January 21, 2025 • 22 mins
In this episode of the EcomPod podcast, Kal Wiggins shares foundational insights for e-commerce entrepreneurs. He introduces the 'E-commerce Magic Formula' which includes traffic, conversion, average order value, and frequency of purchase. Kal discusses the stages of e-commerce growth, emphasizing the importance of goal setting and time management for business success. He encourages listeners to focus on impactful actions and to consistently work on their business to achieve growth.
Takeaways
- E-commerce success relies on a formula: traffic x conversion x average order value x frequency of purchase.
- Many entrepreneurs focus solely on traffic, neglecting other crucial factors.
- Understanding customer acquisition costs is vital for profitability.
- Growth stages in e-commerce include initial struggles, establishing traffic, and scaling up.
- Email marketing is a key strategy for increasing revenue in the second stage of growth.
- Setting quarterly and monthly goals can significantly impact business success.
- Time management is essential; scheduling dedicated time for growth activities is crucial.
- The 80-20 principle can help prioritize impactful tasks over busy work.
- Investing in your business and trying new strategies is essential for long-term success.
- Consistency in marketing efforts, like email campaigns, is often overlooked but necessary.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kal Wiggins (00:04):
Hey there. Welcome to the show. This show, The
Ecomcal Podcast, is forentrepreneurs and ecommerce
store owners just like you andme to help grow their online
store to the next level. Alittle bit about me, my name is
Cal Wiggins. I have been runninga digital agency specializing
specializing in ecommerce since2010.
I buy and build and run my ownstores for my own money as well,
(00:27):
so I am just like you in thesame boat, out there making
money with ecommerce. I wantedto do this show because there's
a lot of people out there, andit's easy to feel lonely. And
guess what? You're not alone. Ifyou were alone, you're not alone
as of now.
You got EcomCal. So I wanna talkabout things over the course of
this show that are gonna helpyou grow your business. I want
(00:49):
to interact with the community.Most of the shows that I'm gonna
do are gonna be live shows thatyou guys can interact with or
send questions in advance to,and, you know, I can help you
guys with what you are havingtrouble with. What I wanna talk
about this first episode as Iset the pace is I wanna help you
guys with a little bit offoundational stuff to grow your
(01:10):
store.
So success in ecommerce to mecomes down to what I call the
ecommerce magic formula, whichis traffic, times conversion,
times average order value, timesfrequency of purchase. And I
know these are all things thatyou may have heard of before,
but people forget about a lot ofthis stuff a lot of the time.
People get really obsessed withtraffic, and they forget that
(01:33):
there's all these other thingsthat go into it. Now when you're
getting started, traffic is themost important thing, traffic
and converting that traffic. Butyou gotta remember over time to
come back to the average ordervalue and the frequency of
purchase.
So what the heck am I talkingabout? Well, when you bring
those fresh eyeballs in, itcosts you time and money and
(01:53):
effort to make to turn those ora percentage percentage of those
into sales. Right? That's calledconversion. And the percentage
of people that you convert isyour conversion rate.
So if you bring in a 100 peopleand you convert 3% of them,
that's your conversion rate, andyou have converted from 100
visitors, 3 buyers. That'sgreat. Well, the last three
(02:15):
segments in that chain, theconversion, the average order
value, and the frequency ofpurchase are what I call
ecommerce amplifiers. And Ithink that's a a really
important concept that that youwanna be aware of, and you wanna
you wanna watch and and alwaystry and grow. Because when you
convert those 3 people tobuyers, that's great.
(02:37):
You made 3 sales. And whateverit costs you to get that traffic
in in the first place, youdivide that out by 3, and that's
your cost to acquire a customer.And that cost to acquire a
customer may be more than theprofit you made on the sale, you
know, especially if you'reselling smaller ticket items
where the profit might not bethere. If you're spending $20 to
(02:59):
get a new client and you onlymake $6 on the initial sale,
you're not gonna cash flow andyou're not gonna be in business
for very long. But if you startthinking along the lines of, how
do I get this person back asecond time, a third time, a
fourth time, you're gonna makemore sales off that person, more
profit off that initial $20investment that you spent to get
(03:21):
that customer.
These are all fake numbers.Right? But what I want to, you
know, make sure that we alwaysremember is that it's more than
just traffic. It's more thanjust traffic and conversion.
It's traffic, conversion,average order value, and
frequency of purchase.
And there's a lot of stuff thatwe can do within that formula.
There's a lot of levers that wecan pull. When you are first
(03:43):
getting started in ecommerce, Ihaving worked with, you know,
probably thousands of clients atthis point, I have seen some
similarities of people atdifferent stages of growth. And
the stages of growth accordingto Cal according to Ecom and
Cal, the first stage of growthis when people are still trying
(04:04):
to get a market concept. Andthis is usually, you know, to
just ballpark rough numbers,it's when you're going from 0 to
$20 a month in revenue.
Right? We're trying to figureout a traffic method that works.
