The Impact of 3PLs on eCommerce Brands’ Market Value and Profit Margins With Casey Armstrong

Casey Armstrong is the CMO of ShipBob, a global omni-fulfillment platform providing businesses access to the best-in-class supply chain and fulfillment capabilities. Over the past five years, Casey has overseen the marketing, partnership, and growth teams. Before joining ShipBob, he was the VP of Marketing at BigCommerce, where he led the digital, content and SEO, growth and CRO, and other marketing and operations teams. Casey is passionate about helping startup companies establish growth and marketing strategies.

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

Casey Armstrong shares how his professional background led him to join ShipBob
What is trending in the e-commerce realm?
Knowing when to incorporate 3PL (third-party logistics) — and the benefits of fulfillment services
How to leverage the customer experience to maximize profits
Borrowing marketing strategies from influential business models
How simplifying goals facilitates the decision-making process
Casey’s unique perspective on stress management

In this episode…

eCommerce has become an increasingly competitive market — prompting the need for innovative marketing strategies. In efforts to scale their companies, some e-commerce brands have invested resources in delivering their products to a global market, partnering with popular retail stores, and prioritizing a personalized experience for consumers. What strategies can you implement to scale quickly while increasing your profit margin?

Brand originality is a valuable currency in the e-commerce industry. Your marketing strategy must captivate and compel your target audience to purchase your product over competitors. But in a saturated market, novel marketing tactics are rare. Rather than spending marketing dollars on reinventing the wheel, Casey Armstrong advises e-commerce brands to borrow strategies from influential brands to inspire their marketing approaches. As your brand grows in popularity, partnering with a third-party logistics (3PL) company relieves you of fulfillment duties — allowing you to focus solely on growing your business.

On this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris welcomes Casey Armstrong, CMO of ShipBob, to discuss trending e-commerce marketing strategies and the benefits of incorporating 3PL into your business model. Casey shares how borrowing influential brands’ strategies can maximize your profit margins and explains why simplifying your goals makes business decisions effortless.

Resources mentioned in this episode

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 0:03

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.

William Harris 0:15

Hey everybody, William Harris here. I'm the Founder and CEO of Elumynt. In the host of this podcast, I'm going to be featuring experts in the D2C industry sharing strategies on how to scale your business and achieve your goals. I'm really excited about the guests that I have today, Casey Armstrong. Casey is currently the CMO of ShipBob, and was previously the VP of Marketing at BigCommerce. And he told me to add this next part. Casey is a Will Harris fanboy. Casey, I'm excited to have you here. It's great to be here. Well, good to see you. Likewise. I'm trying to remember Do you remember, the first time you and I really started interacting? You sent me a book? Do you remember which book that was? Yes, eloquence is in the title. You can tell me maybe the full the full title. But yes, that was a gift from a friend of mine. And after we started talking a bit, I'm like, Okay, this is right up Will's alley. Yeah, The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth. In and I probably mispronounce that name. But absolutely one of my favorite books. Now I've I'm not somebody who likes to read a book multiple times. But this one, I actually have it right here. I have I have read it multiple times. And it's got plenty of good wear and tear on the on the spine there. I love to see it. Yes, it was it was I believe it was a gift to me, originally from my friend Patrick laska vets who has, you know, been able to write a couple bestsellers himself, and definitely helped reshape my views of storytelling and the impact of words. And then yeah, after after we got started to get to know each other. I was like, Okay, well, I've got to get this to Well, I love it. I want to dig in, we're gonna dig into some stuff today, about three pls just marketing in general. And then we've got some good fun personal stuff that we'll get into. Before we dig in. I do want to at least announce our sponsor here. 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 million. And we were ranked as the 12th fastest growing agency in the world by Adweek. You can learn more at our website Elumynt, which is spelled e-l-u-m-y-n-t.com. That said, Casey, take me through first I want to get the backstory.

Casey Armstrong 2:38

We work together when as a BigCommerce.

William Harris 2:42

And you're running Elumynt as well. So and they've IPO, you can put that in the you know, and you're right, I don't think I can do that. Exactly, but then your long list of accolades. I appreciate that. Thank you for the plug. What I wanted to start with here first is for people who have the context of okay, you were you were VP over at BigCommerce. Now CMO of ShipBob, tell me a little bit about just like your career journey and what led from like the backstory of you ending up where you are.

Casey Armstrong 3:12

Um, I'll give the short version. So jumping over to ShipBob, you know, I was very proud of what we accomplished at BigCommerce and what they've done since and have really built, you know, one of the one of the leading platforms out there. But when ShipBob reached out originally, I wasn't looking for another role. I actually just discarded the email. And I remember that night thinking I'm like, what is that company with that funny name that's allegedly growing that fast. And I've never heard of them. And you know, even in my like, quote, unquote, spare time, you know, I was, you know, networking and following the latest from e-commerce technology and latest to the brands and prior to BigCommerce, I was helping run a company called Watchmaster we were lucky to watch you know, primarily direct to consumer, but B2B as well. So luxury watch e-commerce brand based over in Europe, and we'd sell all around the world. And, you know, we grew like crazy 10s of millions in our first year our because it was luxury watches. You know, we're buying, you know, Rolex Tyco or Breitling omega. We didn't have our own brand we were you know, buying and reselling. Our AOV was like 6000 euros and so sure, you know, it's a large sticker price. And so the importance of inventory management and and shipping and fulfillment was so important, but out of everything, I'd say that's where we completely, you know, missed the ball, that maybe some things on the margin side, but anyways, so I felt that pain firsthand. And then when they reached out I was like, Okay, this is this is fascinating, you know, we can basically how do you create the BigCommerce or the Shopify of fulfillment, which is such a tough problem and it's a must have like, if you're running Your brand as everybody listening to spy knows, you're either for, you know, shipping and fulfilling orders yourself, somebody else is doing that on your behalf, or you don't have a business because you're not getting any orders. So it's a must have. There's there's no other option like somebody has to be fulfilling these orders. And so yeah, once once I met the team and sell the product in action, I was like, Okay, let's do this. And it's been almost five years now.

William Harris 5:22

Wow. Yeah, that's great. I mean, I remember when you made that shift, and I think at the time, I was doing a lot of stuff with celebrate. And we partnered with you guys as well. And, you know, it was, it's still just I will admit, this is a world outside of my typical world, where I get much more into the marketing side and the lead gen side and in the logistics is not my forte. And so I would say to that end, what are you seeing trend wise in? Let's just say shipping logistics, the three PL side of things? What are you seeing with a lot of e-commerce brands right now? Are there any trends that are hot?

