w/ Sean Reyes, Shock Surplus
Imagine scaling a business from $3 million to $30 million in a vertical that's as competitive as it gets.
Today's episode is a deep dive into the world of dropshipping automotive parts—a tale of triumph that stretches from the roots of eBay to the heights of a multimillion-dollar business.
Joining us is Sean Reyes of Shock Surplus, to tell us how he propelled his brand from modest beginnings to a dropship titan that cornered the market in 2020.
We'll unpack the journey of a brand that's not only thrived but dominated, dissecting the blend of tech-savviness, market understanding, and the audacious spirit needed to excel.
Sean's story is one of precision growth and the art of capitalizing on market opportunities, from navigating the COVID-19 pandemic to mastering the Facebook ad landscape.
Expect to gather a trove of actionable advice, from leveraging education as a powerful marketing tool to the nitty-gritty of data management with a product catalog that would make a librarian weep.
We'll explore how Shock Surplus has built a robust community by fostering genuine connections with their audience, leading with education, and backing it up with expertise.
Hear how authenticity in content creation and customer education has established Shock Surplus as a trusted authority in a niche market.
Don't miss this behind-the-scenes look at scaling an e-commerce business, a must-listen for any entrepreneur aiming for the stars.
Hit subscribe, and leave a review if you love what you're hearing. It's about growth, not just in sales but in knowledge. Tune in, turn it up, and take your store to the next level.
Today we're discussing a man who has managed to figure out the secret sauce, right, the recipe.
From 2019 to now he's grown a brand, a dropshipping business, a big competitive vertical from zero to 30 million and this just flatly blew my mind when I talked to him, when I was introduced to him.
And so I want to share this story with you.
I want to hear about this.
We're gonna unpack how in the heck is that possible?
Is that sustainable?
How does one go from zero to 30?
And certainly what is growing a team like when you're scaling at that speed?
I have trouble conceptualizing numbers that big.
But alright, the gentleman joining us today is Sean Reyes from Shock Surplus and that's what we're gonna hear about.
How Sean Reyes, Shock Surplus went zero to 30 million selling automotive parts through dropshipping.
This is the Unofficial Shopify Podcast.
I'm your host Kurt Elster.
Tech Nasty.
Sean Reyes, welcome.
How's it going?
And just a little bit of a check there.
It's about three to 30 million.
Three to 30, okay.
You know zero to 30 is more fun but you did 10x it either way.
Yeah, it's been a wild ride the past few years.
So it's been a big challenge.
We were building in the background very undercover in our industry and then when we started in COVID, it really put us on the map.
We really started being everywhere.
During COVID we were pretty primed to start spending on Facebook in a big way and I think that contributed a huge amount to our growth.
So it's been a wild ride.
The team has grown quite a bit.
More money, more problems.
So we, alright, so it's in 2019 you're doing three and a half million.
Today we're doing 30 million.
So four years.
When did this business start?
I started back in 2012.
Officially got the website done in 2013 but we were starting on eBay for many years and then we would moved over to Amazon for a couple years and during a failure of a custom website build out is when we really moved over to Shopify.
You know we we put in about a year and a half with a custom with a dev team and they failed to deliver and you know we were at SEMA, met with the owner, expressed extreme disappointment and had a terrible Black Friday.
Speaking of Black Fridays but that was a that was like our 2016-2017 Black Friday was the worst.
And then me and my my good friend who works with me we decided to build a site on Shopify.
You know, stock theme.
Got it built and selling within a couple months and the rest is history.
And that was in 2019.
When did you move to Shopify?
I think we were selling it on 2018.
January of 2018 is the official Shopify start.
And why Shopify?
Right, because you were starting from trying to go custom.
So really you could probably figure out any platform.
What was it that made you go Shopify?
We were previously on BigCommerce and you know how it goes in tech where you know the thing that comes out the following decade is always just much faster.
You know I knew I think it was you know knowing Shopify is built on Rails, Ruby on Rails, the new tech stack.
You just know everything is just going to be better than the previous generation of platforms like BigCommerce which is what I had experience with.
And so just knowing that I was like I know I can get my whole catalog and everything I'm doing up on this and selling within a month.
And all the things, the speed, all of that stuff really it made it really a no-brainer.
I didn't even consider anything else at that point.
So yeah kind of a no-brainer for me.
And looking on Google I'm able to see you have 78,000 pages indexed in Google.
