Reviving a Plateaued Business & USA Manufacturing

Reviving a Plateaued Business & USA Manufacturing Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Hey, it's Andrew here and welcome to the eCommerce Fuel podcast, the show dedicated to helping seven and eight figure brand owners build incredible businesses and amazing lives. And today on the show, joined by Chris Rose, who is the president of Gunner.com. They make really high quality premium dog products and kennels. Enjoy my conversation with him. We talk about what probably the most interesting I found that we talked about was how to revive a business that has That has flatlined a bit. If you've been in the game for a while, you've got to the point where maybe you're still growing just a little bit or maybe you're flatlined or shrinking a little bit, but you're spending most of your time working on maintenance, on operational things, on getting things done, but things that really aren't moving the business forward in terms of a growth. How do you get out of that rut, so to speak, and pivot to be able to re-engage the growth engine of your business? I found that most interesting because he's come into multiple businesses and done that. We talk about that. We talk about manufacturing in the USA, which he has a lot of experience with. And even at the end, talk a little bit about kids, having kids while trying to work and the balance and pain and joy they're in. So, fun episode. Enjoyed it and hope you do too. We're going to get into it right after this. Today's episode is brought to you by the eCommerce Fuel private community for seven and eight figure owners. We have an amazing vibrant forum where you can connect and get answers to your questions. But probably one of the biggest long-term values is our events. We can build deep connections with other owners. We have ECF Live, our annual summit where all of our members and attendees are vetted versus, you know, a lot of eCommerce events where you have zillions of people trying to sell you stuff. We have adventures, great talks, curated dinners. eComCamp, which is our annual event for eight-figure store owners and smaller meetups and dinners. So if you're looking to connect with people just like you, people in eCommerce obsessed with their business who can talk about it for hours, our community is the place to do it. So that sounds interesting. You can find out more information and apply at eCommerceFuel.com. Was this for Gunner or was this for a different business? Chris Rose: This is for Gunner. Yeah, we actually did this at one of my prior companies too. And it's one admin nightmare for a six month period of time versus an annual admin nightmare on the finance team. So made sense at that organization and made sense here at Gunner too. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Nice. I introduced you at the very top of the episode, but can you give people just a quick overview of Gunner? It's a pretty interesting business. Chris Rose: Yeah, Gunner has been around now. There's some dispute, but Gunner has been around for a little bit over 11 years. The idea came about 13 years ago. Our founder, Madison, and his dog at the time, Gunner, they were constantly looking for a better, more safe way to travel with the dog in a truck bed. An accident that scared our founder quite a bit, he set out to sketch and build something that he would feel comfortable in trusting his dog's life as he traveled. There's obviously been quite a few options on the market for a long period of time, but all of those had significant flaws in safety, significant flaws in the way that they were constructed and never quite felt like a premium option for somebody that takes their dog's safety seriously. He worked to design and build an incredible dog kennel. It's called the G1 and it has so many different components. It's made here in the US, roto-molded here in the US. We're assembled here in Middle Tennessee in the Nashville area. It's got a ton of different safety features that are patented, center for pet safety, crash tested. And we put a lot of time and energy into engineering the best dog kennel in the world. And so we have man's best kennel. The man's best friend deserves man's best kennel is one of the taglines that we had early on in the business because we really did build a product that differentiated itself from the market. As of lately, we're building the best dog products in the world. So we've looked outside of that at the needs outside of just safely traveling with your pet. The hobbyist, the person that's really taking their dog out there in the world, they're looking for other items that make that journey more fun, safer, and looking for a premium option there. So we've started introducing food bowls and crates and outside of kennels, other products that you can accessorize that kennel with too. So yeah, we're an eCommerce direct-to-consumer business. We are expanding into Omnichannel and we're having a great time doing it. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: The pet business seems like it'd be such a good market. I have another good friend who's in the dog space and the pet space. I think there are more pets now than there are kids in the United States, like children at home living with parents. Both categories, children and pets, people will just spend unholy amounts of money and probably rightfully so in these cases. Talk a bit about Being American made. I mean, we're recording this like three weeks before an election like, you know, US manufacturing. It's a big topic. What has been your experience? Why did you decide to be made in the US? How has that experience been? And I'd love to hear your thoughts. Chris Rose: It's been important to the company from day one to support American jobs and build the product as locally as possible. And the benefits from a supply chain standpoint have been great too, in terms of being able to source product quickly, being able to fly out and very easily. Literally flew in last night from North Carolina. And so you're able to go in and hands-on touch and feel the products with your suppliers. You can form a better relationship with the suppliers too, simply by being close in proximity. And we found that you're going to pay a little bit more but the relationship is stronger and the supply chain speed is faster and you can control the quality a lot better and a lot easier. There's a faster process for if you find that the quality is slipping on one of the components of a product that you offer. The feedback loop is a lot faster when you can just fly an hour away or make a phone call that somebody's in the same time zone as you and you've got a great relationship with. The same thing can definitely be said internationally depending on how long you've been working with a particular factory, etc., how your factory rep is. But we've just found that speed and quality, especially for something as Big and heavy and rotational molding itself, the way that we build the product, the patented tech that we've built into the product, that's all something that we feel better being able to control stateside. Staying away from politics, but one of the only things that both sides of the aisle tend to agree on is tariffs. Being beholden to getting our products from international sources that we can't control, that one day we'll wake up and see a 20-30% increase on that product cost in taxes and duties, Not something that we're generally pumped about. So that's one of the other considerations outside of the fact that we feel like we can make the best quality product here in the U.S. