The Margins

Somewhere around year three I started to feel like the big swings were behind me. COVID killed our wholesale accounts overnight and we had to figure out direct-to-consumer or we were done. That took two years and more mistakes than I want to list. Once you have made those kinds of moves, you are not making them again every quarter.

What I spend most of my time on now are tenths, a tenth of a point on conversion rate, a tenth on ROAS. I added two micro-upsells at checkout last year: a rush order option at $7.77 and a lifetime refurb program at $11.77. About 4% of customers take one. That moved average order value by roughly six percent on an AOV already around $110, which works out to about eight dollars per order. Eight dollars does not sound like the kind of thing a founder talks about on a podcast, but when you are pushing volume and your retention rate is 30%, eight dollars compounds.

Most of the early advice is about nailing your product and building your funnel, and both of those things matter, but the advice tends to stop around year three. After that you are on your own, finding every small place where the economics tip in your favor and stacking those gains. I do not know of a version of a fifty-year business where that work gets easier.

I hired a CMO about eighteen months ago and added a director of growth and four SEO partners at the same time. We had never had any of those before, and people watching from the outside thought we were expanding. The honest answer is that I had been under-resourced for years and finally admitted it. I hired people I could not fully afford on the assumption that waiting until I could afford them meant waiting too long.

The math behind that is that I am the last one to get paid, and I have been the last one for most of my career. I am up at 3:30 or 4 in the morning working on things that will not pay off for a year. I run real estate on the side to fill the gap, and I am not complaining about any of it. I chose this. But I say it because the people who build fifty-year companies are not usually sleeping well in years two through forty.

I was not ready in 2018 when my dad handed me the keys, and I think he knew it, but there was no other version of the transition. He gave me a business with customers who had been buying from him since the 1980s, and my job was to not break that while figuring out how to grow it. That turns out to be harder than starting from scratch in some ways.

My dad built the business on craft and showing up, and I have added measurement and testing on top of that. I have seen what happens when shops have great product and no operations, and I have also watched what happens when you get so focused on the numbers that you lose the thread of why someone wanted the product in the first place. Most founders have a natural lean toward one or the other, and knowing which one you are is most of the battle.

The game is long. At 3:30 in the morning it looks like a list of things that did not get done yesterday and a spreadsheet that is off by a tenth. That is still the job.