Building a Business For a Stranger in 51 Mins

This is Cody he runs a custom Trophy and Plax business doing $1.7 million per year it's a family business that's been passed down for four generations but the business only makes 6.4% profit barely $100,000 and after taxes it's even less so if Cody wants to pass this down to his kids one day they're not going to inherit a thriving business just a low-paying job with long hours and a lot of risk I'm alosi I own acquisition. Comom a portfolio of companies that generates hundreds of millions a year and I also sold and built a physical

Products company so I'm very familiar with some of the problems that Cody's dealing with my suspicion is that key things that are going to Catal his business are fixing his pricing scaling his advertising and figuring out how to generate repeat business from his existing customers and so first I'm going to dive deep into the business Then we're going to break down all the tactics that he and you can use to scale your business what's up how you doing let's talk about trophies yeah so my name's Cody Cody schulson I own trophy Outlet well last year

we did about $1.72 million in Revenue mainly trophies and awards personalization uh about $110,000 in profit 6.4 % net margin um and I'm third generation owner of the company we've been in business for almost 40 years so that's amazing so when I saw His low profit margins I immediately think is it a per unit thing that he doesn't have good economics on which could indicate a pricing issue or he just need to sell way more volume based on his fixed cost and so anyways I needed to dig to find out more so what's the uh

yeah what's the goal the goal is 3.5 million in Revenue I really want to d double uh Revenue the reason this goal is so important to me is it's it's a legacy to me if I can create a business That's profitable and can sustain itself that's a fourth generation maybe fifth generation business so who do you help so mainly coaches um event organizers as well as businesses and organizations as well as gag gift uh purchasers I got that Vibe yeah okay so how do you help them uh so we offer free engraving uh fast shipping

everything we do is personalize to the business or the individual they go to the website to our platform purchase you know add the Personalization info the logo things like that and then we fulfill it if it's a needs approval anything like that but most things ship in one to two days sweet how do you make money how do we make money all right so um on our website Direct on our website most of our products kind of land in that1 $150 price point uh we have products that range from $4 all the way up to

$900 so it's a wide range uh most popular item is a$ five and 6ot trophy which kind of Lands about $89 to $130 okay and then Dash plaques which are like little car show things that guys collect when they go to car shows and oh interesting yeah so it's kind of we sell them for $125 um we minimum 50 but we sell thousands of them I've never even heard of that so how do you get customers trophy Al started in 1985 you know this is our 40th year and uh we launched our Etsy uh business

in 2019 we did about $70,000 the first year and then in 2013 or 2023 We launched Amazon and did about $300,000 and then last year we launched Tik Tock shop and we did about $270,000 in Revenue but 250 of that came in December alone uh so we had a video go viral with 20 plus million views that's awesome uh so went crazy so 250 of that came in in one month so that was kind of fun you guys are blowing these up on the Tik Tock shop and since I'm in charge I got to be

here today to make sure these all get shipped out if you can keep it Going maybe next week I'll make the [ __ ] come in and they can take care of it have a good Sunday and you sold those we sold those yeah and not quite family appropriate but yeah no I love that and you were able to fulfill on the amount of orders that came in yeah yeah we did about 13,000 of those so do you have inact set up like you yeah we produce everything in house so we engrave C all ship

it so what I found really interesting about these gifts is they're Very sharable both in that like they're funny and you could share like a video about it on social media but also because whenever you gift you literally send a product to somebody else and so I'm trying to think through you know are there ways that we can harness that or at least lubricate that process so we can get more shares more referrals more return customers across four different channels uh most of our clients come through uh online and internal is Through SEO and Facebook

ads we just launched Facebook ads and meta about October November with an agency yeah and then Amazon we spend about $7,100 a month between agency and ads and then Etsy and then Tik Tok still kind of figuring that one out a little bit since it all happened in December but about $2,000 so far got in ads there so the channels get super overwhelming because we're spending so much money on ads and agencies and what's working what's not Working you know so just getting Clarity from Alex on that piece alone is super helpful well how many

customers have you have you sold so far in 2024 uh Direct on our website and I have this broken work out per channel in a couple slides but total visits is about 990,000 visits to our site about 2500 orders just a 2.8% conversion rate and about 781 products so it's a lot of products is everything everything made to order yeah everything so it's not so it's not like You're carrying a ton of inventory like you got raw raw materials in raw materials most of it we bring in from our vendors kind of as we need

it we don't car a huge huge so when I asked is it made to order that was an important question because inventory can be one of the biggest costs in a business and especially with somebody that had that many ex skes I got really worried about it but because it's made to order then it's really just like optionality so Then you just look at operational efficiency of like how difficult it is to make all these different things and I bring this just from my own physical products appearance with Prestige Labs which is my supplement company

you know you you've got to be looking out you know 8 weeks 12 weeks sometimes 16 weeks ahead of time to make your orders and that can be a huge cash drag on the business what's been holding you back so I think it's marketing um fulfillment Wise we proved that in December we can handle about double fulfillment I mean with limited complexity so um so I just need more people to the site more people buying and we can fulfill it so and also very product heavy with low margins so working on the margin piece uh

getting profits up a little bit so do you want to like sell this company eventually or like what's the haven't really had any thoughts of selling but I want to create a business that is sellable yeah so I Have the option if I want to sell or but I would love for it to be a fourth generation business someday all right so how many locations do you have because you have brick and mortar correct uh we have one retail location now uh we have two locations total uh we closed the other retail location down it

