Drew Sanocki is one of my favorite people to talk to. He's been a longtime friend and possesses a wealth of wisdom. Drew has successfully built and exited a company, turned around two other nine-figure retailers and is currently overseeing the growth of PostPilot, which recently achieved 8-figures in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

What distinguishes Drew in my mind is his unwavering commitment to his family and his well-being. He has a wonderful family and leads an inspirational life. In this episode, we gain valuable insights into his mindset and philosophy on building both a fulfilling life and a successful business.

What You’ll Learn From This Episode:

• Why Drew is waking up at 4:30 a.m. and sprinting at 51 years old
• A transparent look at his daily schedule while managing one of the country's fastest-growing companies.
• The strategies he uses to maintain connection with his kids and wife while running a startup
• The details behind his acquisition of PostPilot for $50,000 and its transformation into an 8-figure business.
• His experience of hiring one person every three days for an entire year.
• How he has acquired multiple 8 and 9-figure businesses without investing his own capital.
• The differences between building a SAAS (Software as a Service) and an e-commerce business.
• Some simple campaigns that you can use with direct mail to grow your business

Links: 

• The PostPilot holiday offer https://www.postpilot.com/holiday-gfo
• www.PostPilot.com

The Google Medic update a few months ago caused a big upset for many people in the ecommerce space.

Our guest today, Nat Eliason, is an expert in content marketing and SEO, and he shares his insights into what happened, the outcome, and why he thinks Google is smart for the changes they’ve made, even those some of his own clients were impacted.

Nat joins us on the podcast for the second time and you won’t want to miss his discussion about why solid, well-written content is still the best way to drive traffic to your site and his recommendations for the best tools for auditing your site and improving SEO.

Enjoy!

Episode Highlights:

• 4:44 Why Nat practices intermittent fasting.
• 7:36 How Growth Machine has grown over the last year since Nat’s first time on the Ecommerce Influence podcast.
• 11:10 Why creating awesome content is still the best way to drive traffic to your site.
• 14:21 Nat explains why it’s better to be paying a bit more for better writers and better content.
• 15:30 How the 80/20 rule applies differently when it comes to writing a creative article.
• 18:30 Google Medic update: what it is and its effect on different sites.
• 21:37 Nat’s hypothesis about why some health sites were hurt by the Medic update more than others.
• 25:06 Recommendations for those that have been hurt by the Medic update.
• 26:36 Why creating a second blog might be a good strategy to try to increase your results on Google.
• 30:08 Why Nat says Google was smart to make the update.
• 31:17 Nat’s favorite tools for site auditing.
• 32:51 The main things to look for in your site audit results.
• 33:46 Other tools Nat recommends.
• 35:23 “No More Struggle Porn” – how Nat’s article originated, why he took a stance on idolizing the obsession with working hard, and how it reached more than 350,000 views.
• 42:21 The reality of what it actually looks like to be an entrepreneur.
• 44:16 Realizing that working harder and struggling can be a false sense of progress in your business.
• 49:40 The importance of creating space for play within the business lifestyle.
• 51:42 The books that had the biggest impact on Nat this year.

Links And Resource

• @nateliason
• NatEliason.com
• Growth Machine
• AHREFS
• SEO PowerSuite
• Clearscope
• It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work
• Elephant in the Brain
• Discipline and Punish
• Darwin's Dangerous Idea
• Gödel, Escher, Bach
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

Become a Member:

If you liked this episode, you’re going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership.  It’s a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we’ll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I’ll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you’re growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!

Sponsor: Klaviyo

Today’s episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Over 10,000 brands have joined Klaviyo to help them build higher-quality relationships with their customers. Klaviyo does not force you to compromise between speed and powerful functionality, you get both. Interested to see Klaviyo’s impact? Tune into their 12-part docu-series following three brands—Chubbies, SunSki and the Love Is Project. You’ll learn how they prepared for Cyber Weekend 2018, marketing throughout the holidays, and beyond. Along the way, we’ll fill you in on what you should be doing as a business to push your marketing strategy to the next level.

Also, as you’re going through this, they’re going to show you how to prepare the business to continue to take it to the next level segment and grow and use it to use Klaviyo to drive more profitable interactions. If you want to go check out this docu-series, go to www.ecommerceinfluence.com/beyond.

Today, we’ve got an excellent interview with Wharton Professor and entrepreneur Peter Fader.

He's a two-time guest. We wanted to bring Peter back on the show because he’s an expert in customer lifetime value and customer centricity.

How do you predict lifetime value? What models should we use to predict lifetime value? This is what Peter spent his entire career focusing on.

In this episode, Peter is going to talk about the difference between contractual businesses and subscription businesses. He's going to talk about share some big name eCommerce businesses that on are track to go out of business because of their product-centric model.

It's a deep dive into customer centricity, lifetime value, and it's something I think you guys will enjoy.

Episode Highlights

• 4:37  The work Peter Fader did with Zodiac that made Nike wanted to buy it.
• 8:45 What is lifetime value and its importance to your business.
• 9:54  Tips on making more money.
• 10:27  What really sets Amazon aside that makes their number two better than other companies number one.
• 14:06  What are lifetime value scores?
• 15:49  What makes EA sports a good example of a customer-centric company.
• 20:20 Answer to why big companies scale too quickly and fail when hitting a certain level?
• 26:55 The concept of quality interaction over quantity interaction
• 28:10 How responding to customers needs becomes an issue?
• 29:50 Distinction between contractual versus non-contractual businesses
• 33:44 Two metrics that non-contractual businesses should demand to see
• 34:56 CRM: expectation versus reality

Links And Resource

• PeteFader.com
• ThetaEquity.com
• The Customer Centricity Playbook
• Brand Growth Experts
• Foxwell Digital

Become a Member

If you liked this episode, you're going to love the Brand Growth Experts Membership.  It’s a community of top ecommerce business owners and marketers who I coach one-on-one to help scale up their businesses. Together we’ll create a plan that will help you scale up your business, and then I’ll help you execute it.

If you want to make sure you’re growing as quickly and sustainably as possible, click here to learn more. Hope to see you on the inside!