E140: Black Friday Just Got Wild

26:00And when you build a projection, you know, it's going to be wrong materially in some ways. And so you need to understand, like, why are you building that projection? What is it helping you to do? And I think the wisdom you were sharing there is really good wisdom, because what you really can't afford to do is get yourself into a bad spot where you have to hit a number where your balance sheet, your debt, your inventory position really backs you into a corner where if you don't hit that number, bad things could happen. And that's how we've heard, you know, friends of ours, good businesses get distressed.

26:33And so I think using a projection and saying, I'm going to build this, I know it's going to be wrong, but I'm going to use it to get an idea of what a reasonable growth target is where I'm not backed into a corner if I don't hit it. I think that that's where we've shook out as well, organizationally, of how we use our forecasts. I just want to say that the smaller your business is, I don't think you have to fit uniformly into a 12-month or yearly forecast. It's like what Mike's saying is - I completely agree with that. Yeah. Why are you doing a forecast? And the honest answer should be for inventory planning.

27:10it's like everything else is just because you want to you know have a number to show your team or like to a goal to rally around those things are noble and good but like the real brass taxes you're doing your financial forecast so you can buy the inventory to hit that and if you're a smaller brand and you don't want and because it's very hard right i had to do november and december forecast for next year before november december of this year happened so it's like what if this year sucked? What if this year was awesome? And now I'm actually projecting that we'll be smaller next year. However long your inventory buying cycle is, that could be your financial forecast.

27:45If you have a six month's turn on inventory, just do that as your forecast. This is what we're going to do in the next six months. And if you want to show investors or the bank a different number, I guess make it up on the fly, but you should only commit to the minimum number that you have to. Yeah. I mean, your forecast always gets worse. It always gets worse the further out you go, I think is the principle you're saying, Sean. And so it doesn't matter how smart you are. And especially, I think, with the, as we said, like, if you had to make a 12-month forecast in January, could you have foreseen everything that happened this year?

28:15Like, no, that would be impossible. And so the further out you have to go, the more disruption and the more events that you couldn't possibly know about are going to happen between here and there. I'm about to name the greatest Shopify brands of all time. Ridge, Hexclad, True Classic, Dr. Squatch, Fortin' Leather Goods, Princess Polly, Kitsch, Pit Vipers, and hundreds more. What do these brands have in common? They're all using Revo. The number one for tension, accounts, loyalty, memberships, referrals, cashback, everything app on Shopify. What makes Revo so special? It's because they're bootstrapped.

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29:32They brought that as a feature for everybody. I am a Revo stan. I've been a Revo stan. They helped us run the best sweepstakes ever back in 2023. Revo is modern. They are quick. They are fast. And they're trying to cram value into this Shopify app. I endorse them. I love them. Check it out. Revo, I love you. You're a great sponsor. You're a great tool. You're my best friend. Talk to you guys later. Goodbye. Dude, okay. I was just going through my old notes because I have notes from every year, right? And in 2021, I'm like, look, by 2025, we'll be doing a half billion dollars a year. I'm like, we'll be doing 500 million every single year in revenue.

30:11I'll tell you, we're not doing that this year. So 2021, me, totally f***ed that up. I had no idea what the future was going to behold. I was coming off of a COVID high being like, hey, if these growth rates continue, you i guess i'll be the biggest company in america and that didn't happen matt you were going to say something i think having a good scenario planning muscle is is a is a like a really good skill like develop as like for a company so like what jason and mike are saying i think is right you know having a baseline budget that you're like i feel really good i think we can hit like we can definitely hit this that's one and then just knowing your scenarios like upside or downside and like what happens and then what parts of the company needs to change if you do start to outperform.

30:55So like what Jason's talking about, we didn't know that we were going to double. It's like, imagine the, like the stress that puts on a business to try to keep up to that pace. Now, just inventory and cash cycles, like it's very difficult on both ends of a miss. So I think knowing your scenarios up and down is good advice. Um, and I think the other thing that Jason's hitting on like and what I wanted to get at when it comes to like having a number that's having a budget that's like you can hit it that's really important for your team like nobody on a team likes to feel like they're losing so if you said we're going to grow 100 % and then you grow 75 % your team's going to feel terrible and you'll feel bad but if you said you were going to grow 50 and you grew 75 you're going to feel like a freaking rock star yeah so like expectations are super important for how you feel about your company.