is production only facility okay so the other retail location um you know does maybe $150,000 in Revenue out of that location so just like walk-in traffic And whatever yeah Walkin email stuff does it break even not really okay so we're kind so you have a manufacturing facility in one retail yeah which also does some manufacturing as well yeah is there any downside to just like consolidating to the one it's something that we're actually looking at and going more e-commerce and kind of cutting the yeah the retail business the fact that he has two physical locations

is a bit odd given the nature of retail in 2025 The vast majority you know and it's continuing to grow as people are doing online sales and especially with the amount of customization that he offers it makes more and more sense for him to sell to a national base which he's already doing so these are the issues what are the metrics you got so numbers 1.72 million in Revenue about 110,000 in profit 40% gross margin I would have expected gross margins to be higher for this business and it varies per product Tons of you know

like certain I was like expecting like you know one like you buy these trophies and they're like you know a dollar and you're like there's no like this is made of rubber you know like okay so it it varies widely between the products and platform and stuff like that but uh yeah net margin about 6.4% uh LTV 133 and then CAC 1190 LTV to CAC ratio 11 to1 and that's Blended across all channels how do you come up with pricing guessing for the most part or I'll look at some competitors but um there's not really

good Apples to Apples comparison necessarily do you do like a Cost Plus or like yeah so I have massive spreadsheets of all of our cost you know things like that factor in labor and then I just kind of add my margins to it and you know have slowly been trying to bring that up over the years yeah when Alex is pointing out the margins and they're really low and I agree I just don't quite know what to do yet and but It's a problem we've been looking to solve for quite a while what percentage of

customers are are new versus return I don't have a percentage for that gut gut I would say probably just on our website and internal customers probably 5050 okay because this four-year-old business so You' think there'd be a decent amount of return yeah a lot of our business I mean $530 in Revenue comes just internal so emails calls things like that most of That is re is is repeat business the fact that he's getting $500,000 per year in return customers I'm going to be poking on that to see if there's any unmissed opportunities there that we

can squeeze the hell out of that and maybe double triple that if we do it on purpose rather than on accident do you have very high fixed costs in this business not too bad no cuz if you have half the business comes in from word of mouth I would expect the margins to be Higher like the net margins think this is big hypothetical it's like if we got rid of all of the new customers right and we just sold the 500 and something thousand from Return customers that should be free customer acquisition and then we

should make money right but looking at this I'd be like I don't know if we would make money and real quick for those of you who are new fixed costs are basically costs that stay in the business independent of how Much you sell so rent is a fixed cost some kinds of Labor fixed cost your internet connections fixed cost these are things you have to pay every single month variable costs are cost as a result of sales so if I sell more products I have more cost of goods right I have more maybe labor in

in creating those products the costs basically work by their name they're fixed or they're variable yeah our cogs are pretty high I do think there's a pricing issue yeah Which we'll get too okay but okay this is good your LTV to cac's pretty strong yeah it's it's pretty decent and I learned that a few months ago coming here the first time so I started increasing and that has that's not lifetime Revenue that's lifetime that's gross profit that's profit yeah okay yeah interesting so what I'm zering in on is is there a pricing issue and to

what extent is there one because this is a great limus test because if you get Free sales which return customers are free sales it cost you nothing somebody else tells them about it and then they come in right you should be the most profitable on those customers and so if that that level of volume you're still not profitable you either have high fixed costs which I asked him in the beginning or we might Dingle lingle Ling have a pricing issue it's 40-year-old business who was in charge of pricing that whole time like you took it

over From your old I guess he took it from his old man so like your third generation so my yeah my parents ran the company they didn't have a price structure they just kind of yeah you know and on an annual basis do you review all prices every year y interesting so about February March of every year is when our vendors raise prices so then I adjust accordingly got it was their margins the same when they were running it uh much less lower oh Way low like not making money at all so my mom was

running it I remember very distinctly looking at a product and the cogs on that were like $50 and we were selling it for like 45 I mean this does not work yeah so I immediately raised prices like you know doubled them almost and constantly just continually up them yeah I think I have some ideas there all right what else you got Channel breakdown so direct traffic and internal is our you know biggest um 13 to1 LTB to CAC ratio Amazon our highest conversion rate at 99.6% conversion and of course the the Blended 11 to1 LTV

to CAC so interesting and so you don't have LTV metrics on Tik Tok no couldn't quite figure that out yet okay um the easiest way to do it is just go uh total revenue divided by total number of customers okay so you did 262 do you know how many customers you sold on think about almost 13,000 Michael 262 divided by 13,000 says 262 13 20 Yeah clean okay so 20 Bucks that sound about right average yeah well that's the average order value right so we we just don't know how many times they've purchased right which

is one as of this point you know MH so aov is typically used in e-commerce uh or retail which is average order value he's saying that he has a low average order value on Tik Tok but it's very different for different customers or on different channels and so it's valuable to understand what the aov is by customer And by Channel now this is a little bit of data but at the end of the day if you want to win you got to know your numbers if we're thinking about the business zooming all the way out

we have the cost of getting a customer and then we have what customers are worth and the first transaction you get is going to be the average card right the first transaction but then after that you want repeat purchases as well and so I'm going to probably be pruning into like okay how Many people buy again or is it a onetime purchase and things like that so little bonus for you so I've been following your content for quite a while and you know obviously you have the caves of God so here's the C goat goat