Casey Armstrong 5:57

So one of the things that we really focus on that ShipBob, it's just listening to, you know, talking to our customers all the time, and that's our CEO, that's, that's myself as the CMO, that's, you know, the often the latest hires, like we need to be talking to our customers, because there are who are going to, you know, shape shape our roadmap, and that's how we're going to learn, you know, what are the what are the latest trends? Where should we be investing. And so what's been what's been interesting, I guess, it's also like my, either lazy or Chico for marketing is just customer voice. But anyways, we'll get to that later. What's been interesting, and I give so much credit to these e-commerce, you know, operators, whether you're the CEO, or the head of ops, or the marketer, or, you know, the intern is the level that the amount of competition and the level of complexity that's needed from these brands earlier, and I think a lot of so much education and knowledge in the space of these brands were now that's like trickling down to these, you know, this, that, and I'll get into what that actually means in a second, that's been trickling down to all these brands, you know, earlier and earlier and earlier, kind of like where, you know, B2B SaaS in the early 2000s was so new, and then people started, like, actually seeing what doesn't doesn't work and obviously continue to evolve, but that trickles down. And so in the D2C space, or the e-commerce space, I should say, you know, went from like, you know, a few years ago, especially pre cut, but it was like, okay, great, I could spin up like a Shopify store and, and some Instagram ads, and like, let's go, we can make millions. And that's just not the case at all anymore. Where these brands, they need to go global much earlier in the journey, they need to start evaluating the retail opportunities early, I've got to give a shout out to the Target that I think she really pulled the retail market forward, because Target was one of the first and arguably the first, the larger retailer that actually instead of trying to avoid these these, quote, unquote, hot brands, they started courting them, and you go to a Target, and it's like a who's who of like, you know, some of like the most up and coming brands out there across all different industries, whether it's pet care, or clothes, or, you know, nutrition supplements. And so anyways, so, so international, the retail side of things. And then another interesting thing is the levels of customization. Because you know, something, especially as marketers like to think about is like, Well, where can I get 100% open rate, and that's nowhere really, except for the packages that you ship. And so the focus on the unboxing experience is so important. So how do you add that customization as a technology component as well. And then as you think of all these different moving parts, you're like, Okay, well, I want to build this brand, as quickly, but also efficiently as possible. So I don't want to like I want to be able to scale revenue much faster than headcount. So that's where a lot of the technology comes in. And so you need to be able to like, okay, which solutions can tie everything together, so I can be most efficient with my time and with my team. And so anyways, just to recap real quick, I'd say International, the retail side, and you know, a lot on the customization layer as well.

William Harris 9:15

Yeah. Well, and I think that to your point, right, the industry as a whole has leveled up. And so the baseline expectations from customers are that you have to be in a different level than what it was. Even if you look at this from any other industry that's happened in in YouTube, right? It's like the baseline content that you can get away with 10 years ago versus almost what's expected. Now it's it's leveled up and that that happens a lot. And so what are those signs and symptoms that you would say businesses start to recognize their need for getting into a three PL that it's like, Hey, here's what you should you're probably seeing these things and here's what you should start thinking about as far as how to evaluate if it's the right time.

Casey Armstrong 9:57

I think it's been very beneficial for Brett hands to do some fulfillment themselves for a while, because they can understand, like, what would actually happen if they outsourced it that said, I mean, we have customers that are doing 10s of, if not well over $100 million that never did the in house. But is that again, from understanding? Okay, how are my man? How are my manufacturing partners? Sending me the goods? How do I receive and store these goods? How do I pick and pack these goods? Who are the carriers I work with, there's, you know, different elements of pricing. You know, it's often based off of weight or dimensional weight, and like the zones, and so you can kind of start understanding the importance of like reducing your the weight or dim weights or reducing, you know, the zones, which zones are essentially how far package needs to travel. And so you can start to just understand each part of the supply chain, like, what are the one or two levers that like we really have at our disposal, and that I think allows you when you're when you're choosing a fulfillment partner, to, to just evaluate them a little bit more thoroughly and better, and that way, because nobody wants to switch their three PL and so that way, you can hopefully identify, Okay, who can i Who's the best partner for us today? And who's the best partner for us tomorrow? And is that the same person? And then also, once you start working with them, I think you can just become a better partner. And yeah, sure, I'm probably biased to say that, but like, it's true, because I you can you can kind of tell when you're working with a seller that's never shipped things themselves. Sure. Versus someone who's just a little bit more experienced. And I think that's where I mean, I'm sure you feel this way is that as a, you know, agency owner, it's like, you know, the the cliche, which is not always the often true, where you know, your your most expensive, or your highest paying customers are much easier than your lowest paying customers. But it's like, yeah, some of that comes just with the experience that they've had with partnering with agencies. Same thing with with your three PL, so it was, I think, but anyway, so I think it's important to have some of that experience yourself. But once you start seeing that operations, and the pick, and pack start eating is eating into your time, that's like preventing your growth, that's when you really need evaluating a three PL partner.

William Harris 12:15

Yeah, I mean, because this stuff can get expensive, right? I remember touring a company's warehouse and the level of automation that they had invested in. At some point in time, you have to look at whether or not it makes sense for you, as a business owner, what are you the best at, and if you're the best at, you know, whatever this niche is, this product is this category is, if you start devoting too much of your time and attention towards the fulfillment side of things, that's okay. If you're, if that is your whole thing, it's like, you're just going to make sure that you're the best at delivering this within a fulfillment center type approach. But otherwise, you're going to be devoting your time, your attention, your resources, your thoughts away from that. And it turns into, I mean, it can be very expensive to get into doing the level of automation that is almost expected to be able to deliver packages in the way that a three PL would be doing.

Casey Armstrong 13:10

Yeah, I agree. Like there's, there's some founders and operators where fulfillment or logistics is their differentiator. And sure, that should keep it in house. But if if that's not then you should look to outsource and looked outsource earlier. Especially because no matter how good you are, the likelihood of you will also want to open up multiple facilities is probably pretty low. And the costs can get pretty expensive. And so you know, if you're in, let's say, Southern California, like I am, and like a lot of brands are, it's, it's pretty expensive to ship to the northeast. And, you know, the we see consistently California is, you know, the number one consumer state and number two is New York. And so you're splitting the coasts, in probably your number one market, which is the United States like that can get pretty expensive. And also, when you think of the customer experience, the transit time to ship from California to New York, just naturally is is going to take a bit longer unless you're shipping the air. And so you should have taken these things into consideration. And then another thing, too, is just fixed versus variable costs. And so especially when you're getting started, you want to keep things variable as much as possible. And so you're often paying your fulfillment partner, if you're doing well, they're gonna do well. And if you're not doing well, you know, you're not gonna have to really owe them anything except for maybe some storage costs. Whereas if you're operating things yourself, that's a fixed cost. And so no matter Sure, maybe the labor is variable, but no matter how well or how poorly you're doing, you still need to be paying the rent on on that space, and maybe that machinery or or whatnot.

