Harry Joiner 3:26
Oh, gosh, um, gosh, I was frozen food trader in the 1990s. I worked for a company called AJC International. You can see them online now at AJCGroup.com. And I left that firm. So for did that for seven years. And then it says absolutely unbelievable experience. And then I left the firm in 99 to go to work as an angel round investor, and director of trading operations for global food exchange.com, which was started by some McKinsey fellows, we raised about 30 million bucks. We did that for about two years, some a little more than two years. And we sold out to I trade network. And then after that it was a recession. And I’ve bounced around Atlanta, interviewed in a number of different places and I just wound up working for a recruiting firm is a contingency recruiter, which basically means and I’m still a contingency recruiter, which means every deal that I take is completely unstack your audience might ask how I charge so I charge and always charge 20% of the candidates first of your base salary if and only if the client hires the candidate so is my brother likes to kid me gunslingers don’t get paid by the bullet. It’s a straight commission thing. I know money changes hands unless the client hires my candidate and that just always appealed to me. And so I’m a contingency recruiter. To this day, I work for a little agency here in Atlanta, helping them build an omni channel eComm. Business, this is way back in 2003, or 2004. And then in 2005, I decided to just go into business for myself. And so I set up a home office that was in a different home. But it’s about today, it’s very much the same concept. You know, I mean, this is what I look like, clearly, this is going to be an audio interview, or video interview. But it really doesn’t make any difference to me, because the only thing that typically matters, in my line of work is how I sound, you know. And so, I work from home. And we’ll get called by, I think, 150 companies, this year of people wanting us to handle their e-commerce searches. There’s only two of us in our firm me and I’ve got a partner my business then Allan Seibert, and Allan and I will take about 50 of those deals. So it’s nice work if you can get it right.
Yeah, very, very impressive. Well, you obviously have an extensive background. And you’ve seen a lot, especially as in terms of the e-commerce industry has changed a lot over the last two decades, let alone over the last decade alone and more changes are continually on the way. But Harry, I think what’s interesting there, you mentioned, you know, you have a small firm, right, you’re well experienced your results speak for themselves. If people go check out your LinkedIn profile, there’s raving reviews of people that have worked with Harry. So Harry 150, you know, companies are going to apply to kind of hire your services. What what are you looking for, as you kind of determine what are the 50? You’re going to work? Work with? What’s the difference between those that you say no to versus the ones that you say yes to? And why?
Sure. Great question. Well, so when people pitch us on a deal, so they pitch me and Alan, and it’s a little bit like if you’ve ever seen a concept pitched on Shark Tank, it’s a little bit like that. Allan and I are very particular about the deals that we take. And I think I learned this watching Entourage back in the, you know, 2000s 2000 never ate fruit, or something that in Hollywood, the richest actors aren’t the richest actors, because they’re the best actors. They’re the richest actors, because they get the best scripts, and stuff like that, as an e-commerce recruit. So we like searches that can be closed on the back of a single story. Right? So the brand new, the, you know, the client, they know what their business is about, and who their business is for, and what their unique selling proposition is. So why should anyone do business with them versus any option available to them? Including do nothing. We look for the underlying economics of the client’s business. So do we understand how they make money? Do they understand how they make money? Do they understand how they’re going to make money in the future, we tend to take a good hard look at things like size and scope of a 12 month file, we’ll look at things like average order value, we’ll look at things like recurring revenue and litter strength and see we’ll look at what it takes to actually bring that concept. So to life, you know, the purpose and values and viewpoint of the brand. And we’ll look at a variety of different factors to try and determine whether our audience which is the top 3% of people in the e Commerce Industry, I mean, 97% of the candidates that watch this podcast are going to they’re they’re not we wouldn’t represent them on a deal anyway, because we’re out there looking for load bearing walls, and this sounds super salesy, but the fact of the matter is when people come to me and Allan, they expect us to be in the organizational transformation business. Right. You come to us looking for a Steph Curry, Michael Jordan, a Tom Brady, that’s that it is like being an agent in Hollywood. And can’t the best candidates in the industry, the people who are capable of bugging and flying and being a load bearing wall and our clients business, they want to make sure that they can do reputation enhancing work. That’s really what it boils down to. And that means that in terms of the search, the client has the budget, the authority and need the timeline in the hiring process, to knock good candidates in versus not come out. And the business has favorable underlying economics that the client has clarity and inability and resolve, you know, commitment towards e-comm, and those are the things honestly that you need. For an A player to do reputation enhancing work in your business. Yeah,
Josh Hadley 10:05
I love the strategy that or the analogy that you made there with, you know, hiring like the Michael Jordan’s or Steph Curry’s, right? If you think about that, you know, as a business owner, right? If you want to attract a Michael Jordan or a Steph Curry, right, if you’re an NBA owner, you’ve got to have a good team, right? And you’ve got to have a good vision and say, Hey, here’s the teammates that you’d be working alongside, here’s, here’s where we can go, if we bring you on to the team, that’s going to attract those a level, you know, talent and players, to your team. Whereas if you’re kind of confused, you don’t have good economics behind your business, you don’t know your numbers, you might be a little wishy washy with your strategy, right? Or your vision for the business, you’re not going to get that a level talent to come join your team. Because I think it’s it’s definitely like a recruiting process, like you have to sell somebody to your business. At the end of the day. How many of our listeners are established businesses that, you know, they probably built a small team, maybe at this point? Let’s probably a few players, they’re making seven figures, they want to go to eight figures and beyond? Right? What are some of the things and best practices that you would recommend, you know, business owner should be focused on now, if they want to get to that point where they would be hiring your services where they are that 3%, that very selective group of the audience that you would even consider working with?
