In short
OPERATORS Podcast Episode Notes
Episode Title
From Grand Slams to Flatlines: Inside the Operator Playbook for Surviving Stalled Growth
Episode Overview In this episode, Sean and Matt candidly discuss the challenges faced by brands when growth stalls or revenue decreases. They explore the psychological and tactical aspects of navigating such downturns while redefining success beyond mere numeric growth. The conversation aims to provide a realistic roadmap for operators facing stalled growth, encouraging them to assess their business's natural size, explore product and positioning pivots, and make necessary cuts or adjustments.
Key Concepts & Discussions
- Understanding Growth Stalls
- Initial Feelings: Discusses the emotional toll and challenges when businesses stop growing.
- Pain Management: The preference for enduring small pains over large, sudden ones, and the dangers of slow decline.
- Defining Winning
- Top-Line Obsession: Critique of focusing solely on revenue growth as a measure of success.
- Natural Size: Every business has an ideal size; pursuing growth beyond that may lead to margin compression and operational struggles.
- Redefining Success: Success should also encompass lifestyle and financial security.
- Financial Security and Evolving Goals
- Shifting Priorities: Discusses the importance of financial security for founders and how it shapes the definition of success.
- Adapting Definitions: Success varies with personal and business stages; initial goals may shift as circumstances change.
- Diagnosing Stalled Growth
- Internal Misalignment: Stresses the importance of cohesiveness across teams (leadership, product, marketing).
- Blind Spots: Identifying gaps and misalignments that may lead to stagnation.
- Types of Growth Stalls
- Tactical vs. Strategic: Distinguishes between immediate tactical issues (like changes in advertising effectiveness) and deeper strategic misalignments (like product-market fit).
- Market Realities
- Playing by the Rules: Understanding the inherent rules of different channels (e.g. CAC, advertising costs) and adapting strategies accordingly.
- Diversification: Importance of not relying solely on one channel or product; building a robust, multi-faceted approach to mitigate risks.
Practical Strategies for Operators
- Survival Cuts: Emphasizes the need for immediate, sometimes painful cuts to ensure long-term viability.
- Exploring New Products and Markets: Operators should expand their offerings and tap into new customer bases or channels.
- Adapting to Trends: Brands must stay aware of market shifts and adjust their messaging and positioning accordingly.
Key Takeaways
- Redefine Winning: Success metrics should go beyond revenue to include profitability, lifestyle satisfaction, and long-term viability.
- Natural Size Considerations: Recognize when a business may have outgrown its natural size and be willing to make tough decisions.
- Diversification is Key: Avoid reliance on a single product or channel; explore new opportunities and markets.
- Embrace Change: Operators should be willing to pivot and adapt rapidly in response to market dynamics.
Conclusion Sean and Matt conclude by reiterating that growth is not a constant; businesses must adapt and evolve to thrive. They encourage operators to be proactive and embrace change while ensuring financial security and a sustainable approach to growth.
Sponsors
- Fulfill: Cloud ERP for scaling eCommerce brands.
- Northbeam: Marketing attribution platform.
- Richpanel: Customer support and retention solutions.
- Revo: Loyalty and rewards platforms.
Subscribe & Follow
- [Subscribe to The Marketing Operators Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/@MarketingOperators)
- [Subscribe to The Finance Operators](https://www.youtube.com/@FinanceOperators)
- [Sign up for the 9 Operators newsletter](https://9operators.com/)
---
This detailed breakdown highlights the essential discussions and strategies shared in the episode, offering a comprehensive guide for eCommerce operators facing growth challenges.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOUnderstanding Failure and Growth
2:16 to 3:20
Discussion on the challenges of business growth and experiencing failure.
“You have me and Matt today, the two greatest operators.”
Defining Winning in Business
3:20 to 4:40
Exploration of what winning means in the context of business success.
“What, what are the, what are the various reasons?”
Identifying Natural Business Size
4:40 to 6:10
Discussion on the concept of a business's ideal size and its implications.
“Yeah, this is a personal thing for everybody, right?”
Evolving Definitions of Success
6:10 to 7:30
Insights on how personal definitions of success change over time.
“And that when you, when you decide to go beyond that size, so like for Ridge, it might be like a 50 million bucks, we would be crazy profitable.”
Navigating Stalled Growth
7:30 to 9:30
Strategies for addressing and overcoming periods of stagnant business growth.
“Let's talk about the natural size of businesses.”
Practical Examples of Business Challenges
9:30 to 14:03
Real-world examples of businesses facing growth challenges and how to respond.
“And that's why a lot of people, I think, get these visions of$20 million flying private, whatever.”
Understanding Stalled Growth
14:03 to 14:50
Learn how companies can suffer from a slow decline in momentum and the importance of alignment within teams.
“This is that, this is that in between where things used to work or were working like they're just working a little bit worse now.”
Practical Examples of Stagnation
14:51 to 16:41
Explore two case studies of brands that failed to maintain growth due to misalignment and market readiness.
“So I had an agency business that was most of my agency clients, right?”
The Right Product at the Wrong Time
16:42 to 17:28
Discover how leadership misalignment and product readiness can hinder a brand's success in the market.
Data-Driven Business Insights
17:29 to 18:50
Learn about the importance of data accuracy and analytics for business growth and profitability.
“So like you need more channels or more markets or more products now.”
Show all 23 chapters
Tactical vs. Strategic Growth Stalls
20:41 to 23:08
Differentiate between tactical and strategic reasons for stalled growth and how to identify them.
“Like I'm a brand I've built to like 10 million, 15 million, 20 million purely on like influencer or Facebook ads or something.”
Adapting to Market Forces
23:09 to 26:13
The importance of flexibility in business strategy to adapt to changing market dynamics and rules.
“Like you did, like I've had to flip that on its head in companies I've invested in or owned.”
Identifying Market Limitations
26:14 to 28:00
Understand how to recognize when your product market fit has limitations and the steps to pivot.
“I'm just going to play it to the absolute extreme.”
Understanding Growth Challenges
28:00 to 29:40
Learn about the challenges businesses face when growth stalls and strategies to overcome them.
“I'm like, we're crossing off whole cities of people at this point.”
Adapting Strategies When Growth Stops
31:59 to 40:08
Explore how businesses can adapt their strategies when they encounter stalled growth.
“Let me ask you this then, Sean, or I guess like number one, where do you want to go with this next?”
Challenges in Product Growth
42:12 to 45:09
A discussion on the difficulties product companies face in scaling and adapting.
“Like if you're an agency, that's a great thing.”
The Nature of Consumer Brands
45:11 to 48:20
Exploring how consumer brands evolve and face challenges in maintaining relevance.
“Like when I talk to founder, Sean, it's often a big pushback though.”
Service vs. Product Business Dynamics
48:21 to 50:46
Analyzing the advantages of service businesses over products in revenue predictability.
“They were on billboards, the whole thing.”
Trends and Brand Positioning
50:47 to 56:06
The importance of adapting brand positioning to align with current consumer trends.
“So this is what people need to be doing.”
Adapting to Consumer Trends
56:06 to 57:26
Learn how to pivot your brand strategy based on emerging consumer concerns.
“But like the consumer shifted or like a whole new type of consumer problem showed up and that we were in the right position to actually take advantage of it.”
Defining Success Beyond Growth
57:26 to 59:11
Understand the importance of redefining what success means for your business.
