Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Where founders go wrong, Tips for bootstrapped small business owners & When to hire an agency with Tash Todd Williams, Word Of Mouth Collective (part1)

Transcript

Where founders go wrong, Tips for bootstrapped small business owners & When to hire an agency with Tash Todd Williams, Word Of Mouth Collective (part1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Tash Todd Williams for Female Startup Club. Hey everyone, and welcome back to the show. It's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Today we're mixing things up and learning from Tash Todd Williams, founder of digital marketing agency, Word of Mouth Collective. Hi.
• 0:26
  I've known Tash for about 10 years now, and I've had the absolute pleasure of watching her journey from launching a fashion publication that she exited before she was 24 to today running a successful digital marketing agency with a special love for female founders and entrepreneurs.
• 0:45
  Today, she's coming on to share part of that journey and a bunch of interesting tips and advice for early stage bootstrapped founders, including where she sees a lot of small businesses going wrong, the challenges that founders have in today's landscape post the iOS Apple updates when it comes to paid marketing, and when a small business owner should actually be looking to engage an agency. There are so many gems in here. I know you're going to love her just as much as I do. Okay.
• 1:15
  And by the way, while I've got you here, are we friends on TikTok? You know how much I love it and I'm having so much fun on that platform. I would love to connect and see what you're creating on there too. Find me at Doon Roisin in all the usual places. Let's get into it. This is Tash for Female Startup Club.
• 1:35
  Hey girl. Hey. Hey, how are you? I'm so great. Now that I'm talking to you, how are you? I'm good. I know we're on totally different time zones, so I'm glad this worked out. Me too. I'm excited to have you on the show today. It's been a hot second since I've had someone come in from the agency world and share, you know,
• 1:57
  blueprint for building an agency, what's working, what's not working. So I'm super excited to be chatting with you. Do you want to give us the elevator pitch for who you are, what you do, what your business is? Yes. So hi guys, I'm Tash Todd Williams. I actually co-founded this business with my brother and a lot of people think we're absolutely mental for working together as siblings, but it's worked for us over the last almost five years. So,
• 2:24
  Word of mouth digital in a nutshell is 360. So it's anything you can think of along this sort of digital ecosystem journey from web dev to CRO to paid, all things paid. And then content, so your front facing, customer facing stuff. In between that, there's a lot of other stuff. And we sort of say we're...
• 2:46
  We're at its core masters of problem solving, not necessarily master like one specific skill set. We've got very, very talented people in our team that will service those individual needs. But for me, the beauty of it is finding the problem, which is often like how to best effectively scale our clients and what's the solution. That's really us in a nutshell. Yeah.
• 3:11
  I love that. That's so exciting. I'm so happy that you're going to be on the show digging into all these things. Super relevant for everyone listening, I'm sure. So we met like a million years ago. I think it was like 2010 when I was trying to think about it earlier today. It must have been. It must have been like you guys should see baby Doom and baby Tash. I had some pretty wild fashion choices.
• 3:40
  But it was a very long time ago. I have a photo of me from that fashion week when we first met. And I am wearing, I'm dressed like very gothic. I'm wearing like 100% all black. And then I have these bright neon. At the time I had hair like down to my knicker lines. Yes, you did. And I have these bright green neon like hair. I mean, now it's back on trend. I should probably get more of those. I think it's cool. These like clip-in hair extensions. And I was looking fire.
• 4:10
  I mean, that was the, like a different time for so many reasons and also like such a different stage of business for both of us. So it actually feels like almost like two different people. Things have changed a lot. I mean, that's 12 years ago. That's like a long time. That was like early days of Instagram. It was early days of Instagram. That was so much fun.
