🤑 Sean Frank on the best ROI (ever) + personalizing products
🏆 Mike Beckham reveals why you need to quit to be excellent
🎁 Matt Bertulli shares the greatest gift you can give yourself
OOH ROI AOV and BFCM
Someone sent me this picture of a massive billboard at the Vegas airport during the netsuite conference.
I didn't pay for it.
Best ROI on a software decision ever.
Free OOH campaigns.
Because Fulfil is Ridge's ERP.
The pitch…
Fulfil gets you live within weeks.
1 place to manage your orders, inventory, accounting, EDI, purchasing, and manufacturing.
- No expensive middleware
- No third-party consultants
- No broken integrations
Especially not during Black Friday.
Fulfil also helped Ridge launch personalization.
We do $10M in personalized add-ons now.
If you can, you should do personalization.
They increase AOV. They increase profit per order.
It is obvious that it does not cost more to ship an engraved product versus a regular product.
They are very popular for gifts. So they smash BFCM.
But personalization is complex-
because we sell a lot of wallets and rings.
Fulfil makes it a lot less complex.
Fulfil routes the orders, tracks the engraving process and helps the team ship out on time.
Your ERP should help make you rich
Not eat away at your profits.
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Mike Beckham
CEO, Simple Modern
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The Counterintuitive Requirements of Excellence
If you want to get good at something, you must start by just doing it. What’s often called “bias to action.”
At first, you won’t be any good.
But that’s the point. You only build excellence by making your peace with a simple fact …
Excellence requires being willing to do things poorly at first.
But excellence requires a lot more than just a willingness to act. It has a few other counterintuitive ingredients that should always be mentioned alongside bias to action.
1. Excellence requires monotony
During the last Olympics, Mondo Duplantis won the gold medal in the pole vault, setting a new world record of 6.25 meters. It was an electric moment to watch.
Think about the training that preceded that glorious moment. How many pole vaults has Duplantis done in his life? 10,000? 100,000? More?
That one epic moment required countless hours of monotonous routine and practice — the same thing over and over and over and over again.
What separates the excellent from the rest is the willingness to hone their craft long after its novelty has worn off.
Can you commit? Can you grind? Are you willing to keep doing that one thing over and over again?
It’s easy when you see yourself getting 10% better each month. Can you do it when you only get 1% better monthly?
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that 10,000 hours is what it takes to become an expert. While that number is debated, the concept is not.
Becoming great at something takes an inordinate amount of time. How much is 10,000 hours? That’s like devoting two solid hours a day to something … for 14 years.
2. Excellence requires judgment
Because excellence requires so much focused work, it is impossible to achieve in many areas of life.
The easiest way to avoid excellence is to devote a little bit of time to a bunch of disparate pursuits.
I like the analogy of light.
If you stand in the sun, you get warm. If you focus the sun with a magnifying glass, you can light something on fire. If you focus light enough to create a laser, you can cut through anything.
The same analogy applies to our time. Focusing our time on one pursuit … becomes a force multiplier.
But that leads to a critical question: What areas of your life are worthy of pursuing excellence?
I’ve learned through experience that I can easily get distracted and pour my time into the pursuit of excellence in areas that just won’t matter to me when I’m 70.
If I want to be an involved and committed father, then I’m not going to be great at video games or golf. My competitive fire can sometimes distract me and dilute my focus on things that won’t matter in the long run.
One of my favorite movies growing up was the original Jurassic Park. Jeff Goldblum plays the scientist Ian Malcolm. When he sees the dinosaurs created from DNA engineering, he observes:
“You were so concerned with whether or not you could that you never stopped to think if you should.”
I’m often guilty of the same mistake — particularly when I’m not being intentional.
We’re intentional about how we allocate money into different investments, but your time is even more precious than money.
Be exceedingly deliberate about where you choose to use it.
3. Excellence requires quitting
If you are reading this, you are likely a person who scores high in persistence — the tenacity to keep going when others quit.
You have the willingness to pay the price of loneliness that often comes with doing hard things.
I’m the same. I just don’t quit. I’ve always viewed persistence as one of my superpowers, an asset.
That was true right up until I founded a company that failed.
Reflecting on that period in 2012, I’m not ashamed of the business outcome. When you make asymmetric bets, often you are going to lose.
The self-criticism I took from the experience was that I kept trying to make the project work long after it was doomed.
