The Exchanges

Q How have you had to change yourself to continue being able to exist in your role as the, the owner of this company?

A One is that I didn't used to need to have salespeople. Because I could do all the sales. And what we found as we grew bigger and I grew older was that I don't always resonate, um, as a proud Gen Xer, I might not resonate with a millennial the way I would hope, and they might not resonate with me. So part of the way to do that is to have a bigger team around you that can support you and be self-aware, hopefully of my own gaps and my own, my own gaps in my knowledge and my own biases and my own personality defects, which I try to be aware. And then surround myself with people that can fill those gaps, and hopefully I can help them fill their gaps as well. So just being aware of what I'm, of what I'm doing and who I am and what my failings are, which I think a lot about. The other part is, it's just very dynamic. When I started doing this, online advertising really meant search keywords on Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo, Bing, Seven Search, Dogpile, Lycos. It was all search. Um, and then social came into play and that didn't really work super well in the first two or three years that it existed and having to learn those tasks and, and to understand that the processes I followed 16 or 20 years ago don't work now because of automations and realizing that new things have to unlock. It used to be that if you were a more sophisticated bidding person, if you knew how to game the algorithms i…

AI assessment note: “be self-aware, hopefully of my own gaps and my own, my own gaps”

Q is incredibly expensive, almost prohibitively for some people, depending on, you know, what they're trying to promote. What do you look for in a potential client? What, what's something that they say or do when they come to you that tells you immediately that this is someone who could be successful. And I guess this question is meant to be answered for someone who's looking to grow their own business.

A The biggest thing. That is to me an indicator of the ability to be successful is not revenue targets because everyone's got revenue targets. Um, they might be made up. They might be plotted on a, on a graph that goes up and to the right indefinitely, but not everyone has, has specific goals around new customers, right? This is how many new customers I want this year. If, if, if I'm talking to a prospect, they've all got revenue targets, but if I'm talking to a prospect and in addition to saying, I'm a, 700,000 dollar a year brand, and I want to get to be a five million dollar brand by 20 30. That's a, that's a, or 2029. That's a typical thing that come into our door. Um, if they can tell me how many of those are going to come from, how many of, how much of that revenue is going to come from new customers as opposed to existing customers. I know I'm dealing with a sophisticated person who's thought about this a lot and is probably going to have a leg up in the competition. Their supply chains might not be organized. They might have a bad product market fit. I, I can't judge those things. Um, but, but if they could tell me how many, what percentage of the revenue they want to have come from new customers versus existing customers, I know I'm dealing with someone who's pretty sophisticated and pretty smart and has a really good chance to succeed.

AI assessment note: “not everyone has, has specific goals around new customers”

Q to kind of scratch that itch, if you will. Uh, so I, I definitely understand why you're continuing to do it. Um, I think helping people is a very interesting thing to do because everyone is different. Everyone has different ideas and different ways of living and doing. And that is exciting for me to see why people are different. Um, How do you navigate your client's differences of opinions?

A Um, I have a, I have a stock answer for that. I don't know if it's a good answer, but my answer to that is it's not my job to do what a client asks. It's my job to give my client my best advice based on billions of dollars of assets under management and 16 years of doing this and hundreds of brands. It's my job to give them my best advice and, and then do what they ask. So navigating it for me is simple. If a client says I want to go up, I want to increase revenue by 40% this year. And I can say, great. Why? How fast do you want to get there? Um, I can, we can, we can, are you taking on outside investment? I think the analogy we use is client says, I want to go up. We say, great. I can take the stairs. You can take the elevator. I've got a jet pack in the back. If you want to get there very quickly, let's talk about how quickly you want to get there and why you want to get there. And then ultimately you do what the client asks. Um, unless it's really, really wrong, and then it's not a good fit, and you, and you mutually part ways. So there's not a lot of conflict about that. It's more like they all have their own way of doing it, and it's my job to apply the best practices I've seen to help them in the best way I can.

AI assessment note: “It's my job to give them my best advice and, and then do what they ask.”

Q Do you think people are thinking about expense management right now? Or if they're, if they are, what are they doing right? What are they doing wrong? If they're not thinking about it, why?

A I think they have to be because all the products are going to be costing a whole lot more, um, today than they were a month ago. So I think they're definitely thinking about it. My pitch for that is that my fees haven't gone up. So if everything else in your, in your ecosystem now costs 30% more because you're importing from China, well, congratulations. I don't cost 30% more. So I'm actually efficient. Um, and we have a whole business model around not really raising fees for clients and And making sure that we can maintain continuity for a client. We have clients that are paying us the same right now that we're paying us six years ago. Um, and it's because the way we manage the business. So yeah, I think everyone's looking at managing finances right now, but we try to be part of the solution and not the problem.

AI assessment note: “My pitch for that is that my fees haven't gone up.”

Q You said something really important that if you continue to do the things that you used to do, you'd be out of business. How has the tariffs affected your business in terms of getting clients, keeping clients or helping clients continue their growth path?

A On Friday, I was talking to a client from the UK, they were in New York, and we were talking, and they were saying that they were thinking about pulling out of the United States. I wouldn't be surprised if more people said that. I think what's different now, as compared to twenty-twenty, is a few things, is to help clients navigate it, right? This week of twenty-twenty, the world was bedlam, we were all locked at home, at least I was in New York, and we were all doom scrolling, and something like 40% of our business evaporated overnight. Sean, when I, when I started the company, I made a dream list of clients I wanted to work with, and one of them was a shirting company, a made in America, a manufactured America shirting company, and we worked with that client, and then this is, which worked in the 2018, 1920, and in 2020, they said, we're giving up. We don't want to go direct to consumer anymore. We want to go to, uh, we just wanted to survive so we can support the haberdasheries that got us here and, and, uh, come out the other side of this. They did not. They ended up, they ended up having to sell the business. Um, so, so what we learned in 2020 was, which was much more, the big difference between 20 20 with COVID and now is that we actually have more certainty now, and I'm trying not to be political in this answer, but, um, Everyone's got the same tariffs. So we all know wh…

AI assessment note: “they were saying that they were thinking about pulling out of the United States.”

Q Were you aware that earlier today, the U S increased the tariffs by another hundred percent on China?

A There's challenges all the time. I started this business in 2008, 2020 was a, was a serious issue. The other thing that's, cause I mentioned earlier, I think I mentioned that about half of our clients are GDC companies, and about half of our clients are schools, and I, I will die on the hill that that is a benefit for our, for our customers, that about 60 clients and half of them are GDC and half of them are schools, because they, they can learn from one another, and I was in Chicago last week talking to a bunch of clients and trying to talk about how they can learn from one another. Um, it's interesting because one of the schools I was talking to has made a serious effort in the last six years to bolster, I won't say what it is, but a certain degree they sell, Which is for whatever reason, demographically, no longer interesting to Americans. And the way they've done that is invest in overseas, um, and overseas enrollment. So they've got people coming from around the world to fill their, their fairly niche, uh, good career outcome, uh, career, uh, college program that they're selling. And that's drying up. And they're aware that it's drying up because at this school, at least as of last week, uh, their applications from overseas were down. They, the good news is they're aware of it and they're working on it, right? They're not pretending it's not happening. They're, they're not…

AI assessment note: “There's challenges all the time. I started this business in 2008”