How We Went from 5 to 30 Clients in 4 Months - We Need More Talent

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: Welcome back to another episode of The Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. This guy can't even, can't even make it through the intro without giggling. He's so excited to be back for the second time, or is this the third time? How many times have you made an appearance now?

[00:00:12] Joy Sharma: This is the second.

[00:00:14] Taylor Holiday: The second time I have the head, the Chief Commanding Officer, whatever you want to call him of CTC Global, Joy Sharma. Joy welcome back to the podcast.

[00:00:26] Joy Sharma: Thank you very much. That was a great intro. 

[00:00:30] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, I think we just call you king of the world. That's what I think is the most appropriate title.

[00:00:36] Joy Sharma: That's how you get hit on Twitter. 

[00:00:38] Taylor Holiday: Well, for those of you that don't know, I think a couple of months ago, Joy Joy came on the podcast to introduce a new program here at CTC that we call the CTC Global Accelerator, which has really been about five years in the making which is a service built to provide,

Everything that CTC offers from strategy and technology and execution to seven figure brands at a price that is better than anything that you can find in the market.

And we have now been running this program for, is it five months, joy? How long have we been live in market?

[00:01:12] Joy Sharma: I think we did the pod in July, went live August. So August, September, October, November. Four? Probably four. 

[00:01:20] Taylor Holiday: Finger counting. You can see how advanced we are over here. We, we do math 

[00:01:24] Joy Sharma: wanna lie. That's the key. I don't wanna lie. 

[00:01:27] Taylor Holiday: So we are four months into the program and it has been amazing so far. And so what we wanted to do today was to come. And give you all an update with purpose. We have two things that we specifically want you to consider is that one is that we know that at the end of the year, many brands are making a decision about their agency relationships, about how they're going to build their team in the future.

And we want you, if you are a 7 figure e commerce brand to consider the Global Accelerator program. Program for your 2025 solution. And I say 2025 'cause we have no spots left. We are completely full. And demand is, there's already a waiting list for us so far, but we would love to talk to you and build, put you onto that list to get you in with the team as fast as, as soon as possible.

And the reason there's a waiting list is the second request that I have and what we're gonna talk about today, which is that we need. More talent. We need more amazing humans from around the globe to come and join this program. So we're gonna talk about both of those things today. But above all of that, we want to continue down a path of transparency that we've committed to in this service offering.

So when joy and I started this I said, Hey, the only way that this is going to work is if we can actually deliver on the promise for brands that experience a ton of volatility and prove that our service isn't just cheap. That's not the point, but can actually deliver what brands need at this level, which is to produce predictable, profitable growth.

And so Joy's been doing something amazing. If you don't follow him on Twitter, you should. Joy Sharma, 11, why 11, by the way, what's, what's the number 11. Is that your lucky number? Okay.

[00:03:00] Joy Sharma: Was not available. 

[00:03:02] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. There's a, there's a few Sharma's out there. That, that makes it a little bit harder to get to, but so Joy Sharma 11, but one of the things Joy's done that we're going to do here live on the pod is he's been providing an update of the performance to expectation across every brand in our portfolio every month, you can go look, he publishes a thread, he calls it the September report card, August report card, and you'll see exactly how each individual brand is performing.

And one of the things that we're trying to bring to light is that for many people, these early stage businesses feel really volatile. And that's one of the hardest things about managing these businesses is that creating predictability and continuity amongst early stage businesses is hard, but we believe we have a system to do it.

So, Dwight, can you give us a little bit about how many brands are you at now? How many members are on the team so far? And then we'll dive into October, but how has the team and the client base grown thus far?

[00:03:55] Joy Sharma: So, I think since we started, the last actual report card I did, we went from being five in alpha testing in July to now, I think there were 23 brands in the report card that goes live for October. For the Womber, we will be at 30. We are a team of four more pro starters, which is pretty cool. And I would say that That got to be the fattest, fastest growth I've ever seen. 

[00:04:20] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So we went from launching the service to starting with a class of five brands. That's what we wanted to test with. To now we'll have 30 in November. That's where we're going to stop for this year. 

For team members and Joy working together to deliver on the service, leveraging all the CTC technology and tooling exclusively for seven figure e commerce brands and the team members are from all over the world. Will you tell us a little bit about who some of the team members are, what their cool qualifications are and how they're working with the brands that you have. 

