out in the market were really sold by boutique shops, so they’d be $20 for an essential oil beard oil, and we just thought we could do a big splash, like a big launch like we’ve been doing, and kind of do this subscription service for beard care products and sell them for really affordable prices that made them accessible for everyone to try, basically.
Kurt Elster: Well, there’s a lot to unpack there, and it sounds like you have done more than most people would ever dream of, and in an incredibly short time. I have learned two things in interviewing entrepreneurs about their journeys. It’s number one, intelligence takes so many forms. I have found people who could barely string a sentence together in an email that are just unbelievably successful or are brilliant marketers. Certainly, you can’t judge a book by its cover, especially with entrepreneurship. And number two, the more you learn about a topic, the more you discover you learn what you don’t know. And early on if you go, “Yeah, I think I pretty well know this.” It means you don’t know nearly enough. You haven’t scratched the surface. You don’t know what you don’t know yet.
Okay, so let’s back up. I have always loved crowdfunding. It’s very attractive to people, because it’s like, “Oh, it’s an easy money button,” is the dream. Run me through. You were doing this crowdfunding five years ago. Is crowdfunding still viable today?
Alex Brown: I think that there was kind of a gold rush around it, and there still is a community that loves to support crowdfunding projects, but I think it’s very much engulfed in exactly what you said. It’s this sort of like get-rich-quick mentality that I think we’re all capable of and guilty of at various points in all of entrepreneurial journeys. Same with I want to make a viral video. It’s like, “Cool. Well, I can certainly show you how to create the conditions for that, but is that really a business growth strategy for the long term?”
So, I think that crowdfunding is absolutely still relevant. There are a lot of brands that have an existing following, and especially when we’re talking eCommerce, as you and many of the people listening to this know. A lot of cashflow gets tied up in inventory, right? So, if you are creating a physical product, and you have a really good handle on how to make that, and to do so on a good timeline, it’s a great option for you. However, the caveat there is it’s just like any other business, right? You need to have a really strong campaign. You need to cut through all the noise that’s out there. If you have a really unique product, that’s certainly easier, but I can think of all sorts of really cool, unique products, all sorts of amazing supplements that are created by these brilliant chemists, and doctors, and kind of going back to your point as well about the people that you kind of misjudged. Some of the most brilliant product people don’t have a clue how to sell stuff. And some of the people that are incredibly brilliant at selling stuff have the worst products, right?
So, I think looking to land somewhere in the middle, either if you’re a solopreneur, or having a team or a co-founder that’s good with product if you’re good with marketing is an amazing sort of way to go about doing that. But success in crowdfunding is just like success in eCommerce. It’s not a case of if you build it, they will come. You very much have to plan, and execute, and really build a solid, solid campaign in order to get it funded. And then again, if you have a solid crowdfunding campaign, great. Now you have to have a business, right? So, if all you’re doing is planning for this launch campaign, and we’ve done this, by the way, so I speak as a guilty person. But if all you want to do is have this solid launch campaign, that’s awesome. You made a bunch of sales. Now you need to create a business, right? So, it needs to roll forward and it has to be a sustainable plan for how to acquire customers and how to make them really happy to the point where they’ll tell other people about it, or they’ll keep coming and buying, and that’s like… I think anybody that knows anything in eCommerce will tell you that that’s the true secret. Not just eCommerce, but to any business, is people that come back and buy again, and tell a good story about you to their friends.
Kurt Elster: Oh, absolutely. One great key performance indicator for the health of your business is your return customer rate.
Alex Brown: Yes.
Kurt Elster: It’s in your Shopify dashboard. Just look up for the last 90 days or year to date, what’s your return customer rate? If it’s less than 20%, that’s either a missed opportunity or you have a customer service problem, right?
Alex Brown: Yes.
Kurt Elster: So, I always look at that one. And then the other one would be customer lifetime value, right?
Alex Brown: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: Happy customers, returning customers, people for which you are top of mind, buy again and again, and you end up with this much better tail on the customer journey.
Alex Brown: And I would just sort of add to that, because a lot of people ask me about subscriptions, right? We have a subscription-based business, and that seems to be super attractive, just like crowdfunding, right? Because it’s like, “Cool, it’s recurring revenue.” Subscriptions are difficult to really nail. It’s all about retention and building that base. But people that aren’t in the subscription business also tend not to focus on retention, and also tend not to pay attention to the people that are buying from them, and reactivating those customers, and increasing that lifetime value, and getting those reorders, but it is the bread and butter of every business, right? So, I think people put too much weight on retention in subscription businesses, and not nearly enough in their own businesses, right? And again, I think you kind of mentioned it, like your product might not be great, or your remarketing might not be great, but the people that are buying from you right now are definitely the most important people.
