How to Hire the 5 Ecommerce Roles That Will Make or Break Your Brand

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16:59Matt Bertulli:I guess that would then bring us, Sean, to number two, which is head of growth, which I think everyone, if you listed it out, that would be the hardest role to hire.

17:09Sean Frank:Yeah, I'm glad the first 20 minutes were just basically us arguing about a controversy. I put it out in a tweet. I want to hear from Katie. You feel the strongest. Head of growth is the hardest. This post became because you had a hard time hiring a head of growth. So I want to hear from you the trials, the tribulations, and how do you think you're going to overcome this? How can we help you find the head of growth? What are you looking for?

17:30Katy Mimari:Yeah, well, head of growth wasn't the official title, but we are trying to hire in at a higher level because we've not had that extra tier in our marketing department and we don't have a CMO, which I think in your list, I think actually a CMO is probably hardest to hire for. But ideally you're growing them within, right? So, so then like you said, the reason it's hard for us is we're in office. That's, that's the hardest reason, hands down, right? Because I need somebody that's leading my entire marketing team to be in my culture, in my office, collaborating in real time and also understand my target audience.

18:12Katy Mimari:I will say for this last hire, we really prioritized experience and I had never done that before. I've always brought up people within the company and I have done this twice where I prioritized resumes and experience on hiring and I have learned the hard way that I do not think that's how you need to hire. I actually think hiring for culture fit and personality and energy and forget all that, even drive and ambition, right? Like how hungry are they and how excited are they about the job you're hiring for is way more important than experience. But to say growth marketing, so I actually think that's an easy one to maybe use an agency for because when I think about growth marketing I think they're inside of all of my ad channels all the time right like they are maverick Curtis right like he is your CMO slash growth marketer is he not yeah I don't know that I don't know what a growth marketer is I'm like my mark chief marketing officer dude you have everything you have to do everything in terms of growing us to that best level right and I throw everything in that thing and say organize all these people and get that movie, right?

19:27So yeah, CMO is a head of growth, right? He's in charge of everything. So Curtis, sorry for jumping in.

19:34Sean Frank:I was going to say in your organization, you have yourself running product, you have Maverick running marketing, and then is there like a third bucket ops? And is that like the only three leaders in the business? No, no, no. There's me. And then I do have a head of product, but I've worked with her for six years and her office is right next to mine. So that like I, they were just, I had eight people in showing me ideas, like just before we started this. Right. So she's right here on site going through hundreds and thousands of variables. And I've worked with her for six years. So I moved over to product and then I got somebody and then she got better than me, but I'm here to work with her on that.

20:11So we had that. Then we have ops, then we have marketing, we have retail, and then we have our CFO?

20:16Sean Frank:Yeah, because, you know, inside of Ridge, there's me, there's my CMO, and then there's everything else. And when I say me, it's really like, you know, we have Brett, who's like a chief product officer. We have Dano, one of the co-founders. Like, this is like the product side of the business. We have Connor running everything else that is marketing. And then we have ops to make sure wholesale ships and warehouses are full, you know, that whole thing. But I said head of growth, and it's just shorthand for modern CMO. The reason why a CMO would be the hardest thing to hire for is because most CMOs are horrible and would ruin your business.

20:48Sean Frank:Right. So like they would come in from PepsiCo and be like, oh, yeah, we need to hire 50 different ad agencies or whatever. Like it would be horrible for you. So I say head of growth is just a shorthand for a modern digital first CMO.

21:01Katy Mimari:Is that not also a VP of marketing, Sean?

21:04Sean Frank:Totally. You can call him VP of marketing. Anyone who's directly in charge of making revenue go up. This is this is the hardest thing to hire for. And why I said it was so hard is if they're really, really good, they're going to make a ton of money because they're going to make a brand or they're going to start an agency. So you have to convince somebody who's really good to not do those two things. And Katie, you brought up hiring people for men and growing them. That's the best way to actually hire a head of growth is hire a junior media buyer and invest five years into them and make sure that they don't want to leave.

21:36Right.

21:37Matt Bertulli:I was going to say, can we just since we're getting like practical and tactical here, Katie, you said that, which I agree with. I think that when it comes to marketing, hiring for experience is probably a mistake. Like market, I don't know if you guys know this, but like a CMO is probably the most, it's the shortest tenured C-suite position, like in the fricking world. And it's not even close, right? Like CMOs change jobs every like year and a half on average. And yeah, so, but I think it's worth mentioning then that there are other roles where experience probably does matter. Like I've had incredible success hiring very experienced product people or finance people or like a supply chain lead.

22:20Matt Bertulli:In that case, like the resume matters. Like they've seen a lot of, and they're more like systems and process. And in my case, product, like they got to know how to make stuff, like hard stuff. But I think on, I just want to be specific. I don't know if anybody disagrees with this because in marketing, I 100 % agree with what you're saying.

22:38Katy Mimari:That was my point. I mean, I agree too. You can't hire a controller or a CFO and they have zero experience. That's not going to work out. Well, you can.

22:46Matt Bertulli:It's just not, yeah.