William Harris 14:49

Yeah, and so if you're an e-commerce brand, and let's say you're five $10 million a year and you've been considering switching over to a three PL one What are those? Those aha moments that you say? Let's say you you make the decision? What are those breaths of fresh air that you taking? Oh, I get it. Now, one of those it sounds like would be that ability to have multiple locations. So that way you can ship a lot faster and better. It's better customer experience. What are those other things that you say people just go? Oh, I get it now. Like they they finally make this switch thing? Oh, yeah. i Why did I wait so long to do this?

Casey Armstrong 15:29

I think people I hear this often when I'm talking to either customers or prospects. But often customers after they've been working with us for a little bit, is they consciously or subconsciously like for their own growth, because they know that, you know, fulfillment is not going away. And so it's like this Sisyphean feat where like, every single morning, you go to sit, you know, every single night, I say, you go to, you go to sleep, you wake up the next morning, there's probably another pile of orders. And if you're growing, it's probably you know, whatever, X number of orders larger than the next day, and you need to pick and pack and ship all of those again. And then you go to sleep. And then the same thing happens. And it happens the next day. And the next day, it's never it's never over. And so, you know, they'll, they'll say, okay, and then peak season comes, and now you're getting 3x The orders, or maybe it's Black Friday, or Cyber Monday or giving Tuesday and you got 20 times the amount of orders or whatever, whatever it may be. And also you're like, how am I going to get all these done, I can't, I can't focus on anything else. And so once they can hand that off, and they know, well, I don't have to do this anymore. I'm sure my ops team or myself a managing the supply chain and making sure my my fulfillment partner is doing what they said they do. And the orders are going out. And I've got visibility across all of that. But now we can just go grow the business. Like now I can focus on product development, making sure my products even better, I can focus on marketing, or sales or community building. And I can really scale this thing up. And so I think that's where we see a lot of customers will be like, Oh, I was essentially a flat sales for the last three years. And now I've handed this off, and like, you know, it's given me the confidence, it took a little bit, but now it's giving me the confidence to increase now I'm not 50% are now up 3x. And so that's, I think one of the biggest aha moments. And another is, okay, we really wanted to try x. But we were too scared or didn't know how and now we can. So again, now it could be I wanted to, I wanted to ship globally, and there's multiple ways to ship globally that you can unlock, you know, a lot of sales are, hey, I wanted to get my inventory in, you know, an international fulfillment center, or I wanted to start adding those custom inserts, but I didn't want to pick and pack all of those myself, or wanted to have custom boxing, you know, or, you know, I wanted to explore a retail partnership with Target or Nordstrom or Saks or whoever, maybe, but I didn't really know how. And I also didn't want to be storing that much inventory in my spare bedroom or my garage or my warehouse. And so it's really just like unlocking a lot of like, what you what you're willing to go aggressively after, because a lot of that can be taken care of for you.

William Harris 18:24

Yeah, I laughed a little bit when you talked about storing the extra storage in your spare bedroom or warehouse. It reminded me actually of my days, when I was helping to run an e-commerce store. So this was a company called dollar hobbies, RC cars, drones. And there was a time where we were going so fast. And we scaled, I want to say from about 3000 skews to 70,000 in less than a year. And it was a massive time of growth, it was a lot of fun. But the warehouse had not grown the same time, right. And so it's like we actually while we were working on finding a new warehouse, we had shipping containers that were just out in the parking lot. And so wintertime in Minnesota, it's cold, but we have to go, you know, the team would have to go out and pick sometimes items are out in the shipping containers and come back into the warehouse and then go back out to the shipping container. And that makes for you know, one of those things where like you said it can scale nicely with you. And the other thing I think from the scale perspective that you talked about was, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, cyber five, whatever you want to call that, that period of time. Sometimes we'd have to hire you know, temp help or something like that. And then there's errors that take place with that and you guys have the ability to flex up and down which is a really nice thing when you're working with a three PL and you know that you're going to have like this uniform experience this uniform error not error free completely but but less likely than hiring temp workers and hoping that you've trained them well enough within the you know, two days you had before you throw them on the floor or something like that.

Casey Armstrong 19:53

Yeah, and it's it's mind blowing the amount of orders that some brands pull off and especially with a On channels like TikTok these days and were sure his product viral, crazy viral, and you know, we're talking like, you know, six figures of sales like, you know, over 100,000 orders within just a couple of days when you know, it's more than they've done in the lifetime of their business. And so yeah, it's, it's pretty impressive what what brands can achieve?

William Harris 20:20

Are there any of those that you're able to talk about that you have permission to talk about?

Casey Armstrong 20:24

I'm trying to think of. I mean, there's a couple we have, I don't know if I can name some of these companies, but I'll try to think of them if there's some people I can mention.

William Harris 20:35

Sure. You also talked about custom boxes and inserts, and I thought that was something that was interesting, because right now we're in, let's just say whether we want to call it an economic recession or not, from a, you know, official definition, we can say that things have receded at the very least, right? It's like, it's like whether this is recession, receding hairline or not like things are receding. And so one of the ways that I think people are thinking about this as like, Well, how do I maximize profitability off of what I'm currently already doing? And I think that that's something that people are under utilizing, is that full experience? And it might seem like it's an extra cost to add on a custom box or custom insert, but maybe not looking at what's the return that they're getting from that. So what are some good ideas that people are doing? And how is this benefiting them in a profitability perspective?

Casey Armstrong 21:24

Yeah, because that's where you do need to think of, obviously, like, what does that impact now in your cogs, but also, then what's the impact on lifetime value? And so, because it might cost you a bit more, and we actually include our standard packaging as part of our offering, so you don't need to pay for this, if you're gonna need some boxes, like, you know, you might you might feel an impact, but a couple of things. One is, I mentioned dimensional weight earlier. And so you can think of like, okay, how do I really, how do I minimize the size of the package, and so maybe I can get the dimensional way, you know, into like a specific band. So now I can start saving money on every single order that comes in? Another thing is, again, well, will this surprise and delight the customers and maybe have them share it with their friends or on social? You know, and will that provide some extra return? What what we've seen a lot of brands do, especially lately, with such an eye on profitability, or, you know, maybe stronger unit economics is, they will maybe only utilize a custom box for the first order, and then they'll create custom rules. So it goes in, like standard packaging for every order after that. Another thing too, is like, let's say custom inserts, you know, marketing inserts is okay, how can that be an upsell opportunity? And so, you know, you sell whatever, this greens, or this coffee, or whatever it may be, but you also sell the cream or, or the coffee mugs, or, you know, maybe some expensive coffee kit? How can I utilize the inserts and maybe drip them over time, just like as we would from like a, you know, an email marketing perspective, or like some launch campaign? How can I utilize like physical mailers that are that like, I know, my customers are going to actually open and see, again, near 100% open rate, or as close to 100 as you'll ever get, you know, how can I utilize that? And so that's been a way that people have definitely, you know, leverage some of the customization side of things.

