Mark Patchett 5:58
Yeah, good question. There’s always quite a few. So a lot of the time, it’s been not understanding what attribution looks like across different platforms. So someone often will say, we don’t think Facebook’s working, we want to be making $3 for every dollar we’re spending, but we’re only making $2. But then you realize that Facebook, used to do a good job of capturing all this, but a lot of the time, now it’s missing it. So when you look at the blended metrics of the company, maybe there are $4 for every dollar, so we help them understand that Facebook might be doing more than they think. So we actually accelerate, well, we’d help them model it out. And we’d say, look, let’s test what happens if we increase the budget by 50%, you’re still looking at that number, which you don’t think is necessarily good enough. But let’s look at how much money you’re actually making. So that’s a major thing, then there’s always just like housekeeping e-bits, like people neglecting the importance of conversion rate optimization, and things like keeping really powerful fresh reviews top of mind. So lots of those types of housekeeping e-bits. But a lot of it comes down to understanding attribution problems.
Jeremy Weisz 7:03
Talk a little bit more about that. Neglecting conversion optimization, obviously, you’re driving traffic to websites and pages. And that’s a big component. I mean, you could do your job and drive lots of people there. And then they’re not converting. So what have you seen when they neglect conversion rate? What are they the mistakes are making there?
Mark Patchett 7:25
A lot of the time, you can find out from just asking what their site refresh rate has been, what the CRO testing roadmap looks like. And the really powerful thing that we help people understand is that we’re like, all right, you want to double your business? And like, well, how would you go about and do that? How would you go about doing that? And they’re like, oh, we increase the budgets? I’m like, well, what if I told you, you could double your business without spending another cent? All right, tell me more, tell me more. And what’s cool about it is that you only need to increase like three of the four main growth levers by 26%, each to double a business. So if you increase the conversion rate by 26%, you increase the average order value by 26%. And you increase the repeat rate, or lifetime value by 26%. None of those need more money, none of those need more traffic, and you can double your business. So we like to execute on those different areas, and then increase budget in parallel. But the types of things that are really common that people are neglecting with CRO is assuming that people understand their brand as well as they do. So we like to use, like a sense check called the reverse elevator pitch, which is that before someone even scrolls below the fold, say they’re learning on the homepage. In about five seconds or so someone should be able to tell you exactly what you do uniquely. That’s it as quick as that. And most sites don’t pass this test. Well, we say all that shit, like, down below, just check it out. It’s in the story page. I’m like, 80% of people aren’t going to scroll below the fall. So you’re going to nail it that says a lot of kind of easy things and very powerful like that.
Jeremy Weisz 9:08
Mark, I think, I don’t know, from my research shows, I don’t think you’ve written a book, but I think you should, how would you double your business without spending more money? And you have three things? Well, there’s four things but three things without spending more money. And then the fourth is obviously, the firepower. Right, increasing the budget there. You mentioned the reviews. And I’ve seen a cool, you present a cool chart, which basically one of the things you do with your clients, I think is you take all of the competitors reviews, and you run them through. I’m not sure exactly how your magic works, but you run them through and you actually see, you help the company find out their unique positioning in the market under different categories. Right.
Mark Patchett 9:54
Yeah. It’s so powerful, so powerful, and it’s part of like onboarding research piece. We love to do it. And it’s like the easiest hackers marketer. So you can go for like a week brainstorm session that costs $50,000. It’s like, who are we? Who are we as brand, but it’s like the people that all find who you are as a brand, are you customers so you can guide them. So the process starts with review exports and review scraping. So what all people need to do is export all of your reviews, find two to three competitors, and usually do it on like the primary product, and then get those reviews scraped. So you can get someone on Upwork to do this for 80 bucks. And then what you do in the most basic form, is to do things like run word cloud analysis, so it just extracts the most common themes. And what we’re looking for is positive reviews, and then negative reviews. And what you’re trying to get as an outcome is, you know how you talk about your brand and how you think about your brand, what your customers actually talking about what’s really resonating with them. And there’s often things that really, really stand out that you’re not even talking about. So then what you want to do is you want to do the same thing with your competitors to then find out, where are we really strong? What are customers loving about us and then hating about our competitors? And what about competitors doing really well that we might not be doing such a good job. And it really works well. So like at Nectar, we ran the same thing. And we found out that everyone, all people talked about was comfort that people talked about comfort for all of our competitors. We had a 365 nitrile verse, they had 100. People just obsessed over that we’re doing an okay job at that. But then people really liked our logistic experience verse, they didn’t like it for our competitors. So straightaway, we know that people are going to look at three brands. So we start trying to find these like trigger points, like kind of twisting, twisting the blade a little bit on the competitors, and it works phenomenally.
