The Ruthless Forecast: How We Hold 7-Figure Brands Accountable

[00:00:00] Richard: the number one rule of business is that you should never lie to yourself.

[00:00:03] And I think that's kind of what

[00:00:04] Joy: That's

[00:00:05] Richard: here is that like, when we're construct a forecast, like what we're doing is making a situation where we're all telling the truth about what's gonna happen. Right. And, that can, that just definitely comes as bad news to people sometimes, particularly when they have an arbitrary we're gonna double our revenue over the next year without any clear plan or clear explanation, I guess, as to why that's going to happen, and that's ultimately what these forecasts provide, which is this sort of breakdown of, like you said before, like if we do nothing or if we continue business as usual, this is what is going to happen.

[00:00:36] Hey folks. Welcome to the E-Commerce Playbook Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffen, director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And I'm joined today to talk about our Profit Engineer seven Figure System with Mr. Joy Sharma, who is the director of the Global Accelerator in the past and now of our profit engine.

[00:00:55] Seven is what we're calling it product. And so, we're gonna talk with Joy a little bit about specifically how the profit engine system and this kind of entire philosophy way of thinking applies to brands that are in the seven figure range. But first off, joy, how are you doing, man?

[00:01:10] Joy: Good. Nice chilling.

[00:01:14] Richard: Yeah. Good to hear it. So let's, since you're good. Nice and chilling, I think we can jump straight into it. So talk to us a little bit about some of the ways that the profit engine system is evol, or rather, I should say, is how we tweak it for the seven figure brand.

[00:01:32] Joy: Okay. I think you were about to ask like, how has it evolved? I think we, we could try, we gonna cover both things, which is basically how it has evolved, which is previously when we offered the service, we used to compete with other people trying to do similar thing across the market. And then ever since the boom of ai, I think now we are not only competing against.

[00:01:53] Human beings. We are also competing against, can I just use Claude? Can I get a similar output? And like all those things. And that's why profit engineer came out, which is you can, you can use AI and try to get an answer, but the idea is you can I believe people will choose profit engine because of this one statement, which is been there, done that.

[00:02:11] When you, when you put that in an AI and you upload our ilog and you put in years of results of tests, like it is a better output of us using that system, which is basically, it's all led by tech trained on ilog, giving out the output, which is this is what you should do, or, so the random AI using a generic advice saying you can probably do this or this, or this, or this, and it's like the difference between that and us is we take accountability and that makes them world.

[00:02:35] Go around. So I would say that's the main difference and why it's better to ai. And the way it changes for B seven is I think the use cases are different or, or where value is incurred is different. And I think that's just because of the size of the business and whatever the needs of the business. And that's why it changes a little bit from what B it is.

[00:02:57] We can go point to point, like there, there're basically three core services in the, in the whole thing that we do, which is itself with forecasting. Then it goes into strategy and then it goes into execution, which is we build a forecast, we execute against it, we build a strategy for it, and then we execute in the A account.

[00:03:12] Also, we are combining some roles into it. We have created a strategy as part of it. That's an interesting topic to get into just because it's, it's controversial in how we believe about it and how people believe about it. That's, that's interesting to see in P seven actually. Inter and then you, you can take the summary of output of what is done from the system.

[00:03:30] If you watch the last video, like that's basically all doubt. But that was of the piece. So, so we can start one by one. If you wanna get into something particular, we 

[00:03:37] Richard: Yeah. Okay. Let's I, I think, I think it would be interesting to start with maybe the creative strategy piece, like why PE seven incorporates creative strategy into one person, and then also maybe how that is of a specific advantage to a brand of the seven figure range.

[00:03:55] Joy: Yeah, so I think let's talk. So that's basically strategy, like strategy is all clubbed together, which is let's, strategy comes after we build the forecast. So what forecast does is whatever it does. The end output of that is basically it's a trigger which like something is wrong. And then we go into the strategies to phase.

[00:04:11] Now across the month, what we are going to do is we're going to give you a lot of strategies. It might be landing pages, offer, it might be a billion different things like whatever you need to achieve the target. That's what's going to be done. The way it flows into creative strategy, and the reason I say this is basically because we have a creative scoring mechanism.