And it gets more and more expensive by the hour. I’d love to see the stat on this, but it’s gotta be like a thousand people every hour start a Facebook ad agency, or an eCommerce business, which has never been easier. It’s great for people that are just getting into this. For the people that are already established, it’s a lot harder, right? Because the price they used to pay to acquire a customer is now growing and growing and growing, so you have to be a lot more creative and you have to get those repeat sales, those repeat customers, and that’s where the true profit in business, in any business really comes, but especially in eCommerce, when you’re doing all this work and you’re carrying this inventory risk.
Kurt Elster: So, all right, I want to ask one more question on crowdfunding and then we’ll move on. Briefly, what’s the make or break difference between a good and bad, or a successful and unfunded crowdfunding campaign?
Alex Brown: Really looking at it as an all hands on deck experience needs to be had, like you have to have momentum right out of the gates for your campaign. This is sort of the chicken and the egg syndrome with crowd funding. Say you have a goal of $20,000, right? To ship out. Nobody wants to be the first person to buy on that and see that you need to sell $20,000 more, so a really important part of any crowdfunding campaign starts before the campaign, and that, in many cases, is as simple as calling up your friends and family and everyone you know and begging them to buy a product. And that experience alone will give you a ton of feedback on how to sell that product through mass media marketing and stuff like that. Social media marketing.
So, really planning to have momentum right out of the gates and hit that goal right out of the gates is super paramount, because then you can get into talking to bloggers, and pitching the media, and different things like that, but if you don’t plan to have success as soon as possible… Your goal has to be met as soon as humanly possible in my opinion, and that momentum is what will allow you to do things like get featured in the Kickstarter or Indiegogo newsletter, right? You cannot think that it’s set it and forget it. You have to internalize all of your success and know that you’re gonna hit that goal, and then the plan is never to hit that goal, the plan is how far can we take this and what can we learn from this campaign in my mind.
Kurt Elster: That jives with what I’ve heard people who have a ton of experience with crowdfunding campaigns say. More than once I’ve heard crowdfunding is a full-time job. If you think it’s like set it and forget it-
Alex Brown: Oh, absolutely.
Kurt Elster: You’re done.
Alex Brown: It’s like if you have a 30-day campaign, you’re working super hard on that.
Kurt Elster: All right. I don’t want to make it entirely about crowdfunding. Let’s move forward, because you’ve started to touch on some other things here. Tell me, what is Dollar Beard Club?
Alex Brown: Right, so we actually, we ran it to the Beard Club about two years ago, but started out there. It’s really a subscription service for male grooming products focused on facial hair. So, it’s beard oil and essential oils, like mustache wax, shaping balm, there’s shampoo, conditioner, and then moving into things like supplements that’ll help you grow thicker, fuller, stronger hair, which are by the way applicable to men and females, or males and females, so it works on all hair. But it’s really about helping people look and feel better. Especially focused around beards.
Kurt Elster: And when did you start that?
Alex Brown: This was in June of 2015, we launched.
Kurt Elster: And within 12 months you hit 10 million.
Alex Brown: Yes.
Kurt Elster: And what was the average order value? I can’t imagine it was very high, which makes this 10 million number all the more extraordinary.
Alex Brown: Right, and that was… Looking at those metrics is what we started to really hone in on, because we were generating a lot of top line revenue and not realizing that… In the beginning, our acquisition costs were super low, but as they climbed, and our organic reach was kind of shrinking, we had to really bump that up. And adding products that had a higher ticket value certainly did that. You know, in the beginning, I think we were averaging around $29, and what we kind of did that allowed us to… Which again, is pretty good, because our products were a dollar for a starter item, all the way up to like $9 for shampoo, and then we started to introduce more expensive products that, like the vitamins.
But we did, I think that allowed us to naturally upsell people, we didn’t know about after the one-click upsells and stuff like that back then, but we charged a flat fee of $3.99 for shipping, right? So, the way our funnel was, people would start with the $1 introductory oil, and nobody… I shouldn’t say nobody. There were a bunch of people that would just buy the $1 oil and pay $4 shipping. Most people would be like, “All right, well, let’s see what else we can get. I’ll add a $5 balm and an $8 shampoo.” And so, people would kind of naturally try and split that shipping cost over products, right? And that was kind of a cool natural upsell.
