Ecommerce Evolution & the Power of a Personal Brand with Trevor Crump

Transcript:

Trevor Crump: 0:00

Unless you're just naturally a storyteller and you're very creative. Go quantity and just figure it out and then start to figure out the quality side of things. So find your format, find your format, find your format.

Jared Ward: 0:11

Don't worry too much about vanity. Metrics like number of views and impressions and engagement's always good to look at, but like don't hyper focus on it because I'm a content creator now. Like I have to be this to accomplish what luminous needs to accomplish. That was a change in identity. You start out as a shitty content creator, Sure sure this is just how it goes and I think when I started I was just seeing like 500 impressions, 500, 1000. They're associating you with the brand or you with the topic.

Jared Ward: 0:43

It's happening even with 10 likes in three comments, like it doesn't matter. All right guys. Welcome to Ops Unfiltered. I'm your host, jared, founder CEO of Luminous. This is Trevor Crump. Yes, sir, trevor, he's a local Utah entrepreneur. You have a deep background in a lot of things. I know you're a podcast host. You're one of the founders of Bestie.

Trevor Crump: 1:09

I know you're involved in a lot of different e-commerce.

Jared Ward: 1:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So I'll let you introduce some of the things that you're part of right now.

Trevor Crump: 1:15

What are the?

Jared Ward: 1:16

cool things you're up to. Yeah, I mean, so I've been.

Trevor Crump: 1:21

I've been a big fan of the. I've been in the e-commerce space since 2016. So going on just almost eight years now, I was one of the original founders, or original partners, of a local brand here called Ashergolf, which is I was supposed to demo them right after this. Oh serious, Nice.

Jared Ward: 1:48

Joe yeah, yeah, joe Jack, yeah, joe Jack, joe Jack yeah.

Trevor Crump: 1:52

Yeah, so one of the original people who launched Ashergolf back in. We started working on it in 2016, launched it in 2017, stepped away from Asher in 20, like 19, mid 2019.

Jared Ward: 2:07

And you're marketing over there, right.

Trevor Crump: 2:08

Yeah, yeah, so did, yeah, we just launched the entire.

Jared Ward: 2:12

I mean we did everything right.

Trevor Crump: 2:13

It was just two of us and I think Joe came on probably like right as I was exiting kind of the day to day full time stuff, so and then moved quickly from there over to started consulting quite a bit for Econ Browns. And then what?

Jared Ward: 2:31

type of consulting did you do for them?

Trevor Crump: 2:34

So it was more so what I had done for Asher. So people had seen Asher, like Asher kind of took off like a really good trajectory in year one and then year two even better. I mean, every year for them has been high growth and so that got a good amount of traction for people understanding like, oh, he's a part of this. I'm trying to do this, can you help me? And then one of the brands that we were consulting for or going to consult for was a brand here locally called Fondesign.

Jared Ward: 3:05

Okay, I've heard of them.

Trevor Crump: 3:07

Yep, and kind of came down to it where they said, hey, we'd rather just have you be our CMO, like, yes, we'd love you to consult, but we need you here. Like, we need you here to more full-time capacity. So was able to negotiate a really cool deal where I could continue to consult, but I was their full-time CMO and so worked with Fondesign from their CMO perspective and consulted on the side until about 2020, 2021. And it came down to it where it's like I either have to put all my time and attention into consulting or I gotta put all my time and attention in here, like the consulting is becoming too much where I'm not able to be full-time over here, and so ended up making the transition to full-time consulting. And at that time we introduced and we were, yeah, like I said, we were only consulting for e-commerce we decided to introduce an agency arm to consulting. So originally we were just like. We literally were just consulting.

Trevor Crump: 4:08

And then we decided to start executing for people as well. So we built out a full-fledged paid-media like marketing agency and creative agency, meaning that we would run everybody's ads and design all of the ads. So that's everything we did. So anything in the performance world for Econ. So we built that up. And what's that agency called? It's called Bestie Media. So we still have that today. We've co-sponsored a couple of events together.

Jared Ward: 4:35

Yeah, yes, Bestie and Bestie are our own.

Trevor Crump: 4:37

Yeah, yeah absolutely yeah, so ran that I still own that and that's awesome Grew really, really quickly. And then last year we started one of the things that we recognized when I was at Asher, when I was at Fondesign, when we consulted with these big brands, small brands and big brands, right so brands that were in six-figure mode for brands that were in nine-figure mode every single one of them had a similar problem, which was they don't talk to their customers. And my background before I got an Econ was tech and all we did was talk to our customers. We were constantly surveying focus groups, we were constantly talking to the customer, and it always bamboozled me that any time when I was a CMO, I would try to get some funding or some budget to put towards surveying or just talking to our audience. It was always on the back burner.