So I'm assuming like obviously there's SEO, there's landing pages, but the bulk of that has to be your catalog.
Your catalog must be huge and that's not including variant SKUs.
That's correct.
Yeah we probably have over 150,000 including variant SKUs.
So it is a big catalog and what we how we actually got started and how we kind of did a little bit of a market arbitrage was bundling bundling shocks for our customers.
A lot of these a lot of these customers they didn't they don't want to hunt for part numbers in a catalog and then piece you know two front parts and two rear parts on eBay or Amazon and doing that whole kind of circus.
So we bundle front and rears for a specialized lift kit or a specialized lowering kit for these you know highly modified vehicles and that's how we gained a lot of traction and how we were kind of able to fly under the radar for minimum advertised price policies that so many of these big global brands have.
So yeah people who aren't in aftermarket automotive don't understand the how deceptively simple what you just said was.
It really it isn't nearly as simple as it sounds.
You know because you've got say you've got a hundred thousand products but they fit a variety of vehicles and so you're carrying effectively dozens of the same thing but only one is the right one for that customer and so you have to filter it down and get them to the right part but even if you do get them to the one right part you're fighting with everybody competing with everybody else who's selling the same thing and you're beholden to the manufacturer who sets a minimum advertised price policy map where you then they're like all right this is the price floor this is where everyone sells at and so it levels the playing field now what do you do you have to find some value add and in your case what you did was clever you took it a step further and you said okay hey I'm gonna get it's like popular vehicles you're like all right we got we know there's a whole cohort of dudes with 92 to 96 Honda Civics who need new shocks and also probably have a lowered vehicle and they don't want to order the wrong thing it's like buying clothes what do I do if this doesn't fit will this fit me with car parts it's like that problem just gets exacerbated where now how do I know that this is the right part for my specific vehicle and my scenario where I have gone and modified the vehicle and so you figure that out and then by bundling it together we get around map because no one product has the price on it right that's correct yeah yeah typically the the rules are as long as the part number isn't in the title you can you can basically price it wherever you want you know all the all the companies have their own little special legal stuff but you know we've talked to heads of these brands and they're like what you guys are doing is okay lawyers say it's okay so here here we are and so you you were able to identify this hole in the market and you know part of its identifying the other part of is like actually implementing it is harder than it sounds based on just this sheer number of fitments and then like deciding on the right one and then deciding on which packages or which products are gonna go into each package was it trial and error was it gut feeling how do you go about this it was it was really gut feeling backing up a little bit I'm not even a gear head I'm not a I don't I didn't grow up around cars or anything I grew up around computers building computers and playing video games but I got started with my my stepdad and he brought me into his little kind of suspension 4x4 shop and I immediately recognized that like he was already doing a little small he was doing drop shipping on a very minuscule basis and I was like wait a second what's this drop shipping thing you can you can we can we don't have to touch the parts at all just ship them to our eBay customers and he's like yep so once I figured that out I was like well all these you know all of these lifted trucks all over the place we were we were already answering those questions all the time on eBay and I was like you know it was that that that market was just screaming for help on top of that shock absorbers are also a very technical product that is they're hard to understand just by you don't you can't understand them just by looking at them and so you have to rely on manufacturers to tell you like what they do and even then you know it's biased by the manufacturer right so combining both of these problems I'm just like oh man I can just literally in 2012 I was like I could just I'm just gonna stay up every single night make brand new listings on eBay and the next by the next day like they were selling and so it was like just creating this flywheel of popular applications different lift kits you know it was like a basically just was really easy to get started because the the need for the help was so so obvious it still kind of is we get flooded every day with questions on do I run this or that this or that for my truck and you know it's we saw a long ways to go on making that information easily accessible and easily digestible you know that's that's that's my whole goal still is just mass education in this category.
So you had it sounds like you had a stepdad who had an off-road shop and he's he was starting to sell on eBay so you saw the potential there and then you got into it with selling on a marketplace just such a great way to test the waters on an idea right you don't have to build a brand and start with an account on a marketplace and it's really dependent on product market fit on the quality of the listing and especially eBay in the early days and so you're doing and then like once you get that figured out now we're testing packages for individual vehicles based on the knowledge that you're putting together based on the questions you're getting non-stop from people and you like yeah when you start to see a consistent question around like will this fit my car and the answer is no and you see that you know five six times you go okay there's an unmet demand if there's these specific people asking about this specific vehicle.
Clever.
