The Kohler Bonus Episode: What’s Working In Accounts Right Now.
This bonus episode dives deep into creative performance, offer testing, team structure, landing page iteration, and mental health as a founder/operator. Andrew, Brad and Zach share actionable insights from their experiences scaling brands past $40M, along with real-world examples of what’s currently working in ad accounts — and what’s not.
Key Takeaways:
Why you might be relying too much on video from your influencer whitelisting
The most underrated ad creative that’s dominating accounts right now
How founder videos can act as multi-hook powerhouses
Why increasing your prices may be your biggest conversion unlock
How to tell if your landing pages are stagnating
How do you avoid the "hero content" trap that can tank performance long-term
The best mindset to have when hiring team members (Especially early on)
How mental clarity can become your unfair advantage as a founder
Learn more about the Scalability School Podcast or listen to other episodes head to https://scalabilityschool.com
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at http://foxwelldigital.com/membership
Full Transcript
(3) The Kohler Bonus Episode: What's Working In Accounts Right Now - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCHQbXvNVVI
Transcript:
(00:00) So, I think one thing that a lot of people like when they think about even whitelisting with a partner or creator, they're thinking video only. They're thinking, "Hey, I'm going to get this person talking about the product in a video and I'm going to run video ads for whitelisting.
(00:11) " A huge unlock is actually running static images with that person and then just like language that they might have even used in a video or that someone might have asked as a question for them. The big one that thematically comes across and in the founders membership too is is like time spent on offer and making sure that the offer and the creative and the landing pages are experimented with and sort of worked on in a consistent basis, but the offer seems to be the leading one. And then if the offer in in parallel with I would
(00:35) say influencers and creative and like making sure that that's dialed in and there's enough diversity in terms of audience and personas that are pushing those two things forward and if those two things are being pushed forward properly then or those things are being pushed forward not both but that sort of suite then it goes everything else kind of flows with it your margin.
(00:53) So I think like a lot of people just say here's what my product costs and here's like I can run I can only run a 30% discount. I challenge a lot more people to say, I could adjust my prices. If you're I mean, we're gonna do 40 million this year, which is awesome. Like, we're that big and we're still taking these massive swings.
(01:10) So, I think if you're sub 50 million in revenue, you can definitely try these things and it might be a complete game changer for your business. So, I think a lot of people are afraid to change prices, but even for us, it was an absolute crazy unlock for the business. there generally obviously when you bring in a new hire there's a lot of anxiety about bringing that person in and there's not necessarily a lot of you know you don't have trust with that person yet and I think because of the way all of us operate it's always better to give them autonomy and tell them that they can screw up and give them that permission and like be like look you're
(01:39) going to make mistakes that's great and I can't wait for you to do that and like I'm going to be watching but also like go nuts it's okay be bold [Music] And now, let's take a listen to the Scalability School podcast. Okay. Well, welcome to the river episode of the Scalability School podcast, where we talk all things fishing in the Northwoods.
(02:04) So, what kind of bait are we using this week? I'm not the person to ask that question. I don't even know if Brad knows identified. The uh Well, welcome. Uh we're live here at the Foxwell Founders Meetup in scenic Shabboan, Wisconsin. actually Coler Wisconsin, Coler/Shboan.
(02:24) And uh we brought together about 50 founder members from all over the world talking about everything under the sun and uh we thought it'd be fun. We were going to record inside, but then we were like, why don't we record outside? It's beautiful out here. It's beautiful out here. Sun reference was very Yeah. on point. It was very good. So So we're here.
(02:46) Uh we're excited to Everybody's always excited at the beginning of your podcast, so we're excited, of course. And uh we're going to talk about a lot of different things. Uh we got some questions that people uh put on the whiteboard in the room. I took a picture of it. Um that we can go through. Uh but we also want to talk generally about I think you know what's working a little bit right now.
(03:07) Um, I did see that one of the questions of course was perennialing on the topic of creative strategy, but uh we can get into that in uh in just a second. I think right now last couple weeks it's obviously been a little bit of up and down with health and wellness updates.
(03:25) Um, what are you guys seeing that's uh that's been that's been really working lately? Um, I mean there's a lot of things I feel like we talk about landing pages a lot, but I was just having a conversation with a founder member, Ryan, um, about just like how much of an impact it can have. I feel like people kind of give up on them too early.