[00:04:49] Joy Sharma: We have people from every single diverse background I think you can think about. We had, we had 20 year old who came and he said I'm gonna outwork every single person you ever know And he has been with us for the longest time period and He crushes it. He is one of the best people I've seen in the game.

So that would be number one to zero background I think actually he might, he wrote an email So, Change Industries, and now one of the best people in growth strategy, And there was a media buyer. They He came through, went through everything, went through the entire training. I think there's a testimony in the blog that we published, it was like, there were a lot of sleepless nights, I made it, and now this is the best thing I ever had. 

Then we have a person from the Caribbean, who was a financial analyst with a master's in mathematics, and then the fourth person that we hired for was, I think, a head of operations of a water company. So, like, the most hours you can ever think.

[00:05:46] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. And this is one of the things I love about this is that The diversity of people from all over the world. So you mentioned the Caribbean, the UK, Joyce in India where are the other team members will give me the other, where people are across the world, Latvia. So Eastern European, like, so just people from all over the world, all different backgrounds, but one commonality, which is a ruthless commitment to delivering excellent service, to learning how we do what we do and being willing to work harder than everybody else.

Like if you bring that into the pot, it's actually amazing. What's possible. And so I think it's one of the, it's like, is this beautiful meritocratic system that we have this joke. If you're good enough, you're old enough. If you're good enough, I don't care where you're from. If you're good enough, it doesn't matter what your background was,but you have to be excellent.

And joy is able to hold that standard because it's the standard he has for himself. And so, there's this, there's this beautiful thing that I get to watch happen that maybe we at the U S have a lot to learn from here, which is that the expectation is that you just, you Do the work amazingly. I don't care how long it takes.

You take as long as it takes you to become excellent, to deliver the thing. And the faster you are great, but this is the standard and we don't move it.

[00:06:50] Joy Sharma: And I think this is a If anyone has ever been in arguments with Taylor, like, you're gonna win, like, four arguments in your entire life. So, everyone that you win, you should cherish it for life.

And this has got to be the biggest one that I want to allow, which was the bet here was that this system works or this program works, because I believe something that Taylor does, and which is people outside of the U.S. actually work harder than every single person inside the United States because of The ideology and the work ethic. And also like the culture is that there's a problem to be solved and We're going to solve that before the day ends. 

And I'm going to put everything. 

And like, that's the one thing, every single team member that I have, I believe is going to work harder than anyone in the entire world to solve that business problem. And I, I will go to war with those people. That's how much I trust them.

[00:07:33] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. And I'm going to, so whether that's true of every person in the world versus every person in the United States is sort of who cares. The point is just that there's just something about the desire that the people on this team have to make themselves great for whatever their individual incentive is that is really powerful to watch play out.

We're talking about people taking calls at any hour of the night, any time in the morning. Joy, what time is it where you are right now?

[00:07:56] Joy Sharma: It's midnight.

[00:07:58] Taylor Holiday: It's midnight. He's on a podcast and it's not a thing that he had to be convinced to do. He's showing up on time, waiting for me to get there most of the time in our meetings.

And. I'll give you a little example of the way I watch this play out that wasn't spoken. It just happened is that at CTC, we do something called one map notes where every day we provide to our customers. The first thing when they wake up, here's what happened yesterday. Here's what it means. And here's what we're going to do in context.

And we do those every day, Monday through Friday at CTC. The international team, without being asked or told that there should be anything different, Does it on Saturday and Sunday to now you can debate whether you think that's good or bad, but it's just what happened. I'm just sharing the natural overflow was a recognition that the client still cares about their revenue on those days.

We're going to provide those information to them in a way that they care about. And those little actions matter to them. And build trust really fast. And so, there is a, there is an interesting dynamic that plays out in this process that we're learning from, and we're trying to figure out how we at CTC can take the same principles and apply them within the constraint, the boundaries of whatever labor requirements we have here to continue to deliver to the customer, ultimately, what matters is that we're spending their money every day and they want to know it's taken care of, and they want to know that someone's watching it and it matters to them.

And so that's what we're interested in building, building trust. Problems for what join this team are doing so well. So joy, let's talk about October then. So we say things are going well, 23 brands. You're forecasting just like it's CTC. You're running the full profit system. You're responsible for delivering a contribution margin level outcome.

