From Professional Athlete To Managing Partner of a 175 Person Holding Company

Hey guys, we're here for episode 12 of the e-commerce opportunity, and I'm joined by Taylor today. Taylor. How are you? Dude, I'm doing well. It's good to be here Good to see you like the the neon sign up from the head get the backdrop poppin get the family you're dialed man I like it. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. We were actually just chatting before this Um, I think the last time that we connected I guess at least in person or kind of for a while was about two years Ago, I was in your office You gave me some killer advice about like how to remove myself from the day-to-day and not just be buried in the grind So I appreciate you for that feedback, and I'm really excited I'll take all that credit. No, just kidding. But yeah, you stop by that feels Thousand lifetimes ago. We were still in person at an office And I think you you and your partner were sort of taking that next step of making a bunch of hires and you were sort Of still doing doing it all and it was like hey, man Yeah, thank you appreciate that and no I'm excited about all the success you guys are having and I've got a lot of really cool Questions that I came up with and even better questions from Twitter So let's let's dive in do you kind of mind starting by sharing like what you're currently working on? Yeah, so our universe is sort of from the top down. We have a whole new company called dream labs inside of dream I have a variety of different entities One is common thread collective. That's our agency. That's my day-to-day role as the management partner red collective And then we have four by four hundred where we own and operate five our own e-commerce businesses Inside of there. That's one by Andrew Ferris And then we have a few other additional investments. Tell me your dreams is a cultural development agency We have kinship which is influencer marketing agency We have a company called amp that works for the amplification of black businesses, which is a rad community With investments in the fascination and a couple Shopify apps and different things So I'm all around the mission of helping entrepreneurs achieve their dreams and sort of consumer product. I Love that man. So what were you doing before all this? Like was there anything that you did that set you up to do what you're doing now? Yeah, just make a thousand mistakes No, my life is sort of like a very nonlinear path to this point I was a baseball player So I grew up I was a professional baseball player playing the Yankees organization When I got released I was prepping to go to law school that's what I thought I wanted to do as a political science major with a minor in psychology and I had a friend who's now my business partner Josh Who's starting a company called power balance selling these silicone wristbands back in the day and he said hey Why don't you come over between class and you can print the orders off the website and take them to the post office? And so I would do that and one day was three orders and we mostly messed around the next day was four and then That company just exploded it went from zero to 60 million in revenue in 20 Just like the most wild growth story and it it sort of triggered in me all the same things that sports Working with a group of friends towards a common goal. We were all young and single and we just lived in it all day Every day, it was just so fun So as that was happening, it sort of became this thing of like this is a real business now What's your job gonna be? They're like, well, you're the young person So why don't you figure out e-commerce social media and you know, some famous people so you can enter influence or marketing So that's like me googling. How do you set up a Facebook page? What is Magento? I have no idea what I was doing, right? but what I became obsessed with was I didn't want people to think I was there because I was Josh's friend like I had it I Wanted I wanted to be a master of my domain And so I just went on the internet and read and learned everything I could and because there was nobody else around I got to be the expert in this area and then it just so happened that like those skills mattered in the world And so in that sense, I got really lucky I got I had just incredibly blessed that they put trust in me to give me that opportunity to learn And then I thought I was in an environment where I do so much cool stuff early on in that That was sort of the initial impetus into entrepreneurship and business building and calm and all of that so that was over ten years ago now, but Really luck didn't do it in that sense. I Love that man. So I have to ask you what what is your secret to building so many successful things? Is it people processes capital something else? Like what's been your your secret? What's been at the core of all this? I think the primary thing is people I think one of the things people will look at our ecosystem and think that I've done a lot in reality it's just not true like every one of the entities that we have have an independent leader other than me that's driving and This is sort of goes back to the conversation that we had when we came to the office it's like people are amplifiers like you're what you can do as a collective group of people just so far exceeds what you can do yourself and For a long time. I think a lot of early entrepreneurs like the motivation is like you're the best at doing the thing whether that's email or