🏔 The Summit: Edition #2

The obstacles of scale and what we’re doing to actually scale

I am sending this newsletter out laaaate - was meant to send out Wednesday, but life happens. Here’s some enjoyable Friday reading for you. I wanted to talk about obstacles to scaling and what I plan on doing about it.

One of the roadblocks I’ve run into while scaling our brands is hitting different levels of stagnancy. I can only share from my own experience, but it seems like there are some clear levels that I have seen that need new solutions.

Level 1: 0-30k/month

This level is really where you are trying to figure it out. What is working and what isn’t working. I find a lot of brands are stuck in this stage (or the next 2 stages). This is where you’re trying to find out if your brand is going to work, and if you can figure out how to find a marketing channel that will work.

Usually this is where 90% of brands die, if not more. It’s not easy to get your first sale, but if you don’t have a rock-solid product, you’re going to have a tough time unless you’re a rock star at marketing.

Level 2: 30-150k/month

This is the next trap in growth. This is an area where I see a lot of brands struggling as well. They may have found a pathway to grow to the 100k per month mark, and have been drifting up and down and haven’t figured out the next level up.

You may have figured out a channel, and even have a loyal customer base, but you can’t seem to crack scale. I’ve seen brands have a hard time here. We have one of our brands in the early stages of this level.

It’s super important to really figure out your funnel strategy - one winning funnel can propel you out of this level, along with some winning creative.

Level 3: 150k-300k

This is actually a really fun level. I’ve seen brands who get here fly through this fairly quickly (if they have the inventory and the cash flow). You’ve gotten closer to product market fit, and you have also learned what it takes to scale what is working.

Generally, this is where you are able to bring in some help after maybe running the show yourself, or having agencies or freelancers helping you with most of the work.

Level 4: 300k-750k

Ok, so this is where things get a bit more tricky. I think as you get closer to the 1M/month mark, you have to look at many different channels for new customer acquisition and also extending customer lifetime value.

This is not as easy as it looks. And when a brand gets here, if they aren’t primed to understand how to expand to more channels, it can be difficult.

This is where I am focusing on in terms of expanding one of our brands right now out of. So this is where I want to spend most of the conversation around concerning what I am working on and what I believe are the levers that can help us get to the next level based on working with other brands with my agency get past this.

Level 5: 750k-1.5M

This can bring a lot more complexity as you’re trying to understand how to balance cash flow, projections, and sustainable growth. I think this is a beautiful and dangerous place to be as a brand.

Usually most brands who get here are starting to get more serious about their organization and may be looking at a few options for the next few years.

Option 1: Grow sustainably and profitable (no exit in mind)

Option 2: Continue fast growth, with profit in mind (with a partial or full exit in mind)

Option 3: Grow quickly to get to a much higher level of scale (5-10M+/month)

This level is about beginning to unlock new levels of efficiency and growth that can scale. I think about this as new channels that can support growth like Tiktok, along with SEO, and even affiliate.

Because I am honestly fairly unfamiliar with building brands past level 5 myself, I don’t feel qualified to discuss the next levels. I assume most of my readers are within the first 5 levels, with some of you doing 20-50M+ a year in revenue.

If that’s you and you have thoughts on biggest roadblocks or levels you’ve seen in the past, please feel free to share.

Biggest Focuses For Us Right Now

So we’re working through transitioning from going from level 4 to level 5. This is exciting and also a challenge, because we have some aggressive goals for the rest of the year. The plan is to be beyond 2M a month by end of year for our bigger brand, Flewd.

But if we take it step by step, let’s talk about what I believe we can do to get us to the next level over the next 60-90 days.

Creative Testing

I was talking to my friend Zach the other day and he talked about continuing to test creative until you had banger ads that could support 5k-10k per day PER creative.

This is such an amazing insight from him, and we’re not there yet. We have had some video ads get 2-3k/day in spend, but they haven’t been able to sustain that spend over a long time.

[Insert creative fatigue joke here]

I think one of the reasons behind this is we haven’t found our ‘bangers’ yet. This likely means we need to test a lot more, including expanding personas, while also testing out angles that we believe could work for our target market.

There was a great episode about creative testing from the Marketing Operators podcast, and one note that I took away from it was they shared that they rarely will copy creative from others as inspo.

