Growth expert Richard Chapple (The Growth Foundation) sets sail with Ger Keohane (StudioForty9) and Gordon Newman (Omnichannels Stories) to talk about growing your retail business, scaling up and brilliant basics.
Along the way, the episode is boarded by pirates and parrots. But karate keeps them at bay.
--
Richard's notes and the strategy information he spoke about can be accessed here: Where to Play and How to Win
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode, Ger quotes from the classics...
Our guest is too impressive...
He's a recognised speaker offering services and strategic planning, marketing... actually too many services to name.
(00:26):
Gordon explains technology...
They do their flashy thing.
And the episode is boarded by pirates...
This episode of Functional & Fabulous is brought to you with pride by Studio49, retail ecommerce experts, omnichannel growth consultants and cut-through performance marketing specialists.
(00:52):
Studio49, where your digital retail success is built.
So you're very welcome to another episode of Functional & Fabulous.
And we're joined here today with our guest, Rich Chapple.
Rich, it's great to see you.
Good morning, guys.
How are you both?
Hi, Rich.
Beyond excited to have you on the podcast this morning.
Yeah, thank you.
(01:12):
Me too.
I can't wait to get into it.
So just a little bit about Rich's background.
Rich is a seasoned growth and strategy expert known for growing three unicorn companies, Gymshark, The Hook Group Ingenuity and play.com to serious scale and profitably.
He is co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of The Growth Foundation, an organisation that provides high-potential businesses with the right tools to grow across all their foundations, from ecommerce to talent.
(01:39):
He's a recognised speaker, offering services and strategic planning, marketing... actually too many services to name.
So I'm just going to go straight to his superpower clarity of proposition.
And that's something that we're really looking to get into today.
That's one of his superpowers.
Rich, it's absolutely fantastic to have you here.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, looking forward to it.
So I suppose just to kind of kick off, you know, Chief Growth Officer at The Growth Foundation, you must be the growingest growing person...
(02:07):
That's a lot of growing, Rich...
Yeah, absolutely.
So let me deconstruct that because maybe some of your listeners have found as well, you sort of start to see the words growth coming up in sort of individual sort of role titles.
Yeah, actually, we've hired a couple of chief growth officers and growth managers.
But ultimately, the way that my purpose and responsibility at The Growth Foundation sort of sits across two functions, actually, it's product.
(02:33):
So the way we talk about products is, you know, the purpose of a product team is to source or create amazing wow products that your target audience and customers love and talk about.
And so I've got responsibility for that here in terms of our client base, making sure that we create those products and services.
And then the second function I look after here is actually brand.
(02:55):
So it's the, you know, the brand purpose is really ultimately, overtly artistic and emotional.
It's storytelling.
It's that thought leadership.
It's getting people to fall in love with you.
And when I say people, our target audience.
So that's, they're the two functions I look after here.
Because I suppose we're called The Growth Foundation, it's all about the products and the brands that we work with and our clients.
If I think about the, you know, the chief growth officers or growth roles that we, we hire into perhaps ecommerce businesses, it's usually slightly lower funnel than that.
(03:24):
It's much more around the performance marketing and traffic and trading and conversion rate optimization of the stores typically.
And I think it's great that, you know, not alone are you working on the growth for your clients, but you also have to imbibe your own medicine and basically make your own brand grow.
Yeah, we talk about quite frequently, we need to grow foundation ourselves here at this moment, because we go through all the same growing pains and joys of our clients as well, right?
(03:53):
And it's a bit like the analogy, you know, I don't know if you guys have got mates who are in the building trade, quite often they're brilliant at building houses for their clients.
And actually, when you go around to their place, there's still a radiator hanging off the wall and the decorating needs doing, because you don't spend enough time on your own thing.
So we obviously proactively and quite consciously make sure we're sort of running our own business through our framework and...
(04:16):
The real cobbler's shoes problem...
Yeah, exactly that.
Yeah, we only relaunched our website last week as a web design, web development agency.
We had the world's most overcomplicated, incredibly hard to use, bleeding edge website previously.
And it took us an awful lot to kind of come back around and say, right, look, what would we have done for clients?
(04:38):
We'd have totally simplified this.
Yeah, we'd have built something like Shopify.
So that's what we're going to do.
Yeah, taking your own medicine, absolutely.
So chief growth officer, what does that mean for you?
Like when you're looking, you mentioned there that you hired a couple of chief growth officers.
What are you looking for?
What kind of person?
Well, I suppose there's two things to deconstruct there.
Chief usually means, or I suppose director, is that you have a, I suppose, permission or expected by, let's say, the board to be responsible for direction and strategy.
(05:09):
And the way that we, when I talk about that, that's the decisions, probably we could dive into this a little bit more around that clarity and purpose of where to play and how to win at the brand.
So we sort of deconstruct strategy into sort of, again, a rational and emotional sides of that one thing.
So on the rational side, where to play, which is which products you do and don't source and make, which target audiences you do and do not try and attract, which sales channels you sell through.
(05:37):
Are you 100% DTC?
Are you multi-channel?
You might have some Amazon in the marketplace, or have you got wholesaling as well?
And then geography, are you an Ireland-only brand, or are you trying to perhaps build in Ireland and then scale out into the UK and to the US and Europe?
So you'd expect your chief, probably in any role in the business, if they're in a commercial one, operational finance, to have some experience in terms of, I suppose, informing the decision that the board would make around those things that you do and don't do.
(06:06):
So that's the chief part.
And then I suppose growth ultimately directly links to demand creation, doesn't it?
And that's probably a combination of having some influence over actually the where to play elements, which is what products, how good are they?
What's the offer architecture and the value proposition?
How do we turn up?
And this comes back to the second side of the strategies, like the how to win.
(06:27):
That's the emotional side.
It's all the things you say and how you say them, when you say them, when you don't.
It's all those elements.
And obviously then it probably covers the marketing, amplifying your message and your product and brand through paid media, CRM, the trading, the point of sale itself, so the website.
So there's an element of those things effectively.
And actually when I say in terms of leadership here within Growth Foundation, I have a very much a kind of clarity around products and brands.
(06:51):
But when I'm talking to a founder of, let's say, a €10 million scale-up business, they expect me to influence and give a sense of all of those demand sort of functions in the business.
And you probably have, I suppose, slightly less permission to be getting really stuck into perhaps then the operational, the foundations, right?
Which are finance, technology, sort of insight, those kinds of things, right?
(07:14):
You know, it's very demand-led.
And can you tell us, Rich, you mentioned like €10 million sort of size businesses.
Is that the kind of sweet spot for the businesses that you work with and the businesses that you help?
Like, when is the right time to come and talk to The Growth Foundation?
That, I suppose that point, and it depends on average order value, right?
Because obviously if you're selling, you know, say beds or mattresses or very high AOV type of products, it may be that you're already up there.
(07:42):
Actually, it's probably around, we look more a little bit more on sort of team size.
And actually the, I suppose, how the founder is thinking.
So usually the perfect time to speak to us will be when a founder's perhaps been, and typically we find that they're now sort of product visionaries.
They've found the need for a product that they couldn't find in the market.
They decide to speculate, take some risk, and they're still working in a bedroom.
(08:04):
Perhaps, you know, family and friends are helping them get going.
And then there's a moment and an inflection point when they think, right, I can see this has got an opportunity greater than a lifestyle business.
This could be a brand that has some legacy or actually could have some material value for me in the future.
Maybe I want to sell it to, you know, a competitor or I could, you know, or float it in the future.
Who knows what comes down the line, but they realise there's sort of more potential in the product or the service that they've created.
(08:29):
And it's usually at that point where they think they're aware that there are known unknowns.
I know these things need to happen, but I don't know how to do them.
Or, and obviously they won't know the unknown unknowns, but obviously a good trigger would be that there's things that I know I need to do.
I've got no idea how to approach them.
And, you know, I'm paralysed by choice.
I'm paralysed by not having pattern recognition.
(08:49):
And also probably there's an element where they start to think about professionalising the organisation.
So I'm going to make my first two, three, four hires, probably in areas that I don't enjoy doing.
So it might be that, again, they're a product visionary.
I love working on products.
Actually, I hate doing the finance.
I hate, I don't enjoy doing the performance marketing, et cetera, right?
And then I'm going to start to hire.
So that's probably a great time to talk to us.
(09:11):
I suppose if you're slightly larger, maybe again, we sort of have, that might be first inflection point, getting out of the bedroom into that first sort of, let's say maturing the business with a bit more sophistication.
There's usually another inflection point once you, it's the couple of years after you've done that first move.
And then it's like, great, this is working, but I may have made some wrong calls on the hires I made.
(09:33):
I've got, I'm actually paralysed by the choice I have in strategy.
I want to go into different countries, but I don't know where to go.
But I think I've got the team now in place to be able to start executing some of that stuff.
So that's a really good time as well for us to sort of interact.
And when you were to - sorry, Gordon - if we were to talk about one of the businesses that you're well known for working with, Gymshark, was that the kind of situation they were in, this, that paralysed, you know, paralysis of choice and trying to figure out what they do next and how to grow their business.
(10:01):
Was that the same?
Was that what they were experiencing?
Yeah, to some degree, yes.
And one of the things we've got at Growth Foundation is we look through sort of two very different binoculars or lenses when we sort of get to meet a business.
And that's one around, I suppose, assessing the clarity of strategy.
So how, I suppose, confident and rigorous are the decisions that the founders or the senior leadership team have made on those where to plays and how to wins.
(10:25):
And at Gymshark at that time, I think probably there was ambition to do a lot.
So it was that sort of, not quite paralysis of choice, but almost like trying to do all of them at once.
Yeah.
And kind of thinking, right, which ones perhaps do we need to focus on first?
What kind of things were they looking at?
It would have been things like, I suppose, and obviously the brand is famous for, like, functional training and weightlifting, for example.
(10:47):
So could we go into CrossFit or running or swimming or other kind of gym-led categories or even potentially when you think about product, is it footwear?
Is it sports nutrition?
Is it meal prep?
Is it all the other things that would potentially take share of an active gym-goers wallet?
How could you take a greater share of that?
There was some paralysis around, I suppose, geography.
(11:10):
The business was brilliantly launched with Ben and Lewis thinking about, this is a global opportunity and Shopify can effectively reach all parts of the world when they launched.
And it was kind of, I would say, you know, they were proactively hunting sort of customers in the UK and the US, but actually rest of world was passive.
(11:31):
But when you think operationally, okay, it's great that we can say we've shipped to over 150 countries.
When you sort of, you know, look from the bottom up in the P&L operation, that package to that Far East location that we sent three or four times, maybe two of them have returned because our sizing doesn't quite work for consumers in that part of the world has been sent back.
(11:51):
We've spent $400 shipping that to and from that place.
So it's those kinds of decisions around, do you know what?
Maybe we should say, we'll proactively hunt these two countries.
These will be passive and will be open because they're actually profitable when we do sell to customers in those places.
And then the long tail of the rest of the 180 countries in the planet will just effectively switch off.
So there's two things going on there, isn't there?
(12:15):
There's clarity around the proposition of what are we selling?
Are we pushing into adjacent categories?
And then the, where are we going to sell that?
I mean, it's where, and then the target audience is the other one.
And this is where they had actually really loads of rigour and clarity.
It will be to young, already in the gym people.
(12:36):
So when I met Ben, and this will hopefully make your listeners giggle a little bit, I remember, you know, I'm in my late thirties when I meet him, I'm slightly more timber around my waist when I met them for the first time and actually meeting them inspired me to get into better shape, actually.
And I said, you know, guys could, would you be happy for me to wear Gymshark products?
And they're like, absolutely not.
(12:57):
You're too old and you're too fat.
That's quite blunt.
Yeah, very, but the clarity of, I suppose of, let me deconstruct that because it might sound a bit arrogant in some way, but actually I suppose the age thing is really interesting in terms of they have the clarity of servicing consumers that were like them.
So in their early twenties, who were already, you know, in the gym already.
(13:20):
And I think the other point around that kind of, you're too fat because I'm conscious that could sound, well, actually, look, that's not very inclusive.
And, you know, we've all got different things going on in terms of managing our weight and things like that.
But actually when I deconstruct that, it was, you haven't earned the right to wear the brand in our view.
You know, the people who wear our brand, this is in the early days, you know, very much in the early adopted days of the brand where they were the individuals that actually took a proactive choice to go to the gym probably five days a week.
(13:46):
And they would train for a couple of hours every time they went.
It was seen as a, I think, and hopefully still is today, a badge of honour by wearing that, you know, that icon.
