Latest / Talk Commerce / AI Is Rewiring the eCommerce CFO Role with Matt Putra of eightX

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AI Is Rewiring the eCommerce CFO Role with Matt Putra of eightX · Talk Commerce

• Brent Peterson (00:06.403) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Matt Putra He is the managing partner with EightX Matt, go ahead, do a much better introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions. Matt Putra - Eightx (00:19.365) Sounds good, Brent. Thank you so much. so I'm managing partner of EightX meaning I'm setting the strategy growth plans and even doing product innovation for my firm. And we serve e-commerce businesses and consumer goods businesses. day-to-day looks like a lot of Claud code right now, working on product, working on innovation. I also have my own clients where we're doing advisory work. passions soccer. big soccer family over here. I'm a licensed coach. still play my oldest and my youngest both play yeah. I have four kids, so obviously they are my everything, my wife, my kids. Yeah. Brent Peterson (01:03.843) Yeah, that's awesome. good. and we'll we can geek out over Claude Code if we want to do the whole episode about that. I'm I'm in in the trenches daily as well. Matt, before we get started though, I do this thing called the Free Joke Project. I'm just gonna tell you a joke. You just give me a rating eight through thirteen. And so here we go. My balloon elephant was too big to fit in the backseat of my car. Matt Putra - Eightx (01:12.005) Yeah. Matt Putra - Eightx (01:15.589) Amazing. Matt Putra - Eightx (01:25.231) I can do that. Brent Peterson (01:32.355) So I popped it in the trunk. Matt Putra - Eightx (01:39.195) yeah, got it. That took me minute. I will say eleven because you made me think. Brent Peterson (01:45.269) All right, good. Yes. People say that they go home and then they're like, now I get it. Good. Yeah, I appreciate it. so tell me, just give us the 10,000 foot view of of Matt's life and EightX. Tell us just to get us started on what where we're we're at. Matt Putra - Eightx (01:51.951) That I was like, shit, I'm not getting it. But no, yeah, I I did get there. I'm gonna try it on my kids. Matt Putra - Eightx (02:06.202) Sure. I was in private equity for a number of years and I was commuting three hours a day from home to office and and back. And I just sort of got sick of corporate and I I fell into working with consumer goods companies because a friend of mine Had an econ business, asked for some help. I helped him. They made a ton of more money. That was really fun for me. And so I just started helping his other friend and this and that. And and here we are six years later with a with a firm and partners and things. And day to day, I would say the last couple of months we've been focused on helping our clients in consumer goods play a strong offense. How do they take market share? How do they show up in the market? How do they get attention and how do they sell more stuff while trying to keep more profit as well. Brent Peterson (02:59.001) Yeah. you mentioned Claud Code and I I I've got a great use case. I we we I'm an entrepreneur's organization and a forum a forum mate of mine has a has a business where he he has a device that goes on your arm, doesn't matter what it is, but he he he uses at the time he used a lot of just Chat GPT to generate designs to give to engineering to so they could design a new product. And he said it he went from Matt Putra - Eightx (03:22.063) Uh-huh. Brent Peterson (03:28.995) three months to less than maybe even a day in some cases where you could come up with proto design prototypes and and then ship them off to a a company to give them a an actual real life prototype. Are you seeing in the CPG space, especially in in prototyping new packaging and designs and things like that, are you seeing just an acceleration in how fast people can do stuff? Matt Putra - Eightx (03:55.317) yes, but not in I we I haven't seen anybody using it for packaging design or product, like physical products yet. So that's super cool. I'm seeing a lot of acceleration in terms of marketing, messaging, A B testing, quantity and quality of ads. That's where I'm seeing most of it. better personalization, that kind of thing. Yeah. Brent Peterson (04:22.755) Yeah, I think the visual part has been a hard road for AI to get past. I mean, it does read your it does read your your your images and it's starting to get more into actually reading full videos. the the parts that you said are that you mentioned earlier, the the generative stuff where you're doing marketing and and especially the A-B testing, how much do you depend on the AI to help you and how much do you depend? Matt Putra - Eightx (04:36.883) huh. Brent Peterson (04:51.237) to depend on the human to give it some governance. Matt Putra - Eightx (04:54.81) Well, I would say some of the best executors I work with have been doing crazy numbers, like five hundred new ads per week. And one brand in particular was able to scale their spend from 180,000 a week to 350 with no degradation in their acquisition cost because they're creating so much more creative for meta to think about and to use. and so like relying heavily there on AI and obviously static ads, right? now the same people are actively hiring copywriters and a media buyer. and designers because there is still seems to be room where a good human thinker takes AI that much further. Brent Peterson (05:49.05) Yeah, and my and I I again I I use every every single day and I love to have this debate with the pundits who say that AI is gonna completely it's already completely replaced the say the copywriter. And I argue that that even the best trained models will slip and and just go back to baseline and I experience that every day. I I have a weekly article called Tuesdays