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: One of the things you hear from people when they try to build things in the U.S.A. is I think one of two responses. Either I called a bunch of manufacturers and none of them got back to me or the capacity wasn't there to manufacture what I wanted to in the United States. So when I think about a kennel Like the Gunner kennel that you make, molded plastic, really high quality. I don't know if it's injection molded or not. But that surprises me that, not that you couldn't make it in the US, but it seems like something that would be exponentially easier and just way more capacity to make it in Asia. So was that difficult to find someone to make it for you in the States? Chris Rose: Yeah, totally. I mean, just in the technology alone, we're very limited by the amount of people that can build the type of product the way that we build the product. And we're very particular about each down to the bolt and the screw and the nut, every component of our product. We're pretty meticulous about that. Price the product high because it really does have a lot of thought and energy into making sure that it's the best product out there. So we are limited with the partnerships that we can have just because it's not as commoditized of a product. We have a brand that people are fanatical about and we put a lot of pride in that product and make sure that we do justice for those people that are in Facebook groups talking about our products 24-7. We really make sure that when we put something out there in the world, it's not going to have a high return rate. People are going to love that thing forever. It's going to last a long time. It's not going to fade. It's got UV resistance, so it doesn't fade in the sun. The ratings of the straps are crash tested. Like everything that we do, there's a lot of detail put into. And so that definitely limits the amount of manufacturing options that we have. When it comes to volume, yes, there's absolutely a better play overseas. But we've just found that for us, the volume that we're experiencing and even the clip that we're growing at, we can still support that here in the US. You know, tooling and machines, you can buy more. And space is not necessarily a huge issue for us. We've got some manufacturers that have much larger contracts than us. And so they've got the space to be able to handle our volume and an increase year over year for the foreseeable future. So it's fortunate. But yeah, outside of freight, because, you know, Boding in a large kennel would be quite an expense. There's definitely cheaper manufacturing to be had internationally, but I just think our core value is put the customer first and our vision for our company is to give our dogs the lives they deserve and we feel like the best product we can put out comes from the US. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Have you thought about building a premium brand? Because you're selling a premium product and you've got some real hardship on the design side, on other facets of it that make it harder. You also have huge benefits on the other side with margins, with reputation. What have you learned about building a premium product? And also, what are some of the mistakes you've made and some of the things you're really glad you have done? Chris Rose: Yeah. I think one of the things that we've learned about is when you have a great brand and your customers really care about the mission that you're on, the product that you sell. It's important to, you have to make sure that you don't make any mistakes in that journey because it's really easy. Factories approach us all the time and say, you know, you could save $10 if you did this. You could save $5 if you did that. You could save 10 cents if you did this. And it's really tempting sometimes to make those decisions. But at the end of the day, we just, we know that we couldn't stand behind and have a lifetime guarantee on that type of product. So you really have to live that life if you're going to go out and advertise that. And we tend not to really We advertise that we're the premium products. We advertise what our product does and we let our customers advertise that it's the best one in the market outside of our tagline, which kind of does say that. We really do let our customers be the ones to say, if you're going to get a kennel, make sure that it's a Gunner kennel. If you're going to get a food bowl, get the best one out there. If you're going to get a training bumper for your dog, Gunner's the way to go and here's all the reasons why and here's my experience with it. UGC, third-party reviews, testimonials has really been the way that we've let our brand say those things through our customers, but then it puts a lot of pressure on you to execute on that. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Yeah. Well, congrats. I mean, even just from the website, part of that too is the creative, the photography, the design, it all kind of signals and the price point too, signals to a premium product, even though I haven't seen it in person. The biggest thing I was excited to talk to you about today was your experience and background in coming into organizations that have, I don't know if stagnated is the right word, but I'm going to use it, that have just become comfortable with the status quo. They're kind of just in maintenance mode. They're surviving versus growing. Many times it sounds like you've come in and helped them get out of that rut, focus on growth again. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Maybe an example if you're willing to share of when you've done that in the past, even if you don't want to name names, maybe just some situational stories or a story. But then yeah, how that works because I think that's something that so many people can relate to. I mean, I've been doing this for eCommerce for 15, 16 years now. And I can see some of that even where I am right now. It's easy to get into an operational mode and forget about growth and just feel like you're being very productive by optimizing things. I'm a huge optimizer. So I'd love to hear your background in that and then how you've helped brands and your own companies perhaps get out of that kind of just maintenance mode. Chris Rose: Yeah, I mean most companies when I land at a company, most companies live by this rule unknowingly that they're spending the majority of their time both individually and as a group day-to-day maintaining the business and they're solving problems that don't grow the business. And I know it's super simple but across too many organizations that I've been at or friends that I speak to in eCommerce, They're so busy in their inbox and they've got a mountain of orders that they have to have to ship out there. AP bills are through the roof and they need to focus on that. There's always work to do on the day to day of the business and that tends to take up the lion's share of their time instead of The time spent going and doing that next thing that's going to really take the business to the next level. Even if it's clear, you know, sometimes it'll be clear where you want to go as a business. And so somebody, a leader at the organization will come in and try to align everybody on here's the vision, here's where we're headed. Not everyone is then aligned on the approach to get there. That's the other step that's always missed is even if you paint the same picture for everyone, how they drew that picture is oftentimes going to be very different. And so you can be clear about the vision, you can be clear about the objectives within that vision, but you're not going to be clear on the road there, the initiatives to really make that happen. What are the projects in what order and what's most important? So priority then kind of becomes the issue. The other thing that I see is a lot of times I'll go to an organization and one person is in charge of strategy or one person is prioritizing the next moves for the business. A lot of times that's the founder or the leader that they've put in place to do that. It's often the busiest person. It's often the person that has the most day-to-day involvement. And so what tends to happen is it gets pushed. So, you know, one person is in charge of all of the strategy and prioritizing the next moves and staying on top of the opportunities that exist out there and having time to whiteboard and sit