Harry Joiner 11:34
Well, this sounds crazy, but it’s I’ve been doing this since 2004, five hours a day, five days a week, 50 weeks a year, that’s my connect on the telephone all day, every day talking to entrepreneurs, right? Whose businesses typically are between $5,000,000.70 $5 million in sales. So let’s just clarify, when I say anything for the rest of this podcast, it’s my slam dunk customer is an entrepreneur who runs an business that’s omni channel, typically, primarily online retailer between 5 million hours and $75 million in sales. Why that break? Well, what I’ve discovered is that less than $5 million in sales, and they usually don’t have enough money to pay me more than $75 million in sales. And they usually have a guy like me on their team, right, and more than $75 million in sales. What I find is that they’re not really willing to take my ideas about what they should be doing. Now, this isn’t necessarily ego. Right? But it’s, it’s a little weird being a physician, in the sense that I treat entrepreneurs with a particular type of mentality all day, every day. And I, you know, and I certainly recognize it, when I see it, you know, it’s, most people come to me, they’re looking for reliable growth. That’s what they’re looking for. And so what does that mean? You know, there’s good growth, there’s background, there’s cashflow, positive growth, some companies are making a sale to get a customer, some companies are getting a customer to make a sale. It’s just so you have to kind of ask yourself like, so what’s my ideal outcome of owning this business? Yeah, you have to ask that question. You just, it’s a lifestyle business. Like, clearly I’m running the lifestyle business, I’m not trading on my good looks here. Right. But for some people that are, I don’t know, the first part of their career, let’s say between 30 and 45 years old, running a $5 million to $75 million thing. It’s like, well, the first person elected me 150 years old has been born. So let’s say you’re 40 years old, and you’re gonna run your business for another seven to 10 years, and then you’re gonna go do something else? Well, you got a career path, just like everybody else has a career path. And you kind of have to look at that and say, Okay, if I, if my goal was to have my reputation precedes me, as an entrepreneur, and to have done reputation enhancing work leading this business, right, what does that look like? And when I was a kid, my dad who built an enormous business, here in Georgia, it’s now like the 10th or 12th largest privately held company in Georgia, he and his partner founded it, and today, they’re, you know, it’s a $2 billion thing. So it’s alarmists, and he’s outrageously successful, is to say your business strategy should be your exit strategy. Don’t build it if you can’t sell it. So okay, that all sounds reasonable to say, Okay, our business strategy should be our exit strategy. What does that mean? This strategy should be your exit strategy. What happens if we sell this thing in five years, what has happened? And in the 1000s of phone calls that I’ve had both with private equity people and with entrepreneurs around the internet retailer top 500 the shock that we’re gonna riff community, whatever, what I’ve come to find is that there are six things that happen to any business. Six things like death and taxes with people the Medaka pay taxes, that’s, we know that for sure. Well, there are six outcomes for any business whether you’re Google Amazon, Facebook, a lemonade stand or your six out. One, you sell to a strategic buyer. Number two, you sell to a financial buyer. Number three, sell to new employees. Number four, sell it to your employees. Number four, you go out of business, how could I forget or number five, you die in possession that sits spot I forget, sell to a strategic buyer seller and a financial buyers self here, employees go out of business dying possession, five, okay. So you have to look at that and say, Okay, which of those is most attractive to me? Well, probably not sell to a financial buyer, probably going to, and I may or may not be able to sell to my employees. Sometimes you can write sometimes your employees are just, they’re not that great. I mean, I talk to entrepreneurs all day, every day, you’ve got a dull, boring institutional concept in your business. You got DeLorean institutional people, pedestrian people working in your business, are you really going to sell your business to them? Maybe? Maybe not? Yeah, right. So at the end of that, if say, Well, I don’t want to buy this asset on the dime possession. So that leaves me with sell to a strategic buyer. So let’s say you, you say, I’m going to sell to a strategic buyer. Now, who’s the strategic buyer? Don’t build it, if I can’t sell it business strategy shouldn’t be your exit strategy. Why would somebody buy it? And then basically, what you’re doing as an entrepreneur, is you’re working all the time to reconcile what the distance is about to build businesses for, and why should somebody choose to do business with your firm versus any option available to them, including doing nothing, and you’re trying to, you know, whip up a constellation of stakeholders, whether they are investors, or employees, or banks, or vendors or, or customers or whomever, you’re trying to whip up a constellation of them around your business based on a concept based on an operating model based on financials based on what’s in it for them. And anybody does business with you, because it’s reputation enhancing for them. And you have to figure out what’s reputation enhancing for you, and the guy who’s got to buy you and send out 10 years. And that’s honestly, God, the stories that I’ve seen unfold between in the last night, I’ve been doing this for 18 years, the stories that I’ve seen unfold in that band, between five and $75 million have been amazing. And I’ve seen some people go out of business or get hit by a bus or whatever. And I’ve seen some people sell to strategic buyers, and make a lot of money. And it’s always really exciting when that happens.
Josh Hadley 18:02
Yeah. Well, Harry, I think that’s an amazing, you know, way to approach business, right? I love that starting your business strategy should be your exit strategy. And I think that is like the first step that any of us listening to this podcast should be focused on right now. And having a clear vision of like, what am I driving towards? Right? So there’s gonna be a long term, like, I’m just selling it to myself, I’m gonna own it for eternity? Or is this like, you need to start building it towards a strategic buyer. And as you do that, I think it shifts your mindset in terms of the different strategies that you would employ, you know, to further that the overall business strategy. So I love that in Harry, you have so many examples and case studies that I want to dive into. So why don’t you share some of those? Let’s start maybe with the successful, you know, case study here, where what, you know, tell us where the brand started from, right, obviously, were between five to 75 million. Who was it that you know, you worked with to bring onto their team? And what are some of the strategies or things that they did and what was the end outcome? Right, I think you mentioned some of them have even sold to strategic buyers, which is excellent. And then on the flip side, you know, what have you seen in terms of people that have gone out of business? What were some of the failures or mistakes that everybody should be learning from that you’ve seen?
Harry Joiner 19:27
Yeah, it’s funny. I didn’t realize you’re gonna ask that question. I’m glad you did. I’m sitting here looking at it’s a spreadsheet basically that I’ve made for myself of all of our receivables in the deals that we’ve done. I mean, there are a lot of like we’ve closed deals for Academy sports academy sports has been very successful, which was deals with my Patriot supply. They were successful with bows deals with God, bulk reef supply, there’s a company It’s now private equity back that was very successful. Big name commerce very successful. Um, I guess I’ll see if I can answer that with some generalities. So, in general, what I see is that a Okay, so you think of growth, I guess you’re on the other side. So, like, okay, so growth goes like this. Go like this to be,
Josh Hadley 20:24
right. Yeah, that that went that way worked right back. So all right.