And our funnel, the way it was was like you had to walk through all these different steps in order to checkout, which was great for bumping that order value, but also really bad for people bouncing away and being like, “This is too complicated. I don’t even know what beard products are. I’m out.” And then creating kits and bundles for people that had never tried it became a really, really great key to increasing that average order value, but also just making it simpler for people who are like, “I want to try this, but I don’t know what the heck it is.” And it was kind of that awareness fight that we were working on in the beginning.
And there’s plenty of people that still don’t know what beard products are or why they should use them, right?
Kurt Elster: So, it sounds like you were following… You had a product ladder, so you start with a $1 product. That’s a very easy thing for people to say yes to, and then you move to, “All right, well, did you want to add this $4 product?”
Alex Brown: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Did you want to add this $9 product? And as you add that series of yeses, it makes it easier and easier. And the reason is the initial question, you’re building a pattern, that initial question’s very easy. And you see exactly the same thing in dating. I use this relationship example all the time. The first question is, “Can I buy you a drink?” The last question is, “Will you marry me?” Right? There were a whole series of yeses that led up to that point.
Alex Brown: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Using your crowdfunding experience and all this marketing experience with the Beard Club, first, as an astute marketer, how did you validate that idea, where you said, “All right, this is a thing we want to do.”
Alex Brown: I definitely, I still don’t consider myself and definitely wouldn’t at that time as an astute marketer, but I think we were doing some things right. But yeah, I think we just looked at what was out there. There were a number of people who sort of tried to do a Dollar Beard Club style thing, but we just looked at the marketplace, and they were products that we were using, and we were frustrated at having to pay $20 for, knowing what the price was. And it was great for us to get our start selling products like that, but again, as things got harder to acquire customers, we realized that bigger margins would have came in super handy.
But yeah, it was just through looking at what was out there and just we loved making videos. That was our favorite part of what we were doing for clients, and doing for our businesses, and we just had fun with it. We’re like, “This is gonna be awesome. We can do this. We can do this.” And there were just endless ideas of videos, and photos, and creative work that we could do that we found super engaging, right? And so, we just had this connection with this idea and this business that allowed us to really create a lot of momentum within the group of us that were working together on it. And then yeah, just kind of seeing that opportunity and that gap in that marketplace, there was no category king. There were a couple brands that were maybe doing 50,000 a month or 100,000 a month in sales, but it was very much like the boutique sort of style thing.
So, just seeing what the opportunity was and spotting it, and then getting really excited about it I think is what allowed us to kind of catapult and just like work our butts off until we could sort out the operational issues we were facing.
Kurt Elster: The unfair advantage you had, and I tell people to always look for their unfair advantage, is you had a creative skillset, and you were passionate about it, and you were able to get excited about this opportunity.
Alex Brown: Definitely. That was hugely… I mean, the reason we were able to build the business and capitalize on this opportunity so quickly was that we were making rapid fire creative assets, and just getting people to share them, and distributing them widely. And I think I kind of mentioned this before. The environment for organic reach on social media then was definitely more favorable, so the timing was just right. Beards were just in. They were on everyone’s faces when you looked around and it was just being talked about, there were people sharing all kinds of articles about it and making fun of hipsters and whatever. So, there was just a lot of chatter and all the conditions were right, and we were like if not us, then who? And if not now, when? This is the time.
And so, we just, we went for it, and it definitely paid off, and yeah, I wouldn’t say it was easy by any stretch, but we just kind of hit the nail on the head.
Kurt Elster: Walk me through that launch, that brand activation strategy, and your content marketing.
Alex Brown: So, we were really a video first, kind of growth focused model for probably the first two years, really. We still do a lot of videos, but it kind of teetered off and learned more about performance marketing and stuff. But initially, we were able to generate a decent amount of kind of email opt-ins, and people were kind of waiting for this, like I said. They were like, “Where’s the beard equivalent to Dollar Shave Club?” And so, we were able to get those early adopters who were like, “Yeah, I would try this out.” And we did some giveaways, and some free product to generate a bit of an email list. It wasn’t nearly as big as it probably should have been, but that was a little bit of early buyer traction, was just having a bit of an email list.