[00:04:26] That's how we use creative strategy right now, which is, hey, we, this is our score. If you're below it, you should make. Better ads. I would say kind of like you're not spending enough on an ad. Like your average spend per ad is not that good. That means you're cutting your waste, which is like a lot of times this particular scenario happens.

[00:04:42] We go to businesses in P seven and we're like, Hey, you are a new business. You've probably made 10 ads. You should make more ads. And a lot of people who understand this messaging will just generally apply this messaging all the time to like make more ads, make more ads. A lot of people cut their way through it, which is like the way they're going to make a bunch of ads.

[00:04:58] They're gonna take the same image, they're gonna change the headline, they're gonna make very small changes. And then what happens is you can't find people, you can't go to a person to be like, Hey, I told you to make more ads and they didn't work. And people like, I made more ads. What? What is wrong? And then there's no way to explain it until you use this model mortgage.

[00:05:14] Like in this model, it's Hey, your average spent basically one 10th, so you made 10 times more ad. And in one 10th, because you basically made the same ad. And we can talk about theory, but basically. When people try to chase volume with their strategy, whatever, like you can have a creative strategy, they, they try to chase volume, they lose so often.

[00:05:33] This idea that I'm going to go and open a motion report and I'm gonna look at what has worked best in the past, and I'm going to try to make a similar reality and I'm gonna find a new winner. Just not true like that. That just doesn't happen. That is a, that's a psyop that's told by the industry to the people in the industry.

[00:05:47] That's not how this works. Because if you really think about it, the way you find a really good winner is you find it in a cohort of audience. And if you find someone in that audience, you've probably reached the ceiling potential of that set of people in that delivery format. And the way you need to do is you need to find something new now.

[00:06:02] People in P seven don't have a lot of resources to go and do that. So what we are trying to solve for all the time is make more ads and do it at a very high hitch rate, which is like my average spend per ad needs to be really high. The way you really do that for a P seven where you don't have a bunch of resources and you can test like thousands and billions of ads, because the way to do that is like you test messaging on images like there there's a whole, this whole, whole supply chain and yada yada, yada.

[00:06:26] There's also better, right? Which is the way you do that is this is what we deliver to, which is we'll tell you offers. Marketing moments, we will plan the marketing calendar out. And we will build landing pages and we'll basically tell you that, hey, what you need to do is you need to make these many ads, which is split between videos and images.

[00:06:41] Then these are the products you need to do. This is how much you need to do for the marketing moment, and then for the, this is Evergreen. And then evergreen is further broken down into, you need to do it for this offer because this offer is winning. So I know what works. Apply it to this offer. The likelihood of that winning is just through the roof.

[00:06:56] Then go and make it for this landing page and then take these best ads and make that for that offer. So, because this is done by growth strategies, because creative strategies would probably not be able to do that, that's not their regular scope of work. That has significantly higher hit rate or average spend per ad that makes it worthwhile to go invest in creative.

[00:07:16] The reason people hate creative in this industry or in in this segment is because they need to spend a bunch of money and the return on that money is terrible. That is all that's everything you should be talking about all the time. This applying this as a part of creative strategy, which is if you do this.

[00:07:31] You can, you can skip what the brief is. I don't care. You can, you can take these things that we just gave you and you can send it to a creator and you will still get an ad that will win. Whilst it's trying to stake existing ad, put a, put a 200 KA month, or sorry, 200 KA year creative strategist on it and try to make a better ation of the evergreen ad.

[00:07:48] And that is it. The value capture is just, is just like infinitely different for a seven figure business that does this versus the eight figure business. That's

[00:07:56] Richard: so maybe explain a little bit more about so because it's, because the growth strategist has visibility into the dynamics of the actual performance and platform or something like that, that gives them like a much clearer sense of what does and doesn't work, which pulls them away from the iteration, 

[00:08:16] Joy: yeah.

[00:08:17] Richard: pulls 'em away from that idea of just repeating what used to work or whatever, like maybe tease that out a little bit more.

[00:08:23] Joy: Okay, so the way a normal creative artist works is they, they're just, I, I would actually say they're just playing in a different game, which is like trying to make more ads that are evergreen and then trying to make people buy from that is just like north worthwhile and that's where they spend all their time.

