Listen Now

Discover the next chapter in Common Thread Collective’s story as Taylor Holiday takes you behind the scenes of our 12-year journey from a tiny IKEA-furnished office and our first Facebook ad experiments with QALO, to the seismic shifts of COVID and our reinvention as a “profit agency.”

In this special episode of the podcast, you’ll hear:

  • How CTC evolved from a passion project into a mission-driven agency focused on connecting marketing efforts to real financial outcomes
  • The cultural transformation that refocused us on customer experience and shareholder value
  • The story behind our strategic growth partnership with Acacia—and what it means for our technology roadmap and your bottom line
Show Notes:
  • Explore the Prophit System: prophitsystem.com
  • Common Thread listeners get $250 by depositing $5,000 or spending $5,000 using the Mercury IO credit card within your first 90 days (or do both for $500) at mercury.com/ctc!
  • The Ecommerce Playbook mailbag is open — email us at podcast@commonthreadco.com to ask us any questions you might have about the world of ecomm

*Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Checking and savings accounts are provided through our bank partners Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC. The IO Card is issued by Patriot Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Mastercard. Learn more about cashback. Working Capital loans provided by Mercury Lending, LLC NMLS ID: 2606284.

Watch on YouTube

Taylor Holiday: [00:00:00] Welcome to a very special episode of the E-Commerce Playbook Podcast. One, I dare say, has been 12 years in the making. Feels like a hundred, but, uh, in reality, CTC was founded just over a decade ago. Uh, and today I'm here to share about the next step in the evolution of our organization.

As of listening to this, you may have come across a press release announcing that CTC has partnered with Acacia to form a strategic growth partnership to help shape the future of where we are headed. And so I'm here today to share a little bit about that news, what it means for the future, and why we've chosen to partake in this really exciting partnership.

My journey at Common Thread Collective has spanned, uh, many different iterations. When we began this process, [00:01:00] for those of you that don't know, it was myself, my founding business partner, Jordan and Corey, the producer here for the pod and employee Numero Uno, and we began as a consultancy. We both had come out of the brand in sports world.

Jordan, a professional athlete in the NFL myself in baseball. We had both worked on the brand side. He worked for a mobile app development company. I worked in a consumer product company as well as a little bit in the agency world. And so we had this duality of relationship between intimate knowledge and working of the sports world to the marketing services.

And Jordan was just sort of the consummate networker. He could find the deals and I could do the work, and that's how we began. And at the same time we, my brother came to me with an idea to. Create a silicone wedding ring, and that was the birth of Calo and Calo and CTC started together in, uh, a tiny little office above the Blue Frog Bakery in Orange, California, uh, about 12 years ago, [00:02:00] right before my children were born.

My twins were born at the same time. So it was quite a hectic time of life where we didn't really have much ambition for a specific outcome. As is the case with a lot of. Entrepreneurial journeys, it was more about enthusiasm for work and the thing that we were wanting to do versus some master plan of what we would become.

And Corey, myself and my brother, bought some crappy furniture from ikea, shoved it into a tiny office and started doing work. And the journey from there, uh, spanned. A process that I watch many people in our space go through it. So I feel like a little bit of an old man in the D two C space now. I'm 41 years old.

I've been at this for over almost 20 years now. In reality, about 18 years in the e-commerce marketing space, and when you begin on the agency side of things. An agency is sort of always seen as a means to an end. It's never for many the actual ambition or goal to build and grow [00:03:00] an agency because I think there's a proliferation of information about the success of consumer brands or even software products that are sort of front and center in a lot of the media cycle that draw our attention and eyes towards that as the idyllic profile of a business.

And I was no different. And those are early years of the agency. We're all about a vision for acquiring talent, but we always thought we were gonna go build our own brands. And after a couple years in, whether it was building klo, which we owned a position in alongside them, or launching four by 400, which, uh, is a well-documented part of our story.

It was birthed outta CTC where we built an aggregator of our own brands. We owned at the largest point, I think six different brands inside of four by 400. Andrew Ferris went to left CTC to go run that. Josh, one of our other partners and Ian now run Bamboo Worth our skincare brand that's still inside of there.

