Transcription
Like everyone knew us from e-commerce, we were like the big player in the e-com space. Every DFO, DFO, the, oh my gosh, they're here, and we got, and we got into lead gen. It was sort of like, yeah, who are you guys?
Hey guys, I just want to give a quick shout out to our sponsors for this video: Offeral and Ringba. Ringba is my preferred choice when it comes to call tracking software for affiliates, for people in paper call, and is what you should be using too.
What's going on, everyone? Got a special interview here. We are at Legion World. I'm with my man Jordan, brother, my man from DFO, SL, Verve Direct. Right, I'm going to let him introduce himself. He's been, he's one of the original OGs, as I always like to say, in this industry, in the affiliate online space. He's got a lot, a long history with us, so I wanted to, uh, spotlight him in a pizza place of all places. We'll be sharing a slice of pizza very shortly. Jordan, how do you, how did you get started? What, like, where did, where did all this begin for you?
Yeah, I mean, so, uh, eBay, back in like eBay early, what year? Early days, 90s, late 90s, eBay. I was, uh, working for a guy who was, uh, basically a watch dealer in New York, and, uh, I worked at an antique flea market for him, and he had no online presence. He used to make me go to auction houses and basically be his proxy. So I would go to the auction, I would bid on watches for him, I would bring those watches back to him with his like security team, cuz I was bidding on like super high-end watches. Right, like what type of watches? Vacheron Constantines, all kinds of like old-school Rolexes, Audemars watches, super high-ticket watches. And so he was like, hey, I've got this other side of the business where I've got like Tag Heuers, Mados, and I get them for like $200 a watch. I don't really have a massive outlet for because it's not my audience. Do you think there's anything you could do with the watches? And I was like, well, let me try to sell some, them, some of them here at the flea market, but I was like [ __ ], there's this eBay thing. Let's see if we can put some online and get some traction. Fast forward a year, we had the little flea market thing going, and eBay took off. We were the number seven, so seventh power seller ever from eBay. They sent us a letter, they were like, you're one of our first Power Sellers, a black, or something like, we got like a letter. Yeah, basically, yes. And, um, and so anyway, that it was going great. I was a young dude, right? So I was young guy, I was making a little bit of money, I was like selling the watches to my friends, selling them on eBay, and because we got him so cheap, like there was, there was a really nice margin there for us. And, uh, one day the guy suddenly passed away. And when he passed away, his trade secret, where he got the watches, everything died with him. And I remember going to his house to visit his wife, and I was like, his name was Ken, and I was like, uh, to Ken, leave any of the information of like where he got the watches or how he was buying them, where the price point, point? And she was like, I'm sorry. So that like ended my hope. She know, she didn't, she didn't know. She didn't know. Like, he was a, no, he was like an old-school super mysterious Jewish guy that was selling jewelry in New York at the time. That's cool. So I, I took an, when that happened, I took an apprenticeship with a with another guy because I was like, oh, I want to get into watches and jewelry. And I was working with the guy for probably six months, and he walked up to me and he said, Jordan, I love, love you like a son, you're a great guy, but your eyes and hands are terrible. You will never make money fixing or working on watches or raining gems because you can't, so go find something else to do. I was like, [ __ ], what else am I going to do? Like, I, I went to college and played, uh, college ball on a scholarship, was okay in school, but like wasn't a great student, didn't really know what I wanted to do, loved working out, which I still do today, but was really passionate about like watches and jewelry, but had my heart broken. So I was like, what am I going to do? So a few months later, a buddy of mine was like, yo man, I'm moving down to, to Florida, would you want to come down and I'm going to open this financial services company and you can work with me? And I was like, sure, I need to finish up college because I still had a couple classes left to take. So he's like, finish up college down there. So I transfer school, moved down to Florida, and, uh, the first year we're working down here in small little office, eating baloney and cheese sandwiches and [ __ ], making no money. I'm like, I'm gonna have to leave, I'm going broke. The money I saved is gone, I'm going to be broke in like a week, and, uh, I don't know, I wound up working at data deal with some guy, we got some data in, and the data was good. And so like things started to pick up with the data, and then all of a sudden, like you were closing on the data. Yeah, and then the market shifted, right? So then the market shifted, and the company sort of started to take off on its own, and I realized at that time like I wasn't, and I think I'm a pretty good sales guy, but I wasn't like super passionate about sales, but I like the marketing, I like, you know, messing around with the