VP of Growth Reveals Biggest Mistakes Brands Use When Diversifying

VP of Growth Reveals Biggest Mistakes Brands Use When Diversifying Speaker 1: Welcome back to another episode of Chew on This. Today's a special episode brought to you by AppLovin and we're going to be talking about diversifying your marketing channels. We have Wyatt who is the VP of Growth over at Mary Ruth. If you haven't heard of Mary Ruth, you're probably living under a rock because it's one of those brands that is everywhere and it's done an incredible job in growing into a nine-figure brand today. Thank you so much for taking the time out today to come and bless our audience on some of the things you're going to share today. But for the few people who may not know you and may not know Merry Roots, can you give them a little bit of background of who you are and what Merry Roots has been built into today? Speaker 2: First off, guys, thanks for having me. I joined Mary Ruth about three years ago. Mary Ruth, we're a VMS brand in the e-commerce and retail space. One thing that's really interesting about the brand is that the brand was predominantly founded as a DTC brand. For most VMS brands, it's usually the opposite because VMS as a category is still 70% dominant in retail. So we kind of did the opposite. But yeah, at Mary Ruth's, we sell organic, vegan vitamins and supplements for all ages, anywhere from toddlers to teenagers to adults to elderly, you know, kind of all life stages we support. And very fast growing. We're, you know, it seems that it never stops. Speaker 1: Incredible. To jump right in, especially in the role of VP of Growth for an ultra-fast-growing brand, what are some of the ways that you look at this coined phrase of diversifying marketing channels? Some call it distracting marketing channels, some call it diversifying, and some don't know what to do. Obviously, there are so many ways to spend money, so many places to spend money. Give us an idea of your stack when it comes to marketing. What are some of the ways you guys are looking at performance and how do you evaluate new platforms such as even AppLovin, which I know you guys have tested? Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think one thing that was a big thing for us was that you also have to remember where you're at as a brand. I think a lot of brands want to diversify probably too early and when I joined Mary Ruth's, the marketing stack was It just needed a lot of repairing and just needed to be sort of modernized a bit. You know, I'd say, you know, things like, you know, overspending and branded search and, you know, just the core things that are like, you know, foundational pieces that we needed to build up. There was really no social presence. And so, so over the last three years, I mean, and the brand, I will say the brand had gotten to a big point at that juncture already by, you know, not having a diversified marketing stack. And I think the growth started to explode once we, for one, positioned the brand and built a creative strategy that actually was high volume, high output, high iteration, and doubled down on where we knew our customers were, which was predominantly social at the time, especially with the audience we were trying to reach. So, you know, I think where we were there is not where we are now, right? I always say what got you here won't get you there. And so where we're at now as a You know, big nine-figure business that's big in retail, direct-to-consumer, you know, TikTok shops, Amazon, every marketplace you can think of. Our media mix is pretty wide. You know, we have everything from our, you know, true DR channels, you know, things that are our lower funnel channels and whatnot, all the way to you know, we were scoping, you know, big TV buys next year and looking at, you know, the World Cups and Olympics and things like that, out of home, you know, digital, you name it, the media mix is very robust. And I think the reason why is because of our sales channel scaling, because when you're everywhere, And people see you everywhere, whether it's in their grocery journey, their online journey, it makes sense to be omnichannel at large scale. But even three years ago, our retail business was still very young, and it didn't really make sense to invest that heavily in those other more upper funnel areas. So for us, we are... We have a pretty wide mix today. I talk about this a lot with different friends of mine and people that are in the industry, but we don't rely a lot on MTA anymore. It's not a perspective from a measurement where it's reliable because our dot-com businesses are We're the third, if not fourth, biggest sales channel, which is the opposite of where most brands are at. For us, we have multiple media mix models. We use incrementality testing every day. That's our right hand. That's how we calibrate and understand what's happening across the business. And for us, like I said, Amazon is our biggest and then retail is right behind and TikTok shops and then our website and then other marketplaces that make up the rest of the pie as well. So for us, we really rely on a wide media mix to drive sales elsewhere. And our goal is to basically allow the customer to buy wherever they feel like they're going to buy. And that's a luxury of being at the size we're at. Most brands can't say that because they don't have the exposure laterally. And so it's been a growth. Aspect for us in that regard. When it comes to testing new channels, I don't think there's been a ton of like crazy new advancements over the last few years that we've like, you know, completely kind of thrown away the playbook and said we're pivoting here. I