An eCommerce Success Story

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular interviews tips and tools for
building your business online
[Music]
well hello and welcome to the e-commerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson whether you are just starting out or
whether like me you've been around the world of e-commerce for a while my goal is simple and that is to help you grow
your ecommerce and digital businesses and to do that basically every week i get to sit down
with amazing people from the board of e-commerce and i get to ask them all kinds of amazing questions about what
they know and obviously how it's going to help us grow and develop our own online
businesses i say all the time that i try and have the conversation that you would have if you got to sit down with them
and have a cup of coffee oh yes i'm really keen that we dig into their story
learn the principles that can help us start and adapt and grow online ourselves so if you enjoy this episode i
would certainly appreciate it uh if you know you like it if you're watching it you subscribe if you like the audio
podcast version of it uh share it with your colleagues share with your friends all that sort of good stuff it'd be
amazing if you do now if you are regular to the show you will know this is season eight yes we are
kicking off season eight in yes we are i hope you had a good christmas and
new year and if you're like me it feels like a long time ago all ready yes it
does feel like a very very long time ago already uh it just does right so
uh welcome to season eight there are a few changes uh to the podcast this season if you're a regular see if you can
notice them if you're not regular you'll just feel like it's a good show so you know enjoy it
and see how you get on it's great you're here it's great to be back missed you guys miss doing the podcast not gonna
lie but it is great to be back now uh do you want to kickstart your
ecommerce business right here at the start of uh but not sure how to get
past the limitations or where to start well you are in for a treat i reckon you are gonna love love love this
conversation i'm having today with jared who is just a top bloke i'm going to
tell you more about jared in just a few seconds after a quick
what can i say a quick hello from one of this week's show sponsors hey there are you a business owner here
at oregon digital we know firsthand that running an ecommerce business can be really hard work
as the online space gets more competitive it is becoming even more challenging to stay ahead of the curve
we totally get it so we want to help you succeed by offering a wide range of services from fulfillment marketing
customer service and even coaching and consulting just so that you can do what matters most growing that revenue
so save yourself the time and the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks so that you can run your business
without having to worry about fulfilling and shipping orders or even handling social media accounts
so what do you say are we a good fit for each other come check us out at oreodigital.com and
let us know what you think
absolutely check out oriondigital.com one of this week's show sponsors a big thank you and shout out to our show
sponsor and also a big shout out and thanks to our show guests this week i get to talk to jared
mitchell about his journey in e-commerce and the reason i love this conversation
is because i feel like jared is my american brother we have such similar stories let me tell you when it comes to
e-commerce jared and his beautiful wife elena i would pronounce it alana but he
pronounces it elena so i want to get that right um they run a couple of beauty websites uh
one is called alana mitchell elena mitchell forgive me uh dot com and the other one is skincare by elena.com they
are in the beauty industry and if you know me in my background i've been involved in a few beauty e-commerce
websites over the years so this is where i was really stoked to hear that uh hear his story um they have been successful
fam fanpreneurs is that how you pronounce it i don't know you know what i mean they
basically run the business as a family husband and a wife they've not killed each other yet they've been doing it for over years which is a miracle well
don't i i'm i'm brilliant there you know i think that's brilliant uh jared also runs a consultancy called beefy sites
where he too helps people grow their ecommerce business so you're gonna love this conversation it's a great way to
kick off here is uh who's a guy who's first becoming a good friend uh
jared mitchell enjoy this conversation connect and do this thank you so much
for coming on to the ecommerce podcast great to have you now we're about we're
whereabouts in the world are you sir because it definitely looks lighter and brighter where you are compared to where i am
yeah um it's funny i woke up and asked alexa you know what's the temperature going to be
today and my wife and i were like it's degrees oh my gosh it's freezing
[Laughter] what's that in real money but it's definitely not freezing
yeah we are halfway in between los angeles and san diego in southern california in
a small city we live in called san clemente and then work is just a few miles north in dana point
okay and are you a lifelong californian are you uh an import
molly uh lifelong californian i did a short stint in texas as a child and then
i did junior high and high school in oregon but the rest of my life i've lived in this area oh wow
wow yeah i i have to admit i i mean i've been a few times but i it is an
extraordinary part of the world california it's like it's like the rest of the natural laws don't apply to that part of the world
isn't it really and it's just it's stunning so i can see why you would stay i can see why you would stay so
what did let's let everybody know what do you what do you get up to on a day-to-day basis in california because man you you do so many things right
yeah i recently tried like record one of our days on video and just show it to people because
i'm used to it like it's like our routine but sometimes i look at my wife and i'm this
is like to pull this off
so um yeah uh very important for us is we all wake up
together and have morning time together as a family unit and for me is to
give my boys a ride to school in the morning and drop them off um and to have that
time with them in the car thankfully their school is only like minutes away and then works just you know five
minutes from that so we tend to do that and then my wife and i work together her desk is also
this desk and um so yeah we come to work together
and we always make sure we get our workout in at least an hour a day for sandy's sake