“It goes down to the people piece, but let's bucket up this advice to these customers, right?”
Embracing Change and Life-Changing Opportunities
59:11 to 1:01:04
Explore the significance of seizing opportunities that can alter your life and business.
“I think, uh, I think the operate paranoid thing goes hand in hand with that.”
Stress Management and Decision Making
1:01:04 to 1:02:49
Discover how financial security impacts stress and decision-making in business.
“If you have$30 million, someone offers you 15, if you already have 30, yeah, yeah, it doesn't help.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00You have me and Matt today, the two greatest operators. We're here to talk about what it feels like to fail. Probably the hardest thing to do as an operating team is the diagnostic work that tells you why growth is stalled. Everyone would rather take a little bit of pain all the time than to take a massive, a massive amount of pain all at once. Sometimes super fast growth is just going to mask a whole bunch of things. Yeah, look, and if you only like your business when it's growing and you don't like your business when it's shrinking, it's like, yeah, maybe you don't like your business, right?
0:29It's really hard to be awesome forever. Welcome to the Operators Podcast. But before we get started with today's episode, I want to thank the six sponsors that make this podcast possible. Fulfill, Northbeam, Sarah's Postscript, Revo, and Rich Panel. Could not do the show without you. Here we go.
0:57Jones Road Beauty, Cody, this ad read is just for you. I use Fulfill. Grunz use Fulfill. Kats uses Fulfill. HexCloud uses Fulfill. Why did we all choose Fulfill? Fulfill will help you move off in a matter of weeks. There's no expensive middleware. There's no third-party developers. There's no consultants of Upwork you got to hire. Fulfill will do everything. You can be live in a couple of weeks for order management, inventory management, accounting, EDI, purchasing, and manufacturing. All of those, that's the full soup to nuts modules that they offer. Pick one, choose one, do all of them, whatever.
1:32Fulfill is here to make stuff work for you. There's a reason why CutSlept Nutsweet. There's a reason why Groons, the greatest e-com brand of the past five years, was looking at all of them and they chose Fulfill. Have you seen my eight sleep scores? I'm getting 80s, 90s every single night and that's because Fulfill. I'm sleeping soundly because I know Fulfill is working seamlessly behind the scenes to deal with all of my order volume. If I do 1 ,000 orders or 10 ,000 orders, Fulfill does not care. It pipes those orders directly to my 3PL and takes care of everybody. They are the number one ERP for this podcast for a reason.
2:04They're our number one sponsor. I use them. Kutz uses them. HexCloud uses them. Groons uses them. Everybody uses them. I mentioned the Operators Podcast and you can use them too. Thank you so much for being the number one sponsor. Thank you, listener, for listening and I'll talk to you later. Goodbye. Welcome to the Operators Podcast. You have me and Matt today, the two greatest operators. We're here to talk about what it feels like to fail. So this is a different type of conversation. This podcast is typically just us dunking, us winning, us hitting grand slams. But even the greatest brands only hit 50-50, right?
2:40It's really hard to be awesome forever. So we are here to explain why brands might not be winning all the time. And if you aren't winning right now, help coach you back to a winning position. Isn't that right, Matt? What else are we doing today? Yeah, dude. It's what do you do when you stop growing? And that could mean a lot of things. That could mean like bottom line starts to shrink. So I've got a guy I was talking to. Part of the reason I wanted to talk to you about this, Sean, is I was talking to a younger founder last week and he's got so much margin compression this year. He's like, my bottom line is shrinking now for the first time in his business's history.
3:19revenue is kind of flattish maybe up a little bit but bottom line is actually like receding that sucks um and it got me thinking that you know this year there's a lot of variables like there's a lot of volatility in every year but there's always people who are not growing and like we should actually talk about that like what happens when you start to feel like you're just not winning anymore and winning in our business usually means growth um so yeah it's like how do you deal with this? What, what are the, what are the various reasons? How do you think about it, Sean? Like, that's why I wanted to talk to you guys is like, what would you, what would you do first?
3:59Right. Like, Oh, the wallet category is dead. Like, it's just not growing anymore. What do I do? Um, you know, and then additionally, I think we should define what winning is. So I think that's helpful for everybody. And we should talk about, you know, being in this messy middle of like you have something that worked at one point, it's starting to look like it isn't working. That is the toughest place to be because if you fail, like if it's an outright failure, that's very fast and that's actually very easy to deal with, right? Like if something explodes, there's nothing left, but this is like where you have a broken leg and you're kind of limping along and you don't know what to do to get better.
4:37So, um, yeah, totally. Um, so why don't we start with this. What, let's just define winning. What is your, what's your definition? Yeah, this is a personal thing for everybody, right? So you said in consumer, typically winning is growth. And I would say that is like the de facto response. It's like top lines growing. That's what people care about. Like it is, it is horsepower in a car number. Like you, you buy the car with the biggest horsepower, right? Cause that's, that's the better one. It's obviously more nuanced than that. It know, weight. It doesn't take into account like the nimbleness, right?
5:14A Miata is actually a great car. It has 200 horsepower. So I do think most people just consider top line growth to be that winning thing. And this podcast is to challenge you to think about different ways to win, right? It's harder to accept, but like, I think having a good lifestyle is the ultimate win, right? you know we i said so this to my cmo connor yesterday ridge is a very difficult brand to get to 500 million dollars we're still on that journey we're trying to get to 500 million dollars in revenue it'd be the easiest brand at 50 million dollars i could have like a 20x mer i could have probably 50 net operating margins i could just be balling out at a 50 million dollar a year business right and you should just look at those facts in your business like should my business be bigger than it is we're trying to make ridge as big as possible and it's like we're stuck in a balloon and like i'm trying to like push out against against the elastic right um where a lot of businesses should naturally be smaller so that's like my my first discussion point is that defining winning and it it doesn't just have to be top line number go up you know it i don't hear too many people say this often, but I have definitely written about this, that every business I think has an ideal size, right?
6:38And that when you, when you decide to go beyond that size, so like for Ridge, it might be like a 50 million bucks, we would be crazy profitable. You're making a conscious decision to try to do something harder, more difficult. You're going to give up like actual margin percentage. Like you're going to give up profitability as a percentage to go chase something else that you guys have all agreed to say, like, we're going to set a new definition of winning and we have a different vision for the future. I really think a lot of entrepreneurs should look at their company, like the company that they're starting or that they're in and really be critical about where is this thing going to be the most fun to run?
7:17Like most enjoyable. And then if you haven't selfishly, like this is a very selfish thing, but if you have not gotten to like a financial security position from your company yet like that should be priority one like you got to get there like get some money out of the damn company in some way so that you can actually like step back and then define what winning is to you personally because i think like at the beginning sean you'd probably agree like winning is probably survival so like base level winning is just like i'm in the game and i'm still in the game i haven't got my ass knocked out yet.
7:51Yeah. A lot of great nuggets in there. Let's talk about the natural size of businesses. Ridge Wallet, the natural size of that business is$50 million. To get to 200 million, I've had to change the business. So it's like, if you're not willing to change your business to hit your revenue targets, it's like, then you'll always be suffering. right so to change the business i had to build all these new product lines and take risk and challenges and take failures and like confront that and if you're not doing that then you're probably stuck in the natural size of your business we we have a friend they do they were doing t-shirts okay t-shirts is a very very very hard business and they were doing you know five million a year doing t-shirts that business probably shrunk to three million dollars you're doing t-shirts then they took all that creative energy to make t-shirts and they started making board games, now that business will do$15 million off of board names, right?