We're trying to figure out, dowe have proof of concept? Is it
worth pouring more money intoit? And, usually, you know, if
this is where you're at, this isthis is part of it.
(04:26):
You know? It feels like astruggle. But the fact is most
people aren't making making anymoney yet when they're in stage
1 because the cost to acquirecustomers combined with the cost
of running your ecommerce store,you know, paying Shopify or
BigCommerce or whoever, and allthe apps that go into it, all
that profit drives drive driesup because you don't have enough
(04:47):
volume to offset the operatingcost of your business yet. So
stage 1 is kinda tough, butthat's where we start, 0 to 20
k. Now when you start gettingcloser to 30 to 50k, that's what
I consider stage 2, this iswhere we're making some money.
We've established a arepeatable, source of traffic,
and we are starting to make alittle bit of money, which is
(05:08):
really good. We're starting tohave some options. In stage 1,
people are usually focused ongetting some kind of traffic
system to work. In stage 2,people are starting to think,
okay. Now I got a couple bucks.
What should I spend it on toamplify it up, to leverage up?
And that thing is usually emailmarketing. Email marketing, not
(05:30):
just emailing to your list thatyou've now started to accrue,
but also looking at automations,like dialing up your abandoned
cart and your new customersequence and your win back
sequence. We'll talk all aboutthat stuff later. I'm just
trying to go over the the basecon concepts here to to lay a
foundation with you guys forwhat's gonna come and all the
(05:51):
stuff that we're gonna talkabout.
So stage 2 is people doing 30 to50 grand in revenue. Stage 3 is
usually when people areapproaching that 75 to a
$100,000 in revenue, and we'retalking monthly here. Now if
you're in stage 1 and you'rethinking that's not even
possible, believe me. It'spossible. Ecommerce is the same.
(06:11):
No matter what you're doing,it's always the same formula.
It's always traffic timesconversion times average order
value times frequency ofpurchase. And the more you work
on your numbers, the more youwork on this formula, the more
you're gonna level up and levelup and level up. You know? I
have clients that are doing 200,300 grand a month, and, I mean,
they're just getting started.
(06:33):
So you just want to look at thisas a formula and look at this as
a bunch of tiny levers that youcan be flipping and working on
over time to realize there is somuch that you can do. I see a
lot of times store owners,especially if they're ran by,
let's just call them beancounters, you know, people that
are all about, you know, thenumbers and the profitability.
(06:56):
You know, they're not working onall these levers. They're not
trying new things, and it'sreally holding them back. So the
more that you realize that, youknow, there's more levers that
you can pull, the the moreopportunity that you have to
increase your business.
Now stage 4, just to complete mymy presentation or whatever you
wanna call it of these stages,stage 4 is when you're making a
(07:17):
$1,000,000 a month. And ithappens. It happens all the
time. You would be shocked. Thedifference between stage 1 and
stage 4 is people get that proofof concept.
They invest in their business.They invest their time. They
look at this as a formula. Andif I if I had to sum it up, the
number one thing thatdifferentiates the people at the
(07:39):
bottom or the people at the topis the people at the top realize
that success comes from tryingnew things and pivoting until
you find success. And that'shard for some people, and it's
easy for some people.
But the more you realize, like,that's what it's all about is
trying something new. And ifthat doesn't work, try something
(08:01):
else new, you know, and and keeptrying new things and some
things will not work and that'sokay. So I wanted to talk about
the ecommerce formula becauseunderstanding this, traffic,
conversion, average order value,frequency of purchase, is
understanding how you're gonnaget from where you are to that
(08:22):
7, 8 figure business where youwanna cash out or keep on going
for the rest of your life,whatever you like. That's the
how is all these little leversthat we can pull. Getting into
the what, what to do now, whatto do next.
This is really about goalsetting. Now what I do in my
(08:42):
business, we have a leadershipteam, and the leadership team is
responsible for differentaspects of my team. You may not
have a team. You may just be oneperson. But whether you're one
person or a couple people, youcan still do goal setting.
And I believe in the rockstheory. I think Stephen Covey
(09:03):
started that. The rocks theorysays if you if you wanna
accomplish all these things,it's kinda like putting rocks in
a jar. And if you start out byputting the littlest, easiest
rocks in the jar and then themedium sized rocks in the jar,
you're not gonna have any roomleft to put the big rocks in the
jar. And in a business, if youlook at goals as rocks, then the
biggest rocks are the ones thatmake the biggest impact.
(09:26):
So for the 1st several years ofmy business when I started, I
didn't mark it. And, hey, youknow, I'm confessing right now,
right here to you guys. I didn'tmarket my business. I had enough
business coming in. I wasstruggling just to get my
systems right and and deal withall the stuff that was coming
in.
And so I didn't market. I didn'twrite blog posts. I didn't
(09:47):
record videos like this or geton YouTube. And the lie I told
myself was I didn't have time. Iwould get to it when I had time,
and the answer is we never havetime.
