Why 50 Brands Trust Our $5K Global Accelerator

[00:00:00] Richard Gaffin: Hey folks. Welcome to the Ecommerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffin, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined on episode two, I think of, of, rocking the headset, Mr. Taylor Holiday, our CEO here at Common Thread. Taylor, what's going on, man?

[00:00:15] Taylor Holiday: Yeah, be on, be on the lookout for the headset for more people. The stand mic is out the headset. Is it? The internet has decided.

[00:00:23] Richard Gaffin: That's right. We're getting getting rave reviews on, on the quality of your so it's, it's not not gonna be so long till I have one myself. But so I think today what we wanted to talk about a little bit is, is we're celebrating a, I dunno, nine month anniversary, I guess this month of our Global Accelerator program, which is our service offering for brands that are kind of in the seven figure range.

[00:00:42] And so what we wanted to talk about specifically is. Breaking down some of the global accelerators wins and then kind of thinking towards next month where we're gonna actually be opening it up and expanding it more broadly to accept more brands just because of the success it's been having and the ability that it's had to help brands through this particular vol, particularly volatile time.

[00:01:03] So, I wanted to just kick it off. Maybe Taylor having you tell us a little bit more, what is our global Accelerator program and why has it been so successful?

[00:01:12] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So I wanna revisit the mission statement that we sort of created for this program with Joy Sharma, who runs the program about nine months ago. He has this tweet he put out that says, Taylor demanded that the offer say if you are less than. If you are a less than $10 million e-commerce brand, you should fire your agency tomorrow as nobody can possibly beat this service at this price. And that was when Joy and I first started dreaming this up. That was the idea was that we had spent so many years trying to service this part of the market.

[00:01:42] We've had a mission forever. We've always, our sort of initial launching mission statement for CTC was helping entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. We've always had a passion for like the early stage entrepreneur in e-commerce. But had had trouble designing a service that the economics would make sense for us and them. and after about, you know, 10 years of building, we felt like we had a couple of advantages that would allow us to do that. One is we had a technol technology infrastructure that would allow us to build system and process to consistently raise the floor of the quality of the service. Two, we had joy.

[00:02:14] Who was this person who had been inundated in our system, who lived overseas and was obsessed with serving this market and could build a team of a global labor force to help us deliver at the price and at the quality here's the great challenge with agency economics, is that generally speaking, your price that you, the customer are paying is just simply a markup on the cost of the labor. Right. And so cheap service is often delivered by low wage labor. That's just the reality of the economics of how you get to the price that a seven figure brand needs to pay. And if we do some, just like basic math here, and let's say that if you have a brand that's doing a, let's just. Make it simple, a million dollars a year. we've seen is that the economics sort of break for you if you're paying more than, let's say, like three to 5% of your revenue. So that means your, your bill can't be more than 30 to $50,000 a year to really survive at that stage of business. Now you're talking about three to $5,000 a month. Is the price that actually you can afford to pay as a million dollar brand. Now, you can stair step that up as you grow into the seven figure range, but the problem is to create a service that covers growth strategy, that covers software, that covers media buying, that covers creative strategy. Those are multiple labor parts, that kind of talent that you were have to buy often from an agency. It's one of two things. Either it's entry level junior employees, just candidly, or it's somebody with 10 clients, 15 clients, and they're so spread thin. That's the only way the economics work. And so we saw this as an opportunity to leverage technology, to leverage a global labor force where we could have. High level talent at lower wages relative to the US market. And then have the, the, the teaching and the commitment from joy to train and execute people, or, that's a weird phrase, not execute people execute with these people at a high enough standard for CTC. So that's what we set out to do. That was the thesis, Richard, nine

[00:04:20] And candidly when I put it forward, like I believed in, I, I believed in joy. I believed in our, our, I had belief in our system. I knew that, that we could design something, but oftentimes these brands are challenging. They're not, they haven't always found product market fit. They don't always have the best underlying assets to work with. Sometimes the margin on the product is not great because they're still ordering small quantities from their supplier. There's real challenges at the early stage of an e-commerce business. And so when we modeled this out, we looked at it and we said, okay, the other thing we're gonna offer is we're gonna offer month-to-month pricing.

[00:04:51] We're gonna, we're not gonna obligate these people to the service. We're gonna deliver a great service that they wanna say. if you think about agency like retention of a service on a month-to-month basis for entry level, if you could get to a six month LTV. In that phase of business, that's gonna be a productive product that you could ultimately make money off of.

[00:05:09] But it's generally speaking a pretty high churn environment. And so we had all of this thought through penciled out, and then we went forward with it into the market. And what we have found has blown away any expectation of both the quality of the service experience by the customers, the satisfaction with the work, their ability to drive business outcomes, and their retention for us all on this same deal. And so we have had to continually scale to the point that now we started again nine months ago with this service and sitting here today, we will have, let's see, lemme get the exact mouth right, 50 customers in the Global Accelerator program. 50. And you know what? We've had leave. So if you think about it, every month, every one of them has an opportunity to depart. They have an opportunity to renew. We've had six customers leave in nine months, six of

[00:05:58] leave. And in most of those cases, if you go ask those customers some of 'em are on Twitter about why they left. promise you it has nothing to do with the quality of experience that was provided by Joy and team.