Jeremy Weisz 11:54
Yeah, I love it. I think I saw with Nectar specifically, some of the competitors were spending, I don’t know, you know, lots and lots of money on their ads and their creative and everything. And you talked about how you spent $300 and help them drive them to 10 million.
Mark Patchett 12:15
Yeah, it was like a beautiful shitty ad as like, yeah, Casper had raised 380 million purple, were killing it with their YouTube ads. And it’s kind of like how ugly websites work sometimes. Because there’s a lot of hypotheses around it. And sometimes it communicates value. Like if you go into like a basic hotel, you know it’s a basic hotel. But this ad will kind of one of the first people to use, like user-generated content. So instead of having these big budget productions, where like, we don’t have the money to do that. So what else can we do? Well, we can do this. And then the concept around that ad all came from that review scraping process. So instead of doing these big, expensive, kind of consulting activities, we just say, let’s find out what people actually give a shit about, then let’s get real people talking about it. The end.
Jeremy Weisz 13:02
So talk about how the audit process works. So when a company that first want to engage with you, you would charge them for an audit, right? So how does the audit process work?
Mark Patchett 13:20
To the audit process has a few different bits of it depends on the size of the company and the amount of data we’ve got. So in the most basic form, it’s plugging into their e-commerce platform. So something like Shopify and extracting out net sales and looking at things like refund rates, then it’s taking all of the data from the marketing platforms that they’re using, whether it’s Google ads, TikTok, Meta, then we mush it all together to run a historical analysis to see how that business has been going month over month for the last two years or so whatever periods relevant. And then we use forms of marketing, and it’s marketing mix modeling, to try and understand patents. So often we’ll find out it’s like, hey, this channel was actually doing way more for you guys, you should have been doubling down, or this channel flatlined, then we’ll analyze the creative, we’ll look at the amount of time people spend looking at the creative look at the percentage of people that will stop in the feeds. So we kind of start with this holistic view, like you’d see in a p&l for the company overall. And then we drill down to try and find some easy opportunities.
Jeremy Weisz 14:23
What brands Mark, right now, are you paying attention to that when you see you think they should definitely be working with you?
Mark Patchett 14:36
It’s any of the guys in like the beauty space or any type of brand that has an LTV component, because what we’re going to find this year is that paid media is going to start getting really hard. The brands that are going to do well are the ones that can obsess over extracting more from their existing customer list by just new product development or improvements in CRM. So any brands that have a natural type of LTV component to them?
Jeremy Weisz 15:04
Should you any stick out here that you’re following?
Mark Patchett 15:09
Yeah, there’s a lot we’re looking at and didn’t really specify quite a few. There’s quite a few.
Jeremy Weisz 15:18
How did you get into this?
Mark Patchett 15:23
I got into this, I got a library book when I was 15 or so which is building websites for dummies. I’m going to tinker around with this. And then I built build a website using Dreamweaver, which was just like a painstaking process like you think you get it right. And then you launch it, and then something’s broken, you go back and forth. And then I finished the side. And like, great, I was like, Alright, now I got this website. I’m like, how the hell do I get people to the website? So Google, how to get people to website? All right, SEO. All right, I got to learn how to write some articles and get some backlinks. Then I started getting some people to site. All right, now I got these people how the hell do I make money from this thing? How to make money online, then got stuck into the affiliate world. And then I’m like, all right, I got these people, I’m making some money, how do I get them to spend more money? Rate optimization, went on this journey. And then we launched new brands work out what I didn’t know, work for a company with people top of their game, kind of learn some more, add some value there. And then the cycle goes on and on and on.