(03:43) We had an episode with Ryan Doni, which I thought was great. But I feel like that's the biggest thing when people kind of get stuck and like I'm hammering as many new creatives in this ad account. I'm trying so many things, but then they're they haven't touched their five reasons why page or they haven't tried like a new offer on a landing page. I feel like that's the biggest thing lately that we've shifted again is just like slight format changes.
(04:03) I know that I mentioned um this kind of concept of taking like Facebook comments and adding them onto your landing page. We still see that working really really well in tandem with like before and afters. Mhm. Mhm. The other thing that was really interesting lately too is we I mean the traditional listicle that everybody runs traffic to is kind of this like these blocks of like 1 2 3 4 5.
(04:22) More recently we were like okay I wonder if we can actually compress that into just one section on the page and have like a scroller to flip through. And so we launched that recently and that's been crushing. So, I think just these small incremental changes on your main landing page that you're pushing traffic to still is like that not a lot of people still like they get a landing page that works finally a few iterations and they just kind of like ride it out.
(04:48) Well, I mean Brian who is here from New Zealand, he's an expert on doing like multifunel quizzes. Yeah. Which is interesting. I feel like something we haven't we haven't talked about a lot. Have you guys ever done quizzes or something in a while? No, we have one client who rips like fitness quizzes and it works really well for like finding the program that you're looking for, but beyond that, not a ton.
(05:07) It's kind of interesting as a topic, but what else has been working for you? I have a list. Um, so and and a lot of these things are actually things that we've talked about on the podcast previously, so they might be a little bit redundant, but um part of this is what we're still seeing working in the in ad accounts today and then also some feedback that we've gotten on episodes from podcasts.
(05:24) So, I just have a couple quick hitting things and if you want to go deeper into any of them, we certainly can. The review image thing that we talked about, I I've not gotten more DMs ever in my entire life cuz nobody knows who I am. Um, but like definitely now. So, like I've got I've personally at least gotten five people that are like, "Hey, we launched this and it's the top spending ad or like top five in our ad account." So, like that's a thing that I would recommend doing. I know you've also gotten DMs about it, too. As a reminder,
(05:49) that is like when you go into your, you know, reviews library, right? Pull images, even if they're like these scrappy photos from your customers and you're taking word for word the review that they wrote, adding that sometimes as an overlay, sometimes as the ad copy. Yep. Very simple to do.
(06:08) And sometimes it's just like what customers the language that they use is what resonates with other people. Yeah. Literally. And then you can take that and you can do all kinds of iterations on top of that. But um that's that's one of the things that we've consistently seen working and I've got a lot of feedback from people who have been listening that some way that we've kind of expanded on that specific type of ad is we've taken the the ads those ads that have hit the images with the length of the review or the actual text of the review we've turned that into
(06:33) like an AI voiceover over the top of B-roll extremely well. Um so like that's doing really well right now. And like we we say at the beginning of the video like this is a this is a real review from people, but the the B-roll footage in the background is just kind of like random that is like relevant for the the specific um review, but that's also working really well. It's a nice way to like get more volume out of those same reviews. Speaking of like things that feel natural, like taking reviews and
(06:57) just like copying them over, we started um I was just like looking through uh Instagram, just like flipping through stories and I was noticing a lot of these influencers will do like the Q&A where they'll like have a question and then they'll answer the question. Um so I was thinking, okay, we have all these like influencer partner relationships.
(07:14) Why don't we take qu like common questions that maybe they get or that were even in comments of those ads and just do statics? So, I think one thing that a lot of people like when they think about even whitelisting with a partner or creator, they're thinking video only.
(07:32) They're thinking, "Hey, I'm gonna get this person talking about the product in a video and I'm going to run video ads for whitelisting." A huge unlock is actually running static images with that person and then just like language that they might have even used in a video or that someone might have asked as a question for them in like the ad comments.
(07:51) Um, again, it's just like taking trying to like extract how people actually think and perceive like those whitelisting ads that you're running and you're like, how can I make that how can I make that more of them and how can I make faster versions of it, which is obviously images are much easier to do. Have you had other types of images work from those white listing partnerships up until that point? Um, we've tried them with like a big punchy headline and those did okay, but these like Q&A cuz it feels so natural.
(08:10) It's like, okay, I see a influencer with like the verification check. doesn't always have to be like the in partnership with and then they're used to seeing that same format in stories. Yeah. So it just feels like way more natural and organic. Um especially on like the 9 by6 format. So that's been cool. Yeah. Nice. That's a good idea.