22:47Katy Mimari:You can. And it just wouldn't be a very good decision. Yeah.

22:49Sean Frank:And so like COO is the easiest executive to hire for if you're because logistics hasn't changed all that much in 20 years.

22:56Katy Mimari:But and they don't and they don't, Sean, they don't have to be in e-commerce, right? Like you can hire a COO or anybody in operations from almost any industry and it's relevant.

23:06Sean Frank:Yeah, dude, they could ship doors. It doesn't matter.

23:10Matt Bertulli:Is your comment on it being difficult because you're in office? is that, I guess my clarifying question there is, is that because people don't want to work in an office or is that more market specific? Because I think you're in San Antonio and I guess that's not a hotbed for consumer. At least I'm not aware of. Every SaaS company says they are AI powered, but very few can explain what it actually does for the revenue of my brand. This is why PostScript's approach stood out to us. They don't just build AI for demos or buzzwords. They built it to drive real incremental revenue. PostScript's AI called Shopper, it shows up inside of SMS at moments with real buyer intent when shoppers are likely asking questions, hesitating, maybe even about to drop off.

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24:14Katy Mimari:No, we're like the only e-commerce company here. No, that's a good call out. I think if I was in Austin or LA, it might be a little bit easier. I actually think a lot of people, even when we posted this job before, I mean, almost everybody that was working remote wanted to be back in office, which is a trend I really like. Yeah. So I don't think that's the problem. I think it's more really we wanted to bring in somebody that had worked with a brand bigger than us. Well, just that comment alone, right, like narrows it down to a unicorn and all the things. And and I I won't I've made the mistake twice, guys.

24:54Katy Mimari:And I did it a couple of years ago with a CMO, which I completely agree. Like, I think the titles of C-suite's ridiculous anyways. And then the people usually running them are a lot of smoke and mirrors. And they're not they haven't had the positions below them. It doesn't make them good leaders. um, I could go off on that, but I think it's just the people, Matt, like just,

25:16Matt Bertulli:I think it's probably fair that, cause like, if you look at Curtis too, like McCoy is, is, am I fair to say Curtis that when you, uh, brought McCoy in or you call him Maverick, but so when he came in, uh, had he had any experience in this space at all? Or like, was that basically like, we're going to build him ground up? Yeah. When in photographer guys, Like he came in, no resume. I read this. My wife thinks I should have a job. And I was already interviewing someone. I'm like, sit down and interview with this person. And I liked him enough. I gave him a shot. But there's a magic to your growth.

25:54There's a magic to your marketing people. Here's why. They have to be confident enough that they can go out and spend millions of dollars and believe they're going to make it, right? They have to have the character enough not to screw you over. And then they have to be good enough people that stick with your company. Because if you're cocky and you're making a bunch of money, you are going to go someplace else and then someplace else. So once you find the good one, how do you lock that person in? So they have to have some integrity as a person so that you know the investment you're making in them, they're going to stick around.

26:28And I lucked out. I got all of those with Maverick, right? And so he just gets better and better and better until I can say, okay. Now, we still fight. I want you guys to know, everyone hears screaming matches, and we're like, we're not fighting. We're just talking very loud about what we think we should do. But I trust just as Sean does with Connor, hey, go run this very important thing. Our whole company rests on your shoulders while I go do everything else. And he trusts me to say, hey, go deal with logistics. Go deal with products. Go deal with all of the other things you have to do.

27:03Katy Mimari:I mean, we know McCoy very well. And I love his story and I love his energy. I do think that because he came in when it was so much smaller and he grew his experience and talent with the company is just invaluable. Like, I think it would be harder to say somebody could come in as a wedding photographer and go straight into growth marketing. Like, I think -

27:26Matt Bertulli:That's definitely not the takeaway here. The takeaway for people listening is don't hire a freaking wedding photographer. No, it's probably closer to like somebody who's got an irrational amount of confidence in themselves is not a total degen and is like digitally native.

27:42Katy Mimari:They don't even have to be digitally native. Like guys, y 'all know Kristen. I mean, she, I got her off the streets too.

27:50Matt Bertulli:Well, we know that.

27:53Sean Frank:Yeah. Okay. I was, I was going to say, but, but specifically if you want to hire a good head of growth right now, do not hire people off the streets, right? I want to make the comment of, look, Maverick is remote. You know, Mike, Mike Connor, I mean, Ridge is fully remote. And then Connor Rowling, HexCloud has a beautiful office. I was there yesterday, 60 people in office. Everybody's there except for Connor Rowling. He's in Denver still. And that's what I'm trying to highlight, but like the head of growth role, it's so valuable and important. You end up having to make caveats for things that you don't want to, right?

28:28Sean Frank:They end up making a ton of money. All of those guys are making 250, 300, 350 a year. Like they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars. They can set their own hours and you have to be flexible because you're counting on them to not screw you over, not ruin your account, not take on freelance clients. And like, that's just the reality is, my conner gets, people try to give him freelance jobs all the time. They're like, will you be my CMO? And it's like, it's just the reality. these. There's so much demand for this head of growth scale, no matter what you want to call it, like a VP of marketing or whatever.