with Claude. And you know, I think what happens is that it maybe it's good eighty percent of the time. So do you trust it for that that twenty percent? If it's twenty percent, that means one out of five of your users are getting a subpar experience. Matt Putra - Eightx (06:19.077) cool. Matt Putra - Eightx (06:24.685) Mm-hmm. Matt Putra - Eightx (06:34.21) Yeah. Yeah. so I've been actually looking at a very simple activity for me just yesterday was creating an exit intent pop-up on my website. You that should be very simple for Claude to just go and figure out. But I will tell you, the copy was garbage. And I even did and I'm look, like I am very AI forward and I've learned how to make it write well. Nothing I tried worked. I did the whole adversary what would a person think and have them score the copy and out at five. And if it's not good, rewrite it. Like I did the adversarial panel, you know, just because I didn't want to do it. And it everything came back not good. And then I finally said, okay, generate like a hundred options for me for me to look at. And I picked the one that I liked. So there are still some cases where I just can't get it done. Brent Peterson (07:22.137) Yeah, and do you ever find that it kind of doubles down too on what it's gonna tell you? Like, for example, this morning I'm like bar graphs versus a donut graph, you know, like a circle with a number in the middle. I think people are really gonna like the circle ones better with the colors and everything. No, no, people like the bar graphs. Tell me the data you're basing that on. I don't have any data. I'm just telling you this is what it is, and they double down on it. I think I d I feel like that's where maybe people that don't use it every day are r are just Matt Putra - Eightx (07:40.25) Interesting. Brent Peterson (07:51.622) depending on it and that's the mistake that I call it a race for mundane mediocrity, like just mundane and and you know, not doing anything. Do you find in the paid ad space then that you still you should always still have sort of your eye on the ball to case something happens? Matt Putra - Eightx (08:11.044) Well, look, I mean, as AI forward as I am, I have a agency who I pay to write my write my scripts and tell me what to do. I did try with AI, but I will say my agency's been more effective. And they may use AI. Sh I I hope that they do, but I know that the guy's looking at it. so look, we should all be doing as much as we can with it. there is just still that like extra amount. Maybe it's that gap from eighty to ninety where a human there is meaningful value created. You know? Brent Peterson (08:52.897) so you you're tell tell us a little bit about eightX Is it tell tell us what you do and how you serve your clients? Matt Putra - Eightx (09:01.114) Sure. So we are fractional CFOs, predominantly. We do bookkeeping, but we're CFOs. We are operations and growth focused CFOs, meaning I don't hire people that have come from big four. one new partner to our firm owned CPG businesses and was a CFO. Another guy was an engineer, and so on. and so our job is to work alongside CEO, founder, or executive team of an e-commerce company, help them understand their data better, help them make better decisions. obviously we do lots of reporting and cash flow planning. but the goal is like you want to go from here to here. We want to help you get there with minimal stress, maximal cash. yeah, that's short version. Brent Peterson (09:50.896) Do you ever find so I I did a short term as a CTO, a fractional CTO with a PE PE owned company, and the CFO focused the EBITDA on the entire company? Like they said, every everything is driven by EBITDA. Do you feel like sometimes the CFO in that in a in a venture capital or a PE situation may overdo or overcommunicate to especially if there's a staff of say 150, like the person in the warehouse? Matt Putra - Eightx (10:19.226) Sure. Brent Peterson (10:20.985) What are they gonna do with the data butt? What how are they gonna help their EBITDA, right? Like they probably d aren't going to the taco truck at lunch to say, you know what, I'm gonna do this to increase our EBITDA for the company. Matt Putra - Eightx (10:29.338) Exactly. Matt Putra - Eightx (10:32.718) No, I agree. and our approach is we believe that the founding or executive team should have a very clear view of EBITDA and what the plan is for it, but that we need to look upstream. So the further we go away from the executive core, the more upstream we have to go with the metrics that we provide people. So if it's warehouse, you know, we should be talking about throughput. and like time on task or or or like time in motion studies rather than Ebitda for them. Cause we can understand how their like let's say packing rate or so on filters through to Ebitda. They typically won't won't see the link as strongly as we will. So we will go and map metrics that make sense to them, but that we know will cor correlate to Ebitda later. Brent Peterson (11:23.153) as a CFO in that CFO role and especially as a fractional, you're mu you're helping founders or even probab or even maybe first first P first purchase PEs on on organizing their data. And hopefully by the time they get purchased their data is organized. But how do you as a CFO help them to like get everything together? And I think the most important thing probably if you're wor if you're looking to get acquired, nobody's gonna acquire you if they if you have all your Receipts in a shoe box, as they used to say. I you know, if you're you're disper everything is dispersed over a Google Drive that nobody can understand. How do how do you help them? Matt Putra - Eightx (12:02.796) Yeah. we we treat the sort of financials and data as as sort of hygiene. and so we we sort of expect a certain level. if someone's dis disorganized, we do have a bookkeeping