Tyson Drake is a fractional CMO for eight- to nine-figure DTC brands, helping them scale profitably. As a self-taught affiliate marketer, he became the CMO of The Oodie, where he trained an in-house team of over 25 people across performance marketing, creative, and e-commerce, scaling the company to nine figures across eight markets.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [4:10] How Tyson Drake categorizes responsibilities as a CMO
• [7:08] Tyson shares his key growth metrics
• [13:58] The importance of leveraging operational frameworks and dashboards for global market expansions
• [23:46] Strategies for launching channels and products in new markets
• [32:14] Navigating a saturated market through omnichannel approaches
• [37:19] How to target various consumer demographics in global markets
• [53:27] Tyson talks about streamlining marketing efforts using EOS
• [1:08:15] Tyson’s personal and professional growth journey
• [1:16:26] Balancing work and family life: Tyson’s strategic approach

In this episode…

As an e-commerce brand, expanding into international markets can skyrocket profitable growth in multiple areas, and a robust marketing strategy is crucial to this expansion. What strategies can you harness to penetrate new markets for exponential growth?

Global marketing powerhouse Tyson Drake scaled to $200 million in yearly revenue by diversifying in multiple international markets. He attributes this achievement to his progressive internalization strategy, which involved having complete visibility into his business operations and regional trends to allocate budgets effectively across channels. This omnichannel distribution is essential in targeting your total addressable market and identifying growth opportunities. When measuring ROI for your efforts, focus on contribution dollars rather than profit margins for a more accurate growth measurement.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with fractional CMO Tyson Drake about allocating your marketing budget to scale into international markets. Tyson talks about targeting new demographics, how to launch into new channels and promote new products during global expansion, and how to navigate a saturated market.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• William Harris on LinkedIn
• Elumynt
• Tyson Drake: Website | LinkedIn | Twitter
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman
• EOS Worldwide
• The Oodie
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Quotable Moments

• "Contribution dollars is the North Star metric, and that's how I think."
• "If you can increase your AOV and maintain a good gross margin, you can scale customer acquisition costs significantly."
• "Every brand will reach a ceiling, and you have to understand why, but also understand the tools to be able to get out of that."
• "Professionalizing the marketing org is just a fancy word for team and leadership."
• "The goal is to make your brand part of their consideration set, which is what mental availability is."

Action Steps

1. Implement dashboards for business transparency: Having a custom dashboard to track contribution dollars helps provide a clear view of your business’ health.
2. Explore international markets: Identifying when to scale internationally can significantly increase your total addressable market, driving business growth.
3. Conduct L10 meetings regularly: These structured meetings keep teams aligned around key company goals and updates, fostering communication and accountability.
4. Leverage new product development: Continually expanding your product offerings can diversify your brand and attract new customer segments.
5. Balance professional and personal growth: Allocate time effectively between work and family, enabling a holistic approach to success and well-being.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:00  

Music. Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show. Hey everyone.

William Harris  0:16  

I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million. To 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Excited about the guests that I have today. Tyson Drake, fractional, CMO for eight to nine figure, DTC brands. He was previously the CMO of The Oodie, brilliantly smart. We're gonna get into a lot of good stuff. Main thing we're talking about today is internationalization, growing from roughly 130 million in one market, 200 million in eight markets. We're talking with Tyson Drake Drakey, okay, so we were talking about nicknames before, what's, what's the most embarrassing nickname?

Tyson Drake  0:54  

Embarrassing nickname is this. What does this show? G rated? PG rated?

William Harris  1:00  

Yeah. Let's keep it. Keep it fairly clean. How about that?

Tyson Drake  1:03

Yeah, yeah. I mean my, my close friends call me Drakey or D rake, you know, like shaver or D rake, shaver, D rake. But yeah, I have a lot of nicknames. Anyone, anyone who really knows me, I've got a really close group of core friends have known me for like, 30 years. And, you know, they put like D and then add like a, like a word to it. So it could be, you know, how is that? You know, after this podcast that the mcgo, how is the dpod, or something like that, bit of, a bit of a side joke. You know,

William Harris  1:41

I love it. You know, I think we were talking about this because even, you know, you asked me, Well, what do you go by will or William? And they sound the same to me. My mom's side all called me will. My dad's side called me William. Sounds the same. Well, I caddied out some Glenmore Country Club there, and there I was, Bill. Everybody just called me Bill. You know, whether I wanted it or not, it was it or not, and it was fine. There's a client, well, I think that's just like a golf name. This is the only thing. I think it was like, the golf Pro's name was Bill. And it's like, when I was there, they're just like, Hey, Bill, okay, I guess I'm running with Bill. I'm Bill. Now there's a client in Pasadena that called me Willy, and there are only people who called me Willie, but there was already a will there. I was like, jokingly just said, Ah, call me Willie. And still to this day, they do. And every once in a while, someone will say, Hey, Willie. And I'm like, Oh yeah, that's me. I got to respond to that.

Tyson Drake  2:30

Yeah, actually, now you mentioned in my earlier days when I was working on the phones for a little bit, working in sales, right as you know, you wear multiple hats in this industry sometimes. So in the early days, I was on the phones, doing sales for a little bit, and, and the early days, I mean, like, 2009 Um, sure. And sometimes people would get my name wrong. So hello, like, you know, welcome to, you know, ex brand, you know, Tyson speaking. And some and people go like, Carson. I'm like, yeah, yeah, Carson. And I just like, roll with it. Or sometimes, one time I get called, I got called Python. Like, Python, like, yeah, yeah, Python, yep. My name is Python, yes. Just roll with it. Yeah. Just roll with it. Let's just get let's get through the name and like, let's just move through to like, how I can help you. Yeah,

William Harris  3:21  

I love it. Yeah, yeah. I'm the same way. I just roll with it. I'm like, Yeah, call me Willy Willis Willard. There's plenty of nicknames for me. I don't really care too much. Sounds like you're similar. I took us way off topic for the beginning. We do have some really fun, interesting stuff to get into before we start into the meat of the discussion. I do want to make our announcement of our sponsor. This element. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that I appealed recently. You can learn more on our website@elumynt.com which is spelled Elumynt.com that said, on to the good stuff here with Tyson. So, as a fractional CMO, what are the three ways that you like to bucket things?

Tyson Drake  4:10  

Yeah. So as a fractional CMO, let's just explore that topic, just just quickly. So as a fractional CMO, I perform the same functions as an in house CMO, but across several brands at a time, usually that's up to three. And so how I like to bucket the functions three things that I work on, and that is where I believe my core competencies are. And so that's bucket one that's like measurements and analytics. So that would be attribution, mean and mixed modeling, incrementality, testing. There might be some custom analysis. There's like, some that might be, like, custom dashboards and analysis. You know, that could be something I like to do is like merchandising analysis, for example. So that's like, like the measurement bucket, and then the second bucket is what I like to call professionalizing. The marketing org. And that's just a fancy word for, like a team and leadership, basically. So everything from hiring recruitment, like, how does the marketing team operate? What is like the cadence of like an in house team? And what I'm referring to is like in house teams, right? Sometimes it's a mix of, you know, usually it's a mix of in house and external and so like, professionalizing the marketing org. How do they operate? What? What is the meeting cadence? How does meetings run? And like, what are the frameworks associated with? Like, a good cadence, basically. How does a team work together? So I call that professionalizing the marketing org. And that's different, you know, different stages. And then the third part is like growth strategy, just broader growth strategy, where that is like in sanitization, you know, new products, new channels, new markets that that could be like growth strategy in terms of, how do we, how do we think about our three lives of growth, acquisition, retention, monetization. So, so they're like, the three key buckets that I kind of come in. Sometimes I'm only working on one bucket. That's fine. Sometimes I'm working across all three. It really depends on what whatever the brand and the founder needs at that given time.

William Harris  6:16  

I love it. So when we talk about measurement, that's actually something that I'm a big fan of as well, and I've written a lot about measurement on a very nerdy level, talk about Simpson's Paradox and Bayes theorem and how that's applied within advertising frameworks. I just got back last week, I was in LA Dodger Stadium speaking there with the bill and visa team about optimizing ads for profit, which is different, and there's different ways you're going about it. So I have my frameworks, but I'd like to hear from you when you think of, let's just say, overall e-commerce growth framework, from a measurement standpoint, a data standpoint, what are you looking at as your your core metric? And you know, people will talk about me, are ROAs contribution margin like, what is your and it doesn't have to be one like, but what's, what's your key metrics that you really like to look at?