The the the task always expandsto fit the time allotted. And
your business may be that waytoo. You know, how long has it
(10:07):
been since you put out a pieceof content or put out a, you
know, a blog post or a video orFacebook post or whatever you
do? You know? Are you consistentabout it?
And are you as consistent as youshould be? Because the thing is,
like, even if you're doing oneevery now and then, could you be
doing 2? You know? It's it'sreally, really easy to put
things off. If you start lookingat them as rocks, then the
(10:30):
question is, what is thebiggest, most important rock for
you to do right now?
Now we sit down as a leadershipteam, and we break our rocks
into quarterly rocks, thingsthat are gonna make a big deal
but can't be done in a shortperiod of time. But they need to
be done. These are our biggestrocks. These are our quarterly
(10:53):
rocks. And then we have smallerrocks that are maybe monthly
rocks or weekly rocks that we doas well.
And so we sit down once aquarter, and we have a full day
meeting where we all plan outour rocks. We all plan out the
things that we want to dodifferently in our business to
change this. And it's not justme. It's my whole, you know, my
whole leadership team. So, youknow, I have a couple rocks, and
(11:17):
someone else has a couple rocks,and someone else has a couple
rocks.
And if we all get our rocksdone, then we're talking about,
you know, 5, 10, a dozendifferent things that are gonna
be major impactors in mybusiness. If you and your team
were able to accomplish 2 to 10to 20 major things on a
(11:37):
quarterly basis, would that movethe needle in your business? And
the answer is yes, for sure,unless you're deluding yourself
about the important things thatyou need to be doing in your
business. You know? So with bigrocks, you wanna pick out the
things that are gonna have majorimpact, hard to get
accomplished, but super worth itif you can do it, and you want a
(12:00):
goal set.
So I wanna start out bysuggesting that you guys make a
goal or 2 for this quarter, forq 4 of this year. I know, you
know, you may be you may behaving a lot of stuff coming up
with Black Friday. You couldstill get some stuff done,
especially in October,especially in December. Maybe
November is gonna be crazypants. That's okay.
(12:21):
But you still have time in thebookends around it to get some
big stuff done. I'd like youguys to sit down and make a
quarterly goal for yourself andmake a monthly goal, at least
one of each. Now in the other inthe other quarters of the year,
I'd suggest being a little bitmore aggressive, probably doing
2 rocks a quarter. You know,don't don't try and do 20 things
(12:42):
that are massively impactful andtake forever to do, because then
you're just setting yourself upfor failure. You want something
that you can make yourself do ifyou really wrote it down and
told other people on your teamthat you were gonna do it to
make yourself do it.
So the how we're gonna grow iskeeping in mind the ecommerce
formula. Traffic timesconversion times average order
(13:03):
value times frequency ofpurchase. The what of it is
gonna come down to what's ourgoal gonna be right now? Set
your goals, and let's accomplishour goals. And this is this is a
huge thing.
A lot of people don't do it.I've noticed in in working with
ecommerce stores for the last14, 15 years now that, you know,
(13:29):
there's things that we know thatwe need to do as business owners
and as marketers. And one of thequestions that, I used to always
ask people in my discoveryprocess was when was the last
time you sent an email campaignout? And wow. The answer
consistently is Right.
(13:50):
Just it's been a while orsometimes I've never sent one
out. If this is you, that'sokay. Right? Admitting it's the
first step to recovery as theysay. And know that it's very
normal.
We all get busy and, you know,with things that are especially
out of our wheelhouse, likewriting an email to people we
(14:13):
don't know about, who knowswhat, do they even wanna hear
from me. It's easy to really putstuff like this off. Right? But,
you know, goal setting is whereit ends. So if one of your goals
is to get email out, get it out,start turning that wheel.
The first time is the hardest,but it gets easier. So let's set
(14:34):
goals, and let's make an impactin our business. The last thing
I wanna mention is the when.Right? We've talked about the
how.
We've talked about the what. Nowlet's talk about the when. Okay?
Because if we understand thatthe ecommerce formula is how
we're gonna grow our store,flipping some of these levers,
(14:54):
if the what is the goal settingto determine which of those
levers we're gonna work on rightnow, And the next question is
when. When do we have time to dothis, Ecom Cal, if that really
is your name?
This is the hard part, or it'sthe easy part. I thought it was
the hard part. And the reason isI told myself, as you may be
(15:15):
telling yourself, I don't havetime. I don't have time. I do
not have time.
And that was a 100% true. I didnot have time. But what was even
more true is that I was choosingto not have time out. That may
feel like I'm pushing yourbutton a little bit, and I get
it. But what you need to hear,maybe not what you wanna hear,
(15:40):
but what you need to hear is ifyou schedule it, you'll find the
time.
You know? 1 of my mentors says,show me your calendar, and I'll
show you where your business isgoing. Because he's looking to
see things on on your calendarthat say I'm planning my
business. I'm doing this. I'mgrowing my business.