and then work it's like grind because we have three businesses teen employees internally
and uh you kind of like feel like you're bouncing around like a ping pong ball um we love it like our employees are
awesome unit here as well and then afterwards very very important
it took us years to get to where we're at to where we can ask the baton
energy and trust this better than we would be able to as well
yeah um now that we're there we can cut off around or
our assistant has picked up the kids she's got them at home she's you know picked up the house and
done things we can't do because we're working and then we can have that family time we we cut off the workload and we
just share and eat dinner and catch a day and try to get the kids do their homework and
take showers and all or jesus that's a pretty typical day for us that sounds amazing i think
it's fascinating isn't it how um i was on a podcast the other day and
they asked me would i consider myself to be successful that was one of the big questions would you say that you're
successful and my response uh was yes i'm successful but not for the reasons that
you would think as in i'm not successful because i drive
you know a fancy car or live in a big house or whatever i'm successful because just about every night of the week i get
to have dinner with my family you know and we sit down and we eat together as a family
and um it's interesting listening to you talk well actually that's important for you you know you're being together with
the boys in the morning being together eating dinner together as a family at night
i mean that's pretty cool because that time goes by i mean it's a cliche isn't it it goes by so quickly
but the fact you prioritize that whilst trying to juggle three businesses that is that always been easy for you
guys or do you find it as a is a bit of a struggle yo that's a big struggle uh marriage
wise it's just imagine working with your spouse waking up going to sleep like
every single moment with spouse you know so we've been proactive with
i you could call it marriage counseling part of it is just mentorship communication help and keeping that um
you know relationship super healthy if we can um you know and then with kids i mean i
couldn't agree with you more like have we talked about at all like uh the
eulogy or epitaph thing that i did recently with just a personal exercise
have you heard about this i've heard of the eggs oh yes but we've definitely not talked about it oh yeah yeah i i heard a pastor giving a
sermon oh man it was five or six years ago now and he was talking about how benjamin
franklin i think it was him or thomas jefferson doesn't really matter one of those guys uh wrote their own epitaph
and eulogy and then read it four times over their life um and i was like whoa
turning about what would that look like if i wrote my own epitaph in eulogy now you know so i did
and um for me it just put everything in perspective because
i feel like every wise old person who you talk to who has lived the life
the way that you to live and seems like they're fulfilled
doesn't give any care about the big pile of money they have stacked up
like you've never heard of u-haul so since then um we have made a concerted
effort to try to position our lives that way as well and how we think about being rich
or wealthy like for us um you know i think everyone inherently
cares about money and how much they have but um gosh we just
i feel like you know it doesn't really matter to us anymore what matters to us is the time
that we get to spend with each other and our children that's yeah that's fantastic and i think
that exercise that epitaph kind of eulogy exercise is actually quite eye-opening it's
something that i've done in the past um i know he talked about it in the book um stephen covey talked about it in the
book seven habits of highly effective people um they talk about in that book as well and i think it's
it is the most extraordinary thing because it's like imagine you're at the end of your life you know that you're at
your own funeral what are people saying about you and what are people remembering about you you know what's
the legacy that you're leaving and you have the ability to to think about that now and write that now it's
it's quite a remarkable thing that as human beings we can do and so
yeah i i totally get it i i think we had the same thing uh when i how old are
your kids i have an year old and a six-year-old
yeah okay so your kids are a little bit younger than mine but when our kids were younger similar sort of ages to yours
maybe a little bit younger we did the same thing then and we were like no no this is what's important to us we're going to prioritize you know eating
together so most of the time we eat together as a family um and
make such a difference the only thing uh because us our stories i think jared are quite similar aren't they you run an
online skincare beauty uh website i used to we sold it recently um i guess one of the things that i
don't do that you do which i i've only ever met two couples in my
whole life that have been able to do it and stay married and that's work together right
so the fact that you and alana can do that i think is extraordinary
yeah it's weird lately it's like been um even more of a bonding exercise now
that we have it figured out and yeah i'm just like hearing you talk really realizing that i should
definitely ask you to mentor me like so much of our stories do line up
and like we're on the same page about so much stuff but you're you know i don't want this come out the wrong way
you're a little bit older than me and so i'm sure i could glean some wisdom there you know
yeah a little bit older that's that's that's very polite of you to say so but no it's great and i i i i i think
you guys are doing great the fact that you work together still love each other and haven't killed each other is a remarkable thing so
uh don't underestimate the power of that you know and uh it always amazes me when i come across
couples that can do that there's going to be people listening to the show matt this is an e-commerce show and it is but so many e-commerce
businesses are run by husbands and wives that's how they start them up and so many problems come later down the
line because actually that husband and wife they're not aligned they're you know i feel like a lot of my
business coaching ends up being marriage counselling it's quite ironic how that actually works i don't know if you found
this in the entrepreneurial world but you end up talking to a lot of people about the state of their marriage
because that's the way to fix their business oh my gosh
so like i don't want to say like every client but like almost every client even if they don't
