In last week's members only issue, I talked about the many reasons why two brands can sell similar product, but one will scale to nine figures and the other will go out of business.
Brand positioning sets your ceiling, but a lack of organizational discipline or an inability to prioritize can prevent your brand from reaching its full potential.
This week, I’m going to share a framework for making better decisions re: resource allocation, along with some examples.
Before we get into it, I want to thank this week's sponsor: Proppel. Proppel helps your marketing and operations team source exceptional remote talent from LATAM, so you can grow faster and reduce costs up to 80%.
If you submit a hiring request to Proppel by May 13th, you'll receive 10% off the placement fee. Click here to get started.
Everything Is Not An Emergency
When everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency. Without operational discipline and ruthless prioritization, growth can disappear overnight.
Sometimes, it’s less dramatic–the business grows and contracts by 3-5%, year after year, going nowhere.
I'm often brought on to help brands struggling with these issues. The first thing I do is dig into the numbers and understand the brand's 1-3 most important priorities. Then, I help the brand optimize those things while putting everything else on the back burner.
This is a framework I use to determine how a brand should focus its time, energy and hiring resources:
Bucket 1: Business Critical, Part Of Our Competitive Advantage
For most brands reading this, this bucket is going to include design, merchandising and/or your main new customer acquisition channel. That’s it.
This bucket doesn’t cover every task or role associated with these functions, just the roles and activities that contribute to your advantage. For example, a creative strategist would be included here but the person who uploads your ads to Meta would not be.
You want to hire for these roles in-house when possible and offer a salary and benefits package that attracts top talent. If you’re doing <$10M in sales, the founding team should be owning and executing these roles.
Bucket 2: Business Critical, NOT Part Of Our Competitive Advantage
This is also known as “grunt work”–uploading products to Shopify. Coding marketing emails. Answering customer support tickets. And, yes, uploading ads to Ads Manager.
Excelling here won’t help you “win”, but messing up can derail your business. I would put financial management and ops in this bucket. Amazon built a moat around operational excellence, but they’re a multi-brand retailer who started out selling books, not fashion.
Filing these roles is tricky, because you want to find people who will meet the “table stakes” definition of a good employee, but overpaying won’t contribute to your competitive advantage.
Being the most efficient at uploading Meta ads won’t help you beat out a competitor who is the best at new product development or creative strategy.
Bucket 3: NOT Business Critical, Part Of Our Competitive Advantage
These are “moonshots” or new programs that could contribute to your competitive advantage, but you need to go from zero to one successfully before that can happen.
Examples: an apparel brand launching a footwear collection, a brand who scaled with Meta ads launching an affiliate program.
For most orgs, you do not want internal employees piloting Bucket 3 initiatives, because they don’t have the knowledge/experience to set the program up for success.
Instead, you’re better off hiring an expert on a fractional basis to get the program up and running, then allocating Bucket 1 and Bucket 2 roles to oversee it.
Bucket 4: NOT Business Critical, NOT Part Of Our Competitive Advantage
This work should not exist, because it provides no benefit to you. Root it out of existing employees’ job descriptions and your own day-to-day.
Here are some examples of Bucket 4 workflows:
- The creation of reports that never get actioned on
- Complicated operational processes designed by junior employees (streamline ‘em)
- Most exploratory calls with vendors, and many recurring vendor standups
- Most decks when you’re a sub-$50M business. Do a Loom or a one-sheet instead.
- Any marketing initiatives that are <10% of your total budget. Scale or cut.
The Lean Growth Unlock: Fractional Bucket 1 + Offshore Bucket 2
One of the most common reasons that small brands reach out to me for advice? They need someone to help scale Meta ads profitably, but they have a limited budget.
If your brand is sub-$10M/year in revenue, you are still proving out product-market fit. And if you’re sub-$1M/year, your brand is pre-PMF. A lot of the best agencies and freelance ad buyers won’t work with clients like this, because too many success factors are outside their control.
For brands in this situation, I recommend hiring a fractional expert to cover Bucket 1 (Meta GTM strategy for your specific situation), and then hiring an offshore contractor to cover Bucket 2 (uploading and launching ads, reporting) when you pick up momentum.
Bucket 1 can be a subject matter expert that provides individual or group coaching (like Mason), a cohort course (like Barry’s), or async video courses + a media buyers’ group (like Foxwell Founders).
For Bucket 2, the smart move is hiring offshore resources. Real talk: this has been the competitive advantage of the brands I've worked with that are going from zero to eight figures in less than three years, profitably.
In my experience, Latin America is the "sweet spot" for hiring overseas eCom talent. The language and culture barriers are lower, the time zones are similar to the US, and the work product is higher quality.
Proppel can help you define the perfect fit for your brand's needs, then find the right candidate from their roster of talented graphic designers, video editors, email marketers, marketing assistants and more.
If you submit a hiring request to Proppel by May 13th, you'll receive 10% off the placement fee. Click here to get started.
Meta ads isn’t the only part of your business where you can leverage this strategy. Here are some other examples:
- Hiring a fractional CMO like Abir to set up the foundations of your cash flow modeling and budget, then using a software like Iris to manage the ongoing reporting and an offshore team member to handle tasks that can’t be automated.
- Hiring a fractional CMO to define your positioning and messaging, then working with an offshore team member on time-intensive marketing tasks like influencer gifting, social media content development, etc.
- Hiring a freelance creative strategist to define your ad strategy as it relates to your product assortment and write briefs, then hire an offshore graphic designer and/or video editor.
- Hiring an email and retention expert to define your email strategy, build an AI copywriting system, then working with an offshore resource to code and schedule the emails.
If you're wondering how some brands seem to be going from $5M in sales to $30M seemingly overnight, this is a big reason why. If you're ready to put this framework into action, click here to get started with Proppel.