• 4:35
  You were working on a different business back then, Breakfast with Audrey. Take us back to even earlier before Breakfast with Audrey. What was getting you excited about starting a business? Like what was going on in your world that made you launch that? You know, I think there was one thing that my dad would always say to me the whole time I was growing up. Um,
• 4:59
  He hated working for other people. And so he would drill into me, if you can work for someone else, if you can work for yourself, work for yourself, don't work for someone else. And so I think there was always like a seed that he planted. Genuinely from when I was five years old and I grew up in a very –
• 5:19
  like sort of very focused, rigid environment focused on education. We went to selective schools in Australia. That's sort of like you have to do a test to sit, to get into the school. So I grew up in like quite a rigid environment where success had one measure and I effing hated that. That's just not how I'm built. I don't like structure in that way. I have ADD. I have been
• 5:46
  Even though I am really smart and I can excel, I needed to do things differently. So like everyone else, I went to uni and I was like, this sucks, I hate it. And I was just desperate to find something that was different. So I just went and interned for who would then be the team I'd work with at Breakfast with Audrey at a different business they owned, which is a very early stage e-com. We were on like...
• 6:15
  We would do our artwork on paints. That's how early stage it was. Oh, my God. And I literally, it was wild. I would literally intern there for free. And, like, the model was very smart. We were buying end-of-season stock from Australian, like, premium retailers. So at the time that was, like, Fleur Wood, Josh Goote, very early stage, Marnie Skillings. A lot of these businesses are now gone and no longer. And we would buy them for, like,
• 6:45
  crazy cheap prices per piece in cash, take them, shoot them in the warehouse in Surrey Hills and then upload them. So all props to the, like Sean who founded that business. It was a really smart venture. And I kind of just got, I loved fashion. I loved the way that there was so much fluidity and like,
• 7:06
  One day my job was shooting e-com. The next day it was buying. The next day it was, you know, running ads online. So I think I kind of wet my whistle there and I got excited. And so I quit uni. I never finished. Wait, we have to stop for this wet your whistle business. I love that. Is that a wet your whistle? Sounds really dirty. I've never heard that.
• 7:31
  I'm using that from today onwards. Guys, wet your whistle is going to be my new thing. It sounds dirty, but it's not. That's going to be my catchphrase. All right, so you wet your whistle. Go on. Yeah, I wet my whistle. And I quit uni. And in my early stages, I lied about that a lot. I lied about that getting jobs. So sorry to all my former employees.
• 7:58
  Because I was so terrified of, like, there's a lot, and still now there's a lot of stigma about not finishing university if you've started it. And particularly how I grew up, like, education and that, like, check of approval from a university was vital. So I was actually embarrassed.
• 8:22
  Now I'm like, who cares? And I honestly, when I'm hiring people, that's not something I look at at all. But certainly at the time, it was a different time, as we said, it was a long time ago. So that's kind of where we ended up before beat up Breakfast with Audrey. And the comp, like why we started Breakfast with Audrey was we found a need.
• 8:43
  when we were running that company was called My Clothes Horse. And we realized there was only, at the time, aside from like your Vogue's, one or two websites where you could place editorially or with ads or with EDMs,
• 9:00
  and get any sort of success on return as a brand or as a business. And we were like, WTF, how do we, that was before Facebook. That was before, like that was pre the era of like the rise of digital marketing as it is today. So we had to find smart ways to get our word out there.
• 9:18
  And that was one of the ways was like placing like Missy Confidential, like that was this sort of like sale website. That was probably the only place unless you were cool enough to get into Vogue, which we weren't. So that's why we started it. And it was like totally lean, super hacky. As I said, the first iteration of that Breakfast with Audrey website was built, like designed on paint. Sorry.
• 9:47
  That's like how lo-fi this was. And that was with one of the other girls that worked with us. And so were you like a founder of that business or like a business partner within it? Yeah. So there was two financial backers and they were Macquarie bankers. And I have a lot of love for them to this day. I think towards the end it became very difficult because I,
• 10:12
  our understanding of the industry was so dissonant between, I mean, I was 20. And also I had no idea what I was doing. And they're like, you know, 50-year-old businessmen at Macquarie Bank. So like their KPIs and goals and mine at the time was so different that that was actually one of the catalysts for why we sold. So it was myself, these two lovely guys who I adore, and then two other girls that worked with us, Pip,
• 10:40
  And Katie, shout out. There was various movements within the business. Katie exited at some point, as did Pip. And I sort of stayed on to the very end. And we built that up over a number of years. And at the time, like Facebook, growing Facebook organically was easy. So I think when we exited the business, we had 50,000 followers,
• 11:05
  We had a huge EDM database and extremely strong search relevancy because, again, like there was not a lot of people focusing on independent digital publications in Australia. What was the acquisition process like at that time? And are you able to share like, you know, what you sold it for? Is it still running? Like what's the kind of what happened there? So it is still running. Yeah.
