Last Week I Got Punched in the Face
Chris Meade
Co-Founder of The Founders Club & CROSSNET | Now Building the World's Best Entrepreneurship Community | Forbes 30 Under 30
Well... it's the day after the Super Bowl and I'm feeling for my Eagles friends big time. Sure you can say the "better" team won but you can't call that penalty with minutes left in the game and ruin the entire outcome of the game. The fans wanted overtime football and we deserved it.
Anyways! It's Monday morning baby and it means we're back to war and the work week is amongst us. I won't lie last week was tough. It felt like I just kept getting hit from all angles. Entrepreneurship is honestly so funny. It’s the only career where you literally just take punches left and right (besides an MMA fighter) and consider it normal.
Some days you’re on top of the world, the next you’re feeling so overwhelmed you feel like your chest is going to cave in. This life is 100% not for everyone but the concept of creating your own destiny, not being a corporate drone, and worst of all listening to a dumbass boss who doesn’t give a shit about you is worth all the struggles.
On the bright side, we have effectively moved all three of our warehouses to 3PL’s in the USA, Canada, and Australia. This was a massive lift from our operations team who have been busting their ass to make this happen after doing all of our own warehousings for the past four years.
Why’d we do it?
After digging into the financials it finally just made sense to relinquish the control. We were paying a couple thousand a month for a warehouse in Canada, $11,000+ for the one in California, and then the headcount required to run those bad boys daily. As a seasonal business in theory you need less inventory and space in your off months so our bill should be able to flex down and up based on our needs. Not something a fixed rent & headcount provides sadly.
As we lean out CROSSNET and get back to the basics I have been so shocked at how well plain text emails work. We’ve always been about sending world-class beautiful emails which are nice, but when I’m hitting customers with big news like a warehouse move the plain text like you’re receiving an email from a friend or colleague works best. This email ripped in the states for us this week.
Speaking of saving money. We actually just switched SMS providers after two years to?Recart. Their team is badass and saving us roughly $10,000 annually. I hate getting pitches but when somebody says they can provide similar tech & cut your bill by 50% my ears perk up.
We’ve only just started with them but they cleaned our list (saved me $ from sending texts to fake or outdated numbers) and then rebuilt my entire welcome, abandoned and post-purchase flows. I thought this feature was also pretty sick showing exactly how much money I’m spending when I hit send.
My suggestion for everyone this year, less is more. Focus on doing one or two things really well instead of 20. You can’t do everything.
Our two things:
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Retail
Building our retail business is our #1 priority from January-April of this year. This is considered our offseason and myself, my brother Greg, and our head of sales are hitting the pavement to close as many deals as possible. This year alone we’re starting with Bass Pro Shop, Dillards, Nebraska Furniture Mart, True Value, Ace Hardware, and a bunch more Tier 1 & 2 accounts. This does not happen without putting in the time to outbound. These people are not always going to come to you!
You can thank Greg for this because he spent way too much time writing this Twitter thread but this is the exact way we’ve gotten into some of the world’s largest retailers. No tricks, no personal introductions, just good old fashion outbounding.
Read the thread?here.
Don’t be a dick, give him a follow too.
Viral Content
This winter we are trying something different. Reducing our ad spend to efficiently zero. We haven’t been able to profitably spend for the past three years when its freezing out. Why would this year be any different?
So rather than looking ourselves in the mirror and saying “oh we’re growing the brand & our lead list”, we are now saying “no idiot, you’re losing money.” Spend less and create banging content that we can use when the weather warms up instead of just digging ourselves a hole to work out of it.
On the?Good Sport?side, we are blessed to have Youtuber Danny Duncan as our co-founder. Danny’s an OG in the space and has been creating weekly content for his near 20M followers for almost a decade. He did a shoot for Good Sport last weekend with Bubble Bash and the videos were unreal. They got picked up by almost every media network including my favorite Barstool Sports. Great for the brand, great for Danny, and some awesome traffic for Good Sport.
I’ll leave you with these few things. Maybe you’ll like them. Maybe you won’t.
Things that have been making my life better lately:
Hope you have an amazing week!
Onward & upward,
Chris
Building AI Agents For Chronic Illness | My mum says I am special
2 年every obstacle you overcome is a step towards achieving your goals.
5k to $12M ARR in 4 yrs (w/ Exit) ?? Scaling my 4+ B2B companies in the same way ?? Daily advice for entrepreneurs.
2 年Gotta fall down to get back up
Global Sales Manager - Nomad Tackle
2 年Great read Chris, I’ll be sure to look out for CROSSNET here in Australia.
Founder of Blu Sun? | Helping companies sow back into their most important relationships through one-of-a-kind giving.
2 年Love you, you inspire me. I cried all morning. Grateful to have a friend like you to help guide.
COO of Fulfill.com | Helping 3,000+ Brands Find The Best-Fit 3PL
2 年Great read Chris. Hit the nail on the head w/ the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. There's no greater feeling than a big win (especially that first one), but something is always going to come around to keep you on your toes. Couldn't agree more with tips 3, 4, and 6. I just had my first son recently and around where and how I structure my day / focus my time have shifted immensely. Morning workouts have been replaced by walks in the AM to focus before work. Lunch breaks are now time to hit the gym while my son and wife are sleeping. and my phone is seen as more and more of a distraction each day (unless i'm taking a video of the little dude hitting some new milestone).