Trevor Crump: 5:40

And so we decided to build a tool for e-commerce businesses that e-com shops could easily, just at the click of a button, start to communicate with their customers outside of. That's your Bestie software, which is a separate thing, exactly. Yep, yeah, a little confusing. We thought at the moment, let's have this Bestie umbrella, what Bestie media, what Bestie software? And now sometimes it gets a little confusing. But yeah, bestie, which we actually rebranded it last month to Bestie AI, because we just implemented a really cool AI component to what Bestie does. But yeah, Bestie essentially is a modern day qualitative data analysis platform for any e-commerce business. It allows you to talk directly to your customers to understand how they heard about you, what's bringing them to the website, how long they've known about you, what motivates them to purchase from you versus somebody else, and we collect that data and give people brand's actionable insights to know how to grow their business.

Jared Ward: 6:40

Okay, that's really cool. So in Bestie is specifically for e-commerce.

Trevor Crump: 6:43

Specifically for e-commerce.

Jared Ward: 6:44

Yep, okay cool. How long have you been doing that for the software?

Trevor Crump: 6:49

So, yeah, great question. We launched it in early this year, so we started working on it earlier 2022, launched it in 2023 and had, like, took a pivot in April where we just recognized so we'd built the tool. We were growing. It was scaling 30% month over month, which is like in the tech space, like your dream, right you know it was awesome, now we were small, growing, but still you're growing 30% month over month.

Trevor Crump: 7:19

And so we're like, hey, we're onto something, but we started to recognize that people weren't in our tool as much as they should have been in our tool. They weren't using it Right. So they would implement it, they'd start it and all this data was collecting, but nobody was doing anything with this data.

Trevor Crump: 7:34

I shouldn't say no one was doing anything with the data, but they weren't in the tool as frequently creating surveys, new surveys, taking the data, learning from it, and so we thought, okay, this is interesting because we can acquire customers, but what happens when people aren't using a tool?

Jared Ward: 7:52

eventually, what is a power user of Bestie supposed to do Like? Give me a scenario how he uses it.

Trevor Crump: 7:58

Yeah, so well. So we tried our rebrand and what we've retooled Bestie is that it doesn't matter if you have a power user or not. So previously, like, a power user would be somebody who would be in that tool every single day, looking at week over week comparison to survey results based on changes made to their business. Hey, we just increased Facebook spending 20%. Did I see an increase in people saying that they heard about us on Facebook or came from Facebook by that much? Do I start comparing those things to see if that's the right step? Is that matching? Because obviously when you start increasing spending, you're looking at revenue first. And so cool, awesome, I see the revenue Do. Can I start making some? You know? Sorry, can I start creating some hypothesis?

Trevor Crump: 8:50

I saw hypotheses to see if that is coming from the spend that I'm increasing over here. Is that spend increasing the amount of search I'm now getting on Google? How can I see that through Bestie? Then can I recreate new surveys that can ask different questions to get deeper insights? That's what a power user would do, right? Somebody who's in it constantly. And that's what we kind of thought, that you know the first kind of go at it. We thought that a lot of people would just do that naturally, like hey, because we're marketers, we have our own businesses, we dive deep into stuff.

Jared Ward: 9:26

We're assuming that other people would be doing that. So it's sort of like, because e-commerce companies, attribution nowadays is such a difficult thing, so this Bestie sort of help you. Say, I'm dumping a lot of money into this YouTube advertisement and it's like I'm seeing lift in other places, bestie can sort of help you through surveying. Okay, our brand awareness has increased through this YouTube advertisement. So there's some correlation there.

Trevor Crump: 9:51

Yeah. So attribution hot topic right now. You've got attribution in a couple different ways. One you've got what's called third party attribution, which tracks your pixels. Right, it's tracking everything that's happening online. You've got tools like North Beam or a triple well, rocker Box. I mean there's several of these third party attribution platforms out there that claim that they can track when somebody clicks on something a month ago and then purchases, that they can kind of get the full history. Okay, just like out of pure transparency. There are some of these tools that work really, really well, but there's also a lot of things that can be missed, right, because sometimes that pixel data can only last for so long with these privacy updates, right? So that's third party.

Trevor Crump: 10:41

What we do is called first party or zero party, which is it's taking this qualitative or anecdotal kind of response from the first party, which is the customer.