31:46Yeah. Or you say you're going to grow 100%, you grow 75 % and you're like, well, that's still pretty good. Then they're going to learn that they can miss their numbers. Right. Yeah. Right. We missed about 25%. It's still good. We did an exercise that was really helpful where we looked at, okay, out of every, you know,$100 in revenue that comes in, what percentage goes to different things and kind of dreamed up like, well, what is the ideal P &L for our business? How do these percentages work? And this is one of the reasons why I think in general having projections and goals that if anything undershoot what you're capable of instead of overshoot.

32:22It's really easy once you've done this exercise to understand why that's so important. Because if you are undershooting on your demand that's available to you, for example, Jason's 2022 example, you can always pull back on marketing. You can always goose margins. You can always hire more people. and I don't think that the demand evaporates or your business is distressed in any way. But the opposite side of that is devastating. If you think that personnel, for example, is gonna be 10 % of every$100 that comes in, but you miss your sales targets by 33 % and now personnel is 14 % or 15%, these are the type of things that can just wreck your P &L.

33:07And you really, you get out of proportion, I guess is the way that I would say it. And when you get out of proportion by being overly aggressive, all of the consequences of that are far, far worse than getting out of proportion by underestimating your demand. Those are good problems to have. Those are solvable problems. And if anything, your margins just blow out for a period of time while you catch up. Whereas if you get the opposite situation, like you get super distressed. And so I actually, one of the guys on my team, he made a really good observation because we set some goals this year that were overly ambitious.

33:45And he said to me last week, you know, I think I just got a little bit greedy for growth. And I didn't realize that if we just grow this business at 10 to 12 percent for the next 10 years, it's a billion dollar revenue company. And so it doesn't have to happen all at once. You know, 10 or 12 percent is very achievable. But when you put up goals at our scale of 20, 25, 30 percent, it's it's I mean, you said it, Jason, it just gets harder. The growth gets harder the bigger you get. And you have to develop kind of a respect for that. A lot of large numbers, man. Like when you started, you got to put up like 20 percent on hundreds of millions of dollars.

34:20It's like you need to go find 30, 40, 50 million dollars. Yeah. Or like another way of saying it, Matt, is it took us maybe three or four years to get to 40 million in revenue. But when you're at 200 million in revenue, growing 20 % means basically adding on the entirety of our company that took us four years to build. Right. It's like not so simple, you know, and really the thing that we've learned is we've got a lot of really healthy parts of the business. And then we've got these other parts of the business that have been boom or bust. But when you want to grow at 20 percent and you have several different aspects of your business, it's very difficult.

35:00None of your parts of your business can really take any kind of a step back and you still hit that number. Right. Okay, I have a question, Ted. I just want to know, because you said 20 % a couple of times. I'd love to hear what you guys think is a good growth rate. 20 % to 30 % compounded over time is insane. So that's insane. So, Mike, what do you think a business in your size, not necessarily your business, but a business in your size, what do you think is a good growth rate? Like that, that you'd, you'd be like, this is great. Or I'm proud of this. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think in my mind, Jason, it's drifted downward over the last year or two, because I've come to respect how hard the growth becomes as you get bigger.

35:47And so like, I think most public companies are trying to grow profits, you know, 10 to 15 % and they're, you know, a billion plus. And so in the range we're in, I think more like, you know, 15 to 30 % is probably a window. And if you're at the higher range, I mean, we had a year in 23 where we grew about 100%. You know, we added almost 100 million in revenue in a year. and so it feels easy when you have a year like that and then I think 24 and 25 have just reminded me like man that is so abnormal so atypical that really if you're if you're in the 20s or or low 30s then man you are crushing it at this size that probably might take today if you don't have a network effect or compounding nature to your business if you're hitting 33 growth you are I I mean, that is top decile.