greatest of all time so I wish is it a cow is it a cow a oh it's a it's a goat for a second I thought cuz it could have been a cat like a calf like a little baby cow I could have done that too I didn't think this is great Yeah this is one of our top selling products actually is it really goat trophy oh that makes sense that makes sense it's you trendy well thank you so much I appreciate it I will put it on my desk and I will show Ila just

remind her of my calf Excellence yeah so we actually have a gift for ilila also which is in the back oh is it is it for me to give to her so I can get some husband points you get some husband points you love this oh she'll love This this is great she'll love this I love these These are really good yeah so you want a double Revenue yep got it what's this I hear about you wanting to buy another business yeah so I had a business reach out to me that's in the same industry

in the St Louis Market that we're already in so um he's getting old wants to retire so and what's he doing in revenue and profit he does about double what we do about 3 million in Revenue don't know profits yet or Anything we haven't even got to that point yet um but he's got a from what I understand he he does pretty decent on his margins he does a lot more custom stuff so which there's a lot higher margin on some of that stuff the biggest concern with him is 70% of his Revenue comes through

one customer yeah so that's a pretty big uh pry buy that wouldn't buy that M gotcha I would try and find out if I could who the vendors were that he has in China for his Connections for his raw materials yeah so that I could try and use those vendors yeah that was actually one resource I thought was well if I could buy this then it's cheap enough it's monstrous customer risk and it's especially if you have somebody retiring that one customer might be so at acquisition. comom we have a scorecard called the value acceleration

method which essentially how can you both maximize value and then also minimize Risk which ultimately makes a company more valuable in this one he says there's two big red flags here first is you've got keyman risk which is when you have a small business you got an owner that's retiring often times they are key man in the business now they've been working for however many years and there's so many things that they're unconsciously competent of and unconsciously are doing to keep the the wheels going and it's often not Documented or at least well documented so

that's a big concern number one but by far the biggest concern number two is that 70% of the revenue is coming from One customer so if that customer leaves because maybe the guy retires and he has a relationship with them then I'm so out right on this deal now the third thing here is we have to answer the question why bother right like why are we even doing this what problem are we solving now he did did bring up that this guy Has some better connections for raw materials which can improve his margins which I

do think is valuable but do I want to buy a business to get a connection I'll zoom out from the from back forward which is like what do we want to be when we grow up basically this is going to become a media marketing business that monetizes through trophies right or you can go the B2B Wholesale route which is probably like outbound sales team that's calling Wholesalers and whatnot yeah from what it sounds like it sounds like you're better suited for the Ecommerce director consumer side that's what it sounds like I don't like currently that's

where we're at yeah CU I think you get more than double sale currently um and it's just easier but that just kind of came naturally it wasn't anything we pursued necessarily but yeah majority of it's all e-commerce and okay you might have one of the simpler plans um that I have Yeah uh yeah which is I I mean simple doesn't mean bad uh simple as good you know sometimes you have like 10 things to do it's better to have three that move the needle a lot and I think you're kind of in that situation there's

three big things but I think we'll um we want you come over here and then we'll we'll we we'll net it out so Cody is actually at stage five product ties in the $100 million scaling road map so if you look at marketing he needs to spend more on Niche down marketing and so the issue here is that he's he has two different avatars and we have to get him to pick pick and commit the nice thing is that I can probably tell you what the other problems he's going to be having at this level

are and what he needs to do to graduate to get to the next level we broke down the stages of scaling a business into 10 steps and we did it across all eight functions of the business so product marketing sales Customer service it recruiting finance and HR and the nice thing is that businesses behaven patterns and so if you want to know where you're at and what you need to do to get the next level this scaling road map is absolutely free and it comes personalized to you so we built this bot you plug in

your business information and we'll send it right over to you now if you like the interaction that I'm having with Cod and you're like man I Would love it if acis.com would take a look at my business and see if they could help me kind of move the pieces around and make it significally more valuable we run scaling workshops under our advisory practice throughout the year and if you want that on the thank you page you can schedule a call talk to my team and see if it's a fit otherwise get the scaling road map

it's absolutely free and enjoy the rest of the video what percentage of customers are gag Gifts so that's the Amazon Etsy Tik Tok Tik Tok that's all that so that's like what's that 4% yeah roughly and that's kind of been the fastest growing since 2019 that's when we launched that which is all under a different brand technically okay um we started a different brand back thing cuz we're we don't want the explicit vulgar to be under trophy outet you know Church moms and stuff get see I hear you with this business like fundamentally you just

Have it's youve traffic in a conversion page like and then if you already have let's call it for right now not a constraint on manufacturing or anything like that the three big kind of levers that I want to go off of is number one is consolidation which instantly heads to profit yeah pricing which also instantly adds to profit absolutely and then media these are the big ones okay so from a consolidation perspective we have the SKS right and then we also have The brick and mortar locations and then we kind of have like model so

like in terms of like how I'm thinking through this so from a SKS perspective if you're not carrying them like normally I'd be like we need to massively cut down on SKS but like if you're not if you don't have like this Warehouse full of stuff and it's just like more options for people to purchase I don't think we need to like get rid of anything and a lot of the excuse too It's the same product just maybe for football versus baseball or something you know it's a very similar product right it's a it's a