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29:47Matt Bertulli:I want to move to number three, which is this, you call it the head of Amazon. Is it a similar dynamic, Sean, with this role? Or do you have a different baseline? Like, this is why this person is so hard to hire.

30:01Sean Frank:Yeah. I would love to hear you guys' perspective. Maybe I'm just really bad at hiring for Amazon or unlucky. I currently have a guy, Chris, who's amazing. If I told you how much money he got paid, you would be mad at me. And he lives in

30:14Matt Bertulli:romania or something he lives in serbia yes i'm definitely gonna be mad at you yeah i mean he is

30:19Sean Frank:he multi multi six figures living in eastern europe the guy the guy is the richest guy in his town for sure but it's because but it's it's because chris is very good at amazon and amazon's really hard because it's a bunch of little jobs right it's i think i think i'm talking about this it's like it's tribal knowledge like you all the only way to know what to do if amazon because oh they banned some listing or this thing happened or you got attacked is you have to have done it before. So like, unlike paid media, like meta, meta will sit down with you and tell you how to spend more money. It's in their incentive.

30:53Sean Frank:Amazon is a black box who wants to screw you over sometimes. So like, it's so, it's so easy to burn money on ads. It's so easy to lose inventory. Like, and then on all of that, they have to do all that. And they also have to not screw you over and launch the same product. Okay. Cause that's the other problem with Amazon. They see how much money you're making. And at any point they'd be like, I'm just going to drop ship this and I'll fuck up your account and steal a bunch of money. So that's why Amazon might be the riskiest hire out there. But I mean, Curtis, who's running your Amazon? The key who's running yours.

31:24I got no idea who's running our Amazon, but our Amazon sucks. That's because we've been bad at hiring, I guess. Right. I mean, we're going to do like 200 million on Shopify and 25 million on retail and 20 million on TikTok and like five on Amazon. Every day I look at it, I'm like, you know, IOL is not that important. I don't even know who runs the damn thing. So we go to the big money first and it just kind of sits down there and I just think it sucks.

31:54Matt Bertulli:Curtis, that person's listening right now.

31:55Sean Frank:He's like, my name's Bob. I've worked for you for 11 years. So Curtis, I mean, that's probably the big challenge to take away from this is my Amazon's up a hundred percent year over year printing money, dude. Like, you know, 8 % ACOS, just like printing money for me, best part of my business right now. Um, so that's the challenge walking up from this episode is, Hey, you can make a ton of money right now. If you just find the guy in Serbia, give him a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, run the whole thing for you.

32:23Matt Bertulli:Our viewership and listenership in Serbia or Romania is about to go through the roof. Katie, are you selling on Amazon, number one?

32:33Katy Mimari:My story is worse than Curtis's. I hate agencies. I don't like working with agencies. I don't really want to talk about agencies as it relates to hiring people, but we use an agency for Amazon. I'm with Curtis. I don't even look at the sales because it's depressing. Every day, Kristen and I are like, do we keep it on there? Do we not? Do we keep it? Do we not? but I don't care. I don't really want to be on Amazon. It shows the genius of Sean writing. That's how hard it is to hire that person. He got the right person. He's been killing it. And we have the wrong people or sorry, Bob, or whoever you are.

33:07And we're struggling. I mean, I would love to double it year over year, right? That'd be fantastic. But I'm just kind of like,

33:14Katy Mimari:no, I don't think we are doing it wrong. I think it's why like Sean's products are perfect for Amazon. Mine aren't. Neither, or yours might be, maybe. You probably are just sucking at it, but mine is not.

33:30Katy Mimari:I know, Curtis, I'm just, I don't, I think you too. It's premium bags, like they're purses. I just don't think we have products that people are going to Amazon for. I think that Sean does. I think a lot of people do. And maybe my product category is easier to expand in product expansion, right? But Sean's is easier to expand on Amazon. I think that's like, none of us are all the same. Like that's what I learned over and over and over again with brand is everybody's like killer at something and they're sucking at something else. And I don't know, I've yet to meet anybody that's like good at all of it.

34:03Matt Bertulli:Okay. A couple of things here. I think what's, I'll give you a statement. It's more true. It's true more often than it's not. most things sell well on Amazon. Okay. Most things. And there are exceptions where some things don't sell well on Amazon, but it commands 50 % of fricking GMV and e-commerce. Most things sell well on Amazon. The second thing I'll say in having talked to a lot of people, especially in Amazon, it's usually shouldn't be very surprising to any of us if one channel sucks and you don't know the person who runs it, but you spend all of your time with the person who runs meta and they have a whole team.

34:46Matt Bertulli:So we tend to resource the things that work. Right. And we're very deep in the things that work. And then these things that we've given no freaking attention to, we don't water them. We don't like there's there's just nothing over there. They don't work that well. And Curtis, like I suspect you could say the same thing about TikTok shops. Like now you figured out how it works and it's screaming and you're resourcing it correctly and it's helping your whole damn business. Whereas like I know somebody who's sitting there looking at TikTok shops and like I can't make this work. And I'm like, well, does anybody work it?

