The Dropshipper Who Sold Too Soon?
Also on YouTube: YouTube: youtu.be/p1PO9o9Se5o
"I'm not very good at success. That's something I learned as part of this. I actually think probably most of us aren't very good at success."
Jayden Clark thought he'd cracked the code on dropshipping success. Then his seven-figure business nearly broke him. We talked about why he sold for £500K instead of holding out for millions, the SEO and paid ad strategies that drove his rapid growth, and how a 90-minute massage changed everything.
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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.
Kurt Elster
This episode is sponsored in part by Swim. Okay, here's a depressing stat. 70% of shoppers who want your products never actually buy them. They browse, they consider, then they forget. That's revenue walking out the door. Swim Wishless Plus turns browsers into buyers. Customers save products they want, get notified when prices drop, or items restock. You can also engage them in personalized fashion through your marketing or sales outreach. It's like having a personal shopper reminding them to come back and buy from you. instead of your competitors. And forty-five thousand stores already use it. And it only takes five minutes to install. You could try it free today for 14 days. Go to Git Swim dot com slash curt. That's swimwithay. com slash curt. Turn those maybe later into sales today. Get swim. com. So I would say most entrepreneurs would be thrilled if they hit seven figures in their first year. Certainly I would be thrilled with it, but of course with that comes a lot of stress. And on the show, we also don't talk a ton about drop shipping. Yeah, a lot of uh original products, private label businesses. And so we have someone who has done all of these things and then, well, in theory, maybe failed at it. Oh, I don't like it. That's a strong word. I mean they did get quite the payout. Well We have Jaden Clark, who started a successful dropshipping business, scaled it to one and a half million British pounds first year. Oh my gosh. uh then sold it for half a million pounds, which he feels is low, and there's reasons. And the reasons are, well, it sounds like he burned out. I mean that that's tough. But that that could be the reality. And so I want to talk through that experience with him. Jaden Clark, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me.
Jayden Clark
Thanks very much for having me. I'm excited.
Kurt Elster
You had you had a dropshipping business on Shopify. What year was this?
Jayden Clark
Uh I started that in 2022.
Kurt Elster
2022. Alright, so still still in the bad times, still pandemic. Uh did what'd you sell?
Jayden Clark
Uh so we sold, I suppose, high-end outdoor living, garden supplies, that sort of thing. So our customer avatar, if you like, was someone who loves having friends, family, etc. over in their garden, backyard, whatever you want to call it. And they want to have all the toys that can create a a place that people want to be, a place they're proud of. They might have a little bit of a bit of an ego maybe. Uh they might have a bit of a desire for the next door neighbours to think, oh wow, that's pretty cool what they've got up there. They might want to invite there. best friend or their, you know, brother in law, whatever it might be, sister-in-law, etc. over and have them feel bit be a bit envious. Um that's who we served.
Kurt Elster
So what uh sounds like more expensive items. Less uh less rakes and more, I don't know, fire tables?
Jayden Clark
Exactly right. Yeah, so our our average order value was probably close to about five thousand British po British pounds when uh when the business was sold. Uh it wasn't uncommon for us to do orders in the sort of mid teens, early twenties, uh if that if that was like bundles of things put together. So that was very much by design. Um the sort of model I followed, I suppose, and the the course for inverted commerce success that had been charted before. We talked a lot about um some of the problems with dropshipping could be solved uh by working with, you know, domestic kind of high-end proper manufacturers. um that allowed you to sort of run a in inverted commerce. And I I don't want to throw shade on any any business model, but I think traditional dropshipping we all think about, you know, generally from China, uh generally without sort of a relationship with the manuscript.
Kurt Elster
There's a lot of baggage with the word dropshipping.
Jayden Clark
Yeah. Yeah. Whereas this was, you know, we had really deep relationships with some of our best manufacturers and suppliers. And they were, you know, proper brands that we could be proud to sell. And we didn't have to wince every time something got fulfilled, fearing that it was gonna turn up. you know, wrecked or break after a matter of weeks and there would be no sort of post-purchase support and that sort of thing. So that was uh that was a big part of it.
Kurt Elster
And you it at this time, this was a a side hustle when it started. You had a corporate gig, right
Jayden Clark
Indeed, yeah. It was never planned to be a side hustle in terms of uh the ultimate goal, but certainly it had to be done. I I'm I'm actually a pretty risk-averse person. Um and the idea of burning the boats and going all in was unthinkable for me and even though I'm still pretty young, I only turned thirty yesterday, actually. Um I I still had, you know, I had a wife, a house, dog, mortgage, you know, responsibilities. I'd been lucky to have a decent corporate career. from the time I graduated. So the idea of just kind of uh risking it all um and going kind of all in was unthinkable to me. So it was uh It was only gonna work if I could kind of get us to a place where we could confidently live on the business proceeds by the you know, to a place while we were still earning our income in the meantime.
Kurt Elster
So young guy, pandemic's still going on, we got responsibilities, and this start this this dropshipping business, why garden supplies?