Harry Joiner 20:27
So typically what happens is people live grow between, let’s call it 20 and 30% per year. And it’s hard to do that. And most of what I say is that entrepreneurs figure out that they need a VP of E commerce or chief marketing officer who can turn marketing from an art into a science they want it to be more process to so up until, let’s say, 10 to $15 million in sales. And it completely depends on the average order value. It depends on whether or not it’s b2b or b2c, whether a company sells a product or a service, domestic or international, whatever, it’s there’s no one size fits all example, that I could give you an answer to this question. Yeah. But it seems like once the company gets to about $15 million a year, they want to turn marketing more into a process. And they want a process for acquiring customers, improving the average order value, and improving legal order frequency, the model that we use to help people step through this is something called the ANSOFF matrix, okay, Google ANSOFF matrix, it’s a two by two grid, it says there’s four ways to grow any business Period, end of story, eliminate scale, airline doesn’t matter if you sell old products, or customers, old products, new customers, new products to old customers, new products for new customers. That’s how you do it. And so it starts with the financial calculator. And you say, Okay, we’re at $15 million now. And we want to be at $50 million in five years. What’s the compound annual growth rate? I don’t know what that kind of continual growth rate is, let’s say it’s 20% per year. It’s like, okay, so any combination of all the old opening data may be new to all is gonna get me there. What am I doing right, that I should do more of all of the new, notable new, what am I doing wrong that I should stop doing? won’t open it due to all new? What’s my competitor doing that I should copy? Photo of the new due to old, new to new? What’s nobody doing that somebody should do? Although all new to all good news. And it’s just, it’s a wash, rinse repeat kind of thing? Yeah. Right. Where you’re saying, okay, at the end of the day, my business strategy spikes strategy, don’t build it. If I can’t sell it, sell to a strategic buyer, roughly, who’s my strategic partner? Right? Why would they acquire me? Am I building a brand? am I building something that’s based on a supply chain? Am I built? You know, is it going to be based on some unique way of selling? Like? I don’t know, back in the day, I think it was Tupperware was sold door to door, you know, so there are like certain businesses that are built on the back of a particular sales and marketing, or whatever, and you kind of have to go, Okay, so what’s the secret sauce in my business? And is that scalable? And is it going to be the basis for a competitive advantage and a unique, unique selling proposition going forward? And how can I build around business that comes to mind as dominance, right? They were the only game in town, when they started that, obviously, the unique selling proposition fresh hot piece of 30 minutes or less, or it’s free, maybe not a guarantee around it. They launched it on college campuses, it was an enormous hit. And the rest is history. And that was a concept that scale. And none of our pizza joints wanted anything to do with it, because they had a legacy infrastructure that was all about restaurants. And they were like, if you guys want to do delivery, we’ve tried it before and it didn’t work be our guests. And they literally let Domino’s have for granted that this is a similar kind of thing where you have to look at sort of dimly, directionally correctly the future and say, Where’s the hole in the market going to be? And what is my unique selling proposition has to be what is my operating model have to be? What are the underlying economics of that business going to look like? It was my slam dunk customer. I mean, everybody that touches your business, whether they’re a supplier, whether they’re a customer, or a banker, whether they’re employee, whether they’re a spouse of an employee, basically, you’re getting those people to go on a journey with you. Right, right. And so they’re, and they’re constantly asking themselves, why should I be here? What’s in it for me? Is this is being connected with this organization going to? Is it going to help? Is it going to improve my reputation? Is it going to improve my knowledge of not the business or whatever going forward? And so you’re constantly, it’s a contest of wills, yours versus everybody else’s. And you’re constantly seeking to derive that paying for it. That’s a real challenge.
Josh Hadley 25:21
Yeah. No, I hear Yeah. And I love the there’s only four ways to grow a business. I like that approach. And it’s very systematic, right. And I think each business owner could look at each of those four buckets and say, What’s my strategy for, you know, old products to old customers? And, you know, there’s so many rabbit holes that you can dive into from there. Harry, I want to ask you, you know, you mentioned, I think it was takut, jeans, or whatever it was that you had mentioned, were there their main business proposition or strategy was selling door to door, right? That was kind of like their sales channel. Now, for a lot of people in the E commerce space. For many people, they’ve built brands on Amazon, right. And Amazon is their main sales channel, Amazon has 98% of their sales, even if they have a DTC website. Amazon is still like the dominant channel there. What are your thoughts about, you know, diversifying yourself off of Amazon? Or, you know, for a potential strategic exit? Do you lean into Amazon further and be like, Look, this is my core capability. We are wicked smart. And we do amazing things on Amazon. And that’s maybe why, you know, a strategic acquirer would want to acquire your business is to say, hey, yeah, bring your team, your products and your Amazon knowledge to us. Because that’s, that’s a gap that we’ve been missing in our own business. What are your thoughts on Amazon and needing to diversify off of it, or no, like, kind of stay the course and double down, you’re in the emotional
Harry Joiner 26:57