So we're not talking about raw. We're not talking about top line revenue. We're talking about affecting their bottom line. Of the business, helping them put money in their pockets. How did we do in the month of October?

[00:09:39] Joy Sharma: I think we're at like 6 percent delta to the forecast. 

[00:09:43] Taylor Holiday: So 6 percent above or 6 percent 

[00:09:45] Joy Sharma: Above, above. 

[00:09:47] Taylor Holiday: Okay. So at CTC, we like to say that good forecasting is plus or minus 10 percent to target. That's the expectation that we have for all of our clients. So across 23 brands. Overall, plus 6 percent to expectation across the book of business. And tell us a little about what categories are these customers in?

Is there, are they all over the place? Are there any success stories or things that you think are worth sharing and highlighting within 

that group of customers? 

[00:10:13] Joy Sharma: I think it's an eye opener for a lot of people when you go through in that detail. I think There, there was a month in which we onload a lot of people. And I think I was playing this with Tara, which was, we got so many compliments that we can go and we can build a wall of testimonials. And if you read through those, it is basically, we did not know this existed.

We did not know this was a problem And we needed to solve for that because there's diversity in industries and perhaps They sell even unique perks that like don't even exist in an industry. We have every single type of product. And the consistent thing that we've seen across is all of their ads work.

Right. The system works on everyone. And we've been able to actually affect every single business in the first 30 days, because there are a lot of bins that are available when you go and you analyze it to our system.

[00:11:04] Taylor Holiday: And one of the things that I think are common tropes about maybe CTC's system. in particular, is that for small brands. You can't use cost controls. They can't, they don't have the data or integrity to do it, or that cost controls just take the bottom of the funnel. And so you can't scale. Tell us a little bit about how the media buying strategy is translating to smaller businesses. 

[00:11:25] Joy Sharma: I think we get it along. We, when we unloaded a lot of customers and I just got off a call about this exact thing, which was a customer came to us and they had a single campaign. They ran everything in it. It was the highest volume. And they told us that we have tried making cost controls work every time we spend money on it. It just burns through and it's not profitable for us. And I think that might happen because you have never run it. But since we took over every single account that we run right now is cost controlled, minimized or cost controls, like manual bidding across the boat. And what we do is we actually show them in the first week that these are all CTC campaigns on cost control.

This is your highest volume. I understand running highest volume, like takes priority, but even then. The most efficient things in that account are CTC campaigns and when we can show that, to a customer you know, the answer to that or the way you scale is let's make more creatives And actually makes the conversation easier Plus we built a part of the service Which is like you get 90 briefs which helps in that process to go and produce a lot more creatives and that's how we scale.

[00:12:28] Taylor Holiday: And that's exactly it is because in my experience, the smaller brands, the thing that they don't actually have is a system for producing consistent quality, creative and that process 

of helping them build a foundation for ideating. And so you said as part of the service, they get 90 briefs, which are going to be thoughtful.

They're going to be built around good quality offers that, you know, we're going to work with campaigns and angles that are effective. And so you're going to actually help them. To meet the volume of creative requirement needed to make the account function that way. And I think oftentimes people try cost controls without that part.

And so then it becomes really frustrating when the campaign they set up doesn't spend and they don't have any new ads to anything. So their only solution is to go back to highest volume and try and get more budget.

So it's really been awesome to see their team work and put in this effort across so many different brands. Honestly, like we have in every imaginable category that you could pick up from supplements to automotive to, you know, healthcare and beauty and anything that you could imagine we're getting to play in and explore and at the price, which Is 5, 000 a month on a month to month agreement is we want the lowest barrier to entry and the highest certainty of quality that we can deliver on for clients that we think at this price, at their size of business, this is the price that we think will outperform the market.

You're going to get gross strategy. You're going to get statless. You're going to get all your forecasting. You're going to get media buying across meta and Google, and you're going to get all of those creative briefs, all in the same service function. I just don't think there's anything better out there.

But before you can respond to that, before we can actually bring more people into this, we have a problem. And what is the problem that we have?

