[Top Agency Series] Why Your eCommerce Store Isn’t Growing or Profiting With Elumynt’s William Harris

William Harris is the Founder and CEO of Elumynt, an e-commerce growth agency focused on profit via hyper scaling. Elumynt has been featured in Inc. Magazine as an Inc. 5000 Winner and Best Workplace Winner. William has helped acquire 13 companies, including one that sold to GoDaddy. He’s also published over 200 articles on the topic of e-commerce in Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Shopify, and more.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• What is Elumynt, and what services does the company offer?
• William Harris explains the discovery process for e-commerce stores
• William discusses his journey from the nursing field to eventually becoming an agency owner
• How to get your acquisition cost down to $1 per customer
• Tips to grow your business through social media
• What makes a company the perfect client fit?
• Creatives that William admires from afar
• William talks about work-life balance
• How to achieve a best-workplace environment

In this episode…

The e-commerce space is booming because it gives consumers the freedom to access numerous stores and brands from their personal electronic devices. If you’re fortunate enough to have an e-commerce store, you probably started it for that very reason. But what happens when your store isn’t profitable?

Entrepreneur and e-commerce expert William Harris recommends conducting a comprehensive discovery process. This usually entails analyzing your strategies to maximize your advertising profitability. So how does that work?

Learn more in this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast as Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with the Founder and CEO of Elumynt, William Harris, to discuss growing e-commerce businesses. William talks about his journey into the e-commerce world, using social media to expand a business, work-life balance, and tips to achieve a winning workplace environment.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• William Harris on LinkedIn
• Elumynt

Special Mention(s):

• Gino Wickman on LinkedIn
• Christopher Voss on LinkedIn
• Chad Rubin on LinkedIn
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
• Titans of Direct Response
• Power Pony
• Dean Snell on LinkedIn
• Snell Golf
• Liquid Death
• David Mortensen on LinkedIn
• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Related episode(s):

• “[Podcast Series] 5 Types of Content You Should Be Creating Now (But Probably Aren’t)”
• “Leading With Passion With Gino Wickman Founder of Eos Worldwide”
• “[One Question] Hostage Negotiator Loses the Hostage With Chris Voss of Black Swan Ltd”
• “Negotiation Tactics From FBI Agent Christopher Voss, Founder of Black Swan Ltd”
• “[One Question] Tips to Increase Sales with Chad Rubin Co-Founder of Skubana”

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz, here, founder of Inspired Insider, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I’m with William Harris of Elumynt. It’s spelled differently. So we’re going to check it out. It’s ELUMYNT.com, which I’ll formally introduce you, William, in a second. And before I do, I always like to point out other episodes people to check out of the podcast since I know that you run EOS. I did an interview with Gino Wickman. Check that one out. It’s fantastic. We were talking about on our last conversation, Chris Voss and one of my favorite books of all time, Never Split the Difference. And he has some amazing takeaways there. And Chad Rubin, right Chad Rubin actually introduced us. And he was your nemesis at one point, when,

when he was running Skubana, which he is now sold. And I interviewed him when at the PROSPER show that we were both at. And now he runs prophecy. But we’ll get more in about Chad Rubin and your rivalry but now you’re not rivals anymore. But check out those and many other episodes at inspiredinsider.com. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25 and Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to your dream 100 relationships and how do we do that we help you run your podcast we do strategy, accountability and full execution of a business’s podcast. We’ve been doing it for over a decade. You know, for me, William, the number one thing in my life is relationships. And I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way to do that than the profile of people and companies I most admire in this planet and share with the world what they’re doing. And so if you thought about podcasting, you should have questions, go to Rise25.com. We also did an episode on the five different types of episodes every podcast should create. So I encourage people to check that out. Because I feel like I repeat that five times a day every day. So it’s easier if you just listen to it. So my voice doesn’t go hoarse. But without further ado, William, thanks for joining me, William Harris is the Founder and CEO of Elumynt, which is an e-commerce growth agency focused on profit, not just return on adspend. And we’re gonna talk and dig deep on that because they have a really strong philosophy on that. And he’s helped 13 companies get acquired, including one that sold to GoDaddy and another, it sold for nearly $800 million. And Elumynt was recently featured as an Inc 5000 Winner, as well as an Inc best workplace winner. And I want to talk more about one of the things you do from a best workplace standpoint. And he’s published over 200 articles in e-commerce advertising leadership, and Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Shopify and many more. And basically, I guess, when I do my research, I think of your team is helping businesses in hyper scaling. Right. So

William Harris 3:21

thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks, Dr. Jeremy. It’s great to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 3:25

So tell me about Elumynt and exactly what you do.

William Harris 3:30

Yeah, I think you, you summed it up very well, I appreciate it. The biggest focus for us when we’re looking at growing e-commerce stores, which is what we’re focused on. One of the things that we noticed that I had a SaaS background, before we got into e-commerce was a lot of e-commerce stores were so focused on like the just the immediate transaction of what was taking place that they were missing out on what went on taking that to the next level. But beyond. Um, one of the things that we found is that a lot of people weren’t looking at necessarily the profitability of their advertising, they’re looking at their return on adspend, which was just looking at top line revenue, divided by adspend. But you know, let’s just say that you’ve got one product that is $200. And let’s say your margin on that $200 product is $25. Let’s say that you have a $100 product that has a margin of $50 on it, well, you might actually sell a whole lot more and get a higher return on adspend by selling the $200 product. But you’re actually, you know, half is profitable on that. So we’d like to look at how do we actually maximize the profitability of what we’re doing from advertising. And that could be on a unit basis, like kind of what I just explained it, it could also be in an aggregate basis. So there’s a lot of ways that we go in and to do that. I don’t know how deep we want to get into the tactics and the techniques, neat that were doing, but there’s a lot of ways to focus on that being the primary driver,

Jeremy Weisz 4:54

Welld talk about, you know, William, it brings up a good point because I’m sure you’re discovered reprocess is very comprehensive, because you have to figure all these things out. And I’m sure a lot of companies don’t figure this stuff out. There’s like, give us your products, you know better than me. And let’s, let’s get people to buy these things. So what does the discovery process look like that you can kind of figure out these really key elements that focus on profit and not just return on adspend?

