30+ Black Friday Tips to Win the Holidays Like a 9-Figure Ecommerce Brand

19:10And if you can do it with excellence, there's big money there.

19:12Sean Frank:I totally agree. We bought that watch factory. We were making wallets there. Tariffs hit. It's basically pivoted to a full engraving and UV printing shop at this point. We're doing thousands of orders. Corporate gifting is a big part of that. But yeah, I love personalization. Yeah, if you don't have a UV printer, everybody listening to this, you should just go look up UV printers. Like, a really simple example, in a place you wouldn't expect it, my son has started a business where he's buying and selling Legos on whatnot. And I'm like, hey, ma 'am, there's not a lot of margin because you don't control the supply chain.

19:48And so he's figured out some ways to buy them at discounts. He's making the numbers work. but you know where the real money is in selling Legos? It's people that are buying Lego parts and they are doing custom UV printing on them. And then they're marketing it up, you know, 6X. That's actually the people that are making really good money. So like I'm seeing this across a bunch of different industries. The like 3D printers, UV printers, like all this stuff, it's becoming increasingly affordable, increasingly easy to operate. Be thinking about, hey, is there a way to incorporate that in our business?

20:18Sean Frank:Totally. All right, we'll go to Matt. Matt had something hot and fresh for us.

20:22Matt Bertulli:Dude, you know what I just realized? The thing I freaking tell my team every year, it's whatever the number of emails and SMS that you're going to send, you should send more. Like we're not sending enough. This is like the one time of year you have permission to be annoying as a brand. And too many people think they're like, Donno, I can't send four emails in a day. It's like, yes, you can. You can send more. It's this one time year. You have full permission from everyone to send more email.

20:48Sean Frank:Yeah, let's double click on what Matt just said. He said four times a day. If you're not thinking about multiple emails a day, you're behind the curve. Matt's going to hit people up about every 15 minutes for 36 hours.

21:03Matt Bertulli:Please buy it, please buy it, please buy it.

21:06Sean Frank:So yeah, that's the pace we're talking about here, guys. Okay, we covered some great tips. Who's got another one for us before we talk about calendars? The best Black Friday offers don't just increase orders, they increase AOV. A couple of years in a row or a few years in a row, we've just come up with bigger and bigger bundles. It's like, it's shocking how many people buy that, you know, like buy these massive bundles. So I would just say like when you're looking at offer, make sure you're thinking about increasing AOV. It's a great tip.

21:36Matt Bertulli:I think Matt had another one for us. Yeah, this is not a offer or how to sell more tip. This is a team tip. you have to you i i really think this is a momentum time of year and you should celebrate like hell so like the day of if things are going well like we just choose this as a time to like have so much fun um it's hilarious to watch these numbers you know like jason when those numbers start to rip for you guys that's a great feeling so like we would put tvs up in the office we would have like real-time hourly trackers people could see it not only that but like you you adjust much quicker when it's like in front of everyone.

22:13Matt Bertulli:But the celebration side of this is actually just a riot.

22:16Sean Frank:Dude, I think it's I think that's a great tip. Take$10 ,000 buy gift cards in$100 increments and throw those things out like you're throwing candy at a parade.

22:24Matt Bertulli:Yeah, Oprah, Oprah, your Black Friday. There you go. You get you get a car. Most AI tools right now are all promise and no delivery. You know exactly what I am talking about. Super fancy launch videos. This is why I'm loving what what RichPanel is doing. They have AI and support smashed together, made it practical, made it useful, made it valuable to brands today, not on some future promise. And instead of asking you to spend weeks writing prompts and uploading help docs and babysitting, they flipped the whole script. Their AI builds your support team for you and everything it needs. I've watched it.

