Rich Chapple was previously the CMO at Gymshark and the CEO at THG Ingenuity, part of The Hut Group, scaling both companies to unicorn valuations. He is now the co-founder at The Growth Foundation, helping eCommerce and DTC brands grow the right way.
In this What Would You Do episode, Rich shares exactly what he’d do in his first 90 days as the new CEO of an 8-figure fashion brand. From finding the real “truth” in the numbers to sharpening strategy, building the right team, and focusing on profitable growth, this conversation is packed with practical guidance for any eCommerce leader looking to scale with clarity and control.
Key timestamps to dive straight in:
[05:52] eCommerce Evolution and Increased Competition
[09:19] “Defining Truth Across Business Metrics”
[11:45] “Financial Analysis by GP Bands”
[14:46] Strategic Alignment and Execution Framework
[17:09] “How to Win with Strategy”
[22:41] Scaling Strategy and Future Planning
[25:39] “Developing Leaders Through Cross-Discipline”
[28:33] “Testing Strategies for Business Growth”
[31:29] Listen to Rich’s Top Tips!
Full episode notes here: https://ecmp.info/586
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you can ask a new recruit, what’s our objective, where do we play, how do we win?
[SPEAKER_00]: And they play back something like 90% accurate, we’re in a good place.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we’re obviously around the boardroom or the senior leadership team, if you’re getting different answers as a CEO, you’ve got to do some serious work around strategic alignment in the leadership.
[SPEAKER_03]: It’s the e-commerce master plan podcast.
[SPEAKER_03]: It has to help you solve your marketing problems and grow your e-commerce business.
[SPEAKER_03]: Cutting through the hinder to bring you inspiration and advice from the e-commerce sector and beyond here’s your host, Chloe Thomas.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello and welcome.
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s great to have you here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for hitting play and choosing to listen to one of our inspiring guests.
[SPEAKER_01]: In this episode, we get to catch up with the brilliant e-commerce growth strategist Rich Chapel.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rich has held senior roles at Play.com, The Heart Group and Jim Shark.
[SPEAKER_01]: He’s a marketer by heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we’ll be the right way to put it, but he’s also
[SPEAKER_01]: Genius really in the space helping many e-commerce indeed see brands work out their best best-part of growth and he is joining us to share the answer to his what would you do?
[SPEAKER_01]: What would you do if you were the new CEO of an eight-figure fashion brand?
[SPEAKER_01]: make sure you listen to the end of the episode because as well as sharing all of that, I’ll be cheekily asking Rich for his take on what marketing is the best marketing to be doing in 2026 and he’s sharing some absolute golden nuggets in the top tips at the very end of the episode as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now to introduce our special guest, Rich Chapel was previously the CMO at Jim Shark and the CEO at THG ingenuity part of the heart group, scaling both companies to unicorn valuations.
[SPEAKER_01]: He’s now the co-founder at the growth foundation, helping e-commerce and D2C Browns grow the right way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hello, Rich.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, Chloe, and hi listeners, looking forward to getting stuck into this.
[SPEAKER_01]: very cool to have you on the show so thank you so much for suggesting this what would you do.
[SPEAKER_01]: Before we get into that though, how did you get started in e-commerce?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think my intro barely covers a tiny, tiny fraction of your e-commerce history.
[SPEAKER_01]: So tell us a bit more about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, so I actually started off on the shop floor at home base here in the UK in the mid-90s.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know you’re listening to us, but in the room I mean, I’m in my home office, which is a studio and I’m massive fan and very passionate about music.
[SPEAKER_00]: and so I was obviously trying to earn some money to fund my musical passions, being in a band and stuff, and effectively grew up in retail, actually fell in love with it, and got a junior marketing job at Carpet Rights, so still within the home improvement category.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you’re thinking, why are you sticking around in home improvement?
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s obviously like family connections and families or building contractors and electricians and things like that, but actually my passion was to say is in music.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in terms of e-commerce, actually fell in love with e-commerce as a consumer, earlier doctor.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was the guy in the group of friends that would be early adopter on actually getting into net connection in the early 90s and on dial up, you know, first one with an e-mail, first person to spend hundreds of pounds on a DVD player, all those things, and was desperate to work in that industry.
[SPEAKER_00]: But managed to grab a job at play.com in the early 2000s, Chloe, if you remember that brand.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do and that would have been like the the must have job back then they were they were the case study on everything
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve just phenomenal.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I joined as a marketing manager and grew up to head of marketing in that business.
[SPEAKER_00]: I joined around 20 million turnover.
[SPEAKER_00]: The business was profitable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Back then selling discs in boxes predominantly and that grew to 500 million in the space of about four and a half years.
[SPEAKER_00]: While I was there, just bananas and a conscious of our time together.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to sort of really what fueled that growth.
[SPEAKER_00]: But ultimately,
[SPEAKER_00]: combination of two things, the addressable market growing massively with people going from analog to digital.
