E222: Introducing EcomCrew Roadshow – Free Next-Level Ecommerce Business Coaching

Need help getting your business off the ground?

We’re launching a brand-new segment called EcomCrew Roadshow where we help ecommerce entrepreneurs come up with a plan to take their businesses to the next level.

You don’t go to the coaches, the coaches come to you.

If you have an ecommerce business with an already existing product, but are struggling to get things off the ground, we’re looking for you.

An hour of discussion over Skype is not enough for the kind of coaching we have in mind because we know from experience how long it takes to build an ecommerce business, and we want to go out of our way to help you out as much as we can.

We will come to your city, spend a couple of days with you at your office, go over your business, review things, and come up with a plan to get your business to the next level.

All this absolutely for FREE.

Yup, that’s right. The coaching will be of no cost to you. We’ll be covering all of our expenses, including travel to your city and accomodations.

What’s the catch?

The EcomCrew community has been one of the most fulfilling pursuits of our lives and the EcomCrew Roadshow will serve as a way for us to give back to the community that has allowed us to grow so much in the last couple of years.

The only thing we ask you in exchange is to allow us to come to your facility or office, record the coaching, and let us turn it into a podcast episode or YouTube video.

Sounds good? Here’s how it’s gonna go:

Just sign up here, tell us a little bit about you and your business, and why we should choose you.

We’ll pick the most interesting submissions, and if you’re chosen, we’ll reach out to you via email for the next steps.

Until the next episode, happy selling.

Full Audio Transcript

Intro: Hey guys, we have a special podcast we're doing today. But before we even get into that, I have another special announcement I need to make real quick before getting into our special podcast. So, it's like a double decker of special. But today is the day guys that we're launching 5 Minute Pitch. And if you are new to EcomCrew, you probably haven't heard us talk about this. But if you have been around for a while, you know that we've been working up 5 Minute Pitch now for quite a while. We did all of filming several months ago, and the first three episodes are releasing today.

Right now go over to 5MinutePitch.com/launch to go check it out. And then every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we're going to have a new episode. And this is going to be exclusively on YouTube guys. So, go over to 5MinutePitch.com/launch. It's our launch page for this project. And we also have a massive $6,000 giveaway that we're doing to help promote this thing, get as many people watching videos, liking things, subscribing things and helping us get promoted on YouTube. We're really excited about it. Again, it's 5MinutePitch.com/launch.

Now, if you are new to EcomCrew, this was a collaborative project I did with Steve Chou from My Wife Quit Her Job, Scott Voelker from The Amazing Seller, and Greg Mercer from Jungle Scout. And it's kind of like a Shark Tank-Esque type project where people are coming on the show, pitching, promoting their product, their company, whatever it might be to us, and they get five minutes to do that. And then we evaluate them whether they're going to go through the next round or not. And then there's some deliberations and another round, but it's all explained over at 5MinutePitch.com.

I'm really proud of this project. Not only did Steve, Scott, and Greg do an amazing job, but Liz and the whole entire team behind the scenes, just an amazing job. It looks like something we're batting above our average let’s put it that way. The quality is amazing. All right, one last time with the URL, 5MinutePitch.com/launch. I hope guys love it, and now into today's special episode.

Mike: This is Mike, and welcome to Episode 222 of the EcomCrew Podcast. If you want to get to the show notes for this episode, you can head over to EcomCrew.com/222, also leave us a comment. A little bit different format for this episode because this is kind of a special episode. We're going to be announcing something pretty big here today that I'm excited about, Dave is excited about; we'll see how it goes. This could be one of these things that is a spectacular failure and a crash and burn, or it could be the next big success of EcomCrew. It's hard to know, but I want to get right into it.

And first off, let me talk about how this thing came to be. Dave, Dave and I were just at Ecommerce Fuel Live as you guys know. I was presenting there, Dave and Dave were attending. It's our favorite Conference of the year. And one of the things that Andrew set up this year was an entire half a day to go over Traction. I don't think that this came necessarily for me, but you guys know from this podcast that I'm a big fan of Traction. It's made a huge difference in our business. It's also been discussed quite a bit on the forum; someone spoke at ECF Live the year before about Traction.

So, Andrew made or hired an implementer, an ELS implementer to come to the show and to the conference and start talking about that. Now, for me, when I originally was thinking about like, man, this is going to be a half a day loss for me, because I've already done this from my business, I don't really need to do it. But Dave actually had a really brilliant and on point idea that we should really actually do it for EcomCrew. We need to take EcomCrew the next level; we need to be thinking about it more as a business.

This is no longer just a hobby. Obviously EcomCrew, when we first started, it was this kind of hobby. We're doing a podcast for doing blogging, we're not monetizing, we're giving back. But it has turned into a profit center for us. We've been very open about this, just like everything else in our business, we're quite proud of what we’ve built. And what we've been able to sell people is I think, a lot different than the average Facebook ad things that you see, which is follow our secret sauce and you'll make a million dollars overnight with doing almost no work, e-commerce is super easy, etc, etc. I see these Facebook ads nonstop and they drive me crazy because I think it goes people like Dave and I a really bad name.

