Whatever you’re struggling with, another operator has already been there, fought to break through, and figured it out.

Today’s newsletter is a goldmine of hard-won experience.

💸 Sean Frank reveals his $10M influencer marketing strategy

📖 Mehtab Bhogul shares 14 books to increase your margins

🎁 Cody Plofker gives away 20 new DTC operator playbooks

Plus, the top five headlines in consumer.

Sean Frank CEO, Ridge

Six things I have learned after spending $10,000,000 on influencer marketing

But I am not going to charge you for it.

1. YouTube is word of mouth

Influencers have relationships with fans.

Youtubers, in particular, get 100% attention share. It is the closest to word of mouth marketing you can pay for.

A YouTube creator ad can be 2 minutes, where you are the focus.

2. Buy these five ad units

- In-feed social posts
- Story posts
- In-content (YT)
- Podcast ads
- Content rights

This is all you need to spend $10M+.

3. Program types (from zero to $$$)

- Gifting (free, super competitive)
- Free product w/ guaranteed post
- Affiliate (reborn on TikTok)
- Pay for content/rights
- Flat fee posting (50% of industry)
- CPM-based deals

4. Understand “Base CPM”

When you do an influencer deal, it is implicitly built around reach/distribution (CPM).

Some brands have higher “buy ins” than others.

Your base CPM depends on the:

- Risk you are a scam
- Product category
- Time in market

Ridge can do deals for $10 base cpm.
Crypto will cost $500.

Want to lower yours, prove you are influencer safe.

Show reviews, past creator deals, real sales. Creators want to know you will not scam their audience.

5. Endemic vs non-endemic

Endemic = creators in your product category
Non-endemic = outside your category

Non-endemic is often BETTER.

Why?

The fishing YouTuber risks their credibility recommending fishing gear, but has zero risk recommending a wallet.

6. Create a system

This playbook is worthless if you can’t run it.

- Find creators
- Reach out
- Follow-up
- Ship product
- Track who posted
- Pay people

That is what SARAL is for.

One platform runs the entire workflow. I do not use it. Because we do not have to.

Because we have a whole team.
You probably do not.

You can pull thousands of creators, blast outreach, track who posted, and send payments.

200+ DTC brands run their influencer programs on it. Gruns, Heart & Soil, Obvi, Spacegoods, Proactiv

They are giving our audience 30 days for free. And a free 1-1 influencer strategy session.

Steal my playook.
Let them run it.

Use this link so they know you are an Operators reader.

Mehtab Bhogul Karta Ventures

Read These Books to Improve Your Margins

Most business books are academic garbage.

My bar for a good book is simple: it should immediately improve your margins or revenue. Every book below has done that for the consumer brands in our portfolio.

Some are ugly. Some are badly written. All of them pay for themselves.

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
​Gino Wickman

Never used a formal management system? Start here.

This is the default operating system for the companies in our portfolio: EOS (“Entrepreneurial Operating System”) fixes most issues at most businesses.
​
It’s six components:

1. Vision
2. People
3. Data
4. Issues
5. Process
6. Traction

All run through simple tools like weekly Level 10 meetings and quarterly Rocks. It’s faster to deploy than Scaling Up and a better fit for companies with lower revenue per head.

Scaling Up
​Verne Harnish

I prefer Scaling Up for companies with higher revenue per head. It also makes sense for larger companies. In consumer this means brands doing over ~$50M - $75M or so.

It’s organized around four decisions:

1. People
2. Strategy
3. Execution
4. Cash

His One-Page Strategic Plan is worth the price of the book by itself.

Monetizing Innovation
​Madhavan Ramanujam

Pricing should be designed into the product from day one.

This book explains what customers value, what they’ll pay, and how to package and tier accordingly. If you’ve never had a thoughtful approach to pricing, this is a great book.

Topgrading
​Bradford Smart

Topgrading is a step-by-step instruction manual on how to hire and not mess it up.

Two tools do most of the work: the chronological, career-long interview, and having candidates arrange their own reference calls. Smart claims the method takes hiring wins from roughly 25% to 80%.

