We (Didn’t) Sell Bambu Earth

[00:00:00] Intro Ad: This episode of the E-Commerce Playbook Podcast is brought to you by Wayflyer. Their revenue based financing is faster and more flexible than traditional funding options, allowing you to get approved within hours and have cash in your account within days. You can learn more at wayflyer.com or with the link in the show notes. 

[00:00:17] Richard: Hey everyone, welcome to the eCommerce Playbook Podcast, my name is Richard Gaffin, copywriter, professor, number of other things here at Common Thread Collective. I'm joined as always by Mr. Taylor, Holiday CEO here at Common Thread Co. Taylor, how you doing? 

[00:00:29] Taylor: Medium plus, I'm gonna call it Medium plus today. 

[00:00:33] Richard: Medium Plus, and I think we're gonna find out why you're not medium or below

[00:00:36] Taylor: Yep. 

[00:00:37] Richard: When we talk about our topic today. But, Some of you who listen to our transition episode with Andrew, where we call, we mentioned the sale of Bambu Earth, which has been our flagship brand part of our aggregator four by 400, which is our sister company.

And we had a deal on the table to sell Bambu Earth. We were gonna talk about why we were doing it, why we were getting rid of a great business. And something happened, didn't it, Taylor? What, uh, what happened with that deal? 

[00:01:02] Taylor: It's gone. It fell through at the finish line. Days like we were supposed to close on October the 31st, and we received notice shortly thereafter that the deal was not gonna go through.

[00:01:15] Richard: Wow. So, spooky Halloween news.

[00:01:17] Taylor: Left at the altar. Left at the altar. 

[00:01:20] Richard: Yeah, exactly right. So let's go through what exactly happened. What were the specifics of why that deal fell through? 

[00:01:26] Taylor: Yeah, so for those of you that don't know four by 400 was a holding company that we've run for the last, I don't know, probably eight years where we bought and sold eCommerce businesses, usually we would acquire them at $7 million, scale them and sell them from there. Sort of an aggregator before aggregators were cool. But we sort of have made the decision at the beginning of this year to move away from the model and sell off the brands and move on.

And so in March last September, we sold FC Goods March of this year we sold slick products. We completed both those transactions. And the last brand left was Bambu Earth. Bambu Earth was the best brand. If you follow us, you've seen us tout its anti fragility, its attributes as a wonderful business.

If you go to bambuearth.com, if you wanna check it out, it's skincare made from the cleanest ingredients on earth. Just really, really high quality skin care. And so we have been working hard to get that business into the healthiest position. To take it to market and sell it. We've been working alongside our partners at Quiet Light, who we think are awesome brokers and have, have helped us sell multiple businesses now.

We went through a number of offers. We selected an offer. We went into the diligence process, went through quality of earnings and all the information transfer that's required to get to the final terms. And days before close, they said that they, the group that was making the purchase did not have access to the capital that they thought and needed in order to close the transaction.

The way that their structure works, I believe, I'm not gonna use names here, but I'm speaking generalities to the best of my understanding is that they don't have the cash on the hand. They have a group of investors that they go to for a capital call when there's a deal. They present the structure of the deal, the terms of the deal, and then the partners will provide the capital to complete the transaction.

And when the 75 basis point increase most recent one from our friends over at the Fed happened, I think that that combined with some, I think, broader business issues in their LPs portfolios, may led them to putting a cash freeze, no more capital allocation for at least 30 days. Concerns that we could be sort of staring at 2008 level recession in the face, led them to do that and they no longer had the funds to complete the transaction. And so rather than us waiting, we said, hey, it's been a pleasure, see you later, we're not gonna sit around and wait for this. We think this is an awesome business and we're gonna keep growing it. 

[00:03:42] Richard: Right. So, obviously the reasons surrounding the deal falling through are all sort of the obvious macroeconomic ones, but I do want to go back for a second and you had mentioned. The decision to sell it in the first place. Why don't you get into that a little bit? Like why sell such a great brand? 

[00:03:59] Taylor: Yeah. You know, and it wasn't, it wasn't an easy decision. And it comes down to pretty simply, this is that we had a group of investors in four by 400 that were committed to us under a thesis that was about the aggregator model and building and acquiring lots of businesses.