[00:08:37] Whereas when you're doing this, you're just, you're inherently giving people a reason to buy today, which would be like a new landing page that we know it works. You, I would say the shots you have taken. Is directly proportional to what your hit rate is. If I've taken a billion shots like this happens in mature ad accounts, like if you're spending a million million a month, your chance of finding a new winner is pretty much like zero or 1% or 2%. But when you enter new ranges, like now, if the same brand that was mature enough will enter a new offer or a new landing page or a new angle that you built, it didn't exist in the market. If it existed in the market in an evergreen period, you would've just found a new creative test your way into it.

[00:09:12] If that brand unlocks a new angle in a landing page in an offer, and they make ads for it in a similar format, you can make similar format, you know? Street interviews work, go and make it for that offer, and it'll just work really well, and that you, you're unlocking a core of audience that didn't exist, but because you're adding a reasoning to it, which is like Taylor talks about it, which is like to every business, even for business, it's like, why should I buy your product today?

[00:09:35] Because you are answering that outside of creative, it makes the creative click through it insane, works well through the roof. This is like the same thing I think people used to do the, everyone does this, which is like they'll take the same offer they have and they'll call it Easter sale and it just works really well.

[00:09:49] What is happening is they're taking something that worked and if you made a attrition of it, it would not work, but they make it interim marketing moment or a culture moment and it makes a cohort of people that didn't exist before. You're doing the same thing in the evergreen time period with offers with landing pages.

[00:10:02] All like customer journey is something we play with so many things.

[00:10:06] Richard: So many things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean then, then I think like the way to summarize it is that because the growth strategist is so many. Use under who understands the marketing calendar and the flow of the marketing calendar, all of the creative that they are. Briefing, so to speak, or, or kind of asking for or strategizing around, I guess, for lack of a better word, is all based on these specific marketing moments tied to things like product launch, things like, I don't know, seasonal sales, whatever the case may be, as opposed to just trying to think of, of another way to say.

[00:10:38] Hey, buy this, buy these socks 'cause they feel comfortable or whatever like that. It's more Hey, here's a reason to buy these now because of this specific sort of like product related thing that we're doing. 

[00:10:47] Joy: He also has obligation through the month to, to provide growth. Right. And that just means like you're, you're connecting creative to growth. Everyone talks about connecting the, a account to the, to the creative strategy. But nobody talks about connecting the growth strategy to the creative strategy because the growth strategy is, if you think about it, he's, he's obligated to deliver growth.

[00:11:05] He doesn't have a lot of levers. If you think about it, we call this the units of growth or basically you have the marketing calendar Outside of that and creative, what do you have? You have landing pages. You probably have offers. That's pretty much it. It's the customer journey. Outside of that, now, they might seem like a very broad.

[00:11:22] Aspect of things you can choose from, but it's basically, it, it, it's, it's infinite. You, you live in an infinite creative universe. When I say an offer, it could, it could mean a billion different things because the growth strategy is spending so much time on researching what works in that industry for that particular group of audience.

[00:11:36] It understands what resonates there. When you apply that to creative strategy, it just gets like outsized returns.

[00:11:43] Richard: That makes sense. So then let's speak to a little bit, you talk a about, you just sort of touched on accountability, their obligation, right? Like the fact that the growth strategist, they're in charge of the creative strategy, but they're also being held to a growth, like a standard of actual performance.

[00:11:58] Right? So those incentives are kind of combined into one, but then, so, there's, you had sent over some notes before we jumped on the record here, and you talked about the ruthlessness of the model and the forecast. And I think this is an interesting thing to think about, particularly when it comes to the way that like our engineers work with a seven figure brand.

[00:12:16] So obviously, like we had just been talking about. Our awareness of the marketing calendar and how that's constructed. So clearly we have some sort of deep understanding of the way that year is gonna flow and that plays into our modeling, into our forecast. But talk a little bit about that concept of the ruthlessness of the forecast and how that plays into the service.

[00:12:32] Joy: So like I'm currently training a grocery manager, so this is like top of mind, which is I believe we all exist in an auction. We all understand that we all exist in an auction on meta. We also exist in a competition at all points of time. That means you're always if you're a skincare company, you're competing against every other skincare company on Facebook.

[00:12:48] And I believe that a person who's applying the system in the way we, and that's where the ruthlessness comes from, which is like we are going to go and build a forecast. I think we had a conversation with Theo, which was. A lot of piece businesses say forecasting is not valuable to me, and like they're just wrong.