data and buying data and like appending the data. Um, but what I really found was interesting was that I learned how to buy traffic on Google, and this is like the very early days of Google, 7, 08, and 2006, like Terry Marshall, end of 2006, 2007, maybe even a little before that, actually started learning what was there, cost for click, like nothing. And I was so, was all like, I was doing mostly mortgage leads, right, little bit of like auto insurance and life and health, but mostly mortgage, and it was all internal. So we were basically keeping the leads and basically closing them internal, and so our thousand X return, and so like our call center team went from like, you know, three guys to five to 15 to 20, and it basically scaled exponentially around the amount of leads we can generate, particularly with the Google leads, because those are like the, the best leads. Yeah, right. And so we got to a point where, where we couldn't, we weren't going to scale the business anymore, so I was like, hey man, do you care if I sell these leads to other people? And he was like, no, if you want to set up a little side business, go for it, be my guest. So set up a little side lead gen business doing just mortgage leads that started to really grow. I found other avenues to buy traffic, so I was buying some traffic like AdBlade and Pulse360, um, and then buying for other categories, right? So then it was like, I can buy for life insurance, I can buy for auto insurance. Fast forward a year, Facebook really starts to hit, and so I figured out how to buy some media on Facebook, and I certainly wasn't a good media buyer, so let me start by saying that I was not an early media buyer, but I was early, so it didn't matter. And so what I realized was, I'm not a great media buyer, but there's, there's this whole other thing called affiliate marketing, which was, I started to learn about by going on forums, just trying to make myself a better marketer, and I was like, maybe I can plug into some of these affiliates and like, you know, generate my own leads, but also get affiliates to generate me leads, and I can sell more leads. So anyway, started doing that, 2008, the market crashes, mortgage basically dies, right? And so I was like, [ __ ], you know, my, my, my breadwinner is, is now dead, what the hell am I going to do? Well, what I quickly realized is that generating leads really translates to any industry, doesn't have to be just for mortgage. And so at that time, that settlement became very popular because the, the economy was in turmoil, loan modifications became very popular, and so that edu days, or a little bit, I didn't do U, but, but probably around that same time, but I, I was focused mostly on financial services. And so that little business that I built turned into now a bigger business, even though the mortgage industry had crashed, that was basically generating loan modification leads, debt settlement leads, still focusing on auto insurance, and auto insurance back then was very different than it is now because you could put a little ad up on Facebook on the right-hand side, and the image could be totally crazy, and it would click, and you would get paid like $10 for what would be like a 50-cent lead. It was super profitable. Yeah. So anyway, we started generating all these leads, and I was leveraging affiliates to, to do all of that, right? So I would generate some, they were generating some, and I built up a huge buyer base, and I had a small little team, and basically the, the days of like me working for this financial services company were over, and I transitioned totally into selling leads and generating leads across a couple different verticals. Few years later, um, you know, building that company, and I had a very small team building the company up, we got approached, um, for an acquisition. We wound up selling the company. It was, um, probably not a great acquisition. I didn't, you know, we had built out some tech, and really the acquisition was built and based around the tech, but you know, had not grown up with money or being around other like entrepreneurs that were, you know, building businesses and selling, didn't know, I didn't know, man, I had no idea. So I sold the business for, you know, now what I look back on it like pennies on the dollar, and had to sort of figure out at that time like what was going to be the next move. And so I worked at an agency in the city for a year, buddy of mine that was that I was selling leads to was like, hey, come join our team, like come work here. So I wound up going there, and, um, thought I was going to be there for like 12 months, you know, my plan was like 12 months to learn more about like how networks work and, you know, take in some knowledge, and wound up being an interesting opportunity. I met some really cool people there, and, uh, I wound up being there for just about two years, uh, before starting what at that time was DFO, which has now become GPC. While you were there, while I was there, like working there, but also like setting up the infrastructure, like non-competitive, yeah, setting up the infrastructure to build this company. And so I met my, uh, current business partner through a mutual friend, and early 2013, we rolled out the first iteration of DFO, so like, uh, early you started Ecom offers, early 2013, we were doing some Nutra stuff, a little bit of lead