Jayden Clark
Honestly, just I'm not a pr particularly, I suppose, uh emotional thinker or I wouldn't even say I'm particularly a p a big kind of blue sky thinker. I I wanted to go where the data data led me. Um so I had essentially decided that once I learned a bit about high-ticket dropshipping and thought that was where I wanted to go because I felt that it it worked as a a side hustle in terms of, you know, fewer transactions because higher order values. Um and I knew I therefore wanted to be even at the higher ticket end of that, my sort of ballpark in my mind was that I wanted to be able to do 100k in revenue from roughly 30 transactions. Because that's what felt in my mind, I felt that 100k in revenue would be s roughly the threshold. by which I would feel and by that I mean 100K monthly revenue. About that point I would start to feel confident that I had a business that could sustain me and my me and my family. um and I wanted to be able to get to that point while still working a full-time job and 30 customers to give a good experience to felt like a reasonable amount. So that kind of gave me my rough average order value formula, right? I knew reasonably where that needed to be. And then beyond that, it was trying to find the right balance between an industry that was branded enough that there was some equity in some of the manufacturers that would allow me to generate some reasonable sales and traffic from some paid advertising to begin with before the business had any sort of brand of its own or name of its own or organic traffic. But also that wasn't so saturated and competitive that the brand still needed to use retailers and sort of specialists in that sort of marketing and conversion to be able to go to consumer. And that was a nice of all I looked at. you know, probably twenty or thirty different product sets. And Garden Supplies, I think, was on a bit of a journey whereby it was quite heavily dominated by physical premises before COVID. Suddenly people had to adapt to wanting to be outdoors in COVID but not being able to physically go and look at these products in person. So suddenly the e-commerce side of the market was evolving and it was a nice balance between kind of uh well known brands that were reputable that you could work with, but that weren't quite yet so deep to see that the value that could be added by a retailer um had been diminished too far. So that's why it ticked a number of boxes um and that's why I dived in.
Kurt Elster
Certainly if you're in anything that was like outdoor or even tangentially related to outdoor during that time. It really really did pretty well. Um e-bikes and bikes in general come to mind as similar categories for similar reasons. The did did you ever quit your job to pursue this full time or did this stay a side hustle? Or were you just like, look, I'm I'm doing both?
Jayden Clark
No, doing both was uh was pretty unthinkable at the time. Uh so yeah, after just shot of a year, I was able to quit my job and go go full time. I think that was probably a bit late in hindsight. Um, but as I said, I'm a risk-averse person. So I uh I probably felt the need to see of a pretty significant number within the context of my own life in the bank before I felt comfortable. My my biggest fear by far was uh letting people down, you know, having to let my wife down. Or and also to be perfectly honest, the the embarrassment of having to go back to work. I I actually of course told next to no one for the first year of this business, which is kind of crazy 'cause I was probably working about 40 or 50 hours on it. So it's a you know you kind of withdraw from social plans, you are quite stressed, and you know, you can't ru I say you can't, of course you can, but I didn't feel like I could tell people about what was behind that because of this. Uh I didn't need to I didn't want to add any extra pressure. I was already heaping enough on myself. um, you know, you kind of have some success and then you fear that if you share it and then it starts to to drop off a little bit or times start to get harder, then you've also got the stress of that plus the embarrassment. So um once I had About a year to 18 months worth of income in the bank. And that's a good thing about the dropshipping model, right? Is you fulfill orders that have already happened. So you don't buy inventory, you don't necessarily therefore have to use retained profits for larger inventory orders to fund growth. So it's a pretty cash flow positive business. So that meant that a good chunk of our profits were sat in the business bank account retained. And by the time that got to a place where I obviously wasn't really taking money out of the business 'cause my full time job was sustaining me, by the time that got to a place where I had that to the year to 18 month runway, then I felt comfortable to take the plunge. But funnily enough, even then I was chatting to my father-in-law about it, who was one of the people uh that me and my wife told and uh He was saying to me, he was like, You're you're crazy. He was like, You probably should have done this six months ago. He was like, What do we need to do to make this happen? And he actually very kindly, uh he's retired now, transferred me, ten thousand pounds uh as an investment in vertical and he said you will almost certainly not need this um but for whatever reason you seem to need the comfort and the permission of some of the money in the bank. So I'm gonna put it there to the number's large enough that you start dedicating more hours to this because the return on investment of what you've done so far is so clear. Uh I think you're a bit mad not to be going going all in on this.
Kurt Elster
That's really really good kind and clever of him to do that, you know, recognizing, hey, what you needed was external validation to keep going. How it sounds to me. Yeah, definitely.
Jayden Clark
I think that I think that's fair. And funnily enough that that money sat in the business bank account for almost a year and then he said to me, Right now, now you're being irresponsible with my capital. So uh now we've used this for uh getting you out your own way. It was like now it's time to work out how you make sure that this is at least, you know, giving you a return greater than probably the six or seven percent interest that it should at least be earning you. Um so then we started looking at some inventory and that sort of thing. So he was very good at at nudging me out of my own way when I was uh probably limited by my own beliefs.
Kurt Elster
the limiting beliefs is tough because they're your beliefs. It's often really tough to recognize them, especially when you know, you're unwilling to get out of your own routine. The times I've recognized my own limiting beliefs have been when I broke my routine. Either, you know, just going on vacation so I had like the third party or the external perspective. you know, looking outside in by taking a break from it, or just, you know, conferences have tended to be the thing that help. So this store, geez, did we ever mention the name of this draw? What was the name of the store?
Jayden Clark
Yeah, not my finest moment. Uh we called it Woodlark Garden Luxury. I think I mentioned earlier.
Kurt Elster
I'm not very uh What's wrong with that?
Jayden Clark
I I think it's so long. I actually can't remember a customer getting their name right in And I I vivid I remember everyone who got it wrong and there was loads of them. Um I think it was hard to remember and really wordy. In fact, uh S spoiler alert slightly, but the uh the people who bought it actually made a jibe at me once being like, couldn't you called it something even longer? Maybe Superfala Fragilistic XBLODOC. co. uk or something. They were like, this is such an unnecessarily long name.
Kurt Elster
So difficult for everyone to do it. So hard to do businesses.
Jayden Clark
It is.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. No, I don't don't uh don't begrudge that.
Jayden Clark
And I just wanted to get in, you know. I was like, I just want the name out of the way because that's just one more thing on the checklist of I was desperate to in avert e commerce, like get in the arena, get some skin in the game, so I just breezed. Uh breezed right through that. I was like, that seems that seems good enough.