23:00Matt Bertulli:It works. It's freaking amazing. RichPanel even guarantees 50 % of your support volume will be automated by within 30 days or your money back. I call that a no-brainer offer. The pricing is also kind of wild, about 20 cents per conversation instead of most other vendors being like$1 to$3, which is a little nuts. If you are interested, go to richpanel.com slash demo, not for some generic demo, but to actually book a call and watch them build your actual support team. This is when it's time to take your team to Chili's. Get an old timer burger, add cheese splurge guys like if you want to get the the brownie ice cream thing at the end that's okay calories don't even count on black friday it's a magical like international waters you really should like celebrate the wins because like it's always on to the next one on to the next one and also like if you go really big during black friday cyber monday there's going to be a lot of work to actually like get that stuff out the door so like you have to take the time to like celebrate

23:55Sean Frank:with your team love the tip big shout out to all the 3pls out there we talk a lot about 3pls we beat them up, but I don't do my own fulfillment. I don't think any of us are doing our large scale fulfillment anymore. 3PLs are the backbone of Black Friday. If you're doing 10 ,000 order days or whatever, it's like someone's got to actually put them in boxes. So shout out 3PLs. Make sure you send them some gift cards too. Oh, and here's a simple thing. Be their favorite customer because that stuff matters.

24:22Matt Bertulli:Yeah. Agencies too, guys. The media buyers. So if you don't do your internal media buying, your agency, these people are staying up all hours of the day. And most of what they're getting is people being like, hey, why does this suck? Why is it not spending what I think it should spend? Why are we not hitting this number? Celebrating your partners. Service agencies. We've talked about this before, but it's a great time to say it again. Like service agencies, basically, all they hear is people's problems and people's unhappiness. If you're their client that's telling them, I appreciate you. How can I help?

24:52You're giving them good communication. Guess who's going to get prioritized? Guess who's going to get the best level of service? Like this is just how people work.

24:58Sean Frank:Dude, these are all great tips. Also, don't be scared to be the most annoying client. Me and Mike are on polar end of the spectrum there. It's a real good cop, bad cop thing. I try and follow Sean around and use the exact same vendors so I can be their favorite and then Sean can be the most favorite. Okay, I got a great tip for everybody. This is true alpha. If you've made it 20 minutes in the pod and you're waiting for that real alpha, it's like, this is all fluff, where's the real alpha? Here it is, guys. Do more gifts with purchase. so we do a holiday gift bag that costs 50 cents to make with the value on that gift bag to a customer is 20 to 30 it's a beautiful gift bag and it solves a problem for them there are people are buying ridge walls to give us gifts now we have an awesome bag for it they could put a little name tag on it or whatever the perceived value is really really high it acts as a promo it acts as another reason to purchase and ridge was built on what we call no brainer offers it's like an offer so good you wouldn't want to buy from anywhere else, gift with purchase helps you complete that.

25:59Sean Frank:So that's the true alpha tip. Take that. Maybe it's too late to get those gift bags going for you, but it's a great tip. The best way to win Black Friday that nobody does is to use it at a time to become your vendor's favorite customer. There is so much alpha in being likable and all it takes is intentionality and using your words and appreciating people's work. And yet most people, They're so in the grind. They're so focused on the numbers. They're not doing it at all. And you know what people remember? They remember people who were kind to them and good to them during stressful moments. This is a stressful moment.

26:32It's a perfect opportunity. Hey, it's simple. Pull out your phone. Just send a text. Hey, I know you're busy right now, but we really appreciate you. We appreciate everything you do for the business. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help. You do that with your key agencies, your 3PL, these people that are making your business possible. like, hey, send one to your manufacturing partners. Hey, we're having a huge day. Let's celebrate. This couldn't have happened without you. I think about it like this. Credit is free. You can give credit for the success of your brand to as many people as you want to.

27:04And the reason why we don't is our own insecurity and our own arrogance. Be generous with credit. People love being able to be associated with something that's going really well and they love feeling appreciated and it'll turn up in all kinds of unexpected ways that it comes back to you.

27:20Matt Bertulli:Okay, this is a fun one, and it's more about how do I stay in front of our customers? We buy an extra phone, and we turn it on, we plug it in, and we turn it on Instagram Live, and we leave it on for days. And it's all it is, guys, is like a cardboard box, right, that's got like our offer on it. and that keeps us in Instagram in the leftmost bubble on the top thing for stories because that means that you are live and live always takes priority over every other story. And find ways to have fun with it. Our team will show up and they'll wave at people and works every year.

28:02Sean Frank:Dude, Matt, that is a great practical hack. I'm not even gonna call that a tip. I'm gonna call that a hack, dude. People want sauce, there it is, okay? I love seeing it because that actually lines up with my next tip. and this is more Gen Z focused, this is more TikTok shop focused, plan your lives right now. If you don't have a live schedule like designed and ready to go by October 5th, it's not gonna happen. Like you need to have people going live Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. You need to book off two to four hours every single day where there's an agency going live because if you're selling on TikTok, you know they tell you that they want lives to be important.