work together man like so imagine you know like if they work together even like worse you know so yeah that's
fascinating isn't it absolutely fascinating now let's um so we're talking about e-commerce let's
move on just a little bit uh off pset although part of me really wants to get maybe we should do a
separate episode like how to run a successful family and a successful business i think that would be a really interesting show to do uh we should get
you on and a few other people that would be that would be quite nice to do it like like a ryan robin type thing so um
sadaf if you're listening to the show set up by the way works with me she's part of the production team here let's put that in the diary let's do that that
sounds like it'll be great um so tell us a little bit about your story
in terms of how you've got to where you are now we've got beefy sites you've got your beauty site how what how do we how
do we get to where we are awesome yeah uh quick and dirty story for me
is i was never intended to be like an entrepreneur or e-commerce or whatever
you call it um i was meant to work in a desk job that's what my father did
and so yeah my wife and i uh graduated from college and i got a desk job and it was literally the worst
thing imaginable for me i literally felt like i was in pale and thankfully at the time i was playing
music professionally and the band that i was in had gotten signed and we had some
success and so i was able to do that for a little bit
but while we were like recording or not touring i needed some supplementing supplementary income
and so i started like a decking business you know okay and i built a website on yahoo stores
and this must been around the year like or something like that
and figured out a little bit about sites and seo and then the housing market dropped off
then the ipod came out and crushed record sales and um
so you know my wife is like um yeah you know i think you need to
figure out something to do and i was like yes i do um let me go surfing
i went surfing and um after surfing i went to costco and got a you know a
couple pieces of pizza or whatever you know year old does at costco and they have those flyers on the side
like uh air conditioning and disneyland all this stuff um so they had one back then called how to
build a website um and so i grabbed it you know because it'd been a while since i've built one
for my decking business and she said hey you know you should build me a website for my skincare business
i've got a full clientele um people seem to love these products i don't know if people will start
searching for them online yet or not but why don't we give it a shot and so i went home and i had spare time and i
did and um clicks were really really expensive back then it was like five cents for a click
the irony yeah yeah i'm the same as when we started our beauty business exactly the same it's like you could throw a
truckload of money out of the window and it would just come back because it was so cheap to do that it was unbelievable
yeah yeah yeah yeah i couldn't figure out how to do the shopping cart so we just did call to order on everything and you know
someone told me google was like a big website so i took the little ads wizard and then we threw up ads and and we had
that kind of like raise your hands aha moments and we were on vacation
um when we flipped the ads on and her phone started ringing off the hook and we made our first sale and in
minutes we made more money than she made the entire two-hour facial wow and i was
like oh man how much money we spend to get that sale oh man three dollars damn
you understand everyone listening to the show is crying right now with their hands in their head
yeah so you know we're like okay you know i think we we have a business here and so that was the humble beginnings and um
you know five years ago we started our own skincare brand um which has been going well
and the original business has over lines now most of our competitors are
owned by the hut group out of europe so we're one of the last ones left here in the us and
growing the business and um and so yeah that's kind of the story how did i do
yeah very good yeah yeah very good so so you guys um what's the skincare
website uh just so people know absolutely so the original one is skincare by alana.com
and the the brand is just my wife's name alana mitchell.com
and um you know how it is matt over the years people are like teach me how to do that and so i started uh beefy sites
beefy's my nickname i'm kind of a bigger guy and you know um so we just went with went with that
and you know online courses and consulting just to kind of service the people that
you know are like teach me yeah yeah totally and this is where we
have such a similar story because again i remember when google ads were super cheap and we just accidentally got
involved in something it took off which was great and the thing that i loved about it was it took off and then people came and
said how do you do what you do can you come help us and i'm like i genuinely
i don't know how to sell look really because we were the right place the right time
and um and it turns out it wasn't just like we actually did know a few things and you figure it out don't you like
actually no i there are some things that i can maybe help you with uh and so like you do the coaching and stuff have you
the the coaching that you do the consulting that you do is that something that you
enjoy the most out of all that you do hmm
yeah i love um the one-on-one consulting i'm starting to realize that i don't
like as much like teaching the like digital courses because it's really the connection
and like you said matt like just being able to like give people insight on like help with their marriage
or like i was talking to a client last week and gave her some like um home mortgage advice
you know but um i just love being able to actually help people like improve their lives and then see it happen like
to me that's really a fascinating thing and kind of a gift you know that we can sort of give to others and
and leave behind no totally what do you what would you say are some of the common themes that
use when people come to you and they're like i need a coach we need some help what are some of the common themes that
you see people needing help for uh in the world yes yeah and to clarify my sweet spot for
coaching is generally like if someone's doing maybe like five thousand dollars a month
or more in their store um i my forte is helping them grow to
the like million a year mark and then pass them off to a bigger gun or
something like that but um so for most people that are coming in you know their sales are in the five