Trevor Crump: 10:52

So the third party is the business, is the North Beam who's telling you this is where your customers came from, whereas zero party or first party is you as a customer saying oh, I heard about these guys from YouTube. Oh, I came, what brought me to the website was a text or an email, or I searched you, or I just remembered you or I saw somebody wearing your product at a grocery store, or whatever. It might be right. How do you track friend or family member in third party data attribution? You can't right, and so that's why surveying is super, super important, because if you are using a third party attribution software, you can layer it on that, you can look at that data and then also look at your zero party data. Or you can just use your zero party data to say, hey, this is where customers are remembering us. Whether it's right or not, it was the most impactful channel or ad or creative or whatever that impacted their memory. So that's a very important thing for us to understand.

Jared Ward: 11:53

That's interesting. I selfishly have a question for you. Yeah, as you've, because you've helped scale marketing for e-commerce companies. How has it been marketing bestie? Because that B2B marketing it's so different. I'm curious what lessons that you've learned from the e-commerce marketing world and consulting that have applied and which ones didn't.

Trevor Crump: 12:18

Yeah, I mean in a lot of e-commerce, like, as long as you've got like a good brand and a good product, you oftentimes can throw spend and you win. You can throw spend at Meta, you can throw spend at Google and you're going to win. Now winning is subjective meaning what is your return on ad spend? Is it higher, is lower or whatever, but you can win. Whereas in a software space there is so much competition in software there's so many people who are doing similar things. Not only that, but I have recognized, as an e-commerce owner myself and just working with e-commerce brands, is that 90% of the tools out there actually don't help people. I'm sure you've probably recognized that too. I can't tell you how many apps I've downloaded in Shopify that told me I was going to solve this problem, or how many 30-day, 14-day, seven-day free trials I've started that I've never actually pulled the trigger on anywhere past those trials Because it's like, yep, it was too good to be true. So there is, in the e-commerce space, a lot of stigmatism towards software that can help you. There are a handful of things that every brand knows they need. I need a Shopify, I need a website hosting platform, I need an email platform. I need an SMS platform, I need an analytics platform, and it's like OK, Shopify, you got Clavio, you got Google Analytics. It's like those things right there you know are helpful things that have been tried and sure they're going to be around forever. Now you're getting tons of people who are competing with the Clavios and all that kind of stuff, but there's like five or six tools that every brand can use, and then everything else outside of that. It's like you have some subscription apps, and obviously those are helpful. You got some bundling apps, and those are helpful. You got what you guys do. That's helpful. But there's an argument that people can even make around you guys as to why. It's like oh, I think I can do this on my own and you know what I mean, and so I'm answering your question by setting the stage.

Trevor Crump: 14:19

It's been very challenging because a lot of the tactics are different, what we're trying to do differently with Bestie well, hold up. Let me tell you some of the things that are working for us. I'm recognizing that in-person events and just being present is what helps the most. So, like, the two things that help us is, I have a personal brand, and that helps a ton because I can just constantly talk about it. People feel like they have gotten to know me and so it's like, okay, I trust this guy. If Trevor's saying that I need this, I'm at least gonna trial it out and see if it works. And then we have to let Bestie hopefully do its thing for them and prove its value for them to say, okay, 14-day trials over, I'm gonna start spending money with these guys, right? So you know, creating content, building a personal brand has been amazing. That actually works really well for e-commerce brands too. So like that is one-in-one there. But then event stuff is amazing, not necessarily sponsoring event.

Jared Ward: 15:16

I wanna sit on that for a little bit, because personal brand is something that I'm also passionate about. I mean, it's why I do a podcast, it's why I post across all platforms. What advice would you give to people about developing your own personal brand for B2B marketing, Like as somebody who owns a surveying company? What impact do you think your personal brand makes? Could you actually put some numbers behind the impact that your personal brand has made? You know?

Trevor Crump: 15:45

yeah, yeah, I mean I should probably sit down and be a little bit better to say, hey, 20% or 40% of our acquisition comes from this personal brand. I've yet to do that, but I would probably say it's between 20 and 35%. That's so cool. On our agency side, it's 80%, oh goodness. 80% of our business comes from the personal brand and then the other 20% comes from referrals from the people that work with us. Right?

Jared Ward: 16:16

Dude, it's one of the biggest. If you're a B2B SaaS founder, or maybe you're just an agency owner, your personal brand is your biggest asset. I've had some more experiences to you where I think events and just being present, like being around, and then pairing that with your personal brand, is so powerful. Now for us, we're more of an enterprise sale, so sometimes well depends.

Trevor Crump: 16:43

Depends on the size of the company, but typically we have long sales cycles.