So we've always had this sort of duality of the agency was this thing that existed to fuel the [00:04:00] opportunities because exits and big growth potential and financial realities were all were never gonna be born outta the agency. They were always gonna be born out of. Consumer products. Um, and so that was like many people that I see.

That was our vision. That was, that was what we thought was the right thing to do. And the, obviously the aggregator idea, pre COVID was something that I think was very popular. This idea you were gonna create shared operational efficiency, learn from what you did in the agency, all these things. So we chased that dream for many years along the way.

And of course, we also. We're connected to the start of the Facebook advertising era, which really was taking off at the same time that we launched the agency. It wasn't our preexisting skillset necessarily in the beginning. We were doing a lot of organic content development, organic social, even influencer marketing, where we, some of our early work was pairing large professional athletes, uh, with equity deals, with different brand partnerships, uh, because of our previous, uh, life experience, but with kalo.

We really cut [00:05:00] our teeth in the Facebook advertising world. 'cause what we learned about meta at the time, or Facebook at the time, was that it possessed this sort of magical attribute for us trying to sell a wedding ring, which is that they knew everybody's relationship status and they knew, and so we could target married and engaged CrossFitters, married and engaged firefighters, married and engaged people in the military.

And that's really where we learned the power of this advertising engine. And uh, we've always been, I think, uniquely. Uh, disciplined in the way that we approach advertising. 'cause it was always learned through our own dollars, our own money being spent in the platform. And so that tends to diminish your interest in proxy metrics and prioritize your interest in financial results because you wanna see your bank account grow at the end of the day.

And we got to ride a lot of that journey. And so the agency, I think grew maybe faster than we had anticipated. Because again, when I, when I say it was really intended to be a vehicle to produce both cash and people and talent for the brands, [00:06:00] that was really the vision when we started. With the agency.

And then I remember very clearly at one point we had gotten to maybe 30 people and we were sitting around sort of going like, what is this thing for? And we had this parent company, we called it Dream Labs. And Dream Labs was the group that owned both Common Thread Collective and four by 400. There's a group of partners in there.

We sat together, we had many of these meetings throughout the years and sort of built a vision map for what each of these entities would serve to do for us as partners. And the reality is when we drew it out. Four by 400 was gonna be our financial reward. That was how we were gonna create wealth as a group of people.

And Common Thread Collective was an experiential project. It was about building a culture and a group of people and a day-to-day life that we loved to participate in that we could learn a lot from that we could then apply into four by 400. That was the vision going back to the early days, and we built that in many ways.

Pre COVID. [00:07:00] If you came to visit Common Thread collective. You would visit us in a 20,000 square foot office that featured a three pl that we were a part owner in a giant production studio. Upstairs was all the brand team. You would have Andrew and Cody and TL and all the people running around up top building our brands Downstairs was the CTC agency.

It was a. Energetic, bubbling, awesome experience inside of that office where you saw both the client service happening, the agency growing our brands, the product being fulfilled, all of it sort of happening in one place. Kayla was in, uh, with us in there for a long time, and we had built a life. And at CTC we built so much of the work.

Our literal mission statement was around this idea of helping entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. And we measured our success as an organization in our capacity to fulfill the mission, which I still think is the way the organization should run, is to be in service of its mission. Um, and [00:08:00] we sort of really narrowed in the definition too, of, of what does it mean, who is an entrepreneur and whose dreams do we serve?

And it became very focused on our people. Our employees. We were, we. If you ever got to join a CTC Dream Day, you know that we built an incredible internal mechanism for helping people spend time in pursuit of their dreams. We had multiple full-time, uh, coaches and therapists on staff that would meet with every employee all the time to work in these pursuit.

The first Monday of every month was Dream Day. We had these big celebrations. It was. Very centric to our culture. And in the part this was because the organization didn't exist exclusively for the product of financial return. Over the course of the first 10 years, we never took a distribution out of CTC.

Uh, we only used money either to invest in alternative opportunities like four by 400. Or to pour back into the experiences inside of the organization. And that was, that was our reality. Um, it's what we wanted to do. And then a lot changed as COVID occurred. 