[SPEAKER_00]: People going straight to broadband not to dial up, you know, more via dial up, but also we managed to stay on top of that opportunity and not let Amazon our arch enemy at the time overtake the market share that we held onto and grew over that time, particularly in video and video games.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, absolutely loved it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Really deep down as a
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually met some incredible operators in that business that have gone on to do very amazing things in the commerce of those community.
[SPEAKER_00]: In terms of those sort of you have to ask in the early wild west of Econ when Google had just opened its sort of search advertising Facebook was only a social media platform.
[SPEAKER_00]: You couldn’t advertise on et cetera.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, really good.
[SPEAKER_00]: They’re say went off then to THG had a number of roles there.
[SPEAKER_00]: actually then went sort of freelance and then met Jim Schalkers part of that journey and that’s brought me up to the growth foundation and I can tell you a bit more about that as and when during our time together.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you, like me, got to play around in the early days where I think of e-commerce as being kind of like a crazy land grant.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, you know, every everyone was adopting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the Wild West, the consumers were just piling in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, we had to do clever things to keep growing and to keep selling, but nowadays with levels of competition, everything, I think it’s a lot harder.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think it’s changed a lot over that timespan?
[SPEAKER_01]: How you go up the mechanics of growing a brand?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the principles and maybe we’ll get into them in our content in a minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there’s some that are evergreen and even with a similar paradigm shift, you could argue the AI has a similar world west feeling about it at the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think even with those in place, those frameworks that I’ve, I suppose, spotted been part of putting in place or actually testing and learning through are applicable because I suppose it comes down to the execution channel as the things that are changing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it is tough for now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I suppose if I go back to those early days for us, Chloe, there was only, remember, looking at similar web data or the equivalent back then.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were like only, let’s say hundreds of sites with over a million visitors a year, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And there are now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I suppose tens of thousands.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, it was just getting the early time right in terms of competition and particularly, again, if you remember technically, you had to have quite, I suppose, weapons grade development help to get any commerce site working to do millions of turnover, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, you can go on to Shopify or other platforms and you can be trading within a couple of hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: with a fully, very, actually with a very beautiful, kind of templated site, ready to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, so the difficulty of actually connecting a payment gateway to a website, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, there’s about 20 tangents of PC IDSS implementation and and the mind-blowing thing of when Shopify came up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ll give you just what I’m very quickly is to bring that to life
[SPEAKER_00]: at Play.com, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So we were a department store for a friend’s team and actually interestingly, well over a million skews, not all in stock.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that development team at the time around, sort of 500 million would have been around 100 people maintaining a high-briss environment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like a roll forward to Jim Sharp, for example, we were on Shopify, the IT team that was working with Shopify directly in a few partners, but it’s a team of four.
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s mad, isn’t it?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it’s so mad.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, I’m not gonna tangent on my tangents because we’ll be here for the rest of the episode just reminiscing, which as entertaining as that would be is not what everyone’s changing for, so.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rich, what would you do is, if you were starting a new job as a CEO at an eight figure fashion brand, what would you do?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, I’ve thought about this and actually replaying my experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve been to pretty much those business I mentioned play, the heart group and Jim Shock at that eight figure moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think I thought about deconstructing this into the first 90 days, which I thought could be helpful for listeners.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, and I think there are five work streams that I would prioritise, but as a CEO, there are many more as we know to get into, but I think like truth is, is one
[SPEAKER_00]: like the strategy, so what are the guiding rules and principles that everyone’s operating under and are they really clear everywhere?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, is there strategic clarity and narrative clarity everywhere on that?
[SPEAKER_00]: What’s the truth about the customer?
[SPEAKER_00]: As a marketer, obviously, I’ve been promoted to CEO, but I’m a marketer at heart, so obsessing about the customer and understanding that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’d want to know where we are on a talent and organization point of view.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I suppose operating leverage in terms of what are our, what’s the opportunity particularly now with AI and systems and those other things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they’re the kind of the five work streams I’m going to look at.
[SPEAKER_00]: And obviously they work across those sort of first 90 days really.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that’s going backwards.
[SPEAKER_01]: That’s operating leverage, talent and organization, truth of the customer, truth of strategy,
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and that’s what actually called truth as a work stream overall, because I think like there’s things like I’ve got them like you know financial truth like what’s going on there really key like channel and cohort truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: So percentage of revenue is repeat versus knowing our cohorts, you know, what’s the Pareto is there a very concentrated percentage of customers like I’ve seen in many businesses like 5% of customers generate 30% of your revenue.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, getting to understand those things, you know, is it actually I suppose, and a product or channel truth, depending on this apparel business that I’ve now taken the leadership challenge on, is it distributed across TikTok shop Amazon, D to C and wholesale, or is it purely direct to consumer Shopify, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So is there a channel truth to understand?