35:17Matt Bertulli:He's like, yes, I'm a freelancer in India. It makes my soul warm to say once again that I think Katie's wrong because if someone's making something work, I want to beat that person and also do it. you can't be really successful and run a nine figure company by half-assing everything like so when you hire we're not talking oh i hired this person we're talking how do you hire a great one who's really going to propel your company right and so if people are making amazon work

35:50Katy Mimari:and they don't even know bob's name curtis and you're now you're like promoting like how amazing Bob is and that you're leaning into him? No, I'm saying I'm not good enough. I should focus more on Amazon because there's something there and we need to scale that thing up. And I've been so busy on all of this that I'm like, hey, you have to take the time, capital resources to make something work because I believe we can beat most people out there. I do. I just believe we can beat them. We have a mature enough and good enough. We can do it.

36:21Sean Frank:Well, I just love that Curtis is a psycho. He's a man after my own heart, dude. He's like, Somebody else is making money. I have to beat them and make more money. Like, yeah, I love that, dude. But Curtis, I can guarantee you, you can talk to my Amazon guy for free. I'm happy to have him, you know, help you out on this. You, because you're doing so well on TikTok shop, you're probably losing$40 million a year on Amazon. Like it's, because Katie, my product actually sucks for Amazon because it's$95. It's too expensive. There's knockoffs next to me there, right? Like to capture the sale. but just because so many people search it on Amazon, I'm able to have a multi eight figure a year business on there.

37:02Sean Frank:So I think it's,

37:02Matt Bertulli:it's the number two search engine to Google. So like, and half of all shopping searches, I think start on Amazon. So it's just, there is again, broadly, like there are exceptions, but oftentimes it's just that we under invest in the channel. And I'm with all of you. I hate Amazon, by the way, Sean called out the most difficult part of Amazon, which is there are so many things, coming at you from the dark on that platform. And half the time, the dark place is inside of Amazon. Like they're just trying to kill you all the time. And they don't even know why.

37:35Sean Frank:There's just lots of killers. It's such a big business. They'll just steal your inventory and they don't care. Right. So like Amazon is evil. But I will say to Katie's point, I just had a kid. I don't think newborn apparel is like a hot category on Amazon. That's probably not the place you want to be investing. But I think for pet, it could be fantastic. And Curtis, I know for a fact, you could do$40 million a year on Amazon with your bags.

37:57Matt Bertulli:Well, there you go, Curtis. Challenge, challenge needs to be accepted. Okay. I want to move on to the fourth role, which is creative strategist, which this is the one, man, this is a hard, this is a hard role to hire for. I actually think this might even be harder than the last one. Sean, give us your take first, and then we can listen to Katie tell you how you're wrong.

38:18Sean Frank:Dude, it's not harder than head of Amazon, okay? Maybe a few years ago, and I heard the term creative strategist for the first time in like 2021, right? Like me and Connor were like trying to figure out who we needed, some guy to script ads. And we actually found this guy, Chris, and Chris still works here. He was hired for the role. He was a bikini photographer. So Chris is just like, he was living in Simi Valley, you know? I mean, the guy's fantastic, very, very talented. but he would just like his portfolio was just taking photo of hot girls and i'm like hey we want somebody to come in here and script ads and do short form and he really grew into the role i mean now he's making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year at ridge like is fantastic is locked down really understands it but like that kind of shows the arc of creative strategists like it didn't really exist we gave this guy a lot of freedom to run an experiment and he built a whole program underneath him and now he could try anybody to do it because he's like a world class expert at it.

39:15Sean Frank:So three years ago, impossible to hire for this because you had agencies like narrative and tube science, like you had those two agencies, like outbidding you for people, like really trying to make this a service that goes out there. But now you can basically find a creative strategist and work with them. It's still going to be super expensive. It's 130 grand minimum to get somebody who's really good in the door. But yeah, that's my perspective on the history of creative strategists. We'll go to Katie. Katie, am I wrong?

39:43Katy Mimari:I mean, I'm paying my creative strategist and tokens right now. And he tells me how amazing I am every day. He greets me in the morning. Like he tells me that I'm beautiful. I, I'm not a fan of his name, Claude, but you know, we're working on it. So, uh, so, okay. So I agree that I agree with you that a creative strategist is actually, I think it's a harder hire than product. truly because I think they have to think of different angles constantly right for the same product over and over again I think the creative strategist and the growth marketer should be very intertwined in fact we've got I have my creative directors McKenna and one of our gross partners is her name's Morgan and they talk all the time with their boyfriend Claude about just constant new ideas ever.

40:37Katy Mimari:But truly, it's something we leaned into with AI. Like just literally using AI to think of different cohorts and different ways to approach those people. That's been a big, not to turn this conversation into AI, but personally, I think that's where we've gotten a lot of ideas, right? Because when somebody's been, when you've been thinking about creative strategy for a single product for 10 years, and you're constantly have to come up with new and new and new again. It's nice to have that sounding board, I think.