28:37Sean Frank:And if you're doing lives, you'll be prioritizing the feed. People are going to be watching football. People are going to be at whatever and scrolling. You're going to want to show up on that live. Plan those lives right now. We have just started to embrace that and it's really working for us. And it's why I'm able to grow 40 or 50 percent every single month this year. Embrace TikTok shop. Embrace live. Plan those right now. Live is a future. The decision makers have spoken. TikTok is saying we are prioritizing this. Whatnot is hitting these crazy valuations. The future is going to be live. the quicker your team makes the transition, the quicker you start.

29:12I don't even think like your idea is great, Matt, but like, I would take it a step further. It's like, you should have people doing live for several hours on all of these days, because that's where everything's going. Go ahead and build the muscle. Now be at the forefront of this and not a late adopter. We've been a late adopter on some of this stuff. That's on us. That's on me. But you can always pick now to be the time where you go from being a laggard to being at the front. Right. And we know where it's going. It's going towards live shopping. It's going towards these more interactive formats.

29:42People want connection. Like you, Sean said, the screen time, I'm sure all of our screen times are a total dumpster fire during the holidays. Everybody is scrolling. Everybody's looking for something interesting to look at. Have your brand be one of the people that shows up and gives them something interesting to engage with.

30:00Sean Frank:Fulfill is the ERP built specifically for D2C and e-commerce brands. Inventory, purchasing, warehousing, financials, all in one system built for the way your operation actually runs. There is not an ERP on this planet, not one, that has more direct 3PL integrations than Fulfill. They integrate with over 400 3PL locations globally, and most of you listening to this right now are either running your own 3PL relationship or you're about to. And the second your 3PL and your ERP aren't talking to each other in real time, you're flying blind. You don't know your true lander costs. You don't know your real margin.

30:30Sean Frank:You're reconciling spreadsheets at 11 p.m. trying to figure out where$40 ,000 went. I know because I am on Fulfill. The visibility we have now versus what we had before, it's not a marginal improvement. It's a different game. Fulfill is the only ERP I've seen that was actually built from the ground up for DTC, and it's not some vive-coded piece of crap. Believe me, those exist. Fulfill isn't one of them. Go check out Fulfill. Tell them Sean sent you. All right, guys, we're firing just rapid-fire tips at you. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Okay, who's got another one? What else are we going to talk about calendars?

31:02I was thinking about Black Friday versus Cyber Monday, and what's the difference really? And I think you can, I don't know if you guys do this, but I feel like you should do something different, right? Really do something different on Cyber Monday and get people to come, give them a reason to come back. And like for us, it's a little bit difficult because just the way our product development works, et cetera, et cetera. But it's like, you know, maybe you just need, maybe we, and you guys could give me a little advice here. Maybe we need to just like put some firepower into certain other things on Cyber Monday so that people will come back, right?

31:39What do you think?

31:40Sean Frank:Well, me and Connor always disagree about this. Connor's a big fan of varied offers throughout the weekend. I wanna have a simple, easy to understand, great value offer that you hit from Sunday to Tuesday. Like the Sunday before Black Friday to the Tuesday after Cyber Monday, it's like an 11 day period. 10-day period, whatever it is, I just want to hit that as much as possible with a simple offer. Connor likes switching it up. He likes putting more things on sale, having doorbusters, whatever. I think there's no right or wrong way right now. If you're a high repeat brand and you're going to have people come back, that's great.

32:18Sean Frank:Don't make it so complex that they can't understand what the hell the offer is. This is why I hate the 12 days of Christmas offer where every day is different because people don't pay attention to your brand. Imagine seeing a post for an offer and then you're yeah, you can't get that anymore. That was the second day of Christmas offer. Just frustrating. It's a bad experience. Matt, Mike, what do you guys think?

32:37Matt Bertulli:We used to do that 12 days of Christmas. It's like every year, I'm like, this is a freaking art project. This is not marketing. Like you're doing this for yourselves. Nobody gives a shit about us for 12 freaking days. Hell yes, Sean. I've got a derivative of this, which is BFCM is the time to sell a ton of your best stuff. And the problem that we've done in the past, Don't be stupid like Mike. It can be easy to be like, hey, we're running a sale. What is everything we're heavy on in inventory that we want to get out of? This is a great time to do it, right? We're on sale. Don't do that. Take your best things and push those and put your discounting and your offers around your best things.

