w/ Johnny Hickey, PerfectWhiteTee.com
Johnny Hickey, former New York firefighter turned digital marketer, tells us what he's learned jumping into ecommerce in 2018 and learning on the job.
He gives us the lowdown on the essentials – focus on user experience and keep your email marketing game strong. He's candid about the ad game too, comparing the heavyweights: Google and Facebook Ads. His advice? Sometimes you need a pro to take a swing at those Facebook Ads.
The real deal with Johnny is his approach to learning and adapting. He's all about experimenting and not being afraid to call in the cavalry when things get too technical. For those grappling with Pinterest Ads, TikTok Ads, and the ever-elusive SEO, Johnny's experiences are like finding a lighthouse in a storm.
(00:00) Transitioning From Firefighter to E-Commerce Entrepreneur
(09:32) Launching a Mask Business in 2020
(19:45) Marketing Strategies and Trade Show Success
(26:41) Maximizing Revenue With Email and Facebook
(40:11) Frustrations With Google, Pinterest, and TikTok
(47:42) Advice and Influence on Shopify Site
Kurt Elster
Heads up friends, the unofficial Shopify podcast is made by indie entrepreneurs or indie entrepreneurs and may contain material not suitable for all audiences, like swearing or economics. Listener discretion is advised. In the world of e-commerce, it is high time we shift focus. It's not just about chasing revenue anymore. In the face of escalating ad costs and slim margins, your real profit is the game changer. That's the name of the game for 2024. Profit. That's where Store Hero shines. By seamlessly integrating your sales, marketing, and cost data Store Hero unveils the true picture of profitability, even down to a single order's contribution margin. Scaling your ad spend will become a confident, data-driven decision propelled by clear, actionable insights. From a platform that values profit over revenue. Ready to redefine e-commerce success? Visit storehero. ai and explore a platform tailored for the profit-centric brand. And here's a sweet deal Schedule a demo and mention the unofficial Shopify podcast for an exclusive offer, a free profitability audit for 2024 at storehero. ai My friends, I turned forty-one shortly this year. I do, I turn forty-one. And I have been involved in e-commerce since I was a teenager. Since I I was doing retail arbitrage before I knew it was called that. I was flipping furbies on eBay was how I initially got into it. Uh, then it just stuck with it over the years. And so digital marketing, e-commerce, the internet, right? These things have all been with me for over 20 years. If I often wonder, if I had to start over, or if I had to start later, would I have taken the same path? Would I be able to? Would I want to? And of course, I don't know, right? Like, s growing up with it, uh uh you know, think about it, it seems normal to you. If As an adult if I'd never been exposed to e commerce and I just went like, oh, I'm gonna get in e commerce, I don't know. It certainly it would be harder, I would have to imagine. And our guest today had this experience. He went from being a New York firefighter to uh a a digital marketer to learning the tools, learning the the industry, the trade, and uh helping run Shopify stores. And so our our guest is Johnny Hickey, who he's got um perfectwhitea. com is the site he works on, uh, along with his wife. Oh Johnny, welcome. How are you doing?
Johnny Hickey
I'm good. Do you have to point I have to point out that Jen Menchak and Lisa Hickey are the uh founders of the store. I just do the marketing.
Kurt Elster
Glad you clarified that. I don't don't want to like steal entrepreneurial glory from someone that's horrible. You were a New York firefighter, you're retired from that now. How long ago did you get into e-commerce and digital marketing?
Johnny Hickey
Or 2017, I started reading some books on Audible. I think four-hour workweek was one of them. And I was like, wow, wouldn't it be cool to have an e-com business? I was in real estate. I had a I was a fireman, but I also had my own business, which were the real estate business. Very hands-on and in-person. So I started to read some stuff and look around and I was, oh man, e-commerce is so cool. No toilet polls. You know, nobody calling you on like Sunday night at 10 o'clock like that. Tree just hit the house, the electricity's out, the police are here, can you help me? None of that stuff. I was like, this sounds cool.
Kurt Elster
What's funny is I thought you were talking about like being a landlord. I did not put together That with like was was that uh firefighter experience or landlord experience?
Johnny Hickey
I bought my first house in 2006 and it was a disaster. Uh so I ended up having financially it was a financial disaster because of you know 2007 and 8 financial crisis. But I had to move into the sub-cellar in this house and rent out all three floors. And one of the floors was already below ground. So I was underneath like fourteen feet underground to uh to financially make it through that through that time. And um so I stumbled into being a landlord and uh I kept at it for, you know, about 12 years or so, 13 years.
Kurt Elster
But all right, so six years ago you read four-hour work week. What's step two? How does that lead to getting into e-commerce? What was your your first venture here?
Johnny Hickey
I was taking a stab at a few different things and nothing was really uh happening. You know, try things out. I started looking around for products. In 2019, I finally had enough time Because I had sold almost all my real estate to start to dabble. And my wife had a website at the time. She's in fashion. She's always launching businesses. So she had a website at the time for a small general store with a couple of thousand SKUs and she turned that over to me to do some marketing. It was a Shopify store. And I was like, oh, this is really cool. So I started trying to make that store do revenues.