mean, you know, we're still, you know, one of our core channels is meta. Well, you know, and there's lots of people who are pulling away and investing in AppLovin or other tools and whatnot. And just for us, it's still a core pillar. But like when we discovered AppLovin, I think the biggest unlock for us was You have to be able to understand what's happening beyond just the, even like the MTA attribution, like at that point, if I looked only at that with my media team, we would have made decisions to cut it entirely. But when we ran incrementality tests, we looked at what the Amazon halo was, what the retail halo is, when we bring in the retail data into our M&M partners and stuff like that, it was very apparent how big this channel was for us. And so that was a big unlock for us into testing a new channel. And I think for us as well, testing other things like TV, out of home, linear, whatever it might be, it always starts with first understanding we always have to measure beyond just our website, which is where I think a lot of people probably get a little stuck today is just looking at that. Speaker 3: Love that. For brands that are out there that are primarily just marketing on meta and maybe some Google branded, right, what would you say is the point that brands should look for where they should start to think about, okay, well, AppLovin is another channel that we should test. At what point does that come and when should brands look for that and then they can actually start and get into there? Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I think for one you have to be at the point where you're not relying on ad spend to keep your business alive. I've been agency side for years before being brand side and I've gone back and forth and I can't tell you how many brands we've worked with that they rely on their advertising to basically hit their P&L every month, right? And at some point you have to have margin and you have to be able to turn the ads off and still survive as a business. And I don't think until you hit that point you're ready to diversify because The way customers buy is not linear. We know this and I think it's important to have presence on multiple channels. But for a business that's doing a couple million dollars a year in revenue, maybe more, maybe less, until you can, like I said, turn that off and still maybe you're not profitable or maybe you're not making a crazy amount of money but your business isn't failing, I don't think you're ready to invest. And I've seen personally, firsthand, Brands that, you know, were even below the seven-figure yearly revenue mark that tried too fast to spend too little across those channels, you know. And I think it's really good at...you really...I've worked with brands as well who are really good at one thing and they did really great on meta or they did really great on Google and it scaled them. And then when they had the margin and the budget to be able to move horizontally without pulling away from those channels, that's when you know you're ready to scale. Speaker 3: I mean, if you were to turn off ads tomorrow, are you implying that the business should be able to sustain itself just through recurring revenue? Or is it like, all right, well, you've solidified your space or solidified your place in, you know, the category that you're in and organic kind of starts to take over. Speaker 2: I think it's both for sure. It depends on the business model. Not everyone has a retaining, like a replenishable, you know, subscription model. But I think in general, my point is more around, yes, advertising and bringing new customers to the brand, and it should be doing that, but you should be able to still make money. You should still have organic strength. You should still have, you know, whether it's affiliates or influencers or, you know, email marketing is generating a lot of returning revenue for you, whatever it might be. There is a systemic problem, in my opinion, where brands over-rely on advertising. This is coming from someone who's primarily... I cut my teeth 10 years ago as a media buyer, right? So I'm biased towards advertising dollars. But I will say that I think you need to be able to sustain business and still have revenue when your ads turn off. And if you can't do that, if your revenue tanks, then I don't think you're ready to spend elsewhere. Speaker 1: That's awesome. Speaker 2: I think you have to probably take that as a realization and say, okay, well, rather than trying to say, let's go try Google ads now, we should probably try to figure out what's going to, you know, improve email and organic, things like that. Speaker 1: Question on, you know, because I think the one cool thing is when any brand is starting a new platform or testing a new platform, there are some fundamentals that are just rooted and needed, right? And I think what would be really cool is taking the maturity of a brand like your guys is, there's still ways that when you look at a new channel, so let's take AppLovin for example, right? When you look at a new channel like AppLovin, What are some of the ways you guys go into even diversifying into a new channel? What are some of those key things you look at, which is, hey guys, we're going to go with this hero SKU and these winning pieces of content from this platform, and then we're going to do this, this, and this, and we're going to look for this, this, and this. Can you maybe help us set up the framework of what diversifying into a new channel looks like from day zero? Speaker 2: Sure. I mean, the first thing I'll say, and I say this probably weekly to every person I work with, winners win. We have over 250 SKUs with