Drive and Convert

Announcer:
You are listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Hey, Ryan. So we've had exciting news for both of us lately. It seems it's coming really fast and furious, if you will. We did our 100th episode, I released Behind The Click and now you have some exciting stuff to announce as well, and I don't want to spill the beans for you, but I can't wait. I know a little bit about this, I just found out too though, I will say. Exciting for me to learn more as well. So why don't you tell me what's happening?

Ryan:
Yeah, first of all, congratulations on the crazy rankings of your book on Amazon. I have high expectations of you, but you might have overshot even my loft expectations and probably some of yours too.

Jon:
I was not expecting the success that we had with it. I thought the book would do really well, don't get me wrong, but it was number one in Marketing and number one in Consumer Behavior on Amazon last week. And I had an amazing launch. Reviews are out of this world from what I would've expected, so I'm stoked, I'm excited. It sounds to me like third time's the charm on a book and-

Ryan:
Evidently, yeah, you're definitely buying next time we get together.

Jon:
Again, books don't make you money, but-

Ryan:
That's true. It's taken me a long time to get my head around how I wanted to do it, but we're launching Grow with Garrow as a community. It's been working on the side as a random email that comes out.

Jon:
Yeah, my team is always like, "Where's Ryan's email?" I'm like, "I don't know. You have to ask Ryan."

Ryan:
Yeah, I wish I had discipline on that side when it was just on the side, like, oh, this is a great thing to have. I've got a huge list of all the topics to put out, and it always fell by the wayside. And so I was talking to my wife, I'm like, "Gosh, this community is needed. We need to get some more resources into the hands of small business owners to essentially keep them from wasting money." I think it's probably with the punchline, like I'm notoriously cheap, I'm the saver and the one that doesn't want to spend any money and I hate wasting money. And so I see it happening all the time in e-commerce where there's a bunch of shiny things flying around that may or may not help, but they're shiny enough that it's somebody grasping for it. And if they had an expert, they could see what that actually was, and the specific use case that makes it shiny, it's not for everybody. They may have been able to save some money and gotten themselves more runway to give them a better opportunity. So-

Jon:
That's great.

Ryan:
... Grow with Garrow is live, growwithgarrow.com. And it's an e-comm community, people looking to grow their business.

Jon:
That's great. So I know you hate wasting money, but you also have four kids, so are you the dad that's always like, "Close the door. We're not cooling the outside," like that guy? Because-

Ryan:
Yeah, we become our parents, right? So yes, I do say that. Then on the other side, I spend money on my kids doing dumb things. Like we'll go to Langer's, which is this little indoor arcade thing. It's Portland so you're indoors most of the year. And-

Jon:
Yeah, right, you don't have a choice.

Ryan:
... Four kids under the age of 10, like between six and 10. Every time I go anywhere it's like $200. Doesn't matter what it is. Red Robin, $200. Go to this place, $200. So with kids, that's a different story. Businesses, I hate wasting it. Kids, I think I accepted it long ago.

Jon:
So you don't really have a choice unfortunately. Okay, so Ryan, tell me then why do we need another e-commerce community, right? There are tons of these. Now don't take that as I'm not excited for this one because I have been part of several that have promised the moon and I know could never deliver, but you can deliver. I know that. So you have the right community already around you. You've got tons of folks that could help SMBs that you're talking to on a regular basis. You get me looped into some of those conversations, so I know what you're capable of with this community, but it still begs the question, why do we need another community?

Ryan:
We don't need another community, I'll be transparent with that. It's not necessarily a need, but there's not one that focuses on eliminating a lot of things. Most communities are out there often trying to sell things, and that's not what small businesses, small e-comm companies need when they're in the process of trying to grow and establish that.

Jon:
That's a really good point though. A lot of these communities that I see that don't really deliver, it's because they're sponsored by a company whose ulterior motive is very clearly to have a community that they can market to. And so then it always ends up devolving into sales pitches and then at that point you know it's time to leave because no one's posting anything of value.

Ryan:
Exactly. And that's exactly opposite of what I want and that's why this is a paid community, it's not a community you're just going to get into free. So small little agencies or marketers are not getting in. If you don't have an e-comm brand, you're not getting into this community. And the people involved in helping these brands grow don't have to sell anybody anything. You and I, we have not monetized our podcast. We've had offers, the people that want to sponsor this, but part of the reason I like this is because we're not beholden to anybody. I've not taken any money. You and I invest our own money in getting this going and supporting it specifically because it forces us to be thinking about content, I think, and it does get our name out there, which is good. But I do believe to my core that you, me and some of our partners, we've been doing this so long, 15 years, you could probably put us in with a leadership team of most e-comm businesses under $500,000 and we could come with a plan to grow that business.

