Jeremy Weisz 10:34
You know, will you get a very interesting trajectory and path in your career? Okay, well, we’ll get into a little bit but, you know, started off in nursing. Yeah. And then went to e-commerce, and then went to what you’re doing now, when you were young, growing up, what did you want to be when you grew up?
William Harris 10:57
So the number one thing, and I’d still say that I kind of still say this is to be an inventor, I just like coming up with new ideas and doing things that other people hadn’t thought of. And I like doing it from a different perspective. And, and so for lack of a clear way of explaining this. I like to study even a lot within string theory and things like that. And I’ve got some ideas about stuff there. And I’ve written like some different math proofs and stuff like that, where I just I like looking at things and trying to figure out how to solve problems. I also really like helping people. And so all of those things that I’ve done along the way, we’re solving problems and helping people and now we’re just doing that in a different environment, if that makes sense.
Jeremy Weisz 11:32
And that’s what happened kind of transition you in e-commerce, you were in nursing, and you’re trying to figure out how to solve the shift issue. Exactly. And so what happened from there?
William Harris 11:46
Yeah, so I was, at the time, a per diem nurse. And so what that meant was, I didn’t work on a specific floor, I’d actually been trained, I started off an open heart got trained in every unit of the hospital, essentially, the only thing I didn’t do was maternity or pediatrics. So I stayed out of that. It’s not my cup of tea. But so I could call into the hospital every night and say, Hey, do you need anybody literally anywhere in the hospital? And there was always a need, right? As you can imagine, that’s hard to staff, because you don’t know who’s gonna get sick tonight, or how many people or what floor needs somebody and, and so it was easy for me to come in. And you know, well, now I’m making double time or whatever. And that was good. And I enjoyed it, because I was, again, helping people. But I started to realize it was like, Well, this is a problem at our hospital. And it’s hard for the hospital that and it means that people aren’t necessarily getting the care that they would all like to get as well, because it’s like, well, they were maybe understaffed on this or this. And it would be better if they weren’t. And I realized, well, that’s also a problem that a lot of other hospitals, what if I could help solve that problem. So I actually started meeting with a guy named Chad Halverson. And at the time, he ran a company called when I work because I wanted to use his API he had already built out like the scheduling software, but it was for everybody else outside of the hospital, you could use it for the hospital, but it really wasn’t built in a way that would sustain the way that the hospitals worked and functioned. And to take this back, this was 2000. Boy, maybe 2014 2013, I think, you know, a lot of the scheduling at the hospital is taking place on paper and pencil, because it was just on the flies. They’re like, Oh, we just discharged this patient. We just got these two admits. And so it’s just not even excel, right paper and pencil. And so when I wanted to use his API to build out the rest of what I was doing, we had a lot of meetings and started talking and he said, Listen, I also see that you have a degree in marketing. And I see some of these other things that you’ve done. And I started this website called six fingered nurse, and they were the these other things I had done within the space. And he said, we’re, we just got our VC funding our first round our Series A, I’d like for you to actually come and lead our marketing team, clearly you understand the concept and the problem, and how you’re trying to address it. What if you just do that? And so that’s kind of what led into my, my foray into SAS.
Jeremy Weisz 14:06
And so well, that was that Sellbrite, or is that? Yeah, no, that
William Harris 14:11
was that company called When I Work? Sellbrite came a little bit later when I officially went out on my own.
Jeremy Weisz 14:16
So then how did we get, you know, then you you’re in the e-commerce universe, right with celebrate?