Facebook ads or whatever it might be and so the logic is like well I need to keep doing that thing and I need to do that because the level at which I'm gonna do it is going to Be the highest and that it's true It's it's probably a fact but the reality is is that the Delta between you and other people on some tasks is actually not that much and so what you want to do is you want to remove yourself from the places where You do those other people as small and put yourself into places where you do those other people as large and and then in some cases there are people that are just better than you at things and so you should find them and Let them do those things and so over the course of you know doing this for I think we're seven years into building this whole thing like I've been Obsessed with finding amazing people because they're such amplifiers and I've gotten lucky to be surrounded by humans and that's that's gonna be Awesome. Let's talk about people. Let's talk about hiring. What is like the Holding car. What's the ecosystem? Like how many people are there and then is the biggest entity common thread? Yeah So CTC is about 125 ish people now 4 by 400 probably has 25 ish And then the others are all sub 10 So across all of them somewhere around 170 ish people or so and you know It's funny hiring hiring is an interesting thing. I had to go through a really personal journey where For a long time. It was hard for me to imagine that really talented people would want to work for like early on our company was really young and and part of that was I Believed that the people younger than me. I had something to offer them I could leave them and then so that was like this mental hurdle that I had to overcome and When I realized that like to leave people you don't have to be better than them You don't have to have more experience than them That's not actually the prerequisite to leadership And I had to get over this insecurity that really smart people would want to work on my thing Candidly, I was like and there's so many cool companies. Why would they want to work for me? like and Getting over that and being willing to put yourself out there and Ask and require and offer your vision to people in ways that they might reject is like an initial hurdle to get over But once I got past that it was a real victory to realize like no. No what we're doing is Meaningful and there are people that would want to be a part of it And it just gave me it emboldened me to ask to like see people go You're you're amazing at your thing. Do you want to be a part of my thing? Like and that was a that was a big issue to get over into a fire Yeah, I completely resonate relate so in terms of actually like sourcing the talent Do most people come in through a job board and most people come in through like an internal recruiter? You have most people come in through your Twitter or someone else's Twitter Like how do most people actually find out about you guys and want to work with you guys? Yeah, so I mean you guys know this you're in a similar industry, right? Like there's a real supply and demand problem in our industry, right? And that the supply of really talented experienced people is small and the demand for them is way really really really high So as employers the markets really out of whack So there's two things that we've done to solve for that one is network Like you said Twitter and the communities and being public and available and getting to know people and just personally going after relationships The second though is that we've worked really hard to build a training and development system that allows us to take smart hungry Interested people and train them into really talented people to sort of arbitrage the market in that way so we have a community group called admission and admission serves sort of both early stage businesses in media buyers and also Media buyers looking to learn more themselves and so that and then every quarter what we do is we open up what we call the admission scholarship program where we Invite people who are looking to learn media buying as a skill and we'll get a thousand people a quarter that want to come In from all over the world to learn media buying and so that becomes sourcing or young hungry talented people or people switching jobs Not necessarily young or you know Has really helped with all of our diversity initiatives and things to give us a pool of talent that we're building a relationship Reality is you have to cultivate Talent the same way you do clients like it's the same sort of marketing and recruiting problem It is on the sales side as it is with talent So you got to treat them treat them the same and most of the people you're looking for are not They have jobs right there in high demand Yeah, they have jobs or they have agencies, right? Which makes sense Yeah, right I mean and that goes back to like the number of times I've tried to get you to come work for us I mean even your partner you did work like these there's so much opportunity right for people with this skills like They're earning potential and the capacity for people in this space is massive And so we you know We have a lot of turnover of people getting poached to go do rad things and we celebrate that and we realize that that's like An unavoidable part of the present ecosystem And so rather than being resentful or disappointed by it We want to build a system that can exist within that even though that's true And so sourcing and developing people has been a huge effort of ours because man, it's hard We're in the human service business people are And so we're only gonna be as good as the people and so it takes a lot of work to hire retain develop Continue to build a system to do that. