499: How the World’s Most Successful People Turn Adversity Into Advantage With Ezra Firestone

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into what strategies are working and what strategies are not with their businesses. And today I’m posting an oldie but a goodie with my good friend Ezra Firestone, where we discuss overcoming problems and basically how to stay sane running your business. This episode is also a great precursor on why going to a live event like the Seller Summit and taking part in a mastermind is so important. Also keep in mind that episode 500

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of this podcast is right around the corner and I have a special episode planned. But before we begin, I want to you know that tickets for the 2024 Seller Summit are now on sale over at SellersSummit.com. The Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high level BS, mine is a curriculum based conference where you will lead with practical and actionable strategies

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specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Now, I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year, we cut off sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k,

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or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 14th to May 16th. And right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. Also, if you haven’t picked up my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Family First Entrepreneur yet, it’s actually available on Amazon at 38 % off right now. My book will teach you how to achieve financial freedom by starting a business that doesn’t require you to work yourself to death.

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Plus, you can still get my free bonus workshop on how to sell print on demand and how to make passive income with blogging, YouTube, and podcasting when you grab the book over at mywifequitterjob.com slash book. Go to mywifequitterjob.com slash book, fill out the form, and I’ll send you the bonuses right away. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quitter Job podcast. Today I’m really excited to have Ezra Firestone back on the show. And in case you don’t know who he is, Ezra runs a number of seven and eight figure e-commerce stores, a Shopify SaaS company called Zipify, and an e-commerce education company over at Smart Marketer. Now, Ezra actually recently spoke at my conference, The Seller Summit, about Facebook chat bots, and as expected, his talk was very well received. But what’s funny is that Ezra and I have known each other for many years, but we’d never really had an extended conversation.

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until the speaker’s mastermind for my event. And after spending eight straight hours in a closed room with the guy, I started liking him even more. And he is a wise man well beyond his years, and he’s very personable as well. So today, Ezra and I are gonna talk about some of the challenges that he’s faced this past year with Boom, his e-commerce business, and whatever else we plan on talking about today. And with that, welcome to show. Ezra, how you doing today,

03:15
My wife quit her job podcast. Hey man, super happy to be here. And I just want to add to that that I hadn’t done one of those, you know, speaker masterminds where you kind of get in, you get together with a group of folks and you sit down for, like you said, you know, eight hours and you really just each person kind of goes through like what they’re struggling with and what’s going on and what they could use help with. And it was like such a cool format. I’m really sold on on that, you know, going forward. I really liked it.

03:43
Yeah, mean everyone was really open which I really loved and you know one of the attendees there like she was tearing up and I think I feel like we I know he you know who I’m talking about but I think we really helped her out a lot. Yeah, yeah, we had a couple breakdowns man. know, I think when when people get the space to actually kind of open up about what’s really going on it can be cathartic and healing and it’s you know, there’s not a lot of safe spaces, especially in the business world where there’s so much sort of

04:12
Posturing it was cool. was a cool thing you set up. So thanks for doing that Yeah, absolutely. And you know even I found out that you have problems, too It’s amazing. I have problems. Yeah, I know I mean listen I think that what’s interesting about like the struggles is in general when you’re experiencing sort of pain or struggle or Discomfort. I mean at the very same time usually some things are going well, too, and it seems to be this sort of like being able to hold

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at the same time, both things that are going well and things that aren’t and how you navigate that intensity over time seems to be how well you do at business because I can tell you for sure, there’s always something that’s like not doing that great in one of my brands, know, or something that’s scary or Shopify is gonna, you know, kick out the replacement checkouts or whatever the catastrophe or chaos is at the moment, it seems to be constant, you know, and so I really do think it’s about how you react to it.

05:09
Absolutely, and it’s actually comforting to know that other entrepreneurs are facing similar issues. It just makes you feel better. Yeah, totally. Ezra, last time you were on the podcast was four years ago. Four years. Four years ago? Yeah, you were one of my first guests. I was just kind of looking back at the at the analyst. Wow, I’d like to go back and see what we talked about then. That’s kind of fun. I have no idea. I didn’t listen to it. I just looked it up.

05:33
I know during our mastermind we covered a number of different things, but can you just quickly catch the audience up about all your various businesses real quick? It’s really hard to keep track because you got to Yeah, you know, well, I think one of my most fun and sort of most popular success stories has really happened in the last four years, you know. 2010 to 2014, I was attempting to launch this brand Boom by Cindy Joseph and using content marketing and all kinds of stuff.

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2014 was our real like first multi six-figure year and then 2015 we did we 10x went from 300,000 to 3 million and then 2016 we went from 3 million to 17 million and then 17 18 19 are have now all been in that You know 20 million ish range and so that’s been a really big ride and also is kind of like you know my team over the last four years has gone from

06:26
When I would have done that podcast with you, I probably had 16 members and now I have 103. So there’s been like a lot of expansion and my journey as an entrepreneur in that time has been going from the driver to the navigator. And I think that a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck in this sort of driver role and it ultimately is what limits their growth where, you know, if you’re on the road taking the turns, you can’t be above the road looking at the mountains that are coming in the distance. It’s very hard.

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to both navigate and drive and where a lot of people get stuck. There’s a number of kind of sticking points that I’ve identified on my journey of growth in my companies, but one of them is technology, right? A lot of us do it yourself entrepreneurs who started from the ground with no money doing it ourselves. We’re doing the Facebook and the Klaviyo and the analytics and the Shopify. Like we’re really bogged down in the technological infrastructure of the business. So that’s one area that people get stuck. And then one of the other lessons, I mean, I know this doesn’t

07:22
Directly answer your question, but now I’m off on a tangent is I think that so yeah a lot of stuff’s been going on a lot of growth I’ve got three main companies smart marketer. I do you know blogging and educational courses on how to grow ecommerce businesses zippify apps I build add-ons to Shopify stores that you know support you in your growth as a Shopify merchant and then boom is a cosmetic retailer for women over 50, but what I was gonna say was that one of the

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Actually, I totally lost my train of thought now. Sorry. I have no idea what I was waiting for. Like the revelation here. It was it was going to be really good. Oh, I do remember now, which is, you know, one of the things that everyone is so focused on is growth. Everybody wants to get bigger and grow and be. It’s like there’s this sort of obsession with growth. And I understand it on one level. But I also think that it’s a bit misguided and ultimately leads often.

