Unbiased Ecommerce Forecasting Starts with a Reality Check

[00:00:00] Taylor Holiday: I was listening to Sarah Carusona, who used to work here at CTC. She was in this dialogue between her CMO-CFO and A CEO about, “do we present the 50th percentile? Do we present the 75th percentile? Like what do we go to?” And the content was around this idea that like interwoven in that is that the person that you're presenting it to has something that they want you to say. And how it was like she kind of got, felt like she got thrown under the bus.

This happens all the time where we bring a number to somebody and they dismiss the output. They say like, okay, that's not good enough. I need more revenue or more profit. when I talk with our people about how to manage that situation, I go, okay, table the output and now bring up the inputs.

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[00:01:07] 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 as I always am by our CEO Mr. Taylor Holiday, representing the New York Yankees organization today.

[00:01:21] Taylor Holiday: no.

[00:01:21] Richard Gaffin: Taylor, what's going?

[00:01:22] Taylor Holiday: it's, it's, first of all, it's coach Holiday to

[00:01:25] Richard Gaffin: Oh, I see.

[00:01:26] Taylor Holiday: the Costa Mesa Yankees.

[00:01:28] Richard Gaffin: Oh, I see the Costa MEA Yankees.

[00:01:30] Taylor Holiday: game today at 5:00 PM against the Costa Mesa Padres, so

[00:01:33] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha.

[00:01:34] Taylor Holiday: in uniform. You're gonna have to be in the field early today.

[00:01:36] Richard Gaffin: I see. Okay, gotcha. Getting, getting yourself in the coach mindset throughout the entire day, right?

[00:01:40] Taylor Holiday: Well, just saving myself, having to drive home and change. That's just,

[00:01:43] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:01:43] Taylor Holiday: of it.

[00:01:44] Richard Gaffin: So here's the que which, which Yankees team does the coast MEA Yankees looks most like, is this two thousands Yankees, Jorge Posada Jeter, or,

[00:01:51] Taylor Holiday: so our league, our league gave us the worst, like you'd think if you're a little league and you're gonna provide uniforms to kids, you're

[00:01:59] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:59] Taylor Holiday: pin strips, right? You

[00:02:00] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, of course.

[00:02:01] Taylor Holiday: stripes. No, we have grays. The all gray and the gray pants don't match the gray jersey. So we're not the, we're not the most stylish version of the of the Yankees you've

[00:02:11] Richard Gaffin: Of of the,

[00:02:12] Taylor Holiday: whatever,

[00:02:12] Richard Gaffin: I gotcha.

[00:02:12] Taylor Holiday: is that. Maybe it's like the, the eighties Mattingly Yankees or something.

[00:02:16] Richard Gaffin: Oh yeah. There you go. Cool man. All right, well, so, so today what we wanna talk about is, this is kind of an, an anticipation of a another Sharpen Your Skills episode that we have coming out later this week. And of course, for those of you who don't know, sharpen Your Skills is the series that we just started putting out where Taylor I.

Draws pictures on a piece of paper that represent very important e-commerce tactics, and that's, it's a super useful way of kind of demonstrating some of the stuff that we talk about. But this upcoming episode we're going to be discussing, well, kind of more broadly the idea of e an e-commerce intervention.

What does it look like to kind of intercede in this difficult time for e-commerce generally? What are the things that need to be put in place to actually begin growing again? But what we wanted to kind of draw out from that particularly. Was the idea of the role that accurate forecasting plays in kind of pulling your e-commerce business out of the type of tailspin a lot of businesses are in right now.

So obviously we talk about forecasting a lot here, so there might be a little bit of retread, but I think we want to kind of pull out specifically how accurate forecasting can help save your business. And I think that's, that's maybe the angle we wanna take here. So Taylor, why don't you bring us into that?

[00:03:22] Taylor Holiday: to connect a couple ideas for you. So

[00:03:24] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:24] Taylor Holiday: So one, if you don't, if you are a subscriber on YouTube, we'd love for you to be get on there so that you can get the videos. We're dropping them every Friday. We've got five in this season. It's technically season three.

