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93. Mission, Magic, Money, and the one formula you must understand for eCommerce Growth, with Taylor Holiday of CommonThreadCo

22 April, 2020
The Bean Ninjas Podcast
The Bean Ninjas Podcast
93. Mission, Magic, Money, and the one formula you must understand for eCommerce Growth, with Taylor Holiday of CommonThreadCo
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How do you scale your e-commerce business profits from zero to $20 million dollars?

In this episode of the Bean Ninjas Podcast, Wayne interviews Taylor Holiday of Common Thread Co. on mission, magic, money and the one formula that will help you in your e-commerce growth. Common Thread Collective agency is one of the businesses under Dream Labs that help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams without breaking the bank.

Taylor will be sharing his practices, visions, and advice on how to grow a business’ profits and drive progress.

In this episode, we discuss:

[01:31] Taylor’s learnings as an athlete that he applies in running a business.
[03:13] Background and story of how Common Thread Co. came about.
[05:04] Taylor talks about the principles that they have developed as business owners with their first 2 businesses.
[06:24] The typical clients they work with.
[07:47] Discussion of the Data Ledge Strategy.
[09:20] The meaning of the growth equation formula.
[12:55] Knowing where to focus to drive growth and important elements to remember.
[18:50] Taylor shares his insights on the impact of the growth equation formula and the recent Covid-19 their businesses.
[20:58] The reason why Facebook is the best platform for marketing effectiveness.
[23:14] Brands testing other social media platforms as a marketing tool.
[24:39] Taylor’s practices in being productive and effective.
[29:20] Adapting to the current changes and happenings in their life.
[31:14] Taylor’s shares his passion.

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Transcription

Mission, Magic, Money, and the one formula you must understand for eCommerce Growth, with Taylor Holiday of CommonThreadCo

Announcer Welcome to the Bean Ninjas Podcast, where you get an all-access pass to see what happens behind the closed doors of a fast-growing global bookkeeping and financial reporting business.

Wayne: 

Welcome everyone to the Bean Ninjas Podcast. I’m Wayne Richard, and we’re talking mission, magic and money, and the one formula you must understand for e-commerce growth with Taylor Holiday of CommonThreadCo.

Welcome to the show Taylor, how are you doing today and where are you joining us in from?

Taylor:

I’m in from Southern California, and given the state of the apocalyptic world we live in, I’m doing pretty well, doing pretty well.

Wayne: 

Good to hear. So today, you’re going to share with our audience your insights to growing your e-commerce store profits. But, before you do, you’re the only guest on this podcast to have listed on your LinkedIn profile, “Pretty straight forward. Tried to hit homers,” for the New York Yankees. So let me know man, let me know man…

Taylor:

It feels like many years ago, but that is part of the story.

Wayne: 

It’s unbelievable, I know. Congrats on that. So what’s something you learned as an athlete from the Yankees organization that you’ve applied in your business?

Taylor:

Yeah, it’s funny. I’d say so much, so much. One is that like there’s a discipline to the rhythm of being an athlete that is so directly applicable to running a business. And even this morning, one of my rhythms right now is I sort of try to figure out how to prepare myself mentally for each day is I don’t know if you guys have ever used the Calm App like for meditation.

But they have this awesome; so Lebron James did like an 8-part series of a meditation sequence that talks about his mental preparation for the game. And one of the episodes is Pre-Game Prep, and it’s Lebron talking through his pre-game routine and what it applies to, and it is like legitimately still so helpful to me is like you’re ready to lead company meetings and everything else. And so, there’s this mentality of the way you prepare for moments in sports that I think is just an incredibly valuable skill.

Calm_app_lebron_james

And then, the other thing is, is that we have this principle or this value inside of our company where everybody is, ‘You’re the entrepreneur of your own life.’ And the idea is that ultimately, you are individually accountable for the outcomes of your own life. And when you take ownership of that, it creates a lot of opportunity for you.

And as an athlete, that is the truth. Your body, everything that you do is your business; like your care for it, you are in control of how you prepare and approach it. And so, so much of that is woven its way into the language that we use in our business and everything else.

So it’s a major factor of our lives because it’s not only me, all my partners, we all play professional sports. My partner Jordan played eight years in the NFL, my partner Cory played for the Tigers, and my partner Iain was a professional surfer for a bit. So we all come with that sort of competitive spirit, discipline and approach to the way we do things.