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to the demise of very good companies because, you know, with growth comes a whole lot of problems. You know, you have to fund more inventory, you’ve got more overhead, there’s more stress and pressure and intensity on you as the entrepreneur who’s the one who’s responsible for the whole operation. And you know, what I am trying to do is first and foremost, enjoy my life and have fun. And I want my team to enjoy their lives and have fun doing what they’re doing. It doesn’t mean we don’t work hard, but I want it to be enjoyable. And you you don’t…

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know how long you have, which could lead into, know something you wanted to talk about, a big traumatic experience I had over the last 12 months, but you don’t know how long you have. So if you’re not enjoying yourself, making time for your hobbies, making time for your social life, making time for your relationships and intimate connections, and you know, really enjoying and putting energy into your business in a sustainable way, not 16 hours a day, then what’s the point? And then I want to make really, really good things that serve the world that are truly great products. And then third, I want to be profitable.

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And I frankly don’t care how big it gets and I don’t care how profitable I am. If I’m having a good time making good stuff and it’s making money and paying my team and paying my bills, I’m happy. And I think that this fascination with growth is actually somewhat misguided. And what you really should be looking at is how can I have a lot of fun, make things that are truly good and then have that be profitable at any level is you’ve won the game. You know, a lot of people get really big and then they’re shackled to these operations that they’re slaving away at that make them miserable, that take them away from their, you know, it’s just like,

09:48
It can get out of hand. just came to this revelation probably two years ago because trying to grow your company fast actually ruins marriages also. So my wife, we were, we were setting these goals and we were stressing out over it because we weren’t hitting them. Um, and then we were getting into fights over and over again. And so we kind of came to an agreement that we were just grow the company, whatever happens, happens grow gradually because fast growth really is painful. You’re right. It is, it is much better since.

10:18
Sorry, go ahead. No, was just gonna say, just our relations have been much better since we kind of came to that agreement regarding our e-commerce business. Yeah, smart. mean, and it’s, you know, it’s like there is this, I call it eternal vigilance, which is the skill set that I think is needed in order to run a business yourself that’s on the internet where you are the entrepreneur who’s responsible for it and also maintain a healthy balance.

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between your outside life and your work because it’s available to you at all times. It’s not like you go to the office and you leave the office and okay, now that’s gone. Like no, the opportunity to continue the mental game of what can I do to improve my business is available to you at all times. And if you’re not careful and you don’t actually set boundaries, real clear boundaries, and then show up to those on a daily basis the same way you have to show up to a diet or a workout program or a relationship, then…

11:15
You’re gonna it’s just gonna fill it’s gonna be the backdrop of your entire life it’s gonna fill every waking moment and a lot of people get caught in that trap and ultimately burn out or Find themselves no longer interested because they’ve just they treated it as a sprint rather than a marathon I think the ability to set work-life boundaries where it’s like, okay from you know 7 30 a.m. Or whenever I wake up to 10 a.m I’m moving my body doing a meditation having breakfast with my family enjoying myself whatever and then 10 a.m. I start work and then

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5 p.m. I’m done and then at 5 p.m. I go on I Engage in my social life and I do my hobbies and I spend time with my family I set it down if you can’t pick it up and set it down deliberately and I’m not saying that there’s not times where you’re in launch mode and you’re just working for weeks at a time sure but I just mean in general as a rule of thumb if you don’t have the ability to Pick up and set down the operation in that way It’s gonna be very very hard for you over time is what I’ve learned But you can’t really do that effectively without a team. So when did you actually make that transition?

12:13
Yeah, I think I think you can I think you can set your your your energetic Boundaries where you are creating space in your life for your personal life your social life your physical body Things of that nature I think you can do that even when you’re a solopreneur and my journey was I was basically a solopreneur where I was me doing it everything myself I mean the whole thing and you know when you and I got started the game was

12:40
American drop shippers and search engine optimization and like Yahoo stores, you know, it was a little bit simpler of a game, but that’s what it was, you know, and I played that myself from round about 2005 until I hired my first team member in 2009 to do customer support. And then I basically still did everything myself and just had one team member all the way through 2012 when I sold that my drop shipping businesses.

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That was the wig business. that was the costume wig business. But yeah, then basically after in 2012 when I started blogging and also selling services, I hired my cousin. I said, hey man, listen, I will pay you 12 bucks an hour to learn how to code. And then once you know how to code, I’ll pay you 20 bucks an hour and you can be a coder for me. And so as of 2012, basically, you know, from 2012 to 2014, I probably hired two or three people a year. And then 2014 to now, I’ve just kind of gone buck wild.

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Yeah, because you got your hands in a lot of pots, so to speak. So it be impossible if you were doing the implementation, right? Yeah, I’m doing a lot of the sort of ideation of reading the market and figuring out what’s going to be well received of checking what people do and giving feedback. I don’t do a lot of actual and it’s hard sometimes. I’m like, what am I even doing around here? You know, but it is, you know, it’s important for someone to hold the container in the vision and, you know, be

14:07
crossing all the T’s and dotting the I’s, sort of checking everything. Yeah. So switching gears a little bit, can we talk about some of the challenges that you faced recently with Boom in the last year or so? Yeah, I mean, I can get into that if you want. I could just go on a run unless you have a specific question. Well, I’ll interrupt you. Why don’t you tell everyone what happened first in case they don’t know? And then, OK. Well, the ultimate sort of hex that everyone has laid on them in society is that you’re going to die one day.