bond business. At the end of the day, it’s like Peter Drucker used to say the whole purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. And one of the terms that we use in our business, I don’t know where this came from, maybe we made it up. But we, we like to say the best businesses are the ones that embrace staff, sa FA, which Safa to us stands for start anywhere, finish anywhere. So a customer may start at a store and then get a catalog and then go to Amazon and buy, they may see your stuff at a Walmart and they see it down the street or to target then go to Amazon and buy. Or they could go to your DTC site and go to your mobile site and get retargeted to somewhere else, then go to a Walmart and buy, or somebody could this that the other thing, and maybe they call it awesome. That’s like, right, you just you want to turn your funnel, whatever that is, and do agrees, shoot. So you have to understand the built in biases of the boot, like who the customer is, and how they think and how they buy and how they make decisions. And is there a built in bias to the way they make decisions. And you want to sell to the customer, the way they buy and the way they feel better about themselves? Because their relationship with your brand. Basically, you’re in the emotional bond business. So some people feel like they can do that best on Amazon. And some people can. I mean, if I were selling batteries, one time we did a search for Energizer and Energizer wanted to be all things to all people as long as Energizer could sell them on Amazon. This is a long time ago. I don’t know what Energizer is doing now, but no this like batteries, where it’s where there’s some gazillion reasons that you would want to get your batteries from Amazon, Subscribe and Save or as an add on whenever you buy a toy. I don’t want to get into all that. But I mean, for some businesses, it’s like, look, we’re just going to continue to sell on Amazon, that’s fine. At a certain point, you have to understand that when you sell on Amazon, you’re feeding the army that’s going to attack you. Without exception. Your your margin. Is there opportunity. We’ve all heard that. Right? And so be careful, right? Because Amazon is a cruel mistress. And so ask yourself, I mean, I’m not Mackenzie, I’m going to Harvard. Right? I would say an average business school and just the only thing that allows me to just wrap out all of this crap, so slickly, it’s just the fact that I’ve done it all day. That’s the only thing that qualifies me to have this conversation at all. And the benefit of that is that none of what I’m saying here is like that strategic, you know, like, just ask yourself, if we were going west, and we just decided we were going to go west, we’re going to take a motorcycle trip we were going to go west, doesn’t matter for the first 500 miles as long as we’re going Wes what you know whether probably we’re going to Seattle or San Diego, no, like, we are really only going to start making real decisions that are going to like impact the final destination in our business, once we get to about Arkansas, or Oklahoma, or Colorado or whatever, then we’re gonna start making some decision until then, all you have to do is just directionally correct. And it’s that with an entrepreneur, if you say, Look, all I know is that in seven years, I want to sell to a strategic partner. But that’s enough. Today, if all anybody got out of me was like, Gee, that’s an interesting do. You know, that’s the pin about being directionally correct was enough. Just go west, sell to a strategic buyer, if that’s in fact, what you want to do, or sell to your employees if that’s what you want to do. And then if you say, Okay, I want to sell to a strategic buyer in seven years, who possibly is the strategic buyer, right? Because like, I’m making this up. This has nothing to do with anything specific here. But let’s just say for example, you had a little brand and you thought you wanted to sell to a pharma company in seven years. Well, whether you sell to Johnson and Johnson versus Merck, that’s it. They’re both pharma companies, but they do radically different things. And both have driving forces and strategic threats that are very different. If you sell the j&j, you’re selling or Glaxo, you’re selling to a consumer health company, more than if you’re selling to Pfizer or Merck, you’re selling to, you know, and so what they acquire from you, what Pfizer or Merck might acquire from you would be something more like, you’d be required to have more, you know, pharma expertise, or biology expertise on scan for r&d expertise on staff, or whatever. Whereas if you sold the j&j, they’re really going to buy a brand. So it’s like, just knowing that helps you staff up in, okay, fine. Broadly, now, I’m gonna go get people who know how to build a farm a brand, I’m gonna go people who know how to sell Amazon, one P, for example. And my next Amazon hire, for example, is going to understand targeted emails, and they’re going to understand, you know, a plus content, they’re going to understand EDI integration, and federally tighten and fast track eligibility and stuff like that. It’s just, if you know directionally where you’re going, that crap can inform the little decisions that you make today. You just want to paint in broad strokes. That was, yeah, but you get the point. Yeah,
Josh Hadley 32:30
no, I like that. And I think that’s a fantastic takeaway kind of leads me in to my next question here. You know, even for our own brand, we’ve crossed eight figures here, we, you know, 10 point 5 million is what we’ll do this year, we are wanting to go to that 50 million in the next five years, right, we we are planning to exit our business to a strategic acquire, that is our plan. So personal question I’d be asking you, Harry is like, how do we determine which, you know, what is the next best hire for us to genuinely take our business to the next level? Is it you know, a director of E commerce? Or is it a CMO, you know, that can run all of the marketing? How do I you know, and maybe from your experience of these 150 people that apply to work with you? Do they come to you knowing what specifically it’s like, I need a CMO. This is specifically what I’m looking for? Or do they come to you kind of with the same question of like, I know, I want to take my business to the next level. But what are the specific roles we should be adding right now and which ones should be added at the right time?
Harry Joiner 33:43
Okay, so for your viewers, if you go to HarryJoiner.com, that resolves to my LinkedIn profile. And a lot of people really seem to dig my content. I have 26,000 followers on LinkedIn. And it’s a very engaged audience, and they’re all e-commerce people in there, those people are very smart. Those people are the genuine article. You’ll see under my previous posts, a posting that I did, where this is, you go back to our screen, okay. So this is this one. Okay, my screen just like that. Okay. Can you see this? Yes, I can. Okay. So there’s, there’s a posting that I wrote about this, um, I totally made this up. Right. But this is an example of what I’m talking about. Right? So let’s say that somebody today as it is as this $17 million in sales, right? And let’s say that in 2026, they want $32 million in sales can is my white washing that out can you see that?
Josh Hadley 34:58
No, no, I can still see it. Yeah, okay, you can see
Harry Joiner 35:01
that. All right. And so we know that in aggregate from 17 to 32, over four years is a 17.13% compound annual growth rate. Okay. Now, this posting, which has got this picture, so if your people go to Harry join your.com, you can look at this post, and then I step people through the math theory, which is, this is the answer to your question.