Wayne:

That’s awesome. And your company is Common Thread Co., how did the idea for CTC come about?

Taylor:

Yeah. So we grew up on the brand side. So we first started a company called Power Balance way back in the day. You may remember those silicone bracelets that athletes were running around wearing for a while.

Wayne:

Yes.

Taylor:

And then got into starting a company called QALO, which sells silicone wedding rings. So we had grown up on the brand side in building consumer product businesses for the last ten years.

And as we sort of got through that, when we did those businesses in our younger years before we all got married and had kids, we just lived at the office. And every weekend was another event and something else, and we just loved it. Just met the same things in us that’s sports stand, and so we just poured our whole life into it.

And then, as we sort of moved into this new season of life, we still wanted to be able to build brands, but we wanted to figure out a way to do it differently. So we tried to create a sort of systemic approach where we thought about how we can build a system that could better support the development of brands. And that was really what gave birth to what is our holding company.

So we have a holding company called DreamLab that owns a variety of different companies. The first on which you’ve mentioned, Common Thread Collective; that’s our agency where we work with consumer product and e-commerce businesses between 0 and $30M to help them grow their revenue.

We also have a company called 4×400 where we actually own and operate our own businesses. So we have four of our own brands that we acquire and operate ourselves. We have a 3PL company called Left Brain Logistics. We have an influencer marketing agency called Kynship. And then we have a cultural development service business called Tell Me Your Dreams.

And so, all of those sit under the holding company, DreamLab, and allow us to get this like really what we think is sort of an unprecedented view into the consumer product e-comm world.

Wayne:

Was it always the original plan to diversify across these many different modalities?

Taylor:

Yeah. So we developed this principle in our first two businesses, which was basically vertically integrating any major line item we had. So we would go through our business and anytime we, on the cost side of the business, we’re looking at a major spend, we try to figure out a way in which we could benefit from that spend.

So if you think about; like if you just go through each of those service providers and some e-commerce business, your agency costs are a major cost centre, your fulfilment is a major cost centre. For us, influencer marketing was a major cost centre. And then, we spent a lot of time and money on this internal cultural service called Tell Me Your Dreams, which is a whole sort of separate podcast in it of itself.

And so, one of the principles that we have developed as business owners is just trying to find the way to benefit from every major line item in our cost side of our business. So even we’ve gotten into commercial real estate, we own the buildings that we’re in.

So we just try and be ruthless about any time we have a major cost centre, how do we create a benefit from it in the long-term. And then really trying to answer the question; what does our client need that we can provide them from the ecosystem to fulfil the mission of helping them achieve their dreams?

Wayne:

So who’s your services best suited for? So you mentioned clients; who do you typically work with?

Taylor:

Yeah. So everything we do is what we call SMB e-comm; so 0 to $30M consumer product e-comm. And I would say depending on what phase of that journey you’re in, you could use more or less of the services.

But we have, at the earliest stage, if you’re sort of in that 0 to $1M range, we have a community coaching product called youradmission.co, which is actually free right now for two weeks. You and I, we’re just wrapping about that. So anyone, to get through this tumultuous time of the common journey, we have about 500 entrepreneurs in that community group.

And then, I’d say, once you get above that million to $5M range, that’s where it really becomes viable to pursue us as an agency partner. So that’s where Common Thread Collective will often step in and be a growth partner on that journey. Now up to about $30M as the top end of threshold where we would really say, “Hey. You need to go and find an enterprise partner that can meet some more of your infrastructure needs than what we’re set up to do.”

Wayne:

Yeah. Just to try to place the silver lining and remain positive here, really, I’m so impressed by folks openly sharing their unique skills, their knowledge and experience, and really, in a spirit of service to everyone. So it’s amazing. So everyone, make sure, check out admission.co and get out there.

So let me know about the agency side. The one thing I found interesting is the data-led strategy you guys use to understanding growth and the different levers that sellers can use to really manipulate the growth in their business. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Taylor: 

Yeah. So I think one of our core value propositions as a service provider is that we are actually co-journeyers with our clients and that we own and operate our own brand. So we approach marketing from an operator’s mindset, and what that basically means is that we think deeply about the financial and economic impacts of our advertising decisions.