Tyson Drake  7:08  

Yeah, so I have, like, a custom dashboard that I like to build, and I've written a thread about this as well. I've done some podcasts about the dashboard. But for me, it all comes down to contribution dollars, right? It comes down like for me, that is the core metric is dollar, contribution dollars, which is different from margin. So margin, I think of as percentage, and dollars, is dollar or whatever, that, whatever, that, whatever the unit of account and currency might be. So for me, that dollar tree that does something that might be euros or whatever. So that is my that is my core. And then it becomes Okay, well, are we? Are we first order profitable? I always push for being first order profitable. And to be, to be fair, I'm, I'm I'm usually not coming in to a business that is not doing well. So I'm usually not like a guy that is called up for a, like a, like a, how, like a, like a failing business, and I'm trying to turn it around. So I'm not, I'm not like the turnaround guy. I haven't, I've been in turnaround situations, but usually a brand comes to me and they're like, listen, we've been scaling really hard. You know, this is like a two or three year old brand, and we're just a bit of a rocket ship right now, and we just need someone to come in and, like, take this stuff away from us and like, so, so me, the founder, can, like, go and do other things. They're just kind of like, here, like, just, like, take it and go and then implement some of these frameworks. And usually those frameworks are more associated with measurements and analytics, marketing or professionalization are usually the two core competencies and and so a lot of brands that come into the the typical situation might be, maybe they're just using a Google sheet and they're just entering in daily contribution dollars on the spreadsheet Right. Or maybe they're getting getting a report from their like, whoever's in finance, whoever's like, running the finance function. That can be, sometimes it's a fractional CFO. Sometimes it's like, you know, bookkeeper, and they're just running with a spreadsheet. Other times, a little bit more sophisticated, they might have, like, a lifetimely or something, or iris in place, or whatever. But I'm usually it's, it's, it's a rocket ship, and they're just like, We need someone to just, like, help us run with this thing and, like, help the team, like, kind of figure out some internal stuff, or, or, or whatever. But yeah, contribution dollars is the North Star metric, and that's how I think, yeah, and that's, that's how it like, I

William Harris  9:44  

like it, because that reminds me a lot of the start of the talk that I got into last week. And something that I think is I'm passionate about, is pulling back I contribution, margin Emer, they're good metrics, and we use them, and they have their place. But it neglects the actual dollar number exactly to your point. And we've run into this a number of times, where somebody will increase their mer before coming to us. They're like, great. We told our team, increase the MER, increase the contribution margin. They're proving things. Their numbers are looking better. And then you look at their profit, though, and their profit is tanking. And that's because it seems counterintuitive that you can improve your efficiency, improve your mer, improve your but if you've done it by scaling back on Ad Spend or something like that, the actual aggregate number that you're getting for that is worse. And so looking at that, that actual contribution dollar, or the actual dollar unit amount that you're looking at is still the key beyond all of the different percentages and numbers and ratios.

Tyson Drake  10:42

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, you can have a, you can have like a, like a flat contribution margin, but you can have like a or a worse contribution margin, and you can have like an increase contribution dollar, because the route the rally is, is that, if you and you can do that while scaling customer acquisition costs as well, because as long as you have an increasing AOV and the AOV, you know, can, you know, I'll give you an example. So brand a for example, brand Hey, like an AOV of $50 and they have a gross margin percentage of, like 80% and so therefore they have a gross margin so dollars of like $40 so 80% of 50 is $40 and let's say they're paying $30 to acquire a customer. So they have a contribution margin, so percentage of 20% and their contribution dollars is $10 okay? And then now take, take another brand. So let's go the other extreme. That has a, you know, a contribution, so an AAV of, like, $200 they have a gross margin of 55% which is far less than 80% they have contribution dollars of you know, 80 55% of 200 is $110 they can be paying $60 to acquire customer, which is double the CAC of brand, brand A, for example, or 30. And their contribution margin can be 25% which is contribution dollar terms, is $50 so you can have like, you can, you know, you can have a like, you can increase your CAC from like 30 to like 60, as long as your AOV is increasing and you have decent gross margin, you don't be ridiculous time over like a 5% you know, 10% gross margin, you still want to maintain good gross margin. But like, you know, contribution margin between 20% and like 25% What's that like? 20 25% order, 25% between 20 and 25 in my math, correct, and sounds

William Harris  12:52  

about right, yeah. Late for me, early for you, yeah.

Tyson Drake  12:54

So, yeah. So you can have like, and, you know, you can have, you know similar as well. You can have a very similar contribution margin at 25% if you even with high AOV, if you just scale CAC, right and so that. I mean, that's a good example. Why you know contribution dollars is better to look at than than contribution margin, in my view,

William Harris  13:23  

yeah, and I'm with you completely on that. So let's get into the science of how you're approaching, let's say, maybe especially that second point of professionally, the marketing team or the organization. Well, before I go there, actually, I want to go to Oodie. I want to talk about what you did at The Oodie with going from one market to eight markets, because we talked about internationalization. What? What was it that allowed you to scale them in a relatively short amount of time from roughly 130 million to 200 million? What were these different markets? How did you look at them? What was the thought there?