goat Trophy and you just put a different plaque on it kind of thing that doesn't bug me and if you were like man this it's super hard for my team to to build all these different things and I'd be like all right well then we should we should look at that but if it it doesn't seem like you're stressed on the manufacturing side no But that's where my skill set lies too as far as operations that's what I'm good at so the second is the brick and morner if you have this retail location and it's

basically breaking even or Los money and that's not even the future of the business then to me I would say let's just save our 50,000 a year in rent and then just add that to the bottom line right I feel like that would be a good idea CU that would increase profit by 50% yeah just like chill Pretty much instantly yeah and also there's just like the headache of like it's this thing over here yeah and youve got and you can probably just take the couple good people from there bring them to bring them home

right you know yeah so that feels good so the next one is model this is arguably the most important decision that he has to make if in this entire kind of interaction with me because this is the strategy or the vision of the business like what Kind of business do you want to be when you grow up and I think a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in no man's land and they just can't decide and so if you think about what the definition of decide is it actually comes from Latin which is decader which means

to cut off and which means we have to figure out what path we're going to cut off by making a decision but like if you wanted to have an exit of some kind then the revenue retention is going to be a Really important thing if he just wants to make money and grow then it would probably be faster for him to just the consumer route and simply Arbitrage media and make the spread which tons of people are doing right now and I think would totally work for him but what won't work is trying to pursue

both Masters and ultimately serve neither so in some ways you have two businesses let alone like if you were like forget about the third one you're thinking about Buying like you already have two and I'd rather have one I'm not saying cut the one that you have it's obviously a 40-year-old business but like I really have to make that decision and and that that's actually not a me decision it's a you decision so if I'll say it the way that I think Le Lea loves framing opportunities this way because I always think about upside and

she always thinks about downside and so it's like what what problem would you rather solve so In the gag gift path the problem that you're going to have to solve is you're always going to have to find new cheap forms of media okay so it's going to be like Tik Tok shop is what it is today and live shopping and that'll probably be good for another year or two and then it's like that'll start to get more expensive and other people compete and it's like then you're going to be in in the next whatever the

next game is and you're just going to have to get really Good at PID ads and creative and conversion optimization on the site increasing average order that kind of stuff the other path is you build either an outbound sales team so that they can sell these these kind of B2B offerings that are you know or B Toc if you want to consider the fantasy leaks and or just like a meta just like a simple meta ad strategy that would lead people to call the number functionally okay and then there you're saying cool our goal Is

to be your Dy provider for life um and I think the fact that your 4-year-old business sounds really good it's like hey we're 4-year-old business our goal is to be your manufacturer for life and so of course we're going to do this one but if you want we'll also give you 20% off next year um if you make the order now or I don't know I I I play around with that but which of the two paths sounds like the the life you want to live that's gosh that's tough only Because media for me has

always been a a hurdle not something I'm overly great at do you like it okay fair I will do it I'm happy to do it if it makes money of course you know okay um but I don't know that I love it per se this is a tough one yeah I'm trying to think what you know cuz you could cuz like if you wanted to hit 3 million next year I was like we could do 10 million next year I would just say we're going To take all of our resources we're going to go all

in on Tik Tok viral organic and you're going to deploy everything into Tik Tok shop and get influencers to do lives for you showing all these funny gag gifts cuz like the the trophies are so built for sharability yeah like and so that's I mean 20 million views is a monster video but I'll bet you you could probably get you probably crack off a million videos all the time with these types of these types of we haven't Figured that out yet but you know it all just I think happened if that was all you focused

on you would be able to figure out because these are funny right and I think having like little skit scenarios uh where people you know walk in and they see the bosses thing or they they change their their uh their plate or you know someone loses and then it just say like Biggest Loser you know like that kind like the the negative versions we still need to make this Decision though hearing you talk like going to here to 10 million I like that better even if I have to do like I'll get used to to

videos and content you know the leagues thing is like that's like that's the that's the very stable version of this business and if you did ultimately want to sell in the future you being able to go to a potential buyer and saying like I have 5,000 leagues that buy our trophies from US every year and leagues on average stay For 12 years MH you know like guys who do fantasy or whatever it is it's like that's that's fairly you know that's a pretty that's a pretty reoccurring business you know that's a that's a that's a

pretty good business yeah um harder to build though and slower much harder to build right that's also why it has more value so that's the so if if between those two paths the like I would like to just make more profit now and potentially scale faster Then we can talk about the media version of this I think that's probably where I would okay cool you know I chose the Tik Tock route because of the scalability of it versus sticking on the the path we're on yeah it can become a big business but I look at

the competitors that have been in the business for 40 years and that's a long road and a long life versus the scalability that I can then turn around and put people in place that I don't have to be there like that's more Appealing to me than just just creating a big business so first things first is we're going to consolidate attention so we're going to shut down losing location so that should right off the bat be a plus 50% Improvement to profit yep which is great Cody cutting down that extra location is going to cost

basically no Revenue because he's getting so little foot traffic that I'm not worried about the loss in sales cuz he's going to more than make up with that in two ways one He's going to have the $50,000 a month cost basically drop straight to the bottom line and for his business given the low margins he has that's significant the second thing is that he's going to consolidate his attention so he can take the best people from there bring them to the you know bring him to home base you know get rid of the people that

aren't necessarily as good or as I like to say release to free agency so they have better opportunities Somewhere else and then this way he can kind of like make the Dream Team at at home base and really double down on what matters and I can't really emphasize this enough the amount of return you get on Focus as an entrepreneur is higher than any resource and fundamentally this is strategy it's prioritization and that means that if it's not a priority you don't do it the second thing pricing so what I want you to do is