Kurt Elster
What what did the store sell? What was it?
Johnny Hickey
It sold women's clothing in the contemporary market. It was in Katona, New York. And the store, I would say, you know, they had a couple items under 50 bucks, but for the most part, most of the items would be 80 to Three hundred dollars. She would sell t-shirts, denom, some outerwear for the winter, and then cards, socks, some small jewelry items, sunglasses.
Kurt Elster
And this was brick and mortar, but not online.
Johnny Hickey
She put it online for me.
Kurt Elster
That was your your first real like I have access to a running e-commerce business. What's this first experience like?
Johnny Hickey
So I was it was uh a little frustrating. I was beating my head up against the wall. You know, I'd she'd have a little success locally with her customers just going online and buying stuff. So because of that, I would pretty much filter through the results and be like who didn't hear about us locally. And it was very few people. It was really, really few people. So the first thing I attempted because I was watching Mr. Sam Baldwin YouTube videos about Google Merchant Center and Google Ads. was I attempted to upload the whole stock up to Google so that I could compete with thousands of other stores in shopping it's. And I probably spent about four or five months doing that. I think the most business I did from Google Ads at that point was about 10 grand over the span of four or five months.
Kurt Elster
Did you see that as, hey, I'm starting to see traction and this is exciting, or were you frustrated with lack of results? 'Cause it could go either way.
Johnny Hickey
I was frustrated with the platform sometimes because there's a lot of policies changes and there's you know a lot of Things that you might not know, it's not very intuitive, Google Merchant Center. And as well, Google Ads, I would say to a lesser degree, can be somewhat tough Google Analytics. Uh it was I was excited by it. I was every time I had like a small win, like a couple of sales in the beginning, I'd hear that ding. I would rush to the phone and it'd be like local custom. or repeat customer and I'd be like, no, no, I want new business. So eventually though, it started to stuff started to fill in. And then when that when that happened, I started to double down. The biggest challenge I had was that buying-wise, she'd want to get stuck with any merchandise. So she would buy like things in three sizes or four sizes, two to three items each size. She knew her customer, so she'd do something like three, two, two or One, two, two, one for sizing. You know, she'd order one small, one medium, one large, one extra large, sometimes one, two, two, two, one. And so when I would sell those items, I had to start with a brand new listing. I didn't want to use anybody else's pictures, so I was having my wife take pictures all the time. And she was busy. She runs like three or four businesses, so she'd be frustrated me asking for new photo content.
Kurt Elster
Once you if you were able to start getting those sales, were you able to convince her to be like, hey, we could stock more? That sounds like the initial hurdle was like just get her to buy more inventory and have faith.
Johnny Hickey
She wouldn't. She wouldn't. She refused. She d she's it's a seasonal business, what she's in, contemporary.
Kurt Elster
You said you're like this business is gonna be a fly. You didn't believe in it. It's come back around on ya.
Johnny Hickey
Yeah, of course. Well At this point, like what year is this? That's around 2019. Uh-oh.
Kurt Elster
Because we know it comes next year.
Johnny Hickey
Yes. The fall of 2019, the spring. I mean, I support my wife in everything she does, but she had opened up three or four businesses in a year or two, and I was just like, oh man, like, let me do my own thing over here. Uh and I liked the photo business, so I was really pushing that. But then she came up with this t-shirt brand idea and I was like, whatever, you know, you do this. I'm gonna take care of Fado over here, which was the mortar store. And whenever she needed help with anything, I would help. But for the most part, her and Jen Manchaka were the ones doing that. I never expressed to them doubt, but I certainly had a lot of doubt in what they were doing.
Kurt Elster
Oh no. That's how you were sorry. So the first you were assisting with that other store photo. What year do they start up perfect white tea? This is because this one really eclipses the first, right? Yes. Okay.
Johnny Hickey
In 2019, they launched Perfect YT and I was working on several stores, other stores that my wife had introduced me to people. I was kind of dabbling with stores maybe doing $20,000 a month or $50,000 a month. I was consulting on them. I was offering them advice. I was tinkering with the stores. I wasn't really making any money at it. I was working full-time in the fire department. And then in uh 2020, I had decided to launch my own little business at one point. And the reason was because what was going on in early 2020, um, we we get these like little meetings in the fire department sometimes from law enforcement or organizations and a national law enforcement organization, a federal law enforcement agent, had briefed us that there was a a virus around and that it was going to be probably going to be something to worry about. And when I returned from this briefing that was at fire department training grounds, I went to the firehouse and opened up this locker and noticed that we had almost no masks. So I made a quick phone call to the place that we get our masks from, another firehouse, and I mentioned it to them and they said we'll call it back. And you know, I don't remember the exact conversation, but basically a couple of days later I heard back from those guys and it was like, we don't have any. Nobody has any. So I was like, oh man, this is, you know, I told my boss, told him about it, but then when I went home personally, I started looking on Amazon and Google and tried to find some. And then I went to a small entrepreneur's website called Fastlane Forum and I found a guy who had access to masks.