William Harris 14:23
Yeah, so the e-commerce transition happened after I left when I worked. There was an e-commerce Store that I knew. They were, you know, they were growing pretty fast. They were still on Magento at the time, and the website was bad. And they said, Hey, could you help us grow our website? And they were actually doing pretty well. I don’t think I’m allowed to say how well but they were doing pretty well. And I said, I looked at what they had and I was like there’s literally nothing I could do that won’t grow your store. Like, despite all the they were doing, it was just it was you know, abysmal the marketing that they had going on. So I came on board with them and we expanded I’m really fast, I want to say that we went from maybe 3000 products to 70,000 products in the matter of like, you know, six months or something just ridiculous. And so as we continue to grow there, I was writing about what I was doing on Fast Company, Entrepreneur and different websites. And people came out and said, hey, well, can you help us grow our, our business? And he’s like, Sure, why not? I know people who can I can pull in to do different things. And I like helping so yeah, I’ll do that. I’m one of those companies, we’ll Sellbrite and Sellbrite at the time was out of IDEA Lab out in Pasadena. So if you’re familiar with Bill Gross, just an awesome incubator there. And when I came on board there, they so their inventory and listing management software for e-commerce stores. So if you’re on Amazon, and eBay and your Shopify store, you’ve got one product left, you know, all of those need to know that. So if you just sold out on the store, you need to make sure that that inventory is now sent over to Amazon and eBay say, hey, there’s nothing more in stock. And so there’s a lot of stuff that’s going on there. Well, that’s where Chad Rubin and I became, you know, arch enemies. If you those are, those
Jeremy Weisz 16:10
are mine. We’re not here. So
William Harris 16:11
I’ll take credit. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we were competitors, right. It was like very direct competitors. And here’s a fierce competitor. And I appreciated that I think that’s what you and I talked about, it’s like, I like people that, you know, push you and challenge you, and they’re not gonna let you have the easy road out. And so, you know, we had a lot of fun and celebrate eventually was the one that was acquired by GoDaddy, I know, Skubana, then Chad’s company was acquired. And, you know, there was a, it was a good run, there was a good group of us for a few other products that were similar that we, you know, we’d meet up at the different trade shows and have a good time, you know, happily happily competing, if that makes sense.
Jeremy Weisz 16:47
So, we’ll all go to how do you grow e-commerce companies now? But back when that company was on Magento, and you were helping these, what were you doing then to help grow some of these e-commerce companies?
William Harris 17:01
Yeah, I mean, at the start for them, that’s where we started transitioning into, you know, looking at growth a little bit differently. At the time, I feel like, you know, the industry in e-commerce was still very young. And a lot of people that were in it, where there was just a lot of like, let’s say, new founders who got into it, they had this idea, and not because they understood business concepts or things, right. And so one of the things that we were looking at from them is, you know, if we begin to acquire new customers willing to pay maybe a little bit more to acquire that new customer is, we’re not looking at necessarily making money on month one, if you have to make money on that first transaction, maybe you’re paying $10 to acquire that customer. But if you look at their 90 day, LTV, you might say, well, here’s what I’m going to make within 90 days on them. Why don’t we actually spend $25 to acquire now you can go and be a lot more aggressive. Whereas a lot of businesses, you know, their first focus is they say, how do we get the, you know, acquisition cost to be as low as it possibly can? And it’s like, well, I can get your acquisition cost down to $1. If you’re willing to only take one customer a month, if that’s what you want, right? How about we instead see how can we maximize the overall profitability at scale, that would be the more ideal way. And so that’s kind of one of the things we started looking at was like, how do we make sure that we go after more net new people in a more aggressive way, knowing that those people end up benefiting us down the line. So we started looking at more LTV, looking at our CAC, a customer acquisition cost, and using that to help grow that. And the way to do that then was, you know, through through advertising is one of the best ways to do that. So, you know, advertising on Facebook ads, I’m trying to think, you know, TikTok was even around then. So I’m trying to remember the channels that we use. But a lot of it came down to making sure that how do we go after those people. And this started coming down to, you know, even partnerships. So this company was called dollar hobbies, and they sold RC cars and drones. And so how do we actually find out where everybody is doing? The different races? RC car races? How do we, how do we sponsor the races? How do we get involved with them that way, they they break parts, and they need new parts, they’re coming to us, right? And it’s very similar to maybe what NASCAR is doing right? You’ve got people that are sponsoring the cars and stuff like that, and just getting involved, really into the hobby. The idea there is like if you’re involved with your customers lifestyle, and their hobby, you know, their needs better, and then you’re there and they want to help support you ongoing even if your price was a little bit higher, they just liked that you’re a part of what’s going on to what made
Jeremy Weisz 19:32
you think and really measure it on lifetime value of a customer and other people weren’t.