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's awesome. That all really resonates and makes sense So thank you for sharing You like what is your day-to-day or week to people look like? I know you mentioned managing partner of kind of the holding co or the top co I have like CEOs on each business and you kind of report and lead and manage them Like what is your day-to-day or week to week look like? Yeah, so so I I'm not a functional manager of the other CEOs Um, we sort of what I would have is like sort of a peer support relationship where we're on Marco Polo Which is an app. I love to use my leaders like and we're sporting We have board level interactions at 4x400 and some of the other entities quarterly and that sort of thing But my day-to-day right now is really focused on CPC Like that's that's my primary responsibility to the partnership is to lead that organization and so I have this exercise that I go through every quarter where I Really try so I have this saying which is that inner peace is when your calendar aligns with your values Um, and so what I want to do is ensure that my behavior is consistent with the things that I value and Create the most so what I'll do is I'll wipe my calendar clean and I build from sort of first principle So for me what that entails is it starts with me and what I mean by that is like myself care That includes my health and fitness rest all those things They go on the calendar first because if I'm not prepared I'm useless to everything then everything sort of falls apart Then the next thing for me is my family. I have three little kids wife Who are the most important things to me? So they go on my calendar next like I have baseball practice on Wednesday nights. My wife's a teacher I have certain support blocks where I'm responsible for the kids where she is and like those are on my calendar Next and then the next thing for me is my leaders at CPC So I lead the organization through them So time with them becomes the next step then all company meetings then key sales and clients like so you just sort of begin to construct Your time to ensure that the things that get left out are not the most important It's because you know you give it like the tyranny of the urgent like every day I could fill it with a thousand tasks related to nothing, right? And so really ensuring that I'm building up to ensure that my time is not being taken from me, but it's being used intentionally It's something I've had to learn to think a lot more about Often I'll say that like one of the things part about being leaders I grieve frivolousness meaning like to just wake up and do whatever I want and like that's fine or to say whatever I want without Consequences to ship an email and not have to worry about it But there's a burden to leading a bunch of people that requires that you actually be more thoughtful than that and it's hard, man I am NOT naturally that way I'm not naturally a super disciplined person But it's something I've had to try to get better at and I still struggle a ton, but that's sort of my method Amazing. Thank you for that. I want to shift gears now to talking about like clients They're not asking for you name clients But how do you guys like acquire clients and how you guys retain clients and obviously with the skill that you're at a lot more People know about you, right? I'm sure a lot more comes inbound, but a lot of people listening are probably About a certain agency early agencies doing some freelance Like what are some ways in which you acquire clients in the past that have been successful ways in which you can recommend? Someone listening go acquire clients. Yeah every agency That I interact with it like this is the core question right and even for us early on and the thing I think that is Constantly happening. It's cliche, but like the businesses are under investing in their own marketing and storytelling, right? like we our highest paid employees are in marketing like we work really hard on the CTC brand and we do it because One it's a catalyst for obviously the new business and recruiting which are the two more primary things that we're after I also think that the audience development and stuff that you're doing from a reputation and value standpoint It's critical to success It also forces you to crystallize your information such that you can distribute it internally and build consensus around ideas Like there's just so much value to it So all everything we do is outbound or is inbound content marketing So we don't do any cold calling or outbound sales in that way Our entire system is a content system that drives inbound sales that we then have a sales team that handles from there We do some of our own advertising. We sort of eat our own dog food in that sense But primarily it's an investment in content and storytelling of things built from within the system That are used to drive awareness for what we're up to Awesome. Yeah, I've seen some of your other stuff. You guys clearly do a great job. So appreciate that in terms of tools like you have 120 something people in the agency 170 people in the ecosystem What are some tools that you guys are using across one of businesses all the businesses that really help with workflow organization? Whatever it might be. Yeah, so