gen, um, and then some like early, very early Ecom stuff. Um, I'd say the bread and butter initially in those days was in Nutra, right? Because that's just where the money was at that time. It's where the industry was. It was also like I understood the space really well, so we, you know, we had built out some offers with some partners, we were running offers in the US and globally, which most people weren't doing, so that was kind of like our niche or our competitive advantage. Is that where the name comes from? Yeah, similar, yeah, pretty much. Yeah. So, so explain to me DFO versus Verve Direct. Yeah, so DFO is the, uh, basically the, think of it as like the, or GPC now, so it's Global Performance Commerce, right? So DFO is turned into GPC. GPC is the holdco, the parent company, and under that, Verve Direct, um, there's Verve Direct, there's the software part of the business, which is, uh, wow, which basically builds out software, so CRM, call center service, uh, software for customer support, um, a funnel builder called CTR wow, which we've used over the years to build all of our offers. So if you ever look at like our pages on the bottom, you see like built by CTR wow, and that's how most people recognize that it's our pages. And I think we've been from that perspective, like very innovative in the way that we've evolved an e-commerce page, like through the F, you know, through the full flow there, from like looking at the ad, but going to like a pre-sell and interstitial, and then obviously having these like very unique checkout pages that we built. And then also under the GPC brand is like the product team, right? And so that's where we were basically building out these products. So you owned all the inventory, not only were we selling products for third parties, but a big part of our business was also selling all of our own products. And the idea at some point was, um, really around vertical integration, right? So our, our thought process was, let's not only buy the media or work with third parties to acquire media, but let's do all the creative in-house, let's build all the systems and software to support that, let's, um, do all of our own customer support and logistics. You're the offer owner in every sense, so we're doing everything, right, sort of like a small version of like an Amazon, right? And, and I think, you know, it's crazy because we're talking 2013, and then really the evolution of the company, and you hit 2020, and Covid comes, and we're like, in that position where it's like, oh my gosh, every person is, every person in the world is own, every person in the in the world is buying something, and here we are selling it. You're built for, and so, you know, you, you sort of like calls today, I guess, because I feel like calls are where all the act, like a lot of the activity is in the affiliate space today. We had everything built out, right? And we were in a perfect position to just like really scale up the business.
We got pizza coming, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hell yeah. Oh, nice. All right, nice pizza. Look at that. There we go. This, this is your place? Yeah. Nice. What's your name? Uh, BR. Thank you so much. So we're at, uh, yeah, we're at Pizzeria Rika in Hollywood, Florida. Very personal to me and near and dear because I'm, uh, well, I've spent a lot of time in Hollywood, Florida personally, and, uh, you know, it's, it's good to be at a place that's, uh, hopefully we'll have some good pizza. I guess we'll find out in a second. Let's give it a shot, man. We start with, what do you want to go? Pepperoni or, I'm going cheese. All right, so we'll start with cheese. Daveid, you joining us or what, man? Go, B, hop in here, brother. Let's go get this. We're going to chop this up, man. We're going to get all these reviews. Let's go. All right, let's go. Got to feed these puppies. All right, feed those guns. All right, all right. That's B. I'll be honest too, man. Yeah, for South Florida pizza, South Florida is not known for great pizza. Let's just be clear. We're New Yorkers and New Jersey. Yeah, actually has a very nice dough here. Good undercarriage, nice crunch, co, bab. So we, we did a mid, uh, pizza review during this, uh, video, so we're going to jump back into it as we enjoy this pizza, of course. So fast forward today, you, you had years of success in the, is the Ecom offers being fully vertically integrated, where did you go from there? Like, was that just a boom through 2020, 2021, 22, and now you're adding in paper call, paper lead as well? You know, it's, it's, you can tell the story of the real story, right? I like to, I like to tell the real story. I'm about the real [ __ ], right? So for me, 2020 was a boom year, 2021 was a boom year, but obviously in 2022, we saw a market correction for sure within e-commerce, right? I think in many verticals at the same time, while we saw a bit of a correction there, there was all this activity happening with Legion, and some of it had been happening prior to that, and some of it was just because of whatever was going on in the economy, whether it be rate rates or whatever else, but there was definitely like a resurgence that was happening within our industry. Now I wasn't paying attention to it because I was so focused on the e-commerce business, rightfully so, because that's, you know, that's, that's the business we