William Harris 19:43
Coming from the SaaS background. So in SaaS, one of the most common things is to look at your CAC LTV ratio, right or LTV CAC depending on which direction you want to go with it. But you know, a lot of times people throw out a number of needs to be three to one or it needs to be four to one well, it doesn’t necessarily matter at least on the e-commerce side, whether it’s a three to one, four to one, whatever you’re talking about, but other understanding, like, where do you need to be for you to be profitable, a three to one for one company might be profitable. But a three to one for somebody else means that they’re losing money. And so just figure out where that number is based on their overhead and expenses and cogs and stuff, right. And so it’s just that idea of figuring out this is just a fun math problem. And I gotta give credit to the guys who I was with, they’re at dollar hobbies, they’re also geniuses in their own right, where they had developed an algorithm that would sell through different parts at different velocities. So that way, if there were, you know, maybe like, one thing comes in with like, 10 different parts? Well, if you’re continually replacing those 10 parts, but this one you’ve got, like an overstock of and this one keeps selling through, it would adjust the prices on the fly to make sure that we were always maximizing the, you know, all of these parts moving at the same time, too. But yeah, so it came down to just saying, how do we look at this from that SaaS model that I’ve been using it when I work in things and say, how do we apply that to what we’re doing here in e-commerce, you know?
Jeremy Weisz 21:00
Yeah. And that’s what you look at is the profit and then lifetime value. And I remember because I went to one of my friends, Brian Kurtz had a conference is Titans of Direct Response Conference, and one of the session leaders that was presenting was Greg rancor of proactive. And you know, that’s a billion dollar company. And he was talking exactly about what you’re saying is, I think I don’t remember the exact numbers, but they wouldn’t be profitable, let’s say until MONTH 14, but they knew month 14. So they, they could spend outspend all of their competitors, just like what you’re saying, because they were focused on lifetime value not optimizing the first purchase. It was so as like, for me that’s like, whoa, blew my mind. You were thinking about this way before? Well, yeah.
William Harris 21:48
I mean, I don’t know if I was thinking about way before he was or anything either, right. It’s just like one of those things that a lot of people weren’t thinking.
Jeremy Weisz 21:55
I mean, you’re talking for me about Greg rancor.
William Harris 21:58
And so, you know, to your point, though, I love that you said, it’s like, you could outspend your competitors. And that’s the thing to recognize is that, like, if you’re coming in here, and you’re not being willing to be aggressive about acquiring those customers, you’re competing against a lot of other people that are thinking about it this way, and you’re just not going to be competitive in the marketplace that.
Jeremy Weisz 22:16
Let’s talk about, I want to walk through a couple examples so people can understand a little bit more about what you do. Let’s talk about power pony. I don’t own one, but But tell me about it.
William Harris 22:29
I mean, you should it’s fun. I’ve written one. So it’s a it’s a children’s, like rideable. It’s a, it’s a pony, right? You can write on and it’s a lot of fun. It goes fast, I want to say like 20 miles an hour or something, right. And it was invented by this girl Mia and I try to remember how old she is. I think she’s 12 now but when she invented it, she was quite a bit younger, maybe eight. And we helped launch them. So we got to start with them from you know, first sale, very first sale, which was exciting. And in you know, we’ve had to do too much with them now. Um, so one of our customers in slash partner, Jimmy Clark, he actually has a number of brands that he runs just like, let’s say top level growth for and he brought us in and somebody that we’ve done a lot of work with on a lot of other brands. And you know, he says, Hey, these are the best guys to work with for growing your store. So he brought us into it. And one of the things that I love is and we can’t take credit necessarily for these, but as a result of the ads that we’re doing, these things are getting seen by a lot of people right and, and Jimmy’s very influential and has helped them get on a lot of other really great shows, you know, the Today Show and stuff. But Paris Hilton’s mom, Kathy Hilton, said that she saw these on Instagram as what I remember hearing, she saw these on Instagram. Well, you know, we run the Instagram ads. And so I’d like to think that it was an ad that we were running. She didn’t specify which things she saw. But so as a result, she bought some for Paris Hilton. And then she also bought one just recently for Rihanna has boy that was just born. And so it’s just really, I don’t know, it’s just a fun brand to see how it grows. It’s such an exciting toy. But that’s one of those examples where it’s like, you know, good advertising has all, let’s say the direct click through attribution, but there’s a lot of people that are also doing other things. And there’s a number of sales that are happening as a result of people just seeing the brand out there in the environment.