8:48So they've changed their business because the natural size of that business should be bigger now, right? So I think you're super smart about that. I guess, do you think though, just to hit on that, in that case, that's clearly not a TAM issue. The TAM on T-shirts is huge. It was just that particular business, the way they approached it, whatever the variables were, that was why it was stuck. Yeah. And it wasn't, it wasn't generic cotton t-shirts. It was a niche of t-shirts that got it. Like funny, irreverent t-shirts, like, you know, printed on demand, no wholesale exposure. It's just like a lot of things about that business.
9:27Like, yeah, it's, if they could get it to be bigger, but it was harder, then they found something that could actually, it naturally wants to grow right um the second thing yeah you you should understand that your goals or happiness will change over time because you're like you know you said survival yeah when i was 20 my business i just wanted to make sure i didn't have to work for somebody i just didn't want a job right sure yeah and and as you get older that those wants are going to change and success is going to look different. Right. And that's why a lot of people, I think, get these visions of$20 million flying private, whatever.
10:11Just, oh my God, I tell people all the time, oh my God, as soon as possible, get to a million dollars in the bank. You know, people say money can't buy happiness. It doesn't buy happiness. It relieves the stress of being poor. As someone who was poor, it sucks, dude. So whatever, whatever it takes, even if you think your business could be bigger and worth more in the future. It's like, I always push people to get that first million dollars in the bank. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Like define a security number. I think we, we forget that like first is financial security. Second is freedom. Yeah, dude, a million percent.
10:45Um, and if you're listening to this podcast, you're, there's two people, two groups of people right now. One are people saying, God damn, Sean, of course I want a million dollars. You're so out of touch. Okay. I agree with you. There's a segment where people being like, I, my business is worth more than that. I don't care. I'm going to wait. Those are the people I'm trying to speak to right now. They are at risk. It's like, just sell some equity to somebody at some point. You just get a couple million dollars and nine out of 10 times you will thank me later for doing it. Yep. Okay. So definition of winning, right?
11:19That's going to change based on stage of company and your own ambitions and your own vision. So like, I think that's great advice. It's easy to get a little obsessive about the category you're in or categories and TAM and like the mechanics of things and forget that like the business is actually here to serve you. It's not the other way around. So I think that's a great advice, Sean. So let's say like somebody's super clear on their definition of winning. Uh, and in consumer, I'm going to say like, you probably want that to be bottom line health as a minimum, and then growth of some kind as like your upside, right?
12:06That's how you feel, you know, like you're, you're, you've got momentum. Maybe momentum is the right word. Maybe it's not growth. Like you feel like you have momentum in the business. Okay. What, how do you think then? Like Ridge is not, Ridge is like any other company. all people know you for is like, Sean just seems to crush all the time. There's clearly been moments where like, you've hit plateaus, you've hit like these things where it's like, this is actually really hard right now. I don't know if you want to talk about specific ones, but I'd love to know like, if you had a brand and that brand was on track to be flat this year, how are you thinking about solving that problem?
12:44And you know, like, no, no, no, this should be a lot bigger. Like the TAM is there, we can do it. We have a great product. Our customers like us. We're just not growing. Yeah. I mean, this podcast is the most difficult advice to ever give someone, right? And it's so dependent on the business and the scenario and everything else. Of course. We were just talking to Danny, who is the founder of IM8 with David Beckham. and he i am eight started as a covid testing company that was public in hong kong right they're responsible for every covid test in hong kong at one point they had 2 000 employees he cut it down to less than 100 employees when covid went away right so he did a very drastic thing to save that business like and the most difficult you have to read the fog of war where it's like, okay, we're not growing.
13:42Is this going to get a lot worse? Is this a macro effect? Is this an us effect? Or do we just need to hunker down and get through this period? And everyone's response is to hunker down because everyone would rather take a little bit of pain all the time than to take a massive amount of pain all at once. And that is where companies die, the slow bleed out, right? Like not doing the drastic thing, thinking things will naturally get better um you have to like understand that the natural state of the universe is going horrible it's like it's like it's it's it's it's entropy right it's all these things fall apart i think momentum is a good way to talk about it it's like once your momentum starts to slow down what are you going to do to pick it back up so let's actually start using practical examples um because really like the scenario we're trying to describe here is not a massive success and it's not a massive failure because both those are easy ends of the curve right so there's a massive of failure, you go bankrupt, you do it again, right?
14:40It messes success. You know, why listen to this podcast? This is that, this is that in between where things used to work or were working like they're just working a little bit worse now. I have two practical examples. So I had an agency business that was most of my agency clients, right? Most of them were stuck in this area where there's, it's, and it's a graveyard of brands. You've never heard of thousands of brands that like had something got to five, 10, 15,$20 million. And for some reason they wouldn't keep accelerating. The momentum died. And usually what I think that is, it's a division of the company.
15:17So it's like the leadership and product and marketing aren't actually all in alignment. And the proof is they're using an agency, right? Like as good as an agency as I am, like you need to have all those things in alignment to actually hit that momentum. them. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that, Matt? No, I do. I actually have never heard that as like a first take. Like when I think of momentum slowing down, I'm like, well, is that the things that we've been doing are no longer working? Or is it like, is it a macro thing? Is it, is it something in my control? Whereas I think what you're hitting on is actually really interesting.
15:55It's like, do you actually have misalignment in the team ownership level or execution level, right? Like we just don't agree on, or, or, or like people are going in different directions. So we're not actually all working on the, on the right things. I think it's that way. I think it is the sand changing beneath your feet. So it's like something, something has changed, but you, you don't catch it because the leadership's focused on one thing, the product team's doing one other thing, or the marketing team's doing something else. And like a lot of, a lot of times I think about like the clients at the agency, they just brought a product that wasn't ready for the market or didn't actually meet the market it's like that's like that's what it comes down to it's like we we had a whoop competitor really awesome team really awesome people but like they were trying to sell a product the market just did not want but as an outsourced marketing team it's very hard to give that feedback to the team it's actually just as hard internally dude like it's really difficult to look at the product or or so like what you're selling or how you're selling it and then self-diagnose that you're doing the wrong thing like that this is just it's not going to work right um you know i don't know if it's a buffet or a munger or like one of the i'm sure it's like one of those like really old smart guys in business where they've got this analogy of like sometimes you're just in the wrong damn boat like you just need to switch vehicles like you're you're a talented uh like we've got a mutual friend who sells underwear and like this guy is like crazy smart but he's selling underwear so like there's always going to be an upper bound to what he is capable of achieving because the car he's in is underwear right like that's a difficult category to make work yeah yeah you know he's he's an f1 driver uh at the go-kart racetrack totally you gotta get you got to get in a faster car so i i guess i get that i think then like the then you got to go drill like you drill down so i think there's like growth can stall for tactical reasons and growth can stall for strategic reasons i think we talk a lot about the strategic ones on the show and we can do that today too but it's like oh you're like you just hit the upper bound of selling metal wallets on the internet, right?
18:08So like you need more channels or more markets or more products now. Like those are strategic things. So like growth can stall for like, oh, I've just done a really good job tapping out the TAM of the thing I'm selling with the messages that I'm using. Hey, you know what's important to your business? Understanding it. That's where Saracen Aletus comes in. Jason, what if I told you that our margins yesterday were about 30 %? But like, you know, there's a big difference between saying you're about 30 % and saying you're 27.4%, right? Like that level of precision can only happen if your data is rock solid and in one place where you can actually pull it from.