• 11:32
  I think that the acquisition process for that was actually quite unusual. Now, as business owners, we're often acquiring companies or selling stuff. The way we treat it is very different. That was sort of, again, pre-startup bros culture in Australia.
• 11:54
  The understanding around that, raising capital, obviously there was that in place, but like what we knew then is totally rudimentary to what we know now. The resource and education level when it comes to this sort of thing is like so vastly different. So that process we actually found very difficult. It was very hard to find a buyer. People didn't really understand the industry itself.
• 12:19
  And we shopped at RoundTube, lots of people, including some like big entrepreneurs. Now we spoke to like Jane Liu. That was this early stage, her running ShowPo, which was actually called ShowPony back then.
• 12:34
  And, like, she was interested, but it just, I think people were like, I don't really get this. And they weren't sure of the value. But it's a testament to the business. And was that because of the, like, was it because of your pitch or was it because just of the time where people were like, it was just media businesses weren't a thing at that time? Yeah.
• 12:53
  No, I think it's probably both. I think like at the time, some rando 20-year-old girl and two 50-year-old men pitching you a fashion publication. I mean, it had stats and facts behind it. But I mean, I think just the understanding of how that could have been leveraged. And I honestly sometimes wish that I still had that because I feel like the power of the database alone would be so valuable.
• 13:23
  Yeah. I think it's a mixture of things. Like, honestly...
• 13:28
  like my selling capability from then to now, like I, like I was not experienced. I was not as confident. Um, you know, I didn't know how to speak to like a six year old CEO at the time. Yeah. Really great learning curve. Yeah. Like I also had a lot of imposter syndrome back there. Totally. Like I was plagued by insecurity and yeah, I mean that stuff I just don't really care about now. Yeah.
• 13:55
  If I could do it all again, I would have done so many things differently. The pitch deck, the way we framed it, the potential value to investors or to our buyers. But we eventually found a lovely lady who had her own e-com business. She was very forward thinking and I actually think back on it now and I think,
• 14:16
  you know, that was a big risk for her. But she leveraged it into something that's still longstanding and she used it to amplify her product and her profile. So she's done an excellent job. I'm actually not really sure where they're at today. I mean, I think COVID has put a lot of spanners in a lot of works. But up until pre-COVID, it was still operating successfully. Yeah.
• 14:43
  That is so cool. What a great learning experience, especially as a 20-year-old young woman going through these things that I'm sure felt like, you know, really big hurdles at the time. But looking back, it was like the most amazing opportunity to be able to hone this skill set that you now really have and foster that entrepreneurial spirit that you had. 100%. I think, you know, the other thing, this is something I always tell younger people,
• 15:10
  people trying to sort of break into this space is when we started that, and you would have felt exactly the same way. I mean, influencers were a dirty word. Like no one, like we sort of were considered influencers slash bloggers. That's what we were called at the time. And I remember my first fashion week, how mean people were to us and how dismissive. And like I was at the time then, like 19 thrown into Australian fashion week,
• 15:38
  working alongside like Christine Centenera and all these really, really incredible, powerful women. And not saying Christine was amazing. She's always been lovely. But I think that skill in and of itself, like if you can go into a room and have the wherewithal at 19 to pick up a conversation with anyone and hold your own, like that is something to hone because now I don't get scared to walk into any room with anybody.
• 16:07
  You could put me in the room with Elon Musk. I mean, it'd be wild, but I wouldn't be intimidated because at the end of the day, like once you learn that you've got nothing to lose and the potential downside is not that bad. There's a lot of freedom in that. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I'm sure you remember. Yes. Yes.