Jeremy Weisz 24:31
Yeah, it starts to become mainstream, the more people see it and get it in the, you know, the stats are, you know, they’re selling a certain number of them. It’s gonna fall into some influencers hand at some point.
William Harris 24:44
Yeah, exactly. Which makes it you know, then continue to have even more legs and take off even more.
Jeremy Weisz 24:51
Um, let’s talk about a different industry golf, for example.
William Harris 24:56
Sure. So one of my favorite clients in the golf space We’ve got a few that I really like but the one that I think just stands out for me is Snell, Dean Snell, the owner of Snell, actually is the inventor of the Titleist pro v1 golf ball. And he also has his name on the patents for I think, like 30 other golf balls. Like I mean, this is the guy that designs the best golf balls in the world. And he went out on his own and started his own company Snell Golf, and designed yet again, the next best golf ball in the world. So when I say next best, I mean, like not second best, the best golf ball, right. And so my golf spy, I think, has done reviews, like, you know, third party reviews saying that this out hits the title is pro v1, it’s a fantastic golf ball for less money than what you would pay for the title of pro v1. And they’re another example where I can remember them coming to us before and they were killing it on, you know, let’s say like, you know, in pro shops and stuff like that. And when the director of marketing, Jason came to us and said, you know, hey, do you think you can help us grow, and I remember looking at the brand, looking at what they were doing on marketing, and without saying, you know, where they were at, they were spending next to nothing in comparison. And it was one of those things was like, Absolutely, you have exact all the markets of what we want to see, which is, you know, you’re you’re, you’ve got product market fit, you’ve got the right product, you’ve got the inventory that you need, it’s just a matter of now being able to take that tell that story in the right way in an ad format, and make sure we get that in front of the right people. And then things you know, take off from there. Which actually reminds me of a conversation I had recently about Liquid Death. Are you familiar with them?
Jeremy Weisz 26:39
I’ve heard of that is someone was telling me about it? Is it like a seltzer water? Yeah, I
William Harris 26:44
mean, I think it’s just basically Canned Water. Like I maybe there’s some seltzer too, I don’t even remember. But it’s just water, right? Like there’s nothing else special about it, it is no different than any of the other waters that basically exist out there. Other than, you know, it’s an akan, the thing that sets them apart, though, from a product perspective, it’s like the product is the same, their marketing is absolutely insane. If people haven’t seen their marketing, you gotta go look at it. It’s it’s very irreverent. But it gets attention. And the thing that I think I really appreciate about it is that there are some brands where it doesn’t actually matter who runs their ads, Liquid Death would be an example of that, where you could put a five year old in that ad account, and it’s going to perform very well, because they just have the branding that’s going to do well. Then there’s the flip side, where you have the other brands where it doesn’t matter who’s running the ads, there is a significant limit to what kind of results are going to have. For us, it’s about finding that right mix, we’re coming alongside to help people that maybe they have a really they have some kind of product market fit. And they’re saying we want to, you know, accelerate what we’re doing. And so then we’re trying to figure out, how do we maximize that on a technical level? And then how do we begin maximizing that on like your product, offering mix, things like that we don’t get into product offering or things like that, but we’re at least trying to look at that and point you in the right direction. We say, here’s where we can plateau from an technical advertising perspective. And here’s where we think, you know, the other gaps are within what you’re doing. And here’s the people that we think that can solve those for you.