[00:13:05] Because what happens is they just see the end outcome. They're like, oh, you applied three strategies. I would've probably applied the same strategies and gotten the same output. What people just don't understand in that is. All the work that went into, into it that caused us to go and find the right thing for you to apply.

[00:13:20] That's how you applied it. Like the, the 90% of the work is not seen that 90% of the work is this forecasting, which is when I do forecasting, it includes three different models. It includes new customer model, it includes returning revenue model, and it gets even effect model. I would say the even effect model is the most important aspect, which is, if you think about it, what happens is.

[00:13:36] We are stripping away the evens every time, making a baseline, adjusting the baseline to the new reality, and then applying the even back on it. And what that causes is basically the growth strategist is now liable to a number every day, and it understands like at all points of time, I can be wrong and I don't care what, what is necessary for them to do.

[00:13:54] For every single day is to have a defensible bet. When you have a defensible bet for every single day, there are only two things that will happen. You will be right and you're gonna celebrate. This is great, but if you're wrong, you just know exactly where I'm wrong and that is all that matters. And the ruthlessness is installed by us.

[00:14:08] Like this is basically what we're forcing people into it. And we, we have trained these people over, over so many years of work, which is. You cannot be off forecast for more than two, two days. That's it. If you're off for the first day, you're off 24 hours, you should have a hypothesis. You should be looking into why you're wrong and what your defensible argument was like.

[00:14:24] This is the beautiful language, is that if I made a defensible argument, I know where I'm wrong, and then you're going to track it if you're wrong for two days, the second you're wrong. For two days, you're going and applying the solve for the exact metric. You know your offer and you'll be able to go and fix it faster than anyone else.

[00:14:38] The ruthlessness comes from a person who is doing that. You are just not going to ever be that person. You are just wiping and saying, I want growth next month, let's think about something. Whereas the person who's every second day he's I'm off here. I'm gonna go and do this and fix for this.

[00:14:53] It's just not possible to beat that person in a competition. And that's what I mean, like the value of forecasting is the stack. You just win there.

[00:15:02] Richard: Interesting. Yeah. Okay. So let's, this is, I, this is really interesting to me. So let's play out a little bit like the conversation you would have with like a, a seven figure brand owner who believes that forecasting isn't valuable. So now to kind of summarize, if I'm hearing correctly what you're saying, they come to you and say Hey, we wanna make X amount of money next to year.

[00:15:22] These are the three things we're gonna do. And to you, it, it's maybe to them it kind of comes off the same, like we say, well these are the three strategies we do as well. But there's something about the approach to the forecast, the sort of like daily modeling, daily setting of expectations that is inherently valuable.

[00:15:39] So

[00:15:40] Joy: Okay.

[00:15:41] Richard: talk through a little bit about like how, how you go about convincing that person that forecasting is valuable.

[00:15:48] Joy: So I think. Well, people say these statements when they're not in the program to be very fair. Like they don't say these statements once they're in the program. And I think the difference is there's a call that happens like if you understand what the onboarding system is like when you onboard, there's the first call that happens in the first week, which is called the duckweed, and we analyze your business' strengths.

[00:16:06] So we would go and we'll do deep analyzes of your DNA of your business. We'll understand whether strengths, weaknesses, and yada yada. And we'll provide our solutions. We will provide a set of strategies that, hey, these are the short things you should do. If these are the long-term things you should do, and if you do them, you'll probably be in a good place once we align on what they believe is feasible.

[00:16:23] Right now we are not providing any numbers and our onboarding is also built in a very certain way, which is like I would ask you for your forecast. But I would try my best to not ask for a number. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to understand what, what is the limit I can work in. It's like a lot of people are like, grow me as fast as you can while maintaining a 20% ebitda.

[00:16:41] Or like they, they will have these things that are still arbitrary, but I'm trying to get to gauge to okay, what exactly do you want out of the business? Now the second call that happens after that is where we present it. The way we will forecast is different than how people build the forecast. And this is interesting.

[00:16:56] This is where it goes off, which is. The way CFOs build a forecast. And I truly believe that we are better than a CFO at building a forecast. And I've had these conversations, like I've sat with the best con like CFOs you can think about, like I sat once with a, with a CFO of p and g who was working for a, for a e-commerce business and.