[00:06:08] There was some business challenge. They had some issue related to stock or inventory or whatever it might be. That the timing I. Forced to change. And so we we're seeing retention levels that are going, we haven't even been around yet a year, but we're fully anticipating them to exceed a year. So more than double the value of the retention rate, the business outcomes. The other thing that Joy does that I think is incredible is every month he publishes them publicly. You can go look, you don't have to take some salesperson's word for it. You can go look on at Joyce Arma 11 on Twitter, and every month he publishes the accelerator report court and looking at the most recent one for February, he'll be publishing March soon. Contribution margin 4% to target revenue per 11% to target, spend 7% to target MER, 3% to target, so accurately forecasting predictable growth for highly volatile seven figure brands across over 50 customers with immense satisfaction.

[00:07:03] is in every facet of anticipation for this program. Joy and team have over-delivered on the expectation. 

[00:07:10] Richard Gaffin: So, I mean, I think that that would be an interesting thing to dig into. Like what's, what's the secret sauce here? So, I mean, obviously there's, there's sort of the conceptually why it makes sense maybe financially for a brand to hire this group. But why is the service level so high?

[00:07:25] Taylor Holiday: You're getting two things. So one, you begin with Joy's recruiting process and shout out to, to MayT tab for spending some time with Joy helping us to build this pipeline. But sourcing from the entirety of the world is a challenging process what we're looking for. Are ambitious, incredibly hungry, high IQ individuals that wanna come in and work really hard and learn.

[00:07:46] And then in the first 30 days, joy puts them through an intensive training program that's modeled and built off of the growth strategy training program that we built at CTC early on to make them fluent in the profit system. To make them fluent in how to build a growth map, use the planning section, execute face meta campaign structures where by the time they get through that process and they're putting in a lot of hours along the way, the expectation here is really high for the level of participation for these individuals. That by the time they get to the end of it, they are able to execute an underlying architecture that was predates them. So we're not having to come up with what do we do in the meta account. There's a decade of knowledge and technology that allows that to sort of be placed that they're then executing on top of.

[00:08:33] So they know how to do their daily one map notes. They know the communication flow. They have all the blogs and resources to educate their customers on why we're doing what we're doing. And so there's this like very eloquent or elegant ability to come in and deliver against a decade of information with that function early on.

[00:08:52] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Okay, so let's, as I kinda mentioned up top moving forward, we're opening this up a little bit wider, so let's maybe talk about that. The, the decision to open it up to make it available to to more brands moving forward.

[00:09:04] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So we have tr, the biggest constraint is we have to maintain the quality of this service as we scale. Again, 50 customers. We've been adding about five a month so far, and that's been the pacing. But what we did recently is we went out and. Through our recruiting pipeline, we built a batch hiring process to be able to open up this coming month to 12 new brands. So we've had five before. We're gonna do our first batch. We have three new strategists who have joined the team. They're on the other side of their training and they're waiting to get started. So for the month of May, and we think this is perfect timing with the tariff issues facing a lot of these brands, is we're opening up 12 spots for Global Accelerator in May. So the largest batch of new customers that we've ever acquired. and why we think this is so beneficial is that there's just no way, no way, whether you're currently with an agency or not, that you're getting growth strategy technology, Facebook media buying, Google media buying and creative strategy for $5,000 on a month to month contract.

[00:10:06] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha.

[00:10:06] Taylor Holiday: just, there's just no way that that price exists. So we have the resourcing dialed now we have some incredible new team members that are ready to do the work, and we've created the space to scale open this program because we've been, we've been booking demands so far out in front that we wanted to create an opportunity to open it a little wider for a period of time.

[00:10:23] I.

[00:10:23] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. So real quick, I think it would be interesting to talk about, I know that you discussed some of this with Joy on the podcast, probably. Two, three weeks ago now. But I think it'd be interesting to reiterate just in this context, some of the specific struggles, and you've already alluded to a few of them and how, how Joy's offering kind of faces them, but some of the specific struggles of that seven figure range.

[00:10:45] So that's just generally the one, one to 9.9, let's say. What, what are they facing that Joy is maybe specifically equipped to help with?