Funny enough, we didn’t really circle back to focusing on email until years later. We just thought it was dead and it’s definitely not. It has a massive return on investment. Hard lesson learned, because we would have a way bigger email address right now. But that was part of it. I think we had made some really strong connections in the world of influencer marketing, as well, and a couple of our advisors that we’d met through the Shark Tank process and stuff were named Dan Fleyshman and Branden Hampton, and they were very influential in LA and the influencer scene. They’ve helped a lot of big influencers build their accounts. They had an agency where they were helping that, so we brought them on board to sort of help us with our audience amplification.
So, when we created this awesome video and we’re ready to launch, we had a bunch of videos. We had this one main launch video. We got them to sort of like use their influence to reach out and work some good deals and some shout outs. They actually owned a bunch of their own accounts, which created this kind of viral snowball of here’s 500,000 eyeballs that are going to this as soon as it launches, and that kind of spearheaded us into people taking note on Reddit. And when people started talking about it on Reddit, that catapulted us to being on Product Hunt, and then it just started this barrage of people going, “Oh, Dollar Beard Club’s here.” And it was Buzzfeed, and Huffington Post, and like all these media outlets that we couldn’t dream of getting into when we were doing these crowdfunding projects, and we had that mentality of like, “If we could just get into TechCrunch, our company would be made.” And it’s kind of a toxic mentality that I’ve had at many points in my life, but that sort of lottery mentality.
We were getting on these organically, and it was just really incredible, right? From there, we actually had an influencer named Dan Bilzerian who we had a relationship with-
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah, I’m familiar.
Alex Brown: Yeah, so he became our first real investor. At that time, we’d taken off, I think we had about 15,000 monthly subscribers. This is a few months in. And we needed cash. We kept running out of product and we didn’t have that infrastructure in place, right? So, he also brought a lot of eyeballs with him, right? So, he started posting for us, and that would just bring on a ton of new followers and social media, a ton of sales, so that continued that sort of viral growth pattern of launching videos, and having him involved, and that also, just being able to keep up with inventory, and start to invest more in paid social media advertising was really good for us, as well. So, that was kind of how the initial viral snowballs took off, and just a commitment to creating awesome content again and again and again. Not all of our videos went viral and were awesome. Some of them, we’d spend a hundred grand on and had lions and all these exotic animals, and really they didn’t perform well in terms of sales. Sometimes, we’d want to have a good time and we’d just do a joke video for 1,800 bucks, and go shoot it in our back yard, and it would bring in a couple hundred thousand dollars, right?
We were just addicted to trying new things, and having fun with this brand, and that was what allowed us for those first two years, especially, to perform well and to sell a lot of products.
Kurt Elster: With that experience, what are the conditions for virality? It’s so hard to engineer viral events, and websites, and marketing, and I’ve had two viral websites, but that was… I had to launch 30 to get two. What do you think? How do you set yourself up for success? Knowing there’s no way to guarantee it.
Alex Brown: Yeah. I mean, I think you kind of just hit it right on there is that there is no guarantee, and even if you look at where we’re at now as a brand, having… I think it’s over 1.1 or 1.2 million likes on Facebook, for us to put out content, to have it seen by people that opted in to see our stuff is even a challenge, right? So, the atmosphere has certainly changed. I think virality is obviously still possible in many different ways. People go viral every day. Manufacturing it is another difficult part, right? I always encourage people to think about the content that they’re creating through the lens of what is the purpose of this? Is this to acquire customers? Is this to build our brand? And what are the metrics of success? And can we put ad spend behind this to get it in front of those people and still be profitable? And is this something that can perform well over time, right?
So, I recommend people kind of take a step back from that sort of winning the lottery approach, and understand that you’re gonna have to create, like you said, 30 to get the two.
Kurt Elster: So, it’s knowing your audience, knowing your story, having that connection, and the unfair advantage there is really you need to share that passion. You need to be your own customer avatar.
Alex Brown: Yes.
Kurt Elster: Which in this case, you were. How does someone go about building that brand story? Extending this metaphor.
Alex Brown: I mean, I tend to encourage people to ask three main questions, which is like why, what, and who, and they’re in no real particular order, but really understanding why the brand exists is such a huge underlying question to ask for anybody that’s building an eCommerce brand. If you can’t answer the question, like why are you? Why should I buy from you and not someone else? Why are you building this product and not something else? What’s the mission of the business? And it’s fine if you’re listening and you’re just starting out, or you’re doing something like drop shipping, and you don’t have a why or whatever. That’s fine. Again, this is kind of a circular process. It’s non-linear. And you get deeper and deeper, and I can share stories of how we created deeper whys within the business, and it fueled us, and changed the messaging and the marketing. But really understanding why you exist and having a clear mission, like we exist as a company to fix this problem, right?