Kurt Elster
Hitting seven figures in the first year, like really quite quite extraordinary, quite unusual, not something most people are going to be able to repeat. And a lot of factors went into that. What as far as like Driving awareness that early in the game is really tough. What do you think the the acquisition channels and what were s that worked? What were some of the factors that that helped drive this quick success?
Jayden Clark
Yeah, definitely. Um I think a few things. I think the first thing that was ideal was we I I was following, I suppose, kind of a a charted path and a and a roadmap, which I think is actually when I'm best. I think I'm pretty good at executing uh I'm quite good at taking in knowledge and understanding. Yeah, I'm quite good at just being quite uh militant on then just executing that once I've got the plan in front of me. So Ben Keneggendorf is someone who uh sort of has a course on this sort of thing, helps people certainly excellent at that sort of zero to one um stage of the business. And uh I kind of had access to that. I bought into it very heavily and I think I was able to quite quit I I always have quite an obsessive personality. So once I started seeing But I had this uh growth trajectory I could go on um in terms of learning the strategies of the levers and then I could get the the feedback from implementing them and seeing business growth. That became quite addictive and I was able to work hard on that. So i in in principle I think the bar success was I think in other businesses, sometimes like a a huge product market fit or something quite radical can cause that rapid success. In this case, I think it was just a case of a Of a fairly simple business model with a pretty clear and well charted roadmap and set of strategies that I was just able to just go ahead and implement.
Kurt Elster
Um and I've seen it was Ben Negendorff's Was the source of the show?
Jayden Clark
Yeah, Benkeneggendorf. Yeah. In fact, I actually heard him on this very podcast, which is the first time.
Kurt Elster
I was gonna say, I just I just had to Google my own show. He was on the show January 18th, 2022. And the title of that episode is Ben's High Ticket Dropshipping Approach. I think his th 3D printers, yeah, he sold 3D printers. So again, it was like You're right. It it's high ticket item, you know, that's got in his case it was like it had a more technical approach to it and he was able to get, you know, develop relationships with the the suppliers for those 3D printers at that time. You know, today it's different. Um, but yeah, you're right. It is. That's his approach. And oh my gosh, I'm thrilled to hear it worked.
Jayden Clark
Well, and it was it was nice for me because it was a bit of uh like an unleashed moment because I was listening to the podcast in general and obviously you have some incredible founders on here. But uh my uh my propensity for risk was standing in the way, I suppose. And so sometimes the idea, you know, I'd hear people who are you know, had placed a lot of gymnade orders or had, you know, kind of uh gone a li take a bit more of a leap of faith and had be you know been well rewarded for it. But I was kind of thinking, even for me at the time the idea of placing like a five thousand pound inventory order And then not being able to sell these things felt like I'd be letting my my wife and my family down. So the idea of with Ben's model. Essentially, I knew I just needed to work hard, learn the strategies. And my point in the value chain was do good marketing, do good conversion rate optimization, do good customer service. I was like, okay, that feels Like I can just work hard and try and learn that and the only thing I have to give up is my time and my uh my effort and my dedication. And if it wasn't to work, I'll have learned some new skills and hopefully won't have let anyone down. And so that was like a right That is what I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna go for it. And I actually I was driving when I was listening to the podcast, and I can still now remember where I was when I that There must have been some sort of penny drop moment when Ben on your show was describing this. And I can still picture my surroundings then because it was a bit of a aha moment for me because I'd felt a bit frustrated, I suppose. uh you know I'd done the classic, you know, read Tim Ferriss's book, decided I really wanted to do this. I was mentally in, but I didn't feel yet like I had uh a clear path of how I was gonna go about trying to make this happen. And this was a turnaround moment for me. And so I suppose there has been That zero to one of Ben's model has been fantastic. And then there's also been other people along the way that I've I became, I guess, addicted to this, acquiring knowledge and implementing it. And so I suppose going back to the original question of what really worked from a kind of customer acquisition perspective, it was. Being really strict, well, the first things versus this is a demand capture business principally, right? So that I think is slightly easier. to learn than sometimes demand generation. I think demand generation and convincing people who are maybe not even problem aware yet, definitely not solution aware. to be aware of the problem that your product solves and then aware that your product is the solution to the product they weren't aware they had. I think that requires a sophistication and a level of marketing and then probably also a level of spend to be able to test and learn that sometimes demand capture doesn't quite in the same way. Whereas with demand capture I was able to build a model, I suppose, where we leaned very heavily into organic SEO-driven traffic at the top of the funnel and was very uh we were very focused on making sure that we were were brilliant when it came to topical authority and informational keywords around our product type. So if someone was trying to understand, uh do I need planning for permission for my Pagola, you know, what happens if I've got really strong winds in my area? What sort of foundations do I need to install it? What sort of fuel type is okay for this fire pit? Is it gonna be warm enough for the area? How long is it gonna last? All these things that happen when a customer is aware they might be interested because they've been to a friend's house or they've seen one somewhere, but is on that sort of long-term browsing journey, as happens with a lot of high-tier products. You know, buying cycles can be measured in months rather than days. that we would be ever present there, helping them and kind of establishing ourselves as as topical experts and trying to get as many touch points with the customer and bring them into our own funnel, whether that's getting them on our email list or you know, getting them on site so we can retarget to them, whatever it might be, coupled with that, being really competitive at the bottom of the funnel when it comes to paid advertising. And so we, over time with the business, essentially banded keywords as much as possible into what we felt their commercial value was to the business based on the intent they showed. And we would aim to be incredibly competitive on what we saw as really high purchase intent, low funnel keywords. Imagine we're selling a certain fire pit, a really low uh of the low in the funnel, high intent keyword might be something like you know, two meter concrete rectangular wood fire pit, for example. That is a customer who knows what size they want, what finish they want. what fuel source they want to put in it, all these things. Like this is a customer who's primed to buy if we can show them the right product, the right experience.
