Iain Calvert: Sometimes overthinking things just stops stuff happening. And essentially to make any improvements in profitability of your business or any changes that you want to make, you just got to go do stuff. There's a really good metric called marketing efficiency ratio, mer percentage of your net revenue you spend on advertising. If it's higher means your ads are less efficient and if it's lower it means you're going where and you probably want to spend a little bit more. So it's kind of like when you go to Woolies and you go food shopping. If you don't take a shopping list, you come home with like Nutella and donuts for dinner.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that express delivers all
Iain Calvert: you need to know in the fast
[Voiceover]: moving world of online retail.
Iain Calvert: Here's your host, Bush.
Nathan Bush: Welcome to another episode of Add to Cart. I'm Bushi and I'm joining you from the land of the Turrbal people, otherwise known as Brisbane, Australia on Add to Cart. We welcome everyone to share and listen to e commerce stories. The more diverse the better. I want to especially welcome the traditional owners and the original storytellers of the land that we are on, our indigenous and Torres Strait Islander listeners to join us in our e commerce conversations and our community. All right, full disclosure, today's guest is
[Voiceover]: a good friend of mine.
Nathan Bush: We recently caught up. He was a bit miffed as to why I hadn't invited him on Add to Cart yet.
[Voiceover]: Talk about awkward.
Nathan Bush: And apart from my lack of planning and proactivity, it was actually a no
[Voiceover]: brainer for him to join me and
Nathan Bush: share his knowledge and share some of the conversations that we've had recently on all things E commerce marketing. I think you'll really enjoy his unique view on E commerce and life. My guest today is Ian Calvert from Boom E Commerce. You might recognize Ian from his unprovoked e commerce tips on LinkedIn. He is an e commerce consultant and trainer with 20 years experience. Originally from the UK, Ian now concentrates on the Australian market and helps Aussie brands do E Com better. In today's chat, Ian shares his nifty P and L hack for working out which areas of your business you should focus on. He gets real about Google Attribution and we hear his carefully curated shopping list for buying e commerce businesses. If you want to take advantage of Ian's expertise some more beyond this chat, he is offering Add to Cart listeners a discount on his coaching, so stay tuned at the end for that code. All right, let's get into it thanks to our partner Shopify. Plus here's our conversation with Ian Calvert, consultant and trainer at Boom E Commerce.
[Voiceover]: Ian Calvert, welcome to ADD to cart. You've already made me sick in our pre chat. You've told me that you've got a hard stop because you've got to get to yoga and that you're going to Bali on Thursday. I'm not sure I like you as a guest.
Iain Calvert: I've just been the typical stereotypical digital nomad y sort of like type thing. I used to be really against it. I was like, no, I don't want to be no digital nomad. I'm a remote worker. Just lean into it. It's kind of like. Some of the stuff I've done is sort of like side hustles. I hate the term. It's awful. Is a. I got a side project, Ben. We calls it side hustle. So just lean into it and just sort of like go with it. So, yeah, I've got to go to yoga at 5:30, so. 6:30. 6:30. Yeah.
[Voiceover]: It's hard keeping up with what you've got to do. Between that. Urban surf.
Iain Calvert: Yeah, that. Look, can I just say, if anybody's listening to this and they're in Melbourne, they want to go surfing. First one's on me. Or if you're just going, let's go. Because I love that place. I'm trying to set up an event to do it. I've just got to find somebody do an event. We should do an add to CART event there.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, get me on a surfboard. That'd be hilarious.
Iain Calvert: Yeah, let's do it.
[Voiceover]: We've jumped straight in. We've known each other for a long time, so hence the casual intro. So it's nice to do this and we were talking about it and you're like, why the fuck haven't you invited me on ADD to CART yet? I'm like, I just haven't thought about it. We've had more beers since then. But I really admire what you've been doing in E commerce, both before you started, what you have now and we'll get into that, but you've obviously got a long history as a retailer and leading agencies in Australia. Focus for those who do not know Ian Calvert, the famous Ian Calvert that they've probably run into on LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera. Can you describe to people what you do and why you do it?
Iain Calvert: Yeah. I'm going to change my headline now on LinkedIn to the famous Ian Calvert, because if somebody else says it, it's true. There's this VC that I work with that he just changes his headline every time he gets like quoted or something. Yeah. Oh, look, the kind of. The short version is as you can probably tell originally from the uk, I love like white wakeboarding and surfing. It's kind of my thing. I work for agencies in the UK and then I kind of really started in my stripes when I started working for a retailer in the UK that sold skate, surf and snowboard clothing. It's called Two Seasons and I was the Ecom manager there. So I did all the digital marketing and ran the team and then we got bought by Billabong, so we became Billabong. But there I learned the fundamentals of retail, like when to discount gross margin, keeping your costs low, like all that good stuff like from a true retailer. And then I applied that to E commerce. I ended up working for a business called Reload Media that some people would know here.
[Voiceover]: So we've had Craig Somerville on the show before. Reload.
Iain Calvert: Yep, that's it. Craig, my old boss. I was actually the MC at his wedding as well, so it's funny to call him my sort of like boss. And we still stay in touch. So I headed up part of the agency there. I was in charge of SEO and the account managers and then Craig went to work in the UK and then I became the general manager. So basically I just was running the business then decided to work for Self and so since 2018 I've basically been E commerce consultant, working hands on with a handful of Ecom brands. So I literally just have a handful. So it's basically got one a day and I will help them run their business but I'll also implement all the marketing for them. So I'm really hands on with Google Ads, Facebook, building links for SEO, managing affiliates, Klaviyo, all those sort of bits and pieces, it's all kind of intertwined together and so the whole thing is kind of making them as profitable as possible basically rather than like this hyper growth spending loads on advertising. It's like really just essentially the combination of digital marketing and business applied to these individual businesses.
[Voiceover]: And how do you qualify the types of businesses that you want to work with?
Iain Calvert: So there's two sides to it. So the way I started and the way it does still work with Boom as well is that it's really funny because I help other people sort of start working for themselves. They're all worried about not getting work and like don't worry about that. There's loads worry about getting the Right.
[Voiceover]: Work.
Iain Calvert: Because the trick is if you've got shared values and what you're trying to do is you're trying to suss somebody out to see if they're going to be good to work with. Because I'm the salesperson, I'm the account manager, I'm the digital marketer. So I've got to deal with these people. So essentially I've got to like them. And a lot of them just end up becoming friends. We go surfing together and there's been some really amazing moments. Right. It's like actually, let me share one. So I was talking at Retail Fest last year and, and a client of mine, we managed to pay off their mortgage. So their whole goal was to pay off the mortgage. Kind of small family run econ business. They paid off their mortgage and then they bought an apartment on the Gold Coast. And I was doing the talk at Retail Fest and my client said to me, hey, do you want to just stay in the apartment that you help us buy? And it was opposite the road to the convention center. And I just had this really nice little moment where he sat there on the balcony talking. 20th floor up, view, like literally view straight out to the sea. And you're just like, this feels pretty good. So there, for example, I've worked with them for five years and we meet every single week and there's mutual respect.