(08:27) What other ideas you have on your list to keep grow? No, I've got so kind of sim similar but different to that cuz like so that's from like a specific individual partnership setup. This is pretty common, but I looked across a bunch of ad accounts leading up to being here and some of the top spending ads and many of those is like founder videos.
(08:45) Um, and in those specific instances, so I I watched them just to like make sure that it was like, okay, it's not it's not it's not luck, but there's a consistent theme that shows up throughout all the founder videos, which is probably true of any type of content. Maybe there's like some additional benefit of like I resonate with the story of the the founder that's telling or that's in this ad.
(09:01) But like all of them feature very early on in the beginning like the specific pain point that they were experiencing that led them to designing the product. So like very early on in the video that's called out. Um and in some cases it's more than in many cases it's more than one feature. So what's cool about that is you can get a lot of runway from that base unit video.
(09:20) Say how you record a threeminute founder video and they talk about seven different features throughout the entire thing. Each one of those is a hook that resonates with a different person for different reasons. Um, but we've continuously seen the founder type video content do really well and it's I mean in the in the several cases that I pulled it was very much storytelling about like the the pain points that led them to designing the product. Um, which I think just helps connect with the customer better.
(09:43) Ties into one of the questions that was that was asked about do we believe in just individual hero ads or believe in like an ad ecosystem. And I think it I think it plays into the you know we do believe like an ecosystem is an important thing to have because it goes into personas and it's like when you sort of do one thing that's when you get into really risky behavior because you could die really quickly and then you don't have anything else to go on.
(10:05) I mean they kind of drew out like a graphic of like there might be four different types of images that you're all running and that those might lead to like a hero video just like as a concept. I think that's what I'm picking up from this drawing. But yeah, I mean that's definitely part of it. I think it's a lot of people we talk a lot about like cohort or angle based like advertising.
(10:23) I think you have to kind of build your bases that way and not just rely on the heroes cuz I mean like for example for hollow we had one uh with a whitelisting partner this guy Forest Galante who's like a huge YouTuber huge outdoorsman million subs on YouTube awesome guy.
(10:42) We ended up working with him for a few months and his content was like him out doing crazy like he was like with an alligator and he had like the sock over the alligator's face. It was like kind of crazy content. Didn't perform at all. It was like horrible. Then you put him in a podcast like setting and he's literally talking naturally to his friends that he brought socks to on the podcast. RIP.
(11:02) So like that one for us was such a big spike in January and February that it almost like messed with our whole ad ecosystem. It was too much of a hero that then as soon as that started to taper off, it was like, "Oh now we got to like catch back up and get back to baseline." So I think the whole ecosystem is is needed. One other thing on like what's working. People are definitely familiar with all the AI stuff that's kind of going on.
(11:22) V3, which is like Google's tool um to do a lot of this stuff. We've been doing these V3 like 8second hooks in front of our ads specifically during sale periods of just absolutely absurd crazy Um because we make our socks out of alpaca. Like we have all these videos of like people riding on alpacas, gorillas that are like talking to the camera, riding on alpacas, talking about the sale, like just crazy gnarly stuff.
(11:51) And during a sale period, if your goal is like capture attention first, then get into like a hero ad that works well. It does its job of like gaining attention. Um, we've also done like kind of not gray area but sort of a lot of like fake news clips. Um, where there's like a newscaster talking to the camera and they're like, "It's hot as balls here in the US. Like everyone's wearing shitty cotton socks. It's time for you to change.
(12:13) " And then it like goes into like a normal UGC video or whatever. But um, is the gorilla telling the news? Not on that one. That's an idea. Well, so interesting related to that because you mentioned that what wasn't working with him was maybe some of like those crazy visuals that it's like the sock on an alligator. It's like hard to maybe connect that with what the actual benefit is.
(12:31) Like it doesn't and I think we've we talked about this previously where like brands will do these crazy hooks with just the goal of trying to get people to stop, but it's like completely disconnected from what the actual benefit is. related to the founder video point I was making earlier.
(12:48) Some of the things that really stand out in the hooks for the ones that work best is they're they're showing a bad alternative like very clearly like it's a before and after transformation. Um, interestingly enough, the podcast went the the one with with Ryan went live today as we're recording this and I was listening to it on the way to the event and like you guys that's one of the things you guys talked about for landing pages was like showing the transformation of like what a bad product looks like relative to yours. But if you can show it visually as well. I'm picturing um we have a client that sells hoodies and it's like here's the
(13:12) really shitty hoodie I stole from my my boyfriend or husband and then here's the one that I designed that's like substantially better fitting for me. My phone doesn't fall out. Um but it like shows that clear visual very early on which back to the point it's like the alligator has no relevance to why you should buy the sock. But at least showing the bad alternative is like one of these compelling ways to do that.