18:44That's where Sarah's Analytics comes in for rich. So every single day I'm going in there, I'm looking at my contribution margin. I'm looking at my sales breakdown, my sales by product type, and it really just starts shining a light into like the black holes of your business. Jason, what have you gotten out of Sarah's Analytics? Honestly, everything is at my fingertips. Our dashboards pull in from everywhere, from Shopify, from Amazon, from our ERP, from Costco, every single channel. And we go to Sarah's Pulse and we get our daily contribution margin reporting. We get all of our marketing metrics by channel, by category, even down to the skew.
19:19Everything is pulled in automatically. I get an email report in the morning. I go check things during the day. My entire team lives in this thing. Yeah. And everyone knows the revenue yesterday. If you ask any brand, they'll tell you what the revenue was. Maybe 20 % of brands can tell you their contribution margin and about 0 % of brands can tell you their profit for yesterday. And if you're not watching your profit on a daily or at least weekly basis, it can just get out from under you. To the Saris's team's credit, we have a daily growth dashboard sheet from probably 2018 and they're able to import all of that data.
19:54And the reason to do that is eventually Sheets just breaks. We ended up having three or four full-time people maintaining this giant sheet. And Serious Analytics, by putting it into an actual database with actual data connectors and pipelines, it just makes it more future-proof. I'm going to give you guys a real world use case. So I just had to set 2026 financial budgets. Serious Analytics made that data available in four clicks compared to 40 hours. It used to take me probably literally a week or two to like figure out what my projections for the next year could be. With Saras Analytics, I got it done in an afternoon.
20:26So it's like AI for your business knowledge. And if you want to check out Saras Analytics, that is S-A-R-A-S and see how daily precise data can transform your profitability. Then there is like tactical things, which is the things that got me to where I am. Like I'm a brand I've built to like 10 million, 15 million, 20 million purely on like influencer or Facebook ads or something. And I'm just, those tactics are just no longer working like they used to. They're getting inefficient. I can't spend a dollar, get a, get X return. So I think I'm saying all this because probably the hardest thing to do as a operating team is the diagnostic work that tells you why growth has stalled.
21:15Yeah. Well, I want to keep talking about the growth stalling bit because of tactics. Jordan from Instant Hydration is a great friend of the brand, of the Operators Podcast. We got an episode with him. And he talks about this concept of natural CAC. So Instant Hydration is the fastest growing hydration brand I've ever seen. In 11 months, let's call it nine figures in revenue just incredible incredible growth that i verify i've seen i've seen everything there's a real brand and they're absolutely killing it um and he he was the growth team at rise superfoods which is mushroom coffee and he was the growth team at everyday dose okay so what he explains like how he got through like figuring that out and he's like he talks about this natural cac on the platform that facebook wants 50 for a subscriber.
22:08And he's like, everyone focuses on trying to drive the cost of CAC down. And he's like, you're fighting against the algorithm. Like, no, Facebook wants 50 bucks for that customer. And like, you're trying angles and everything to get a lower CAC. And he's like, you actually need to switch the script and be like, how do I give them a higher CAC? How do I change my business to tolerate a higher CAC? Right. Cause he's like, look at a higher CAC, I can just scale more. My business can be three times as big. Sure. There's more nominal dollars coming in. All this to say is he's thinking about it like he is a block of jelly and a lot of brands think about it like they're a block of concrete they're immovable they're unwilling to change who they are but jordan jordan's like i just want to win so and that's the thing it's like when you're stuck at 15 million you're you're the concrete you're not changing your business to what yeah what the responsive forces are going to be which is really hard and scary to say when i say change your business.
23:03We're talking about firing people, changing your product, changing your offer, changing your prices, like doing the things that you do. Go to market in general. Like you did, like I've had to flip that on its head in companies I've invested in or owned. Like we're just in the wrong place. We were selling the right thing in the wrong damn set of channels, like throw them away, start over. Um, that was the Danny lesson, right? It's like the pivoting and moving and being super malleable is like really important. Yeah, bro. You, you, you got you got to be jelly you just got to roll with the punches you got to know that a bunch of stuff about your business probably has to change um and you you're not big enough to deserve to be immalleable you know what i mean you're not uh you're not walmart it's like you got to just yeah you got to be nimble do you know the the thing i'm i've been i use often in my company is like this rules of the game analogy.
23:56So like right now, I'll give you a good example. So for Pila case, I look at the TAM of mobile accessories and I'm like, our business could be a half a billion dollar a year business because the TAM is there just in case. Now we're not there because, and this is my assessment. It's a brutal assessment of my own company. We're not there because we don't like the rules of the games being played. So we've just opted not to play them. right and a good example of that would have been like phone case in uh mobile carriers you're you uh sean ridge is like new to the case industry but you're going to figure this out if you talk to the carriers in the u.s the history of the carriers is like for a long time they were the best place in the world to sell mobile accessories then the industry got bloated and this thing called return rates came in.
24:53So, and which is just the rules of the game. Like if you wanted to sell your product in a Verizon or an AT &T or T-Mobile, the way that they would do those deals is they would look at you and say like, yeah, I'll buy your stuff and I'll sell it. But anything I don't sell, I'm going to return to you. And they would just overbuy so that they would never not have product. Well, five, six years ago, I looked at that and I'm like, I hate the rules of this game. I'm just not going to sell on those channels. but I'm giving up like 70 % of the TAM by not being in those channels. Now, the rules change over time and now we're entering those channels.
25:26I'm doing the same thing right now with Amazon, Sean. I'm looking at my team and I'm like, we should have a huge Amazon business. We don't do it because we don't like the rules. We don't like that to be on Amazon, I probably can't do it with my brand. I gotta do it with another one because the price point needs to be dramatically lower. We don't like that it's a lower margin business with higher volume, but the rules are the rules. Like just like CAC on Facebook that you're talking about. Like that's just the rule. So if you want to win, accept it and play by them or just shut the up and or change your game entirely.
26:01Yeah, dude. And you can try breaking the rules. You can try forcing your way around it. But like eventually you have to give into market forces, which is like the rules are going to win. um mike and i uh we did a titans episode it's going to come out with um the utopia deals guy jabron and he's just like a master of this right it's a huge business dude like he's they're going to get to a billion dollars in revenue like he's the largest privately owned amazon seller in the world like the only people bigger than him are public companies uh the lesson i took away from him i didn't actually say this in the show so i'm going to say it now is like this guy is just masterfully looking at the board and he's like, okay, well, like, here's how the game is played.
26:47I'm just going to play it to the absolute extreme. Like these are the variables I can control. And I'm just going to do that at a, at a massive level because I'm okay with those rules. And most people aren't. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, it's like, it's, it's, it's game IQ. It's, it's being a perceiver, right? So being able to step outside of your business and really look down at your life and the tools and everything going on and being like, what am I doing that's not optimal? It's why Wayne Gretzky, despite being 5 '7 and 120 pounds was the world's greatest hockey player. He knew exactly how the game was played to a perfect tee, right?
