Growth Is a Muscle — Here’s How to Train It

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: We're in a position right now where brands. Have come out of the era of having to significantly restrict costs to rightsize their business, to be in a position to grow predictably and profitably.

[00:00:13] And now they are faced with the more challenging part of the curve to invert that reversion. So they've kind of had to reduce their top line revenue in many cases, get leaner and are now working. To try and drive growth again, and that muscle of growth has sort of atrophied, 

[00:00:30] I think people don't do very much, and I think the vast majority of people just wildly underestimate the volume that's required. They're like, Hey, I've been selling for 90 days. I'm like, okay, so how many calls a day do you take? And they're like, five or six live calls. I'm like, okay, you've taken like 400 live calls.

[00:00:43] This is John. He's closed 4,000 deals, not calls, taken deals. That's why he's better than you. It just comes down to a number of actions taken per unit of time.

[00:00:51] Taylor Holiday: I came across that clip from Alex Ozzi and set aside whatever your feelings may be for a second about him. And that phrase, the number of actions taken per unit of time has hung with me, um, in this moment. We're in a position right now where brands. Have come out of the era of having to significantly restrict costs to rightsize their business, to be in a position to grow predictably and profitably.

[00:01:22] And now they are faced with the more challenging part of the curve to invert that reversion. So they've kind of had to reduce their top line revenue in many cases, get leaner and are now working. To try and drive growth again, and that muscle of growth has sort of atrophied, is what I've noticed, is the capacity to go out and produce has left them, and they're needing to find that rhythm again.

[00:01:49] And inside of all the organizations that we work with, I find this to be maybe the deepest truth of my entire business experience. The number of actions taken per unit of time growth is in energy. It's a force that moves through organizations in ways that produce profound results and more than ever before, I remain convinced that the ability to drive a business forward comes down to volume.

[00:02:14] It comes down to how much can you press against the endless inertia of what it means for a brand to just exist in the world. How constant can your pressure be? How constant can your energy be towards the problem? And in reflecting on this, I came across three examples that I wanna share with you that illustrate the power of this idea and how it comes to life that relate directly to our industry that I think will help to reinforce the position I shared in that opening click.

[00:02:46] So today we're gonna go through three different examples of how volume, about how the number of actions taken per unit a time are the imperative to your future growth. The first is gonna be a tweet that Ron eComm shared on Twitter this week. If you don't follow him yet, he's a great follow. He likes to be private about what his brand is, but this was maybe the best.

[00:03:10] Total encapsulation of what I believe about creative production inside of a brand. And this is perhaps most important for enterprise organizations to hear, for larger brands to hear, because I find them to be the furthest from this behavioral principle. And paid media really is in this day and age more than ever before.

[00:03:32] Two, there's a two part game, there's two part rhythms. There's deep strategic planning around creating big moments and novel product launches and uh, campaigns. And then there's in between those peaks, massive volume and energy towards problem solving. And I'm gonna read this tweet to you. He says, for the month of April, we spent 4.3 x more than last April with a 17% reduction in cac.

[00:04:00] So if we just start from a baseline authority statement, if you could spend four times more and readers cac, something good is happening. He goes on. This is one of the many things we have done differently to last year, more different and better ads. Okay? This constantly gets framed as if these things are a trade off to one another, that to have more, you must be worse.

[00:04:23] And I just flat out reject this principle, but it is this sequence that follows about how he's gotten there that I think is so important. Last December, we had 70 ish ads active in the ad library. As of today, we have 400. So 4.3 x more spend on over five x. The amount of ads at this rate, we will probably hit six to 800 by the end of the year.

[00:04:47] My strong is, my strong opinion is that there are three path dependent variables for ad production, for scrappy brands. I. Quantity first, then diversity, and then finally quality. This is really important. When I say quantity, I don't mean 500 variations on the headline, just five concepts per person, three to four variations each uploaded each week.