Jared Ward: 16:47

What I've noticed is just being around and then having content that people can interact with. It decreases the sales cycle and also it has had a crazy impact at Luminous Totally.

Trevor Crump: 17:01

I can imagine when people can.

Jared Ward: 17:02

They just they're already considering us. They might have seen us through an advertisement, but the fact that there's content on TikTok, there's a podcast, there's so many different things that they can get value from it doesn't matter if you're getting 50 views or 1,000 views or 100,000. Totally, people see that you're about it and, like you said, they trust you a little bit more For sure I mean listen.

Trevor Crump: 17:27

So I told you I got my start in software. So I was over demand generation at a company locally here in Utah called Workfront and our sales cycle was like six to eight months because people were spending $100,000. Back then project management tools costed tons of money. Now they're a dime a dozen right, and so our sales cycles were massive. And the way you would break those sales cycles down it was like let's create all these ebooks, let's create these white papers, let's create these data sheets, let's do these webinars.

Trevor Crump: 17:58

One pagers, yeah, these one pagers Exactly, and it was like we would create these email flows and drip campaigns and that was how we did it right. Every now and then you get a sales rep who'd call and follow up and do some things there, but for the most part, everything was through email communication back in like 20, what was that? 2013, 2014 with me. And so what's cool about the personal brand is you may do some advertising for your brand and you might spark somebody's attention, but what a personal brand does and even a brand from your actual company too, and the more people within your company that can create personal brands, it creates such a flywheel effect.

Trevor Crump: 18:43

Oh yeah, that's what we're doing Is super, super powerful, because now what happens is people get on and the algorithms are doing such a good job at showing you what you're interested in or what your needs are right. So for me, right like on social media, I get tons of marketing stuff because I'm just always I get tons of founder stuff. I'm getting all that kind of stuff just naturally, because that's what I'm spending more time on, that's what I'm liking, that's what I'm commenting, and the personal brand can take you through that journey the same way emails were. But now but nobody's opening their emails anymore.

Trevor Crump: 19:20

Right, I've got 20,000 unopened emails. It's the new drip campaign.

Jared Ward: 19:23

It's instead of dude. This is. I had this. We had this discussion with one of our sales reps too, because he keeps having prospects ask him for like why don't you guys have a one-pager? Totally, we've content go check out our. Youtube video, like we have a YouTube video, though probably explain this way better than one-pager will Totally. It's so true. Yeah, that's a hot. Take your personal brand and the content around your personal brand. It's the new drip campaign.

Trevor Crump: 19:48

It really is man and fortunately and it's the same thing for Econ brands too Like it's not just for us B2B, like everybody should be doing. That I was out, I was golfing last week with a nine figure CMO for a nine figure apparel brand CMO, and he just turned to me and he said like what do I need to work on? Like, what should we be doing? And they're crushing it. I thought it was interesting that he even asked me for advice in the first place and I just said I was sitting there and I'm like what could I don't even know what to tell this brand Scratching your brand? Yeah, I'm just like you know.

Trevor Crump: 20:25

And then I thought to myself like I never see your content. Like you need organic content. Like whether it's a personal brand or you just figure somebody out how to do it in the company. Like you guys need organic content, driving views, because if you can, it's so hard to win organically. If you can find a way to do that, then your paid game is 10, you 10x your paid game. You know it's like.

Jared Ward: 20:50

Because people want to buy from people. People buy from people, not machines. Totally, that's in our space. It's really interesting because we compete against a bunch of inventory tools and ERPs like Netsuite and Skiubana and like all these. All they do is they speak robots. It's best IMS on the market best OMS. Look at Jeanie. Jeanie is talking about how to scan at a warehouse. That's we're giving luminous. We're making warehouse management, inventory management. We're making it cool, like we're putting some personality on it.

Trevor Crump: 21:24

Well, that's what I was about to say, like when you asked that original question. Like we actually stepped back when we launched Bestie and we said we're gonna launch Bestie and we are gonna treat Bestie actually the same way e-commerce brands treat their products. So we're gonna turn Bestie, which is a SaaS tool, into a brand, like a brand that people want to be associated with, because everyone can copy what we do. Right, like we weren't the first people in the market. Now, we haven't copied our competition, but we definitely weren't the first people in the market. But since then we've seen other people copying a lot of the stuff that we do. So it's like at that point, it's like how do I build a brand? How do I get people to like me? We spent tons of money. It's gonna sound stupid. We spent tons of money on our logos and our design.

Jared Ward: 22:12

I don't think that sounds stupid.