And it's a thesis that we personally no longer believed in or wanted to execute. We wanted to focus on an individual brand. That wasn't the path they wanted to go down and out of sort of respect and obligation to them as the initial investors, we felt like this was the right thing to do to sort of maintain those relationships and be respectful of the nature of the original thing we set out to do together.

We felt like, working alongside them and our board decided that this was the best path forward to go and see what the market option would be for the brand. It was gonna be a good deal. Everyone felt good about it. And so we had decided to accept the offer and were excited about completing the transaction, but it just ultimately didn't come to fruition. So it wasn't a begrudging sale. We understood the premise that they were asking us to follow within, but we love this business and I believe that Dave and Josh and Ian and Sadie and the whole team that's over there on a day to day basis are doing just a freaking awesome job. And they've really done some special things this year. And so to still have the asset actually feels pretty dang good. 

[00:05:09] Richard: Right. So then, yeah. So let's fast forward then to. Well, actually, maybe we should pivot to this then. So, because obviously the reasons why the deal fell through are maybe not, not a mystery to anybody. We sort of understand that this is what we're going through right now.

But of course, the purpose of this podcast is not necessarily to be an updates on CTC or the CTC news channel or whatever. So what's, the lesson here, or what do, let's say our audience need to be thinking about in terms of if they're thinking about selling their business right now, what do they need to, how do they need to pivot? How do they need to shift strategy? 

[00:05:40] Taylor: So there are still deals getting done, right? There's two sort of buyers, right? There are people that have the cash on hand and need to deploy it coz they raised money over the last couple of years, and those people still have access to capital and are gonna deploy it and are gonna make deals and they're still strategic buyers and they're still people buying businesses.

But what I'll say is generally true is that the cost of capital has gone way up, what does that mean? If you wanna borrow money, the rate at which you're going to be loan that money, we all know this is way higher. What that means is that the hurdle rate, which is a financial term for the necessary return profile to justify the risk of making an investment, also goes way up.

So that means the kinds of businesses that are going to get access to capital, the quality of that, the bar for that, goes up as well. And so what that means is that there's a bunch of businesses that aren't going to be able to get access to the next round of capital that they need to stay alive or the deal that they want to get done the sale of the business isn't gonna have the return profile that people are confident enough to make the purchase decision or the investment capital in.

I'm looking right now, I don't know if you saw this Richard, but Birchbox, sort of one of the darlings of the D2C world, is likely going bankrupt and shutting down, right? People were charged for boxes that never got shipped, their most recent purchase says to our members, we know you're first frustrated.

Birchbox is facing a host of unprecedented setbacks that are affecting all of you, our cherished members. Within the next couple of weeks, we'll be able to share details about the future, what that means, Birchbox couldn't get the money that they need, right? And I've seen this from, house was one of the first dominos to sort of fall in this way, that they had a funding deal that fell through at the last second.

You're seeing this all over the place where seemingly available capital is being sucked out of the system, and that means if you are not default alive, meaning you're producing cash every day as a business and you need the next round of funding, you're in real trouble. And so this sale is just illustrative of capital that this business, the acquirer in this case, thought was available to them, suddenly wasn't available to them, and the end result here was they couldn't buy the business.

Okay, that's very different, but there's a lot of scenarios where that seemingly available, capital disappearing, is a life or death issue. 

[00:07:59] Richard: Right, I do feel like there's a, certain element of BS evaporating maybe in this moment. We're coming off a era or, rather this interest rate increase is the first in a long, long time, right?

Like we've been in a situation where capital has been free for a while and as great a scenario where a lot of D2C brands have been living off of that, which without having, like we've been talking about many times an antifragile model to back that up. 

Yeah. 

And so this maybe gets back to, or go ahead. 

[00:08:28] Taylor: Well, I was gonna say, the other thing that's sort of a reality in our world is , when there is free capital available, what gets built on top of that is a layer of capital that's still pretty expensive, but it's willing to be lent, at a higher risk profile than normal. 

So what gets built on top of free capital is like lending arbitrage. So if I can get money at 1% and I can loan it to you at 10%, even if you're a really, really risky person to receive my money, that expected value calculation can still work because the money's so cheap.