[00:05:09] I have two PHT members that I train closely to do this. A lot of the discord on X starts with a presumption that you have resources to do shit. The reality is you don't. You can't hire anyone good. You have to do it yourself and hire someone average who's hungry, and train them units of production per moment of time.

[00:05:28] You have to compromise on something. Don't compromise on volume. Start shit, then become good. Quantity, precedes quality. This is how we all learn anything. Also, AI can help you lift the floor or the bottom, so use this to your advantage. Keep on studying. I wish I were born great at making ads or heard work experience at CTC, but I am fucking shit at making ads and content because I was trained as a doctor, so you have to put the reps in.

[00:05:55] This is the same for your overseas team members. This might not seem like a lot of ads that people on X, but we are lapping the fuck out of competitors by like four X their number. It's enough ads. I check the ad libraries for a lot of brands. In the founders group, I'm in 80 to 90% have less than 100 active ads, and they spend, um, are asking about cost caps or bid cap.

[00:06:16] They spend their time asking about cost cap or bid caps. The key thing is the discipline. Every week, this must be done with no exceptions. When you have this basic volume, then you can focus on diversity. Just browse X, the creative search sash and try everything new. It's way easier to try and manage things now that you have a system.

[00:06:32] The difficult thing is the steps outside of your customer comfort zone. There's no such thing as brand. The goal is different ads look a bit shit, but if it's different, send it. Once the production is steady, you must cap the quantity. Capping the quantity is a prerequisite to quality. As builders, you have to prioritize just accepting shitty ads for a few weeks and trust that they will get better.

[00:06:51] Uploading shit ads is better. That uploading none at all. Our ads are way better than before. Versus 12 months ago, I did not have the taste to know how bad our ads really were. Big shout out to a lot of people on X. Um. The argument between quality versus quantity, in my opinion, is not relevant for founders.

[00:07:07] You have to actually just do it all, not just all at once. Okay. This is so good in terms of helping to think about this, start with the muscle for quantity and, and I wanna reinforce, he says this for scrappy brands, but what are the biggest problem I actually see is in larger businesses have no. Muscle here.

[00:07:25] Their entire design and production system is related to about, uh, using a fixed set of resources across a lot of points of distribution, from point of sale retail to email to all these things. There's a ticketing system. There's this legacy infrastructure that is actually counter to the capacity for volume and the, the quality standards actually prevent their capacity from walking through this door, because in the beginning, they have to redevelop the capacity for volume. 

[00:07:49] But the end result on meta is that this is how you win. You can lap your competitors because most of them do not have this many ads live in the ad account. And I, I'll admit, we struggle providing this solution for ourselves at CTC. We are constantly trying to walk through the door of finding the capacity to help our customers generate more ads because we believe so strongly, again, in these two rhythms, the peak planning that drives the moments and then volume in between.

[00:08:15] Yes. Second example, this is a clip that I'm gonna play from Sean, uh, at Ridge on the Operator's podcast this week. 

[00:08:24] On that right thing publicly. But, um, what I'll say is we, we, we launched a bunch of stuff. So we launched 52 things a a year. Basically every, every week we're launching either colors or new silhouettes or new product. We're testing bunch different. Um, and our company was kind of built around this, like, we're like, we, we spend the past two years building this muscle to actually get those things out the door, right?

[00:08:41] To actually make them on the product side, get them into the creative side, get them into the marketing team, get the op orders.

[00:08:52] No, the actual goal is every one of those things is just lottery tickets. Like we're just trying to hit the lottery, right? And we built a system that buy as many lottery tickets as possible, and then as soon as you hit one, which takes a year, it took 52 can launches to hit one. Then we stopped playing the lottery for a year and we just focused on, you know, maximizing the return on that.

[00:09:05] Right? So for real numbers, the power banks in 24 hours did more money than the rings did in 24 hours, or the carry-ons did. It was a massive six figure email. We sent an email and we did multiple six figures in power banks. Totally shocked all expectations, right? I, I just, I had to take my power bank order.