team as well and we'll get them organized. So we we do wanna see all transactions in QuickBooks or Zero or whatever tagged with the receipt or invoice, like right in the the expense, because that's that's the best organization you're gonna get. Trying to find something in an email two years later is very difficult, but if everything is tagged to the transaction. makes life make is a lot easier. So in fact I would say that for me is a big theme of when I want to do bookkeeping or create audit ready books is that every single transaction has either a detailed note or even a receipt or a analysis tag to it so that someone could open the books in two years, open a transaction and know what the person was thinking and why they did what they did. If you can do that, solves a lot of problems. From there You know, you have to have some dashboards and scorecards that that show to a pro potential acquirer how it is that you guide the company and how you make decisions. For this, we rely heavily on EOS. most people will have heard of it. If you haven't read the book Traction, but if you follow the basics of EOS, you're gonna create enough meeting minutes and so on to sort of show an acquirer that you you know how to think and solve problems. but Finance accounting is, you know, basic hygiene. You you need budgets, you need everything tagged in QuickBooks. If you do that you'll be fine. Brent Peterson (13:47.076) Yeah, so I'm I'm glad you mentioned EOS. I don't have to ask you if you know about it. I I would say EOS was the basis, was the starting point that got us organized to get ready to be acquired and then finally be acquired when when when I sold the our last company. but one thing that was interesting, you just said was the minutes that you need to also give to potential. And I think that's a great example of how to use the, you know. Matt Putra - Eightx (13:51.279) Yeah. Matt Putra - Eightx (14:03.13) Amazing. Brent Peterson (14:15.139) I'm assuming you're saying using the notes out of your L ten meeting and other meetings like that to help purchasers understand the workflow and the cadence of your meetings and and what's happening with the company. Matt Putra - Eightx (14:18.702) Yes. Yes. Matt Putra - Eightx (14:25.88) Yes. Yeah, if you are so I would say this is important for when you're selling for like a multi-eight figures or raising a series B. When you get to those levels, the person who's going to be investing or acquiring has really need to know that your team can function. And there's no better way to do that by showing them that each department and team has their own L10 with issues and resolutions and tracking over time. Like what better way could there be? be because if you don't do that, you how else are you gonna prove that all these teams can function without you kind of fixing everything? So we are huge fans of EOS. And especially if you're looking for a big multiples or a big raise, this will help you convince the acquirer that your teams can function. Brent Peterson (15:13.603) Yeah, that's I mean traction, what a great book. and I would recommend everybody to go Geno Wickman Traction. It's it's my default book that I tell everybody to read, and I have it and audio and print and and digitals just so I can take notes in it. I I know in I was reading, you know, just a little bit of the your background. You helped close two large exits last year. What did how did you see that or how did you contribute to that to get those companies ready to sell and really maximize their value? Matt Putra - Eightx (15:46.393) Yeah, so one we were with for about four years, before they sold and we had raised their series eight and then I believe we did a follow on and then they did have their exit. So I'll make it sound nice, but as we all know it's it's a messy process. the w they were in the UK and they they had a supplement, tumor their tumor company. I can I'll now that I've given their name, I'll say things that are publicly people know about, but with them for four years. They the goal in the beginning was scale revenue. So how do we understand the client lifecycle, customer lifecycle, conversion funnel, growth economics in a way that we can scale revenue while still maintaining cash and bootstrapping? Then it was as we continue to scale, how do we get the right debt in place? Then as we got into wholesale, it was now we're doing wholesale, now we have thousands of doors. How do we afford the payment terms and the lead times? And then we did manufacturing in-house. So then how do we buy machines and equipment? And how do we train the staff? And so there was a lot that went into that over those four years. And when we got into the sales process, it was very intense. Like, but we had raised before that, so we we had some idea of what it would look like. but we had data rooms, we had to show Forecast down to the unit level by channel, like what SKU was gonna sell what in what channel. Like we had to really break things down. it was a very a a good valuation and and great terms for the founder who's actually still running the company. but they were purchased by AG Bar, which is a massive beverage conglomerate. So it was it was a very, very hard process. but Matt Putra - Eightx (17:34.073) You know, we had built something that was well organized. EOS. They were well organized with EOS. We had two years of EOS before we sold, I believe at least. And and yeah, we we were transparent. We we asked for something f fair. We gave them the data they needed. We had a lot of stuff prepared. but it was still it was a tough process. Brent Peterson (18:01.2) Do you find that there's a a threshold that EOS doesn't make sense? Like you get too big and maybe you're half a billion dollars or something that EOS just doesn't make sense anymore? Matt Putra - Eightx (18:09.996) Yeah. So the the big