[Voiceover]: Do you generally work with the founders direct? Like, is that who you look for?
Iain Calvert: Absolutely, yeah. And it's the same with the coaching as well, that normally what we do is we have the founder and then we have the marketer. So the founder. We're kind of. They tend to be really good at products. They might be good at marketing or something like that, but we get them across the numbers. That can be tricky to understand just by simplifying it. And then we work with the marketers to be sort of like, kind of like hands on. But essentially it's the decision maker, right. In those smaller businesses because there's lots of them in Australia and they're fascinating to work with. They're like, honestly, I learned so much from them. There's one that, I don't know. If you suffer from this, I'd be keen to know. But I used to overthink things. I would literally make spreadsheets for days, like planning something like that. And then one of them said to me, yeah, I just do more than I think. And he does some really dumb stuff. Don't get me wrong, you really got to steer. And just watching other people, I've Worked for that. Very successful. They just execute. Yeah. And I know it's like, it's a bit of a cliche. It's like, you know, go and execute stuff, do stuff. But honestly, for me, that's when anything has changed for the better. I've just done stuff. Buying that ecom business that we'll talk about. Moving to Australia was literally like, okay, there's jobs coming up in the uk. If I don't apply for something now, then it's just going to happen. Or like working remotely, it's like, cool, let's just go and do this. It's just kind of execute. Just do stuff and don't be worried about it not going well. It's like, you know, like posting on LinkedIn and stuff like that Amazing email. People that don't share stuff that they know because they're like, oh, what if I get it wrong? Or nobody reacts. It's like, oh, my God, you see some of the stuff I put up that nobody ever sees, like subtitles.
[Voiceover]: It's like, I saw the post, though, around exactly that. And I think you posted it mid January and it was about this year or. My approach is that I'm not going to go out and read a whole bunch of books. I'm paraphrasing for you, actually said it a lot better. I'm not going to go out and read a whole bunch of books, do a bunch of research. I'm just going to do. And it actually served me pretty well so far in terms of move to Australia. Started this, started this, started this, has acting on impulse and acting first without doing due diligence. In terms of your personal life, obviously it's different with clients, but in terms of decisions you've made personally, has it ever backfired?
Iain Calvert: Actually, no. It's really interesting. What happens is, is that you get yourself out of any situation you put yourself in. Anybody listening to this, think about something that's happened that you weren't sort of like happy about. Right. Or like yourself. Right. You get yourself out of it because you've got no choice. So actually what it becomes about is what situations you're willing to put yourself into. And you think about like an entrepreneur. And I do not class myself as an entrepreneur in any way, shape or form. Right. Don't identify as you say, and if you look at some of the really successful ones, they'll let you just go whack them in some situation and off they go, they're going to work it out. I think that's fundamentally an underlying confidence that you can just do things and work them out. Now, I'm not saying go and jump off like a balcony or sort of like something like that, but sometimes overthinking things, actually a lot of time overthinking things just stops stuff happening. And essentially to make any improvements in profitability of your business or any changes that you want to make, you just got to go do stuff.
[Voiceover]: Yeah,
Nathan Bush: Shopify have put together this their version of the Australian e commerce avengers. 10 e commerce experts, including me. Unfortunately, I think I'm the Hawkeye of the group to give you tips on how to set yourself up for success this year. You'll even recognize some of the contributors from past Add to Cart episodes. Mark Bartzer, Kelly Slessor, Paul Waddy, Lisa Jones and more will share tips from from how to create great discounts, how to boost conversion rates, optimize email and sms, even use AI to drive sales. It's all in there. I share how to set up your team for success. I can guarantee you will take at least two to three tips that you can use to optimize your sales this peak season. So put on your Spandex and join the E Commerce Avengers with Shopify's free Peak Season Playbook. Download it at shopify.com/forward/guides forward/peak sales season 2023or just follow the links in the episode show notes from the device you're on.
[Voiceover]: It's an interesting one because the side that I want to talk about is the conversations that you're having with founders at the moment. We're really early into 2024. I've already had a fair few conversations with founders and the overarching themes that I'm seeing is there's a sense of stuckness, if that's even a word. They just feel stuck and lacking for ideas. There's a sense of stress around profitability in that terms of sales are okay, like sales are flat or slightly growing. But profitability is a real struggle. And I think there's a sense of a bit of loneliness from a few conversations that I've had is that these founders just want people to talk to and work through their problems with. Is that what you're finding as well as you talk to founders?
Iain Calvert: It's a bit of a mixed bag. So I think that loneliness thing is forever. Like times when I've been sort of like at the top of the business. You're the only person there that's tough. That's just sort of like how it is, which is one of the really nice Things about this boom community is that essentially we just have a load of founders sort of like together, and they talk about stuff. They'll go, hey, this product failed. And I feel like this went sort of like wrong. And seems like, look, this happened to us. And there's some really magic moments there. And I think the more that those people can come together. And that's why I like any events that you've done. And I think what you're doing here is amazing because it's sort of. And I really want you to take it further, like with add to cart and more events and stuff like that, because I just don't want to organize it, basically. So there is that. So it's really interesting. I'd say there's a bit of a mixed bag. Sort of like there's quite a few founders that are. If they've managed to get a break over Christmas, they've come back and they're like, right, let's do this. Get on with it. Things slowed down last year. It's sort of like pretty tough, but there's kind of green shoots coming through. It's not. We're not out of the woods. Whereas you think about if we sum up last year, I remember the talk that I did, or the panel that I compared to global retail was sort of like, what to do if a recession comes. That was sort of like the talk.
[Voiceover]: Right.
Iain Calvert: We're not there. I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say I don't think it's going to happen. I think it would have already sort of like happened. And I think we pay too much attention to the US and the uk. We're a very different place.
[Voiceover]: I saw some stats this morning saying that there was 50% chance that rates are going to come down by June and the banks have rated it as 100% chance by September.
Iain Calvert: Right, yeah. Anyway, there was all that sort of like last year and things were tougher. It was definitely sort of like, slow. It wasn't as tough as the end of 23, I remember. Jesus. It was like October and stuff. It was just. It went. So the ones that got a break will come back and they're like, right, ready to go. There's kind of some sort of like, green shoot sort of like coming through. But then if we go to the numbers of which I do really enjoy, because I don't think it's very hard to fudge proper numbers. Conversion rate in October. And for me, conversion rate is the definition of how many people are buyers compared to window Shoppers and October conversion rate dropped. November conversion rate was pretty good. Not as good as the previous year. So year on year slightly down. Most people were up sales wise, but they were spending more on advertising to get people there. And then December conversion rates down as well. Obviously varies across different sort of like industries, but I'd say as a trend across, I probably have access to about 20 different brands intimately, sort of like with numbers and that was consistent. There's a few outliers and stuff like that. So they're sort of a little bit apprehensive, but kind of just want to get sort of like to it. And I acknowledge my bias that I'm always optimistic and the having been through the retail cycle many, many times because I'm 43 now, so I really started sort of like when I was like 23. So we're going on like 20 years. Is that you see it go up and down with the economy. Right. That's the way our economy is designed. It's like there's peaks and troughs and we're essentially consumer spending and so we're at the forefront of that, basically. I think there's a lot more optimism out there. And it's interesting. I'm seeing some really good stuff come through because we've got all these issues with Facebook, with iOS 14.5 and was that like May 2021? There's advantage for shopping campaigns. They're great, they're brilliant. It's just like really, really good. Got some really good clients running PMAX campaigns. Sort of like in Google, we're just running sort of like PMAX campaigns and, you know, starting to get some results like ad costs are sort of like up.