William Harris 23:28

Yeah. Are there any ones that have stood out to you is like that was creative. That was well done in insert or anything that just kind of took you back?

Casey Armstrong 23:41

Let me let me think of some of those. Like, there's, there's a lot of customers I have there, but there's some who we can share and some

William Harris 23:48

some. But I understand that completely. Yeah,

Casey Armstrong 23:52

I'll think of some some, some idea, a lot

William Harris 23:55

of good NDAs and stuff that exists in our space. I also was thinking about just, you know, okay, shifting away from purely specific e-commerce to just marketing in general, you're the CMO. And so there's a lot of things that you're wrestling with from a marketing science and understanding perspective. You were talking to me before about, you know, not just one playbook. And what do you mean, when you talk about there's not just one playbook?

Casey Armstrong 24:24

So something that I think's helped me a bit in my career, and I see some of our customers and I'll give an example in a sec. It's helped them is how can you, you know, from either your direct experience or watching others from afar or reaching out and talking to, you know, you know, founders or marketers or whoever salespeople and other companies in other industries, like how can you like steal from them? And so, you know, I know when I was helping run a company called paleo hacks, it was very like direct response marketing. I was able to take some of those his ideas like the summits, we used to run at paleo hacks, which drove a lot of revenue, and, and create so much great just user generated content and expert content and brand awareness, but also drive conversions. And we essentially stole that and and replicated it BigCommerce, and it's there make a big conference. And they've run it. I think they ran it, what, four or five more years after I left. And you know, we've done similar things over at ShipBob. And so again, you're like, Okay, well, what worked well, in D2C marketing are what worked well, in direct response marketing, and how can I apply that to B2B SaaS. And so we're seeing that with some of these brands as well, where they Okay, we are amazing at direct to consumer sales, we are just murdering it on Instagram and TikTok. And, and, you know, whatever YouTube shorts, like how do we replicate? Or have that help us? You know, globally? How do we have that help us in retail sales. And so, I remember, you know, I was, you know, playing on, on the socials, you know, late last year, and then earlier this year, and I started seeing, so bloom nutrition in their customer bars, I started seeing them, just heavily promoting themselves at Target. And I was like, Oh, this is pretty fascinating. And they have this, you know, army of, of just advocates and people who love their product, you know, as they showed, they've done such an amazing job cultivating this community. And they were essentially like, you know, whatever, release the hounds like to these to these different target locations, and you couldn't find a target that could keep their product in stock. And so it's like, how do you how do you blend what you're really good at, and, and just get really creative? And apply that to like these other channels that you're that you're looking to get into?

William Harris 26:56

Yeah, and I love that, because I think that this works. I like the idea of lateral thinking, right? It's something that I talk about often even just with my brothers and stuff is being a lateral thinking and thinking about things from different perspectives. And I think this works very well when we're talking e-commerce SaaS, it works very well even outside of that, but at least from an e-commerce, SaaS perspective, or just e-commerce in general. I'm seeing a lot of things where the D2C and I call them the D2C darlings, right. It's like they were, you know, DMVs. They were disruptors, they were doing things a certain way. And then things change, the economy changes a little bit, economics changes a little bit. e-commerce takes up about 15% of total retail sales. And they're starting to pivot and adapt to excuse me, some of the things that the traditional retailers have done, and they're I'm seeing, you know, catalogs have a resurgence. And I thought catalogs are dead for a while, but I'm seeing well, people are starting to send out catalogs. Why? Because it worked. It helps to expand what you're currently doing. I'm seeing, you know, obviously a lot of traditional retailers wholesalers adopting a lot of the mentality that we've seen from the this the disruptors in the D2C side of things. And so there's borrowing there. When I started in e-commerce, I was SaaS before that. So I was at a VC back SaaS company called when I work in celebration, SaaS as well. And, and so I took a lot of what I had learned in the SaaS world and my partner as well, Jeff Snyder, and when we really started building out what we were doing from our agency here for e-commerce, we borrowed heavily from what we'd son seen in SaaS, a lot of that would be, let's say, the LTV CAC ratios. That was something when I think we were doing this, there weren't people really talking about this very much in e-commerce at the times that e-commerce was still very transactional for a lot of people. And when we started really pulling this in, again, more established brands were talking about it, but the D2C community that wasn't a big talking track of theirs. And so looking at this and saying, Okay, how do we understand that the different lifetime values and what we're doing there, and so there's a lot that can be borrowed across these different places. And like I said, I take this even further, and would even say, like, even within physics community, I can remember talking about this years ago, maybe 10 years ago or so. I was I had a health background, I was a nurse. And one of the things that I was thinking about when it came to nuclear physics was the idea of right now they send things through a toroidal you know, reactor, like a doughnut shaped reactor, and that's typically the way it was like, Well, what if we use like a helix shaped react or something would that cause any difference or changes or whatever. And it's like the idea of borrowing from what we see within, you know, bio field and applying that to physics or taking what we see in physics and applying that to bio taking biology and applying that to robotics, applying that to AI taking what we learned from these other fields, and the more that we take that ability to cross pollinate these playbooks. I think the more that allows you to like you said steal these ideas from things that could be completely outside of yours or just So within here, you know, running on that tangent one more time. Let's go with the LTV side of things. You've got just subscription based businesses in e-commerce as well, a lot of D2C, right there was that idea. It's like, well, I got my transaction. And that was good. And I'm moving on. And then I said, Wait a minute, how do I actually just create this ability for me to have this recurring revenue? Let's do this. Let's do upsells to cross sells, and there's a lot of ways that you can start to borrow from what's worked in other industries. So I love the way that you worded that.