Things that are outside of theday to day. Right? It's really
(16:01):
easy to get caught up in the dayto day. But if you schedule it,
you'll make it happen. Now letme tell you how it got really
easy for me to stop believing myown lie that I did not have time
to work on my business.
I did not have time to work on ablog post really because I
didn't wanna write a blog post.I didn't have time to make
videos and make courses andthings like this because I
(16:23):
didn't really wanna do it. Therewas other things that would give
me a bigger dopamine hit. Icould go and hit up one of my
clients and make them happy or,you know, mail out something.
Like, there's so many things.
Right? Here's the breakthrough Ihad that made me stop believing
my own lie that started helpingme see that I had plenty of time
(16:44):
to grow my business. First ofall, it doesn't take a 1000000
hours to grow your business. Ifyou consistently spent even a
couple hours per week notdealing with day to day stuff,
but dealing with only thingsthat were gonna grow your
business. If you spend an hour,2 hours, 10 hours, whatever you
(17:06):
have is going to make anincremental benefit.
So look at it this way. If youspent an hour each week on your
business, at the end of theyear, that's 50 hours that you
spent putting in new systems ordoing more marketing or creating
new videos or whatever it isgonna be. The breakthrough I had
was I was thinking about the 8020 principle and how we, you
(17:30):
know, spend 80% of our time onstuff that makes 20% of the
impact and 20% of our time onthe things that make 80% of the
impact. We know this to beuniversally true. You guys have
heard this.
I looked down at my calendar oneday, and I saw 80 20 in my
calendar. I realized that eachday of the week was 20% of the
(17:52):
week. And if I look at 4 days ofthe week, that's 80% of my week.
So one day, the day left overrepresents 20% of my week. And I
thought, oh, right now, I'mspending a 100% of my time on
busy stuff that's not growing mybusiness.
It's taking care of my business.It's important, but it's not
(18:13):
growing my business time. Right?I need to decrease that 80 or
that 100 down to 80. Right?
So what if I just did all thestuff that I have to do with my
business in 4 days instead of 5?And I spent that 5th day just
doing things to grow mybusiness. Right? That was huge.
(18:42):
Huge.
And to be honest, if I hadn'tdone that, I don't know if my
business would still be aroundbecause, believe it or not, the
market changes. The economychanges. All these things
happen. And if you don't if youdon't keep growing, you're not
gonna stay caught up. You know?
You have to be able to pivot andchange and improve as the market
improves, and you gotta do itfaster than your competitor. So
(19:05):
think about it this way. If I'myour competitor and I'm spending
20% of my time growing mybusiness, doing things to edge
into your market share, andyou're spending 0% of your time.
Thank you. Thank you for lettingme take your business.
You know? So what I wanna conveytoday is, number 1, we can all
(19:30):
grow our businesses. Whetheryou're in ecommerce or some
other online business, we canall grow our business by boiling
it down to those simple levers,traffic, conversion, average
order value, frequency ofpurchase. We can all actually
make movement by deciding whatthose goals are that we're gonna
set to work on that as abusiness, And we can assign time
(19:53):
to grow our business by lookingat our calendars and assigning
80/20. Now if you're, you know,a full timer at a at a normal
job and you're just doingecommerce on the side for right
now, I get it.
I I have lots of people likethat. But make sure that make
sure that you have somepercentage of your time assigned
to growing your business. So letme give you an example. 1 of the
(20:15):
businesses that I have, is abusiness with the you know,
where I sell this plastic plugfor for auto for the auto
industry. Doesn't really matterwhat it is.
But I used to manufacture thisthing in my garage. I bought I
bought an injection moldingmachine, and I was doing
(20:35):
injection molding in my garage,which was awesome and fun. What
it didn't do is grow mybusiness. But I would do my own
injection molding, and I wouldmake these things. And then I
would, you know, I would putthem in, bubble bubble envelopes
and send them out and drive themto the mailbox or whatever.
And I moved overseas for alittle bit, and I couldn't do
(20:57):
that anymore. And so I had toget a warehouse. I had to get a
a factory. I had to I had tomake my process able to be done
by somebody other than me, and Idid. It took a lot of work to
get it there.
But when I when I got to thatpoint, I realized, wow. I can
still spend the same time on mybusiness that I was previously,
(21:18):
except now I'm not gonna spendit pouring plastic or driving to
the post office. Now if I spendthat exact time actually
marketing my business, actuallydoing those things that I was,
you know, effectively puttingoff by by choosing to do
manufacturing and stuff, mybusiness will actually grow. And
it did. And that was pretty eyeopening because I I really
(21:43):
enjoyed the the manufacturing.