Jeremy Weisz 16:31
Oh, Mark, just three things I want to ask about which I know you think deeply about? And the first is positioning. Markets crowded, you mentioned with Nectar. I mean, there’s competitors in every industry, right? So how do you think about positioning?
Mark Patchett 16:53
It’s a tricky beast, it’s tricky beast. We have the advantage that we’ve done it before, and built companies, which, if you’ve only like most kind of performance, agencies may just do like Facebook, they may do some ad creative because they kind of need it. But then and you can think it’s the be all and end all. Like I remember when I did that I’m like, yeah, I know my shit. I’m the king of Google, blah, blah, blah, and then you go and work inside one of these companies or launch your own. And it’s just a fraction of it. It’s like the reality of building these brands and making them successful, is negotiating 30 days, 45 days, net payment terms with suppliers, or it’s negotiating that they can get a piece of equity in exchange for a massive reduction in cogs. There’s all these types of parts, that the true kind of defining factors of the really successful consumer brands. So the positioning that we like to bring is that we have in-depth knowledge of that side of the business. So we take that and we have like executive level discussions, not just talking about Facebook, it’s like overall strategy, whether it’s global expansion, like those types of things. And then we still have our toolkit below. But it’s all based off a strategy that comes from understanding how to build really, really big brands, overall.
Jeremy Weisz 18:13
You mentioned some growth levers with CRO the order value, repeat value. And the last tip of fuel is a lead generation piece. So I love for you to talk a little bit more about lead generation and putting that firepower on.
Mark Patchett 18:31
Yeah, a lot of it, it kind of unlocks. And it’s almost like a roleplay game, we have to go through certain doors to unlock certain things. So for example, if you don’t pass the reverse elevator pitch, it’s really hard to scale paid media. Because if you haven’t got that, it means you don’t have the right piece of creative. And if you don’t have the right pieces of creative, it’s really, really hard to scale kind of paid media. So the kind of reality of where it’s at now is that like 80% of success on platforms like meta is coming from the creative. And even now with the way that Google is going a lot of it’s kind of mushing in rich media creative with the kind of standard text ads that you’ve got to get really, really good at that. So adding the gas actually comes from all getting all of that other stuff sorted first. And then the other kind of 20% is the technical media buying that.
Jeremy Weisz 19:27
When you’re evaluating the companies and seeing where should we put more effort and time, you’re looking at a lot of the data. And you mentioned briefly earlier about a data platform. So how does that work with the brands that you help?
Mark Patchett 19:45
So with the brands that we help, we have a platform that we built, which extracts all of the data, and then puts it into one unified view, which some brands get close with this, like maybe they’re using a tool like TripleWell, or Pireaus doesn’t really complete the picture there, or they’re doing it and built it in Tableau or Looker. It’s hard to build this stuff, and it’s expensive. So we’ve solved that first problem by building all these integrations and then unifying it to give you kind of like an executive-level view at any time. How’s my business performing today? How was it last week, yada, yada, yada. But the bit where it gets more powerful is looking at things like cumulative analysis. So like any business is going to have different pieces that contribute to an overall goal. So what we do is we have cumulative pacing, which looks at exactly how you’re pacing versus your goal versus last year versus this month. And then it breaks it down with the same view over email over meta. So the idea is that you should be able to learn on one page, then you shouldn’t just scroll down a tiny bit. And you could pinpoint even if you didn’t understand the technical things, and you can understand exactly why a business is performing well or not, and where to focus energy next.
Jeremy Weisz 19:53
And then, is that something that you share in a report? Or do they see like a dashboard? What’s it look like visually?
Mark Patchett 21:04
Yeah, they get access straight into the mothership, which is another like accountability thing. So instead of just sending like a monthly report, which is like, well, Facebook says, everything’s really good. And they’re like, Yeah, but the business is looking like a piece of shit and the p&l. We don’t hide behind anything like that. So we use them all direct access.
Jeremy Weisz 21:26
Nice. I want to talk give a little bit more detail on what you do. And we mentioned Nectar before. So can you just talk a little bit about just some of the steps when you first started working with them till just like a scaling up?