Casey Armstrong 30:30

Yeah, I agree. I mean, back to your example your your question on like, customization and inserts, you know, I purchased from a customer called, called Rise, they do the mushroom coffee, and yeah, and matcha. And they've just been blowing up. And it's, you know, it's pretty cool. Because like, when you order, you know, it does come with, like, whatever the special spoon and it comes with like an ingredients booklet of the non grades booklet, like a recipe booklet of like, here's some cool things you can make with it. And so they're they're already finding ways of how can granted they, you know, they want you to be able to enjoy the products, you order more, but it's also well, how do I use the product faster? Yeah, which therefore I need to buy more. And then also it's like, okay, one of the main ingredients, that's consistent one of the recipes is the creamer. Well, guess what the other marketing insert is, we have a creamer. Sure. And so just thinking through, like, how do a lot of these things play off each other. And I know something that, you know, we've spoken about over the years, and I feel very strongly of is like, understanding also like, how a lot of let's just say different marketing channels work together. And so that's where, you know, five about like full stack marketing. And like, if you if you understand, you know, that there's there's value and maybe being a subject matter expert, like a certain channel, but if you understand paid search, and you understand SEO, you can understand how Okay, well, Google gives me all this information on pay, they give me essentially zero under the guise of privacy on SEO, will I use the PPC data to feed does Yeah, well, then we move on to email marketing. Okay, what's what's working? What's getting clicked on in the paid ads? How can I utilize that in email marketing, and you just start trying to think through like, to really get hockey stick growth, you need to think of like the, you know, the compounding value of like, combining the benefits of all these channels together. And then same thing, you know, there were with e-commerce brands, it's like, okay, how, okay, well, we have one insert, again, with recipes. And the other one is the upsell that has the products that are in the recipes. Or maybe hey, here's, you know, these complementary products, or, you know, here, here's what you need to get on subscription. Because I agree a lot of brands, you know, both rightfully and wrongfully, they went hard on like, the subscription side of things, but it's like, how many subscriptions Do you really need? But there are a lot of products that lend themselves very well to the subscription side. And then it's like, okay, well, how do we always stay top of mind? And that's where I've seen brands also utilize things like SMS really well. An example I always give is like verb energy, I think they've done an amazing job of that. Whereas like, how do you how do you stay top of mind and also make like the reorder and like verification process easier, because what you don't want is people to cancel, and it's much easier to cancel some D2C order than like some B2B SaaS tool. So anyways, just trying to think through like, you know, how everything kind of works together.

William Harris 33:21

And that's the key, making it easier, right. And so a lot of times, we come up with these ideas or these tactics, and we say, I saw this on Twitter, and somebody was talking about this being the thing that you should do and whatever that might be. I like to look at every one of the tactics as far as how does this help your customer. And into your point, if you have an insert for this other product that you sell, that goes along with the recipe that you've got here, that helps your customer to say I liked this recipe, I want to order it, now I don't have to go and spend time looking for this ingredient or whatever that might be. Or like you said, that SMS, sometimes we use SMS, as you know, a spam tactic. And I see a lot of people doing this, it doesn't have to be look at it from the context of, I don't want to have to go in you know, place another order. Same thing with, you know, some of these subscriptions, I might not want to have to take the time to place an order of something that I already know that I want. And so in that case, the subscription is a beautiful model. But if it becomes something that it's not really that much of a you know, consumable to the point where I'm, I'm having to cancel this and stop it, and now I'm pausing it and then joining back up on it or whatever it's like not only has it become unhelpful, not helpful, it's become unhelpful and in a nuisance to me, that's the complete opposite of what your goal is. And so thinking about how do you make these tactics ultimately just help your customer and if you do, then they love you for it.

Casey Armstrong 34:46

Agreed? It's just get get back to the basics. It's, I've worked with countless marketers and salespeople and others I'm sure you have as well where they're like, well, we can't send another email we sent another one this week or last week or whatever it may be. Is this? Don't think about it through that lens? Is this email? Or let's say is the marketing answer whatever, maybe the new product feature? Does this help our customer? Right? Because if it does, then that just kind of changes the way that you view it versus a lot of people like, Okay, well, how can we make more money? Or it's like, Okay, let's start with what do our customers need? And how can our product, you know, benefit them. And then you can just start to expand from there is I mean, it's seems very simple, but I think a lot of people often like lose sight of what the ultimate, you know,

William Harris 35:35

I had a similar mindset shift, when I was talking to one of my business mentors one time, and he asked if I would be able to help him out with something that he was doing on the marketing side. And in, you know, his relationship meant so much to me that I was like, I don't want you to be a customer. Like, I just, I don't want you to ever think that I'm like using you, right? Kind of like, in my mind, I was like, no, no, I can't, I can't have you as a customer. Like, you know, like, this relationship just means too much. And he was like, You're not my friend, if you have a way to help me. And you don't help me like, like, like, not in that way. But it's like, more or less getting to the point where it was like, Look, you're not selling me, I need this, you are the one who can do it better than someone else, as a friend helped me out kind of thing into your point where it's like, Look, if this email, if you're sending it out, and it's truly not helpful, then yeah, don't send it. But if it's truly helpful, don't hold back that help from people who are looking for that help. That is the best thing you can do if you actually care about your customers. Good. One of the other things, speaking of reaching out to help, this is another thing that you and I talked about what is when when people reach out to you for helping a lot of people do, what is the biggest piece of advice that you like to give to them?

Casey Armstrong 36:54

I think consistently, it boils down to kind of have talked about before. It's just like simplifying, you know what you're what you're trying to achieve. I know I've made this mistake a lot, especially earlier in my career, we try to like overcomplicate the issue at hand, because it makes you feel smarter, or you feel like you're achieving a lot more, but just trying to simplify, you know, the problem at hand, and reducing the variables to hopefully like a max of two, and then making your decisions from there. And so I'll I'll give, I'll give a quick example. So let's take a let's take BigCommerce as an example. This is not the the model that I use when I joined there, because I was not necessarily thinking about it through this lens at that time. But it's like, okay, a BigCommerce from a marketing perspective. What should we focus on, you can say the same thing for ShipBob, same thing for other companies, I'll give it a counter example. You know, let's just have two different variables on like, the y axis, it can be impact, and on the x axis, it could be confidence, okay. And so you've got like the, you know, the the two by two box, which you see in every single like investor presentation, and you know, your company's always on the top, right, because you're the most awesome. But it's, you know, and so you can, another way to think about it as well, instead of impacting confidence is just high ceiling, or is just floors and ceilings. Okay? So the top right would be high ceiling, high floor, the top left would be high ceiling, low floor, the bottom right is low ceiling, high floor, and the bottom left is low and low floor and you kind of just start plotting your marketing channels, for example. And you go, okay, BigCommerce, it's or Shopify, whatever, maybe, okay, let's take both those. They are an e-commerce platform. It is a known thing. There's a known problem. People are looking for this, we can put it into, you know, so a channel like SEO, and paid search their search intent, and this is proven and B2B SaaS. So the impact and the confidence are through the roof. So where are you maybe plot those in the top right box, include cost and efficiency and the team skills and so forth, whatever, I don't care, pick and choose where you want to put it, but they're in the top right, there's no questions asked, then you might take something like a TikTok, influencer. And again, we're talking about the B2B SaaS world with the right influence or a partner, second CLL, but with the right influence or partner, sure, the impact could be high, but the impact could also be zero. And so that might be on the top left, because the ceiling again, could be high, but the floor is essentially as low as it could possibly be. And so you start plotting these things. And then as you think of what should I focus on every day, what should my team focus on every day? How should I hire my team? Should I hire an SEO or paid search? expert, you know, or some top tier digital marketer or should I hire this, you know, influencer program manager that is extremely strong? How should I stagger my hires, and you just tried to like simplify it as much as possible there. And that's really helpful too, especially for those of us whether it's your counterpart on sales, or your CEO, or your board, or your co founder, whoever it is, is asking, Why are you focusing on x? Or why are you not focusing on y. And again, it's just something you can easily plot out and look at this. And so an example early in my career, there was a it was in the project management, B2B SaaS space, so about as boring as you could get. And I remember, a CEO came in one time, and he's like, Hey, Casey, like, why aren't we on Pinterest? My wife's on Pinterest all the time. And I'm like, I don't know. Because we're in B2B SaaS, we're a project management tool, like, what? And obviously, I said, you know, it's like, being more professional that, but that's what's going on through my head. He's like, Well, where are we on it? Like, I want to own what the, you know, the game plan is by tomorrow, and then I start executing, and I'm just like, Oh, my goodness, like, Well, I'm gonna waste two days of my life, like, so we put together and, you know, I wasn't able to necessarily articulate, you know, I would put that in the bottom left, but whatever I could, he could plot wherever he wants. And it's like, should I focus on that I only have so much time in the day. Yeah. Or if I 2x, my effort on SEO, or paid search, or affiliate marketing or, you know, partnerships or events, or whatever it may be, that's in my top right quadrant focus on that. And so anyways, I think that's just where trying to control the variables is. And then to really simplify the decision making is extremely important.