I enjoyed mailing it andprinting my labels from ship
station and all that kind ofstuff. And, when I when I forced
myself to stop doing it, Irealized that was holding me
back, man. Because I wasspending my time doing things
that didn't grow my businessinstead of things that did. So
that's huge. I don't wanna go onand on and on, but I wanted to
(22:03):
just kinda lay the foundation inthis podcast, you know, as to
what to expect and who I am andhow we're gonna grow our stores
together.
I'm gonna bring you guys tons ofcontent. Again, most of my
episodes are probably gonna bedone live on Fridays. You'll
have to just stay tuned on that.You can reach out to my agency
at epic design labs.com ifyou're interested in working
with us. We do designdevelopment marketing coaching.
(22:25):
And wherever you're listening tothis, hit subscribe. I'll see
you on the next one. Thanks.
Hey there. Welcome to the show. This show, The
Ecomcal Podcast, is forentrepreneurs and ecommerce
store owners just like you andme to help grow their online
store to the next level. Alittle bit about me, my name is
Cal Wiggins. I have been runninga digital agency specializing
specializing in ecommerce since2010.
I buy and build and run my ownstores for my own money as well,
(00:27):
so I am just like you in thesame boat, out there making
money with ecommerce. I wantedto do this show because there's
a lot of people out there, andit's easy to feel lonely. And
guess what? You're not alone. Ifyou were alone, you're not alone
as of now.
You got EcomCal. So I wanna talkabout things over the course of
this show that are gonna helpyou grow your business. I want
(00:49):
to interact with the community.Most of the shows that I'm gonna
do are gonna be live shows thatyou guys can interact with or
send questions in advance to,and, you know, I can help you
guys with what you are havingtrouble with. What I wanna talk
about this first episode as Iset the pace is I wanna help you
guys with a little bit offoundational stuff to grow your
(01:10):
store.
So success in ecommerce to mecomes down to what I call the
ecommerce magic formula, whichis traffic, times conversion,
times average order value, timesfrequency of purchase. And I
know these are all things thatyou may have heard of before,
but people forget about a lot ofthis stuff a lot of the time.
People get really obsessed withtraffic, and they forget that
(01:33):
there's all these other thingsthat go into it. Now when you're
getting started, traffic is themost important thing, traffic
and converting that traffic. Butyou gotta remember over time to
come back to the average ordervalue and the frequency of
purchase.
So what the heck am I talkingabout? Well, when you bring
those fresh eyeballs in, itcosts you time and money and
(01:53):
effort to make to turn those ora percentage percentage of those
into sales. Right? That's calledconversion. And the percentage
of people that you convert isyour conversion rate.
So if you bring in a 100 peopleand you convert 3% of them,
that's your conversion rate, andyou have converted from 100
visitors, 3 buyers. That'sgreat. Well, the last three
(02:15):
segments in that chain, theconversion, the average order
value, and the frequency ofpurchase are what I call
ecommerce amplifiers. And Ithink that's a a really
important concept that that youwanna be aware of, and you wanna
you wanna watch and and alwaystry and grow. Because when you
convert those 3 people tobuyers, that's great.
(02:37):
You made 3 sales. And whateverit costs you to get that traffic
in in the first place, youdivide that out by 3, and that's
your cost to acquire a customer.And that cost to acquire a
customer may be more than theprofit you made on the sale, you
know, especially if you'reselling smaller ticket items
where the profit might not bethere. If you're spending $20 to
(02:59):
get a new client and you onlymake $6 on the initial sale,
you're not gonna cash flow andyou're not gonna be in business
for very long. But if you startthinking along the lines of, how
do I get this person back asecond time, a third time, a
fourth time, you're gonna makemore sales off that person, more
profit off that initial $20investment that you spent to get
(03:21):
that customer.
These are all fake numbers.Right? But what I want to, you
know, make sure that we alwaysremember is that it's more than
just traffic. It's more thanjust traffic and conversion.
It's traffic, conversion,average order value, and
frequency of purchase.
And there's a lot of stuff thatwe can do within that formula.
There's a lot of levers that wecan pull. When you are first
(03:43):
getting started in ecommerce, Ihaving worked with, you know,
probably thousands of clients atthis point, I have seen some
similarities of people atdifferent stages of growth. And
the stages of growth accordingto Cal according to Ecom and
Cal, the first stage of growthis when people are still trying
(04:04):
to get a market concept. Andthis is usually, you know, to
just ballpark rough numbers,it's when you're going from 0 to
$20 a month in revenue.
Right? We're trying to figureout a traffic method that works.
We're trying to figure out, dowe have proof of concept? Is it
worth pouring more money intoit? And, usually, you know, if
this is where you're at, this isthis is part of it.
(04:26):
You know? It feels like astruggle. But the fact is most
people aren't making making anymoney yet when they're in stage
1 because the cost to acquirecustomers combined with the cost
of running your ecommerce store,you know, paying Shopify or
BigCommerce or whoever, and allthe apps that go into it, all
that profit drives drive driesup because you don't have enough
(04:47):
volume to offset the operatingcost of your business yet. So
stage 1 is kinda tough, butthat's where we start, 0 to 20
k. Now when you start gettingcloser to 30 to 50k, that's what
I consider stage 2, this iswhere we're making some money.
