You're the key man and that's fine. Here's how to double sales.

0:00Hi Alex, how are you? I'm Seda. >> Hi Seda. >> Um I am the founder and owner of a skin care brand called Miracle Butter Cream. >> It shows. >> Oh, thank you. >> You're welcome. >> I started the business when I turned 50 back in 2017. >> in 10 years? >> Uh yeah, I'm >> [laughter] [gasps] >> So, I um am currently um bringing it and I start I I left the television uh producer career after 27 years.

0:28>> Okay. >> Um and how I got into skin care is a whole different story, but >> What's revenue? >> Um it is 100 I'm sorry, 1.3 million a year and then 275,000 in profit. >> Got it. >> We can definitely >> Where do you want to go? >> I want to go at least to doubling my sales within the next year. Okay? >> Okay. How do you get customers?

0:54>> I 70% comes from Meta and Google. >> Organic or paid? Okay. All ads? >> All ads. I do email marketing >> it's all paid. I mean, yeah. >> Yeah. >> How'd you get into paid? Are you good at it? >> How did I get into paid? No, I have a digital marketing company that does my ads. >> Okay. And that was like the first thing you did. You started this business and you just hired a digital marketing company to start running ads for you.

1:18>> No, I didn't start into See, I had a large network from the television industry and I got a lot of my celebrity friends to do videos. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So, did they So, did you give them a kickback or they just did it for fun? >> Oh, they did it for free. >> That was nice. >> Like, these [laughter] are people who I put on the map, you know. >> But, they did this and that that gave you a little bit of affiliate base or kind of a a mini influencer launch. >> Right. And so, those ads are not really performing well anymore. I need more like organic ads. But, my my whole question is like I want to at least double my sales within the next 12 months. And I I am the key man who if I disappear everybody below me is just they make the products cuz they're handmade products and then we they ship the orders and that's pretty much the operation and so I want to know like what would you do to double the sales if you had the capacity space warehouse all of that.

2:17>> So I would erase key man from your vocabulary for now. Because you're doing a million bucks a year. Obviously you're key man. It's you and five friends. You know what I mean? Like you're going to be key man. Like key man risk is predominantly it's it reduces the value of the asset for an acquirer for somebody who's going to buy the business. You're not trying to sell it right now and no one would really buy it at this level anyways, right? No one real. You know what I mean? So if we take that off the plate all all sorry all like we put a pin in that for a second.

2:43We're just asking how do we sell twice twice as many people or do we get how do we get the customers we have to double AOV? How do we get the average cart value up or how do we get them to buy more times? >> Right. >> Those are your levers, right? And so any of those would double the business. If you do all three of them you eight x the business. So the thing that I I will tell you is that you are in the e-commerce space that is highly commoditized. Right? The lotions and potions, you know what I mean? Is a space where yeah you know it's 98% water anyways, right? And so having

3:18>> Mine is 100% pure. All natural ingredients. >> Water's all natural. So >> [laughter] >> My stuff is different. >> No water no alcohol. >> I'm point point being to the consumer lotion squeeze whatever, okay? So the the point is is that if you play this out, right? You could you why can't you double ad spend right now? The ads aren't performing, right?

3:44>> Yeah and according to Ed I have too little ads in the first place. >> Yeah. >> [laughter] >> With that the ads aren't performing, right? And so in order to fix that, we'd have to create UGC campaigns, right? And have a huge variety of avatars, ICPs, whatever you want to call them. Um which will feed into Andromeda, which is how the ad, you know, ad platform is working now. It's all about many micro niches rather than big hero ads, or less of those. >> Mhm. >> And so, that would be how you would double the business.

4:11The issue with a double as a goal, and I'll explain specifically for your business, is that unless you have a clear and compelling brand, you will just be in the arbitrage business, which is that you were in the buying clicks for a dollar and selling them for two, and then continuing to buy more inventory, and then over time as you go to colder and colder audiences that are less and less likely to convert, your margins will compress until you're doing $10 million a year making no profit. And the amount of e-commerce businesses that are in that in that realm is is too many to count.

4:44>> Mhm. >> Because they started as media buying and performance-driven marketers, rather than thinking, "How can I develop this brand and distribution?" Because the end goal is that to compete at the higher levels, which is I'm guessing where you want to go. >> Mhm. >> Do you want to go there? I don't know. I'll presume. Okay. >> [sighs and gasps] >> Brand delivers the three things that an e-commerce company needs. You get cheaper clicks. You have higher conversion rates at premium prices.

5:11I guess it's four things. Higher conversion rates at premium prices, and you get higher, and this is the big one, higher return rates, as in people coming back. >> Mhm. >> And so, one asset that you develop basically covers the whole business and allows you to continue to scale. The way that e-commerce companies have done this in the past and do this today is that they borrow the associations from other people who who espouse or who who represent the values that they want their brand to be. Simply said, they get cool people to be in front of it, so other people are like, "I'll be cool, so I'll buy it."

5:40Right? >> Right. >> And so, to double the business, we have to do UGC campaigns, and we want to be really selective about who these influencers are making sure that they represent your values. That is the simplest way to do that for you. I would probably also look really aggressively at the front-end email campaigns and like how many different flows we have to bring people back, what different levels of awareness in terms of the ad hooks that we're doing so we can hit different slices of the market and we can basically layer our campaign so we can bring people in from colder to more aware and then we can start really like your blended rise will go up even though some specific ad sets will go down in actual row as. So it's more of a campaign approach rather than just finding individual winners. I know it's a little bit more complex than probably you're looking for but it's the reality of the answer.

6:27>> So I don't need an operational manager working under me? >> No, not now. You're doing a million bucks a year in e-commerce. It's like >> Yeah. >> Not nothing but like it's like you're just getting going, you know. It's a very low it's a low operational drag business. Like that compared to a service business it's it's it's easier. >> Got it. >> Harder on the marketing side. >> Okay. Thank you. >> If you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page you can just book a call with my team and we will look into business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.