Hey everyone Scott Austin here.

Welcome to this episode the podcast and for this episode I have a guest JT is the owner of repto Chip and that's a company I've been working with for a year year and a half now and JT has done a fabulous job in growing his business over that period of time um especially his online store and his Shopify store so I wanted to bring him on so that you other store owners can see all the different things that he's done because there's no one Silver Bullet um and learn from how Scrappy he's been uh for the past year year and a half in uh building this business so welcome JT

hi thanks Scott for having me on

would you tell us a little bit about repa chip what is your product

so our product line is uh based around a coconut husk chip if you can imagine that that's uh used in agriculture but we use it for reptiles and animal bedding that's my Niche

yeah and I love the way you said Niche because I always say there's riches and niches and you know you definitely have picked a niche um and it's very focused right and and I think that brings power to to what you're doing um has your product changed in the past year year and a half

not a lot of changes we brought some uh new products to the market but it's a slow process uh being in that we're with animals we want to make sure that everything is 100% above board and that the products ring true um to one US and to our customers so we do a lot of testing before we bring anything to Market so a lot of experimentation and stuff but uh other than that remained relatively the same adding one or two products a year

and how large is your product catalog like how many different SKS do you have

uh outside of like multi packs we basically have seven or eight go-to products and then we have some other product lines that we carry for that are more uh contributing to that kind of thing uh not our branded products but another company's branded products too

yep yep and in in the the past year and year and a half how much has your online business growing

oh I'm not I don't have numbers in front of me but I think we were averaging about a year and a half ago we were average ing gross on on our website y uh maybe four or five grand uh the the caveat to that is we we are actually with the company paying paying them to do run some ads and stuff so the uh the profitability of that was pretty pretty small

yep and so you were like four or five grand a year year and a half ago and that's what I remember I mean remember that 5,000 number monthly yeah monthly yeah and what are you at these days

uh last month I think gross was around 25 so uh we've been going up that was yeah last month uh we've been steadily going up yeah here's the paid advertisement du due to you

well no it's it's it's due to you right and and we've worked we've worked really well together in the past year I think and that's what I I want to get into is all the things that we've done to grow your business from 5,000 to 25,000 that's 5x little more than a year less than a year and a half um and you know a lot of that was loow hanging fruit we won't we won't be able to 5x it in the next year but you know if you keep being aggress as aggressive as you are and expanding your efforts you know I think it'll continue to grow um so so no no serious change in product but a serious change in Revenue and and you know yeah where do you think that change came from

well you know we didn't even address I I hired you originally to do a wholesale site based off of our current at the time our our current retail site yep that's not even including those numbers so that's a totally separate number and I'm very happy with those numbers as well so real number is more than that yep um the uh as far as what I'm sorry what was the question or we attributing

so we we fxed your business you fxed your Revenue in the past year so what do you contribute that to like you know what sort of efforts did you have to go through to make that happen

a lot of different things right one was tackling making the the website more user friendly we even had to uh uh move it over to a different theme yep um just because the the theme that I was using was not uh didn't allow us to do the things that we wanted to do uh we also moved over email marketing from MailChimp to clavo recommendation of you and you're very uh Savvy at the cleio uh and I'm still you know to this day trying to learn it but it's such an effective tool for us uh that's that's brought in a lot of revenue for us um you know there's a number of other things like um just the way that we use coupons um we have outside efforts like uh going to shows or specifically targeting uh certain customer lists um that's helped grow the business yep but one thing that I wanted to mention outside of the just the website in particular is that Scott I also use you as a uh a mentor like business Mentor uh that's to me that's proven to be very valuable the uh the relationship that we have and uh being able to bounce some ideas off of you because what I didn't realize when we initially hired you and I kind of like I I remember I had you on with uh a friend that does business analytics and stuff like that and uh we kind of went through a process and then we did you know we started off with the wholesale site and and we've you know gradually grown from there so we took our I don't know if we took our time but we definitely did our due diligence on you but what I've learned over time is that because you have your own businesses uh and you have a background and just this but the the the beauty of it is that you see and I don't know how many customers or clients you have but the you see a lot of different businesses so you have a a deep background in what's working for other businesses and you can bring that to the table uh there's stuff that you were like immediately dismissed that if if we're you know like interested in going that route and you're like here's what I would do if I was you I'd come over here I'm sure that that is um something that's probably un unaddressed uh when when people are you know looking to have a site built or managed you know by you so that's been a big deal for me

thank you thank you I I'm I have a lot of opinions right and I'm more than willing to share them for better for worse but I do find you know you know and this isn't about I don't want this episode to be about me I actually want to be about you because you you you are an inspiration for other store owners once they hear your story um but the thing that that I spend a lot of my time on is trying to convince my clients not to do things right and stay focused on what the important things are and I think what Mak makes us work together so well is you're willing to try things um and and we both look at the data in the end and we learn from it right you know and so well I want to go back and and talk about you know the things that you've done to improve your site and I want to start off with your your uh your website redesign right cuz you had spent a lot of money getting a completely custom website built and it was beautiful I was intimidated by your website when I first saw it because it looks so nice and and your your custom designers had done some pretty you know you know sophisticated elegant things inside of it you had a nice looking website and it cost you a ton of money but it was pre- online store 2.0 and because it was custom it didn't have to go through the Shopify review process therefore it wasn't compatible with a lot of things you know like apps and and normal functionality you would expect and you know after about I don't know six or eight months of us working together it became a blocker for us right we didn't want to spend the money of doing a redesign doing as much as we could as Scrappy as we could but we got to the point where it became a blocker for us um and then you know because we had started improving the revenues you know you invested a lot of money in with me to do a redesign but the nice thing is you had that North Star of your elegant design that we got to copy in in in you know inspired by so we ended up with a store that's just as elegant I think but easier to manage and integrates with all the latest Shopify functionality which has been really really powerful for us