Mark Patchett 21:44
That’s a really good bunch. So I initially started, I’d quit a marketing director role at a company called Trouva, which we scaled to be kind of top five fastest growing in Europe, really, really smart guys. And then met a guy called Scott McCloud, who’s the genius, the column Scotty Boy Genius. And he was like the linchpin at Nectar and as the three other founders, so initially, I was just helping out with some meta bits, and then kind of saw the potential as I meant, I want to do some more with these guys. And what was cool about that structure is that Casper had like a floor. And New York City, high rises, purple, massive office. Nectar was like, all right, let’s just build out this team, wherever we want anywhere in the world. And I’ve been living in Asia and a bunch of other countries and loved finding the best talent anywhere in the world. So they kind of essentially said, you guys do whatever you want. Just grow this business, hire the right people. Let’s be smart about it. Just go. So zero red tape. And we will really growth you guys. We weren’t like x management consultants. We just love to tinker and tinker and tinker. So things like that, that add that did 10 million, they’re the things that get turned around in a couple of days. No long meetings, no management meetings, just little slack updates. And we just kind of hacked our way to it. And we just unlocked a little bit of a conversion rate improvement, not really an LTV bit better ads, increased budget and kind of just tinker and tinker and tinker. And you forget what the numbers are like. And then you log in and you get a reality check. You’re like, wow, we’re spending like 10 million bucks a month. This is like a big thing. This is a big thing. So yeah, tinkering and freedom and just putting smart people in one virtual place and letting them do their job.
Jeremy Weisz 23:35
Mark, when you look back on that, what learnings did you have, maybe where you felt there were these key points where you unlocked something? What would be an example of a time when we unlock this now we’re kind of on the next level?
Mark Patchett 23:53
I think a lot of it came down from really understanding your numbers. That was a huge bit. So it was the time when Facebook attribution was still good. So instead of obsessing over it, we built out like an automated way of doing it and like we did this in Google Sheets, or like basic sheet, but it was all live and all updated that would extract real revenue total media spend across everything. And our perspective was, if the business is looking good here, keep hammering it, keep spending, be aggressive. And just use the metrics within the platform’s is kind of guiding principles. But we never obsessed over it too much as long as the business was working. So I think the big learning there was don’t obsess over minutia. If you’ve got smart people that are executing on the right things and they’ve got freedom and in the overall numbers of the company looking good, just keep hitting it. Just keep hitting it.
Jeremy Weisz 24:52
You also worked with idle brands, talk about what you did with them.
Mark Patchett 24:57
That was another mattress one, which was really interesting. And like the catalyst that really grew that one was a partnership with the United States Postal Service, which is an absolute beast. And the cool thing about the partnership they had, which is like a say, God bless America, because they have these programs that not every country has. And then they allow you to extract like 16,000 leads a day. And the data point is that like 60% of people when they move by a new mattress, like 60%, and we know that all of these people are moving. So it was a lead source that didn’t require Facebook didn’t require Google ads. It didn’t require anything like those channels working for us. But this thing was like, a nitrous Jetstream injected into the business. And they went from doing like $100,000 a month to 5.4 million a month and like nine months, absolutely beast.
Jeremy Weisz 24:57
I would think that would break a business.
Mark Patchett 25:46
And it did, yes. And it did. And the big learning there is that you can look at all the growth numbers, and it can be fantastic. But I’ve always had this over Christmas time, where we’re hitting these unbelievable numbers. And then on the other week, were the happiest people ever. And then you look at the poor customer service people and the poor operations people, they’re like, they just see a tsunami coming out and stop. We’re like we can’t, we need our graph to look good.
Jeremy Weisz 26:33
How do you prepare now, companies for that trajectory? Right, that maybe they’re not used to that fast growth? What do you do? I don’t know, maybe to warn the operations or customer support?
Mark Patchett 26:48
Yeah, well, there’s a lot we’ve done on the automation front, with customer support says that there’s really cool like AI tools that you can plug in. And even with like, the open to the new chat platforms are coming out, they’re insane. They’re insane, they can help automate a lot of that, but like the most pain you’re going to get is if you’re just not shipping things in time, because you can’t keep up, like the majority of customer service issues go away if your product is good, and it gets shipped on time. So the big thing with operations was that this was the time of like the China’s anti-dumping was, that’s what really hurt. So having domestic production as like an overflow, even if you’re going to lose margin, but it means that you can ship things on time is really, really handy. And then a lot of it comes down to the payment terms that you’ve got with the suppliers. So if you really want to be growing that quickly, you’re going to see a lot of money coming in, you’re going to see even more money coming out if you’ve got to pay 60, 90 days upfront.