[Voiceover]: I was having conversation with someone the other day around pmax and Advantage plus and is there a risk? So if you want to be the optimist, I'll be the pessimist in this conversation. Is there any risk that we all get comfortable that it seems to be common that, yes, they're performing for everyone really well and better than almost managing it yourself for a lot of people. Is there a risk that we turn them on, leave them on, and then Google and Facebook adjust the numbers and over time we just get a bit complacent and they just don't perform as well.
Iain Calvert: Wow. Well, that's a very good question and really kind of brings us to our topic of conversation about profitability. Right. Because that's where a load of people have got caught short before. So there were so many E Com businesses just based on Facebook and instagram ads, you know, you could sell like a $50 top for like five bucks, as in a conversion cost, right? So you're like, just keep turning up, off we go. And what I have seen throughout my career is that every now and again, three to five years, something major comes along that really shakes stuff up. And if you're a light on one channel, then that causes you a problem. So it's like a good investment portfolio. You want it fairly diversified. Like you don't just want Shopify shares, right, because they went gangbusters, but then they come down. So if you've got multiple channels firing and if you are genuinely across your numbers on a weekly basis, and I do believe unless you are like a hundred million, $300 million business every week is enough because it gives you enough of a pattern that you will spot it. Because essentially there's a really good metric called marketing efficiency ratio, mer percentage of your revenue you spend on advertising. If it's higher means your ads are less efficient and if it's lower, it means you going well and you probably want to spend a little bit more. So you would see those numbers. And this is the way I manage all the accounts from 500 grand site to like a $25 million site. We see those numbers going up and down, we start making adjustments so you can stay on top of it that way. And I think that's the way to, to manage them very well. It's like automation is great, machines are there, designed to help us do things, but you question it every now and again. For example, I set up a meta campaign the other day and it was running and I said, hey, this is what I want. Essentially sort of like sales. And for some reason it picked one ad. The click through rate was low, but it was making sales. Now the problem with that is that in meta you're getting charged for your impressions, so you want a high click through rate. So it's basically going, I've done it, good enough. But then you go and turn that ad off and it finds other ones that get high click through rates and then improves your performance. And that's the two sort of like working together. And I think that for me is certainly the foreseeable future. I don't think you want to just completely push it over. But also I feel sad for some people that just run ads and they try and control everything because that's just not the case anymore. Going to get frustrated. Yes. So a really specific example of the risk of getting really nerdy is that so within Google Ads you Always used to want to get to sort of like keywords per ad group so you could really control it. And it was exact sort of like match and broad keywords were the scourge of the devil. It was like these things are awful. And long tail, long tile, long tail. Yeah, right, all that. And admittedly when you broad targeting first came out it was terrible. It was awful. Right. But they've made so many improvements to it and actually my Google rep convinced me to try it and I was like look, because of the client you introduced me to in school thought just critical thinking, you've got to be open minded to these things. I was like I will try this again. And it went gangbusters. It was great. I'm massively sort of like on board with it and I think it allows us to do more with less people. And I think if anybody's listening to this and they're sort of on the fence whether they want to admit it to themselves or not, if is that that's the trend that is Google and Meta are going down, right? You're not going to be able to sort of fight that. You can bitch and moan about it as much as you want or you can focus on other areas of the business that you can have impact on like learn other channels, learn klaviyo learn, learn about the finances of business, learn about shipping all of these other sort of like bits and pieces and you're adapting and you will always be employable or always sort of like get clients.
[Voiceover]: You know the most amazing part of that story, you've got a Google rep that you can talk to.
Iain Calvert: Oh, got lucky if you want to get into it. Meta, my God, I have never spent so much money with the business and got such poor service. Google, it depends who you get this, this account spends like a million dollars a year. So they kind of like love us and, and they're good and the person's ex agency and they kind of like
[Voiceover]: understand and to be fair I am throwing stones but it is just something all founders want more access to. It's fair the people they spend their money with and there's just not that many boots on the ground to get that kind of firsthand advice.
Iain Calvert: No, that's right. And the thing is is that I think you have to always understand somebody's incentives. So if you understand their incentives, you can understand the way that they're going to behave when push comes to shove. So for example, if you're paying somebody a percentage of what they're spending on ads, it doesn't matter what good person they are, how well intentioned they are, when push comes to shove, if their boss says, hey, we've got to get this ad account, well, we've got to make more money, sort of like from this. The choice is always going to be to turn stuff up. Right? So Google are genuinely helped from the genuinely very good data company. They have a huge amount of data and some of the reports that they've been able to show me have correlated with stuff that only we can see. You're like, okay, so I now trust this. But there's an underlying spend a bit more, spend a bit more. So you just have to take that recommendation each time and go, come back to your numbers and go, well, if we do spend more, we're not going to be profitable and how long do we spend more? Because we then want to sort of like get more growth and you just have to just be sensible about it, basically. Yeah.
[Voiceover]: And to your point, take things on and trial things and be willing to challenge your own predetermined thought of what works and what doesn't.
Iain Calvert: It's almost like worse, the longer you do it, you get these priors and then you decide not to do it. I'm really mindful of that. It's like with the keyword stuff within sort of like Google, like, no, no, no. Anyway, when founders contact you and they
[Voiceover]: go, ian, I'm really struggling with profitability, I need you to come in and help me. Where's the first place you look?
Iain Calvert: Oh, no, it's a bit. It's a lot more common now that they're coming to me with that. They've normally come to me and go, hey, we've got like a Facebook sort of like problem or something like that. And then you can't dig into it because it's amazing. There's a lot of people that are not across their numbers and whether it's. They meet with their accountant once a year and work out if they're profitable or not. Well, they get monthly reports, but the monthly report comes at the end of the previous sort of like month. And then it's too late to make changes and stuff like that. But essentially, once we get down to it and we're like, right, this is sort of. Essentially he's just kind of breaking the P and L down into different areas to make it a little bit more understandable. So came across this really, really good model that I saw Paul Waddy talk about at first. Friend of the show.
[Voiceover]: Friend of the show.