(13:30) Um, but like I've also been thinking about how do we just like you can get crazy with the visuals as long as it's still connected to like the point of what the point that you're trying to make. Um, so yeah, I know like for for Hollow, we talked about showing really sweaty socks like when you step on the ground and then it comes up like totally um that kind of that kind of thing.
(13:48) Yeah. So, somebody asked Zach, "What's been your number one learning going from marketer to brand owner and dealing with inventory cash flow versus just quote worrying about ads?" Well, I still worry about ads for what it's worth. Are you sure? Yeah, definitely still in motion every day looking at North Beam one day click all all the time.
(14:06) Um, we're gonna die on this bench by the way. Yeah, I know. We definitely are going to flip this over. Yeah. Um, I mean the biggest thing is I think I mean I came from the agency space and not to like put any down on agency space, but it's much easier to not understand like a crazy financial ecosystem in the agency space. You have mostly your team cost, a little bit of software, payroll, pretty straightforward.
(14:29) soon as you go brand side like the amount of expenses and like cash flow that you need to manage um and debt that you need to acquire and when you need to pay that debt back and how you can use credit cards to like float different payments. I didn't anticipate how much of a learning curve that was going to be.
(14:47) Um fortunately like I've been able to meet a lot of great people and a lot of great clients that connected me to like their CFOs and other people that we were able to learn that fairly quickly. But that's been the biggest thing that I didn't think I was going to be so focused on a weekly basis of having to think just about the financials of the business for hours a week.
(15:04) Not just like when you're running an agency or maybe freelancing, you're not necessarily thinking about how am I going to pay all these bills. It's more about how can I do the best work that I can possibly do. So that was really interesting. Like team on brand, uh running a team on a brand versus running a team on an agency is very different as well.
(15:24) Um, on an agency, you're basically just trying to find people to like fit kind of a mold and be like, I want you to be really, really good at this one thing. When you're a brand, especially trying to stay like lean, you need people to be able to do like a million different things. You need someone to be able to look at like inventory, update in Shopify, talk to an Amazon rep, like go like run an errand for you and ship a product out, talk to an influencer. Like, the roles early on in brand are very wide.
(15:50) Um, and you need to learn a lot of things because there's just so many moving pieces. I think that learning to like lead a team like that was kind of hard in the beginning. Um, because normally I'm used to just like, okay, here's your role. I'm going to help you get really good at this one thing and then I can kind of step away.
(16:07) This is just like there's always going to be kind of fires in all the elements because everyone needs to do a lot of things, wear a lot of hats. So, learning to lead it felt a lot different and I think that that's been a big transition too. Who has questions that you'd like to to ask? Shane has the orange mic. So my question specific to a problem for us, but you can extrapolate because I think it's important for like anyone to know.
(16:37) I think a lot of brand owners, especially small brand owners, like we get very focused on individual metrics at times. So the question is representative of like what role does each piece of the funnel play and when they all improve where you'll see improvements that you weren't necessarily targeting. So if we're in the example that we talked about with like click rate that's a struggle for us but then one of your answers was well if you get this landing page that starts to convert better that will then downstream impact other metrics in the account. So like when you look at the full funnel within the ad account and metrics that
(17:08) need to improve, could you just explain what's happening more on like say whether it's the algorithm or how each metric impacts itself so that when you're trying to pursue improvements to things, you're not only focused linearly on one specific metric, but how it all ties together and you'll see improvements across the board by attacking each different stage intentionally.
(17:31) I mean, I would I'll just say before you answer this, since I've listened to these bozos for a bunch of episodes now, that the the big one that thematically comes across and in the founders membership too is is like is offer right away. And that's where I think, you know, is a difference where you spend a lot of time and your team spends a lot of time.
(17:51) You guys can comment on that, but there's a lot of time spent on offer and making sure that the offer and the creative and the landing pages are experimented with and sort of worked on in a consistent basis, but the offer seems to be the leading one. Yeah. And then if the offer in parallel with I would say influencers and creative and like making sure that that's dialed in and there's enough diversity in terms of audience and personas that are pushing those two things forward.
