Podcast 20: Three Growth Paradigms – How to Think About Rapid Growth

Three different ways to think about rapid growth, some resource and books to look into further, and Drew's preferred approaches to growth. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Want the transcribe from this episode? Click here to download it as a PDF. There is a ton of info out there about how to grow a company. Books, blogs, podcasts like this one, and everything in between. If you could use some help narrowing down your focus and deciding how to approach eCommerce growth, this is the episode for you. Drew covers three different growth paradigms – tactical, strategic, and operational – and shares a little bit about his personal approach to growth. Highlights How Drew thinks about growth when approaching a new company Three Growth Paradigms – How Drew Took Karmaloop from Bankruptcy to Profit in 10 Months Tactical growth strategies – optimizing what you're got Some Blogs to check out for good tactical growth advice The risk of absorbing too many tactics A few of Drew's favorite books on growth Leveraging distribution advantages (ie: influencer marketing) The shortcomings of marketing books when it comes to digital marketing Operational-level growth Improve three areas of your business by 30% to double your business (Three categories to focus on improving) Links / Resources To learn more about data-driven strategies that grow ecommerce businesses, just sign up for my mailing list. Transcript Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also download it for later. → Read the Transcript Everybody, welcome to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. This is Drew Sanocki, live. It's not live. If you're listening to this at some point, it's not live. What do I say? Podcasting from New York City. It's better if it's live from Times Square. Live from Times Square, this is Drew Sanocki, the Nerd Marketing Podcast. That sounds better. We're going to say it's live, even though it's not, obviously by the time you're listening to it, but hey, everybody, this is Drew Sanocki. I'm broadcasting live from Times Square, New York City, center of the universe. We're talking about growth. We're talking about eCommerce, and today's topic is karmaloop.com. It's going to be the next episode's topic and the next episode's topic. Basically, we're going to walk you through what happened at that retailer, so this was a bankrupt retailer last summer in June 2015, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. I want to say 500K. Don't quote me on that. I was part of the team that went in and purchased the company out of bankruptcy. I came on board as the CMO, and within 10 months, we had gotten the company to break even, sold the company for more than we bought it. I can't get into details, but this is the story. That's an amazing growth story, and probably the most important thing is I'm not an idiot. We just got confirmation that I am not an idiot because the stuff I teach on this podcast actually worked at this retailer, so there is your stamp of approval. I know what I'm talking about as evidenced by this latest case, but we're going to dig into that. Want to save this transcribe to read later? No problem, click here to download. We're going to talk about growth, how I think about growth when I go into a new company like this, how you can think about growth at your own retailer, getting some really good successful things happening in a short amount of time. I'm going to talk to a couple of people at Karmaloop about what happened in their part of the business, but the topic of this episode is really ... Let's step back a second and talk about growth paradigms. What is the perspective I have when I go into a company? I work for a private equity fund now, so if they hire me to go into a company, they want what's called 100 day plan. They want an immediate ROI in their acquisition.