We're calling it season two officially. But there was a prequel if you were an early subscriber. But be there 'cause. We're we're onto the third episode this week and we're gonna be recreating a piece of content that was initially a talk that I gave at a conference about the D two C evolution, that we're sort of calling the e-commerce intervention.

And if you think about an intervention as a premise, right, it's sort of the idea. That somebody or some well, yeah, someone has a problem we need to awaken them to that issue and offer them the opportunity to deal with that objective cold reality. Right? Like that's, and when I think about I. The role that we often at CTC are asked to play is customers are coming to us, generally speaking, not because everything is rosy and going to the moon, although there are those cases, but for the most part there's some challenge that is leading them to pursue an alternative service provider. And. cases, our role in that situation begins much like an intervention, and that comes in the form of a forecast and a forecast that's rooted, not in desire, but in data. Our first job is to tell them what is likely to occur if nothing changes. What is the data telling us about the degradation of your new customer acquisition efficiency, about the state of your existing customer file? When we put that all together against your present cost structures of the business, here's what the future looks like if you do nothing new. And that is sort of the intervention moment that forecasting plays is that, and, and this is why I think having a third party without any of the underlying incentives that usually lead to people overestimating the forecast. Provide you a point of view on the future and to show you the underlying models that are creating that reality. And to deal with the math is a really important intervention moment for brands to stop and go, okay, where are we right now? Absent any of the desires that people have of where we wanna be, and any of the pressures they might have to over represent the state, but to get a really cold view of. This is where we are right now. And it's not to

[00:05:40] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:05:40] Taylor Holiday: that that's gonna be bad, but it's just to say an objective third party assessment of where are we today is a really important step to then building a plan that gets you to where you want to be. And so that that intervention moment. Is what a forecast has the opportunity to represent, and what many brands right now I think need because they're carrying with them an old forecast or a forecast that's maybe rooted more in desire than data, they're operating within that and it's forcing to not, what it actually forces you to do is not change your behavior enough

[00:06:12] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:13] Taylor Holiday: you have this underlying belief that things are actually better than they

[00:06:16] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Well it's interesting that you point that out because obviously in in the intervention metaphor, the first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem, and that's sort of what the sort of what the role, the forecast plays, or at least defining exactly what the problem is. But it's interesting that there's this dynamic where brands are coming to us in the first place because they do sort of know that they have a problem, but then they're also bringing this forecasting that says like, actually, maybe we don't really have a problem, or things aren't as bad as they seem.

[00:06:42] Taylor Holiday: Or there's this dissidence between the individuals in the organization,

[00:06:45] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:06:46] Taylor Holiday: someone might be sort of trying to sound an alarm and they're using us to help them

[00:06:49] Richard Gaffin: Right?

[00:06:50] Taylor Holiday: in some ways versus maybe what the board wants or what the different, you know, parties may have a desire for. And so sometimes we're helpful in bringing that clarity, whereas internally, 'cause I, if you think about it, like if you're ahead of marketing,

[00:07:02] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:02] Taylor Holiday: really hard to go to your CEO or CFO and say. It's not working, it's not gonna go well.

[00:07:08] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:07:09] Taylor Holiday: you have every incentive of the world to never say that, right? And so, or vice versa, if a CO does send it out to a CEO, it's really hard for the CEO to accept it and not go no do better, right?

[00:07:20] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:21] Taylor Holiday: so internally within an organization, there's all these conflicting incentives for how the number gets to where it should be,

[00:07:27] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:28] Taylor Holiday: so sometimes what we are is just like another, another data point. To get to where are we currently, and again, we're not suggesting that the initial view is where you want to be. And oftentimes we like to say that the gap between what is likely to occur and what you would like to occur is what strategy is.

[00:07:44] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:45] Taylor Holiday: But the problem is can't develop the right strategy unless we can all agree on what is presently true.

[00:07:51] Richard Gaffin: Right.