• 16:30
  Since then, you've done some really cool things. You've worked for a guy in Australia called Jack DeLosa. He's very big in the entrepreneurial space. And for anyone listening who's not from Australia, he has this network of, you know, multiple thousands of entrepreneurs who he's helped to raise money and do all these different things. He's quite known in Australia. Yeah.
• 16:50
  And then you went on to work with H&M or maybe that's the wrong way around. But how did your career kind of go after the acquisition? What were you thinking about what you wanted to do after selling the business? At that point, I really needed money because even though we sold the business and there was some benefit there, you know, I was like, what the hell am I going to do? Like we've got
• 17:17
  plans and futures and bills to pay and I mean I've been with my husband since I was 16 so we would like I have commitments to him as his partner um and honestly I went out on a limb with H&M because I didn't really have the skill set like this is a multinational corporation launching a very very big brand into Australia and
• 17:41
  My boss, who I am so grateful for, she was my mentor in so many ways. She really took a chance on me because I'm sure there were much, much more qualified applicants. But for them, they hire a lot on CultureFit. And so I think...
• 18:01
  One of the core – it sounds so salesy for H&M – but one of their core values is entrepreneurial spirit. And if I've got anything, it's that. So I think she could see that drive in me and she really took a chance. I mean, I was getting paid almost nothing like fashion 10 years ago. Peanuts. But I mean –
• 18:23
  The benefit of saying, even now to this day, saying I worked at H&M has benefits. So that was pretty cool. I got to travel the world, got to see the Backstreet Boys live. Every girl's dream. Yes. I was like arm lengths away. Well, every girl from? From our generation. Yeah. Yeah. Got to deploy some really amazing campaigns.
• 18:49
  We launched the Balmain collection, which everyone, all those like designer clubs everyone knows and loves. So that was pretty cool. But while I left, I was bored. So this is the thing I think when it comes to someone that wants to start their own business, I think the freedom and the space to be frenetic one day and creative
• 19:16
  hold space the next. So like for me, I would finish my job at H&M in two hours of the eight-hour working day and I'd be like, what am I going to do?
• 19:26
  And I would just have to find things to do. And then I got to do lots of extra stuff, but I was not challenged by the end. So I quit. I went and worked with Jack, which was incredible. It was a learning experience in and of itself. What did you learn working with someone like that who is obviously very entrepreneurial, very in the space? What did you learn working with him?
• 19:52
  I have so many good things to say about Jack. I think the most fun part for me was that frenetic energy. Like there was always high intensity. It was very high intensity. And typically in high intensity environments, particularly in startup, there is a lot of churn when it comes to team because that's not sustainable often unless you're,
• 20:17
  you really believe in the purpose or you're being rewarded in some way. And I was certainly being rewarded, but one of the other downsides of the entourage is that because we're coaching and training so many amazing entrepreneurs, most of the team is like, I can do that. And so they'll leave and start their own businesses. So they also like, look, it's a testament to Jack, but certainly hard to keep stuff, I'm sure. Outside of that, I think,
• 20:45
  There's a lot of stuff that I thought was silly or woo-woo, which is around mindset. I think my, like, rigid education brain from growing up really dismissed all of that stuff, like how applying mindset to your business can have a really positive effect. So Jack's really big on really delving into the psychology of how you operate as a leader and how do you apply that to your business. And I think I found that really...
• 21:14
  helpful. And the other thing that I found really helpful as someone who has ADD was really focusing on how you, like we call it systemizing a business. There is so much you do not have to touch and shouldn't touch as a business owner. And if you are, you're wasting your time and you're working in your business, not on it. So, I mean, I've learned a lot of that the hard way myself, but just knowing that and knowing what tools and resources you could put
• 21:43
  like the freedom that comes with that is such a relief for a lot of people that you can see that immediacy and payoff. I mean, there's lots of things that they did amazing, but those two are like what I always talk about when I talk about the entourage. At some point, you obviously started getting the inkling that you wanted to leave and start your own business. I think we're around like circa 2018 at this point. What was that inkling? What happened? What was the shift? And how did you get started? Yeah.
