In this insightful episode, Matthew Stafford, Owner of Build Grow Scale, shares how he has helped thousands of e-commerce entrepreneurs to the true game of success in e-commerce: the inner game.
You will discover:
– Two simple hacks to your checkout process that will change the game entirely
– What separates $10M e-comm businesses from those that can only dream of being $10M e-comm businesses?
– Why your comfort may be biggest obstacle for your conversions
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And here with us today is yet another high demand coach in the one and only Matthew Stafford who, over the past three decades, has been entrepreneurial and successfully built several businesses across multiple industries, including concrete, brick and mortar locations, pod and software based ventures. Matthew is the CEO and Managing Partner of build grow scale and an equity owner in some in house e commerce brands. He’s got a knowledge and expertise that enable him to mentor 1000s of store owners through paid e commerce groups and live events. His experience has also allowed him to help hundreds of E commerce brands to scale past the million dollar mark, with many hitting ten million as well. Well, Matthew, very excited to have you on the show e commerce, just such a huge world, particularly in terms of potential. But just because there’s potential there doesn’t mean that we’re all going to get it. So what have you found in your experience really separates those kind of ten million plus e commerce businesses from those that can only ever dream of 10 million?
Matthew Stafford
Well, I think it would go back to the coaching as far as it’s typically the owner of the business, and I always tell them, the more work that they do between the six inches between their ears matters more to their business than the actual website. Because when they when they get that right, everything else seems to work out in their favor.
Scott Ritzheimer
This is fascinating unpack that for us, because someone who’s coming from the E commerce world, that’s what most of us would expect, is the opposite of what they would have to say. What are some of the things from a mindset perspective, that get in the way of something even as kind of simple or external as an E comm site?
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, well, I would say people’s money stories. So we’ve had several entrepreneurs who were kind of stuck at that under a million dollar mark when they got their money stories right, I would, I’d say, pi, this is my best student ever. He went from a million to 14 million to 40 million in a 24 month period. So but again, he had got to that. He had this mentality of, I want to earn 1010, grand a month so that I can build a real business. And I told him, I said, you have a real business. But the problem is, you’re dealing with a money story that’s holding you back. And once we dealt with that, and you know, he was off to the races.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s fascinating, and it’s one of those areas where I found a lot of folks underestimate the personal aspect of entrepreneurism, right? Entrepreneurship and and something as simple as you know, how our parents taught us about money or didn’t teach us about money, how our second grade teacher told us we were never going to amount to something, you know, like, just, they’re crazy things like that that that create these very, very real boundaries for success. Now you kind of, you laid out, you know, one to 40 million is a great reason to do it. So we’ve kind of got some of the why. But, like, how do you change that story?
Matthew Stafford
First, you have to be aware of it most. Most of the time. People aren’t even aware, like they struggle. They say, Oh, I’m going to make this change. But then they struggle to do that. They don’t actually take the time to break down. Well, what do I believe? Who am I or what do I think I deserve? And so just asking yourself some of those questions and taking the time to think through that, I realize I think it was I think it was Henry Ford said, thinking is hard work, and that’s why most people don’t do it. And a lot of times you just have to look at the results that you’re getting. And you could ask yourself the question, what do I have to believe is true in order to achieve these results, or to achieve the results I have? And then what would I have to believe is true in order to achieve the results that I want to and what’s that gap? And so just creating awareness, I think Carl Jung said, Until you make the unconscious conscious, you’ll go through life and call it fate. And so essentially, what you’re trying to do is just bring your awareness to it, and as soon as you do, you can go, oh yeah, that’s not actually how I feel right now, in your brain will upgrade you to your current state now with a new understanding, rather than this loop that you’re playing in the background of this old belief that you are taught or however your parents modeled money to you or or whatever you know they might have been arguing. During one time when they were talking about it. And so you thought, money is evil, or money causes arguments, or whatever, all these different things. And so, yeah, it’s really, really fascinating, because we’ve got to work with so many entrepreneurs to you start to see patterns, and the ones that do really well are very good at identifying their story and then making adjustments. Now, change is hard, but if you can identify the story and understand what you’d have to believe in order to carry that out, it’s a it’s much easier to shift.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so you right in line with where I was going next. You had mentioned my one of your best students along the way, in addition to being able to identify their story, what have you found has been true of those that you’ve been able to help the most, right? Those who have been able to take what they learn from you and actually capitalize in it? What traits do they tend to have in common?
