Hey, let's get Austin here. In this podcast episode, I'm going to be on the receiving end of the interview. So what you're going to see is an episode I recorded with the iron Shepherd podcast, where they're asking me questions and I'm given the answers.

So I hope you enjoy this interview. Thanks for listening.

All right. Welcome back to the podcast for the Iron Shepherds. We're here with Scott Austin of Jade Boomer Scott. How are you doing? Excellent, Chris, thanks for having me today. Good. Thanks for, thanks for joining us from San Diego. I'm just, just up the coast here, but, I don't know, whatever that is 80 miles or something like that.

We're both probably enjoying the same weather. Yeah, it's a beautiful November day here in San Diego. It's awesome. So why don't you tell us a bit about,

Jade Puma? What you guys do, how you make money. So, Jade Puma is a Shopify only agency, right? So we help small brands grow and build their online business through Shopify

So tell me about your normal clients. I mean, Shopify can kind of I mean, I don't know what are there. There's millions of Shopify customers or something like that. Who's the normal kind of business that comes to you?

Yeah, I think these days there's probably 3 million Shopify stores. Right. But, you know, of course with anything there's a head and tail. So you got the big brands out there like, you know, Kylie Jenner is on Shopify, Gymshark is on Shopify, those kind of things. I have found that my niche is the opposite end of the spectrum, not the people who wish they could do business.

You know, they're on Shopify, but they're not doing any sales.

But I help new brands start out. And, you know, I'm 58 years old. And I realized over time, you know, what I'm good at and what I'm not good at or what I have patience for and what I don't have patience for. And I spent like 12 years at Microsoft and I couldn't stand red tape.

Right. And I, I had one client and one of my early clients, and Shopify was a fortune 500 company, and I would get on with a meeting with them. They'd be 12 of them and one of me, and we'd all be talking, here's the plan. So we got to do. And the guy we needed to do the work from the client side was never at the meetings.

And I just I couldn't stand these meetings and anyone else was like, that was a great meeting. Like, we didn't get anything done. We didn't make any decision. We did move forward. So I ended up over time gravitating towards smaller and smaller brands because I want to work with the decision maker. I don't I get frustrated and it's just me being an impatient old, old man, right kind of thing that I just don't enjoy having, you know?

Let's go through the first round of approval and the second round in the third round, I love working with the business owner and we make decisions and we just take action every single day. So in the end, I ended up, you know, servicing everybody in the beginning. Now I'm like, now if you're a small team, you're a founder, you're the owner, and you want to work and get hands on with your business.

I'm the person for you. Right? So, I think you've been in business, what, about a decade or maybe a little bit. A little more or less. Jade Puma has been around since 2018, and before that, I had a previous agency with a business partner called Product Graph, and that's how I got into shop, like kind of accidentally.

And that we started that in 2013. I think. So yeah, I'm doing Shopify for 12 years now. Yeah. So how is, how is your industry kind of changed with that with I mean, I know Shopify has changed quite a bit since then, but how is how how those things kind of evolved? Well, I think what's happened a lot in that time frame is you used to be able to run a commerce business, a retail business without an online presence, without an online store.

And then if Covid hadn't done it, it would have happened anyways. Probably. But you have to in today's world, have an online presence, right? And you have to be selling multi-channel. Now there are some still, of course, some, you know, still just brick and mortar. But if you're on Amazon, which is a great channel for people, you don't own your customer relationship.

So you if you're a successful Amazon, you know, business, you're going to want to develop your own Shopify presence. Now, I say that like Shopify is like a Band-Aid. You know, the term that nobody understands. Like if you have your own online store today, it's me. It's an absolute no brainer on the Shopify, right? This is why I focus only on Shopify, not because I get paid by them to do that, but because I found it.