Then when you ask that, then you can come and circle into the next kind of question, which is what, and what is like how are you fixing that problem for them? You have to have a good product. You have to have something that actually works. And I think what people fail to look into, and again, whenever I say when someone fails, it’s because I’ve failed at it before. Nine times out of 10, probably 10 times out of 10. But is understanding what it is you’re truly selling, and I’m a huge Seth Godin fan, and I think in his latest book, This is Marketing, there’s a really famous saying of like people don’t want a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole. And he takes that a step further, which is, “No, they actually want to be able to hang a shelf with that hole on the wall and be able to use the shelf.”
Actually, they want to hang it, because their wife’s been asking them to do it, and finally their wife comes home and is like, “Oh, honey. You hung that. Thank you so much.” So, they want that actualization, right? So, it’s going deeper and deeper into what it is you’re actually selling, because those are the real buying triggers. And this isn’t just in eCommerce, this is in every business, right? So, it’s like what is the emotional reaction you want someone to have when they’re using your product, or when they see your video, and that’s where those real subliminal triggers really anchor in of like, “Hey, I want to try this.” Or, “Hey, I want to share this.” Or-
Kurt Elster: By far, one of the most important things a merchant can do for their business is this customer development. We have consistently seen it really empower and significantly improve marketing and the understanding of the business, and even confidence of the business owner. Do you have any recommended resources for someone who’s like, “I want to do that. Now what?”
Alex Brown: I find a lot of times getting that sort of feedback is really good if it’s informal, and if you go in without expectations, and that’s, again, I’m always learning. If anybody listening to this has a great tool that I can implement, I’m happy to hear about that, but for me, it’s like the personal touch really goes a long way, and actually hearing people’s voices. Surveys are great, but it’s really easy to give unspecific answers on a survey. It’s a lot harder to lie to someone’s face or to their voice, rather, and not give honest feedback if you honestly want it.
Kurt Elster: No, absolutely. We’re coming to the end of our time together, but I would love to know some of your advice on scaling, of working on your business as opposed to in it, because you did something incredible, growing from zero to $10 million in 12 months is just tremendous. One of the most common complaints… Not complaints. One of the most common concerns, pains, problems I hear from people is, “I feel overwhelmed.” So, what should someone do when it seems like they just don’t have enough hours in the day?
Alex Brown: Well, first of all, give yourself a break. Every organization faces limited resources, limited time, limited cash, and there are various points, especially in the beginning, where you’re gonna be wearing a ton of hats. So, I recommend a couple things, which is to A, to really try and look at the big picture and how all these various pieces put together, and I kind of lay it out as there’s like 15 foundations in a business. Everything from manufacturing, to fulfillment, to finance. Really to understand the big picture and take some time to learn more about those things, and that could even be as issues come up and blind spots come out, but seeing the big picture will allow you to, especially in the future, as more resources become available, put that hat on the right person.
And one of the big things that I try to encourage people to do is to try and look at what they do every day in their business, and what their team is doing every day in their business, right? And just taking an inventory of where you’re spending your time, because if you do that even for like two or three weeks, and just keeping loose notes, you’ll start to identify these areas of like this kind of like… When I do this on Tuesday, this on Wednesday, that kind of looks like a role that I could hire someone for. And I get it, again, if you’re cash strapped you kind of have to do that in the beginning, but there are amazing services and amazing virtual assistants, and various people you can find that can take some of those jobs, especially the ones that you hate doing, that are draining your soul, and your fire for the business, those are the ones you should try and get off your plate right away.
And how you do that is by creating documentation around these processes in your business, and everything you do in your business, whether you do it once, or you do it 100 times a day, is a process, right? It’s either conscious or unconscious. So, taking this inventory of what you’re doing also then allows you to see like, “Oh, so I’m doing this thing three times a week, or my teammate’s doing this thing five times a week.” What’s our process on how we do that? So, if I do need to bring someone on and train them, I can say, “Here. Here’s all my notes on how this job is done. And I would invite you to look at them critically, and I would invite you to give suggestions on how you might able to do that.” Or maybe there’s this particular piece of software that would save you those couple hours, right?