well and seamless to me right like you just said all right hey um you we're going to you know work on this new theme we're going to build it it's all back in behind the scenes kind of thing and then when we launch we're still going to be testing it out like I wouldn't have known any better until uh you know you stop saying like hey we can't really do it because of this but now any anything that we want to do we can uh kind of move forward with um that was what I appreciate about that as well is the fact that off the bat um when we were talking about doing this retail site and uh you know all the improvements essentially that's what I hired you for on the retail side is make improvements um what would you do kind of thing y um which I really appreciated but what I also appreciated was the fact that you were you would say you know let's see how this goes and then drop the money on moving over right like let's just see how it goes first and see if the juice is worth the squeeze and then when it was not a problem we transitioned over so you weren't in a hurry to spend my money I just think that that's you know these are all things that um outside of the magic that you do I I think that are important to address

yeah I call that operationalizing you know your spend like you don't want to be spending more investing more in your business than the revenue you're getting back right because as small e-commerce stores small being you know less than $10 million you guys aren't getting external funding you don't have a treasure chest of money so you need to be spending your profits you need can't be losing money because you go out of business when you do that and I actually I've seen many small stores go out of business because they overspend on their ad budget or spend too much time on the website it's like no F have your investment in your business follow your Revenue once your revenue is growing then your you know your spend is going to grow like when we met and started working together together you were all of the business the marketing and you know you had some people in operations and fulfillment but today you have a second person don't you

yep we've got uh um a marketing person um which is something that we worked hard to get to right I mean think we talked about it for a year yep you were even giving me ideas like hey you know like let's just see if we can get somebody part-time like the local school you can talk to their marketing department and I'm really particular and opinionated as well so I think uh I throw it back uh not on you but uh you know there's some things that uh and I'm sure your your listeners will understand there's some things that like you're gonna say that I'm like no I I get I respect your opinion I'm not going to do that though uh another thing I appreciate is you're a candidate and will always give your opinion another thing is though I I do give my opinion well I mean that's that's one of the things that I really want because whether I like it or not I'm gonna get it and um I need that you know I appreciate that from other people and I hope that I'm like that with people um but the other thing is you treat my my you treat my business in my you know funding or budget like it's yours I think that that's um something that uh you can't you can't barely find very easily so um I think that's that's good

once again making this about you what what what I love that you did right is I was you know telling you you need to invest in content you need to invest in marketing you need to be creating campaigns and we had to do that together right but now that you're 5x the revenue you have the revenue to justify the spend in the marketing person and now you have a fulltime head which a year ago that would have been dream a dream for both of us like there's no way you're G to have a full-time person for that and now you do because you have you know confidence that we're going to keep that Revenue going to justify that spend and

and you know it's funny because I've I've realized that our relationship now when we we do our our you know twice a month or every other week meeting I I realize now that we're spending a lot more time talking about about promotions how to make it happen how so the fur it's like the further we get going on it the more direct impact we have like the time that we spend together now is about bringing in money right bring and that's in instead of backend stuff which is exactly as the ball got rolling just kind of leveraged up and uh the things that we're doing now and Having learned throughout the process the things that we're doing now are just becoming more and more effective and like you said with the revenue increase now we can afford to experiment a little bit more and you know actually try to do maybe a promotion the right way instead of just peac mailing It Go all in on it and if it doesn't work oh well you know that's part of learning and then when it works when it hits it's like okay hey we're on to it now we're going to keep developing this thing and some of those have become really really lucrative for us

yeah yeah the way I think about it is in 2023 we spent that year building your foundation we were adding tools through your toolbox and we also got some basic learnings in right so we were testing with those tools but now in 2024 the foundation is built we know enough about the tools we have a plan and now our goal in 2024 is to maximize your revenue and increase the learnings about your customers during that time frame

and you know even with that said like I I didn't feel like we were ever even when we were in the building phase and last year I didn't feel like we were stagnant at all I always knew like every week every other week that we would talk I'm like another you know I always felt like there was progress so I could see how it's coming together you know like not having to worry about the details of of the magua of the website was uh you know that was pretty um pretty legit let me focus more on the macro

yep yep so let's talk about some of the foundational things because uh you know we did the redesign we talked about that and one of the big things that came out of the redesign I think two big things one was we now have a sections anywhere theme that we can add you know pages to all the time right we do a landing page for this a landing page for that you like you go off to a show we make a landing page for that thing World snake day yada yada y right