14:34
And that sort of awareness of your impending death is, you know, something that causes midlife crisis crises. It’s something that is used to sell you every for everything under the sun. You know what I mean? Anti-age and health stuff. And like it’s it’s it’s something that we all have to confront as human beings that one day this ride is going to be over if we’re like everyone else or who knows what happens. But but existence as we know it now may not be around. And

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What I had happen to me, just introducing that topic, the idea of death and how scary that is, is my business partner, who was also the ambassador slash face of my company on every product page, every email was coming from her, I mean that whole thing sort of suddenly passed away really abruptly on like, you know, we knew she was sick and then basically seven days later she was gone. so that- I didn’t realize it was that quick.

15:32
Yeah, well what happened was she’d had one bout with cancer two years prior, so three years ago, and she’d gotten really close to the door, you know, she’d gotten really close and then she made a full recovery. mean, she was a hundred percent back, I mean, fully. And then generally when these things come back, they don’t come back better. So we thought it was like totally clear, all good. And then boom, we found out about a year ago to the day almost, hey,

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this thing is back and then within seven days she had passed. So, you know, that was really traumatic for me on a mental, emotional, spiritual level in that Cindy was a very close friend of mine. She was like a groomsman in my wedding. You know, I moved to New York, or grooms person, grooms woman, whoever. I moved to New York when I was 17 to play poker for a living after getting out of high school and I moved in with her and she kind of like…

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You know, lived with her for a few years before kind of going on my own in the city. So she kind of like was a jumping step between teenage years to young adult years for me. And yeah, so we were like really, really close friends. And so, you know, that was tough. She was a much like a second mother figure in a lot of ways for me. And then also, you know, just from the practical side of it, like sort of setting that down, the practical side of.

16:53
The business operations were rough too in that I mean she wasn’t very involved from an operational perspective I had been running the company forever and she actually hadn’t been on a video or audio For two years because when she first got sick we realized hey, you know Maybe it’s a it’d be good to diversify the representation of our brand rather than it just being from one person’s voice make it about the experience of all women so we had actually started that process, but there were things like

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The community of women who were our customers were very used to hearing from her given that all of our emails were coming from her. She was doing all of the product demonstrations. All of our Facebook front end ads were leading with her story and her doing product demos. Our team, which is 30 people or something at Boom, was very worried that we were going to go under or fire them. I mean it was just chaos. We had to very quick, we had to announce her death.

17:45
You know publicly because she was a public figure and it was starting to get picked up by news outlets and that proved to be an issue with you know her family it was just like it was and it was mad it was the most intense period in my business career by a pretty far long shot and Is that when you came to this revelation of having more fun with your business and not you always yeah, I’ve always been in the

18:14
You know one of my mantras in life is fun is the goal and love is the way like I think that that I’ve always been I think that success is a very popular but less fulfilling game than having fun and I’m really into success and wealth creation and all this stuff that Society will tell you is the way to go, but I’m not in it to the detriment of my pleasure in my life because you know I have I was raised by a bunch of hippies and so I kind of had that I grew up on a commune

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mindset that you It that we that you can only give from your own surplus and so if you want to be You know my tagline in business. It’s serve the world unselfishly and profit and if you want to be of service Which is my goal I really do then you must first and foremost Take care of yourself because you cannot pour from an empty cup So I’ve always had this goal of enjoying myself taking care of myself making sure that I am

19:09
energetically sound that I can show up and give and so I’ve always kind of been on that path and yeah, I mean that you know when when someone close to you dies it is very intense and you’ve you you reassess Everything like what am I doing? Why am I doing it? What is the point of all this? Like, you know, you really go through that intense sort of introspection about Your behaviors and actions and what is motivating them? Are they motivated by ego? Are they motivated by the desire to?

19:37
Please people are that like what am I what am I actually doing here? See I went through all that man and and on the practical side of it You know the the announcement of her death to our community the rewriting of all the email sequences the modifying of all of our front-end Facebook ads that the Removing Cindy from all of our product. I mean it was like the reassuring my team that we weren’t gonna go under you know I mean the whole thing was was very Emotionally draining and I felt that like it’s now

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August she passed in July of last year and I feel like from July to like January was triage and then the first three months of this year was like, okay, things are kind of like getting back to normal and then now like the last three months I feel like I fully like sort of digested as much as you can. mean, mourning is a whole thing and trauma is a thing and who knows I’m not educated enough in the area of, you know, trauma to understand. I don’t know what lingering effects that stuff causes, but

20:35
I feel pretty sound from it. And we’re having our best year ever from That’s what I was going to say. You had your best year ever and it continues to grow. I follow you and I know you’ve used Facebook ads, Google ads, email marketing, all that stuff over the years. I was just curious, what has been your primary source of growth in the past year despite all of this trauma? Well, I think the diversification of having our…

21:04
Front-end Lee sort of lead in customer generating strategies not being a hundred percent focused around Cindy has opened us up to be Well received by perhaps women that maybe weren’t resonating with her because now we lead with a variety of women We’ve also discovered that there’s some reverse ageism in our market where you know women in their 60s Don’t want to have a woman in her 40s or 50s telling them about aging so we’ve kind of been able to mix up who is presenting on behalf of our company and that seems to have worked and also

21:34
You know through the process of reassessing every area of the company product cost of goods advertising email strategy, you know repeat just we kind of went through every and one thing that I don’t know that I ever told you was you know before Cindy with the first time she got sick I went to her and I said hey listen, you know, like Do you really want to be doing this? Like how you know you got sick and and and you really almost died and so

22:04
I just want to you know have the conversation of I mean I know I do all the operations in the business but like I want to have the conversation of like Are you interested in continuing this ride or should we sell this company now? Because it’s worth a lot and you know You could then be set for life and take care of your kids and all that and maybe it’s time to end this ride like you know a death scare as I said has you evaluate everything and she said you know what so we got on board about that and we got really close we got all the way through the process of

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due diligence, a buyer, the whole thing, and the deal was about to happen and she passed away. And then those people backed out. And then I wasn’t thinking about selling the company after she passed. I was just trying to maintain stasis. But I also think that the process of going through, and I would recommend the Quiet Light brokerage podcast, your podcast, e-commerce fuel podcast, to listen to folks who’ve almost sold their businesses and hear the things that you do when you go through a due diligence process and you sort of kick every tire.