Kurt Elster
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Jayden Clark
Predominantly um Google ads uh based on those keywords with specific landing pages. Yeah. So we were very competitive SEO-wise at the top of the funnel. more difficult for us as a newer domain to be competitive at these sort of very highly transactional keywords. We kind of began to get there towards the end, but predominantly we were hyper competitive on paid search. for these high intent transactional keywords and then highly competitive up the top of the funnel with uh more organic searches because it's obviously incredibly difficult, especially when you have dropshipping margins, which are traditionally lower. To have a profitable ROAS on a top-of-funnel lower intent keyword. So working that organically was far more effective for our profitability. And then the bottom of the final keywords were the ones that we really identified at a high propensity to convert. And then we could be more competitive with the CPCs required to get that traffic, even with our dropshipping margins, because we knew We had the properly tailored landing page, the kind of right keywords in the ad campaigns to be able to make sure they convert to the right the right rate.
Kurt Elster
That's very clever. So type of funnel. We're going organic because it's it's broader, it's not going to be nearly as profitable. And then bottom of funnel, we're doing these really high intent keywords, but you know, by slicing it thinner, I would imagine you you're getting better ROAS, potentially paying less than if, you know, using the broader terms at the top.
Jayden Clark
Indeed. And you can imagine obviously uh Google's a weighted auction, uh quality score and bid, and you can imagine if we're going hyper focused on individual keywords and we're creating landing pages that are hyper-focused on those keywords. Google's perspective of what our quality score will be and then also our user signals when customers get on those pages help our quality score to be really high, which means that our bid doesn't need to be quite as high because our blended auction score of the two is higher because that quality score is so much better versus one of our competitors who is maybe taking a more generic approach to keywords and therefore their landing pages are less tailored and therefore when the customer gets on those landing pages the user signals they send back to Google are poorer. They might be bidding as much or more as us but have a weaker quality score and therefore we still outperform them in the paid search auction despite the fact that Actually we might be bidding less.
Kurt Elster
And then on the site itself, I would imagine it has to look trustworthy. If you're this focused on SEO, I I bet you got a ton of content. It like it starts to become more like an educational resource. It's a little more brochure-like. you know, maybe you know, attempting to be a digital showroom experience, for lack of a better word, but like a really nice catalog. You know, something that's not thin Yeah, that seems to be when we think of dropshipping stores, it's like these thin, spammy stores versus tell me about paint the picture. What did this site's content look like?
Jayden Clark
Yeah, sure. No, I think that's a good point. And yeah, that is a we we could never quite decide what we wanted to call it. But yeah, digital showroom, hybrid e-commerce, something like that. Um I think uh lead has sort of gone out of e-commerce a little bit as a term unless it's for you know an e-commerce site that is trying to generate leads for a service-based business. But I think in high-ticket e-commerce the value of a lead is still really high. So one thing we did is we started to view a success metric. when a customer came to site as generating a lead and a deeper relationship with the business rather than a conversion. And that's because of the fact that there are larger buying uh sorry, longer buying cycles with these larger items with uh, you know, more to consider more that you're spending, etc. And so the first win was if we could get a customer onto our site, whether it's biorganic or paid, and we could get them to r appreciate that our site had enough knowledge, ability to consult with them, ability to add value, that they would become a lead. And that might be that they sign up for a certain sort of added value service that we try and help them with browsing. That might be resources that we've created, you know. how to work out if your area is suitable for a fire pit, or if you're going to need planning permission for this Pagola, or if um, you know, or what how to measure up the space to decide what dimensions you're gonna have, or all these things. And you know, this is true across saunas, standing desks, um awnings for the side of my motor home, you know, and a hundred different hard-to-get products, you know, we had to find through speaking to customers, learning about customers, what were the things that were at the front of their mind that they were struggling with, the other e-commerce experiences weren't giving to them, and show that we had done the thought, helped customers with this and sort of done a lot of the legwork for them and that therefore we could add value. And if we were able to get them to become a lead by showing them that. And we did things as much you know, even things to do with uh like CAD design and 3D render. We had a couple of people in Indonesia who are incredibly skilled at um literally taking a photo of someone's backyard and uh superimposing a fire pit and a gazebo and other products like that into that space. And we were You know, we were getting these done at points, like three to five of these done a day. Um, but you know, when there's gross profitability of maybe one or two thousand pounds, uh you only have to kind of work out what a reasonable conversion rate might be off the back of giving an artifact like this to a customer. And obviously you have to work out who are the serious leads that you do this for and you think the cost and who are the less. But yeah, we really started to work on get the traffic, turn the traffic into a lead and establish ourselves as the best place to help them on this journey. And then after that we felt that we could just genuinely try and help the customer from an on uh from a point in the industry as well where we covered most of the brands. So if they were working with the DTC store, they were getting information that they're that that brand was the best. Whereas we could give an impartial view. And we very much had a policy that If we felt that a customer was better off buying a £3,000 unit than a £5,000 unit, we would tell that and we tried to engender trust and and win word-of-mouth marketing and accept that rate to conversions by actually serving the customer would serve us more in the long term than trying to constantly upsell inorganically. So all these things together trying to replicate what people are used to in a physical setting from high ticket experiences in e-commerce.
Kurt Elster
They absolutely I I love the idea of you ha setting a specific policy in which it is okay to down sell someone on a product, if you're like, look, that's just the better solution, you don't need the more expensive one. Because it ends up working out better for everybody. Like Yeah, you could have sold them to the more expensive one, but would that have been the right item? Would they have been happy? Would you have gotten the word of mouth? Like what's the real cost of doing that? You know, what's tremendous about this business is is how quickly and how successful it was and you know how rare and unusual that is. How how did you interpret that success at the time? Were you like, hey, did it feel like, well, I'm putting in the effort, this is just how it goes. I'm I'm a business genius? Or was it more like, I you know, the rocket ship has been ignited, I am now just holding on.