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, just they’re coachable. So they’re they’re humble enough to not believe that they know it all. And I’ll, I’ll give a damaging admission of myself that I’ve really come to grips with over the past couple years. But I used to believe I’m really smart and I’m a hard worker, and what I realized was there’s a lot of people that are doing way better than me and have accomplished way more, and if I think I’m smart, then I’m essentially shutting my brain off to New, new understanding. And so I just, I started using the question, what if I wasn’t smart? Then that opens up all kinds of possibility and an open mind to explore other ways to continually improve. So the moment we think we have the answer, or we believe that we know the truth, we stop looking. And so I would say that the majority of people that do really well, they remain very curious, and they’re always open to see what’s working better?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I couldn’t agree more. I want to shift gears for us a little bit, because you know a thing or two about e commerce. Now, one of the challenges that I’ve personally felt when I was running e commerce business, and I’ve seen in so many others, is there’s there’s this very real understanding of the limit to your resources, right? And, and there’s this, there’s this very big, it seems like inexhaustible pool of resources that your competitors have access to, especially in that space. So what do we have to do as the kind of upstart founders, the scrappy entrepreneurs, to kind of to change the game to our advantage?
Matthew Stafford
Yeah. So I’ll give you, I’ll give you two different optimizations that work really well, that anyone can do. One is on your thank you page of your store. You ask a question, and the question is, what is the one thing that almost made you not buy? And you track all of those results, and what you have is everybody that spends money with you, or the majority, you’ll be shocked. How many people will actually answer that well, will tell you what part of your website they didn’t understand or cause friction or wasn’t clear, or they didn’t enjoy, and then you take those survey questions, and you go back and you update those sections in order to clear those up. And it’s, it’s amazing. I would say probably six out of our 10 largest wins. And at this point, our large wins are worth millions of dollars to our to our clients, six of our 10 biggest wins came from those answers to that question.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow, I love that. I love that for a couple of reasons. One, you’re only asking people who have actually paid you, which is really, really cool, because there’s a lot of people who have lots of opinions who aren’t entitled to share them, right? And so this is brilliant for that respect. And and two, it’s fresh, right? So many times we’ll try and do like market studies or feedback or, and one, they just don’t care, right? To give feedback. So it’s always a challenge to get people to engage. And then two, they don’t really remember, right? There’s been so much editing in the story about their experience with you. So I love that question. It’s so simple and really remarkable. You said he had two though, what was the second?
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, the other one is on your on your checkout page, where you ask for their information. So in the form fields, and this I got from a book by Robert kieldini called persuasion, and in there he was talking about people don’t mind giving information as long as there’s a reason why. And so in there we ask for email and phone, but we don’t say why. Nobody’s forms say why. And so we realize there’s a lot of errors there. We track those on our sites. Trying to hop, trying to optimize a site, and what we realize is when we put email required for order confirmation, it reduced the errors, gave us a better email, and we had a lot more abandoned recoveries. And then so we’re like, okay, let’s figure out one for the phone, and what we put there is required for shipping notifications. We know that people want to know when they get their item. That actually boosts conversions. So telling them that’s why we want that information, we get a better we got less form errors, and so we recovered a lot more with SMS and the order confirmation email gets open 85% of the time, and they want to see that their order is correct, and they want to know what they’re getting. And so we realized that they give you their good email instead of their spam email for that reason, and it’s just it’s literally never not given us an increase that was measurable.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow, remarkable. So my question that comes off of that bunch of different ways you can go with it, but with these little nuances like that, how is it that anyone could possibly hope to find those right? There’s so many different iterations of what that could be. How do you help folks to identify which ones actually make a meaningful difference?
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, we, I mean, we have a blog on our website, buildgrowscale.com/blog, and we give away tons of the principles that we teach. And the reason for that is we want people to grow their store to enough volume where we could partner with them and do their optimization and testing and all that for them, because the majority of the smaller businesses, you know, I would say, like that, 250,000 a month and up, typically, are looking For a team, and can now justify that, because when you can increase their, yeah, you know, you increase their average order value and their conversion rate. It Yeah, makes sense.
