Introduction

"Should I keep going with my business or shut it down?"

When Kevin first showed up to my digital marketing agency, he was understandably frustrated. He had wasted the entire previous year and tens of thousands of dollars on two agencies that didn't know what they were doing. Neither of them could get him even close to profitability or his first million dollars.

Although Kevin was passionate about his high-end car accessory brand, poor sales persuaded him that people wouldn't buy it. "Is it even worth it?" he wondered. He started questioning the value of what he had built.

But nothing was wrong with his five-star product or its ability to attract an audience. What he needed to question instead was the competence of the agencies he'd hired to do the work. Our audit showed exactly why the product wasn't selling: They didn't target the right audiences. They had followed a misguided strategy, setting up his targeting all wrong and failing to optimize his ads to drive revenue. They'd created multiple campaigns and weren't spending nearly enough on any one of them to do any good.

They wasted his time, squandered his cash, and almost destroyed his will to continue.

When Kevin and I met, he was gun-shy and losing money. Spending $4,000 a month on advertising to make $3,000 in the same period, he was frustrated enough to close his business. But my agency had helped a good friend of his make millions of dollars, so he decided to try us as his last resort.

During our audit of his brand, we uncovered a second problem: when people complained in comments on his Facebook and Instagram ads that his car accessory was too expensive, Kevin had been defensive with them.

We coached him to see the comments not as adversarial but as an opportunity to emphasize quality, listen instead of argue, and respond with empathy.

Although it's hard to measure the impact of that transformation on sales, you can be sure it makes a difference. No one who disputes their customers can expect to scale.

Here's what's easy to measure: We repaired Kevin's broken strategy and made his advertising profitable in just four weeks. For only twice what he had been spending, he's now seeing a profit that's sixteen times that amount.

Since his business has taken off, Kevin has something to scale. In fact, the ads we did for him got so much attention that he not only proved the validity of his product and made money for the first time, but he also attracted a major auto manufacturer who wants to set up a partnership deal.

Where You Come In

You probably have a lot in common with Kevin. You founded a company born out of your passion. You've poured good money into bad places, so you're nowhere near where you want to be. You know there are a million ways to spend money on a business, and it could fold up and die if you choose the wrong ones.

You've tried many, many things, but you just can't figure out what it takes to move the needle. I can tell you that trying doesn't mean you're doing it right. In fact, if I told you how many new clients have told us, "I've tried Facebook and Instagram ads, and they don't work," you might not believe me, unless you've had the same discouraging experience.

I can also tell you this: if you think Facebook and Instagram don't work, then you-or more likely, your agency-have not done those ads in the right way.

Businesses are a lot of work, unknowns are scary, and you don't even know what you don't know, so you're probably frustrated and doubting yourself. Without a seasoned advisory board, the journey can be lonely. You're watching everybody else make millions of dollars online, and you can't figure out where you're going wrong. You need someone to tell you what to do.

And that's where this book comes in.

Your Solution Is Here

In the pages that follow, I'll show you what you can do on your own to grow your business. You'll learn how to optimize the most crucial areas of your operation. You'll learn the answer to key questions, such as:

• Why does connecting with my customer matter so much?
• How can I see a return on my spending?
• What can I do now to boost my revenue?
• What can I ask my team and my agency to get us on the right track to scale?
• Should I sell on Amazon or shouldn't I?
• How can I get out of my own way?

Plus, the one question asked by every single frustrated person who ever walked into our office:

• Can I be doing better?

And even this one:

• Should I close my doors?

This book will help you whether you've been selling online and got stuck at one revenue level or you fled to online sales after brick-and-mortar retail took an unprecedented hit in 2020. Either way, you'll understand how to spend your limited resources wisely and sell online profitably, so you can finally stop fearing selling online and actually scale. If you haven't reached your first million, you'll find that getting to that point can open up a lot of doors for you. Suddenly, you'll be able to attract funding, take on resources, and hire people so you don't have to do everything yourself.

How I Know What You Need

I began working in direct marketing and catalog marketing for technology companies in 1995. Four years later, when consumers were buying their first computers, Dell recruited me to help run their consumer direct-marketing division that sent out 200 million print catalogs a year. How different from today's online world that was! With direct marketing, you could be wrong 99 percent of the time-only 1 percent of recipients had to buy a computer-and you would still see a profit.

We certainly did, and it felt good to help Michael Dell make a lot of money. That upward trend continued. After two years, I moved to Dell's consumer eCommerce division, where I found even greater growth potential. We had no training or playbook for online selling at the time, so we just figured things out as we went along. Within two more years, we went from small, scrappy, and unknown-number five in the market behind Gateway-to number one.

Once we got there, however, the work wasn't nearly as much fun. I missed the exciting days when the brand was still emerging. I had been at Dell for six years when I left to recapture that excitement and my passion.

After having children and doing some consulting, I went to work on the online portion of a then-tiny consumer brand providing natural products for moms and their babies. My salary was half of what I'd made at Dell, but I so believed in the brand and the CEO's love for her mission that I happily worked even longer hours.

In three years, first as an employee, then as an agency, I helped that brand quadruple its revenue, moving from seven figures to eight, with more than half of that growth coming from Amazon sales. In fact, the business became so attractive that it was acquired by a multibillion-dollar international company.

I knew I wanted to do the same for other businesses. I began helping startups and other emerging brands. These were companies with limited means, which meant that any wrong move they made could cost them their entire business.

To help these companies in need, I co-founded ROI Swift, a digital marketing agency in Austin, Texas, in 2015. Since then, I've worked with hundreds of companies that have faced issues like Kevin's, both at his company's size and much larger. We focus on consumer brands with $3 million to $50 million in revenue-too small to be able to afford an expensive consultant like an MIT data scientist or a Facebook alumni with ten years of experience to guide them.

Many companies need this expertise, so by founding the company, I had found my mission and my goal: to help one thousand emerging consumer brands by 2030. After five years in business, we're heading to two hundred, and we don't accept more than thirty new clients a year at this point. That means it's unlikely that we'll take on eight hundred more in less than ten years.

That's also where this book comes in. I wrote it to help you and at least 799 other CEOs to avoid typical mistakes I've seen companies make. If you take away one thing from this book that helps your business-and you're likely to take away a lot more-I'll consider it a success.

What You Can Expect

This book is organized in two parts. In Part 1, you'll find valuable information about four business fundamentals that can have an enormous impact on your bottom line. Without them, it's not only difficult to scale but often impossible to sustain the scale or even the business. The first four chapters will show you how to:

• Start discovering and solidifying your Core Values as soon as you can.
• Apply them to Hiring...