Trevor Crump: 22:14

But most people in the SaaS world would say it would be In Econ, they wouldn't, they're not gonna go. Yeah, that makes sense. A brand is so important. But most people in the SaaS world are like it's product market fit, product market, product market fit, which is true, right, but that's just table steak now. It's like whatever. Like, of course your product has to fit.

Trevor Crump: 22:32

Or else nobody's gonna do it. But when everyone else starts copying you, who's gonna like? Am I gonna be more interested in the cool brand and the guy that I follow on social media who's talking about everyday stuff that might not have anything to do with the tool in and of itself, but is also giving me such valuable information. It's like 10 times out of 10. That's why personal events work really really well, because it's like, okay, do I wanna go with Netsuite or do I wanna go with Luminous? Because I met you and you're so much cooler and you're nicer and if the prices are the same or even if you're a little bit more expensive, like I can go straight to you. I know who you are, you're gonna respond, you know, and so like to me. I think SaaS companies could take a page out of Ecom Brand's marketing book.

Jared Ward: 23:22

And that's why we're doing the creatively add to it Like it's. I think I'm going all in on personal brand and the brand of Luminous and being different, like putting a face behind it. Humor, like let's bring some levity back into SaaS.

Trevor Crump: 23:37

Totally yeah.

Jared Ward: 23:38

So, yeah, we'll see how that goes. I have a question why do you think people because I've said the same thing to a lot of people Personal brand is super important and it has a massive impact to your sales and to your bottom line. Blah, blah, blah. It's hard to attribute, but it does happen. A lot of people quit really fast, like they'll do three posts on LinkedIn and it gets bad engagement or what they think is bad engagement, bad impression, and they just stop. What advice would you have to them about getting through those beginning phases where you have like three likes and one comment?

Trevor Crump: 24:15

Yeah, you know some of the best advice. Well, so one. I think this happens for a couple reasons. Right now, there are just a lot more business owners in general who are millennials, right, and that's not because Gen Z isn't smart enough to be business owners. That's just because millennials are older and we've had more experience to be able to launch businesses. You have plenty of people in the Gen Z space who are crushing it, who are business owners, but I think right now, what's happening is millennials.

Trevor Crump: 24:48

We didn't grow up with cameras in our face. In fact, that was a huge faux pas, right, like if I were to ever take a selfie or record myself, I would be so embarrassed to do that and everyone would have teased me if they ever saw me doing anything like that. So I think that us millennials, from a social media perspective, we grew up in the Instagram boom space, where it was really easy to grow social media back in like 2017, 2018. That was very, very easy, and so when we don't see immediate success on stuff like doing stuff that worked five years ago, we quit, right, and then. So there's that piece.

Trevor Crump: 25:32

And then the second piece is it's very challenging for us to get in front of cameras and it's very challenging for us to document, whereas, like someone in the Gen Z generation, like they grew up in high school with everybody filming everything and phones in front of their faces and the way they chat is through. The way they chatted was through Snapchat and it was through, like taking a selfie and then writing like hey, what are you up to? That's how they chat. I see, like my nieces and my cousins who are that age, that's how they communicate with their friends, and I'm like I never would have done that. I would have been mortified to send a picture of myself to a girl and been like what's up, girl Versus? Like hey, just texting them, what are you doing?

Jared Ward: 26:16

And we're better at that than calling like, hey, what's up?

Trevor Crump: 26:21

So I think that older generation have preconceived notions of what success is number one and it's just a little bit more challenging for us to understand the type of content that wins. So we had this guy on our podcast. His name was Ben Zaver and he owns a protein company called Seek Supply S-E-E-Q, and he blew up on TikTok, his personal brand, and scaled his business to seven figures in less than a year, just crushed it and they're scaling to the moon. And we had him on our podcast and I asked him a similar question I can't remember exactly what I worded, but it was very similar and he said what you have to do is you've got to find your format. So he's like no one's format works the same, like everybody's a little bit different. And he said so what I did in my beginning stages is I just posted so much I went quantity over quality and when something worked, I noted that down, analyzed why I felt like that video worked and that's where I doubled down. So you kind of cast a wide net and let's say you're getting two or 300 views or 25 likes or whatever. But then one blows up and you get a thousand likes or 100,000 views and he's like okay, cool, let me figure out what's happening here and see how repeatable this is, see if I can categorize this. And he said that's what he did. And he figured out three or four formats that worked for him and then he just doubled down and the only videos he ever created were videos that fell into those three or four categories and scaled his business to the moon. That's really cool.

