Consulting 8 & 9 figure DTC brands I Prev. VP Growth & Marketing | PE Backed Brands I Key Marketing Exec in 2x Successful DTC Ecom Private Equity Exits

Joined June 2013
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This is one of my favorite posts I've written on being a part of Marketing Leadership in DTC brands:
What it looks like to be a great Executive in DTC brands is not talked about enough. I've been an Executive in 2x different Private Equity exits and in successful DTC Turnarounds: As an Executive your role can be massive. You need to be able to inspire your team, agencies, partners, and affiliates. You need to be able to work with leadership to set the yearly forecast for your business unit (and each channel) and own it. I've found it helpful to have understanding of asymmetric bets. I've found it helpful to constantly be looking for opportunities where you can have small but compounding advantages: slight edges. You need to be open, interested, excited, while also being able to discern what opportunities are going to be worth putting resources into. At times your role is going to be to protect your team's time. Other times your role is going to be to create plans that are so ambitious they will tell you it's not possible. You are going to hear a ton of ideas and suggestions from the CEO, ownership, investors, board members, and agencies or ad platforms. Your role is to have enough experience, data, intuition, and maintain such a deep network of other brand executives and media buyers you keep up with that you are able to make great choices. While you are able to advocate what you see as the most optimal direction you also need to be open to sometimes the company may choose another direction to go in. Your role is to be endlessly learning and on the look out for upcoming changes with Meta, Google, SaaS, regulation, and the entire DTC space. At times your role will be to represent your area of the business to bankers, potential investors, or buyers. While you may know your business deeper than anyone… you need to understand how to focus on what matters. You need to know how to make the complex simple. These Executive roles can be incredibly dynamic, highly cross-functional, and require exceptional people skills. My belief is these roles can be so much larger than any job description gives them credit for. They can take an exceptional balance of skills.
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Some of my favorite content the last two weeks 🧵
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We are living in an extremely exciting moment in ecommerce where roles like Head of Growth or Head of Paid or CMO have extraordinary new AI tools to make them more efficient I think continuously learning is one of the best ways there is to be able to know what are some of the questions you want to ask these extraordinary tools to help you build and work on
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On the Paid Media side previously some roles might depend on a Full-Time Director of Marketing Data Analytics and now suddenly if you know what to prompt and how to iterate well with Claude and other tools you can do so much more near instantly
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Stellar podcast with @codyplof @andrewfoxwell @will_sartorius Excited about this new DTC AI pod! I find myself spending a lot of time outside of day-to-day work playing with, I mean working with, lol, AI tools I'm continually so amazed by how capable these tools are. A lot of the work in the past I would need a Director of Data Analytics to work on can suddenly be done instantly with Claude: it is wild. youtube.com/watch?v=QGt41xKi…
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Podcast was inspired by this post by @Seanfrank x.com/Seanfrank/status/20453…

Hardest Ecom jobs to hire for, in order: 1- head of product. Surprise for number one. Product is everything. Without product, you can’t build the offer. You don’t have ads. You don’t have angles. We all are in business with SOMETHING. But the ability to create something new, that people want, over and over- that’s the hardest thing in consumer. 2- head of growth. Everyone asks me for this. The product hire is a unicorn. You either have it or you don’t. The head of growth is more of a financial problem. The best heads of growth either started brands (my Connor) or start agencies. You can’t peel my Connor away because 1- we are best friends. But 2- he has 8 figures in ridge equity. Would you give him 35% of your already established 8 figure brand? No. So you are forced to hire someone worse for a lot of money. You need to be paying up $250k minimum, with remote flexibility. That’s just the market for a real rain maker. 3- head of Amazon. Same as head of growth. Amazon is a million little jobs. And you need to own them all. It’s also a tribal knowledge industry. You don’t know all the tips and tricks unless you lived it. Everything’s hush hush. And then it has the same problem as head of growth. If you are truly elite- you start an agency. 4- creative strategist. Creative is the new targeting. You need thousands of ads a year. Who is going to make sure they are good? This is getting easier, but it is just such a new job that the pool is small. Still a 100k job. 5- head of influencer. Very easy to suck at this job. You get to build these relationships and give money to famous people. It’s just very easy to get soft. You want someone connected, but not too much. Former creator is the best move.
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I personally think for most brands a great Head of Growth role can be an extraordinary difficult hire. I also think the compensation is much much higher to get a great Head of Growth than many brands realize.
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Stellar podcast with @IstvanicMarin @andrewfoxwell @brad_ploch. For years I loved using 7DC1DV ABO testing then duplicating to run also on 1DC low-bid inflated budget cost-cap. Scaling the original & CC build alongside each other. Really like using multiple attribution setting builds for scaling. Super actionable pod! youtube.com/watch?v=lpHVJAHa…
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Because of incredible AI tools I’m doing some of the best work of my life
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Great take. Retail Media Networks can require a lot more work to explore and try to estimate their effectiveness and my assumption is a lot of brands do not hold the channels the same standards as their other channels. In other words they do not give the care it takes to investigate on their own the effectiveness of their spending.
I’m starting to wonder if maybe we’re a little unfair to Google wrt branded search. Amazon search ads and RMNs function exactly the same way yet they don’t provide basic geo capabilities to let you run holdout tests. I am calling on brands to hold back your spend until they let you properly test it!
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Stellar opportunity for an agency to create a Tier 1 case study that will drive you lots of inbound leads and also make you money while doing it! If you are a CRO or Funnel pro check this out.
Well @jforjacob offered $15k, so I’ll offer double. $30k to whoever can beat our top compression sock funnel for HollowSocks.com. If your page can hit 100k sessions at a higher Northbeam 1DCROAS, the money is yours. Could be as simple as a lander or pdp update. Will post results here. Contact @MaxorrLloyd our CMO to enter. CRO agencies if you want leads that will take you to 8 figs…this is your opportunity. *Grifters can fuck off, we’re only running quality funnels not black hat bs.
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My mission in life is to become an extraordinary digital marketer and leader. For the last 6 years, by my own choice, I've worked 60 hours a week driven by my incredible passion for digital marketing and growing great brands. Many of you do not know me offline but anyone who knows me would tell you I'm one of the most passionate people they have ever worked with. I’m posting more here because I want to share my incredible passion with others. I also want to share appreciation for the people whose content helps me learn and grow. One of my hopes with posting online overtime is it will help allow me to continue to connect with and learn from other people who are just as excited and interested in all things direct-to-consumer and marketing as I am.
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