• 22:13
  It was literally one moment where in Sydney, Australia, when like you're catching public transport, there's like a tunnel in the city near Central Station. And every morning...
• 22:28
  Everyone in suits is like trudging to work down that tunnel. And I literally just had a mental breakdown and I looked around and I was like, oh my God, I cannot do this for the rest of my life. Like I will die if I have to do this. And that day I quit. I was like, I'm out. Oh, wow. Wow.
• 22:48
  You had the moment and you were out. I had just a, I mean, obviously I didn't notice, but I just had a revelation where I was like, if I don't do this now, I'm trapped in this hamster wheel of like going and working for someone else and doing a nine to five and building something for someone else for life. And I just refuse to do that any longer. So I quit. And then I was like, oh my God. So I had to move pretty quickly after that.
• 23:16
  Did you know you wanted to start an agency or you were like, okay, let's come up with a business plan. What do we want to do? Tap your brother on the shoulder. I think I just knew that was my like most, like I didn't have capital in a big way to, and also time to go in and find a product. The only resource I had at my fingertips was my skill set. And I fundamentally believe in my skill set, maybe not.
• 23:45
  Maybe that's arrogant. I don't know. I know what I can do and what I'm capable of. And I also know what my brother can do and is capable of. And we sort of had been consulting, you know, on the side here and there over the years, slinging like clients back and forth to each other, my brother and I. So I just...
• 24:05
  Sort of fortuitously at the same time, he was feeling the same way at his job, which was in fintech. So we both just quit. We had one client. We had no backup and no money. So we had to make it work.
• 24:18
  I imagine that there are a lot of people listening to this episode and thinking like the same feeling that you are having, you know, I'm in the nine to five, I'm in this rat race that I don't want to be on. I want to do something, but I don't have the capital to start something that requires a lot of upfront money, like building an e-commerce brand, for example, or anything product-based. Can you just break down like in the very easiest sense, like
• 24:41
  the blueprint for how you built this agency, especially in that first year, how you went about finding clients, how you went about growing your kind of revenue and getting this business in traction. Yes. In motion, rather. We were slowly grinding the wheel. Look, I'll caveat by saying we made a lot of mistakes. So, like, by no means am I saying do everything we did, but you can learn from me.
• 25:11
  In terms of finding clients, one thing that has been incredibly important to me my whole life is nurturing my network. And I know that sounds like really old school. Your network is your net worth. And I don't necessarily believe that's true for everyone. But for me, my motto has always been if someone asks me for something, whether it's in business or personally, if I can do it, I will with no expectation of return.
• 25:38
  And what I found was when I started to do something where I needed help, all those people that I'd helped over the last 10 years were like, hey, I can sling you a client. And all I had to do was ask. So letting go of your ego and humbling yourself and knowing that if you put it out there,
• 25:59
  like what they say no or they don't respond to your email, like who cares? It doesn't matter. And if they are consistently not reciprocating, maybe you can make a call. But at the end of the day, if you're saying yes to helping someone, if you think it's transactional to me, that's kind of a gross way to behave. So like, it's like for me, it was all these people I had said like, yeah, like,
• 26:22
  book you for this job or, you know, send you a client or like send you some, whatever, like book an ad on your website. That all started to come back around.
• 26:34
  But I will acknowledge the privilege in that because part of my network came from being raised in a very privileged environment in Sydney. I had access to really amazing education and my network from that alone was incredibly helpful in resourcing our business. So that is not feasible or possible for everyone. And I totally hear and understand that.
• 27:00
  Um, you know, if you don't have access to that immediate network, it is a lot harder, but it doesn't mean you can't build it. It can be as silly or simple as like, if you ask 10 people to go for coffee with you, one of them will say yes. And then once that person says yes.