It's a credible product for credible, regular gym users.
So that's a really interesting thing to try and protect as you do grow.
And you want to sort of, again, reach more consumers who perhaps quite aren't as active when they're training.
(14:09):
But that clarity that they had there was absolutely key and clear.
So that customer decision there, Rich, that's almost as important as, or probably as important as the adjacency discussion.
So you're kind of, do we push into different categories or do we push into different age groups or different activity levels?
(14:32):
Yeah.
And even within age, if you think about that, the way, and I suppose actually there's some great, I suppose one of the things... actually I'll quote something I heard from Steven Bartlett on Dragons' Den.
I'm not sure if you guys get the UK BBC Dragons' Den?
We know Steven Bartlett...
And he said something that was, I suppose I've encountered and encourage as well, which is like in a very crowded market, if you want to disrupt, you know, that strategy and those decisions you make on the where to play should be needle-thin.
(15:01):
That will allow you then perhaps to really service a, you know, very narrow set of consumers.
Because if you think about, you know, 16- to 24-year-olds, we've already taken a lot of the addressable market away as the population.
We've now said who are in the gym, we've gone down again, who are actually only in the weights area of the gym, we've gone down again.
And actually, there's another divide that we kind of identified, which was the customers that we were really keen to sort of, I suppose, engage and build communities around, were the ones that actually, like, were the extroverts in the gym.
(15:30):
They were the ones that would, like, look training in front of the mirror.
They would like, you know, it was a social space to build relationships with other gym goers.
And then there's a, you know, there's another group who are in the weights area of the gym who are, you know, hoods up, headphones on, or on their own.
This is a very personal space.
It's an introverted sort of experience.
So we've gone down from, like, millions to, you know, hundreds of thousands, down to maybe 100,000, 10,000.
(15:55):
It was like, you know, that kind of factoring down and then building a product that absolutely delighted them.
And not only products, content, creative storytelling, all that good stuff for quite a needle-thin target audience.
Would you have, like, an example of, let's say a decision they made that under other circumstances might seem a little bit bad, but in hindsight, okay, this was exactly the right thing?
(16:18):
There's quite a few, but I'm conscious of, like, you know, privileged information and things like that.
So let me give you one that would come to life but we'll see with, you know, what we know.
So let me give you sort of a sense of some of the clarity around the playbook.
So, you know, that other kind of sort of fourth limb of that where to play was not discussed yet, which was channel.
The business made a proactive and conscious choice to be 100% direct to consumer online only.
(16:45):
And what could feel unusual is that as we were building a bit of leverage and gaining some traction and attention, we would be approached by very famous sort of, you know, fashion retail businesses and they would be very direct in terms of, here's a very large, you know, seven, eight figure purchase order if we can have your brand in our store.
(17:05):
Yeah, there'll be a lot of temptation to just, to just push into wholesale because of the reach that certain sports retailers will give you.
There's an, yeah...
So before the clarity of that decision, the business was losing some, let's say return on energy was low on that subject because you kept negotiating it.
(17:26):
Should we, shouldn't we, should we do it?
What are the pros and cons?
And we made that clarity of, like, no, you know, while we can create profitable demand, you know, direct-to-consumer models are phenomenal.
They're cash sort of generative and positive.
Usually, you know, you get your cash settled within a few days, you're paying your suppliers on maybe 30, 60, 90 days, you own your customer and the relationship with them directly and the insight it gives you, you know, all those things where, as soon as you start to get, let's say hooked on the wholesale drugs, which for some brands are, is the right channel for them...
(17:53):
You lose a lot of that visibility insight.
You know, you become a negative cash model, all that other good stuff, right?
So, but actually that clarity around was, once we knew that, when those sort of invitations would come over by an email, it was, you know, a 30-second, thanks very much.
Great, we're delighted to being asked, but no, thank you.
And then that energy can be used then on that sort of tactical executing where we should be, you know.
(18:17):
It must be so difficult for a founder to kind of write those emails, you know, thank you very much.
We're delighted to be asked by such a large retailer, but we're going to say no, because you know what that means.
You know, you're turning away quite a substantial potential.
Yeah, and it's an interesting psychology there, isn't it?
It's a bit of the cat-and-mouse there because actually they just want you even more?
(18:38):
Yep, yep.
So they would come back a month later and say, have you changed your mind?
And you'd be just building your leverage.
And actually, I suppose for that business, while we would continue to grow, you know, grow the right way effectively, that we just felt like we were building more power and leverage in that opportunity when we needed it.
So there was a time when we needed to pull it, yeah...
Yeah, it's a great example though, because you can feel the temptation.
(19:00):
So Gymshark now have opened up a store in Regent Street.
Did you have any thoughts about that?
I've actually been there, visited it just as it was before it opened and just after.
I mean, it's a phenomenal place.
If you get the chance to go, absolutely get down there.
Some of the innovation in physical retail is phenomenal.
They've got kind of, you know, racking that can move in and out of the ceiling to turn the space into a retail environment, back to a gym studio, etc.
(19:27):
They've worked very closely with Shopify, I think, to work on incredible point of sale.
So again, you know, it's not queuing at a till station.
You've got that kind of more Apple experience to go and buy with people on the move, on the shop floor, et cetera.
It still stays very true to that target customer...
Yeah.
...that originated.
Yeah.
I think, I suppose if I had,
(19:50):
I suppose a similar budget
and it was my choice to make only,
I think it would have been interesting to look at
perhaps, you know,
actually going perhaps more gym first versus retail first
and sort of creating epic kind of flagship
kind of Mecca-style,
apologies for using that word,
you know, sort of places that you go on a pilgrimage
(20:12):
to go and train in
and then kind of retail perhaps.
It's more like a sort of like a Disney experience, right?
Which is I'm going to go and enjoy and get the dopamine from training, and then the gift shop's on the way out sort of thing.
Which could be really interesting, and who knows that might be something those guys are considering?
And the other thing, when I was sort of thinking about, you know, where the brand, if I was getting, was sort of really ideating and blue skying, is where that brand could go outside of retail.
(20:38):
If you look at sort of being, I sort of took some inspiration from what the guys at like Aston Martin and some of the luxury car brands are doing.
They're creating kind of apartment blocks and places to live that are associated to the brand.
You know, so the Aston Martin team is doing the interior design of these very exclusive apartments in Miami and Dubai.
And you can bring your Aston Martin up in the middle of the building and park it outside your apartment with a window to look at your car.
(21:01):
There could be some interesting ways.
You imagine if you sort of, you said, right, what could we do in the future with that brand in terms of again, really hitting the wants and needs of that very quite narrow group of consumers in terms of effectively getting more of their wallet share.
Yeah, it's really, really interesting.
That would really make gym life real life, wouldn't it?
Yes.
And it is for those individuals, yeah.
(21:22):
So we've talked a bit about, obviously, you know, Jim Sharpe wasn't the only highlight.
Do you want to tell us a little bit about The Hut Group and the kinds of things you brought up today?
Yeah, very different proposition.
Yeah, I joined The Hut Group in 2009.
So its formative years.
It was a business then that was effectively exclusively a white-label ecommerce platform.
(21:45):
So we were empowering the entertainment retail, online retail stores for the likes of Asda and other general merchandisers who were perhaps struggling in having some of their online market share taken from the likes of play.com and Amazon.
And actually Play was my previous employer.
So my experience in Play was the thing that kind of gave me the opportunity at The Hut Group.
And over the time I was there, my first couple of years there, I was, I suppose, actually what would be called growth now.
(22:09):
I was responsible because we called it ecommerce director, but it was responsible for demand creation and then had obviously a stakeholding in sort of product to some degree, but much more than around owning content, performance marketing, trading and conversion rate optimization.
And then as we, I suppose, demonstrated that we could start to grow more profitably and faster through myself and a few other guys from Play joined.
(22:32):
And again, we started to, again, that business was in that inflection point of hiring experienced people into its business.
We were able to sort of upturn the demand generation.
We were able then to talk to investors to say, we know we've got a formula for growth, put some money in, and we're going to use that to then acquire, I suppose, more friendly, perfect for ecommerce sort of brands or product categories, which are sports nutrition, which is high frequency, high gross margin, low return rate, easy to manage operationally effectively.
(23:08):
Likewise beauty, it's in the same place.
So we kind of designed that, what would be perfect if you had an ecommerce platform end-to-end, which The Hut Group owns.
It's a full first-party platform end-to-end.
Like, well, if we design, if we could put anything through this, it would be things that meet those criteria.
So that was the migration from CDs into very, very different categories, but still ticking those boxes of high frequency, low return, kind of would fit through a letterbox, obviously a bit...
(23:37):
One hand pick was the kind of the thing we used to talk about, not two hand picks.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
So earlier on, we started out, we were talking a little bit about strategy.
You mentioned some of the things you're looking at, where to play, how to win, which products to which channels, to which audiences.
So that's kind of, let's say, the high level.
From a tactical point of view, what are the things that you're looking at on a day-to-day basis or a quarter-to-quarter basis to help push that strategy forward?
(24:07):
I suppose the way that we look at that, so we think about sequencing into tactics, actions and control.
So again, to maybe to bring that to life in the minds of the listener, if you think about the strategy, and we've talked about fitness a bit, haven't we?
So imagine you think to yourself, I'd like to feel a bit fitter, a bit thinner.
That's the Hollywood version of myself in your head.
So that's like the mission and the vision you have in your head.
(24:29):
The objective might be lose 10 kilograms by the 1st of June, ready for the summer.
And then the strategy would be diet.
When you deconstruct that, would be move more, eat better.
And that's the rule, the immutable rule that never changes.
That's that clarity of the rule.
Tactically then, depending on the individual, and this is obviously in brackets, depending on the company, you might say, well, for me, I love running, I love swimming, but I'm going to join a gym as well.
(24:57):
I'm gonna get a personal trainer, stop eating beige food.
And they're the tactics.
And then when you come down another level into actions, well, if you say, well, I'm going to join the gym, I've actually got to go, sign up, turn up, train.
They're the actions.
And I suppose then the control is the measurement, right?
And the measurements are, am I on track?
So I said, am I losing a kilogram a week consistently?
No, I'm not.
Actually, I stopped.
Oh yeah, I fell off the wagon and had a load of drinks with my mates during the middle of the week.
(25:20):
I'm feeling a bit tired or whatever, right?
So that's the thing that feeds back into, and a brilliant, I suppose, a way of actually talking about tactically having to ensuring tactics, actions and... are changed by default.
Think about when Covid came, if you're using this analogy, I can't go to the gym anymore.
I can't meet my personal trainer.
I'm not allowed to go to the swimming pool.
What am I going to do, right?
(25:41):
The tactic now is to run up and down the stairs.
It's to jump around in front of the TV with Joe Wicks.
But my tactics change based on a macro situation that changed.
So that's kind of the framework of thinking about that.
And then I suppose the way that we do that with our clients, when we're talking to them about how to understand the different tactics across the business, and they vary massively, don't they?
(26:02):
Because if you're in the product function, what the tactics you're deploying are are very different to the ones in the customer service team, right?
Just worlds apart.
We will group the company into 10 functions.
The first five I'm going to read out are, think of them as like vertical pillars in your head.
So think about five vertical pillars and think of customers moving through, across these pillars from left to right.
(26:23):
So you've got product, brand, marketing, trading and operations.
And operations is like that fulfillment and customer service.
So they, customers move through that journey.
And then what allows those pillars to stand up above the ground is then the foundations underneath.
Including our name, Growth Foundation.
They are the horizontal kind of foundations that layer up to support those pillars.
(26:44):
So you've got from the ground moving to the floor, there is insight, tech, finance, people and executive.
So we will then sort of understand those things.
And then you can clearly articulate where your people are and where you think about, what's the purpose of these functions?
So product we've already discussed, like making and sourcing awesome products that my target audience love.
(27:04):
Brand is storytelling, getting people to fall in love with me.
Operations, deliver the promise that we make to our customers.
Finance, make sure we've got enough money to do the things we want to do, et cetera, et cetera.
So that's kind of that high level, right?
And how we think about things.
And then I suppose tactically that I think about, you were talking about some of those things that we do that kind of came back to some of the sort of the playbook thing.
(27:25):
It would be, if you understood, like for example, in Gymshark, we're about conditioning and the journey of becoming the best version of yourself.
And one of the things that we thought about as well that we understood that's where we play and how we win is in that clarity of that conditioning.
It would be tactically, we have an opportunity to sponsor a football team.
(27:46):
They phoned us up and said, do you want to go on the shirts of a Premier League football team?