Jeremy Weisz 27:49
I only told him to prep for production, because I’m not sure. For in the case of there’s a lot of different types of cycles, whether it’s a mattress or a beauty product, if it takes a certain amount of time to actually make the product, it’s hard, the inventory management seems like you said, a kind of a cash flow slash preparing for growth. How do you tell them, we want x number of months on hand for this campaign when they’re maybe not used to that?
Mark Patchett 28:24
It depends on how sure you are of your growth rate. So like another common problem we see is that people like the founders have such as steadfast belief and how big their business can be, that they’ll often allocate, say they raise a bit of money, they’ll allocate 80% of that to doing like a bulk inventory deal. In exchange for getting a 20% reduction in margin, what can be a better approach is appreciating that maybe we won’t hit those numbers yet, we will later. So it can often be better having lower margin in exchange for lower orders, until you really, really validate that you can get it. And then in terms of like inventory pacing, that can be really tricky as well. I want to be sure I have a very high degree of confidence that I can hit the numbers I’m going to hit based on historical data not based on my gut feel. Even if it means you grow a little bit slower, you’re going to have a much more stable business and then you can ultimately be bigger and stable.
Jeremy Weisz 29:28
Because there’s a lot of moving pieces with the supply chain and we saw even during COVID a lot of these break down right supply chain some of them shut down. So how did you manage that during, whether it’s COVID or something else? How did you see your clients manage that?
Mark Patchett 29:52
The ones with US production were largely okay. It was the ones that had things coming from China that got hammered, and with once like that, the answer is how is it managed? Just not that well, France just got cleaned out. Like that’s a really hard one to plan for. But the brands that weathered it, were really honest with their customers. And we’re like, hey, guys, this shits happened. We don’t even have a GPU yet, but we’re going to work on it. And in exchange for doing that, we’re going to do this. The ones that got really hammered are ones that just mismanaged communication, because people can be very, very reasonable, as long as you just don’t bullshit them, as in customers.
Jeremy Weisz 30:42
Mark, I know from my research, team and culture is important to you. So I love to hear about hiring and how you maintain culture, because, again, I think people are all over the world, on your team.
Mark Patchett 30:57
Yeah, it’s super important. So we have three values, which is smarter, faster, happier. And the idea there is that you should be able to build really big things, while getting better at it, while enjoying the process. Because I’ve had some tough slugs working inside of like venture backed companies, which, once your goals are set by like VCs, they’ll want you to hit the moon, or just miss and die. Like that’s kind of the business model, if they have one in 20, that’s going to be a unicorn, they want to find out who that’s going to be as quickly as possible. And this is kind of just a quick decision that gets pushed down. And then in the engine room that people dealing with that are just burning out, like just getting absolutely slammed. So I wanted to make sure that when I built Growth Shop that we didn’t do that. We didn’t do that. So in terms of the hiring process, I do a lot of the first rounds still, because I can get a good sense as to someone’s culture fit very quickly. And it’s small things like asking about what they’re reading, and a lot of it is just chit chat, kind of bullshit for 15 minutes, just to see how curious someone is and to see how they’ve thought about solving problems in their lives, like whether they’ve got up and traveled and moved and the problems that have had their, how they’ve overcome them, that type of stuff is really important. And then we do a paid audit. So we’ll give them access to some anonymized data. And it will vary based on the seniority of the role. But if they don’t progress into a full time role, then we’ll pay them to thank them for their time, which works quite well. But then in terms of the people we look for, we look for entrepreneurial kinds of people that will ultimately start their own business, which feels counterintuitive. But it’s like I’ve left all the companies that I’ve left because I got capped. So instead, what we do is we hire people that we can train up and be phenomenal. And then if they want to launch something of their own, they can do it with the team that they’ve helped build up. So they can ultimately become like a client or we can invest in.