Tyson Drake  13:58  

Yeah. So context for those playing at home. So I came into The Oodie like mid, like maybe June or July, 2021, and The Oodie had already experienced like a fairly you know what is at this stage is probably on its third year to a second and a half or third, third year. And so they'd already experienced, like a rapid rate of rate of growth in its own right. But like all brands you hit, you hit different phases of growth, and there are different challenges with all those different phases. And so The Oodie was much was a part of a much larger group called the Davie group and the woody while, while The Oodie was the most known, well known and successful of of the group, the group probably had, maybe, I don't know, teff, somewhere between five and 10 brands at the time. Time. And so I came in, and I was working across all probably five brands at when I first came in, including the hoodie as one of them. So maybe my time was split like 40, 50% hoodie and maybe 10 15% across some other brands at the time. And that wasn't just me, that was a lot of people who are working within the David group. The David group. And the challenge with that is that it just wasn't getting the attention that it needed. And so it had some restructuring in the business, and I was so I was like, head of performance marketing, I think, going into that and then, and then I promoted to CMO of The Oodie, and then I was full time on Oodie. And then, but throughout that period, so the hoodie was had where we had, think about five warehouses in different continents. So like, maybe Australia, maybe New Zealand, US, Canada, maybe not New Zealand, maybe UK, and then one in Europe. So I think probably five, maybe six. And so they had all this, like, inventory sitting there ready, and most of the woody sales, a majority already stay. I mean, it is like, you know, a massive wearable hoodie, yeah, wearable blanket. And so you have, like, really, you know, four months of the year to make maybe, like, 80% of your sales, or 70% of your sales, or whatever. And so it basically a, like a jacket brand, you know, you sell, you don't sell many jackets in summer, you know, you, I mean, you sell, you sell jackets in summer. In this case, Woody's in summer, and we did, but you just sell a lot more in winter. Yeah, you sell, you sell a lot, 100% and so we always were playing this balancing game of like, all right, it's southern hem so that for the rest of the Australian New Zealand, it's southern ham winter. So we need to basically push as much budget as possible and scale as fast as we can, because we have, like, four months to really capitalize on this push as far as hard as we can to, like, Australian or southern hem winter. We caught it. And then, you know, Southern hem kind of goes up, and then, you know, it starts to, like, decline. And then as it declines, you hope that, like, you can transition fast enough into northern hem winter and do the exact same thing all over again, where you'd shift a lot of budget towards northern hem winter and the creatives, merchandising, you know, everything involved with that. And then you push that as like, hard as you can. And so when I came in, it was like, and so we didn't have any frameworks for this, right? We didn't have any frameworks to like, how do we how do we think about budget allocation across hemispheres? How do we think about like, where do we where do we prioritize our activities, not just budget, but marketing activities across hemispheres, and is there a framework to do that? So I came in and started to implement a lot of different frameworks, and one of those frameworks were like measurement, like we talked about before, and it was like just bringing some transparency and some dashboards into, like, what's going on in all his business. Because we had, we had our websites launch, and we had a different like Shopify instances launch in in regions like Australia. We were New Zealand, was aggregated with Australia. Then we ended up rolling out new zealand until its own. We had UK, we had EU, which is basically all of Europe, minus Germany and France, I think, and UK, if you want to include them with Europe. And then we had US and Canada, I think, I think that's all. And we had so we had our warehouse as well as product at the time and but they were just sitting there, right? They weren't really doing anything that in the northern hem anyway. They were just kind of sitting there. And, yeah, we were like, sales are kind of trickling through. But so one of the things, like, one like, bring dashboard and measurement transparency to what's going on, and then be like, Oh, look, we're like, you know, we haven't, you know, and then we have like these inventory ports coming in about where stock is sitting and where, and, you know, aligning merchandising team or ops team with marketing. And then just starting to have, like, this case, okay, and what, what do we need to do, smooth this inventory? And then, and then, so he's just bringing in a lot of these frameworks. And so, so pilot, pilot framework was what I like to call this, like, progressive internationalization, where, you know, first of all, you need to absolutely have some kind of dashboards and transparency as to what's going on in the business. You know, that's inventory. That's like, how much we spending in these regions, if anything, you know, how much inventory is moving, how much inventory do we have in these regions? And so it's like, just bring some level of transparency to what is. Going on in different regions. And then from there, you can start to be like, okay, so what do we need to do to kind of move this inventory, how we merchandised? You know? Why are we feature non not featuring our best sells on the homepage? We need to feature our best sells on the homepage. What is our budget allocation per per region? How do we think about how do we think about that? And how do we like? How do we how do we like? Put the foot down. So, so it, the good thing about it, it was like a like, a re like at the time, maybe like $70 for 6060, $70 for an hoodie. And people would buy multiple hoodies. It was a pretty big gifting product. And so we had, like, a decent sized AOV where, like, on every single purchase would be first purchase profitable. And so that's a great that's like a really great position to be in, because then becomes Okay, so how, how much budget can we? How can we allocate budget effectively across channels? And then, how can we, like, have like, good creative we had, or like, majority of that creative we had in house, and so then just became a game of like, okay, so how could we, how fast can we scale and how much can we put the foot down and strategically on allocate budget between, you know, campaigns or platforms, and have like, the right measurement infrastructure to be able to see that, to have Like, inventory transparencies, be able to see when inventory items going in and out of stock, what best sells are. Make sure we're making Creatives or the best sellers. You know, I'd argue that's merchandising, not just creative strategy and three, just aligning the team on, like, what the different countries are and what the inventory position is. So we can then make sure we have the right allocated budget associated with that at any given time, but then communicating closely with, like, the ops team, and, you know, have a tight feedback loop between ops and merchandising that's like, hey, you know, we have, we have all this inventory in next region, and we, we have the, you know, the ability to mark some of it down because it's been there for a while, but got these other new product launches that we can launch in this region, but not in the southern hand, but we can but we can in the northern hem. I give the example that, like, we had Disney rights for our merchandising in southern hem, so a NZ, but we didn't and UK, but we didn't have in the US. So when we're, you know, we had to have a different merchandising strategy for US and Canada. So when we're communicating like, Oh, these Disney patterns have like, are now launching on social, we can't just say it's launched everywhere, through like, exclusively AU, NZ, UK only, and so just setting expectations, but in terms of scaling that, that's really how it worked for the for The ODN. So I came in implant his dashboards, and we've got some transparency as to what's going on. And then it's just a matter of All right, well, let's see if we can scale as fast as we can, and then just making sure the right people were working on the right things.

William Harris  22:54

There's a lot that I want to unpack there. We're going to get to the team optimization in a little bit. One of the things that I think that you touched on that I really appreciate is, you know, there's the saying, it doesn't get measured, doesn't get done. And I think, to your point, there's no way to impact that many different markets if you don't have the right dashboards set in place where you're actually starting to see how things are flowing. And I think that's a very good point. But I think where you went that I really appreciated that, I thought was interesting is, you How did you know that it was the right that was the right next thing to do? Because there's, there's a significant amount of complexity that goes to this. You covered a lot of the complexity that's there. Average business is there, like, a threshold, dollar amount, 5 million, 10 million, wherever, where they get to where you're like, Okay, now you maybe know that this is the time for you to branch out into other markets instead of just expanding in the current market that you're in, yeah?

Tyson Drake  23:46  

So I would think through in terms of Yeah. So yeah, to make clear, we, like The Oodie was in a really good position when I came in. It was already a rocket ship. They were doing phenomenally well, and I just kind of helped pour, like some fuel on the fire. So just, just to be clear, and but for brands who haven't, you know, don't have, didn't have the luxury of, like, warehouses already in different markets, and like a, like a, you know, and lockdown at the time, let's get, let's bring some context we had, you know, down across the world. And no one's like traveling to work every day, and people sit in the homes and their hoodies and like working from home. So right conditions, but also right founder, Davey was very was is a phenomenal like marketer and a and a really understands, like a lot of these concepts, is extremely smart and works really hard as well. So right, right founder, right product, right, right market conditions as well. And so for founders that aren't in don't necessarily have all those things lined up that kind of trifecta. How do you evaluate when it's when it's like good to go international, right? And so I would say that I would think. Of it in terms of, in starting, starting to think in terms of how big your tam is in your local market. And so, what is Tam? So Tam, for me, is total addressable market within your category. And so, how I would define a category? You know, even in skincare, it is like anyone you know, all women who, who like skincare product, which is probably everyone, right? Every, every, every woman like some, some form of skincare, but, but then there is like, okay, so I'm sure there's like sub, you know, categories within that category might be like natural skincare, or like luxury or, I don't know, I'm not too, you know, I haven't worked in too many, like, different skincare brands, but, um, you get the picture like there is, like, a skincare category. So you're like, Okay, what is the TAM your skincare category within your market? And there's some tools that help evaluate that. One of them is tracksuit, for example, and there, but there are some tools that kind of know what that TAM is. And so tam is made up of two different kind of, two different areas, in my view, you have in market audiences, where, where those are people who are in the market to buy your product and service for the category. And that can be, you know, think of a chart, right? You have like, a chart on like the the y axis is like, percentage, yeah. And then on the x axis, down the bottom, you have like time and then so like, like in market is kind of like this thing that fluctuates over time. You know, at some point in times there is a greater percentage of people who in market, there might be q4 and or there apparently, depends on seasonality. You know, if you're a winter brand, you know, your tam in market. My god this, and then God that for other for other times of the year. But the point is, Tam is like variable, so in market is variable and so. And then within the in market, you essentially have brands who are fighting for this in market demand, right? And that is like what, essentially, the like Facebook is, or any, any ad platform that that uses behavioral targeting, and behavioral targeting, you know, I kind of frame frame, and understand that as targeting, the ability to target people who want to buy, and are in market to buy. So therefore, you know, Facebook and majorities ad platforms who use behavioral targeting targeting in market and and, yes, you know, you know, doesn't mean they're necessarily in market only for your product. It means they are in in market Facebook, or, you know, meta, whatever, thinks they're in market for the category. So it's just a frame, this, this context. And so you have in market audiences, and then you have, like, this next percentage of the TAM, like the majority, which is potential category buyers. And these are just everyone who's in the category. And so what happens, and how I think about it, is how people, how brands usually scale, is they start off with just targeting all of their in market buyers, and they scale, and they compete against other brands who are doing the same thing. And then eventually you kind of reach this, like ceiling, all this sideways growth, you know, sideways growth, to make the term sound a bit nice, and you don't grow anymore. Yeah, so there's some ceiling, you know, it's not, it's not that you, you know, imagine like in market demand is like here, for example, and it's like maybe five or 10% or whatever it might be, of like, the total addressable market. And so maybe you reach like here as a brand. And but, but, but there's all these other brands in the category that are still fighting. So essentially, you have to take market share away from all the other brands who are fighting for in market demand. And so that's when you kind of reach, you know, the we are competing for market share within their in market. And that's when you usually see this kind of sideways growth kind of play out. And there's a few ways to kind of, like, look at sideways growth, you know, zooming out and looking year over year, if you're not really growing, or if you've declined, and the market conditions aren't absolutely terrible, like, now is a bit of a hard gage to kind of see if that were, like, comparing the year after covid, if you're like, you know, pig lockdown product, and then, like, the years after, you know, there has to be some context within the category. Zoom out. Have a look. Maybe you've seen some cyber grow some months or quarters, and you're like, we can't grow. We can't grow. And so what, what, what is essentially happening is, you know, you've probably tapped out of your in market audiences, and you need to think about where the next phase of growth is coming from. And I know I talked about that for like, a little bit of time, but it's really important, because every brand will kind of reach this ceiling, and you should understand why, but, and then also understand what are the tools to be able to, like, get out of that? And there's three ways I like to think about it, it's, it's, it's, like, new. Markets, new channels and new products. And that's how I really like to think about that. And we can touch on all of those if you want. But this is, like, going on to internationalization, so new markets, right? I don't know. Let's talk about new channel, new channels in the concept of this town. So you have, like, all potential category buyers. So in market, all potential category buyers. And let's say you're in you know, you're in us, and you're like, oh, no, no. I think us is not a good example, because what you know us has the the luxury of, you know being 125, 130, 5 million population, you have a massive affluent middle class, in comparison to other countries, in comparison to New Zealand, there's a, you know, a, you know, not that they're not affluent or whatever, but they have a population of 5 million. Yeah. So it's like, what state in the US has a population of 5 million? I don't know, maybe, maybe, exactly, maybe none. And so not even you know, you know. So you have, in one extreme being New Zealand, another, more extreme being like Estonia. You know, my my fiance, she's Estonian, and I have 1.3 million people. Yeah, so your in market audience is going to exhaust very, very, very quickly. If you are targeting, you know, you know, skincare buyers in Estonia, maybe there's, like, you know, half the population of purchases, like, 18 to, you know, whatever. So I know maybe that's like, you know, 400,000 people. That's your that's your like, in market. So, so how do you think about, you know, new markets is, is, you know, in market, Tam is relative, right? And so, so in New Zealand, you exhaust it a lot quicker than you do in the US. And so you have to think, okay, so how do I, how do I get out of this in market demand, and what, what levers come up I pull? So for that is that's new channels. And channels, I think, in two parts, channels is like new distribution channels in terms of your distribution so there's like wholesale, there's retail, you know, that is maybe Amazon, so marketplaces, if you're not there, and if you are maybe owning an Amazon brand that might be moving to direct to consumer, and having a website, and so that's how I think about