Yeah and you know you've got some experience in the automotive aftermarket space but like the tech adoption and well technology adoption and retail trends and just that whole thing is we're so far behind in general as our industry versus general retail so education being education focused is still new for a lot of people in this category and in this space where like people you know have been educating in general retail at the higher end for a decade now so you know seeing seeing what's happening in general retail and general DTC you know we're definitely ahead of the game in the automotive space in that regard.
Talk to me when you say education why you think education is important and you're ahead on it what do we mean specifically are we talking about SEO content?
We're I mean we're talking about legitimate education and I don't even educate for SEO purposes we we educate on on YouTube through like real experience you know so my staff and myself we go through various vehicles we use the exact products we're we're selling and we we do just massive comparison tests massive comparison reviews and like what Alex Hermosy says which is when you have when you've done the thing you have the conviction that what you're saying is true because you're not really you're not on borrowed knowledge how many how many retailers how many people at small automotive shops are all on borrowed knowledge they're just using manufacturers descriptions and all of this stuff to sell the product or sell the product based on their margin you know we're we're doing it out of a genuine need for or a genuine position of like what's best for the customer you know our our motto is like we're not trying to tell you what to run we're trying to help you figure out what to run and so by doing that we're testing all the things that we can on a given application that's why we that's why we're a lot deeper on certain like Toyota applications or Ram applications or some of these vehicles where we have so much experience because our staff has ran it numerous people from the company have driven the staff vehicles on all sorts of different products and so once we go really really deep and that kind of helps us just build authority in the space and be the guys to come to when people you know need a recommendation yes scrolling through your YouTube channel kind of issue you said we don't tell you what to run you have a video entitled shock surplus we don't tell you what to run it is only 30 seconds long it has 400,000 views we that we that was a previously a paid promotion thing that we're like at about 200,000 I made it public and I was like well this is our message so might as well just make it public but it's it's picked up a lot of you still so yeah and the number of videos you have and like the breadth of it and it's so it's very product focused like you know coil over comparison and so it's like here's five different brands and in 20 minutes you're gonna compare them 26,000 views and another one like here's three different brands King vs Fox vs icon a hundred thousand views and it just keeps going like that and I love you do a series shocks in 60 seconds you highlight a single product in one minute and those will just be like five ten twenty thousand views yeah we've one of the things we really discovered in the past couple years is manufactured virality and you know in the automotive space it's like Ford versus Chevy or Dodge versus a Toyota whatever the case may be the same thing exists in our little our little category of parts where that King Fox icon video I knew is gonna blow up before we even published it because you know just the fanboys from each each brand following is like no this is better no this is better or a lot of the people just getting into the overlanding space you're familiar with with all that with your experience at overlander but just so many people entering the space of high-performance shock absorbers which was not a thing before them at all so they're they're brand new they're really trying to understand what these big names are all about and so you know we take that perspective of like talking to the news this is what it means there's no one best thing it's what's you know it's what's best for you and I think a lot of people from in any category can really take that approach as well ours is a little bit different because it's not it's it's very not aesthetics because you can't really see the suspension on a vehicle so it really comes down to how does it feel if you get that vehicle tall enough then you can't I think that's when you've done it right you need that stepladder to get into it SEMA builds with Bluetooth Drive shafts yeah yeah that having been to SEMA nothing is crazier than like the f-250 builds that like they have to be outside because you can't realistically fit it into any interior space you know they're like well it's roughly slightly taller than my house just completely absurd stuff they're fun though I mean the whole point is that it's absurd you're like look what I did you know really flex that engineering muscle for no reason other than look what I did okay so on the educational content like a lot of places do will do builds and you keep it more educational it's like installation overview decision-making pre-purchase decision-making like a lot of that but done without judgment which is clever and then you know some installation stuff like how to stuff so I find educational content on YouTube works really well especially for brands that have an inherently do-it-yourself component so how do you get the ideas for this educational content we I mean there's always new products coming out always new vehicles coming out and so it's that and in that regard that kind of model has been like is almost a red self just just the model is almost evergreen because the new you know the new a brand new took Tacoma is coming out and the brand new Tacoma is gonna have six or seven or ten different shock absorbers that's gonna be applied it's gonna be coming out for it and so you know we're already planning what what that looks like in a year or two as new options come out because everyone's gonna be so hot on it and so you know we look at new applications we look at you know and once you own that space on YouTube or in Google you know you just benefit so much from inherent SEO you just benefit at being top one through five on all those related search terms you know and YouTube you know YouTube ever since the bookmarking we treat a lot of our YouTube videos like a blog post right you bookmark the times the timestamp the different sections and it's basically it you know that's a huge SEO little trick as well and so we the product side of things is very kind of that that game plan is already kind of written itself we're trying to get a little bit