Mary Ruth's. How often I promote anything other than our top five, top 10. Rare, right? And I think that like, it's a little bit easier for someone like me, who's not the CEO, not the founder, you know, there's smaller brands where the founder probably has an emotional attachment to every SKU and you want to promote everything, right? But like, just like, frankly, you have to kind of put those glasses on and be like, okay, what's actually going to set us up for the most success? So when we looked at onboarding with AppLovin and testing there, our first thought was, We're going to launch with our hair growth SKU. That's our liquid multivitamin plus hair growth. At this point, it's gotten so big that people just see the bottle and they're like, oh, I've seen that. It's the orange and white Mary Ruth's bottle. You just have seen it because there's so much Media and earned growth that we've had from that too. So it was like, okay, well, let's set us up for success. Don't make it harder on yourself than it has to be. If you're testing something new, put in what you think is gonna work. Put in what's working elsewhere. With AppLovin, it was interesting because the discussions were always, hey, this is built to be reminiscent of an ASC campaign. So the strategy, which for us, we spent a lot on ASC in meta. So we're like, okay, this should be pretty one-to-one in terms of the strategy. So we brought in our best performing creatives and we promoted a single SKU to start and that was the liquid morning multivitamin plus hair growth peach mango flavor. And again, the first couple of months for us were I always will give people the benefit of the doubt, and I always will trust them. Hey, we need a few months to get learnings under our belt, right? I'm not going to be like, all right, I'm not naive to think that's not going to take time. This isn't going to be as incremental as meta overnight. It's going to take time to figure this out. I think that was October last year, and I think by January, I was just like, I don't know. I don't think this is going to work. We were spending maybe 200K a month with them. You know, we're really close with other brands and we always say we're the first to share what's working. And I was like talking to the guys at HexCloud and I was like, what are you guys doing? They're like, yeah, we're spending like, you know, 10x that. And I'm like, damn, like, what are you guys doing that we're not doing, right? And then we looked at some category insights with the team in AppLovin and the big unlock for us was like, well, wait, let's back up a second. We're really only looking at what the impact of Shopify is. Like, yes, that is a big sales channel for us, but again, It's not our number one. For most brands, it's their website, then maybe Amazon, then some retail, right? But for us, it's the complete other way around. I had to also say, well, we're optimizing and we're basing the efficiency of this platform off of 20% of its projected impact. Like, we're looking at this and its impact could be this. So let's look at this. So then we brought the data into our model partners. We ran the incrementality tests. When we validated, that was sort of the validation, like, hey, the model said this and, you know, both models were like, hey, AppLovin is super incremental to Amazon, like 80% of its impact is Amazon. And we ran the test and the test said the same thing. And so like that right there was immediately the realization like, hey, For one, this is probably driving a large, substantial halo to Amazon. We proved that. We're in the middle right now of bringing retail in. I'm sure there's impact there as well. We even had the proof, like to your point, Ash, a minute ago you were talking about like meta and not seeing the lift in retail. One of the things that happened to us, just a sidebar really quick, was we had one of our core funnels is this buy two get one free. It's like a 90 day supply of that multivitamin. Best landing page we've ever had. It's been running for like two years. And we had our Whole Foods buyer call us and say, hey, are you guys like pushing a promo? Let's buy two, get one free because we've had like all these stores calling us across the country of people going in asking if they can buy that with that promo they saw online. We realized that in the creatives, in our end cards, we had like Now Available on Amazon, Ameris.com, and Whole Foods. People were going in the store and actually asking if they could get the same deal. Our retail team was a little miffed like, hey, why are you guys pushing a promo that you're not offering, we're not offering in store? I was so blind to that and realizing we probably shouldn't The whole food's name that I was like, oh my God, this is proof that people are going in store and buying the product after seeing a meta ad. And we ran that same funnel heavy on AppLovin really early. So, and that happened, this happened like Q2 of this year. So there was, it was actually kind of a, it was a, it was an affirming kind of thing that happened where we were like, hey, this is actually validating that like there are people that are seeing this and taking action in store as well. So I hope that, you know, next time we all talk 90 days from now or whatever, that you'll ask me that and I'll tell you exactly how much It's driven into retail. But for us, that was the big thing with AppLovin and testing a new channel was understanding that it's probably going to follow the exact same splits that your revenue channels are. That for us, it was predominantly Amazon, then Shopify, then retail. That's probably exactly what it's going to be for a new channel we do. And for us, again, the test validated the model. And it's not perfect. It goes up and down, right? But that was what made us confident to bring it in as a core channel. Speaker 3: I'm actually really curious, just based off of this story, do you end up changing some of the destination of your ads from these lift results? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good question. Speaker 1: No. No. Speaker 2: Here's my perspective. Well, for one, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And we've been sending traffic to our website on Meta for years, and the halo's huge to Amazon. So why... Yeah, you could say, well, then why don't you send traffic to Amazon? It's your main sales channel. You could in theory say that would maybe make the halo greater, but in the same regard, maybe it makes it worse, right? Like who's to say one way or the other? So our process is like, my mindset is this. If a new customer is hitting us on meta, they probably at that point have at least seen us somewhere else or heard of us. Maybe they haven't maybe fully been in the consideration phase, but they've at least probably heard or at least seen. Maybe there's new customers who had never heard of us. The best place to send them will always be the website because it's the most informational, it's the most educational, it's the best place to learn about the brand. It's the best place to realize that Mary Ruth is a real person. She is a living mother and founder of this brand. You'd be surprised if people think she's like an AI, just like a made-up person. No, she's a real person. There's a real story here. There's real products. This is a real business. We're not some dropshipping brand from Amazon. So the mindset is always send people to where they can believe in the brand and let them buy what they want to buy. As long as we have marketing touchpoints across all those, you know, across that journey to remind them and maybe bring them back here. Maybe we want to push a promo more to Shopify. Sure, we'll do that. But we always will send traffic to Shopify first across our big, like, you know, upper funnel, quote unquote, sales channels or marketing channels. I mean, so. Speaker 1: I'm curious on a brand like with Mary Ruth, when it comes to metrics and North Star metrics or your day-to-day metrics, what are some of the ones that are like your go-to that you have to look at and if it's not in the right direction, you're raising red flags or what do you wake up and check first? How do you look at this large war chest of different metrics and I think different brands that look at different things but I'm curious at the size you guys are, maybe you can either give us an evolution of what you guys have started to focus on or maybe just where you're at today. Speaker 2: I mean, there's two sides. There's kind of two hats I wear. One's like the marketer, one's like the finance kind of executive hat that you have to wear. To answer the latter first, EBITDA always, profit, contribution profit. At the end of the day, no matter what we do, for example, this month, Prime Day, those are epic days for us. That makes up, we have some of our best months. However, if the bottom line doesn't hit, then it's all pointless, right? That's the goal for a business like ours right now. So it always starts with contribution profit in terms of health and general goals. That's what I'm graded on and looked at by our board and by our C-suite as well. So that's the first kind of executive part of the hat. In the marketing side of things, I think the evolution shifted from just the general one-day click ROAS, whether it's like I'm looking at Northbeam and I'm trying to get directionality with Media channels and things like that to more of a true IROAS. I feel like that is like what I reiterate to my team daily, you know, whether it be from a model or from a recent incrementality test or whatever it might be. I feel like incrementality is the buzzword that's commonly misused, but it is the most important for like the efficiency of our marketing because we have such a strong affiliate influencer business. We have such a strong organic. We have such a strong email and SMS as a brand. Attribution is always going to be messy. It always has been. It's always going to be, you know, I think our Amazon team told us that from their data, they see at least eight touchpoints before a consumer buys from Amazon alone. So, you know, our consideration phase for a new customer is anywhere from, you know, a day to three months. And the bigger cohort of that is one to three months. So, you're going to know there's going to be more than one touchpoint. They're not going to buy right away. And I wouldn't say we're high ticket, but we are definitely premium in the VMS category. So with all of that, it makes Finite attribution windows, you know, or those small windows of time or even larger ones, somewhat either one understated or two irrelevant altogether. So for me, I am looking more at like incrementality on a baseline tactic level, like how incremental is paid social, how incremental is upper funnel, out of home, TV, things like that, that, you know, out of home is a little bit trickier to measure, but we will, we're constantly running tests. We're like every month there's at least two or three incrementality tests going. And for us, it just gives us the read on seasonality and the media impact in that moment. And so that, from a marketing perspective, is probably the most important thing we look at today. Aside from, you know, business level, P&L, health and whatnot, because it does give us a high level understanding of, is this tactic going to actually meaningfully