I want you to switch from and you're probably familiar With this so there's a lot of different pricing models but you have basically something called a Cost Plus model you look at your costs and then you add a margin in and whatever the problem is is every business I know that does a cost plus model doesn't make a lot of money and so you want to switch to Value based pricing which is purely based on what someone's willingness to pay is and that could be unlimited and it doesn't matter what your stuff costs cuz why

do they Care what it costs right basically like as your vendors increase their costs to you in some ways it shouldn't have any effect on the price of what you sell because the price of what you sell is completely divorced of that and based on what somebody's willing to pay got so in terms of how we can do this so a which seem a little bit less scary is I would consider this to sound crazy but like monthly like 5% price increases like just keep going okay and just keep going That is like path one

yeah and the thing is is that every time you raise the price by 5% you double your profit or I'll say 6% if you want to be like hey I doubled my profit this month then the next month you can raise by 6% and then more than double because it's 6% times 6% right so that is that is one way the other way is that you just start um immedi split testing kind of like 8020 on your highest sales velocity items this is simple right this is Simple to do you have to do any thinking

you just add it and that's what it is this one will probably get you more profit faster it just takes a little bit more thought so you'll take those four 4 foot 5 foot 6ot trophies and just start like just keep bumping the price and just seeing what conversion rate looks like what what you're trying to optimize for is gross profit times unit sold and so if you think about it's like where's the sweet spot where I get the most Amount of units sold at the highest gross profit often times it's it's higher than you

think it is because we're I think a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck is like sales velocity goes down and then they get afraid but the thing is is that you will usually make more money before you make less money when sales velocity drops usually I'm referencing something called price elasticity meaning if we make the price go up how much do the sales go down in General when you raise a price fewer people buy but the question is buy how many so for example if I were to double the price of something and that might triple

my margins or quadruple my margins and 25% fewer people buy I should absolutely do that even though fewer people ultimately say yes and so he's in one of these situations where he's selling barely enough to say profitable he's selling a decent amount of volume and so I'm just saying I Wonder if there's a way that we can bump this price even by 6% would double his profit that's why I'm testing like how sensitive is this market now he did indicate that the customer that he decided he wasn't going to pursue which is the the the

car show guys the B2B sales the people who are kind of not the gag gift thing those people are very sensitive and so it's like okay if they're the sensitive ones and we're going away from them are the ones that We going towards less sensitive and it seems like the answer is yes and to me that's a big profit opportunity in terms of C kadence for Price tests would you do it on the site more or do you think you would be doing it on the phone it'd be on the site okay yeah because that's

where customers see the pricing even if they call or anything like that yeah I'll bet you right now cuz I don't know how many people like Buy is it a super price sensitive Market trophies yeah can especially with certain avatars like car show guys are cheap which ones car show guys car show I'll bet you what's interesting about this is that your recurring Revenue business is very price sensitive and your gag price your gag business is not is not at all right I mean it makes me lean more towards the the gag gift side anyways

because it's like we can get customers for free and we have far more pricing power CU they're in the moment They think it's funny whether it's or it's $12 or $16 like I kind of just want to buy it yeah you know the difference between eight8 and 16 is monstrous right for the business so psych PR test and I would probably start with uh the gag okay gifs here and then I'll make three let me try one 6% on uh boring side boring trophies at the end of the day you shouldn't take anyone's advice including

your own you should just take the customer's advice and the way the Customer gives you advice is by running a test and just actually seeing will you buy it or not and the nice thing is if you raise the price and you go too high and you ultimately have people you know sales decrease then you can always lower it again not a big deal but not testing your price is the most expensive thing that you can do in a business from The Profit that you should be making but aren't now this is the major part

is if your focus is going to be media and That's going to be the direction that you're going in was there an influencer or something who who made the video that had the the trophy in it no this is my oper oh you guys did it and it just happened crush it got tagged our product on Tik Tok shop got tagged and we sold 70 to 100 off of that and then we did a follow-up video and that's the one that had 16 million views okay so yeah it how many Tik toks you make in

a month uh right now we're doing about uh one a day And we're trying to ramp that up to three a day okay the gifts that he has the gag gifts the head mofo in charge uh those types of gag gifts lend themselves really well to being shared and going viral and so him doubling down on all the different permutations of that as different Hooks and different organic content that makes complete sense and he should just do as much of it as you possibly can and for anyone who's listening to this is like okay he's

Going to go from 1 to three I want to just break a belief for you you can post a 100 times a day the platform is incentivized to distribute your content to as many people as possible to retain attention and so there's a lot of Mythology on all platforms of people who say don't post more than x times I think it absolutely just comes down to equality metric which is how many many times can you post good stuff but there's a an Instagram page that's in Bollywood that posts a hundred times a day and gets

like 9 billion views and so the thing is is that not the same people are going to see every post and so right now when you make a post only one or two% of your audience likely see it and so if you make 10 more posts they might just show to other people in your audience that aren't the first people who saw it so the direct site traffic right now comes predominantly from SEO so talk me about that do you have an SEO Firm or you good no it's an SEO firm agency how long youve

been working with though this one about 8 months traditionally I've only I've always had pretty good success with SEO okay and we stopped SEO because the company wasn't previous company wasn't performing and we just let it go for several months and then hired another company and then when these guys came in and started going back up again what stops you from like doing more SEO or rather what stops that Like if if you were to say Hey cuz I mean when I see you 13 to1 right I'm like that sounds interesting if you were to