• 27:19
  you can leverage that to find another person to have coffee with you and you just have to keep asking and it will happen. In terms of building our service offering, we really like Alex and I just looked at what his skillset was and thank God it's complimentary. He's a tech whiz. He studied psychology but ended up in FinTech. So he can build any website from scratch and I can drive all the marketing in the world to it. So yeah,
• 27:46
  I think this sort of like interesting dynamic between a brother and a sister, this complementary service that was like very integrated because we live together. My brother lives with, I live with him and my husband. We work together and we know each other very intimately meant that the way we approached the strategy around any client I feel was quite unique because we could feed into each other in a much more
• 28:13
  more honest. Like I can be very honest with him and also very like we can be really dynamic, turn things around really quickly. We live together. So if like I needed a tweak on a website at 10pm at night, he would do that for me, whereas I think a typical agency probably wouldn't. So that was sort of like how we built it from the start. We fucked up a lot of things. Like what? Give us some examples. What are the mistakes? The biggest mistake we made was tax. And so...
• 28:44
  We've fixed it all now. But like in the start, like again, like I was pretty young back then and we didn't really understand how to structure our business effectively for the first –
• 28:54
  I want to say six months, we were just lazy and we didn't get, so now we've got like a trust set up that owns our business. We're directors of that business and it owns various other entities as well, which protects us personally from liability. It protects the business. It protects our other assets. So like, thank God, nothing happened because we were totally liable and we were operating
• 29:22
  under like just like a company ABN. We weren't paying, like submitting our BAS properly. We weren't now when money comes into our bank, my brother has it set up so it immediately splits off into our five pools of cash. So like OPEX, which is operating expenses, tax, GST, paying our staff and profit. Yeah.
• 29:46
  So we didn't have any of that. So we didn't pay GST for like six months. And obviously we've got like a giant tax bill. And that could have crippled us. And that honestly is where I could see a lot of businesses failing is if you don't have the cash to sort of support the cash flow suddenly getting hit with those giant bills, you'll fold. So don't do that.
• 30:10
  Even though you might want to dip into those funds, you know, early stage business, first year, you've got a lot of expenses, you're maybe not making as much as you want to. It's just not genuinely not worth it. So that's a big one. Yeah. Like one that I feel can easily be overlooked. I don't, we see it all the time. And particularly with say, say you're a small business and you're operating as a sole trader.
• 30:39
  And you're suddenly earning over 75K and you have to start – in Australia, you have to pay what's called GST, goods and services tax. So that's a 10% on top. But a lot of people will charge the GST but then not put it away. And I see that so often because you're like – you see that hit your account and you're like, sweet, it's an extra. You bill out six grand, you get an extra $600. You don't think about, wait, I've got to pay that back in three months.
• 31:07
  And that might not be for everyone, but I've seen it a lot of times. And it can add up really quickly. Wow, that's really interesting. Yeah, a very key one to...
• 31:19
  take note of. I know it sounds boring. Like tax sounds boring for people, but. Yeah. And I think also like knowing your numbers in general is one that people often kind of like don't look at where their profit margins are and like just numbers in general can get like pushed aside, but it's actually the most important thing of the business. Numbers are the business. So you need to like focus on the numbers, focus on the tax and like the legality side of things and just be like, sweet. Yeah. Like getting a contract, like our contracts were not ironclad for the first year either. Like we,
• 31:49
  ended up paying a contract lawyer to write all our contracts, which, you know, I think we spent about, including trademarking, we've spent almost 10K on legal stuff over the last couple of years, but it's totally worth it. Yeah, absolutely.
• 32:08
  I want to switch kind of tracks at the moment and talk more about the small businesses that you work with or the businesses in general that you work with. What are some of the biggest challenges besides the tax side of things that you see right now for small businesses? Yeah. I mean, there's, God, it's a tough market out there. So there's a lot of challenges. And I see you or your business owners. The biggest challenges.
• 32:34
  And probably the biggest education piece for us is firstly focusing or putting all your eggs in one basket. So if you think Instagram is working for you now and it will in the next five years, it won't. I'm telling you right now. So there's that. Making sure you have a strong channel mix. Diversify. You've got to split out your risk and make sure that you're always channeling new people to your business.