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42:08Matt Bertulli:Karis, I'm curious how you guys do this because creative is like, I mean, all of us are starving for it all the time. It is like the part of the business and direct to consumer that you feel like you never have enough of or better, right? How at Portland Leather Goods, how do you guys handle this? Do you have a creative strategist? There's a lot of people that don't even have this role. So tell us about the team. We do. I did a lot of it. The word creative is every stupid person thinks they're creative. And they're really rare and you've got to get the right one. So that's number one. Number two, we did and we outsourced it.

42:46We do ours out of Brazil. And he's very good. And he brings a lot of ideas in. And I served as a lot of that at the beginning of that. I've moved away from that. But I think the most important thing that like we're at number four and we're still arguing about this and we've got another one coming. Is that hiring is an ongoing at all times. Like it's not like I got the person, I got the private person. Now I can kick back for three years. Like there's always bringing in more talent as you grow. It is. You've always got to be looking. You've always got to be evolving. and I'm going to say the one that everyone hears, but we don't always do.

43:25You've got a clean house of the people who are just sitting in some place and aren't excelling. You've always got to be cleaning a little bit out to make room and always bringing somebody new in.

43:35Matt Bertulli:I guess on this, Sean, based on what Curtis and Katie are saying, do you think that this function in a business is actually one that's changing a lot right now because of AI? Is this actually a thing? I always think creative strategists, I'm like, well, what about copywriters? And what about the analysis part? And then the creative supply chain management. There's a lot of jobs to be done in creative. And it does seem like a lot of that's getting squished together now. Or do you have a different take?

44:05Sean Frank:It's the newest and most dynamic of these roles. I mean, I'm glad Katie brought up Claude. So internally at a range, what is a creative strategist? They come up with the concepts for ads that will be shopped. So they come up with hooks, visuals, all that type of stuff. So they have a script and then they find UGC people. They manage the UGC people. They make sure they get the products. They shoot it. They get all that raw footage back. And then either they're hands-on editing it or they're working with third-party editors to produce 50 or 100 ads a week. Now, it used to be we had probably five people doing that job.

44:39Sean Frank:We probably have three people doing that job now. and they are cutting out large portions of that because they can script way faster with Claude and they can do a lot of visuals inside of Higgs field or something else, right? So that role is very much compressing over time. And also, once you do it for like a year, you have a list of UGC people that you just like and you always go back to them, right? So I think at first you're getting a bunch of random people and trying it out and using TikTok to source people. Then at a certain point, you can really hone this down. the last thing i'll say and then we go to katie is the hudson method of mass seating on tiktok getting a bunch of content and then promoting that content is also you know directly at odds with the creative strategist because you're mass sourcing versus scripting and you need to do both of those things but it also just helps fill the creative funnel so katie anything i say piss you

45:32Katy Mimari:off no i agree oh my god i'm just here to help guys i so ours is separate too like creators influencers and listening to each of your like how you describe your creative strategists like ours is in the photo shoots every day and ours is styling and ours is uh working like you guys said like with the image generation with ai or ad generation and uh and then also just making ads themselves or working with our graphic designers. Like to me, the creative strategist has to know the style and aesthetic of the brand and be able to like, I don't know, make it, make all the different aspects of it work.

46:16Katy Mimari:Because if she doesn't, or mine is McKenna, if she doesn't do her job right and get really good creative for our product, it's going to fail on social. It's going to fail in activations. It's going to fail a product on site. Like I, I think that it's a, I think it's a very important role to hire for. And to Curtis's point too, and what we've done. So we've got four people on our creative team and I have hired all of them to do something different than they're doing today. And I think sometimes with creative people, you've got to get them in and then see what they're really good at. Like we hired a girl that was just going to run YouTube for us.

46:52Katy Mimari:And then she, in her free time, she started going in our studio and just shooting content and it was amazing. And so we've completely shifted what we use her for and are hiring somebody else now for the role we initially filled for. And I think that's with creative people in general. You've just, you got to get them in the door and then see what they're good at.

47:11Matt Bertulli:Agreed. I think Sean, just for everybody, Curtis, myself and Katie, the common thing between our brands is we, I think Curtis, as you coined this term, we sell buy my shit things, which is you see the visual of it. And that is the reason to buy most of the time. Whereas Sean, I would say your products have these very intrinsic features and functions that they have that you guys just do super well. There's a material story where a creative strategist for you might have a very different sort of like job to be done. And then if you could then bring in something like a supplement or, or a food or a beverage where they're like actual problem solution products, right?

47:56Matt Bertulli:Like I'm solving a pain. So like, I think creative strategists or like this person who heads up creative and every brand again, is one of those things that can be quite category dependent, which then drives like, well, where do you find these people and what do they do? And like what their job in a day is very different.

48:12Sean Frank:Yeah. You know, I think I should have went through before we talk about each one and define what I think that job is. And then it probably would have given us common language so we would argue.

48:21Matt Bertulli:No, it's good because then we can just argue about it, Sean. It makes for better content if we're just all pissy and laughing at each other. All right, so you guys just brought up creators, influencer. Your fifth one was actually head of influencer.