[00:17:13] They, they're great. There's not great in this industry. I saw that forecast. It was like, my AE goes up, my ad spend goes up, my CAC stays the same. We all make money, and there were like 300% growth in a year. I'm like, this is just not true. That just doesn't happen for, for a business like that. And that's why they're, they're wrong.

[00:17:29] But what happens is that statement that I just told you about happens because people have a forecast. They have a number, they've put on a spreadsheet with no mathematical backing to it, and they're trying to achieve that. And depending, and it's a hundred percent human, right? If it could be very, it could be very conservative or it could be like very aggressive and they will track against it for three months.

[00:17:47] Right now we are in March, so people will come to us, for example, for three months and be like, I have a forecast. I want you to achieve it. I'm like, how did that forecast come to be? Like how, how did that become true? And that's why I like, before we get into that fight, what I'm doing is I'm gonna build my baseline.

[00:18:00] Which comes from the models, which is I will enter their conversation with my first forecast, which will be like, Hey, this is the baseline forecast. What this is, is my model is saying, if you continue your actions as you're doing right now, you will get this resolved. And I think what happens is that's a bottoms up forecast and they have a top down forecast and the second I present that, the first thing, they're like, I don't like it.

[00:18:22] It, it is always that. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes there are really beautiful businesses, like most of the time it's I don't like it, and I'm like, this is great. Let's just stop here. What I'm telling you is not that I'm going to achieve you this, I'm telling you, if you, if you continue on the work you're doing, you're going to achieve this and this is your expectation and there's this gap now we can fill.

[00:18:40] Now, did you remember we present to your duck weed and you said yes to two out of the 13 strategies we provided. Yeah. Then we'll layer on the effect of those strategies because we can, to a degree, still predict the gap. We're like, Hey, this is our forecast we want to achieve. Like I would say, your baseline is 7 million.

[00:18:55] Your target was 10 million. This is what you're going to happen. The two strategies you said, when do you think we can apply? They were like, probably by the middle of the year. I'm like, okay, for the six months that we're gonna apply it, it's an additional million. We still have a gap of 2 million. Now we can either agree upon more strategies together.

[00:19:12] We can achieve or we can just align on this forecast and they get to choose. They have all the power to them. My job here is to just be the, be the person who's transparent about the truth. The worst thing in this industry, and that's basically like this, this is a sales pitch everywhere, which is we are going to triple you next month.

[00:19:27] That's just not how this happens. So I'm just trying to be transparent, this is what's going to happen. These are the actions that are going to make the lift happen and we can agree upon how many actions we have, the ability to go and resource for. And that is what the future is. Now, if you notice the difference between my plan is I have every single dollar backed by some action.

[00:19:45] That means I can track to that action every single day. That's the difference between me. And then whenever this conversation goes sideways and the the client is oh, sorry, we committed our numbers and yada yada, and I don't think your numbers are right. We can, we always, we are happy to go into the math.

[00:19:58] How did you build your forecast? How did we build our forecast? Like this is finance 1 0 1. If you ever anyone goes through financial training, like day one, they're thought, okay, like everything is a lie. Everything is assumptions. So we are, we are just asking like which, which assumptions the CFO has, what assumptions we have, and then we can compare them and who has better data and we get aligned on what the forecast is.

[00:20:17] But basically that's how forecasting is done and that makes it valuable. The thing that makes it valuable is we are building a bottoms up. We know what is going to happen, we build actions on it. Then once we agree on a forecast, unlike the CFO, who is, like I said, it will be a million dollars. It is half a mill, and that is what it is.

[00:20:34] Go solve for it. We are like, it was going to be a million dollars. These were the reasons we're going to be a million dollars. If we land at eight point 90, these are the actions that didn't get fulfilled and let's go and make up for it in the future. That's the pure

[00:20:46] Richard: No. Yeah, it, no, it totally makes sense. I think it's like I was trying to think of I don't know if it was on a podcast we did together. I don't remember. But there's one thing that I've heard once is that the number one rule of business is that you should never lie to yourself.