[00:14:03] Joy Sharma: The problem is, so when we started this Tero, Tero messaged me and we have this email card, which is months old, which is, I don't care. We don't go to market. If you don't have the best offer in the world and it took months for us. And even the last reply from Tero was like, I think this is good, but let's let the market test it. So he never said it was good, but we proved it. It's good. We got so much demand that he will finally agree to it and say that, yes, it's pretty good. We went ahead and we built the same offer. I built the same offer for hiring. I believe this is the best thing in the entire world. If you fit in this ICP, the ICP is that we want to hire elite talent. The table stakes of that is you work incredibly hard and incredibly isn't bold italics, everything that you want to think about. And that's just a table stakes to get an entry. And then we will test you on how good you are at the natural talent with numbers, with the raw ability to go and process a lot of data and come up with really thoughtful insights and make really good decisions. Because if you have that raw data, we believe that over the last 12 years, we've built a system that we can put people in that system and they will, they, they will do great work. And that, that is about like, you can go and like, if people argue with that, that that's not true and you need to have e comm experience and all those things, like, We publish the actual report card. And if you believe this doesn't work, there's a report card that proves that does now, the thing that we're, we're trying to solve for is we're trying to get in front of a lot of people. The way you do that is you do, you talk about it a lot and you have something that's really enticing. So the offer here is that the key thing here is that you get joined. And I think I was trying to figure out what's the best way to put it. And the best way to put it is you get joy. 

And what joy means is what I've done for the last few years is I went to every single person in e comm, learned everything from them, absorb them, built into the system that we have right now that you prefer that works So good.

And what do you get access to is you get access to learn all that from us in a month or so, in two months at consolidated high speeds and high volumes. and we pay you to learn from that. 

Work for us and loan the CTC structure and get the branding of CTC. So you get the best of everything that could exist. and it's essentially like, I will just want people who are like me achieve everything I did at a faster pace than that exists outside. 

[00:16:20] Taylor Holiday: And so we've used this metaphor together. I put out this thread yesterday on Twitter that some of you may have seen about La Masia. So this goes back to many years ago at CTC, when you're an early stage brand and you can't just simply go out and buy the best talent in the world and overpay the smartest people to come work for you.

You have to sort of figure out how am I going to get the best talent? Cause at the end of the day, you need it. And I'm a sports guy and I became. So I started studying FC Barcelona and they had this legendary academy that at this point is sort of the thing of mythology. It's risen to that because of the messes and the any estimates obvious that have gone through it called La Masia, which is just Spanish for the farmhouse.

And this is their youth training academy where the thing that Barcelona understood was The most expensive way to acquire talent is in free agency and free agency on a business metaphor is to go to the open market and try and find people that are already superstars and overpay for them to come work for you because the market has already realized their value.

And so what FC Barcelona understood was if we could actually start training players from a young age and develop them to become great players, then for a period of time, we will be able to work for them before they go on to free agency and be able to realize their total market value. And so there's an immense benefit to FC Barcelona, but to the players themselves too, because they get to develop into world class talent that the market demand for will be through the roof.

And so this metaphor I applied previously at CTC, but I made a mistake. The mistake that I made was that I didn't hold the bar high enough for what the individual talent needed. The beginning root material needed to be of the individuals. I thought that we could sort of turn anybody who wanted to try hard into that kind of person.

But the reality is, is that there's an intellectual threshold and a individual intrinsic motivation factor that has to exist. The thing our FC Barcelona understands is that they begin with world class youth talent, and then they equip them. And so what we've wanted to do here is to. To replicate the same idea where as joy described, there is not anybody in the world.

And I mean this, that I think that you could learn how to serve this customer base from better than joy. Joy has learned from all the masters. And I don't just mean me. I mean, everybody out there, he has, there is nobody that has gone further to try to understand how to be effective. So you're going to get the best training from the best coach.

You're going to get to leverage what I believe is the best system in e commerce that exists for delivery Of effective growth strategy and common thread collective. You're going to get to do it a loss across a lot of clients where your compensation is going to be tied to your capacity, where you have the opportunity to earn more based on your ability to deliver more quality work.

And the end result will be you as an asset, as an individual will have immense earning potential and authority in the marketplace to go and make for yourself, whether that's launching your own brand, whether that's going to work for a legacy brand that you care about to go out and earn a bunch of money along your career path.

We guarantee that trajectory. Yeah. And that's what we're seeing our people do now. Our hope is that you love the work here and feel uniquely equipped that you want to stay with us for a long time. And we're committed to trying to create that environment for you. But the end result is you're going to be a world class talent and you're going to be a world class asset, whether you're in this organization or you use it as a trampoline to your next one.