William Harris 41:47

That's wildly helpful. Because I feel like that's one thing that I see people struggling with right now is what to focus on. And I think people flail a bit more during times of economic uncertainty. And I kind of equate this to similar to drowning, which is maybe such a horrible metaphor to think of, but you know, when somebody is drowning, the immediate response, unfortunately, is panic. And you often do things that are the exact opposite of what you should be doing at that moment. And so you're you actually probably could float if you started, you know, swimming in a certain way, or swimming a certain direction and going with the tide at first for whatever it is, right. Like, I don't live by the ocean. But I think I remember seeing signs when I was in California, like, Oh, you got to swim out with, you know, whatever, it's pulling you out first, and then you can swim across kind of thing, you know, instead of fighting it, and we do the opposite of what we need to do. And it's very counterproductive. But that idea of figuring out how to evaluate what's important to at this moment, and then simplifying it, that is a skill set that I think is not easy to come by. And I would say right now a lot of what we're doing is instead of simplifying things, we're adding more complexity to it. And so we say, Okay, well, I need this, this third party attribution tool, but I also need this other third party attribution tool. And I also need this one too. And I also need this one. And we've got five different ways of looking at the exact same numbers, all of them are saying something different. And we ended up just doing nothing again, which reminds me of another completely tangential thing. You remember, Home Improvement, Tim, the tool, man, Taylor, right, and Wilson. And I can remember, Tim, going over to Wilson and saying, I, I'm not sure if I should do this, or this, and I don't remember what it was about. And Wilson, you know, kind of comes over like this, right? We can't see him. And he said something along the lines of a deer being stuck in headlights, he said, You know, oftentimes, Tim, the deer freezes when the headlights are coming towards it. And all that you had to do was move left or right didn't really matter which decision it made in this decision issue. It just had to move. But because it froze, and it didn't do anything, that's when it gets hit by the card. And I think that's true for a lot of what we're doing in business too, are trying to analyze and then re analyze and then over analyzing the double analyze, and if you just set it up maybe in like this two by two matrix that you were explaining and to say, let's just make it simple. Here's where it is how much confidence you have, give it a shot, see what happens if you see what happens if it doesn't have the intended effect. Well, okay, move on. Right, but don't spin your wheels over and over again.

Casey Armstrong 44:17

Yeah, or even in times that are tougher economically, like they have been for the last year and a half. Some companies that okay, well, whatever x needs to get better. So hire people, or add new initiatives versus like, let's just print out the p&l. And like, what are the biggest, you know, what are the biggest line items? Like how do we make this one bigger or smaller and like focus at the top because like, let's say, you know, line item x is 1020 50% of all of your costs. Yeah, well If you can save, you know, a fraction of your largest line item, which that savings is probably, you know, much larger than another line item is in total. And you're in you can't do away with things. And so again, it's just trying to just simplify where the focus is, you know, by saying, Okay, well, what are the biggest levers? And just like with marketing sales? Like there's just a couple levers? Are we getting enough? You know, leads or at bats or potential customers? Yeah. Okay, yes or no? Are we converting them? Yes or No? Or why? And then, what's the average order value and B2B SaaS, like, what's the what's the ACV? What's average customer value? And how can we make that larger, or maybe increase the margins? And again, it's just trying to like simplify, there's only a handful of levers at the end of the day.

William Harris 45:49

Right? Right, all of those other things bubble up to one of those core levers. I want to dig into a little bit about some of your personal story, who is Casey Armstrong, cuz I think it's fun. And before I get into like questions specifically about you, I did want to look at The Elements of Eloquence because I hinted at this, this is the book that you sent me in and it became one of my absolute favorite books. For those who don't know, I am a parent, I am somebody who absolutely also loves just words, vocabulary, big words, and and I appreciate it. So he's got it. This is a plug for the book, like there's nothing else about this other than, like, I'm just plugging it, I really think that people should read it. And one of the things especially at least in marketing and advertising, and why I think this book is so good for anybody that's in marketing, advertising, is understanding so many of these different things that are being done that you might not even realize why they work. But they work from like a verbal perspective, in the words that you use. And one of the things he talks about here is HIPAA taxes and payroll taxes. And I I really like the way mark words is because he's he's what he's British. And he just has like this typical British humor and the way that he goes about it. And so he describes pair tax, this is the way that you just commonly speak English. It's just you know, this sentence, Subject, Verb, Object, and it's very, very normal. And he said, but you can get away around the punctuation set, we can turn it into just more of a story. And here's his quick blurb on that he goes, but you can get around the punctuation problem by using conjunctions and just keep your sentence going and going forever. And then chuck in a few buts, but not too many, then a couple of bends. So listen carefully to people telling a story and you'll find that usually there are no full stops and it's just conjunctions. They go on and on forever. And I love that he just when he describes payroll taxes, instead of just describing it, which he does, he just gives you a really good example of that and you're like, Ah, okay, I get it, which is literally probably what I've done a million times on this podcast. And then he goes on to describe the HIPAA taxes which is a little bit differently. Where you're you're writing a subordinate clause upon subordinate clause and so this is my favorite one of my favorite paragraphs in the entire book and that's why I wanted to get to this part at least, he goes the alternative should you or any writer of English choose to employ it and who is to stop you is by use of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, which itself may be subordinated to those clauses that have gone before or after. To construct a sentence is a such labyrinth, labyrinth and grammatical complexity that like Theseus before you and he searched the mark, the dark Minoan mazes for that monstrous monster, half bull and half man or rather half woman for it had been conceived from or in Pasiphae herself within a Dalian contraption of perverted intention, you must unravel the ball of grammatical yarn, lest you wander forever amazed in the maze, searching through dark eternity for a full stop. And I'm just like, it's such like a tongue in cheek way, the cheek way of getting around to the point of what he's trying to make here. And you go, Oh, I get it. I understand payroll taxes and HIPAA taxes now, on a level that I couldn't have understood without sales, just very clear examples. So it doesn't really do anything other than the fact that that was the book that you sent me. And I love it. And I do think that marketers should read it.