The lower the cost of capital, the more risky the lending profile of the kinds of people that get access to capital becomes, and so what develops is, this is a strong word and I wanna be careful because I don't think it's always the case, but there is a predatory set of lenders here, that are lending money, to people who never had a profile that was gonna be able to pay it back ultimately, or in the event that there was any headwood at all, which was inevitable.

And so you saw an eCommerce in particular, suddenly everybody was a lender. And I sat with so many eCommerce entrepreneurs who just kept taking the next slightly worse, debt term to pay back the other one when the whole thing was never generating cash. And it is a house of cards of collapsing debt risk that the hat was just sort of past the next person who is more and more willing to lend at a more predatory and more aggressive term, and that is collapsing right now. There's a bunch of people who are not going to be able to make those payments, and there's no more capital. There's no next hat to pass it to, and that's the moment we're in right now. 

[00:10:12] Richard: Right, we had a piece come out in April of 2021, which again, we've referenced many times, which is talking about the antifragile playbook and the characteristics of a business that make it able to weather these storms.

And originally I think the concept was, well, the storm is coming and originally it was like in 2021, it's going to come in the form of people, covid restrictions being eliminated, people going back to retail all of these other elements. But I think what we're really seeing is that the storm finally hitting in this really profound way.

And one thing to bring it back to the 4 by 400 conversation, and one reason that you've mentioned a couple times already that you're excited, is that as it turns out bamboo is one of those antifragile businesses, and so holding onto it at a time like this when the waters are really rough is actually a real benefit. So maybe talk through that excitement, why you're stoked to still have bamboo worth in the profile or in the portfolio? 

[00:11:06] Taylor: So, yeah. If there's two things I'm proud of, yeah, the piece I wrote in 2020 about how entrepreneurs should go and the piece I wrote in 2021 about how they need to be cautious, I think we're exemplary of the reason why this podcast should be of value to you, and I would encourage you to go read both of those on our website, we'll link them in the show notes. But it's because we see the industry at a really broad level that helps us to get a glimpse of the future. And so when I wrote The Antifragile it started as a tweet of like, I was struggling so hard with the volatility.

It's really good, it's really bad, I don't know what's coming, the future seems really uncertain and I kept trying to bang my head into the wall of, build a better model, become more predictive, get more accurate, more complex data, da da da da, and it was just all wrong all the time. And so then I read, you know, The Scene Till's book, and it sort of unlocked for me this idea of what does it look like to win regardless of what the future is?

What's the kind of business that wins, independent of whether it's a good time or a bad time? What are the timeless qualities, basically? And so, I started to think about that and just think, okay, what would be true? And you started going through all the sort of weak points like, well, if you have all of your demand creation in one channel, if that channel collapses, you're in trouble, so a diverse channel mix of traffic is really valuable. 

Well if CAT goes up and you have bad margins, you get destroyed really easily, so I know CATs is gonna go up at some point, I don't know when for sure, but how do I withstand that really great margins? Well, if I have to acquire customers that break even, and that's the only way I can capture more demand, how do I still make profit?

Amazing LTV, right? And you sort of just start to think about all the bad things that could happen and what would need to be true such that if the bad thing happened, you would still be okay, and that led to this set of attributes that became the driving principle for how we built and managed Bamboo Earth. And so what I'll say is that right now, this year, while our entire portfolio for most of our businesses at CTC is like flat, Bamboo Earth is up 24% at the same efficiency, with better new customer acquisition than ever before, producing more cash and not just EBITDA free cash flow than we've ever done as a business,

because we've bought into these principles and gone after them so relentlessly with clarity and conviction, and it's why when I, when we bring these things forward to people, what we're trying to offer out of is, like anybody who tells you they know for sure that they're going to improve your Facebook ROAS over the next 90 days is a liar.

Like, you've gotta accept this, like, and this is part of why I'm so frustrated with, there are certain attribution platforms out there that the cover of their website is like, Improve your ROAS now with my tool, and then they'll publish a report talking about how the collective ROAS is down like 40%.

And you're just like, how? I can't promise you that, so how can we think about what it would be like to give you ideas and principles that would help you regardless of whether ROAS goes up or down? 

[00:14:05] Richard: Yeah, not naming any names, of course. 

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[00:14:53] Richard: So maybe let's talk specifically like you mentioned some of those essentially managerial or strategic decisions that you made within Bambu Earth to reflect some of that antifragile thinking. So can you get into some of those specifics? Like how did you change materially in order to bring this situation about? 

