Hunter Molzen’s Post

A lot of people might find my idea of a “vacation” a bit weird. If I’m going to take time off work - it’s going to be to do something fairly intense. Alpine rock climbing, thru-hiking, back country hunting… I’ll end my trips physically exhausted, but counter-intuitively, mentally refreshed. I’ve been an entrepreneur for pretty much my entire adult life. I never received a W-2 until I issued myself one. Which means work almost never goes away. So the act of sitting on a beach is pretty much torture. I can’t turn off work if I have a cell phone with me. And even if I found a beach without cell service, my mind keeps running. So instead I find myself drawn to “hobbies” that take 100% of my attention and focus. Maybe that’s healthy, maybe it has it’s own issues, but that’s not the actual point of this post. I’m going to be doing some long, back country hikes late this summer - and I need a new tent. An influencer I follow introduced me to the concept of “floorless” shelters that allow you to run a wood burning stove. This gives you the flexibility to stay comfortable in almost any weather - and they’re typically very light. Great concept. The influencer recommended a specific brand. It was a paid partnership, so really the brand had paid to get my attention. Now I’m in market for their product. The problem is, I’m now also instantly aware of 4-5 competitors that make similar products. And they’re all good. They all have good guarantees, long track records, great reviews, etc. But no single company is really doing anything that puts them over the top to win my business. So I’ll split hairs on features and guarantees and whatever - and make my decision. It probably won’t be the original company that got my attention. And this happens to my businesses, and your business, every. Single. Day. The wonder of the internet was that it made the barrier to starting a company, very low. The downside is that it makes discovery of your competition, very easy. So you’re essentially paying to send your competitors customers. And to some extent, it goes both ways. But if the original brand that got my attention had some sort of offer, or incentive, or ANYTHING to justify buying from them over the competitor besides the “splitting hairs” kind of stuff - I would’ve probably bought from them already. They don’t, so here I am comparison shopping. Getting attention is hard. And expensive. Once you have a prospective customer’s eyeballs, you really need to pull out all the stops to make sure they buy from you NOW. Try to go through your customer experience with an outsiders perspective, and really pick apart what dynamic you’re creating here. Unless you’re in a category of one, chances are, you’re probably sending eyeballs to your competitors unwittingly.  What would it take to win your customer NOW. Food for thought. 

Offers scale - not products. A lot of founders have trouble scaling advertising.' But funny enough - almost everyone can scale during Black Friday. Obviously, customers are spending more money during the holidays - but I think most of us miss the more obvious factor. Most businesses lack clarity in their marketing. They have a good product, with good features, but have trouble nailing down market positioning and lack a focal point offer for new customers. The Black Friday promotional period tends to cover up these mistakes with brute force. It has implied time restriction - the holidays only last long and there are baked in shipping deadlines. Implied FOMO - everyone knows stuff sells out during Black Friday And typically, a big incentive - 30% off site wide, freebies, limited edition products, etc. These are the pillars of a strong offer. Then the holidays end, their website goes back to baseline, and our ability to scale disappears. Developing a strong offer - or a series of strong offers you can rotate through the year gives your new prospects something to focus on. Lots of companies have success with “offers” by accident. Limited editions. New product releases. Collabs. Close out sales. The list goes on. But you can create these things purpose. And you can run some of them evergreen. Even better, you can test them against your baseline, and against each other to see what works the best. Customers have a lot of options. They get confused. They have trouble making decisions. Giving them something to focus on helps them narrow down their purchase decision, and gives them a goal to accomplish. Start planning your marketing calendar, and advertising with central offers in mind - and I guarantee your ability to scale your advertising will improve accordingly.

I interact with a lot of business owners, from small (~$500k/annually) to very large (~$80m annually). A common theme this year - almost everyone is struggling with growth. Particularly when it comes to paid advertising. We've been able to continue to grow Barbell Apparel's online revenue at ~30% YoY - and that's all planned. We could probably grow a bit faster, but we take the excess profits as dividends instead. It's low stress at this point - but that doesn't mean it's low work. I feel like we've had to be five times as skilled to achieve the same results that were easy 3 years ago. For a very long time - digital advertising was cheap enough, that you could simply buy ads and make up for any mistakes in the rest of your operation. In my estimation, those days are gone, and they aren't coming back. We actually have lower CPAs now than we have at almost any point in the last 5 years - but it was a ton of work to get there. And our marketing organzation is heavily diversified across channels (paid digital, paid influencer, ambassador, organic, owned, etc.) Everything gets tested. Everything gets optimized. That's the what it takes these days. People look at their cost of customer acquisition - and think there's something wrong with facebook, google, etc. but really - that CPA is most likely telling you there is something wrong with your business. And if that's off putting to you, it shouldn't be. If advertising is truly not cost effective anymore - then we're all screwed. But if the problem is in the business itself, that is something within your power to fix. I've audited dozens (maybe hundreds) of businesses at this point - and I almost always find the same or similar problems. Lack of optimization in: the offer, AOV, CLV, funnel strategy, creatives, etc. Once those things get fixed - things tend to fall in line when it comes to CPA, ability to scale, etc. Granted - depending on your company, some of those problems could be very difficult or long term to solve. But you have to start solving them. There's nothing wrong with paid advertising - it's working as well as it ever did. But it's not cheap enough anymore to cover up a bunch of mistakes.

I had several calls with a close friend over the past couple of weeks who felt like their business was underperforming expectations. I offered to jump into the analytics - and see if I could spot any problems. After running e-com businesses for a decade and a half - I feel like I don't even see dashboards anymore. Everything just looks like code in the Matrix 😂. It took me 15 minutes to find the problem. Paid media traffic was down year over year. WAY down. Over 80% down. Budget was down as well - but the main problem is that all of the remaining budget was being shoveled into campaigns that were not well tailored to getting the business new customers. They had decent ROAS numbers on the dashboard - but the actual effect on the business was terrible. And that's the main problem with most agency's. Most of them do not come from an operator, owner, stakeholder role. So their prime directive is to set things up, so that they can show you pretty numbers week after week - and you'll feel to afraid to fire them because you don't want the pretty numbers to go away. I gave my friend - and their agency - several videos on how to re-structure the account and how to report on numbers in a way that will be beneficial to the business. I suppose time will tell how it works out. There is no magic in advertising. Good ads, for a good product, shown to the right people. That's it. If your agency isn't making ads from scratch for you - they don't know, or influence anything that you don't. They're just a labor role. Which is fine. But do not offload your own control of the business to them because you think they are some sort of expert. At the end of the day, YOU have to be the one in control of what's happening - the agency is just a tool to help execute the strategy that's best for your business. I'll post a quick guide to holding your agency accountable in the comments since I'm at the character limit 😂

We're looking to hire a corporate sales rep, and wholesale rep for Barbell Apparel Fast growing company with great culture, benefits, and incentives. Must have experience in the apparel space. Feel free to DM me resumes, and/or send them to team@barbellapparel.com