You're like, no, we don't.
We're not where the goals are scored.
Could we tell stories about how that Premier League player went from grassroots into the team?
That's where we'd like to work tactically with you.
And then you can sort of see the guy, the sponsorship sales guy at the football team scratching his head going, no, we don't, we can't, I don't have a package to sell you that.
(28:06):
I don't have a billboard.
And then that takes a bit more energy, which actually we have because we're not considering should we go and sell to a marketplace or not?
We've got some energy now to go, well, why don't we work a bit harder on this and see if we could secure some storytelling with your players, for example.
So that's kind of how we sort of, the hierarchy of that structure works.
(28:26):
You're not about where the goals are scored, you're about the journey.
Yeah, I'm sitting here grinning, listening to all of that, Rich, because anybody that's ever done any work with me will have heard me bang on relentlessly about the SOSTAC planning framework.
Yeah, you can see I've kind of squashed it around what we do, absolutely.
But what I really love to hear is the clarity on your vertical and your horizontal pillars for delivering that at a tactical level.
(28:55):
I think the first bit of the battle is having that clarity on what your strategy is and then understanding, okay, we know where we're going, but what are those things that we're going to do?
Under what headings to deliver against that strategy?
And I think this is a really useful takeout for anybody that's listening because it keeps manners on everything.
(29:19):
Yeah, it does.
Yeah, it keeps you real.
And actually, again, this is about that return on energy.
So I think about that strategy often can be on a piece of paper in a document that you write down and say, right, where do we play?
How do we win?
What's our objective?
What's our mission, vision?
But actually, Gordon, I love the SOSTAC model, but we changed it to, actually, I suppose, bastardised it is the right way to talk about it.
(29:40):
We put a V in it for vision and mission because actually that doesn't exist in SOSTAC .
You can have situation, objective.
It doesn't talk about purpose enough.
Yeah.
And then also there's a brilliant model and that where to play, how to win, that's not something I'm gutted to tell everyone,
I didn't, we haven't created that.
That's something that P&G come up with in the 60s, which is, it's a phenomenal model in terms of the clarity it brings you.
(30:01):
So we've kind of squashed all those frameworks together.
But yeah, I think one of the things that you talk about, like, you know, some of those things, I suppose, thinking tactically is, I'm trying to think about like the vertical and the horizontal.
Some of the things that we will try and work into sort of the taxonomy and language of the brands and clients we work with is, think about if you are, if you are, let's say, the most senior leader in the marketing, and usually it's called the marketing team.
(30:29):
I want you to talk about that as a function.
It's one of the functions of the business.
So you're the leader of the marketing function and the purpose is traffic at best quality, highest quality, highest volume traffic at the lowest cost is your purpose.
And then think of your team as your peers left to right.
So if you're a head of marketing, you've got a head of brand next to you, a head of trading, that's the team.
(30:50):
When you look left and right across those pillars, that's your team.
You need to work really closely together to align and collaborate and do all that wonky thinking that you do when you're coming up with the plans and tactics.
So the idea of, all right, we know we're a conditioning brand, or we know we're a window blinds brand, what do, you know, et cetera, et cetera, right?
Where, and then what do we want to do then tactically?
(31:10):
And you're working left to right collaboratively and then you, I suppose, translate and narrate that information back into your function.
And we talk a lot about, you know,
this monologue I was talking about,
like having your strategy down on a piece of paper,
which is all very well,
but some of the best businesses that we see
that have kind of got themselves
up into the €10, €20 million mark already,
(31:33):
what they usually have is maybe a bit of luck
that one of the founding team
or one of the strategic kind of decision makers
of the business is a great narrator.
They're a brilliant storyteller.
And what they do in every interaction, if you're a supplier, a partner, an employee at any level from the very junior to the very senior, that individual is brilliant at keep reminding you and narrating you the plan.
(31:55):
So it gets into the muscle memory of the business.
And again, to think about that for the guys to bring it to life, or put your minds back to the Karate Kid movie from the 80s?
Think of your brand and your business as Daniel at the beginning of the movie, the high potential, you know, champion of the future.
And then you can then think of the strategy actually as Mr. Miyagi, right?
(32:18):
So, but Miyagi is the narrator.
He's actually not the strategy himself.
He's the narrator.
He's the guide.
He's the guiding light.
And actually what's interesting, there's a brilliant book that brought this to life for me called Story Brand.
So check that out.
I'm a huge fan.
That's another one of my books that I give out to people.
This is where it comes from Gordon, right?
So, and then, but actually that whole thing where he's training Daniel in the summer of wax on, wax off, you know, wash the cars, paint the fence, scrub the deck...
(32:46):
That's getting the strategy into the muscle memory of Daniel, effectively the brand.
So that's what you've got to think about.
It's like, okay, I've written down the strategy.
What are the techniques now I need to use in my business to get that strategy?
So when someone is approached by an unusual question internally or externally, hey, would you like to sell a marketplace?
Would you like to sponsor a sports team?
(33:08):
It's instantly muscle memory.
Yes or no.
Because you've got that clarity of the strategy.
Yeah.
Do you find with some of the people that you work with, if they haven't got that strategic clarity, do you find that you would then end up working with organisations that are very tactically focused?
And if you do, how would you get them to take a step back from being down in the trenches and think about strategic direction?
(33:34):
We have a framework which I can share.
So maybe you guys can take a look at the template.
Happy to share this for you and your listeners, actually.
We put strategic clarity and rigour on a Y axis.
I think of a quadrant, four squares.
You've got the Y, so the Y vertical axis is strategy clarity.
And then we put tactical capability on the X.
So if you are, and if you think about then, what's the scale of that?
(33:56):
Because it's difficult to give it a number.
So we actually put needs work right at the bottom to leading edge at the very top.
And you go through as expected and above average.
And we actually will score that based on relatively subjective and peer group knowledge.
So when we meet a, let's say, 4 million turnover brand with a team of three, et cetera, the scoring is appropriate comparing it to, let's say, the Huck Group now who are 2 billion turnover with 10,000 employees.
(34:22):
It's not appropriate to score them on each other.
But either way, you can now imagine when we look at a business and we deconstruct strategy, which we have done, which is where to play, how to win, and we deconstruct how to win into, actually, the narrative clarity is one of those.
How good are you at narrating this strategy into the organisation?
So we score all of those things.
That allows me to plot you, let's say, on above average for strategy.
(34:45):
And then typically the brands we meet are usually this way around.
They have a slightly above average or strategy and tactical capability along the other axis is usually around the needs work and or as expected.
And you might find, like I found at Gymshark when I met them, they were leading edge on influencer marketing and earned marketing.
(35:08):
It was still quite an immature space.
So they weren't particularly sophisticated, but compared to their peers, no one was doing it as well as they were.
And then you looked across all the other things you can deconstruct in tactical capability.
So how good is your organic media?
How good is your paid media?
And then you deconstruct that again into paid search, paid social, display, above the line.
You can imagine how that all sort of works through CRM, conversion rate optimization, visual merchandising, category management of products, et cetera.
(35:34):
They under index, that was all that needs work.
Tech stack needs work, insight needs work.
And then that kind of gives you a sense of, right, the focus actually is we need to do a bit of work on strategy to bring some more narrative clarity here.
But actually the focus for the next year is all about upgrading the tactical execution.
And then what that does when you balance them, it moves you into the top right-hand quadrant, which is growing the right way, which is what we call that kind of...
(36:00):
And that's almost an ideal starting position...
Yeah...
Real clarity on what you want to do, where do you want to go? Who are you for?
And then you make the decisions tactically on...
Yeah, and you think about the impact of some of those decisions. So if you think, right, I do want to open, it's right for my brand.
And we've got an everyone brand.
It's a mass market proposition.
It's quite convenient, low value.
(36:22):
It's really appropriate for us to be, let's say in grocery or physical retail and marketplace.
Once that's established, you come then down to tactical capability.
You're like, well, who have I got here?
I don't have anyone to manage this.
I don't have the right technology.
Do I have actually enough cash in the bank to now have a negative working cash channel?
Although it could be amazing for my marketing because I'm now on the shelf in a thousand pharmacies or whatever, right?
(36:44):
So that then, it sets those out.
If you go around the other way and think, right, I'm going to build my tactical plan and my org first before setting the proposition and the strategy, you'll end up again, probably low return on energy and yield.
What we've been speaking about, Gordon and I work so frequently in all of these areas.
(37:05):
It's so interesting how the frameworks, they kind of cross-pollinate each other.
And sometimes I think the experience that you bring to the whole thing is even just understanding which pieces of the model, all of the models that are out there, which pieces you're actually going to bring to the table.
The most useful within the context.
Exactly, exactly.
One of my favorite quotes is, all models are broken, but some are useful.
(37:26):
It's not knowing which ones are the ones that actually...
And actually, I suppose turning it, sort of our model on the head slightly as well is that you could come this with a very kind of, I suppose, exclusively model-led consultancy.
Here are some great models.
And you sort of talk about that.
I suppose the benefit of what we have and the majority of my team, I've got 25 people at Growth Foundation, only two are actually exclusively agency background, and they're in my creative team, which absolutely is fine because actually they're not wedded to the pressure of worrying about money and P&L, right?
(37:59):
They're just brilliant creative thinkers.
Everyone else who has any responsibility near a number has come from a business like a direct-to-consumer ecommerce business.
So they can, again, look at the model and understand actually that part of that model was brilliant or actually that KPI that we used in my previous life over here is perfect for this or we've been there and had, like I'm sure a lot of your listeners will have, is that the highs and lows, the dopamine and the serotonin of, like, the Shopify bell ringing, and then not.
(38:27):
Like, it's Saturday morning, you look at a number and go, oh man, it's going to be a tough week.
It's going to be a tough week.
You know, we've all been there.
And actually, yeah.
So we know, so there's, I think a lot of things we talk about our values here is that unlike other perhaps more, I suppose, established consultancies, like the McKinsey's or the Bain's or the big four's, they can do quite a lot of work on strategy.
(38:49):
We've got the pattern recognition and we've been there, and the empathy to understand what it feels like to be a first-time founder or employee number three in a small business or a scale-up business.
We've all been there.
It's a unique thing to bring to the table the kind of pragmatic and practical background and experience, not alone the thinking around strategy and understanding where and why those things are important, but also how to bring that back to the tactical piece.
(39:16):
Because at the end of the day, anybody who's going to be speaking to you will also want to know, well, that's great.
Now, what am I doing tomorrow morning?
Like I'm coming into work on Monday.
Where am I going?
And that comes back to the tactical pieces that you were talking about earlier on.
A question to wrap up, because we could speak with you all day, obviously.
But a question just to wrap up that we've been asking people recently is what do you feel is the opportunity now in ecommerce for the next 12 months?
(39:44):
I know that you've been working with this great little tool, Order Rescue.
I spotted it on LinkedIn.
I really like the look of it.
Let's talk about that briefly.
But is that also the biggest opportunity?
Yeah.
So I think, I suppose, opportunity sounds like when you sort of, I suppose, maybe the dictionary definition might go something around finding new, maybe tactics or areas for growth.
(40:06):
And I think there will always be.
So again, if you're out there listening as strategic decision makers or owners of businesses, you've always got permission to question the decisions you've made.
Have I chosen the right audiences?
Have I chosen the right products?
But my guidance there would be don't do that in an open environment where your tactical people are.
You'll confuse them and you'll lose energy.
Think of that ethical pirate captain on a ship.
(40:28):
He's in his office, in the captain's thing at the back of the ship on his own thinking about that.
He won't be musing that with the crew because he'd just confuse them.
They're like, no, I've already told you, we're going over here.
This is why we're going.
There's a big pot of treasure.
And maybe he's back in the office thinking, there might be a bigger pot of treasure over in that other island.
But I'll keep musing that on my own before telling the crew to get distracted.
That's one thing.
(40:48):
I think if you're more tactical, opportunity, goodness me, I think the ease of getting distracted with new things all the time.
I think just making sure the brilliant basics are in place in everything you do and every function.
And that will be really different.
But I suppose let's talk about conversion rate optimization.
So are you in stock most of the time of the things that people come to you for, that you're famous for?
(41:10):
You know, the grocery store, bread and milk, or if you're at the home improvement store, it's the white paint and white spirit.
Is that in stock all the time, every day?
It's really boring, but it's the bread and butter of the business.
Yeah, absolutely.
Get that sorted before getting distracted with the champagnes and chocolates at the front.
And this feels like this year, 2023, it feels like a year of consolidation.