[00:09:22] I'll order hundreds of thousands of power banks now before the end of the year, and we have other launches where I do $2,000. Right. It is just, I'm just buying lot of tickets. No one know it's gonna work. So when it does work, now the entire company, like get where Power Bank company, we're gonna, we're gonna scale that to probably eight figures by the end of the year, just like we do with.

[00:09:38] Taylor Holiday: Product size. Okay, I'm gonna stop before he gets to the result. Notice we spent two years building a muscle to have the capacity to produce 52 new products a year. Okay? This is the mechanism, same principle as Ron Quality. First, the capacity to build and generate and do. Number of actions taken per unit of time.

[00:10:04] Increase this variable across these spectrums across not just creative, but also across product development. And remember, Ron's result four x the ad volume at a reduced cac. Let's see how this same principle applied to product development is helping Sean.

[00:10:39] It took them 52 shots on gold to hit the lottery. So he describes each new product we launch as a lottery ticket. Same thing as creative. Again, avoid the people who will tell you for sure which one of these things will work the most. I'm not saying they don't exist, but I'm saying that they are very few and far between and they likely don't exist inside of your organization.

[00:10:58] Instead, build the capacity, the muscle to try many. And then once you discover them, once that lottery ticket hits, it's transformative to the value of the business.

[00:11:19] Okay, so the newest product were launched, power Banks outperforms their current large lines around rings and luggage, and now is gonna become an eight figure part of their business going forward. But it's 52 product launches a year to discover One Power Bank. Okay, now ask yourself, okay, how many product launches do we have planned inside of our organization?

[00:11:38] And then what odds of the game are we playing? Now I get it. Some brands have a more intensive process or it's more cost prohibitive and the ratio isn't, it's not to replicate 52, but it's to ask yourself about what is possible within your organization and how are we preparing in the number of actions taken per unit at time.

[00:11:57] Yeah, the last thing I'll say is about us at CTC. We have been in this content game for 10 plus years, and when we started Corey and I said that there was one rule. The one rule was to publish that we were gonna build a muscle for having the capacity to create a. Content. And if you go back, you could scroll to the very beginning of our Instagram account.

[00:12:18] You could scroll to the very beginning of our YouTube channel and you'll see some hilariously terrible content, right? One of my favorite might be go pick up Pete's sweater series where we made our intern stand in a closet and describe things that he was learning this week. It's just, but the point was we, we were gonna set the ego of the view count aside, and we were gonna build the capacity.

[00:12:38] Well now, 10 years later. What can happen as a result of that consistent rhythm is that I don't know what piece of content is necessarily generating demand for our business, but we have a content agenda that's driving a mid eight figures growth of an agency. I. Right. And I'll give you two very practical examples of the way that this unpredictable constant volume has come to life.

[00:12:59] Okay? Over the last month, I, I, my, I, I applied this symbol to principle to Twitter where I'm constantly just trying to publish, right? And so I was on vacation actually, and I published a random tweet about a thought about a Kovas app. Out of that ad has flown so much conversation around the topic, an idea that we have.

[00:13:19] It's built a relationship between me and Krista that the CMO at Kovas, a sequence of additional relationships, partnership opportunities between multiples of our brands, all sorts of things that have come out of a random consistent presence. I had no idea when I sent it that any of that would exist.

[00:13:34] I'll give you another example. Recently we published a podcast talking about Andromeda Meta creates an update. We create a blog, we create a podcast, and right now we, if you go search Meta Andromeda on Google, we're the number three result that comes up for, and it's driving hundreds of page views a day to our website.

[00:13:51] Was it intentional? Was it some SEO strategy? Not at all. It was presence. It was the muscle that we've developed about consistent content development. And this is what I see inside of the organizations that I work with. They have this energy towards the, uh, the idea of growth. Everybody, whether it's from email to ad creative, to the events team, to influencer, is committed to taking the ball and pressing it forward against the inertia, against the resistance, the gravity of nothingness that exists for all products and brands every day.

[00:14:21] The consumer starts from caring nothing about you, and you must make them care every single day. And it's funny, as I think about it, this is the power of our profit system. This is the power of what CTC has designed. Its capacity and service around for our customers is that the profit system, our way of working, brings this idea to life.