Kurt Elster
So uh just based off the fact that you couldn't acquire them immediately. You already had the sense that these were gonna be in demand? What was like what was the driving force behind trying to source masks?
Johnny Hickey
I don't watch TV. When you're in a firehouse, there's TVs sometimes. And I would walk through rooms occasionally and hear guys While they were talking, people were talking. The news would be in the background. And we were hearing a little bit about the coronavirus from the news. And I had new known this briefing. And I also know that The city of New York has a tremendous resources. So if the fire department in the city of New York doesn't have any masks, that means that that's a big problem.
Kurt Elster
Ah, okay. And so based on that, you knew just experienced, you were like, this is suspicious And you knew you know the news is talking about it, you're getting briefed on it, so I think your your spidey sense is going off and now you're like, all right, we gotta source these things.
Johnny Hickey
Yeah. That's correct.
Kurt Elster
All right. And so you source them. You're able to find someone who could source them. Now what?
Johnny Hickey
It went over a couple of weeks. The guy on the Fast Lane Forum was looking into China and he was trying to find out how to get them. You know, communication was a little difficult, transportation was difficult. But eventually he was like, hey, dude, I got this stuff. Uh, you know, and I I went to talk to my wife and I was like, I had it, you know, I sold my real estate business really Very recently and I had some cash laying around. So I just said to my wife, hey babe, I'm gonna take 10 grand out of the bank, I'm gonna bring it to New Jersey, I'm gonna buy some masks. This is like an early It's probably earl late February, early March. And my wife goes, uh, we're shutting down our little t-shirt business for a little while. She goes, we were talking about making masks ourselves. Are you going to compete with me? So I said no, I mean obviously I'm not gonna compete with you. You need help? And she said yeah. So I called my Brennan explained the situation to him and he was like I could care less dude. I He's like, honestly, I'll give every of these on my own. It's not a problem. I was I o I was only going to give them to you just because we hadn't a, you know, I hadn't been talking to you. I didn't want to cut you out. So that was pretty cool. And so my wife uh shortly thereafter launched launched this little company called the American Mass Project.
Kurt Elster
I love that it's such a good name.
Johnny Hickey
They're so good at that stuff, her and her partner. It was Jen and Lisa watched it. I would imagine somewhat reluctantly because they wanted they were very focused on the t-shirt business, but I was doing Google Ads and I was doing Facebook ads. This is in early, this is in late March, early April of 2020. My Facebook ads budget was $50 a day the first few days. And I was spending about three to four thousand a day within a matter of weeks. It's a little fuzzy, but I would say within 30 days I was spending four grand a day.
Kurt Elster
Is it profitable?
Johnny Hickey
Yeah, I mean we're we were making them ourselves and you know it's sewing machines set up and fabric set up and it was extremely profitable, I would say. But we made it cheap. We made them as cheap as we could. We sold two masks for ten bucks, which was When I pulled up Amazon, that was like the going rate at the time. R masks were just fabric. Um, but there was a lot of Amazon had a lot of fabric masks at price, and we were just like, we'll just make it at that price. Our our core thing was just to keep in business, um, just to keep the sewing machines running, because we had, you know, we had sewing machines and to keep the workers working and to keep the the store, my wife's store, would have an ability to to have people delivering and unpacking boxes. What uh what month was this? This is March and April of 2020.
Kurt Elster
Oh, okay. Yeah, that's when we were like peak uncertainty. We're like, what's gonna happen here? You know, no one knew. You're right. It was like just anxiety, uncertainty, and let's keep busy. Where were they selling these masks?
Johnny Hickey
So my wife has wholesale distribution all over the United States. So she was selling these masks to small retail stores all over the country. We had a Shopify Shike. We shut it down probably September or August of 2020. They they were really set up. Once there was enough people doing that mask business, they were just like, let them do what they're gonna do. we're gonna do what we want to do, which is t-shirts. So they moved quickly back to t-shirts. I would say by July of 2020 or June even, they were already ramping down and saying we're walking away from this and I was like, wait a second, you can't do that. I'm doing eighty thousand dollars a week here It was like for me, it was like a dream because I'm reading all these books about big numbers and running Facebook ads or running Google Eds, hire a professional, and I'm doing it myself. And I'm crushing it, you know. So I was like, no, I'm gonna stay here and do this. And eventually, there was just nothing left. They sold all of the product to um Amazon. And Amazon did SBA on the remainder of it, sold by Amazon. And I was just standing there like, wait a second, get me more product. My website's still doing good. And I wasn't getting paid for this. I was doing it for free. I was in the fire department at the time, so really it was just deriving a lot of pleasure from it because it was like a hobby to me.
Kurt Elster
When I mean those numbers and that success, it's addictive, you know. Like the the cha-ching, the the profit, all of it, it just it flips that trigger in your brain. You get that dopamine hit. You're like, I gotta keep going.
Johnny Hickey
100%. I love that. I still have the ding on today. I've never turned it off.
Kurt Elster
The the classic, the cha-ching noise.