Scott Ritzheimer
Got it? Got it? Excellent. All right, so it’s interesting you use that number, because my next question was actually the same version of that number. I’ve seen a lot of E commerce companies that have kind of plateaued around that $4 million mark, which I guess that’s almost the same number, and I did the math wrong. My head doesn’t matter. And sometimes the owner’s just content, right? Then maybe some bigger mindset issues as well. But what I’ve found is common the common theme through all of them is that it feels like the low hanging fruit is gone, right? You know, up to that point, you know. And it doesn’t start off this way, but at some point you realize, like, hey, we just add more money and more sales come in, or we just add another product and more sales come in. And now that might be true, like you spend more on ads and your revenues go up, but your ads go up a lot more, right? You could add another product, but the total you make per product goes down when you do even if total revenue goes up. And so it just feels like it feels like a losing game, right? The returns are just going to diminish. Why even try? So what do we do again to kind of turn that around, overcome those diminishing returns?
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, so I would say a lot of that is in the entrepreneur’s head. Yes, your margin may go down a little bit, but you have the potential for a lot more over over time, repeat business, because how do you actually increase your your business? Effectively, one, you need them to come back and buy more often. You need them to be able to buy more items and and then the average order ticket. So all of those things are supported by them having more than one thing to buy and being able to come back, or bundles and things like that. There’s a lot of different strategies. But again, I think that the majority you kind of hit on it right in the very beginning when you said their their mindset is, why is it worth it? And the truth of the matter is probably eight out of 10 people, when the going gets tougher, or when there’s extra work to do that’s not low hanging fruit, they’re just not going to do it, even they have good intentions, but they won’t. And so I love that, because I know that the people who are willing, like I said, that are coachable or learn they understand that it requires more to do more, and in order to do that, it’s not a it’s not a losing game. You end up winning.
Scott Ritzheimer
What I like about that is I. Yeah, it really speaks to this idea that the challenge that you’re having is that you you now have something to lose, right? Because a lot of these people did, I mean, almost by definition, they all did something hard, right? That you to get a business up off the ground is not an easy thing to do. Maybe had a little bit of luck in it most of the time. That’s not the case. But the very same people who did all this hard work to get out of that early stage are now struggling to do hard things, because there’s something to lose, right? That there’s there’s something to protect. It might be a lifestyle. It might be a feeling of, hey, if I have to do that and I look stupid, then I’m not as successful as I thought. There’s all this stuff that we’re trying to manage. And the reality of it is the and I think this is what you’re saying, the only way to break through that is to be humble, to be coachable, and to know there’s more on the other side of that. Would you agree?
Matthew Stafford
Yeah and I think business is the ultimate inner game. Like, no matter what, every like, even the successful people like their business is reflecting back to them every week where they’re not showing up, or where they need to improve, or, you know, where maybe their competition is beating them, or, you know, just all the different things. Maybe they’re not serving the client in a way that are communicating with the client in a way that keeps them, etc. So it is always requiring that you’re improving, and if you’re not, you’re gonna have a competitor that’s willing to do that, and they’re gonna eventually steal market share from you.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, Matthew, On a similar note, so there’s this question that I have I asked all my guests, and I’m interested to see what you have to say. What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Matthew Stafford
That it’s worth that so many times we let fear of different things, like, what are they gonna think of me, or are they gonna make fun of me, or my friends gonna pull me back into the pot? But that it’s worth it, like learning how to do hard things and do it consistently sets you up for success in a lot more areas of life than just business. So it’s worth it.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s good, Matthew, there’s some folks listening, and they’re tipping into that territory where they really do need to optimize. They’ve got an E commerce, e commerce site, and they’re ready for more. They need someone who can help show them the way, tell us a little bit about the work you do and where they can find more out about you.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, So we have our business, buildgrowscale.com, and what we do is we help take people from the build phase all the way through scaling. And you can go to our website at buildgrowscale.com, and look at the different ways that we can help you. There’s a lot of free resources as well. And if you want to get a hold of us, you can either hit a contact form in there or just email me at [email protected] and I read all my emails.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. Matt, thanks so much for being on the show. Just a privilege and honor having you here. It’s fascinating, fascinating insights. I absolutely loved it. For those of you watching listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Matthew Stafford
Over the past three decades, Matthew Stafford has been entrepreneurial and has successfully built several businesses across various industries, including concrete, brick-and-mortar locations, POD, and software-based ventures. Matthew Stafford, the CEO and managing partner of Build Grow Scale and an equity owner of some in-house e-commerce brands, has knowledge and expertise, enabling him to mentor thousands of store owners through paid e-commerce groups and live events. His experience has also allowed him to help hundreds of e-commerce brands scale past the million-dollar mark – with many hitting the $10 million mark.
Want to learn more about Matthew Stafford’s work at Build Grow Scale? Check out his website at https://buildgrowscale.com/
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