[00:15:09] Taylor: One, we got really honest about the operational overhead of the business and one of the things that happens is in good times, a few extra people, a little bit of extra opex, that's fine.

We're growing, they're gonna get better, we'll improve the efficiency, it doesn't work, so we, went through a series of layoffs at the beginning of the year, we had to make the team much leaner, we had to make a big change in the Facebook ad account. We moved everything to cost cap, and there was two rules that Dave and I would talk about.

It was that nothing gets spent without a cost cap that makes us first order profitable and you have to spend all the money every month because what's easy to do is to let yourself off the hook for one or the other, and to their credit, they've just became diligent about that and have done an awesome job of creating, an ability to scale against that premise. 

So cost caps in the Facebook ad account, ruthless clarity of the first order profitability that we needed. We weren't willing to push the value capture out far, which we were doing in the previous years, which helps you grow faster, get more new revenue, but it creates cash risk.

Coz Bambu Earth was never like a bad business, it was it just had too latent of a payback period, and so we had to tighten that to help right size cash. We got really clear on the production process, went in and cleaned up coz we do, Bambu Earth is interesting because it's vertically integrated.

We like buy raw material and we make the product. So getting clear on the actual cost structure of that business and the fulfillment side of it to really pick back up points of margin. So we picked up a few points of gross margin on the product and you combine all of that and all of a sudden you have a business that's growing, producing cash and is continuing to be successful.

And so, those are sort of the business strategies, there's like Facebook ad account strategies that we did in terms of how the creative was and what we, how we deployed it and that sort of thing. But I honestly think they're the less important part of the story. Not that they aren't hypercritical, but just it's too easy for us to think that that's the answer, and if we had done that and not all the other business stuff, it wouldn't have worked. 

[00:17:08] Richard: Yeah, I think like one of, one of the lessons here is although we can't necessarily say, hey, do exactly this because every business is different, blah, blah, blah. What we can say is like, there are certain things that are the actual problem that you need to address.

And let's say for instance, one of the things that's not really the problem is, maybe Facebook ROAs going down, like there are deeper business level things that you need to be focusing on as an eCommerce business in order to weather the storm, and it's largely on the operational side in terms, thinking about margin like that sort of more like, it's not marketing, it's not about marketing, it's about figuring out the business, right?

[00:17:46] Taylor: And, there's a woman named Priya that is in admission and what I really appreciate about some of the conversations that she and I had over the past year is when she would read the Antifragile playbook, what it actually led her to was an honest assessment that the, we call it the genetic attributes of the business she was trying to build were wrong.

They weren't going to enable this opportunity, and so she made, the hard choice that probably is gonna save her years of her life to say like, this isn't the right underlying foundation to build the kind of thing that wins. And that's actually the hardest decision of all, is that there are a lot of businesses that I see as partners that the right answer is that barring some sort of miraculous change to the underlying structure of this business, you are dead.

 And how can you be honest with yourself about that? how do you avoid the sunk cost fallacy and make decisions to allow this set, this framework of thinking, the antifragile premise to reveal to you, be a mirror back to your soul about the likelihood of success of the thing that you're doing.

Cause it's easy to think of it as like, oh, it helps to highlight the one little area that I need to go improve. But maybe you're sitting at like 40% margin and you don't have a path thats 75, and so I'll give you another great way that it illuminates is that I think this premise has eliminated a lot of the like D2C beverage as a premise , like, it basically took the whole category and was like, yeah, you can't really get to the gross margin that you need, in order to make this thing work. 

So Amazon, you know, and like, it gives people the opportunity to reimagine the distribution requirements or distribution opportunities for their individual product, in ways that maybe the system's just not developed enough yet. Maybe eventually are operational infrastructure as a nation will be so good that shipping costs like pennies to ship heavy cans. For now, that's not the truth. 

[00:19:50] Richard: I was gonna say, like, I wonder if there's something philosophical here too, in the sense of sitting down and really asking yourself the question, like why am I building this business, right? And I think a lot of what we saw is, like, the answer to that question was often we're building this business to grow it as fast as we possibly can and to get investment money and to sell the business, right?