[00:07:52] Taylor Holiday: and so because it often really reframes how dramatically we need to act in the future relative to how much we need to change the present state.

[00:08:01] Richard Gaffin: Right. Okay. So if, so the role then that, I mean, kind of summarize the role that accurate forecasting plays is to define what is right, to define what the playing field is, what the map looks like, what's likely to happen if nothing changes. But one thing that we're kind of talking about a little bit before we hit record is this idea that accurate forecasting doesn't equal growth.

Like obviously this is only, this is only a first step. So talk about kind of where, where things go from there, I guess.

[00:08:25] Taylor Holiday: Right. So, so it may be accurate in a forecasting exercise to say that you're going to shrink next month,

[00:08:30] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:31] Taylor Holiday: it, when we give that forecast to a client, they're, they're never gonna want that. Nobody wants to

[00:08:36] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:08:36] Taylor Holiday: for me to make their business get smaller.

[00:08:38] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:39] Taylor Holiday: So what we now have to do is we now have to sort of decompose. What are the most immediately movable inputs of this model? And then how do we set goals about improving the underlying attributes to beat the model? So we talk all the time about set the model, break the model,

[00:08:55] Richard Gaffin: Mm.

[00:08:55] Taylor Holiday: we wanna outperform the historical view. 'cause, 'cause a model is often just an extrapolation of the past, right?

So

[00:09:01] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:02] Taylor Holiday: what has been true recently and saying, okay, if things continue on this trend line. What occurs. And so we wanna, we wanna break that. We wanna create deviations from the historical reality. And so that allows us to begin to look at, okay, what would need to true to be more efficient on new customer acquisition or increase new customer acquisition volume?

How could we improve our returning customers and outperform those curves? What new marketing moments can we create in the future to do both of those things simultaneously? And so we begin to. at all the different inputs that we have the potential to affect. We set goals that begin to push the model.

'cause when you think about like a. Any modeling exercise, it's not a binary thing, right? You

[00:09:40] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:41] Taylor Holiday: every input and put it on a spectrum from the 99th percentile outcome to the first percentile outcome, and you could set the targets or expectations for the likelihood of achievement on that spectrum.

1. So I think what we're often doing with clients is sort of negotiating to the expectation of where we sit on that curve. And we're gonna have conversations around, all right, well what, what assets do we have to improve the historical media efficiency? What new products are coming, what marketing moments, what other things are going to occur such that we have reasonable expectation that we're gonna outperform the past? And so we wanna build in. Reasonable. We wanna build in actions that created a reasonable defense of outperforming the model and then hold ourselves to that on those actions happening. And so that's the dance all the time is here's the model, here's the spectrum of possibilities. Now let's talk about what we're gonna do together, what the strategy is to outperform that baseline expectation.

[00:10:34] Richard Gaffin: Right. Yeah. And and maybe the irony here is that like the goal itself may not change. Maybe somebody comes to you and say, we wanna grow X amount over the next few months. Our model shows that that's not gonna happen. But what we can do is build a path towards that

[00:10:47] Taylor Holiday: That's right.

[00:10:48] Richard Gaffin: as opposed to just saying, kind of arbitrarily, we wanna grow this much and we're just gonna kind of make it happen however it happens, right?

[00:10:54] Taylor Holiday: Horizons is a really important part of

[00:10:56] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:10:56] Taylor Holiday: where nobody ever wants to just be told you can't have this growth goal.

[00:11:00] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:01] Taylor Holiday: Right. And so oftentimes you have to work with them to say, okay, we, we are gonna get it. But rather than in four months, it might be nine. Or rather than that being the one year goal, that might need to be the three year

[00:11:10] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:10] Taylor Holiday: And I think that's a lot of what this era and moment represents is like adjusting horizons. We recognize that every business wants to grow and we believe that's important and we should be in pursuit of that. But in many cases there's like so many different steps that go into it. It may involve like we may need to completely reset the opex.