more into lifestyle which is more what I'm about terms of all the trails and all the different adventures and camping and destinations that we go to but that's a that's a little bit of a different I would say audience that we're going after and you know where we where we live really live is is is being you know product product enthusiast and kind of specialist that's that's really where our value is so one thing I found with someone who has this much experience with automotive and YouTube one thing I've noticed is in the comments on automotive social media there is schoolyard gatekeeping at the level of like Sega versus Nintendo and it is so strange because like wait no we're all here for the same thing because we love automotive but you guys are like so deep into it you know you the commenters are like just fighting over the dumbest thing and you alluded to it you're like you know there is some virality just to doing a comparison video in which you don't even seem to declare a winner you're like here's pros and cons and they still are guys oh this is the best shock because I own it you're invalidating my purchase yeah even after a long 30 minute 20 or 30 minute video or we're trying to explain the pros and cons people are like well which one is the best I'm like you didn't get you don't understand it's like what do you want to do with the vehicle what's your budget okay that one is the best these people can't figure it out for themselves and there was recently some internal discussion about like we have to give people less options because it's like they enter analysis paralysis even when we're doing a good explanation of all the products people still want their handheld and told what what kind of decision to be made back to that word gatekeeping though that's that's another reason why I kind of got into this space or maybe why I charge so hard into this space because of just the opaque nature of shock absorbers of technical product you know our this industry is very much ran by gearheads and very polarizing in people like business approaches and you know these are some of these brands are like led from X racers who used to race against this guy and now there's always a rivalry and if you ever run this you'll never run that because of whatever whatever you know all that stuff going down and so now we have you know shops and motorsport places that you know they change little minute things in in your shock absorber to make it feel a certain way you know literally just stacking metal pieces a little bit differently and now now they are professional tuners and everyone goes to them because they know how to do these little special things to the shock absorber but those guys will never share that information and they'll they'll never put it on a dino graph to show you how it behaves they're very much that's like the epitome of gatekeeping in in in this space and so the long-term goal is to democratize the learnings of how to do that yourself it seems very esoteric and very like super nerdy but the amount of people that are buying these extremely high-end two thousand five thousand seven thousand dollar systems and then don't have the ability don't have the education don't don't have the knowledge to be able to alter them yourselves when they're meant to be altered that's that's where I see the big opportunity because teaching a man teaching a man of fish right and so that kind of helps helps with the gatekeeping helps democratizing the knowledge of how to do the thing and that's that's all my ultimate goal right now we do a lot of like very introductory level stuff I always call us we're not we're not experts we're more enthusiasts that like really learn by experience we're not professional race car tuners we're not professional racers at that very very high level but we need to kind of get there eventually and bringing all of that knowledge down down the chain to the average person they want to do it themselves it's admirable and it will result in so many angry stupid comments because you're right it's like they sell there if you get really fancy you could buy an adjustable shock meaning you could change the rate at which it come it opens and closes this would be the layman's explanation and if you don't know what you're doing you just wildly screw it up where it's like I mean I have no I understand the concept I'm never gonna get that right given the option I'd be like give me the non adjustable shocks save me from myself I don't want to screw this up and I've been there I've done this I have really made a very uncomfortable to drive Subaru in my past trying to find info and get you know three people tell you three different things and so like okay obviously education helped a lot here you start this in 2012 by like 2016 we're on Shopify 2019 we're doing three and a half million then things go insane I mean you 10x since then in four years how how does one do that I mean just incredible growth yeah we I think we were very very well positioned because the we were using channel advisor as a back-end inventory management tool and an order tool and I'd always seen channel advisor for my eBay days as like the pinnacle of achievement to manage like you know order management because what's the big thing when you're scaling when you're scaling something is automated tracking information back to the customer right and that was a big deal in the eBay days because you want it your item shipped within 24 hours better ratings and all that stuff so we immediately had that set up in about 2018 2019 and so when COVID hit we we were already showing things that were in stock or out of stock you know that was the big thing for us probably a lot of industries everything you know who had stock of stuff and so I mean we in automotive we got hit by that I think more so than others where just the inventory shortages are still happening today and yeah still recovering we um so and we had a really big network I basically have we have accounts at pretty much all the major distributors in North America and that's a lot more than most of our competition so most of our competition only has probably two or three accounts and we've got like 11 and so tied in with all those inventory COVID hit we're in stock we're seeing massive you know ROAS on our on our campaigns I'm just like well just keep spending because we're making money everyone's talking about out of stock or in stock and at the same time we had Facebook just branding campaigns just running little quick 10 15 second like action clips of a lot of our adventures and so it was kind of the culmination of right place right time a lot of preparation that we just got extremely lucky and I feel extremely lucky because we our first business in 2008 2009 got crushed by the first recession or that recession and so