22:59
I think having done that exercise of, we’re going to sell this thing, understanding all the things that affect valuation, profitability, things of that nature that I didn’t have a lot of attention on before, even though I had sold the business, and then having a year of operating after that, I think that also was a big factor in why we’re growing. But yeah, mean, our Facebook ads performed extremely well January, February, and March. We’ve introduced a bunch of new products, which has been really great. think one of the keys to scale

23:27
once you have a company that’s been around a while is to introduce three or four new products a year that you can cross sell to your past customers, buyers, and subscribers. So I feel like we’ve done a lot of stuff right. Can we talk about more specifically what your process of kind of reevaluating all the different aspects of the business were? Yeah, I mean, so when you’re looking at selling a company, there’s a number of factors that go into the valuation that you’ll receive.

23:54
One of them is repeat business, right? So what’s your return rate? So if your return rate is, you know, 50 % instead of 30 % or 20%, you’ll end up with a higher valuation. One of them is profitability. So how much profit do you actually generate? Your multiple will usually be a percentage of profit. And, you know, one of them is diversification of visibility and customer source. So like we did a bunch of things. We

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renegotiated with all of our suppliers. We switched suppliers in certain cases. We changed out our packaging. Like we did things to increase our margins on the products that we were selling. We raised our prices and we ran a price raise sale, which was the best sale we’ve ever done. We made half a million dollars in two days just by telling our community, hey, our prices are going up by 10 % in a week and you can buy at the current prices now with a 10 % discount. we got, you we haven’t ever raised our prices. And as the company gets bigger, things like

24:49
you know, inventory and salary and our costs rise and so we have to raise our prices. So we raised our prices and so we did things to increase our margins. How did you know how much to raise the price and how did you know that you weren’t at like some limit in terms of just price? So we split, so on our two front end offers, so I only have two things that people buy from me when they find me for the first time. Then those are my cosmetic sticks. They come to me for that. It’s a lot easier to sell.

25:16
than it is to sell like skincare, for example, because everyone has skincare. But the skincare is the back end, right? What we sell to people already know us. So the two items that are the front end offers, we split tested the changes in pricing from a low change, a medium change to a very drastic high change. And ultimately, raising the front end price of our products by $10 would have ended up increasing the profit the most significantly, but it was cutting down too much on customers that were coming in the door.

25:46
a goal of not only profitability but also a big footprint because one of the other things that affects your valuation is literally how big your audience is and how much revenue you generate, not just how much profit you make. So all three price tests won against our control and we went with the medium raise on the front end. The back end products, which is our all 14 other of our skincare products, we just raised by a flat 10 % across the board and we didn’t even test it and it’s been fine because those people

26:13
already know us, like us, engage with our content, and are gonna buy from us because they like us, not because they’re price sensitive. And so we kind of were in the medium end of the market in terms of what we were charging, and now we’re more at the higher end of the market. so front end products that are for customer acquisition, I would recommend that you split test that, but your back end cross-sells, you can usually get away with five or 10 % without much of a problem. Interesting. I actually didn’t even know that about your business. So you had this like one lead-in product.

26:41
that just opens up. have two lead in products. and it’s like my whole schtick is simplify your makeup routine, know, color cosmetics. It’s it’s make cosmetics are what gets people’s attention and then everything else I sell is basically a back end upsell cross sell and a lot of businesses are that way where they’ve kind of got like one fly, especially businesses that are driven by direct response. I if you’re an Amazon brand, sure you got a million products you sell but.

27:07
And if you’re a Google, if you’re, if you’re driven by direct response, but it’s search traffic, you generally have a whole bunch of products you sell because you’ve got a bunch of different queries. But if you’re driven by story based direct response where you’re telling a story, engaging a subscriber in a conversation and then offering them something, you usually have one or two products that are the real like 85, 90 % of what you sell on the front end. And then everything else tends to be a backend upsell cross sell to people who came in from one of those funnels and heard about you. And, um, you know,

27:35
Pretty much every business that I’ve evaluated that is this same kind of business has a similar story to that. So in terms of increasing your repeat business, what did that involve specifically? It involved running more sale events. So we now do six a year. It involved introducing more products. we’ve kind of ramped up the product launches work. I there’s a reason Apple does them. There’s a reason Amazon does them. There’s a reason that people do them. We started building anticipation rather than just, we used to just say, hey, we’ve got a new product. Here it is. Now we spend two weeks.