like new channels. But new channels can only be distribution. It can also be like marketing channels. So that can be like, maybe you are just using meta and Facebook. So meta and Google ads, you know, Google search ads. So maybe new channel for you might be YouTube, okay and so, but adding YouTube, even though it is, like, probably classified as behavioral targeting. It's probably a bit more broader reach, and it's majority conversions are probably not going to be click based conversions. They're probably going to be a combination of click and view because, like, 50% of people watch YouTube on their TVs where it's not really you know, is there still a harder to track? I mean, you can see click based attribution. But a lot of actually, you know, a lot of purchases don't happen right away because they're on TV, right? The ad stock effect, which is, like the the percentage of people who buy over time after seeing your ad concept use more. So in like, marketing mix modeling, it's just a lot, a lot longer to see the effect of the ad, whereas paid search ads like kind of happens right away, so the ad stock effect is super quick. And so you can think about, okay, well, just New Zealand, for example. All right, so we're sideways growth for a long time, few quarters over year over year. We're not growing, or we've really only grow a minute little bit. So let's say the concept of, all right, we're going to go more upper funnel, and we're going to and how I define top of funnel is essentially targeting potential category buyers who are not in the market, not currently in the market, or targeting, you know, non in market audiences. And the bet is you target a wide enough group of people where you know that the majority of those people who you're targeting are not going to be in market, and the goal is to make your brand part of their consideration set, which is what mental availability is. Is just making is it mental availability just a fancy way for saying we want to become part of our future customers consideration set. So when they transition to becoming in market, from being a potential customer, they're not currently market, they transition to becoming in market for whatever reason, whether it be, you know they broke, I know they broke like their, their No, their part of their pan, or you know that they run out of some you know, you know, consumable, um, the makeup, or whatever that may be. Like, something happens that that's a trigger, and like, oh, I need, like, or is it like, winter, it's like, oh, I need some new wind. Or the trigger, yeah, they become in market, and they're like, Ah, I remember, you know, you know. And people usually have, you know, there's. Well, lots of studies we've done this, and people usually have around three brands as part of their consideration set. You know, you're not gonna, you don't have like, 20 brands. You go through this listing and you, like, rule them out, like, like a checklist. You're like, that's not really how people think they have like, three, that they're that their brands are kind of, like, most memorable, or they have, like, some kind of emotional connection with and that should be the goal of, like, you know, this top of funnel advertising is create an emotional connection to your potential customer. So when they become in market through some kind of trigger, you are memorable to them, and and, and, you know, maybe they go directly to your website, or in a retail context, there they see you on the shelf in in front of 20 other brands. And I get, I remember them, got some kind of connection and trust have been built with with them, emotional connection or some kind of trust. Oh, you know, I'll buy that product. So that's the kind of thing. Yeah, sorry, yeah.

William Harris  35:54  

What I love about this, right? And I let you go on that 10 minute rant, because you're, you're saying some good stuff, but like when you think about new channels. So we are on the advertising side, and I see a lot of brands who exactly said maybe they've grown 300% year over year, and then 200% the next year, 100% the next year, and then it's like 25% the next year, and they're trying hard, and they still want to continue to grow. And 25 still great in that position, in that context, but they're starting to see that level off. And to your point, it's like they've maybe really reached their in market segment. And so where we like to go, from an advertising standpoint, saying, Okay, this is at the point now where we need to go beyond just that in market segment. Let's loop in CTV or something else, like you said, Let's go a little bit higher in that funnel, and let's start creating that demand, instead of just satisfying the demand that's there. But I like how you're you're pairing that with also new channels, being, you know, wholesale or retail. Because we forget a lot of times in the DTC space that, you know, e-commerce, sale only makes up about 15% of the total retail pie in the US. That's still a very, very small amount. And so you've reached that group. But there are a lot of other people that are exactly like those people that just aren't going to buy on your website. They but they buy if you were there. And so if you're if you just go to the retail and you forget about doing the CTV, where you're expanding beyond the people that are in market, then they're not even going to think about you. They're going to go there. They're going to walk right past you. They don't know you. And so it's a combination of both of these that really helps to

Tyson Drake  37:19  

accelerate that growth. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think people, you know, should we get, you know, direct to consumer, your staff is direct to consumer, but you know, people should remember that it's just another channel. Direct to consumer is a channel if you're a wholesale brand and you've exclusively only been a wholesale brand for your entire life cycle. You think of direct to consumer as a channel, and you kind of bolt that on. You build you build out some internal or external competencies, use an agency or whatever, maybe you build out that competency and but it becomes a channel. And you know, if you really want to build a large, you know, life, lifelong brand, you know, you should be multi channel. You shouldn't just think of of directing a schma as the only way to distribute your product. It's just a distribution mechanism, right? You know, it's, it's like, you know, you don't just use Facebook, you know, or just like Google search, you have a multi, you know, channel approach to your marketing. And the same thing should be thought about distribution, but, but it's only one way, right? So, so like and