36:43It is, I mean, it is creme de la creme doing that. And Taylor Holiday has a chart and hopefully we can find it and share it. But it's from like 2024, it went super viral. And it was about like, this is, he called it, this is the Mona Lisa of e-commerce. And it was a business that started out with a lot of new customers. And then over time, the returning customer rate, just every day, 80 % of their transactions were returning customers, 20 % were new customers. That is some sort of network effect compounding out of itself, right? That is, I'm sure, the same chart that Groons has. Groons goes out there and they add auction and every day they add 1 ,000 new customers.

37:19But then next month, 800 of those people come back. The month after that, 750 come back, right? And so every day they have this compounding nature. Rich has the exact opposite chart. Me and Connor were talking that we have the Doomer version of the Taylor Hall and the chart. It's like, if I showed you my new customer rate over time, I've added like a million new customers this year. That means they've never heard of Ridge before. How did I find those people, right? That is, I made the joke that eventually I'll acquire everybody on Earth and then my return and customer rate will be 100%. Like that is the rate that we're going at.

37:53You're going to have to go to other planets. We're going to have to go interplanetary for Sean to continue to acquire. But I mean, it's such a great point that in durables, which all of us sell a durable, there's this kind of perverse thing that goes on that the better your durable is, the more problematic that is. If we sell you a water bottle that you can use for five years and it's great and it's going to hold up, awesome. But how in the world do we get you to come back to buy more? Totally. And this is why category is the most important thing. I think all of us have flirted with the idea of something you put in your body because we want you to consume it because we're very good at acquiring customers, but we have to figure out how to get that compounding nature.

38:32So to Jason's question, I mean, I'll think of, you know, on running is like the best consumer breakout brand. You know, it's very much rivaling Nike, right? I remember they were public, they had 75 % growth one year, right? So like that is not even top 1%. They're the best you could possibly do at that scale. And then it just goes down from there. I mean, Yeti this year, revenue will be up 2%. So it's somewhere between 2 % and 75%. And if you can consistently hit 25 % growth in your business, I mean, micro the numbers, you get a billion dollars in revenue. At 25%, you double every three years, guys.

39:10That's so hard. The reality is that it's very similar to investing. So if you look at investing, you look at the best investors, the thing that you see is their early career, they put up these unbelievable returns. You know, like Warren Buffett in his early years, it's like 100%, you know, 150 % years. And then, you know, people realize, oh, this guy's a great investor, plus they're growing their capital. And so more people are wanting to invest with them. And then they're hitting 50 % returns. And then, you know, they grow some more and now they're managing a few billion dollars and they're hitting 30 % returns.

39:45And then they're managing tens of billions of dollars and they're hitting 20 something percent returns. And the point is that by being good at something, you earn the privilege of scale, but that is always going to pull down on the growth and the returns that are possible. And it's the same way in business. It's in some ways the best people in business end up having growth rates that are fairly unimpressive because they're running really big businesses, that the game gets proportionally harder, growth gets proportionally harder, the bigger the thing that you're managing. And so it's real sexy to say like, oh, my business grew 100 % year over year.

40:22But in general, what you're really just saying is that you're playing at a level of scale where, you know, the big dogs don't really compete. As your growth rate goes down because you're dealing with a bigger business, you're competing against better and better competitors because you're managing more money and because the nominal impact of that growth is bigger and bigger. okay i gotta take a break and tell you a quick story from a few weeks ago we were at e-commerce fuel live this is andrew's live event that he does once a year it's like 200 brands they do a great job and this story is just it's too good not to share so like bear with me while i tell it and i'm at the opening night party i'm talking with ahmed ceo of rich panel one of the great sponsors of this podcast and ahmed and i are having a good chat and beside me walks in Katie to say hi to Amit.