33:17It's so simple and so straightforward, but also it's so easy to think, well, I've got to get lighter on inventory and this is the right time to do it. I actually don't think these huge swell sale periods are the right time to reduce your inventory exposure. They're the time to absolutely blow it out on your very best stuff.

33:33Sean Frank:If you have a long tail of TJ Maxx is your friend, go ahead and call them up. They'll take whatever you want and they'll pay you basically like what it costs you to make it. So TJ Maxx is your friend there. This is an event that's about throughput. If you actually want to make a ton of money, you want to focus on black wallets and black water bottles and black phone cases and just get a ton of throughput on the things people already want and buy. Give them a good offer and just drive that home. I love that tip. Jason, I love your tip. Think about things a different way. Matt, you brought some fire tips.

34:04Sean Frank:Last call, guys. What do we got cooking?

34:07Matt Bertulli:Don't ignore the post-purchase upsell at this time of year. I will say we've gotten incremental dollars out of our businesses over the years. by just doing that work ahead of time, having it dialed ahead of time, and then having pretty good bonuses post-purchase. You'll get extra money.

34:27Sean Frank:We just cost a million dollars in year-to-date upsell revenue via Aftersell by Rocked. They're a sponsor of this podcast, all the stuff we do. We love those guys. And I've driven a real million dollars in incremental revenue via a little widget on my website at checkout. So use it. I mean, you can get millions of dollars driving through your website that you would otherwise miss. Okay, Matt, you got a tip for us.

34:48Matt Bertulli:This is a dumb one. It may sound dumb. Charge more for express shipping. At this time of year. You can pick up an extra couple bucks, guys. People are like, they really want your thing. And you're charging, let's say, 12 bucks for express shipping. Make it 14. It's not going to matter.

35:08Sean Frank:We should have a whole episode on shipping profiles going into the holidays. Oh, my God.

35:13Matt Bertulli:We can talk for, oh, yes.

35:14Sean Frank:because I think people actually overspend on fast shipping when you don't need to. If somebody's buying December 2nd, they really want that package by December 24th. So it's like no reason to give them free express shipping because it's a Christmas purchase. Now, if somebody's buying on the 18th, you actually have to give them free two-day shipping for it to show up on time. So it's actually a ladder where I think we give away too much free shipping early and not enough in the later period. And actually, as a rule, Ridge has no overnight shipping because it never works. If you ever want to get the angriest customer ever in the most expensive package, do overnight shipping.

35:49Sean Frank:I hate that stuff. No, I think you're right. I think it's the right offer as you get to that December 18th to 21st, 22nd period is like, hey, free express shipping is a banger offer and that's going to draw people in. On Amazon, the numbers, usually the way that the curve builds on Amazon is it builds all the way to like the 22nd or 21st. Like that's your biggest day because it's just like a hill. And you can see as a lot of the other e-com kind of comes off the table as a shipping option, Amazon just reaps all that demand because they've got the two-day, one-day shipping. And by staying in the game, there's a lot of juice there.

36:28But I agree, Sean, like you don't need to be paying for express shipping as a brand, especially like early December. But if you're going to do it late, you better deliver because it is not worth the headaches of the additional sales you're going to get if people aren't going to get their product on time.

36:43Sean Frank:Yeah, and what we target is like a 95 % success rate on packages that we guarantee the two-day on like 1220 or whatever. We should do a separate episode about just that last week of Christmas. I don't think we talk enough about that. Black Friday, Cyber Monday is great. But the 21st of December is like my fourth biggest day of the year or something. We should have a whole episode about post-Black Friday, Cyber Monday, optimizing December because there's so much money to be captured there.

37:11Matt Bertulli:Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming. Are you ready? Not in the normal marketing calendar offers prep sense. I'm talking measurement and attribution. Are you even going to know what winning and losing looks like when the big Q4 season hits? Reality is the businesses that win set up their measurement solution when the times are slow, not the night before the big weekend. There's a reason for this. You see, with NorthBeam, you're getting a totally independent, completely new set of ad performance numbers with infinite look back windows. That means that the longer that the data grows, the more valuable it becomes.