We've worked really hard with EcomCrew Premium to over deliver, under promise, over deliver. We've had less than 2% refund rate. And we have a no questions asked refund policy so people certainly could take advantage if they wanted to. We have a really good retention with EcomCrew Premium, which I'm also really proud of because again, we go out of our way to help our members and make sure that we're giving them more value, that it's something when they think about the money that they've given us that they feel like it's one of the best values that they've done in their business, or certainly they don't feel like they've been ripped off or japed or had the wool pulled over their eyes, etc.

So, we've worked hard on that but it is definitely a profit center nonetheless. So, it's something we need to be treating that way at this point. And so, we decided to go through Traction for EcomCrew. And we're actually going to talk about that in future episodes as well, we'll do at least a full length episode of everything that's come out of that. And we're still working on some of it actually, right now, anyway. But one of the big things that came out of the Traction meeting was the whole thing about who do we want to be? What's our three, five, 10 year goal?

And, there's this whole theory of we want to be going to where the puck is going, not where it is, and we want to just build a better product, a better podcast, a better blog, a better premium product, whatever other things we have. And a part of that is going to just be probably producing fewer episodes of the podcast on an ongoing basis. Instead of doing two per week, probably it will be something like one per week. We're not doing that effective immediately. So, don't worry, we're still going to do two per week right now. But eventually, I think we're going to — the idea here is to shift into doing super high quality content, way better than we doing now.

And I appreciate all the comments and the things that people say great things about what we're doing but I think we can do better. I do think we can take things to another level. And that's what I want to announce today. That's what I want to talk about this new program or thing that we're doing whatever you want to call it, that's going to be turned into a podcast, turned into YouTube videos but we're calling it the EcomCrew Roadshow. And what it basically is going to be is the Under the Hood segment, but like on super, super steroids.

The Under the Hood segment is not a whole lot of work on our end, we invest an hour of our time, it produces amazing podcast content. I've loved doing the Under the Hood segments. The people that have been on it have given us awesome feedback, especially people that were on it six to 12 months ago, that are able to now see the things that we've talked about and helped them with come to fruition and it's a great feeling. So, we want to reproduce that on a on a much bigger level. And that's going to be this roadshow where we're actually going to come to you instead of you coming to us or you coming on the podcast.

We're going to physically travel to you and give you a couple of days of our time to go over your business and really take things to the next level. And this is going to be way beyond just a chit chat. But like, let's look at your books, let's look at your P&L, your balance sheet, your cobs, your ad cost, I mean everything from the ground up, your advertising, your landing pages, email marketing, whatever it is that we think that we can help with or you think we can help with, we want to be there to help with those things.

I mean, after doing e-commerce now for five plus years, the whole Malcolm Gladwell outliers effect of  just being the outliers of e-commerce, I feel that way now. I kind of start to feel like Neo in The Matrix when it comes to e-commerce because I've done all this stuff and Dave has done all this stuff. We've been in the trenches doing it for five plus years. And it doesn't seem like anything at all to me because when you're learning this stuff a day at a time, it doesn't seem like you've learned or accomplished all that much. But when you sit down with something like a new EcomCrew Premium member who's just getting into e-commerce, you immediately reflect back to how difficult this business is.

I mean, it really is a lot of moving pieces from you're dealing with a manufacturer over in China, getting things inspected, getting it into a container, getting it over the pond over here to the United States, getting it to clear customs, making sure that you have all that stuff in order, getting your labels done right, making sure that your boxes are the right size so you don't get inbound performance alerts from Amazon, getting your product listed, doing PPC, doing Facebook ads, I mean, like the list of stuff goes on and on. And again, to me at this point, it just seems like second nature because I've been practicing and doing this for a long time. But it's become clear that we have a lot to give back and share with the community. And that's what we want to do here with this EcomCrew Roadshow.

Just like Under the Hood, it's going to be completely free for the people that are selected, it will cost you nothing, there is no tricks or anything up our sleeve. It's a just like Under the Hood. No cost, we won't own any of your business afterwards. You don't need to pay us some secret fee or hotel rooms or anything like that. We're going to pay at our expense to get out to your facility, your office, your colocation space, whatever you work out of, to do this with you.

And the only thing we ask in return, just like Under the Hood is that we can record it and we’ll record it both an audio and video format, because we're going to put this also on YouTube but I think it's going to make a great podcast. We ask that we can come to your facility over a series of a few different days. I think that instead of coming out for an eight hour day, which is really hard to just focus, and also take away from your business that long, I'm thinking it'll be a two or three hours per day over a three or four or five day period, depending how much time each business needs for us to go over your business, start implementing stuff. And then we'll open up the laptops and start implementing stuff right then and there.