28:05
saying, hey, this product is coming, building up excitement for it, doing ads and emails, talking about what it’s gonna be. And then we release it. And we’ve literally doubled the effectiveness of our product launches just by adding a two week anticipation funnel on the front end of the product launch. Which I share that on the Zipify blog and the Smart Marketer blog, how we do that. But I mean, excitement works. If someone’s paying attention to you and there’s an opportunity for them to…

28:30
follow along and get excited about something and sign up for it and then get a few emails saying it’s coming. I mean they’re much more likely to convert rather than hey we introduced a new you know moisturizer that helps for after you’ve been in the sun. I mean that’s nowhere near as compelling as giving the opportunity for someone to be excited. So in terms of getting people excited in terms of just running Facebook ads are these just awareness ads or are they are you trying to get

28:54
And email. Yeah. So for product launches, they’re 95 % people who have either been on our email list or bought for us from us in the past. We still, do run a lead gen on our product launches to build anticipation for them to cold as well, but it doesn’t really convert that well. So really our product launches are about monetizing the community that we have. And then for Facebook lead gen, we’re still leading with our, our flagship products and our customer acquisition, Facebook customer acquisition. And you know, we’re constantly changing up our,

29:23
video formulas and testing different articles and doing everything we can to reduce our customer acquisition costs for sure. But you asked specifically about repeat business and one of the main things done for that in addition to improving our content marketing significantly. I we release four posts a week. We’ve got two writers on staff. I invest about a million dollars a year in non-branded

29:50
content marketing that’s designed to engage my community. And I think once you get bigger and you have a front end customer acquisition funnel that is bringing you customers, the game of keeping those folks engaged through content that they’re enjoying and being entertained by is a big part of scale.

30:09
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30:36
Now that is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council. They have a package service called Total TM, which provides the same attention to detail and process that large law firms do at a fraction of the price. Now for me personally, I like Emerge Council because of their philosophy. Their goal is to maximize IP protection while minimizing the price. So before you decide to register a trademark by yourself or file for other IP protection, such as a copyright or a patent, check out Emerge Council first and get a free consult.

31:06
For more information, go to emerge council.com and click on the Amazon sellers button and tell Steve that Steve sent you to receive a hundred dollar discount on the total TM package for Amazon sellers. Once again, that’s merged council.com over at EMERGECOUNSEL.com. Now back to the show. Let’s talk about content marketing a little bit. Are you writing primarily to tell a story or are you writing for

31:35
the intention of ranking in search? do no, nothing is with the goal of search engine optimization. Not a single thing is with the goal of ranking. I mean, yes, we rank and we get organic traffic and we do put, you know, meta title tags and meta descriptions and maybe an H1, but there’s no keyword for thought before we create our content. Our content is all, you know, eight skincare tips for aging skin.

32:00
or how I overcame perfectionism or my battle with anorexia and what I did about it. Experiences that the women in our community are having, we’re talking about them. Women are going through their hair graying, their skin wrinkling, their hormones changing through menopause, their skin changing, all this kind of stuff. Dating after a divorce is a big one for women who are in their 50s. mean, there’s a lot of experiences that they’re having that we can talk about and we’re doing that in a number of ways. We’re writing articles. We’ve got a new ambassador program where we’re allowing our customers to

32:29
create videos about our products and also about their makeup routines. And so we’ve got a bunch of different pillars that we talk about. Sustainability is a big one. You know, how we are sustainable, why we’re sustainable, what we do in that direction. We have these sort of content pillars that we create regular content within a given sort of framework, know, tips, lifestyle stuff, ambassador stuff, sustainability stuff. You can go to the boom by Cindy Joseph blog, uh, and which, which will, which will about.

32:57
next week be on Zipify pages, my landing page builder for Shopify. We just released blogging and we’re switching it over. We currently have a WordPress implementation for our blog, but managing both WordPress and Shopify and the cross-domain tracking and the lack of, I mean, it’s just a nightmare. So we built this really sweet blog integration on Zipify pages and we’ve moved the boom blog over there and it’s about to go live. I’m pretty excited about it. But yeah, so that’s kind of like what we do for content. So what’s funny about that is when you’re articles, I guess that

33:25
Without the intention of ranking in search a lot of times those articles kind of get buried deep within the blog eventually right? So are you doing a lot of things to bring that content back to people or we we do remail on it? We remail you know any any article we track what articles and videos perform the best in terms of click-through rate engagement and purchase rate because people buy from these things too even though they don’t aren’t going to Content or aren’t going to products you can get to the our products once you get to our blog So it’s a big part of how we monetize

33:54
is keeping this content coming and anything that works, any good article, if it’s a really good one, we’ll turn it into a front end pre-sell article and run it to new subscribers and prospects. So we will use our current list to determine what is the best content and then we’ll take that and we’ll run that top of funnel. We will re-mail on our best posts, we’ll put our best ones in our email automation sequences, but a lot of our stuff just gets buried on the blog and is never used again. That does happen a lot.

34:23
So a lot of this really is just building a community, word of mouth, and social is probably your primary strategy, mainly because you’re in the cosmetics business, I would say, right? Yeah, I mean, we amplify that content. So any content, our blogs and videos and articles, our Facebook fans will see it, our subscribers will see it, we’ll amplify it on Google. So we’re paying to push that content out once it’s out there, we’re running ads to it, and we’re also emailing our list. And the idea is, you know, people get 150 emails a day, so.

34:50
We send three or four content emails a week and that generates 40 grand a week in revenue for us. Those aren’t sale emails. And then every four to six weeks we’ll either introduce a product or run, or sorry, we’ll introduce product four times a year, three or four times a year. But every six weeks or so there’s either a product launch or a sale or something like that where we have a big monetization of our community. So the content is responsible for, it definitely ROIs at a very, very solid,

35:20
number based on how much money we spend to produce it and amplify it and how well it has our see what happens is your sales work better right if you’re keeping your your community engaged if they’re seeing content from your brand in their news feeds and on Facebook and on Google and on YouTube and on display network then when you run a sale and they see sale ads they’re much more likely to engage with them so our sales work way better because we have this content strategy

35:45
I’ve heard you and Molly Pittman give a number of webinars about Facebook ads and how advertising is just getting a lot more expensive. What are some of the trends that you’ve been seeing and how have you countered them? Some of the negative trends, I should say. I mean, since we’ve been online, Steve, I think advertising costs have gone up on average 15 % year over year. Oh, yeah, actually more than that for me in some cases. Yeah. Yeah, me too. You know, I don’t think it’s going to change. And, you know, I think that there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do. And I think one of the biggest opportunities is short form.