Josh Hadley 35:24
Okay, good. So,
Harry Joiner 35:26
what, what we hear a lot is that people say, Well, here’s how big we are today. And we want to be this big in the future. But they never say, here’s how we expect our channel mix to evolve. And how your channel mix evolves, is freaking huge. Okay, so you remember a little while ago, I said, you’re going on a journey, and you’re, all of your stakeholders are going to go with you, your customers, your spouses of your employees, your employees, you’re fed all of that you’re on a big, it’s a big wagon train that’s going west. And we don’t know if we’re gonna go to Seattle or San Diego, we’ll figure it out when we get to Oklahoma. Remember that? Okay. Okay. So we basically said 17 is these 32 is Wes. And now, what we see is that over the next four years, we would like DTC, which is currently $5 million to grow to 19. And we would like Amazon, which is currently $4 million of the 17. We’d like to phase that out, because we’re feeding the army that’s going to attack us, right? And then we want, excuse me, b2b, to grow from eight to 13. Okay, now, this is this is what I did. This is I think what makes me different than most contingency recruiters is that I, I have an aptitude and an interest in doing this kind of stuff. But I have tons of resources to help me figure it out on a per case basis. And again, sales pitch for anybody who cares. I work on a contingency basis. So when you call me as an entrepreneur, five to $75 million, this is the animal that you’re gonna get that hat and everything. This is it. I love it. So we’re going to figure out what your channel mix is going to be. Now remember, when we get to what we say here, when we get to $32 million in sales, notice what happens to b2b b2b grows at 13%, but DTC grows at 40% per year. Okay, so that’s, that’s a biggie. So you’d ask the question, what kind of people do you have? Do you have to hire? Well, first of all, you have to hire growth oriented people, to hire people who really understand the mechanics of selling DTC, because if your business strategies, your exit strategy, don’t build it, if you can’t sell it, this is what we’re building. Maybe this is where we are. But this is what we’re doing. So what does this mean? Well, it means we got to sell old, the old old, the new, new and old, new, the new once we get there, right? We got to have customers and average order value motor frequency, right? Yeah, we gotta have the digital marketing trifecta of paid, owned and earned media, we have to have a plan for all of them. We have to have a plan for being in the emotional bond business with the customer who buys from us if this point, right, right. So it’s like, if you do fantasy football, if you know anything about football, you know, or even hockey, Wayne Gretzky said, skate to where the puck will be Tom Brady isn’t throwing to the person. He’s still like leading the person. Right? You know, 10 yards ahead, whatever that how that works. In the moment for Tom Brady, this is you’re building an organization for here with the team you have here. So you’re constantly asking yourself, do I have the right people on the bus? Is the bus going in the right place? Do I have the right people in the right seats? Yeah. And what a lot of entrepreneurs do when I liked the bus example. That’s a Jim Collins thing from good to great. Love it. Yep. But your customer is going on a journey. Your employees going on a journey. Your bankers are gone on a journey. Their suppliers are going on a journey. And you’re all you all have to crowd into the bus. Right? And so some customers are going to be ankle biting jackasses and they need to be thrown off the bus. Right, right. And some stakeholders or bankers or whatever they’re going to be ankle biting jackasses do and they need to be shown the door, et cetera. So you’re constantly working to trade up. Interesting what I’m looking for. And I realized I sound like a little bit like a kook. When I say all this, like Jesus Christ, this guy has a handful, but like, what I see is that it’s all it’s all about managing these stakeholders and understanding broadly, where are you going directionally, where you’re going and as you get closer to about Arkansas, then you’re starting to make real decisions about okay, So this is who I’m getting on my bus. If my average tenure here among my employees is three years, and I might your two and a half here, and I’ve got two and Okay, so then unless I fire them, the people that I hired today are still going to be around. Yeah. So I have to start looking at their ability to think strategically about stuff, to metabolize change to see the business and our value proposition through the eyes of the customer, to make customers feel better about themselves because of their relationship with the brand. Got to do all of that stuff. Yeah. And it takes drivers. It takes people who are drivers. Yeah. And it takes people who are insatiably curious about all of this stuff. I’m, I personally am restlessly curious. As to not a sales pitch. I’m restlessly curious about all of this stuff. I’m obsessed with the plight of the $5 million dollar, the $75 million entrepreneur because I was raised by one. I’ve got other entrepreneurs that are at that level in my family. That’s who we are. And it’s a values thing for me. I’m all it just all about that. I love capitalism. And I love democracy. And I’m just stridently about those two things.
Josh Hadley 41:12
Yeah, no, I love this. And I love that approach, Harry, I think like, being able to have a clear vision and always asking yourself, who’s on the bus? And who needs to continue to be on the bus? You know, if this is the destination that we’re heading to, right? Because I know the, you know, the old adage is, the people that got you here are probably not the people that are going to get you there. Except with some rare exceptions, I think, right. And so I think that’s what you’re talking about is like, you’ve got to have those players that you add on, that can think strategically and level up your game. Because if you just think by, you know, brute force, you’re going to, you know, will your way to, you know, that higher value, and you’re not going to get there. So another question I want to ask on this note here, Harry, is, you know, we’re talking about how adding the very capable team member to the team, now you’re going out and recruiting some of the best talent in the world. For these brands? How do you weed out, you know, the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, right? How do you know, this is the this guy is really good verse. You know, I think there’s maybe some better talent out there. And maybe what are some pointers that people could apply even to their own internal hiring processes, even if they’re hiring somebody? It just like a customer service level? What are some of those things that you’re looking for? In a level talent that says to you, this guy’s good? This guy?
Harry Joiner 42:43
Yeah, I like people who are smart. I mean, you can tell when somebody’s smart. I like to be intimidated. Frankly, when I first started recruiting, I don’t like in I’ve been a recruiter for 18 years. So I’m in my late 50s. So I’ve been around forever. When I first started recruiting 18 years ago, I had no problem with like panic, and ammo and like fear of the phone for the first probably year and a half that I did it. And you know, before I would call a VP of e-commerce, it wasn’t a there wasn’t a big list of TVs with e-commerce. My palms would sweat. And it would just be like, Oh my God, you know, and give me a frickin sweat as annoying as hell. Yeah. And over time, what I learned was the people who were in the top 3% of the industry or the two people typically who make my palms sweat. And our time I began to link a lot of pleasure to the fact that I was getting sweaty. Interesting, and that now I look like that’s the canary in the coalmine. If I’m on the phone with the candidate, and they start asking me a bunch of questions about Okay, so you say your company’s you say your client has a $50 million business? What percentage of that is b2b versus b2c? Okay, so $25 million DTC business. Okay. Let’s talk about that. What percentage of that is third party markets versus DTC where they have a website and shopping cart and center? Now, what percentage of that is mobile versus desktop? And what percentage of that is, you know, where’s that traffic coming from? Is it you know, direct organic, paid referral, you know, social. And then I realized, like, in shit, they’ve got more questions than I got answers. And I my palms start to sweat. very insecure person, very insecure. And over time, I’ve learned that actually, my insecurities are a feature. They’re not a bug. I love my insecurities. That’s where the money is. And so if you’re on the phone with a candidate, that they know their numbers, they ask great questions about your business. Right? Who’s on the team? What agencies are you using? What’s your cost per lead? What’s your cost per sale? What are you doing to drive traffic in Georgia by improve the conversion rate what platform that you want, what are you doing right that you should do? Or maybe you should stop doing? What’s your competitive doing? You should copy that is anybody doing that somebody should do? And all of a sudden, if you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re just like, I don’t know, perfect, that’s what you you want that candidate who’s got more questions than you not answers. Yeah, footnote for the basic stuff that you’re actually hiring for, they have to be able to give you here, right example action result. So let’s say you need somebody who has amazing Amazon three P chops to play. So make sure they have the chops today, for planning and forecasting for, you know, Amazon advertising or whatever it is, make sure you get what became four, but the stuff that’s going to get you here is just being able to think aggressively about the underlying economics of the business. Does that make sense?