We

[00:11:26] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:27] Taylor Holiday: a bunch of old inventory that we have to move through and get back to cash. And some of these processes don't just happen overnight. It's not like you can just immediately take a bunch of bad inventory, clear it all out, buy a new one, have it all ready to go, have it be on trend, on moment.

Perfectly priced, all those things. This stuff is often a sequence where some of the, the congestion that has occurred in the business may take a while to flush out, and we have to build a set of steps that are gonna get us to that expectation in the future.

[00:11:52] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. So I kinda wanna jump over then a little bit. Speaking of, I guess, forecasting being an anchor to reality or a connection to reality one thing that we're kind of doing internally a little bit, we may end up releasing publicly, I'm not sure, but it's, it's kind of based on something that our I.

Head of Growth Accelerate, or our Growth accelerator program Joy Does, which is releases kind of a report card of how all of the clients that are kinda within his suite of clients are doing relative to their goals. And this is something that we call the the profit system report card. And the idea is to look at all of our clients.

And kind of understand where they are relative to where we predicted they would be. So tell me about what, what the kind of value is of looking at that information in aggregate and how that helps us kind of refine this forecasting process.

[00:12:36] Taylor Holiday: Well, the, the first thing is if we're gonna sell you on the idea that we're gonna help you forecast accurately, we need to defend that statement and we

[00:12:42] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:12:43] Taylor Holiday: ourselves accountable to measuring that. And so we want to just look at, okay, how did our system perform in the process of attempting to accurately forecast revenue? Right. So we, look, we set goals for all of our growth strategists in this process. That success is plus or minus 10% to target. So we've like to think of forecasting as an exercise of being closest to the pin,

[00:13:04] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:05] Taylor Holiday: it's not actually good to substantially outperform or underperform the model, right?

Because that e-commerce is such a game of like predicting inventory volume, buying for that volume, selling at a specific volume, like in a way that the more consistent you can be at that, the, the easier it becomes to run the organization. So I wanna look at this across the entirety of the system. So I can see for the month of February, for example, that we were plus 5% to revenue across the whole organization, plus 6.85% to spend. So we were of Target, we are 5% above target on revenue, 6% above target on spend for the en entire organization. Across everybody that we have now, what we also do is we break it down by individual growth strategists because a lot of what being a good growth strategist is, is negotiating and managing the expectations of the individual clients, as well as a bunch of individual decisions that get made.

Now we still, we have a good amount of the process that's dependent on the data science team and the modeling exercise, but there's still some very human decisions that go into the process, and there's also execution.

[00:14:08] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:08] Taylor Holiday: that forecasting is an exercise and execution as much as it is in modeling.

So when we look at this, what I'm able to do then is to think about our system in the same way you would think about improving AI or any model that exists, which is reinforcement through reinforcement, feedback through human learning, right? So can look at it and go, okay, I can see across all my growth strategists. We had, we had a, a range that went from. The lowest was minus 13% to target, and the highest was plus 22% of target. So every growth strateg sits along that spectrum. That's the total bound of outcomes from minus 13% to plus 22%. And the best being we had somebody that was in, within, like was in. Less than 1% of target that was like the best.

So

[00:14:51] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:51] Taylor Holiday: I can go into each of those scenarios and ask questions about, okay, what did we miss? What client were we wrong for? What was the scenario? What happened? Were we were we optimistic? Where were we too optimistic? And what failed to occur when we were pessimistic and we missed under what, what did we not consider?

And the answers to those questions become. Ways that you can improve your model. Maybe we're not taking, maybe we need to have a better consideration for inventory positions before the months start. And under being able to infuse that data into the modeling can help us to correct for issues. 'cause most often forecasting goes wrong when a product runs outta stock or

[00:15:24] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:25] Taylor Holiday: stock, or you know, some, or was delayed in the launch date or whatever it might be. It's like, oh, email is substantially underperforming consistently, or meta is underperforming Consistently. We can find areas where across the system there are inputs that are consistently off, and then we can use that to reinforce the model from the start. So you can sort of root update the whole system on the basis of constantly learning where you're ahead or behind.

