Dylan (04:44):

But, uh,

Jared (04:46):

$5. And I sold $175 order over the phone and they paid shipping. And I said, Elena, I think that we have a business here. And so that's how this whole mess got started from there. We started adding more and more product lines to that website, skin gear by elena.com or the last 15 years we sell over 300 brands. And more recently we started our own brand three to four years ago under my wife's name, Elena Mitchell. And that has grown exponentially almost 10 X each year. So it's been a lot of fun.

Dylan (05:16):

That is, that's a wild ride. It's five to 10 cent clicks on Google and hand this, what if that was still a thing?

Jared (05:25):

Yeah, man, I hear you can do that sort of thing on Reddit and Pinterest, but, but you know,

Dylan (05:30):

My gosh, yeah. I haven't seen clicks that sheep since fricking I started to take talking snap ads and even then you can't get that that much anymore.

Jared (05:40):

We're still a, when we run ads around here, we still get them that cheap on Pinterest. And my marketing manager who's really into ads and stuff tells me that Reddit is still in that range. If you know what you're doing, you know, you're going to work a little bit to get there, but, you know, um, that's, that's the word on the street.

Dylan (05:58):

So with you being the head honcho over there, I imagine you help set the goals kind of projections more or less. So when you're setting your goals for y'all's marketing budgets or, you know, marketing KPI goals, do you look at the LTV of a customer average order value? I'm kind of curious what runs through your mind to kind of set some parameters to essentially set that limit up, you know,

Jared (06:20):

Yeah. Planning, um, out goals for the year is something that I really thrive on and we do back into things pretty much, um, directly from our data and our numbers. And it essentially starts with the overall revenue goal for the entire business. So essentially I have three businesses, one's a retail store, one's that brand. And then one's beefy sites, the online course, you know, consulting business, speedy sites.com, check it out. Um, thank you. Thank you. And, uh, basically I'll set a revenue goal for each of the business and you, if you saw me right now, like on camera behind me, you see the fruit of this. I have a large whiteboard in my office. We essentially set the overall revenue goal. And then we set the marketing channels that bring us in revenue and we set where we are right now and then where they need to be to hit the revenue revenue goal.

Jared (07:13):

And then simply under each wheelie at the steps we need to take to reach that. And we lay out every single metric that you just mentioned and more and how they need to change to get there. So everything is quantifiable and we can literally have my CPA, um, do a forecast budget down to every single line item of spend so that we can reach that overall goal. In some months we exceed it. Like we all probably had a good time during COVID doing that. And then some months were maybe a little shy, but overall we are all on the same page. And then more importantly, um, something that my mentor, Greg Hawkins, the guy who IPO by.com taught me is if you want to have happy employees and you want them to stick with you for forever, make sure everyone has access to the appropriate numbers that you've laid out and then incentivize them to hit them too.

Dylan (08:07):

That's beautiful. Hey, win, win, or lose, lose. Ron has trained together, you know, and I think that's a great way to kind of put it there. Cause I mean, you want the guys who are incentivized to really go above and beyond to make a work because more money in their pocket, more money in the business's pocket. So kind of a no brainer there, right?

Jared (08:22):

A lot of people don't take the time to really spell it out or get the right people under their wings, like is what I have, you know, cause I'm not like the number cruncher type of guy, um, to spell it out. But once you do, and once you get in that routine, um, you're on the course for, uh, you know, a stress less way of scaling your businesses where you're not waking up at one or two in the morning, each night, worried about it,

Dylan (08:46):

Man, I'm already done am for this one. Let's go ahead and dive into this bad boy. So of course in the podcast, we'd love to kind of into the rich and poor at AK what's working for you and what hasn't kind of worked for you, maybe some of those more things you're kind of embarrassed to admit, could it be an offer strategy? Who knows? So what's your rich ad. And this scenario here

Jared (09:11):

[inaudible] by Richard is not an ad at all. It's so funny and I'm going to totally throw a curve ball here. I actually kind of hate ads doing ads myself. Um, and I don't like getting into like the Facebook ads manager. I don't like setting up audiences. Um, I'm, I'm not down with the tick talk. I'm just not, you know, that's what the adults say. They say the tick tock, you know, so I'm not down with the tech talk, even though I have an account and I understand how it works, like, but I know enough to know my boundaries and my limits, and I know I need to hire the right people to do it. So I do feel I have the right people in place in most of those areas. So actually what I want to talk today about is something that I noticed happened to a lot of people that do have a passion for ads, which is sort of the opposite of me.

