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00:00:01
How to Grow a Business Fast (Tips from a $450M Founder)
72 Plays1 month ago
Matt Clark helped take a small Shopify store from $200K a year to over $50M — and in this episode he breaks down the exact framework he used. You’ll learn how to pick a product that can really scale, build one killer funnel, and use a single traffic source to blow it up. He also shows you how to cut the fat, get paid first, and finance rapid growth without blowing up your cash flow.
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Join over 50,000 subscribers to discover the exact strategies, tactics, and frameworks to scale your business faster than you think is possible (from a $450M founder) — 100% free newsletter: https://mattc.com/scaling/
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
A few years ago, I partnered up with a friend to help him grow his e-commerce business. The year before, it only did about $200,000 in sales. But I noticed something. In his Shopify stats, people just kept rebuying and rebuying and rebuying. So I knew there was something there with that product. So I made him a deal.
00:00:16
Speaker
I said, hey... If I can help you grow this thing, then I want about half of the business. If I can't help you grow it, it's all yours and this work will have been done for free. And so we started growing that business in January 2019. It went from a year before to in sales that year to $16 million dollars in sales the next year to $25 million dollars in sales the year after that. And then now we do over $50 million dollars in sales. So from 200 grand to $50 million in just a few short years.
00:00:45
Speaker
And in this video, I'm gonna share with you a repeatable framework that you can use in your business broken down into five steps to scale your company faster than you ever thought possible. I'm Matt Clark, and I own three businesses that do about $100 million dollars a year. I'm also the founder of Amazing.com, a company that pioneered selling consumer products on Amazon years ago. And we estimate the people that have been through our programs in that business has sold over $10 billion dollars online so far.
00:01:12
Speaker
So tip number one is you've got to have a product that can scale. So I remember talking with this older couple years ago, super nice couple, they were building their business, they were looking for advice on how to grow it, and they were owning their market. They were number one on Amazon with multiple listings, they were number one on Google with multiple listings. They completely own the online world for this product.
00:01:33
Speaker
There was only one problem. Nobody wanted to buy it. They sold the little pop gun things that if you were to go to like a big mall and see some kiosks or those little wooden guns where you push or pull and little piece of rubber pops out and makes that sound, that's what they sold. And they absolutely destroyed their competition online. They were hand making these things. I guess it was a high quality version.
00:01:52
Speaker
The problem was is there weren't enough customers. The maximum sales for that entire business online was about $30,000. So no matter how hard they worked, no matter how good of branding, of scaling, of funnels, of marketing, all that sort of stuff that they did, they would have never been able to scale this thing. So you have to have a product that can scale.
00:02:11
Speaker
And there's a handful of big niches or markets you can always look at. Health, wealth, to sex, and maybe power. So health, supplements, things that make you prettier, makeup, skin creams, all that kind of stuff. Wealth, depending on what kind of business you're in, you can help people make money, invest, build businesses, that sort of thing.
00:02:29
Speaker
Sex, anything that helps you look better. You know, anything from clothes, fashion, huge brands online, any of these big categories where people are always buying so much stuff. And so that's a big, broad category. Then what you want to do is you want to find a niche within that big category that can expand. Our business that does over $50 million dollars a year right now It's a coffee company. And so we sell low acid coffee, which is in the broader niche of healthy coffee, which is in the even bigger niche of coffee in general. And so it's a massive market and the trends are in our favor. So that gives us the ability to start with this niche product where we have very little competition. And as we build brand recognition, testimonials, reviews, better funnels, marketing scale, we can keep growing within the broader category and never have to change products. So that's what you want to look for. Depending on how big you want your business to go, say you want to get to $10 million. dollars
00:03:26
Speaker
Ideally, you have just one product that can support all that growth because your life is going to be so much easier. So look for one product that can sell at least $10 million dollars a year. Easiest way to figure that out is if you have a competitor or somebody else out there that's already doing that. That's a good sign that it's possible.