[00:20:59] And I think that's kind of what

[00:21:00] Joy: That's

[00:21:01] Richard: here is that like, when we're construct a forecast, like what we're doing is making a situation where we're all telling the truth about what's gonna happen. Right. And, that can, that just definitely comes as bad news to people sometimes, particularly when they have an arbitrary we're gonna double our revenue over the next year without any clear plan or clear explanation, I guess, as to why that's going to happen, and that's ultimately what these forecasts provide, which is this sort of breakdown of, like you said before, like if we do nothing or if we continue business as usual, this is what is going to happen.

[00:21:32] We're very clear on that. And if we wanna make a change in the direction that you wanna make a change towards, we have to tweak these specific things at these specific times in these specific ways. And that's the only way that this is going to happen. The other thing too, I think that's like useful.

[00:21:45] Pull out here, and some of you have mentioned before, is that what the forecast gives, like you had mentioned this sort of like daily every two days, kind of like readjustment. It, it, what it gives you is these sort of like day-to-day metrics that then ladder up to long-term outcomes as well. And usually the long-term outcome and the day-to-day metric can get really separated from each other when you don't have a forecast like this.

[00:22:08] And I

[00:22:08] Joy: Hu Humans are not built this way. Like if I, if I said Richard, you want to achieve $35 million next year, what do you think your revenue should be on the 1st of January? You have no answer to that. People, people don't even have our brains just not wired this way to understand what it needs to be like.

[00:22:22] You, you can't even do mental math on this. What you are going do is divide it by 365 and then do your math and you'll get a number and then oh, I'm just off by $2,000. You know what $2,000 actually mean? If you are like, let's take the worst case. Let's say you were a health business because they crush it in January.

[00:22:39] So if you were a health business, you were off by $2,000 on the 1st of January, none of your returning revenues coming back. That means that $2,000 gap on the first day itself in new revenue. Probably caused you additional four grand in the backend within the same year. So you are actually off on six grand for business.

[00:22:55] That's like making like 10 grand a day and they lost off on 2000 dollars on the first day. That's just huge. That's like people don't understand the gravity of this.

[00:23:05] Richard: Yeah, yeah, totally. No, there's a, there's a compounding effect to missing on a day-to-day basis. And if you can't understand on a day-to-day basis like what missing even is, then you're not gonna be able to understand that. And that's why we have, that's what you need the computer to do it for you basically is what we're saying.

[00:23:20] You need the AI to come in and tell you exactly the modeling, whatever. To actually ex give you clarity into that, and that's what we provide here. Okay. Let's let me see, I'm trying to recall here what's our, what's our next point?

[00:23:34] Joy: I

[00:23:35] We, we do a. This is the new part of the profit engineer. We do a version of incrementality for every new business we get. It's not the geo holdout incrementality like that takes time and you to especially set it up. But Steve, our great friends here, have actually set up a basic incrementality that is given to every single person that when we onboard, when we build their maps.

[00:23:53] So that's something like a lot of business would like to know what, what the next dollar should be spent out. When you're, especially you are, you're limited on resource, like you're constrained on resources. You would love to know where I should spend the next dollar.

[00:24:06] Richard: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a good point too. Like the idea that like what this osso provides to you, this is something we've mentioned on the pod a few times now. Is clarity in the sort of attribution or, or like how many, how much, how many sort of like.

[00:24:20] Dollars you could actually say are coming from Facebook over and against what they're reporting. And that's something that this, this system provides as well. And again, this is providing it to the seven figure brand that normally couldn't even dream to have this level of clarity. So really,

[00:24:35] Joy: You like, I think there's a, there's a limitation on the geo holdout, which is I think it's like you need to actually spend in a year, like seven mil in ad spend for the year to actually even qualify for it, so you can't even qualify for a geo holdout. This is like the best incrementality that's available to you for free as part of the program.

[00:24:52] Richard: Yeah. Right. So if that's not enough for you I don't know what will be, but all right. I think we can, we could probably call it here. Joy. Any, anything else that you wanna hit on this? As far as P seven goes,

[00:25:05] Joy: I think strategy and execution is basic. I would say we.

[00:25:08] Richard: is basic. I would say.