36:14
video content, so sub 15 second video ads on Instagram stories, Facebook, mid roll videos, Facebook. I think if you’re not doing short form in addition to whatever normal video ads you might be running, then you are definitely missing out on the cheap inventory at the moment because that’s where all the cheap inventory is. Of course, you also have to have the longer form videos and what most people aren’t doing is also mixing in image ads, GIF animation ads and carousel ads because you know, Facebook is only going to show

36:44
user a video ad a few times it’ll show it but it’ll show that same user if you’re targeting let’s say a lookalike of your buyers or something or even just you know people who are fans of Ezra Firestone digital marketer or whatever you know what I mean if targeting any group of people and you have multiple types of creative images videos gifts short form long form carousels that prospect in that targeting group will see more ads from you because you have more diverse

37:11
sort of ad creative that Facebook is willing to show them. In addition to that, most people only run conversion focused ads designed to generate either add to cart events, purchase events, or even email leads. If you’re only ever running conversion ads, again, Facebook’s only gonna show a certain amount of conversion ads to every prospect. If you also have 10 % of your budget in brand awareness, in dynamic product ad or catalog sales, in Messenger,

37:38
where you’re clicking the messenger. Like if you’re using different objectives within the platform, even at a small percentage of your budget, you’ll reach way more people in your audience because those objectives have a much lower cost per thousand people, CPM, cost per impression. even though you’re spending less of your budget on these other objectives, you’re actually reaching way more people than you would if you were just using only conversion focused ads. Let me ask you this. I mean, your team is like over hundred people now.

38:06
And to do across three different companies and fair. Yeah, so, you know, it sounds really fancy, but I want to just give transparency into that, which is 40 of those 100 people are on the development team for Zipify. So that’s a big chunk of folks. And we rather develop a whole and that is my only physical location. All the developers are in one place. And then, you know, let’s say 20 on boom and then, you know, essentially it’s almost like 20 boom, 30 Zipify and

38:35
10 or 15 smart markers, of mixed up in that way. I was just going to say, to create the number of creatives necessary to do all this testing on Facebook, Instagram, short stories and whatnot, it kind of requires a lot of effort on your part. So if you don’t have a large team, would be your recommendations for kind of like a more bare bones approach? Yeah, and I mean, I think that’s another kind of limiting belief. With Boom, for example, we have like

39:05
five videos that we’ve been running for the last like two years. mean, yes, we mix them up and edit them in different ways. You don’t actually need a lot of creative. You just need good creative. And so one video editor or one graphic designer is actually plenty and you can freelance that. You you can hire a freelance video editor and you can shoot videos on your iPhone or you can hire a freelance designer and make GIFs and images. And basically you can run the same thing for months and months and months until it stops working.

39:34
Or if you’re spending a lot of money, yeah, then you’ve got to refresh your ads quite often. But if you’re spending less than four or five hundred bucks a day, you don’t need to refresh your ads that often. mean, Zipify, for example, you’re probably seeing the same Zipify ads that were running four months ago running now because I’m only spending, let’s see, you know, 50 bucks a day or something amplifying Zipify. So you don’t need actually that much creative. It’s more about.

40:00
quality creative that’s going to engage the particular audience and yeah, you got to test that. So when you’re first launching, you might need to try three or four different videos, five different videos, a couple different images, but you only need one team member in that role to support that. So for Zipify, I only have one designer. For Boom, I only have one designer, although I also have a video editor. SmartMarketer, I also have a designer and a video editor, so I have two. But you could freelance those roles. could buy that on an as needed basis.

40:29
through service providers. This is actually a question, this is kind of a different type of question, but I’ve always wondered how Zipify kind of falls into your overall strategy. Is it just because you were doing all these things with Zipify with Boom, like the equivalent functionality that you decided to create this SaaS company? So I, yeah, I believe in permaculture as a business model, and permaculture is a farming term, and what it means essentially is to reuse all of your resources to their greatest benefit.

40:59
capture the rainwater, water the garden, take the chicken shit, use it for the compost. Like take all your food scraps and use those for the compost. Use everything that you can to further your goal. And a lot of people think that they need stuff outside of what they already have, but they just haven’t taken inventory of the assets that are actually around them. And so this is a rule that I live my life by instead of looking outside of what I already have access to.

41:26
Let me look at what I have access to and how I can better utilize that. And if you look at my business model, it’s very permaculture. Um, take a look at this. It’s like, okay, I innovate in the direction of e-commerce first and foremost with boom and any other e-commerce business I’ve had over the years. Then I take whatever works and I document that and I share that on my blog with smart marketer and I offer that to business owners and I create courses that are in depth and I sell that. And then I take the money from those courses and I put it back into the e-commerce business. And then

41:55
I was also back since, I mean, 2011, 2012, doing development services. I was building websites for people on Magento, OS Commerce, XCart, PrestaShop. I understand the e-commerce customer journey and also the technology that powers that from the early days of before Shopify, BigCommerce, and Volusion were the big three, from the Magento days, the Yahoo Store days, the XCart days, the PrestaShop days.

42:24
I’ve been in this industry and I’ve also had a mind for development. Now, granted, I’m not the greatest developer myself, but I, I know how everything talks to, to, I know how every piece of technology talks to every other piece of technology to create the customer buying journey. And I I’ve always sold services. I had an AdWords services agency from 2008 to 2012. I had a Shopify, um, and sort of every other platform development agency from 2011 to 2015. And with services,

42:54
I failed miserably. mean, it may be my worst ever business venture. I had a real hard time in my life, setting boundaries in general, and that spilled over into my services agency. And I think I sold three or four million dollars in services and made like 30 grand in profit, maybe, because like what would happen is I’d sell someone a website and then they’d come back and say, hey, can you do this? And I’d be like, sure. And I go back to my developers, hey man, we need to do this, you know.