Jared (09:57):

And many of you who are listening do have that passion. So I want you to listen up because, um, what I noticed is that during the COVID crunch, things were up and down. And when I do business consulting, 95% or more of the businesses that I go into really only have one to two main channels of revenue and are, raise your hand to yourself. If that's true, most of you, that's probably true what we've done here over the last 15 years. And what I do for my clients or anyone that I consult is I take those two sources of revenue and I try to increase them right away. Of course let's go for the juggler, but more importantly, let's build 15 to 20 more around it that are also bringing in revenue, because if you were alive during COVID you realized one or two things, most people are really into like Facebook ads, Facebook, Instagram ads, and really into like, you know, um, maybe Google or, uh, lastly, Amazon like three, the three big boys, right?

Jared (11:01):

And most people haven't really diversified their sales channels. Well, here in Southern California, I don't know if you've heard, but the Amazon facility burnt to the ground. One day, Amazon ran out of product for a lot of merchants. Um, Facebook, CPAs and stuff I heard were all over the map. And all of a sudden you might've realized, ah, I don't know if I actually really own my business right now, especially if you're all in the Amazon, you don't own your customers. You don't own your business. I can shut you down at any time or cut off your distribution. Facebook can change the algo in your like host the next day, right? Oh yeah. A hundred percent. So can we talk today a little bit about some of the other sales channels that you guys should be setting up so that like my businesses that grew and thrived during the COVID crunch, if it's gonna happen again, um, you know, you'll be prepared because some channels might be cut off, but you got 15 to 20 others that can pick up the Slack.

Dylan (12:05):

I'm getting, I'm getting sweaty. I'm so pumped to dive in. So many guys, you know, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Instagram, that's their three bread and butter. And I mean, with everything going on there, it's just on all those platforms. So I think having these other channels to really diversify at all is going to be a huge game changer.

Jared (12:22):

Well, yeah, and not a lot of people like to talk about the other channels because honestly they're just not very sexy. They're not, they're not like hip, they're not, what's buzzing. They're not what people are raving about. Um, but don't be fooled. Like a lot of these can really surpass your bread and butter and you might be surprised how passionate you actually become about,

Dylan (12:43):

So let's dive into it. If somebody is in that Amazon, Google, Facebook, Instagram world, what would your kind of first three steps be to kind of start diversifying that essentially or introducing your brand into new channels?

Jared (12:56):

Well, the first thing I usually do when I hit clients is, you know, getting all their analytics and I see if they've already got something that's like, low-hanging fruit in general and you can see a lot of these. I'll probably just turn around, uh, Dylan, you can, I think senior right now. Um, because I have them written on the board because it's something that I do so commonly with clients. Um, essentially usually I'll start with my proven least expensive way. Long-term way to get a new long-term customer. I'm not as worried about sale. Number one, I'm more worried about sales number two through 12, and you should be too. Okay. So you hear a lot of buzz about organic SEO. I've had the fine fortune of being able to learn from the best Neil Patel. Um, so I usually start there and I also start with email acquisition and email marketing.