thousand a month to two or three hundred thousand a month range starting out and it's it's always the
same thing it is just always you know they've kind of found this right place right time business which is
like so cool you know we had that once matt yeah yeah totally very grateful yeah yeah yeah and um
they just don't know what to do because there's like too many things to do the business is growing they're booked
dates they're in to date um they don't know what to do next with
their marketing they don't you know have the connections or know the right agencies to hire to grow
certain sales channels and so it's really um coaching them on how to like not do
everything themselves like the e-meth right yeah yeah
yeah no totally it's it's that book isn't it by michael gerber we've mentioned that a few times recently actually i think that book's gonna make
a resurgence because i must have mentioned that book like four or five times over the last few weeks do i mean it sort of goes in
cycles isn't it but the e-myth yeah so so teaching them not to do everything
themselves but to to either outsource or to bring in good people that can help them is that right
yeah i mean usually they have revenue coming in each month whether it's increasing or decreasing they have
it and they have no idea where they're at financially profit loss balance sheets right and so
their hair is on fire because they're looking at their checking account and they don't see much money and then they
have bills coming up yeah and they're like how am i going to pay this like nothing adds up because most of us that start these businesses
are more on like the marketing side you know not as much from the like ops yeah financials
yeah so usually the biggest challenge is trying to convince someone which is by the way what someone had to convince me
of okay is like hey jared if you can actually get your inventory upstate and your
financials up to date you're not going to be losing as much sleep at night because you're going to understand
how your business works where your money's coming from and how you can sort of like lay out
your financials and forecast and predict things you know so if you do have a negative month come in you can
understand why and not be so worried yeah it's very very good advice
and i think uh you know people say to me what's one of the secret what are the secrets of your success matt i i often
straight away without any shadow of a doubt say listen it's got to be the team that we have right and there's a lady on
our team called michelle and she's michelle is great she's been with me since uh since a year dot i think since noah
was around basically shel and i were hanging out and um she does that so so well the whole
bookkeeping keeping track of finances keeping track of money cash flow expenditure
sorry cash flow forecasting especially if you're buying you know stock or your manufacturing and you've got things like
three to six months lead times which we now have on one of our businesses you know there's so many things that you
need to think about and having someone on your team that can help you do that if that's not your gifting and like you
say let's if you're running your own business it's probably not your gifting right uh so you're gonna you're
definitely gonna need some help with that i think that's such a very very good piece of advice
hey there are you a business owner here at oregon digital we know firsthand that running an ecommerce business can be
really hard work as the online space gets more competitive it is becoming even more
challenging to stay ahead of the curve we totally get it so we want to help you succeed by offering a wide range of
services from fulfillment marketing customer service and even coaching and consulting just so that you can do what
matters most growing that revenue so save yourself the time and the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks
so that you can run your business without having to worry about fulfilling and shipping orders or even handling
social media accounts so what do you say are we a good fit for each other come check us out at oreodigital.com and
let us know what you think
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[Music] so do you find then when you're talking to clients um
you're unpicking first and foremost a lot of the the data around the site so
the financials the kpis the traffic the conversion rates all these things that
in effect should be fundamental i think when you're an e-commerce entrepreneur you know the data that you should know
do you find you're unpicking all of that you spend a chunk of time doing that
yeah that's one of the first things that i do is okay let's get access analytics maybe your platform if you're
comfortable with it search console whatever other analytics sites you have set up um sometimes email
and like if they have like a pop-up technology um and some of the more important
marketing channels ppc whatever and get in there and establish the metrics and
half the time you're you're going to be educating the client in my opinion on what the
metrics are and what they mean because they don't know half of them they have some of them figured out they don't know like all of them and
maybe their source for checking that metric um is uh like their platform and it tracks
it a little differently timing wise than google and so understanding what the real metric should be and what that all
means so there's definitely a lot of work under the hood that i do um and
part of it is like education in regards to what these things are and why do we need to track
them yeah yeah i know it's super important and i guess if you're i mean if you're listening to the show writing
you are just starting out um get these things in early you know get the get the data in early and all you
need is a simple google spreadsheet where you just track key pieces of information right and and bring that
along and make sure your bookkeeping is in order it's such a such a fundamental but it's always so low down the list and
i'll tell you why it's slow down the list because it's not sexy like marketing right but and like you i'm
that way i'm like you know what i forget about bookkeeping i want to know like about digital marketing let's get
into digital marketing right because that's going to bring the traffic that's going to bring the money we've got all
of that to go for so i'm much more focused around that because it's much more fun you know rather than
spreadsheets [Laughter] yeah and you know we i hire all that
stuff out because it's it's not us you know and someone else should be doing it not me yeah yeah yeah someone who's
actually got a skill and a care for it yeah yeah absolutely so what are some of the things then um