48:34Sean Frank:I'll just say real quick. I mean, I needed to find a fifth one because I said I would make a list of five. So I was thinking about people. Yeah, I was thinking people inside of Ridge. I'm like, who's hard to hire for? But there's some justification for why I had an influencer so hard. And what it comes down to is, and I've seen this happen a couple of times, you hire someone who loves influencers, who loves celebrity, who loves YouTube, like whatever thing you want them to manage. They have to love it. They have to be all about it. But then they also will bring their biases into it, right? Like, you know, they will want to work with a creator so bad they will overpay it.

49:11Sean Frank:And like, you know, we, we had a guy who loved Casey Neistat and he just kept bringing up, like, how can we get Casey Neistat? Like, look, dude, he doesn't want to work with us. We have to go find somebody else. It's like, I'm like, he's not responding to emails. Okay. Email 10 ,000 other people. And every, every day he would just think about new ways to reach out to Casey Neistat. And that guy doesn't want to work with us. So it's, it's, you have to find someone who's obsessed with like a, you know, pop culture and celebrity and the internet, but also has to be fickle enough to not care about any one person and willing to work with whoever's going to generate you the most money and then also not abuse the relationship because you're giving them money and if they're nice to you, you want to give them more money.

49:52Sean Frank:It's not your money. You just like this person a lot. So it's like the ultimate form of patriot, like Patreon or patronage or whatever. So anyway, that's why all the risks of the role. Curtis, you seem like you're digging it. No, you're nailing what you do and what you do very well. We don't really even do that type of thing we hired for community we have a 250 000 person facebook community that they just they're worth 40 50 million dollars a year they're just always buying we have entire teams 24 hours a day keeping those people happy and then we went the tiktok affiliate route to create the flywheel of new information in we failed at everything in terms of this like you're nailing it because I watch some of your stuff or I'm a YouTube guy.

50:38So I'll be on there and that Ridge stuff will start coming at me a little bit and then we'll start following me around. I'm like, ah, shit, I wish we did this stuff, but we don't, we have a community. We do meta and then the Tik TOK thing, which has really taken off for us recently. Just crazy.

50:54Matt Bertulli:Katie, what do you guys do at Caden Lane? Are you community? Like what Curtis is talking about, or are you more creator, influencer, do you have ambassador as an affiliate like there's just there's so many ways to skin this

51:07Katy Mimari:like relationship yeah i we do all of them so we definitely lean into um like a vip community group and then do a lot of education around our products right online with youtube things like that but with creators and influencers which are two different things right so influencers are more partnerships that you're doing with them they're talking about your product they're posting it on their accounts. They're hopefully toggling on like whitelisting with your brand, things like that. We do a ton of that. We do mostly, honestly, mini like micro influencers. I mean, I used to be like what you said, Sean, where I'm like, oh my God, if we could only get so-and-so right to post, then we'd crush it.

51:52Katy Mimari:Well, then we got them and it honestly wasn't as great as we thought it would be. Most of them buy our stuff anyways and then don't link it, which just infuriates me because I'm like that you actually paid for that product. Tell your people about how you love that instead of your hair growth serum or something like that. And then creators is the team that we've really leaned into and that we've got several people working on. And it's just constant outreach to, I think a lot of people that want to be influencers. So we don't care if they have 300 followers or 3000 followers. If we like their content, what they're putting out, their style, their voice, what they look like, right?

52:32Katy Mimari:Like the whole aesthetic of their personality. Then we bring them on and usually we only pay like$200 truly. And they'll send us multiple videos, which, you know, then we can put on meta and YouTube and TikTok and all the things to test out ads. And so I think keeping them as two separate things. Does that make sense? Like influencers are partnerships creators are content creators well i think that's like head of influencer what sean is calling head of influencer there's like a bunch of different types of like

53:04Matt Bertulli:working with outside sort of like creators or influencers right like you could just do seating for content you could do the hired creators you could do like integrations curtis brought this up sean ridge is like best in class at like youtube integrations you guys have been doing that for years. Then there's like, what a lot of people now do is Katie, which you brought up is creator, like more relationship management to get whitelisted creators. So like, you're actually not even wanting the organic post from them. You actually just want them to make content and give you whitelistings that you get the paid machine going, which has got far better reach than organic anyway.

53:41Matt Bertulli:Sean, what am I missing? There's like, I know there's lots of types in here? And does all of this fall under this one person or do we think this is multiple?

53:50Sean Frank:Yeah. So we, we tip rated that. Our creative strategist manages all of our creators, right? So like, that's probably like the difference is like my creative strategist is managing the UGC people, the people who are whitelisting there. You know, we have a guy, Mason internally, who's runs TikTok shops. He's running the affiliate program for us and getting that content and then feeding it to the paid media team. When I say influencer, I mean paid for posts on their channels. And here's a story. I had a guy on my team and he loved Livvy Dunn. Livvy Dunn's like a female gymnast who like Gen Z thinks is really hot.