the not I don't have to say hey Scott can you build this thing out for me that's that's the beauty of it is like when when we had like the custom site and everything else yeah like I was relying on everybody else to do something but now if I need something done you shot me a tutorial and Bam I can do it same day I don't have to worry about any of that other stuff

yeah yeah you know Shopify does a really good job in allowing store staff that aren't developers or technical people to be able to do a lot of the basic things so even your new marketing hire you know can build a page or create an email and all that good stuff which is which is absolutely fabulous right you're you're empowered and one of the fun things I want to talk about with your your site redesign because it was so much fun was your business right you you sell coconut substrate and it's it's five or six different versions of the coconut basically but you know it's a applicable for hundreds and if not you know thousands of different types of animals right so every every type of frog you can think of every turle every snake every spider they all can use this substrate so we did right in your store was we built a Blog around all of the animals so each animal you know we would say you know the Amazon Blue Frog I don't that's a real animal or not just made it up right or or the you know the pink boa constrictor right and we built we built a Blog article around that but because it was sections anywhere we could tie that straight into the product catalog we actually built a really cool navigation experience where you can you know pick on snakes it shows you all the different types of snakes and you pick the one that's yours um but for SEO we were then able to because we had this platform of of online store 2.0 now say all right here's the animals we want to Target for SEO purposes and now you know because SEO takes a long time but now we're starting to see traffic come in for all these different so when people look for you know how do I care for my pink boa constrictor you're showing up in the listings because we actually have a page optimized for pink boa constrictor where we never had that before because it was too hard to do in your old theme that's the kind of that's G to pay off forever now right

yeah that's um so that's the you know a longterm like you were saying SEO we we're hitting you know we've got like paperclick like the very t itical uh piece of it all the way up through uh like the long-term SEO strategy and we're like you said we're starting to see some SEO come back uh the beauty of that was I think we were also able to create a lot of content very quickly using AI um not always ideal and for us it's definitely not the instate but uh correct me if I'm wrong in SEO we wanted to get the pages out published referring to animals correct but not as detailed as I would prefer it it's important to have that uh that you know publish it as yeah recently as possible to start gaining some traction um in fact now we're on the step of going through and starting to proof some of that stuff build out the pages even more detailed and has given us a Launchpad for some other stuff one like at the bottom we can say you know here's the animals here's a lot of cool information about them um here's some uh you know like whatever their range is or their diet or whatever people are just interested in that in general I mean they're not looking for a substrate starting to hit on it in general uh but we've got a lot of ideas from there like what if we had a very specified care sheet for that animal or something and then you subscribe to get that care sheet right there's another benefit bonus to us um those kind of things like it's just bringing all kind of together um you know investing just a little bit at a time a little bit at a time but I can I'm in the stage now you know year two of doing this is kind of just like um you know you start to see the pieces starting to come together and you see like the bigger picture of the stuff

so January 2023 I think it was I had the three most productive hour hours of my Shopify life in your store right and in three hours I added judge me reviews subscriptions and clavio and those were three foundational tools as you T as you just talking about right they all link together really well but it's hard to see it when we do that right

oh when you were you know I was like you know because our own site we have reviews you know MailChimp and it was you know I I didn't know how to use it very well besides like just do the basic you know newsletter blast kind of thing um and so when you were like yeah we got to have reviews uh really you know we have to pay a little bit for these reviews and now I see how it comes together like you said you know your site needs to be live that's one of the things that I think you taught me that I you know maybe it didn't register exactly when but it's like that's the community you need people like you need updated content you need new reviews you need like them to see your acted on socials you need you know all of that kind of stuff like it's the place to be like keep keep coming back and I think uh that started to I started to understand more and that rang true a little bit as we got going I'm like oh you know what this is I'm starting to get it now I'm I'm not the sharpest you know knife in the drawer but after a while I start to kind of figure it out and it totally makes sense now now I'm all yep y

well and so but you know every business is different right and you have to look you know and I I say this all the time to my clients it's like just because you see a best practice elsewhere I totally believe that best practice is true for that business and it may or may not be let's just give them the benefit out that's good for their business right it doesn't mean it's good for your business and you know the beautiful thing about your business is you know you have a consumable or replenishable right so people buy your coconut substrate for their their animals tank and next month they need more right so it's like it's like chocolate or or or coffee kind of thing and we've done a really good job in leveraging that so for you repeat customers become absolutely essential right you know if you're selling diamond engagement rings none of that matters right it's all about attracting new custom only one or two maybe a couple times yeah yeah not a monthly thing hopefully not right hopefully not a subscription service for that but uh in your space it's you know that's why adding subscriptions and adding you know a good email tool was so so important and then you know you know so you've done a really good job in focusing on collecting email addresses so that you can Market to them because yeah email has been a really effective marketing tool for us because even though they bought the product in the past or intended to buy it and signed up well they still need it again and they always need it again and you know cavio has been an absolute outof thee Park success for you I think

absolutely uh so much so that you know we are starting to it it really kicked off other promotional campaigns for us like you were talking about we're I don't know if it's a shoestring budget but we we don't have a lot of budget for for ads and everything else and we don't have a lot of people you know we have workers in our uh manufacturing facility and stuff but as far as um all the management all the admin all that kind of stuff like a lot of your listeners probably it just starts with me and then um I'm lucky now that I I've got broke my marketing person uh and so the uh I was lucky to grow into that but now we're starting to tackle things outside of paid advertising or or you know socials like we're going to uh shows and coming up with promotions at shows to capture email addresses because what's a more qualified customer than one that's walking into a reptile show to see reptiles you're not going to get much better