41:11And Amit looks up and I swear to God, this is true. He goes, Hey, Matt, is this your EA? And before I could react, Katie absolutely tears him a new one and says, I am not Matt's EA. Matt is my EA. So if you ever wanted a lesson in how to stick your foot firmly in your own mouth, this is it. Amit could not catch a break the rest of this event, deservedly so, right? And by the end of it, I think she actually said, I will never switch to RichPanel unless you give me a 100 % discount. Now, I know this is a strange sponsor read, but I just needed to tell the story because I think it's kind of funny.

41:48So I don't think Katie's going to get a 100 % discount, but honestly, I don't think you need it. Switching to RichPanel is going to pay for itself anyway. They are genuinely one of the best teams to work with. I mean that. We work with them at our brands. They have more than paid for themselves in their software. So if you want to reduce tickets by like 30 % or more, save on your SaaS bill, go into Black Friday without any chaos, give Rich Panel a shot. Just go to richpanel.com slash demo. And Amit, if you're listening, dude, that's just a terrible, terrible example of what you say to somebody when you meet them the first time.

42:23Oh, and Amit promised me there's actually a super special promo code. If you use SorryKaty, sorry k-a-t-y you'll get 20 off your subscription give it a shot okay let's let's talk about gdp plus businesses so amazon.com this is not their aws services this is not everything else just like people buying stuff on amazon i think it might grow five percent this year right or you know early in the year i think they wanted to grow 10 right so if you're getting bigger than 10 growth on amazon think about that Logically, the whole pie is growing 10%. I'm growing 30%. That means somebody else is shrinking, right?

43:04It's zero sum to some extent, right? Yeah. We talk about e-commerce is infinite. We can go out there and generate demand. But inside of a marketplace in particular, if they're only going to grow 10 % and you're going to double, someone else has to shrink for you to get those sales, right? And it doesn't have to be in your category. It's not directly your competitor or whatever else. But Amazon does need to shrink someplace else because their whole pie is only inflating 10%. So you should also just understand like the world you operate in, right? Like if Amazon's only growing this much, if Target's going to be down year over year and you're up in Target, somebody's losing shelf space.

43:38You know what I mean? That's just like - And the bigger you get, Sean, the more that that share that you're taking is going to be coming from somebody with a big freaking company and a lot of resources, right? Like you nailed it. It's like, okay, if Yeti is going to grow at 2 % and I want to grow at 10%, then like it kind of stands to reason that I'm part of that has to be like, I'm pulling people away from Yeti, who's a multi-billion dollar company with tons of resources. Right. And that's not super easy. Yeah. And on.com, I think you control your own destiny. We're like, you're actually not directly stealing.

44:09Like you can go out there and get people into your business and into everything else, but specifically with the channels, right. I think about if you want to be a fast growing candy company in Target, it targets going to tell you the candy, the candy aisle is going to go 3 % this year because 3 % more people are going to walk through it. You're going to grow 100%. I mean, Snickers is selling less. It's like there's no other way to get to that number. This is also how you get bought, by the way, by the big public companies, is that you do come in and successfully compete and still share. And then they say, if we acquire this thing, it can provide the inorganic growth that we need to hit our numbers.

44:46If you look at public companies, public companies do acquisitions because they cannot get organic growth. Everybody runs out of organic growth eventually, right, Jason? Yeah. I mean, IBM was that way for decades. They were just an acquisition machine. There was no organic growth, right? I mean, no one talks about IBM anymore, but that's why. Like, they weren't able to continue to innovate on their own. It just gets so hard. Like, I think 20 % growth, if you are 300 plus million in revenue or even 200 million in revenue, if you can grow your business with a two in front of it and have margins with a two in front of it and you can have a path to sustaining that, that to me, it's hard to do a lot better than that, guys.

45:35On running is an incredible story. I saw them speak at the ICR conference last year in Orlando and it's like, it's incredible. They're like, they're such rarefied air. It's like, this is like the edge of the curve, right? And even we at Hexclad are in many ways like at a different, we're pretty far out there on the curve too. Not anything near what on running is, but you just see like the tail, like the tail, it just gets, it's crazy. But can we just acknowledge then like on running, a lot of this is just cultural phenomena. Like, let's not like, listen, they run an incredible company. give them all the credit they can.