Uh, the COVID prior to COVID, right before that period, we probably had about [00:09:00] 60 people.

We had offices in LA and New York, very geocentric, uh, culture. We didn't allow remote employees. We actually had a couple of employees, Aaron or Orff and Aaron Wasowski at the time, who were flying in multiple weeks a month. Um. To, uh, to, to allow for the first time we had sort of partial remote. I remember Shireen, uh, who you all know Abe from, from Twitter.

She was with us at the time and she was the first employee that like really was requiring remote work. And so this was, we had begun this hybrid thing and then all of a sudden. COVID occurred and we walked outta that office in the middle of March and everything changed for us at that time, uh, for a number of reasons.

One was, uh, we lost that cent, that culture, the centricity, the office experience disappeared suddenly overnight. And everything that we had built around that community, around the relationships, candidly around the social fabric of my life, sort of. Was taken away, um, in ways that we could not really anticipate the impact of.

And [00:10:00] then simultaneously that led to a massive. Influx of demand for marketing services in particular, meta advertising and growth and media dollars. And so the agency sort of went through an explosive period and you had these brands going through the same thing all in this same period. And so suddenly, I.

This agency had been growing steadily, probably, I mean, 50 to a hundred percent a year for six years. Went through a massive influx of demand and we went from 60 people to almost 180 people in like 18 months. And the thing became something very different because you just lost a lot of that. I. Relational connection.

It became very hard to manage and execute some of the same cultural programming that we were going through. Um, there was a lot of turmoil in the world, more broadly as it relates to everything that went on in that period. Towards the end of 2022, both on the brand side and on the agency side. There was a massive reset as the COVID demand suddenly fell off a cliff.[00:11:00] 

We had also. Uh, experience, I would say in that growth going from 60 to about 180 people, a massive decline in the quality of the service at the fringes. One of the things I really believe about an agency is that the quality of the experience is usually tied to the tenure of the people. Your job is to operationalize ideology through every EndNote of the system, and it is usually least well deployed through the newest person in the system.

That's just the reality. It just takes time for them to be onboarded into your systems and process and deployment and experience. And when you get to a place where more than 50% of your employees have been at the company for less than 12 months, you're going to experience a simultaneous degradation in the experience for customers.

There was also, I would say, a lot of brands that were propped up by COVID era demand. But needless to say, we went through a really hard reset at the end of 2022, both on the brand side inside of four by 400. We experienced that there as well, but also in the [00:12:00] agency. And that's forced us at the beginning of 2023 to really reconsider our whole ecosystem to say, what is this thing that we're doing?

We went through a substantial amount of layoffs at CTC, and I had to take a step back and decide what is gonna make me want to continue to do this, and how does the vision that we had about this, um. The. Four by 400 and brand thing being the path to financial freedom versus this being the experiential thing.

Well, suddenly what had happened was the CT C thing wasn't the experience that was fulfilling to me anymore. It wasn't providing that social fabric of my life. The in-office experience, this like very human relational. Joyful thing suddenly had changed very dramatically, not out of our own tension. And the four by 400 thing wasn't providing the same financial viability as, as we had intended, as the aggregator model sort of showed up with all sorts of the cracks that people are well known, which is that there aren't really operational efficiencies across various random business categories that all have different supply chain and different capital requirements and different growth stories.

[00:13:00] Like that model, uh, had a lot of its own flaws. And so we took a step back in 2023 and said, okay, well what do these things exist to do now? As partners, as owners, and I also at that point had become friends with Steve Weiss at Mute Six, watched them go through, uh, their transaction and success on the agency side.

I had watched what Power Digital and Wpromote and Annuity had all begun to do and was awakened to the reality that a service business is actually a great. Business that it actually has real financial upside if you can deliver on a certain set of outcomes and results, and watching those people execute a playbook, uh, in our space and getting to know them and understanding the reality of it, I just realized that I was naive, that I was naive to the potential of both of these business categories and the complexities and challenges.

And so we committed in 2023 to go through a major transformation of who, who we were as CTC. And what we were going to do is we were going to toggle [00:14:00] us from being, taking the employee experience and putting that at the center of the organization to saying we're gonna create the customer experience at the center and that we're also gonna feel committed to delivering shareholder value.