Jayden Clark
I'm not very I would say first things first I'm not very good at success. Um that's something I learned as part of this. Sounds a very negative thing to say. I think probably most of us aren't very good at success. I think most of us are kind of taught to be quite good at accepting our lot in life. And I actually think to like want more and be satisfied when you get it is probably actually a skill that you have to learn. Um so I guess first things first is a caveat would be that I was a huge part of the problem that emerged when the business started to scale. I do think there is a natural Like for want of a better term, like a uh sometimes rapid growth can be a little bit of the hug of death. And that can happen to some extent, right? It's great to grow quickly, but sometimes really fast growth can uh remove the benefit of learning and having time to implement those learnings before the next stage of growth comes. And you can get out of your depth quite quickly with fast growth. And this being my first venture and then me also being quite a financially anxious person and person quite a cautious person meant that that rapid growth I think I was a good personality to generate the rapid growth because I was a bit of a grinder and I was happy when I knew what strategies I needed to learn, understand and put into place and I did that well. The problem was then I was probably overly limited and overly cautious when it came to reinvesting and uh making sure the operational side of the business could keep up with the growth. And so Yeah, we did get to a point relatively quickly where I had probably grown the business beyond the point where it could operationally cope with what was going on. And then I was also at a point where I was probably in so much burnout from working a hundred hour weeks from keeping my corporate job for all that through all that growth and trying to do this along the side. that uh I uh I then needed to try and unpick some of this, but I was in a state of such severe burnout that I became probably the worst hirer and trainer of any any manager ever. Um so it was a little bit of a perfect storm in that sense, I suppose.
Kurt Elster
So how b it at peak, how big was the team?
Jayden Clark
Um uh we there was a point where just me and my wife um and well actually yeah, just me and my wife and a subcontracting phone answering service were operating this business at over a million pounds in revenue. Um which I I don't say with pride, I say with uh what on earth was I doing in my mind
Kurt Elster
I think it's incredible. I mean, I get why that would also be a little terrifying, especially with how quickly it occurred. But it's cool. You should be proud of what you did.
Jayden Clark
It was definitely cool. Um and you know, it is incredible. Like it does show how, you know, with certain things and certain things amongst this business model that, you know, it can be done at incredible scale. I think it's just the opportunity cost of that was huge. I think I could have hi I think I could have found fifty to a hundred thousand a year for a team and probably from the headspace that would have freed me up. made that back on the bottom line very, very quickly. And I probably could have had a bigger business that was just as profitable. I probably could have been a lot happier. Um, but I don't I was just uh that is with the benefit of hindsight. Uh that's the benefit of some of what I know now. It's also most importantly from a place where my mind is infinitely clearer than what it was then. Like I I I almost couldn't think straight because I was so locked in and just trying to keep up with harvesting all the growth and demand.
Kurt Elster
It's tough when you're like it that's where you're too close to it, where you need to take a break, but you can't. It's hard. I think that is the cost of the rapid growth, especially when this is your first attempt at this. You don't have the experience and the perspective that someone who has tried and failed a couple times might have had before seeing the success. Yeah. Um the how long after starting Did you realize you wanted to sell it?
Jayden Clark
Oh honestly, I think I love the idea of taking exit, probably From the moment I started one of one of the reasons I was keen to start a business, I was really keen to avoid starting something that was more arbitrage than a business. So the fact that a proper high-to-get dropshipping business as opposed to a more traditional dropshipping business was an actual asset built on customer relationships and manufacturing relationships that actually could be sold as an asset. So I think uh The idea of an exit always was like quite tantalizing anyway. Um, probably not in such a short time frame. I mean, we ended up being pretty much two years from start to exit, and Yeah, exit was a bit too literal, I think. It was less of a oh we're at the peak, let's uh cash in here, and more uh, I need to to take the the panic exit here a little bit because uh I'm I can't see a way forward and through this um because I'm too close to it and too burnt out at the moment. And I can't see how I can get the space without harming the business by taking it because I've embedded myself too deeply in. what needs to happen on a day to day basis.
Kurt Elster
So when did you when did you sell?
Jayden Clark
Me and my wife got married. We just did a very simple spa day the next day to just try and, you know, decompress and enjoy the fact that we'd we'd done that. And I had a 90-minute massage that my wife had booked for me, which with where my mindset and headspace was at the time was like a real scary place to be. Ninety minutes silence with my own thoughts was that was the opposite of a spa treatment for me. And so I was having this massage and my mind just raced the entire time. I was so, so nervous. And I felt such an intense responsibility to my wife to be present, a good version of myself, you know, not super stressed, not either checking my emails and being on the phone, or at the very least to thinking about wanting to check my emails and being on the phone. I thought this is actually a bit of a wake-up call that this isn't really sustainable. You have gotten past a little bit the point of no return and you are trying to hire people and do things and put processes in place. to extract yourself out of the business and you are continually doing a poor job at it because you are just so burnt out and cooked. You know what? Let's take the exit. It's still a fantastic exit and it's still gonna give breathing room to to learn, to think, and then to go again in business, whatever that might look like, from a position of a much better mental state. And so that was in a nutshell the conversation I had with myself in that massage. And I came out to it, out of it rather, and I got uh back into the sparrow of my wife and I said I I I wanna uh list the business for sale and I messaged uh a friend of mine who had exited a similar business about six months earlier and said, Please send me the details of the broker you used and I reached down to him that night.
Kurt Elster
Really in the same weekend, you married your wife and divorced your business.
Jayden Clark
Yeah. But uh two brilliant decisions actually.
Kurt Elster
See and you used a business broker. Uh good experience
Jayden Clark
Medium experience would be my gut feel.
Kurt Elster
What's tough about it? Like if you did it over again, what would you change?