thing with EOS for me is it's light at the strategy level. So they're very yeah, you nod your head, you know, right? So they're I would everybody should st if you don't have something, start with EOS. Start. Just just get going. L10s first and then whatever else, but start. When you get to the point where There's maybe diminishing returns just for the incremental growth stuff that you're doing, or where international expansion is an issue, or where you have so many opportunities you don't know which ones to take. EOS begins to break down a bit. And what I've seen at this level was probably 80 million roughly, approaching a hundred. The CEO of this company tacked on the playing to win framework, which comes out of the the I forget it was the CEO of of PNG, I I I can't remember exactly, but the framework's called Playing to Win. Playing to Win walks you through who are you going to beat in competitors, in what segment and what activities, and then what's needed from your management team and your tooling and so on. And it helps you make a lot of these strategic decisions that sit, I would say, above EOS. When you make those big decisions, EOS can then help you get the traction on the decisions. But what I have found is it can be light. the strategy. So again, if it's a massive blue ocean, sometimes you need to pick a lane. And EOS won't really help you do that. Brent Peterson (19:38.052) Yeah, my my friend sold his company last year, same and he he was the EOS and he said the biggest thing he s the biggest gap he saw was that strategy piece that he wished was in there. And I and you know, if if you're doing a self implementation, is there's no reason why you shouldn't do that. And I just actually wrote down Playing to Win, just because you know, just look it up later. But I think that's a great such great advice and and good good insights as well. i if you are a smaller brand, let's just say You're in that you're in that one to ten million dollars. Is there some financial habits as a CFO that you would say to build them to ten X eight X I'm sorry, they wanna eight X what they're doing? Matt Putra - Eightx (20:21.526) Yep. the if if I had to pick the most important thing you should do at that stage is to understand very clearly your conversion funnel, meaning from ad advertising. To impressions, to click through eights, to site sessions, to add to cart, to check out all these things, right? and then then from there, like LTBs by product and by segment and so on. And the reason I want you to understand those things is because at that level, as you grow, one of those things will either break or will be below average, either your average or industry average. Then you pick the thing that's broken the most and you fix it. And if you do that, you'll see a step change in growth. Let's say it's for example, I talked to someone today, their funnel suggested that all they had to do was throw more sessions at their website. So for them, the answer is simple: spend more money on advertising. They'll do that. When they do that, something else will break. It could be click-through rate or it could be add-to-cart rate. But which one it which one it is will will show them what to do next. So maybe they need if it's click-through rate, they need better ads. If it's add-to-cart rate, they need better landing pages or better product pages. And so if you map your funnel and you monitor it daily, and then bonus, if you can connect that funnel to your budget for the year, so you can see in it every month what am I expecting for impressions and all the way through, you will be able to show yourself what to do when something goes wrong or when you want to work capture more opportunity. like even sometimes you'll see CPM spikes for someone and the agency will have done something with the targeting, which doesn't happen as much anymore. So you could say, go abroad or whatever. there one one brand I interviewed who I did an audit for $40 million clothing brand roughly. They were about to spend $200,000 on a website redesign, and I mapped their conversion fund for them and I said, by the way. Matt Putra - Eightx (22:33.23) don't do the design. There's only one piece you have to fix and that's called their reach checkout rate. If you have Shopify, you'll see this. That reach checkout means someone has added stuff to their cart and they have to go to the checkout page. That was the only part of their funnel that was broken. It was it was well below their historical average and below industry. So I said fix that one thing. If you get back to industry average, that's five million bucks you're gonna make. And that's not gonna cost two hundred grand, it might cost twenty-five. So As far as I know, I I gotta follow up with them still, but they've probably saved one hundred and fifty grand and they'll still capture the benefit of the conversion. Brent Peterson (23:09.283) Yeah. And there are there are great they're great tools too to follow your entire customer journey through your site. And there's companies that will tell you where they're dropping out and even giving you a real time warning when they drop out. I think that's yeah, that's I mean very insightful. Matt Putra - Eightx (23:14.062) Yes, yes. Brent Peterson (23:27.159) You my the company that I I run now has human beings that write content and I think we recognize that there is these like entities out there that are humans and we w talk and write and stuff like that. and it's really under siege. The content writing business is under siege by AI. Do you think the financial business is next and and and that the CFO role might even be re you know, resigned to an agent? Matt Putra - Eightx (23:43.417) Yeah. Matt Putra - Eightx (23:49.818) Yeah, I'm very worried about it. I'll be honest with you, I'm quite worried about it. and one of the reasons if I show