looking at COVID it just deathly afraid like what is gonna happen and then you know we pulled back so like hesitating on what to do next and all of a sudden just massive massive demand I mean we did like we did 10 days of Black Friday sales in a row in in April which was like I don't understand what what's happening with the world right now so that was we found ourselves extremely fortunate at that point we held on you know that play that played out in 2020 2021 2022 is when ad add cost started going all janky and we learned some lessons there lost some lost a little bit of money there recovered and we've used financing tools like Shopify working capital as well because we don't aren't fully dropship we do buy inventory and so being able to use you know shopping Shopify capital to to amplify that program where we can we were also cornering markets like we would we know of a brands triple triple movers triple a plus movers we would corner all of those in the entire country for like one or two months and so we'd be able to turn off ads sell them at full margin and you know that benefited us as well not not necessarily on the money side of things but more on the authority side of things because I mean when you're the only one with something you know you're basically you guarantee your your number one spot on Google for for those searches and so we kind of arbitrage in a bunch of different areas over the past couple years with this this demand that we saw it did hindsight being 2020 this just seems like such a brilliant move at the time it would have felt risky that's what you did you had you're doing dropshipping but you are fully integrated with your warehouse distributors you're using channel advisor that's our middleware and that's both going to route orders to the correct place whoever has it in stock but also sync the inventory back into Shopify and so in real time you're able to well like within hours real time you're gonna able to show live inventory at a time when everyone is worried about do you actually have this at a time where we unintentionally educated consumers on this is what dropshipping is right people are now much more sophisticated than in 2019 and so they understood okay if they say it's if I've got a website that shows me stock status where some things are out of stock some things are in stock then they probably actually do have it and so they were much more willing to order from you because like in this space you have people who they know what they want they could just search a SKU a manufacturer part number and then see in Google shopping results here's who has it and then order and then you get the cancellation email where you're like wait I thought I thought it was in stock right as a the site that can very clearly demonstrate yes we actually have stuff in stock is the is the one you order from plus you know the authority of educational plus everything else but I think you're right I think that became since 2020 I think that if you're dropshipping real-time stock status becomes table stakes mm-hmm yeah I mean I think I think most of our industry was on the other side of things which is just like we have this available and if you you're buying it then you're okay with whatever waiting waiting time there is but but you know with Kovat happening tons of people just going outside and spending money on on parts for their vehicle because that's the only thing you could you could do I think it really crushed our competition with just customer service issues because yes we're like you know people that are used to going buying on Amazon be like it's in stock I'm gonna get it the following day we're now buying from these shops and these these motorsport companies were like they thought it was in stock and then waiting a week and these motorsport companies don't even understand the need of that customer and so now they're like crushed by all these folks they're like they're making money but then they're also refunding half those orders because those customers are waiting waiting around and so you know our customers those guys were getting crushed by customer service looking to us pretending like we had it easy and we're like no we prepared for you were prepared for this moment and the the drop shipping thing is so interesting because it's been happening in retail for a long time but even in the automotive space there's still so much opportunity because so many of these big garage sites I call them garage sites because they sell they sell everything they're ran by you know older generation maybe some people that figured out the drop shipping really really really early you know right now with us and you know other big big guys like you know auto auto anything went out of business car ID went out of business these guys are all dying from a thousand cuts because it's so easy to get into this space and they were huge absolutely huge yeah like ten years ago the idea of them just collapsing under their own weight and inability to get inventory would have been unthinkable auto anything was my like not an inspiration kind of my inspiration I looked to their site like we were gonna have a site like auto anything someday because they you know I always thought of them as like the you know they were just a stellar stellar company in the late 2010s right but yeah if you're listening to this there's still so much opportunity in the smaller categories of automotive space because of the education these giant garage sites have no special specialty of like their customer service has no specialty right there it is there it is you're just an order there you want to return you want an exchange what is it right they don't know how to get you into something that will work all these things kind of play a part in gaining authority and and building a business so I think you know if you were to try it today the mistake is trying is addressing the entire market especially you know and even like if you're doing aftermarket and you're saying oh yeah I'm gonna address all of aftermarket well if your idea is to cast a wider net do all replacement parts because replacement parts that's like a hundred acts the size of aftermarket but the reality is you just making it harder and harder on yourself and so you know you focused on a single product type within the aftermarket automotive shocks and it seems like it it tends to lean toward off-road and so like that's slicing it a little thinner and even then you know you still have 78,000 pages indexed in Google so you see we're like going too wide you just make it a really difficult to manage site you know one of the most successful sites I worked on it sold only tuners for diesel trucks that was it and because they're like we have this and this is what will fit your vehicle they were able to succeed at that.