37:42Matt Bertulli:So when CPMs are spiking in November, you will know precisely where every dollar is coming from while your competitors are guessing. This is important. Black Friday is one in the summer, not the day before. Book a demo with North Beam today. The link is in the description. Go check it out.

38:01Sean Frank:Okay, guys, talking about a lot of stuff. Now we're talking about calendar and how to actually plan out this quarter. Here's Ridge for you guys. We just wrapped up the first week of September, our sweepstakes. Okay. We pulled that into July. So July was a dead period for us. There's obviously prime day, but there's nothing else going on. So we started our sweepstakes early. August is all sweeps. And then it ends the first week of September, the day before the Apple event goes live, because then we're in tech-temper. So now we're all tech-focused in September. So those two months back-to-back, massive months.

38:38Sean Frank:Then it comes to October and we start a friends and family sale. So October, we do some product launches early in the month. Then we do a friends and family sale. And then we have one last product launch the first week of November. And then we go straight to offers. And then we're on offer from 11.15 to 12.20, basically. Like we're hitting offers that whole time. So I think you can do product launches in Q4. I think you can do different sales in Q4. Friends and family is basically the same as Prime Day because there's a new Prime Day in October every single year. So I think you can do more promotions.

39:07Sean Frank:It doesn't have to just be a spotlight on Black Friday, Cyber Monday. I think you can do longer, bigger promotions, and that optimizes the revenue curve. But I want to know how you guys think about calendars.

39:17Matt Bertulli:I'm laughing because I'm trying to Benjamin Button myself, and I'm just going to be Sean when I grow up. Pila is literally doing the same thing this year. It's like product launches in October, then we're on offer pretty much from, I think, November 12th through December 20th, whatever that timeframe is.

39:34Sean Frank:Yeah, I just think we focus too much on the revenue spike and not enough on the revenue curve. I think we can have very, very large revenue curves basically from the early October with product launches all the way to the shipping cutoff. And that's why Ridge's 50 % of our revenue is coming in Q4 this year. Mike, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing I said earlier. 17 % of the revenue on gift buying is happening during those four days. But all those other days matter. And like you said, Sean, people love deals. the end like you need to find a way to be able to communicate deal as often as you can as a brand without damaging your brand i think is pretty much the strategy like be on be on sale as much as you possibly can without damaging the brand that's your your job as the brand owner and so when there are periods where it's just expected to be on deal you better be on deal find every single one of those what one other thing you can do to like smooth out your margin profile is that a lot of times you'll have variations of your product.

40:32Like Sean has different colors of wallets. I have different colors of water bottles, you know, whatever. Kila certainly has this, is that you don't necessarily have to have everything in a product family on sale at the same time. And so this is one thing that we do is like, we might have half our colors be on sale as a part of the October prime day, but you know, there's, there's a good number of people that come in and are like, yeah, I don't want any of the ones that are on sale. I'm happy to pay full price. And so our margin profile doesn't even take as much of a hit as you would think. So again, you find all these tactics for like, how do I stay on deal as much as I can without taking the margin or the brand profile hit?

41:08And there's a lot of tactics out there.

41:11Sean Frank:Yeah, look, and on that 17%, if it's a 50-day shopping period, that means every day is 2%. And these four days are 17%. So they're basically 2x average. That's not that much. You know what I mean? I mean, they're still, it's like, look, they're the biggest days by far, but there's still a lot of days to do a lot of revenue. Jason, you've told me in the past, the way you plan your calendar is if car dealerships or furniture stores are on sale, HexCloud's going to be on sale. Is that the strategy you're taking this year? Really? I don't know. I don't know if I said that, actually. You know, you guys make some actually really good points.

41:48But look, what we typically do is, you know, we've got, there's going to be an October prime. And then we're going to start early. like kind of when everyone else starts, like it's, what is it, like November 15th these days or something like that. People have been starting early and we see the pop. Like we see people are just like, some people are just grabbing it when the deal comes out. We do have a couple of really key product launches this year. We're not like precious about when to launch products. It just so happens that we're launching something really big in October. And here's the beauty, we're probably going to sell it all before BFCM.