It's the best, you know, platform for, you know, an online store to be on where, you know, 15, 20 years ago, there were options. There are still options today, but Shopify just somehow just is fantastic at keeping themselves way ahead of the competition in that space. So if you're in online store, what's what's changed is you have to be an online store because you started off as an Etsy seller, you start off an Amazon seller, you got to have your own store because that customer relationship is so important, right?

It gets harder and harder today to compete in the world of advertising gets more expensive. Everybody's drowned out with all the messaging. So you have to develop your own relationship with your customer and get a lot of your business from your existing customer base. Repeat business through email. You're only going to do that if you own the customer through your own store, right?

So along those lines, you know, because I, I know a bit about, you know, what you do in, in that e-commerce space. So when you talk about Shopify and of course you've got, I don't even know how many, probably millions of different plug ins that that you can do and integrate, whether it's ship station or things along those lines.

Do you get into like helping your customer manage the business, or is it really something like, hey Scott, I need I want to start doing something to manage SMS marketing. And, you know, and you say, oh, well, I recommend you use X. And, you know, I can help you integrate and implement it, but you're going to have to have somebody to use it or to actually use it.

Or do you, do you have an agency that actually says, we'll do that, we'll do that for you? Well, we'll handle the flows and things along those lines. Yeah. And it's a great question because every agency has different rules or different boundaries of what it does and does not do. And of course, you know, it's sort of like, you know, if you own your own house and you call in the pro to come in to fix your house, they're like, well, I only do the plumbing.

I don't do the electrical, I only do the tile. Like, you want someone to do everything, but no one does. Everything or the ones that do everything are super big, which means you have a lot of overhead and they're super expensive, right? So with the small brands that I'm working with, they can't find one agency to do everything for them because they can't afford that agency.

So where I have drawn the lines of what I do and don't do is I work on your website and I'll also help you with your email if you're using like a klaviyo platform. If you're using MailChimp, I will migrate you to Klaviyo in 10s, but that's where I help people out. And over time, that's gotten more and more like we.

I used to just do the liquid code and HTML edits and setting up the themes. Now we do custom apps, now we do graphics, now we do video and editing and all that kind of stuff. We do email creation, content creation, anything you want on your website or in your email marketing with the things we don't do is drawing traffic to your site.

So we don't do social and we don't do advertising. I find that those take, you know, daily active work and people need to be experts in those platforms, right? I have decided to be an expert in the Shopify platform. To the extent we go over the top on that, we only use one theme for every store that I've ever I've built in the past five years.

Before that, we use one theme for, you know, every store we built in the previous three years before that.

the theme I use right now is the flex theme by out of the sandbox. I may change that in the future.

But the reason I do one theme, just like I do one platform, is I

understand that theme really, really well.

Whatever customer you know has a request for me. Like I want to do X, Y, and Z, right? I have done that before in another store in the same theme. So I can just copy the code from that store, drop it into this store, edit it for their specific needs. But it's a lot easier for me and quicker for me.

And anything quicker for me is cheaper for my client, which is super important to me that, you know, focus on one platform, one theme so that we can accelerate the time to market for people. And so do you find that, I mean, because I think you have a wide range of verticals, if you will. Yep.

And I'm just going to come up with an example.

But what a fashion sort of company be okay with the same theme as, energy beverage company or something like that. Is that, you know, it's funny you say that because because everybody thinks the theme drives their customer experience, right? So people have perceptions of a website design when they look at a website like, I love the design of that website.

Nine times out of ten, they do not love what I consider the design of the website. What they love is the imagery of the website. And a lot of people pick their theme based on the, you know, placeholder images they put in there are relevant to my space. Therefore, I think it's built for my vertical. I find that, you know, for me, what a design is of a website is the decision making engine that it becomes.

Right. So how do you break down the choices the customers have to make to understand the product catalog, to be educated in the choices you're making? So they have confidence when they get to the cart that this is the right product for them. That to me is the design of the website, which is navigation pages, taxonomy, filters and all that kind of stuff.