And the good thing about CTC is we went through an esop. Our employees are owners and so there isn't actually a inherent conflict between, as there is in many organizations between. The interest of the shareholder and the interest in the employee base, which is one of the underlying complexities of capitalism.

That's a conversation for another day. But for us, because we have this sort of communal capitalism opportunity, we could actually create this mutual benefit by saying, we're gonna serve customers and deliver them value as a prerequisite to delivering shareholder value. And we're gonna do that. By getting really disciplined about ensuring that the price that we're providing the service at the operational efficiency, we were doing it, and the quality of the experience are gonna go way up.

And that may actually come at a cost of some of the, uh, let's call it the internal benefits that we were touting to employees. Whether it was the amount of time off that you were getting or the programs that we, a [00:15:00] part of what we were doing is that we had just found that we had sort of lost the script as it relates to the relationship between those things.

And so we went through a complete. Organizational overhaul and I have a great podcast coming out with Andrew Derian. Where we're we? Talk into more if you're interested in some of those cultural overhauls. But what it led to was a business that did a much better job of providing excellent quality service for its customers that looked into how we could become more operationally efficient, a greater investment in technology, a greater investment in system, and a prioritization of people and talent that we're committed to delivering value to our customers.

Who loved what we were doing. You know, agency's a funny thing. It's really easy to adopt tropes about how hard customer service is and how much clients suck, but the reality is there are a group of people for whom they love this work and that are committed to doing it excellently. And that's the team that we were left with after all that struggle was people who wanted to be here.

Who loved what we were doing, who were committed to [00:16:00] delivering that value, and weren't overwhelmed by the idea that you're gonna have to manage a bunch of clients. That's part of the experience, and that was actually invigorating to them. The diversity of problem solving became exciting, and so we leaned into that core group.

We reimagined who CTC could become, and we, we went after this idea that now is core and centric to who we are as an organization around. The connection between marketing efforts and financial outcomes, and starting in 2023. You've probably seen my Bridges series. You've probably seen a lot of our content on forecasting.

We leaned into what we saw as a coming problem for our clients as it relates to the lack of availability, capital, the need to drive profit, the need to understand more, have a higher level of sophistication between. The, the advertising thing, efforts that you were making and the bottom line results. We talked a lot about p and ls.

We got, you know, conversant, uh, uh, in gross margin and to really begin to think about how we could deliver on financial realities for our customers. We were also kind of tired of coming outta the COVID era where people's growth [00:17:00] expectations were wildly unrealistic. And so. We put fp and a financial planning and analysis and forecasting at the center of our service because at the end of the day, I believe this job is about setting expectations and meeting expectations.

And so we wanted to have a thoughtful way to set appropriate expectations that we could then pursue delivering together. To hold both of our internal team accountable to this question of are we doing what we said we're going to do across the organization? How often and when we fail? Why? But also to make sure the customers knew that when they paid us what they were getting in return would be of value to them.

And that transformed everything about us. I'd say over the last I. Three years from 23 to 24 to 25 CTC, um, has become the best version of ourselves, uh, in at least through the lens of a customer for sure, in terms of what we're able to deliver on the promise of the service that we're making, as well as, you know, what's interesting is that the culture followed as well is that you, instead of a culture that was about the experience of the individuals, we became a bunch of people who loved to be in service of high quality work [00:18:00] to customers, uh, to build cool technologies, to find ways to deliver.

Uh, novel solutions and we have a group of people that are committed to that enterprise. And along the way, one of the things that we learned is. Customers when you have a successful relationship are constantly looking to you to find ways to deliver and bring more opportunities and value to them. If CTCs at the center of our growth and profit relationship with the customer, when a new platform like App Loving comes out, or when they begin to look at, should we take on podcasts or tv, or what should we do with our Amazon channel?

They look to us to be the source. Of those questions, they, those answers to those questions. And I've watched as, as we compete in the market, our capacity to provide a holistic set of solutions across a broad spectrum that meet the needs of the market today is really important. And so there's lots of ways that we could pursue that.