Jared (13:53):

Those three in combination tend to be our least expensive, best way to get a long-term, you know, lifetime customer. Um, and it is dirt cheap once you get it up and rolling, a lot of people hate us, yo, because you hire an SEO team and it takes them like six months to actually show you the month money. Well, that's absolutely true that that is kind of how it works three to six months to really get your momentum. But here's the dealio after you get it established, it's not like someone can flip a switch and turn you off. You have that momentum, you created that large snowball and it's going to take awhile for it to go away. So in general, I'll start and I'll look at websites and I'll say, you know, how are we acquiring emails? Um, and we start there because in general people aren't thinking it through, you know, maybe their traffic is going to a different source. Maybe they don't have exit pups set up. Maybe they don't have any sort of public diversity on their website, like hello bars, right-hand side footer, slide ins, maybe they're completely disregarding mobile, or maybe they're doing pop-ups their own way. And it's actually hurting their SEO, which is a thing now entrance popups, right?

Jared (15:11):

Yeah. Yeah. We are our highest converting exit pop, um, is the spin wheel right now when we're in skincare,

Dylan (15:20):

Man, it's still driving. Then

Jared (15:24):

I, you know, we just go with the data. So we sometimes will, and we do a lot of split testing Dylan, and you can do it on your popups companies. Like opt-in monster, make it really easy for you to split test your publics. Um, and you should be. So if you don't have pop-ups yet, um, just get started by setting up exit pops on both desktop and mobile and set them up and also set up a split test. Sometimes the uglier more horrible version of the split test ends up converting, but I just encourage you to listen to your target customer persona and go with the data flow

Dylan (16:00):

Numbers. Don't lie. Hey,

Jared (16:03):

Numbers don't lie. And then, um, the other thing is tying it into your email marketing. Um, so most analytics that I hop into, uh, you know, email, marketing's like maybe 5% of the revenue they've, it's an afterthought, you know, it's maybe a small part of the funnel and that's all that people have really thought of most healthy companies that I consult for. It's actually 20% of their overall revenue for us. It's more like 30 because we're like crazy about it. But since we have good SEO and since we do a really good job, acquiring emails, every email that I acquire and keep is literally dollars in my pocket. And so we've gotten really good at both automated campaigns and both batch and blast campaigns, automated, maybe campaigns are awesome. They're like, you know, abandoned cart sequences. And most of you guys probably have those, but there are a ton more automated campaigns that you could focus on, like your welcome series or abandoned site and even more like customer winback and you can get crazy about it. You can set up split tests and those are the campaigns, Dylan, where you're sort of drinking the peanut colada on the beach and you're watching your money come in because it's all automated. I love it. Now

Dylan (17:24):

Y'all's too, you know, what mean a business is more or less is that what's hosting those Shopify WordPress and kind of curious there.

Jared (17:30):

Yeah. If you're just getting started with email marketing, I would have you look into like opt-in monster for your pops. It's it's just really good and cheap. It's, you know, it's a, it's a good system. And then I love, uh, Clavio for email marketing. It's really easy to get started and integrating into Facebook. Uh, and then for us, like for our brand, we use Clavio cause it's sort of getting off the ground. You know, it's a pretty new brand for our retail site. We use a company called list track, which is kind of built for larger retailers and, um, it's more expensive, but it's, you know, again, we, we make more money because we use them basically. And um, for my consulting business, I use Kajabi and they include their own email marketing system, man.

Dylan (18:19):

Super interesting. I'm going through the first Clavio of lows now. So,

Jared (18:25):

Well, let me know if I can help you. I got a bunch of stuff I can send. Yeah.

Dylan (18:31):

Email channels. I think you're spot on, you know, I've been getting way more on the email train talking to a lot of email experts. And I mean, when I see brands, you know, that are really pulling in five to 10% of the revenue, I'm like, man, you're missing out on a ton, even though I don't know much about it. I know what the possibilities are. So it's probably one of those cheaper areas to kind of really, you know, allocate more resources to, to kind of really ramp it up.

Jared (18:51):

Absolutely. Just think of it as another form of retargeting, if you're really into ads, you're really into retargeting. Right. So, um, you know, that's kind of how we think of it and it's something that you said it and sort of can forget it, check out, check in on it once a month on your automated sequences. And then there's a full other side to batch and blast, you know, with holiday and this and that on black Friday or cyber Monday, Dylan, how many emails do you think my company sends? If you're on my list,

Dylan (19:18):

I would say six 16. Okay.