I just did a recent podcast episode inspired by your show efforts right and it was explaining to people you know hey go to shows and get email addresses and here's here's how to do it and that was all based off the things I had learned watching you do that and you know as you think about your business right what what I hear you saying is you know you've got this this we built this engine for repeat purchases right we've got subscriptions in place and people are subscribing so that that constant revenue is turning up and then we also have you know emails to re-engage the ones that aren't the subscribers um and before I go on on that why don't you tell us the learning that you learned and taught me about subscriptions and emails and campaigns do you remember that one

which one are we we talking about

in the one where we don't send email campaigns out to subscribers

um yep so you know as we as we go along we're always learning something um different so I think like with a lot of this stuff it's the shotgun approach so you get a little bit more and more precision and so one of the things that we learned was um you know we might send out we don't like to rely on a discount every time you know we do giveaways or something else or buy one give one whatever it is but uh in when we're talking about sending out a blast to subscribers um for a discount um and uh we we hit our subscription service subscribers and they come back and they say hey can I get if you're giving me 10% off from the subscription of the product now can I apply the 15% off you just sent out to all the uh email subscribers that probably is starting to get too tight on so like okay hey we need to control uh the groups a little bit a little bit better and I'm still you know like now I realize the value of having the audiences and the segments and the list um and having it very detailed so that you can then apply it to whatever campaigns that you're doing maybe I don't want to hit people that um you know I just sold to 10 days ago off the regular retail side or uh what have you and now we're applying that to social so because clayo can work link to your socials at least meta so uh we're starting to use that like maybe we don't want to target the people that we already have as a customer like yeah can now only can exclude them from our s sorry sorry subscribe customers but different folks right

what I always say is when you look at a clavio implementation that's been around with with a team that's been aggressive with it for like five years you're amazed at how sophisticated it is right like they've got flows with all sorts of paths and things going on and you know you look at it you're like wow these people are geniuses how do they figure that all out well they're not Geniuses no offense to anybody right they're just you know everyday store owners and they figured out one step at a time like the thing we learned was all right we need a segment of subscribers and we send out a campaign with a discount in it we're going to exclude subscribers from that campaign so that we don't cause this you know conflict in their mind about how much of a deal they're getting kind of thing and then we learned other things we keep adding those one step at a time and already your clavio is much more complex than it was a year ago and in two or three years it'll be even more sophisticated

right I can see it now I'm adding stuff now that I'm like oh we don't want to talk to the people that we're getting leads from at the show if we're doing a giveaway we don't want to Market something different to them before the giveaway has results right like so uh I I totally get it now about what you were saying about the complexity of things um it's not really complex when you start from zero and you build it yourself it's it's going to be pretty intuitive

yeah yeah but it is that organic growth and it takes time to do that and it's because every business is different you know there's a lot of Basics that are similar like I said before like just because someone else has the best practice doesn't mean it's right for your business and you've got to learn those things on your own one step at a time and and I I'm a big believer that the way we learn the most is by making mistakes and we do things wrong and we learn from it and correct from that um kind of thing instead of trying to anticipate ahead of time what all the scenarios are going to be um so you know talking about how you know in your business you've got this consumable side of thing and we did a really good job and our continue to evolve that with subscriptions and email in re-engaging existing customers but what you did in the past year is because you had that experience of spending lots of AD dollars and not getting a good return because if you have a great engine for your repeat customers you still need to be pouring more people into the top of the funnel right 100% now you're what you're working on is this alternative strategy of targeting your new customer acquisition through going to shows instead of spending dollars on Advertising platforms right going to shows instead and collecting email addresses because you have confidence in your email not just your email platform but also the campaigns you built around email in the last year to engage those people

yep and and you see what works and you just start to expand from there yep um but the value of it is you know we've done other uh sales Platforms in the past uh we still do other sales platforms but uh nothing beats owning your you know owning your own customers and stuff so uh whenever whenever possible we want to invest The Limited ad spin that we have or the limited budget that we have um kind of hit back into our customers y there's always the need to have like you said at the top of the funnel learning all of this though um specifically the past year with the website and how you've helped us build it kind of I want to say it is from the ground up we had an idea of what it is but like as far as the business aspects of it all the tools that you brought to the table um it's taught me about my own sales funnel my own marketing funnel right like it's it's so much more clear now year in of what we need to do to get to the next area and how that funnel works for us in particular now i' got diagrams and diagrams all that kind of stuff and a lot of that you translate directly to some things like clavio or whatever or you see another part of how the things start to link together like if I want to do a show list that we're attending um you know we could link that with a lot of different things um you know notification it could be linked with um you know hey we're going to be in this area now we're going to do a Clayville blast to everybody that signed up the past show and we're gon to Target those people and say hey we're gonna be you know just let you know we're gonna be here or whatever we want to do maybe aale so uh yeah fast forward you know a year from last year I'm like I just feel like we're in a much better place and I understand my own business um better specifically because of some of the things that we were doing the website