contribute to top and bottom line? Or am I just inflating ad spend on a touchpoint that would have already driven someone by? You know what I mean? Speaker 3: I'm actually very curious. Have you guys run any tests that actually proved that some channels and maybe some spend just didn't even do anything, right? I'll give you an example for Avi where we've gone from spending, you know, a million a month on meta and fluctuating between maybe half a million to a million and a little bit more. And then retail kind of just stays the same. And we'd always assume that, oh, there should be a halo effect. People will learn about us. They'll see us in the aisles and then they'll pick it up. But there's like zero effect to it. I'm very curious if you guys had similar story. Speaker 2: Oh yeah. The retail aspect has been probably the newest part of that because as you know, and like, The lack of synchronicity between every retailer and POS data is just like awful. Like there is no consistency or cohesion. Everyone reports something different. The data is not homogenized. So that's been a big thing for us is how do we get it synchronized into one, you know, easy to understand, bring it into our data warehouse, and then feed it to our partners to do testing on. The results, to answer your question, that we have seen, we're not with retail, but we're with Amazon and R.com, things like PMAX, things like Non-brand search for us is like, you know, what we thought. I think that, I'm trying to remember, this was like early this year, I think we ran a PMAX test that we felt like, actually, it's two parts. Sorry, I'm thinking as I'm saying this. The PMAX test actually we thought was underperforming and PMAX overperformed in our tests for .com and to Amazon as well. And then the one that was obvious for us was obviously brand was weak as we expected. We went into the test expecting that Google was overstating brand, but non-brand was one that we felt like we had opportunity to scale in and it didn't move the needle at all. And so from a Google perspective, if you were to look at the tactics split in that channel, We invest less than 5% in non-brand search, which is crazy for some brands, especially in this category, but it does not move the needle on either channel. The things that have moved the needle on our channels were actually things that we thought maybe weren't going to, like PMAX. We thought, oh, this is maybe just really Helping capture traffic for Shopify and maybe that's it, but it's not super incremental, but it was highly incremental. So interesting results for us, but yeah, I think like on Google that was that. Meta is still like for us, We have like, I think, three different media mix models we use, you know, from different partners and we just kind of look at them all and then kind of have the art versus the science decision making perspective. And for us, it's consistently the next best dollar spent. Because I think we have, well, I don't think, I know we have data to prove that a dollar spent on meta will drive incremental dollars on our website, Amazon, and retail. And so a model will understand that's more impactful than a dollar spent on TikTok shops, where it's going to drive Really only to shops, right, in terms of its incremental contribution. And to add to that too, it's not as profitable. So for us, that's been like a big unlock, has been just understanding, you know, where we are efficient and where we're not. Speaker 3: I'm actually very interested to see or understand how you guys think about running these tests, right? So like, are you doing like geo holdouts? Are you, you know, testing, I guess, lifts within certain branded phrases on, you know, Amazon versus like Google to go to shop? How are you guys thinking about like actually running these tests? Speaker 2: Yeah, so it starts pretty, pretty like umbrella high level, right? So it's just like general holdout on the tactic levels kind of where we start with everything. And then if we want to dive deeper, then it's usually tactic or, you know, like let's use meta as an example. Okay, we'll start with, you know, kind of understanding meta's incrementality across all of our sales channels. It takes time and money to bring that data. It's not just an easy OAuth connector on Shopify. Retail doesn't exist like that, right? Amazon's complex like that as well, especially with the new customer data lag. It's like 21 days. So once we figured all that out, test meta, we'll test certain campaign tactics, we'll test certain product splits if we want to understand. You know, product A versus product B, or we want to understand ASC versus like CBO, or we want, like recently we're going to, we're running a test, I think starting August 1 for like the new incremental attribution. Like we want to understand like how impactful is that versus, you know, just traditional kind of what we've always done. So we'll do that once we've validated the channel, but only once we've validated the channel as a whole. And, you know, certain things like we're not, I don't think we're getting as for when we can't, we can't, we can't run a geo test on Amazon sponsored because doesn't go, doesn't allow us to go down to the zip code level. We can do it on DSP, which is something we're also going to test as well, probably in August. So, you know, we don't spend a ton of time like in the weeds, like understanding like, you know, I would even say that I was probably an advocate to not test ASC versus CBO and stuff like that, those very specific media buyers will advocate for that always. We also have to remember that, like, regardless of the tactic, we have margin to allow us to be