you my screen, I have ten cloud code terminals open is because if I'm just very, very honest, like I'm I'm operating a bit out of fear and I'm trying to work very, very quickly. I'm working very, very hard. because the basics of what a CFO will do is gonna be automated in a year. So the the work that I do for brands that are sub five million. They'll be able to it themselves in a year, probably. So, what we're doing as a company is there's still a human side that will be around for a number of years, which is where we are setting setting a path, but also aligning the humans in a company around a path. And that I think is gonna be around for quite a bit longer. so we are working a bit more on that side of things as well. Brent Peterson (24:46.083) I I find that when you decide you're gonna use AI and then you give it a model that it we talked about this, there's slippage, it's not always consistent. And and and I think that language is we can argue about this, but language is more complicated than than accounting, right? Accounting is complicated, but accounting is is very binary as well. There's not a lot of gray. There's some gray areas in tax, but maybe in accounting it's usually a one or a zero, right? Matt Putra - Eightx (25:15.32) Yeah, often, yeah. Brent Peterson (25:15.793) but with language, it's subjective when you want to use too many adverbs or all the different signs in language now that AI has captured. moving a lot of that to automations through AI. And and I guess too, to be clear, automations an AI is not machine learning. It's it's it's it's large language models that are doing things like a like a human, not but not necessarily always with. An if-then statement or a s you know, a code, a hard gate to get through. And sometimes, like even when you do develop gates, let's just say I don't want any checks to go out that are more than $10,000. Claude may wake up in the morning and decide, today's the day I'm letting this check go through. Cause I don't know, I just don't feel like it. Or you're right. You're absolutely right. You're fair to give me pushback on that. there's a big risk in having governance over to an AI. what what's your views on that right now? And do you think it's gonna I'm obviously it's gonna get better, but should people always trust it? Matt Putra - Eightx (26:21.336) Well, so we are actively trying to build stuff that will do what you're talking about, run payments and things. But I but the way that I would do it is to treat AI like any other employee. and the best financial operating systems have gates. So for example, when I have bookkeepers working for somebody, they're not allowed to s to send money out of their bank out of their out of a client account without an approval. What does that mean? Well it means my bookkeeper will load the payment into ramp or whatever, but the payment can't go out until the founder or whoever's in charge clicks the approve button. So you have to be the same with your AIs. Because AI isn't gonna steal from you because its kid is sick and so on, but it's gonna wake up and It's gonna read the system prompt, but it's gonna not read the back half of it for some reason, because they do this, right? And then it's gonna go, shoot, I didn't see the gate, I'm so sorry. Well, don't don't be in a position where the AI has to say sorry to you. Set up the guardrails the way you would for a person that could steal from you if they had the inclination and the opportunity. If you do that, you'll be mostly fine. You you you you're still gonna get situations where the AI does the bookkeeping and it puts something in the wrong account or misread this number or whatever, right? But so can a person. It will get better over time. but right now, like you you'll you'll have seen this in your work. Sometimes your AI will read the first half of a system prompt and not the back half or skip the middle or and it's like, why did you miss it? And it's like, I'm so sorry, I forgot to read that part. Like a human would though, right? So it's same thing. Just set up the controls properly. Brent Peterson (28:03.054) Mm-hmm. Brent Peterson (28:07.609) one thing I've done is I I have a violation log and I started it because every once in a while it would just deploy for me. And I was like i like it usually was in when you're testing, it would then suddenly trigger deployment because you've said, Yeah, it works in testing. Or I or w let me test this again and then it'll come back, fix it and then deploy. And I'm like, No, you can't do that. You can't deploy to production without me. I want to deploy to pro production. so what it's help what it's helped me to do is categorize things that are happening and then maybe move that gate up when it when you have to have it move up. And I I've definitely no I've I I I did get an auto deployment this morning, and was in that exact same situation. But it's happened instead of every two or three days. Now it happens once a quarter. And I think that Matt Putra - Eightx (28:43.587) Yeah. Matt Putra - Eightx (28:58.852) Mm-hmm. Brent Peterson (29:02.713) as long as you can keep track of and then categorize I call violations, the better it's gonna be for what you're doing. I and I again I think that having the human that human gate is is probably your best bet. Matt Putra - Eightx (29:17.784) Well, I mean I mean, so we we're doing a ton of development right now, but I have a software engineer on staff. And the closer my apps get to like production status, the more he reviews the AI sort of bolt on PRs they're called, but like the he the more he reviews the PRs to make sure that they're okay. you can also, if you've ever heard of test-driven development, TDD, you can ask your AIs to write tests so that every time they create a new commit or PR. It runs all the old tests so you can be assured that things aren't