yeah yeah because uh I'm about to rant now because as you say all this stuff you know I got YouTube open on the screen over here I always have YouTube open I'm looking at things and I use it for research and all and what I can't stand about the internet is you know every video you see is all about how quickly you can get it done when the reality is in e-commerce the quicker you try to get it done done the worse it's going to be done right you set up your Google analytics 4 account in 2 minutes or less if you set up your ga4 in 2 minutes or less it is going to fail you right it should take three or four freaking hours unfortunately but that's what it should take because it's that hard and that complex and if you don't set it up properly and you go for the quick win then you don't get to to measure things in the Google analytics example and and I I think that you know one of the reason I want you on here is to explain to people who you know are at the position you were at a year ago you know and oh wow this guy you know he 5x his you know monthly revenue on his website like you know what's the Silver Bullet the Silver Bullet is working really hard for a year right a little bit at a time right

like y it's eating an elephant I think that's the that's the key is you just you know some days you can't hit it so you try to make up forward on the other days and you just do the best you can but you got to you gotta keep keep building I mean I look at it now and I see how much I see exactly where we are and where I want to go a lot more than I did in the beginning um when I kind of just handed you off something and I was like uh you know hey help me yeah I feel like that's a lot of what what we did is like and then I I I learned I learned by watching what you were doing

but but that's that's the key there right because I I talked to so many clients all the time you're saying before and a lot of them have the expectation that they're just going to hand me their problem I'm going to solve it and I'm going to hand it back to them and it's complete it's sort of like they you know when you go to a dealership you're like I want a car and they roll out a completely functioning car the problem with an e-commerce business is you need to build that engine and you the store owner need to understand every single N bolt and spark plug in that engine you just can't let it be a black box

no and I don't want like there's things that you you're doing that's recurring that need to you know be handed off to me like hey you know like a certain point we like got it you know yep hey how I build my own landing page you taught me got it don't don't need Scott for that anymore like and I don't want Scott for that because that's you know you created the the system now it's on us to uh you know utilize it um but yeah yeah there is a learning curve for for us people that aren't you know web developers and stuff and I think that uh uh another thing that I kind of like is like you you can translate some stuff right like we don't have to I don't ever feel like I've got uh too much Tech speak and stuff like if I'm like why is it this working you're like you explain in a way that I can easily understand so

yeah so because the way I I think about e-commerce businesses is like hey they all have to have great products in today's world right any anybody with crappy products will not last for long they also have great service and fulfillment those are Givens right so the secret sauce then is is your customer acquisition you know e-commerce brands are successful at customer acquisition that's what they're good at yeah every they have to be good at products and fulfillment that's a given that is not going to differentiate you which going to differ at a business level as customer acquisition and if that's your secret sauce why would you Outsource that you have to do that inhouse and building that loyalty right that brand loyalty what's going to make them come to your website over go to Amazon yep

right Amazon's easy everybody wants Amazon Amazon's simple two clicks you can return it whatever they've got they're gonna have that on all of us forever right y but what's the brand loyalty that you're going to build at your site and why do people keep wanting to come back um and I think like we're addressing those issues and starting to like again I'm starting to kind of see the bigger picture of okay how do we keep those customer how do we gain them how do we keep them um and starting to have advantages over places like Amazon I'm just using them for instance uh there's a lot of stuff that we can do because it's ours and we can do everything that we want with it and not abide by you know the rules of big corporate entity whatever like we're we're effectual and I don't have to wait on customer service I don't have to wait on uh their policies I don't have to abide by their specific rules I create my own little world and now I'm inviting people into it and like we we even can like you know we can fire customers now you can't do that on some other site right like if you're not a good customer to us or you want to take advantage of us you have the control of that now it's kind of a beautiful thing

I see you smile because and I'm smiling right now think about the day I got to fire at my first client at Jade Puma was like one of the happiest days of my life it's a great on anybody else you're like do whatever you want to man I'm I'm I'm okay

one of the things you know you talked about brand a second ago and and I think you know you do a really good job in showing that you care about the animals right it's not just you're selling a product um can you talk a little bit how like have you have campaigns I think where you you build your brand by having a campaign that supports an animal-based charity and things like that right

like uh we can um thinner certain campaigns around um you know we have an organization in particular that we want to donate to and we can we can build that out and um and bring awareness to the the organization

how how have you done in the past year because most brands have a hard time being the face of their brand and you know I always tell small store owners is embrace the small and I think you've done a really good job of that you know how did you get yourself more comfortable being the face of the brand and what steps did you take if any to get there