built, right? Yeah, right. But on the other hand, I could see that there was a lot of activity there, and I could, and, and you know, some of our publishers, like some of our best partners were like, look guys, we love running Ecom stuff with you guys, and you guys are great. Day, lead gen, because we'd also like to diversify a little bit. And I have to say for the first like six or seven months of fielding those questions, I was like, H, you know, whatever, we're just going to focus, we're going to stay in our lane, but the market didn't pick back up, right? Like the market sort of remained flat, and not to say, not to say that it died off, but it just was flat. It was still ahead of where we were in 2019, but exactly, people weren't home, people were like, now out spending money on experiences and travel again and doing all these different things, not necessarily sitting on their computers wanting to buy small consumer electronics or beauty products or whatever it is that we were selling at the time. And so with that, I, I, you know, I decided that in early 2023, I wanted to get up and running with some lead gen stuff, and so, you know, we dove into some of the categories, the Medicare stuff, in some of the ACA, but also started looking at different types of lead gen offers that we could work through, right, in different categories. What I didn't realize is that in doing that, it's almost like starting from scratch again, right? Like everyone knew us from e-commerce, we were like the big player in the e-com space. Every DF, DFO, the fir, oh my gosh, they're here, and we got, and we got into lead gen. It was sort of like, yeah, who are you guys? You know, I would get on the phone myself with some advertisers, and I, I would think like, oh yeah, I'm just going to get on here, I'm going to close them, I'm going to tell them how, you know, we're a big company and this and that, and they were like, okay, cool, we'll work with you, but you know, you can start off with the, you know, 50 lead cap, and I'm like, 50 leads at 20 bucks, that's like $1,000. We're used to spending that in like, you know, 20 seconds, so how, how is that going to work? You know, you got a company with, with almost 400 people in it, right? Because we grew significantly over the years, and, and obviously that's counting some of our costs in our people, but I mean, at one point we were, you know, probably somewhere between 380 and 400, and I, I couldn't figure out a way to transition that with the small, you know, with the small caps we were getting in lead gen, especially with some of the categories were, would you say like CU? I came from brick and mortar, I own a gym, and then I did drop shipping, and then I came into lead gen, paper call, and what I noticed, I don't know if you saw this too, it's way more like good old boys network, relationship-based in lead gen and paper call, and is an Ecom, Ecom is very not transac, but it's very, e-commerce is, you have a lot of smaller entrepreneurs, right? And when you work with smaller entrepreneurs, and, and to be honest with you, like the reason I left the Legion space to begin with, right, and part of it's like I had the little non-compete, but part of it was the pitch is so much different, right? When you're pitching a lead gen company, especially the bigger companies, maybe not some of the aggregators or brokers, but like the bigger brands, and I really only want to focus on the bigger brands, not the smaller companies, and you know, no knock on them, but it's just, it's very different when you're going to like the direct source, right? So when you work with an e-commerce
Entrepreneur. You're you're working with the direct source. They can make all the decisions. They can give you the budget. They can give you exclusives. They can allow you to optimize or build pages around your traffic flexibilities, etc. Whereas when you go to like a big leaden company, right, a A in the Medicare space or auto insurance, it's sort of like, "Here's our Pages. Here's what we can do. Here's the creative," and you have to deal with, you know, three different layers and then wait 3 to 6 months to get a a contract signed before you can actually go live. If at that point they even have budget and cap for you, right? Whereas again, working with the entrepreneur, you can you can have one or two meetings and you're basically ready to go, as long as everyone believes there's a fit, right. And so that's the part of the reason I walked away from Legion because I I couldn't stand that pitch, like having to go out there and, "Here's what we do," and you know, back then it was like a deck; maybe now it's a little diff—you don't necessarily need a deck—but they really want to know what you can do before they're going to onboard you, right. And so it was it was a learning experience for sure, like having to get back in there and having had all this success, feeling like I'm going to walk into this space and just take it over by snapping my fingers and sort of being humbled for the first year where you appreciate—I found it to be very challenging. Oh man, I appreciate the hell out of it, right. Cool. And I think, you know, if I look at where we are today, I've built a small level team up and I think we're now pretty well positioned to be successful in the lead gen space, but it took a lot longer than I expected it would, right. And that was very humbling.