Whenever we implement it, our success rate goes up. The only downside is that the book is poorly written and too long.

Scaling Up Compensation
​Verne Harnish

You’ll cut compensation-related discussions by 80% after launching a comp philosophy, and this book is a guide on how to do it.

• Reduce churn
• Attract the right talent
• Align your team on what matters

Pair it with whichever operating system you run so your values flow into how you pay people.

The Purchasing Advantage
​Omid Ghamami

One of the best books ever written on supply chain!

Ghamami spent 18 years at Intel, at one point responsible for roughly $1 billion in annual spend. The book is all process steps and templates … TCO analysis, negotiation prep, the basics of purchasing contract law.

Just go and look at the cover of the book. You can tell it’s going to deliver tremendous value because of how ugly it is.

The Goal
​Eliyahu Goldratt

Lean manufacturing principles wrapped in a story. Plant manager, Alex Rogo, has 90 days to save his factory or it gets shut down.

It is gimmicky. But it has sold millions of copies since 1984, and Amazon reportedly had its senior executives read it.

If you run any operation with throughput constraints — manufacturing, fulfillment, customer service — this will reframe how you think about bottlenecks.

Unfortunately, what could’ve been 50 pages is 300. The core content is excellent though, and plenty of people enjoy the story format more than a textbook.
​
​Profit First
​Mike Michalowicz

We don’t use Profit First at any of our companies. The system is about idiot-proofing a business more than running it well.

That said, if you’re a new founder, don’t have a financial background, or keep ending the year wondering where the money went, Profit First is a great book to read.

You allocate revenue into separate buckets — profit, taxes, owner pay, OpEx — the moment it comes in (instead of paying yourself whatever’s left at the end). It forces discipline.

The Kevin Hillstrom Books

Specifically, Hillstrom’s Merchandise Forensics, Hillstrom’s Customer Development + Hillstrom’s Fix It!​
​
Three short, tactical books. You can read all three in a day or so. There’s no dumb filler.

Kevin ran database marketing at Nordstrom, Eddie Bauer, and Lands’ End before starting his consultancy, MineThatData. The booklets are essentially his client diagnostic frameworks: rolling twelve-month analysis, comp segments, repurchase tables, etc.

They’ll be extra relevant if you run a business with a lot of LTV or a lot of SKUs, especially something like apparel. Kevin’s blog is the OG ecommerce resource online.

Financial Intelligence
​Karen Berman + Joe Knight
​
No financial background? Read this.

Andrew Youderian (EcommerceFuel) recommends it. And the Operators CEO, Aaron Orendorff, picked it up because of him. Aaron swears it saved his job the first two months he stepped into the chief-executive role.

Double Your Profits
​Bob Fifer

You’ll find at least one thing that saves an insane amount of money. This is what I recommend whenever someone asks me how to quickly improve margin without a massive overhaul.

Corporate Turnaround Artistry
​Jeff Sands

Loaded with tactical advice you can implement immediately. I recommend it alongside Double Your Profits for anyone that wants to expand their margins.

Sands lost his own business in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, then spent his career saving other people’s. He won TMA Turnaround of the Year three years running.

Corporate Turnaround
​Donald Bibeault

A foundational classic. Bibeault’s lines about what makes a great turnaround manager are some of my favorites in business literature.

With that said maybe some of this is kind of redundant if you’re reading the Jeff Sands book and I think Jeff’s book is better.

Reversing The Slide
​James Shein

Shein teaches turnarounds at Kellogg and was a turnaround CEO and restructuring lawyer before that. Good tidbits, especially around legal basics.

Less tactical than Sands. Still worth the read.

Don’t read everything at once.

Pick the book that matches your biggest constraint right now.

• Hiring
• Pricing
• Cash
• Margins

And if you only take one thing away: get an operating system.

Traction if you’re small, Scaling Up if you’re not. Everything else gets easier once the machine runs itself.