46:13But like, guys, they're the most popular freaking shoe in the best customer segment. And they've been able to like, they're keeping it. Like that's culture. That is not like, oh, that guy's a genius. It's like, no, like you've just nailed a trend. And it'll end, it'll end, you know, like, and it's coming from Nike who, you know, five years ago, I mean, there was a point when we did this show early on where we said like, who do you think is the strongest consumer brand? And I think Nike came up a couple of times for us. And it's like on running is part of the reason why Nike has really sucked recently.

46:46And so like even when you have a period of the kind of success that on running is having, I guarantee you in the next five years, there'll be a period where the worm turns and, you know, there's negative growth or the growth is, you know, they totally stall out because that's the nature of business that you just it never goes on forever. It always there are these ebbs and flows that come to things. Okay. It's the nature of the consumer business, right? Totally. Yes. That's a great distinction, Sean. It's the nature. There are some businesses, Molson Hart posted a chart of UPS and FedEx price increases over the last 15 years.

47:25And it was literally just the same number every year for 15 years. It was like, yeah, we're just going to raise prices 5.9 % every single year. But that's not a consumer business. Really, that's more of a B2B service business, when you're selling consumer products, trend is a huge part of it, like you're saying, Matt, and you cannot stay on trend forever. That's an impossibility. Yeah. Dude, nobody cares if their oil comes from Saudi Aramco. You know what I mean? 80 years of the empire pumping out oil, right? But you know what people really care about? The shoes on their feet, right? And Nike did fumble a bag and on running was there to pick it up.

48:02And we wish them all the best. I hope they become the next Nike and suit out there and crush it. But like statistically in consumer, you're cool for, you're lucky to get cool for two years in a row. You know what I mean? See, for example, Lululemon, see, for example, Lululemon two years ago, I was like Lululemon. This is like the most, this is the benchmark for, for me in running a business. Yeah, I know. I know. But like, just, I'm just talking about me, right? Like I was, I was like, this is when people are asking me, what are, what are, what are our comps? Because it's very hard to comp our business, very hard to comp any business, but really hard to comp our business.

48:37I was like, okay, well, let's look for like really great consumer brands, best in class consumer brands are the comp, right? And now you go to Century City, Westfield Mall, and it's like, there's a sick aloe store, there's a sick Viore store, there's like Beyond Yoga. And it's like, Like Lululemon got outcompeted, like whatever it is, like they got outcompeted. And as Mike said, a big part of that is just like, it's just trend. What is on trend? And good businesses like Lululemon and like ours, you really have to be thinking about like, what are the upstarts doing? Like who wants to come and eat your lunch and continue to innovate?

49:20If like Lululemon dropped the ball, I think Nike has dropped the ball. and on running is like an incredible story. And if you look at Aloe and Viore, like their stores are sick. And like, I'm at Neiman Marcus buying a coffee and the girl in the line in front of me is wearing Viore. Like she's not wearing Lululemon anymore. There's like two different types of growth. And I think it's important to delineate. There's kind of structural growth where it's like we built stores, we added distribution, we made forays into product categories where we've established a beachhead. and that is like durable growth.

49:56And then there's like, I'll just call it sexy growth, which is like you're the, you know, the flavor of the month. And if you run a brand and you experience some of the sexy growth and we have at points and we've had other competitors that have experienced a ton of it, you know, Stanley right now, O 'Walla is kind of like getting the sexy growth. When you're planning your business, I think you really have to count that sexy growth as eventually it's going to zero, that that's not sustainable growth. So that's not something that you can feel like is actually yours in a way that you can hang on to because you know that it's that those people will go other places.

50:32And then I think the other point to what you're saying, Jason, which is is really worth mentioning, is that when you do put up exceptional results, other entrepreneurs see that. And there's going to be a flood of competitors that are trying to do the same thing. Like there's a whole generation of entrepreneurs that are looking at on running and are like, I want to launch a shoe brand and they're going to come for them. And some of them are going to find a way to knock the king off the hill. And that's the nature of capitalism and entrepreneurship. And it's beautiful. But like you can't have just unbelievable, you know, industry leading results and not expect for just a throng of really talented people to come and try and take that from you.