Josh Hadley 45:55
Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. And, you know, even as I look back on the team members that we have hired, and we recently hired a VP of Operations for our business. And to be honest, as I go back, I don’t think I’ve ever like come to this realization until I spoke with you about this. And you kind of shared those insights where honestly, the the candidates that have been the best that we have ended up hiring are honestly the ones that I was kind of most nervous for going into their interviews, whereas like, I need to come prepared, because I know they’re going to ask difficult questions. They’re going like, I almost feel like, I’m going to need to sell them on my own business and establish the fact that like, we have our crap together. And we would need to bring them onto our team, like, I still need to be knowledgeable enough. Like, for example, with our VP of Operations, I spent probably a good half a day gathering all of like, our financial data gathering and looking at what’s our average order value? What you know, what percentage of sales are coming from different channels? You know, how many products did we launch this year? How many products? Are we planning to launch next year? Set? Like just lots of numbers, right? What are our margins? What’s our gross profit? All of it? Right? Because I knew that was going to be a question asked there. And sure enough, on those during that conversation, you know, he was fairly impressed. He’s like, Oh, you came very prepared with like, your numbers, you know, your stuff. And it went both ways, right? Like, I was impressed with the questions he was asking, because that’s the type of person that I need on my team that’s going to push me to ask the difficult questions. But then number two, he then was like, Wow, this, this business knows where they’re going. They know their numbers. They’re not just kind of throwing things around and hoping things stick. They have a clear vision and action plan of how to get there. They just need that extra talent to take them to the next level is would you agree? Is that a kind of a fair assessment to that take?
Harry Joiner 47:53
No. I mean, the best people in the industry. I really hate to put this out there because my competitors will see it, and they’ll learn from it. But but the fact of the matter is a players, the people who have Game Changer DNA, they want to do reputation enhancing. The example that I always give is that people forget that John Travolta took a pay cut to play the part events in Vegas and in Pulp Fiction. It worked for scale, whatever the sag scale was, it was 20,000 hours a week or whatever. But people forget that, like, he’d already been on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine and was a known quantity in Hollywood and was a star. But he was he wanted a job that he wanted a career opportunity that would bring massive transformational value to him. He knew he could bring massive transformational value to project. Yeah, but he was looking for, you know, a part that would allow him to recast himself as something dark and funky and gritty and sexy and edgy. And that wasn’t Vinnie Barbarino from walking. Right. So yeah, it’s one of those things where you don’t have to, you know, you’re not shooting Titanic in your business. Right? You can shoot reservoir Bella, you can shoot the Revenant you can shoot, get out our house thing, Blair Witch Project, and you can cut through the clutter. And anybody who touches that project can do reputation enhancing work. And here’s here’s the kicker, right? If you’ve made it this far on the cast and suffer the slings and arrows of my bed here. Here’s the kicker for all of this is that once you solve for that, then recruiting a players is a lot easier, because they just want to do reputation enhancing. Yeah, they just they just want to be able to go on the journey down the road with you. Let’s say the typical a player not age discriminating, right? But let’s say A bit. Generally speaking, it’s somebody between 35 and 50 years old. Remember the first person validity. And if these aren’t had been born, I’m 58. Okay, sad. Clearly I got tons of energy. Alright, so somebody who’s 50 is not too old. But let’s say for example, it’s a 35 to 50 year old person, it’s critical to them to know, how is this job going to contribute something lasting and meaningful to their reputation in the business? Yeah, they will they want to come in and help you go to the Super Bowl, and they want their fingers to be their fingerprints could be all over that trophy. Yeah, that’s really truly what people want. And so if you think like a team owner, Jerry Jones, or whoever owns a team, you know, Robert Kraft, you have, it’s not just about we’re gonna get Tom Brady, or Dak Prescott, whoever it is Amari Cooper, it’s not just about that. It’s here’s what kind of an offense we’re trying to build. Here’s who else is going to compete against us in our division, or in our league? Or here’s how we’re going to the Super Bowl, and we’re going to win. Yeah, that has to be baked into, you know, the premise of your approach. Talk to da play.
Josh Hadley 51:15
Yeah. Is it primarily a focus on like, the exit is is, is that what the A players are looking for is like, Oh, I do want to say that I’ve sold to a strategic buyer, right. And we had a huge 100 million plus dollar pack, you know, sell? Or is it just the vision of like, this is the movement that we’re on, right? It could be eco friendly products, or we’re saving the environment, right? What what is that? You know, because I think I’ve heard both things like some people like they want to join your mission. Is it? Is it the mission? Or is it the exit that like the long term vision that they’re driving towards?