[00:14:39] Because every day you are faced with a conundrum of what to do in the face of your present state by building a financial plan. That leads to a set of expectations and metrics. Every single day you wake up asking yourself, did I accomplish what I intended to do from the previous day? And if not, what am I going to do about it now?

[00:14:58] Right. Freaking now and again, I want to iterate that this is not to devoid us of the responsibility of deep, long-term strategic planning. These are separate rhythms. They must both exist. Today and tomorrow, both must both be planned for as well as six months from now as well as a year from now within the context of an organization.

[00:15:18] I. We want our responsibility to be the executionary partner of your long-term plan. This relationship is actually the most important thing I've discovered between agency as service is that we aren't going to be your long-term planning partner. We aren't here to design your next product release to build your campaign promotion, but we are here to be your absolute masters in execution of the present.

[00:15:42] Our system, the clarity to the efficacy of each planned billing block. Literally every email, every ad spend has an expectation of performance against the clear financial goal. You can easily see whether or not you have enough actions planned to arrive at the destination that you have for the month, and.

[00:15:59] How those, each of those individual actions are expected to perform. And the second you're off course, you're able to course correct. And it's this energy, it's this enthusiasm. And it's funny, every time inside of my own company that I find us beginning to veer a little off course when I go in and peep behind the curtain of the problem.

[00:16:16] It's an absence of energy towards the issue. Today's May 5th. The start of the month is always my favorite part inside of CTC because I can see very clearly who has immediate energy towards the problem. Is it okay that on May 2nd we're already 15% behind spend plan? Who has allowed that to exist? That's the absence of energy and inside of many of the partners, it's the same thing.

[00:16:39] Who responded quickly, who had an immediate expectation that we corrected how off, how aggressive were they in participating? And we can, we can PPO or diminished the idea of hustle culture or all these things all we want. But the reality is May 2nd was a Saturday this month, or sorry, May 3rd was a Saturday in this case.

[00:16:58] Somebody didn't look at the results. Somebody waited till the fourth, somebody waited till the fifth, and by the time they got there, there was already a hole that probably meant they couldn't dig out of it, and someone else had the energy towards the problem. And across every organization, whether it's.

[00:17:15] Alex harm in the things he's saying, or Ron, or if he, what he's up to, or Sean in, uh, at Ridge or us at CTC. In all of these cases, the, the, the truth remains the same. Growth is in the making. It's not in the measurement. It's not in the meetings, it's in the doing. It's in the making stuff happen with clarity of the end objective and applying a force of will against the problem with a constant pressure, a constant pressure against the goal.

[00:17:41] That's it. We can all try harder to think about what may happen in the future, but we sit here amidst the world. I think about tariffs, right? Uh, and how unpredictable the future is. And as someone who spent years forecasting as an exercise, I just, it's actually altered my behavior more and more towards this disposition, which is to say that it is important to be thoughtful about the future, but the real way that you bring it to life is you exert your will on it.

[00:18:09] The future. You are good at forecasting because you shape the future with your behavior, not because you guessed. Right? Um, and that energy is what we're trying to introduce to ourselves and our partners. And I, I would consider for you, what is your organization's number of actions per unit of time? Could we help you implement a system to raise it, to increase the amount of actions per unit of time to grow, to raise the floor of volume as an initial starting point?

[00:18:35] Not to dismiss quality, not to ignore its importance in your business process, but to understand the sequence that Ron described about how we get there. So hope you've enjoyed this episode. This is what I've been thinking about this week and what I'm seeing is the next step for growth as we've gone backwards into a resistance of cost cutting step that many brands, it was necessary coming out an out of an era of excess.

[00:18:56] We had to get lean. But in that lean, we've atrophied the strength of will and pressure to move organizations with speed and pace and clarity. So I hope this helps. We'd love to talk to you about it. Um, thanks for tuning in to this week's Ecommerce Playbook Podcast.