Iain Calvert: And I don't know if Paul came up with it or not and if he did, congratulations, it's great. But it's essentially, it's called 50, 30, 20. So what you do is you split your P and l into three different areas. So gross profit. So which is the 50% and that's any variable cost. So cost of goods, any international shipping, any cost that goes up or down when you sell. So for example, if you're on Shopify, you're getting charged probably 1.5% of all transactions. So you add that in. Afterpay used to be 6%, it's probably 4% now or something like that. To build that in that essentially you want that to be 50%. Remember that's after GST has come off, then you've got your expenses. So rent paying people, advertising, the stuff
[Voiceover]: you stuck with, whether you sell a million or you sell $10 worth, exactly your fixed costs.
Iain Calvert: Right. And it's interesting because essentially marketing has always been seen as a fixed cost. But Google and Meta have convinced us that it's now sort of like a percentage which I'm on board with to be quite honest, because it's sort of like so you then got the 30% and then the 20% is the net profit. Now I'll be honest, the 20% is pretty optimistic, sort of like for most, particularly with our costs, sort of like going up, stuff like that. But I think it's still doable, you can go for it. So essentially you then group all of your expenses into that and then you go, well your gross margin is only 40% or it might be 35% and so that's an opportunity for improving your profitability. So this is actually some of the criteria for me buying an E commerce business. It was only 30%. I'm like, well let's just sort of like increase that so you can then quickly pinpoint where you need to focus. So often a no brainer is that people are either over or underspending on advertising. So it's so common to hear somebody spending like 40 or 50% of their net revenue on advertising and you're just like for those of you not watching the video, I'm pulling a very strange face with pained.
[Voiceover]: That face.
Iain Calvert: Well yeah, that's right. And there's this whole industry that's geared up for you to sort of like spend more.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. As my partner would say is playing the pokies. Another spin, another spin, another spin.
Iain Calvert: Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know that million dollar account that I'm running, like spend is like it's still two Budgets up, you're just like, where does this happen? So what you do is you extend your validate and all I do is honestly I use the dead simple spreadsheet. I'm more than happy to share it with everybody in here and I use it across all the businesses. And you basically just put in all your costs and you see on a weekly basis where you sit 50, 30, 20, because it will fluctuate sort of like sometimes, and that allows you to then manage it, it allows you to keep an eye sort of like on it. So to answer the original question, essentially it's normally you make sure that the gross margin is good, as in the cost of goods low and stuff like that. And then you look at the advertising costs and essentially the most successful and best businesses have got really low OPEX or operating expenses. So they're spending less on advertising because they've got some type of community or some type of brand that's really, really strong, where people then sort of like coming back to it. And essentially what you want is you want some advertising, but not a massive amount of advertising. But to do and to not advertise, you've got lots of hard work to do because you've got to then build a community and all those solo bits and pieces. So yeah, ad costs, that was going
[Voiceover]: to be my question to you around MER marketing efficiency ratio. And we've had this come up a couple of times before in previous conversations.
Iain Calvert: So good.
[Voiceover]: It's similar to ROAS in terms of it tells you what's happened straight away, how do you measure mr? And keep in mind that sometimes you want to do exactly that. You want to build brand, you want to build community so that in the long term you can turn down the dial on those variable costs and rely on returning customers and loyal customers.
Iain Calvert: It's a good question. So MER is essentially a very similar way of measuring return on adspend. So return on adspend, return, spend $1, get 5 back. The same example would be we're spending 20% on advertising. Now the thing I love about MER is that it makes you think about what you're spending, not what you're getting, which is more of a kind of like a reality check. And it basically forces you to understand the P and L. And I think anybody that is spending any money for a business in any advertising needs to understand their P and L so that they can then make good decisions. Because honestly there's a lot of people who show this and you're just like, oh yeah, we can't turn that up because then our expenses will be like 40%. And then went here and I was like, well done, we're there. Now let's define how we're defining myrrh. Double define it is everything that goes on marketing as a percentage of your net revenue. So net being take off your GST and so you could be doing like performance stuff, Google and Facebook and but then you could be doing sort of branding stuff and the branding stuff doesn't pay off sort of like for a while. So there's basically a lag number.
[Voiceover]: Yeah.
Iain Calvert: So you might spend loads on like a branding campaign first six months of the year, but then you don't see it until sort of like the last six months. And that is literally the million dollar question is when to spend and when to sort of like stop spending. What early signals are you starting? Sort of like to see is your conversion rate starting to go up? Because think about what we're talking before. The conversion rate essentially is that there are less window shoppers, there are more people taking action and they're taking action sort of like for a particular reason. And I remember kind of really cracking this when I was working with. It was like a car hire business, they did like comparison and stuff and we wanted to branding stuff. This is years and years ago. And the owner, super smart, super switched on one of the best business people ever, ever had the pleasure of working with and he was like, why don't we just spend it and see what happens? And it was so simple, it was brilliant. Whereas you get these people try and do attribution of this happens here, this happens, happens over here. And it's like, it's not data that you can then trust. What you can trust is money in, money out. And essentially it's how ballsy you are to sort of like to spend sort of like for how long? That's the best answer I can give you because essentially it's an absolute R. And you can also shoot yourself in the foot with MER. Let's say your target mayor is 10% and so you keep it at 10% but your sales are going down so you just keep it at 10% so you're going down. So actually you want to put it at 12 or 15 and push it sort of a little bit higher. The trick is knowing when to push. For me, I push when I see conversion rate go up. So you push that sort of like a little bit harder to then get that sort of return. And I think that's why I've always enjoyed being very hands on with businesses, because you're essentially pulling a lever and you just get like an intuitive feel for it. You're like, okay, we've done this over here, and then this has happened here, but then this has happened over here. So it looks like working. Whereas if you are purely just looking at Google Ads, Google Ads is designed to say, hey, we're doing really, really well. And if you ever dig into attribution, it's a guess at best. And that's being polite. And they'd say that. They're like, if you read their terms and conditions, it's a guess. There's a little two that comes up in the matter. This is my motion hotspot. There's a little two that comes up in the Facebook ad manager. And it basically says next to the results. And you go over it, it said this is statistically modeled. And you're like, right, so that's why I start measuring it. Money in, money out. And it just works really well.
[Voiceover]: Basically, when you're looking at mer, is it a signal, almost like a flag for you, that you then have to dig into individual channels Occasionally, Yes.
Iain Calvert: So now this is where it gets a little bit tricky because essentially you need the information from the platform to say how well it's going. However, what I do is instead of looking for little incremental changes, because that's just noise, basically, you're looking for a massive change. So let's say you're running 10 campaigns, which it probably wouldn't be, but let's just say you are for the argument's sake. And there's one that's costing, is reporting, it's guessing that it's $100 per sale. And there's another one that's at $20 or $30 a sale, and it's getting volume. That's a clear signal that that's working better than the other one. So you can then start turning that off. Right. But if you want to get to the next level for mer, and this is something I'm working on with quite a few clients at the moment, is that what you do is you set up a campaign per product category or a group of products, and then you measure how much you're spending on that campaign. So let's say you're selling. I know. Headphones just. I've got a pair on. Right, You've got a headphones campaign, and then you measure in your back end system actually how many sales headphones have been made. And then you calculate a mirror based on that.