I was like the doctor who keeps using the electric paddles on a patient who is clearly already dead.
I should have taken the “L.” Learned from it. And then, moved on.
But I was determined to make it work because … I do not quit. The result? I wasted another year of my life (and another couple of million dollars) because of my persistence.
Persistence is not always a virtue. It can also be toxic.
The person who keeps going deeper and deeper with a destructive addiction. The co-dependant personality in an abusive relationship who keeps trying to make it work. The gambler who keeps doubling down right into bankruptcy.
This isn’t just true of overtly negative situations.
The most dangerous business is the mediocre one. Good enough that you can’t quit. Lacking the potential to be truly successful.
Persistence is only helpful when we apply it in the right places.
How do you harness the positive power of your persistence without the toxic aspects?
You become good at quitting.
It’s completely counterintuitive but 100% true. Here’s how Seth Godin put it in a tremendous book called The Dip:
“Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt.”
“Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time. [...] Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.”
When you become skilled at quitting, your persistence becomes a superpower.
Quit the stuff that doesn’t matter. Quit quickly. Quit without guilt.
If you aren’t afraid of quitting, it will make you much more willing to experiment and try new things.
Make the decision to quit everything except the most important things. Then, focus your time, attention, and energy on being the absolute best you can be in those areas.
And those areas alone.
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Matthew Bertulli
CEO, Lomi & Pela Case
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The Greatest Gift You Can Give Yourself This Holiday Season
Building a company while building a family isn’t easy.
During Q4 in consumer, it’s even harder.
If you’re like me, you already have enough tactics screaming at you from guides, emails, and social posts. More than you know what to do with. More than you could possibly put into action.
So instead of another holiday marketing strategy … I want to talk about something we rarely bring up. Something that might make you feel guilty even for entertaining it.
Something surprising.
But it might just be the greatest gift you give yourself and your family — especially this time of year.
Should you? How? And the emotions around it.
Let’s dig in.
One of the benefits of a successful business is financial gain.
We have the freedom to alleviate some of the “balancing” pain that comes with raising a family while building a company.
Choosing not to do this in any capacity is usually rooted in emotional reasons, not practical ones.
Operators endure immense stress building our business. I think those experiences often teach us this is how all of life needs to be in order to live it well.
Sure, struggle isn’t a bad thing. But unnecessary struggle — if you can avoid them — is kind of stupid.
My wife and I have some really basic rules around what we outsource (hire) versus what we do ourselves.
Our goal is simple … don’t outsource being good parents.
For us, this means dropping off and picking our daughter up from school ourselves. We go to whatever activities she’s involved in as well. We spend a lot of time together.
Basically, prioritize being present.
Anything that involves spending time as a family, we do it.
Anything that needs to happen in the periphery, we outsource. Cleaning the house, logistics, random shopping or errands, etc.
Our belief is that both quantity and quality of time spent matter. First, to each other. Second, to our daughter.
I have zero guilt about paying people to do other things that allow us to optimize time as a family. Those same investments give me the time to stay healthy and enjoy time with friends doing things I love to do. Same with my wife.
Of course, the obvious question is …
“Matt, not all of us have the sort of financial freedom you’re describing. What then? Just more guilt?”
Not at all.
My good friend Katy Mimari describes her approach to building family + building a business during Q4’s busy season as …
When you can’t be OOO, take your work home.
Not the stress of it. The joy of it.
The more I share — especially in my excitement — the more my family has learned to love the rush.
“Mom, what are your sales at now?” makes my heart jump every time I hear it.
Involve your family. Share the excitement.
This isn’t a job; it’s our passion. And our loved ones will be so happy to see us excited, too!
Health. Relationships. Family. Joy.
Is it cliché to say those are the greatest gifts?
Yes. But that does not make it any less true.
Anything you can give yourself to get them … is worth it.
One Last Question
Not to get too personal — even though Sean, Mike, and Matt got really personal. Get it? Mike and Matt’s topics were obviously personal, but Sean also said you should “personalize” your products. Anyway, not to get too personal …
Any chance you’re in Charlotte?
If so, our friends at Fulfil are hosting a DTC dinner next Tuesday (Nov 11). Here’s the link to register.
With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff 🤓
Chief Content Officer
Disclaimer: Special thanks to Fulfil for sponsoring this newsletter.