So, it’s A, about really understanding the big picture, and again, giving yourself some slack, because I’ve juggled and worn so many different hats, and it sucks, and I know it does. But taking a deep breath and going, “Cool. This is why I’m doing this. I know what I have is special. I want to learn about the big picture and get good at business because there are no shortcuts, but get a really good understanding of this so I can understand who’s gonna run in those lanes.” And then B, what am I doing right now inside the business that I can do better or that I can hand off to somebody else? And creating documentation, and documentation’s never perfect, but some big areas are like customer service. If you have say a team working with you, or if you’re doing it yourself, if you start to create like, “Hey, here are the answers I would give to the most frequently asked questions.” Oh, crap. People are asking these a lot, I should put those frequently asked questions a little closer to where they’re checking out or whatever it might be, and try and answer those, because they’re identifying gaps in the understanding of the offer, which can increase your conversion rate. All sorts of stuff.
Again, you can kind of see how all this is linked, but customer service is a big one because it also carries over into things like what if someone needs to have product reshipped? What’s the procedure for that? What if they need a refund? What’s the procedure for that? So, you start to look at how all these systems are built together and intertwined, and then you can bring somebody on and onboard someone very quickly without spending too much time and money training them and saying, “Hey, here’s what you do to own this area of the business.” And customer service is a big one, because it’s a really important one, because that’s the contact, going back to what we were talking about earlier, the contact that your brand has with people. And it’s very important. So, make sure that there are important instructions on how you talk to that person, and the information you’re trying to get from them, right?
Yeah. Again, circle back, it’s A, getting the big picture, and B, just being I think really rigorous at writing down what you’re doing, looking at it with a critical eye, and then finding ways to get that off your plate, because you should be the one building the team, driving the brand forward, working on the big partnerships, whatever it is that are those levers, you need to be pulling those instead of the little tiny ones that are just kind of keeping you afloat.
Kurt Elster: Phenomenal advice, first of all, but number one, don’t be so hard on yourself. Two, inventory your time. Three, prioritize your time. Then create standard operating procedures around everything, and then that way you can delegate, and delegate can take the form of software, automation, a virtual assistant, a remote worker, contract, whatever it is, so that you aren’t thinking about it. It’s not stressing you out anymore.
Alex Brown: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Couple follow-up questions and then we will wrap it up. You mentioned toxic lottery mentality a couple times. I thought that was interesting. Briefly tell me what that is. How do I recognize it and avoid it?
Alex Brown: Yeah. I mean, this has permeated both my personal and professional life, is kind of this idea that when I get to this point, things will be this, right? And then it’s kind of like time travel. You’re living in the future, or living in the past, but anyone that’s done something really significant in business and built a great business will tell you that there are no overnight success stories. Even with Beard Club, we did really well, really quick. We had companies that failed before that. We’ve learned all these lessons. So yeah, we were an overnight success after having learned all those.
But it’s really, it’s difficult to stay inside the journey, especially going back to what we were talking about before, when the journey kind of sucks some days, and it really does, and it’s really hard, right? But it’s really important to be able to look at the future, but also understand that putting the work in now is what’s gonna get you there. And I kind of used the analogy, it’s like being a rock star. If you’re playing in front of a couple hundred people versus a couple hundred thousand people at a festival, the only way you’re gonna get from A to B is by focusing on your art, right? And your team looks different if you’re playing stadium shows than it would if you’re just like solo gigging at a restaurant, right?
So, being in that mentality of being a rock star right now is what’s super empowering and super important that gets you to the end goal. And I guess the lottery component about it is we’re all entrepreneurs that have shiny object syndrome, and we all would like to believe that there is a piece of software, or a celebrity shout out or whatever that’s going to absolutely change the game for us. And although that might be true to some extent, and you might see a lot of time saved, or you might get a ton more sales, at the end of the day, it’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon. Right? It’s just super important that you try and catch yourself when you’re thinking, again going back to the rock star analogy, you’re not gonna buy a guitar that’s better than the one you have now and all of a sudden you’re in that stadium playing that show, right?
So, it’s understanding that those can be useful, but it’s kind of limiting the mentality that this is the absolute game changer. Otherwise, you end up going in 100 different directions and you’re not executing them well, and you’re not prioritizing well, so it’s about kind of like guarding yourself from that instinct that we all have to go in those million directions.