our sort of tech stack as an agency is slack for primary communication. We use internal HR HR software called Bob that we do all of our sort of important progress. These are one-on-one management things ADP is our payroll software. We use a sauna for all project management We use our own internal data tool that we built called stat list for all reporting client management I'm so that's one thing we've spent a good amount of time in building ourselves and then G Drive for all file management So so nothing super novel there It's actually one of the things I'm thinking a lot about is especially since we've gone remote in the last year like Information systems have gotten more complex. There's less natural absorption of information And so I'm really thinking through what is the best way to deliver information broadly? So I think the fundamental value proposition of an agency is to operationalize institutional knowledge It's that every single person has access to the knowledge of the agency If what you're hiring is just an individual person and their individual skills, you might as well hire a freelance, right? So if we're gonna live into the core value proposition that we're offering to our clients We've got to figure out how to get knowledge shared throughout the system It's really hard when it's not naturally happening conversationally or being overheard. You have to be really intentional. So we also we also have a Central learning LMS that we call common knowledge that our head of training and development built where we all meeting notes Things like that all information our employee handbook all live and it's like searchable. It's just like a giant wiki basically So we try and build up that so but now it's something I'm thinking a lot about There's anybody out that that's got great remote work systems and information systems. I'm all for learning more about yeah If you hit Taylor hit me up as well. I'm interested too. So I think that's I think it's a new world problem, right? Like are you guys fully remote now? Yeah, we are I think we've got like 50 to 60 people across I don't like six countries So I'm zones this that people coming in junior senior this time the other it's tough Super tough and what I found is that so as a leader There's already this problem that you have to say things way more times than you realize before people absorb it So like I get tired of hearing myself say things way before people even understand it like that And that's a really hard thing to remember and realize that you have to constantly reinforce ideas and now I've just found it's like even worse because There's sort of this game of telephone that happens now where it's like you're in a meeting and then that gets slacked and then that Gets sent and by the time it reaches the final person It's like a fraction of what you intended it to be or it's been modified a bunch, right? And so we're playing this like never-ending game with telephone in some ways And so you have to work even harder to both share information, but also check for understanding That's another big thing is like let's say you send a loom out to everybody It's not enough like so a lot of times people like I'll leave a check mark when you've watched it or Luton gives you The analytics but that to me isn't even enough You actually have to then follow up with a question that allows you to check for understanding Confirm that they understand it in the way that you're intended and those little extra bits of effort They're hard. They're not natural. And so I think that there's so many ways that remote work has brought new challenges, but new benefits to Yeah, dude couldn't agree more I have one more question for you and then I want to open it up to kind of some of the questions from Twitter The last question I have for you is what do you think the most valuable skill is that you've learned and kind of how? Does that serve you? Great question. Um, so I think the value will skip the most valuable skill that I've learned as a leader is that I'm Is what I call the skill of becoming okay, so in the beginning I had a narrative about who I was I don't like process. I want to do the work. I don't like being on sales calls I don't like client relationships and I would speak all these things up over myself and at certain points I realized like well to urban you're either gonna need to step down as the CEO or you're gonna have to change that about you because the Organization needs you to be great at process work because we're a bunch of people and so what I realized was like those stories those narratives What they were was me avoiding Putting myself in places where I felt bad at something and I was insecure And so what I did was process I don't well like it instead what it was was I wasn't good at it I was uncomfortable acknowledging that and putting myself in a place where I might look stupid because I have an ego that I had to work through it and working through About looking stupid like I don't want that right So but learning that like one I can become good at process. I may not we have this saying We say yeah, right like it's like this joke It's like not yet, right? And so it's just this reinforcement that we are all becoming and can become more and as a leader Who you are that's gotten you to this point is who not who you need to be to get you to the next level and so you better always be becoming and never be finished and I think Embracing that has been a really useful reframe to allow me to be not