Casey Armstrong 49:09

I agree. And I think he uses his sentences, like you said, he could tell you or he could show you. And I think that goes to, like, you know, one of my favorite marketing books Medium is a Massage by Marshall McLuhan, which is how you get to your customer is equal, if not more important than what you get to your customer. And he you know, that's how and so it's, he's, again, showing versus versus telling, and you actually get to see in action, so yeah, great example.

William Harris 49:36

Yep. Okay, now for the personal questions. One of the things that I was thinking about and this came up after I saw some stuff that went around, you know, there's there's always people that are saying good things, bad things about every company, and there's a lot of stress when you're in the C suite, and that's something that a lot of our listeners can relate to as well. People who have started their own e-commerce business and are leading these e-commerce businesses. Right now there's a lot of stress just in SaaS in e-commerce in general, how do you deal with the stress of this job?

Casey Armstrong 50:06

Um, so again, I think this is easier said than done. And I'm by no means perfect at it. But I think over time, it's realizing the benefits of some of the stressors. And that's where you grow the most. And so, you know, there have been countless times that at prior roles and at ShipBob, where it's like, can can we achieve X? Like, can we, you know, help this customer hit these milestones? Can we as a business, you know, crack these revenue thresholds, I've, you know, insert whatever, maybe I've never done this before. Like, you, you can just like you can, like, feel you can feel and you're wearing the stress, but I think, you know, especially over the last couple of years, like, Okay, let me let me try, Revert, like flipping the script, Let me embrace the stress, because I know, it's, it's parts of it are gonna suck. But if I can, if I can push through it, like, now, this is this, like, new skill, or this new thing that I've unlocked. And so again, embrace, embrace that stress, and, and, you know, look to your team, or whoever it may be, or maybe yourself to like to get through it. Because I think a lot of us can look back fondly, or maybe not so fondly on different stressful experiences in our past, whether that's personal professional, and I'd say, you should, you know, much, much more often than not say, Okay, I actually learned a lot from this, or I now, now I now have this new skill, or at least I know what not to do again. So that's, that's my view.

William Harris 51:59

It reminds me a lot of almost like the Wim Hof message, right, where, you know, he's that guy, like Iceman or something like that he runs barefoot in the snow. And you just think, you know, that's absolutely crazy. But there's something to be said about not seeing the struggle or the pain as a struggle or a pain but as as an opportunity to unlock a new growth, skill or whatever that might be. And it's that idea of you have to love the journey more than the destination. And if the destination is where you're trying to get to that you're gonna be miserable. But if you can find a way to appreciate the journey, for instance, working out like it's like, if you're just getting to like this, this goal, this ideal, you're gonna hate every day of working out until you get there. But if you can get to the point where you love working out, then the destination almost doesn't even matter anymore. But yet you reach it better because you've enjoyed the journey along the way.

Casey Armstrong 52:51

But a grid, I had a travel blog forever ago called The journey is the goal. That's that's another conversation.

William Harris 52:57

Yeah, maybe let's let's let's unpack that on a whole nother time then. Because that sounds like a lot of fun. What about Have You Ever Have you met anyone famous?

Casey Armstrong 53:09

Yes, I'd say the first time I think the I think the first time I met somebody famous. So my growing up my neighbor. He actually was rather successful himself as a soccer player, which, you know, I grew up I was born in the 80s. And, you know, soccer in the US was essentially nothing right? So nobody knew who he was. But he worked in, you know, the, the greater sports sports Forgeworld. And he actually worked at the forum, which was where the Lakers used to play before Staples Center or whatever they call it crypto center now, yeah. Anyways, he got us to go to a Lakers game. And through that he got us into the locker room and one of the games man so there were a handful of stories there. So one of them was this player Elgin Campbell. He was you know, a serviceable big man for the Lakers. And actually, we saw these players and you know, we didn't know what to do and we wouldn't get their autograph. Oh, goodness. I guess we should look up whatever Eldon Campbell's. Like rookie year was but I was probably like, I don't know nine or 10 or something like that a

William Harris 54:21

peak of where these people are like, you know, your superheroes? Yeah,

Casey Armstrong 54:25

yes. Exactly. And also they're gigantic humans. And especially when a child and they'll gamble it was huge. So anyways, there's a couple of quick ones so my brother especially loved Nick van Exel so Sonic fan annex also we got you know, our neighbors card and we're like, okay, like and we're like what do you say is like just walk up and say great game. Can you sign this and so or I'd love your autograph and so we recommend axles and then we see album Campbell can we say hey great game Can you sign this and you know very graciously signs it and then you know our neighbors like hey, by the way he didn't play and and suddenly Oh, awesome. I just told this guy. A game and go on the court. And then look craziest was just turning around and you see some other players, they're just walking around in the buff. And there's like, there's like female reporters in the room like interviewing them. And I just my brain couldn't comprehend what the heck was going on. Yeah. So I was in Shanghai, and I've actually met, whatever, you know, fair share of random celebs or famous people, but another one that always sticks out just because I thought it was just such an interesting thing was I went to I got through their prior role. This is years ago, I got to sit courtside at a clippers game. And you know, I'm sitting there and you know, this guy starts coming in to sit next to me and it was things his real name was like, tiny, but remember the guy I think, you know, all right, you know, pour some out if he passed away, but he was the guy who played debo and Friday. Oh, yeah.

William Harris 55:52

I don't remember his name, though. Yes,

Casey Armstrong 55:56

the pig do debo. And I'm like, Oh, my God is depot sitting next to me. So anyways, that was, uh, that was that gave me a laugh.

