TL;DR

You’ll make it through this.Be creative.Be willing to make tough decisions.Focus on what is most important.Keep connecting with your customers.

Meet Alida Sholl:

Connect with Alida on LinkedIn.

She is the director of operations at Rep Fitness. She is responsible for sales, customer service, account management and the entire tech stack. This covers pretty much all customer touchpoints, so this is a very important role for making happy customers at Rep Fitness.She has an incredibly diverse background: industrial engineering, process improvement and animal welfare. All of this has prepared her to take on the excitements and challenges of her current role.

Meet Rep Fitness:

Rep Fitness is NOT like Gold’s Gym equipment (the latter might break if you use it, the former won’t).Rep Fitness focuses on the home/garage gyms. The goal is to make functional fitness accessible for all. While not at the top of the price point, the product they offer is very durable.Rep Fitness strives to have excellent customer service. They want happy customers. As such, they support the customer through the entire sales cycle, including set up after the purchase. It is admirable that they help customers find the right product instead of the most profitable product.Alida points out that equipping a home gym is never complete. Very true, indeed. Keeping your customers happy through this process will ensure they keep coming back.Rep Fitness was started by two brothers—they bought a container of barbell weight plates, and everything went from there.

Setting the stage.

Rep Fitness is high growth. They are used to new challenges (maybe even enjoy the adrenaline dump from growing fast—just a little bit?).

This episode will focus on adapting to challenges. Through this COVID-19 pandemic, many merchants have faced the challenge of less sales. Rep Fitness has had the opposite challenge—”too many” sales. As we look into this, you will see that the techniques for dealing with too many or too few sales are similar. It comes back to adapting and being willing to make really difficult decisions.

For most online retailers, Black Friday is the big day of the year. If a sales record is to be set, it’s going to be on Black Friday.

We as a team, are very scrappy and willing to just get in and make those quick decisions to keep us moving forward.Alida Sholl

Rep Fitness has blown their Black Friday sales records for days and days through the lockdowns associated with COVID-19.

Joseph wonders if this is like Black Friday on steroids (pun intended, possibly). Alida said its the “best steroids ever”.

Getting into the challenging weeds.

Rep Fitness has had to deal with unprecedented order volume. On the surface, this sounds like a dream—tons of orders coming in, all while lockdowns are forcing many other businesses into closure.

However, Rep Fitness has had to come to grips with how this affects them:

24-hour fast shipments—no longer possible.Order fulfillment process—completely rebuilt.Customer expectations—must be reset.

Rep Fitness’s fulfillment team takes pride in getting all orders shipped on the same day. They go home knowing that they got their orders out quickly—and the customer will be all the happier.

What are the goals we can set for today?Alida Sholl

Alida’s team had to focus in on the here and now. They adapted from long-term to the short-term. While this sounds counter-intuitive, you do what you have to do. When a tsunami hits, you don’t focus on long-term business goals. You focus on today.

If your business has lost the majority of its revenue, your adaptation is still the same. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Look at today. What can be cut? What can be promoted?

Customers have quickly adapted to realizing that delays are inevitable. They are giving extra slack to brands. For the record, Amazon themselves are facing major del