(18:13) And if those two things are being pushed forward properly then or those things are being pushed forward, not both, but that sort of suite then it goes everything else kind of flows with it. And you talked about on two episodes about how just spending more as well once you have something that is working is like actually a big unlock like just looking at the amount that you're spending as a winning metric versus sitting there and being like you know looking at the rorowaz necessarily and you know so yeah I mean did I answer this like in way do you know what you're talking I feel like so we just did this we just
(18:45) did this for hollow in the last few weeks uh we performance was pretty like weak out of June. Selling socks that are perceived as warm weather socks in the summer is hard to do. Um we've learned this now multiple summers in a row, but we keep trying to double every year, but um which is fun for our whole team.
(19:03) What we were thinking about when it came to offer was what can we change that's going to feel like the most dramatic and the easiest to understand. So we were running this buy more, save more, which I've talked a lot about historical episodes a lot about over the years, and we were like, okay, what could we do to simplify this offer? So, it's so much like it's we dumb it down as much as possible. And I'm like, okay, a BOGO is the classic buy one get one is the simplest thing.
(19:27) Unit economics for socks doesn't make sense. We can't do a $20 sock, get one for free, and ship it to you. It just like wouldn't make sense. So, we looked at the unit economics of our product and we're like, hey, if we increase our prices by 33%, which is a huge swing, we increase our prices by 33%.
(19:47) We can run a buy three get three free which seems very simple to understand seems like a great offer externally to customers. Um we will actually produce more net margin at a 2 NC raw than what we were at a 2N ro with the previous buy more say more offer and it was kind of a big shot big swing. Um we didn't run an AB test. We were just like screw it. We're just going to roll this out.
(20:07) and it clicked and it was almost instantaneous where not only did NCO as pop new customer or returning customer came back because it was a whole new offer that was introduced to them that was just very simple to understand. Um and then all of the down kind of downfunnel metrics just started to work better, right? So, not only were our emails getting higher open rates cuz it was like this new punchy offer, um it was easy to understand our I mean like our clickthrough rates in our emails, our CTRs on our texts, it was like the CPMs in the in the ad account started to come down, CPC started to come down,
(20:39) clickthrough rate started to go up, like it had that full shift. So, I mean, I think a lot of the time you have to, and what we were talking about earlier today was you kind of have to build an offer that consumers feel like is a strong, you know, there's a lot of value in what they're getting, but also can make sense for your numbers, make sense for your your margin.
(21:03) So, I think like a lot of people just say, "Here's what my product costs, and here's like I can run it I can only run a 30% discount." I challenge a lot more people to say, "I could adjust my prices." If you're I mean we're going to do 40 million this year which is awesome. Like we're that big and we're still taking these massive swings.
(21:21) So I think if you're sub 50 million in revenue, you can definitely try these things and it might be a complete game changer for your business. So I think a lot of people are afraid to change prices, but even for us it was an absolute crazy unlock for the business. Maybe this isn't the heart of what you're getting at, but I think you can use different metrics and like so if you're looking at clickthrough rate, I think you can come up with a bunch of things that you can do to improve clickthrough rate, but you shouldn't be honed in on just watching clickthrough rate go up as a result of it, right?
(21:45) It's like what is the impact of that on me, AME, uh NCO as a result. Um, so I just, you know, I think I think it's fine to use those things as uh as a guideline or a starting point for inspiration of what to try and fix, but um it shouldn't be the only thing that you watch as a result.
(22:02) Other questions? Nick, you have a question? Do you have any lessons about how to find and hire those people in particular? Um, outside of potentially partnering with someone who's done it and and you know, giving them equity, um, if it's if it's employees that you want to bring onto the brand, are there any common traits or anything like that that you would be looking for for that sort of you have to wear a lot of hats, you have to live in the chaos type like individuals? Yeah, I mean the biggest thing is that our now chief of staff applied originally for a Google Ads job at the agency. And when I did an
(22:35) interview with her, her name is Mary, she's awesome. When I did an interview with her, I could just tell she was a problem solver. She'll get it done no matter what. And I'm like, "Okay, that's the type of person I don't even care if you don't have any ops background, logistics background, any of that As long as you have that mentality of like, can they get it done?" And they're scrappy. Usually they're like a little bit earlier in their career. Those are the people that have been incredible for us. I mean, like we brought in um
(22:58) originally like a junior finance role. He's gonna become our CFO soon. Same type of person, no DTOC background, but he was like a friend of a friend that said, "Hey, I have this young guy. He's a hustler. He works 60 hours a week. No question. He just wants to go solve problems." That is like the best hires you can have early on.