And so that's what we're trying to create. But now what we need is how do I find more joy? Sharma's we, we jokingly call him a unicorn here inside of CTC. But what I've decided to reject is actually, I'm going to, I've decided to reject the idea that joy is a unicorn. And to actually just say that there are a lot of people with that level of ambition and hunger and intellectual curiosity and capacity that we could find.

And the world is a big place. And this is the fun thing about opening it up to the six and a half billion people across the world. Is that we, we want to hear from you and we don't care what time zone you're in. I don't care how good your English is. If you can make sure that you're going to go after these things and make an effort to communicate effectively.

Then we're in so joy where, where would somebody go if they wanted to be a part of this? What should they do? Do they just go start in incessantly messaging you on Twitter? Or what's the best way for someone to pursue this?

[00:20:22] Joy Sharma: I think anyways, works like I'm trying to open as many pipelines as possible. So message me on Twitter, LinkedIn, email me. We have a blog going live on our website, which is called the exact same thing. Go apply there. We have job position. Now there's a site link on CTC itself that says global carriers. Go apply there. 

[00:20:40] Taylor Holiday: So I will put in a comment of everywhere. I'm posting this Mickey. You can include this. I'm going to, it's going to be a link to the blog where you can read this story. You can see what we're building. You can follow joy to get the report card, to test 

the data for yourself. Are these brilliant brands? And you'll see the brands responding, go DM.

Some of the people that we work with go DM. The, we have, you'll see threads from the current strategists talking about their 

experience at CTC. You can go talk to the clients. This is as open book of an opportunity as you will find to understand who you're working with, whether or not it's as effective as they, we say that it is.

And we want you to come be a part of it, and we want hungry people. We want you, because here's the thing. It's not just about what we're going to give you. Like, this is the thing I want to be really clear is, we actually need you to make us better. We need your level of thoughtfulness, and care, and curiosity, and desire to improve the system yourself to be additive to this place.

We want you to bring your, the metaphor I use at CTC is bring bricks with you, because we're building something. And I'm not just going to give you the things to do, bring your bricks too, so that you can help us build La Masia 2. 0, something really, really beautiful and awesome in the digital space here.

But more than that, I think also getting to have a relationship with joy is going to be worth it in and of itself. This is a person that I have no doubt. Is going to make a massive impact on my life personally and will on yours as well. And agency, a lot of times, the best thing that you can get from it at the end result is a network of human beings that will change the trajectory of your life forever.

And so I think that's what's an opportunity for you to get here. So that's my, I'm going to brag about Joy because he won't do it himself. But that's, that's the other thing I would say joy, anything you'd, you'd leave them with before we sign off.

[00:22:18] Joy Sharma: I'm excited for the entries. 

[00:22:20] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So how many people are we taking? Like, what are we, what's the goal here?

[00:22:25] Joy Sharma: I think we're talking about three people. That means about at least 150 applications like actual entries, 150, 

[00:22:35] Taylor Holiday: So our goal is to get three more people in the program to start in probably Q1. We're opening up, we're hoping about, we'll be able to get to adding five new brands a month for next year. Joy has ambitions that are bigger than that, but right 

now that's the starting point is that we're going to be able to, January is probably going to be filled before we start January, but we're hopeful.

So get in line 

now. Yeah, I think January would be filled really soon, but we want to keep, we're just going to hold the bar high. That's the thing I refuse to capitulate on is that we will not lower the bar to speed up. Because it's too important and we can compound this thing too effectively if the work stays amazing.

So, that's what we're after three humans from anywhere in the world. The only, the only criteria is you got to fricking want it and you got to be excited and be interested in delivering an amazing service. If that's you, we want to talk. And if you're a brand, we want to meet you and see if we can't deploy these amazing people on your behalf.

[00:23:30] Joy Sharma: All right. 

[00:23:32] Taylor Holiday: There he is. He's not a man of many words y'all, because he wants to get back to his ad accounts, but joy, I appreciate you being here, man. Thanks for putting as much care into this as you do. I'm proud to have you representing the CTC name and excited for what we're doing together by everyone.

[00:23:47] Joy Sharma: All right. Bye bye.