51:10Mike, I was going to make the same point. Great fishermen don't tell you where they fish. Right. Absolutely. We've seen Lululemon on like they were worth more than Nintendo or Honda. They were a$40 billion company. And eventually, I mean, millions of people tried to outcompete them. Eventually, someone will, right? And it's the same thing with Nike. They were the most valuable single consumer brand, right? They were worth$150 billion. And everyone makes shoes. Eventually, someone's going to make a shoe that's better or cooler or something's going to click. And that's kind of what happened. So yeah, I think that's sexy growth.

51:44And you brought up Stanley. They're like the poster child of this inorganic growth dying eventually, right? like amazing, huge, great outcome. It was super, super hot. There's no way to follow that up. You know what I mean? It's like - Sean, this dovetails into all of your, like the management part of what we wanted to talk about today in the pod, because really what it is, is about your organization being able to stay sharp and stay competitive. And it just gets harder too. Like when the organizations get so big, there's so many constituents, there's so many people. it's like on running was just way scrappier, you know, way scrappier.

52:24Aloe was just way scrappier. Viori was way scrappier. And like you lose your scrappiness and it just becomes really hard. You have to like, as a leader, I really believe this, like try to, how do you keep the scrappiness and keep the culture? And it just gets harder and harder and harder the more bodies you add. You know, it's one thing to be directionally right about your margins and another to be precisely right. And that's the big difference between saying our margins are around 30%, 20 % and knowing it was 24.7 % on Shopify and 28 % on Amazon yesterday. Those few percentage points add up fast when you're doing 20, 50, 100 million in sales.

53:09That's exactly where Sarah's pulse comes in. Saris gives you daily contribution margin reporting by channel, category, even down to each SKU. All pulled automatically from Shopify, your ERP, your 3PL, your ad platforms, everywhere. So instead of guessing or waiting weeks for finance to update your numbers, you wake up, you know exactly how profitable you were yesterday, and you make moves. Maybe Facebook was down 20 % because of free shipping promos, but Amazon held strong at 35 % that day. That's the kind of insight Saris gives you in real time. And contribution margin is one of the things that really matters.

53:53It's not just product cost, but it's everything, all the variability, shipping, pick and pack, packaging, returns. That's your true profit per order per SKU. You should know that. With Saris Pulse, you spot leaks before they become losses. Keep cash flow visibility every day and show investors or partners exactly what's going on. For a$50 million business, even a 10 % improvement in contribution margin means millions to your bottom line. And Saris helps you find that. We love it. I mean, there's every dashboard I look at running our business is coming out of Sarah's. So stop flying blind. Start operating with absolute financial clarity.

54:35If you don't have a Sarah's dashboard, if you don't have Sarah's Pulse, you're leaving money on the table. Check out Sarah's Pulse. That's S-A-R-A-S. And see how daily precise data can transform your business's profitability. In the last 10 minutes of this podcast, I want to talk about a tweet I put out. And this is in defense of all the CEOs. So if you want to listen to four CEOs, older white guys, defend being a CEO, this is a great section of the podcast for you. I'm going to Slack you guys this week. So you guys. I just want to say Sean just referred to himself as older. And that's amazing.

55:14I love that you're grouping yourself as older now. He's a prospective papa. Yeah, yeah. I got a lot of big things cooking over here. I'm going to join AARP pretty soon. So, okay. What I said is what makes a good CEO? And I think all you guys could understand this because you guys live it and you breathe it. But it's the ability to hear from the entire committee throughout the entire organization. We just did a thing at Ridge. We have a thing called the 12 things. And it's the most important things we're going to focus on next year. I did 11 of them. I'm like, hey, here's our top priorities. For this 12th one, I'm going to take submissions from the company.