William Harris  38:33  

going to new channels, yeah? So going up, but then there's also,

Tyson Drake  38:37  

yeah, go ahead, yeah. So going up the funnel, up the, I guess channel marketing funnel is only one way, and whatever channel, you know, the channel selection might be different for every brand. Maybe you start with YouTube, or maybe you could start with, you know, connected TV, or whatever that may linear TV, whatever that may be right for you, and it's not right for everyone and not every. And the New Zealand case is a really good example, in comparison for the US, where, if you're in market audience, for exhausted, very quickly you got, you know, that's that's one way, but there are other ways. And so if you think about, you know, new channels, and then new markets is the other one. And so you might go, Okay, well, we are going to, rather than invest in top of final activities in New Zealand, which we know are going to be costly, and we have to invest significant amounts. And you know what? We're not We're not shrinking, we're not growing really fast, but we're still growing a little bit year over year. And we're happy with growing 15, you know, 1015, 20% year over year. We're happy with that in our main market, which is New New Zealand. In this hypothetical, let's launch in Australia, because, you know, Australia's we're 26 almost 27 million people now. And culturally, it's. Very, very similar to New Zealand. I'd say the relationship is really akin to US and Canada. And so you have, and so you go, Okay, we're going to internationalize to Australia and and that's one lever that you can pull right. And so, you know, the decision is, how do what is the, what is the way to do that, and how everything about doing that is through the concept of progressive internationalization, right? And so you can start this whole you can basically start the entire process again, right? Where you start by targeting your market audiences through behavioral targeting channels. And then you go into this market, and you, you know, there's a few ways to start this out and test it. So let's talk about the concept of progressive internationalizations in the context of this kind of framework. And so it usually starts off as like introducing a new country within a marketing campaign. So let's take meta you're only targeting New Zealand. Sometimes people might just add Australia into their campaign targeting. And so now the same campaign is targeting Australia, or same campaigns are targeting New Zealand and Australia just being added in there. Maybe they're a bit more savvy, and they either have one campaign for New Zealand and then one campaign for Australia. And so I would say that's the first, first step, in my view, is segmenting out the campaign spend, because what it does is it gives you some form of customer acquisition costs, transparency or accountability, you can at least control, yeah, yes, you can control spend. You can say, okay, or we have a cost cap of x, or we have a budget of y, whatever, whatever your methodology might be, it just gives you control, right? And so you start, you start spending some money, and you go, Okay, wow, this is what we're paying to acquire customers, not any in platform. But, you know, maybe you're just driving customers all to the same website, you know. And any like, step like, I'm step phase two of this is like, Okay, well, we want to, you know, use Shopify as Shopify markets. And that would be to at least set up some form of local currency, you know, local local prices, etc, all the good things that people should know and should absolutely be doing with Shopify marks, local currency, local pricing, payments. Maybe you have some form of inventory control. If you have, like, multi warehouses, one in New Zealand, one Australia, and then you should, like, have like, associated shipping rates as that. So just just go into Shopify markets and like, fill out the necessary information that that'd be like step two in this example. And there's, you know, there's plenty of free resources from Shopify to help do that. And so, you know, step one, separate your campaigns. Test control budget. Step two, fill out the Shopify markets information that Shopify provides you. And then step three would be, let's assume that things are going well. You're making some good sales, and you're targeting market audiences, you're scaling, and then you're starting to see, like, some decent growth again, as a result of, like, bolting on this new market, right? You just say you've you just bolted on this new revenue stream, which is like, doing the same thing in a different market. Great. And so the next phase there is kind of like, okay, well, we think we should provide ourselves a little bit more accountability. And so what that means is probably segmenting in some way, how the PnL is split out through, you know, either just reporting this a new country within the existing PNL, and they're also separating them out completely. And so we go, Okay, we have p&l A for New Zealand, and then PNL B, and then they run as two completely separate businesses, but, but, you know, they use the same resources in this regard, and maybe that's an internal team that is managing everything. And so maybe you just 50% the internal resources. But you have different cogs. You have like duties to pay for. You have different associated currencies that you have to think through as well. And so you'd be like, okay, you know, maybe at different three, pls, one in New Zealand, one Australia, and then and from there, I would encourage people to think through splitting out ad accounts, where you have different currencies as well. And so here, you know, you've gone from a aggregating New Zealand, Australia to one campaign. Maybe you've just rolled it out into its own campaign, but, but then you want to start planning ahead and think All right, well, if we're gonna it just it's a little bit less obvious with a and NZ the dollar, because they're pretty close. However, if you're using something like the pound or or the USD with with the NZD, it there's a significant there's a pretty significant difference, and it just makes it a little bit hard to like. Think through in terms of, you know, imagine, all right, Shopify saying reporting in New Zealand dollars, your Facebook account is reporting USD or whatever, and then maybe look at something else, and it's reporting in pounds, because maybe UK branding. And it's just as messy like no one's just thought, no one's just thought about how to do this, right? And so you go, Okay, well, we're going to launch in your ad account, and we're going to put it in, you know, the native currency, which, in this case, might be AUD, and that we're rolling out to to align with our Shopify reporting, which going to report an AUD, and, you know, and our PNL is going to be an AUD. And so we're just going to, you know, align all the currencies together, so reporting is a bit a bit more in line. And we're talking apples to apples when we're comparing markets, right? And so that would be like the country segmentation part rolling out in a PNL segment, it to different, you know, the local currencies, and then, and then, yeah, so, so that's kind of just like progressive internationalization. And from there, maybe it starts to grow a bit more. Maybe you need to think about local creatives or local targeting, or local translations, if you're in Europe especially, and you kind of, you know, maybe you get big enough where you have, like, brand A has its own GM Country Manager, brand two has its own GM, and then you'd be like, talking nine figure plus. And so that's kind of like how I think about progressive internationalization.

William Harris  46:25  

I love that, like, I don't even need to add anything to it. That's just brilliant. But there's something that I would say that's like tangential to it that I really like, which is, when you're talking new markets, one form of new market is internationalization. Another form of a new market, though, is even within the same country, just a completely different segment of people than you were previously reaching. And the brand that comes to mind for that, for me, and I mentioned them all the time, is Stanley mugs, right? They went from like, you know, middle aged construction worker to teenage girl. It's like, that was a wild market expansion without even having to go internationalization. And that's not always gonna be true, like The Oodie, right? It's like, well, maybe that could work. That could work, where you go to a completely different group, where it's like, maybe you're hitting, you know, teenagers on Tiktok, and then all of a sudden you go to grandparents. And it's like, that can be done too, but sometimes it's gonna say, how do you determine between the internationalization new market or the new market within different demographic or something? And I'm sure there's ways we can get into it. But there was a third thing that you mentioned, though, too, that I wanted to get into. So it was, you know, beyond the new channels, new markets. And I forgot what it was, what was the third one,

Tyson Drake  47:30

products, new products, product, yeah, yeah. So yeah, new channel. And that's new markets, new products, yeah. And new products is potentially,

William Harris  47:37  

I would say, then you have to weigh on what is your brand new products? To me, seems like the most challenging one, because I understand marketing. I'm not a product guy, but if you're a product team, then you might say, I don't know, figuring out a new channel seems a lot more difficult to us, but we can crank out a new product very easily. And so you just have to look at what your particular skill sets are. Yeah, absolutely.