• 33:02
  via new traffic sources or if you're offline via different mediums. It's so risky to rely on one source. And we've seen that with the change in iOS for paid social, for Facebook, that had almost an immediate impact on all of our clients and, like, has been a really tough slog the last year. So that's key.
• 33:31
  Almost every business owner I've ever spoken to doesn't have a full understanding of the facts and stats behind your business, the data. So if you're an agent, like say you're working with an agency, you need to know at any one time what is your cost per acquisition. And I can't tell you the amount of times that a business owner is like, what is it?
• 33:53
  or you say your CPA is $20, and then say your AOV is $80. But what is your cost of goods? So say your cost of goods is $30, so that we're already at $50. You've only got a $30 margin. Then say you're doing free shipping, it's $8, your transaction fees with Afterpay. You're paying an agency. Okay.
• 34:17
  So by the time you whittle down, your margins have already disappeared and you're actually operating at a loss. And I've seen this time and time and time again. So that's the biggest piece that we try and educate. Whether you're a client or not, that will usually do like a bit of an audit. What's the solution for that? Like for that specific scenario, like do people need to raise their prices or do they need to restructure? It's a bit of everything. So firstly, what we often find is that,
• 34:47
  We don't understand those margins, so then we allow our cost per acquisition to become too high. So that's also whether you're doing it yourself or you're getting an agency to run your ads, there are ways to bring your CPA down and that's through a strong sales funnel, making sure you've got traffic.
• 35:05
  you've got your convincing piece and you're retargeting. So you can drive down your CPA and make sure you can also do that by driving traffic from organic traffic sources, influencers, EDMs. So that's one element of it. Secondly, is your cost of goods. Where can you negotiate with your manufacturers to bring down costs? Do you really need that extra fixture like button that's
• 35:28
  in gold or could it be black? Can you save a dollar? Can you negotiate with afterpay to get them to reduce their percentage cut, which we've done many times? Can you negotiate a deal with DHL? So like every single piece of the pie that makes that cost of goods. So you need to look at how can you negotiate that down? And there are clients that will like push that hard and will push the
• 35:58
  So there's that element first. And then the second element is, can we increase the AOV? Can we increase, like encourage customers to add another piece to the cut? Or can we look at increasing our prices for particular products? I mean, there's a lot of touch points. You have to make, it depends on the business. Like it really does, but yeah.
• 36:24
  Any business, you can cut costs. Or it could be like, do you need that app? Do you need that subscription? Do you need to pay an agency? Do you need that team member? Can you switch hosting providers? Can you cut your warehouse costs? Right. Looking at all aspects of the business. Got it. Yeah. So that's like, you know, a big part of what we do is...
• 36:44
  Digital marketing is one thing, but it's nothing without the full picture. So I can come to a, like, I could lie and be like, yes, you know, CPA is amazing and your AOV is a hundred bucks. So like how return on investment is five times, but I'm not ethically doing the right thing by our clients then.
• 37:05
  Yeah, something that I often see go south for smaller brands and early stage founders are kind of jumping to hire an agency very early on when they don't have those foundations in place. And they kind of, it ends in this vicious cycle where a lot of money goes down the drain. It obviously is bad for both parties because then it's, you know, it starts that conversation around like this agency like ripped me off or like this was a really bad experience, but like it wasn't the right time either.
• 37:35
  When should a bootstrapped founder actually work with an agency? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, it depends, but we'll often turn clients away if they're not, like we always say, we're not in the business of bankrupting anybody. So we'll typically do those kind of financial forecasts and look at including our fees, including.
• 38:00
  annual proposed marketing spend, what can we achieve? If we think you're going to operate at loss, we'll say no. So what you need to look at is...
• 38:08
  There's tipping points of scale. So there's one scenario where you've just raised seed funding or something and you need to spend it and you need an agency who has skills and resources to help you. That's one thing because you've got presuming very aggressive targets to achieve to report back to your investors. So that's totally separate. If you're like running lean and doing this on your own,
• 38:32
  I would say it would come to a tipping point where you do not have the time resource or the proclivity to upskill yourself. And you have too many moving parts in the business. And usually you're at a tipping point by then where the revenue you're generating for the business is enough to at least consider investing. What I would say is look at, look, agency fees vary, but a reasonable agency is between companies.