[Voiceover]: So you're mirroring by category, not overall business.
Iain Calvert: Exactly right, so that's level two. So then you've got some levers that you can start pulling because what a mistake that digital marketers make is they go, hey, this is selling. So just put more of into it. You're like, that's cool for SaaS when you're essentially selling usernames and passwords. But in E commerce we bought the stock two months ago so we don't know what's going to sell. So if you sell out of that, that's not good for us. So whereas if you can control by category, so you might have a high weeks of supply for something, you can then push sort of like more into that individual category and then measure it that way. And to be honest that I haven't come across software that does it. If anybody's listening and they've got it, hit me up. I'm keen to start using that for clients. That's basically just Excel and just doing some vlookups to get the sort of like the two together. And then you kind of get this sort of like control of the business. So you're then controlling stock by locations. If you want to go to the next level and you've got multiple warehouses and so let's say you've got a warehouse in Sydney and Melbourne. Then by category you can create your campaigns by warehouses and categories because you might be running out the Sydney warehouse and it costs loads of money, transfer it to the other so you can push harder in one and then sort of like kind of pull it back like that.
[Voiceover]: You've got a MIR machine, you can have that one.
Iain Calvert: Oh, that's a good name for the MER machine. Yeah. To be honest, I was going to write an article and kind of share it with everybody. So I just wanted to get some really solid results sort of like from everybody I tell about. They're like, hey, let's go and do it as a coaching kind of work with. I kind of half mentioned it and they just went and implemented it and I was like, hey, there's a bit of a transition that you've got to go through. It's like no, no, we just, we're on it. But again, founders, they just do stuff.
Nathan Bush: Sorry, I'm interrupting this conversation because I have a message for any sales folk listening who are in E commerce services or tech. What if I told you that you could meet Australian E commerce decision makers in their car, follow them to the gym, even join some of them in the bathroom? Well, if you sponsor add to cart, you Might be able to do that legally. We have sponsorships available for 2024 right now. Come join our industry leading partners such as Shopify, Info Impact.com Convert Digital and Farsight in helping to bring amazing conversations, events and more to our e commerce community in 2024. Email me directly@nathandecart.com for the full 2024 prospectus. And in the meantime, don't get any ideas about bathrooms.
[Voiceover]: Last question on this before we move on because you said something interesting before that I want to pick up on. When you are looking at channel attrib, you do get into that and you really want to scrutinize individual channels and work out if they're working. Where do you take your source of truth? Is it from the channels? Is it from Shopify, Is it from ga? Where's your source of truth?
Iain Calvert: Hard that there isn't one. Right. This is a really fun exercise for anybody. Right. Take the sales that your back end system reports, the money that the bosses, whatever, it's all based salesforce. Take that number. Then go into Google and see how many sales it thinks it's made. Whatever attribution model it's using. Glasscope data driven. Then take Meta and see what it's claiming. Then take Klaviyo. If you're really going for it, like taking just any channel that's reporting and trying to get your money, add it together, you're probably going to be about 250% of your sales. Yeah.
[Voiceover]: Go and retire. Cash in your chips.
Iain Calvert: Yeah, that's right. It's just, it doesn't add up.
[Voiceover]: Yeah.
Iain Calvert: So after many years of trying to solve this, essentially just realize the simple approach is the best approach because you're better to have really solid data that you can make a decision on. And essentially you think about what attribution is trying to measure. It's trying to measure what made somebody do something. So let's just keep talking about headphones because just got them. All right. I'm looking for a new pair of headphones. I might have done some searches or something like that. But then you say to me, hey, I've got these headphones and they work sort of like really, really well. I'm like, okay, all right, I trust Bushy and yet he's been using them. Great. And then I click an ad on Facebook and I then sort of like go and do it. That's not measuring what made me do something. And that's almost impossible to measure.
[Voiceover]: Right.
Iain Calvert: So they're trying to measure something that you can't measure and so therefore it's essentially useless data. And you have to understand that there is multiple. Humans are very complex and they. There's multiple things that then influence to go and do these sort of like bits and pieces. Oh, can I tell my Geneva story? This is like my friends backpacking through Europe thing.
[Voiceover]: I love this tangent. I'm here for it.
Iain Calvert: But this is when I was working with the Bulgarian guys and we were going to Google in Geneva. It sounds fancy, doesn't it? It was a real pain in the ass because we were flying from Bulgarian and stuff like that.
[Voiceover]: Bulgarian air. How's that?
Iain Calvert: They clap when they land. That's all I'm gonna say. So traveling a lot. Needed suitcase coming into land. And there's a brand called Victrandox, I think is the way you pronounce it gifted CIS here somewhere bad with it. And they burnt into the side of the Runway like a big Victronox logo. And I remember just thinking, oh, that's pretty cool. I kind of like that. And then, you know, I'm searching for stuff and end up sort of like buying one. And we went to this Google session and really smart guy, he actually wasn't from Google. They employed somebody else to make it seem a bit more sort of like legit. And I said, hey, look, this is the situation. How do you measure that against what's happening with that? And it kind of fumbled around with the answer a little bit and statistical modeling. And then I was sort of like, you know when something just doesn't add up? And that was like the Eureka moment. I was like, yeah, which is why I'm a massive fan of brand marketing. So, you know, you look at stuff like July, and what those guys are doing is that they've got a really good mix. They've sort of like, they do really interesting stuff. They just put stuff out there that is likely to get attention, is really, really good, creative and is going to amuse people. And I don't know how they measure it. Sort of like, unless you really talk to Zoe sort of like about that. But I think they're just a good example. An Australian one with a great strong sort of like brand.
[Voiceover]: I think as long as Ethan says he likes it, then just keep going. So you talked before around buying e commerce businesses and what you look for when you're buying e commerce businesses. I like how you just casually threw that into the conversation. You publish a newsletter that helps other people who might be interested in buying e commerce businesses. How did that come about? And why are you interested in buying e commerce businesses rather than starting e commerce businesses.
Iain Calvert: Good question. So I can almost guarantee you that nobody listening to this podcast has not come up with an idea for an e commerce business. Business. Yeah, right. I'm exactly the same. I really enjoy coming up with ideas. I've got a whole list of them. Every time we get together for a beer, it's like, oh, we should go do this. Right. And when I started working for myself, I had the opportunity and sort of like capital where I could actually go and build something and sort of like do it. And I don't know whether this is overthinking or not, but essentially this is kind of the practical brain that I own is that I was like, well, I know what I'm doing with E commerce and I've seen the inside of businesses that work really, really well and these are the things that we need to sort of like, hit. And basically I worked out every idea was going to cost 15 grand.
[Voiceover]: Okay.
Iain Calvert: So five grand of stock that you're taking a punt on. Five grand of like ads to get sort of like stuff going. Unless you've got a massive sort of like, audience. And five grand, just all the other stuff. Yep. And I can build websites, I can run ads and all these other bits and pieces. So realistically, by the time you get there, it's 15 grand.