Jeremy Weisz 28:11
So when we look at who is a perfect fit for you, one, the company has product market fit. You mentioned it, you know, with the Snell Golf that they had the inventory, infrastructure capabilities figured out. And for some, there may be gaps, you see some gaps in their marketing, what else is a checkmark that would be that you look for it’s a perfect fit for you as a client. Yeah,
William Harris 28:44
perfect fit is gonna be on Shopify, we do have clients that are on Magento, we have clients that are on you know.net, like other other versions of e-commerce, but for us perfect fit is Shopify, there’s just so many reports that we have built out very, very nicely for the Shopify infrastructure that that I like. But otherwise, none of those other things are going to take us away from what we think is is a worthwhile client. Ideal Client size, spending at least $100,000 a month, only because the level of what we’re going to do within their ads account works significantly better if they have, like data to play with where, you know, I think I told you about the one client where we can show that there’s a difference in profit month over month from them coming with us of $800,000. I’ve got a couple more over here that I’m literally looking at where it was like $437,000, literally within one month of profit change. And so those are the ones where we’d say we are putting our resources to the best use to help companies in that environment because I don’t think I gotta look at this. Again, I don’t think there’s a single person on our team that has less than five years experience. The majority have, you know, close to 10 or 10 plus years experience coming from big, big agencies. We brought in, you know, the best of the best and so we want to Put these on accounts that we think we can make significant massive impact for in a very short amount of time. If we’re bringing on a company that’s maybe only spending $10,000 a month, we can make a big impact for them. But they usually aren’t going to be able to ramp up their inventory production accordingly. And things like that, there’s just a lot that they haven’t figured out. That doesn’t mean we don’t like them, we have a whole separate program for them called our accelerator program. We like them still, because those are the ones that are fun, where you get them in here and you say, nobody knows who they are. Nobody maybe even necessarily wants to work with them. But we want to take a shot at seeing what if, what if they could be the next, you know, snow, golf, liquid death, whomever? Let’s, let’s give this a shot. So we love bringing them in here and seeing you know, what can we do with them?
Jeremy Weisz 30:44
Do you have cases where someone isn’t spending like 100,000? And is paying much less to cut, but they’re in retail, but they’re spending a lot in general? So they have the infrastructure? But maybe they haven’t turned on the ads yet at all? Or is that less common?
William Harris 31:00
Yeah, so that was probably a big thing that happened over the last two years, right? A lot of that happened as a result of COVID, where there are a lot of businesses that had next to nothing going on online right now. But all of a sudden, they’re not getting the sales that they wanted to in the stores, department stores weren’t buying what they used to buy and things like that. And so they said, We got to figure this out. So we do have a couple of clients, I can’t name their names right now. But the one is also in the Gulf space as well. And there’s a number of brands that we were able to bring on, essentially from nothing, right, where they had almost no e-commerce sales at all, to scaling quite nice. But I think the one brand that I’m thinking of in the Gulf side, I believe, as of January this year, they are officially completely out of all of the wholesale side of business, they’ve gone fully into e-commerce, I wouldn’t recommend that as for most brands, I actually think that the right amount is a blend of both. But that was just where they were seeing the best profit and growth. And so they just went all in on that. The thing that’s fun with those brands, is because they have the inventory, because they already have some recognition, you can usually get like an instant, an instant win for them, which is really nice. Where it gets tricky for them though is, a lot of times they’re still stuck in like the catalog days, not necessarily in terms of you no actual catalogs, but they’re stuck in like the marketing that they have around this can sometimes be very generic product descriptions, some very basic images, they don’t have any UGC built out, there’s just a big lack of, let’s say content ready for us to use for ads. And so for them, the biggest thing that we end up having to focus on is we need to really start generating a lot more creative assets that we could use for the ads to test things out. Because they’re missing those things that are just the least clear differentiators from like a normal D to C type approach.
Jeremy Weisz 32:57
Well, I mean, you may not have an answer for this, but I’m gonna ask anyways. Um, are there companies out there right now that you think are a perfect mix of this? That you’re like, Oh, we would kill it for these brands? Who are some of the brands that when you look at, like, Oh, this is someone I think we could really help?
William Harris 33:19
And that’s a good question. There’s nobody that I pinpoint, say, like, in my mind, this is exactly who it is. But it’s, it would be anybody that is, is, has found some product market fit. And they’re, they’re just not getting the results that they’d like to get from this. I would say one of the one of the key pieces is, if every agency has told them so far, that they just need more creative and they’re creative stale. Likely that would be a perfect fit for us, like if you have agencies telling you this, because one of the I think that’s a big red flag that the agency you’re working with likely is just not smart enough to figure out what what’s what’s actually going on underneath all of the different scenes. So that agency is also likely not feeding Google the data of your cogs, right. Like just to put that in perspective, like they’re not they haven’t actually maximized what they think they know, they just maximize likely their creative, more focused agency. And that’s what they know. And they’re just saying, we just need more creative. What I’ve found, though, is through a lot of testing what we found, there was an ad that we were running, and this was when we were at GoDaddy. And for, you know, in celebrate, so I want to say it was like four or five years running, it didn’t matter. Who else tried to make ads for this, like World Class ad people. The ad that we had running for four or five years was the best ad just continued to go on and on and on and on and on and nothing could beat it. And so I think the idea of like, ad creative fatigue gets overused for somebody basically saying, I’m not analytical enough to figure out what else is going on. But I know that if you just give me some new ad creative, I can make it work and that’s Truth, right? Like you can, but that’s not the only thing there. So if you’re hearing that that would be an ideal customer.