Tyson Drake  47:57  

And so so the way, the most brand. But I love the way that you talked about new markets in the context of targeting new customer segments as well. It's absolutely and sometimes, in the case of Stanley's case, they used to be a well like, well, they their core market. Wasn't it like, like, hunt, like hunters or outdoor adventure like, that was that cool customer segment, and they, like the guy from crocs came in, and then, you know, they target, you know, middle class American women and you know, kind of RE, you know, probably, like a product, product, market like the like the Venn diagram was like market product, and you kind of like ven that in the middle, it's like, same product, new kind of repositioning of same product. Yeah, very, very clever. You know, wonderful case study that people should really understand how to reposition your product and but, yeah, talking about, talking about new products. So the way most direct to consumer brands start is, let's I like to give us this example with, like, T shirts, right? Because I think it's one of the most obvious examples. The path forward to new products for most, for most direct to consumer brands is pretty obvious. For most is really pretty obvious. You know, let's take some an example. You launch a t shirt, right? You launch like, a white t shirt, and it has this new fit, right? And there's a few brands that have done this that might come to mind, you launch a new T shirt, it's a, like, a really good fit. And that's like, it's innovation. And then you go, Oh, wow. People really like this t shirt. Let's launch some new colors. Because people, our customers, you know what, are asking for new colors. And we think that makes sense. They lost some new colors. And then you're like, Oh, well, our customers, like, really like these new T shirts, new colors. What about we launched like a V neck as well, and then, so you add on, like, a very similar type of product. So you're like, maybe crew neck, and they have a V neck, and it's, but it's very, very similar products, right? Maybe add like a poll on top of that, and but you still like the t shirt, kind of like category. And then you're like, Whoa. Um, you know what else our customers would like? They'd probably like some pants. I think our customers might like some pants, you know? And that's not like a innovation, right? It's just like going, and then you go, you know, what else might our customers who buy power from us, like they might like jumpers and shorts and and so the path forward to most brands within existing categories is pretty obvious in that regard. And that's kind of like how I think about it and and, you know, whatever reason you might transition to going from T shirts to pants might be, just be seasonality. We don't, you know, you're like, summer, and then all of a sudden, winter, like, Oh, our sours kind of don't do well in winter, no one's buying T shirts anymore, or not as many people are buying T shirts anymore. So what do we need to do? Well, we need a winter range. Well, what's a good winter range to style? Well, maybe that might be pants, because whatever reason, we might be better at starting with pants than jumpers or hoodies or water for whatever reason. And so, so that's the case. And then it becomes Okay, well, that's how you kind of start your new product, right? You do like some kind of analysis, you might either be a product, and I usually find founders sit in a few distinct buckets, and maybe one or two core buckets at a time. So if you created a fashion brand, maybe you are, like, a you come from some kind of fashion background or knowledge, or you have, maybe you're a designer. It's very common for, like, fashion brands that found to be a designer or something that they've always been interested in, they might, you know, work for a design, you know, design previously, all they've just done as a hobby, like, I want to try and do this, or maybe they're like, some kind of, you know, they have a marketing background. They've kind of learned what products people like, and then, you know, solving that kind of problem that way. So, but because founders used to have some kind of core competency, and if their product background, they're probably more more intuitive about launching a new product than they are, maybe about launching into new markets or even launching just higher up the advertising funnel. And so whatever, like, box they pick is usually what, what is there like they're most comfortable with? Yeah, in my view. And that's not to say you can't do all three at the same time, right? You can, you can. So you should absolutely, out of all of this, new products will probably benefit you the most, because you can launch new products in new markets and across new channels, and you just kind of like, kind of complete that, that playbook all the time. And I think brands should be get should get very comfortable with launching new products within, within their category, to build out their like portfolio, to de risk, you know, you don't just want to have one single best hero product. You absolutely want to de risk it and have some leaves that you can pull with due to seasonality, or due to, you know, just general risk management of your business, right? Whatever reason, totally

William Harris  53:27  

agree with you. So let's say that you did decide to go do all three. You've iced it out. You know, you and I have talked before that we both really appreciate the ice framework for evaluating things, and you've got a really great, great tweet about that that people can go check out. Let's say you've iced it out, and now you're trying to get your team all aligned on all of these initiatives across multiple international markets, and, you know, multiple new products. How? How do you go about streamlining the marketing organization,

Tyson Drake  54:02  

yeah, so do you want to discuss ice? Or you want to talk about, yeah, how to run the building? Or,

William Harris  54:09  

I feel like ice is fairly intuitive. I think they can go check out your tweet there. And I think the thing that I personally struggle more with understanding that I'd like your thoughts are, are like that, expanding that marketing team, yeah, getting them all on the same page,

Tyson Drake  54:27  

yeah. So I refer to this as, excuse me, I refer to this as professionalizing the marketing org and and so I'll set the context where it's, you know, maybe you've internationalized into a few markets. You have a combination of some agencies or some freelancers and some in house team. Maybe you're fully in house, or you have a now. So either way, you have some some kind of team in place, and the founder is maybe overseeing the team, or maybe there is like a head of growth in place. So context, there is like some kind of team in place. Yeah. And you know, there has to be some kind of operating cadence for which the marketing team understands, like, how to how to operate, like the weekly or monthly cadence, like what to work on, and how do you hold people accountable? And like, how should a meeting be run? Who should be in the meeting? And so I think there's a few frameworks that are that are pretty, pretty useful. I'll start with, I'll start with what I'll what is the L 10 meetings, or level 10 meetings, by by a guy called, I think his name is Gino. Gino Wickman. I think his name was, I hope I didn't butcher that. And he's written a book on this called Traction. It's from like this EOS framework, which is entrepreneur operating system. If ever, if people haven't read it, I recommend they do. It's broadly applicable to,

William Harris  55:58  

we use business, yeah, it's every business. Yeah, very

Tyson Drake  56:01  

broadly applicable to every business. But there are some nonces that you should adjust within the context of whatever business you're in, whether it be to be, whether you know, with e-commerce. So I like to implant this like like an e-commerce version of this L 10 meeting, and it starts off as like so, and this is like a meeting cadence, right? So maybe the start of the week, on a Monday, all the team gets together. And who did decide? Does that mean it might be every department leader, somebody like head of growth, like maybe head of retention, head of acquisition, you know, ops, whoever's responsible for ops, who are responsible for merchandising, product, etc. So whoever is responsible for their business function within, within your brand. And so it kind of starts off as, like, everyone's there on time, and it starts off with good news, and it's five minutes of like, Alright, let's talk about some good news for the week. You know what happened last week? And it might be personal, or might be something that you want to celebrate in the business, whatever that is, just to get people you know feeling good in the meeting. Or if you're in if you're in Germany, you don't do any good news, you just start the meeting. That's something I learned about working in side tangers. One of the things I learned about working in Germany is, like, the meeting just starts, yeah, there's no like, how's your they used to joke about this with me. They're like, oh, there's no, like, How's your mother has your brother, has your dog, has your sister. No, you know, you just start. You just start the meeting. And so there's, like, some cultural you know, there are some subtle cultural differences. The athlete used to work across markets, but yeah. So in this context, you you forcefully start with good news. You five minutes worth of that, and then, and then, from there you have, you know, what would be the department specific scorecards that you're just talking about, a very high level of what's going on within department. So with marketing, might be reporting on how we go into forecast, or in terms of, like, net sales or contribution dollars, for example, are we on track last week? And for the like, for the quarter, like, maybe a more broader, zoomed out, or maybe just week over week or month to date, if you want to report on that, and then you have, like, maybe inventory position, so merchandising, you know, what are our high higher level in stock or overstock SKUs and weeks worth of stock, whatever, like merchandising might want to report on bestsellers overstocked or whatever. Maybe ops report on delivery times or like freight inbound, and then you have like, like customer success, which might report on like tickets time to, you know, ticket closed or whatever, or whatever that may be for a number of tickets, to time to resolve whatever that may be. But just like some a few core indicators to just know how the different departments are doing. And then from there, you kind of go into like quarterly goals, or as like traction, Gina refers them as rocks by Edge quarterly goals. And so I think the whatever you're reporting at the scorecard level should transition into the quarterly goals. So, like, that's why I said with the scorecards, if it's like, you know, just bring up, like, a bit of a zoomed out approach. That way you can see you kind of hit two birds with one stone. And so the idea through this is, you know, talking through scorecards and goals is to not have a long discussion as to like, here's where we're at. Here's sales contribution, here's where inventory position is. Go through different departments. Okay, next one, quarterly goals, how are we, how are we on track for our quarterly contribution target, or EBITDA for the target. How are we on track for that? What's in inventory position? How is that? You know, whatever the OKRs are, or quality goals rocks for this, for different parts, everyone, everyone touches on that five minutes, not really a discussion. Just like, here's where we are at from a high level perspective. And then that's quite kind of the quant part. And then, like, then you move into, like, the qualitative part, I'd argue, which is like, alright, let's, let's go to customer, any customer feedback, you know, neutral pods. Of negative, that would be customer success team, and then then they're going to like, Oh, our customers have been saying this. We're getting inquiries about this. Our returns been pretty high, and they're talking a little bit, little bit about that, or just some good feedback, like, recently had a product launch, feedback has been super positive, and everyone has just been saying such good things about our new product launch. Or now we can service this market, and we're getting some really good customer feedback with that, whatever that may be, so that'd be customer success. And then what I like to do is have whoever is responsible for the marketing calendar to talk through what is happening in the next like, this week and the next week, just to like, align the team on like, here's what's going on, here's what we're launching. Here's what sale we have on. Here's like, the discount tier, if it's changed or it's a new one. Here is like, you know, we have a creative teams. Can be doing a photo shoot this week, just like a high level view of what is going on from a marketing counter perspective, to just align the team on, like, what is what is happening in marketing as well. And so that's just like, you know, share your screen, bring up. Here's the marketing calendar, here's the days that we're doing XYZ or next week. Here's what's coming up, and then maybe ops like, oh, hang on. We're just waiting for the three PL to get this back to us, and we need to hold off a few days on that. Okay, let's bring this forward a bit more. So I won't launch on Tuesday. I launched on Thursday now. And everyone kind of like, so that might be something that might happen. Note, action item for later. And then then you have like, okay, so what are you spend five minutes on that? And those things shouldn't be spent any more on five minutes on each of those that would discuss so far. And then you have what's called IDs, which is identify, discuss, solve, and from there, you talk through what are some challenges that are occurring in the business and, and here is where the discussion really happens, right? Where you discuss, Alright, so we've got this issue with, you know, with whatever it may be with, with this three PL provider, they haven't been, you know, every time it's been terrible, they've been losing they've been losing inventory, and they're really expensive as well. And we're considering moving this is a big challenge for us at the moment, but it's in a different market, and so it's in Canada, for example, might be in Australia. So how do we do that? What were the steps? And so, okay, mate. And then you go like, what is the real issue? And then you get to the real identifier, what is the real issue? Might be multifaceted. In this case, you discuss, you know, what are the associated things around that? And then you try and solve that as well. And maybe not everyone needs to do this, maybe just a high level, a few people have oversight of and you go from there. And maybe, you know, this could be done in, like, an ops meeting as well. Doesn't have to be in a broader meeting. Maybe it's just a more ops specific discussion. And goes to ops and they run their own kind of they run their own LTM meeting to do that as well. And then you just go down the list, right? So that's where, like, the majority of time should be spent. You do that. And then at the end, you know, maybe it's like, some should be keeping time here, and there's five minutes left in the meeting. You know, Gina recommends an hour and a half this meeting, but I've generally found that most of the staff can be done within the hour. And then you conclude the meeting five minutes ago. Someone's like, hey, five minutes left right. Conclude meeting. You recap your Oh, sorry. One thing I forgot is, is even before the IDs, you should have a to do list from the previous week. And so that can be like action so action item was like, do this, and someone's taking notes, action I'm action item, action item. And then you kind of filter that out into everyone who needs to be accountable for those items. That might be the department heads that are in the meeting or and they might transition that to individual contributors who they're responsible for. And then you know, you know, you do that next week, you come back and someone's like, okay, hey, just following up. Have you had this go? Did you finish this? And so, like, 90% of tasks should be done throughout the week, and if 90% aren't done, maybe there's an accountability issue, or maybe it's just a multi week task, but yeah, so that should, that should happen before the IDS should be last week's tasks and and then you go to IDs, identify, discuss, solve, find this remaining conclude, you review the new to do list that does Come. You talk about any cascading communication that needs to go to the company or to the rest of the team, whoever the leaders are responsible for. And then afterwards, you can give the meeting meeting a rating from like one, one to 10 as well. And the idea is to not grade whoever is running the meeting, but to talk about how the flow, the meeting ran, the structure. Maybe it's like, well, we don't like spending too much. We spend too much time on this, or we don't think this reporting needs to happen. Or we think more reporting needs to happen. Another department needs to be brought in there that hasn't been and so yeah, like or like, we don't think. Think everyone is contributing or goes too long. Maybe it goes an hour and a half. You're like, we don't need it an hour and a half. We think we can do this in the hour. So that's like the rate the meeting in some form. It can be like a Google sheet that people put their thing on, or like a Google form that you fill out people rater, or, you know, whatever the mechanism is, you have some rating. I've also worked some brands who just don't like to rate it. Either, you know what you know, whatever. But, um, that's kind of like part of part of that, yeah, 10, yeah. So that is like the 10 meeting in a nutshell.