[00:15:49] Richard Gaffin: Gotcha. Yeah. So, well, a couple things. So like one, one, this is just out of curiosity. It's like when, what are the factors that play into a forecast being too pessimistic? It's kind of like an interesting sort of counterintuitive thing. Like, oh, we, we beat it so much. Let's, that's incredible, but actually, where'd that go wrong, I guess?

[00:16:07] Taylor Holiday: So, so it it, in our world, the, the bias that we have to fight against is our growth Strategists are often hedging,

[00:16:15] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:16] Taylor Holiday: Nobody wants to over set an expectation that's too high and then miss it by a lot, right? Like,

[00:16:21] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:16:22] Taylor Holiday: the disease that we're trying to help fight. So you can, but you can sort of swing that pendulum too far.

Whereas like a clever growth strategist will be good at convincing their client in some ways to take too low of a target.

[00:16:32] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:33] Taylor Holiday: And so there's this balance that you have to do on both sides, which is to press for growth, right? To set a expectation up that curve up the bound of possibility and move everyone towards it aggressively. So I think that can be a piece of it. Other things that are off will happen is that. All sorts of unanticipated creation things that occurred like a big PR hit and unexpected influencer posts where you get these big spikes in revenue that weren't part of the marketing calendar that were sort of unplanned or unexpected revenue. and those just offer you the chance to go back and go, whoa, that's interesting. Could we have known. If, if so, why didn't we know? What were we missing? What point of communication? Oh, the influencer team's not actually plugged into our communication flow. So we could have known that there was a schedule of posts, but we didn't have access to it.

Okay.

[00:17:20] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:17:20] Taylor Holiday: maybe update that as part of the planning system or, you know, there are things that are truly unplanned. You know, I think about the, the moment that blenders had were Dionne Sanders. Showed up and was wearing those glasses at a conference and like that became a big, like, things like that happen all the

[00:17:34] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:34] Taylor Holiday: is seen wearing your product, whatever, you know. So those kinds of things do occur and then sometimes you have an ad that just pops off. It does way better than you anticipated Your product drop, your, the bottle that you had for anticipating how well that demand would go is wrong. So there's all sorts of ways that you can be wrong to the upside for, for products all the time.

[00:17:52] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay, so, so talk to me then about, like back to the idea of looking at this information in aggregate, and you had mentioned the idea that like having this kind of like overarching or sort of 10,000 foot view of the data gives us the opportunity to change the way we think about the system at large, right?

So is, is there a circumstance, I guess I'm asking where we're missing in a certain way consistently across a number of clients and therefore there's something about the system itself that needs to be revamped. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[00:18:39] Taylor Holiday: if this is my number one critique of our own system right now is that we need to make sure that we're being more aggressive in pressing for growth, especially in the cases where we're ahead of expectation. the one thing that Targets can do is that they can sort of get you to this place where you go, oh, I'm, I'm hitting it. I sort of leave well enough alone versus going, especially like with contribution margin, I'm not saying that necessarily what you wanna do in that case is you wanna like book future revenue.

And so what do I mean by that? Like if I have contribution margin excess, I think of that like, surplus of financial assets that I want to invest into longer term growth. So. say I outperformed contribution margin expectation by a hundred thousand dollars. would like allocate a portion of that excess to more top of funnel or longer term investment channels to make sure that next month's result is guaranteed as well,

[00:19:36] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:37] Taylor Holiday: I wouldn't take that and try and allocate towards like a sale or a transactional moment, but could I do some lead gen for email capture? Could I take a really good brand asset and move into. Like a YouTube test or something like that where I could now maybe pair some tilling up of the future soil.

Could I take that and book some influencer posts for the next month with that excess $50,000? And to think of it like an investment portfolio where I don't wanna just take that a hundred thousand dollars and put it in my checking account.

[00:20:05] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:05] Taylor Holiday: didn't need that money. Now, I'm not to say to take all of your surplus, like I'm okay with, like taking extra profit is cool too, but, but at the same time, I want to reinvest that money.