Jeremy Weisz 35:05
When you say that about the more creative I picture the I don’t know if you’ve seen the Saturday Night Live skit more cowbell. That’s a yes. It’s kind of
William Harris 35:15
I made that mean literally exactly that for that thing is like, we need more creative.
Jeremy Weisz 35:21
Well, who are some other companies that you admire their marketing? You mentioned Liquid Death? Who else do you kind of study from afar and think they’re doing some cool things? Um, you know,
William Harris 35:34
as a general rule, I really appreciate a lot of a lot of the stuff that went through like the disruptors, right? So there’s, we have like the DTC disruptors. And that’s like this category, now that we have people like, Purple Mattress is a good example. Like, they did a fantastic job of coming up with ads that I think really got outside the box of what they were doing. I appreciate that. So from from a creative standpoint, from a positioning standpoint, I think they nailed it. And again, they’re another brand that I would say, almost without having to try, you could have found good profitability within the ads account. Another one that I think that I appreciated, was, you know, this is a, this is an old commercial, but a Barbie has a really good commercial author, I don’t remember how long ago this was maybe 10 years ago, they really got into like, the emotional side of of the buying persona. And so see, if you remember this,
Jeremy Weisz 36:32
I think I know you’re too I think I know, you’re gonna say but but
William Harris 36:35
okay. So you see, you see, I’m trying to remember the direction that this went, but like, you see this, I think like this little girl, like and maybe the one little girl is dressed up, and she is delivering a speech to a roomful of, you know, like college students, and she’s a professor. And then you see this other little girl, and she’s dressed up as a doctor, and she’s visiting her patient. And you see these girls go through these different, you know, careers and things. And then, at the very end of the commercial, I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it again, at the very end of the commercial, it actually shows that this little girl is actually playing with her Barbie dolls right then in there, right. And so it’s like, she was just imagining and dreaming all of these things. And as a father, I have three, three daughters. And I love that just thinking it’s like, that is what Barbie is selling really, they’re not selling just, you know, plastic toys for people to play with, they are selling the ability for kids to dream. That is the kind of thing that I think really helps you to stand out and go from just selling. And I think that we got into a habit of that over the last few years of just like selling products versus selling, what the company is doing, what it stands for, where it’s going, and why I like to see that we’re getting back into a shift back towards that, though, again,
Jeremy Weisz 37:44
talk about parenting and family, balanced with entrepreneurship, running a company.