Trevor Crump: 28:03

So I think anybody who's getting started it's like one don't expect immediate success. Like it's like you wouldn't go to the gym for the first time and have a six pack the next day or even 30 days later, right? So give it time, start with, unless you're just naturally a storyteller and you're very creative, like I was not that way, so I very much went the quantity route versus the quality. There are some people who can figure it out a little quicker by going the quality route. If that's if you just are good at content creation, if you are really good at storytelling, if that's something you're used to, then I would recommend going that way. But if you don't go quantity and just figure it out and then start to figure out the quality side of things, so find your format, find your format find your format.

Jared Ward: 28:52

That's great advice. I think one thing that I would add, too, is don't worry too much about vanity metrics like number of views and impressions and I think engagement's always good to look at but like don't hyper focus on it, because you'd be surprised. I remember I made a decision about probably March of this year that I'm a content creator now. Like I have to be this to accomplish what luminous needs to accomplish. So that was a change in identity.

Jared Ward: 29:29

You start out as a shitty content creator, Sure sure this is just how it goes and I think when I started I was just seeing like 500 impressions, 500, 1,200. I was posting on YouTube and like one would get 300 views and the next one would get 7 and then 10 and 6. What I noticed was when I started to show up to Utah events after I was doing my own founder content. It was wild the amount of people that came up to me like hey.

Trevor Crump: 30:07

I've seen your.

Jared Ward: 30:08

LinkedIn video or I saw your YouTube videos. What? The one with 100 views. I was too focused on the vanity metrics and the fact that I was getting 100 views. Now, I think it's good to always have that as a metric To improve, for sure, but also understand there's a lot of lurkers, there's a lot of people who see but don't comment Totally, and they're associating you with the brand or you with the topic it's happening even with 10 likes in the three comments, it doesn't matter.

Trevor Crump: 30:43

Yeah, and people aren't liking and commenting anymore, like it's just like I never do and I'm on social media quite a bit. I never, never, ever comment on it.

Jared Ward: 30:51

I do for the algorithm. I will every now and then.

Trevor Crump: 30:54

I do a lot on Twitter. I'll comment a lot on LinkedIn, but TikTok and Instagram I never do, Very rarely do, Unless it's somebody I'm really supporting and wanting to push the algorithm for them. It's less about me and more for them when I'm doing it, and I think that's a lot of people. Yeah, I'm totally the same way. Any event I go to.

Trevor Crump: 31:18

I was at one last night and everybody I sat down with would just sit and look at me and they're like I know you. Some would come out and be like, oh, I just listened to your podcast, or oh, I just watched this video, or oh. But others would just sit and be like I know you and I just like you don't want to be that guy who's like, oh yeah, I create content, but I'm sitting there and I'm just like I'm going to wait for him to figure it out. And then somebody like Nudge and Bick oh, he has this like podcast, or oh, he has this, or you know, and they're, oh, yeah, you're the guy who creates a video on which is XYZ. It's crazy.

Jared Ward: 31:50

I can actually see the path to becoming it's this weird micro influencers, that this that's the trend that I would say is on the rise is. Everybody can be a micro influencer of their personal brand through LinkedIn, slightly through Instagram or YouTube. But it's really interesting the power of your reach, even just as a micro influencer. Obviously nobody knows who I am Sure Outside of freaking Utah.

Trevor Crump: 32:17

Sure but somebody.

Jared Ward: 32:21

There are some connections that matter where they're like. Oh yeah, I saw your podcast or I saw that post. You're the inventory guy. Totally, yeah which that does so much for your business. It's wild.

Trevor Crump: 32:32

Yeah, that's 100. I mean, I'm telling people, anybody I talk to right now, any CEO, whether it's on the SaaS side of things or on the e-commerce side of things, and they're asking me hey, what should I be focused on? It's like your primary focus should be. Your three focuses should be making sure your team is the right team. Obviously You've got to hire and have the right people in check and you've got to fire the people when you need to fire them. Don't waste any time there. You've got to create content. You have got to be the content creator and you have to make content creation an ethos of your business so that other people in your business want to do the same thing. And then the third thing is just making sure your product is dialed.

Jared Ward: 33:11

That's all.

Trevor Crump: 33:11

CEOs should be working on. Love it Sometimes you've got to wear more hats, right, when you don't have the money or it's not coming in. Obviously you've got to do some accounting things. There's things that you have to do, but if you really want to scale, those are the three things that you should be doing 100%.

Jared Ward: 33:29

So pivoting real fast. What year were you born in? I was 88. 88, ok, I'm 92. Ok, did you have a flip phone when?