We [00:19:00] could hire leaders as we've done before, and build services in-house. And that takes time. Um, or we can look at. The way that m and a can be complimentary to what we already have in place at CTC. And so as I watched that occur, and I thought to myself, Hey, the pathway here for the next era of Common Thread collective might be to combine the internal organic growth engine that we have in place with some additional complimentary services around some key areas that we believe are gonna be critical to the future.

Things like Amazon, things like more content development and creative production on the AI front. Things like web development or CRO or other elements of where the transaction occurs. Maybe that's on TikTok shop. Maybe that's other places. There's an opportunity for me to say, Hey, I think we can pair.

Some of what CTC has done, reputationally with some other best in class providers to build a service offering that distinguishes itself in the market. All around this idea of connecting marketing outcomes [00:20:00] to financial realities for our customers and to stay. To remove we're, we're gonna be letting go of some of the old terms of the last era around being a growth agency, and we're really gonna lean into this idea of being a profit agency.

We are here to help generate bottom line outcomes for our customers. Uh, and as we've watched D two C evolve in how it happens, um, I think we all recognize that omnichannel is a big piece of that reality, that Amazon continues to be a place that you're going to have to reconcile with and deal with as a brand, uh, as you want to pursue growth.

I think international markets become a big piece of where there's opportunity for future growth. So our job. As an agency that's committed to helping brands grow predictably and profitably is to provide the tools and resources and services to help them do that. So for me, as I think about where CTC is at, and we've gotten to a size and a level of, uh, uh, quality and delivery, that launching a net new service with one person inside of CTC becomes an insufficient way in reality to launch something new.

[00:21:00] And so we look at it at the future and we said, okay, hey, I've watched great competitors in the space from Wpromote to annuity, these other folks. Walk this road in ways that have allowed them to come into a competitive bidding with me with a playbook that's broader than ours. And so we recognize that as an opportunity in the market.

In addition, we know that technology is at the center of what we do at CTC. But my personal background is not in development and we have an incredible CTO named Quran, who's been at the center of what CTC has been, uh, developing in stats for many years. And we see that as an actual, like an an absolutely critical center point of what we are building.

And so we thought, okay, how can we go out into the market? How can we create an opportunity to realize value for the shareholders, the commitment that we've made at CTC, while also helping us to build a platform, not for CTC to go away, not for me to go away. [00:22:00] For us to say, how do we become the best version of ourselves in the future by being able to enable strategic acquisition and to get support on our technology roadmap.

And to make the kinds of investments into technological infrastructure that are required to compete in this space. And that's what led us to go out and pursue a strategic partnership like the one that we found with Acacia. In addition to their technology and m and a expertise, we chose Acacia because they get our business. They share our vision, our values, they understand our culture and are great to work with. We gotta spend a ton of time with these guys in person over dinner, getting to know one another. And of all the potential investors we've talked to over the years, the Acacia team just stood out above and beyond them for all of those reasons. And, um, I wanna give a shout out to the team at Plao and Eric in particular, uh, for their support in this process.

It is a, not a simple one. It is a complicated journey, and Eric and the team at Palazzo sought me out many years ago. [00:23:00] Before CTC was really in a place where we would've been a very attractive acquisition target and Eric flew out. He met with me when some of the other key players in the space kind of poo-pooed me and wouldn't take the call because we weren't quite in the right space yet.

And he did a lot of work to build relationship and to spend time and to see the vision of what we could become together. And he and their team guided us through this process over the last 12 months. And we took a lot of meetings. We went through the whole, whole playbook, uh, of everything that's required along the way.

You build the deck, you take the meetings, you have all the calls, you go through the giant filter. And what I'll tell you is that along the way it became incredibly evident. I. Who the right partner for us was. It is not hard in this journey to actually stand out, um, as a PE or a a, a potential partner because for many of them, there's sort of a very standard way that they engage and it doesn't feel very personal.

It just feels like that you are a sort of calculation in a modeling exercise that they hope spits out an inevitable [00:24:00] return on the other side. But what I noticed in Fred and Zach and Chris and the Acacia team. Was that they understood some unique things about us. And from the very first meeting, they had done a level of analysis about our business and the market.