I want to put it back in to tilling up the future soil. And I think that's where I, I'd like to see. Our growth strategist to be a little bit more aggressive. It also signals to me that maybe like we, we don't have all the costs considered exactly right on the on the margin side. So I really wanna go back and check the data integrity of the cost, which is really hard to get right for every brand and make sure that we trust that number a ton and it's something we feel really great actioning against. So. In every case, I, I wanna try to understand what's happening and what does that teach us and what could we go investigate a little further as well. The other thing I'll say is that our spend, like if I think about the revenue, deltas being from minus 13% to plus 22%. The spend, deltas are more dramatic.

They run from minus 15% to plus 42% in some cases. And so it's like, Ooh, I, that's a wider range of outcomes on the spend side. And so I want to, that's another thing I wanna go interrogate a little bit. Like, okay, what is happening that's making our spend a little bit wider of a result? 'cause it's not just like. The average isn't. It's also just, it's also the bounds are really important that the tighter that we can get, that the more consistent our work is across the portfolio.

[00:21:23] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:23] Taylor Holiday: so those are all really important things for us to sort of pull on and go, okay, what, what happened here? How do we tighten up these bounds so that ideally, only do the averages get closer to zero, but the range gets closer to zero as well, so that we're more right, more often.

[00:21:37] Richard Gaffin: Yeah. Okay. So, so this, actually, you may have answered this question a little bit, but my, my tactical, practical question, which I do kinda like to finish it off, finish us off with, for this particular conversation was gonna be like, where do you see, like, given this aggregate data and then your general experience with forecasting, where are people most likely, what metric are most people most likely to miss on and what direction?

And then like, what's the thing that you do too? Kind of mitigate that, I guess.

[00:22:02] Taylor Holiday: I think, I think in forecasting, people focus way too much on and have their internal organizational arguments around outcomes. So like revenue is an outcome, profit is an outcome, and not enough around the inputs.

[00:22:14] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:15] Taylor Holiday: as an example, I was listening to Sarah Carusona, who used to work here at CTC. She's creating a bunch of cool content right now, and I was listening to a TikTok where she was talking about how she was in this dialogue between her C-M-O-C-F-O and A CEO about. Do we present the 50th percentile? Do we present the 75th percentile? Like what do we go to? And and the content was around this idea that like interwoven in that is that the person that you're presenting it to has something that they want you to say. And how it was like she kind of got, felt like she got thrown under the bus.

In this scenario, she's describing whatever you can go check out her content, but, but this happens all the time where we bring a number to somebody and they dismiss the output. They say like, okay, that's not good enough. I need more revenue or more profit. when I talk with our people about how to manage that situation, I go, okay, table the output and now bring up the inputs.

[00:23:03] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:23:04] Taylor Holiday: Okay? And let's discuss. Where do you think I'm wrong? Which one do you think I'm being too conservative about? Here's my returning customer expectation and where it comes from. Here's the curves, here's the model, here's where it's at. Here's where we've been the last few months. Here's my new customer acquisition.

Here's my budget, here's my efficiency. Here's where it sits in the model. Here's where I'm on, what percentage I'm at, and if you think I'm wrong about my returning customer revenue number. Why? Because, and do it through the lens of. Help me learn to be better,

[00:23:33] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:33] Taylor Holiday: to understand what you're seeing that I'm not seeing. Right. So what, what do you have in your head that's telling you that this is gonna be way bigger than that? and let's talk through it. Oh, we're gonna spend more on existing customers. I don't think you're considering that portion of it, or, Hey, I think the drop on the 27th is gonna be huge. And so it's gonna be different than, we didn't have that drop last year, whatever, whatever. if you can move the argument of the outputs and into the inputs, I think you're gonna have much more productive conversations. actually gonna force the organization to defend desire. And this is like, I think the thing all

[00:24:06] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:24:06] Taylor Holiday: is that just 'cause we want it to be so, doesn't make it.