27:24Well, it sounds like Jordan's doing the same with instant hydration. It's like he just understands the rules of the game. And he's like, I'm okay with that. I'll adjust my business to fit them. Yeah, yeah. So I would want everyone here to really try to perceive those things. I'm going to give you my second practical example of this happening. we've changed rich a bunch like 2021 we had an existential crisis because i didn't think the wallet business could grow anymore i think we probably did 75 million just in wallet sales in 2021 and i'm like guys i'm looking around there's nobody else like i'm like i'm like humans i'm like yeah i think that that year we sold like close to a million wallets in america and i'm like guys I'm like, we're crossing off whole cities of people at this point.
28:08Like we're getting every person on earth. I'm like, we can't grow anymore. We have to, we have to try different things. And the wallet business has not been the growth engine for Ridge for a very long time. Right? Like we're crushing it because I've totally changed what my business is. Right. I have five different business units inside of Ridge right now. And I run them like how yum brands runs Taco Bell and pizza hut and all these other things. You have one thing that's always killing it. You You have a couple of things doing okay. And you have one thing bombing. And like, you just kind of rotate that out.
28:35It's a, it's a hedge effect inside your own business. So that is the practical. I'm, I took my own advice. That's the reason I get a podcast. Dude, that's a great one. It's, uh, yeah, sometimes the, you're just up against a category and a market issue. Um, I actually, I, I, I'm of the opinion, I think most growth issues, like most growth problems are product market or category problems that are very rarely are they tactical like platform problems like you use the example of instant hydration with meta and cac i find that actually to be more rare we're like you're not growing because you're just unwilling to pay the price anymore right like there's lots of other moves for you to make and you can like lead.
Read the full transcript
29:22So like basically, you know, tactics within a thing that you're doing is sometimes it's more often than not, not the case that you're not growing, if that makes sense. Like, it's not like you just, you only get so much out of meta ads before you have to start moving to other channels. Like, I think that's just true. All right, folks, this episode is brought to you by our friends at Northbeam, the marketing attribution platform that every smart performance team should be using. Northbeam just dropped something game-changing. It's called clicks plus deterministic views, the world's first deterministic view-through attribution model.
30:01Well, why does that matter? Well, because traditional one-day click attribution is completely skewed towards bottom-of-funnel campaigns. It's like giving all the credit to the player who makes the last shot and ignoring everyone who passed the ball to get there. You know the story. Your TikTok and CTV ads are building awareness, driving engagement, lifting overall revenue across every channel, but your dashboard says they're doing nothing. Meanwhile, Google Ads looks like a hero because that's where people click last. That's the click-only trap, and it's one of the biggest myths in performance marketing.
30:35It creates a vicious cycle where you cut top of funnel spend, your awareness dries up, and performance tanks. Northbeam's new model fixes that. Clicks plus deterministic views actually shows you which ad impressions drove conversions. Not guesses, not modeled correlations, verified data. They pull direct impression level data from Meta, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, and CTV and match it deterministically using real identifiers, order IDs, hashed emails, logins, not cookies or fuzzy logic. It's precise, transparent, and built to close the gap between awareness and conversion. You'll finally see those mystery revenue spikes tied back to upper level funnel campaigns that actually deserve the credit.
31:24That's the North Beam edge. Clarity, accuracy, and confidence in your budget decisions. You'll know which channels are really moving the needle and which ones are just taking the credit. And yeah, the biggest brands are already using it. Manscaped, Dollar Shave Cloak, Hexclad, Gruns, and many more. So if you want to see what real deterministic view attribution looks like, go to northbeam.io slash demo to book a demo and tell them that we sent you. Because if you're still flying blind on clicks only, you're missing the full picture. Let me ask you this then, Sean, or I guess like number one, where do you want to go with this next?
32:02Because I got ideas. No, you take it, bro. I'm looking at the agenda, but let's go off the cuff. No, no. So let's just like, let's follow this. So like you, I think one of the things that I'd love to understand more from you is like this idea I saw that you wrote down in, in our agenda, it's like the hardest thing is that when something was working and then for some reason it just stops. Right. So like, let's just say forget, forget the, okay, I'm, I'm advertising on meta. I'm getting a certain amount of results. I'm not just nuts. I'm not just stalled now. It's just not working anymore. Like the, the rules that I, the things that I've been doing, they're just not working anymore.
32:47What do you do then? Like, how do you look at that? Yeah. And that's the toughest situation, right? Especially if you can't diagnose it quickly and you're like, just things stopped working. Right. Um, this happened a lot with SEO brands. Like if you're, if you're a heavily dependent SEO brand, a new update happens and you're like, I don't know why, but all my organic traffic has stopped showing up. Right. And a lot of it is we really are all just riding different waves. And it's like sometimes the waves crash out. And that is why this is – okay, if that happens to you, we'll try to figure out some advice to you later on in the episode.
33:23But like this is why you need to be diversified. This is like the whole argument to be omnichannel. It's the whole argument to have multiple product lines is that at some point something always stalls out, right? Right. Um, if you were, I mean, I think that one of the most memorable examples of this is there was a bunch of media companies who were built on Facebook traffic to their media. Right. Great example. Yeah. You remember this, right. And then one day Facebook decides to turn that off. They just, they just turned it off one day and they were big companies. These were not small ones. Like that was like Buzzfeed, right.
33:56At its heyday was, was one of those companies. buzzfeed huff puffs i mean the whole millennial wave of like content content engines on websites and then meta is like okay let's just do it on our own platform and they turned off one switch and it killed hundreds of businesses right um now meta is not evil for doing that right it's you you built your business on someone else's land but all of us do that it's it's it's all it's a feudalist system dude we're all building on each other's stuff um so yeah it's gonna happen the best thing you can do is be diversified to hedge against it. Do you, so on that then, what I'm hearing you say is you should assume that you're going to stall out and that you should be making moves now on the assumption that what you're doing will not work for much longer.
34:47So like basically operate paranoid. Yeah. Only the paranoid survive. Um, and I was, some of I've done this by my whole life and I've left a lot of money on the table by doing this. So the counter is I diversified away from Facebook ads very early. I was doing influencer ads and podcast ads and YouTube and all this other stuff in 2016. In retrospect, I would have made way more money just scaling Facebook until 2021. Right. But I didn't do it and I diversified really fast. And maybe my business is half the size that it should be if I just went on a lot of Facebook. but every year there was a 5 % chance I went out of business by not diversifying.
35:24And it's like, you never take into account the counter risk. Right. So that's, that's, that's why we did it. We just diversified it. At some point, Facebook could have just been like, we actually want$5 a click. And if it was my only thing I had going on, it could have totally me. Yeah. It's the, what you're, what you're hitting on is the most common, I think one of the most, if not the most common piece of advice in business is focus. Like don't get distracted. just like you've got something that's working, go deeper, deeper, deeper. It's the inch wide and a mile deep thing versus a mile wide and an inch deep.
35:55But the counter to that is in consumer, you are exposed. Most brands don't own their own distribution. We do not reach our own customers. We are renting distribution, whether it's from Facebook, Google, Target, Walmart, like Costco, we're always renting distribution. So what I'm hearing you say is it's the trade is worth it. Like the, a little bit of diversification, like layering it in over time is worth the sacrifice of focus because you get diversification. Totally dude. You know, I was just trying to think, I don't think any brand at any scale owns a distribution unless you're Walmart or whatever.
36:41it's like all all of us really are just we're along for the ride and the the more down to try new things experiment like just i think the higher chance of success and that is that is what the diversity ends up being is it a good thing is it ever a good thing that a business stops growing okay like do you should you be okay just taking a beat yeah look if your business is evil like if you sell fentanyl or whatever, I would love for your business to stop growing. Um, you know, this is one of the things that happen here. Um, if I run a service business and my service business stopped growing, so let's say I I'm a roofer.