William Harris 37:54
I think anybody will tell you that it’s probably the hardest thing that you will ever do in your life. I don’t I don’t have that all the way figured out. But I tried to do the best I can. And I’d say that if I was going to tell anybody anything, just remind yourself that you’re doing the best you can. There are there periods of time where you know, you have to go all in on the company, because, you know, maybe Maybe you lost your biggest client or something. And so you saying, Hey, we got to double down. And I’ve got to focus on this and figure this out, or some of the problem that’s come up with fire or whatever. And then there are times where, you know, you, you’ve got to make sure that you’re there for your family during that. Like there’s some, you know, big crisis there or, or even just making sure it’s your kid’s birthday, it’s like, you can’t miss those things, you only get one chance with them. And so there’s an article I wrote about this. And it’s as much a call to other entrepreneurs as it is a call and a reminder to myself, which talks about Don’t be like Elon Musk, when you take your last breath. And I here’s the thing, I actually love Elon, I think he’s a genius in so many ways, and I follow him and I really appreciate a lot of what he does and stuff. But you know, it’s the idea of it’s like, like, super incredible like work, work, work, work, work, work work all the time. And I’ve had my stages like that. But the reality is, going back to my nursing days, I’ve physically held the hand of a lot of people as they took their last breath, I have felt life leave the human body. And there’s not a single time that any single one of these people ever said, I really wish I would have worked more, I really wish I would have been more successful and worked more if I would have just made this little bit more money, then I would feel better on my deathbed, when 100% of the time, you know, if they had anything more to say it was, you know, I wish I would have spent more time with my family. I wish I would have done a few of these other things. And so I think that you know, the idea here is just keeping that in in your your focus and remembering that even as an entrepreneur, it can feel like everything maybe weighs up to you. But just remember that it’s like there’s things that you can’t see there on the other side of this. And so, for me, I’m a believer in God. And so for me, when I approached this, I think I can see what’s on my timeline, within, you know, like, let’s say two dimensional timeline, I can see what’s right here. And I can see that, hey, if we lose this client, I can’t pay this or do this or whatever. But I don’t know as what’s on the other side of that timeline, because I’m blocked by that. But But God can see what’s on the other side of that. And if you if you’re not a believer, maybe you think the universe or whatever break, but like, there’s something on the other side of the timeline, it may be that you need to lose that customer. Because on the other side of that lost customer is a bigger, better customer that is even more of a fit for you. And so just remember that it’s like just what you might think is is a logical next step, you don’t know what’s the step that’s after that that might actually be better. And so give yourself the grace and break to
Jeremy Weisz 40:42
I love hearing your evolution, from nursing to SaaS to e-commerce, SaaS to actually agency owner. And you mentioned sometimes you can’t see on the other side, the other side, but you have mentors, right, that can sometimes see and there was an instance where you told one of your mentors when your issues and they sort of laughing at you?
William Harris 41:02
Yes, good memory. Yeah, I can remember, are they laughing it? I want to say it was a moment where an I had had had tried to change a little bit of our positioning, I think. And as a result of that, we lost three good customers. Now, at the time, I’m just seeing this as we just lost a lot of revenue. And so I can just remember just thinking that it’s like, I just make the wrong decision here. Like this is dumb, like, what did I do? And I remember telling you about it, and I was I was pretty bent out of shape about it. And without even meaning to. So my mentor here is Dave Mortensen, he’s the founder of Anytime Fitness. And I can remember him just belly laughing at me just like laughing, right? And not at me, but it was exactly what I needed at the time. Because it was that way where you realize, I’m freaking out about something that’s not that big of a deal. It’s just not customers come and go. And, you know, those customers have since been replaced by better, bigger customers that fit what we were trying to do even more. And I think it was easy for him to laugh at it the way that we will maybe laugh at little kids who are you know, bothered by, you know, you know, she called me a poopoo head since like, you can’t help but laugh a little bit, because you’re just like, I think that’s kind of silly. And it’s not really a big problem. But when you’re for you know, being called a poopoo head is the worst thing you could possibly imagine. But I think being able to see the you know, the levity of the situation there. It was warming to my heart. We realize
Jeremy Weisz 42:38
I’m laughing because that happens often in my I have two daughters, and my wife and daughters will be doing something, I’ll start laughing and they will all turn on me and start yelling at me. Like how do you think this is funny right now. So here, I can kind of relate to your mentor probably on that front. Let’s talk about best workplaces. So what are the things that you do as a company to achieve that?
