Unlocking 10x Growth: Chris Shipferling’s Omnichannel Blueprint for Skyrocketing Your eComm Brand!

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Unlocking 10x Growth: Chris Shipferling’s Omnichannel Blueprint for Skyrocketing Your eComm Brand!

chris-shipferlingChris Shipferling is a Founding Partner at GW Partners, a M&A firm providing operational consulting, financial management, and strategic planning. He’s also a Founding Partner at South Col, an e-commerce accelerator providing capital, strategic advice, operational support, and exit strategy.

Chris has 20 years of experience in the consumer product sector, navigating sales and marketing roles across the spectrum from small businesses to corporate giants. His passion lies in guiding founders to achieve their goals with his deep understanding of the consumer products industry and expertise in digital strategy and e-commerce.

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Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

  • Chris Shipferling gives an overview of the current state of e-commerce
  • What makes a brand attractive to aggregators
  • How to scale using omnichannel strategies
  • Why Amazon sellers should learn to leverage TikTok
  • Omnichannel: Which marketplace works best for your products?
  • Chris’ tips to 10x your brand

In this episode…

10x-ing your brand typically refers to achieving exponential growth and impact for your brand. What are some highly effective strategies if you’re an Amazon seller who wants to 10x your brand or maybe even become a household name?

One of the most common mistakes e-commerce sellers make is relying on a single sales channel — usually Amazon. If you haven’t already, e-commerce strategist Chris Shipferling insists you broaden your reach by listing your products on multiple marketplaces, such as Etsy, Walmart, Newegg, and Rakuten. Next, he encourages sellers to experiment with influencers and affiliates to drive traffic to your DTC channel or TikTok Shop. Finally, Chris advocates for leveraging the skill of experts who can help sellers reach their goals more quickly.

Join Josh Hadley in this episode of the eComm Breakthrough Podcast as he welcomes Chris Shipferling, Founding Partner at GW Partners, to discuss how brands can 10x their business. Chris talks about what attracts aggregators to brands, scaling using omnichannel strategies, and why sellers should learn to leverage TikTok Shop.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure ecommerce owners grow to eight figures. Of course…

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

As a special bonus to my podcast listeners, this month I’m giving away one $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit session at no cost. Email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com with the subject line “Strategy Audit” and tell me why your business should win the free audit for the chance to win and don’t worry, if you don’t win the free strategy audit this month, you’ll automatically be entered for future months.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:04

Welcome to the eComm Breakthrough Podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level. Join Josh Hadley, an eight-figure e-comm business owner and investor, as he interviews highly successful business owners. Get ready because you’re going to learn specific actions you can take today to help your business reach its full potential and leave a lasting impact on the world.

Josh Hadley 0:37

Welcome to the eComm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Adam Heist, Kevin King, and Michael E. Gerber, author of The E-Myth. Today I’m speaking with Chris Shipferling, Founding Partner of GW partners and South Col with over 20 years of experience in the consumer product sector. And we’re going to be talking a lot about how you can 10x your brand, and then also exit your brand. This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven-figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. Listen, Chris, I started my business back in 2015, and I grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years. But I made a lot of mistakes along the way that made the path of getting to eight figures take a lot longer than it needed to. There were times where I doubted myself as a leader, whether I doubted my abilities to actually manage the cash flow in the business or whether my brand could actually become like a recognized brand in our industry. So to our listeners, those of you who have hit similar plateaus and want to know the next steps to take your brand to the next level, then go to eCommBreakthrough.com that’s e-comm with two M’s to learn more. And as a special bonus to my podcast listeners, this month I’m giving away one $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit session at no cost. All you need to do is email me at Josh at eCommBreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” and then plead your case as to why I should choose you and your business to work with for this month. And if you don’t win this month, don’t worry you’ll be entered to win for future months to come. But today I am excited to introduce you all to Chris. Chris is an industry luminary with a remarkable 20 year tenure in the consumer product sector, adeptly navigating sales and marketing roles across the spectrum from small businesses to corporate giants. As the founding partner of SouthCol, he’s played a pivotal role in shaping the e-commerce consumer products landscape through strategic investments. Joining GW Partners in 2018, Chris brought his wealth of experience to the team previously having run his own consultancy, where he crafted and executed digital strategies for business owners. Today his passion lies in guiding founder owners to achieve their goals, leveraging his profound understanding of the consumer products arena and his expertise in digital strategy and e-commerce to drive unparalleled growth and success. And with that being said, we’re gonna give credit to ChatGPT for creating that intro for Chris. I would like to say that Chris, while you’re just a master copywriter have your bio here, so I’ve already spilled the beans.