And so, what that has led us to do is to really try and create sort of ideological frameworks that we can help coach our internal employees on and bring our clients through to help them think about the different levers of growth, the different levers of profit, and how we help them to achieve that.

So we worked really hard to sort of think about solving two problems. One is educating our employees and doing training and learning development for them so that we can begin to make them effective in helping to accomplish our client’s goals of growing their profitability. And then also, what are the different marketing metrics and data points that are signals of a business’ health at this early stage?

And so both of those things we think are absolutely critical and foundational to being able to actually succeed, especially in a world of paid media where we spent a lot of our time and it’s so data-driven and metrics-driven, but the metrics that are important are really constantly changing over time relative to how people are growing their businesses.

Wayne:

The one formula I’ve seen you out there promoting is (V x CR x CM) – VC. Let us know what that means.

Taylor:

Yeah. So this is sort of what we consider the growth equation that is most critical for e-commerce businesses in this damn age. Now, I’ll go through each of these metrics and sort of what they mean and how we think about them.

So on the front end, what you have is Visitors; so the V stands for Visitors x Conversion Rate x a metric that we call Cash Multiplier, and basically, if you think about that as an equation to generate Revenue. So that sort of gives you a revenue output of a specific cohort of users.

So now, let me talk specifically about Cash Multiplier for a second. So that formula used to be Visitors x Conversion Rate x Average Order Value = Revenue. And for a long time, that was sort of a sufficient way to look at it because there was the business of growth was really about arbitraging the front end of the equation, arbitraging visitors because they’re so cheap to acquire traffic that revenue really was a great proxy for profit.

But nowadays, that’s not as true as it was three, four or five years ago. And so, a lot of people are moving to a metric that is now sort of an industry buzzword called Lifetime Value, right? So they would replace maybe Average Order Value with Lifetime Value of a customer. But for us, we actually think for most early-stage e-commerce businesses, Lifetime Value is actually not a very helpful metric at all.

And the reason is, one, it’s a subjective metric, meaning that when you use the phrase lifetime, it applies to a variable period of time for every business. If you’ve been in business five years and I’ve been in business six months, when we use that metric, we’re referring to different things.

And so, anytime I find that to be the case within metric, what it says to me is that it doesn’t communicate clearly. And it’s also not that actionable because we have this joke that everybody will all die waiting for our LTV to show up.

Wayne:

That’s right.

Taylor:

And the idea is that like nobody can wait a year usually, because e-commerce businesses are so cash flow-intensive and managing cash flow is absolutely the most critical skill of an e-commerce business that looking at things in 12-month window really doesn’t give you a whole lot of insight.

So what we did is we created this metric that we call your Cash Multiplier. And again, we call it that just to keep in the forefront of your mind that your job is to grow your cash, and what we use that is; we define that as your 60-day LTV.

And what we say is like you have the right to adjust that number to match your business; you could you look at it at a 30-day window or a 90-day window, but we think a 60-day window is a really powerful number for most businesses to consider how much they’re increasing the value of the customers that they acquire within that 60-day window.

And so, that match like your Cash Multiplier becomes really critical to understanding the value of your customers. So we think about it as Visitors (V) x Conversion Rate (CR) x your Cash Multiplier (CM) – your Variable Costs (VC) = and we just put a dollar sign, but another phrase that’s commonly used is Contribution Margin (CM).

So when we say your Variable Cost, what we talk about is every dollar that gets spent in the process of getting a product to a customer and changes based on the number of orders that you get.

So that’s where the variable idea is; that number goes up or down relative to the number of orders that you get, and it’s every dollar that goes into getting the product to the customer. So think of this as your transaction fees, your shipping fees, your pick/pack fees, obviously, the cost of goods, your advertising fees; anything that goes into that number.

Wayne:

Awesome. So how did you put this together as a brand? How would you know where to focus first to drive growth? And is there one element that’s more important than any of the others?

Taylor:

Gosh. Okay. Yeah. So this is such a great question. And one of the things, the reason we talk in these frameworks is because there is no one answer for everybody. But this give you; like the way I teach my strategists that their job is to be an investigative journalist. They are writing a story about a problem and using these variables as a lens to discover where the problem exists. But it’s going to be different in every business.