[SPEAKER_00]: quite often is there a hero skewer here a product line truth and quite often in the brands that I’ve worked with more recently that are in eight figures found of his visionary led still.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is actually a hero product and quite often they’re getting distracted by newness and other things you’re like, hang on we need to really focus on the hero and we’ll be still haven’t really unlocked that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there’s that truth obviously the organization truth and then those kind of things that’s quite kind of what I’m after in those truths.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love the fact you start with those truths because I think it’s so easy to assume that when you come in in that high position in a big business, you take all that for granted and just start making decisions, but it’s that’s not the way to go about it, is it you need to actually make sure that when you’re looking at an apple, it’s an apple, when you’re looking at a pair, it’s a pair and so on and therefore you’ve actually got those accurate stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and even, and I’m sure you’re the same client, I meet a number of, I say, eight figure founders or investors or senior leisure teams, and still the vast majority are still arguing about the truth or actually revenue, like net revenue yesterday, you know, excluding returns, cancellations, tax VAT, Shopify will have its own slightly unique algorithm of what it calls sales.
[SPEAKER_00]: The finance system has a slightly different view of that and actually getting it and I was understanding where some of these untruths are really quickly and that really helps.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I’d imagine actually look, if you’ve got an opportunity to join a CEO, this might be day minus 30 as you’re sort of a preparing to start, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You’d start to immerse on these and get to know the business and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, that’s really key.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, on the financial
[SPEAKER_00]: the contribution margin and one of the things that we do, or I’ve got into the habit of doing, is grouping or lining contribution margin is the different sort of aspects, sections, I suppose, down the PNL as it were, I’m trying to think it would be a better word for it, but yeah, you’ve got gross cost of goods, and then that GP1, GP2, I look at that as brand, so any sort of more fixed.
[SPEAKER_00]: mid to upper funnel investment, GP3 sort of variable performance marketing, GP4 trading costs to acquire the customer at the point of sale, and you put potentially your payment processing fees in there, but it could be a rent for a shop or the license fee for Shopify in there as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ops, you know, outbound fulfillment, you know GP5, then GP6 overhead, so you look at all those different bandings, right the way down to GP7, final ones, what salary, and you can get
[SPEAKER_00]: great particularly D to C businesses have brilliant GP one right where you’ve got I’m feeling all that great charging.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting again, go back to my play in early THG days.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, GP one would be like 35, 40% which you know, again, shows you how cheap it was to acquire customers in the early days as well, right, compared to what it is now.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so nice.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, that would be one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we spoke a bit about the sort of cohort tree.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, looking at customer
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I think organization treats really interesting one and conscious again, we could probably spend an hour talking about this, but I just meet a lot of again, those sort of eight figure.
[SPEAKER_00]: sort of early eight figure brands where you’ve got founder and again, so it’s like early loyalists who are friends, family, sort of founder, centric decision making around all design and actually that’s an interesting thing to have to fix or manage in terms of how do we upskill the operating horsepower or capacity of the team but also keep some of this loyalist in place, you know, that’s really interesting dynamic.
[SPEAKER_00]: is a true ownership of the P&L where actually one of the things I mentioned when we were together last as like particularly with AI and the pace of decision-making actually where is the power of attorney and agency in the business?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it truly a performance market’s desk or that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Does it go back to the finance director every day for example, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Just understanding that but yeah that’s that’s first 30 days truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: all about the trees and it’s, I like the fact that you’ve included both the metrics, the numbers, which I was going to say called the hard and fast numbers, but as we’ve just gone through, they’re not necessarily hard and fast.
[SPEAKER_01]: They should be, but you’ve got to find that tree and get them solid.
[SPEAKER_01]: You’ve got that kind of the black and white of the numbers, but you’ve also got that soft decide of.
[SPEAKER_01]: does everyone actually think we’re doing the same thing?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there, you know, confusion at the board table of what we’re actually here to be, are we a retailer or are we an online store?
[SPEAKER_01]: Are we a marketplace and all that kind of cultural values but kind of even harder than culture and values side of things that needs to be outlined.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and this is a perfect segue actually into my next sort of month month two, which is actually, once you’ve looked at the truths and sort of captured them, I think even if there is, let’s say, strategic alignment, but codifying it and then creating a system or a way of becoming a broken record and a consistent narrator of strategy throughout the business is really, really key.
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got a framework, the great foundation that we’ve developed and actually look, I bumped into different sort of strategy frameworks and things throughout the last particularly 10 to 15 years and I’ve sort of grabbed the best bits from all of them and pulled them up.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think, you know, situation capturing what’s happening now and being brutally honest is first one, both strategically I suppose macro what’s going on in the market, everything else, especially internally.
[SPEAKER_00]: strengths and weaknesses and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The vision and mission, so again, why does the brand-up permission or the company of permission to exist is really key for us all to remember?
[SPEAKER_00]: An objective, capturing that, which actually is very much a quantitative process of how much by when, and that’s not just like revenue and an EBITDA or contribution, but also some of the softer things like maybe customer satisfaction, employees satisfaction, sentiment and other things
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the way we deconstruct the strategic choices here is actually a phenomenal PNG or Proxer and Grable Framework, which is where to play and how to win and you might have bumped into that before Chloe, but it’s a lovely way of like sort of the symbiosis between the rational choices you have to make strategically in the emotional ones and you say the hard and soft so
[SPEAKER_00]: in the way to play, and anyone listening, I’d look at this through for your own businesses, you know, who is the target audience?