Jayden Clark
I wanted to keep a lot of control over the process. And so the broker kind of created the listing, um, you know, got all of the, you know, worked with me to get everything in terms of information ready, to value it, etc. Got it up on, you know, the marketplaces like Flipper, etc. And then pretty much from the moment we had a letter of intent, all of the sort of three to four months of due diligence after that point, the broker was next to um next one involved in. I think part of that I think he probably should have done a bit more to insert himself into things. And then I think I should have also deferred to his expertise more. And I think what happened there is you can imagine like the emotion that exists as a first-time person exiting a business and then also the fear of if this all falls through, like I'm running on fumes here and I need to keep this business going. and performing as well as possible because it's going to affect my multiple and affect how how much appetite the buyer has. But also if this pulls through and w through and we have to start again with three to four months new due diligence, that's going to have a really meaningful impact on my life. So as you can imagine I probably wasn't in quite the position of strength that you would like to be. And I think that's where the broker, who has the benefit of being without emotion and uh with the experience of having done this process, probably could have balanced me better. But also I am I do recognize that I am a bit of a control freak and I probably cut him out of the process more than I should have as well.
Kurt Elster
I will say, Woodlark, still up. Appears to still be up and on Shopify.
Jayden Clark
Yes indeed. Yeah, they haven't they haven't by any means run into the ground. In fact I've really enjoyed working with them. Small kind of private uh private fund. They only own five e-commerce businesses. Uh I won't go into it 'cause it's quite a long story, but incredibly cool story whereby the guy was ex uh Air Force, he got commercial rights to uh equipment to go into face masks. Started selling them before COVID. As you can imagine, face masks was a pretty good business to be in when a pandemic launched. Its team scaled insanely to cope with the demand. Pretty much the Foreign Office of every government was helping them to ship masks into the country. They were making money hand over fist. Uh Jeff Bezos helped them get, I think it was seven million pounds or something out of their Amazon account to help them to continue to do what they needed to do. Um anyway, then you can imagine uh COVID. In a virtual commerce ends, things go back to normal demand and they've got this huge team of manufacturing, customer service, advertising, etc. , that are now essentially all redundant. So they took uh a huge amount of private um investment money in order to buy businesses and plug them into this existing system um in order to try and grow and scale them, which I think actually This was completely by accident. I reversed into this. I would have sold to anyone who was willing to give me what I thought the business was worth at the time, because I was that fried, but luckily for me, I think ended up with a really good home because they were operationally excellent. I was operationally disastrous. The business was demand and acquisition excellent and operationally disastrous. So it was a bit of a match uh made in heaven. And I've actually I did a six month uh earnout with them uh or kind of consultation period because I'd created a huge amount of of owner's risk as you can imagine. Um, you know, if I disappeared off in my uh in my new car or whatever, um, then it would have been a bit of a disaster for them 'cause a lot of the knowledge was in my head. So we worked together for six months on that, um, sort of gradually moving the time down and actually I really enjoyed working with them. Um and I'm still But I mean contact and I think they'll do really well with the business.
Kurt Elster
This episode is brought to you in part by Zippify One Click Upsell. Hey. You still guessing which products to upsell? Yeah, look, that's how upsells worked like five years ago, but this year, in 2025, that kind of guesswork? It's just losing your revenue. One click upsell by Zippify uses AI to recommend the best upsells and cross-sells based on your actual sales data. live in real time. Yeah, it's smart, automatic, and way more effective than the old school I hope this works method. So just install the app. Launch your first upsell funnel with one click. No code, no testing, and no more generic offers. You can upsell across the entire customer journey. The whole funnel. Product pages, cart, checkout, post-purchase, thank you pages, even the shop app. And now they're tossing in a free Cart drawer just for installing. Cart drawer's the best. Over 50,000 Shopify merchants trust one-click upsell. And it's already driven nearly a billion dollars in extra revenue. So go to zipify. com slash Kurt to start your 30-day free trial. That's zi-i-p-ify. com slash K-U-R-T. I mean fabulous to see that it's still going and that you know the earnout worked out. If you're gonna sell a business with an earnout that you tends to be where the wheels fall off as you don't get all of the earnout. That's where the dispute comes in. So if we got it all, you know, to work out to the end and it's still going, that's fantastic. I mean this that means it all worked. Did you mention how much you got for it?
Jayden Clark
Just uh just above sort of half a million pounds, which obviously is uh maybe about six hundred K in dollars. How'd you feel about it? Too good? This is so hard to say, um, because No, I actually think it was the right amount. Um I think I left a huge amount of money on the table. Hundred percent. Uh due but if they would give it to me back now and uh let me come in with this fresh headspace and take it to whatever, a a million pounds in enterprise value or beyond, I think I could do that very, very well and pretty quickly. Have I had I have not burnt myself out in quite the same way and created this uh problem for myself, I think You know, ultimately there are very few business ventures where I think I probably could have doubled the enterprise value in maybe a couple of years, not to mention the net profit that you can imagine. You know, you normally get about a 4x multiple. on these sorts of businesses. So you can imagine, you know, two years of that net profitability plus the enterprise value, that's a pretty good return on two years' worth of work, um, especially for a guy who was working a corporate job, you know, a few years ago. Um so in that regard, I left huge amount of money on the table. On the flip side, I think I learnt a huge amount. I also think it was a pretty much a non-negotiable for what I owed my new wife, my friends, my family, myself, my own mental health at the time. I think to continue In that way for two more years would have been totally irresponsible. Um, wouldn't have been good for anyone, probably nor the business. Um In So in principle, like if you think of it purely financially, yeah, I left a huge amount of money on the table. In the long term, I think it will make me much more successful from the lessons I learned from it and having the ability to retrospectively go into news business ventures with what I've learned. Um not to mention like just from a lifestyle perspective, it was it was so important.