And then you're able to make your then you may able to make your product your product pages are all tailored to the diesel the diesel tuning product right you can have a dynograph on there you can have a air filter kind of comparison chart right that's the benefit of you know we've seen where you're when you're able to make your product description page your PDP speak specifically to your category and not have to worry about also talking about an air filter or talking about wheels and tires and all of that other stuff right.
Oh man wheels and tires if you want to pick the most complicated category there do wheels and tires it's just like everything has ten different specs to it and it but it'll fit all kinds of different fitments unless they have this one package oh my gosh we built one of these wheel whiz wheel whiz dot Canada dot CA what a nightmare I mean product information management's nuts.
Yeah there's a lot of horror stories of PIMS people really eating their shorts on developing their own PIMS product information management systems.
Yeah product information management when you're in dropshipping and you have a huge catalog and it's technical like this and then you add all the fitments to it it's very hard how do you manage it with that I assume that you've torn all of your hair out I see you still have your eyebrows though you could pull those.
I was blessed we we clean tons of our data and back to the gatekeeping a lot of these brands they don't they don't even the guys developing the Excel files regarding their products are like oh it doesn't matter if it's for two wheel drive or four wheel drive for this application like just look at the product specs and you should know like no no consumer knows that the top mount on the four wheel drive means a stem and the two wheel drive means the eyelets that uses other part number so these guys are the reason why we have a business because we we demystified all this this this nuance that the general customer doesn't know there's still cut businesses there's still brands in this business that don't want to give you a shock link because they're like we're not gonna tell you they're only usable for our kits and etc etc and so we clean a lot of data my my product manager Ryan he's he's a data scientist trained at Cornell and so you know I kind of discovered his expertise to help us out really early on and so basically a cusp we have a custom system that all the stuff and a pipeline goes through and fitment apps and all of that whole side of things we've kind of built in-house almost by accident I don't really like you really illustrated the challenge here to manage product information for selling just shocks you have a data scientist from Cornell build a custom solution that's how you did it pretty much yeah that's why this is so hard to do right yeah I mean it's almost by accident because you know now me and him we talk all these companies and you know they're they're like bouncing ideas off us or bouncing our ideas off him because like we're so deep in it not not only from like a product basis and an enthusiast basis but we actually have like the technology chops to back it all up and so you know we've just yeah back to being prepared for for the moment you know we we've been real lucky in it just a whole lot of all out of a you know a genuine you know excitement for building this big of a brand and also excitement for you know what's what's ahead and just being able to help more people 10x revenue in four years that also means you need to really scale your team what were those challenges like I think we're a little bit behind on that one we've only got about 15 people right now but is you know more more cut hiring customer service and finding enthusiasts that aren't gonna that are really gonna the whole idea of this is culture fit you know people have been talking about this for the past year now or so you're to with culture kovat no people not in the office our team big ups to my team I love them so much they wanted to come back to the office as soon as possible when kovat hit because everyone really jives together and the energy really it helps it all helped each other out but we we have a couple remote employees and we have some people overseas helping with customer service as well but the bulk of our team is in LA I think we got 10 or 11 people there now and they're all enthusiasts we all go camping together people go out for drinks together we're all pretty young there are some gear heads everyone has like their own vehicles you we've had a number of people get hired with cars sell their cars and get trucks or Jeeps because thought they want to join us on the trips and so it's very much that kind of culture we're all pretty young tech oriented and it's it's been a we've had we haven't had too much fallout but still a small team and we're we've used this year as kind of a don't grow let's solidify reevaluate we you know continue building the foundation for the next phase of growth and that's not in just like business economics or KPIs or anything like that like margin but it's also building building the people here training them more building them up as you know leaders where I can so it's it's been a big challenge in that regard because I don't remember who said it but people you know people build companies you don't just build a big company on your own right so yeah it's been it's been good and challenging but I you know I think rewarding for a lot a lot of our team yeah like many people you found