37:28I sell, I sell roofs to people. Okay. And for some reason, my business isn't growing anymore. What would you do? This, this is almost like a child test. It's like I would try to get new customers, okay? And then if that didn't work, I would find new things to sell. Maybe I don't do roofing anymore. Maybe I also do gutters and I do whatever, right? I would expand the services and I would expand the customer base. The third thing is I would try to go do roofs in a different town. I'd be like, okay, I did all the roofs in my town. I'm going to try to do the roofs in the next town over. Think about that.
38:05Everyone knows that innately. If you had a service business, those are things you would try to expand. I never see brands do this. I never see product companies do the same thing. It's the exact same type of problem. Oh, I'm not growing. I should try to sell it to new people. Okay. If that doesn't work, I should try to sell the people who already buy from me something else. Right. If that doesn't work, maybe I should try to sell somewhere else. Right. Those are the three levers, people, product, place. It's like, that's what you need to focus on. Now, if you're not growing, your question was, Hey, you're not growing.
38:34Is that necessarily a bad thing? And that's when it goes back to the first thing, define winning. It doesn't have to be about that. Like not growing could be good if you're at the state of your business in life where you don't want to grow anymore. But by choosing to not grow, you probably have to change the economics of your business, meaning you probably kind of fire a bunch of people and cut a bunch of costs. Yeah, sure. Yeah, because you were likely while you were growing, you were probably investing ahead of the curve, right? So you've probably got people on the team that are for future revenue, not for today.
39:02um you know i sometimes wonder if the if the stall out is the forcing function that a lot of companies need to be more reflective because i think one of the downsides to fast growth and i've been a victim of this is like you you're just trying to hang on for dear life when you're growing really fast you're not paying attention to a lot of like the really nitty-gritty fundamentals that you would if you were going a little slower and you were like having a chance to refine the machine on the way up. You know, we experienced this with Lomi. Like we went way too damn fast, right? Like it was like zero to a hundred million in 18 months.
39:40It was just stupid. And we made so many mistakes because of the speed. And then we stalled out and then we had to shrink the business. But all of that was like net, net a good thing. Like now we have a better product in our subscription, like our net revenue retention after years better. They're like, all the other metrics are healthy. We just had to like sacrifice the ego of, oh, I have to shrink this company to actually get like to a much healthier place. Right. So like that part was hard. So I think there is an argument that like sometimes super fast growth is just going to mask a whole bunch of things that are going to come back at some point.
40:19And that the stall out is actually your chance to reflect and figure out what needs to be built better, like what needs to be fixed. yeah look and if you only like your business when it's growing and you don't like your business when it's shrinking it's like oh that's good yeah maybe you don't like your business that's good yeah that's really good i'm about to name the greatest Shopify brands of all time Ridge Hexclad True Classic Dr. Squatch Port and 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 retention, accounts, loyalty, memberships, referrals, cashback, everything app on Shopify.
41:03What makes Revo so special? It's because they're bootstrapped. It's the next generation of SaaS and Stuart is hands-on. He'll be in Slack with you, helping you achieve all of your goals. They are the number one accounts platform, loyalty platform, membership platform, referral platform, cashback platform, and more. They're bringing all of those tools to Shopify for one easy low price. I've been using them for over 24 months and there's a bonus free offer for everybody forever. They've just launched Wallet Passes and it's a brand new product that's free for everybody forever on Shopify Plus. What is Wallet Passes?
41:40You know when you go to like a sports game and like you can double click and there's like tickets, right? They brought that as a future 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. Why do you think product companies treat this differently? Like if you're an agency, that's a great thing.
42:17Like when my, I owned my agency and we started to notice like, oh, like this is, it's difficult to grow the thing that we're doing right now. Uh, how do we actually like build it bigger? We went wider in the services we offered. I don't know if that, like there was a trade-off there for sure. Um, we probably could have just gone deeper and figured out more markets and like, there's other ways to expand. Why do product companies feel like they're a little less. I guess, uh, comfortable with this. Dude, I don't know. It's, it's the biggest pushback I get from brands all the time. I'm like, you should sell different stuff.
42:52And they're like, like they treat it like they're like, no, I've invented the whole, the whole grail. It's like, this is what, this is what people want. Maybe it's because it's harder. It's more risky. Cause it's like, look in service businesses. I'm like, yeah, we do Facebook ads. Hey, we're doing Google ads now. Why hire one guy? I'm like, yeah, he does Google ads. So I'm gonna go sell Google ads. Right. And if it doesn't work, okay, that guy's fired. And I, I sell actually tabula ads now or whatever right um yeah in product business your product development costs can sometimes be quite expensive um sometimes not but often it is right often it's like really risky to try a new product and go to markets hard you have to spend money the whole thing so i think i think maybe that's it they're like they're worried about um the the cost associated they also get like they're they're worried about diluting the brand or whatever and i always point to like name a company they started selling one thing now they sell a lot of stuff it's like yeah like yeah the the original macintosh computers to iphones and apple tv plus subscriptions where they they make shows now i'm like those you look like every luxury brand every freaking one like you listen look at the history of them it's like hermes started off selling like horse accessories bro it's so funny that that was the exact example i had in my head I always both think I'm like, yeah, they sold riding gear and now they're selling luxury scarves.
44:14They have nothing in common. Yeah. And I think that that's actually like, uh, I like those, I like those companies because they've actually had to shift with like society, you know, they saw like the change from nobody rides a horse anymore. Guess we need to make somebody for people with a car. Um, whereas like most of us now we're shifting. I think our businesses have to pivot around channels and go to market and a little less like societal, you know, um, I might have to pivot at some point here with Pili case where like people might just not buy phones anymore. Like that's a, that's a real threat at some point in the future is like, Oh, the smartphone is just a stupid form factor for technology, you know, 10 or 15 years from now, I guess we're doing something else.
44:58So, man, that probably speaks to the paranoid thing. I'm already thinking of that. It's like, what, what is the other crap that I need to like start developing to, to build this brand over a long time? Um, yeah, you're right though. Like when I talk to founder, Sean, it's often a big pushback though. Like I can't develop why my brand can't have other products is, is the argument I get so often. Yeah. And I'm glad you brought up luxury brands because, you know, Tiffany's went bankrupt twice. it's like it's like i mean you know they they got bought for 20 billion dollars they're like they're you know the most prestigious uh julia brand of all time dude in the 70s they were trying to give away it's like nobody wanted it it's like yeah you you go through these these ebbs and flows as a brand uh goyard which is like arguably the most desirable leather goods brand of the past 20 years they were they were bankrupt in the 90s dude it's like a guy bought it like yeah it's like it's just it's what happened it's really hard to be it's really hard to grow forever okay it's really hard to be cool forever it's really hard to be on top forever like all of these things um it's like nearly an impossible game so like if you're going to be doing it uh change change is the constant factor they should count on every single year the rules will change every single you know it's uh what you're speaking to is the dynamic it's like why consumer companies are also not as valuable as other categories um i saw you and may tab going at this on x this week uh dude you notice i've actually i'm starting to say x on a completely different topic i'm no longer saying twitter i'm like holy it's working the rebrand is it's actually like it's burrowing into my brain that I'm now saying X.