[SPEAKER_00]: We mentioned about obsessing about that, which I’ll come onto.
[SPEAKER_00]: The product that you make, so you know, a customer product, the channel you sell through and the geography you’re in, and you can make, obviously you could say, I’m going to be to every customer, we’re going to make every product in all channels, in all countries,
[SPEAKER_00]: the skills, the capital, and the sort of limited resources you have a business probably won’t succeed, if you went, let’s just do everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it’s then coming down to how do we choose should we be, you know, as you say, when do we launch a new country, when do we launch into TikTok shop or not, become quite interesting strategic choices on the where to play?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then how to win comes after once you’ve got the confidence in that where to play is the way the almost other way you act
[SPEAKER_00]: the offer architecture and it’s own right, which I look at as being, okay, what is the brand?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there some heroic myth or story we can tell how unique is the product?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there an irresistible call-to-action that we can create?
[SPEAKER_00]: Which doesn’t necessarily mean discount.
[SPEAKER_00]: It means it could be scarcity or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just makes people act today and then social proof.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all those kind of, it’s then like the how and also
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve where I’ve helped influence and build these strategies with other brands.
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s a true ability to point them externally to customers and they work, kind of this how-to-win sort of set of rules, but also internally in terms of how we behave as people it works as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: If that makes sense, like it, there’s a real kind of blurring of that internal external in terms of the way the brand behaves and how to win within those choices you make.
[SPEAKER_00]: I suppose that all the limits test for me is as if you can ask a new recruit, you know, does it matter any level?
[SPEAKER_00]: What’s the objective?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where do we play?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we win?
[SPEAKER_00]: And they play back something like, you know, 90% accurate.
[SPEAKER_00]: You’re in a good place.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if, obviously, around the boardroom or the senior leadership team, if you’re getting different answers, then there’s probably, as a CEO, you’ve got to do some serious work around strategic alignment in the leadership, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s really key.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we’re talking about this as what you would do as the CEO started in New Job, but both at month one and even more importantly, the month to activity, this isn’t used squirled away in your quarter office, working things out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it this is a whole company project?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and depending on the size and complexity of that, it may be that there are
[SPEAKER_00]: maybe it’s not a whole company, but very much a not an insular, you know, as you say, squirled away in the corner office, you’ve got to understand, particularly I suppose, in that first month, like just getting everywhere and actually into the warehouse, get to the manufacturer, get as much truth as you can, I think is really key.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I suppose there is probably a little bit more remote synthesis in the strategy because you probably have a view, if you’ll see, but actually making sure if you let’s say create a draft in terms of, I think this is our where to plan how to win, going get that tested and challenged across the business actually from, you say, from junior all the way to senior levels around and find out, particularly potentially you might think as a CEO, actually we’ve opened a a new market, for example, you know, let’s say you’re 100% direct to consumer,
[SPEAKER_00]: You’ve got 80% of your sales in the UK and let’s say that 20% long-tow is 30 countries and the comb team are distracted positively by launching a French website or something else, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You can actually, is that the best use of how much energy is spending that’s using half your week to create?
[SPEAKER_00]: 5% revenue should we put that?
[SPEAKER_00]: 50% of your time back into driving the UK more.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there might be some interesting challenges you’ve got and quite often I’ve seen them sometimes they’re linked to people’s bonuses and incentives, which is particularly around channel conflict, retail versus D to C and there’s all sorts of things going on there isn’t there to unpack.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, how much to unpack?
[SPEAKER_01]: But I guess that’s why you’ve got to spend that first month trying out and cover as much truth as possible, because then as you start building the strategy, you start to then, it’s a lot easier to find the conflicts and the issues.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, completely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think so often when people here say, oh, we’re going to create a strategy and announce it to the team, they think it should be this big kind of wow surprise moment, but in the way you build a strategy and in what the actual strategy is, I found it’s often more likely to be a,
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that’s not unexpected, you know, it’s always like if you announce the strategy to the company and everybody’s shocked or surprised, then you’ve probably got it wrong because it should be kind of obvious in some ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and often my experience is usually doing less but doing it better.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it’s usually what I find happens around the eight figures because it’s just sort of got a bit distracted and not kind of really focused in on that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the other thing
[SPEAKER_00]: actually creating a KPI around measuring the recall of the strategic propaganda in the business.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I’ve been in another senior roles in other businesses using a sort of a PR tactic, which is like, you might get a question from a colleague or a co-worker and then reframing a question back that includes the strategy to say, oh, yeah, because either in your apply,
[SPEAKER_00]: The answer is this, and that’s because our worth of plays just constantly referring back to it to get it into the muscle memory of the business.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think you said, called it the consistent narrator of strategy, which I think is so critical isn’t that you have to keep reminding everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you find again, I’ve been, I’ve previously been quite a few different organizations.