(23:18) Once you get a little more skilled, then you can bring in the specialist. then you can bring in someone where you can actually afford the six figure salary and all that stuff and bonuses um because they've already kind of proven it. I think the other lesson that we've learned too is like we recently brought in a head of growth for one of our newer brands that was at like a 9 figureure business and the great thing about that is he already had been from like 20 million to 9 figures. So he already went through all the problems
(23:42) that we're just learning and like just facing. Um, so he kind of already had that playbook to just like plug him in. Of course, the salary is going to be, you know, uh, be part of that, but it was like a no-brainer.
(24:01) So, I think early on the kind of jack of all trades is just like problem solving people that are willing to just get it done no matter what because a lot of us are, you know, you're doing it for the first time yourself. Like even for me, like I didn't know, I didn't know how to set up a warehouse. I didn't know how to order racking and buy all sorts of random I didn't know how to like source products. I didn't know how to do any of that.
(24:19) So I think as long as you find people that have a good attitude and that they're like open to solve problems actively not have an issue with that, those are like the best early on. Yeah, those I mean we've so we've hired six roles for different organizations this year and last year we hired I think it was 12 roles and um the people that are most successful in the brands that we've worked with and hired are the they have two things. One is they have like a hunger which he's talking about, you know, they want to get it done. usually they're younger.
(24:45) And the the second thing is usually the founder is recording looms daily when they even before they start uh walking through how they think because the biggest disconnect that happens with hiring someone as a founder early on is somebody will come in and this is in agencies too, right? Like you hire that person and then you want them to think like you do and they don't know who you are, but you know that they have this experience, but you need them to take over and you're like, "Well, I need to hire a killer." And you're like, "Well, that's great. There's a lot of killers,
(25:14) but how do they actually think through things the way that you're going to think through this and solve it the way that's going to be this most seamless?" And so I think it's underrated in terms of teaching the person early on even before they maybe even start how you think and how you would solve it because they want to do a good job.
(25:33) Everybody does especially if they're new in the job. And so making sure that you're recording it in some way, screen recording, um mirroring, you know, they're mirroring you for a week, right? A lot of times I always tell people it's a mistake when a new employee starts and you give them a list of tasks and they don't see you in the first week.
(25:51) Like if that's going to be an early hire, like they should literally be attached to your hip and you be like, "You're just going to be quiet for a week and you're just going to take notes because I'm gonna try to basically through osmosis, you're gonna learn." Um, and I made this mistake like, you know, Shane who's standing here, like Shane's our director of operations, like I didn't learn this till a lot later where like, you know, he eventually over time learned how I thought and it was too late. Uh, and but he's like now has figured that out and
(26:16) could write an email like I could. But that's what taught me to do that with other people. And those people that are really killing it in those roles, they understand what the founder is looking for and they can almost like, yeah, write an email like them or write a Slack reply like them.
(26:29) They're going to make that decision. And the final thing I'll say is there generally obviously when you bring in a new hire, there's a lot of anxiety about bringing that person in and there's not necessarily a lot of, you know, you don't have trust with that person yet.
(26:49) And I think because of the way all of us operate, it's always better to give them autonomy and tell them that they can screw up and give them that permission and like be like, "Look, you're going to make mistakes. That's great and I can't wait for you to do that and like I'm going to be watching." But also like go nuts. It's okay. Be bold, right? Because I think that has a lot of impact. Um because that's ultimately what you're looking for. You're looking to make your life easier. Yeah.
(27:11) I mean, tactically, like, go find a bunch of companies that are where you want to be on LinkedIn and find the people that work in the positions that you think you're hiring for and just DM them. And then in that process, like make sure the interview covers that they can show you that they know the process that took them from where you are to where you want to go.
(27:30) Um because like I we found this just even hiring for the agency like in the interview process I it sounds so stupid but it's like if you can't explain to me how you've done creative strategy in the past and you're a media buyer that's going to be working with creative strategist that has to make requests to creative strategist and you can't tell me how you're doing it today.
(27:46) It's like okay all right I could teach you that but I'd pref like in this case like we'd prefer to hire for that. Um, and I think, you know, in some of these like maybe zero to seven figure kind of brands or approaching eight figure brands, um, a lot of people are scrappy, so they're probably used to being scrappy and being jacks of all trades. Um, so you might just be able to find somebody by doing that.