What do you enjoy about this process more than your your last phase in Ecommerce?
Well, you know, I think um, I mean, look, so e-commerce will be our main business, right? Like that's the reality. I don't ever envision—and I can't say ever, but like I don't ever envision—Legion being more than 20% of our business. I love e-commerce, you know. I like—we're deep-rooted there. My expertise, my knowledge, like I understand the business at a very high level, as does our team, right. But I think when I look at Legion and the way that the the inbound call space and platforms like Ringba and Retriever have have really like revolutionized things and made it really interesting, and I can see that applying to a multitude of different verticals—I think that's what has really caught my attention and something that, you know, even from an e-commerce perspective that I'm looking at very closely because how does that apply across a multitude of different businesses, right? Like you're essentially driving that inbound call that should have much higher intent than someone just filling out a form. And once you've dialed in that process at a very high level and have the systems in place, you should be able to apply that to anything, right? Like there's no reason that any business—there's no reason that like—why would someone not want to buy a physical product through an inbound call, right? If you can make the numbers back out.
Have you started testing this a little bit?
A little bit. Like I don't want to say that we've we've gone real deep there, but we have started to do some testing there, and that will certainly be my focus over the next six months, right. And I know in our space people don't like to talk about the things they're doing, yeah, but I'm happy to talk about it because, you know, for me it's like if if someone's going to take the idea and do it, then then go do it. Like, still a lot of work, right? You still have to figure it all out.
Yeah, so you're trying to find create LTB more like lifetime value in the inbound or the form fell, or is this the idea?
I'd say yeah. So I'd say from an inbound perspective, right? I mean, it's it's higher intent, right? And there may be certain types of products that we we don't necessarily sell today because if you think about sort of like the Performance Marketing e-commerce world, the products that we s we've sold historically—and I'd say this is for many companies in the performance Market space—generally range from like 40 bucks to 120 bucks, but there's all these other products, all these amazing brands or products that live out there that are $200, $300—very hard, very very hard to build a funnel around that to get someone to take out their credit card and spend 300 bucks or 500 bucks or 800 bucks—whereas if you can drive that inbound call and create that intent and have someone that's actually pitching them on buying this product, might be something very interesting.
Interesting theory.
I think it'll work. I mean, for sure, I we'll see over the next few months if it works or not, but it could open up a whole new avenue, you know, of this of our—I think a lot of people are too—especially in this industry—there's on the affiliate side, there's a lot of guys are too lazy to experiment because that that there's a lot of risk. It takes a lot of effort. You got to be willing to talk to people. A lot of people are, especially in in those higher ticket sales, probably will require a little bit more of a sales skill set than a general call center agent, right. So that's interesting, man, like like the more so like we did calls for the first time with it Focus the last four months and I found—well, what was the hardest part for me was a I didn't have enough direct buyers to to have like a good margin that I that to scale, right? Uh, which we've—I mean, we also had that same challenge.
Sure. And finding the right buyers, right? Because because it is—there there's a lot of buyers, but there's also finding the right buyers, and there's not so many of the right buyers. $60 payout on a 120 doesn't mean the same thing. And that was kind of what I was saying earlier, right? Like, you know, at least with the e-commerce it's like you're dealing with the product owner, everyone's, you know, everyone at least should be—it's a different process—but when you're looking at lead buyers, like not all lead buyers are cre equal, not all the backend that they tell you that they have is created equal, and so then you have to you have to figure a lot of a lot of that out yourself, like who is the best opportunity, why isn't the best opportunity, how does it all flow together, and can I make it work for for for me and my team?
What would you tell yourself today or a year—sorry—what would you today tell yourself a year ago to do differently or expect differently?
Yeah, I mean, look, I think on the lead gen side, whether it's form fills or calls, I should have came in being a little humbler, right? Like I thought I was going to come in and basically just steamroll things, and I think if I would have come in with a slightly different approach and had focused on building out a team earlier as opposed to like trying to just do a lot of the stuff myself or transitioning certain people that I had internally from, you know, one vertical into another without having any real experience there was a challenge, right. So I would have done that differently.