• 39:00
  $1,500 and 10 of, I mean, look, if we're doing full service, it might be like 10K plus. But usually for like, if we're just running Facebook ads, it's usually about $1,500. So if you look at that as a minimum and you think about what your growth goals month per month are, so say you want to make $100K this month, your average order value is $100. We can feasibly, you can feasibly estimate how much you think you could possibly allocate to this resource.
• 39:29
  And if you can finance that, that to me is the perfect time. Well, you've got the stock. You have your conversion rate metrics in place. You've got the traffic to the site. You have your automations and your flows set up for EDMs. You've got a social presence online. You've got content. If you don't have content, don't even bother. So, like, there is a bit of a checklist there.
• 39:50
  The content piece. Yes. The content piece is so big. That's another thing I see. I feel like it's like you can't go down the agency route without also having the content piece sorted. And either you need to be someone who is an expert at creating content at scale yourself, or you need a content partner. Because there is so much content that's needed for, I mean, even if we just think about Facebook and Instagram ads, you know, you need to be launching like,
• 40:19
  I don't know what the actual number is here, but like in the space of like 100 ad campaigns to see what works and then scale those campaigns, you need 100 different pieces of content. That's crazy. Also different formats and like obviously different devices. Even for organic like –
• 40:37
  You know, for one of our clients, for instance, we post at least 10 stories a day, four posts on the feed, two TikToks, one reel. That's one client. So like think about the scale which we have to create content to service that. And obviously they're a fairly large business. But, you know, for a general punter, you know, creating five reels a week, almost impossible by yourself, genuinely. So that content piece...
• 41:05
  You know, it can be iterative. It doesn't have to be editorial level content. It just has to speak to your brand values and communicate effectively what you're trying to say. I think people understand that startups are a work in progress. You do not have to be perfect. But without that, like that's probably the biggest roadblock or hurdle for us when we're onboarding clients outside of budget is content. Like the content is not up to scratch or it doesn't service the sales funnel.
• 41:36
  Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And the reality is without good content, your ads aren't going to perform anyway. So it's money down the drain. I mean, a lot of people I feel consider that to be quite intangible because like what is good content? It's pretty...
• 41:53
  subjective. But there are some objective qualities that you can as business owners, like if you're thinking about how to develop this content, there are checkpoints that you can hit. And that's around your messaging, who your target audience is, what's best practice in market, and then what's achievable for you. And I think if you can look at those four elements, you can build something. It's not going to be perfect unless you invest a lot of money into it,
• 42:23
  Right. What is your best piece of advice or your top tips for bootstrapped founders today? Hmm. It's a good question. I think there is a big piece around, well, there's two things, but a big piece around outsourcing. So I think there's really cost-effective ways to outsource
• 42:47
  important pieces of work for scalability. And that's not necessarily talking about agency. That's talking about VAs. That's talking about content creators. That's talking about, you know, accountants, legal advice. You know, I think bookkeeping is a really big one that a lot of people are not on top of. I know I'm talking about finance a lot. And I'm actually not really very financially minded. That's my brother. But it is something that I find really important because I'm not that good at it. I have to be on top of it.
• 43:17
  Outside of that, I think there's two things. You need to decide whether this is a business that you're going to build and exit or a business that you're going to scale and operate ideally, like this is a lifestyle business for you.
• 43:36
  So I think when you look at those two things, and we have both, like word of mouth, that's our lifestyle business. We will work and live in this in some capacity, hopefully forever. And then we've got other businesses that we know, or I know, we're going to exit at some point.
• 43:52
  KPI mind, and then we're getting out. So I think when you change your frame of reference around what the purpose is for the business, it allows you to look at how you can scale that effectively. If you're looking to exit, raise capital. If you want it to be a lifestyle business, don't give up equity. Great advice. Thank you. I love that.
• 44:20
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 44:44
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 45:07
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that. Thank you.
• 45:23
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 45:48
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 46:10
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.