It's not the imagery. So a lot of people, when they look at the website like, I love the design of that, it's the image they're looking at. I focus a lot of my energy on that, what I call the design, the taxonomy decision making engine. And I can use one theme to

service. Any vertical. Now we might, if you have a larger catalog, bring in a, a filtering app like boost filtering app, which has, you know, more robust features, your small catalog, we use the Shopify filtering app.

So we will change out what we're doing from a app standpoint and also how deep we're going in the code. But one theme can satisfy any vertical because there's a lot of flexibility there. And in Shopify, once we get a theme store in the store, we have complete control over it. We can open it up and do anything we want inside of it, which is one of the beauties of the Shopify platform.

Yeah. Interesting.

Building. Trust in your store is essential, but let's be honest. Most trust badge apps make your store look worse, not better. Their badges clash with your brand and give your store a Frankenstein like feel. That's why we built Godzilla, the Shopify app that delivers trust badges that seamlessly match your brand. Originally crafted for our private clients, but Zilla was so successful, we turned it into an app for every Shopify store.

With badge zilla, you'll access hundreds of badges, all customizable to your brand guidelines, making them a natural part of your customer experience. Place badges on product pages, collection pages, the home page, and more. Take it a step further with conditional logic. Show a made in Canada badge only on products made in Canada or tailor badges to highlight your unique selling points.

And the best part? Badge Zilla comes with a robust, always free plan so you can start building trust. Risk free transform trust into conversions with Godzilla.

I want to pivot a little bit to our, kind of introductory emails, you know, for the for the people out there. I contacted you, you called, you were nice enough to get back to me, which is always nice in this day and age, my years of sales. You know, I probably gotten a lot more since I started this business.

Like, I get a higher response rate with this business than I ever did when I was at Oracle. It's kind of interesting, but, but anyway, you had, you had mentioned something of the topic that you wanted to discuss was about kind of, you know, starting get rich quick businesses. And I think you might have you actually use the buzz word for it in the email.

I'd love to get your insight on, you know, why that bubbled up to the top of why you want to talk about that and feel free to share your experience.

Yeah. So in my experience, you know, having talked to probably over a thousand stores by now, they've been doing this for well over a decade.

And I you remember I'm focused on the small guys. So it's the people that are just getting started or they're trying to build their business and take it from 100,000 to $1 million a year in revenue. A lot of my stores that I used to work with have failed. And, you know, I find it's really hard to build a business.

Right. And this is my third business. I've built myself before that, you know, you know, I worked in the government in Microsoft. You know, I've got three decades worth of experience. And in my experience, nothing is easy. Nothing. Whether you want to be, you know, a, you know, if you want to go to the NCAA, a, you know, championship as a basketball team or you want to play pro football, and if you don't even at the top level stuff, just anything in life is hard.

Getting on your high school football team can be hard, right? Being a successful high high school football team really hard. You know, getting a master's degree, everything in this life is hard. It takes work, it takes energy, it takes tons and tons of time.

I can't multitask at all. Like even at the life level.

I'm like, if I can do more than one thing at a time over a year's time. So one of the things I work with stores to understand and we we can remember, I'm working with small brands. They're not a big company. They don't have peers that they can talk to. So I end up being a counselor for them a lot of the time.

And like, I'll have clients who almost, you know, they're they're almost in tears sometimes and they're like, yeah, this is so hard. This is so frustrating. I'm like, that is exactly the normal response. So they think it's unique. Like they think everybody has an easy time making their business so successful. Right. Because they look on TikTok and they see someone dance in and they they're showing their million dollar frickin sales day or whatever, which, by the way, is complete and utter B.S., right?

When people show that garbage. Right? Yeah. And the real example I give there is like a never listen to somebody whose YouTube video has a Ferrari or a Lamborghini in the thumbnail. Right? That's one of my best practices. Never look at a video where the person looks like maybe they haven't graduated high school right yet, like they're too young to graduate high school, right?