[Voiceover]: Plus all your time.
Iain Calvert: Plus all your time. Right. Like, you know, that's huge chances that first idea hitting might get lucky. Chance of the second idea hitting, you're increasing your chances. Third, probably you're going to hit something. So you're already at $45,000 to get something sort of like off the ground.
[Voiceover]: And probably a bit loco if you're up to your third business.
Iain Calvert: Right? Yeah, most people won't. Most people give one crack. Doesn't work out. They'll just sort of like go back to whatever you. And I realized essentially what you're doing when you, like, you think an idea is really, really good, but you're looking for market validation. So like, you know, essentially shadow testing you. Will something sell? Right. So then I was like, well, wait a second. I get approached all the time about running these e commerce businesses and making them more profitable and stuff like that. And I'm pretty good at picking the ones that I can help and do. It's like, well, instead of just helping, why don't I just buy one? And so then that just started off this whole chain sort of like event. I'm pretty sort of curious. And so then I was like, oh, okay, cool. Right, well, let's do that. And then just started looking and just got into a really good habit of looking sort of like for them. And so I literally, I just put money in a separate account so it's ready sort of like to go. So I had no excuse not to do it again. This whole do more than you kind of think about sort of like doing stuff. And then I just started shopping for them. So there's lots of websites like Flippa's, the main one. Now you've had Blake.
[Voiceover]: Blake, friend of the show.
Iain Calvert: Yeah, friendship. And there used to be one called Shopify Exchange, which had all the Shopify day, which is sort of like I stand. It's actually where I ended up buying mine from.
[Voiceover]: Okay.
Iain Calvert: And basically I set a selection criteria, so I call it a shopping list. So it's kind of like when you go to Woolies and you go, you go food shopping. If you don't take a shopping list, you come home with like Nutella and donuts for dinner and you're having a great time for the first five bit. Right. Fantastic. For five minutes. And then the kids go on the sugar high and then everybody's feral and then you don't win. Right. So you just end up buying like something that you love. So I'd end up buying like a surf store or something like that. Whereas what I did was I just wrote a criteria of what is a successful store. So I want a conversion rate of. I think I was like, I wanted like 1 1/2% or something like that. Unless the average order value was higher. Minimum average order value of like a hundred dollars. So I could afford to advertise on it based on that 50, 30, 20 ratio. I didn't want any fad products like fidget spin spinners or anything like that. Didn't want anything with multiple sizes. So like a fashion business. And I personally wanted to stay away from cosmetics because it's just super, super competitive.
[Voiceover]: Yeah.
Iain Calvert: And so actually I started saying things that I wanted and things that I didn't want. And then once you do that criteria, then you start. Because if you ever go on to Flipper, it's like, it's a bit overwhelming. There's like loads. You're like, how do I know I'm not going to get scammed by Nigerian print sort of like type of thing? But once you then have that criterion, you start filtering down. And if you check every Tuesday, for me, Tuesday was key because Monday you get stuff out of the way. And then if you make a regular habit of checking Then there's likely that more sort of like come up.
[Voiceover]: I thought you were going to say there's like a cheap Tuesday business offer or something.
Iain Calvert: No, but what I do is I now send out the email every Tuesday on these are interesting E commerce businesses that I would look at buying or ask or buy more questions because it's about routine. Right. So then all of a sudden you start whittling it down. Oh, sorry. The other thing was I wanted mine in Australia, so the stock was kind of like here. I potentially would have done one. So like in the uk, so all of a sudden there's like six that I'm looking at that fit that criteria.
[Voiceover]: What'd you buy?
Iain Calvert: I don't tell AB what I bought because essentially I share all the numbers of everything that I'm doing. I sell lamps. Lamps? Yeah.
[Voiceover]: You don't strike me as a lamp guy.
Iain Calvert: Well, that was the other thing is that. And I get contacted by a lot of people about this and they basically say, I just haven't been able to find a product love. And I'm like, don't find something you love, find something that you know a bit about. Like, I was never going to do skincare because as my wife says, I'm very basic for skincare, so as in I don't have any. But I wasn't looking for a surf store because a surf store might come up but the numbers wouldn't match what I needed to do. And then that gets you criteria down and then you start contacting them, you get like P Ls and you can start going through and then what you're looking for is you're looking for the property problem because there's a problem. There's 100% problem.
[Voiceover]: Right.
Iain Calvert: There's a reason that they're selling it. Nobody's selling anything. That's like amazing. And if they are, they're charging a premium. And the trick is, can you solve that problem? So the one I bought had a gross margin of 30%, knew it needs to be 50%, essentially. I just knew if I ordered more I'd get a better gross margin. They weren't running any ads, so they weren't getting traffic through. They were literally doing everything themselves. So I was like, well, I'll just bring in a 3 PL and I'll model it sort of like up on that. And it hit the criteria and I'm like, okay. So I've said I'm going to do this. The money's in a separate bank account. Like, I've got to kind of do it. Because I find people put up all these barriers. They're like, oh, I can't find this. Or whereas if you kind of set yourself up to then go and do it, you then it just sort of happens again. It's more like doing what I'm saying, but I mean, interesting. So mine cost 5,000 Aussie. Yep, that was it. And essentially what I bought was market proof that this product sold. I had to go and order a load of stock. I had to put quite a bit in sort of like stock. But essentially I remember placing the order and thinking, oh, well, if this goes wrong. I was like, well, if this goes wrong, I'll just go to the market and sell them at the price that I bought them for off the Chinese guy.
[Voiceover]: Or you'll have a very well lit apartment.
Iain Calvert: Or I have a super well lit apartment of big electricity bill. They call it fear setting. Right. And I think once you kind of break it down into that, literally just writing it down just kind of sort of like, helps. And to be honest, it's just been so much fun. Yeah, it's just been great. It's like the random stuff that has happened just sort of like without the people you get introduced to. Like, I remember placing the order with the factory in China. Like, okay, cool. So just to finalize the order, we just need your company stamp.
[Voiceover]: What?
Iain Calvert: Like, company stamp. So I drove down officeworks. Like a physical stamp. Like a physical stamp. Like a physical stamp. I mean, I should have just done it on Canva or something like that, but I went and got physical stamp, spent two hours lining up all the letters of the official company that I'd formed, Sort of like to buy it, to then stamp it and send like, great. And then I just sent the money to some random Chinese bank account in US dollars and was like, hopefully it turns up. It's good times.
[Voiceover]: Great times.
Iain Calvert: Yeah. Yeah.
[Voiceover]: And how do you fit that in with everything else that you've got going on?
Iain Calvert: Poor cousin. Definitely the poor cousin.
[Voiceover]: But profitable is paying it.