00:03:42
Speaker
Now, if you have an even bigger goal, you want to build $100 million dollar business, a billion dollar business, you need a product that can scale to that level. That's why these people, you know, celebrities, for example, when they launch these brands under their name, they're not going after tiny little niche things because to make a dent in their finances and with their reach, they need a product that can scale massively. So, you know, you've got The Rock launching a tequila brand. ah You've got Ryan Reynolds partnering up with a cell phone company. So these are massive markets because they're going after billion dollar opportunities. So you don't have to quite go that far at first, but make sure that the product you sell can scale to the level of growth that you actually want to get to so tip number two is you want one really good sales funnel and so when we sell stuff online a sales funnel is basically a series of pages that you walk through and tell people give you money and so when i was first building my very first e-commerce business you know 16 years ago i ended up creating this website called vita south.com not the most brilliant name i was in texas which is the south and i sold vitamins so that's what i called it and this website did okay i went from nothing to two million dollars a year in sales In just two years, never built a business before. And so that was a decent success. There was just one problem, that it was complete chaos to run because I had 11,000 products. And this was before I really got into and learned how to build my own consumer products brands. And so I was selling 11,000 products and I was driving traffic to, that means 11,000 different pages because I was using Google search traffic and basically had 11,000 different ad campaigns out there running all sending traffic. And I can never scale this thing because as soon as I would try to press on the gas pedal, the whole thing would go falling apart. And so what you want is the opposite. And what we've put in place in my other businesses, two of them that have gone to over $100 million dollars in sales, is you really want just one good sales funnel.
00:05:33
Speaker
I remember I sort of discovered this when I was trying to figure out how to make sense of all this chaos going on in my business. I started going to some internet marketing events and I came across this guy named Mike Geary and he sold this info product back in the day for about $47. It was an ebook called Truth About Apps.
00:05:48
Speaker
That product was sold with just one long-ass page. And that was it. That was the entire business was basically one page. And he was doing like $10 million a year. I'm like, oh my God, that seems like so much of an easier way to do business. So what you want to put in place in your business is one really good page. Because you're already going to have a product that can scale, meaning it can support that growth. Then if you want to sell as much as humanly possible of that product, you don't want a lot of different pages you have to manage. Because if you can get one page that converts well and start with one traffic source and really optimize that page from a revenue per visitor standpoint, then you can build any business that you want. You can go to $10 million, $50 million, $100 million with literally just that one page. That's basically what we've done in our business. Almost all of the $100 plus million dollars in sales we've driven have all originated because we acquired customers using that one single page. So the main things you're looking for on the page, is a good conversion rate so conversion rate anywhere between three and six percent is going to be good it's going to depend on the market and the price point and all that kind of stuff but for typical e-commerce stuff three to six percent is good then you want a high average order value so it doesn't do you any good if you have a super high conversion rate on the page but people don't give you that much money they're buying ten dollars at a time that's not going to get you anywhere because when you're advertising on facebook
00:07:10
Speaker
There's basically kind of a minimum cost per thousand impressions that everyone has to pay. And so your goal is to be able to make the most money per visitor per impression so that you can afford to spend more than anybody else in your market. And so the way you do that is get people to pay more upfront, higher average order value. I recommend a benchmark of at least three times the average product that you sell. So we sell bags of coffee for kind of low 20 something dollars. Our average order value is over $80. So those two combined conversion rate, average order value are going to give you a high revenue per visitor. And that's how you make any traffic source on the planet work for your business. Tip number three is you want to start with just one traffic source. Whenever you're scaling a business, this whole way to scale a company is keeping things as simple as humanly possible. If you overcomplicate things, you're never going to be able to scale your business. You're going to be spreading yourself too thin, you know, sort of going an inch deep, a mile wide, where you want to go an inch wide, a mile deep. That's what you're really looking for. And it applies to your traffic as well.