Never look at the video where it says how to do this in 30s or three minutes or less. If they're trying to tell you how easy it is to get it done, they're lying to you, right? Just something as simple as, you know, we were talking before about email. Setting up Klaviyo properly for email marketing takes tens, 20, 40 hours worth of work, right?

A full workweek just to get it set up. Not even effective just to get it set up properly. All the flows and the templates and the designs

and you'll see the the video, like how I made $1 million in Klaviyo in three days or less, like utter BS, right? So what frustrates me is, you know, we all understand the term clickbait.

We all understand like everybody living their their best fake life on the internet. But the problem is and that's the only message you see all the time you believe that's true. And then when you start doing it and your email system isn't effective in three minutes or less, and it's going to take you a full workweek to get it up to be effective, you're like, what am I doing wrong?

And so I have to tell my clients all the time, no, you're not doing things wrong. You're doing things exactly right. Like, I have a client who was on my podcast a couple of years ago from Raptor Chip, and when I first started working with JT, his monthly revenue was about $5,000 a month. Now this is three years later.

His monthly revenue just hit. I remember looking at the numbers yesterday, hit $96,000 for the last month, which is like 20 x, right? Literally 20 freakin X. But if you look at his growth line, because I have this, you know, scorecard, I send him all the time and it's slowly went up and you could barely see it, but every month it went up.

You know, generally the trend was up, up, up, up, up. And then this past year it actually started not hockey sticking, but actually the slope increase kind of thing. But it took him two years. We did all every I mean with him every single month. Every two weeks actually every month for the past three years. And we work on all these things.

Right. The first thing we did is we added subscriptions and we added reviews and we added email. Mr.. Doing marketing programs. And then we tried, you know, some SEO strategies. And we did a lot of stuff. And what I love about JT, this is the hardest working client of mine that I have. Anything that any idea come up with.

Not everyone because he won't do videos enough yet, but he'll get there. But every time we talk about stuff, he does his work and he does the hard work like we come up the SEO strategy to make a blog. He sells his substrate for animals. So, you know, the animals are like snakes and turtles and frogs and stuff like that.

So he had no content on his site for the Egyptian tortoise, for example. So he made a page for the Egyptian tortoise. But then he made that for 270 animals, right? Ography and the guidelines and the habits. And we've been growing these things for two years now. And now it's a massive traffic driver. So has been converting really well.

So we keep working on how do we get it to convert, how do we get to convert kind of thing. But he does the hard work. And now three years later, he's much, you know, higher revenue than he was in the past for a whole bunch of different reasons. But he took a step every single day, got better, smarter, better, smarter, and just kept trudging along.

And it's probably his military background. He just doesn't give up kind of thing. Right? That, to me, is the kind of person we all should be thinking about. When we start our own business. We should not be thinking about Kylie Jenner. No disrespect to her all. I think with her cosmetics company. Absolutely fantastic, right? And people like she built $1 billion business overnight and then a year later it's worth 2 billion and people buy it out and all that kind of stuff.

But you got to remember, she didn't build that overnight, right? That started in 1972 with her dad winning the Olympic gold medal, literally. Right. And then her sisters and the whole dynasty for decades becoming who and what they are. Right. If you were, you know, in a family of the Jenners or whatever. Yeah, you could build something like that overnight.

But let's face it, the other 99.999% of us don't have that advantage. So we have to build it from scratch ourselves. And that is a long, hard, never ending slog. It amazes me how many times

I'm talking to a client about something and this is happened yesterday, like, yeah, we're migrating this store, this client built. He built it by hand, his own code in 2001, 24 years later, that store is still up and running.

But, you know, we're we're going to bring it that into the new millennium by moving it to Shopify. He's got 64,000 products, 14,000 customers and all sorts of data. And we're trying to migrate. And it's not perfect, right. The old data, you know, dirty kind of thing. And I'm like, yeah, we're gonna have to go through line by line for everything you've sold in the past year and manage inventory.