you've you i love this you've got your own ecommerce businesses you've worked in the industry for a little while
you've done the coaching you've done the consulting what are some of the key things say around digital marketing
let's pick up on that because you're a marketer i'm a marketer that you have learned you know
where you are right now this is like principle number one for anybody wanting to do digital marketing what would what
would be hiring your list oh wow yeah that's a big question
well you said earlier there was some so funny and i think this goes into part of my answer
of like not knowing how good you were at digital marketing you know
um that struck a tone with me because um i was there
and um basically what i did is i applied for a
job with uh neil patel who's kind of like a bigger thought leader in the digital marketing
space if you haven't heard of him um and many of us have and yeah i've listened to his podcast is that you is
that you behind that uh i'm not behind the podcast but uh yeah if you've been following and you've
probably heard me or seen me on some of the media he's funny he likes to mess with me and
one of the ways he messes with me is by putting me on videos okay
and then he also tells people that i'm his bodyguard okay beefy
[Laughter] yeah that's a whole other story but um
so yeah i i didn't know how good i was and so i i was like been following neil for a
little bit saw him at an optimizely concert he put out a job ad i said babe should i apply she's like yeah why not
you know and so you know he's got his email list as millions and back then it wasn't as big
but thousands applied and he hired me and for me that was like
a big confidence boost and i found out whoa i am actually pretty good at this
and so i think to answer your question the first thing you need to do is like have some self-confidence
because i didn't i like had none yeah and you know you're probably pretty good at doing
what you do the first thing that i look at is those things
what are you doing well um let's formulate the least path of
resistance way to scale this business most ecom businesses that are up and running
i find a split the healthiest split i tend to see in revenue channels will be about um
email email acquisition another to and paid and then the rest is split between
affiliate you know text push um all sorts of things maybe some more paid
media um so i tend to just like you said get into the data and
see what the sales channel split is i mean more common than not i'm asking people hey you may want to sell on
amazon half the u.s is buying there so and things like that once i'm able to
like you know label and hash out the sales channels i can make some you know reasonable suggestions because i know
where the revenue is coming from and what the least path the resistance will be yeah no that's great and in fact organ
of amazon you uh you recommended that i connect with a chap called brett curry right
uh yeah brett is um he's coming on the show by the way now so thank you for
that okay i would check it out um yeah not to say he's not an expert in amazon he's an expert a lot of things
okay um in the u.s well i'd say in the world right now he's known as one of the top
youtube ads guys um and they are single-handedly the best um
ppc agency we've ever hired for google being um so um he's also got some crazy
talents on the amazon side and on the social side as well yeah i know i was i i enjoyed talking
with him actually and i'm like dude we need to get you on the show to talk about some of these things so uh he's coming on the show and we'll talk about
amazon and we'll talk about youtube but just you saying the whole amazon thing reminded me of that so
um so yeah so you know self-confidence being the first one what are you good at
how can we help this grow um i think is is is good i think
fundamentally people actually know more about marketing than they think they do you throw the word digital in front of it and people go like well i don't know
because it's facebook it's google i just haven't got a clue and it's like yes you might not get the mechanics of how you
do paid media maybe on google like pay-per-click but you still i think people get marketing don't they and actually
the principles and rules of marketing are pretty consistent you know and what
i learned years before we were online has helped me no end i mean now i am
actually online those principles back then still applied the idea of getting people to like you
getting people to trust you jeremy and giving a good customer service all those things really help with
marketing so i like that develop yourself comments you actually probably know more about marketing than you think you do uh including digital marketing
would be my my echo of what you said which is yeah you know
i think if you're an entrepreneur and you're like on social media you're not receiving a lot of encouragement it's
more like fomo or fear of missing out yeah you know or people that are showing
you how they're better than you so i do feel like there is a big um duty
for me as like a consultant or mentor to encourage them and affirm them and what
they've accomplished and how how much they've done yeah that's so true that's so true
especially if you're turning over several several you know books every month it's you don't usually get that by
accident these days it takes a lot of hard work a and um uh what was interesting actually when you
went through the numbers is you you allotted around for a good site about to email
marketing right and one of the things which still surprises me to this day
i mean i could tell you the case of a company uh we were having this conversation
literally two weeks ago uh turnover is probably around what three
four million dollars a year somewhere around there um email marketing is rubbish i mean
fundamentally is is just non-existent and i'm like well there's a million bucks on the table right
there just right yeah there's a million bucks have you do you is that just a phenomenon that i see or do you see it
yourself it's like well there's we want to do social media because email marketing is dead or do i mean there's some screwy thought pattern in their
head which means email marketing which for me is the fundamental of digital marketing has just not been done
right do you come across that oh man yeah and i think part of that is like if we think it's annoying we don't
want to like do it as a marketer because it's annoying to us and like so many people think email
marketing is like annoying because they get annoying emails all the time you know and for a while i was that way i like i