Kurt Elster
Well, and at the same time, you know, the it's easy to someone who's not been in the position, it's easy to sneeze at it, go, well, that wasn't enough. But at the same time, you got six hundred and seventy thousand dollars US cash. And no one the equivalent of uh that's that's a hard amount of money for anyone to turn down.
Jayden Clark
I can promise you that is uh That is more money than I've uh had in my bank account by a ridiculous multiple. So yes, it was life-changing enough. Of course it was a stepping stone in in what I certainly view it this way as a stepping stone in my career. And to but to be honest though, I want to be I actually I re with the exception of some of the the harder bits, I I really enjoyed the journey and I want to continue being in business. And I think I'll look back at this and be like, that was fantastic, because it allowed me the space and breathing room to do some of these things. It allowed me the capital to do some of the things that I'll do next. And ultimately, yeah, great. It could have been uh could have been a million or it could have been, you know, seven figures or whatever on the exit. But actually I think there will be future e whether they're exits or, you know, whatever it might be that happen because of what I learned from this business. So yeah, no I I can honestly say I have I have no regrets from the exit. I of course have in a way regrets of making myself need the exit, but again, I knew no better. You know, at least at least I've learned the lesson now.
Kurt Elster
But you know that that the value was in the experience and then you get this tremendous payout on top of it. I would not be apologetic or upset about it in any way. I mean it's thrilling. It's great. What did you do afterward?
Jayden Clark
When I exited, my my wife thought, well, we should take some time off. I think we just had, you know, uh a huge injection of cash and you're completely burnt out. uh let's take some time off. And I thought, yeah, that that sounds like a good idea. I don't I I didn't love the idea of doing it. I was I was pretty excited. Uh in fact this is crazy, but on the flight back I I flew uh to uh sign the papers with the with the buyer. We were in different areas 'cause my wife and I moved to to Barcelona um in the final year of the business. So I I flew there and I actually have Notes in my notebook. I bought a new notebook at the airport and started writing out what I wanted my new venture to look like on the flight back, which uh I think that was a bit much. I wouldn't say that with like a a badge of honor. That probably spoke to the fact that I was a little bit hyper pro productive at that time. But um The uh the main reason I did that was because uh in the lead up to the sale, I'd started speaking on podcasts. Um, for example, like Ben Canegga North uh has a community uh of people who sort of do this business and then others other sort of similar business owner, small business owner podcaster, people who are in the first, maybe Maybe uh like zero to three to five years of their journey. Um and I started speaking, I suppose, quite candidly. Um I think I was just at a point where there was no energy left for facade. So, you know, you kinda come on these podcasts and especially in the earlier phase of business ownership, you get put on a pedestal. It's like, you know, this guy has done what we all want to do. He's gone from corporate job to the you know, to where this business is at. And I would I would talk about how great that had been because I was super grateful for it. But I would also talk about how mentally difficult the journey had been, how business had I guess uh show me things about my own like uh limiting beliefs, uh my uh own anxieties, stresses, etc. , that hadn't been highlighted before. And by the way, I think would have come up anyway outside of business, it would have just taken a different life stress to cause those. So again, I'm kind of grateful I had the opportunity to work through them because better in business than arguably with the presence of your first child or, you know, with some sort of like family illness or whatever might cause that life stress. But um I essentially spoke about both the good and the bad and was really overwhelmed by the outpouring of people who would reach out to me after that and sort of say how glad they were. Because I think we all have this feeling that we sometimes have to put a facade of success up in business and therefore sometimes people feel and I certainly feel this way. I had many times where I thought, this is such a shame, because clearly I have what it takes to build a successful business, but I don't have the requisite like resilience or, you know, emotional sort of strength and makeup to be able to hack it. I thought that's Such a shame. And then I over time I sort of started to be more open with my own experience and therefore speak to people who were going through similar things. And I kind of learned that actually we're all we're all just on this journey and actually the whole challenge to be to be honest, is kind of uh dealing with our own mental uh warfare and that sort of thing. Um so that was really, really powerful. And so I basically decided I wanted to just start working with these people in some way. Whether that was just chatting to them, sharing experiences, like I'd learned that people seemed to get a positive reaction when I just talked about these things. So I wanted to do more of it, but I just didn't really know what it looked like. So I thought, you know what? I'll just use the fact that I've had the exit to talk about it openly because I've got this moment where people will probably listen because it's kinda like a nice story. Um, and I will just chat to people who want to. And so I just offered I just had coffees and, you know, virtual coffees, chats uh with people who are in the same sort of position. And sometimes we talked about business, sometimes we talked about the mindset side of business. Um and yeah, I just I found I loved it. I found when I was running the e-commerce business a lot of the conversations I was having zapped me of energy. And then when I started speaking to when I kind of felt like I'd uh it's a bit of a corny phrase, but like found my people in terms of small business owners who wanted to uh, you know, wanted to do this to spend more time with their families or to, you know, be able to spend more time with their partner, do things they want to do, you know, change their life in that sort of way. And they were having some success but also some struggles and we could relate to one one another. And then also seeing that actually help them, uh suddenly I was like, okay, this is what it feels like to do work where your energies didn't get depleted, you actually get excited off the back of things and had so many times where 'Cause uh I was speaking to also people in the US and Australia as well, so the time zones would often not line up and I'd think, Oh, I'm really tired and I've got to call with that person in Australia and it's, you know, whatever, ten PM here. And within five minutes of the call, I was so energized and I was wide awake.
Kurt Elster
I was like, okay, this is really interesting.
Jayden Clark
This is what it feels like to be uh to get energy from a business venture rather than have it suck energy out of you. So Yeah, that that is uh I suppose in a nutshell what what I did next and and why I went into it quite so quickly. And and since then I really have tried not to overthink what the business model is. I probably couldn't even really tell you what the business model is now. Uh we have We have a membership that people can be a part of, uh, but we also have a free part of a community. It's it's overall it's called Founders Clubhouse.