If I looked back now, what's what what are you seeing with Ecom—Neutra—that side of the business today, like where where do you see that evolving to in the next few?
Well, look, I mean, the the the fortunate thing—and obviously I I don't have that magic crystal ball—um, but I think with the economy—with the economy now picking picking up, right?—and and who knows, we could we could wind up in recession in 3 months—but assuming that rates start to go down a little bit, consumer spending um remain strong as we've seen in Q4, then 2024 should be a really good year for us, right. And you know, so far it's it's very early into the first month of the year, but so far the data is telling us that people are buying right now, which means that, you know, e-commerce should be in for a really good year. Now that said, the way that I'm thinking about Legion also is sort of the way I'm thinking about e-commerce: like diversity, right? Like we've sold lots of different products, but we've focused heavily on small consumer electronics, some beauty products, and then some supplements. Definitely thinking about going a lot wider right now as opposed to deep and just getting more categories to work. And we saw in Q4, even though our Revenue wasn't as high as it was let let's say in 2020 and 2021, we sold more product, so our our product diversity was greater than it's ever, right? Which means we need to work a little harder to bring in more products, but on the other hand, there is a bigger opportunity if you can find those products that obviously cater to, you know, the the customer and the demographic that's looking to buy.
Do you do you ever try to build your brands for like an exit?
Yeah, we we we have, and we've um, you know, we've got a few Brands today that we've built up or partnered on. Um, some of those brands have um, you know, brought on and raised private Equity capital or VC funding. Um, I wouldn't say than any of them have ever been in a position to go public. We've partnered with um, you know, some some athletes and celebrities and some of the brands, so like we we've definitely been able to do that, and that's a really interesting model to have because you don't even need to be super active with the brand, you know. So if you have a a good partner that's running it that has a good plan um and you know you can essentially work to assist them and they can leverage, you know, either the traffic traffic or the marketing uh materials or cre atives, puts them in a really good position to win, and they can still be the day-to-day where you can sort of sit in the background and not have to get involved in running too many businesses because I'd say something else that I learned over the years is um, you know, people like to say I'm a jack of all trades—not me personally—but in general, like that's I hear a lot of people say that.
Yeah. Jack of all trades generally don't find a lot of success, right? So I think it's really focusing in on the things that you're good at, doing what are you good at and putting other people in to be successful.
What what would you say is your superpower?
I mean, you know, I I've become a good leader over the years, right? And that's in building team, right? And and Leadership is a really interesting thing because—but transitioning from Sports as a young man, right, where I was playing football and I played high school and Collegiate football, you have to be somewhat of a leader to do that, right? Like that's just the natural characteristic that you build um when you get into business. It's a very different kind, you know, it's very—I mean, the the shirt similarities, but it's also very different. And I think, you know, when you have a small team and running a small team, you could say you're a great leader, but it's pretty easy to lead a small team. When you start to build a really big team, the leadership capabilities change exponentially, right? And so I had to I had to really figure that out, how to become a better leader, right? Because again, I was a, you know, played football, I was very vocal on the field, um, you know, I'm an extrovert, I'm outgoing, I'm, you know, I'm happy to be around people and take command, but in small groups, and when the group grows, the skill seted changes dramatically, right? And so I think it's adaptive to that, so leadership quality is something I've learned and I've studied it and, you know, read a lot of books and like really spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a good leader. Um, you know, I'm naturally creative, right? So like I mean, I think anybody in this space that's been doing affiliate marketing um is generally pretty creative, right? And obviously some of us more creative than others, but I think the longer you're around marketing and people like us, you just sort of naturally adopt it and pick it up, and the mind starts to work very differently. You know, if I think about some of the meetings—like I'm sure you—this would resonate with you—you know, you're you're hanging out, we're having this pizza here, or you're hanging out at, you know, one of the events or after hours, the conversations and the ideas that you collectively bring up are pretty amazing, right? And especially if you have like a small group that starts it because they they've got the creative juices going, and then everyone sort of just piggybacks on that.