still think social media is kind of annoying and so like i didn't get into like you know social ads soon enough because of
your time it's just this the analogy i use is like you know we all go into the grocery store we all do it um
you know and we all shop a different way you know certain people look at the food shelves
in the eye line certain people are only there to get coupon deals certain people are there just to go straight to the
meat department you know and it's the same way for people who interact with your store the most
important customer in my opinion is the one that you're trying to get to repurchase
because you've already obtained them yeah and email right now at this day and age is um especially in the post
ios you know update obliteration uh phase that we're in is still just the
one of the most relevant channels because a it gets those people to come back and purchase
again but b it's very shareable you know if you do a good job at it i think one of the biggest honors
that i have received as an e-commerce business is when i hear
someone say yeah i told my friend verbally about your website and they
visited it and purchased something yeah like getting back to your comment original
marketing years ago like it's the most important thing like running a business that people are so happy with
and so satisfied from that they share it to their friends and vice versa and so
on and so forth yeah yeah it's so true so true the idea of giving such a good
experience that they tell of their friends about it it's still for me the best way to grow your e-commerce business
it takes a little bit longer but it's a heck of a lot better and my experience is i don't know if you've if
you've measured it uh jared with your own sites or with your client-sides my experiences if i can get you to refer my
website to somebody else then not only are you likely to buy from me more often because you're happy
enough to refer it right you're putting your reputation online you're going to keep shopping with me the person you have referred is much more likely to
stay with me and to buy from me time and time again so both of you become much more valuable
than the customer that comes in through paid media do you mean your your lifetime value to me as a company is
much higher onward absolutely yeah and there's so many um guys out there
teaching e-commerce in a way that's almost temporary or fake where you're in
this business and you almost don't even own your brand you're like you don't own your supply
uh you don't own your stores uh like amazon owns you like china owns you like
this whole kind of fake model and um so it can be a struggle sometimes i'm
like if if you're in that boat um there's hope okay like you can fix it
and it's time to start building like a real brand and think about you know are these people receiving your
products and interact with your business and having such a good interaction and such a good experience
with your product that it's good enough for them to really want to share if not
what are you doing yeah that's brilliant did is that what
you did um you said at the start of the show that um you obviously set up a skincare brand
for your wife you built that website and the way i heard what you were saying john correct me if i'm wrong is actually
you were selling other skincare brands on that website um and then at some point you were like we are going to set
up our own skincare brand so then alana mitchell.com was born right so you've got skincare by alana and alanna
mitchell.com um yeah is that it have i got that right and you
in setting up your brand i mean that's that's a massive investment right having set up skincare
brands before that's not a ch you don't just you know you don't just go down the supermarket buy a few ingredients
and put that together and away you go no no yeah i mean certainly in the uk there's so much legislation there's a
lot of loops you have to sort of jump through so i appreciate the size of that investment so when you're sat there you
yourself and alan are thinking okay we're going to set up our own skincare brand what's going through your mind
why are you wanting to do this and what are some of the key principles i guess that you learned doing it
yeah this story might like this is not the way that it usually
goes down i'm so thankful that we have ownership of all of our businesses and
that everything is bootstrapped that also means that you feel poor pretty much at all times
so it's cool and it's not cool but what i would say is um so how we started our
own brand and many of you are listening might own a retail store like we do and did it
first where you sell other people's brands okay is i was looking um at our discounting
and i noticed you know we had a lot of discounts going out the door great because we also have a lot of
sales going out the door but margins are thin they often are in our business yeah but i just started thinking like
well what could i do to lower the amount of discounts that people are using well i know that as a private labeler or
as someone who owns your own brand you can usually buy a widget at like three bucks a unit and sell it for ish in
our industry right yeah and my wife knows enough about skincare to make sure it's
a really good product so um i wanted to start my online like or years ago but it was always
told to me you know hey that's a a huge beast and another animal and liability and so on and so forth so we
never did but we did come out with one product um
and its intention was to be a eye cream
that people could use as a free gift instead of a discount
so we started offering the free gift option you can only put one promo card in car uh promo code in our cart
at a time and that's still the same thing for this day and people started using this free eye cream because it was a value instead
of getting their or off of their order yeah therefore we're only out three bucks
yeah and that's right that's our line launch because people started using this peptide eye cream
elena knows her stuff and it's awesome it's still our most popular product and
then we had people calling and requesting to order it and we didn't even have it set up as a product just a
free gift so that's literally how our product line was born so if you're a retailer and you have problems
with discounting and stuff well you know why not consider starting your own private label brand
that's such a good idea i and again this is why i like you so much we've we've
been there we've done that and i can tightly attest to this as a strategy because you in effect are buying something at
low margin which has perceived high value and you're giving this as a gift with purchase on your website which stops the
discounting but your customer feels like the value to them has increased it's a