Which is in and of itself, maybe not necessarily a bad thing, however, it seems to me like that's fundamentally diametrically opposed to the antifragile mindset, which is you have to be building something that will last first. Because right now what we're seeing is that investment money's just drying up because it's not built to last, they don't even have the money to invest in it. 

[00:20:28] Taylor: That's right. And this is where I think part of this premise is so valuable as an investment thesis. Like we talk about this on customers at ctc like yesterday, Peter and I, who's one of our managers on the sales team are talking about like sort of the ideal or you and I, are too.

Talking about the ideal customer, yeah, and Peter and I had a follow up conversation about it, but this idea of the ideal customer profile for CTC and the reality is, Our Facebook ads don't make their gross margin better. We can merchandise the product differently and we can certainly get skew specific raw ass targets and do all the things that we do to be disciplined about it and help.

But if you have a 50% gross margin skew set and no LTV, you're asking me to produce for you a 98th percentile outcome, and that means that, it's not impossible, but it's a highly unlikely outcome. And so if I'm accepting that customer, I'm accepting a 98% chance of failure, right? And so we think about this because we think at CTC a lot about like, what should the retention rate of our customers be?

How often should we succeed? And there's not one answer to that question, right? Because for an anti-fragile business, like, well, that should be a hundred percent probably. For some businesses, it's a 2% chance of success and we need to have a way of thinking about that and have eyes wide open that we can both be honest to the customer about the situation that they're in, and also help our internal people not feel like they're beating their heads against the wall trying to accomplish something that was never very likely of occurring in the first place.

[00:21:58] Richard: Right, yeah. I think we use a lot of analogies to talk about this but, one that comes to mind right now is maybe hiring an agency to focus on your marketing is sort of like giving a hockey player a hockey stick. But if the person holding the stick doesn't have the DNA to be good at hockey, it doesn't really matter that they have the best hockey stick.

[00:22:16] Taylor: Right. 

[00:22:16] Richard: Something along those lines, right?

[00:22:17] Taylor: That's right. 

[00:22:18] Richard: It's simply a tool. 

[00:22:19] Taylor: Exactly, so whatever the metaphor is, yeah, like if you are Shaquille O'Neil's son, your total potential NBA ceiling is greater than Hayden, my son. No way to change that, I'm sorry, Hayden. Yeah, like it's just the reality of it now does it mean it's impossible? No, but does it mean that like the likelihood of success is much smaller? Yes. 

And that's why like I really believe, I put it out this tweet the other day that like the last era was won by first and being first and fast, and then this era will be won by operational excellence. And I think that even our service, we're evolving our service, and I think what the market is going to need is someone to help people with this problem, which is how do I become more efficient? How do I become more disciplined? How do I get clearer on what I'm trying to achieve? It's gonna be less about like, how much creative can you make and how fast, because like that problem, one, it becomes commoditized really quickly.

And the actual differentiation is like most people producing tons of UGC, they can produce a Facebook Ross somewhere between, a 1 and 1/2 to a 2, to a 2.2 maybe on the upper bound. So the question is like, who wins in that game? Well, It's whoever has all those other principles, that means that they can scale at that outcome and they can keep producing a bunch of volume to enable that system.

And so I think when we think about whether it's the Enterprise Scaling Guide, if you think about the Enterprise Scaling Guide, and even when we sell CTC, what we say is it's an operating system for profit like, it's a day by day way to manage your business with diligent, specificity and execution. And it actually requires that the way that we get better internally is by being, more operationally excellent. 

And that's where we're focusing is like it's not trying to come up with the best new ad format. Like the variation in outcomes just aren't wide enough and variable enough in that way. And that's gonna be potentially controversial to say, but... 

[00:23:59] Richard: Right, well, I think it pushes against the move fast break things mindset that's sort of been, there for a long time, which is to say that like you find the opportunity, you move into it fast as possible, doesn't matter if you plan for it first, in this environment, it's, you know, proper planning prevents poor performance or whatever the military say, right? 

[00:24:19] Taylor: Yeah, well exactly. So, it's really important to say that those philosophies move fast, break things, whatever, they're not wrong, they just serve a different environment, right? Like in an environment where the range of outcomes on Facebook is between two and four, you're talking about degrees of profit.