good at something to allow me to engage my weakness To be more helpful Dude killer that was also fantastic. Thank you. All right. So now the fun part the questions from Twitter And thank you guys that are listening that submitted these The first question is how do you see Facebook ads and email best working together in the new post iOS update world? Yeah The post iOS update world. What is the post iOS update world? I think we're still discovering what that means so I think there's a there's a sort of an answer here that I think is more principled than Tactical in the sense of like what is really happening right now? and that's that that they need to be in relationship with one of them one of the things that we work really hard on is This idea of breaking especially for brands as they're reaching a certain growth threshold to break down The idea of a single customer profile into cohort specific ideation, right? So I'll give you an example like there the other day. I bought it a sweater from Everland Okay, giant become probably one of the darlings of econ and I've received nothing but women's apparel follow-up Right and this is like a fairly simple discretionary flow for somebody who appreciates email you do you would certainly have something to say about that like and what it means is that The likelihood that I reengage or open or feel like the brand is positioned for me just decreases, right? And so my LTV decreases and off we go and it's not a not a complex change to make make that system But it's to understand. Okay on the basis of certain customer types How did they come in the door and therefore what should we say next, right? It's a lot more human than we make it which is just simply this question. You're having a conversation with somebody You're having a relationship. What should you say next? I think we would do better to ask that question about certain customer types more often And I get it a lot of times This is a resource constraint creating lots of specific flows is really challenging But you can sort of work from a Pareto's principle find the 80% purchases and speak to them really well And then move down the chain and work to the next ones I think the key is to begin to develop a relationship between me One of the things I say is that the promise that you make in the advertising is matched on the website is matched in The email is matched in the experience of the product and tying it together all the way through And so every campaign that you launch the funnel that you're launching on the front end You should be asking the question of what's the back and if we just tied those up to start I think we would do a lot Yeah, completely. That's awesome. Thank you There's this next question two different people ask more or less the same question with a different variable So I'll let you answer it in either which direction If you were to start an ecom brand was one of the questions or if you were a certain agency Which was the other question? What would your first steps be so if you want to go the ecom brought brand route or the agency route? You know, what would your steps be kind of set up the business for success? Yeah, so so What I think there's a question in here, which is really interesting Which is which one when I start and there's this like the classic thing Which is every agency owner wants to start an ecom brand. Um, I think agencies are massively underrated as businesses massively under And e-commerce businesses are massively. Um in terms of complexity an e-commerce business is ten times harder than Like by at least the cash flow the capitalization the inventory risk Like all of it is way way harder and riskier. Maybe it has higher upside, but it certainly has higher downs So starting an agency is simple because the way that you begin is you begin with revenue you get someone to pay you for a service Generally speaking what happens is you're a freelancer You find someone who will pay you $1,000 and you find another person will pay you $2,000 you make it 3,000 You're sort of still in your current job Then when you get enough to substitute your revenue you make the switch and then you just sort of grow and you're never net negative Right, like you can it's very easy to be cash flow positive making profit building an agency from the beginning So the question is like what's your skill? What's the demand for it that you can do and then find somebody to pay you for right like that's that's how you start and It's very simple on the agency side on the product side. It's much more complex because One you have to prototype a product. You have to conceptualize the thing You have to find somebody to manufacture it You have to find the money to buy the initial inventory Because no manufacturer is giving you terms on supplier because you're just somebody with no backing or no No credit worthiness or anything else. So there's a lot of complexity there now starter and things like that certainly provide Vehicles and I think if I was like truly starting from ground zero, I would really consider one of those because they're really low risk In terms of your ability to generate a really cool idea and get feedback on it publicly before you take a lot of risk So I'm probably I was at ground zero really consider one of those routes But otherwise, I think like we have a lot of you know When we think about four by four hundred where we own brands We have sort of a set of principles that we think about for e-commerce businesses And the idea is