43:22
And basically I just never figured out how to really set a container around a sale. So I was just like doing stuff for people like forever because I didn’t, yeah, I didn’t quite have a command of boundaries, which is something I had to learn. And that’s something that served me well since I have picked up on how to do that in a way that feels good to the person I’m setting the boundary with. But when I, so I’ve always done development and sold development and I only stopped because I couldn’t figure out how to make it work, but I always.

43:51
thought it was a good business and thought I could do well in it, but I didn’t love so much talking to people or being the person. Yeah, I’m a charismatic hermit, man. I want to be in my cave making stuff and then come out to your event for two days and then go back to the top of the mountain where I get to be alone and make things. I I’m not the best service provider because I don’t want to talk to the client. But what I discovered, so I was taking a look at the Shopify ecosystem and I actually,

44:20
In 2014, I created a WordPress plugin for Amazon business owners, maybe it was 2013, that allowed you to do the one-time giveaway coupons where you could give a product away for a dollar and give them a coupon and this and that. That was kind of the strategy for ranking on Amazon back then. And so this WordPress plugin allowed you to collect an email address, give them a one-time Amazon coupon, follow up with them, build a landing page. It was a pretty sweet little plugin called Booster Page. And I think I spent like 30 grand to make it.

44:47
and about 380,000 in revenue on it. So it was extremely profitable and it was a monthly subscription. Of course I had to keep it up to date, but the update of the development, you know, was not that much. And so basically I was like, oh, so the way that you make development work is you don’t sell a one-time fee, you sell a subscription, you do software as a service. And so once I figured out the software as a service model, I’d always had the goal of when it, you know, I want to get back into the development game and I want to do it as a

45:16
product rather than you are buying me and my time and my consulting, you are buying this product that I’ve created that is essentially thousands of lines of code that create an experience for you when you log into it and do things to help you. But you’re not buying Ezra, you’re buying this individual product that you pay for on a monthly basis. So I liked the idea of recurring revenue of selling development and yeah, I mean, I am developing things for my site all the time and anything that works, I roll into my landing page builder or I roll into my upsell builder. So

45:46
Essentially, it’s permaculture all over again because I’m taking what’s working for me and my students in my mastermind and I’m developing that into the application and open sourcing that for my customers who can buy that on a monthly subscription. But what I underestimated was how difficult that business model is, is far and away the most difficult business I have ever been involved in by a factor of 15 or something. It’s very resource intensive too, right? It’s so hard. It’s like so, so hard. But

46:16
It’s really fun. It’s kind of a never ending spiral of integrations and madness and Shopify changes something and just like it’s crazy. Uh, and the product is amorphous. It’s like with boom, I’m selling a tub with goo in it. And when I, when I, when I scale, it’s like more tubs, more goop, more labels and ship them. mean, it’s really great goo and it’s amazingly well made and all. It’s a really wonderful product, but it’s very simple. Um, zipify is like a code base that’s always changing. And so like,

46:46
I don’t need just a manufacturer and then someone to ship it. I need front-end engineers, back-end engineers, QAs, project manager. I mean, it’s crazy. The product side of it is very, very difficult. How do you actually allocate your time between your three businesses? You know, I kind of do what is needed when it’s needed. I mean, that doesn’t give you good answer, but each business has a project manager who is responsible for all ongoing operations who you could label essentially a COO.

47:15
And then I have a president who kind of swings across all companies and is sort of like dipping in to the key projects when needed. And he’s really great. And so, you know, I might spend a week or two working only on boom and then a week or two working only on smart marketer. I might have a week where I do, you know, all of them in the same day. So it’s just kind of like as needed. But each of the companies at this point has very strong leadership and a very clear and cohesive direction and ongoing operations. And so we’re no longer, none of them.

47:45
are any longer in the startup phase where it’s like, we don’t really know what we’re doing. It’s all chaos. It’s like every one of them has consistent ongoing clear operations and objectives and team members. And, know, with smart marketer, had a big change because I was both the lead educator and also the lead kind of person who was doing strategy and content and all this stuff. And I found that as boom scaled and as zipify scaled,

48:13
I was no longer having time and energy to keep the courses up to date. And so with smart marketer, I’ve kind of transitioned to the main thing that we sell or the main thing people want to buy from us is training on paid advertising. And I’m really good at teaching that because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but Molly Pittman is also really good, if not better at teaching that. And so she’s now come on board to be the lead advertising educator, which has kind of freed me up. And then I’ve got Colleen Taylor teaching a course for me, Brett Curry teaching a course for me. So

48:42
Now with SmartMarketer, I’m no longer the one responsible for the courses, even though here and there I will do a course and I really like it, but it’s more like I am the guy who’s out there speaking on stages and generating awareness, because I can do that better than anyone else, getting people to know about us, and then the monetization or the product side of it is done by other folks, which is kind of cool. Okay, yeah, that makes total sense, Ez, I want to be respectful of your time here. We’ve been chatting for like 45 minutes.