So we have to really force ourselves to ask how we're gonna get there, what is going to change. And this is where again, like, not to plug us, but, but that's kind of the point of the podcast here, is that. W it's really helpful to be a third party in this moment. It, it is just one of the ways in which we can enter into an environment and provide you a POV that is just not rooted in all the historical, emotional baggage of an organization. just really hard to do that. And so CEOs like, I think in particular, I would almost always on your annual planning process, have a third party view that you can use to compete against what your team's telling you. You

[00:24:45] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:24:46] Taylor Holiday: either we're gonna come back and say that your team's sandbagging a little bit or your team's being too aggressive and they might be just like telling you what you want to hear and you might be setting the organization up.

So anytime, if one, if you're behind on your expectation through Q1 and it's time for a reset, use us as a resource to that. Or if you're, if you're way ahead, same thing. And especially in any annual planning process. I know everyone's fiscal calendar is a little different. But I would almost always want a third party POV to that exercise.

It's the same thing companies do in the diligence process. Like imagine, imagine you were doing diligence to buy a company and all you did was like, take the company you're acquiring forecast.

[00:25:22] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:25:23] Taylor Holiday: you would never do that. You would never do that. Why would you never do that? Well, because they have every incentive in the world to give you the rost picture of what's going to occur.

That's often true for your internal team too. So the reason it you go through a QOE or the reason you often bring in a third party to assess when there's an acquisition occurring is because that objectivity, that lack of attachment. To the outcome. It's not my goal. It's not my KPI to provide you a forecast.

It's not my job at stake. And so it's so helpful to layer in that set of information to help give you that POV.

[00:25:52] Richard Gaffin: Yeah.

[00:25:52] Taylor Holiday: it's a, the intervention moment.

[00:25:54] Richard Gaffin: Yeah, exactly. Well, I was gonna say that that brings it nicely full circle in that like if we, if we start off by saying that the first step towards recovering your recovery in your e-commerce business is a, admitting you have a problem, but then establishing, anchoring yourself in the reality of what that problem is.

Of course, again, I. As, as you were saying, part of the purpose of this podcast is to plug ourselves a little bit, and so I wanna say if you would like to anchor yourself in that reality for your business, go ahead, hit us up. Comment thread code.com, hit that hire us button, give us a call. We would love to chat a little bit more.

Anything else? Go ahead.

[00:26:24] Taylor Holiday: I'll just say like, so if you go watch on YouTube right now, I have the D two C evolution talk or watch my next episode this Friday for sharpening your skills. And what you're gonna see is that in most cases, what it's helping people to discover is that you need to take bigger swings.

[00:26:37] Richard Gaffin: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:38] Taylor Holiday: Is that the present system of just sort of like iterating on creative and trying to make some more ads next month and the same products isn't going to produce what you want. And so oftentimes what we're helping brands to do is to take a step back and go, shit. I had a conversation this week with one of our customers that like, they're dissatisfied with their presence.

They, and we sort of had this. Moment together of like, is the current product mix and current marketing campaigns an initiative gonna get us where we want? And the conclusion was, no. Like we need to take a

[00:27:03] Richard Gaffin: Hmm.

[00:27:04] Taylor Holiday: back and there's gotta be a bigger swing here. We've gotta reimagine the product. We've gotta reimagine the demand system.

It's all two paid media. We gotta figure out how do we get some organic into this pipeline? What would it be like to take a shot with the bigger influencer? How do we create a bigger campaign moment? How do we generate some PR. what it forces you to do. It forces you out of this like system that you're in that's kind of driving towards this continual degradation that you're out of and it forces you to, okay, I've gotta think, I gotta get back into that creative mode, that problem solving mode, that innovator mode that drove you to start the business in the first place. And that's helping brands create the necessary trigger to go pursue that line of thinking that I think is so critical to growth.

[00:27:42] Richard Gaffin: That's right. All right, folks. Well, I think that'll wrap it up for us this week. Appreciate y'all listening, and we'll talk next week. See y'all.