Jon:
Yeah, and have the folks in the room to get it done, right?

Ryan:
Yes, we could do it.

Jon:
And who have done it before as well.

Ryan:
Yep. But they can't afford us. And it doesn't make sense from me supporting four kids that I have to take out to Red Robin, I can't spend my time doing that. And so it has to be a group that can take care of themselves with some added insights from experts like you, me and some of the other people that I know have a heart to just grow these companies and not steal from them is what I like in a lot of companies in the e-comm world. I do believe there's so many people that steal from companies that don't deserve to be stolen from.

Jon:
Yeah, that's a good point. It's a good way to look at it. So-

Ryan:
Yeah, and so it's really capturing my passion to help companies grow. I've talked to my wife through this whole process and likened it to kind of on how our family specifically runs. I am really good at growing top line revenue of companies. That is my skill setter, maybe my superpower in e-comm, top line. You want me to manage a PNL and spit black numbers out the bottom of that PNL, that's not what I do. I can do it, but it's not where I get my energy from. It will drain me and I'll burn out very, very quickly. So I have partners that can help do that thing, but I think it's finding that way to grow and giving the options to help other areas. So there's going to be options in this community to help that PNL in the middle because there's partners that are better at talking through that than I am.
But it is focused on that growth and figuring out what makes sense. And like you, I spend a lot of my time talking to business owners every day and most of them can't afford me, I'll say that. They just can't afford to work with Logical Position and that's okay. It's not fault of them. It's partners trying to help them grow. Say, "Hey, you need to talk to Ryan. He knows what he's talking about and he won't steal your money." And a lot of my conversations, I'm having the same one. So that's what got me through this idea of we just need a community that I can really do kind of that one to many like, okay, if we establish a common baseline where everybody understands do this, this, and this; generally speaking, it's going to work out for a lot of you and there's going to be exceptions in there that we can work through. But a lot of my conversations are undoing some thinking or something they heard at a conference or in a webinar.
A great one that I come across more often than I would've expected is the need for influencers and how it works no matter what. Don't get me wrong. Influencers are great. I talked about that. I'm sure we have a podcast that's talked about influencers. But you'll see this webinar or this talk at a conference was sponsored by this influencer marketing entity, and they talked about... Here's their case study of this brand that used influencers to go from zero to 10,000,000 in six months. And they're like, "Oh my gosh, it's so great." So they end up signing up for the service for 5,000 a month, get six months down the road and they've just lit $30,000 on fire. Nothing to show for it.
And what they didn't get in that talk was the reality of, well, the brand owner knew Kim Kardashian and her friends and those are the influencers they started with to launch the brand, get it up to 1,000,000 in revenue where they could afford to bolt on an influencer system to add onto what was already being done. And they already had a track record with Kim Kardashian making money that everybody else could come onto that. If they had somebody like me early enough on, I would have said absolutely terrible idea right now. You've got to fix certain things on your site and get this taken care of. You've got to get a social community established and start posting organically and then you need to go DM some small influencers to get them to work with you for free product before you go hire a company and get big enough there to make cents. But that doesn't come across in webinars because they have to sell everybody because it's a sales avenue.

Jon:
Yeah. Where are you hosting this community?

Ryan:
It's going to be on Slack.

Jon:
So all the data will be there? So if somebody has a question, they can search through that large database that will continue to grow over time?

Ryan:
Yeah. And what we'll do is we'll put channels into different areas. So if you want a channel talking about just growth, how do you grow the traffic to this site? Well, there's certain things you need to do to make that happen. Now you've got traffic, it makes sense to start doing some things to increase the conversion rate on that traffic. It doesn't matter what your conversion rate is if you have zero traffic, right?

Jon:
Right, exactly.

Ryan:
So convert it-

Jon:
Yeah, you got to start there.

Ryan:
And then you got to get lifetime value out it. They bought one from you one time, now how do you get more value out of them? How do you serve that customer better? And then there's a whole bucket for how do you increase profitability within the business by lowering merchant processing rates or increasing your profit within a shipping space? What are the things you can test there? And then tracking as a whole nother avenue. Certain products are better than worse.