When we finish our migration process, he's like, wow, that's really hard. Yeah, it is, but it's the only way we can do it now. Sometimes I mean, annual is the only way.

if you want to do it right. Sometimes you do it the hard way and you do it manually. We're gonna sit there for two weeks straight, checking every single line item kind of thing.

Now, if we can do it programmatically, great. But it amazes me how many times, like, there's a hard thing to do, like make 270 blog articles, about 270 different types of animals. And my client's like, oh, that sounds great, and they never get to it. But the ones who get to it and the ones that do it are the ones that stay in the game longer and become, you know, successful over time.

Right? Right. You know, it's interesting you and you were talking about things being hard. And I wish I could remember who the quote came from, but, something that pops into my mind from time to time is, getting rich is hard. Being poor is hard. Choose your hard. You don't know if that resonates with you, but it always makes me chuckle.

Well, the quote I love and it's funny because I work for a company that was a startup back then, Active Network in 2011 or so, and I developed a strategy course that I was deploying out to the company to get people thinking more strategically, supposedly. Right. So I found a lot of inspirational quotes and back then there was this guy I had never heard of, Jensen Wang, who was the CEO of this small company called Nvidia back then.

Right. And I found a quote from him in 2003, a video he did, and I thought it was so inspirational back then. I threw into this course I did in 2011. And it's so prophetic today because for the ten people who don't know this, Nvidia is now the largest CapEx company in the world. But in 2003, the CEO said, you don't need a winning strategy for your company.

You need a strategy that keeps you in the game for the next year, because next year you're going to be smarter about your business, and then the next year after they get you smarter, he's like, don't try to find a winning strategy. Try to find a strategy that keeps you company alive. And then over time, you'll get smarter about things.

And obviously that worked out quite well for them. Yeah. So, you know, in the years that you've been in business, kind of keep it with the same theme, you know, getting started, probably being a one man show,

had all kinds of hard challenges year. You did at the start. What's what's hard about today for you today?

The hard for me is because I've done a really good job, at least I think in building a brand like I, you know, I always ask my, my clients when they first find me, like, how did you find me? And there's a bunch of different ways they do. And I'm a huge fan of content marketing. Right. So I have a podcast.

I've not missed a single episode in six years time. I do YouTube videos, I do blog articles. I don't do anything outbound. It's all inbound, right? I'm just waiting for people to find my content and and contact me, which is there's a lot of things about that strategy you absolutely love, right? Especially for me, being such a what's the term for people hate people introvert.

Yeah. Introvert. That's the word I was looking for. Thank you. I'm a huge introvert. Right. So, you know, I don't like reaching out to people kind of thing. So I like when they come to me. But the hard part used to be, you know, I say the hardest part in any business, any business, I don't care what your business is.

The hardest part is customer acquisition.

And everybody thinks, oh, it's the product, it's the technology, it's the science. Like not that's that's hard. I'm not disagreeing. The hardest part in any business is customer acquisition. So for me, the customer acquisition strategy of inbound and content was the hard part. And I have to like the example of doing the hard work.

I do my podcast every two weeks. It goes out on Wednesday. There are many times that my podcast is not ready on Sunday night. I'm not. I don't allow myself to go to bed on Sunday night until my podcast is done. There are many people who might say, yeah, I'll get to it later. Like and then they missed that one.

And once you missed one, you missed them, you know, then you've then you've given yourself permission to miss all of them kind of thing. So I'm very proud of the fact I don't care what you know, every other Wednesday. I don't care if it's Christmas or Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is on a Thursday, right? But

I don't care what it is.

If I'm on vacation. Doesn't matter. I always publish every other Wednesday kind of thing. Now I'm I'm a little bit, you know, the way I am kind of thing. And that's not for everybody. But the point is, you got to do that hard work.

In the early days, the hard work was having content for that customer acquisition of finding customers.