Yeah, right. We came up with some weird uh marketing Styles yesterday, like after a couple beers we're going to test out. I'll tell you about OfferA. It's amaz—I mean, it's pretty amazing, right? So so creative leadership and creativity are probably like my two major strengths at this point. Um, you know, I've also—one thing that uh that I've focused heavily on over the last few years and I and I—this is something I highly recommend for everyone—for anyone listening right now—I wasn't a finance person, right? So I was in the finance industry, but I didn't go to school for finance. I didn't have a finance degree. As we started to build our business, I didn't realize how important good finances were and having like a good CFO and a good team under that CFO was. And so, you know, we started the company, we're a very small team, we had a guy who was a great guy, he was like a VP of finance that we sort of made our like facto CFO, but he wasn't really a CFO, and he wasn't doing the things CFOs should be doing, right? And I think what happens is as the company grows and you don't have that skill set, things can get out of control very quickly because being creative or being a good leader doesn't necessarily mean you're good at managing a company's finances. And again, when you go from three people to five people to 10 people to 20 people to 50, things change very fast. Yeah, and if you don't have your finances in order, it prevents so many like amazing, but also just like basic things from happening, right? You could you could wind up spending more than you're potentially even making at some point, right? You could you could think that you're working at, you know, one margin when really you're at another, and that margin can be very different, and it impacts the way in which your business can operate, right? It it impacts the way in which you can do things, especially as you start to grow your business. You become very acquisition focused, right, naturally, and you know, if you're looking at assessing companies and you don't really have a good handle on your own finances, you can't really ever figure out what's going on with their company, and therefore you can make a really bad decision, right? And so I think something that I've learned and studied now and and during Covid it was a great time for me—I I spent a lot of time like thinking about Finance, but also taking courses um online just to like, you know, sharpen my skills—and now I feel very comfortable having those conversations and looking at numbers and being able to assess whether a company's worth buying or whether a team's worth keeping or a division of a company makes any sense based around numbers, not just the feeling that you get inside because something sounds amazing, right?
Yeah. And for many of us that are that especially in the affiliate space that have shiny object syndrome—well, if you don't know the numbers and then you have shiny shiny object syndrome on top of not knowing the numbers really well, it's a disaster.
Totally. It's how you get that one campaign—very dangerous.
Yeah. So understanding your numbers, and if you're going to build out a team, understanding the why—I'm building that team out—what's your why?
Right now—right now is is is very tricky because I'm in a different place, right? I I I look at where we are today in like sort of a transition, right? So like again, focusing on e-commerce but also building out new things, so my why is changed from when we were really focusing on like vertically integrating just in the e-commerce space, right? And that's—I mean, that's an honest answer, right? Like the the why is always really important, but sometimes it takes a while to get back to the why because your objectives change.
So what's the why today for you?
The why today is um, you know, is it a why or is it um, you know, I think for me it's not so much about my why; it's it's eliminating any of the things that have created chaos or clutter over the last few years, really simplifying things, you know. So I'm I'm going back to like sort of almost basics of just keep everything really simple, focus on the things that we're really good at doing and not get distracted by the things that may have high-end potential, but they're either out of our core capability or skill set or just way too far out in the future, right? So keeping the next 24 to 36 months in front of us as opposed to 10 years.
What are you most excited about today in this industry, your own life, and gener—
Yeah, I mean, look, so from an industry perspective, um, I'm having a lot of fun working on new campaigns, right? Like I said, we've gotten a lot of things to work that we may have not like focused on in the past, right? Which is what we saw in Q4 that like, "Oh my gosh, we could actually have all of these interesting products running and like and and evenly distributing sales to a number of them," which I think is really awesome, and that's super exciting for me. Yeah, obviously the second thing is um, you know, diving more into the lead gen space, particularly on the call side, because again, of what the value proposition around the calls are in themselves—super interesting, super valuable—and I think, you know, as I said earlier, there's there's some really good companies building out the technology and the software behind it, but they're also very supportive of the industry, right? Like they're people from the industry, they understand the industry, and therefore they can give you the right information as opposed to just another software company that doesn't really understand all of your needs at a super high level.
Yeah, for sure. Well, super exciting, man.
Yeah, thank you for joining me. I'm glad we got to do this over for some pizza, and I got like 50 more questions I need to ask you, but we'll do that for part two. Thank you for joining me, man.
Appreciate you.
Yeah, awesome, man. Appreciate it. Now let's enjoy this [Music] pizza [Music].