say hey I want you to give me like three client's worth of focus so that you can give me three times the backlinks and three times the Articles or whatever it is that they're tring out for you is there anything that's because if you get 13 to1 it's like we should spend as much as we possibly can on that and that's why I started meta is but It's different though right cuz it's Interruption based ads versus SEO or it's intent based do you think you go to the SEO agency and just say like how do

you Max me out I could absolutely do that okay I would because it's also like these things are things that are not taking your time right right so the SEO was interesting to me because he had an Outsource agency that was handling the vast majority of it so it wasn't actually a big time drain for him and it Had really good returns and so again allocational resources think about this way if you have a machine that you can put a dollar in and get $13 out what do you limit your dollars in with you don't

you put as many dollars in as you possibly can which is why I asked the question like how do we do 10 times more of this so this is like media one is SEO max out and the SEO company wants me to do Google ads as well is that something you'd kind of throw into that mix okay Mhm yeah especially like these are both intent based right yeah like at the very least you should own your own terms which is like all your names and der derivatives of your names like I've I've rarely seen anyone

in any business just own their own terms and not make money off of it and so people like why I want to pay for a click I was going to get the thing is is like you're not always going to get the click and so having it there I'm like you're going to make the Money like just you know what I mean but then the the the second version of that is you know Associated terms like the long key wordss now gag gifts 100% no one's like hey uh you know [ __ ] your moon

follow the plan uh you know trophy right or whatever um you're probably not scroll on Facebook yeah like I'm really looking for yeah I've been looking for a goat calf uh trophy right okay so this is the like if if we're looking at this these are all What I would consider like black and white very low lift almost guaranteed to make you more money moves almost all of these will just make you more money this is 13 to1 this is probably going to be high return this double the profit this takes adds $50,000 to the

bottom line the price that's for sure going to increase on the gag gifts so now we can talk about the the media side so we're going to go from 1 to three a day and I think that you should focus on Trends and memes cuz this is a gag gift brand so it's okay for you to just like be silly and ridiculous and so like there are so many memes Michael where do we find our like Tik Tock meme stuff just hire a 17-year-old um sit there and scroll yeah yeah and just be like what's

like what's trending right now you know what I mean like if you're a little bit on the older side perhaps you're a millennial right and you have a graying beard and you're ultimately going to be Taken out to Pastor in the next 5 years right and put to rest um as I am you have to get people who are younger than you who are in you know in the game of social media who know what's hot right now and can make contextually relevant or native media that ultimately gets way more shares way more views and

then ultimately more conversion plus 1,000 Aura to Cody so what's interesting is that a lot of these um Tik Tok ones also do well on Instagram so you could repurpose there do you do you post on Instagram yeah okay yeah started yeah at least you're getting you you'll get a double you know you get double usage on that but yeah Tik Tok is like the perfect platform for you for thei GI like it makes complete sense to me they did 250,000 in a month and so when I the reason I said the 10 million is

like okay well that happened on accident let's do it on purpose and if you can do 250 a month just from that It's like well there's 3 million yeah I think you getting really ridiculous with the volume will get you a lot better and I think this is one of those things that you should live close to okay like you like these things are all things that you can do probably the week you get back you know what I mean this one is going to be this is like the the big commitment of what's the

bet we're making the bet we're making is that mastering Tik Tok live selling Etc is Going to be the way it's definitely a new skill it's a little intimidating uh to know like okay this is where 80% of my time is going to go now for a new task that I've never done but very Innovative which I love Innovation I love thinking about like oh hey how can we be different than the industry and this is definitely different now the second part of kind of like Tik Tok Mastery is going to be um influencers okay

and so what's nice with Tik Tok Shop is that your stuff is automatically to be listed there and other people can uh make videos for it and you're in the price point that's perfect for Tik Tok shop like 20 30 50 like it crushes for that stuff and it's it's such easy videos for people to make right and that lines up with what Tik Tok has been telling us too wait have you been reaching out to them or we have an account rep now oh cool great well I guess you did 250 so yeah but

yeah Affiliates they said hit Affiliates hard T and I mean fundamentally like these are basically onetime work mhm this is the only ongoing work that you do Trends and memes and I'd be posting one to three times a day there repurpose on on IG right that's that's just free traffic and then the influencers will also kind of this will it'll be like a loop here so it's like they'll do something something that works well and then that will feed like it'll just be this nice Loop where they're also creating content for you okay real quick

this type of content I've gotten a ton of positive feedback on and so I'm going to continue to make it but what I need your help on is helping it distribute because this isn't wide algorithm stuff a lot of people aren't going to see it because it's narrower and it is for business owners so if you know a business owner or you have kids and you want them to learn business where if people were Business interested it would mean the world to me and my team who put so many hours into making this stuff for

for you it would just mean the world if you send it to them it would mean a lot and then I'll put I'm going to put number seven on here because I think this is worth it the Tik Tok ads which you said you just started basically the the process is going to look like this you make the ad right or sorry you make the content you're making content Right you're making Tik Tok content that Tik Tok content you know 10% go viral whatever and then 90% flop right then this you put ad money behind