slightly unprofitable. I mean, it's definitely a loss leader strategy on those where we're looking for, you know, break even month two. And that's kind of how we operate the marketing arm of the business. It's not like that for every brand, right? Some brands need to be profitable same month. And I think on AdKak, we are. We have been profitable on AdKak, but that's blended, right? My point of saying that is because some of those things aren't going to yield such a substantial outcome change that it really matters. Maybe it'll make the ROAS look better, but incrementally, is it going to equate to $200,000 of contribution profit up or down? Probably not. Maybe at scale. We try to balance between higher level thought process and more in the weeds decisions when it comes to our tests. Speaker 3: One thing that you mentioned was taking your exact creatives and funnel from Meta and applying it to AppLovin, right? Which is what I think a good standard practice is if you want to try another channel, right? Like if you want to try TikTok or Snapchat and AppLovin, you'll use the same creatives that are working on Meta, right? Speaker 2: Naturally. For sure. Speaker 3: At what point do you guys actually start to craft a different strategy specific to the platform and how do you go about doing that? Speaker 2: So I don't think we've changed too much on AppLovin. The tactics we've changed have maybe been more optimization, buying tactics. I think the biggest change is that we're, you know, and I didn't think I would ever say this because we churn so much content on Meta. I mean, our in-house performance creative team is doing 60 ads a week, you know, just alone on, you know, net new concepts, iterations, whatever. And Metta was always getting the majority of ads, but it's actually AppLovin now that's more than that. We're feeding it so much content. From what we've seen, from the advice of our team there, it's like that has been probably the biggest strategy change is that we're giving it even more content than we thought we would. We're doing just 20, 30 ads a week sometimes. And I think that you know, without having like, I'm not going to sit here and try to pretend that I know how their black box of their tool works, you know, and you know, how, you know, how they're able to do what they do, or how meta does for that example, for that matter as well. But I will say that, like, that's been the biggest change. But strategy wise, I think across the board on a lot of core channels, We've released some of our preconceived media by our notions on how we need to buy, how we're going to split this, how we're going to hyper-segment. All the things we were doing four or five years ago are completely gone. We don't do any of that anymore. It's a creative first strategy. I think that applies across all of our channels. I don't think there's been as much net new. Realizations or media tactics we're just doing on AppLovin versus the other. It's just probably seen that it needs more water from the hose than even meta. And that's definitely helped us. Like I said, we'll split campaigns. We have optimizations for day zero, day seven. We're testing cost per purchase, ROAS campaigns, all the different things that they're advising and we'll test them and we'll optimize from there. But other than that, it's not that far off from the rest of our strategy. Speaker 3: How about your end cards? Speaker 2: We're testing a lot there. We really push our top five products there mainly, but yeah, we're burning through end cards with them a lot. I know my lead media guy who runs AppLovin, They're constantly going through end card iterations and testing things like that. And we're just trying to give them basically everything that's working on meta, pass it over there and vice versa. I don't think we've really found anything yet that's like, you know, that's like, hey, you know, we found a whole new concept, but we need, you know, like something that works on meta that doesn't work on AppLovin or vice versa. But, you know, so far the strategy has been pretty congruent between the two. Speaker 1: Amazing, Wyatt. We're going to jump into the rapid fire questions. Cool. Let's do it. So feel free to be as short or elongate as you like, but we're going to hit them off now. So number one, Wyatt, what was the biggest oh shit moment in your career? Speaker 2: I've had a few, you know, I think we all do. I think one of the ones was so January is a super seasonal month for us because it's new year new you. We had a huge January 2023, like the best month the company had ever had. And we assumed that we could beat that in 24. So we bought an Amazon homepage takeover that was like $1.5 million for just the Amazon homepage and didn't work. And we have a great relationship with our Amazon team. They're one of our best partners from an ad perspective, a commerce perspective. And we just were like, whoa. And we had a deal the day that was paired with it. And there was no incremental lift from the homepage takeover of the deal, of course, but that was like a, well, okay, that was an oh shit moment. Like, you know, we had a course correct a little bit and say, okay, we still have to deliver the month. So let's pull that off. And, you know, every year or every month this year, we've looked back, it's been year over year comparisons. It's like, okay, let's look, you know, there's January. Marketing spend was like, whoa, you know? So that was one of them. There was also a time where, This was early on in my career where I didn't have the cost cap set up right. It's set to like $30,000 a day. Granted, sales went up and thank God the client at the time was like, oh, this