Trevor Crump: 33:39

you were in high school.

Jared Ward: 33:39

Yes, yeah, I think I was the last part of the millennial generation that didn't have an iPhone. I didn't get an iPhone until I was 23, I think.

Trevor Crump: 33:52

Yeah, I was probably 22 or 23 for me, I guess, which would have been? I would have been 26. That's pretty late for you. Actually, then it was.

Jared Ward: 34:05

And that was just the culture. That was my family. No technology Got. It Can only play Nintendo 64 for 30 minutes a day. Yeah, I didn't get a phone until I was 16. Got it, no, actually 17. I make it a phone until I was 17 years old. Ok, and it was a flip phone. Yeah, yeah, and I kept that all the way through.

Trevor Crump: 34:24

So yeah, yeah, I was very technology. I grew up in a family that maybe not a strict that way, but we just my family. We were encouraged more not to be on devices and I played a lot of sports. But, however, I was super into technology. So I had a phone when I was 14. And that was like right when I think I got a phone the same year maybe my dad got a phone, or maybe a year before, a year after my dad got a phone.

Jared Ward: 34:56

I still remember my I had the NV2, like the one that would like T9 word. I could text that Flip phone didn't exist.

Trevor Crump: 35:05

When I like there was no flip phones. When I first got my cell phone, that was like more the Nokia that had the snake. Yeah. And no you remember Snake, that game.

Jared Ward: 35:14

Yeah, oh yeah, I remember that.

Trevor Crump: 35:16

So those were the ones, yeah, but.

Jared Ward: 35:19

That's great. It's so interesting Because so I have my nanny that helps out with my kids. I'm a single dad, so I have kids 24, seven. Sure, she's. It just hit me one day because I come home and I try to like interact with her. She's like 19. Sure, she's a college student. Yeah, and I've had a couple experiences with babysitters where I realized like, oh, I'm old, yeah, I'm the old guy, because, like I think of myself as just like, oh, yeah, I'm just young.

Jared Ward: 35:58

I feel like I'm still in my 20s, even though I'm 31, and like I look at these kids and it's like I am around the same age sort of thing. And I remember it just hit me one time when I was talking to her, like because I would always, I'd always tell my friends like yeah, you know she's, she's a little bit awkward, you know she's Seared is like she doesn't really talk to me, yeah, but it's, it's all good, like she's, like I just I put it on like oh, she's just awkward, sure. And then one day I realized I had to like take her somewhere. So I can't, I can't remember. Yeah, but the awkwardness in the car I realized was oh, I'm old.

Trevor Crump: 36:41

Yeah, yeah, for sure I'm. I'm the old guy yeah, she's not as comfortable talking. It just like hit me and I was like what just happened.

Jared Ward: 36:51

I'm old, like there is a like Gen Z Millennial, like I felt it.

Trevor Crump: 36:56

Yeah, it was wild.

Jared Ward: 36:58

It was so funny yeah.

Trevor Crump: 37:00

Yeah, it's funny. Like I feel the same way. Like anytime I'm talking I've got like this you know, this kid on my team is he's super young, he's Gen Z and I'm like you know, I feel like I'm his age and then sometimes I'll be like, yeah, he's probably. He probably thinks I'm strange when we like finish talking.

Jared Ward: 37:18

It's funny, man that's great, yeah, okay. Well, for the last couple minutes I have some rapid-fire questions, all right. So the whole point of these is just like try to give like a 30 second answer. Perfect, we'll just move on to the next one. Cool, um, all right. So Trevor now is Transported back to Trevor in, let's say, I don't know 2015, or let's say like at the beginning of your agency. What is the one piece of advice that you would give him as you're starting your agency.

Trevor Crump: 37:50

Um, create content sooner. Yeah, I mean I I created, I started create it pretty quickly, but Create content sooner and make it a part of who you are and what you do. I also think that Kneesh down and what you want to do as well. It's always easier to niche and then expand versus Not have something that you're known for and great at and then niche down to it. So I think those are two big things, yeah best platform for organic content.

Trevor Crump: 38:27

Don't do that's such a. That's a hard thing, because I feel like there needs to be Like an addition, like I think I think that question. There may be some. It may be a slightly incomplete question, okay, and you might do this on purpose, like it depends on the business that you're in and it depends on the industry that you're in. What if I I'll tell you what my favorite one is? Can I answer?

Jared Ward: 38:54

it yeah, oh yeah.

Trevor Crump: 38:57

My favorite piece of as much, as I hate it right now because the engagement is so bad. Instagram is my favorite right now. Yeah, it gets me the most business.