We've established a arepeatable, source of traffic,
and we are starting to make alittle bit of money, which is
(05:08):
really good. We're starting tohave some options. In stage 1,
people are usually focused ongetting some kind of traffic
system to work. In stage 2,people are starting to think,
okay. Now I got a couple bucks.
What should I spend it on toamplify it up, to leverage up?
And that thing is usually emailmarketing. Email marketing, not
(05:30):
just emailing to your list thatyou've now started to accrue,
but also looking at automations,like dialing up your abandoned
cart and your new customersequence and your win back
sequence. We'll talk all aboutthat stuff later. I'm just
trying to go over the the basecon concepts here to to lay a
foundation with you guys forwhat's gonna come and all the
(05:51):
stuff that we're gonna talkabout.
So stage 2 is people doing 30 to50 grand in revenue. Stage 3 is
usually when people areapproaching that 75 to a
$100,000 in revenue, and we'retalking monthly here. Now if
you're in stage 1 and you'rethinking that's not even
possible, believe me. It'spossible. Ecommerce is the same.
(06:11):
No matter what you're doing,it's always the same formula.
It's always traffic timesconversion times average order
value times frequency ofpurchase. And the more you work
on your numbers, the more youwork on this formula, the more
you're gonna level up and levelup and level up. You know? I
have clients that are doing 200,300 grand a month, and, I mean,
they're just getting started.
(06:33):
So you just want to look at thisas a formula and look at this as
a bunch of tiny levers that youcan be flipping and working on
over time to realize there is somuch that you can do. I see a
lot of times store owners,especially if they're ran by,
let's just call them beancounters, you know, people that
are all about, you know, thenumbers and the profitability.
(06:56):
You know, they're not working onall these levers. They're not
trying new things, and it'sreally holding them back. So the
more that you realize that, youknow, there's more levers that
you can pull, the the moreopportunity that you have to
increase your business.
Now stage 4, just to complete mymy presentation or whatever you
wanna call it of these stages,stage 4 is when you're making a
(07:17):
$1,000,000 a month. And ithappens. It happens all the
time. You would be shocked. Thedifference between stage 1 and
stage 4 is people get that proofof concept.
They invest in their business.They invest their time. They
look at this as a formula. Andif I if I had to sum it up, the
number one thing thatdifferentiates the people at the
(07:39):
bottom or the people at the topis the people at the top realize
that success comes from tryingnew things and pivoting until
you find success. And that'shard for some people, and it's
easy for some people.
But the more you realize, like,that's what it's all about is
trying something new. And ifthat doesn't work, try something
(08:01):
else new, you know, and and keeptrying new things and some
things will not work and that'sokay. So I wanted to talk about
the ecommerce formula becauseunderstanding this, traffic,
conversion, average order value,frequency of purchase, is
understanding how you're gonnaget from where you are to that
(08:22):
7, 8 figure business where youwanna cash out or keep on going
for the rest of your life,whatever you like. That's the
how is all these little leversthat we can pull. Getting into
the what, what to do now, whatto do next.
This is really about goalsetting. Now what I do in my
(08:42):
business, we have a leadershipteam, and the leadership team is
responsible for differentaspects of my team. You may not
have a team. You may just be oneperson. But whether you're one
person or a couple people, youcan still do goal setting.
And I believe in the rockstheory. I think Stephen Covey
(09:03):
started that. The rocks theorysays if you if you wanna
accomplish all these things,it's kinda like putting rocks in
a jar. And if you start out byputting the littlest, easiest
rocks in the jar and then themedium sized rocks in the jar,
you're not gonna have any roomleft to put the big rocks in the
jar. And in a business, if youlook at goals as rocks, then the
biggest rocks are the ones thatmake the biggest impact.
(09:26):
So for the 1st several years ofmy business when I started, I
didn't mark it. And, hey, youknow, I'm confessing right now,
right here to you guys. I didn'tmarket my business. I had enough
business coming in. I wasstruggling just to get my
systems right and and deal withall the stuff that was coming
in.
And so I didn't market. I didn'twrite blog posts. I didn't
(09:47):
record videos like this or geton YouTube. And the lie I told
myself was I didn't have time. Iwould get to it when I had time,
and the answer is we never havetime.
The the the task always expandsto fit the time allotted. And
your business may be that waytoo. You know, how long has it
(10:07):
been since you put out a pieceof content or put out a, you
know, a blog post or a video orFacebook post or whatever you
do? You know? Are you consistentabout it?
And are you as consistent as youshould be? Because the thing is,
like, even if you're doing oneevery now and then, could you be
doing 2? You know? It's it'sreally, really easy to put
things off. If you start lookingat them as rocks, then the
(10:30):
question is, what is thebiggest, most important rock for
you to do right now?