Wayne:

I love that. I look at it, too, like a machinist, and you have levers you can pull, right? And you have the V lever, the CR lever, the CM lever.

Taylor:

Exactly. So depending; so one of the easy ways that we have this accounting principle, and because we’re on a financial podcast, I don’t mind getting into this. Normally, on marketing podcasts, people’s eyes are glazed over, but I think that your audience will appreciate it.

Wayne:

Preach.

Taylor:

So we call it the four quarters accounting principle of e-comm, okay? So the idea is if you were to break apart your P&L into four different categories, the first category being CAC (cost of acquisition). In other words, how much are you spending on media dollars as part of your P&L?

And then the second quarter would be what we call cost of delivery; so that goes back to that variable cost idea – everything that you spend on shipping, fulfilment, your merchandising fees or your transaction fees, your payment processor fees; everything that goes into the cost of delivery.

And then the third quarter is your OPEX, and then the fourth quarter is profit. And if you broke your P&L into all four of those categories and you’ve looked at them all through the lens of greater or less than 25%, you could begin to find where there’s area of opportunity for improving your profit.

So that is not to say that every business should be at 25% across all three categories; of course not. But we think that that is an indicator that begins to allow you to hone in on the problem. So let’s say if, on the CAC side, you were sitting at 40% CAC, well, now we’ve got to begin to look at why and how we reduce that because a business is not going to be able to survive at that cost of acquisition.

Or in some businesses, we see the OPEX lower of around 50%, and in reality, for most e-comm businesses, that’s also not going to work. So from trying to discover entry point in the profit, that is a really simple way to sort of size up your P&L and get a grant, a way in which to identify potential problem areas. So that’s on the sort of looking at the accounting side of things.

Now, on the equation side, Visitors x Conversion Rate x Cash Multiplier, I’m going to give you some, again, general principles to use as thinking about lenses. So on the cash multiplier side, what we want to see, as for any business that is dependent on LTV.

Now, what kinds of businesses are dependent on LTV? Any consumable product, any product with a large skew set. Anything like that is going to be; it’s really critical that you think about your cash multiplier. A general rule.

Wayne:

The subscription that exists.

Taylor:

Yeah, exactly. Anything where your goal is to get somebody to purchase more than once. So the general rule is this; if you can increase the value of your customer 30% within 60 days and 100% within a year, you’ve done a good job of indicating that you are building a brand connection to that customer that is going to signal a healthy LTV.

So that is like a lens that when my people start, they’ll look at cash multiplier and they’ll go, “Okay, where do we set rules of the 30%? If it’s less than 30%, why? Oh, it’s a single skew business with giant AOV and big gross margins on the first purchase? Okay. Don’t bother worrying about it.”

Or this product, like one of the common things that we see, is that people don’t think about the relationship between the consumption rate and the size of the thing that they’re selling relative to the rate at which they want people to repurchase, and the pricing associated with it, so we’ll help them solve that. So there’s lots of things that that 30/100 rule on the cash multiplier side will help you with.

On the conversion rate side, this is one of the harder ones, but this is so because it’s so relative AOV. But what I would think about is that, I’m going to give you, again, very general rules here. This is like giant red flag, don’t apply this number directly to your business, but 2%, and then think of it as the lever going up and down relative to your AOV.

So if you were sitting at a business selling a $75 product, you would want to be somewhere around 75%. Or, sorry, if $75 product, 2% conversion rate. Now, if your AOV goes up, that conversion rate can come down. If your AOV goes down, that conversion rate needs to come up. Right? So you can start to think about those as levers that hold each other intention to start to identify the problem for your business.

And then on the visitor side, it all goes back to a metric that we call marketing efficiency rating, which is just Total Revenue, divided by Total Spend. And what we want that number to be, is again, using that four-quarter accounting principle, I want to see that your marketing efficiency rating, your MER is greater than 4.

So if 4, that means that for every dollar I’d spent in marketing I’m making 4, that means that my CAC is going to be less than 25% of my overall revenue. If it’s north of that, we’ve got some problems. And at scale, I really want to see that number starting to get to 5, 6, 7, 8 to really be healthy.