Jared Ward: 39:12

There's no, I need to get some advice on that. There's no, I'm ignoring Instagram.

Trevor Crump: 39:15

There's no better place to build a community. That is the only thing Instagram has done right is they've got a really good way at building a community? Yeah, it's. It is the worst when it comes to, or like, getting organic reach. It's terrible. It seems like every month it gets worse and harder for me. I get really good reach. I get really good reach on tiktok, but I don't get as many Like people who, like I, like this guy. You know I just get more lucky lose there. But for business I'd say Instagram and then LinkedIn, okay, yeah for your e-commerce companies.

Jared Ward: 39:55

I in my content, I talk about oh shit moments and how they happen a lot in e-commerce, as you're scaling real fast. Yeah, what's what's your number one oh shit moment across your e-commerce companies like ash or golf?

Trevor Crump: 40:05

Yeah, I mean, this one's a really easy one. I got we when I was at fond design we we, when Trump was in office he was raising tariffs and we got a got bought into Getting a lot of in, like getting more inventory before a tear, like that way, more inventory than we needed before a tariff came in or before he like raised tariffs. And we ordered the team before me, so I wasn't there to do this they ordered probably like triple the amount of inventory we needed in a year. Dude, it was crazy and their, their thought was like we saved four or five hundred thousand dollars in tariffs, like so. So logically, it's like, okay, I get that, but we were sitting on so much inventory, okay, and we had to pay for a lot of it. We had really good terms with our supplier so we didn't have to pay it all up front. You wouldn't even have to pay half of it up front, so we had amazing terms.

Trevor Crump: 41:07

But what we started to think about was we didn't know how long our shelf life was on our product to be sitting around for a year or two. So we started like panicking big time. So we went full-fledged sales mode. Let's just we went how do we sell as much as humanly possible and the flaw was we Took the pedal off of building up our brand and experiences and our ethos in who we were and we let a ton of competitors come in and build that and even though we were selling so we were selling and we had record years, you know a record year because we sold an insane amount of product. But the next year we suffered Because we didn't spend all like we used to do these really cool collaborations and we did some really cool product development and we just built the brand and and yeah, we just like, we focused on growth and we didn't focus on Scaling a brand, whereas brand is your brand's, your protection, you know, because anyone can copy you and nowadays everyone does. Oh goodness.

Jared Ward: 42:17

Yeah, yeah. So I In my content I talk about oh shit moments and it's like a lot of times for e-commerce companies it's either you didn't buy enough and you go out of stock early totally it's like 300,000 more easy or, oh shit, we bought way too much and it's gonna be sitting in the warehouse for three years.

Trevor Crump: 42:39

So, logically, I get why they did it, but yeah, that was. My worst mistake as a CMO is that I should have, you know, either delegated somebody to Sell more and continue, you as a CMO, to build the brand, or I should have, like, made sure somebody was building that brand, but all of us were just dedicated to selling, selling, selling, selling, selling.

Jared Ward: 43:00

Okay, what's? What's an action that you took that you're most proud of, and why?

Trevor Crump: 43:16

This is kind of a dead horse. Like best thing I've done to date and will ever is creating a personal brand like best thing I've ever done. It was really, really hard. I thought about it, for I started a personal brand when I was like 30. I'm 35.

Trevor Crump: 43:33

I would have started it when I was like 32, but I thought about it when I was like 26, like I had this like gut instinct that I needed to be doing something before any of these platforms were, before tick tock existed, before any of these things really existed.

Trevor Crump: 43:48

And when I was 28, I thought I have to start a podcast. Didn't start it till I was 32 and and the amount of like I said, the amount of business, the amount of connections that I've made through creating content, has been the best insurance plan for me as an entrepreneur. Like I'll never, will never not have business, will never not have, right you know, success or new opportunities, the opportunity, the amount of opportunities that come our way because of it. It's, it's crazy every single day, right? The only reason you probably reached out to me today To be on this podcast was probably because you saw my personal brand. Yeah, right, you know, and I know that you would eventually seen, bestie, if I hadn't, you know. But yeah, yeah, best thing thing I'm most proud of by far, like and yeah, it's a thing like I said, like I'm an entrepreneur but I consider myself a content creator, probably first, okay.

Jared Ward: 44:43

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, that's it. I think we're out of time.

Trevor Crump: 44:48

Nice.

Jared Ward: 44:49

Thanks for coming on the podcast and I think we got some really good clips there.

Trevor Crump: 44:53

Nice I appreciate it.

Jared Ward: 44:54

Thank you Awesome Thanks, man Cool.