it you send this to influencers and say make stuff like this because this is what's converting and then they'll make versions of this that'll also inform your content which you'll then try to make iterations of what they're doing and so Like you're kind of your Source like you're starting here's the Tik Tok content some does well great push ads behind it by the way guys here's the ones that are working well they make stuff you can take theirs push money behind it as well and model it and make for permutations of it gotcha and so

for this stuff I would be kind of hook Centric meaning for well for most short for platforms like the hook is everything and once you have a winning Hook I would like reuse reuse it over and over again the reason I'm recommending he doubled down on Tik Tok is you want to go where the fish are right you want to go where where the getting is good and so right now Tik Tok shop is crushing it it's blowing up lots of people are doing very very well on the platform and he already has seen some

success and and so as soon as I get that little inkling of success there's that little blood in the water That's when I want to just like go go ham on it so one is how do we increase volume secondarily how do we increase quality of output basically once we do these easy fixes this is really the long-term strategy that he needs to get really good at is that he's got to get really good at media you actually have a really simple one the nice thing is that I have a lot of confidence in your

like there's there's basically no like I'm not really sure like site price test Could easily like 2x profit like on its own because the are so slim right now right uh 6X this is a 2x on profit for sure SEO max out right now it's 50% of Revenue is coming from that so it's like maybe we get a 50% Boost from them doing a better job on it PPC will just get you good returns this might give you like a 10 to 20% boost so I don't think going to be huge but it's like it's

free and it's a onetime setup so it's not hard to do Tik tok's going to be the big lever Of like how do we go from 1 million to 10 million it's like if you if you did nothing else but just say like a year from now if all we did was Master Tik Tok and Tik Tok shopping MH we would win like if you did nothing this is just going to take all of your existing business and make it more profitable so that you can take all of this cash and and float into here

but actually fairly straightforward that's a good thing that's a good thing rather than like we Have to bet the farm on something which sometimes has to happen yeah that's awesome way simpler than I was thinking so oh good yeah dud just do more of what works right and the fact that you have such low margins excites me because when you make five or 10% improvements you double or triple profit right and the fact that you haven't like that there was no pricing um discipline like there's no there's no like process to pricing besides like we'll

just keep Raising it when our cost go up usually there's just like when I see a business like that there's like massive unlocks like I'm saying 6% on boring trophies but like you might be able to push 25 yeah and that 4X is 5X is profit right whenever I see a business that's mispriced or extremely mispriced I get really excited because I know it's one of the lowest operational drag moves that you can do functionally everything else you have to do in a business you Got to do something with pricing you literally change a number

or you say a different word at the end of a phone call like it's that easy to change but it has such a dramatic impact on how profitable a business is and what's crazy about that is that entrepreneurs tend to be the most afraid of pricing changes so it's all between your ears and psychology and fear Just Having the courage to just say a bigger number the fear is that you're somehow going to Lose your business you just if it doesn't work you just lower it back again not a big deal but this could change

his life and so I'm very interested to find out more there what's the offer that you have in the Box usually it's a little code that says like 10% or something to order here order again why don't you give something much better than that okay so we have to come up with a really compelling offer to get people who are buying the nice Thing the important thing is are you doing fulfillment for Amazon sales uh we have some FBA but most of it's fbm so we're fulfilling most of it okay great so you're fulfilling most

of it that's wonderful okay so and Etsy same thing Etsy fill everything yeah great okay so that means that we can put something in the Box to be really compelling to get them to to buy something so if now Amazon and Etsy the purchasers who are buying there are they more bread and Butter people or are they more gag people I would say more gag more gag okay because they're more like funny death signs funny saying stuff like that or jok I would put a bugo offer in or a so buy one get one to

two free okay and then just fix the pricing of the one so that it makes sense I would basically have this little thing here so that would be the headline on the top of my little my little my little doad yeah you got your QR code and then I would have My top one two and three gag gifts okay because they just bought one so it's like let me tell you the other gag gifts that people buy the most of gotcha and I would put that into every one of the boxes okay and the framework

that I'm talking to him about right now which is you know what we're going to do buy 1 get two free buy 1 get three free like what are we going to do that actually is a little a little a little Easter egg for what's coming out in my next book What do you how big is your email list for trophy side yeah I think we have like 10,000 contacts what do you do for long-term nurture not much okay well guess what we just found ourselves another couple hundred grand so let me tell you a

stat that'll blow your mind most mature e-commerce businesses get between 30 30 and 50% of revenue from email W we're missing out a lot yeah on that so there's probably like 1 and a half Million sitting there yeah and that's all profit because there's no ad spent right most e-commerce businesses basically Break Even or lose money on spending ads to get customers and they make it up with their email followup gotcha we just found a big bag of money how about that so this was a late nugget but I'm glad we found it I assumed

because anybody who's in e-commerce or at least if you're in e-commerce you're in physical products or retail email Marketing is just massive and the difference between small companies and big companies is often times just what percentage of customers are return customers and one of the primary vehicles for doing that is email and SMS and so he's not doing really any at all and so this was just a massive profit opportunity because he's getting all these customers in the door and then just never talking to them again and so if you're a business owner right now

and You have this big list of customers and you haven't like emailed them in a while it's the closest thing to free money you just send the email out with some sort of offer and you can get money immediately for basically no cost because you already incurred the cost now the structure that I talk about with emails is that obviously you can't do that forever because then you just fatigue the list and people would be like well I don't want to list to this Thing all this guy does is try and Hawk stuff I like