Jared (19:22):

Yeah. And people love it. They expect it. Um, you know, the thing when you're like sending annoying emails, um, and you're worried that people are going to bounce off your list. That was a big problem for us for years. If you go to the bottom of our emails and you click on subscribe, it takes you to a preference center, which I recommend all of you have Clavio does offer it if you're on Clavio. And that's one way that we segment our lists and actually send people emails they want to receive. So we definitely do that. And it also helps us retain people when they're getting annoyed. It gives them the freedom to say what they want to hear was a sale or skincare tip or whatever tip. So we use that like a beast and we will only send people content that they want to see.

Jared (20:09):

If you're worried that you have not been doing it. There's a free tool by Google called Google postmaster tools. So if you Google Google postmaster tools, you can see the health of your overall IP. With regards to email sent. When I started it was poor and now it's good. Make sure you check that out. So organic SEO works. Hand-in-hand in this. Most people don't set up their pages properly. I teach how to do it for free on my, how to build a Shopify course, which is a free course where you can do an over an hour, check out the SEO video there I'll show you how to set up each page. You'll be ahead of 90 to 95% of on Google. Ooh. And it's a free course. You said? Yeah. Yeah. I just teach it. Um, I had so many people that wanted to take my e-commerce class.

Jared (20:57):

Um, but didn't have a story yet. And then I I'll watch Shopify version of like, here's how to build my website. And it was so slow and so boring. I was like, I gotta do my own. So I did my own and it's faster. And it's like, uh, you know, I teach things that I think are important, like SEO and conversion, which they don't even touch on now. And you know, so yeah. I just it's, it's it's way better. So I refer people to that and there's a, there's a few videos on SEO. Is that on BB sites.com? Yeah. Yeah. Y'all heard of BB stats.com. Courtney. Yeah. So I mean that's easily a win there. I mean, it's, it's a no brainer for most businesses and I mean, you also have some great resources to kind of help execute it.

Zach (21:40):

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Jared (22:56):

Check it out@funneldash.com. So while that's definitely awesome there, we'd love to kind of dive into the not so awesome things here. Maybe some of those things that are kind of embarrassing to bring up, you know, Hey, it could have been an offer try before you buy a strategy or a campaign. What is your poor ad and this ecosystem? Oh man, like an embarrassing situation. Goodness. I probably should've thought about this before coming on. Well, I think part of my strategy too, is to celebrate failure. We have that instilled here as a culture, literally to celebrate failure. Um, one thing that we do that not a lot of companies do is we are not afraid to, to just reach out and try and there's, I'm going somewhere with this. Okay. So I joke around about the tick talk and all this, and we are, we are doing T talk ads at the moment it's brand new for us and we're experimenting.

Jared (23:57):

Um, in general we will have probably 10 things we're experimenting with and in general, maybe one will pan out. So we do have a lot of failure around here. So for us, we have to learn how to celebrate the failure. One failure we had recently was on Pinterest with just getting a funnel that was converting. Um, and we had spent a lot of time. The ads are actually really cheap there. Um, but ultimately it was ended up being a failure for us. We kind of gave up and moved on to different networks because as best as we could tell the types of audiences that we are attracting on Pinterest or not buyers, they're not leading to conversion is either that, or it was the fact that our brand is new and unestablished, and that we just need to create more awareness before we went after Pinterest.

Jared (24:51):

That way. I'm not really sure, but we failed. I think we'll try it again. You know, and we're working on other networks right now. Um, but we celebrated it and we literally almost throw a party and we have people in and we're like, okay, well what happened? And we lay out all the metrics and we lay out the landing pages and then here is the key, what did we learn? And we will literally write it on the board. Like Dylan, you can see behind me, what did we learn from this? What consumers, like, what did we learn about this space? What do we learn about this website? And then we ran out what questions that we had and we go through it and we keep it up on the board. So I can literally look at it year round in my office.