remarkable thing to be able to pull off if you can do it uh and i think the fact that you guys have done that is
brilliant so that's how your skincare brand was born what are some of the sort of the core values i guess for you guys
in setting up a brain because you know the skin care industry let's be real it's not what you'd call a moral
industry right it has its it has its flaws which we could probably wax lyrical about all night so
what did you guys think when you were setting up this brand you're like we could do this however we want to do it these things are important to us what
were the values that you were thinking about yeah um so we wanted it to be a real
brand which means that we own the ingredients and the products
and maybe we would start out by private labeling a product from a lab but
eventually once we hit economies of scale we want to redo and own that product so it's
really important to us um and we also wanted to set up sales channels
in a diverse way so that we didn't feel like amazon owned our business you know
but so we have like shopify we have amazon we're all over the place you know we have full-fledged omni-centric
marketing going out so that if ios kicks in and facebook social ads go out the door
we're still okay you know so that was very very important to us the second thing
um was making sure that we basically had my wife in uh inspect every single ingredient
and try every single product and we still to do that to this day
um and not only that she's got me trying them now too which is is scary
if you're watching this and you don't know actually jared is about years old and so he just looks a little bit
yeah his cream's working really well that's what we're saying yeah yeah
um yeah definitely um and actually it's become a little addicting i um i start
to make products now myself and pass them off my wife but um we are very very
particular uh because the u.s is not as stringent as europe so we have heard
um and we go through all the ingredients we explain all the ingredients we have an ingredient dictionary where we define
them and we have an ingredient naughty list that we stay away from
um you know after those things are established for us it's really important to be on point with branding and packaging
and positioning you know i just think everything comes down to how you're different
finding a new and needy audience and addressing them in a way that's you know
has integrity at the right price so how did you guys do that how did you find the
the new and need i like that the new and needy audience how did you do that
well um for us we had already sort of established that with years of our
own business and sort of like establishing my wife
as an influencer or someone to follow so we really honed in on people
that trust her and have trusted her over the years been begging her to come out with their own products over the years
and the derivative of that is really centered around moms it's very mom centric so
um from the research we found most of the people that are early in his age they want to take care of their skin but
they kind of really don't because they don't have time or money or something and they need someone they can trust to tell them
what to use and so for there we've really settled in uh to that niche and
it's kind of a weird business model because we've been scaling our retail store
and that's sort of congruent with scaling our brand our brand is our most popular line
on our retail store and the more brands we qualify for and resell and grow the more authority we
give our own brand and the more we're able to cross sell upsell down sell post purchase one click upsell thank you page
upsell onto our own brand which is just margin margin margin margin margin right yeah that's brilliant that's great
let me just take a sort of slight side step if i can um you mentioned earlier
on uh you went and worked for neil patel uh and if you don't know who neil is go
check him out he is online he is a bit of an influencer and has been around for a while and i've heard a lot of his stuff and he's he's a funny guy i i
always laugh when i hear his stuff he seems quite down to earth i've never met him but he seems like a genuine down to earth guy and so
what are what are some of the key things maybe you've learned from working for neil that you learned from him uh what
would be some of the things you've learned there yeah gosh so much
the things that i learned from him i think that were incredibly valuable is like uh
he's okay he's so successful in every sort of way and um he's like the most humble dude
and the funniest guy and he really really doesn't care
like what people think about him and so i'll you know bring something up
like if we have an event to go to or a client coming or this or that and be like neil dude i you know
i feel like i should roll up there in like a nicer car or something like a suit and all that he's like why
he's like i show up and he's like i show up in an uber and i'm in my shorts or
pants in a t-shirt to these speaking events with thousands of people yeah and it doesn't matter he's like just be
yourself yeah and you know really he gave me permission to not feel like i needed to act a certain way or
dress a certain way or you know rub shoulders a certain way to be successful
um and he is one of the kindest most genuine guys i've ever met so for me um
certainly i've learned a ton about digital marketing seo video marketing i
mean he's he's a master of many things from neil but the most important things i think are life lessons
that's really interesting bringing it back to how we started talking about family and family is all about life
right um so he does just let's just connect a little bit with the video marketing thing so i
think this is a bit of a hot topic at the moment the whole video marketing thing and i think he has done that quite well
what what's some of the thinking behind that strategy in terms of video marketing that maybe
someone who's on this side you know just starting an e-commerce business or you know has maybe turning over five
grand a month but actually it doesn't do any kind of video marketing what are some of the steps that we could look at
taking there which would help us as far as like just getting started with
video marketing yeah is the question yeah yeah yeah um okay well
with clients i'm often like having to say okay um are we producing any video content like at all okay so if we are
send it over because sometimes the people are like no not me like we need to hire like someone to do this
[Music] the point is like some people have further to go than others but most clients have like a start on it and or