46:49But I saw you guys post this about like the quality of revenue in a consumer company is much lower than even an agency that services consumer companies because the agency's revenue, number one, it's going to be contracted in some way. But number two, there's less question marks about like what drives their business. There's always going to be another brand, another product company that's hitting its upswing. Whereas if you're the brand, there's going to be questions about like, how trendy is this? Is the consumer going to buy this forever? You know, like, is this one of those sticky product categories that like, are you selling Coca-Cola or are you selling like the Segway, the little rolling machine that nobody used after four months?
47:35you know, consumer is so fickle that I think your comment on it's always changing and is, is actually like the most important one for people to take away. Like if you've stopped growing, one of the things that may have happened is you're no longer solving a problem that the broader consumer wants or needs solved, you know, or like they just don't care. It's like, You're just not cool if you were a lifestyle product. Yeah, totally. And let's really break down the advantages of a service business. And here's another example. Stanley. Stanley was doing$70 million a year. In, I think, three years, they got to$750 million in revenue.
48:16Yeah. Everyone wanted to be Stanley those three years. Everyone talked about how cool they were. They were on billboards, the whole thing. Now, this is two years after. Now, nobody wants to be Stanley. Stanley had to go through a 50 % revenue decline. They had to fire people. It's painful. It hurts, the whole thing. But the thing is, people did Stanley's ad campaigns, that agency. They still get a ton of business. They had business before. They had business during. They got more business because they worked with Stanley. And now they're working on other accounts, right? If they get fired from Stanley, whatever, there's more B2B.
48:52That's what you're saying is the predictability of revenue. so stanley right now is is it's an ebda trading business of probably 5x because they just they're like you just had a 50 revenue decline we don't know what this business is going to look like maybe they get 6x maybe get 7x right but the service business is probably always a study 6x in there it's like it doesn't have these ebbs and flows in the same way because of the predictability of revenue yeah it's uh one of the things that i think people would be surprised about with apple is how big their B2B business is. So like even the, you know, like who's buying iPhones?
49:26It's like a lot of companies buy iPhones. It's not just like consumer preference. It's quite literally like a bank is gonna buy 50 ,000 iPhones over the next whatever, 12 months. So I think there's a, if you're a product company, I think you really gotta think about, let me back up. If you're gonna be in consumer, You have to realize you are a product company. You're not just, you're a product company, a brand. You need to actually build a good product development muscle in the business. You can't just be a killer Facebook ads funnel guy and expect that to last a long time. That's like the riskiest position to be in is when I see a brand, it's like crushing it zero to$50 million.
50:16I'm like, there's no new products. and you're just running on one channel. I'm like, you are the most fragile thing in the ecosystem because too many things can change out of your control that kills you, like just nukes your company. So like you have to build product development muscle is probably number one. And then that's going to allow you to enter more markets and more channels and talk to different types of people, which is then going to get you the diversification. Dude, it's all fantastic advice. So this is what people need to be doing. And you and I both have service backgrounds. So I think it's easy for us to understand.
50:56You have an amazing product development team in Cycle. And you're always flexing that. And it's like, you got to sell to more people. You have to sell more places or you got to sell more products. It's like, that's how you grow as a business. And it doesn't matter if you're Apple getting into iPods. It doesn't matter if you're Hermes getting out of saddles. Like that's the solution. You know, what you are hitting though is, dude, like even culturally in my company, I have people who have allergic reactions to like adding more product sometimes. They're like, does that fit the brand? Like everybody has an opinion on like, does a product fit the brand, which is valid.
51:33Like you should come up with some kind of like set of rules for like Ridge isn't going to turn around and start selling lettuce. Like that doesn't work. Right. So you, there should be like, there's obvious things that you shouldn't make, but I, I don't know if you've had this experience, man. I, we are finding product categories that are like real debates here. It's like, does this, and people get really passionate about like, we can't, we can't possibly release that. And I'm like, well, why not? You know, like goes with the other, we sell. Yeah. But they get, they get crazy about it. Yeah. We fought a million times internally of rich it's we we call it the the product brand aperture it's like how big is your aperture right like how much how much light are you willing to let in uh and mine is bigger than everybody's that's what it comes down to i'm like yeah i'm like we're doing deodorant we're doing t-shirts we're doing bar soap i'm like yeah name a thing i'm gonna try to sell it because you said lettuce and i'm like well let me think about that when i sell lettuce that's good Okay, I got to take a break and tell you a quick story from a few weeks ago.
52:42We were at eCommerce 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 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 Amit, CEO of RichPanel, one of the great sponsors of this podcast. And Amit and I are having a good chat. And beside me walks in Katie to say hi to Amit. And 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 I 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 rich panel unless you give me 100 % discount.
53:37Now, I know this is a strange sponsor read, but I just needed to tell the story because I think it's kind of funny. So I don't think Katie's going to get 100 % discount, but honestly, I don't think you need it. Switching the rich panel 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.
54:08And 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. Oh, and Amit promised me there's actually a super special promo code. If you use SorryKaty, SorryKaty, you'll get 20 % off your subscription. Give it a shot. Look, you also, you had the foresight years ago what people might not remember because memory on the internet short is your company started off as Ridge Wallet and then you actually at some point it just became Ridge right and I still have people that I know that think of you as Ridge Wallet like they're just that's their customers of Ridge Wallet they're still not on the whole x Twitter thing like they still haven't caught up to where the brand is as a consumer dude that's that's most customers this week we we called customers for ads so i i dial them on the phone i'm like hey i'm Sean the CEO of Ridge and they're like what i'm like Ridge wallet you bought a wall off from us it's like yeah that's what everybody dude it just it take it'll take it it'll take two decades to get there but anyway yeah it's uh you know what it is too like i what i've experienced when revenue has stopped one of the things that we've like we've have absolutely experienced in our brands is our positioning just got boring like we just sort of we tapped out the customers who cared about a particular position and that we needed to move to a we need to try new messages or new positioning you know who did this i think um he called it trend trend surfing was will from i was it iq bar that we had on trends that's a concept that still sticks with me he's like you constantly have to be looking at trends and then how do you line up with those trends so like for him he did it with products and and like actual ingredients and function in his product we've done the same thing like one of the things that we tapped into in the last 12 months with with pila case was we were always our position was always environmentally friendly sustainable all that stuff well the last 12 months what we figured out is people started to really care about microplastics and their health and like i sell like the only thing that doesn't have any So that became a new piece of positioning, a new trend, same product, didn't change the product at all.
56:33But like the consumer shifted or like a whole new type of consumer problem showed up and that we were in the right position to actually take advantage of it. and we weren't precious about it. We're like, no, no, no, we can ride this trend or the local manufacturing thing this year, right? Like that became topical. We're in a position to take advantage of the trend. So I think if you're not in the spot as a brand to build new products, like right now, like you don't have a product on the ready to go. It's like wallet stalled out, rings are nowhere near ready, right? What do you do? It's like, well, you have to work with what you have And then that's just going to be like, we got to figure out how to sell the same thing to a different type of person now.
57:19And like, what else, what's going on in the world is probably the best place to start. It's like, do we fit anywhere else? Like maybe grandma's like weird wallets because they're indestructible or something. I don't know. Yeah. It goes down to the people piece, but let's bucket up this advice to these customers, right? All of our listeners, all of our great, great operators, fans. And this episode's about it's okay to not grow all the time. You should define what winning looks like for you, right? It does not have to be top line. That is the laziest horsepower type number. It's like, give me the bigger number.