Johnny Hickey
Yeah, if I go to the supermarket, if I go to the funeral you know, families, dinners or whatever. I'll I'll have it in my pocket on Buzz, but I still have it. I know people say they're like, one day you'll turn that thing off, but we've had 4,000 orders in a day and I still have it on.
Kurt Elster
Oh, I assume it was just continuous.
Johnny Hickey
Yeah. Um I could care less. Like I I just wanna I just wanna know what's going on. I'll be honest with you though. I understand why people want to shut it off, but for me, if I don't hear it going, I go to the website and there's been times when I went to the website and something was broken. And so there might be an app one day that will relieve me of this, but I have like uh like a a trauma situation, personal trauma. from running ads with low five figures spend in a day and there's something broken on the homepage. So your conversion rate goes to like 0. 25. And you just blow money like out of the window. So uh so yeah, so I keep it on still.
Kurt Elster
I think there is an app for this. Uh There it it's all right it's a hundred a month. It's called uptime automate uptime automated store tests. I heard of it. Oh it starts at I'm sorry it starts at 29
Johnny Hickey
I I think I'm actually I spoke to him on Twitter, that guy. I think I'm actually he's on my list of things to to uh implement. Uh you know, seems like a cool guy. It's a great idea. Yeah, that's him.
Kurt Elster
I've spoken to him.
Johnny Hickey
Yeah, okay. I've I've talked to him by DM. And and you know, that's the old adage, recent the recent old adage, which is there's an app for everything
Kurt Elster
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Johnny Hickey
This might be because I'm 50, or it could just be because maybe I fell down too many times, but uh this time period's very fuzzy for me. I was there were months where it was a weird time. Yeah. Well the the fire department was very weird at that time. There was some months in that in that time period of 2020 where I did 300 hours of overtime in a single month. So it was a real blur. My kids are very young at the time. I wasn't doing a lot on the website in the very beginning, but they did use me for certain things. So I was doing engagement on Instagram for a little while. So what I would do is follow accounts and that were picked, they were given to me, like, hey, follow this account. And then I would engage with those accounts. to garner some traffic, which is from Russell Brunson's book, Traffic Secrets. You know, you down you download a hundred or you list a hundred influencers and then you interact with those hundred influences in social media that might influence your perfect Avatar customer. I would highly suggest to anybody who's looking for cheap traffic or to to build traffic to read his books.
Kurt Elster
The yeah, I've traffic secrets is there's some good stuff in there. What's the other one?
Johnny Hickey
There's three of them. That's the only one I can remember the number the name of, but
Kurt Elster
Traffic secrets, uh dot com secrets.
Johnny Hickey
No, dot com secrets, that's it.
Kurt Elster
It was like how to start a cult. I don't know, maybe it's expert. Yeah, it's traffic secrets, expert secrets, and dot com secrets. I know the one, the intro is like, all right, I've studied cults, and here's what you need to know. And then he makes it, you know, a reasonable case for it. Um the it's kind of fun.
Johnny Hickey
He's good. So he's really good.
Kurt Elster
And Yeah. Oh yeah. Uh he's he's been around a while.
Johnny Hickey
Uh so perfectly You can apply his book across any business, I feel like I I feel like even B2B, B2C, it doesn't matter what what you're selling. If you're selling something that requires people to go to a website or even just requires to go to a business, His his book will apply.
Kurt Elster
And they're c uh they're quick reads. I I'll throw it in the show notes. Back to Perfect White T. You turn your attention back to perfect YT. You're doing Instagram engagement. Walk me through some of the other strategies we're trying that worked. I like the the Instagram engagement one is a classic and probably overlooked just because it like, oh, it seems too easy. But You you put in the time and you get the attention.
Johnny Hickey
It works so I would say in the very beginning, and this is Lisa's story, but I can tell it because I know it pretty well. I've I've worked in her wholesale business for a long time. They got the product into 700 stores in the United States. Nikki Joy, who works for Lisa, works with Lisa, and she runs Sherm Delfino, my wife's wholesale company. They're like experts at the trade shows, roadshows. You know, they'll they'll do um they actually started up their own trade show in 2020 called Local Fair. And what they did was they called around to all of the brands in the contemporary market and said, hey, you know, we can't do any shows right now, but what we were thinking about doing is maybe bringing some rolling racks and putting them in the parking lot of stores so that all the local stores could just show up to that one store's parking lot. And it's outdoors in the summer and they could kind of do their buying things so their customers could have product because contemporary works off of seasons. So if you're not Seeing a season, it's really hard to buy it. This business usually works off of in-person sales. And the trade shows would happen that the Javits or You know, the peers in New York City, LA markets, Atlanta market. So they they launched this basically trade show with 50 or 60 brands in 2020. And that had a huge, huge part to play in Perfect YT success because there's companies all over the United States that are not going to trade shows, and Perfect YT had its own trade show.
Kurt Elster
It starting your trade stuff is clever, especially at this time, because people are like looking for ways to get out of the house. And so just setting it up outdoors was the solution. Um and you're like you're bringing the audience to you. That's very clever.