I had a bit of poetry recently where I was talking about the North Star and the mists dissipating and all of that.
(41:36):
It's still there, still in the same place.
I think the opportunity is as well, particularly for pure play ecommerce stores.
And this is a message, I've got the luck of, I suppose, my age and when being born when I was.
I actually worked in physical retail for the first sort of nine years of my retail career.
And one of the things I've tried to do whenever I can, if we have the opportunity, is take pure play ecommerce clients and teams I've had into physical retail environments.
(42:00):
The disciplines that you need there are obviously very different.
It's a bit like, you know, you both want to win the race, which is growing your brand and your revenue through the till.
But, like, physical retail is Formula One driving and e-com is rally driving.
A lot of the terminology is the same, but the way of winning the race is very different.
Spend some time, like, try if you can, to go and work in a shop.
(42:24):
Literally, spend some time or visit more physical retail environments and take on...
Why have they put that there in the window?
Why are they dressed at the end of the aisle there?
How are they flowing people through this store?
There's a reason that the grocery stores put bread and milk in the back of the store.
It's because you have to walk past the champagne and chocolates and all the other stuff and you end up with a eight times bigger basket than you would have done anyway.
And I don't think there's enough content.
(42:46):
And, you know, I don't know what you guys think around thinking like physical retailers and applying those techniques and methodologies in an e-com environment, in an e-com.
You're preaching to the converted, my man.
We talk about this all the time.
Like, yeah, it absolutely has some.
And actually that's quite a nice segue to Order Rescue because one of the things we get asked a lot is, should I be using voucher codes and promo codes?
(43:13):
Am I using too many?
Should I turn them off?
And obviously we'd like, again, one of our methodologies, you know, we want insight-led decisions or to make insight-led, we want to have insight-led informed decisions, sorry, right, when we're making things.
So we're like, well, actually, let's have a look at, and I don't know how you guys feel when you're in this sort of space, but there's not brilliant reporting visibility of actually what's going on with voucher codes at all.
(43:36):
You can see how many were used.
You can see, you know, what you've got live in your ecommerce CMS, but actually you don't get any visibility of the interaction of the voucher code box in any ecommerce tool as far as I'm aware.
And so we thought, well, be interesting to build some tracking to see actually what's going on with that very small, you know, micro-step of the journey to the checkout, but it's a very sensitive one.
(43:56):
We've got people in high intent to buy, they're feeling anxious, all the thing around, you know, is it the right time?
You know, that anxiety around, I suppose.
And particularly if you're in a product category which is quite impulsive, where you see a brilliant piece of content on TikTok or social media and you think, I want that.
And you come in and something goes wrong.
You're easy, very quick to leave and bounce out of the journey.
(44:18):
So we're like, let's have a look at that.
And it really surprised us what happened.
So we tracked about two million checkouts across a number of merchants.
And on average, 8% of everyone who enters the checkout will attempt an invalid voucher code and then not convert because it wasn't valid.
You get that invalid code, try again.
And what's interesting, if you deconstruct the thought process of that user is that the value... they think they've come with a valid deal.
(44:46):
So there's either that they've been given it from an influencer, they found something and they think that that's it.
And that group, the loss of that offer is greater than the benefit of the product that they're about to buy.
So they don't convert, which is really interesting kind of psychology there of a consumer.
So we're thinking like, again, coming and bringing this back to a physical retail store.
Imagine you've got a coupon from the paper that says 10% off baked beans today.
(45:08):
And you kind of put it in the bottom of your handbag.
You've walked into the store, got your beans in the thing, go to the checkout and the code doesn't scan because it's kind of been screwed up in your bag.
What would happen in a physical retail store?
I guess most often than not, you'd have the checkout associate would say, don't worry, I've got a copy here on the till.
And you'd be on your way, very happy.
(45:30):
And that doesn't happen in e-com, you get invalid code, try again.
The amount of disappointment, like you say, entirely outweighs the value that the customer thinks they're going to get from the product.
And this is a consumer, actually this is a human psychology thing from, I think it's the fast and slow thinking guys.
And I can't recall their names.
Those wicked Nobel prize winning psychologists, which is the fear of loss is greater in humans than the gain on the other side.
(45:58):
It hurts to lose things more than it does to win.
This ties in with something I saw this week.
I was reading it on LinkedIn and it was from an SEO agency.
And one of the most common search terms for any brand is brand plus voucher code or brand plus promo code.
And I'm sure that's gonna be one of the behaviours that's being surfaced here as you get to the promo box.
(46:23):
And then it's like, right, okay, I'm going to type in whatever it is I'm shopping for plus promo code.
And then you're at an inflection point.
Their suggestion to fix that was put all your promo codes on your website, which I thought was quite an interestingly risky approach.
Now my advice would be install Order Rescue.
So what it does is effectively acts like a checkout associate.
(46:46):
So if you've got one of the, I call them the chancer and there's a lot of those, right?
So about 8% who invalid and leave, we believe it's merchant dependent and how well they've managed their codes previously, but roughly half are trying it on.
They try staff one, two, three, test one, two, three, all that good stuff.
And then the other guys are genuinely, have got a genuine code, welcome 10 and their thumb on a mobile phone keyboard has typoed it wrong.
(47:10):
And then they leave.
So we've built a tool that allows you to configure based on what's typed in.
If there are a new customer returning, what's in the basket, you name it, a rescue offer, which can be percentage off, if we purchase a fixed money off and it acts like a human would do a till.
So for example, new customer comes in with a very slow-moving, high-margin item in their basket, which costs £500 and says, could you do us a deal on this?
(47:34):
You might go, yeah, I will do you a deal on that.
I need to move that stock on.
If a returning customer comes in and says, I'd like to buy something you sell loads of, not great margin.
You'd be like, no, sorry, move on.
And obviously if they come with the valid code and it just doesn't work, then make it work.
That's what the tool does.
Brilliant. Rich, thanks for summing all that up.
(47:55):
And thank you for joining us this morning.
We're out of time.
I wish we had another hour to chat to you some more, but it's been an education, which is, it's an education for us.
I hope it's an education for the listeners and it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast.
Yeah, likewise.
And I mentioned and promised some of those resources.
So guys, I'll PDF up those things over to you.
(48:18):
And likewise, if anyone wants to reach out, we're at The Growth Foundation. You can find me on LinkedIn as well.
So happy to share more and help your listeners.
Thanks so much, Rich.
We'll talk to you soon.
Take care.
Thanks Rich.
Great stuff. Thanks, guys.
Wasn't Rich great today?
I learned tons.
And I think the biggest takeaway for me, apart from nautical analogies, which we'll cover later, was that strategic clarity of where to play and how to play and who you are actually targeting.
(48:55):
And having that clarity and being able to tell that story to the teams that you have within your organisation and for everybody to align behind it is such a fantastic tool.
And then of course, you've got this breadth of tactical tools that you can use to deliver against strategy.
I think it's important because there's a lot of talk about strategy.
(49:18):
And the one thing I always remember when I listen to people talk about strategy was I increasingly had no idea what they were really talking about and or what it meant.
Like, you know, we're going to put it down on paper.
What are we going to put down on paper?
A sentence, like, an entire, like a one-pager?
And you'd see some businesses with, like, you know, 100 pages worth of strategy.
I came across a quote a while back around strategy.
(49:41):
And the quote is that strategy is the focus of multiple resources on a single purpose.
So it's that idea of we have a single purpose.
It's clearly stated.
We all know what it is.
And we have multiple resources.
There's lots and lots of people.
There's marketing people.
There's the trading people.
There's the product and production people.
(50:02):
But all of these people are all focused towards this one single purpose.
And he talked about that quite well.
So he talked about, as he said, the where to play and how to win.
But then he talked also about how, across the roles and across the positions in the business, everybody would look and try, look from shoulder to shoulder from the ecommerce manager to the trading manager, to understand how they would work together to push towards a single vision.
(50:30):
And there is that element of the single vision.
But within that, there's the recognition of the practical reality that we are going to have to implement this as a tactic.
We have to execute on this.
It's not enough just to say, here's a sentence.
This is our strategy.
What are we doing now?
And then he talked about the tactic, the action and the measurement of that.
(50:52):
Yeah, the control, which I got very excited over the idea of tactics, actions and controls.
But that's the bit about getting things done and pushing in the same direction.
I also really love the idea that you might get distracted and there might be another pot of gold somewhere else, but that involves a strategic change.
(51:17):
Resist the temptation to bring that into the broader team because that's going to be really confusing.
And what strategy does is it gives the teams the tool to know where they're going.
And I think that clarity was so evident in some of the examples they gave around Gymshark.
Yeah.
(51:38):
Really enjoyed that.
There was actually something that I was speaking with him about as well is the whole idea of an offer architecture.
It was something that I hadn't come across before.
Like, obviously, I've heard you talk loads about pricing architecture and that area, but he spoke about offer architecture and we didn't get into it in the podcast, but the offer architecture, the four principal points, the uniqueness.
(52:03):
So something unique about the product that you're offering.
The brand.
How does the product support the brand and what you're trying to do and what the story is that you're trying to tell?
The social proof.
So the elements of who else is using this and how are they benefiting from it?
And the actual offer itself, the price point scarcity and things like that.
(52:25):
So it's just kind of, like, an idea of an offer architecture, which I thought was really, really clever.
And it's very impressive how he has these, from the tips of his fingers, these whole kind of like, he has all of the models, but is also still able to bring this back to a practical example and talk about, I mean, certain things like, let's say, Audi, he talks about a little bit about the emblematic design.
(52:50):
So the idea of the Audi, the lights on the back of an Audi now, where when they turn on the indicators and the LED lights kind of...
They do that flashy thing.
Yeah.
So you can tell, you know that that's an Audi from miles away.
They're in front of you.
You know that's an Audi in the distance.
I learned a lot in that area.
I think the offer architecture, that just really practical, let's say, experience, that lived experience that he's able to bring to this area and how that feeds into the tactics and how that then feeds into the driving on of the strategy.
(53:19):
I thought that was fabulous.
So you've got that offer architecture there, or proposition architecture, if you like.
The other thing that I really, really enjoyed was having, he has practitioners on his team.
So they have felt that empathy that all of us have felt at one stage.
(53:40):
It's one thing when the Shopify bell dings, it's the other thing when it doesn't.
Yeah, he had a story there.
We didn't get a chat.
I mean, but I could see him, you know, he obviously was remembering something in his past.
We've all been there where we think we've done absolutely everything right.
(54:00):
And we are expecting something to fly and it falls flat, and you need to go back and actually ask those questions of, was it really aligned to our strategy correctly?
Is it the right customer?
Was it promoted in the right way?
Did we actually have availability?
I think anybody who's listening has probably been in that awful position where you run a big promotional piece of activity and then bam, all the inventory's gone.
(54:31):
Gone within seconds.
And you're just sitting there with traffic.
Well, you're sitting there with complaints and customer service and social media saying, well, he never had it anyway.
You know, they're just tempting us in here with their lies.
We could probably do a whole show on the various horror stories that we have experienced over the years.
(54:51):
We probably won't.
Would people listen to us?
What about the, I love the pirate captain, the maverick, the guy in the back of the ship with the parrot on his shoulder?
Nautical analogies are definitely up there...
I think there's two things that have come out of this season of the podcast.
One is brilliant nautical analogies of which, like more boats.
(55:13):
And I do like the idea now of a patch and a pirate - eh, a patch and a parrot.
A pirate with a patch and a parrot.
And then the other theme that sort of that has come is brilliant basics.
Absolutely.
Everybody that we have spoken to has talked about brilliant basics and doing this really, really well.
(55:35):
And this is the key to unlocking creativity because if your basics are brilliant, then you can do all of the other cool stuff... with your parrot.
You know, in reality, it is, it's a hygiene factor.
You know, it's nearly table stakes nowadays.
You have to be able to come to the table.
You want to play the game.
You have to be able to do the basics brilliantly.
So you need to focus on that.
(55:56):
Remember to come back to it again and again, because otherwise, if you don't have that level, you don't have that platform to, let's say, to start off of or to scale off of how are you going to implement something beyond that?
It's like the opportunity cost of it, though, isn't it?
That where are you spending your time?
You have a finite amount of time during the week.
(56:19):
And if you're spending all of that time putting out fires, fixing problems, you're not spending that time on things that add a bit more value.
And to be quite frank, are a lot more fun.
Yeah.
The basics should be easier, but they're really, really difficult.
They are really difficult.
And on that note, yo-ho-ho, me hearty...
Arrr!
(56:39):
Thanks very much, Gordon, and thanks to everybody for listening.