[SPEAKER_00]: You find sometimes you get natural narrators as CEO’s are in the leadership team and sometimes there isn’t a natural narrator.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it’s again, sometimes you can find other individuals in the organization that seem to have a impact and influence and relationship with the organization.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, again, might be one of those legacy loyalists have been there, OG employee for.
[SPEAKER_00]: they can be really impactful on getting them on board on narration of where we’re going because obviously the trust has been built or you know always a case you have to proactively engineer it into particularly leadership roles is that that you know strategic clarity is part of a KPI a soft KPI is aware right for for that team.
[SPEAKER_01]: So month three what comes next after
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think well there’s particularly probably now I’ve got a bit of understanding of talent truth and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So looking at then is the organization designed for sort of scale or in future scale or survival.
[SPEAKER_00]: So quite often at eight figures I find typically under investment in CRM and I’ll bump into that probably a few times in our conversation today.
[SPEAKER_00]: dedicated obsession on customer insight and customer relationship management to build LTV.
[SPEAKER_00]: I suppose the interesting one here, as well as the nuance around if the founder is still in the business like in your CEO working through a really understanding decision-making governance of who’s doing what is really interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: That might be the
[SPEAKER_00]: the founder becoming more non-executive and floating around and impacting brandy products and customer and things like that, or versus, you know, the real operating daily pulse of the business that would be really key.
[SPEAKER_00]: And typically what I would look at doing in that them, I’d be like future gazing into what is the organization need to look like a twice our revenue now.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then working right where are the major gaps?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where do we have to prioritise right in terms of that?
[SPEAKER_00]: And being very pragmatic around look I can’t tie up all our working capital.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would like to buy stock and demand with by putting another 30 people in for example, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to be very pragmatic but getting a sense of what does that organization look like if we’re twice as big?
[SPEAKER_00]: and on the current run rate, how quickly is that?
[SPEAKER_00]: So kind of really had 12 to 24 months horizon on that would be really key.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thermo cash and working capital disciplines are making sure all over the inventory, mark down production lead times, margin guide, guardrails, and I suppose back then he has been making any changes if that, if the businesses, let’s say we come that would be really key.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other thing I suppose is getting out to that understanding if you’ve got the strategy set and happy, you can then think about the execution of that strategy and I suppose particularly now more than ever where is it appropriate for an AI to all or system or ways of working to help increase product, productivity or
[SPEAKER_00]: Do we get, you know, is it much more, I suppose, utilising brand and creative, for example, are we using more influential and planning?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I’m sure there are opportunities, of course, the whole business around where it can be used, and how it could be leveraged, so I’d be thinking about that in particular, in tandem with the talent organisation piece, as well, yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I suppose that having your vision of where the company is going to go, but also the vision of where the organisation of the people is going to go, you know, what that structured chart looks like when you’ve doubled.
[SPEAKER_01]: That’s not just about hiring, or AI, these days, that’s also about who you developed to get into which role, because you’ve got a time window until you get there of, I think, Sukey could actually become a head of marketing, but she needs this, this, this, and this done.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the time you get to month to, end of month to, and you’re in to month three, you’ve got some idea of who the stars are in the business, who are the best cultural fits, and all those elements and how you can keep them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I’ve done that in a few other organizations been in where you’d find those, that’s a really high potential, like all kinds of high horsepower people, and given them actually, they’re often leaning in high bias fraction, problem solving, and actually, you know, some of those more.
[SPEAKER_00]: I suppose things you don’t quite get to on the to-do list that’s still with very much within the strategy, you know, can say like a special project, like one of you get together as a group and actually cost functionally, they may not be, get them to own a task or a project that isn’t maybe in their core discipline, but you’re helping progress their skill outside of their core discipline as well, so you get, you know, perhaps a,
[SPEAKER_00]: ahead of finance, you know, seeing your performance, marketing manager and a campaignman, whatever, to get together and go, right, we’ve got a problem around our returns rate, fix, you know, whatever, right, and you’ve got smart people from different places thinking about that holistically from just instead of just an operational challenge, for example, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the other one that’s really key actually in this third week, sorry, third month, now you’ve got that strategic.
[SPEAKER_00]: and third week it could be because it was like that doesn’t it?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that’s an A like all isn’t it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and actually anyone listening, I’m sure as we all work in e-commerce, perhaps when we look around our peer and friend group, we realise a day in e-commerce is a week in anyone else’s life, like they generally are dog days aren’t they?
[SPEAKER_00]: in our industry.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the governance and decision cadence as well, like, you know, weekly trading monthly strategic reviews or quarterly, also, what’s the right operating cadence for the business?