54:24Sean Frank:And this guy, every meeting, would just bring up trying to sponsor Livvy Dunn. He was obsessed with sponsoring Livvy Dunn. He would have spent any amount of money to sponsor Livvy Dunn. And I'm like, this is where if he was the influencer manager, he would be bad for my company because he would sign a deal for millions of dollars just to talk to her. And that's why it's like, you need someone who's like incredibly locked in, knows the industry, probably is a creator. Our guy, Doug, who runs it right now, has a 200 ,000 sub YouTube channel, right? So he really knows the space, but also Doug is cool enough to not ruin everything for us.

54:59Sean Frank:He would not spend millions of dollars trying to sponsor a living time because he thinks he's just hot. He would look at the deals and actually be able to assess what the value is and then have really tough conversations. Because I mean, this went viral. I don't know if you saw this or not. Bill Gates' daughter has a startup. And she is doing DM outreach to influencers, trying to get them to post about it. And the influencer was like, yeah, I want$4 ,000. And she's like, look, I think it's worth 500 bucks. And that person screenshot that and they said, your dad is Bill Gates. Give me the$4 ,000.

55:31Sean Frank:And the problem is that ad space wasn't worth$4 ,000. So how do you tell an influencer that their ad space is not worth what they used to get or what they want to get. And it's just a really difficult conversation. So you have to hire somebody who's good at that. And it's why it could just be a tricky hire. So I do think Katie's point, keep creators and influencers separate, like paid for posts versus paid for rights or content. But there are some trial and tribulations if you want somebody to get paid posts for you.

55:57Katy Mimari:Those are very important positions to have, and they don't have to be extremely high level. I think those are almost better if you've got a bunch of people working on it constantly because that's a game, right, where volume counts.

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56:54Matt Bertulli:I could actually argue that while this might be a hard role to hire, if you're actually a newer brand, this might actually be one of the first roles you go hire. Is like somebody who manages, does outreach, and like is getting content and like building relationships. Like if you're sort of younger as a brand, this is a super important role right now. Yeah, I could actually make that argument. Curtis, I got one on your sort of like community first answer. Do you guys get like, obviously they drive a lot of revenue for you. You called that out. Do they also provide a lot of content for you guys?

57:30Matt Bertulli:Like do you get a ton of raw like stuff that you use in the paid machine? Well, we have two different things. We have our insiders who follow us, who are just like every day. They're there and thousands of posts and they follow us. And all we have to do is feed them anything and we'll sell out that day, right? So need a million dollars, come up with something on a Tuesday and they're going to buy it out, right? So they just generate a lot of interest and hype and cult behind what we do. on the other side are the creators who are creating for this flywheel engine that we that we're doing and i believe that is the new thing i think we all think that is it's not everyone used to come to me on the influencer side and say like who do you think would be a good influencer for our product and like i don't know i think i'm a cool guy but i don't know shit about most of this stuff right like what about this person never heard of him what about this I have no idea who that is, right?

58:23Like there's so many things out there. Sean, I was shaking my head because there's so many little different areas out there that you have to have people have their fingers on each one of those. I don't have that. So what we've done is the little TikTok, send out things, have them create videos, and throw it in that flywheel and throw it out there on Meta and show what works. I was just in Austin, Texas at Commerce Roundtable. And this guy got up and he had just like a Yeti thing. He knows Mike and everybody. He has a frosty mug thing that he sells. He's like, four years ago, I did 10 million. Three years ago, I did 20 million.

59:03Two years ago, I did like 30 million. This year, I'm expecting to do 190 million. And he did it all because of the creation flywheel of TikTok creating all of these things. He comes out with new things and will every new release he has, he already has 500 new videos to throw into meta to actually scale that up. And his jump is incredible. And I sat with him at dinner and he's just like, yeah, they create all the content. I throw it in, it works. I'm making a bunch of money. So I love that new idea. I think that is what a lot of people are doing. It's what Hudson does. It's what he does. It's what we've proven in the last month to work for us.

59:43So that's kind of what we do. Like specific influencers out there, I'm too dumb to know who they are.

59:49Katy Mimari:product seeding though like is what you're talking about on tiktok and i think it's important too to call out like imagine if jason was like product seeding hex clad to every single little influencer like some brands have to take into consideration the product right like i'm jealous of of you know our friends at bk beauty because they're sending makeup makeup brushes out for tiktok too and i'm like it's cheap to ship it's right like not an expensive product it's one size like they're just like shipping thousands and thousands out to all these creators and mine I have to know the size what size is the kid wear right like the whole thing so but it is if if you can do product seeding I think it's a massive unlock it's been a huge unlock for us too that's very much where

1:00:37Sean Frank:the world of influencer is going it's like you know celebrities less and less important like you know and and big accounts are less important than ever before um so unless you're getting ad rights to run the big account in your content. Those marquee partnerships are just really hard. The Libby Dunn deal wouldn't have made sense. Now, we have a deal with Marquez, and that's part of our influencer program, and Marquez is a co-owner, and we run all that. That ends up working out. The big celebrity deals really need to live on YouTube, I think. You have to work with a big YouTuber because they have just a better audience, a commanding audience, like paying for a Libby Dunn Instagram story.