Johnny Hickey
This is one of the businesses that I thought would be a great business that my wife launched at. I'm always wrong because this one's like kind of like low end now. as far as revenues go. They they still do it, but when it first started, they had like s they had b brands begging to get into the show and they were just turning them down left and right. Brands do it twenty, thirty, fifty million a year. Brands that have been around 10 or 15 years, brands that sell in Nordstrom and you know Bloomingdale's and Saxfield Avenue, they're like, nope, no rumpia, sorry. And they had 60 brands in the show. And guy were like that, they were like, that's it. It's too big. We can't do it. We can't go paint beyond this core group of brands that we're in in the very beginning. So any of the brands that came later, they were like, no dice. Huge denim brands in the United States that are, you know, doing $50 million of sales a year. They were like, nope, can't come in.
Kurt Elster
Perfect YT, what are you doing? How what marketing, what uh engagement strategy, what are we doing to grow this thing?
Johnny Hickey
Because I know you start getting a CRO. So I was looking at the site, I was tinkering with uh maybe the returns, frequently asked questions, product pages. They didn't give me a lot of of things to work on in the beginning. They weren't like, yeah, go ahead and do whatever you want to do. They were very protective of this website. But I was reading stuff and I always come up with ideas like, hey, let's try this, let's try that. They're like, no, no, no. Not doing any of that stuff. And then By the fall of 2021, or actually in the summer of 2021, they started to bring you back in again. They had employed an agency to run Facebook and Google Ads, and things weren't going so well. Sales were great. But they had gone up and down in a short period of time. They were they hit six figures in the first seven months of sales in a single month. And they hit a million in the f yeah, they hit a million in like less than seven or eight months in sales. And that's in DTC. They had already sold over a million in wholesale. So now they started looking at like mid-five figures monthly and they're like, what's going on? We had a six figure month in January. How is this possible? So they brought me in to take a look and I started looking around stuff and you know I was listening to a lot of your podcasts at the time. So I think by you know I was listening to Facebook, you had a Facebook guy on there in like August or September or face maybe maybe it was a woman, I think. You had somebody talking about Facebook ads that I listened to in August or September. So it was an iOS type uh pod. So I was like all over the Facebook guys like, hey, I I need to talk to you guys. What are we doing about iOS 14? And they're like, nothing. Everything's cool. It's fine. And I'm like, what's your plan? No plan. So I started looking at Facebook ads and then I took Facebook ads away from these guys. They're good guys. I I looking back, I gave them way too much of a hard time. But I also, you know, it was my wife's company and they were charging like five grand a month to do work, and I'm free. And and the year before I was doing 80 grand a week in sales on a brand new website. So I was like, I could do this. Anybody can do this. This is You know, this is easy.
Kurt Elster
So Yeah, you got in like right when it was shooting fish at a barrel.
Johnny Hickey
I I can't tell you how many people I must have infuriated in 2020 when telling them how good I was at ad, you know, media buying. as a brand new guy who was media buying with a product that many people would want that's super cheap, made in the United States readily available when nobody else has the product. And they were listening to me be like, I know what I'm doing. These these media buyers must have been like, what an idiot. This guy's just headed for the rocks. And uh, you know, thank God I always listen to people. And You know, I did struggle with Facebook ads after well after that period of success, I did struggle with Facebook ads. I did struggle with Google Ads. Fortunately, I I would go back to Reddit was my old source of information, Reddit PayPalClick, Reddit Google Ads, Reddit Facebook ads. And I would be in there like, hey guys, sorry I was such an you know an A-O last year. Can you guys help me out now? And they were very generous to me. The community was very generous with knowledge. And so in the fall of 2021 We were doing high buy biggers monthly. My goal was to break six figures a month. And I think I mentioned it on Twitter. You had Chase Clymer, right? Is it Chase? No. Chase. The email Chase. Chase Diamond. I was listening to his episode about email, and he's got all these high-level strategies in there. To me, high-level. Even today they're high-level to me. But I was like, oh my gosh, I gotta do this. So I open up Clavio. And I'm like hitting the keys. Oh, this is hard. I don't know what I'm doing over here. And I was trying to send out some emails of struggling. So I I turned to the in-house team that we had at the time was supplemented by my wife's crew in wholesale, which is like a dozen people. And you know, they're all 20, 30 year old women, uh, 20s, 30 year olds women. who are adept at marketing and sales. So I was leaning on them heavily to help me out as a 50-year-old guy who's a fireman. Used to swinging, you know, an axe and and a mole, used to breaking stuff for a living. Like, can you help me with this stuff? And they were helping me, but it was a little slow. So I went to Fiverr And I probably should have just reached out to Chase Diamond, but I I was cheap. And I I went to Fiverr. I found a guy who did all the work for about 500 bucks, set up all my flows for me. And we started seeing revenues almost immediately. So I was like, hey, can you do campaigns? And he was like, I'll do it for two grand a month. And I'm always like very free with money. in the beginning. So I'm like, yeah, we'll give it a shot. This is August of I mean, this is October of twenty twenty one. And he sent an email and it did like thirty grand campaign email. I was like, holy cow. I found the holy grail over here. So in November, we did about five times our normal amount of money that we had been doing up to that point. Which obviously is Black Friday. And December was like the this is, you know, this is where the the buck stops. What happens in December? We did a hundred thousand dollars just in email. Clawio attributed, so I'm sure that it's not all, but our revenues were three times what they had been in September and October each month compared.