I'm delighted to have you once again on this episode of Functional & Fabulous.
Thanks, Ger.
Bye.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman.
If you'd like to know more about the podcast, or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith, and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode, Ger quotes from the classics...
Our guest is too impressive...
He's a recognised speaker offering services and strategic planning, marketing... actually too many services to name.
(00:26):
Gordon explains technology...
They do their flashy thing.
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This episode of Functional & Fabulous is brought to you with pride by Studio49, retail ecommerce experts, omnichannel growth consultants and cut-through performance marketing specialists.
(00:52):
Studio49, where your digital retail success is built.
So you're very welcome to another episode of Functional & Fabulous.
And we're joined here today with our guest, Rich Chapple.
Rich, it's great to see you.
Good morning, guys.
How are you both?
Hi, Rich.
Beyond excited to have you on the podcast this morning.
Yeah, thank you.
(01:12):
Me too.
I can't wait to get into it.
So just a little bit about Rich's background.
Rich is a seasoned growth and strategy expert known for growing three unicorn companies, Gymshark, The Hook Group Ingenuity and play.com to serious scale and profitably.
He is co-founder and Chief Growth Officer of The Growth Foundation, an organisation that provides high-potential businesses with the right tools to grow across all their foundations, from ecommerce to talent.
(01:39):
He's a recognised speaker, offering services and strategic planning, marketing... actually too many services to name.
So I'm just going to go straight to his superpower clarity of proposition.
And that's something that we're really looking to get into today.
That's one of his superpowers.
Rich, it's absolutely fantastic to have you here.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, looking forward to it.
So I suppose just to kind of kick off, you know, Chief Growth Officer at The Growth Foundation, you must be the growingest growing person...
(02:07):
That's a lot of growing, Rich...
Yeah, absolutely.
So let me deconstruct that because maybe some of your listeners have found as well, you sort of start to see the words growth coming up in sort of individual sort of role titles.
Yeah, actually, we've hired a couple of chief growth officers and growth managers.
But ultimately, the way that my purpose and responsibility at The Growth Foundation sort of sits across two functions, actually, it's product.
(02:33):
So the way we talk about products is, you know, the purpose of a product team is to source or create amazing wow products that your target audience and customers love and talk about.
And so I've got responsibility for that here in terms of our client base, making sure that we create those products and services.
And then the second function I look after here is actually brand.
(02:55):
So it's the, you know, the brand purpose is really ultimately, overtly artistic and emotional.
It's storytelling.
It's that thought leadership.
It's getting people to fall in love with you.
And when I say people, our target audience.
So that's, they're the two functions I look after here.
Because I suppose we're called The Growth Foundation, it's all about the products and the brands that we work with and our clients.
If I think about the, you know, the chief growth officers or growth roles that we, we hire into perhaps ecommerce businesses, it's usually slightly lower funnel than that.
(03:24):
It's much more around the performance marketing and traffic and trading and conversion rate optimization of the stores typically.
And I think it's great that, you know, not alone are you working on the growth for your clients, but you also have to imbibe your own medicine and basically make your own brand grow.
Yeah, we talk about quite frequently, we need to grow foundation ourselves here at this moment, because we go through all the same growing pains and joys of our clients as well, right?
(03:53):
And it's a bit like the analogy, you know, I don't know if you guys have got mates who are in the building trade, quite often they're brilliant at building houses for their clients.
And actually, when you go around to their place, there's still a radiator hanging off the wall and the decorating needs doing, because you don't spend enough time on your own thing.
So we obviously proactively and quite consciously make sure we're sort of running our own business through our framework and...
(04:16):
The real cobbler's shoes problem...
Yeah, exactly that.
Yeah, we only relaunched our website last week as a web design, web development agency.
We had the world's most overcomplicated, incredibly hard to use, bleeding edge website previously.
And it took us an awful lot to kind of come back around and say, right, look, what would we have done for clients?
(04:38):
We'd have totally simplified this.
Yeah, we'd have built something like Shopify.
So that's what we're going to do.
Yeah, taking your own medicine, absolutely.
So chief growth officer, what does that mean for you?
Like when you're looking, you mentioned there that you hired a couple of chief growth officers.
What are you looking for?
What kind of person?
Well, I suppose there's two things to deconstruct there.
Chief usually means, or I suppose director, is that you have a, I suppose, permission or expected by, let's say, the board to be responsible for direction and strategy.
(05:09):
And the way that we, when I talk about that, that's the decisions, probably we could dive into this a little bit more around that clarity and purpose of where to play and how to win at the brand.
So we sort of deconstruct strategy into sort of, again, a rational and emotional sides of that one thing.
So on the rational side, where to play, which is which products you do and don't source and make, which target audiences you do and do not try and attract, which sales channels you sell through.
(05:37):
Are you 100% DTC?
Are you multi-channel?
You might have some Amazon in the marketplace, or have you got wholesaling as well?
And then geography, are you an Ireland-only brand, or are you trying to perhaps build in Ireland and then scale out into the UK and to the US and Europe?
So you'd expect your chief, probably in any role in the business, if they're in a commercial one, operational finance, to have some experience in terms of, I suppose, informing the decision that the board would make around those things that you do and don't do.
(06:06):
So that's the chief part.
And then I suppose growth ultimately directly links to demand creation, doesn't it?
And that's probably a combination of having some influence over actually the where to play elements, which is what products, how good are they?
What's the offer architecture and the value proposition?
How do we turn up?
And this comes back to the second side of the strategies, like the how to win.
(06:27):
That's the emotional side.
It's all the things you say and how you say them, when you say them, when you don't.
It's all those elements.
And obviously then it probably covers the marketing, amplifying your message and your product and brand through paid media, CRM, the trading, the point of sale itself, so the website.
So there's an element of those things effectively.
And actually when I say in terms of leadership here within Growth Foundation, I have a very much a kind of clarity around products and brands.
(06:51):
But when I'm talking to a founder of, let's say, a €10 million scale-up business, they expect me to influence and give a sense of all of those demand sort of functions in the business.
And you probably have, I suppose, slightly less permission to be getting really stuck into perhaps then the operational, the foundations, right?
Which are finance, technology, sort of insight, those kinds of things, right?
(07:14):
You know, it's very demand-led.
And can you tell us, Rich, you mentioned like €10 million sort of size businesses.
Is that the kind of sweet spot for the businesses that you work with and the businesses that you help?
Like, when is the right time to come and talk to The Growth Foundation?
That, I suppose that point, and it depends on average order value, right?
Because obviously if you're selling, you know, say beds or mattresses or very high AOV type of products, it may be that you're already up there.
(07:42):
Actually, it's probably around, we look more a little bit more on sort of team size.
And actually the, I suppose, how the founder is thinking.
So usually the perfect time to speak to us will be when a founder's perhaps been, and typically we find that they're now sort of product visionaries.
They've found the need for a product that they couldn't find in the market.
They decide to speculate, take some risk, and they're still working in a bedroom.
(08:04):
Perhaps, you know, family and friends are helping them get going.
And then there's a moment and an inflection point when they think, right, I can see this has got an opportunity greater than a lifestyle business.
This could be a brand that has some legacy or actually could have some material value for me in the future.
Maybe I want to sell it to, you know, a competitor or I could, you know, or float it in the future.
Who knows what comes down the line, but they realise there's sort of more potential in the product or the service that they've created.
(08:29):
And it's usually at that point where they think they're aware that there are known unknowns.
I know these things need to happen, but I don't know how to do them.
Or, and obviously they won't know the unknown unknowns, but obviously a good trigger would be that there's things that I know I need to do.
I've got no idea how to approach them.
And, you know, I'm paralysed by choice.
I'm paralysed by not having pattern recognition.
(08:49):
And also probably there's an element where they start to think about professionalising the organisation.
So I'm going to make my first two, three, four hires, probably in areas that I don't enjoy doing.
So it might be that, again, they're a product visionary.
I love working on products.
Actually, I hate doing the finance.
I hate, I don't enjoy doing the performance marketing, et cetera, right?
And then I'm going to start to hire.
So that's probably a great time to talk to us.
(09:11):
I suppose if you're slightly larger, maybe again, we sort of have, that might be first inflection point, getting out of the bedroom into that first sort of, let's say maturing the business with a bit more sophistication.
There's usually another inflection point once you, it's the couple of years after you've done that first move.
And then it's like, great, this is working, but I may have made some wrong calls on the hires I made.
(09:33):
I've got, I'm actually paralysed by the choice I have in strategy.
I want to go into different countries, but I don't know where to go.
But I think I've got the team now in place to be able to start executing some of that stuff.
So that's a really good time as well for us to sort of interact.
And when you were to - sorry, Gordon - if we were to talk about one of the businesses that you're well known for working with, Gymshark, was that the kind of situation they were in, this, that paralysed, you know, paralysis of choice and trying to figure out what they do next and how to grow their business.
(10:01):
Was that the same?
Was that what they were experiencing?
Yeah, to some degree, yes.
And one of the things we've got at Growth Foundation is we look through sort of two very different binoculars or lenses when we sort of get to meet a business.
And that's one around, I suppose, assessing the clarity of strategy.
So how, I suppose, confident and rigorous are the decisions that the founders or the senior leadership team have made on those where to plays and how to wins.
(10:25):
And at Gymshark at that time, I think probably there was ambition to do a lot.
So it was that sort of, not quite paralysis of choice, but almost like trying to do all of them at once.
Yeah.
And kind of thinking, right, which ones perhaps do we need to focus on first?
What kind of things were they looking at?
It would have been things like, I suppose, and obviously the brand is famous for, like, functional training and weightlifting, for example.
(10:47):
So could we go into CrossFit or running or swimming or other kind of gym-led categories or even potentially when you think about product, is it footwear?
Is it sports nutrition?
Is it meal prep?
Is it all the other things that would potentially take share of an active gym-goers wallet?
How could you take a greater share of that?
There was some paralysis around, I suppose, geography.
(11:10):
The business was brilliantly launched with Ben and Lewis thinking about, this is a global opportunity and Shopify can effectively reach all parts of the world when they launched.
And it was kind of, I would say, you know, they were proactively hunting sort of customers in the UK and the US, but actually rest of world was passive.
(11:31):
But when you think operationally, okay, it's great that we can say we've shipped to over 150 countries.
When you sort of, you know, look from the bottom up in the P&L operation, that package to that Far East location that we sent three or four times, maybe two of them have returned because our sizing doesn't quite work for consumers in that part of the world has been sent back.
(11:51):
We've spent $400 shipping that to and from that place.
So it's those kinds of decisions around, do you know what?
Maybe we should say, we'll proactively hunt these two countries.
These will be passive and will be open because they're actually profitable when we do sell to customers in those places.
And then the long tail of the rest of the 180 countries in the planet will just effectively switch off.
So there's two things going on there, isn't there?
(12:15):
There's clarity around the proposition of what are we selling?
Are we pushing into adjacent categories?
And then the, where are we going to sell that?
I mean, it's where, and then the target audience is the other one.
And this is where they had actually really loads of rigour and clarity.
It will be to young, already in the gym people.
(12:36):
So when I met Ben, and this will hopefully make your listeners giggle a little bit, I remember, you know, I'm in my late thirties when I meet him, I'm slightly more timber around my waist when I met them for the first time and actually meeting them inspired me to get into better shape, actually.
And I said, you know, guys could, would you be happy for me to wear Gymshark products?
And they're like, absolutely not.
(12:57):
You're too old and you're too fat.
That's quite blunt.
Yeah, very, but the clarity of, I suppose of, let me deconstruct that because it might sound a bit arrogant in some way, but actually I suppose the age thing is really interesting in terms of they have the clarity of servicing consumers that were like them.
So in their early twenties, who were already, you know, in the gym already.
(13:20):
And I think the other point around that kind of, you're too fat because I'm conscious that could sound, well, actually, look, that's not very inclusive.
And, you know, we've all got different things going on in terms of managing our weight and things like that.
But actually when I deconstruct that, it was, you haven't earned the right to wear the brand in our view.
You know, the people who wear our brand, this is in the early days, you know, very much in the early adopted days of the brand where they were the individuals that actually took a proactive choice to go to the gym probably five days a week.
(13:46):
And they would train for a couple of hours every time they went.
It was seen as a, I think, and hopefully still is today, a badge of honour by wearing that, you know, that icon.
It's a credible product for credible, regular gym users.
So that's a really interesting thing to try and protect as you do grow.
And you want to sort of, again, reach more consumers who perhaps quite aren't as active when they're training.