I don't know I I don't I'm not comfortable I've never been comfortable doing that um you know if I could have somebody else online talking uh about for an ad or a promo uh I will um but at some point it's also just necessity right like indirect communication um we have to take on you know podcasts and stuff uh we do you know I do reptile podcasts every now and then uh that you know and when when we're at a show and we're doing live and we just want to speak to the audience mostly it's necessity right like we you just need to say what you need to say and get over it uh where I where I always am gonna have a challenge is prepping something and coming up with it or what it's like and there something something you taught me was just like just do it just set up your camera do it that's it that's also helped a little bit

well I I think I had to mock you a couple times and challenge your manhood to get you to to make a video but but the beautiful thing is you've actually made videos now which I tell all my clients if you're not making video with you in them you're you're not living up to the potential of your brand

it's true and it is so important that's one of those things that like you tell me and I'm like yeah I get it but like that's a lot of time uh and then you know like I one time I found myself I'm like I got a little bit of time all right let's try to knock out a video uh and we made one and I did a couple rehearsals and I got uh my oper manager to film me and uh it might have taken 20 minutes right yep a lot of time relatively might be a lot of time but maybe you know you can squeeze out 20 minutes um and then I launched it so I was just thinking hey what would you know would Scott say I just you know I did limited amount of uh you know cutting and stuff like that to it uh tried to improve the Audio I don't know maybe I spent another 20 minutes on that launched it um and immediately I didn't get great feedback I didn't get bad feedback I just didn't get a lot of feedback from the video yeah uh and I was also so I'm like I think I I think I showed it to you and you're like oh man you're coming across too dry like I think it was humorous but like you're like you're coming across too dry like it's all relative like your audience doesn't know this specific thing so you have to clue them in as to what you're talking about um and so I did all I did is I just did subtitles under it like somebody else was putting the video or developing the video and it took off like a while I mean it did exactly what I could have I mean I did a lot it did did what I hoped it would do just off of that basic recommendation you

yeah well and and to be clear about the subtitles they were making fun of you right it was self deprecating humor and like my my favorite YouTube channel that I watch uh which is in in another industry that I'm involved in um the the host of the channel is fabulous but the editor is twice as fabulous because the editing and and he makes fun of the host all the time like he's a personality in the videos even though I've never seen his face right and that's what your video did you injected some humor making fun of you and the best humor is self- depr and you used that

well it made it made sense then but I think the what I learned out of the whole thing and I'm fine with making fun of myself yeah I I hope I hope people laugh at me when I make fun of me

they laugh with you they laugh with you J

but you know I mean I don't care about all that but what but I what I learned about was like hey you got it's like I have to get it kind of outside my framework and think more about the audience right like they didn't know you know like if I'm trying to make a joke about all of this you know we barely have any inventory and I show like pets in a warehouse full of inventory back there it's still relative does the audience know that that's a lot of inventory or do they think like oh he probably Burns through that in a day or something you know because I'm saying we only have a little bit left yeah it didn't make sense to them it was out of their frame so you have to kind of bring them uh into your world a little bit more

well and and the other thing I I'd add to that is you know you literally have to spoon feed your customers like we we think that and humans are sophisticated and complex people they absolutely are but when it comes to your customers in your business they understand on10th if not one hundred of what you think they understand about your business

yep that's that's what I'm learning is like when were doing something like that um you kind of gotta boil it down to like the guy that just you know hey he knows he knows my business repti chip that's it yep that's it he doesn't know anything else about it

so because yeah as store owners the the customers you talk to are mostly your friends who use you a lot or the customer who's you know the the person that buys your product 80 times a year where everybody else buys it one time a year so you're talking to it's it's like talking to your spouse about your personality yeah they know more about you than somebody who just just met you on the job kind of thing but we assume that every all of our customers have that same level intimacy with us as the few that we talk to who actually our highest value ones and they're the exception not the rule in their understanding of us

yeah yeah a lot of lessons learned with that I think we'll we'll keep doing it right because like that's what this whole thing about learning growing and getting better every day if it's just a little little learning every day is is is better than than going backwards which many people do go backwards

so let's uh talk a little bit about if we talk about learnings you know give me a couple things you've learned about campaigns you've tried a bunch of different campaigns in email and I think only one is not worked but you you now have a bunch of different types of campaigns that you can run

yeah uh we've done you know we've done Grand awareness campaigns and really learning what that is for us it could be different things for different people but you know do we want to be hitting two million people well I don't know they have some interest in reptiles maybe but uh maybe our brand campaign you know broader you know topof the funnel type campaign is you know certain like learning that there's a certain qualifier first like they have to have an interest in repels or whatever yep um but uh you know down to like lead capture and how important that really is becoming to us um down to you know the actual sale and then you know at the bottom bottom of your funnel is you know resale right for us it's like we captured the customer now we make them a lifetime customer right like that it never ends right we're always trying to recapture that same customer I've learned that recently um within the last year I'd say is uh that whole systematic funneling of of of our our customers um and and how it continually needs to be fed not just at the top but like you got to feed the people at all the different sales levels right like you can't just you can't just throw new names in the top of it like you got to take care of the names at the bottom of it too

yep yep so um one of the things you did in the past year that I loved watching was the whole repet thing so tell tell us the story of the repet