William Harris  1:05:32  

And I love it. We run on it as well. We have our senior leadership l 10. We have departmental l 10s as well. And those are the ones that we only have as an hour long, whereas the full senior leadership one is the full 90 minutes. I would say, I love the framework. My tips that I would give for maximizing it is, you absolutely have to stick to that timeline that you discussed. That it is critical because it's too easy to get sidetracked otherwise. The other thing would be, you know, they talk about, this is no politicking, right, where it's like, you've said your point, say your point, and then, like, move on from there, like, not continuing to rehash the same point over and over and over again. And then the I part of the IDs, I think, to your point, it's, I think, in a in a pretend world. You think that, like, all of the eyes that are going to come in there for the idea are going to be right, but they're not, I think, to your point, like, you have to actually, kind of, like, do a little digging to get to the what's the real problem that we're trying to solve? And so I think, you know, having done this a little bit longer now, I've realized that it's like, oh, that's ID. ID. ID is like, identify. Discuss, discuss it more okay. Re identify, nope. Discuss it a little bit okay. Now we know the actual problem. Now we can actually go about solving it. Otherwise you try to solve the wrong problem too quickly, and I think we got caught doing that a little bit early on when we implemented that. And the challenging part

Tyson Drake  1:06:53  

as well is maybe getting to the root cause of what we think the problem is, might, you know, might not be favorable for some departments over other departments or some people, right? And so you know, you have to deal with that as well, where you know like, and just be conscious of like, not trying to blame like, oh, well, this was your you're responsible for this, no, you know. And so just trying to do that in a respectful way, but, but do it in a way that doesn't, you know, I like to say, doesn't hide the crap under the rug, right? You know, we're not trying to hide the crap under the rug. Let's bring it up. Let's, let's, you know, understand what the root cause of this really is and then, and then, let's try and solve that together, right? And people should be empowered, that they have, you know, the capability, or that they're being empowered to help try and solve this as well. That's where the magic comes from. Is like the discussion and the solution once you really solve it as well.

William Harris  1:07:58

So I can't believe how fast this time has gone, I like to transition into the who is Tyson Drake part of this show. Speaking of magic, you mentioned magic? What makes you magical?

Tyson Drake  1:08:15  

I've got two really good magic card tricks. That's what makes me magical? No, I'm, I can't really show show you, because you're not here and I don't have a deck of cards on me. But no what I think I'm what makes me, I guess, let's substitute magical with unique.

William Harris  1:08:35  

Okay, is

Tyson Drake  1:08:37  

I've been, I've been, I've been doing e COMM For like, 1516, years now, and that's across venture backed brands, that is across countries, you know, spent three years in in Berlin, working for a venture capital firm. You know, I've done, I was doing direct to consumer in 2009 when, when it was just called e-commerce, right? And, you know, importing own products from from China and factories and challenges associated with that, you know, I've done fitness equipment, I've done pet and, like, you know, kids, you know, products. And I've done MRO, which is like maintenance, repair operations, which has like, 100,000 SKUs. I've done single hero product SKUs, you know, I've done, you know, so many different categories across so many markets and so many levels of inventory that I've just built up, I guess, a wide range, like a broad repertoire, working like in these business and not just like one function of these businesses. And so, I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. I have a broad range of, I guess, use cases to draw upon. Yeah, and a lot of the frameworks I've kind of come across or developed over my career is has been a result of me trying to solve problems in like, one business that I've, you know, later on, just been like, Oh, this is just applicable to this other business as well. But I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have, like, figured this out in this business, to the extent that I've had to figure it out. So I'll give an example. So I've got this merchandising scorecard that I use, which which like, is really detailed view of how to understand what categories are like moving, you know, what categories are producing revenue and and, or what collections within those categories, and what products in those collections, within those categories. And I developed that with a with a when I had, you know, went into this business that had like, 20,000 SKUs, and I was just like, What the heck is going on in this business? Like, how? How do I first of all get some sense of transparency, like data, like, what is just going on, right? So, okay, how do I structure data in a way that I can see what, what? How do we arcade budget across categories, across collections? What? You know, you can't just promote the single best Euro product all the time because you've got 19,000 other products to promote as well. But do you, or do you just call out the best Euro product in whatever category or collection, and then how do you structure your ad accounts to like account for that? You can't just run a consolidated ad account for that, because Facebook just going to find the best seller and run with that, but you've still got, you know, 19,000 other products to move. So how do you think about that and across seasonality as well? So, so just like you start like problems I've just encountered with some brands I've just found out, well, they're actually applicable to other brands that even have hundreds of products, or, like, 1000 products, or 10 products are still applicable and so, so what's matching about me is, I guess, the breadth and depth of which I've operated in a lot of these brands at scale, and then, of course, you just build up this bank of like ways to think about and solve problems, right? And I think that just comes with experience and time and my core competencies, I believe in those three buckets, which is why I've segmented them as a fractional CMO, their measurement and analytics. And I'm really good at data analysis, and you know, measurement infrastructure, establishing that if they haven't got any or coming into existing infrastructure, and building or building that out to, like the marketing, professionalizing the marketing awards or the L 10 meetings, but also RACI, you know, responsible, accountable, consultant, informed. Like, how should you think about that? But, but also, like, hiring, right? And, you know, I believe hiring shouldn't be left after up to putting out a job ad and letting the whoever is currently looking for a job be your best candidate. No, you should go out and find the best candidate through LinkedIn or whatever way you might want to ask your peers to, or your network to, if anyone knows any good XYZ. So, so it's just like these frameworks of like, okay, well, I've had to come in, and usually I've come in where I've been, like the head of growth of a brand, and where they either are working only with agencies and they need to in house, or they want to in house all their competencies, and then say, Okay, well, learn how to hire, learn how to run this team, learn how how to, you know these and over time, over time, you just build up these playbooks, right? Yeah. You like, Oh, okay. Well, I've read traction, like, several years going like, Okay, well, that's like, that's applicable for e-commerce, and yeah, we could adjust it a little bit, but it's applicable. And then, like, okay, and then you just build up your your competencies over time. It just takes time, right? And so that's like, the marketing org, and then, like, the growth, growth strategy, right? It's like, well, you know, in socialization, new markets, new products, new channels. But also like three, three ways to go, a brand, right? Acquire more net new customers, reacquire existing customers, or reactivate and then, and then grow AV, and then, like gross margin. And so every growth tactic essentially fits into those three, three buckets, I would argue, and sometimes multiple and even the new channels you marks new products, is kind of like an acquisition method. So you stick that into, like at the back of the acquisition So, yeah, you just build up this playbook over time. I guess I