yourself in your niche right you were just exposed to it and then saw the opportunity and ran with it what advice would you give someone trying to find their own niche or niche I'm saying it appropriately I like niche better I'm sorry yeah I like this also this is America's niche I I don't know there it is it does feel cliche right when we're talking about passion or whatnot but my passion before was like throwing stuff in my truck throwing my tent in my truck and throwing my bike in my truck and just go camping for the weekend up in the Kern River or somewhere and when I got into kind of the off-road space I was like oh well you know I do this and I can use these products so let's just go discover more about it but if I wasn't in this I'd probably be making a beach volleyball app or something because I play a lot of beach volleyball or I'd be discovering some better running shoe could do a lot of I do a lot of trail runs and running races or whatnot I right now is I can't say it enough but right now is the time for everybody to really think about what they love to do what they would do they didn't get paid to do it and just go start talking about it on tick-tock like we haven't even talked about tick-tock or Instagram and the whole arbitrage of education there is right now it's like everyone's kind of just entertaining and very junk junk food junk food content on Instagram right yeah but on tick-tock education educating in your space or edge educating in your just your what you're excited about has massive massive opportunity so even in the automotive space there's opportunity for people that are that look their Chevy truck but this plays out in all aspects right where all these big companies they're all dying by a million cuts because small creators are building a brand around their interest and then maybe maybe using an existing product or they're developing their own product and so I don't know how to go about doing that but really think what you can just run a camera on what you like to do on the weekend like what would that be start exercising that just a little bit more and if you get excited about it then like that is a signal to keep going and that's such good advice and for existing Shopify merchants any one piece of advice for them yeah I got a lot of advice there you know roll your con roll all this content if you aren't doing content start doing education content and if you are roll that into email flows you have an email system like that we do we do about 20 to 25 percent of our revenue through email that's you know Klaviyo reported email but I find so many businesses not even the automotive space but every space there they are not having a follow-up email campaign they have no welcome campaign with you know five or six emails me and you are this is like seems super obvious for us because we're in this space but the small businesses still aren't doing the thing where they also they're worried you know they're doing less in revenue but they aren't doing these small things that are extremely obvious setting up a newsletter or regular delivery of the content that is coming out to you know that you guys are developing show that to everyone that has shown interest to you that's been I think the content side of things is is really what has been able to set us apart we have so much fresh content going out to our email all the time how often are you sending those emails we've got I mean I think we probably send out 12 10 10 or 12 campaigns a month usually always on new product reviews releases head-to-heads and then we have a welcome we have a welcome float that delivers five emails based on your preferences of whether you've got like a heavy-duty truck or you're off-roading or you're got a car so heavy segmentation on the emails I think we sometimes send too many emails but the thing is is like the revenue the revenue always goes up with more emails we send so it's it's hard as a business owner in this retail ward to like pull that back when it is producing money but email is how I think it's one of the still untapped things that a lot of small businesses are not doing with their with their customer base especially now with customer acquisition costs going going way up how do you get more out of your exister out of your existing customers you know I was talking to a friend that has a massage practice and you know for the past couple years he's like I'm so busy I'm so busy and I'm like that's great that's great and then now it's like not so busy I'm like did you get moving on that email program yet he's like no not yet but yet the same time he's talking to me about how to market to get more customers in the dorm like like you've never sent me an email and I would pay way more for not only this service but any other service you might have to take care of my body so it's still lost on a lot of small businesses that you know how much more you can get out of an existing customer lifetime value is our biggest focus for the next couple years I think that's I think it's brilliant advice and you're absolutely right Sean before we sign off where could people learn more about you shock surplus everywhere we're also shock boss on tick-tock I'm doing massive amount of question and answer over there with videos that's our that's our newest thing is kind of showing showing answers with with experience so shock surplus on youtube.
com Instagram shock boss on tick-tock beautiful Sean this has been great thank you so much thanks for it I really appreciate the time