uh so I've got a buddy and we actually carry some of his products here uh at our store um he's a master at marketing like he can he develops new innovative ideas gets people on board with it and launes them and he's usually just doing his thing and one one day at a show he threw me the little clickable knife that you get from overseas in China and you can have your brand written on it or whatever stencil on it or whatever right it's like a little switchblade but it's doesn't have a pointy and it's more for like a safety for like cutting like seat belts and you can cut bags and stuff he threw me one of those and said hey man this is all for you and I said oh thanks man thanks uh and I was just thinking it was one of his branded items and he was like no no no no this is for you and your company this you should do this and I'm like what am I gonna do with this knife right yep he's like it's it opens your product and uh when I hit buddies actually said it told him this is what I opened my repor chip with and like that uh I was like oh that's brilliant right so you know went on ALB and I found you know companies that have you know can stencil your stuff some s over um and now we're using that in particular as an incentive for a lot of different campaigns like lead campaigns or conver version campaign or inperson lead campaigns um that little trinket really that cost very little has uh done a lot for us um and it just taught me the value in um a lot of the things like Y and all that kind of thing

so the uh so just so people know you know what you do a lot with your products you have you know repa chip is the brand name and you repta other things like rep to Earth and stuff like that so the repet is a little baby machete with the reptichip brand on it he actually has the repta chedy brand name on the little chachki and it's a cute little like switchblade knife like you're talking about but you have these big thick bags that your product is containing that that actually are a pain to open and this knife is perfect for that um what what does that repet cost you per unit

I think it's like a dollar 30 $40 or something like that and then uh I mean shipping it to the people if we're giving it you know it's like three times as much right like the actual thing so and and inperson conversion is really ideal for that thing because if you just hand it to somebody uh it's that's that's money right yeah the um and and you know this thing kind of took off too right like so I noticed like we have since Brooke is our marketing person is like getting after other influencers and all types of stuff like now when we send out stuff to influencers to kind of like you know video or review or whatever like we send them a repet yep so that now they're starting to every video like opening up repet and it has and it's got the little click when they open the little switchblade action everybody loves that it's just a cool little trinket thing but they're starting off opening all their stuff with the actual tool that we don't even I'm not even trying to sell we list on the website and people buy it now

so we've never um run the numbers so if you were to like guess what do you think the value of an email address is to you

um it depends on where it came from because you know if it's a if it's a show it's gonna be more valuable than somebody uh off the street even may even be more valuable than one that's you know clicking online like on our popup or something yep um if we're giving away something big maybe it's not as valuable because maybe it's just somebody that wants to you know enter that giveaway if it's you know if we're getting an email address from say uh you know a customer that isn't necessarily our customer but has been buying our product through uh a different platform yep me that's worth a lot more they're already a customer of ours we just don't own the customer according to uh other you know terms and services

but like trading that dollar whatever value rep theet for an email address is that a fair trade in your mind

a dollar all day long I mean we'll go if I think that that customer is gonna I mean we'll pay six eight1 t0 like you know and you got to just do the do the math on it if you have you know what's what's a lifetime customer value like what's that worth is what the real question that you have to figure out before you start figuring out so if my lifetime customer is worth $3,000 I can give away a lot of repet right

yeah well then the other way you use repetti that I like is you know because you do you list it on the website I think it's 9.95 or something so we we put a retail value behind it and then you've done a couple campaigns where you're like hey I think your average values around $50 or something like that so you do a campaign where it says hey you know if you put $75 you know in your cart if you make a purchase for $75 will give you a free repet so spend $25 more dollars and we give you a product that cost us a buck 50 and people see value in that because you've actually built hype around the product and you've made an emotional attachment to that free chachki product you know that is higher than just the $150 that it costs you kind of thing

yeah I'm a big believer in this thing now if you asked me two years ago I would have said no way but uh also like it's also customer retention device too right like out of the blue hey I haven't heard from this customer a while I'm just gonna send him this thing and say Hey thank you so much I really appreciate it like there's a lot I know I feel good when I get something like that unexpected in the mail like you know there's there you just get you thinking there's people out there that just like they're not taking you for granted they really do appreciate you and it costs barely anything to tell some really good customers thanks you know

yep so you send thank you packages to people

well customers yeah yeah occasionally right like uh we don't do it every day but I'd say once a month or so we'll kind of uh or we'll pick out or some you know hey somebody gave us a shout out for no other reason than they like our product like we just try to you know kind of take care of them send them in a shirt yep product ref something um in conjunction with you know saying hey really appreciate that you know

yeah and so in listening to you talk about all this stuff you know the way I'd summarize it is is there's all these different things you're doing right and it you know any e-commerce store it's not like you're working on just this one thing today kind of thing but you do have to keep focused right you can't you too many things at once you've got to do a step at a time but it's not like there's just one set of rails you're riding along like it's spaghetti and you know it's that whole throw spaghetti against the wall and see see what sticks kind of concept yeah and but you got to be watching and seeing what sticks and and listening to your customers um however listening happens right it may be watch watchingg what they're doing on the website in sales it may be talking to them physically or it may be calling up your abandoned carts or whatever but you you've got to listen to what they're doing through all the different ways that you're getting a signal from them to determine which of all these best practices you're trying are working and that in the end when you do that it gives you a better understanding of your customer and you can start to see the big picture where it's not like you can see that big picture when you start you got to get in the car and drive before you can see where that destination is for