Harry Joiner 51:54
None of the above. It’s kind of a journey. And you know what? I’m shot, go to HarryJoiner.com. It sounds like I’m fishing for leads. Most of your audience members are not going to be clients or candidates of mine. So I’m just trying to deal with all of this, but go to HarryJoiner.com. And I actually asked this question yesterday in a poll on my LinkedIn profile, and most of the people said, basically, let’s say you think the way I’ve worded The question was, let’s say you have two competing job offers. One is from Patagonia. You know, who doesn’t love Patagonia? That’s like motherhood and apple pie all about saving the planet and they give their, you know, the value of the company to the poor or whatever it is, they they they’re amazing. Alright, and let’s say the Death Star International also has given you a job offer and both job offers expire at 5pm. Tomorrow, you can see this poll on my LinkedIn profile. Patagonia gets stuck. How much more does Deathstar have to offer you in terms of day salary for you to take their deal? $20,000 $40,000 $60,000 or $80,000? Most of the people didn’t even say they needed $80,000. Most of the people would sell their souls to the Deathstar for less than 80,000 hours a year. You know what that says? That says that people are full of shit. That’s what that says. And maybe you can edit that. I don’t know. But that’s what that says is that people will just say it’s nice to save the planet. But like at the end of the day, Hey, dude, I got kids to feed. That’s what that says. Right? So what I think and I’m not Pooh poohing Patagonia’s mission and I’m not saying that I’m gonna run human resources for Deathstar International. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that in general, people will sell their souls to work on the Death Star, and not even for the maximum amount of money in my poll. Don’t look at it yourself. Okay. So what people want is they want to do reputation enhancing work, when John Travolta signed up to play the part of Vincent Vega for less than the maximum amount of money with Pulp Fiction. He wanted what he would become as a result of that. That’s what he wanted. He wanted to get to know Quentin Tarantino, Sam Jackson, he wanted to know the crew. He wanted to know the investors. He wanted to know Harvey Weinstein. He wanted to know you wanted to get in with a different crowd. Yeah, he wanted to play a different talk. He wanted to broaden his horizons. That’s what that was fine. And so it’s, you know, what’s, what’s the benefit of getting to this point when you get to this point, and but ahead of schedule. When you get to this point, what do you get? Well, you get maybe if you get options, a bag of money, and then you have a new boss. Yeah. Right. Because the big pharma company that bought you now they’re the boss. And so this entire cast and crew, they’re now reporting to the boss, man, or woman, wherever they are. So at that point, they’re It’s not a psychic income to the person, the value of the opportunity is the skills, the abilities, the talents, this person will cultivate what they learn who they get to know what they will do. Right? That’s really what life is about.
Josh Hadley 55:14
Yeah, yeah. Yes, that is a, that’s a fantastic mindset shift. And again, it goes back to, I just had this experience with our VP of Operations, he left his former job, because he felt like he had kind of tapped out his potential in terms of learning, he had gotten it to this point. And he was like, Yeah, I don’t see where I’m going to push myself or grow further. And then he saw, you know, he’d stumbled upon our job listing. And he saw, like, these are the challenges that I would love to take on. Because I’m going to learn new skill sets, I’m going to learn more about Amazon, I’m going to learn more about, you know, just the to see, and this is a different opportunity to take them to the next level. But through that process, and I’m kind of teaching myself as I go through this. And through that process, Keanu, the skills talents, he would develop with us. And that’s why he was willing to say, Hey, I do want to join you, you guys, you might be a smaller business than what I was currently working for. But the person I’m going to become, through this process is going to be reputation enhancing. So I love it.
Harry Joiner 56:22
And one other thing that I’ll piggyback onto the back because you just nailed, right. But one of the things that I will say here is that, notice how much the business is changing for DTC right there, right. Yeah. And so if you have, let’s say, what is the spot 1234. So let’s say that this is a five year job in the year 20 to 20. Looking at it in reverse, um, basically what this is, it’s not, I mean, this is a five year job. But for this, the person who runs this, this is more like a three year job, or actually, it’s like a one year job three times this b2b In a it’s more like a two and a half year job that you’ve had twice. Right. The Sexiest, coolest funnest job in the entire house is going to be this green one right there. Yeah. And so that’s the thing if, if somebody’s with you six years, you need to make sure that they get six years experience once, not one years experience six times or 10 years experience three times or whatever. People want to do reputation enhancing work, they want their they want their reputation to precede them. Right. By the time Harry Joyner shows up to a meeting people now he’s a recruiter, an e-commerce recruiter and get out of that. Whatever discussion there’s been about Harry Joyner has been on the basis of ace this ninja e-commerce recruit. Yep. And so when I go in to meet anybody, or I talk to anybody on a zoom call, and I don’t have to prove myself, my reputation has preceded me, it doesn’t mean I’m smart, doesn’t mean I’m handsome. Clearly whatever. It just means that my reputation as an e-commerce recruiter, and it’s preceded me, I’m like an icepick. Okay. absolutely priceless if you need an icepick and I’m worthless if you don’t. That’s what most people want by the time they get into their 50s if their reputation is preceding them, they want to be like Meryl Streep, or Eric Clapton or, you know, anybody who’s older, but they’re well known for one thing, and they claim to fame stuff to support that contention that they’re the ice kicked for that one thing. Here’s the guy who built Company X, took it from a $17 million thing to a $32 million thing, but built a $19 million DTC business up from $5 million. This green line is going to be the basis of a claim to fame for any candidate. That’s what they want to hear about zombies. I
Josh Hadley 58:57
love that. Yes, it makes perfect sense. And then it’s such a great mindset shift. And Harry, I mean, we’ve we’ve gotten over our kind of initial time that we were talking about doing this podcast, but I think this has been so valuable, not only for myself, but I think for our listeners to have a completely different way to approach the way you’re hiring people and the way that you’re casting your vision for your business. Harry, I’ve got a few kind of quick Spitfire questions that I’m going to ask you here to kind of wrap thing, wrap things up. But before I get to that, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. Here are the three takeaways that I noted. Harry, let me know if you think I’m missing something here. I would say action item number one is to if we go back to the beginning of the podcast is the comment you made about your father. Your business strategy should be your exit strategy. I think that’s where it that’s where it all begins and you listed five different ways that you’re essentially going to, you know, exit your business, whether you do it by choice, or it just happens as a natural consequence of your inaction, so to speak, right? That’s got to be, that’s got to be action item number one, you’ve got to get very clear with like, what is that exit strategy look like for you. And even if you’re the type of person that’s like, I want to hold this in my family for eternity, okay, well, if that’s your approach, then start formulating what that’s going to look like. Action step number two, is you have to start understanding your business. And the financials. We talked about this, and you shared so many examples of, you’ve got to know your average order value, you’ve got to know your repeat purchase rate, you’ve got to know how many units you’re selling, like, how many are repeat purchases, versus new purchases, versus old customers, buying old products, and old customers buying new products, right? You’ve got to know the intimate details of your numbers. Because if you don’t, you’re gonna have a problem when we get to step number three here. And step number three and action item number three, I would say is you’ve got to cast a vision of what your exit is going to be, where are you going? In the future? What is your five to seven year plan look like? And how are the people that you’re trying to recruit or bring onto your team, especially a players, how is what you’re trying to employ them to do going to be reputation enhancing for them. And you’ve got to get very clear with that. I love the John Travolta analogy that you’ve shared with us there, people are willing to take maybe even a pay cut to join your mission, if they feel like the reputation enhancing, you know, the experience that they’re going to get outweighs, you know, the monetary compensation. And so I think for business leaders and CEOs, if you genuinely want to take your business to the next level, you’ve got to get really good at all three of those action items that we shared today. What do you think, Carrie? Anything else you would add?