And so, each of those begin to give us a sense of what is the problem with the business that is causing it to produce the less profit that we want it to. That was a lot. I hope it made some sense.

Wayne:

No, it’s so practical. And I think we’d be tone-deaf if we didn’t kind of share maybe some of the impact that we’ve seen. We’re recording now on the 20th of March, so we’re in the midst of the impact due to Covid-19. So in recent weeks, what have you seen as the impact to this formula across the brands that you’re a part of?

Taylor:

Great question. Great question. So the biggest impact we see right now is conversion rate. So if you think about that middle part of the equation, what we’re seeing on the visitor side is that actually what’s happening, and we’re going to keep with the economics terms here’s because again, just trying to tailor this message to your audience.

On the advertising side, what we’re seeing is supply and demand economics lower the price of traffic. So everybody is at home using Facebook and Instagram, so there’s more ad inventory available, so we’re actually seeing the price, the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) on ads build down. So the traffic is actually cheaper than normal, so your V would be less expensive than it normally is. But what’s happening is people aren’t converting as often.

Now, there’s a lot of categories where this is not true at all. There’s categories that are exploding right now. Pyjamas, lingerie, in-home fitness, meal delivery, even skincare; there’s a lot of categories that are exploding.

But on average, collectively, across our entire data set, conversion rate is where we’re taking, seeing businesses take the biggest hit. And when that’s the case, we begin to do work around messaging to the moment.

One of the biggest problems for most brands is that the reasons people bought products two weeks ago is not the reasons that they’re buying products today. We are in a completely different state as human beings and we need to update our messaging to reflect that, so that’s what we’re working through with a lot of our clients is helping them improve the conversion rate.

And then the other thing is just a lot of people are running into supply chain issues. So things that are affecting the variable cost. Either they are seeing that get turned off, they’re seeing delays in shipping, they’re seeing increased costs of air freight; all sorts of different things that are affecting the VC portion of the equation as well.

Wayne:

So awesome. So I want to switch gears a little bit. You guys do run a digital growth agency and you’ve spoken quite proudly about your involvement with Facebook. So why is Facebook the best platform for marketing effectiveness?

Taylor:

Yeah. So Facebook, and I want to be clear; I have no incentive to say this, I have no like monetary compensation from Facebook, I will leave Facebook the second this statement is no longer true; I am completely platform agnostic, but Facebook is the greatest advertising tool ever built and it’s not even close.

And the reason is this; for the last, like a lot of people think about Facebook and Instagram as the power being about targeting. In other words, that you can go in and choose these really specific subsets of people to go after, and that’s sort of it.

But actually, what it really is, is their ability to identify user purchase intent. So for the last ten years, Facebook has had a Pixel that has been sitting on every website on the internet virtually, that tracks every purchase that every human being makes.

In addition to that, if any of you have ever used Facebook Connect to log in to any app in the world, along with their ability to track your location, etc. etc. the bottom line is Facebook knows everything about everybody, and who they are, what their purchase intent, what they’re browsing on the internet, when they’re going to buy, why they’re going to buy and can target ads relative to that behaviour pattern in ways that no other business can.

So their ability to do something that most ads had struggled to do, which is demand creation, in other words, turn a non-intent shopper into somebody who is suddenly shopping for your product is unmatched in the universe. And if anybody’s sitting there; one of the things that we often hear is like, “Oh, my customer is not on Facebook.” Wrong. Everybody on earth is on Facebook or Instagram. Like, there is not a consumer demo that you can’t reach on this platform.

And so, it is just so far above and beyond, so much better than any ad product that exists right now that our biggest risk to our business and most people’s businesses is just how over-indexed they are with their media spend on to this single-source platform, but it’s because moving dollars anywhere else comes at an opportunity cost.

Wayne:

But how do you balance that with the opportunity to test? I know even in looking at my teenage daughter and the videos that were made on Musically, now TikTok.

Taylor:

Yup.

Wayne:

But when should brands experiment and test just to be in a position to know that there’s another platform they can have some success in and potentially be the outlier?

Taylor:

Yeah. The answer is when they can afford to lose the money. And I mean that very directly. When we say, test, we have to understand and define what we mean by that. A test is, by definition, an opportunity to go explore something that you have no reason to believe will produce a significant outcome.