Chris Shipferling 3:21

I did. I’m really good at prompts. That’s what I’m really good at. Super creative prompt writer, man.

Josh Hadley 3:28

I love it.

Chris Shipferling 3:30

Welcome to the show. Yeah. Thanks, Josh. Appreciate it. Man. Thank you so much first time on, and I’m really excited. Yeah,

Josh Hadley 3:35

Chris, super excited to dive in. You truly do have a wealth of knowledge, right. 20 years of experience in the consumer products industry. You’ve helped brands exit their businesses, you’ve helped, you know, provide consulting services to actually grow businesses to a point of where they’re actually ready to be sold. And so I love that you’ve kind of gone you’ve seen the full spectrum of e-commerce brands. Yeah. So Chris, one thing I want to just kind of start the conversation off with is what do you see going on in the market right now? There’s been news of bankruptcies with some of the Amazon aggregators. What’s going on in the industry? Yeah,

Chris Shipferling 4:15

I mean, look, it’s a little bit, you know, and I’m not gonna sit here and say, oh, there’s no told you. So there’s no hey, we said this, we said that, you know, look, when we first saw the run up of aggregators, we thought, okay, you know, nothing’s new under the sun. You know, there’s aggregation that occurs in a lot of different sectors and in different cycles in the past and m&a cycles. United Rentals is probably one of the best aggregators that’s ever existed. They’ve been gobbling up all types of local businesses for the past almost 25 to 30 years and set aside cash every year to to acquire and so we thought, okay, this is going to be interesting. You know, we had some hesitation because we thought aggregating a very siloed company, that’s hard to do, right when you’re trying to aggregate and then create effective efficiencies and economies of scale. It just doesn’t work for Amazon businesses no matter how you slice it. And so we thought, okay, well, there’s been a lot of cash that’s raised the expectation was we’re going to buy these things for as cheap as possible. We’re going to build an army of brands, quote, unquote, and then we’re going to wrap and we’re going to IPO. I mean, that was the PowerPoint that raised all the money, right? And so venture, which tends to see, or get more comfortable with riskier investments, you saw a lot of venture debt come in, that’s number one. And you did see some institutional guys come in, you know, they drank, I wouldn’t say they drank the Kool Aid. I mean, look, consumer products had a massive run up, our entire economy flipped on its head, we were always two thirds service and 1/3 consumer. And we became a two thirds consumer economy, and a 1/3 service because of COVID. Right, because of the pandemic. And so, you know, a lot of a lot of big institutional minds were going, this is here to stay, like, you know, McKinsey came out with that report that everyone shared, showing that, hey, the compound effect of this over the course of specifically with ecommerce, over the course of the next 10 years, you know, we’ve grown seven years, and you know, three months, basically, so there are a lot of these bullet points, people kind of all, again, I don’t wanna say drink Kool Aid, because that’s a, that’s a negative way of saying it, but a lot of folks rode the wave. And because of that, you had a lot of people going, it’s a lot of copycats, basically, hey, if they can do it, I can do it, I can do it better. And I can do it better. And then you had 100 voices, all screaming, I can do it better. And in the process, you actually flip the PowerPoint on its head, because the whole idea was to buy for here and sell for here. And you were buying for here. And now you’re liquidating here. And so you’ve effectively had a complete cycle shift away from the original concept. And now it’s just moving into a very normalized view of where consumer products is right now. And then when you get very granular, and you look at Amazon in particular, you go, Oh, well, this is where it really was pre pandemic, we’re kind of back to where we were, you want to sell your Amazon business, almost no matter the size, unless you are huge, we’ll get to that in a moment. Because you’ve got real market share, you’ve got real critical mass, you’re selling for three to four, multiple all day long, man. And now unfortunately, if you’ve reached a specific size, your buyer pool has actually skinned up significantly. And so if you’re a one to $3 million, business up to five, you can still utilize the SBA loan, you know, there’s some really great guys, even in the e-comm space that are doing that, you know, one guy, his name is Steven spear, he’s been doing this for years and years and years. And he’s still helping, you know, e-comm brands, you know, and buyers find e-comm brands, but it’s gone, it’s just cycled back to where it was before. So the state of the market is you’ve got to now really think about your company in a much different way, you’ve got to really, if you want to exit the business, and let’s just take the exit piece out, but you really want to capitalize and become a brand that you know is going to have real sustainability, you’ve got to start looking at a lot of other things. And that’s acquisition channels, and its sales channels. And that is not an easy, it’s very easy to say it’s actually quite easy to put on paper, just kind of like the aggregator model, much, much, much different thing to execute. And to be very frank, there are a lot of folks who can succeed on Amazon that fail to succeed outside of Amazon. It’s not an easy route.

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