(14:09):
But that clarity that they had there was absolutely key and clear.
So that customer decision there, Rich, that's almost as important as, or probably as important as the adjacency discussion.
So you're kind of, do we push into different categories or do we push into different age groups or different activity levels?
(14:32):
Yeah.
And even within age, if you think about that, the way, and I suppose actually there's some great, I suppose one of the things... actually I'll quote something I heard from Steven Bartlett on Dragons' Den.
I'm not sure if you guys get the UK BBC Dragons' Den?
We know Steven Bartlett...
And he said something that was, I suppose I've encountered and encourage as well, which is like in a very crowded market, if you want to disrupt, you know, that strategy and those decisions you make on the where to play should be needle-thin.
(15:01):
That will allow you then perhaps to really service a, you know, very narrow set of consumers.
Because if you think about, you know, 16- to 24-year-olds, we've already taken a lot of the addressable market away as the population.
We've now said who are in the gym, we've gone down again, who are actually only in the weights area of the gym, we've gone down again.
And actually, there's another divide that we kind of identified, which was the customers that we were really keen to sort of, I suppose, engage and build communities around, were the ones that actually, like, were the extroverts in the gym.
(15:30):
They were the ones that would, like, look training in front of the mirror.
They would like, you know, it was a social space to build relationships with other gym goers.
And then there's a, you know, there's another group who are in the weights area of the gym who are, you know, hoods up, headphones on, or on their own.
This is a very personal space.
It's an introverted sort of experience.
So we've gone down from, like, millions to, you know, hundreds of thousands, down to maybe 100,000, 10,000.
(15:55):
It was like, you know, that kind of factoring down and then building a product that absolutely delighted them.
And not only products, content, creative storytelling, all that good stuff for quite a needle-thin target audience.
Would you have, like, an example of, let's say a decision they made that under other circumstances might seem a little bit bad, but in hindsight, okay, this was exactly the right thing?
(16:18):
There's quite a few, but I'm conscious of, like, you know, privileged information and things like that.
So let me give you one that would come to life but we'll see with, you know, what we know.
So let me give you sort of a sense of some of the clarity around the playbook.
So, you know, that other kind of sort of fourth limb of that where to play was not discussed yet, which was channel.
The business made a proactive and conscious choice to be 100% direct to consumer online only.
(16:45):
And what could feel unusual is that as we were building a bit of leverage and gaining some traction and attention, we would be approached by very famous sort of, you know, fashion retail businesses and they would be very direct in terms of, here's a very large, you know, seven, eight figure purchase order if we can have your brand in our store.
(17:05):
Yeah, there'll be a lot of temptation to just, to just push into wholesale because of the reach that certain sports retailers will give you.
There's an, yeah...
So before the clarity of that decision, the business was losing some, let's say return on energy was low on that subject because you kept negotiating it.
(17:26):
Should we, shouldn't we, should we do it?
What are the pros and cons?
And we made that clarity of, like, no, you know, while we can create profitable demand, you know, direct-to-consumer models are phenomenal.
They're cash sort of generative and positive.
Usually, you know, you get your cash settled within a few days, you're paying your suppliers on maybe 30, 60, 90 days, you own your customer and the relationship with them directly and the insight it gives you, you know, all those things where, as soon as you start to get, let's say hooked on the wholesale drugs, which for some brands are, is the right channel for them...
(17:53):
You lose a lot of that visibility insight.
You know, you become a negative cash model, all that other good stuff, right?
So, but actually that clarity around was, once we knew that, when those sort of invitations would come over by an email, it was, you know, a 30-second, thanks very much.
Great, we're delighted to being asked, but no, thank you.
And then that energy can be used then on that sort of tactical executing where we should be, you know.
(18:17):
It must be so difficult for a founder to kind of write those emails, you know, thank you very much.
We're delighted to be asked by such a large retailer, but we're going to say no, because you know what that means.
You know, you're turning away quite a substantial potential.
Yeah, and it's an interesting psychology there, isn't it?
It's a bit of the cat-and-mouse there because actually they just want you even more?
(18:38):
Yep, yep.
So they would come back a month later and say, have you changed your mind?
And you'd be just building your leverage.
And actually, I suppose for that business, while we would continue to grow, you know, grow the right way effectively, that we just felt like we were building more power and leverage in that opportunity when we needed it.
So there was a time when we needed to pull it, yeah...
Yeah, it's a great example though, because you can feel the temptation.
(19:00):
So Gymshark now have opened up a store in Regent Street.
Did you have any thoughts about that?
I've actually been there, visited it just as it was before it opened and just after.
I mean, it's a phenomenal place.
If you get the chance to go, absolutely get down there.
Some of the innovation in physical retail is phenomenal.
They've got kind of, you know, racking that can move in and out of the ceiling to turn the space into a retail environment, back to a gym studio, etc.
(19:27):
They've worked very closely with Shopify, I think, to work on incredible point of sale.
So again, you know, it's not queuing at a till station.
You've got that kind of more Apple experience to go and buy with people on the move, on the shop floor, et cetera.
It still stays very true to that target customer...
Yeah.
...that originated.
Yeah.
I think, I suppose if I had,
(19:50):
I suppose a similar budget
and it was my choice to make only,
I think it would have been interesting to look at
perhaps, you know,
actually going perhaps more gym first versus retail first
and sort of creating epic kind of flagship
kind of Mecca-style,
apologies for using that word,
you know, sort of places that you go on a pilgrimage
(20:12):
to go and train in
and then kind of retail perhaps.
It's more like a sort of like a Disney experience, right?
Which is I'm going to go and enjoy and get the dopamine from training, and then the gift shop's on the way out sort of thing.
Which could be really interesting, and who knows that might be something those guys are considering?
And the other thing, when I was sort of thinking about, you know, where the brand, if I was getting, was sort of really ideating and blue skying, is where that brand could go outside of retail.
(20:38):
If you look at sort of being, I sort of took some inspiration from what the guys at like Aston Martin and some of the luxury car brands are doing.
They're creating kind of apartment blocks and places to live that are associated to the brand.
You know, so the Aston Martin team is doing the interior design of these very exclusive apartments in Miami and Dubai.
And you can bring your Aston Martin up in the middle of the building and park it outside your apartment with a window to look at your car.
(21:01):
There could be some interesting ways.
You imagine if you sort of, you said, right, what could we do in the future with that brand in terms of again, really hitting the wants and needs of that very quite narrow group of consumers in terms of effectively getting more of their wallet share.
Yeah, it's really, really interesting.
That would really make gym life real life, wouldn't it?
Yes.
And it is for those individuals, yeah.
(21:22):
So we've talked a bit about, obviously, you know, Jim Sharpe wasn't the only highlight.
Do you want to tell us a little bit about The Hut Group and the kinds of things you brought up today?
Yeah, very different proposition.
Yeah, I joined The Hut Group in 2009.
So its formative years.
It was a business then that was effectively exclusively a white-label ecommerce platform.
(21:45):
So we were empowering the entertainment retail, online retail stores for the likes of Asda and other general merchandisers who were perhaps struggling in having some of their online market share taken from the likes of play.com and Amazon.
And actually Play was my previous employer.
So my experience in Play was the thing that kind of gave me the opportunity at The Hut Group.
And over the time I was there, my first couple of years there, I was, I suppose, actually what would be called growth now.
(22:09):
I was responsible because we called it ecommerce director, but it was responsible for demand creation and then had obviously a stakeholding in sort of product to some degree, but much more than around owning content, performance marketing, trading and conversion rate optimization.
And then as we, I suppose, demonstrated that we could start to grow more profitably and faster through myself and a few other guys from Play joined.
(22:32):
And again, we started to, again, that business was in that inflection point of hiring experienced people into its business.
We were able to sort of upturn the demand generation.
We were able then to talk to investors to say, we know we've got a formula for growth, put some money in, and we're going to use that to then acquire, I suppose, more friendly, perfect for ecommerce sort of brands or product categories, which are sports nutrition, which is high frequency, high gross margin, low return rate, easy to manage operationally effectively.
(23:08):
Likewise beauty, it's in the same place.
So we kind of designed that, what would be perfect if you had an ecommerce platform end-to-end, which The Hut Group owns.
It's a full first-party platform end-to-end.
Like, well, if we design, if we could put anything through this, it would be things that meet those criteria.
So that was the migration from CDs into very, very different categories, but still ticking those boxes of high frequency, low return, kind of would fit through a letterbox, obviously a bit...
(23:37):
One hand pick was the kind of the thing we used to talk about, not two hand picks.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
So earlier on, we started out, we were talking a little bit about strategy.
You mentioned some of the things you're looking at, where to play, how to win, which products to which channels, to which audiences.
So that's kind of, let's say, the high level.
From a tactical point of view, what are the things that you're looking at on a day-to-day basis or a quarter-to-quarter basis to help push that strategy forward?
(24:07):
I suppose the way that we look at that, so we think about sequencing into tactics, actions and control.
So again, to maybe to bring that to life in the minds of the listener, if you think about the strategy, and we've talked about fitness a bit, haven't we?
So imagine you think to yourself, I'd like to feel a bit fitter, a bit thinner.
That's the Hollywood version of myself in your head.
So that's like the mission and the vision you have in your head.
(24:29):
The objective might be lose 10 kilograms by the 1st of June, ready for the summer.
And then the strategy would be diet.
When you deconstruct that, would be move more, eat better.
And that's the rule, the immutable rule that never changes.
That's that clarity of the rule.
Tactically then, depending on the individual, and this is obviously in brackets, depending on the company, you might say, well, for me, I love running, I love swimming, but I'm going to join a gym as well.
(24:57):
I'm gonna get a personal trainer, stop eating beige food.
And they're the tactics.
And then when you come down another level into actions, well, if you say, well, I'm going to join the gym, I've actually got to go, sign up, turn up, train.
They're the actions.
And I suppose then the control is the measurement, right?
And the measurements are, am I on track?
So I said, am I losing a kilogram a week consistently?
No, I'm not.
Actually, I stopped.
Oh yeah, I fell off the wagon and had a load of drinks with my mates during the middle of the week.
(25:20):
I'm feeling a bit tired or whatever, right?
So that's the thing that feeds back into, and a brilliant, I suppose, a way of actually talking about tactically having to ensuring tactics, actions and... are changed by default.
Think about when Covid came, if you're using this analogy, I can't go to the gym anymore.
I can't meet my personal trainer.
I'm not allowed to go to the swimming pool.
What am I going to do, right?
(25:41):
The tactic now is to run up and down the stairs.
It's to jump around in front of the TV with Joe Wicks.
But my tactics change based on a macro situation that changed.
So that's kind of the framework of thinking about that.
And then I suppose the way that we do that with our clients, when we're talking to them about how to understand the different tactics across the business, and they vary massively, don't they?
(26:02):
Because if you're in the product function, what the tactics you're deploying are are very different to the ones in the customer service team, right?
Just worlds apart.
We will group the company into 10 functions.
The first five I'm going to read out are, think of them as like vertical pillars in your head.
So think about five vertical pillars and think of customers moving through, across these pillars from left to right.
(26:23):
So you've got product, brand, marketing, trading and operations.
And operations is like that fulfillment and customer service.
So they, customers move through that journey.
And then what allows those pillars to stand up above the ground is then the foundations underneath.
Including our name, Growth Foundation.
They are the horizontal kind of foundations that layer up to support those pillars.
(26:44):
So you've got from the ground moving to the floor, there is insight, tech, finance, people and executive.
So we will then sort of understand those things.
And then you can clearly articulate where your people are and where you think about, what's the purpose of these functions?
So product we've already discussed, like making and sourcing awesome products that my target audience love.
(27:04):
Brand is storytelling, getting people to fall in love with me.
Operations, deliver the promise that we make to our customers.
Finance, make sure we've got enough money to do the things we want to do, et cetera, et cetera.
So that's kind of that high level, right?
And how we think about things.
And then I suppose tactically that I think about, you were talking about some of those things that we do that kind of came back to some of the sort of the playbook thing.
(27:25):
It would be, if you understood, like for example, in Gymshark, we're about conditioning and the journey of becoming the best version of yourself.
And one of the things that we thought about as well that we understood that's where we play and how we win is in that clarity of that conditioning.
It would be tactically, we have an opportunity to sponsor a football team.
(27:46):
They phoned us up and said, do you want to go on the shirts of a Premier League football team?
You're like, no, we don't.
We're not where the goals are scored.
Could we tell stories about how that Premier League player went from grassroots into the team?
That's where we'd like to work tactically with you.