William Harris  1:14:33  

love it. Well, speaking of magic playbooks, I also have two very good magic card tricks. So the next time we meet up in person, we'll have to have a magic card trick competition between the two of us. Wonderful. Love. What about what makes you cringe? What's something you're like? Oh, yeah.

Tyson Drake  1:14:51  

So I like to joke that, you know Twitter, Twitter is very especially DTC, Twitter is very US centric. And by that, I mean. The majority of people who are just on there, on us. I think I can probably name all the Australians that are on DDC Twitter. There's probably maybe 10 of them, well, you know, maybe five or 10 that are, you know, just, you know, a bit more vocal. And there's, there's a lot of lurkers. I was a lurker for a long time, and, you know, wasn't a contributor now, and now I'm contributing a lot more, but I always like to, like, joke around and say, like, look like, looking, look in Twitter and like, Oh, what do you what do you Americans arguing about today? You know, arguing about, you know, it's always cost caps or, like, what marketing tactic are the Americans arguing about today? And it's not because you know Americans, you know, argumentative, whatever. It's just that, you know, strong, strong opinions Lucy held, right? You want to have a candid discussion, a robust discussion, and sometimes that involves, you know, that that should involve multiple views with multiple opinions. And, you know, that's, that's how you kind of get to the truth, right? And that's, you know, that's great, you know, but it's just us, really us dominated. So it's, to me, it's always, what are the Americans arguing about today?

William Harris  1:16:05

I like that. That's fair. Last question. I really like talking to people about, like, you know, obviously you're up arrowing your business. What about the rest of your life? Are there certain things that you're trying to up arrow in your personal life, relationships, health, or things like that and how,

Tyson Drake  1:16:26  

yeah, my, I mean, I have two kids, right? I have a three and a half year old and a six and a half year old, three and a half year old girl, six and a half year old boy. And so one thing that I have really enjoyed about being a fractional CMO is, you know, I'm not, I'm not working like, 6078, hours a week anymore. I mean, I can, if I want to. I'll just take on more, more work like, but by like, I only work with maximum three clients at a time, and and every client that I work with will get a dedicated day. And so usually, how it works out is is very rarely I'll do one day a week, but sometimes I might, and usually, clients get either two or three days a week. So so if you go, one client gets one day a week, one client gets two days a week, and one client gets two days a week. You know it's going three clients. Kind of three clients. But majority of time I'm working with, you know, one to two clients. And so what it does is, what it has done is it's freed me up to, like, take my son, to like football, for example, Australian football, which is like, you know, from 330 to, like, 430 so like, usually, I pick him up from school at 3pm and and we live five minutes walk to school and back. So usually I'd be like, walk to school, five minutes, pick him up, walk home, 10 minutes done. And then I just like, get back into into my work again. And that varies. I usually take him to school in the morning, and, you know, so now I can take them to school in the morning, right? I take my son to school in the morning 830 you know? And I'm not, like, stuck in traffic for an hour from like, 830 to nine, and then, like, I work by nine or 930 or whatever. So it's just given me a bit more freedom, and part of that is because the majority of my clients are in the northern hemp. So either I dedicate mornings to like a line align with them from like their evening or their late afternoon, and or they're in or be my my night, or like you, or European mornings would be my afternoon. And so I have, like, so that's usually my work hours. And maybe maybe, like, part of my work hours actually, like, managing team, being on calls, running meetings or stuff like that. But a lot of my work hours is me, like, either doing some analysis or building a report or, you know, doing things where I don't need to be in the same room with people not gonna, and I can get get work done. And so, you know, having, you know, choosing to either take on more clients or not, I now have the freedom to to be present a lot more with my with my children, and that's something that I really, really value. And that doesn't mean, you know, they come home from school and I'm straight away, like spending two hours with them. It means that I have the ability to pick them up, take them to school, you know, take them to football practice for like an hour, you know, during the during the day, if I want to, and then, and then come back, come back home again, and then work, like, in the evening, if I want to. So I'm not like, I don't have the boundaries of this. Like, you have to be in office from like nine to five or whatever that may be, you know, when you have more responsibility issues, you like, you know, be in the office from like nine to six and then go home and then work. Of you know, work on the stuff that you didn't get done during the day, because your meetings all day. And that's just something that I've found is I've just been able to get back a lot of my time and, and, yeah, and so for me, it's been the the prioritizing family over work and making conscious decisions that that is what I'm doing as well, rather than, you know, having to, you know, not be, not being at home, and not not being able to pick up my kid from school, for example.

William Harris  1:20:34  

Yeah, I think, like you said, the conscious decision to do that, being intentional about it, and something that I've learned I've got three kids as well, and something I've learned from raising my kids is, I thought that it needed to be this really unique, dedicated time that I spent with them, like, almost like this fake time, right? And more often than not, it is that half hour drive to sports practice or whatever that is, you know, just genuinely good one on one conversation, getting to know them. And it's like, I think, as a parent, just reminding yourself that it's like, hey, there are a lot of opportunities. They might not necessarily look the way you thought they were going to look, but it's like, if you're if they're there, if you're willing to grab a hold of them and use them,

Tyson Drake  1:21:13  

yeah, I think the most important thing is just in some capacity, whatever that capacity is, and that's different for every individual based upon their commitments and whatever, but just being present with them in some capacity. And for me, it's just, it's just being more present as a parent, you know, that's on the weekends, that's on, you know, when I, when I'm with them at any time, just just being more consciously present. And, yeah, so that's, that's the main area that I have trying to, I guess, level up my life in

William Harris  1:21:52  

Tyson, it has been absolutely amazing talking to you today. We are at the end of our time. If people wanted to work with you, follow you. What's the best way for them to get in touch. Stay in touch with you. Yeah.

Tyson Drake  1:22:02  

So if you're on Twitter, follow me, Tyson Drake. If you want to reach out, I have a website, tysondrake.com and my in my LinkedIn is also Tyson Drake. So yeah, making it easy, any, any of those ways you'll you'll find me

William Harris  1:22:22  

that's perfect. I really appreciate you taking your time to share so much wisdom with us today. It's been very, very insightful, and I appreciate you.

Tyson Drake  1:22:30  

Yeah, thanks. Will really appreciate you having me on the podcast.

William Harris  1:22:35  

All right, have a great day and everybody else, thanks for tuning in. Thank you.

Outro  1:22:40  

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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