42:24And that's what I want to do. I was like, I've been fighting with my team to launch this thing as early as possible so that we don't have to sell any of it on sale because we know how much the factory can make. And I'm pretty sure we're going to sell it all because it's one of our biggest launches that we've ever done. But what was interesting about what I just heard is Mike's point about BFCM only being 17 % and then talking about like 70 days of holiday shopping. I never really thought about pre-BFCM before that time period. And I want to go back and think about that. I think that's actually really interesting because after BFCM, we rolled into Holiday, right?

43:02And we have different deals, but we're like, we're running something until the shipping cut off, just like you guys. But that time, like between Prime and November 15th or whatever it is, like that's interesting because people are shopping then, right?

43:17Sean Frank:I agree with you. Do not launch a big product and then mark it down for Black Friday Cyber Monday. We always do big product launches either in October or in November. Those stay full price. There's no expectation, to Mike's point, that the whole website needs to be on sale the entire time. That's just not true. Like, have a flagship offer, have people you drive stuff to, but our luggage, it's new. It's going to be full price, right? And there's no expectation that it's on sale. So I'm with you on that one, Jason. If I had to start over and scale to nine figures today, Saris IQ would be non-negotiable.

43:52That's the only AI that I trust with accuracy. If you want to just pull data out of wherever and drop it in Claude, you are really gambling your business. I get reports every day and I know the data is certified. And that's just me. My entire team is so deep in the weeds in Saris. We have every single data source in our business linked into Saris. Therefore, we can go and grab whatever we want. That way, we have so many different avenues of accessing our data. and you're just flying blind without this. Big brands already trust it. Growing brands now have access to the exact same foundation at under two grand a month.

44:27Live in a matter of days. Go to sarisanalytics.com and book your walkthrough today. You have to know what is success for your company, this BFCM. What is it? What is the North Star metric? What is the way in one sentence that you would describe what success is? And it's like, well, it's to sell a lot of stuff. Yeah, I get it. But like specifically, are you trying to acquire more new customers? Are you trying to maximize your contribution profit? Are you trying to do a particular thing with your supply chain? Are you trying to logistically, are you trying to hit certain kinds of efficiency in terms of getting people their orders or the time it takes to get their orders?

45:04You need to have a really specific goal for your team that helps them understand what success is because it can't be as amorphous as just like, hey, sell more. So when we've been our strongest, I've given the team a really clear definition of what would be success in this period for us. In some years, it's been like as many bottles in hand as possible. In other years, it's been like, this is our time to really maximize contribution profit so that we can hit the number that we want to hit for the year. But know what that is. Tell your team beforehand. Have it on dashboards. Be aware of it. Be sending slacks where you're updating people on how it's going.

45:42so that everybody knows whether or not you're succeeding at the goal of what you're trying to do so that everything, your offer structure, your shipping prices, everything else is structured around making sure that you're able to actually be successful on the metric that you've deemed the most important to your business, this BFCM.

46:00Sean Frank:So Mike, when you're setting top-down goals for your whole organization, are you breaking it out by team? Do you have different key objectives by department or leader? Or how are you actually drilling those down throughout the entire organization. Absolutely. We're starting at the organizational level and I'm asking what sets us up for success going forward organizationally. And then I am empowering each of my leaders. I'm like saying, hey, for each of you and your departments as they roll up to me, here's what I think this looks like. And then I'm giving them the autonomy and the judgment about how to push that down their teams.

46:32So it's a combination of being fairly heavy handed with like, this is what we have to accomplish, but then pretty flexible about the tactics and how they get there. So for example, for sales, I might say like, hey, you have this contribution profit goal for the fourth quarter, but there's 10 different ways they can get there. And I know they know their channels better than I do. And I give them the flexibility to decide exactly how they want to get towards it. And I think that that's probably the blend that works the best in most businesses. You're never going to have as much context when you start to get to a scaled organization.

47:06You're never going to have as much context as somebody who's thinking about it every single day. But instead, you got to paint the sidelines. As I like to say, you got to paint the sidelines on the field that you're playing in and say, hey, these are your constraints. You can have a lot of freedom of movement in between those, but you got to be able to be between these lines. So those lines are basically the goal for the organization. Like I said, sometimes it really is, we want to maximize how many new customers are coming through the doors. But as you get bigger and bigger as a business, it becomes like everybody's been saying, hey, this is a time to make profit.