00:08:15
Speaker
And nowadays, you know, you can basically reach the entire world. You know, there's something like three plus billion people that you can reach through Meta, which combines Facebook and Instagram advertising. And, you know, it's more than, you know, it's basically half the entire world's population. But really, you probably don't even want to target or try to reach those other people unless you're trying to advertise in China or something. But otherwise, you could basically reach everybody you could ever possibly want just with that one advertising platform. So why start anywhere else? Maybe there's somewhere else that's cheaper and that sort of thing for a short period of time. But bread and butter, I'm telling you how to scale an e-commerce business or really any business. Start with meta advertising as your one traffic source. You've got one product that can scale. You've got one good funnel and you've got one traffic source.
00:08:58
Speaker
That's all you need. And then all you're doing is optimizing it so that when you put a dollar into your funnel from meta advertising that you get at least a dollar out in gross profit. That allows you to scale your business and acquire customers for free. That's all you're trying to do. And the good thing is, is that as the world progress and technology progresses, meta advertising is getting simpler and simpler and simpler. Today, it almost makes no sense to do any audience targeting. That means all you have to do is once you have a good product, a good page is feed some different creatives, images, videos, that sort of thing with a little bit of text into Facebook. and it will find you the right kind of customers. As long as your page converts and it's a product people actually want, Facebook will take care of all of the rest. I recommend starting with just three to five different ads.
00:09:43
Speaker
Default to videos, they work almost better than anything else right now, at least for what you would call top of funnel, which means getting people to actually know you exist versus bottom of funnel, which is retargeting people that are either already customers or already visitors.
00:09:56
Speaker
So start with three to five unique video concepts. And to find out what kind of videos to create, Just go to Facebook ad library, literally Google Facebook ad library, look at some competitors or big brands you're aware of, then create videos similar to theirs. That's a great starting place. Three to five different ones, ideally as different as possible because you don't know what's going to convert at this point. So create ones as different as possible that are relevant to your product and your page and then start there.
00:10:21
Speaker
and then basically pick the one that's working double down on it spend more money on it create similar versions to that one and keep testing another three to five completely different ones that's how the entire machine works we basically for the first year and a half uh only ran facebook advertising then we added affiliates and then we added amazon even though i had had a decade of amazon experience we didn't want to over complicate things so we started with just one traffic source and that's what i recommend you do too So tip number four is to cut the fat. I can tell you from every business that I've built and that I've seen other people build that have scaled really quickly, the problem becomes not how do you scale faster, the problem becomes how do you keep the whole thing from falling apart? And more importantly, how do you keep from becoming overconfident And that destroying your business and especially profitability.
00:11:07
Speaker
There was at one point when one of our business was just scaling like crazy, we were spending money all over the place. We were spending, you know, half a million dollars to build some custom mobile app we didn't need. Another half a million dollars to build a custom community platform that we didn't need. Could have just used something off the shelves. We spent a million dollars on a radio show advertising campaign that we couldn't get out of. We hired four executives, 60 employees, nine finance people, all six-figure employees and a $40,000 a month office. It was just insane. That's the kind of stuff that happens the more that you succeed and the faster that your company grows. And the biggest companies in the world aren't immune to this kind of thing.
00:11:43
Speaker
Back in the 70s or 80s, Coca-Cola even owned some shrimp farms. And one of the greatest CEOs in Coca-Cola's history came in and basically got rid of all that nonsense so they could get back to what really mattered. And their company was dying because of all this stuff that complacency brought.
00:11:58
Speaker
So what you want to do the faster your company grows and the faster that you want it to grow is you have to be relentless about cutting the fat. That means expenses that kind of bubble up that you don't need. That means people that aren't working out. That means marketing channels that aren't working because I've seen some people with good healthy businesses or that would otherwise be good and healthy that are just loaded up with a bunch of agencies and everyone doing a lot of stuff that doesn't necessarily need to be done which starts taking their focus away from the real potential in scaling their business.