Like if you get the worst outcome there, you're still winning, so go really fast and play in that range when the range of outcomes is from like 0.7 to 1.8. That's the difference between death and life, and so we've moved from playing a game that was about, degrees of profit, and so whoever captured the market, what made the most money, and you move the fastest there, you win to a game where we're talking about life and death, because if you spend below that threshold, you destroy cash and there's no more cash available.

And so, The game just changed. It went from capture the flag, capture the territory, no real way to lose to life or death. And that's the important distinction that requires now a different set of behaviors. 

[00:25:18] Richard: Okay, let's touch on real quick so to go back to the beginning, you had mentioned moving away from the aggregator model, in terms of your sort of belief in that model as effective whatever. Let's get into that a little bit, like why move towards the single business rather than continue with the aggregator model?

[00:25:38] Taylor: I think the fundamental premise of most aggregators is arrogance. 

[00:25:43] Richard: There we go. 

[00:25:46] Taylor: The underlying premise is that I can do something more efficiently and better than the person I'm acquiring it from, and I will use my sophistication, knowledge and you know, just overall skill to make the thing better with less effort.

And that effort being measured in like literal operational cost . And what I have found is when you take a brand and you remove from it, especially at the early stage, I wanna be careful, I've never done this at the hundred million dollar level and VF is a very successful company and so there are lots of people that have done this in ways that I wanna just tip my cap and say that I do not know everything.

But at the small business level, the entrepreneur is such a force of will that carries forward both this untangible spirit about what the product is and why it matters in the world, and puts forth such an effort that when you extract that person and you insert a brand marketing manager that's managing four different brands, and is a shared resource that now gives a portion of their mind and heart share to the thing, the end result seems to reflect the input.

No matter how smart you are, there's a problem with that. And there's always this tension around capital allocation, where should you put the next dollar across which business? And the same is trouble with time, where should you allocate your next minute? If you're the email designer, if you're the media buyer, if you're the shared whatever, whatever, whatever. You're constantly making trade offs that come at the cost of one thing or another. And I think that ultimately, you lose to people who are wholehearted and that's tends to be the issue is just wholeheartedness expressed in the form of business function. You know, there's a David Sax quote that Josh, our CEO loves to reference, which is that the benefits of synergies are hypothetical, but the benefits of focus are immediate.

And I'll say that that's what we saw inside of Bamboo Earth. The second that bamboo earth was the only thing inside the thing, it was a way better business. And yeah, so that, and that's what my experience of people who are running those aggregators is like they're all having a similar experience in that way.

[00:27:50] Richard: Mm-hmm. Here's a hypothesis. So the aggregator model is the child of the previous period that we've been in, right? The free cash world, coz in a sense that heart and that focus is, part and parcel of operational excellence in a way, right? It's like that, the dedication to the day to day and perhaps in an environment where that wasn't quite as necessary or capitalization wasn't quite the problem that it is today.

The aggregator model was attractive to a lot of people, and now we're seeing that, at least at the business levels that we're talking about in terms of annual revenue, that's just not going to work anymore.

[00:28:28] Taylor: Yeah. And again, like I just think the incentive structure is also really hard to figure out. Like I just try and imagine supply without Patrick, and I know that we're on this just coz we just mentioned it, but like, go look at the website, like if you know him or anything about that business, like, it is him, It's as much an expression of a human as it is a product, from the story about being an engineer who used to work, on selling fighter jets to developing this thing, to showing up in ads and writing funny comments in the thing, like the force of will for it. What happens when you extract that magic? I think it's an interesting question, and it's not to say that somebody can't pick it up, but somebody has to pick it up.

And what I've seen inside these aggregators is that as soon as every brand is just a bunch of products that we're all trying to sell to make a bunch of money, then when it's like Tuesday at 11:45 PM and there's that customer that's unhappy, it's just sort of like, eh, I'll get back to it tomorrow morning, whereas like the founder's, like in their bathroom answering it, you know, it's just like, there's just, ooh, there's something there, there's something about the magic of it all. 

[00:29:31] Richard: Thanks again for joining us for the E-Commerce Playbook podcast, please remember to rate and review, and if you're watching on YouTube, please remember to like and subscribe. Also, if you wanna check out Bambu Earth, we'll have a link in the show notes, you can dive in. Its a great brand. And of course, if you're interested in starting a conversation about working together, please drop us a line at commonthreadco.com. We'd love to chat, have a good one, folks, and happy skill.