Now that that's been successful, I have to keep it going, right. It doesn't mean I can stop when I say I'm successful. Content creation doesn't mean I stop creating content. But that has gotten so good. I actually have more business than I can handle. So the hard part now is I now have to hire. I would be very proud of the fact I was a one man shop for you to see.

I used to say, I guarantee you I'm the best one person shop agency in the world. Maybe it's an exaggeration, but maybe not. I consider myself pretty good for a one man show, but now there's ten of us working at Jade Puma, and the hard part for me now is finding good help and keeping good help. Right? You know, that's a super hard part of every business that has more than one employee is finding good employees and keeping good employees.

So normally I would say the hardest part is customer acquisition. I'm doing well at that now. The hardest part is me, you know, keeping that customer acquisition satisfied because with good service. Yeah. So interesting. I kind of anticipated you would have said customer acquisition. That's interesting. That you do that with no outbound. Good for you. That's awesome.

So along those getting good people if you if you had to if you had a magic wand, well I guess you had a magic wand, you would just wave it and you would have good people sitting in chairs. How do you struggle with that? Or what do you think, could be better that that would make that a little easier on you?

I don't think I can. Well, you can always make it better kind of thing. I just think it's the challenge of, once again, it goes back to everybody thinks it's easy, right? Everybody thinks everything is easy. So I'll meet somebody who says, you know, they're good at something, right? And then you find out they're not good at it.

And when it comes to solving a problem, they don't know how to solve a problem. Now, I'm 58 years old. I'm a complete old curmudgeon. You know, I'm not of the boomer generation, but people have called me Boomer before and I accept that. Right. And so I am one of these people who will say quite often, kids these days.

Right. And there is a generational divide, between, you know, different groups of people. And the way that I do things is not the way that, you know, people who are 30, 40 years younger than me do things, not saying they're right or wrong. It's just that difference. Right? So for me, the challenge is trying to understand how people think differently.

And I'm also like I used to coach, kids and roller derby in the past decade. And I was considered myself like a 1970s football coach. You know, the tough love kind of thing. And suck it up. And then there's there's strength to that, but it's not for everybody kind of thing. So I've never been the rah rah guy.

I'm not usually inspirational. I think the job is the satisfaction. Success is launching the site, not the celebration about launching the site. And not everybody is that way. So for me, the secret is finding people who work well with me. You know, they may be great people, but they're not great people with me because of my style and their style.

So, you know, a working relationship, like any relationship, the two people have to work well together, respect each other, understand each other, and if they don't, then you just quickly part ways kind of thing. So I'm a big fan of trying anybody out who seems like they have promise. And if it works, you give them more and more responsibility to them.

But does it cut them loose in a second? Right. Yeah. Yelling is just not going to work. Yeah. Just looked at the clock and I want to be respectful of your time. I know we went over the time I booked for you. What did you tell the audience? You know how they do go about, getting in touch with you?

Should they want to procure your services, we can we can jump out here. Yeah. If anybody is looking to become successful on Shopify with e-commerce, I'm here for you. I'm absolutely love helping brands, and I love the relationships I end up developing over years with people. Right. So if you want to reach out to Jade, Jade puma.com, that's where you get started.

You can just contact us,

through there

and happy to help you out. Terrific.

And Scott, like I said, we're not far from each other. And I got a bunch of friends at San Diego. Maybe we can maybe pop out, one of those Pacific Beach, places. Grab some lunch on these days. Tap room, baby, two blocks from my house.

I'll be there today. Is that your, is that your lunch? But. Yeah. Yeah, it's two blocks from my house. I love I what I call this two block radius of his board two blocks from a house. I'm not sure if I'm going to go. So. Because where I live, there's a lot of stuff. And in two blocks, it's kind of fun.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe I should move down. Here's my. I have a mile and a half bubble, so that's pretty good. Well, awesome. I really appreciate you sharing your your business. It's it's it was a pleasure getting to know you. And,

Yeah. Hopefully we'll stay in touch. Sounds good. Thanks a lot for having me. All right. Thanks.