Behind the Scenes: Blue Ribbon LIVE 2018 in Denver, Colorado!

Brett: I think that’s maybe a preview of things to come. For future smart market event is we will see sumo wrestling. I wanna bring sumo wrestling to Blue Ribbon.

Man: Perfect.

Ezra: Blue Ribbon Mastermind. Denver, Colorado. We’ve got the cream of the crop, the creme de la creme, some other analogy for top of the food chain, you know. We’ve got folks here who are CEOs of 150-million dollar e-commerce companies, people who just sold their brands for 100-million plus. Looks like seven, eight and nine figure e-commerce business owners who are doing really well and look, it’s one thing to be successful in business and that’s cool and that’s how you get in the room. But, you don’t get into the room unless you are a good person. I don’t let anyone in this group who isn’t like nice and kind and wants to share and is open.

So we do this couple times a year and my Blue Ribbon Mastermind. It’s a high-end event for people who have successful e-commerce businesses and want to grow them further. I’m gonna take you behind the scenes, talk to some of the speakers about what they shared and it will be a good time so let’s go do it.

Drew: My name is Drew Sanocki and I am the CEO of AutoAnything.com. We talked about private equity and we came into this company through private equity, we bought the company from a much bigger company.

First of all, I think it’s a great idea to buy versus build. I think the speed to market and the speed with which you can build some wealth is probably a lot quicker if you’re open to buying. You can buy a business that requires your exact skill set. So if you are good at leadership and management, you find the company that’s lacking that, you know. If you’re good at SEO, you find the company that’s terrible at SEO. I think most entrepreneurs see opportunities, we’re good at seeing patterns and applying them in different spaces and I think…

There are all sorts of acquires who look for different things, you know, but in general, I would say making your business as profitable as possible would appeal to financial buyers. I think developing a proprietary product line.

Getting some firm numbers around your customers is probably the best thing you can do. So how much does it cost to acquire a customer and then what’s the lifetime value of that customer? And obviously, you want one more than the other so that you have to run a profitable business but getting your head around those numbers and knowing how your acquisition is generating profits for the business will really help you sell the business someday.

Brett: I’m Brett Curry, I’m the CEO of OMG Commerce. In terms of what an e-commerce store-owner needs to know now based on kinda where things are going. A few things, I think part goes back to traffic diversification. So if your someone that’s largely relying on just one source, well that’s Facebook or Google or whatever, you need to diversify. Every platform, every channel is shifting and changing and so the more diversified you are, the better.

Nick: My name is Nick Shackelford. My company is Common Thread Collective. You’re not even thinking about investing in influencers unless you’re committed to having a brand for a couple of years, right? I think the biggest takeaway is A, activating influencers and using as another channel to drive revenue. The second is where it fits in the funnel of marketing. Actually not just get in the post, but getting access to the Facebook page and you put your brand hours behind it, it’s just so valuable.

Zenovia: Zenovia Andrews. I’m the CEO and founder of MaxOUT Marketing Agency. My presentation here at Blue Ribbon was focused on high-ticket sales funnels. And it really looked at one was the high-ticket sales for packaging your product as yourself and education. And then two, you know, what is that look like? Could be automated. Can you evergreen that product? And then the third thing was optimizing the opportunity with whatever sales offer that you offer it in.

Ezra: See you gotta get low, you gotta come from the side. And it’s all about…it’s not forced. You can’t force it. You gotta just come and be gentle with it.

So the activity for this Blue Ribbon Mastermind was ping-pong as you got to see. And who would have known, a bunch of tech people and ping-pong, it’s like a match made in Heaven. Everybody loves to pong. People went into training camp, they went to… They trained for this event. So anyways, I just wanted to say I’m pretty excited about ping-pong. I just discovered. It’s not what I wanted to say but I’m gonna tell you anyway. I discovered ping-pong about two years and it’s like, “Where has ping-pong been my whole life?” It’s like the most fun thing ever. So if you don’t pong yet, pick up a paddle. You feel it in your hand, it’s a kind of power that you wheel but you didn’t even know that you had.

Anyways, thank you for taking a little behind the scenes tour of our Blue Ribbon Mastermind. If you’re an e-commerce business owner who’s doing seven, eight or nine figures in annual revenue, we’d love to have you in this group, you know. Come… Go to smartmarketer.com/mastermind. Check us out, apply for it or just keep, stay tuned to the blog. You know, we appreciate you being a subscriber and someone to watch our videos.

We do all of this for you, to try to add value to your life and share with you kinda what’s working for us in our businesses. So thank you so much, my name is Ezra Firestone, I hope to see you, I hope to stare across the ping-pong table and… What do you do is that the ping-pong do but I don’t know. I hope that we play ping-pong sometime.

All right, talk to you later. Bye.