William Harris 5:24

Yeah, so for you know, a lot of businesses, we actually want to get some type of like a spreadsheet, or if they have like a data feed of their cogs, that’s a big help for us, because then we can look at at least specific to the skews, then we can actually feed that information back into Google. And we can make sure that even not just us, but Google is optimizing towards the products that are more profitable for them, which gives it it’s a whole nother level of excitement there. But otherwise, we’re just looking at ideally getting the basic numbers from them, such as like, what is your cogs as a percentage of sales on an average basis? What is your overhead on average, what is your shipping cost? On average, what is your returns costs on average, but like at least get some kind of like an analog to your p&l. But ideally, we’d like to get to the p&l is usually we don’t get into p&l, before we sign clients getting some kind of an analog, but then once we signed clients, probably about 40% of our customers actually share their p&l directly with us. And what’s interesting is, that’s not something that even traditionally, the marketing teams were even aware of a lot of times, and so the marketing team has their objective, in they’re not even aware of that. And we had this, this customer, and it was interesting, where the first month we came on board, we were able to scale them significantly. And our bill for that I want to say it went from like $10,000 is what they were used to paying for the advertising management. And our bill was maybe $20,000, you know, almost like double what they’re paid or something like that. And I remember the marketer at this company was like, wow, like, That’s twice what we’re used to paying, like, I’m gonna get in trouble for this. Like, you know, this isn’t, you know, this isn’t good kind of thing. And I said, Wait a minute, wait a minute. Remember, we talked about this, before we started, we met with your finance team, which is a big part of what we try to do before we even you know, move forward with the business meet with whoever is on finance. And we said we were able to spend X amount more. So you made this much more top line revenue, subtract the cogs, subtract your overhead, subtract your returns, costs, subtract your shipping, check the adspend, subtract the management fee, and you actually made about $800,000 more in a single month after starting to work with us. Is it okay that it costs an extra $10,000 To make that $800,000 and more profit? And he was like, Well, yeah, you put it that way. And I was like, Yeah, that’s exactly how I’d like to put it.

Jeremy Weisz 7:44

I love that. Because, you know, there could be some agency owners listen to this, right? And talking about value based pricing. Right. So how did you, you know, because you could have used to be like, Listen, I don’t want to ruffle any feathers. Let’s just keep it at the 10,000. I’m sure. On the surface, you get pushed back. But when you dig deeper and do Oh, you make 800,000 You pay us an extra 10. Is that okay? Right? Was it always like when you first started the agency? What were you doing? Yeah, so

William Harris 8:21

you know, we still build based on a percentage of ad spend. And so like the the framework, it hasn’t changed since what we’re doing. And I’d say that we’ve we test that a lot of other billing options. One that we tested out was the percentage of revenue, which a lot of people test it out. There were problems with that. And one of the problems with percentage of revenue is, well, how are you going to define that revenue, you ideally want to define it as revenue that was directly impacted by ads? Well, Google took credit for it, Facebook took credit for it TikTok took credit for email took credit for it, but it was still just one sale. And so that got muddy, whereas the ad spend, it’s a fact, as long as we’re saying we’re optimizing the ad spend towards what you ultimately want, which is I don’t want to spend more money to not make more money, I actually want to make more profit at the end of the day. So if we can show that what we’re doing did that, then we’re at least in a good spot, but from a billing perspective, it’s the same.

Jeremy Weisz 9:09

You know, willing, when you talk about, you know, you really want to impact the bottom line in the profit. And you probably do things differently than a lot of agencies because you’re asking for different things. Do you ever get pushback or objections? When you’re like, we want to see the p&l? Yeah, no company say it? Well, there’s

William Harris 9:28

there’s two types. There’s, there’s one, there’s the companies that are smaller and could show us the p&l but just are more private and just don’t don’t know if they’re ready to do that, right. Like they’re not maybe transparent with what they’re doing. And then you’ve got the much much bigger companies where it’s such a big organization, and even the person we’re talking to on the marketing team doesn’t have anywhere close to that information. And so there’s just like, we just don’t even know how to make that happen. And so there’s two options. If there’s somebody that’s willing to give us an analog to it kind of like what I said was like, Can you give us a rough idea of what What your percentage that we can at least have a model that we can march out. And if something changes significantly from that model, we’re still showing that what we’re doing should be more profitable towards for you. Unless something changes, if all of a sudden you just hired 10 more people, well, we need to adjust our model, then accordingly, we don’t need to know the exact numbers. And so that’s the easiest way to get around that objection, if that’s still an issue for people. And it rarely is, but if it is, we just don’t work with them. Not because we don’t want to, but they’re just not ready for what we offer. And there plenty of other agencies that can go work with that don’t get into the bottom line, and then that’s fine.

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