yeah totally like just doing it you learned so much about your customer right like I feel like that's something that uh P the past year that I'm really starting to get and then appreciate and then want to get even a better understanding of that customer right um and all this stuff right is like you start off and you think you know your customer hey it's going to be ale you know males between you know 18 and 25 and they're gonna like cars right that's my that's my thing but your customer is not that right like we think we know our customer our customer is you know when you think about like Facebook algorithms and like you know it's like intelligence agency level type of understanding of who that person is they have you know 300 data points on what that person does doesn't do likes is is not all that kind of stuff like that that level of understanding is uh maybe something we aspire to but uh it's really about like uh determining the customer's needs and trying to fill those

yeah or not fill them yeah yeah well and also as you develop your brand message and not just your brand message but your brand right like the the authenticity that you have right as an animal lover right a a you know a company that came in says oh I'm smarter I'm you know more uh financing I'm going to put these repti chip guys out of business they'd never be able to do because you have an authentic brand like I've seen you do your podcast where you know you're you're holding a snake and you're just it was it was a female and you're like oh this is such a beautiful girl you're pet in the St like it was real right like people people see that that also love snakes they're like this guy is real and authentic therefore this brand is real and authentic and you can't fake that kind of stuff right

no and you should I mean you shouldn't even want to right I think that's just what you know that is a core that is core to our brand is like you know made for reptile people by reptile people right like this isn't a play on anything else and I think probably a lot of your clients are like that like that's why we get into these these businesses um and it's you know we can never lose sight of that that's got to be up up here that's why we're doing what we're doing in the meantime we gotta figure out how to make a living out of it

yeah but but there's the key right is yes Mo most small business owners are probably at that level of authenticity the challenge for them is to get that out in their messaging so their customers can see that yeah right yeah yeah always a challenge yep always a

unless unless you do what you do is just get up there in front of the camera just start talking and that's that's pretty damn valuable you know it's hard to do but it's pretty damn valuable I think I'm more introverted than you are and you know know it's it's just like Nike says just do it right just do it yeah like I I was a spokesperson accidentally when I worked at Microsoft I was an Xbox and I became one of like the four or five spokespeople for Xbox and I would have to go to you know industry events and talk to press for three days straight you know a 30 minute clip with each different press Outlet right and once you do that one show you know three days at 30 minutes a clip like you know how to do it right and then you start doing show after show after show it's it's a learn skill for most people some people may be natural at it you know great I respect those people but most people that are you know good at it or confident at it it's a learn thing and they were very uncomfortable about it in the beginning but you know just do it you know would you down do another like you did for your December video uh would you do another one of those pretty quickly again

yeah I think it's carbon out time but I mean the benefit to it now is like uh just like you said we learned we learned some things that are gonna make it faster easier uh that you know keep us from going down some different Pitfall roads you know whatever it is make sure your audio is good yeah yeah

well and you know you also get over some of your inhibitions about doing it right just do it right like you're you're a way better looking guy than I am I'm like the ugliest guy that I've seen on YouTube in the past year but people aren't listening to me for my good looks they're listening to me for my advice right and you just you learn to get over your insecurities about things and and just put yourself out there

no I got a face for radio so

oh no you're you're a good-looking guy JT so uh so I don't

well I I hire good-look people that's that's my uh that's my secret y

but you know you know in you know in all seriousness like in authentic Brands right and this is even before the age of the internet where was like the I love this you know business so much I bought it those you know people that were the spokesperson for their own businesses kind of thing you know yeah there's you know some of those people are crackpots like crazy Yeti or something like that but there's also an authenticity behind it that you know that authenticity is is a connection that people can make to a brand and you know I think all small stores there's a couple exceptions but very rare all small stores you know the owner should be the face of the brand and you've put yourself out there and you're doing that now um where other people aren't and that's why they're behind trying

yeah yeah it's not it's definitely not something that's comfortable for me but uh that's how we grow right

totally totally you that's how you grow as a person and that's how you grow your business right yeah exactly it is win-win so um we've been talking for quite a while here any other words of wisdom for uh people that are in the situation you were in a year ago

I don't know it's a lot kind of the things that we've danced around or talked about already which is like one whether it's the website stuff or getting online or you know whatever doing a video or whatever I I find a lot of value and I know because you say this all the time too is just do just like like do it right like do it and let it be crappy and don't get fixated on it has to be 100% right do the 80% put it out there learn on the next one just start building like that and that applies to a lot of different things not just like videos or promo or anything else

that is a beautiful summary of of the whole conversation we just had right literally like we can end right there because that that is just do not be embarrassed just do it it's going to be horrible and that's okay

yeah yeah that's okay like I look at it like this is like get used to it right get used to the suck get used to it hurting and get used to failing right because it's all on the path to success yeah uh the only time that you fail is when you quit

yep well I I appreciate all the insight and and all the all the stuff you've been sharing with us I it's been a great time

I'm happy to do it Scott and uh I know you yelled at me when we had a break like not to not to promo you or like give you a shout out but it's hard not to because I really do appreciate the things that you bring to the table outside of web development and that's uh I think that's probably what your business is probably should be known for is like it's more a business development it's not NE just happen to be technically uh toid

well that's my foot in the door all right thanks a lot you got it Scott