[SPEAKER_00]: And does it need to flex around peak moments or launches and things like that?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, again, I’ve been in business where there’s a very-
[SPEAKER_00]: I so standard sets of let’s say campaign ideation on a monthly basis, but actually when you get to peak intensive periods, perhaps in Q4, that’s actually a daily stand-up, which is around blockers and it just flexing, making sure we’ve got real clarity of, again, why we meet the objectives of the meeting, how frequent, are they valuable and keeping really on top of that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, meetings can be a material time suck when you start to get into large
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I totally get what you mean, holding on to the same meeting structure you had in year one when you’ve got to make figures is probably a bad idea, but Richard, I love that three month breakdown.
[SPEAKER_01]: I suspect many of our listeners are going right.
[SPEAKER_01]: We’re doing this as of next week.
[SPEAKER_01]: We’re just going to do it ourselves and sort it out, fix all these problems.
[SPEAKER_01]: This time of year is a great time to be doing it, but
[SPEAKER_01]: You are, as you said, a marketer at heart, your greater growth.
[SPEAKER_01]: So an extra question for you.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you were a CMO at an e-commerce store this year, what would be the key things going into your marketing team?
[SPEAKER_01]: What would you have them working on this year?
[SPEAKER_01]: Would it be a CRM focus?
[SPEAKER_01]: Would you be diving into TikTok shop and channels doubling down on meta?
[SPEAKER_01]: What would your recipe, if I can ask?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh man, it’s so hard because I suppose one of the things I always think about if I depending on the financial health of the business, I suppose again I’ve put this on a spectrum of is the business in wartime.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you know where it might be thinking or we’ve got a cash wrong way of x and we might struggle to pay our team in a few months’ time or are you at the other end in peace time where you’ve got really amazing working capital
[SPEAKER_00]: If you’re in the more in the piece-time side of the world, I think having a test budget around either incremental 20% on top of what you’re responding to tests, those different things, Chloe’s absolutely brilliant.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she’s really exciting for the team again, perhaps the work cross-functionally around.
[SPEAKER_00]: We’ve got some money for demand and awareness creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: What are those new and emotion channels that we can go and test and try?
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, I’m like a remnant snatch deal on above the line posters.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m sorry, you know, our home posters on the underground that I’ve managed to get and can be just thinking about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I suppose testing and learning, I suppose principle of particularly probably if you’ve got to ape figures, that’s probably it’s part of the business of why it’s got there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you apply that to new and emerging channels?
[SPEAKER_00]: I always put, I suppose.
[SPEAKER_00]: extra confidence and investment into CRM.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the more you can do there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, AI is doing a great job of helping do more at scale.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it’s pacing that function or in that channel.
[SPEAKER_00]: That’s definitely something there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think never underestimate the power of actually just meeting your customers.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, one of the things I’ve spot off and if we’ve listened to PURPAD to see listeners and hear of Chloe, is that I often ask who’s your top customer and they go, oh, I don’t know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, who are you top 10?
[SPEAKER_00]: And they don’t know the name, they don’t know where they live, they don’t know anything about them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, spending some time actually either talking or interacting with customers at ideally in different value segments, so very valuable, you know, medium value, low value.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, what’s going on?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why do you buy it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why don’t you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who are you buying?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, just getting to know them.
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s so much comes from those little conversations you can have around a piece or an a beer or some other thing you could do with them relative to your brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ll be doing that for sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that comes straight to mind, and of course, experimenting with productivity through AI and seeing where that gain is, is it on content production, is it on analytics?
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m sure you’ve seen these clearer as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can see there are a lot of power if you can connect truth into these systems to help you make decisions quicker.
[SPEAKER_02]: Ecommerce Masterplan is supporting by some of the greatest companies in the Ecommerce sector.
[SPEAKER_02]: It’s time for the top tips round.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I love this section because it gives me and our listeners some really quick ideas for taking our businesses to the next level.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rich, are you ready for the top tips?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, go for it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the book top tip.
[SPEAKER_01]: If everyone listening to this podcast agreed to take Friday off and read a book to make their business better, which book would you recommend?
[SPEAKER_00]: Cool, but it’s really difficult to choose one, but the one that I find most of my people I talk to haven’t read is The Hidden Persuaders by Events Packard.
[SPEAKER_00]: Written in the 60s, Events was a consumer psychologist that worked for the Madison Avenue ad agencies, and it’s a brilliant thing around psychological depth of
[SPEAKER_00]: like how cognitive bias, consciously and subconsciously works on decision-making.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, very quick story and I’m conscious of time, but there’s a really good example of this that one section in the book talks about ad agency were approached by a big chocolate company in the U.S., and they would ask to design like the full packaging, the pricing, architecture, absolutely everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they counterintuitively fall as a low-espendring power consumers,
[SPEAKER_00]: The packaging was really, let’s say, opulent lots of bows and foil and ribbons, and you can’t see the chocolate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then for the highest-bending power cohort of target audience, it’s all about having clear and open chocolates that you can see the chocolate inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that’s still true today.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at like a five-pound box of chocolates, you can’t see inside them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s very nice box.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the expensive chocolate you’re actually looking at the products inside.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it’s this live perception of my giving this a gift, this is for myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s a lovely things in this book around.