gonna break in new ways. That's something that we've even done. We've done it for copywriting as well and our and website development as well. Brent Peterson (29:58.692) Yeah, and I, you know, I've I I've I use Play Right and I've recently just discovered Claude and Claude and Chrome, which is such a great way to just do a a quick validation of something. And even on simple things like our content website, I have it go and look at our key landing pages to make sure that they exist and the content is still there, and all those things. you spent some time running a metal recycling plant. Tell to tell tell us about that. That's Matt Putra - Eightx (30:08.378) Totally. Matt Putra - Eightx (30:17.145) Mm-hmm. Matt Putra - Eightx (30:24.384) I did, yeah. Brent Peterson (30:28.131) Super interesting and how yeah, go ahead. Matt Putra - Eightx (30:28.154) So funny. yeah, I that was my first like real job. I was nineteen and I I had thought I wanted to be a doctor and I had taken my first year of pre-med and I like, no way. And I went to I dropped out of university, I went to work at this metal recycling place and it was it was a grind, I tell ya. But I very quickly became supervisor and manager in the in the plant and I was managing people that were in their forties and whatever and some ex-convicts and whatnot. You know how it goes, metal recycling. And I learned that I really enjoyed managing. I really enjoyed problem solving. I was actually very good at it as well. I enjoyed working with people and managing and all that. and it was sort of my first foray into business, I guess. And I was there for almost 10 years. but throughout the time there, I learned a ton. you know, with metal recycling, you have to look at commodities and futures and what do you buy from the client and how do you sell it then for a profit. And so I learned a lot about all that. Learned a lot about managing people, a lot about process. I like I learned to weld. I can operate an excavator in a bobcats and weld and all these things. And Yeah, it was it was it was tough. It was very hard. Hard job, hard physically. But I'm actually still connected with the owners of that company. Yeah, it's so weird. Brent Peterson (31:56.441) That's awesome. is there is there something that you learned out of that that's really helped you besides the management that's helped you in the financial side? Matt Putra - Eightx (32:05.223) man. Matt Putra - Eightx (32:12.11) You know, the one thing that those guys did is when 2008 the whole meltdown happened, I was working there and they didn't have to do any layoffs. And most a lot of people did. And they had I guess they'd saved up some reserve or something to enable them to withstand that very strange time period. And I think that's one thing I've learned is trying to have a reserve, a nest egg, if you will. not always possible, but it but if you can do it. and I think the other thing, less financial, but maybe operational, is they were very, very service forward. So they overserved their clients. And I think that's a big thing I've taken with me is if you provide really great service. You can be at the top end of the market. Brent Peterson (33:10.915) Yeah, over deliver, underpromise. No, over yeah, under prom that's I I think I got it right there. I a year ago I went to the global leadership conference for EO and all the talk was was tariffs and especially in CPG, w depending on where you where you source it, are you seeing some of that kind of die down now and and and the the whole stress that it put on entrepreneurs that Matt Putra - Eightx (33:17.048) Yeah. Brent Peterson (33:39.609) That stress is somewhat subsiding. Matt Putra - Eightx (33:43.471) Well, there was the initial short term stress of this new thing happening and trying to figure it all out. And then we didn't talk about it a ton. And then refunds have re rev rev revitalized the topic, so people are talking about that. But some of my clients are getting multi-six figure refunds back, which is great. But also that that apparently the government's enacted a new program of tariffs. Maybe they're called something different because the old version was deemed illegal. So they're still around and so we're still discussing them. People aren't freaking out as much. but yeah, I mean credit to entrepreneurs generally, you just you know, there's a shock to the system and then we all just figure out how to go forward anyway. I mean, but yeah, we're still managing that. There's still lots of it going on. Brent Peterson (34:31.437) Yeah, I mean credit to my friend built a business out of or he pivoted his business into going to Latam and helping custom companies automate their production lines so that that and he targeted low tariff countries to help them and you know at the end of the day, they're gonna have a more productive production line, right? So it's like a win win for everybody. what what I mean, you're in Canada, right? is it Matt Putra - Eightx (34:41.316) Cool. Brent Peterson (34:58.627) I would imagine that it it's a little bit different, but you're very dependent on the US for a lot of things. did you do you see a difference in in the in the maybe the trading behavior on some of your brands or most of your brands in the US? Matt Putra - Eightx (35:15.182) I would say most of our brands are in the US currently. We have a a bunch in Australia, but and and in Canada too. no, there's no difference in trading behavior just because everybody wants to sell in US dollars if you can. So I haven't seen any a major difference there. if anything, people are trying to penetrate the US more. That's what I see from Europe, from Australia, from Canada, as people are trying to get it, you know, it's the biggest market in the world, I think. So there everyone's trying to get in. And inasmuch as we may complain, it's still the