Kurt Elster
So it was obvious that email was were you just not sending emails before?
Johnny Hickey
We sent them, but we didn't have any flows set up that were, I would say, branded. You know, I had those Clabio flows that are just like You left something in your cart, sir.
Kurt Elster
Yeah.
Johnny Hickey
You know, like a little picture.
Kurt Elster
Excuse me, miss. You dropped this.
Johnny Hickey
Yeah. So this guy, uh Timmy, his name is Timmy, he he does branded emails. He's like gets the brand voice down and they're really beautiful emails. So he's sending this stuff out. You know, he's got like I don't know what the core flows are, maybe seven, six or seven, something like that. And three or four emails in each flow and strategy, you know, like a sh he's executing like a marketing strategy to like We left this in your cart. That's the first email, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and perfect YT speak. Second email is, hey, you left this in your cart, you know, we really want you to come back. Here's 10% off. Later email at like fourth email might be 15% off last chance. So we started to see crazy revenues coming in from email. And I immediately took all that money and put it into ads.
Kurt Elster
You took a all you saw the email success, took the the profit or revenue from that, and you're like, that's just my new ad budget now?
Johnny Hickey
To a point. I mean, we have a we have a number that we like to hit monthly in profit. So I auto-apply that number in my sheets that says this money is not to be touched. And then whatever was left over that, we just spend it.
Kurt Elster
All right, I like this approach. And when you phrase it that way, it sounds saner. Um you hit the goal of like, this is what we need to bank. All right, beyond that, that's We've got our short-term money, now our long-term money, we're gonna reinvest back in the business in the form of marketing and advertising spend. And that must really like crank up the the marketing flywheel here. Like we have email. We add email w to a point where it's like really successful. Now we're able to start putting that back into ad spend. Does that does it scale? Does it work?
Johnny Hickey
I was having a tough time with Facebook ads at the time. I was running them myself. I wasn't really getting very far with Facebook ads. I just wasn't spending anything in the account. Like I give it budget and it wouldn't spend. The creative was my creative. I was making it. Wasn't awesome. Google ads were crushing it. Yeah, I was using UTMs at the time, so I could see that the shopping ads were doing well. The brand search obviously was really doing well. And Google Ads were doing great. They were moving up, but I was having to just trouble just spending the budget in Facebook. And I think that was mostly creative and also technique. I was using Some old techniques that I'd used on previous ad accounts like look-alike audiences, targeting, um Well, I was just using a lot of different old school techniques and the the face Facebook was not doing well, but we were growing at a pretty good rate.
Kurt Elster
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Johnny Hickey
Before I would do anything on a site, I would make sure that it looks optimized for sales. And then I would set up emails, the first thing I would do. And after setting up emails, I would focus on Facebook ads at the beginning, unless you think that people are Googling your brand. But I would say get a good four or six weeks, two months in Facebook ads before I would really focus on Google ads, if you're seeing revenues. If you're not seeing revenues, I would just keep doing Facebook ads. But me personally, I think email is the first thing to get right.
Kurt Elster
Okay. I like this approach and I like your thinking here. You know, my advice to people has been like, hey, get on site get on site right first within the best of your ability. And, you know, as you gain experience and you get customer feedback, it will change over time. And so that's our We want like user experience to be as good as we can reasonably do. And from there, set up email. Email keeps you top of mind. It's the gift that keeps on giving, right? You set it up those flows, you set them up once, they're gonna keep going. But as you learned, just having the default ones aren't that's better than nothing, but having them like fully styled, branded, in use brand tone of voice. Then they start to sing. If you don't have that brand awareness where people are going to be Googling the brand, don't bother with Google Ads, which that has been opposite of my advice. I mean, like to try Google Shopping first because it's it is easier um that you don't have to figure out creative with it in the same way that you do with Facebook. You're saying, hey, do Facebook ads until you get traction with that and people are, you know, get ha are aware of the brand and Googling it, then do Google ads.
Johnny Hickey
Yeah, and for us, that was not a problem because because we're in 700 stores and there's just a ton of competition on Google Shopping for our brand name. For us, I was having a lot of success with Google Ads, but this is just from working on other brands other than Perfect YT. Other brands I've noticed, if you're not getting Googled, It's tougher if your item is not something that's going to be a shopping item. You know, we have we have like brand names like, for instance, I'm wearing this hooded sweatshirt, it's perhaps it's called the Tommy. So if somebody's not looking for the Tommy in Google Ads, it's not going to do really well. Um Right.
Kurt Elster
I'm going to search for uh like I'm searching for hoodie. I'm not going to type in Tommy because I don't know to do that.