[00:10:54] Taylor Holiday: Yeah. So there, there's so many different pieces of it, right? I'll give you an example. So I have some good friends that started a company called Thread Performance. Shout out to Clark and the boys over at thread helping kids get better nutrition for young athletes. Love it. Go check 'em out if you have a young athlete in your family. but they're a new brand that has a challenge. It's a subscription, first supplement company that's in the early stages of trying to manage debt. flow, creative production and thinking about what is the right target to scale and set to in order to manage this business. so for them to be able to have a team. Come in and say, alright, we understand what your opex commitments are, what your debt liability is, and we can forecast the contribution margin to ensure you can sustain growth. And then we will manage the expectation of the media execution to achieve the amount of new customers we want at the appropriate CAC to deliver a financial outcome is novel.

[00:11:48] At this level, it's novel, but really that's the challenge. Early on in e-commerce business, you don't have a lot of money. You have limited inventory and you have to make the math work to be able to purchase your next set of inventory. So this intimate connection between marketing and finance and then how that shows up in your day-to-day execution is just massively valuable. And it usually at this stage of business that doesn't exist yet to have the level of forecasting sophistication, and then a system to manage execution against that every day. That's what that infrastructure provides, where all of a sudden you have a growth strategist conversing with you every day about the contribution margin outcome and where we're pacing relative to that expectation and how that informs next month's retention model and et cetera, et cetera. So it helps build confidence when Clark, their CEO goes out to think about, okay, do I need to go get more capital? When will we be cashflow positive? When are we gonna be profitable? And to be able to use that in information setting with. Investors, et cetera, et cetera. So that level of confidence in the underlying execution of your acquisition is so important in the early stages of business. 

[00:12:47] Richard Gaffin: I think it, like, it really eliminates a lot of the decision fatigue that I think founders in that stage tend to run into. So I think this was probably, again, a month or so ago I talked to Jack Zabi, who's the CEO of D Louise, who's a brand that's experienced a ton of success with the Growth Accelerator program.

[00:13:04] And part of the reason that they're able to do that is that they are relentless executors. But Joy has given them exactly sort of a game plan of exactly what they need to do. So it's, you need to go out and need to create this many ads in this amount of time in order to run this amount of budget in your account.

[00:13:21] So for Jack and his team, all of those decisions are already taken care of so that, you know, mental energy is, you know, that's the most difficult one to expend. So that's already done. So all of their energy can go towards just doing. And I think like that's, that's really the gift that this gives to a lot of entrepreneurs.

[00:13:36] Taylor Holiday: that's why I think it works despite having newer employees or people from all over the world, is because what you're really giving people is a way of working a system. And in the same way we'll often, you know, compare our, our. to traction like that, which

[00:13:51] like sort of, not traction, it's called eeo, EOS.

[00:13:54] The book is called Traction, excuse me. EOS is like an operating system for how businesses can run KPIs and goals and meetings, et cetera. Like the profit system is a similar idea for e-commerce growth brands. It's a way for your team to work, for everybody to have an expectation every day of what they're supposed to do, whether CTC is doing it or not.

[00:14:09] And when we're partnering with these brands, oftentimes they're still handling email, they're still handling creative production, but the question of how much win, what should we expect? That's all structured into the the growth map and the planning process the CTC is providing. So everybody on the team every day knows their role, what they need to do, and the actions to go take to solve problems.

[00:14:28] Richard Gaffin: Alright, so obviously like

[00:14:31] opening up a bunch of slots for this moving forward in May. So please visit us@commonthreadco.com. Hit hire us, let us know that you're interested in the Global Accelerator program. We would love to talk to you about bringing this service to you.

[00:14:42] Taylor, anything else you want to hit on the accelerator program?

[00:14:45] Taylor Holiday: thing about this is like, don't believe me, don't take my word for it. Go ask anybody who is currently a customer of the Global Accelerator program about their experience. Just ask. Ask the people paying. Us for the service. I know that their retention speaks for itself.

[00:14:58] I see their results every day. I see the comments collected by Joy and team. You can listen to Jack and others on the podcast about share their experience. Like there's a beautiful thing in marketing, which is that like the hard part is when you have to mask the service quality with the marketing, and you have to find ways to tell the story.

[00:15:13] That's not the case here. We just tell you this is the result. Joy literally publishes the financial result of every customer in his sort of thread. Every month you can go and talk to them and you can ask and see for yourself. $5,000 for that level of service on a month-to-month agreement. You can leave anytime if you don't like it.

[00:15:29] Yeah, you own your own ad account. It's all, we're not standing in the way. All we're delivering is a world-class service at a world-class price. So we're opening up 12 slots. That's gonna be for one month only. Then we're gonna go back to five. We're gonna try this batching rhythm for a while to build and onboard more talent. Bring in the customers, work through that cohort, do another one and see how that goes. So spots are still limited. 12 may sound like a lot, but we're gonna fill it up fast. So we would love to talk to you, especially in this moment in time. Both the low price and the flexibility are everything you need when there's volatile challenges on the economic front.

[00:15:59] So we would love to chat with you.

[00:16:01] Richard Gaffin: That's right, folks. All right. Again, comm thread to co.com. We would love to talk. All right. Thanks for joining us, everybody, and we will talk again next time. See ya.