[00:25:09] Joy: We can touch on both of them a little bit. Like strategy is important right now because a lot of people at that stage just don't know what the best processes or what the best next step is. And the issue is you choosing wrong strategies will kill your business at that size, we enter into the, into infinite conversations. I think we have affected, and we have helped more people from our sales calls than any other agency has combined to help their size. Just because, like sheer amount of people we deal with, but we tell people to not do it. Like we don't, don't do TikTok, don't do Apple.

[00:25:39] There's so many small things that we just tell people at that size, and it is, it is wild to me that people come to us by watching our content and they don't know these things about us and we try explaining to them. The, the advice matters so much at a seven figure, which is like me saying no is actually worth few.

[00:25:57] A thousand dollars to you, given how many sources you have and how much dollars you are playing with between survival and making it as a seven figure business, that's actually in valuable. Should like a person who who won't have perverse incentives will sell you something else. Like it's the same thing with Twitter, like paid promotions and like billion different things.

[00:26:14] But strategy manager a lot in that context of saying no. But even in saying yes, then it's like. Which path. If I say yes, you should do a marketing calendar, how should I do a marketing calendar? What? What are the next steps? There are like 15 different paths. Which one should I take? I can either go and take every single one or I can trust a random person on the internet or I can trust flaw.

[00:26:34] This is like the wireless thing, which is people will open claw and they will trust it and, and then if I told them like, Hey, you could also hear to 15 other people on Twitter. They would not trust that. Then why would you just trust a generic AI that has no context about what the future looks like?

[00:26:49] And I think that's the difference, like when we do this analysis, like even if I use Claude, mine is more smart, smarter than you because it has 15 years of data and research on it. And think that's where strategy is difference. Like saying yes or no. And when I say it, it's like the same sitting, been there, done that, know the result.

[00:27:06] That's why I did this.

[00:27:07] Richard: result. Okay. So then let's, let's leave it at this. So if you can distill, what's the most common thing that people need to say no to at this level?

[00:27:17] Joy: I think outside of channel expansion, if you're asking, I would say I.

[00:27:20] Richard: if you're asking, I would

[00:27:21] Joy: Anything like brand awareness? Anything brand awareness? Actually, I would just say no. Like I would be, I would be brutally no on. Hey, should we run traffic ads because we have X, y, or Z thing happening? Should I do popups? Should I do this for a brand play?

[00:27:33] Like the most generic advice, like this is the most generic advice because it, it applies to probably the biggest amount of people. Like there, there's no brand. When you're spending two grand a day, like you don't actually, you are not reaching the whole wall, like people don't know you. You like brand awareness is not a real thing.

[00:27:47] When you're just spending two grand a day, you are probably aiming for. Pro you're, you're aiming for a product market fit, let alone branding at this point. So people who deviate so early and they try to build brand at that point is probably not the best choice. Like you should, you should do. You get Also, brand is so wild that a G one built the most.

[00:28:06] A G one was the wildest borderline gray hat subscription business to a hundred million. Then they rebranded and became the most luxuries thing ever. So I don't think it really matter. You could always rebrand when you can affirm it.

[00:28:18] Richard: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, that totally makes sense. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like not, not feeling the temptation to, I mean, we say this a billion times, but not expand channels before you need to expand them, make sure you're like winning in the places you need to be winning for and building that sort of base of product, market fit, organic revenue.

[00:28:36] So I think to go back to the piece of advice that you gave last time we were on the pod together, which is. Basically right now, you should just be thinking about making as much creative as you possibly can. That works, and that's like a fit for your marketing calendar is that's, that's what you need to be focusing on.

[00:28:51] Everything else you can just go ahead and probably say no to. 

[00:28:54] Joy: Building, building a great marketing calendar offers landing pages, I think based on their site. But I think actually to, to distill it further, I think what do we do is discipline is probably the best answer. So it's the discipline to know what to do because nobody does the calculation of roic.

[00:29:09] You're small, you should do the calculation, return on invested capital on every dollar you spend, and nobody has the discipline, but we do. When you ask us advice, everyone is doing that on the backend to actually give you that answer.

[00:29:22] Richard: Yeah, that's right. All right, folks. Well. Look, if you want us to tell you what to say no to, you know who to call. Common thread code.com. Hit that high risk button, let us know that you're interested, particularly if you're a seven figure brand. Let us know that you're interested in being with somebody on Joy's team.

[00:29:38] And we'd love to talk to you. But until next time, folks, take care and we'll see you