49:11
Where can people find you? Where can people check out your products and see for themselves what you’ve been up to? That’s I got a little sidetracked there because I was going to go on another tangent about something. But go on the tangent. Go for it, man. Well, it just, you know, was going to say that I think what you do is super cool. You know, you do this podcast and you also run a bit. We have very similar businesses. And I think that this that in today’s world, anyone who wants to do something

49:41
and then talk about what they’re doing and share that and share tips has this opportunity to be an influencer. I mean, maybe a micro influencer, but an influencer to a group of people who are sharing a collective experience who are interested in getting better at that experience over time. And I think that there’s a lot of rewarding things that are available when you build a community around a given topic. not only can you monetize that community by selling products, but like then

50:07
you make friends with people in that community and like it’s just a super cool thing to do. And I just wanted to like anyone who’s listening to this, who maybe has considered the potential of putting themselves out there and starting a Instagram handle or a YouTube channel. Like I could not recommend it more highly. And, and you know, you’re talking from someone who’s pretty much introverted, even though that is not my public persona and I’m really good at turning it on on stage and being my authentic self and sharing that. like in general in my life,

50:35
I’m not like, if I get into a big room of people at a party, like I don’t know how to handle that situation super well. I like smaller groups, so I just think that this opportunity is available to anyone. I can definitely agree with that. Nothing ever bad has ever happened from creating content. Nothing bad can, only good things can happen. Totally. As long as you keep it up on a consistent basis. Consistency is the key. So you can reach me at

51:00
at Ezra Firestone on Instagram. That seems to be the hottest place right now. I can tell because it used to be when I spoke at events, I would get Facebook likes, know, a couple hundred Facebook likes. I don’t mention my, my, I don’t say go follow me, but I would just watch. And then like a couple of years ago, it was like all of a sudden I was getting followers on Twitter. And now every event, I literally get no Facebook followers, no Twitter followers, but I’ll get hundreds of Instagram followers. So it seems that Instagram is like kind of the go-to platform at the moment. So you can find me, uh,

51:29
at Ezra Firestone on Instagram or you can go to my blog smartmarketer.com or if you’re a Shopify person you can go to the Shopify app store and type in Zipify, Z-I-P-I-F-Y. You know it’s funny Ezra, we are very similar in what we do and SaaS is missing from my portfolio and I actually was thinking about doing a SaaS company for a long time but just after talking with you and a bunch of other people like my kids are my primary priority and it seems like it’s all consuming.

51:57
It’s in the first year to 18 months, it’s a very big cycle. But I will tell you, one of the ways to look at this, Steve, from one of the things I’m looking at, and I think this is the last run I will go on, but I think it’s really important. I think the game that we are playing is resource generation. And I think that a lot of people will say, what are we doing? Well, we’re optimizing our businesses so that they’re more profitable and perform better over time. But it’s like, yeah, but for what? To generate.

52:22
as much resource as we can in the time that we have to work and then to use that resource towards causes that we find noble, taking care of our families, supporting our communities, serving the world and taking care of the world. when we look at what are the most effective ways to generate resource, I’m looking at, most people look only three to six to nine months ahead. I’m looking at, I think you need to look further. I’ve got 20 years left at this pace. I’m 32, I’ll be 33 in a couple of months. I’m not gonna be working at this pace.

52:49
much later than my early 50s and then I’m going to be slowing way down, I think. So, okay, I got 20 years, right? And I have some high revenue goals and profitability goals and wealth creation goals because I have a lot of direct people in my family of where I was raised. I got 60 hippies to support. I got a lot of people I’d like to take care of. got a lot of things I want to do in the world that require large amounts of resource. So, as I understand it and have looked at the game of wealth creation, it’s

53:18
You know, cash flow businesses do not, will not get you there if the goal is massive amounts of wealth creation, which is a fun goal to have. And if you’re going to play the game, why not have that goal? So what gets you there is asset liquidation. So the monetization of assets that you own and have equity in, and then the deployment of that capital into the market to acquire other assets, let them appreciate and then liquidate those. And the most common way to do this in the

53:45
you know, 70s through today has been through real estate, right? Take your money, buy an asset, let it appreciate, sell it. But I think that, you know, the way that I am playing this game is to either purchase, operate and grow businesses and then liquidate them or build, operate and grow businesses and then liquidate them and then use that money to deploy in the marketplace. And when I looked at smart marketer, smart marketer is a cashflow business. You could never sell it. It’s built around my persona. So what was a way that I could

54:12
create an asset from this community that I have gathered around my persona who I am serving, well, Zipify could be sold one day. Zipify is an asset and the beauty of a SaaS business is the multiple that you will receive on the SaaS business is even higher than the multiple you receive on an e-commerce business because SaaS businesses are generally valued for a multiple of revenue, whereas e-commerce businesses are generally valued for a multiple of profit. So I do think at some point,

54:39
If you have the community and the desire and the skill set and the, you know, interest, it’s not a bad experiment because it would result in a very valuable asset, uh, even if it’s very small. mean, let’s say you built up a small little app that wasn’t super complex. You only needed a couple of developers for, and it only made a hundred grand a year. I mean, that could end up being worth between 500,000 and a million dollars free and clear liquid in your pocket. Uh, if you ever were to monetize that asset, which is a

55:07
a huge sum of money in liquid cash. especially considering even if you have a million dollars in liquid cash, you can put a hundred or two hundred of that thousand down towards the acquisition of an asset and take a loan. mean, it affords you opportunity that not having large sums of money doesn’t afford you. I know you already know all this, but I’m just saying it for the audience. And this is just something like our mutual buddy, Drew Sinaki does all the time. Exactly. So anyways, I think you should do it maybe someday.

55:35
Thanks, well we’ll catch up at the mini chat conference. I’m eager to hang out with you. Yeah, looking forward to it. Hey man, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. Thanks a lot for coming on. Take care. Hope you enjoyed that episode with Ezra, which is actually one of the favorite ones that I’ve ever recorded with him. More information about this episode, go to mywebcoderjob.com slash episode 499. And once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2024 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting,

56:04
develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. That’s SellersSummit.com. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to MyWifeQuarterJob.com and sign up for my free six-day mini course. Just type in your email and it’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.