(28:05) So like what is your like team structure on the brand side? Like how do you set that up? And also when you are finding those like really talented people that have taken a a brand from 20 million to 100 million, like how are you finding those people? And like what does that look like? Yeah.
(28:23) So, um I might butcher this slightly, but um we have so myself and then I have a partner in both of the main two brands that we run. Technically, we have a portfolio three. One's kind of like on autopilot right now. It's smaller. We're mostly focused on the the top two of those. I have a business partner in both.
(28:41) One's 50/50 and the other one, which is hollow, I own 85% of and my partner is like not involved in the day-to-day. Um he was early on co-founder. he kind of came up with the product idea and I ran with it from there. Um, so for that one I'm basically CEOing that business through and through. Um, we have uh a head of finance.
(29:00) Um, and that head of finance kind of floats across all the businesses. Um, and then we have a chief of staff uh who I mentioned earlier, Mary, who kind of floats across all of them. She's mostly right now building like a lot of SOPs, a lot of processes because as we've continued to hire just like things have gotten messy.
(29:20) So her job right now is just like clean all of that up and add a lot of clarity to everyone's like role, their responsibilities, all that stuff. Um and then it really starts to move into like the growth team which we have Max who's here who's our VP of growth and then we have two head of growths on each brand. So this is where like the brands start to really split.
(29:40) So um yeah, head of growth on each brands. Uh we have uh head of creative strategy. Uh currently we had one but now we're splitting it into two. So each brand will have a head of creative strategy. Um and then each brand will start to have creative strategists, editors, designers. And that whole team is offshore in Argentina. Um that we've built up in like the last 3 months.
(30:05) It's a 15 person team now of strategists, designers, editors. For the other brands, we just have like head of ops. CX is a completely separate team. We use an agency now called Horatio. Um, we tried to have it in-house and then it kind of imploded on itself. Um, so we just ended up hiring this agency, Horatio, who's been great. So, I don't know, there's 10 to 15 reps on each brand.
(30:26) Um, and then we use Homestead for retention. Um, so Homestead runs all of our retention for all the brands, email, SMS, direct mail. Um, I'm trying to think what else I'm missing. Ops, finance, growth. That's mostly it. Yeah. Yeah. And then I'm paid as a $100,000 a month. Yeah. Consultant. Really really eats into the P&L. Yeah.
(30:50) Brad's free. Yeah. Yeah. Brad's free though. Yeah. Just But yeah. And then so like one of the brands I have like a coco on and then Hollow's I'm kind of in charge of that one. So um that's been really interesting having a co-founder versus not in the day-to-day. I'd highly recommend having one.
(31:08) Um, it feels really good when you have someone else who is as driven and pushing as hard as you are because obviously being a founder and like having multiple businesses, there's days where you're just off. And so when you're off or you have a family thing going on or whatever, just have someone else continuing to keep the foot on the gas has been really great. So, um, I highly recommend that. And the thing the decisions that I made on that front is I know growth, I know finance well enough.
(31:28) Uh, ops okay. I really wanted a product and brand person. So like my two co-founders on both brands are products brand through and through. Um and that's been that's been huge because that's not really a skill set of mine. One thing that's interesting, you know, I think it'd be interesting to chat about with everybody here.
(31:46) You know, I think all of us uh I heard from a lot of people last night at our dinner uh about how busy we all are and how much we have going on. And I think it's interesting to just talk about uh balance and you know how you're staying sane um and what kind of things that you're doing. Like Zach, I know you've taken up meditation this year. You did say you wanted to talk about this on a podcast. So this is not a total left field. That's a left field though.
(32:12) But you're but you know doing some meditation. Um, obviously Brad, I know you love a good workout. Like because I I do think that mental clarity is something that really a lot of us struggle with and obviously we all struggle with imposter syndrome. All of us like I don't know. I mean still every day you're like I don't know what I'm doing.
(32:32) I literally why do I do this? Why do I run this? Right. Um I think that's important to call out. What are what are other things that you think it would be important to just like bring up in terms of self-care that really contribute to mental clarity and helping you make better decisions? Uh the idea of balance is an interesting one and like I think it's pretty personal for how you define balance and so I think and it probably changes dayto-day. So I think just not beating yourself up over how you define it but then just like listening to the feedback
(33:02) from the categories in your life that you care about, right? So, like for me, I don't really do anything outside of work and like hang out with my family because like those are the things that I care about, you know, and working out. Um, but like I'm comfortable with not having a ton of hobbies cuz like I just get enjoyment out of those core things.
