The Backbone of Every Successful Brand

Hey everyone,

I hope your week is going fantastic thus far. In this newsletter, we're going to talk about probably the most unsexy yet one of the most important topics in eCommerce.

And that is… drumrolls, please… Operations

Yeah, we know it's not as sexy as marketing, CRO, raising money, etc - BUT, it is the backbone of every business, and without strong operational systems, tools, and frameworks - none of the sexy stuff would be possible.

Since we can't cover all aspects of Ecomm operations in one newsletter, we've divided this newsletter into three sections: Marketing operations, financial operations, and People operations.

In each section, we'll give you our most important takes and the tools we use to streamline operations within the different departments.

Let's get into it!

Marketing Operations: Building the infrastructure needed to let the CMO be the CMO

One of the things that we've realized quite late in our journey is that the CMO's role should not be to manage UGC creators, write email campaigns, build ads, etc.

… or at least not if your CMO has a more advanced skillset than doing that.

We're not saying that those things aren't important, but since we all have the same 24 hours in a day - we simply have to figure out what the highest-leverage activities we can do are and then focus all or most of our attention on them.

And in order to do that, we need to constantly ask ourselves the question, "Is there a tech tool/platform that can do this more efficiently, better, and cheaper?" or "Can an employee do this more efficiently, better, and cheaper?".

Luckily for marketing operations, most of the time - the answer is: Yeah, there is a tool for that.

Since we started tapping heavily into tech tools to support every aspect of our marketing operations, we've been able to significantly increase the team's efficiency.

An excellent example of this is something like Triple Whale, which allows us to get an all-in-one cockpit or entire business at any point in time. We used to have an analyst pull out all of these numbers and do the same thing every day - but now we can leverage his brain in another way, because we have Triple Whale to do the tedious work. Another example is stuff like creator sourcing, negotiating with them, paying them, etc. It's basically a process that can be done more efficiently with tech, so why not just use a tool like Insense to just make it 10x easier, faster, and just generally less messy to deal with

As a result of that, our CMO (yours truly) can focus his time and attention on more high-leverage work that produces more output per unit of input.

Financial Operations:

Financial operations are one of those topics that THE LEAST amount of ecomm owners understand, let alone have a good operational framework around.

We could write multiple newsletters on financial operations in and of itself - but for the sake of keeping it short and sweet - we'll just give you the three most important components of our financial operations at Obvi.

1) Fire your bookkeeper

In the age of AI and Automation, technology replaces manual work done by humans - and now is the time of bookkeeping automation. I can't imagine going back to a world where I have to wait +20 days to get my books done and be able to see my P&L and cashflow statement. In business, you want to make the right decisions fast. The first part of the equation comes down to having accurate data, and for your bookkeepers, as talented they may be, it will be almost impossible to be able to pull all the data at the pace eCommerce businesses move and get it right. The second part of that equation is having the information available NOW. Not in 20 days, not next month - but right now. The only way to get that is through technology. The tool we use for automating our books and staying on top of our finances is Finaloop. The reason why we chose Finaloop over other providers is that they speak eCommerce fluently. And that's super crucial because there are quite a few differences between doing bookkeeping for a "normal" retail store and an eCommerce store.

2) Get a fractional CFO to help you do your financial modelling.

We've chosen to leverage a fractional CFO to do our financial modelling as well as help us with our strategic decisions regarding finances because it doesn't really make sense for us to hire an internal CFO (yet), but the value which we can get from a CFO is huge. Also, just having a 3rd party take a look at your financials and guide us has helped us a lot.

3) Leverage FinTech tools for financial engineering

One of the key things that have allowed us to scale Obvi fast has been our ability to properly use various FinTech tools like Parker, Wayflyer, UpSide Financing, etc.

Most people still struggle with understanding that you don't necessarily need to use these tools because you desperately need money. Instead, you can leverage them strategically to buy yourself more runway to A) figure out how to sell your products and B) outspend your competitors on growth-related costs rather than tying everything up in inventory.

People operations

This is by far the least talked-about topic in eCommerce… by a mile!

… and it makes zero sense.

Because whether we like it or not, we just have to realize that we are in the people business too.

You may be able to grow your brand to a certain level without getting additional hands on board, but at some point - you need to start building a team. And once you reach that level, your ability to put together the right team, with the right values and the right incentives, will be the leading factor in whether or not you succeed.

So, to give our employees the best experience in working with us - we need to have our systems in order for this process too.

The first takeaway I want you to chew on in relation to this is; "how can you incentivize your employees in the best way possible - so that they actually WANT to go that extra mile?"

How do you get that owner mindset installed in them?

Well, one thing you can do is to actually make them an owner…

What we've done more or less since the beginning has been to issue phantom shares and give our employees the ability to buy stock in the company. The rationale behind this is that we'd rather have employees who are always putting their best foot forward because they have a piece of the upside rather than have slacking employees that are bringing the culture down with them (and thus making everybody's pie smaller)

Another thing which has been huge for us, has been implementing a system called Gusto - which is basically just the Triple Whale for HR. From here, we can organize and manage all of our payroll, employee PTO, contracts, etc., from one single interface. This is a big thing for us because it makes our lives easier - but it's also a sign of legitimacy and safety to your employees. So get that setup today, too, if you haven't.

Questions of the day

The season finale of Chew On This is out now!

Thanks for reading along!