biggest market in the world. Brent Peterson (35:53.574) you had mentioned QuickBooks and some other financial systems earlier. if you're setting up a website, like say you're on Shopify, you're can you're connecting all these different systems, which one do you wish you would have connected first, you know, after you've done it six months later or whatever? Which one is it the the that you should have done first instead of waiting? Matt Putra - Eightx (36:19.834) Is this for someone who's setting up the first time? Brent Peterson (36:22.189) Yeah, or you or you have your Shopify set up and and and you know, you have your your fulfillment set up, but i we something that you wish you would have done in the first place. Matt Putra - Eightx (36:30.594) Okay. good question. man. This is a good question. I would say I would say the thing, okay, I'll answer it by by saying it this way. What I still find to be the most common mistake and the hardest mistake to fix is launching new products, but then not killing them if they don't perform. So there isn't really like a specific system that tells you to kill bad SKUs. But that is the the process that I wish everyone would have earlier in their journey because it's the it's the by and large the most common mistake that people are still making time and time again, even after now being six years working with e-com brands. A lot of other things got better. This is still the worst one. So you'll you'll you'll launch a new product, which as an owner, you you love your new products or like your little babies. And when they don't perform, you don't want to kill them because they're your little babies. And so you're still managing the skew, you're still putting it in three PLs, you're still managing safety slot for that skew and pick and pack and recounting and all this, where if you just kill it, you'll be better off. But people hate killing SKUs. and so and they still do. Even I mean, e even companies that are Matt Putra - Eightx (37:59.033) Multi eight figures, high eight figures, they hate killing SKUs Yeah. That's the toughest one. Brent Peterson (38:05.998) Yeah, my my cousin is the brand new brand director for or the the emerging or whatever brand director for Perfetti They make Mentos. And whenever we're out together and we both run ro marathons, so we often will travel together, he makes me go to Target or to Dollar Tree and he'll look where it's positioned in retail, like, that these are should be on the top shelf. Do you feel like as an owner or as a brand director or whatever? You have to have that extra passion to drag your cousin along into a retail store to see where your brand is sitting. and and what how much of a like from a CPG standpoint, where it sits in retail, does that have a does it have a big relationship where it sits in digital? Matt Putra - Eightx (38:41.102) That's pretty cool. Matt Putra - Eightx (38:53.668) retail? We love retail when you can get in. Absolutely. I think if you are have a type of product that could succeed at retail, you should try to get into it. The timing is important because if you if you try to get in and you don't sell through, you get kicked out and you don't get another chance, or not always. So if you can build attention and then you can get a shot at retail, take it. People are people hate the idea. of like keystone pricing where you have to knock your price down by half and give it to retailer. They hate the idea of payment terms, but I will tell you, almost without fail, the brands that tack retail on to their e-com do more money and profit. Yes, managing cash gets hard, but you'll you're more profitable. you're taken more seriously, banks take you more seriously, you you do make more money, more contribution margin, all of it. So we love retail. But if you do it too early, you can't get sell-through, they're gonna kick you out. So you have to be careful when you start. Brent Peterson (39:57.466) Yeah, I've had more I I've in I've I've interviewed a number of brands, even even brands that maybe they got misplaced inside the store. So I I can't remember what the product was, but he was in Walmart and he was in the wrong section. And it was, you know, the Walmart didn't quite know where to put him and he could never he it took him a long time to say, No, this should be an automotive or rather than or what I don't know what the I I'm just making that part up. But Matt Putra - Eightx (40:10.552) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Brent Peterson (40:22.393) You know, kind of that follow through and making sure you're in the right place. And then once you get into a rhythm, it's really you're really positioned in a good space. Is there is there any big box that makes sense as a friendly place for the first place to test it? Matt Putra - Eightx (40:39.002) I'm I'm not sure if I can answer that. Matt Putra - Eightx (40:46.574) I think I've seen I've seen good launches in grocery, in Target, in Walmart, in Costco. And when I say grocery, I mean Kroger Publix, Wegman's like I've seen great launches in all those. So I don't I i I probably I can't prescribe one. I will say drug and and convenience. is a very difficult play. So you have to be you have to be careful if you're approached by them. And and the reason I say that is because I worked with a company who we were approached by CVS with a massive, massive initial order, like multi-seven figure initial order. And our board told us to stay away. just because sell through is not great and then they send your stuff back. So so be careful about those. Beyond that though, I think it's product dependent. if you're approached by one, it you just need to do some research and and talk to some people in industry. but it's probably product dependent, I think. Brent Peterson (41:52.25) Yeah, my my first thought was comes to Costco because I