They gave them a thesis about why there was a unique opportunity here together. And, uh, similar to Eric, what I have always felt is that somebody who is willing to take that little bit of extra step to go above and beyond to show the attribute that we used to hire for in day one at CTC, we called it effort and interest.

It's what I'm always looking for in a potential partner, in a potential employee is who has a motor to work in a way that's going to allow us to get through a bunch of really hard problems together and who's like really curious and interested and loves what we do. And Zach on the Acacia team in particular is just the kind of curious motor nerd that I resonate with that loves a spreadsheet and will build a model and has a view what he believes about our [00:25:00] space.

That was compelling to me, that made me feel like as a leader, I could actually attach onto a vision bigger than my own, which I think is sometimes an underrated attribute of a thing you're looking for in partners. Is that so often as a CEO, you're. Your burden, and I say that word not in this negative way, but in this heavy way of constantly looking out into the future and imagining this sense of possibility for yourself and everybody around you.

And when all of a sudden you get a partner in that, somebody who looks out and actually might see something bigger than even you see, and can help you stretch to your sense of possibility, that's exciting. It's invigorating. And so as we step into this next journey, um, what I hope you as the listener here is one, if you run a world-class service offering in one of these spaces, we wanna talk to you.

We wanna build the Avengers. We wanna build an incredible world-class service offering that continues to stand on top of what we've done at CTC to deliver a, just a, a level of quality and experience that can't be competed with. Um, and then if you're a customer, to know that, that we are committed to being the absolute go-to [00:26:00] source for profit development.

If your profitability is not the level that you want, we wanna be the people that you talk to, to help you create financial rigor, build better forecasting and financials, to be disciplined in your media marketing, to understand measurement, to bring clarity to the chaos that we experience inside of advertising right now, and that we now have more resource, more technology, better people to help us accomplish that.

That's where we're at. So the important thing is I'm not going anywhere. I love what I do, man. I, I love this journey. I love to be a part of it. I'm excited to get, to play this game at a new level, to be able to consider what might be true for Common Thread, to become a platform to push the brand for forward further, to improve the quality of service.

Our leadership isn't going anywhere. We just now are equipped with some experience. Some intellect and some capital to help us go onto the next stage. Uh, and so that's where we're at. What you're gonna be seeing more of from CTC, uh, is to continue to build on the reputation that we feel like we've established about being [00:27:00] the leaders in marketing and finance, and the combination of those things to be your CFO's favorite agency.

To help put more money in the pockets of founders and shareholders across our industry to navigate what we believe is a really challenging time. We don't think this is the, the, the best era in the history of CDC. We think it's hard. We think that the ability to produce profit, there's a lot of transition happening, uh, and we're excited to get after it.

So hopefully, uh, you've enjoyed a little bit of a journey of explaining why we've made the choices that we made and where we're at today. Uh, and I am as enthusiastic as I've ever been. Probably more honestly, I feel I have a better understanding of this business model that I've ever had. I feel like we have partners that are not only, uh, philosophically aligned, but have experience in ways that we don't, that are gonna help us to improve some of the underlying systems, uh, and make us just continually better.

And as Tony Chop, my VP paid me. This says, uh, today is the worst we'll ever be. And I believe that that is as true today as it's ever been. [00:28:00] Is that here on June, uh, the 30th or July the seventh, whenever this goes out, Corey, that CTC is the worst it will ever be. And that's exciting. That means you're a part of something that's gonna continue to develop and improve.

Uh, and that's all you can really ask is that you know, you are surrounded by a people group of people that are relentlessly committed to being better tomorrow. And that's what we're after. And so I hope that if you are an agency provider or a brand that that's something you're interested in being a part of.

We would love to talk, but I wanted to share a lot about it. Many of you have been incredibly supportive to me. I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for this audience, the community, the customers, the employees that have all contributed to this process. There's too many to thank. Um, and this is a big step for us to, to.

Head off onto the next evolution, uh, of what we're gonna become. And I'm excited, and of course, all on the way, you'll be hearing about it right here on this microphone, hopefully with high quality audio as much as possible. But thanks for, uh, listening and excited for what's in store.