really just that it's hard to win And I want to select a product and business structure that gives me the best chance of winning doesn't guarantee it and so the way I think about that is like 75 plus points of margin, right? The fastest production timeline that I can the lowest total cost of goods Ideally, it's like low cost of production low cost of shipping, right? And ideally it has at least a 30% increase in LTV within 60 days Like there's a set of attributes we one of the things if we're gonna use Facebook is the primary distribution for ads I want it to be niche or novel So niche meaning I know the community that exists in and they're gonna really relate to it or novel as in something nobody's seen before It's really hard to sell commodities that are in Facebook that aren't gonna stand out in any way So that's like a set of attributes that I would consider for the product and thinking about starting Wow, thank you. That was incredible One or two more questions that are now completely outside of e-commerce completely outside of the agency Around kind of some of your passion around sports and you know and be a top shots on those things So the first one is which players baseball card you think will appreciate the most in the next 10 years so all of my So the three baseball players are by or one Soto for NATO tattoos That's the simplest answer that those three are Absolute Hall of Fame legends and then Mike trout like I'm a big believer in like by the blue chips and hold Like that's that's the simplest strategy. Now that said I have a bunch of like I got I'm awesome because I'm such a big baseball nerd. So this is CJ Abrams He's one of the Padres top prospects like I in baseball There's this really weird dynamic where player values of their cards usually peak when they debut So in the NBA or everything else, it's like the stars that hold the value but baseball. It's all about prospect It's like people betting on the future So I I spent a lot of time in that world and there's like a pretty safe market of like if you're looking for lower end stuff where if you go look up like the Baseball America top 100 and you look in like that 40 to 80 range and You go look up PSA 10 Bowman first Chromes of that subset of people You can find them in the 40 to 60 dollar range and they'll be at 150 a debut and that's really really safe So depends on the play you're trying to make whether it's flip or long-term hold Blue chips for long-term hold top prospects for flip. This is sick. I love this and the last and final question What NBA Topshop would you buy for one care under for the best return? See, that's so that's sort of the problem. So I wouldn't do it for NBA Topshop so NBA Topshop the problem with that market in particular is that It's like there there's a there's an incongruence between the supply of some of the like general assets And the current value that is way out of whack If you think about it most baseball cards, like if you buy a pack of baseball cards 99% of them are completely worthless They're you know noise makers and bike spokes and stuff that's thrown around because they're worthless like literally zero less than a penny The same is gonna be true for NBA Topshop Most of them are going to be worthless the cards that you want are any collectible the core assets are scarcity Right like and the quality of the the nostalgia and the human or the object that it represents So again, it's you want scarce LeBron James assets, right? like the only two top shots that I own my highest value ones are a LeBron James series one and Zion Williamson rookie debut like those the only two assets that I own The only other player that I would consider buying is probably stuff very and I would buy one of its series ones They're expensive But the thing about the NFT space and this is what I would wait for is like it's all gonna be fractional You'll be able to pay $5 and get into premium assets soon even now like if you go like so as in another example like in the NFT space like Cryptopunks are sort of the OG original asset, right? And but they're like $57,000. It's the cheapest one now it's super expensive, but if you go to like NFT or NFT X which is like a site that allows you to create an index with a sub underlying set of assets You can buy $5 worth of a set of crypto punks and you can get into the best assets This is this is why NFTs are so valuable. They empower ownership in the high-level assets for small dollar It's like this is a really important just like attribute of them So I would I would look for fractional entry into premium assets not speculate on sub-tier assets And this is killer. I'm actually learning a lot. I'm really excited about this Taylor Thank you so much for the agency the econ the NFTs. Thank you so much for all the wisdom across the board What's the best way for people to follow up with you connect with you work with you come work for you What's the best place to reach you? Come on? I got a chase down chase on there on Twitter Grinding out there. I don't know. Do you have a ghostwriter bro? Like, how are you? How are you publishing so much content every day? It's it's a lot. I'm spending like out. I'm spending more time. I want to admit It's been like hours and hours a week on like I've literally part of my job now is to create content for social Yeah, you're doing you're doing great. But yeah Go Taylor follow Yeah, give Taylor follow Taylor, thank you so much for being here man. I really appreciate you. All right, buddy. I see it