I'm a big Costco fan and I like I said I live most of the time in Hawaii and it's great to get local brands, especially in Hawaii and Costco. And I every time I travel it seems like there's a little section that has local in it so you can sort of get a flavor of what the local town is like. Matt, what what what sort of Matt Putra - Eightx (42:01.263) Yeah. Brent Peterson (42:16.227) things are you seeing on the horizons that people should be aware of and especially around the CFO role and and what where you're seeing some trends happening and what what are we looking for H two now of this year? Matt Putra - Eightx (42:28.25) Well let's see. in terms of CFO stuff, I think it's it's sort of steady as she goes. we're growing, which is we're lucky. but the the work isn't changing a ton. I mean what we're trying to do is is do more for the same with AI. So just give more value, be more communicative, give more data, more background. But the work is still the same. Part of that is because If you're non financial, you're not sure if what Claude gives you is actually right or not. So we still have a job today. In terms of consumer goods, I th I yeah, I mean I don't know. I I you know the the the one thing that's is a struggle today, which since 2022 has been a struggle is debt financing. And so I I always want to caution people just to try to find the right financing for you. But more and more people are coming out with more and more options these days. So just make sure you understand the market there. Matt Putra - Eightx (43:37.998) Yeah, I I think the the AI CFO solutions, we're seeing more of those come out. I think you should test them. If you're if you don't have a CFO, if you think you might need one, there's no harm in testing. Like Iris is a good one. but yeah, I don't know. Brent Peterson (43:55.374) All right. I as we we as we close up the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What Matt, what would you like to plug today? Matt Putra - Eightx (44:03.797) sure. Woo would I like to plug? You know what I'll say is we have a research team and so we are writing a lot of content. AI assisted of course, but we're writing a ton of content right now. and I think that for the consumer brands You'll get a lot of value from looking at our blog. And our we've made a chatbot on our site that has our corpus of writing embedded inside of it. I think if you have questions about e-commerce, if you go to our blog eightx.co/blog, you can find considered researched answers to a lot of your questions. And our chat bot will help guide you to the right articles if you want. So I would say check that out. We are putting a ton of effort and a ton of money and a ton of time into writing very high quality, considered researched content. Brent Peterson (45:02.895) That's awesome. I would I was double down on the plug on research content. That's what we do for a living. And I think that yeah, I mean, I think that's one thing I I I think well definitely that's one thing that AI is not gonna replace in the short term is is the long form research content and a lot of it because it is so complicated and there's so many different pieces that I don't think AI is ever gonna understand what a human wants and maybe it does at some point, but then like it's only gonna decide what everybody else wanted last year. Matt Putra - Eightx (45:08.439) cool. Okay. Amazing. Brent Peterson (45:33.263) So yeah, I'll I'll I'll I'll second you on that. And one last question. So I watched a lot of soccer. Who plays in that fantastic looking stadium in Vancouver now? Is it CFL or who's who's in there? And do you have a does Vancouver have a pro team for pro MLS team? All right. Matt Putra - Eightx (45:49.369) Yeah, we do. We're called the Vancouver White Caps. There's a lot of controversy right now about whether they're gonna stay here or go to Vegas because our our government, our local government owns the stadium and stuff. So we don't want them to leave because we wanna we want a pathway for our our kids out here. But they're called the Vancouver White Caps. We've had season tickets for three years. We take my kids all the time. I love it. yeah, it's a great, great place. Brent Peterson (45:56.382) Ugh God. Brent Peterson (46:13.089) Yeah, we have Minnesota or Minnesota United is my Minnesota team, the loons. They have a such a great stadium. It is packed all the time. I hate just give Las Vegas a new one, like you know, the year Matt Putra - Eightx (46:15.908) Course. Matt Putra - Eightx (46:28.29) I know. There's enough there's enough there's enough people that want to play and enough people that want to watch that we could all have a team. Our government just needs to be smart about what they do with the stadium and and not make it hard for the owners to stay here. But like Antoine Griezmann's coming to it, I don't know if it's Minneapolis, but it's I can't remember, but Griezmann is gonna be in the MLS next year. So like we're gonna keep getting these marquee players. Brent Peterson (46:36.653) Yeah. Brent Peterson (46:49.623) Win Minnesota will be one of the last ones to get a marquee player, but we're never very good in the sports business. Matt Putra it's been it's putra, sorry, it's been such a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. very much enjoyed it. How would people get in touch with you? Matt Putra - Eightx (46:56.907) Yeah. Matt Putra - Eightx (47:05.368) Yeah, thank you. Matt Putra - Eightx (47:10.21) EightX.co best place. We have buttons that say talk to a CFO if you want to talk to me, that's the best one. We have a contact form, I see it instantly. yeah, easiest place to get a hold of for sure. Brent Peterson (47:22.149) All right, Matt Putra is the managing or partner with EightX. Thank you so much for being here today. Matt Putra - Eightx (47:28.548) This was so nice, thank you.