to try and have some sort of value if possible now value can be described in different ways if you have gag gifts then it's probably going to be in the form of entertainment more than is education right like people are going to like oh let me let me six ways to use trophies like I don't know if I'm really into that but if if I see funny versions and maybe even emailing some of his content that's that really does well Might be a great strategy for him to uh get people to continue to click and

basically reinforce that Loop so that they want to open it because at the end of the day people buy newspapers because they want to feel educated but what they read is they flip to the back and often read the Funnies and so it's like how can we take that old school human behavior from an old platform and how can we mirror it on a newer platform so eight was our offer which we added in Yeah nine it's going to be email followup okay there's going to be two different types of email that you're need to

do so number one is going to be flows so these are based on user Behavior so when someone visits a specific product they should get like a five email sequence of being like hey saw that you were looking at the goat whatever right and that should just that should happen for anybody who opander Does a twostep or abandon cards right do you have a Bandon card we do have okay good the other piece is we need the long-term nurture all right so what I'd recommend is three times per week it feels like a lot for

trophies cuz trophy is a less frequent purchase the gag I feel like is a it's like if you buy one gag gift you'd be willing to like buy them for many people because you just think they're funny they are separate Brands though correct yeah Technically kind of sep because you have like okay so I would so this I'm I'm cool with on the gag gift side okay because right now you're not making any return sales anyways right so you might as well get we don't really have an email list for the gag side because it's

all through Amazon Tik Tok does Tik Tok not give you a email so I think we'll go one time a week and we not worry about the gag gift okay I think just one time a week of and If if your basically domain score your domain Health your domain Authority stays healthy and your open rate stay okay you click the rate stay okay I would increase frequency okay so you start with one a week and you're probably thinking okay what am I going to what am I going to email them about right right so when

you have customer stories cool trophies cuz I'm sure there's every week there's like one trophy or something that's just like Interesting that you guys have right probably stuff about recognition status and cheapest compensation so I think if I were to if I if I owned your company right so I'd be like okay are we in the trophy business no trophy is what we sell right but it's really just the vehicle for giving people recognition status and compensation right right and so my the things that I would email would probably be about how you could either

give your team a pay raise or you Could give them a trophy and believe it or not here's this research the trophy is actually even more meaningful so they like it more and you like it more as a business owner right so it' be that kind of stuff that I'd be you only have to write 52 it's not that many EMS right you could literally probably do it in like a day and a half or two days so keep it low in the beginning just to like get a feel for it see how like the

first couple emils are going to shake Out because you're going to have a super responsive list and we want to keep these all text all text okay yeah all text I would say link to the image because then curiosity is going to drive the click okay and also image based tend to get lower uh deliverability rates than like full text one and when people opt in or S when people purchase or opt in they abandoned cart the first one I would have is um reply back for funniest Trophy of all time and so as soon

as someone Ops it's a double optin so to increase your deliverability right and so they'll they'll reply back and then it's an automation you have to do and then you'll s them the link for the for the clickable picture and they'll be like this is ridiculous and then underneath of that so when you have the when you have a clickable link you want it to take them you want to have it take them to a page it looks like this Whatever uh and then here you have bye so like you can have the funniest thing

but it's also uh CTA to get someone to buy something gotcha one through 5+ n y are all like bread and butter do these zero thought y so in terms of order here all right so this is number one cuz this is just going to give you time back first this is probably second is it the same agency that does this and this yeah okay so that's for Both of these that's one call this is fourth [Applause] fifth six put the email follow up in place cuz we're basically going to optimize other other things and

then we'll basically follow up with everyone and then this is going to be 7th eth awesome cool yeah super cool well I think we Found um a few doubles yeah in the business absolutely I love it feel all right yeah I feel really good appreciate it than yeah you bet man this is awesome going be great this is much cleaner and simpler than I thought oh good good I just got done filming with Alex I'm super excited after this I mean to have a 9-point bullet point of here's your Tactical what to do to grow

2x 5x 10x it's pretty cool so whether you have a trophy company or not all of the Fundamentals that we're walking through here is one we're consolidating costs because there wasn't a strategic advantage to having a larger footprint number two is that we're running pricing tests regularly so that we can optimize how much money we get per customer and see how much how much higher we can drive it especially with older businesses they often don't change the prices as frequently enough and especially with the amount of inflations That's happened over the last 3 4 years

if you haven't really adjusted prices in a big way like 50% plus then you're making significantly less money the next one is doubling down to what works so in two senses one is he had good Returns on SEO but also we know that his organic with Tik Tok is working so I want to double down on those things but if you look at how these things are ordered so I tend to order them using ice which is impact confidence ease so how big of a Difference is it going to make How likely is it to

occur and how hard is it and so if you have something that's really likely big impact and easy you start with those first and then you just work your way down and number four and this is a big one we make sales to get customers we don't get customers to make sales and so the point of the first transaction that I'd like to shift Cody's perspective on or anybody's perspective on is you get the gag gift Sale but then you do everything else to turn it into a lifelong or at least repeat customer and so

we're doing this through multiple paths one is that we're creating the offer to get them to come back so we can own the data on top of that then we have the remarketing in place that's going to happen in terms of email followup on top of that we could just have remarketing across all social media for anyone who hits his site each of these things have one clear intention Which is how do we get somebody to buy again so if you like this video you're going to love this video I did with Raymond who's a

multilocation chiropractor I break down tons of stuff that applies to many many businesses click go watch enjoy