So I think it is very important for businesses who have expendable budget to use it in an R&B fashion that is about trying to identify new areas of opportunity, but you have to consider it lost money. And I know that that’s like, because the problem that I see people get into is they talk about diversification of their media spend, and in their mind, what they’re saying is I want to go spend money somewhere else that will be as efficient or more efficient than the current place I’m spending in.

That’s not what a test is. So I would absolutely encourage people to test, but to test with the understanding that the expectation is that that money does not return as efficiently as the places you’re currently spending it.

Wayne:

So awesome. So I want to switch gears a moment and talk Taylor.

Taylor:

Yeah.

Wayne:

So help me understand. So here you are, you’re a twin dad, entrepreneur across portfolio of businesses. What are some of your go-to processes or practices, even some tools for being productive and effective?

Taylor:

Yeah. Man. This has been the biggest thing that I have been on a journey on for the last year is that I reached a point where I felt like who I was, was no longer actually capable of continuing to lead the organization that I was building. And if I didn’t transform myself, like the organization wasn’t going to go where I needed it to go.

And the reality was I identified, and I’m going to get a little bit personal right now and this is just who I am, so I hope you guys appreciate it. But I realized that I had a few problems, and they were manifesting themselves in my organization.

So one was I lack discipline. So I don’t have a relationship with a father figure in my life. I’m a CEO. I have very few people that have authority over me in any way in my life and can provide accountability to me in any way. And I find accountability to be an incredibly useful thing for every human that exists. And I was struggling, and our organization, as a result, was struggling with discipline.

So a few things that I have done in response to this that have been really like genuinely transformative for me as a human, one is I got on to a really rigid workout routine with a group of men that show up every morning at 5:30 with me. And we work out six days a week at 5:30 in the morning so I can be back before the kids wake up.

And then, I also got on to a rigid diet. I had just sort of become this emotional crutch in my life that after being an athlete for many years, I sort of has just lost the energy and focus around how I cared for my body because I didn’t make the connection that care for my body would affect my business in the same it did as when I was an athlete, and it just absolutely does. So those have been two major things is discipline around diet and exercise that genuinely have transformed how I’m able to show up for people in my life.

The second thing is like what I mentioned as it relates to mental preparation for my work. So meditation has been a big part of that for me; prayer is a big part of that. But if I don’t mentally prepare to show up for my people at my office, they don’t get the best version of me and I quickly get overwhelmed.

The same is true for my family and my kids is that I can no longer just roll out of bed and roll into my day and expect to be effective. Like, there’s just too much on my plate for that to work. So I have to really think about preparing for my day like I would for a game or like I would for anything else.

And again, that includes a workout, it includes my diet, and that includes like mental preparation, and that is a huge one for me. I’m a really emotional dude. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and it’s a gift and a curse. I’m a passionate guy, hopefully, you’ll feel some of that in this conversation, but that can get the best of me.

And I once heard and read this thing that I’ve taken to heart as a CEO is that the best CEOs can move from conversation to conversation. And the one can be a difficult conversation where you’re having to lay off an employee, to a conversation about finances, to a public podcast like this, and no one knows the room that they just came out of because you can emotionally transition from one to the other.

Well, that doesn’t happen naturally well for me. If I come out of a hard conversation, I wear that on my sleeve, so I have to emotionally prepare for that. So that’s the second thing.

And then the third thing is informational organization. Across all these different businesses we described and the things that we’re doing, I have a lot of inputs on a daily basis. And so my external brain hard drive that I build in Evernote is a really critical component for me to be able to easily access information when I need it to be effective and efficient in quick time frames.

Speed is really important in my world. We deal in a world that for digital marketing that changes very fast. And our brains are really good at some kinds of recall, but if I asked you like, “Hey. What did you talk about in that conversation that you had on December 1st with that client?” Specifically, our brains are really bad at that kind of recall, and I’ve learned that.

And so, indexing conversations and notes digitally with tags, it allow me to easily sort it and access it. Just has amplified what I’m able to be and bring it to conversation as a person in a way that is super, super helpful. Super long answer. I’m sorry. But it’s so important to me and I hope it’s helpful to somebody.

Wayne:

No, absolutely. Help me understand, too. Has this been disrupted or have you had to adapt in the recent weeks in light of school closures and kind of moving teams to work from home?