And then we want to do a follow up a few months later, and just talk about how the things that we've suggested have completely destroyed your business, I mean, helped your business in the future because I think that that's where the real interesting stuff comes in. So, I think the perfect candidates for something like this is going to be someone who's already started. I think if you're in the stage of I just have an idea, it's probably a little bit too early for this. We need something that's tangible, that there's already existing products and some sales. It doesn't have to be necessarily a lot of sales but if you have sales, that's all the better. But our goal here is to show some dramatic improvements of the business before doing this to afterwards.

So, it's going to be people that are still earlier probably in their journey, and still have a lot of questions left to ask. And we want to help answer those. That's really the whole idea. So, we'll see how that goes. I mean, again, this could be one of these spectacular failures where just complete crash and burn and embarrassing and not one person submits a form and has any interest. Or maybe it's so overwhelming; we don't even know who to go to first. But we're going to start collecting some information and seeing what we get and then we'll go from there.

So, the way to sign up again, EcomCrew.com/roadshow. It's a simple form, your name, your business name, where you're located, what city you're in, just so we know, geographically what we're getting ourselves into, and just a field to tell us about your business, and why you think you should be on the show and what we can help with. And we're excited; we're excited to meet more people in person to do this, to get back to the community. Obviously, I think it's, again, it's a situation where what goes around comes around. So, we definitely think that long term, this is going to be really good for EcomCrew, and building our audience and things of that nature. And in the meantime, we can give back and do some cool things for people. That doesn't hurt us in our business in any way. In fact, it probably just helps.

So, it's one of these rear win-win situations in life, usually someone comes out more ahead. But I think in this case, we can produce equally good value for both of us. Now, because we're putting all this extra effort into it, the people that we select for this are going to need to agree to full disclosure, just like we do on the EcomCrew Podcast, with our own brands and things that we're doing. A lot of this stuff on Under the Hood, we will keep under wraps because just to be respectful of people, and the fact that they're coming on the podcast, but the people that are going to be doing this roadshow thing, we're putting a lot more time and effort into it, we want to produce even better content, not disclosing your brand, or what you pay for stuff or some of the problems you've had, that you're embarrassed about, or whatever is going to make you a bad candidate for it, for the show.

We want people that are just going to be very open and honest about everything with us and have some struggles to share along with some of the things that they want to share that are good. So, you need to be willing to give back to the community as much as we want to get back. So, it's a two way street, and you got to be comfortable with that. Now, if there's a few things here and there that you aren't comfortable sharing, we get it, that's going to be fine. But it just can't be this, I'm not going to share this, I'm not going to share that attitude. We're not going to ask you to post your manufacturer’s name and number and things like that obviously, on the website. There's obviously limits to this, and we're respectful of that.

But in general, we want people that are going to be open minded. And that's the whole idea here folks. And there's some other stuff that Dave and I are working on that we're really excited about that are similar to this that would be discussing and talking about later this year. But right now we wanted to see how many people are interested in this roadshow thing. So again, head over to EcomCrew.com/roadshow, fill out the form and then Abby or Muffins will get back to you and start discussing if you're a good candidate for this or not. And we can talk about scheduling and we’re going to do this later in the year when we're ready for that, but right now we're just looking to collect some info.

So, that's going to do it for today's episode everyone. Again, if you have any comments or want to talk about this, you can go over to EcomCrew.com/222, 222 episodes in the can folks. Don't forget as always to go over to EcomCrew.com/free as well if you're just getting starting your ecommerce journey or intermediary, I'd say somewhere in that range or just getting started, intermediate. EcomCrew.com/free is a great resource of a bunch of mini courses that Dave and I put together that are 100% free of charge. Just like we're doing with this roadshow thing, those courses are free and we teach this stuff all the time on EcomCrew.

I mean, obviously, again, by having a free course, we develop a relationship with people, and if and when they're ready and we have EcomCrew Premium open, which we only do now a few times a year, those people when they're ready, they'll sign up. And we know that in the meantime, we develop a relationship with people. This is the exact thing that we just went over in our leads to sales presentation that we did at Ecommerce Fuel, and we just did it also for our private community. Building a relationship with people, having their email address, having them pixelled, having them on ManyChat and giving them value first can really change the dynamic of your business.

I mean, it's created a multimillion dollar business for us with ColorIt by doing this, and it's something that we also encourage you to be thinking about for your own e-commerce businesses. And we're also applying a similar methodology as we talked about quite a bit to EcomCrew. And this is another one of these extensions of that. And instead of constantly thinking about what am I going to get out of this exact thing or what is this person going to do for me right now? It's more the way that I also choose to live life and the same thing with Dave which is why we get along so well and the other Dave; you don't have to necessarily always worry about those things.

What goes around does come around, and sometimes it doesn't seem fair because sometimes bad crap comes back around too. We've definitely dealt with that in business as well. But for the most part, I definitely can see the rewards of that. And that's the whole idea here, guys. So again, EcomCrew.com/roadshow, I can't wait to see all the submissions, and until the next episode, happy selling and we'll talk to you then.