47:39I'll remind everybody, the reason why it's called Black Friday is because historically, if you were a retailer, you lost money until these days. This is when you went from the red to in the black, and you had to make your money during this period, or you lost money for the year. So you need to be able to understand what you're trying to accomplish for a lot of brands that needs to be actually making money. And it's a lot of these concepts we've talked about throughout the pod kind of come together. You can't be overspending. You can't be chasing that additional customer where the marginal CPA is$150 just because it feels good and it makes the number tick up a little bit more.

48:17You can't be selling through something where you're down to two weeks of inventory with 25 shopping days left, this kind of stuff. So I try to be pretty prescriptive at a high level. And then I give a lot of freedom in terms of how it's applied at the ground level.

48:32Sean Frank:Dude, I love it. Yeah, look, this is a maker to break a moment for so many brands. I mean, if you mess up discounts, if you mess up inventory, if you mess up pacing, if you mess up fulfillment, it ruins your whole year, right? I mean, really, 50 % of our sales and volume come in this like, you know, six to eight week period. It's do or die for rich as a brand. So, so much pressure on this. That's why it's such a hot topic. It's why this is the number one rated episode of all time. People are going to listen to it and share with all their friends. And it's because of the stakes. Mike's given us a good, a good framework to make sure you understand what you're playing for.

49:06One other thing I would really encourage every brand, you need to understand how critical is BFCM to my actual business. If you run a more gift driven business, then like you have to crush it. Like there is no excuses. There's no way that a subpar BFCM works out okay for you. And like, for example, we're in sports licensing and it's like sports licensing, you do 50 % of your sales in like 20 of the days in the year. So it's like, you just have to crush those days. There's other businesses, like adult drinkware is kind of like this, where it's nice to do well during BFCM, but it's not existential.

49:40And I think we've gotten ourselves into trouble some of the time when we viewed it as more important to that business than it actually was. So you need to have a really high level of awareness of like, what is best for your brand? And you know what? Like probably stay off Twitter because you get on Twitter and everybody's posting screenshots. And it's really easy to compare yourself to a bunch of anon accounts that are, you know, tweeting about brands that aren't even really related to yours and have totally different goals than yours. Know your business, be secure enough that you're able to prioritize BFCM in accordance with like how important it is to what you're actually selling.

50:16Sean Frank:Matt, we've talked everything Black Friday, Cyber Monday. We've given so many tips for the brand operators out there. As the face, the lead architect of Winx, our in-house brand, Does any of this matter to you? Are you going to change anything?

50:29Matt Bertulli:No, and this is kind of what I asked the guys in the webinar that we did. And Jason had good advice. Like Winx is so early in the journey that it's almost suicidal to try to spend ad dollars for us at this time of year. We're not a gifting product. So it's like, why go into the CPM war when January is much more important to us? And Jason had great advice. And I think it was bang on, which is we're probably going to lean more into creator and just impressions and getting surface area out there on social. so that when we do hit prime time for Wings that we're ready. Well, I was just saying, I think this is a great time to lean into organic, right?

51:03Just because there's so many people that are engaged.

51:06Matt Bertulli:Yeah, yeah. I love that advice, Jason. I think you're framing on it. There's a lot of people online. They're not just going to shop. They're just going to consume more content. So how do we be there for that? That is top of mind. Yeah, and let's set ourselves up for New Year, New You, which is the beginning of the year. everybody's thinking about, hey, what do I want to change about my diet? What do I want to change about my sleep? Or, you know, like, how do I want to lose a few pounds? How do I want to get in the gym? And that's a really perfect time if you run a consumable or supplement company to be there and be ready.

51:39And this kind of just goes back to what I was saying earlier, like for Winks, like BFCM is not that important, right? Like people are not thinking about buying supplements or buying something for their sleep necessarily during that period compared to any other time of year. And so there's no reason to be trying to go to head to head with Hexclad and Ridge, you know, in the ad auction. But I think we can set ourselves up for one of these periods where a lot of brands aren't doing much. You know, Sean, you've talked about it as like the Q5 period. I think the Q5 and the New Year, New You period for us is going to be huge with Wings.

52:14Sean Frank:all right guys that's the pod you got hit with 20 30 50 of the world's greatest tips people would spend millions of dollars to get these you get them for free to listen to the operators podcast thank you for being here thank you to jason mike matt myself the four original operators and all of our wonderful sponsors thank you for being here we appreciate it talk to you later goodbye