I think that’s a good note. I think looking at what’s trending on Tiktok as well as in ad libraries you like is good, but in the end there should be a creative part to educating and entertaining your audience into purchasing from you.

I think we need to do a better job of expanding our angles to see if there are ways to either be more general or more specific. I know, that sounds a bit confusing but let me explain.

We have a promising creative that talks about the group of products and their benefits. It’s a classic “x reasons why” type of creative. I think this is a great insight that we could be general about the product and capture a strong CPA.

But what do I want to do next? I want to see if I can get specific. If we say x reasons why these bath soaks will cure your insomnia, will that ring true with a big enough audience so we can scale the creative?

I’m not sure, but I would love to find out. There are tons of concepts you can test using one winning concept that touches on different pain points, personas, etc. Using a specific trend to make 10-15 creative is a really good use of time and effort.

Here are some iterations on the x reasons why winning concept we can expand on:

• 5 self care hacks I wish I knew sooner: bath edition

• 3 reasons why these bath soaks are winning over epsom salt fans

• 5 ways these bath soaks have changed my life

• 3 little known self care routines I am loving right now

If you look at this list, that I created in just a few minutes, it not only includes a strong hook, but also possibilities for a lot of different content from different creators.

I think this is the type of way to expand on what is working in an ad account, without making it all feel the same and a bit crunchy.

Sponsored - Foxwell Founders

One thing that I’ve found about tactics is that I end up learning some really good insights in Slack communities. The one that I highly recommend is the Foxwell Founders group. Highly recommend checking them out if you’re looking for a solid community of marketers and brand owners that are amazing humans and also like growing brands. One tip that was shared recently was about implementing LLA in our ad accounts (are we in 2017 again??) and it’s been going really well.

Channel expansion (and not the way you think)

For most brands working to grow from the 500k → 1M → 2M+ per month mark, I think the biggest goal is to go deeper in the channels you’re doing well in (aka Meta + Google) and then exploring one more channel to expand into to generate more scale.

The logical example is TikTok & TikTok shops. I think it’s an opportunity that is really special right now, and we are working to expand into. I believe that the main places to expand into is to get better quality creative and scaling on Meta, while also expanding Google in turn while seeing if you can find some scale through TikTok Shop & running ads behind winning affiliate content.

This is the place I feel the best about expanding into over the next few months. I know many are talking about Tiktok Shops right now, and it’s great to be able to see the actual volume that some are doing on TTS. But most aren’t able to get there.

If you are able to get enough affiliates posting through strong bots who can do outreach for you, as well as getting samples to enough people that will get you the highest chance of success, this is what I think will win.

For us, because we are concerned about not only growth, but the view of our brands, we will be taking it a bit slower and doing outreach to affiliates that fit what we’re looking for and our brand look and feel.

This may take longer to scale on TTS, but I still believe it will support growth in the long run in a healthy way.

Buyer Persona Expansion

One of the items that I think gets lost in the noise of people talking about growth is the importance of keying in on your buyer personas.

There are so many individuals scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok throughout the day, and there are so many different types of people. You see different content than your sibling, mom, or grandfather do.

So I think one of the ways we will be scaling over the next 3-5 months is through expanding to personas that fit our expanded goals. The questions I’m asking my team is concerning where our future customers are? It’s great to key in on our current ideal buyer personas, but to go from 10M a year to 25M a year means you have to unlock new personas. This means doing research on types of people who may not currently be in your marketing funnel.

I guarantee you that the 57 year old grandma is seeing completely different content and messaging than the 22 year old new graduate. So how are you going about this in your overall strategy to hit those individuals. For us, that is something we’re thinking about and planning so we can expand into personas that can help unlock new levels of growth.

Conclusion

I’m sure there is more that will be uncovered over the next few months, but these are the main drivers I feel confident about when it comes to growth for us. We are going to continue to test offers, will continue to test landing pages, as well as focus on strengthening retention efforts and increasing customer LTV. All of those are extremely important but I believe those are started earlier on in the process of growing brands.

How about you? What did you find was your biggest unlock as you expanded to new levels in your own brand or brands you have helped grow? I’d love to know and would be happy to feature some of them in my next newsletter. Please let me know.