Kurt Elster
And it's I was gonna say what's the name of it?
Jayden Clark
It sounds cool. It's called Founders Clubhouse and and it is essentially uh a space for predominantly new entrepreneurs, uh but in but indeed that you know any that sort of feel like they are still fighting, which I imagine probably most entrepreneurs do, but sort of fighting their way through and struggle to have people in their life that sort of get some of those struggles. I think it'd be really hard to talk to friends, to family, to your traditional support circle about these things. And so It's a space for those people to essentially like I did, find their people and interact and help each other overcome some limiting beliefs, overcome some of the sort of like mental struggles of entrepreneurship. And then also like a a thought leadership knowledge sharing space. So I have spent time, uh, whilst it's all still fresh in my mind, documenting a number of the different strategies that helped me to grow this previous business so quickly. um from sort of paid advertising, SEO, and uh a number of things around conversion and optimization in a lot of different facets. And then I've also uh lent on some people who helped me along the way as well who are real experts in other disciplines to create some. And so that sort of library is available. And then we have a weekly coaching call where we we jump on and we talk about something. If there's an expert from outside, they'll come in and sort of join it. But we also just use that as a vehicle for us all to to chat and speak. We celebrate each other's wins, help each other when we're struggling. And um yeah, it's been it's been amazing. Um some of it I work really closely, some of it's more like light touch, but I love it.
Kurt Elster
You know, it sounds like you built the thing you wish you had.
Jayden Clark
Indeed. Yeah. So I I that's exactly it.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. And that's really cool. You're like, look, this was my experience and this is I I wish I had these tools, so I built them for you. And you know, now you that that feedback of like I am helping people Who I can empathize with their struggle. Wow. You know, now you've you've built this business that's that's much more satisfying, that's much more people oriented. Are you burned out now? You know what the give me the the difference in mental state?
Jayden Clark
Yeah, I I honestly I don't feel burnt out at all now. I think Firstly, I've been able to create some balance. Um I mean the X is fantastic for that because so I I have minority stake in a couple of of e commerce businesses where I sort of sit more in a I think my my sphere of expertise or where I'm strongest is probably in what we talked about earlier. So the acquisition side of things and how we sort of build the right system for generating awareness demand and getting people into the funnel. So I have minority ownership in a couple of businesses where I sit with a very prescriptive role. So it's like quite a clean headspace and I'm working on that, which is great. And then the rest of the time I spend doing this where like I said I get energy back from the conversations. And I had it recently with a one of the people who joined the community in its first first like days, um, he had some really high stress around the back end of last year and uh he sort of reached out to me and said, I'm so sorry to do this, but I'm feeling ri he was He was in an inventory business, e-commerce business, and he was really struggling to make his payments on the inventory financing that he'd had, and he was incredibly anxious, and he had three young children. And he and I just sort of chattered through things, just tried to come up with plans. We jumping on a call maybe sort of twice a week perhaps. And uh it was both a privilege and and horrible for me, 'cause on the one hand I could literally feel the stress and anxiety coming off him. And I've had that for different reasons, but I could really heavily, probably a little bit too heavily, empathize with where it was at. But on the flip side, he sort of came through that struggle and and, you know, I was delighted to have even have been a small part of that. And then we started working together in sort of a a weekly coaching capacity. And then he actually came out to Barcelona to see me. About three weeks ago now, um, and we were talking about and planning for him. He's now his business is now doing the numbers that allows him to sustainably kind of leave his job. Um he teaches at a different school to his kids, so he sort of has to be out early and he gets back quite late, so he barely gets to see his children. He's now gonna leave his job. Work from home, it's gonna allow him to do the school run to see his kids after work and that sort of thing. And he is so, so excited. And and honestly being a part of that journey, is the most fulfilling thing I've done in work by an absolute mile. So and there have been a number of others, none that are quite as uh emphatic as that, but um Yeah, that that sort of thing goes a long way away from uh what keeps me a long way away from burnout, I suppose, because that was uh if that happened once a decade, I think it would be enough to keep me keep me working with satisfaction.
Kurt Elster
Well, I mean clear it it's rewarding. Uh ma'am, my final question for you, where can we go learn more about you?
Jayden Clark
So I've set up like a URL for listeners to the podcast, which is just found as Clubhouse, which is obviously F-O-U-N-D-E-R-S, Clubhouse. co. uk, and then forward slash Kurt. Um that whole website of Founders Clubhouse is a good place to learn more. But to be honest, I would love it if your listeners did want to learn more that they kind of Do that by just reaching out. So uh that will just take you to a very basic page that allows people to first and foremost give their email for so that they get access to my diary. And I would love if anyone wanted to have a virtual coffee. To be clear, like the agenda can be completely wide open. It can be about anything I've spoken about on the podcast or anything you might have heard about my journey. Obviously I would love it if someone is maybe struggling a little bit. struggling with belief, struggling, you know, maybe they're in a sort of situation. If if I can be of any help to help someone through that, that's awesome. But also I know as entrepreneurs, sometimes we get very excited about the tactical side of things as well. So if it is that you want to learn more about you know, bottom of the funnel paid advertising or top of the funnel organic, whatever it might be. As I said, I've done a lot of work at getting these things out of my head, so happy to chat about it. I'm always I always enjoy geeking out um on these sorts of things. So Whatever it is, I'm just delighted. Like I say, I made a pact to myself to just now I've found my people in Inverse Commerce to to just spend more time chatting to them and trying to get value. So uh if people go there and and want to chat to me I'll be I'll be very happy.
Kurt Elster
Jaden Clark, formerly Woodlark Garden, now founders Clubhouse. Thank you so much for your candor. This has been really great.
Jayden Clark
Thank you so much for having me.
Kurt Elster
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