Harry Joiner 1:02:08
I think that’s right. For anybody who made it this far in the podcast, I’d say thank you. I, you know, have a process for all of this. Right? If anybody wants to call and just chat about any of this. It’s so I, I really don’t want to stress. I didn’t go to Harvard. I never worked for McKinsey. I didn’t go to Wharton. It’s none of what I do. It’s, it’s all designed to be it’s very back of the envelope stuff. And so in this example, I mean, this examples, I made it up. I mean, this just could have been any client, you know, that I’ve worked with, um, I hear all the time while we want to be 17 million, and we’re looking to grow to 32 million in the next five years. I mean, and where does that number come from? Well, an entrepreneur just thinks, Well, I have to be twice as big. That’s where they pull it out of the air. And I don’t fight them on that. I just say, okay, hypothetically, let’s say you’ve doubled the size of your business, what percentage of that would be DTC? What percentage of that would be Amazon? What percentage of that would be target? Walmart, eBay, Overstock. What percentage of that would be domestic versus International? What percentage of that you know? And what percentage of that would be one p versus three people versus blended one p three P. Right. And when they might go up? And that’s okay, too. I’m not condemning that, because you’d have to be Carnac on Johnny Carson, to know the answer to that you’d have to be, you know, clairvoyant to understand that. What I really want is for the person to just broadly, vaguely know, we’re coming west, and we think we’re going to Seattle, but we may change our mind when we get to Tulsa and start getting down to San Diego, but we don’t know. Well, you know, we’ll figure it out. When we get to Tulsa. That’s good enough. If I work for McKinsey that you pay me a ton of money for that. And so none of that is really hard. But like, as you start to grow your business this time next year, when you think about all of this again, you would know Okay, so Tulsa is in another 24 months, I’m going to have to make the decision. So as I look at my business from last year, what did we do, right? What did we do wrong? What should we copy but is nobody doing? How did we do to open up the Old Navy, it’s just a high level crap than any, trust me. I mean, if I can do it, you can do it. Just it’s just off the top of your head. You can do it with a six pack of beer and a legal pad and a football game in front of you. It’s not designed to be assessed for if somebody wants to call me and learn more about the process there. Well,
Josh Hadley 1:04:53
I love that Harry. You’ve shared so much value on the podcast today as we wrap up here my quickfire questions for you? What’s been the most influential book in your life? And why?
Harry Joiner 1:05:05
You know what I would do? Like, let’s assume that home office burned down because I’m probably 500 business books. And I can only buy, spend $200 on books. The day after my home office fire, I would just go buy all of the Dan Kennedy books on Amazon. Go clean out Amazon Dan Kennedy books, no BS pricing, there’ll be as marketing. It’ll be as direct marketing, no BS. You know, the the Ultimate Sales Letter just called. Oh,
Josh Hadley 1:05:36
Awesome. That makes sense. I’m big fan of Dan Kennedy as well. I agree with that. What is your favorite productivity tool or resource?
Harry Joiner 1:05:45
Financial calculator? I mean, literally old school, I’ll tell you what is like for real, for real, a five by a car. Really, and truly a calculator and a five by color.
Josh Hadley 1:05:58
You just got it. No
Harry Joiner 1:06:01
piles of them in my home office that you know from 18 years of drawing out firefight. notecards. Those are awesome.
Josh Hadley 1:06:09
Hey, old school. That’s easy, actionable. I think it also helps your mind clearly like there’s something to put in pen to paper that helps dry out strategies and thoughts. I like that. All right. Last question for you here. Harry. Who is someone that you admire most or that people should be paying attention to in the e-commerce space?
Harry Joiner 1:06:29
In the e-commerce space? Up? So I’ve got three people? Three people.
Josh Hadley 1:06:34
Yep, that’d be perfect.
Harry Joiner 1:06:36
I know one of them. The other two I don’t. I’m big fans. If there’s one is Andrew Youderian with eCommerce Fuel. Yep, I think he’s so smart. And I’m such a fan. And I think he’s great. And some of the people that he has on his podcast are phenomenal. Bill Alexander, I think is on his podcast a lot. Again, he’s wicked smart, too. Okay, so that’s one, number two would be Bill LaPierre here with Data Mann who has a blog post that comes out once a week and, and his blog is fantastic. And he’s great. So Bill LaPierre, the Data Mann with two ends at the end of that Data Mann. Okay, and the third one, I’ve never spoken to either, but he’s sort of a hero of mine is Kevin Hillstrom. with MiineThatData, that guy IQ is lost in the rounding of that guy’s IQ. He’s a freak. He’s hella smart. So awesome.
Josh Hadley 1:07:37
Anyway, those are some great recommendations, and people can go check out the content that they’re putting out. But also, Harry, you’ve already mentioned it a few times on this podcast. But if people want to learn more, they’re interested in your services. Where should people go? To learn more about you or even to consider working with you?
Harry Joiner 1:07:57
Yeah just go to HarryJoiner.com. H-A-R-R-Y JOINER , we’ve been googling all over the web. My websites are CMOSearch.com. eCommerceJobs.com and eCommerceRecruiter.com. So if you need e-commerce people element, I’d be happy to spend some time on the phone, casing out your needs there. But if you just want to, you know, follow any of my LinkedIn stuff a lot of people do. It’s there at Harry Joiner.
Josh Hadley 1:08:29
Awesome. Well, Harry, thank you so much for your time today. You’ve dropped a lot of knowledge bombs with us all. I know I’m you’ve taken away a lot of action items from my own team from this podcast. So thank you so much for your time, and we’ll look forward to connecting with you again in the future.
Outro 1:08:46
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