55:50So if you guys have an idea, submit it to me. I'll review it. And then I will potentially add it to one of our key initiatives. and you know i got 60 plus responses i used ai to like you know chart them out and analyze them the whole thing and what what i saw is that people just submitted things that that are important to their department which like of course like that's what's going to happen i i didn't expect it but you know in retrospect it makes a ton of sense that like you know my coo i i love him to death he's like the most the 12th most important thing in this business we should change warehouses it's like, okay, that is not like a key initiative.

56:26That's like just normal business operations. He's like, but we should spend more time talking and focusing on it because it's important. And I agree it's important, right? The brand team's like, we should make a brand book. We should refresh our brand book. Like once again, an important thing, but not like a key company initiative up there with like, you know, scaling new product lines or whatever. So that thing is what makes a good CEO is that everyone in your company has something that they care about and they focus on and they think it's really important, but you have to hear all that information.

56:54You have to sort it. You have to find out what's really important and what to prioritize. And then you have to go all in on it. So what are your guys' thoughts on that to end the pod? The CEO is the judge, okay? CEO is the judge. Like the CEO is probably the person at the company with the best judgment, okay? I'm actually the president, not the CEO. I run the company with Danny. He's the CEO. But I operate in many ways like that. But the guy who runs the company or the woman who runs the company is the person probably that has the best judgment at the company. That's just how it works. The cream rises to the top.

57:35It doesn't mean you're the smartest people. There's plenty of people here that are smarter than me and Danny. But it's just like, that's the way I think about it. Like the CEO is the judge. You're the motivator of people, but you're also the judge because all these people have different competing priorities. and they want to do things and it's like Solomon, right? You just have to, there's so much stuff that there's a million little decisions that need to get made and you just have to be the judge and exercise good judgment. I think it's also, Jason, your CEO or president, when you're in those seats, you have so much more context and perspective than most of the people in the company.

58:14You can see everything if you're organized correctly and most people from their seat like your sean like your example like your head of supply chain isn't looking at anything from marketing and it shouldn't be you would be mad at them if he was totally right so like i think that the that's an important piece of this is that in the seat that you're in you have all the information the second thing you have is you have permission like you're literally a permissionless role like you could just make these calls without needing to go to a committee or going up the food chain like you're the top so i think that's important and yeah i think sean you're right i think that the job is basically putting the puzzle together like i spent my last week doing this like this is totally here's here's my take you guys know how like in uh martial arts they'll be like by knowing this pressure point you can incapacitate a man by pressing your pinky into you know whatever like this one part of his body but the idea is kind of like as you learn about the human body and you learn where to apply pressure, that there's these points on the body that are just incredible leverage.

59:20You don't have to apply just tons of force, but you can get the outcome you want just because there's so much leverage. And I would draw the analogy that being the CEO of a company is that exact same idea, that Matt, as you're saying, you are the one person that has context of what everybody's doing and is able to kind of compile and consolidate all of those points of view and kind of stand over it. And as a result, Sean, like you said, you're able to see things in terms of importance, relationships that nobody else can see because you've asked them to be specialized in their own little area and to care about their own little area.

59:58And that really effective leaders and CEOs, they're able to take all of that information and look at where are the points of leverage for our business. Where are the things where if we press, then we are going to get really disproportional return for it. And then you focus the organization on those things. It's very obvious in any organization, well, what are the things that can get better or that we could spend time doing? It's not so obvious. What are the things where by putting a pound of pressure, we can get a hundred pounds worth of outcome. And that is what really effective leaders do is they're able to use judgment and all the information that they're consolidating to find those and then focus people on those things.

1:00:45All right, dude, that's how we're going to end the pod. A little bit of a CEO tips and tricks. So we talked BFCM performance, holiday performance, what to do if you're missing, how to stay hot, how to stay cool, how to listen to the operator's podcast and we ended on being a cool CEO. All right, Mike, Jason, Matt, the Operators Podcast is coming directly in your guys' inboxes. There's a newsletter, subscribe to it, ECFFUEL. We have great sponsors all over the place. Here's the list of them on screen right now. Subscribe, like, talk to you guys later. Goodbye.