Cody Plofker Advisor & fmr. CEO, Jones Road

20 Brand New DTC Playbooks From The Operators

People tell me I vibe code too much but you should see what the Operators team built. A dashboard that has every single thing the network has ever done.

• Every newsletter
• Podcast transcript
• And webinar recording

With an AI search engine that lets you ask any question and get real advice referenced by speaker and source.

As soon as I got access, I dumped the Portal’s 4.8 million words into a repo, gave it to Claude, and ripped 20 playbooks.

• GTM strategy
• Product development
• Fixing an ad account

And lots more.

Aaron said he’s going to add the 20 playbooks directly into the Portal. Probably in the next week.

Try it out for yourself. It’s free.

THE FEED

​$450M, 6 Brands & 4 Countries: Why Sunil Agrawal Refuses to Stop​

​Why Brand Equity Is Losing to Dropshipping Ecommerce With Roman Khan​

​The Performance Creative Director Hire: Operator vs. Ideator​

The Trends

Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, the five top stories in commerce and DTC.

1. Mars Men Goes Omnichannel: LinkedIn​

Fast-growing men’s health brand Mars Men is going omnichannel and just launched nationwide at GNC. Founded by Benjamin Smith and Zach Stuck, Mars Men hit a $100M run rate in less than 18 months using only one channel, DTC.

The company also closed a $27.5M Series A round led by L Catterton in March. This will likely be the first of many key retail launches for Mars Men.

2. IM8 Scores $1B in Growth Financing: TechCrunch​

IM8, one of the fastest-growing supplement brands of all time, secured $1B in non-dilutive growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. Under the arrangement, General Catalyst will finance 70% of IM8’s marketing spend and IM8 will not have to issue any equity, warrants, or convertible instruments.

IM8 reached $100M ARR in 11 months and the company expects annual revenue to top $400M in 2027. IM8’s other strategic partners include Giannis Antetokounmpo, Aryna Sabalenka, and Jay Shetty.

3. Final Boss Sour Closes Round: Business Wire​

Final Boss Sour closed a $4M funding round led by Evolution VC Partners. The Angel Group, Mondelez, Melitas Ventures, and GFR Fund also participated.

Founded in 2023 by Tommy Riggs, James Hicks, and London Lazerson, Final Boss Sour specializes in dried fruits covered with a sour candy coating. The company is gearing up for several major retail launches including Target, Kroger, and 7-Eleven.

4. BUFFS Secures $1.1M Ahead of Launch: Twitter​

Innovative snack brand BUFFS secured $1.1M in pre-seed funding ahead of its August 11th launch. Co-founded by recent college graduates Beckett Kitaen and George Zhou, BUFFS offers grass-fed beef puffs containing 10-12g of protein and no seed oils.

Several seasoned operators and consumer investors like Jordan Brown, Ari Raz, Nicholas Mares, and Sumesh Sachar participated in the round.

5. Supernatural Ventures Backs FAVE: PR Newswire​

Organic drink mix brand FAVE raised $1M in seed funding led by Supernatural Ventures. The Angel Group, Great Circle Ventures, and a number of strategic angel investors also backed the brand.

Founded by 20-year CPG veteran Ryan Raish, FAVE is a modern drink mix alternative that’s USDA Organic, low-sugar, and free from artificial flavors, colors, and preservatives. FAVE also just made its nationwide retail debut at Sprouts Farmers Market.

 Three Last Things! 

If you missed our first-ever Operators Mastermind last month outside of Austin, TX … write something nice on Twitter (X), LinkedIn, or YouTube and you might get an invite!

If you’re in LA this Thursday, we have two spots left for a fancy dinner Sean Frank + Jason Panzer are hosting. Smash reply and include your brand to apply.

If you want to join a small, 20-person (max) group next Monday online — Connor Rolain from HexClad + Matt Bertulli from Pela Case will be there — also hit reply!

1. Say something nice
2. Apply for the LA dinner
3. Let’s hang on Monday

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff
🤓 Chief Executive Officer

P.S. (Disclaimer): Special thanks to Saral for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

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