Johnny Hickey
Okay. Yeah.
Kurt Elster
So sort of is like product title.
Johnny Hickey
Yes. And if some I actually I I I'm not positive of this today, but at some point in the past I had hoodie as a negative keyword, like in some of my, you know, like cheap hoodie, uh well-made hoodie, like there was a bunch of negative keywords that I put together because I could see that I was not getting any return on Antspend. with those words because like for instance this hoodie costs 170 bucks. So most people who are looking for a hoodie when they go into Google Shopping are not looking for this one. They're looking for something totally different. So it's tough. Once you get established, yeah, people will look for your product more.
Kurt Elster
And so well, what's the biggest the biggest monthly ad budget? You've managed?
Johnny Hickey
I would say I, you know, when you ask a question like that, I feel the need to look at the number because I uh never trust myself with stuff like this.
Kurt Elster
We would just if we were to just estimate.
Johnny Hickey
So I I know what it is now. It's uh $512,000. $512,000.
Kurt Elster
From running ads at a volume like that, what do you think? What's the biggest lesson you've learned?
Johnny Hickey
Cody Flocker did an uh audit on my account last year, and he gave me some tips. And the thing I would say is get the account audited. every six months by somebody that you think knows what they're doing in Facebook ads. Even if they have a different way of running ads, they might come up with a few tips. That, you know, you pay this guy a grand or fifteen hundred, whatever he maybe two thousand dollars, whatever he asks for, who's running high level ads, you get his input. And It's gonna be worth money. It's the best money you're possibly gonna spend to me.
Kurt Elster
I love this advice. Like cause you're you're running the edge yourself, but you're saying, hey, every you know, every six months, you know, quarterly w twice a year annually, get a fresh set of eyes on it from someone you respect and trust. Cause they're gonna have a different perspective. And maybe that's gonna get you unstuck, get you try something new, or get you see something that you had become blind to and didn't know.
Johnny Hickey
So I run the ad account, but I do have somebody who helps me a little bit. So I don't want to take 100% credit for the ad account. There is somebody who helps me in the background a little bit. But yeah, I control it myself. Like day to day, like yesterday, I raised the spend on everything. Right now I'm spending about a hundred and ten or a hundred and twenty percent of what I was doing in October.
Kurt Elster
Hindsight being twenty twenty. Looking back on it Of the strategies that you've employed on to grow perfect white tea, what do you think was most effective?
Johnny Hickey
A lot of the things I did on Fiverr in the very beginning, just like little things like setting up shopping. Uh, because I I've learned, man, I I'm the wrong person to set up a Google Merchant Center just because I'll make some stupid data entry mistake. Yeah, so I farm out all that stuff. I I did it myself in the beginning. I spent hundreds of hours in Google shopping, in Google Merchant Center, in, you know. all of these different little areas like you know Google console and I would just spend hundreds of hours over a four to six month period and be like account suspended Like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna kill myself. No, not gonna kill myself, but you know, just like extreme frustration. Um so I would say r oversee things, but if you're not really good at something, get somebody else to do it. Get somebody, maybe not who's expensive at it, but somebody who's experienced at it.
Kurt Elster
Smart. Yeah. I mean, otherwise you end up you're just like banging your head against a wall and it's not you're not getting anywhere and you're frustrated. So knowing what you're not good at and then farming that out, always good advice.
Johnny Hickey
Three things that I can name right now that frustrate me. Pinterest ads, TikTok ads, and SEO. Not on-page SEO. I'm good with that. I love SEO.
Kurt Elster
Interesting.
Johnny Hickey
Yeah, I'll do, I'll do, I do the on-page SEO myself. I I love to do it. Like anything in inside of the website, but the backlinking and all that stuff. Just because Google's always changing their policies, we do I do zero SEO now off page. Like backlinking, blogging, all that stuff. Nothing. I do nothing of it. Um and Pinterest and TikTok ads just sheer frustration for me. Maybe it's just because I'm old, you know. Pinterest maybe because I'm a man and maybe women are better at it or somebody's better at it. I had this guy recently talk to me on Twitter about Pinterest stats and I was like You know, no way. I'm not gonna do that. I spent a ton of money and a ton of effort and I got zero out of it running UTMs, like looking every day for like four or five months. TikTok adds to spent like High buy figures in a four to six month period, very little to show for it.
Kurt Elster
Ouch. See I mean sometimes it's it's good to know what doesn't work, but well have you have you messed with uh TikTok shop at all?
Johnny Hickey
Everybody's talking about it. Everybody's talking about it. I'm like, oh man, I hate that I hate that platform. Um I don't I have a TikTok uh account myself personally, and the brand has a TikTok account But we've done fifty or so like TikTok ads that we created just for TikTok and they bombed And we did we've done a ton of content on TikTok, just organic content. And none of it's really, excuse me, none of it's really done awesome. So at this point, I'm like, okay, cool. Move on. Not my thing.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of like any of these platforms, it's trial and error. What we have seen with with TikTok shop, it For the people where it it worked, where it resonated, the juice is worth the squeeze. And I say that because it's like, oh yeah, you're getting daily orders through it, but also the the integration, and I'm sure it's gonna get better, but at least the initial integration is was rough. Um, you know, just a lot of a lot of frustration and gnashing of teeth as people get up to speed with it, but still, you know, willing to fight with it and and work through it because they were able to get orders with it. We got a few people who are like, this thing's gonna make me crazy. Also, it could say also I'm gonna keep fighting it.