Jon:
Yeah, everything that you've just mentioned, I know you have a really good solid connection for. So even just bringing your network into the mix here is super valuable. That's awesome. I'm excited to hear more about this.

Announcer:
You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon McDonald, Founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
Okay, so tell me this, Ryan, you've kind of outlined a high level of what the expectations should be, but what else can people expect from Growth Garrow?

Ryan:
I think it's generally going to be smaller businesses that don't have the funds to pay for experts. If you're already paying Logical Position or Jon at The Good, you don't necessarily need this community. You know what? You've got a team working for you already that can do most of what this is. I think what you're going to get out of this is direction on working hard. Starting an e-comm brand is not easy. Getting it up to a $1,000,000, that zero to 1,000,000 is tough.
Once you get to a 1,000,000 in revenue, you've got some marketing budget to be dangerous. You've established a brand and some credibility, in my opinion, becomes more fun. You get to play with more. And I like that space, but it's that grind where you have more time than money and there is no easy button here. So you're going to get a bunch of people together that are working really hard on their business and all with the same goal of I want to get to that $1,000,000 to be able to hire more experts to scale my brand even faster. But it's going to be doing it without wasting a bunch of money. There's not going to be a lot of-

Jon:
Right. So the idea here is don't repeat the mistakes that other people have made. And so have a community you can learn from to not repeat those same mistakes. And if you're playing shoots and ladders, skip over the ladders or the shoots. The shoots.

Ryan:
Go up the shoots, no. Exactly. I've made a tremendous amount of mistakes. I've learned from a lot of my mistakes, but I read a lot of books because I try to learn from other people's mistakes. If I can save myself that pain because I saw that happen, I'm like, "Oh, that's great." My forehead's very flat from banging my head against the wall multiple times and now I've been pivoted a few times to help it move quicker in the right direction.
So I think you're going to be working hard. Things are not going to go right, and you're going to have a community there to help you pivot and think through the change because it's inevitable. You're going to make bad decision. You're going to be like, "Okay, I've got to pivot." In fact, I had a meeting this morning with the gentleman building this site out and it was like, I have made so many mistakes, but I've been in motion and it's much easier to fix something as I'm going in one direction to say, "Oh, that's not quite right. I missed the target, slightly off-center, come back to the center and still keep moving forward." And so that's what this community should be about.

Jon:
I am a proponent in business of doing two things and the one is always be moving forward. Just make some decision. You know that most of your decisions probably won't be great when you start out, but they will get better as you learn and grow. And the second is to just try to avoid making mistakes that others have made by understanding their experiences and listening to those around you that are a step ahead at least, right?

Ryan:
Yep.

Jon:
So I'm just getting really excited, sorry, hearing about this because-

Ryan:
Me too. It's been-

Jon:
... These are all things that... I had no idea that this was happening, so I'm really excited to learn more. Okay. I'm on your email list. It's called Grow with Garrow. Is that going away? What's the situation here?

Ryan:
No, that's going to stay there. It's just going to be now I've committed to it publicly that it's coming out every month, so it's there. Now I'm on the hook, so if I'm not giving it out monthly, I'm not following through on my commitments and that's a problem.

Jon:
Well, you should have enough inspiration from the community to help you have content for the email now too.

Ryan:
Yeah, and the email list is out to brands that I've worked with, prospects that have not worked with us yet, but still have interest in our partner network where it's more of a what am I seeing going on and what kind of things do e-comm businesses need to be aware of or paying attention to right now. So obviously when it comes out once a quarter, it's not been as up-to-date as it could have been. And so that'll be an important thing there, I think, just to get it out there regularly and it'll help with my wine suggestions coming through monthly. You'll get more appropriate seasonal selections coming through there.
And then we're also adding to it a monthly webinar interview, which we selected that platform because it's interactive. What I didn't want was just like go out and do an interview where it goes out there and you can just listen to it. That'll be there. It's going to be put on YouTube and you can listen to it later and double the speed if you don't like how fast I talk. But when you're in the community, you get to be onto the webinar and actually asking questions. And it's going to be me interviewing a business owner or a marketing team that has been there, done that. And so I've got a list of these businesses coming through the pipeline, one that's gone from, man, I think less than $250,000 to 300,000,000 in seven years, six years maybe.