1:01:12Sean Frank:Or we were talking to Hailey Bieber, and this was probably two Christmases ago. like she was going to give Jason, or no, sorry, Justin Bieber a ring for like Christmas because they're married or whatever. And they're like, yes, we probably want, I don't know,$450 ,000. And I'm like, it's just that that's not going to make a, we won't see a good return.

1:01:34Matt Bertulli:I got a, I'll give you a good Hailey Bieber story. This is actually another shout out to Jason from Hexclad. Remember when he did the Hailey Bieber cooking thing? Like they did their whatever. Jason went on set and they were doing their show, they were filming, and he saw that she had a loamy in her kitchen. And he was like, he's like, I'm just going to move this in the shot from my buddy Matt. So then he sent me the YouTube video. He was like, I did that. I'm like, thanks, Jay. All right, so five rolls. Good debate, good discussion. Does anybody have, would anybody have another number one? So like Sean's was not product.

1:02:13Matt Bertulli:Katie, you said head of growth. Curtis, what would your hardest role to be done on everything we've talked about? What do you think the hardest one is? I'm going to be an asshole right here and say it's replacing me.

1:02:28Like, I created this.

1:02:32Katy Mimari:The egos on this show are so exhausting sometimes. Oh, my God. somebody make Curtis's screen on the YouTube thing bigger so that it's proportionate with his head size right now. I have never thought about giving up being CEO, but I'm at a point where soon I will be moving to a board and other areas and having somebody, maybe it's several years, maybe it's five years, but I've created this thing with duct tape and in my brain, all the ways that the books say, don't do it. like create systems and create processes that we're growing too fast right like let's get it done let's get it done now and people say when i'm not in the building the energy is down and things do not get done so how do i get somebody to come in and replace my crazy ass energy my crazy ass optimism with the systems that are going to run for the next 10 to 20 years and i don't even know how to judge that person right like if they're too much like me i'm going to hate them.

1:03:37If they're not like me, I'm going to hate them. So how the hell do I choose that? So I'm going to be fair. Sean, how do you replace yourself?

1:03:44Sean Frank:Typically, a private equity group would come in here and fire me and then it's their fault to deal with it. But I think it's a fair question. What I was going to say is, you guys, this is my list of the top five. What did I leave off? So Curtis is saying CEO. It's too hard to replace a founder. That's the number one job, especially if you're going to have equity. If you're not selling your business and you just want to replace yourself, it's like, yeah, the way you do that is you hire somebody right now and you wait five years. It's like, that's the transition plan. I think Katie has found that in her number too, that if Katie wants to step away, she's put in the five years.

1:04:21Sean Frank:It just takes five years. But besides CEO, besides my list, Katie, Matt, who'd we forget off? Go to Katie first.

1:04:28Katy Mimari:In marketing specifically?

1:04:30Sean Frank:No, any role. The hardest role that you think is out there to hire? Is it just head of growth?

1:04:34Katy Mimari:I think it's head of growth. I do. Yeah. But, but I'm, I think more like VP of marketing. Like I don't necessarily think it's in the ad buying part. I almost think it's somebody that is like what Curtis is saying, almost like just running the entire machine of marketing and making sure all the pieces of the flywheel are communicating together because they have to understand, right? Like we're all talking about jobs where they have to obsess over influencer or creator or product or whatever. I need somebody that obsesses over all the categories. And I think that's a hard, and if it's not a CMO, what is it?

1:05:09Sean Frank:Totally. I mean, yeah, good feedback. Matt, who do we leave off the list?

1:05:14Matt Bertulli:Off the list, you know, there's a lot of them, but I think that this is one of those, like a top 1 % person in this seat could do a lot of damage is a retention person. So like somebody who really knows how to bring people back. Like they can write. They're like just crazy empathy. The whole system. I think that person is hard to get just because there's a lot of mediocre. But there are exceptional people out there that when you see them and you say, man, they're awesome. And they're worth their weight in gold. My CFO, who is in charge of all the money and taxes and paying and everything, is someone that I like to talk to.

1:05:57Which is really weird in accounting and finances that it's actually somebody who's got a great personality is amazing because I talk to her every day. And there are people who I avoid talking to because they just kind of bug me. And you never want your people who take care of your money to be that person. So we really lucked out. It took a long time to find her. And once you've got someone who is just an amazing person, amazing friend that I can call to 18 hours a day, we can call up and get that information. Having people who control your money, who you like and trust, I mean, that's the world right there.

1:06:33Sean Frank:Curtis, I think it's a great point to end on. You said trust. The CFO role is so hard because they can steal from you. You only see what they prepare unless you're logging in the bank account and you're in charge of your account's payable or whatever else. It is, there's no easier role to actually commit fraud. So you have to have a CFO you trust. It is hard for that reason. All right, guys. I think that's in the books. Curtis and Katie, we love having you here. We always love a good debate. You guys are fantastic members of the operators family. Curtis, enjoy your whole kingdom that you've built, the people running around you.

1:07:09Sean Frank:Go drop some for somebody to pick up. Talk to you guys later.

1:07:17Thank you.