Taylor:

Oh, dude, yes. So my wife is a teacher. We have three little kids as you mentioned. So, my wife, she teaches Tuesdays and Thursdays. So she’s out of the house now. She goes to my office, which is now empty, and teaches online classes. So from 8:00 to 2:30 on Tuesday and Thursday, I am home with all three kids, and then I basically work a night shift on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And so, that is completely different logistical change for our family. And then, like there’s so many things; the workout thing, obviously, we can’t go to the gym anymore so I’ve had to reprogram all of that. My wife, of course, still wants to work out, so when we get up, it’s completely transitioned.

And like, there’s so many things, and I actually feel over the last two weeks that I’m experiencing this like; it’s almost like I can feel my brain being rewired around all sorts of new creative problem solving because I feel so engaged in coming up with new solutions to new problems.

In some ways, it’s really draining. It actually requires that I over prioritize sleep and some other things, but in a lot of ways, it’s like unlocked a creative energy that I haven’t felt in a really long time. So it’s a combination of draining, and energizing, and just constant problem solving that I’m sure many of you are feeling as well.

Wayne:

So great. I also feel it’s pulled together a bit of more connectedness. I know with my children, the mornings are typically rush, rush, rush; scream and yell a little bit; hug and kiss, get them out the door.

Taylor:

Yup, yup.

Wayne:

Now we’ve had those mornings, that get together, enjoyed breakfast as a family and really not feel rushed. We’ve been doing some online yoga classes together, and laughing and giggling together. So that connectedness has been a positive light in this disruption.

Taylor:

That’s so good.

Wayne:

I want to start to wrap things now, Taylor. And really, I’ll share with you a quote I discovered from some of my research as a proper podcast host here. And you said in the past, “Audit the things you’re deeply passionate about and figure out a way to tell people about it.” So Taylor, what are you currently passionate about and where can people hear you share it?

Taylor:

Well, as you can see, like I have the unique gift of living every day doing the thing that I absolutely freaking love, and that’s helping entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. It’s my heartbeat. I’ve built my entire life to do just that, which is do a thing that I love every single freaking day, and I’m blessed enough to do that.

So you can find us in lots of places. For me, personally, actually, the place I engage the most is on Twitter at @taylorholiday. There’s an awesome community of e-commerce businesses in that environment and I am on there a ton so that’s where you follow me personally.

You can follow; if you’re looking for us as an agency partner, commonthreadco.com is where you can get a hold of us. If you’re an early-stage business and that community group makes sense, youradmission.co is where you can find us.

And if you’re interested in potentially selling your business and you’d be interested in exploring that with us, 4×400.com is where we own and operate and acquire businesses. So that’s our world, man.

Wayne:

Man, I wish I had more time to chat today, but I know you got a lot of things on your plate. So I really appreciate you taking the time out of your schedule to be here on the Bean Ninjas Podcast.

Taylor:

Yeah, man. What I’ll say for those of you that listen to this is that I truly believe that the underrated skill that is going to define the future success of the e-commerce businesses is accounting. I have spent the last month, and maybe I can even share some of this in your show notes, Wayne.

We’ve developed a training program for our key account executives. We call them the Growth Guides. And a lot of it has been around helping them develop accounting skills and principles because as things become more difficult, your ability to understand how to squeeze profit out of every part your business is so huge.

So I think what you’re doing is awesome and I think it’s going to be a big part of what makes businesses win in the future. So keep going, Wayne.

Wayne:

Yeah, we’ll be glad to share it as well. Thanks so much. Take care, buddy.

Meryl:

Would you like some resources to help you get on top of your business finances and to prepare for what’s coming? We’re living in unprecedented times where borders are shutting down, mass gatherings are canceled and cities, even entire countries are going into lockdown in an effort to flatten the curve.

In tough and uncertain times, it’s more important than ever to rally together. And here at Bean Ninjas, we believe that now more than ever, it’s important for business owners to understand their numbers and to get on top of their finances.

To help with that, we’ve created some helpful tools and resources for you, and most of these are free. If you head over to beanninjas.com/resources, then you’ll be able to access all of them.

Contact Taylor Holiday:

References and Links Mentioned:

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