Iain Calvert: Yeah. Definitely not. 50, 30, 20. Yeah, profitable. If I probably add in my time, probably not as much. So it's interesting that the challenge is that essentially the. There's only a couple of SKUs. Yeah. When did I buy it? 18 months ago. And so I've been getting samples, but because I've been traveling a lot, which is kind of the digital nomad thing. But it was actually because we just had to move twice in eight months because of everything that's happening with rentals in Melbourne and stuff like that it sort of, it became sort of like the. The poor sort of like cousin. So I need to probably get up to about 10 SKUs. And I also need to get. Get repeat customers coming through. So I think that's a big learning for me in the learning realization that the next one that I buy would definitely. There needs to be more repeat sort of like customers sort of like coming through.
[Voiceover]: Yep. What a great way to practice what you preach, though.
Iain Calvert: Oh, yeah, yeah, that's it. And to be honest, I think that goes quite far with people. But it was. I just wanted to do it, to be quite honest. I was like, yeah, why not? And then I just came up with this really good line. The marketing brain came. It's like I bought an E commerce business for the price of a holiday. People are like, I could do that. It's like, yeah, you can like go nuts once you've got that selection criteria. There's a few tricky bits that you've got to sort of get through. But I mean, I worked out.
[Voiceover]: Speaking of being excited and curious, what's caught your eye in terms of new tech that's out there at the moment? Is there any platforms, any SaaS, anything that you like? Oh, you've got to get in and try this.
Iain Calvert: Do you know what, it's funny, I don't think this will surprise anybody, but obviously we agree some questions sort of like beforehand, just to give it sort of like structure, to be honest. We've gone off on random tangents.
[Voiceover]: Questions, actually.
Iain Calvert: Yeah, but it's funny, I remember that sentence three and I was like, I really gave me pause for four because. And actually I think the way you phrased it was sort of like, but you can't say AI. And I'm like, no, that's fair. And it gave me pause of thought because I actively shy away from the new shiny things because I've been through that process, right. Of, oh, that's new and shiny. Let's go and do it. And it always comes back to the. That a lot of time the value is not there. Whereas the stuff that I find really interesting is like, let's say when I talk to you, or I'll talk to. I'll give a shout to Paul Goldston now, sort of like from Shopify and just some of the things that you guys see sort of like happening. Or Kate Collinson who's been on sort of like the show as well. She does very similar.
[Voiceover]: Friend of the show.
Iain Calvert: Friend of the show. She does very similar sort of like work to me and not So I trust those opinions. That is like, does it work? Does it sort of like move the needle? But I appreciate that's not everybody can do that because they might not sort of like have those connections and stuff. So I genuinely gave this quite a bit of thought and what I landed on was that I'm really excited about businesses learning more about their customers. And the way that comes geeky and manifests itself is that because obviously all the third party data is going away where Facebook collects it. Whereas if a brand collects it as like zero or first party data is in, they explicitly go, you ask a customer, hey, you signed up for this main list, but what are you kind of interested in? So we can tailor it sort of like to you and then building that up because again, that's just good retail, right? Yeah, it's just good retail. It's like somebody walks into the store, hey, what are you looking for? Where are you from? What sports? All those bits and pieces. And you're like, well, that solves a lot of the problems that are coming down the pipeline if people are going to lose that sort of like data. And it's pretty easy to do. Like, this thing's like, like a shout out to a kendo, I think is a great, great platform. They do these surveys where it kind of like pops up and says, hey, you know, you're an existing customer. I know, let's say selling furniture, are you renovating a room in the next couple of months or something like that, and then you can customize it to people and that just. Yeah, that's just smart, right?
[Voiceover]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love it. So it's not necessarily what's coming down the pipeline, but looking at what's already available out there, like a lot of the. There's not a lot of new problems, is there?
Iain Calvert: No, I think they're fundamentally all the same because we're just dealing with human beings. Right. But it's sort of what tends to happen in our industry. There's a bit of an echo chamber of like, everybody talks about this. Like a while back, everybody was loyalty. Like loyalty is the solution to every problem that you've got. I remember somebody quoting, it's like, oh, yeah, forget acquisition, it's all about loyalty. I'm like, I mean, fundamentally that doesn't work. Yeah, that's a leaky bucket. Like, yes, I get the repeat sort of like cut customers and stuff like that. And I think, I know the marketing thing is it depends, but it's all context, right. And you can only have the context if you understand what's going on in the business. You've got to understand what the numbers are, what's actually moving sort of like the needle and being able to then do those things and then apply them to themselves. So for example, I work with the furniture business and we've had some chats about sort of like loyalty. And you're like, all the loyalty programs out there are sort of designed for like fashion and cosmetic businesses where there's repeat purchases. All these sort of like times you're like, well, well, yeah. I mean the life cycle of somebody buying furniture is sort of like a lot longer. So it has to be done very differently. It's sort of like we have to really kind of think about what is going to incentivize people and just go, hey, here's a point system and go fill your boots. And you've got to use it in sort of like three months. It's not going to work. So, yeah, I suppose that's why I stay away from the new kind of shiny stuff. Yeah.
[Voiceover]: Makes a lot of sense. What events do you have on your radar? Because I know you are very curious. What are you holding up as events that E commerce founders and people who are working in E commerce need to get to this year?
Iain Calvert: Yeah. So obviously the add to cart event that you're going to do, I'm just stitching you up for sort of like now just because I want you to.
[Voiceover]: I've got one attendee so far. That's good.
Iain Calvert: Yeah. So as long as we're in the country, retail, global, like sorry. Retail fest by Retail Go actually. Yeah. So Gold Coast, April time. I always find that's really, really good. I find some good brand speakers there and you get to meet a load of other people and just sort of like catch up. I love online retailer but it's normally on in the winter when I'm away.
[Voiceover]: Yep.
Iain Calvert: The Flipper do really good events. It's kind of about buying sort of like businesses. You know, like when Shopify started doing all those meetups and stuff, they're kind of doing sort of like the same things. Yeah. What else? Well, at the risk of plugging something, I have this idea, speak to me. So you might be keen on this. So I went to Japan last year and loved it. It's amazing. And I'm going back this year and I'm throwing around the idea of doing an event in Japan just for a couple of founders and merchants and then just getting a couple of partners involved. So it'd probably only be a group of like 10 or 20 people we go to Japan, we go and do like a Shopify meetup because we know some people in Japan and they would present on how E commerce works in Japan and then we present how E commerce works in Australia because it is very different. Something like 50% of online transactions finish in a 7 11.
[Voiceover]: Really? Yeah.
Iain Calvert: So you go and order something and then you walk down to your local 7 11, scan a barcode and do it because their culture is risk adverse so they don't lose in credit cards
[Voiceover]: apparently really good egg sandwiches in their 711 as well.
Iain Calvert: Crush it. They're amazing. Like it's awesome. Like we think 711 is like really bad where it's actually genuinely convenient. So I'm really interested in about that. And then we present the way it works here. Then I think we do like a night where we sort of have a like an E Com dinner where everybody just sits and sort of like talks. Then probably like a boozy night on the sake or whatever and then just go and visit a like an E commerce warehouse in Japan and just see the way that it sort of operates. So essentially they're before events over like, like four days or what have you come along, see what it's like and then take like a holiday sort of like afterwards. And so if anybody is keen on that, I'm keen to sort of like chat and yeah. Talk about it. I'm making a commitment now.