Dylan (25:29):

Oh man. I think that's super valuable. Cause I mean, everybody loves to flex the winds, but I mean, you said it best, it could be 10 tests or one, it hits that jackpot. So I mean always be testing, you know, it's kind of, and especially to celebrate those because I mean the numbers, you can kind of see why it didn't work. How can we kind of toggle with this a little bit to try and make it work? So, I mean, I think that's huge to have an, a kind of culture system to just really reiterate, Hey, not everything's going to be rainbows and butterflies, you know?

Jared (25:56):

Yeah. One sales channel that was just the opposite for us was push notifications. A lot of people don't, don't use those on their website and we just tried it on a whim, just like we did with Pinterest ads. And now our list is tens of thousands of people that we can push, notify that have and want to receive those. And that tends to be one of our lowest costing ways we can get a sale

Dylan (26:19):

Who would have thought, you know,

Jared (26:22):

Yeah, those are crazy and you can set up automated sequences with them. Okay. So it's sort of like turning push notifications in email marketing. So you do those and take more Omni centric approach and integrate your text message marketing. If you're in the right industry with the right demographic that wants to receive it. And you've got you, you've got a pretty solid, uh, net there of sales channels.

Dylan (26:48):

It's a super interesting,

Jared (26:51):

Yeah. I could go on all day about sales channels. I have about probably 10 to 15 more that I could talk about, but I don't think you want to do that. So

Dylan (26:59):

Horsetail channels one, 1000000%. So we'll have episode two of this.

Jared (27:05):

Oh, okay. All right. Cool. I'd love to be back. You know, I haven't done like a ton of podcasts, but they're going pretty well. So, you know, hopefully, you know, if you like it, just ask me questions and you know, let me know how I can help.

Dylan (27:18):

Excellent. I'm going to have some questions in a minute. I guarantee this. So for the final segment of this, we'd love to kind of go into the crossroads of the marketing and financial side of things. And I know we spoke about this a little bit before, but what is your kind of financial tip of principle that can put some more money in some pockets? And I know this is going to be a big one here.

Jared (27:35):

Yeah. I'm surprised and excited to share this with you recently. My wife and I had the pleasure of opening our personal bank account and we realized that the us government had inserted a, another years of salary for us over the weekend. So hopefully I have your interest in peaked. Um, many of you, uh, like myself and like Elena are innovators and creators and inventors, whether you realize it or not. Okay. So just want you to think about that for a bit. Um, the us government has a billion or $2 set aside to incentivize businesses to innovate, create and invent. Um, and the process of writing off your research and design hours as a company, if you are an inventor or creator or innovator, like most of us are again, whether you realize it or not, um, is something that you can do if you've never done it before, here's the beauty.

Jared (28:45):

You can go back seven years. Okay. So we have, I have patents. I'm like, I'm on the wall here. And we create new products, new innovations. It's like one of my passions, like when I got my first patent, that was like, that's cool. I felt, I felt like I won the Guinness book of world. Right. I never thought I'd be inventing things that no one thought before. You know, um, we just invented a really cool in which is a, uh, a protective face mask. That's anti-aging Ooh. So, you know, everyone gets acne and they're worried about it messing up their face. This one actually does the opposite. So anyways, I love to invent things. And what I realized is you can actually go back and write off those hours and you can either take it as a tax credit, or you can have them depending on your corporate structure inserted into your personal account and the company that you to do this for you, we'll take about 30 to 35%, which is completely fair. It's a crap load of work that you don't want to do. That money is a straight write-off for having a really good year. Your year just got better because literally my scenario, we have a year of extra salary sitting in my personal now, and we have the extra X, X, X, X, whatever, to write off because we're having a good year. And I think many of you are in this COVID pandemic e-commerce area.

Dylan (30:11):

Oh man. And this is like the first time I've ever heard of the research and design side of things. So, I mean, I knew this was an actual thing. So I imagine 95 to 99% of our audience has no idea. This thing even exists.