And then you can sort of see the guy, the sponsorship sales guy at the football team scratching his head going, no, we don't, we can't, I don't have a package to sell you that.
(28:06):
I don't have a billboard.
And then that takes a bit more energy, which actually we have because we're not considering should we go and sell to a marketplace or not?
We've got some energy now to go, well, why don't we work a bit harder on this and see if we could secure some storytelling with your players, for example.
So that's kind of how we sort of, the hierarchy of that structure works.
(28:26):
You're not about where the goals are scored, you're about the journey.
Yeah, I'm sitting here grinning, listening to all of that, Rich, because anybody that's ever done any work with me will have heard me bang on relentlessly about the SOSTAC planning framework.
Yeah, you can see I've kind of squashed it around what we do, absolutely.
But what I really love to hear is the clarity on your vertical and your horizontal pillars for delivering that at a tactical level.
(28:55):
I think the first bit of the battle is having that clarity on what your strategy is and then understanding, okay, we know where we're going, but what are those things that we're going to do?
Under what headings to deliver against that strategy?
And I think this is a really useful takeout for anybody that's listening because it keeps manners on everything.
(29:19):
Yeah, it does.
Yeah, it keeps you real.
And actually, again, this is about that return on energy.
So I think about that strategy often can be on a piece of paper in a document that you write down and say, right, where do we play?
How do we win?
What's our objective?
What's our mission, vision?
But actually, Gordon, I love the SOSTAC model, but we changed it to, actually, I suppose, bastardised it is the right way to talk about it.
(29:40):
We put a V in it for vision and mission because actually that doesn't exist in SOSTAC .
You can have situation, objective.
It doesn't talk about purpose enough.
Yeah.
And then also there's a brilliant model and that where to play, how to win, that's not something I'm gutted to tell everyone,
I didn't, we haven't created that.
That's something that P&G come up with in the 60s, which is, it's a phenomenal model in terms of the clarity it brings you.
(30:01):
So we've kind of squashed all those frameworks together.
But yeah, I think one of the things that you talk about, like, you know, some of those things, I suppose, thinking tactically is, I'm trying to think about like the vertical and the horizontal.
Some of the things that we will try and work into sort of the taxonomy and language of the brands and clients we work with is, think about if you are, if you are, let's say, the most senior leader in the marketing, and usually it's called the marketing team.
(30:29):
I want you to talk about that as a function.
It's one of the functions of the business.
So you're the leader of the marketing function and the purpose is traffic at best quality, highest quality, highest volume traffic at the lowest cost is your purpose.
And then think of your team as your peers left to right.
So if you're a head of marketing, you've got a head of brand next to you, a head of trading, that's the team.
(30:50):
When you look left and right across those pillars, that's your team.
You need to work really closely together to align and collaborate and do all that wonky thinking that you do when you're coming up with the plans and tactics.
So the idea of, all right, we know we're a conditioning brand, or we know we're a window blinds brand, what do, you know, et cetera, et cetera, right?
Where, and then what do we want to do then tactically?
(31:10):
And you're working left to right collaboratively and then you, I suppose, translate and narrate that information back into your function.
And we talk a lot about, you know,
this monologue I was talking about,
like having your strategy down on a piece of paper,
which is all very well,
but some of the best businesses that we see
that have kind of got themselves
up into the €10, €20 million mark already,
(31:33):
what they usually have is maybe a bit of luck
that one of the founding team
or one of the strategic kind of decision makers
of the business is a great narrator.
They're a brilliant storyteller.
And what they do in every interaction, if you're a supplier, a partner, an employee at any level from the very junior to the very senior, that individual is brilliant at keep reminding you and narrating you the plan.
(31:55):
So it gets into the muscle memory of the business.
And again, to think about that for the guys to bring it to life, or put your minds back to the Karate Kid movie from the 80s?
Think of your brand and your business as Daniel at the beginning of the movie, the high potential, you know, champion of the future.
And then you can then think of the strategy actually as Mr. Miyagi, right?
(32:18):
So, but Miyagi is the narrator.
He's actually not the strategy himself.
He's the narrator.
He's the guide.
He's the guiding light.
And actually what's interesting, there's a brilliant book that brought this to life for me called Story Brand.
So check that out.
I'm a huge fan.
That's another one of my books that I give out to people.
This is where it comes from Gordon, right?
So, and then, but actually that whole thing where he's training Daniel in the summer of wax on, wax off, you know, wash the cars, paint the fence, scrub the deck...
(32:46):
That's getting the strategy into the muscle memory of Daniel, effectively the brand.
So that's what you've got to think about.
It's like, okay, I've written down the strategy.
What are the techniques now I need to use in my business to get that strategy?
So when someone is approached by an unusual question internally or externally, hey, would you like to sell a marketplace?
Would you like to sponsor a sports team?
(33:08):
It's instantly muscle memory.
Yes or no.
Because you've got that clarity of the strategy.
Yeah.
Do you find with some of the people that you work with, if they haven't got that strategic clarity, do you find that you would then end up working with organisations that are very tactically focused?
And if you do, how would you get them to take a step back from being down in the trenches and think about strategic direction?
(33:34):
We have a framework which I can share.
So maybe you guys can take a look at the template.
Happy to share this for you and your listeners, actually.
We put strategic clarity and rigour on a Y axis.
I think of a quadrant, four squares.
You've got the Y, so the Y vertical axis is strategy clarity.
And then we put tactical capability on the X.
So if you are, and if you think about then, what's the scale of that?
(33:56):
Because it's difficult to give it a number.
So we actually put needs work right at the bottom to leading edge at the very top.
And you go through as expected and above average.
And we actually will score that based on relatively subjective and peer group knowledge.
So when we meet a, let's say, 4 million turnover brand with a team of three, et cetera, the scoring is appropriate comparing it to, let's say, the Huck Group now who are 2 billion turnover with 10,000 employees.
(34:22):
It's not appropriate to score them on each other.
But either way, you can now imagine when we look at a business and we deconstruct strategy, which we have done, which is where to play, how to win, and we deconstruct how to win into, actually, the narrative clarity is one of those.
How good are you at narrating this strategy into the organisation?
So we score all of those things.
That allows me to plot you, let's say, on above average for strategy.
(34:45):
And then typically the brands we meet are usually this way around.
They have a slightly above average or strategy and tactical capability along the other axis is usually around the needs work and or as expected.
And you might find, like I found at Gymshark when I met them, they were leading edge on influencer marketing and earned marketing.
(35:08):
It was still quite an immature space.
So they weren't particularly sophisticated, but compared to their peers, no one was doing it as well as they were.
And then you looked across all the other things you can deconstruct in tactical capability.
So how good is your organic media?
How good is your paid media?
And then you deconstruct that again into paid search, paid social, display, above the line.
You can imagine how that all sort of works through CRM, conversion rate optimization, visual merchandising, category management of products, et cetera.
(35:34):
They under index, that was all that needs work.
Tech stack needs work, insight needs work.
And then that kind of gives you a sense of, right, the focus actually is we need to do a bit of work on strategy to bring some more narrative clarity here.
But actually the focus for the next year is all about upgrading the tactical execution.
And then what that does when you balance them, it moves you into the top right-hand quadrant, which is growing the right way, which is what we call that kind of...
(36:00):
And that's almost an ideal starting position...
Yeah...
Real clarity on what you want to do, where do you want to go? Who are you for?
And then you make the decisions tactically on...
Yeah, and you think about the impact of some of those decisions. So if you think, right, I do want to open, it's right for my brand.
And we've got an everyone brand.
It's a mass market proposition.
It's quite convenient, low value.
(36:22):
It's really appropriate for us to be, let's say in grocery or physical retail and marketplace.
Once that's established, you come then down to tactical capability.
You're like, well, who have I got here?
I don't have anyone to manage this.
I don't have the right technology.
Do I have actually enough cash in the bank to now have a negative working cash channel?
Although it could be amazing for my marketing because I'm now on the shelf in a thousand pharmacies or whatever, right?
(36:44):
So that then, it sets those out.
If you go around the other way and think, right, I'm going to build my tactical plan and my org first before setting the proposition and the strategy, you'll end up again, probably low return on energy and yield.
What we've been speaking about, Gordon and I work so frequently in all of these areas.
(37:05):
It's so interesting how the frameworks, they kind of cross-pollinate each other.
And sometimes I think the experience that you bring to the whole thing is even just understanding which pieces of the model, all of the models that are out there, which pieces you're actually going to bring to the table.
The most useful within the context.
Exactly, exactly.
One of my favorite quotes is, all models are broken, but some are useful.
(37:26):
It's not knowing which ones are the ones that actually...
And actually, I suppose turning it, sort of our model on the head slightly as well is that you could come this with a very kind of, I suppose, exclusively model-led consultancy.
Here are some great models.
And you sort of talk about that.
I suppose the benefit of what we have and the majority of my team, I've got 25 people at Growth Foundation, only two are actually exclusively agency background, and they're in my creative team, which absolutely is fine because actually they're not wedded to the pressure of worrying about money and P&L, right?
(37:59):
They're just brilliant creative thinkers.
Everyone else who has any responsibility near a number has come from a business like a direct-to-consumer ecommerce business.
So they can, again, look at the model and understand actually that part of that model was brilliant or actually that KPI that we used in my previous life over here is perfect for this or we've been there and had, like I'm sure a lot of your listeners will have, is that the highs and lows, the dopamine and the serotonin of, like, the Shopify bell ringing, and then not.
(38:27):
Like, it's Saturday morning, you look at a number and go, oh man, it's going to be a tough week.
It's going to be a tough week.
You know, we've all been there.
And actually, yeah.
So we know, so there's, I think a lot of things we talk about our values here is that unlike other perhaps more, I suppose, established consultancies, like the McKinsey's or the Bain's or the big four's, they can do quite a lot of work on strategy.
(38:49):
We've got the pattern recognition and we've been there, and the empathy to understand what it feels like to be a first-time founder or employee number three in a small business or a scale-up business.
We've all been there.
It's a unique thing to bring to the table the kind of pragmatic and practical background and experience, not alone the thinking around strategy and understanding where and why those things are important, but also how to bring that back to the tactical piece.
(39:16):
Because at the end of the day, anybody who's going to be speaking to you will also want to know, well, that's great.
Now, what am I doing tomorrow morning?
Like I'm coming into work on Monday.
Where am I going?
And that comes back to the tactical pieces that you were talking about earlier on.
A question to wrap up, because we could speak with you all day, obviously.
But a question just to wrap up that we've been asking people recently is what do you feel is the opportunity now in ecommerce for the next 12 months?
(39:44):
I know that you've been working with this great little tool, Order Rescue.
I spotted it on LinkedIn.
I really like the look of it.
Let's talk about that briefly.
But is that also the biggest opportunity?
Yeah.
So I think, I suppose, opportunity sounds like when you sort of, I suppose, maybe the dictionary definition might go something around finding new, maybe tactics or areas for growth.
(40:06):
And I think there will always be.
So again, if you're out there listening as strategic decision makers or owners of businesses, you've always got permission to question the decisions you've made.
Have I chosen the right audiences?
Have I chosen the right products?
But my guidance there would be don't do that in an open environment where your tactical people are.
You'll confuse them and you'll lose energy.
Think of that ethical pirate captain on a ship.
(40:28):
He's in his office, in the captain's thing at the back of the ship on his own thinking about that.
He won't be musing that with the crew because he'd just confuse them.
They're like, no, I've already told you, we're going over here.
This is why we're going.
There's a big pot of treasure.
And maybe he's back in the office thinking, there might be a bigger pot of treasure over in that other island.
But I'll keep musing that on my own before telling the crew to get distracted.
That's one thing.
(40:48):
I think if you're more tactical, opportunity, goodness me, I think the ease of getting distracted with new things all the time.
I think just making sure the brilliant basics are in place in everything you do and every function.
And that will be really different.
But I suppose let's talk about conversion rate optimization.
So are you in stock most of the time of the things that people come to you for, that you're famous for?
(41:10):
You know, the grocery store, bread and milk, or if you're at the home improvement store, it's the white paint and white spirit.
Is that in stock all the time, every day?
It's really boring, but it's the bread and butter of the business.
Yeah, absolutely.
Get that sorted before getting distracted with the champagnes and chocolates at the front.
And this feels like this year, 2023, it feels like a year of consolidation.
I had a bit of poetry recently where I was talking about the North Star and the mists dissipating and all of that.
(41:36):
It's still there, still in the same place.
I think the opportunity is as well, particularly for pure play ecommerce stores.