they're like us they have their own ambassador um or one of my clients right now doesn't really like do their own
ambassador thing but they have people on their staff um so the first thing i do and i think we're gonna touch on this is
like i have them lay out their target customer persona yeah here's ours and
maybe you've done this maybe you haven't um ours is pretty detailed as you can see we talk about their kids their age
where they eat where they hang out or their vacation we hang those up in every floor and room
of our office so that we all know who our customers are because the first thing i ask is where are your customers
hanging out um you know so one of my clients is in the baby space and
the clients are young moms and so we started on tick tock and she thought i was crazy
and you know for me tick tock right now um i think you'll notice that people don't
talk about [Music] new advertising networks if they're
being really successful on them yet they like want to keep it on the dl
and so i said hey you know let's just start organically there and start posting these videos and whatever the
how to's and the answer the public's and just you know how can we be helpful and encouraging these moms and
some of the videos organically have gotten hundreds of thousands of views on tick tock we haven't started ads yet
like okay instead of a pixel you know um another big one right now is is youtube
it's so funny matt because i um got super annoyed with uh shopify because they do like how to build your own
website class yeah and i was referring people there and i'm like this is so boring this is so boring
so long so i made my own um how to build a shopify course because i
was that annoyed and it's just i think mine's boring but it's like a quarter of the time and it's better because like
show them seo and all this stuff some of my videos are getting like views plus i've done nothing like
zero um so i think you too
right now first business so i'm really excited that you're having bret on later to talk
about it um i think the full answer to question is like let's start uh customer centric
i want to find out where they're hanging out and where they're watching video and start putting videos there and get
over yourself a little bit right just get on video it's not going to be as bad as you think there are very few people
like that have shot video that i've gone yeah that's really as bad as you think it is [Laughter]
normally there's something that we could use or rescue and uh and i think there are ways which you can
produce video which actually is not onerous it's very straightforward and actually has a big impact and i
appreciate you sharing that um jared listen i feel like we could go all night uh
we're just sort of getting warmed up but i want to be respectful of your time and the listeners times how do um how do
people connect with you how do they reach you if they want to get hold of you yeah man if you just you know search
beefy sites anywhere uh it'll pop up and that's one reason why i went with the name so weird
[Laughter] so just type it anywhere man you'll find
me just like you'll find beefy sites you'll find you'll find jared there in all his beefiness uh with his flawless
skin [Laughter] just waiting to say hi that's been brilliant listen jared
honestly it's been a real privilege uh i it's it's nice when i get to laugh a lot with guests and you've been an absolute
joy and privilege to talk to so thank you so much for coming we will definitely be in touch about the family
thing because i think that would be so so critical and so important uh but appreciate you being here thank
you thank you thank you so what did you make to that my
interview with jared he is such a cool dude has such a beautiful family
uh and so you definitely do want to connect with him my thanks again for him being on the show
uh quite a lot of takeaways wasn't that in that interview there and uh hopefully you got a lot out of it
and you know what that's what we're like here at the ecommerce podcast and you can download by the way all the transcripts all the
notes everything from that uh conversation uh with jared at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
eighty eight zero that's what you need eighty ecommerce podcast.net forward slash you can get the transcripts
and the notes um for free you don't have to put an email address or any of that kind of nonsense i don't just head over
to the website and get them there for you and you can get all the links and stuff that you mentioned there
as well which is great so uh do do that because like i was saying uh here at the
ecommerce podcast we love to talk to amazing people yes we do about how to run an ecommerce business and next week
is no exception and so what i'm gonna do now is just play a little excerpt from
next week's show here's a little teaser you're gonna enjoy this one
so what if we turn that around our head and if we know that most people care mostly about themselves
we can give them what they're looking for by talking to them first on our about
pages and then you transition and you tie your own story
into the customer story whatever pulled them in on that about page so there is a chance an opportunity for you to talk
about you or your company your mission your values but lead with the customer first to hook them to capture their
attention and to like avoid what matt just described where you're they're you're boring them
right out of the gate with the first two words [Music]
oh yes you are not going to want to miss that conversation uh with rhys spikeman she was fantastic i really enjoyed uh my
conversation with she there was honestly there's no holds barred with that conversation she is going to tell you
straight uh next week's show how to create a killer about page that converts with reese bikeman make sure you
subscribe because you are going to want to hit that let me tell you the about as paige one of the most visited pages on your
website so do check out next week and if you get a chance to watch the video do because uh she will share her screen we
do talk it through if you're on audio only but she is going to share a screen and give you some insight there as well
so do check that out thank you so much for joining us thanks
for being part of the team here at the ecommerce podcast always great to put these shows together and listen to some
amazing people like jared and coming up reese next week thanks to you for listening or for
watching if you see us on youtube or facebook uh i've enjoyed this one so
i'm looking forward to next week so that's it from me bye for now
you've been listening to the e-commerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
tips and tools for building your business online
[Music]