Now we sit down as a leadershipteam, and we break our rocks
into quarterly rocks, thingsthat are gonna make a big deal
but can't be done in a shortperiod of time. But they need to
be done. These are our biggestrocks. These are our quarterly
(10:53):
rocks. And then we have smallerrocks that are maybe monthly
rocks or weekly rocks that we doas well.
And so we sit down once aquarter, and we have a full day
meeting where we all plan outour rocks. We all plan out the
things that we want to dodifferently in our business to
change this. And it's not justme. It's my whole, you know, my
whole leadership team. So, youknow, I have a couple rocks, and
(11:17):
someone else has a couple rocks,and someone else has a couple
rocks.
And if we all get our rocksdone, then we're talking about,
you know, 5, 10, a dozendifferent things that are gonna
be major impactors in mybusiness. If you and your team
were able to accomplish 2 to 10to 20 major things on a
(11:37):
quarterly basis, would that movethe needle in your business? And
the answer is yes, for sure,unless you're deluding yourself
about the important things thatyou need to be doing in your
business. You know? So with bigrocks, you wanna pick out the
things that are gonna have majorimpact, hard to get
accomplished, but super worth itif you can do it, and you want a
(12:00):
goal set.
So I wanna start out bysuggesting that you guys make a
goal or 2 for this quarter, forq 4 of this year. I know, you
know, you may be you may behaving a lot of stuff coming up
with Black Friday. You couldstill get some stuff done,
especially in October,especially in December. Maybe
November is gonna be crazypants. That's okay.
(12:21):
But you still have time in thebookends around it to get some
big stuff done. I'd like youguys to sit down and make a
quarterly goal for yourself andmake a monthly goal, at least
one of each. Now in the other inthe other quarters of the year,
I'd suggest being a little bitmore aggressive, probably doing
2 rocks a quarter. You know,don't don't try and do 20 things
(12:42):
that are massively impactful andtake forever to do, because then
you're just setting yourself upfor failure. You want something
that you can make yourself do ifyou really wrote it down and
told other people on your teamthat you were gonna do it to
make yourself do it.
So the how we're gonna grow iskeeping in mind the ecommerce
formula. Traffic timesconversion times average order
(13:03):
value times frequency ofpurchase. The what of it is
gonna come down to what's ourgoal gonna be right now? Set
your goals, and let's accomplishour goals. And this is this is a
huge thing.
A lot of people don't do it.I've noticed in in working with
ecommerce stores for the last14, 15 years now that, you know,
(13:29):
there's things that we know thatwe need to do as business owners
and as marketers. And one of thequestions that, I used to always
ask people in my discoveryprocess was when was the last
time you sent an email campaignout? And wow. The answer
consistently is Right.
(13:50):
Just it's been a while orsometimes I've never sent one
out. If this is you, that'sokay. Right? Admitting it's the
first step to recovery as theysay. And know that it's very
normal.
We all get busy and, you know,with things that are especially
out of our wheelhouse, likewriting an email to people we
(14:13):
don't know about, who knowswhat, do they even wanna hear
from me. It's easy to really putstuff like this off. Right? But,
you know, goal setting is whereit ends. So if one of your goals
is to get email out, get it out,start turning that wheel.
The first time is the hardest,but it gets easier. So let's set
(14:34):
goals, and let's make an impactin our business. The last thing
I wanna mention is the when.Right? We've talked about the
how.
We've talked about the what. Nowlet's talk about the when. Okay?
Because if we understand thatthe ecommerce formula is how
we're gonna grow our store,flipping some of these levers,
(14:54):
if the what is the goal settingto determine which of those
levers we're gonna work on rightnow, And the next question is
when. When do we have time to dothis, Ecom Cal, if that really
is your name?
This is the hard part, or it'sthe easy part. I thought it was
the hard part. And the reason isI told myself, as you may be
(15:15):
telling yourself, I don't havetime. I don't have time. I do
not have time.
And that was a 100% true. I didnot have time. But what was even
more true is that I was choosingto not have time out. That may
feel like I'm pushing yourbutton a little bit, and I get
it. But what you need to hear,maybe not what you wanna hear,
(15:40):
but what you need to hear is ifyou schedule it, you'll find the
time.
You know? 1 of my mentors says,show me your calendar, and I'll
show you where your business isgoing. Because he's looking to
see things on on your calendarthat say I'm planning my
business. I'm doing this. I'mgrowing my business.
Things that are outside of theday to day. Right? It's really
(16:01):
easy to get caught up in the dayto day. But if you schedule it,
you'll make it happen. Now letme tell you how it got really
easy for me to stop believing myown lie that I did not have time
to work on my business.
I did not have time to work on ablog post really because I
didn't wanna write a blog post.I didn't have time to make
videos and make courses andthings like this because I
(16:23):
didn't really wanna do it. Therewas other things that would give
me a bigger dopamine hit. Icould go and hit up one of my
clients and make them happy or,you know, mail out something.