And this is a message, I've got the luck of, I suppose, my age and when being born when I was.
I actually worked in physical retail for the first sort of nine years of my retail career.
And one of the things I've tried to do whenever I can, if we have the opportunity, is take pure play ecommerce clients and teams I've had into physical retail environments.
(42:00):
The disciplines that you need there are obviously very different.
It's a bit like, you know, you both want to win the race, which is growing your brand and your revenue through the till.
But, like, physical retail is Formula One driving and e-com is rally driving.
A lot of the terminology is the same, but the way of winning the race is very different.
Spend some time, like, try if you can, to go and work in a shop.
(42:24):
Literally, spend some time or visit more physical retail environments and take on...
Why have they put that there in the window?
Why are they dressed at the end of the aisle there?
How are they flowing people through this store?
There's a reason that the grocery stores put bread and milk in the back of the store.
It's because you have to walk past the champagne and chocolates and all the other stuff and you end up with a eight times bigger basket than you would have done anyway.
And I don't think there's enough content.
(42:46):
And, you know, I don't know what you guys think around thinking like physical retailers and applying those techniques and methodologies in an e-com environment, in an e-com.
You're preaching to the converted, my man.
We talk about this all the time.
Like, yeah, it absolutely has some.
And actually that's quite a nice segue to Order Rescue because one of the things we get asked a lot is, should I be using voucher codes and promo codes?
(43:13):
Am I using too many?
Should I turn them off?
And obviously we'd like, again, one of our methodologies, you know, we want insight-led decisions or to make insight-led, we want to have insight-led informed decisions, sorry, right, when we're making things.
So we're like, well, actually, let's have a look at, and I don't know how you guys feel when you're in this sort of space, but there's not brilliant reporting visibility of actually what's going on with voucher codes at all.
(43:36):
You can see how many were used.
You can see, you know, what you've got live in your ecommerce CMS, but actually you don't get any visibility of the interaction of the voucher code box in any ecommerce tool as far as I'm aware.
And so we thought, well, be interesting to build some tracking to see actually what's going on with that very small, you know, micro-step of the journey to the checkout, but it's a very sensitive one.
(43:56):
We've got people in high intent to buy, they're feeling anxious, all the thing around, you know, is it the right time?
You know, that anxiety around, I suppose.
And particularly if you're in a product category which is quite impulsive, where you see a brilliant piece of content on TikTok or social media and you think, I want that.
And you come in and something goes wrong.
You're easy, very quick to leave and bounce out of the journey.
(44:18):
So we're like, let's have a look at that.
And it really surprised us what happened.
So we tracked about two million checkouts across a number of merchants.
And on average, 8% of everyone who enters the checkout will attempt an invalid voucher code and then not convert because it wasn't valid.
You get that invalid code, try again.
And what's interesting, if you deconstruct the thought process of that user is that the value... they think they've come with a valid deal.
(44:46):
So there's either that they've been given it from an influencer, they found something and they think that that's it.
And that group, the loss of that offer is greater than the benefit of the product that they're about to buy.
So they don't convert, which is really interesting kind of psychology there of a consumer.
So we're thinking like, again, coming and bringing this back to a physical retail store.
Imagine you've got a coupon from the paper that says 10% off baked beans today.
(45:08):
And you kind of put it in the bottom of your handbag.
You've walked into the store, got your beans in the thing, go to the checkout and the code doesn't scan because it's kind of been screwed up in your bag.
What would happen in a physical retail store?
I guess most often than not, you'd have the checkout associate would say, don't worry, I've got a copy here on the till.
And you'd be on your way, very happy.
(45:30):
And that doesn't happen in e-com, you get invalid code, try again.
The amount of disappointment, like you say, entirely outweighs the value that the customer thinks they're going to get from the product.
And this is a consumer, actually this is a human psychology thing from, I think it's the fast and slow thinking guys.
And I can't recall their names.
Those wicked Nobel prize winning psychologists, which is the fear of loss is greater in humans than the gain on the other side.
(45:58):
It hurts to lose things more than it does to win.
This ties in with something I saw this week.
I was reading it on LinkedIn and it was from an SEO agency.
And one of the most common search terms for any brand is brand plus voucher code or brand plus promo code.
And I'm sure that's gonna be one of the behaviours that's being surfaced here as you get to the promo box.
(46:23):
And then it's like, right, okay, I'm going to type in whatever it is I'm shopping for plus promo code.
And then you're at an inflection point.
Their suggestion to fix that was put all your promo codes on your website, which I thought was quite an interestingly risky approach.
Now my advice would be install Order Rescue.
So what it does is effectively acts like a checkout associate.
(46:46):
So if you've got one of the, I call them the chancer and there's a lot of those, right?
So about 8% who invalid and leave, we believe it's merchant dependent and how well they've managed their codes previously, but roughly half are trying it on.
They try staff one, two, three, test one, two, three, all that good stuff.
And then the other guys are genuinely, have got a genuine code, welcome 10 and their thumb on a mobile phone keyboard has typoed it wrong.
(47:10):
And then they leave.
So we've built a tool that allows you to configure based on what's typed in.
If there are a new customer returning, what's in the basket, you name it, a rescue offer, which can be percentage off, if we purchase a fixed money off and it acts like a human would do a till.
So for example, new customer comes in with a very slow-moving, high-margin item in their basket, which costs £500 and says, could you do us a deal on this?
(47:34):
You might go, yeah, I will do you a deal on that.
I need to move that stock on.
If a returning customer comes in and says, I'd like to buy something you sell loads of, not great margin.
You'd be like, no, sorry, move on.
And obviously if they come with the valid code and it just doesn't work, then make it work.
That's what the tool does.
Brilliant. Rich, thanks for summing all that up.
(47:55):
And thank you for joining us this morning.
We're out of time.
I wish we had another hour to chat to you some more, but it's been an education, which is, it's an education for us.
I hope it's an education for the listeners and it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast.
Yeah, likewise.
And I mentioned and promised some of those resources.
So guys, I'll PDF up those things over to you.
(48:18):
And likewise, if anyone wants to reach out, we're at The Growth Foundation. You can find me on LinkedIn as well.
So happy to share more and help your listeners.
Thanks so much, Rich.
We'll talk to you soon.
Take care.
Thanks Rich.
Great stuff. Thanks, guys.
Wasn't Rich great today?
I learned tons.
And I think the biggest takeaway for me, apart from nautical analogies, which we'll cover later, was that strategic clarity of where to play and how to play and who you are actually targeting.
(48:55):
And having that clarity and being able to tell that story to the teams that you have within your organisation and for everybody to align behind it is such a fantastic tool.
And then of course, you've got this breadth of tactical tools that you can use to deliver against strategy.
I think it's important because there's a lot of talk about strategy.
(49:18):
And the one thing I always remember when I listen to people talk about strategy was I increasingly had no idea what they were really talking about and or what it meant.
Like, you know, we're going to put it down on paper.
What are we going to put down on paper?
A sentence, like, an entire, like a one-pager?
And you'd see some businesses with, like, you know, 100 pages worth of strategy.
I came across a quote a while back around strategy.
(49:41):
And the quote is that strategy is the focus of multiple resources on a single purpose.
So it's that idea of we have a single purpose.
It's clearly stated.
We all know what it is.
And we have multiple resources.
There's lots and lots of people.
There's marketing people.
There's the trading people.
There's the product and production people.
(50:02):
But all of these people are all focused towards this one single purpose.
And he talked about that quite well.
So he talked about, as he said, the where to play and how to win.
But then he talked also about how, across the roles and across the positions in the business, everybody would look and try, look from shoulder to shoulder from the ecommerce manager to the trading manager, to understand how they would work together to push towards a single vision.
(50:30):
And there is that element of the single vision.
But within that, there's the recognition of the practical reality that we are going to have to implement this as a tactic.
We have to execute on this.
It's not enough just to say, here's a sentence.
This is our strategy.
What are we doing now?
And then he talked about the tactic, the action and the measurement of that.
(50:52):
Yeah, the control, which I got very excited over the idea of tactics, actions and controls.
But that's the bit about getting things done and pushing in the same direction.
I also really love the idea that you might get distracted and there might be another pot of gold somewhere else, but that involves a strategic change.
(51:17):
Resist the temptation to bring that into the broader team because that's going to be really confusing.
And what strategy does is it gives the teams the tool to know where they're going.
And I think that clarity was so evident in some of the examples they gave around Gymshark.
Yeah.
(51:38):
Really enjoyed that.
There was actually something that I was speaking with him about as well is the whole idea of an offer architecture.
It was something that I hadn't come across before.
Like, obviously, I've heard you talk loads about pricing architecture and that area, but he spoke about offer architecture and we didn't get into it in the podcast, but the offer architecture, the four principal points, the uniqueness.
(52:03):
So something unique about the product that you're offering.
The brand.
How does the product support the brand and what you're trying to do and what the story is that you're trying to tell?
The social proof.
So the elements of who else is using this and how are they benefiting from it?
And the actual offer itself, the price point scarcity and things like that.
(52:25):
So it's just kind of, like, an idea of an offer architecture, which I thought was really, really clever.
And it's very impressive how he has these, from the tips of his fingers, these whole kind of like, he has all of the models, but is also still able to bring this back to a practical example and talk about, I mean, certain things like, let's say, Audi, he talks about a little bit about the emblematic design.
(52:50):
So the idea of the Audi, the lights on the back of an Audi now, where when they turn on the indicators and the LED lights kind of...
They do that flashy thing.
Yeah.
So you can tell, you know that that's an Audi from miles away.
They're in front of you.
You know that's an Audi in the distance.
I learned a lot in that area.
I think the offer architecture, that just really practical, let's say, experience, that lived experience that he's able to bring to this area and how that feeds into the tactics and how that then feeds into the driving on of the strategy.
(53:19):
I thought that was fabulous.
So you've got that offer architecture there, or proposition architecture, if you like.
The other thing that I really, really enjoyed was having, he has practitioners on his team.
So they have felt that empathy that all of us have felt at one stage.
(53:40):
It's one thing when the Shopify bell dings, it's the other thing when it doesn't.
Yeah, he had a story there.
We didn't get a chat.
I mean, but I could see him, you know, he obviously was remembering something in his past.
We've all been there where we think we've done absolutely everything right.
(54:00):
And we are expecting something to fly and it falls flat, and you need to go back and actually ask those questions of, was it really aligned to our strategy correctly?
Is it the right customer?
Was it promoted in the right way?
Did we actually have availability?
I think anybody who's listening has probably been in that awful position where you run a big promotional piece of activity and then bam, all the inventory's gone.
(54:31):
Gone within seconds.
And you're just sitting there with traffic.
Well, you're sitting there with complaints and customer service and social media saying, well, he never had it anyway.
You know, they're just tempting us in here with their lies.
We could probably do a whole show on the various horror stories that we have experienced over the years.
(54:51):
We probably won't.
Would people listen to us?
What about the, I love the pirate captain, the maverick, the guy in the back of the ship with the parrot on his shoulder?
Nautical analogies are definitely up there...
I think there's two things that have come out of this season of the podcast.
One is brilliant nautical analogies of which, like more boats.
(55:13):
And I do like the idea now of a patch and a pirate - eh, a patch and a parrot.
A pirate with a patch and a parrot.
And then the other theme that sort of that has come is brilliant basics.
Absolutely.
Everybody that we have spoken to has talked about brilliant basics and doing this really, really well.
(55:35):
And this is the key to unlocking creativity because if your basics are brilliant, then you can do all of the other cool stuff... with your parrot.
You know, in reality, it is, it's a hygiene factor.
You know, it's nearly table stakes nowadays.
You have to be able to come to the table.
You want to play the game.
You have to be able to do the basics brilliantly.
So you need to focus on that.
(55:56):
Remember to come back to it again and again, because otherwise, if you don't have that level, you don't have that platform to, let's say, to start off of or to scale off of how are you going to implement something beyond that?
It's like the opportunity cost of it, though, isn't it?
That where are you spending your time?
You have a finite amount of time during the week.
(56:19):
And if you're spending all of that time putting out fires, fixing problems, you're not spending that time on things that add a bit more value.
And to be quite frank, are a lot more fun.
Yeah.
The basics should be easier, but they're really, really difficult.
They are really difficult.
And on that note, yo-ho-ho, me hearty...
Arrr!
(56:39):
Thanks very much, Gordon, and thanks to everybody for listening.
I'm delighted to have you once again on this episode of Functional & Fabulous.
Thanks, Ger.
Bye.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman.
If you'd like to know more about the podcast, or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith, and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
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