00:12:26
Speaker
That one main product, that one main funnel, that one main traffic source. And so that's where you constantly have to be vigilant about cutting away all that other sort of nonsense and focusing on what really matters applying the 80 20 rule to your business what's the 20 that drives most of the sales in terms of products marketing channel people funnels and then what's the 80 that doesn't really matter but it's probably sucking up a lot of your time at one point we had something like 50 different flavors of coffee but it was just getting too crazy it was sucking up a lot of time customers were getting confused it was an inventory nightmare And so the plan wasn't trying to figure out how to do that better. It was like, hey, let's go back to like the core 12 flavors that really matter.
00:13:06
Speaker
And maybe even that's too much. I don't know. But it was a much better move than sticking with and just letting our sort of operations balloon without really adding that much revenue or profit. So you have to cut the fat as you scale faster.
00:13:19
Speaker
And tip number five is to get paid first. And so I have a buddy of mine who built a pet supplement business. And he started it before the pandemic, but the pandemic just gave him a huge tailwind. And so he at one point, his business was growing so fast that he had a choice. He could either slow down the growth or figure out a way to raise some money so that he could fund the inventory that he needed to buy. He actually ended up taking on a $10 million dollars private loan, personally guaranteed loan to grow his business. And he was very stressed out, as you can imagine, but it all worked out. He took this business, what i which I think was like a
00:13:54
Speaker
$500,000 initial investment three, four years later, sold it for almost $200 million. dollars And so hopefully you don't end up having to go into debt to grow your business because there's really some different ways to finance the growth of your company.
00:14:08
Speaker
So number one is you do what we already talked about. You get customers to pay more. You either increase your prices so your margins go up or you increase your average order value so your customers are essentially funding the growth of your business. Another way is to use equity. So that can either be you putting more money into the business or somebody externally coming in and buying a piece of the business. Another one is to use debt like my friend did.
00:14:31
Speaker
But ideally, you increase your average order value, but then don't have to do anything else. Because the other way to get money into your business and so you get paid first, which allows you to scale way faster, is to keep pushing out.
00:14:43
Speaker
paying vendors. And I don't mean sort of, you know, dodging calls and that sort of thing. I mean, constantly negotiating with them. So you don't have to pay upfront. For us in the coffee business, it's a weird quirk of the industry that we end up not having to pay our vendors until we actually sell a bag of coffee. So we don't have to order a bunch of inventory upfront. You're likely not going to be that fortunate. And so, but you can, as your experience and your scale grows, you can start pushing out when you pay them. Maybe at first you got to pay you know, 50% up front, 50% when it's ready. Then maybe you can pay 20% up front, you know, 80% when it's ready. Then maybe you can pay, you know, 30 days later. Maybe you can pay 60 days later. That's been the secret of Costco's growth. So you think of Costco running these massive warehouses with all these thousands of products, being a crazy sort of money-sucking business to run.
00:15:33
Speaker
But they've become extremely profitable and able to scale like crazy because all those products sitting on their shelves, They don't have to pay for until much later after it actually lands on their shelves. So they're basically using their vendors to fuel and fund their growth.
00:15:48
Speaker
That's what you want to try to do. And the bigger your business grows, the more leverage. You have to make that happen and it becomes essential because like I said, at some point, you're going to grow so fast that you need some way of funding that. So you can either do it through suppliers by getting customers to pay more, maybe even pre-order campaigns, equity or debt. And hopefully you're able to do the one that's the least painful, which is getting customers pay more.
00:16:11
Speaker
and vendors to finance the growth of your business so those are the five tips on how to scale any business fast that i've proven with two different companies that have each done over a hundred million dollars in sales and so i'm creating this video as a gift to you so if you like it please share it with somebody else like and comment below subscribe to my channel i've got nothing to sell you just trying to give you as much free information that actually works to help you scale your business so you get more freedom and can make a bigger impact