I worked with a client to scale her small Etsy store into a $40,000,000 business. Year 1: $193K Year 2: $1.4M Year 3: $4.4M Year 4: $8.6M Year 5: $25.3M Year 6: $41M This is her story:
For obvious reasons, I’m keeping her brand and identity anonymous. But everything you read here is 100% true...
She started with a small children’s boutique Etsy store in 2011 out of her long time passion for children, clothing, and innovation. Fairly quickly she built the business herself to $200K in revenue!
Her customers LOVED her handmade products and demand was through the roof. She wanted to scale past handmade products and build a real company, so she started working with a small manufacturing partner.
Immediately, Etsy caught wind of the partnership and shut her down... So does she throw in the towel? Give up? No way.
This is around 2016 when she came to me with a problem: “I’ve got some loyal customers who love my products, but I want to scale this into a larger business.” My partner and I looked at her business and quickly realized she had a rocket ship that just needed some fuel…
You see, many ecommerce companies my partner and I work with fit the same mold. - High Integrity - Passionate founder - Innovative, unique niche - Amazing product developers Being an incredible product developer was a HUGE reason she was so successful.
In fact, she had such a great product that her customers formed a motherhood around the similar experiences of raising their children. A community like this is a clear mark of an amazing brand! Anyways, here’s how we scaled her from $200K in sales to $40M in 6 years…
Due to her product’s quality, she had a very high gross margin (GM). High GM allows Ecom companies to outspend their competitors advertising costs. Additionally, her company had outstanding cash flow cycles due to her business model which I’ll explore later.
So here’s 3 of the largest problems Ecom companies will run into. 1. Can’t spend enough on ads 2. Can’t predict Cash flow 3. Can’t create better products (and thus increase LTV). Her business had none of these problems!
1. She could spend plenty of money to get new customers. 2. She had reliable cash flow cycles to invest in ad spend/inventory. 3. She had high LTV due to her product development. All we had to do as her performance marketing team was build, test, and deploy great ads for her.
This formula combined with 6 years of compounding results has built our client an amazing brand her family can be proud of for the rest of their lives.
This Thursday I’m writing a thread about Miss Excel, the TikToker making $30M per year as a digital nomad. (S/O to @myfirstmilpod) To get notified when it drops, click on my profile and follow me!
Also, if you want to encourage me to show you how entrepreneurs build companies like these, PLEASE give the original post a like and RT!