[SPEAKER_00]: your offer architecture and thinking of some of the more subconscious decisions that customers make around status and what it says about them and their needs is amazing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I haven’t come across that one and I think as a marketer, you can’t ever read too many books on consumer psychology because it hasn’t changed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s how we’re hard-wired.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that’s a game when you think about AI and all the other kind of big, again, where we’re
[SPEAKER_00]: We still act, I think, unless we’ve all got AI chips in our heads or anything else, but we still act in, actually, there’s a brilliant, my second book on there was thinking fast and slow by any camera right, which is that, again, conscious, slow thinking brain versus the fast subconscious brain.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that’s linked to Vans Packard’s one very much.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it will still be wanting our posh chocolate visibly and our cheap chocolates wrapped in boxes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, or particularly, I’m now the CEO of an apparel brand.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the apparel brand says about me was on walking round or when I look at myself in the mirror, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So there’s some interesting things that can consciously subconsciously.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly, right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Number two, traffic top tip, which marketing method do you either prize above all others or think doesn’t get the press it deserves?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I mentioned Sierra Merleus.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m not going to leverage that one again.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have been a big fan of my whole career actually on remnant above the line inventory.
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s some amazing deals to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you can approach a media owner directly and say, look, I’ve got artwork ready.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you can phone me once a week or tell me what you’ve got left over, I can pick that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can usually get deals as good as 10 to 30p on the pound at full rate card.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, during my play.com days and at the hot group in particular, where we used to get marketing co-op from brands.
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s an amazing arbitrage opportunity there, where we would go out and buy remnant tree.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let’s say remnant at 30 pence and the rate card is at 100, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You can imagine that, and we used to buy…
[SPEAKER_00]: tens of millions of eyeballs at a 70% discount from the rate, just but then the flexibility is then knowing I can’t plan it exactly around the start day end day but I’ve still got that access to the consumer and focus on the frequency so yeah there’s amazing opportunities in particularly our home audio TV still if you’re in that remnant space.
[SPEAKER_01]: I’ve having started my career in mail order, huge fan of remnant stuff and remnant above the line.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you know though, the strangest thing I have never been approached for a last minute deal on podcast sponsorship or email newsletter advertising at the risk of being out being bombarded with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one has ever gone, Chloe.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there’s ads we ran two months ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you have a space later this year, what could you do it for?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it expires.
[SPEAKER_01]: It’s just like the magazine industry or the side of a bus shelter.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don’t know how you feel as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s interestingly that again, I don’t think I’ve been probably in the last 10 to 15 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: It’s very rare for me to go into an eight figure brand and find an individual with any traditional above the line or non-digital buying experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think even with a prep potentially immediate buying partner and attempt to focus on remnant, they still get a commission and they’re so much opportunity and again, I think some of the upsides of why would you do it by the line?
[SPEAKER_00]: It has a still has a trust and again, there’s a brilliant thing, you know, when I think a few years back when Facebook had to apologise around a scandal of some kind of, you know, they use billboards and newspaper ads to do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: because we trust it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly, exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s a brilliant trust, and it does bring you out from the other, let’s say, I’m going to call everyone, you know, bedroom operators, that’s not appropriate, but there’s a sense of you in the real world, suddenly becomes, there’s something, again, coming back to our conscious psychology of a consumer, oh, you’ve turned up here, you know, why banks used to build big monolithic, columns, buildings at the end of high streets is because it’s around trust, and similar thing works there in the media choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: are completely a tool-top tip then.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe a collaboration tool, a social media plug in, a phone up or just a way of working.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there a call little tool you use that makes you and your team at more efficient from day to day?
[SPEAKER_00]: These aren’t tools predominantly, but ways of kind of build a bit more productivity for myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think turning off all notifications while you’re at work.
[SPEAKER_00]: except maybe VIP, but the ease of getting distracted by a ping or a ding or anything else absolutely key.
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s an amazing feature.
[SPEAKER_00]: I live in the Apple ecosystem now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve done for the last sort of 10 years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don’t know if you are you in Apple as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m not an app owner.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the Apple ecosystem there is a thing called text replace where you can put a shortcut on your keyboard and it can replace it with any text.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I’ve got probably 30 different like just at and then three letters and it can replace the thing I type quite frequently.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think generally over the last five years I’ve saved a week of my work in life by not having to copy, paste manual, type these things out and it can be things like email addresses, maps, instructions for X, things like that and calendar link
[SPEAKER_01]: love those kind of tools.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have one myself in my PC world called Type Desk, which has whole emails.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you can insert them with two character hits on the keyboard.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it’s just like alt C and up it pops.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I’ve been a bit of a minor raises.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like exclamation mark, whatever the next, like three letters or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that’s really key.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other one, I spend a lot of time in spreadsheets, obviously as a more sort of commercial analytical marketer, um, two things that drive me crazy, merge cells.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don’t merge cells.