down and think about what the next steps are. But they can't do that because they've got an inbox that has 1,100 unread messages from last week. So that's one of the other challenges that I find. And sometimes the leadership that exists within an organization is operational focus. So maybe you have a CFO or a COO is leading the business and maybe has been promoted to a president or CEO. They're typically making the decisions based on what's the smoothest decision. They're really focused on like procedural perfection more than they're focused on growth. And when they think of growth, they think of it maybe differently than another leader. So is it top line growth? Is it bottom line growth? So there's a lot of misalignment there sometimes, but typically even if you have alignment there, you still don't have a good prioritized plan to get there. And so that's That's definitely the crux of across enterprise, across startups, the problems that I see when I join a new organization. A couple examples, the ones that I can point to. Even at Gunner, moving into Gunner, when I got there, it was like, we need to go and really market and go acquire new customers, which is 101 level eCommerce strategy and the things that I've heard every business that I've ever been involved with say right off the bat. But they want to go acquire customers without first understanding what the lifetime value of their current customer looks like. What does their product roadmap look like? What are the unit economics now versus in the future? Can they be more profitable than they are now? What does the customer acquisition cost look like today versus what will it look like in the future? They're really unprepared. For the next stage of business and it's across the board. Maybe they don't have, maybe the warehouse can't keep up with that type of demand if they were to grow at 50%. Maybe there's a better omni-channel strategy that can get them in front of customers for free instead of paying. I typically sit down and I've done this at the last three companies, you know, where they're stuck in important but operational tasks and they're really executing on the demand that they've already built. We build out a strategic framework. And the way that I kind of look at this is something is better than nothing. Simple is better than complex, which is true again for both enterprise and startup. Sit down and figure out what your vision is. Not a mission, not a fluffy cultural statement. It's not your purpose of your company. It's intent. What are you intending to build with this business? And then specifically once you have what you're intending to build, talk about the objectives that actually break that down. So that could look like I'm building an omni-channel business. I'm building a high-value brand. The perception of my brand is going to be incredible. It's going to be the best product in its category. It's going to have profitable unit economics. It's going to have operational efficiency. And then when you have opportunities or somebody comes back and says, we need to be doing TikTok ads, then you say, okay, what objective does that align to? And how important is that? And that's when you start getting into what's the impact of that? What's the effort of that? What's the urgency to do that? And you start to score everything that comes across your desk. So if you own a channel or if you own a business unit, everything needs to then fit this strategic model and you need to start to rank all of those things. And what you're left with if you do this across the whole business, which is cumbersome to do out of the gate, but three or four times now in a row, I've gone into a business, I've sat everybody down across the business and I've said, operations, admin, finance, marketing, you name it, products. I need you to put in order everything that you want to do over the next three to five years and I want you to tell me what objectives of our new statement, our new vision that we've put together. What objectives they support and then I want you to rank it in terms of impact effort and urgency and I want you to tell me the reason why that's number one on your list and why that's number five on your list and why that's number 13 on your list and Every time you're left with a three to five year plan and you go back and forth with scoring and reprioritizing and adding ideas it's actually better when it's collaborative and you have multiple people and not just a one person and maybe their executive team leader. But if you truly have a little bit of collaboration across the company to build that strategic framework, every time you're left with a three to five year plan that if you stick with, you are going to grow the business. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: I liked your impact effort and urgency as a matrix for prioritizing. So let's say you do that, you come in. How do you deal with all of the things that you are maintaining? The day-to-day business things, the APs you're collecting on, the platform migration, which is just really not going to grow your business, but it's going to prevent you from becoming outdated technologically. Those things are all happening and they're not going to grow the business, but oftentimes they're important for keeping the ship sailing. How do you deal with The fact you can have less bandwidth for those things when you're trying to grow the business. Do you just get ruthless about it? Is a lot of the stuff that you see just kind of busy work to make people feel better and that many of us when we're in that plateaued mode, we're doing all this stuff to kind of avoid the hard work of growth or is it work that doesn't need to get done or is there or if it is work that needs to get done, how do you make the time to do it while also creating time to grow? Chris Rose: It's definitely a combination of the right work. So you've got, you know, everybody in your organization works differently. Everybody is different in terms of the amount of energy and ambition that they have. But let's just say you've got a great team and they're working pretty hard. There's still going to be people that are working on stuff that may not necessarily, they're not thinking big picture about whether or not that there's ROI on that, that time, right? So I found that I've been at organizations where Everybody is filling out reports manually, saving those reports into some folder system and then checking the box on their to-do list and telling everybody, yep, I went and did my reports for my channel that month. But they're not analyzing it. They're not synthesizing anything from those reports. They're not utilizing those to make any decisions. Nothing is changing because they're filling their reports out. In that scenario, I'm like, why don't you automate this as quickly as you possibly can? Everything at this point can go through some sort of a data studio or visualization tool. Everything has a quick connect. Why don't you automate a report that gets you the information that you need here so that you can spend five minutes looking at the report and 15 minutes strategizing based on that report instead of an hour filling it out and then, you know, the next hour after that feeling burnout and probably not doing a whole lot. So that's one of the things that commonly happens. Sometimes, there's just a shift in mentality where you have to let certain things drop. There might be something that feels important right now, but everybody's had somebody either in your organization leave or you've had to let someone go and you found that, sure, there's a couple things that people need to pick up the slack for and you need to delegate those Responsibilities out. However, there are things that just stopped happening and nobody noticed. And I find that there's a level of that that does exist and it's tough and it's tricky and it's a hard conversation to have. It's kind of a sticky topic, but there are things that people are doing in your organization right now that if they just stopped doing it, it would have zero impact to your business, but it feels really, really important. And that's sort of the trickiest center section. Of course, there is the reality that everybody does have work that they're doing that is significant and they are busy and they aren't necessarily slacking off and there's not a time management issue. Those are the hard ones because you do still have to do that and not everybody can afford to hire and grow their organization to where that stuff's covered so everybody can go work on strategy. That's a little idyllic. I do think that there's something to be said for if that's 50% of your work, that other 50% that you can make that calculated decision to let something drop or that other 10% or 25% or whatever it is that analyze everything you're doing and determine is this actually impacting the business. I think we'd have to all have pretty strong egos to say there's nothing that I'm doing that I can't trade for something better. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: For a number of years, every summer, I would fill in for a lot of the operational aspects of the company because we had a smaller team and I'd cover because when people would be out for... We have an annual sabbatical for a lot of our team members for a month. Teams got a little bigger, so I didn't do that this year. But I miss it because one thing I realized is you jump in and when you do your team members work, even for just a very short period of time, It's very easy to forget what they're doing and forget how they're doing it. I think a couple of things happen. One, you realize, wow, it gives you appreciation for your team members, which is great. But two, inevitably, you come out of those periods saying, I can't believe we are doing this this way. Your head kind of explodes. And then you can come back and talk to them. And sometimes you don't realize, okay, there's a good reason we're doing this. Other times you're like, we've been doing it this way for two years, and it's been an absolute waste of time. So you've come into a lot of organizations as a president, as a leader. Is that part of your core process as well when you come in for the first period is shadowing people or stepping into their roles and seeing what they're doing on a day-to-day basis? Chris Rose: Yeah, I mean, isn't that incredible though that that stuff can exist for years before somebody uncovers that, wow, this is taking three times the amount of time it should because we don't have to be doing this or this could be done a lot faster. I absolutely see that everywhere and that's part of I would say that first third or first 25% or whatever it is for your organization where you've got somebody that's doing something In air quotes, the way that it's always been done, maybe they were hired and are maintaining something that was already built when they got there. Maybe they build it. A lot of times somebody just wants to get an MVP product out there. So they'll build a process to do whatever it is. And then they won't really revisit that because they don't have time to revisit that. So yeah, that is absolutely something that I see all the time. And it's usually part of that first round of exploration. What are the things that we're going to do over the next 12 months, even zero to 12 months first, but what are the things that we're going to do really over the next three to five years? Something as foundational as that. One of the things that I didn't really get into in the last answer because it's a little bit of like the next level up is once you've got your list, the best thing that you can do is sort of label Is this infrastructure? Is this problem-solving? Is this scale? Is this discovering scale? And really try to add some clarity to each initiative that you build. What is it doing? And the ones that are problem-solving or infrastructure typically go first. So that would be an infrastructure thing where someone's like, I just I can never get to this next level of my channel because I'm constantly doing X. Well, let's figure out what X is. Why is it taking you half of your week every single week? And let's build that into infrastructure because if we don't fix that, we can't do any of the other stuff that's on this list. And I think looking at that infrastructure category will identify a lot of the times where you'll find someone working on something In a way that can be changed to make it faster, better, automated, etc. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Do you have an anecdote or two about things that you saw when you came into organizations that desperately needed fixing? And also maybe an anecdote on the other side too, when you went through this process. Okay, here's where we want to go. Let's get, you know, the priorities from all of our departments put together a three, five year plan, like what the outcomes were a couple of years into executing that. Chris Rose: Yeah. I mean, you know, walking into the door at Gunner, we had a team that was really Exhausted from working with our ERP system and our WMS system. The way that they were working or not working together created a lot of manual work, a lot of time and energy spent making sure that things from system to system Equal and that you know on any given day there is an error report where there would be an order to that just goes off into the ether and you have to figure out why that it didn't go from system a to system b there's always something that was not working there and a lot of that was because it was built you know a couple years prior and now there are. Solutions that directly connect the system to that system, etc. But either way that everybody was sort of just living through it. And every time that a PO was submitted, they would have to make sure that when they go into the other system, they'd have to go line item by line item to make sure that it went in there properly. And all of a sudden there's a rounding error and a decimal moved. And we ordered 2,500 of a product instead of 250 of a product. So you had to have really high attention to detail and things were very cumbersome and took a long time. And our SVP of Ops and Finance spent. Seven months, you know, at the beginning of this year, making sure that we rewire the way that those systems were connected through Soligo, as an example, and making sure that data was passing through properly and that fields were mapped together. And that was a thing at the very top of his roadmap. And it was an infrastructure and a problem solving endeavor, and it worked out really well. So now we're at the point where there's probably, for our supply chain team, Four to five hours a week minimum of time that they have back to work on true supply chain strategy. And where are we going to dual source this product? Or is there a way that we can make this product get to our doors faster from the time that we place a P.O. to when we receive it without having to air freight it? They're able to engineer the supply chain now instead of making sure that data from system A went to system B properly. And that's a pretty rudimentary example, but there's always something like that that you'll find where typically if you just started asking questions about where are you spending your time every week when you're new to an organization, people are going to point every single problem out for you. You won't have to dig far. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Hey, Andrew here at The Quick Sidebar. I want to introduce you to Brett who's the owner of microfiberwholesale.com. He's been a part of eCommerce Fuel since the very beginning, one of the OGs and a really cool guy. He has an avocado farm, travels in a van with his family and just great guy. Here's what he has to say about his experience with eCommerce Fuel, our private vetted community for seven and eight figure owners. Unknown Speaker: Yeah, the membership area that's most valuable to me is just the forum. And I spend an inordinate amount of time reading the forum and trying to make sure I don't miss anything. And back when I joined almost 10 years ago, I remember my wife was pregnant with our third kid. And she was maybe eight months pregnant when I got into the forum. And I remember coming home That first day and saying like something like, Hey, you're not going to see me for a while because I've gotten into the forum and seen how much value there is in there and realized how many things I'm not doing that I should be doing in my eCommerce business. And just, I was like overwhelmed. I'm like, Oh my gosh, I have so much stuff I need to do. It's not the right thing to say to your wife when she's eight months pregnant, but that really hasn't changed. I mean, I still get tons of value out of the forum, out of, you know, people asking questions and posting, you know, not hacks, but strategies they're using and just bringing things to my attention that I totally wasn't aware of in the world of eCommerce. It's been incredibly valuable for that. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: After hearing literally hundreds of comments like this over the last decade our community has been around, it's easy to offer our 10x guarantee. If you don't get at least a 10x ROI on your membership in the first year in terms of increased revenue, saved time and saved money, we'll give you a full refund plus an extra $1,000. But many of our members report seeing massive value in just the first month or two when applying it to their seven or eight figure business. You can learn more about the community and apply for membership at eCommerceFuel.com. Okay, back to the show. Chris, you've been in the space since 2004, so 20 years. And most, if not many of those roles have been either on the CMO side or the CRO side driving revenue or on the leadership side as a president or a CEO. You've seen the entire spectrum and a lot of perspective on it. How do you think about marketing in 2024? I think the game has changed so much even in the last 18 months. Reading some commentary on someone I deeply respect who knows... I don't know the paid marketing space very well. But this person I do deeply respect mentioned that most people are going to have a very difficult time scaling up businesses with paid ads. alone in kind of 2024 going into 2025. So you've seen the dynamics. How are you thinking about marketing and getting awareness right now? Chris Rose: Yeah, that's completely, completely aligned with the way that I think about it. I think Most people would agree that in 2024 going into 2025, the era of being able to spend to grow your business is gone. It's been gone for quite a few years now, if we're being honest with ourselves. But we tried to be really creative with the way that we spent those dollars on multiple platforms. We tried new platforms. We tried different mediums. But at the end of the day, Customer acquisition costs, first purchase profitability, positive EBITDA, the things that the world wants to see from a retail business or an eCommerce business to be considered successful today has changed from 2016 when people could spend to the top and had investments that allowed them to scale pretty rapidly. But we've also seen what happens when you buy every customer and you get to a point where You're not retaining those customers and you're not keeping them engaged and you're not building a brand that's going to be around in 30 years. That didn't work either. So even though that's gone, I don't even know that that was necessarily a good thing. Look at some of the unicorns that existed back from 2012 to 20, let's call it 17, 2018. They're not necessarily brands now that I would say have created a 30 year legacy brand. To be a really sticky brand, you have to treat marketing, ironically, I believe the way that brands were treating marketing before the internet, you had to really create something that people want to be around. You had to have a little bit of a gravitational force. And I think that you're forced to be more creative. And it's not just the next influencer. You have to truly form partnerships with influencers, customers, other brands. You have to be in a space that people really want to spend their time to time and experience, especially Millennials, Gen Z, experiences and time is important. And so if you can meet somebody where they want to spend their time, you're a lot better off. I've had the fortunate pleasure of being in businesses where people want to spend their money on whatever it is that I'm selling. I would probably feel very differently if I sold insurance. But I do genuinely think that to build a brand today, content, perception, products that actually are valuable to the audience and meeting them in An area where they want to spend time. Everybody's so distracted with social media. Everybody's so distracted with what's going on in their own life. You need to find the area of their life that they want a brand. They want a cool brand and that's where you have to be. Commoditized products, customer acquisition costs and hoping that you can find a way to get some subscription revenue in the future so that investors are somewhat happy with you. It's just not a good model and I don't believe in it. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: You've been with Gunner for a little over a year now or a year-ish. And even if you look at the last two years, have you noticed the speed of growth at the companies you've been at the last two years has been a little slower than let's say the last five? Chris Rose: Yeah, I think that's one of the things that The last business that I was at did really, really well was we got ahead of this curve. In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, everybody in the retail industry is laying people off, planning for the worst. Businesses are down 50% year over year. And our plan was, well, Even before the pandemic, we're a small business, friends and family, Series A, and we can't afford to go and acquire customers like we could potentially if we had gotten investment of Series A had hit in 2017 or 2016. Maybe we would be different, but we couldn't afford that anyway. And now business is down 30-40% year over year. The pandemic is really hurting retailers. What are we going to do differently when consumer behavior comes back, when it returns to some level of normal, which during the pandemic, nobody knew what that even meant. And one of the things that we found, I look at marketing now on the omnichannel side of things. It's not just a sales channel. You're putting a stake in the ground that says, I'm willing to sell my product through this channel, but I'm also aligning my brand with this brand. The last business, we did a lot of volume through Nordstrom, but Nordstrom also is just a massive platform with millions and millions of visits that are qualified fashion shoppers. Having your brand seen on Nordstrom is It's a great experience, right? There's going to be some direct traffic that you get from having your brand visible to that many people. And also at the same time, if you're a good partner to Nordstrom and you ship things out on time and you give them favorable margins and you stay communicative with them, they're great. They know that they can offer that to you, right? So you're going to have a great time. And at the same time, that is marketing dollars. You are going to recognize some direct traffic from that and brand recognition and brand buzz. But at the same time, if you sign up with every Omnichannel partner and you're selling through every marketplace that you possibly can and you're not thinking from a marketing hat, then you're gonna commoditize your product. So I think moving into the role with Gunner and even just in general, a business that really values their products, be selective about partners but pick some big ones that you align with their brand value and you're gonna find that you are marketing when you're working with Omnichannel partners. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Diving into that a little more, who are you selling Gunner through in terms of other channels? Why did you pick those partners? Chris Rose: We're gearing up for exactly what I'm talking about. And right now, our strategy has been a direct-to-consumer strategy for quite some time. In the past, we've dabbled in different levels of wholesale. And I'm excited about... We have some great trainers, dog trainers, etc. across the country that are Accounts that are part of our partner program and they get a chance to pass discounts along to their customers. They're reselling for us and that community has been really strong. They know the product incredibly well. We really value the relationship with them. They value their relationship with providing the best recommendations to their customers. So that's been great for us in an organic way. Obviously started to think about what other marketplaces and wholesale relationships that we want to get into. And that's a 2025 strategy for us and something that I think we're going to do a little bit differently than other businesses have in the past. We're going to make sure that we're creating the right product for the right partners, giving them exclusives and collaborations, really cool products that you can only get in certain places. We're not going to pick the model where we just take our catalog and some SKUs go here, some SKUs go there. We have a relationship with a business that sells waiters and other camo accessories and they're a great partner to us and they're opening a retail store. So we're building something that you can only, it's a kennel that you can only buy at that store that's going to have a special door print from I'm with Mossy Oak, one of our partners in the camo space. And it's a really cool moment. It's something where you have to make the trek to that store to be able to get your hands on it. And that to me is a much more fun brand experience and gets people really engaged versus, okay, I could buy it there and now I can buy it here. And that's really going to be the difference for us next year. But we haven't started those relationships yet. We've started to build the infrastructure for it. We started to ideate on it, but haven't executed just yet. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: The more you talk about it, the more Gunner sounds like it perfectly or very closely fits the mold of this concept of the smaller durable brand that I've been talking about for a little bit, which is people who deeply care about their product tap into a niche group. It's grown more slowly through more kind of boutique or bespoke partnerships. And it takes longer to build, but you're building loyalty in a way that is going to make your business smaller, but much more valuable and durable in 10 years than it would be if you just scaled up with Facebook ads. Chris Rose: Yeah. When I was with Guess, the CEO at the time, Carlos Albarrini, great guy. I had a saying that I don't know whether it was his saying or somebody that he heard it from. He said, we're building muscles, not fat. It was such a succinct and easy way to say what we're building is a legacy brand that the name itself can stand alone for years and years to come. I think Yeti does an incredible job of this. Yeti is one of those brands that has built premium products very similar to us, but just not in the dog space. They've done an incredible job of building a premium product that people want and then they've encapsulated the lifestyle around it too. They're great at introducing the smaller products that Just get people excited, you know, a beer pong set, one of one and they'll raffle that off. But they also have their core set of products that they use, you know, in omni-channel retail, in their own retail stores. So I think they're a great parallel path when we think of inspiration for business strategy. Yeti is definitely one of the people that we talk about. And there's just a good fit, a lot of, you know, crossover between the industries that we serve and the outdoors and their customer, their core customer. So I agree with that, Yeah, it's one of those things where today, the way that I think you can build the best business is by building a great product, building a great brand and setting it up for long term and not needing the cash to finance the growth. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: You have come from a pretty long line. I don't know if it's been entirely, but I'm guessing the majority of your roles have been with larger companies or companies that are Investor backed or startups. So they have, they've got investors, they've got a meaningful amount of capital, at least at the early stages. Most of the people listening to the podcast are people who run eCommerce businesses that are likely bootstrapped. You know, they have anywhere from a single founder to let's say, you know, 40 or 50 people and occasionally they'll go to over 100. But that's the real meat of the listenership. Running those businesses, what have been the things that you have really enjoyed about being able to run an eCommerce business from that perspective, from the startups with more money and funding? And what are the things that have been really hard and difficult that people listening to this may not appreciate about the position they're in running a smaller bootstrap business? Chris Rose: Yeah, there's obviously a list of pros and cons for an enterprise level business that's publicly traded and has The budgets to be able to go and do really fun things, brand activations, you can just get any celebrity you want and do anything you want, you know, with a phone call. And that's a lot of fun. But the reality is the impact that you can have at a smaller startup business is much greater. A challenge, but actually in my mind, a good and healthy challenge would be being profitable from day one. I think that every startup that's bootstrapping right now is very familiar with Cashflow and profitability and the moves that they can make to grow that business and. Keep it to where their control of the business and they can make the moves that they want to make strategically and. Don't let the business control them. That's something that's really difficult to do. But if you successfully do that, it's going to train you for the outer years of 5 to 10 years into that business when you're becoming a medium-sized business and now you have access to capital. But do you necessarily want to use it all? You'll make better decisions further down the line the more that you Make those muscles early on in your journey. Again, one of the pros for an enterprise level business is you're able to do things much easier and with a lot less impact to your P&L that smaller businesses would have to save and probably sink their marketing budget to come up with a fraction of something as cool. There is a little bit of the luxury of that, but that also means that thankfully there's a lot of lazy marketers at enterprise level businesses that they don't necessarily know how to be a scrappy. They don't know how to get in and they don't have their sleeves rolled up and know how to navigate through an ad platform and optimize this or they're not thinking about the latest way to use dynamic content and emails or what the latest SMS strategy is there. They're in that maintenance mode. They're in that somebody else built it, they got hired and now they're just kind of maintaining an SMS calendar and not really thinking big picture. And I think the other con about being at a larger business is to be impactful. It's a lot more difficult. The stakes are a lot higher. The revenue is a lot higher. In order to really do something meaningful that everybody at the business can feel, you have to make some pretty incredible, incredible moves. You have to save millions of dollars, create millions of dollars. You have to find big gaps in the business, which I really enjoy doing. But I think that At a startup, there's so many opportunities to win. If you're entrepreneurial and it's in your DNA to want to be involved in a lot of things and move really fast, You can change people's lives forever financially and experience. You can elevate people into roles that they probably never knew that they would be in and set them up for the future and headhunting. When you exit down the road, they'll walk into a job elsewhere. There's a lot of good that can come from startup in terms of impact. So I would say it's just a different speed and there are definitely pros and cons but it says something that for The early part of my career, I was at startups. I went to these big organizations. I had a lot of fun, did a lot of great things. But at the end of the day, the most fun that I had for my personality was at bootstrapping businesses and ones that didn't have dollars to spend. And I love that challenge so much more and it's more fulfilling. And yeah, so I would say hopefully that answers the question. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: No, totally does. Love it. Thanks. Chris, I'm going to wrap this up with a lightning round. I know you've listened to a handful of podcasts in the past, so you're familiar with it. But if you can just give me a quick You know, one or two sentence answer for these. And the first one is how would you describe the eCommerce environment in one to three words right now? Chris Rose: One to three words? Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: One to three words. Chris Rose: All right. Changing, profitability, Creativity. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: What's one of the fondest memories you have from your childhood? We're going to psychoanalyze you after this. Chris Rose: I have this core memory and I don't even know how old I was but sometime probably between the ages of like three and five like one of the earlier memories where I just don't remember anything else but this. I was sitting on the floor of the kitchen in my parents house and my mom who was an insurance agent at the time in the 80s was cold calling people trying to sell them insurance policies and just getting hung up on and hung up on and just kept going and kept calling and kept calling and it was like getting punched in the face repeatedly for hours but grew that business really successfully and for some reason that sticks with me and I feel like it's in a business it's the way you have to be. You have to be willing to be relentless and persistent and never give up. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: What a cool memory. Have you told your mom you have that memory? Chris Rose: I have, and she's like, what you didn't see is I probably put you to sleep and then cried my eyes out. It was definitely one of those things where I think that's definitely from an ambition standpoint, got it from my parents for sure. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: If you weren't living where you live right now, where would you live? Chris Rose: Man, I really loved Los Angeles, but my favorite part about Los Angeles is San Diego. So I would say Southern California, probably south of Los Angeles by 30 to 50 miles or something like that. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Nice. Yeah, if I was to live anywhere in California, any of the major big three cities would be San Diego, full stop. Chris Rose: I mean, 100%. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: No question. No offense to LA and San Francisco. What's your favorite product that you have sold across your career? It could be a hero product. It could be a tiny little accessory that you just had an affinity for. Chris Rose: I'm not just saying this because I'm at Gunner. The Gunner G1 kennel is truthfully, it's got a ton of intellectual property and it's overbuilt. I mean, it's incredible. That's got to be the hero product in my mind. It's something that people are fanatical about and it really does save dogs lives. We post a lot of those stories on our Instagram channel to showcase what happens if you roll your truck over with a gun or kennel that your dog can walk away safely. And I think there's something just super meaningful. It is an extension of your family. It's a member of your family. So that has to be my answer. However, if I was forced to pick a second answer, that's not my current company. And so it's not that much of a shameless plug. I feel like the answer is, you know, I really enjoyed selling aftermarket automotive parts. I think that it's a very similar industry to Gunner where they're out, you know, using that product in a way that's connected to their hobby. It's something they want to spend time on when they're not at work, when they're not, you know, family duties or whatever it is, whatever responsibilities they have in life. Selling aftermarket automotive products to people that own Jeeps and Mustangs. So much fun. We did some collaborations with, you know, designers, hot rod designers and off-road and athletes in the automotive space in the racing industry and selling those products and watching people come to car shows and smile like crazy. That was, it was a lot of fun. It was very, very similar to what we're having go on here at Gunner. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: That's cool. I've got an old vehicle I work on and I have I'm guilty of this to some degree too, so I'm not passing judgment. But the amount of money people will spend on their vehicles is just flabbergasting. Chris Rose: The best years for businesses that sell aftermarket automotive parts have been tied to the worst financial years. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Really, why is that? Chris Rose: I think when people are tightening their budget everywhere, sometimes they lean into their hobbies. And if you think about it, working on a car is a great example of something that it takes time. When you're in the mode installing something on that vehicle, you're not thinking about the rest of life and the things that are going on. But some of the best years in the automotive space were election years, pandemics. It's wild. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: What's the hardest part of your current business Gunner? Chris Rose: I think that in an organization like Gunner where the expectations from our consumers are so high and you know, they really expect us to hit a home run with every single product. So we really need to make sure I would say production of our products, making sure QC just does not slip, engineering our products to just out of the gate be The best option. So if we're going to do, you know, a food crate like we did, it needs to be the best one out there and it needs to have so many features that it makes your head spin. And I think that that is, it's a really great challenge for us. We have some super creative product team members that do a great job of testing and listening to our customers, but it is also very difficult and the stakes are very high. And if you slip, your customers will let you know. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: And the perennial fan favorite, how much money is enough? And you can answer this either one or two ways. You can say lump sum if I had $5,000,000 in the bank, that'd be enough. Or you can say if I had $20,000 every month for life or $100,000 per month for life. Doesn't mean you're not going to make more money in the future, but if you had X and say, you know what, if I didn't make any more, I'd be okay. I would stop making decisions based on money at this point. Chris Rose: Yeah, I think when I think about that question, it's also changed because I have a year and a half old. So if you had asked me that question a year and a half ago, I would have, well, Prior to my wife being pregnant, I would have given you a very different answer. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: $800 a month, baby. That's all I need. Chris Rose: Exactly, exactly. I was on a bachelor's budget for sure for quite some time there. But I would say now, yeah, if somebody would walk up to me and say that you could cover all of your basic expenses, your house is paid for, you have enough money to take your kid to Disneyland once a year and Yeah, occasionally splurge to go on a date with your wife every week or two. I'd be totally fine with that. I'm pretty simple. I'm not doing it necessarily for the dollars. I think that there's more stability is really the answer there and I don't know what the number looks like. 10 to 20,000 a month is probably the point where I just wouldn't worry about it. The next day, I would still work. I would still come to the office. I think that would be the answer. If I had the Powerball tomorrow and I had $100 million, I would still show up to the morning meetings on Monday and Wednesday ready to go and still build something great with Gunner. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: That's cool. Last question, how many hours a week do you work? Chris Rose: Again, if you had asked me that question a year and a half ago, I would give you a different answer. I'm probably working 60 hours. It's one of those things where I'm at the phase still that my daughter goes to bed fairly early. So afterwards, you can get into whatever strategy you want. You can think big picture. You can whiteboard. My wife is awesome. She loves to read. She loves to watch TV. The most awesome human and is very very forgiving with allowing me to sit on the computer or phone and plug away. So I would say somewhere in the ballpark of 60 hours, but you know, there's phases where I'm Doing it for 80 plus hours and there's a week or two where I'm at 45 and you know, got a got a tap out because there's enough family stuff on the calendar, but I would say it's an average around 60. Got it. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Congrats on your daughter. That's 18 months old. Chris Rose: Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, she's so awesome. She's starting to repeat everything that we say. So we're watching ourselves very carefully. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Nice and that's cool. That first year or two. It's it's you know, it's like the Dickens quote right best of times worst of times and it's it's It's really cool. Probably the hardest time in my life was when we had our second daughter. And it just was a ton of responsibility doubled with work stuff. I feel like when you think of that time in life when you're trying to build a career or work in business meaningfully and build something cool, but also raising young children, it's just again it's a beautiful time period but it can be really hard. Chris Rose: Did you plan to have a second and if so what was the What was the like work mentality of, we know what we just went through and we're still going to choose to have a second? Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: We did plan to have a second. Definitely always knew we wanted a second. Didn't know if we wanted a third. That was a much harder decision. Glad we made it, but that was the harder decision. But yes, we did know. And then what was your second question? Sorry. Chris Rose: What was your thoughts in terms of like, I know what I just went through over the last year and a half and how much time and what it does to your schedule. Was that a consideration in the second, it sounds like more so in the third one, but was that a consideration when you're thinking about, we know what we're about, when you know what you're about to go through, it's a little bit different. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: For us, it wasn't because we knew we wanted to have two. What I will say, and I hate to I hate to say this to you as a father of just one child, going to one was a lot of work, but going from one to two was like the doozy because then all of us, my wife and I, both of us had zero free time. You couldn't hand off because you each have one kid. Almost incessantly. And so for us, well, for me in particular, that was the hardest step. But for a number of kids, we knew we wanted to have two. So we just did it and we were like, well, we'll just deal with whatever comes. That's awesome. Chris Rose: You get to a certain point too where you return to a little bit of normalcy and you can kind of Find the right times where you need to hang the phone up or take away from the computer for a little bit and then you figure out what the routine looks like. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I feel like having kids. Like any entrepreneur knows this deeply. There's nothing good that comes without a lot of pain and suffering and hard work, right? And it's just, and children are like that too. Like children have brought the most, the most intense joy I've had in my life and the most anguish and suffering I've had in my life, right? At different phases. And it's not very probably politically correct to say or, but it's just true. But the thing that I have found is, is as they have gotten older, ours range from almost seven to almost 12 right now. And it's just such a sweet spot to see kids get older, become their own people, to be able to teach them and shape them and it gets increasingly more enjoyable. So again, some people love that baby face. I was not someone who loved that baby face. I still love my kids dearly, would have taken a bullet for them. I feel like I congratulated you and then told you how commiserated with you. You didn't even commiserate. I was probably just reflecting on you. Chris Rose: No, I couldn't have said that any better. I'm looking forward to that phase as well of just watching them learn and see new things and become individual. It's great. I'm looking forward to that. I've got nieces and nephews and now having one of my own. It's a really cool experience. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: It's a super cool experience, man. You're in for a really fun ride. Chris, Gunner.com, if anyone's listening, if you have a dog and you care about them at all, check out Gunner.com. Like we've been talking about, they make incredibly durable, rugged, high crash resistant, I don't know if that's the right marketing term you use, probably not, but very durable crates for, yeah, not crates, kennels, excuse me, for dogs. So check them out, Gunner.com. Chris Rose over on LinkedIn, he posts stuff frequently over there and has a good following. Chris, anywhere else? People should follow you or anything else you want to mention before we wrap up. Chris Rose: Yeah, check out Gunner Kennel's TikTok, Instagram. Social media tends to do a really good job of storytelling and so if you want to get a feel for the brand really quickly, I'd appreciate the follow. Awesome. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Well, Chris, really appreciate your time doing this. Thank you for being a part of ECF and have enjoyed the conversations over the last year. So I hope we get to keep in touch and keep doing this. Chris Rose: You as well. Thanks. We got to reconnect soon. Andrew Youderian | e-Commerce Entrepreneur: Yeah. That's going to do it for this week. A big thank you to OneClickUpsell who offers incredible upsell software to get more from every single customer and increase your average order value on your site. To make more money from the customers you already have, check them out at eCommerceFuel.com forward slash upsell. And if you own a seven or eight figure store, you really should be a part of our private community and forums here at eCommerce Fuel where you can connect with over 1,200 store owners just like you. We're so confident it'll be a game changer that we offer a 10X ROI guarantee. If you don't see 10X your membership value in the first year, we'll refund you 100% of your membership fees plus toss in an extra $1,000 for the hassle. So you can learn more and apply at eCommerceFuel.com. Thanks so much for listening. Work hard, adventure often, and look forward to seeing you again next Friday.