William Harris 43:03
So I think it starts with a mindset, the mindset that I have, and have had, and I would say now our company has as well is what do people want from a job? There’s a lot of things and I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of these studies that say that people don’t leave because of the money, they usually leave because of something else, right. And so they might cite money as the reason why they’re leaving, but it’s just because they don’t want to maybe acknowledge or even have a conversation or argument about what the other thing really is. And, you know, one of the things that I think that we all want intrinsically as human beings to, is to say control over our destiny in our future. Like that’s ultimately what we want. And so that could be like our destiny a future as far as like, how we spend our day. Or our days, I should say, how we spend our time and and how much money we can make, like do we have control over these things. You can never have perfect control over that there’s this you know lie that you might think becoming an entrepreneur means that you’re all of a sudden in charge of your every waking moment. And while you are you aren’t you have customers that you are responsible for you have bills that need to get paid, like there are things you have to do whether you want to do them or not. Otherwise, you just don’t have the business anymore. And so, you know, you’re always going to have obligations and responsibilities. But as an employee, sometimes I can feel like there’s there’s a lot more limitations there as a general rule. And so what we’ve tried to do is one take care of like the basic needs of like their basic human needs, which from employee one, we made sure we had health insurance where we cover 100% of their health insurance, medical insurance and dental insurance. Because if you don’t have to worry about that, that just a big weight off of your shoulder, right. The second part, though, is we have unlimited PTO, and I think that’s gotten a bad rap from people a lot. I think the reason why it gets a bad rap up, though, is because it just hasn’t been manageable. I’m not saying that we’ve cracked the code on that. But we actually force people to look through their calendar, you know, at least on a quarterly basis and say, you haven’t taken time off, you need to take some time off, like, let’s make this happen. And I, I think just about everybody is taking right close to four weeks off a year, at least write in more if we can get to that point. But the the idea here is, it’s like, if that’s, you know, perfect powder, just hit in Colorado, and you want to get out there and go skiing, and it’s like, that’s a big thing to you, it’s like, I want you to be able to have that ability to be able to do that. Now you have obligations to your clients. And so we have to make sure that that’s everything is taken care of on that end. And so we’ve just kind of said, Let’s like, you have to figure that out. Is it something that you want to do a little bit when you’re there, and you’re saying, hey, I want to put in a little bit of time while I’m there, but I’m gonna go work from there. Great, awesome. We had a girl that went and lived in Mexico for a few months. Great, like, please do. And so being able to have that the remote working environment and everything. And then the other part is on the the finance side. And so we have an unlimited bonus potential. So there’s a part of the bonus that we tied towards just, you know, overall employee ship where, you know, there’s based on your your ability to do like the the basics of what we’re asking you to do. And like, Are you are you stepping up beyond that, are you are you, you know, doing things that maybe aren’t necessarily just revenue driving for the business, but like, are just helpful and good overall, help perpetuate the business. But then there’s a bonus, it’s tied towards the actual amount of revenue that you generate for the business. And so if you help your clients grow, those clients that were maybe spending $10,000 A month when they came to us are now spending $100,000 a month, like we’re getting more business revenue as a company and you we want you to benefit in that as well. And so everybody has that potential to say like, there is no cap to what you can make with us. He helped us grow, help us scale, help us grow your clients, your your clients are happier now. We’re happier now. You’re happier now, right? Like that helps on that side of things. So I think this idea of like, being able to have some influence over your destiny makes a difference.
Jeremy Weisz 47:12
William, first of all, I have one last question. Thank you, thanks for sharing your journey, your knowledge, it’s pretty amazing the path that you’ve taken. And I want to first encourage everyone go to Elumynt, E, l, u, m, y n t.com to learn more about what they’re doing. My last question is just, I know, you read a lot and distant mentors, you have, you know, actually in person mentors, were some of the resources or books or podcasts that you like, or listened to, that you’d recommend others? Yeah, um,
William Harris 47:47
well, you know, I think one of the things that I really appreciate is just a good old fashioned book book now. You know, paperback, one of the books that I’ve really enjoyed over the years that I’ve kind of find myself coming back to, again, and again, actually is The 4- Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. And I think it’s just a good mindset shift for people to think about how do you batch things essentially, like if I was going to sum that book up? It’s just the idea. It’s like, how do you get things to the point where they’re automated and batched. And I think that’s something that’s important for every employee to do as well, even within your job. There’s this idea of like, you know, we talked about us, you have right person, right seat, you have the role and responsibility, it might be your responsibility for this to happen. But it doesn’t mean you have to be the person that actually made that happen. How do you figure out how you can automate parts of your job, whether that’s to chat GPT, or to, you know, someone else to interns to whatever, but figure out how to automate and batch things to be the most efficient? I think that’s one of the books that I liked the most. Otherwise, just other really good self help books. I mean, we’ll go back to How to Win Friends and Influence People. I’ve probably read that one dozens of times. There’s classics like this, I think, for a reason. And those are some of my favorites.
Jeremy Weisz 48:57
Awesome. I want to be the first one to thank you everyone. Check out Elumynt.com more episodes of the podcast and thanks so much. Thanks, everyone. Thanks again.