Johnny Hickey
So I remember the integration was a little rough. I remember the integration was a little rough. It was a little weird, like Hokie, the program, you know, the the platform inner base is a little odd, maybe not that difficult. It was just like not intuitive. But I wasn't even talking about that. I was just talking about getting 50 videos created that cost. you know, a good amount of money edited, set up, everything's done. Takes, you know, 45 days to get to start getting one video from the day that you start paying people. Takes about 45 days till you till I got an ad that I could run. And just the level of frustration with watching the UTMs and seeing nothing come through. I was like, oh my gosh, this is this is money so much w better spent on Facebook. But I am curious about their new setup because I see all these guys talking about it. Um, I've heard crazy stories of like their TikTok is giving 20% off on orders. But they're putting that money up themselves. So that's interesting because anybody who's going to do that, like, hmm, maybe this is something. Maybe we could figure this out. So yeah, I'm I'm interested and I'm watching it.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, it's it's certainly something to to keep an eye on. Uh so what's next for you? Any exciting plans, projects on the horizon?
Johnny Hickey
Uh no, I would say we're just gonna keep doing what we're doing. I I'm I'm probably gonna launch TV soon. And that's most of the reason I wouldn't be going towards TikTok shops right now, is that I usually like to do one. thing at a time and get it locked in. And I would say, you know, we we grew up we grew over 300% this year, like close to 350 or 360 by the time the year is over. Which is much more than we grew last year, and we grew in the two in the high twos last year. So I'm very happy with that But my goal this year is to grow another 300%. And who knows? You know, I might not make it. I've I've set goals before in the past that were ridiculous and I got them. And I've set goals before that weren't that you know spectacular and and missed them. I usually don't let it affect my uh my personal life too much or my happiness. I'm just like, eh, whatever. You know, it's a number on a wall, just erase it, put a new number up, no biggie.
Kurt Elster
You are probably wiser and more mature than I am. Like missing goals, you know, running into frustrations like that, just brutal. Yeah. I I gotta be careful with it and be aware of it.
Johnny Hickey
I don't give up so easy though. I had a goal on the board this year. I had most of the goals that we had set. But I had one goal this year that we have not hit yet. It's a it's an overall number for the year. And I'm very close to it. But obviously, you know, I track everything by day. So I know there's very, very little chance of me hitting it. I have to go. crazy numbers before the end of the year to hit that goal. And, you know, it's maybe like six figure. I'm six figures away from it, low six figures away from it. So the last five or six days, I just been plotting and scheming about how I could hit it. And we don't do a lot of discounts, so I can't do a sale. So I came up with a couple of ideas. Yeah. I have to have videos. I don't have any content. That's the problem Uh we don't we do all of our content in-house. We we don't use UGC whatsoever. Um my wife used to take all the pictures and her partner used to take the pictures and now we have one of their friends who takes all the pictures. She runs all of our creative in-house. So we're then we're not video people. So we're kind of locked into what we have. But yeah, I mean, uh maybe it's a thought. Maybe I get off the phone and just say, hey, let me spend two hours on our TikTok account. It's still I still have the ad account. I think they they suspended it for a little while because I'm not using it, but I probably could get it going again
Kurt Elster
That you know, something to try. Um man, this is there's so much in here to unpack. I I appreciate the advice. I appreciate your your candor and honesty with your experience. Um It it's ins interesting and inspirational. Uh Johnny Hickey, thank you so much.
Johnny Hickey
You got it, Kurt. Thanks a lot. Thanks for all your help in my early stages, man. I uh I was listening to Tech Nasty. And I got, you know, I I listened to so many of them I got there it goes. I was sick of the sound at one point. I was like, oh my gosh, I wish he would stop doing that. But I kept listening and I got a lot, a lot of it. So tell me um It helps it helps me remember what it was like in the very beginning when I did not have a Shopify site and I was thinking about how do I get a Shopify site? Because I remember hearing it for the first time and being like, you know, your pod, not the technesia. But I I heard about it and I said, man, how do I get my hands on a Shopify site? And then my wife's like, I'm thinking about putting some of the content online. What do you think? And I'm like, shop. So you you you actually influence which platform I ended up on.
Kurt Elster
Oh man, that's what we'd love to hear. And you know what's funny? The whole time I heard that ding going off in the background.
Johnny Hickey
Yeah. I heard the ding. So so easily so easily entertained. I'm so easily entertained by just that simple sound.
Kurt Elster
That's you know, that's uh one of the secrets to a happy life is appreciating the little things. Johnny Hickey, thank you so much.
Johnny Hickey
Thank you so much, Koukart. Thank you.