(33:21) Um, and I think a lot of the I don't know, there's like competing fe feedback on both sides where it's like some people are like you need to go all in and do this and then some people are like you have to have balance like whatever. Um, and I just you have to kind of define it for yourself because um otherwise you'll go crazy. Yeah. You can't do it all. What about you? Yeah.
(33:39) I mean, I think there's like seasons in life where you kind of have to decide if you're going to go all in or you could pull back. I feel like I've had like some of those where there's been moments where I'm crazy anxiety like to the point that I'm like, I don't even want to work right now where I'm like, okay, have to pull back.
(33:56) Maybe let's go to therapy for the first time. Let's get into meditation a little bit. Um, and then there's seasons where, you know, you're everything feels right, feels good. And to Brad's point, like I like a lot of us here, like are like work, like what we do for work. And you can put in a lot of hours and enjoy it. And I think there's that.
(34:13) I mean, the other part of it too, like for what it's worth, is a lot of you have kids, and I think family is like an important thing. And I think comparing yourself, bringing that up to people that don't, I think is a very important thing to take into consideration. We have don't have kids as of right now.
(34:32) Um, but I think that's one thing that I've had a lot of questions on from people. They're like, "How can you work so much?" And why do you work so much? It's like, well, I can clock in from 7 to 7 every day if I want to. And but I don't know. I think finding balance is becoming more of an important thing now that I'm getting a little bit older and I've had a lot of reps and had a lot of, you know, low-key mental breakdowns over the years of just like horrible clients or inventory gets lost or stolen or whatever. So, I feel like once you have a lot of those hard points, you kind of realize it's fine to
(35:01) find your find your own balance. And a way to mess with pull-ups. Yeah. I mean, I think it's I think a lot of it is something that I've talked about a lot too, which maybe some of you have heard, is like making sure that you give yourself the time to have quality of thought because that's a competitive advantage.
(35:19) And that's something that I don't think is talked about enough in our industry that, you know, uh, taking time and whatever that could mean, that could mean an hour, that could mean all afternoon. uh but by sitting there and trying to overoptimize or trying to overthink it or whatever, it's not going to actually help you build the business or or the you know the self that you want.
(35:44) Um you know cuz ultimately I just had a friend on our porch, Gracie and I, uh who's totally into meditation just came back from a retreat and the retreat was called uh the journey back home. Is that what it was? And it was all about coming back to yourself. And I think that's so interesting like all right so I'm old obviously in this industry. I'm 40 and it's a lot of it is I feel like I'm learning now who I actually am finally and it's like what I actually need and I think that a lot of us don't go through that. A lot of us come through and you know we're talking about ecom and we're getting into it and we're
(36:10) like yeah we're scaling that we're doing that creative but then I'm always like so what have you done for you lately? What have you been up to? It's like uh you know I don't know not not too much. But I think it's like you can also make a conscious choice like Brad of saying this is where I'm going to spend my time and I don't go outside of that. Right.
(36:26) Um literally don't go outside. Yeah. Literally don't go outside. This is a lot of outside time for you. But but like also making sure that you're caring for yourself. And I think that's important to mention like here at the end of the Fox Founders meet up too because I think that's one of the things that we stand for which is building long-term businesses that help us build lives. That's that's a difference.
(36:45) All right. That's not I mean like we're all here to make money. Of course, we're all here to grow grow it, but I think growing it the right way and growing ourselves the right way is really important um to think about that. So anyway, just had to go on a soap box a little bit. Beautiful. Love it. Love it. Anybody want to bring anything else up? No, I thought that was great. Okay.
(37:03) All right. Well, that was great. Good. Thank you for uh listening to this episode and uh let us know if you have any feedback. Cool. [Music] The only way that we grow this podcast is by you sharing it with your friends. Honestly, like reviews kind of don't really mean anything too much anymore.
(37:27) They're really meaningful, but they don't do a lot for the growth of the podcast. Um, and so sharing YouTube links, sharing Spotify links, sharing Apple, whatever we call it under the podcast app. Now, anything you can share, the better we're going to be. Um, guys, anything else you want to say on this? Yeah, please go check us out on YouTube. Rack up those views for us. We'd love to see it. And then subscribe.
(37:46) Make sure to subscribe on YouTube as well. And I relentlessly refresh the YouTube comments because it dictates my mental health for the day. So, please say something nice about all of us. Thank you everyone for listening. Honestly,