William Harris 56:04

That's pretty cool. Um, what about what was your? So we talked a little bit about your childhood? What was your childhood? Like? And do you think anything within your childhood has led to you being the person who can, you know, lead a company the way that you do?

Casey Armstrong 56:21

I think, a pretty easy childhood. And I think just, you know, was fortunate to get a get a, you know, a lot of the, you know, support and emotional support from parents and whatnot. And I think, from that, I've just expected myself to, you know, be able to, hopefully come close to reaching my potential or pushing myself because I'm like, Hey, I, you know, I was I was afforded, you know, at least, you know, parents that cared.

William Harris 56:55

Let's just start with that. That's, like, number would, yeah.

Casey Armstrong 56:59

Well, number one, like, you know, you know, we weren't the richest I didn't have like, everything in the world by parents who cared. And, and definitely put a huge emphasis on education. And it was like, Okay, well, if, if I was handed this, then there's no reason why I shouldn't try to maximize as much as possible. Yeah. And so I think that and then, I don't think this has anything to do with my childhood. But just as a career progresses, like, I think there's a healthy dose of like, just paranoia, you know, there's Andrew Grove’s book Only the Paranoid Survive. And like, I think that's, it's at times, like, you go back to like, your stress question. I can be like, unhealthy at times, but I think it's sure like, Only the Paranoid Survive. If like, as a business, if you take your foot off the gas as an employee, or caller, you take your foot off the gas, like, you know, the rug can be pulled out from you at any moment. And so I think that just constantly thinking about, okay, how can I get better is important,

William Harris 58:02

which, which leads into my next question, which is, like, what are you afraid of? And maybe that's it, it's just like, how can I get better?

Casey Armstrong 58:09

Yeah, just just across all things in life, you know, personal professional, like, exercise or whatnot, like, just constantly trying to, like, you can't stagnate? Yeah. Like, I think the second second, you start stagnating in any part of your business, like, you're just gonna get lapped. And so, it's where, you know, I try to push myself professionally as well. You know, you and I, we've seen it in marketing, we've seen it in technology, like, the pace of of change, and evolution is so rapid, I mean, just I'm not going to open up the any the AI conversation, but just like with a potential there, and so it's like, it's wild. And so it's like, okay, how can I achieve as much as possible, as fast as possible while there is that, you know, younger, hungry, individual that also doesn't have kids and other responsibilities, that's working 20 hours a day because they also don't need to sleep? Like we used to be able to, yes. How do you, you know, I need to, I need to be able to, you know, drive much greater impact than them whether you know, it's the person that wants your job or it's the competitor, you know, and so I think just Yep, paranoid and and just just being, you know, ruthlessly competitive

William Harris 59:37

Yeah, no, I completely relate to that. Even with the AI stuff. I feel like you know, I I've been doing a lot with it a lot more than I had previously. But you know, I got in on I got I got into Bard the day that it was officially launched. Thankfully, I've gotten into the Adobe Firefly beta as well and played a lot around with bid journey played on a Uh, with Chad GPT. And I still I spend, you know, maybe a half an hour a day working on it, because I've got so many other responsibilities, kind of like what you just said, it's like, well, I'm still running the business and I've got a family. And it's like, well, I want to take my wife out on a date. And I want to, you know, put my kids to bed. And so there's these other things that are arguably, admittedly more important. But it is hard to not feel like it's like, man, but I'm getting left behind sometimes, right? Because you just like there, there are people that are able to spend eight hours a day just digging into this and they're, they're testing out things that I'm that I'm not able to test out. And to your point, you know, that is sometimes disconcerting, and frustrating, a little bit, but at the same time looking at it and saying, but they don't know what I already know, too, right. And so there's a lot of things that you and I have already learned just in how things work and how to frame things. And so I think that there's there's maybe even within a half an hour, there's a lot that you and I can gain within that half an hour that we don't need eight hours to practice and look into that as well. So I use that at least somewhat to console myself on on the lack of I dig into the AI right now as well.

Casey Armstrong 1:01:07

Yeah, well, it's like a sports you know, we're not old but like old man game show, you know, you'll you'll get your spot, you know, to conserve energy. And same thing can be said to the business world.

William Harris 1:01:16

Yeah. We're coming up to the end of of our time. I don't know if you notice this, but throughout the episode here, I've actually hypnotized you. And so I actually am connected to your brain right now. I can read your mind. And to prove this that I can read your mind. I'm going to flip through this book because I have memorized every every word in where it exists on every page. And I'm going to flip through the book and when I flipped when I when you want me to stop? I want you to tell me to stop. Okay, you're ready.

Casey Armstrong 1:01:48

Yep. Stop.

William Harris 1:01:52

I got to make sure that you tell me if I need to move this around so you can see it. Can you see the words on the page?

Casey Armstrong 1:01:58

That didn't focus? A couple glasses? Yeah, I can see similar words. Okay.

William Harris 1:02:02

Can you see the first word on this page? Yep. So you can see it? Huh? Okay. I'm gonna close it, you've got that word figured out, right? You've got that word. In your. Okay. So I'm keeping the book here so that we can see it's still close. Okay. So I want you to picture this word in your brain. I want you to start to write it in your brain. So picture yourself writing this word. So maybe you're actually writing it with. Maybe you're writing it with a, like a red trans picture yourself writing this with a red Fran. Okay, so this word almost feels like it has something to do with like a location for some reason. So I feel like it's a location or some way to like, connect with you. It's but it's it's not a number, right? It's not like a phone number. It's not a phone number. Nope. But it's always it feels like it's past tense. So it's not future tense. It's not present past tense, but it's a way to connect with you in the past tense. Is the word addressed?

Casey Armstrong 1:03:19

The that is.

William Harris 1:03:21

So I will not put you back to sleep and take you out of this. And you are back. No, I'm just kidding. I'm obviously just making that up. But having a little bit of fun for those of you know, that is not staged. I actually did do that. There is a trick to it. It is a lot of fun. Maybe I'll show how to do that on some later. podcast episode.

Casey Armstrong 1:03:37

We should do that the whole time.

William Harris 1:03:40

Magic Show will be a very short show. And not that good. Casey, I appreciate you coming out and giving your time. If people wanted to connect with you to follow you to work with you. What's the best way for them to reach out?

Casey Armstrong 1:03:59

Check us out at shipbob.com You can DM me the good and the bad on Twitter. I haven't been posting much lately. But that's just @caseya. And yeah, check out check him out on wills podcast. So there we go.

William Harris 1:04:15

There we go. Again, I really appreciate you coming out sharing all of your wisdom and time with us here today.

Casey Armstrong 1:04:20

Thanks for having me. Good to see ya. Likewise.

William Harris 1:04:21

Thank you everybody for listening in. Have a great day.

Outro 1:04:25

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.

‍