[Voiceover]: It's real.
Iain Calvert: It's going to be June or July basically.
[Voiceover]: Okay, beautiful. I'm actually over there in July but I'll be with the family so I won't be warehousing with you. I'll be Disneylanding.
Iain Calvert: Just come over earlier. There we go. We can do. I can do July. Yeah. What about you? What other events? Imedia is pretty good from what I hear. I've never been invited. Thanks guys.
[Voiceover]: Imedia is great if you are a retailer and I've been there both as a retailer and a vendor retailer you get everything for free accommodation, put up the whole lot, you know the deal is that. But they'll do one on one meetings with vendors who pay for you to be there.
Iain Calvert: Yeah.
[Voiceover]: And I know from a vendor perspective a lot of vendors go if you actually need to get deals done it's a good place to get deals done. So.
Iain Calvert: Okay.
[Voiceover]: Because it doesn't feel salesy like it's actually a really nice feel there. It's like yeah, that's a really good one. I keep hearing more and more about Etail emerging and I'VE been to Etail a couple of years ago but haven't been recently so I'd be interested to keep an eye on that. But I am also.
Iain Calvert: When is Etail?
[Voiceover]: I think it's May.
Iain Calvert: Okay, I could do that but I'll
[Voiceover]: definitely be at Retail Global with Ash and the team and we might be doing a few little sub events around that and I will definitely be at online retail because. And I'm working with those guys as well to do a little activation there.
Nathan Bush: So to me you know they're the
[Voiceover]: key ones and I think it's a great way to get everyone in one spot and have all those conversations.
Iain Calvert: It's awesome. It's like water cooler chat isn't it? Yeah it's like I actually in fairness like anybody that's still running like Shopify meetups so the cut in Perth they still do them I think Reload are still doing them in Brisbane I'm pretty sure Processor doing them in Sydney as well. Yep, they're pretty good. Oh and E combination do them in Adelaide now don't they?
[Voiceover]: Yes, they did one in Adelaide. We will be doing. I haven't even announced this publicly. Here we go. We will be doing Add to Cart socials again this year. We kind of tested the waters but we're going to do Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and we have a really interesting format in mind so it'll still be predominantly social, come and meet some new people, catch up with old ones. But we have something pretty interesting that we've been flagging in the we've been talking about in the Add to Cart Slack channel around what people want out of an event. There's been some pretty cool ideas thrown around so we want to do something that's a bit different but keep an ear out for that. Ian, this has been such an awesome chat. Probably a little bit more filtered than our normal chats but very useful I think if you, you know a couple of areas that we touched on around if you are considering going freelance I think the conversation right at the start around there's more work out there for you. You got to have a bit of
Iain Calvert: a structure if anybody's thinking about it just reach out to me on LinkedIn I'll tell you everything you need to know.
[Voiceover]: It's a no brainer something for the marketers out there around Myrrh and how to attribute and then something if you're looking to buy or sell a business. So we've covered a lot of ground. What's next for you and boom E commerce.
Iain Calvert: So we're we're building. I was going to say trying to. We are because it's happening. We're building the most profitable community of E Com businesses in Australia. And it's great because the focus is on the profit rather than the top line growth. You've got to have top line growth to get some profit, but it's easy to get it sort of like masked. And really that's the focus this year for me because I have my businesses that work sort of like hands on. Yes, I have the E Comm Store, but I think the most value is in just to be honest, really breaking down a lot of stuff that we've just been through sort of like today and applying it to individuals sort of like brands and just because, yeah, in theory it's sort of like good, but it's actually being able to apply it to a situation for somebody individually I think is where the value is. And so that's what Brian and I really sort of focused on. So Brian's like Shopify developer slash project manager, sort of like type thing. So we cover like a multitude of sins and it's kind of pulling all those bits and pieces together.
[Voiceover]: Awesome, mate. And there are so many things that people could contact you about, probably just about the trip to Japan. What's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
Iain Calvert: You. I mean, you can email me on. We'll put it in the show notes because everybody spells Ian wrong. It's not lame, honestly. Just hit me up on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the best place. I'm very sort of like active on it and I'll give anybody sort of like the time of day if I can help. I genuinely believe if you can help somebody like do it, it's, it's not, not much skin, sort of like off my nose.
[Voiceover]: You are very generous with your knowledge, mate. So thank you so much for sharing it with us today. I've got got to let you go because you got yoga to get to
Iain Calvert: go get some down dogs done.
[Voiceover]: Yeah,
Nathan Bush: good luck with your down dogs, mate.
[Voiceover]: Thank you for joining us on Add to Cart.
Nathan Bush: You are now friend of the show.
Iain Calvert: Excellent. Please refer to me in that in future podcast. And thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. It's been great.
[Voiceover]: There you go.
Nathan Bush: See, I should have had Ian on earlier. Right, my bad. If you liked Ian's take on the world of Ian E commerce and you want to explore his coaching program, we have a special offer for you. 20% off for the first six months of coaching. Head on over to coaching.boomecommerce.com and use the code add to cart or one word to get 20% off e commerce coaching for your first six months. I feel like you can go around the Internet at the moment and use Add to Cart code and just see what you can get at the moment. We've got so many great discounts popping into our chats. All right, here are the three main takeaways I got from our episode with Ian. Number one the 503020 p l split if you're looking for a really simple measure to see how healthy your P L is, you might want to consider Ian's ratio. Split your p l into three different areas. 50% gross profit 30% expenses 20% net profit. See how your business stacks up to that. I I think 20% is very high. That's kind of a dream scenario for
[Voiceover]: a lot of people.
Nathan Bush: But measure it against that and you can quickly pinpoint where you need to focus. Marketing Efficiency Ratio A common theme that comes from most of our Add to CART discussions is the frustration of attribution. Ian's approach to this is to skip it altogether and use Marketing Efficiency Ratio, or mer, to measure overall spend versus overall return. If you're getting bogged down in channel attribution, it might be worth stepping back and taking a look at your investment from a MER perspective. Don't Overthink things. Execute if you don't get the theme from our first two tips, Ian is not a fan of overcomplicating things and he applies this to both E commerce and his life. Rather than waste time on unknowns, Ian's philosophy is to execute and then adapt. And as you heard from him, most of his initial leaps were usually right. I bet it's the same for you. Thanks for joining us today on Add to Cart to listen to all our E commerce conversations now in the hundreds, you can head on over to add to cart.com there.
Iain Calvert: You can also join up to our
Nathan Bush: free private Slack community to share each commerce ideas, tips and questions with other listeners. You can also subscribe to the Add to Cart weekly newsletter and browse some of the video highlights from our chats. There is a lot there that's add to cart.com au and if I can ask you one thing before you go. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with a friend or a colleague who could benefit or leave us a review. It really makes a difference. Thanks. Thanks again for listening. And until next time, keep those customers adding to cartoon.