Jeremy Weisz 33:05
Typically, what have you seen? Do people want to start a brand or e-commerce business?
Mark Patchett 33:13
A lot do. But then after they work with a bunch that is way too hard. I don’t want to do that anymore. Because we the outside of it. Like a lot of people just manage Facebook ads, like Yeah, I scaled the shit out of that brand. I can do it. But then because we do so much people get visibility into what it really takes. So how do people wanted to like, no chance?
Jeremy Weisz 33:38
Sometimes the grass is greener. Right. You mentioned books. I love to hear some of your favorites. Your favorite books?
Mark Patchett 33:54
So let me look at my Kindle. So a few that I really like, it’s like a bit of a mix. I like some wacky ones like Bill Bryson’s one of my favorite writers. Because to get my head like out of thinking business, I love travel and travel stories. And I like funny ones. So he’s depiction of traveling around Europe, and then in Australia, and Africa is just, it’s outstanding. And I’d like to be laughing and kind of joking around is it really opens up my brain. But then on the other side of things when I like to read business types of books. The Almanac of Naval is unbelievable. And I like to read that or listen to that. Like once every six months, and then there’s also like wacky old ones like I like learning about things like cybernetic transposition and like goal setting and kind of setting visions and realizing that so much of that came from like years and years and years ago. And then things like Simplify was really good. That was fantastic. And then I like books about science. So like The Science Delusion, that’s fantastic. As it helps you, like when you’re learning about atoms and molecules, it pulls you down to such like a deep layer that you see different patterns when you come back up.
Jeremy Weisz 35:20
Any favorites when it relates to goal setting?
Mark Patchett 35:27
To goal setting, yeah, I think cybernetic transposition is for sure, one of my favorites or As A Man Thinketh. Really, really good. Really powerful. And they all kind of say the same shit when it comes down to it, but it’s just its reaffirming, that, hey, if there’s a lot of interesting people talking about a similar thing, there’s got to be something there.
Jeremy Weisz 35:52
I mean, you see patterns, you probably see patterns. Same thing with the e-commerce, right? It’s certain things work. You’re seeing certain things work across a bunch of brands, and you start to see patterns.
Mark Patchett 36:04
Yeah, exactly, man. Exactly. And sometimes the brain needs a little bit of force-feeding through repetition to kind of get it.
Jeremy Weisz 36:13
Yeah, man mentioned Mark, you had depart from the Ukraine. So what was that experience like?
Mark Patchett 36:26
A tough one. So we built out quite a big team there in Ukraine, who were just amazing, like some of the best people I’ve ever met, and then found the love of my life. And then the whole war thing started. And it was very weird. So we were away in Paris for the weekend for her birthday. Kind of knowing that something is going to go down. And then a few days later, it all started so then we were actual refugees for six, seven months. Yeah, stranded. And it was weird, because I kind of have an arrogance having like an Australian passport, I can go anywhere. But then like the visa clocks run out, and you’ve got to keep moving around. And it was one of the first big years after COVID trouble with people and more confident. So Airbnb prices, just insane. We’re just getting slammed from that point, and then having to move and then trying to stay focused and building agency where you have to pick up and move every three, four weeks. Yeah, quite a weird experience.
Jeremy Weisz 37:32
I imagine your wife’s family was there, even though she was traveling outside the country?
Mark Patchett 37:40
Yeah, well, they were stuck because men can’t leave. If you’re under 50 or so. So like her dad is awesome. They were stuck there. And then it’s very tough for her mom to leave because she’s got cats and her life there. So it’s like a Western perspective is like, oh, why didn’t one of us leave? Like, it’s not that easy to leave. Like, where you’re going to go? How are you going to take stuff? And it’s like a 35-hour train to get out? Yeah, and people not everyone’s got employment. Not everyone speaks English, or other languages. It’s very, very tough.
Jeremy Weisz 38:17
Did you end up going back? I mean, it’s almost like you just kind of leave your stuff stranded there.
Mark Patchett 38:23
Yeah, we did. We waited until it calmed down a little bit, and then went back in. For six weeks or so we had to pack up the apartment and wanted to see family,
Jeremy Weisz 38:35
Were you worried that you would not be able to get out once going back in.