Kurt Elster: Right. You end up, you find yourself when you suffer… I call it entrepreneurial ADD.
Alex Brown: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: When you look back at what you did that quarter, or that year, or even that day, you find, “Oh geez, I went an inch in every direction instead of a mile forward.”
Alex Brown: Absolutely. Yep.
Kurt Elster: Two more quick ones. You had a lot of early success with influencer marketing. Is that still a viable marketing channel today?
Alex Brown: I believe it is for sure. I think that again, if you get away from the mentality of looking for those one big shoutouts that are gonna change the game for you, it’s a lot more… A, it’s a lot more risky, because those people are typically a lot more expensive. The people that I talk to now that do really well with influencer marketing, and some brilliant marketers who built amazing brands with it, will tell you again to go back to that sort of long-term view of things. It’s about working or partnering with someone that’s a really good fit, that loves your product, and that wants to talk about it again and again and again. Because if somebody has an affinity for an influencer, a person, a celebrity, whatever, they trust that person, they want to see that person trust that product. So, like they can see through. There’s so many shoutouts now, they can see through that as a one off. But if someone that they like, know, and trust, and this goes beyond just big influencers or small influencers, if this is a family member that you see posting about a product, those are really important influencers, right? Because that’s an easy like, know, and trust connection.
But if you see somebody that fits those criteria that you really trust and you follow, and they’re using it again and again, I think that’s where the big victories come in, and I think just getting away again from that sort of lottery mentality is a really healthy thing to do in the space of influencer marketing. And just not being afraid to get somebody, whether it’s a VA, whatever, to do some of the grunt work of the micro influencers. And really find that solid nucleus of customers that grows and grows, and in parallel of course, test out somebody that’s bigger with a longer relationship, but just kind of working both sides of getting product into people’s hands, getting them to use it, getting them to love it, taking that feedback, creating messaging for it. That takes a lot longer and it’s a lot less sexy, but that’s really what building a long-term successful brand is, is getting people to come back again and again, and getting people to love your product.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely. So, final business question for you here. What is the single one most important thing that entrepreneurs should be doing when building their eCommerce business?
Alex Brown: This is the million dollar question, isn’t it? I think that right now is a really interesting time to live in. I think it’s the best time to live in. It’s also a very challenging time and there’s a lot of negative things that you see in the media. There’s some serious environmental challenges that we’re facing. There’s a lot going on on this planet right now that needs to change, so I believe the biggest brands of the next few years that are going to be built are ones that are aligned with messages of bringing people together and not dividing them apart, and building bridges, that are companies that are treating their employees, the environment, and the social-political climate favorably, instead of just breaking people down and trying to sell more stuff.
So, I think, like I’m geeking out completely right now on sustainability, and the brands that are coming up, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Evolved Enterprise, a book by Yanik Silver?
Kurt Elster: No.
Alex Brown: I would highly recommend it. It’s really about how brands that, like Patagonia, and all these sort of iconic ones, and Toms and stuff, how they’re building business models that serve the world more than just create a profit. That’s a really easy story to tell, and we circle back to the brand stuff, a brand is just really a great story that you’re able to tell people and then they’re able to tell each other, right? And these brands that are creating these stories with positive messages that are bringing people together, that are treating the environment and the people on the world better, that is the future of building brands, and that will be the only future of building brands. I think within the next five years if you don’t pay attention to those things and you’re not a company that’s promoting just those messages, and believes in those things, you’re gonna find it extremely hard to compete. So, I think that that’s the biggest opportunity for people right now, is to get connected with better messages, better products, and better ways to do business, because we need to change a lot of things right now, and we will, and I think that we’re an important part of the universe experiencing itself, and I think we’re gonna figure out a lot of these problems.
And the people listening to this, you’re gonna play a role in it whether you like it or not.
Kurt Elster: I love it. I absolutely love it. Where could people go to learn more about you?
Alex Brown: Probably just follow my Facebook page is ECommerce Rockstars. That’s kind of going back to that analogy. So, Facebook or Instagram, ECommerce Rockstars, and I try and put out some good content and some good free training to help people build better businesses, and that’s probably the best spot. And reach out. If you have any questions on anything I’ve said today, or you want to go deeper, I’m always happy to help people no matter where you’re at with your journey. Just shoot me a message and we can chat.
Kurt Elster: Fabulous. Thank you so much, Alex. This has been great.
Alex Brown: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been fun.