Jared (30:24):

Oh, it's, it's a boring process. You know, they call up and these people have to ask you a million questions. And the reason I keep saying, you know, you don't really understand how much of an innovator and creator you are is because you don't, until you talk to these people, they'll actually ask you some pretty detailed questions about how you're spending your time. And they'll tell you straight up if you're not a fit. Okay. But for me it was a huge fit. And, um, they'll, they'll get things out of you that you've done that you're sort of creating an amending that you actually didn't even realize you were doing on your own.

Dylan (30:57):

Yeah. Yeah. Cause I mean, it's, it's good. They probably have a set batch of questions to realize this, this let's, let's figure out who this guy really is. I mean, yeah. I mean, you probably don't have to think about it, but I mean, that's, that's super nifty there and I mean, that's some low hanging fruit there to, you know, add some extra cash flow without a doubt.

Jared (31:13):

Yeah. It's incredible. And then the sort of the, you know, upsell on that is there are companies that exist that this is all they do, and that's just one tax credit. You can get that. There are like, it depends on the industry you're in and selling to, but there are a ton more of that people just don't even know about. And I just love it because the beauty is the government will allow you to refile your taxes. You know, they'll allow you to do it and take back. What's rightfully yours.

Dylan (31:44):

Well, y'all, y'all got some homework to do on this one. Oh my God. Geez, Jared, this has been super value packed, man, sir, I'm learning some new things. I love this, but what's the best way we can kind of support you. How can people get in touch? And do you have any projects in the kind of mix

Jared (32:02):

Cool projects? I'm trying to think of my next like class I want to teach, but I've been speaking and doing podcasts more. My buddy Neil helps me out quite a bit. That guy's awesome. Make sure to check out his, if you haven't already, he's doing a podcast here soon. Um, so yeah, you know, w what I do is basically I have a passion for helping people establish those still channels, or, um, you know, grow their, their brands. They'll, they'll get sort of caught up in like one way of doing things and they, they don't know how to do the overall sort of business growth approach. Um, so yeah, I offer two products. I mean, one, you know, self-serve, and there's a new class each week where I show you how to, e-commerce a hundred bucks a month. And then the other one's about a thousand a month where I do one-on-one consulting with you each week and we dive in your brand and I don't do any execution, but I just look at all the data.

Jared (32:52):

And I tell you exactly what to do that week to expand and grow. And that's a lot of fun because there's so many people that are in that area where they're doing enough sales, where they can afford me, but it's not too much. And so I can really help them move the needle. My first campaign for one of my clients, uh, last week, I think we spent 400 bucks so far, we have about six, $7,000 in sales that have come in. And it's a very first thing I've done. So I love, love doing things like that and scaling, you know, whatever type of campaign it is that they have gone. And I like how you're kind of more coming in from the outside. So we're still making them execute it more or less to where they're also learning as well, improving their expertise. So I think that's a really cool way of kind of knocking it out and having a double-edged sword there.

Jared (33:36):

How can somebody find you just beefy sites.com? Yeah. And just come check it out and, you know, look me up on social and just hit me up. Like, I love just hopping on calls and, you know, I don't always charge for help if someone just needs help. I'm really passionate about just helping mom and pops and small businesses. Cause that's where we came from everything bootstrapped, you know, and we don't have like deep pockets and all this stuff. So, um, yeah. You know, just hit me up, get in touch and, and, you know, gosh, thanks so much for having me. Hey, I was about to say, Hey Jared, thanks for coming on, man. This was, this is one of my favorites vetted out really. Wow. That's great. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks for jumping on. Thanks Dylan. Thanks

Zach (34:19):

One for listening and hope I get to get in touch with them. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the rich ed or ed podcasts. If you're like me and listen to podcasts on the go, go ahead and subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and rich dad, poor dad.com/podcast. And if you absolutely love the show, go ahead and leave a review and a comment share with a friend. If you do take a copy screenshot of it, email me zach@funneldash.com. Show me you left a review. I'll give you a free copy of the rich add or ed book to learn more about the book. Go to rich ed for a.com to leave a review that a rich ed or at.com/review. Thanks again.