Mark Patchett 38:40
I wasn’t too worried that we couldn’t get out. It was just the level of difficulty to get back out. It was a bit worrying when we’re there. So I did like a lot of nerdy analysis on the different military targets that were close to us. We were unfortunately positioned right between the parliament and then the mayor’s office. So I was like, that’s kind of not good. But then I analyzed all of the different warheads that the Russians were using, and then looked at the blast radius of all of the different types of ones. So is it alright, if they hit any of those? They’re going to be like 300 500 meters away from us. So then our windows will break and the rate that windows would shatter, so the windows are shattered, but then we’ll be safe. Like that was a bit nerve-wracking.
Jeremy Weisz 39:28
It’s not the analysis you want to do. I guess the analysis that you’ve done for e-commerce is paid off. When you’re trying to go into a war zone. You never thought you’d use it before?
Mark Patchett 39:39
Yeah, I built a dashboard. Yeah, adding that up enough confidence.
Jeremy Weisz 39:47
So Mark, most under normal conditions. It’s not necessarily easy to run a business. How are you running the business during these type of conditions where you’re traveling, you’re kind have pushed out of your home. And everything that was going on.
Mark Patchett 40:04
It’s really hard, because is that you still, you still have the same hours in the day. So from that perspective, it’s still there. But then not having like a, just before I left nostril build me like the best office ever. So I have my whiteboard, I had the desk, I had the monitors, and it’s like, unbelievable, then like the amount you can get done when you have the right environment is just mind blowing. So then to have that and you’re on like a tiny table, and you’re just off the laptop, and then the WiFi is dropping out. And then you’ve shifted time zones, again. And then you’ve got to work out where all the local things are, it was really weird. So and you feel like a bit of a failure, because you know what you’re capable of, but it’s kind of like, you got this incline uphill like that with weight strap. And then in the beginning, we didn’t even know if the family was safe. And dad was in really hard situation. So trying to add support from that side by trying to build things. Yes, is a tough one.
Jeremy Weisz 41:11
Yeah. What do you do mentally during those times? Because like you said, it’s not just the business. Now you’re worried about everything else that’s going on that puts things in perspective, too.
Mark Patchett 41:25
Yeah, I think it’s trying to like, reduce things down to the minimum. So I’d shift my typical, like goal setting to just be what are the three things that I need to do today that are just going to keep the business going, just those three things. And then I use the Pomodoro timer is super helpful. So I always use that. Here, it was just essential. Because if I do four 25-minute blocks in a day on the three most important things, it’s often enough to just keep things running. So it’s trying to get hyper hyper focused.
Jeremy Weisz 42:03
I love it. I have one last question mark first, before I ask it, thank you, thanks for sharing the journey. It’s pretty remarkable, you’ve done and I want to point people to growth.shop, and learn more, learn more about what Mark and the team are doing. Check out more episodes of the podcast as well. What’s next, Mark for Growth Shop.
Mark Patchett 42:29
It’s all about the data. It’s all about the numbers. So the focus of this year is well it’s twofold. So it’s extending out our platform so that people can get access to it even if they’re not a managed service clients. So super excited for that. And then the next bit is on the Growth Shop Academy. So it’s taking all the pieces that we’ve learned that companies even if they’re not at a level where it would economically make sense to be managed service, we still want to give people access to all of that information so that they can grow and get to the level where they’d be ready to jump in. So those two pieces are going to keep us pretty busy.
Jeremy Weisz 43:06
So people could do Growth Shop Academy, they could have access to the platform if they want to use it or the managed services where you basically take care of everything for them. Are there any other places online we should point people to or as growth.shop the best place.
Mark Patchett 43:26
That’s a good spot or you going to find me on LinkedIn I’m always happy to talk shop.
Jeremy Weisz 43:30
Is the platform piece can people find that through the same site?
Mark Patchett 43:37
Not yet, that’s still behind the sites for the managed service people.
Jeremy Weisz 43:43
Yeah, so at some point it will show up magically on the site when it’s ready for anything.
Mark Patchett 43:52
Yeah, exactly man.
Jeremy Weisz 43:53
Everyone go check out growth.shop and Mark thank you so much.
Mark Patchett 43:59
Pleasure, man.