Like, there's so many things.
Right? Here's the breakthrough Ihad that made me stop believing
my own lie that started helpingme see that I had plenty of time
(16:44):
to grow my business. First ofall, it doesn't take a 1000000
hours to grow your business. Ifyou consistently spent even a
couple hours per week notdealing with day to day stuff,
but dealing with only thingsthat were gonna grow your
business. If you spend an hour,2 hours, 10 hours, whatever you
(17:06):
have is going to make anincremental benefit.
So look at it this way. If youspent an hour each week on your
business, at the end of theyear, that's 50 hours that you
spent putting in new systems ordoing more marketing or creating
new videos or whatever it isgonna be. The breakthrough I had
was I was thinking about the 8020 principle and how we, you
(17:30):
know, spend 80% of our time onstuff that makes 20% of the
impact and 20% of our time onthe things that make 80% of the
impact. We know this to beuniversally true. You guys have
heard this.
I looked down at my calendar oneday, and I saw 80 20 in my
calendar. I realized that eachday of the week was 20% of the
(17:52):
week. And if I look at 4 days ofthe week, that's 80% of my week.
So one day, the day left overrepresents 20% of my week. And I
thought, oh, right now, I'mspending a 100% of my time on
busy stuff that's not growing mybusiness.
It's taking care of my business.It's important, but it's not
(18:13):
growing my business time. Right?I need to decrease that 80 or
that 100 down to 80. Right?
So what if I just did all thestuff that I have to do with my
business in 4 days instead of 5?And I spent that 5th day just
doing things to grow mybusiness. Right? That was huge.
(18:42):
Huge.
And to be honest, if I hadn'tdone that, I don't know if my
business would still be aroundbecause, believe it or not, the
market changes. The economychanges. All these things
happen. And if you don't if youdon't keep growing, you're not
gonna stay caught up. You know?
You have to be able to pivot andchange and improve as the market
improves, and you gotta do itfaster than your competitor. So
(19:05):
think about it this way. If I'myour competitor and I'm spending
20% of my time growing mybusiness, doing things to edge
into your market share, andyou're spending 0% of your time.
Thank you. Thank you for lettingme take your business.
You know? So what I wanna conveytoday is, number 1, we can all
(19:30):
grow our businesses. Whetheryou're in ecommerce or some
other online business, we canall grow our business by boiling
it down to those simple levers,traffic, conversion, average
order value, frequency ofpurchase. We can all actually
make movement by deciding whatthose goals are that we're gonna
set to work on that as abusiness, And we can assign time
(19:53):
to grow our business by lookingat our calendars and assigning
80/20. Now if you're, you know,a full timer at a at a normal
job and you're just doingecommerce on the side for right
now, I get it.
I I have lots of people likethat. But make sure that make
sure that you have somepercentage of your time assigned
to growing your business. So letme give you an example. 1 of the
(20:15):
businesses that I have, is abusiness with the you know,
where I sell this plastic plugfor for auto for the auto
industry. Doesn't really matterwhat it is.
But I used to manufacture thisthing in my garage. I bought I
bought an injection moldingmachine, and I was doing
(20:35):
injection molding in my garage,which was awesome and fun. What
it didn't do is grow mybusiness. But I would do my own
injection molding, and I wouldmake these things. And then I
would, you know, I would putthem in, bubble bubble envelopes
and send them out and drive themto the mailbox or whatever.
And I moved overseas for alittle bit, and I couldn't do
(20:57):
that anymore. And so I had toget a warehouse. I had to get a
a factory. I had to I had tomake my process able to be done
by somebody other than me, and Idid. It took a lot of work to
get it there.
But when I when I got to thatpoint, I realized, wow. I can
still spend the same time on mybusiness that I was previously,
(21:18):
except now I'm not gonna spendit pouring plastic or driving to
the post office. Now if I spendthat exact time actually
marketing my business, actuallydoing those things that I was,
you know, effectively puttingoff by by choosing to do
manufacturing and stuff, mybusiness will actually grow. And
it did. And that was pretty eyeopening because I I really
(21:43):
enjoyed the the manufacturing.
I enjoyed mailing it andprinting my labels from ship
station and all that kind ofstuff. And, when I when I forced
myself to stop doing it, Irealized that was holding me
back, man. Because I wasspending my time doing things
that didn't grow my businessinstead of things that did. So
that's huge. I don't wanna go onand on and on, but I wanted to
(22:03):
just kinda lay the foundation inthis podcast, you know, as to
what to expect and who I am andhow we're gonna grow our stores
together.
I'm gonna bring you guys tons ofcontent. Again, most of my
episodes are probably gonna bedone live on Fridays. You'll
have to just stay tuned on that.You can reach out to my agency
at epic design labs.com ifyou're interested in working
with us. We do designdevelopment marketing coaching.
(22:25):
And wherever you're listening tothis, hit subscribe. I'll see
you on the next one. Thanks.
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