57:58I want the company to be bigger. Winning can look like a lot of different ways, right? Two, your business probably has a natural size. And if you want to exceed the natural size, you have to start doing extraordinary things, right? Three, look at your business like it was a service business. You should expand places you sell, people you sell to, the types of things you sell. Number four, you do number four, Matt. We will go back and forth on these. What are some other things people should learn? Okay. So number four, there's an uncomfortable truth in consumer that sometimes the answer is your brand was a good idea for the moment or the product was a good idea for the moment, but the market shifted and that you need to shift with it.
58:40Totally. I think that's a good one. I would say number five is if you're going to reassess the future of your business, it's better to be more drastic than less. I think you should be like Danny from IMA. You should do the deepest cuts. You should get down to war mode and then start building it back up. You don't want to be one of these slow death companies, all birds in the public market. That is, if you're going to fail, fail fast. If you're going of move, you know, move with purpose. Um, don't just kind of stutter. Yeah. I think that's really good advice. I think, uh, I think the operate paranoid thing goes hand in hand with that.
59:22Like if you're, you should have some, some vision for the brand. Um, I know that's really hard to do if you're listening and you're like in the zero to 10 million, zero to$20 million range. because I remember those days. It's very difficult to think beyond like how do I just make the thing I have work at bigger scale? But I can guarantee you that if you take the time now to think about the next product and the next product and like how is this brand going to evolve over time and you can start investing in product instead of just plowing all your money back into marketing, that is going to pay off over time.
1:00:02Like you're going to have a company that is more resilient, is more sustainable. Dude, for sure.
1:00:10And this is a bonus one. If you ever have the chance to take money that changes your life, you should try to change your life. You deserve to change your life. Yeah. Don't be holding a million dollar bill and be like, yeah, but I really want$10 million. If you have no money, take the million dollar bill. Oh my God. And especially if you're young. Dude, like how many people, I mean, I know so many people who are like under 30 years old, they get offered a, like a price for their business and they just emotionally feel like it's worth so much more. And I'm like, but you're 27 years old and somebody is going to give you like two or$3 million and you don't have that.
1:00:47I don't, I cannot stress how much that changes everything about how you move through the world as a human. It gets so much better. If someone offers you life-changing money and it could actually change your life, you deserve to change your life. That's the thing. If you have$30 million, someone offers you 15, if you already have 30, yeah, yeah, it doesn't help. But really when you have nothing, I was 25 living in cockroach-infested apartments and dude, now I don't have to do that. Life's awesome. So anyway - Dude, Sean, I was never in that position. Like I've never been in a position in my life where like money was a real question.
1:01:32I'm lucky. Like I just grew up in a good family and like just everything kind of worked. But I can still tell you that like the first few million bucks, the first million, two, three is like actually life-changing. It just, all of a sudden you're like, oh, my risk tolerance now is much higher. Like I don't have to worry about my house. Like that's just a whole different shift. yeah i can eat any sandwich i want it doesn't any store that sells a sandwich i could buy it never think about it dude yes and that like that's a little thing but it's actually like because ultimately now too i can tell you this like i have a uh i don't know if you get this way with ridge but i sometimes still get stressed out about the business like i'll actually get like I'll feel stress.
1:02:22And what I've noticed is over time that I don't feel it for as long of a period anymore. So like now it'll be like, I get stressed in the day. And then by evening I roll around, I'm like, oh, but this doesn't really matter. Like I'll get to that place much faster. I wouldn't get there if I didn't have financial freedom and financial security. Like if I didn't have those boxes checked, I would be operating scared more frequently. And I find I don't make great decisions when I operate scared. No, I'm still an emotional wreck.
1:02:56But Matt, we'll end the pod there. Hopefully we gave some good advice to some people. That's our goal. No, that was good. 20 ,000 brands listen to the Operators Podcast. We want all of you to get 1 % better every week from listening to us. If that doesn't happen, I'm sorry. I don't know. Stop listening to us. Like, subscribe. We have a newsletter. We have an Ecom Fuel Partnership. Matt goes there every year and he's high-fiving people and hugging them. It's a great forum to share what's going on. We want to thank all of our sponsors. So we have 10 sponsors across three shows. They're all fantastic.
1:03:29So on this one, we have Fulfill, the number one sponsor, the greatest sponsor of all time. We have Northbeam. We have Saris Analytics. We have Rich Panel. We have Revo coming in, new sponsor. We have PostScript, old sponsor. We have a bunch of great people on this podcast. We have other sponsors on other podcasts. Listen to those shows. Matt, send everybody off. dude it's always it's always a pleasure just like jamming on this stuff i leave i don't know how people can leave these things and not get something because i leave and i got something uh and i'm the one talking sometimes so this is great man i listen to the podcast every week i think it's a good podcast yeah i always like listen to yourself it's it's like what do i need to hear today like what is like week old me gonna yell at me for is uh it's how it works all right dude that's the pod all right R medications!
1:04:18The roof Thank you.
From the publisher
“What do you do when you stop winning?”
In this episode, Sean and Matt drop the highlight reel and talk candidly about what it actually feels like when a once high-flying brand stalls, hits flat revenue, or even starts shrinking.
They unpack why every business has a “natural size,” why top-line obsession is the laziest definition of winning, and how to think more clearly about margin compression, momentum, and your own financial security as a founder.
From redefining success beyond horsepower-style revenue numbers, to product, channel, and positioning pivots, to doing the brutal “Fog of War” cuts instead of slow bleeding out, this is a tactical, psychologically honest roadmap for operators trying to diagnose stalled growth and decide whether to push for the next level or intentionally right-size the business and finally take money off the table.
Chapters
00:00 – Cold open: what it feels like when winning stops
02:20 – Why this episode matters: growth stalls, failure, and the messy middle
04:06 – Defining “winning”: growth vs profit, lifestyle, and the natural size of a business
07:18 – Survival first: financial security, changing goals, and evolving definitions of success
12:51 – Diagnosing stalled growth: macro forces, misalignment, and internal blind spots
17:42 – Tactical vs strategic stalls: product, category limits, and being in the wrong vehicle
23:48 – Playing by the rules of the game: CAC, channels, and market realities
33:13 – Diversification as defense: why building on rented land is dangerous
39:00 – When winning tactics stop working: SEO hits, waves crashing, and preparing for stall-outs
44:00 – Operating paranoid: assuming stalls, diversifying early, and the tradeoff of leaving money on the table
50:00 – Changing the business: adding new product lines, multiple business units, and hedging inside your own brand
56:00 – Rented land warning: Facebook media, platform dependency, and why omnichannel is non-negotiable
Powered By
Fulfil.io
https://bit.ly/3pAp2vu
The Only Cloud ERP Designed to Efficiently Scale 8 and 9-Figure Brands.
Northbeam
https://www.northbeam.io/
Richpanel
https://www.richpanel.com/?utm_source=9O&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ytdesc
Saras
https://bit.ly/9OP-Ytdesc
Rivo
https://www.rivo.io/operators
Subscribe
Subscribe to The Marketing Operators Podcast:
https://www.youtube.com/@MarketingOperators
Subscribe to The Finance Operators:
https://www.youtube.com/@FinanceOperators
FOPS — Sign up to the 9 Operators newsletter:
https://9operators.com/