[SPEAKER_00]: and learn keyboard shortcuts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, the speed of very quick story about school, I did a when I grew up, I was in the late 80s and only 90s, like going through secondary school and yeah, there were four computers at school, but I had a guy that taught us like XL1.
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn’t have any mice on the computer.
[SPEAKER_00]: everything was lent by keyboard and you can see where I’m showing spreadsheets to other colleagues or people that like see me work the keyboard moving around the spreadsheets a bit like oh my god hating that instead of holding the mouse on the scroll to the right-hand side and it takes 30 seconds to get to the outside I can go straight to the other end of the table in a keystroke or hatch to that so honestly it’s bending half hour learning keyboard shortcuts in x-hour or google
[SPEAKER_01]: And I also like your little plea to anyone working with you to not merge the cells in a spreadsheet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god, I see a merge now.
[SPEAKER_01]: I completely concur with all your recommendations there, Rich.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that merge cell features should be like admin level switch on or offable.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
[SPEAKER_01]: I’m with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, the carbon top tip.
[SPEAKER_01]: What’s your favorite way to reduce the carbon footprint of an e-commerce store?
[SPEAKER_00]: This one actually came up really struggling to be crazy because obviously I’m rail running an agency business and we’re pretty light on carbon and all those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don’t print it if you’re and I’ll think you’re getting, got it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’ve been working over the last six months actually on a lot of subscription supplements businesses looking at, you know, I’m doing commercial due diligence for investment
[SPEAKER_00]: impact also a commercial benefit so this is a double win on shipping quarterly instead of monthly so a quarterly supply on a quarterly basis so you know it’s three times as less or you know the packaging the fuel all those things slightly heavier package
[SPEAKER_00]: but in terms of cardboard uses and everything else, like no brainer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually what you look like, commercially, when I do my LTV analysis over these cohorts that are on the three months, they’re typically worth more money, over the same period of time than a monthly subscriber as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that would be… Love that one, thank you Rich.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now before we say goodbye, could you please let the listeners know how they can get in contact with you and your business?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: For it, the growth.foundation is our website.
[SPEAKER_00]: There’s a form there on the foot of the page, but you can also find me on LinkedIn.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m just forward slash Richard Chapel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I’m looking forward to hearing from you guys.
[SPEAKER_00]: I’m very open by the way for any questions or ideas or anything you want to know, please feel free to drop me a line.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rits, thank you so much for coming on the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you giving us all a ton of stuff to think about, which I love.
[SPEAKER_01]: So thank you so much for being here.
[SPEAKER_00]: No problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: always a treat to catch up with Rich.
[SPEAKER_01]: And how do I summarize that?
[SPEAKER_01]: Here’s what would you do if you were starting a new job as CEO at a Nate figure fashion brand?
[SPEAKER_01]: I love the way he split it down into what you do in each of the first three months.
[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, finding that truth, the truth and the numbers, the truth and the strategy, the truth in how the business is operating and how everyone is kind of culturally aligned.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then, month two, getting into strategic alignment, both working out what the strategy should be, and then becoming that consistent narrator of strategy, obsessing about the customer and working out where to play and how to win, and then making sure everybody is on board with that and kind of living and breathing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then month three, start looking at, is the organization designed to scale?
[SPEAKER_01]: You now know what your strategy is.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, now know you’ve got the numbers and the truth throughout the business.
[SPEAKER_01]: So how are you gonna go about doing that scale?
[SPEAKER_01]: Organizationally, has there been enough investment in the CRM?
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you have clarity on your customer insights?
[SPEAKER_01]: How is the CEO working alongside that founder role?
[SPEAKER_01]: build that what does the organization or structure need to look like when we’re doubled when in turn over.
[SPEAKER_01]: How does AI fit into that?
[SPEAKER_01]: How does hiring fit in?
[SPEAKER_01]: How does talent acceleration?
[SPEAKER_01]: That’s not the right word.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it talent development work?
[SPEAKER_01]: So many bits of these.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, there’s so much just in the top tips that you could pick out.
[SPEAKER_01]: such a good, a good rundown there from rich, and I think even if you’re not a new person who’s just got a new job of CO and eight figure fashion round, I think we could probably all apply that to our businesses in this off-e-commerce season of the spring and work our way through those things to make our businesses tighter and stronger.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can get your hands on our notes from this episode, including those top tips and links to what we’ve mentioned by heading over to ecommercemasterplanned.com.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can also use ECMP.info for such the number of this episode to go straight to the right page of the site.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you get to the website, please do add yourself to our email list.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you don’t miss out on any of the things we share to help you improve your business.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you liked this episode, then make sure you check out.
[SPEAKER_01]: All our other what would you do episodes, which you will find via the website at ECMP.info forward slash WWID.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for tuning in to this and every episode of the Ecommerce Master Plan podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: I bring you a new interview every week because I want to inspire and help Ecommerce business owners like you to succeed and thrive with your businesses, including progressing along the path to net zero.
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[SPEAKER_03]: Hope you have a great week and don’t forget to keep up to Mising.