Jon:
Wow.

Ryan:
I've been along for that ride.

Jon:
I'm in the wrong business. [inaudible 00:16:03].

Ryan:
It is. There's some phenomenal businesses. But the punch line is just these businesses have been there and they've gone through that startup phase. Get going, figure out what your market looks like, and then step on the gas and get to where it's just fun. And you are then the big 800 pound gorilla muscling competitors around because that's a really cool place to be too.

Jon:
Yeah. Yeah, it can be. It's all about getting more resources over time and then being able to do more with it, right? So sweet. I'm excited to hear about this. Okay, so is there anything else I should know about this community? I'm kind of awestruck, I want to know more.

Ryan:
Well, it's live now, just launched, growwithgarrow.com and as it scales, we will begin putting companies in bands of revenue together. So once you get over a 1,000,000, there's a few companies that'll probably still stay in the community. They're going to have different conversations and needs than somebody that's at a 100,000. And so I understand the need of that. Out of the gate, it'll be a tightly community and then we'll revamp it, but it'll be experts in there. Hopefully Jon's going to poke his head in there every now and then and direct some people on CRO.

Jon:
I was going to wait until we were done with the podcast, but I was going to ask behind the scenes a little bit, how do I get in? Can I get in?

Ryan:
Jon's in, so everybody knows this. There's not anybody better to talk CRO and guide CRO conversations for companies without having to worry about getting sold. But there'll be experts popping in there and being able to lead monthly conversations as they want. There's not that many people that can get me on a Slack channel and actually ping me with a question and expect an response. So as the community grows, I probably won't be responding every hour. But again, for me, it's a passion for me. I love e-commerce.

Jon:
Awesome.

Ryan:
And I enjoyed defending or standing up for the small business that wants to grow and has a reason or desire for it, but just needs some direction on that.

Jon:
Maybe we should auction off your phone number, your cell phone number, if anybody.

Ryan:
Yeah. Yeah. The site's not going to have my phone number on it. I had to get a new phone number.

Jon:
Because I will be honest, we used to be in a few Slack groups together for random partnership stuff over the years, and now it's kind of like, I don't know if I can get ahold of you there or not. So I just text you and I'm lucky that I can do that. So to have people in a community that you're running to have that direct line of access to you is there's a lot of value to that for sure.

Ryan:
Well, you know what I think is going to end up being cool out of this is when you or I go to like, "Hey, I'm going to be down in Austin meeting with BigCommerce next month." "Okay, great." "I'm going to be down there on Tuesday night." "Hey, I'm going to be hanging out at TopGolf, come by and say hi, and we'll have a beer, hit some golf balls." But this community hopefully is going to be that resource where we can actually eventually get face-to-face time. And-

Jon:
Awesome.

Ryan:
... Because those connections where we get to strategize in person, I think those are fun.

Jon:
That's amazing. Now I'm really excited about this because you and I are both in Portland area generally, so we could do a lot of these here. That'd be fun too. Okay, so growwithgarrow.com. Can we give people some little incentive here or am I asking too much?

Ryan:
Jon's already giving money away. No, yeah, we decided the Drive and Convert community, if you want to be a part of that, you're going to get 50% off of the community cost for three months. So just go to Drive and Convert, check out, it'll ask if you have a coupon code or a discount code. I can't remember what the actual verbiage is, just use the code Drive and Convert, and that'll save you. And so it'll be fun to see people on there because I'll be able to track how many of you come on with that code and we can maybe pay some special attention to you-

Jon:
Love it.

Ryan:
... In that process and get you over that $1,000,000 threshold where things get more fun. You can hire more experts.

Jon:
Well, definitely say hello if that's the case. If Ryan does indeed let me in and doesn't change his mind, then definitely say hello. And I would love to connect with folks who listen. I know we get emails and comments, and I hear about it on calls and I'm like, "Oh, I had no idea you listen." So definitely hit us up on there. That's great. Wow. No excuses now, right? 50%-

Ryan:
No excuses.

Jon:
... Off at three months. There is no excuse-

Ryan:
Come have some fun.

Jon:
... Not to give it a try. So I'm looking forward to hopefully being given keys to some of the kingdom so I can check it out as well.

Ryan:
Looking forward to it. Thanks, Jon.

Jon:
Hey, thank you Ryan.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up-to-date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com