is great, you know, and they could afford it. But I was like, oh, wow, that could have been bad. So that was a lesson I taught my media buyers later on. Speaker 3: I love that one. What's a hill you would die on when it comes to brand building? Speaker 2: I think that a lot of people want to diversify. And this is like kind of what we were talking about earlier. I'm thinking of it more from a product perspective. I think that a lot of people will, I don't want to phrase this, I think you should focus more on doing what you do best before you start expanding that. A lot of people will try too fast to have too many products or expand their category or, you know, I mean, look at Ridge. You know, they're a great example. I mean, Sean and Connor and those guys, they just did wallets until they were nine figures. And then they expanded into luggage and rings. Now they're diversified. I think you need to do that. You don't need to have 100 products one or two years into your brand's life. I think you need to focus on winning on one thing before you do diversify, whether it's your products, Your ad strategy, your commerce strategy, whatever it is. I think just get really good at one thing before you diversify. Speaker 1: What's your brand building red flag? Speaker 2: A brand that has too many products, too young. No, I'm just kidding. I think that's one of them, but I think a brand red flag for me is a brand that's built on someone who's had super, super, super fast growth. It's built on a FOMO strategy. I used to come into contact with brands or clients and whatnot. It's like, yeah, you guys grew crazy fast, but how are you going to sustain that? I don't think that most of them do. It's kind of the tortoise and the hare type. It's like slow is smooth, smooth is fast. I think that there are many brands who grow too fast and aren't able to sustain it. Maybe that's because they're like I said, maybe they're a FOMO drop based, you know, really hype, really trendy for in the moment. And I think that's definitely a little bit of a red flag when it comes to like longevity. I think anyone that's good at what they can do can make something last even a little bit longer, but I don't think you can make a sinking ship float. That can be a really big red flag. Speaker 3: Which genre of music do you think is the worst overall? Speaker 2: You're asking a musician, too. That's tough. Speaker 1: You can't love all of them. Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't love all of them, but I don't hate any genres. Which genre do I think is worst? God, I feel like I'm going to offend whoever, whatever I say is going to offend someone. You know, I definitely lean into like the rock, Americana, blues, you know, rockabilly, like that's like my kind of like music that I listen to and like the punk kind of counterculture. So for me like I'm just not a huge like disco guy, you know, like the R&B 70s disco. Speaker 1: You're not insulting to us. Speaker 2: You just miss me. Speaker 3: Those people are watching the podcast. Speaker 2: I used to be in cover bands and stuff when I was like right out of high school and I used to play with this, I got invited to do a gig and I It was a disco gig and I'll never forget feeling like I am sticking out like a sore thumb. Like this is not me, you know, and I never listened to it. Unknown Speaker: That's awesome. Speaker 3: What's your favorite punk rock band? Speaker 2: I think I have different ones for different phases of my life. That's fair. But I think the one that's probably the last with me the most was The Clash. I just remember when I was in like 5th or 6th grade, my neighbor let me go through his garage and he had walls of vinyl and cassettes and CDs. There were two bands he gave me, Infectious Grooves and The Clash. I loved them both. But The Clash, there was something about that record. It was London Calling, of course. For me, that was a big Lean into the punk scene for me and then diving into the British punk and stuff like that. That was a big part of my life. Unknown Speaker: So there you go. Speaker 3: Awesome. Well, Wyatt, this has been amazing. A lot of tactical stuff, especially for brands that are looking to diversify how to do it properly, what to look for. Amazing. So thank you for joining us today. Just want one last final takeaway from you for the listeners and viewers. One piece of advice to implement in their business, what would that one thing be? Speaker 2: One of the biggest things, the most successful things that I ever did, and this is coming from someone who was agency side for years, bring your core roles in-house. There are times for agencies and they support a lot of great things, but when it comes to growth and when it comes to finding the right person, It's much better money spent hiring a right hand who's going to help grow your brand. That is skin in the game because I think there's just... I could talk for hours about that. But I think, again, there's agencies that can support that and they can help you grow. But you need the visionary and the strategic to be in the boat with you. And I think that's like the biggest thing that I've seen with every brand I can think of. I can't personally off the top of my head think of a brand that's like grown to nine figures that did it with an agency that was like they're like number one, right? I'm sure there is. I personally just can't think of it, you know, off the top of my head. So that's like my biggest thing is like find the right person to help you take this ship and sail it. Speaker 1: Chew on that. Speaker 3: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and check out the website ChewOnThis.io.