Dr. Travis Zigler knows a thing or two about the entrepreneur’s journey.Sometimes the path you end up taking as an entrepreneur is NOT the path you had in mind when you set out.Travis and his wife, Jenna, are both optometrists by trade, but they had an itch to build an eCommerce business. They started with sunglasses, then landed with a dry eye product, but what began as a product-focused company shifted to a customer-focused business.Here’s a look at what we cover:
- How to cultivate raving fans.
- How Travis and Jenna shifted from selling plastic to serving a person.
- How and why they built a YouTube channel.
- How they almost sold the business for nothing but then turned things around.
- His most important lessons from success and failure.
Mention in This Episode:
Travis Zigler
Profitable Pineapple on YouTube
Profitable Pineapple Amazon group on Facebook
Transcript:
Brett:
Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the eCommerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today I've got an expert. I've got a friend, I've got a guy that you're just gonna love, you're gonna love this interview, I can guarantee it. Uh, we're gonna be talking about lessons learned from building and selling a multimillion dollar brand. And hey, we may even talk a little bit about ad agencies as well, just for fun. We may throw that in for good measure. Uh, but my guest today is Dr. Travis Ziegler, co-founder of I Love. He's now serving as the president there. He's also the CEO of Profitable Pineapple Ads. And so I think, in fact, I don't think I know, I first met Travis at Ryan Daniel Moran's house. We were hanging out at Ryan's Lake house. Um, he's part of Ryan's community and does some things. I'm an investor. And anyway, uh, we've met and we're like, Dude, uh, this guy's awesome. He's really bright and I love what he's doing. And he, he works with his wife and they've done amazing things in the eyecare space. And he is also a doctor, so we need to find out how is he a doctor, Uh, and then we're gonna get into just all kinds of fun lessons and stories and goodness along his journey. So, with that, Travis, what's up my man? How you doing
Travis:
Brett? Thanks for having me on. Excited to be here and excited to be on this podcast cuz I, I'm a longtime listener.
Brett:
Yeah, thanks. I really appreciate that. And, uh, thanks for taking the time. So a couple of things that are interesting. I wanna, I wanna, uh, you want you to tell people how you're a doctor and are you a real doctor? I know that you are, but, uh, people may be questioning are you a real doctor? Um, so I wanna talk about that. Also, uh, we get to see each other a handful of times a year, probably at different events. We're we're quasi competitors, right? Like you, you've got an agency, I've got an agency. We do, um, harass each other, I think, in a very healthy and fun and friendly way as far as that goes. Uh, but then just tons of respect in terms of what you've built. And so we'll focus mostly on the brand you've built, which will be fun. But I also wanna talk agency just a little bit, uh, towards the end as well. That's right. That's awesome. So, uh, explain Travis, what kind of doctor are you? And then, uh, what is I love before we dig into the, the full story.
Travis:
So, uh, I, I am a fake doctor to some, but I am, I do have my doctor ri <laugh>. Most people just think of a doctor as an md. I have my optometry degree, um, a doctorate optometry. So it's an OD not an md. And my wife is also an optometrist. That's where we met, that's where we fell in love. That's where
Brett:
We do do people. Uh, and sorry, I cut that off. You guys like the cutest, You guys like the cutest e-com couple slash agency couple. Love hanging out with you guys, Everybody loves you. Um, do, do people look down on optometrists because I'm, I'm, I'm reminded of, I don't remember know if you remember the Seinfeld episode, You're an anti <laugh>, <laugh> say, where Jerry is like, uh, you know, dentist are real doctors and Kramer calls him an anti dite. It was just, just one of the funniest episodes. But do people look down on optometrists? Cause cause you're a real doctor.
Travis:
Yeah, so it's the same thing as dentists, as chiropractors, as opt optometrists, we're, we're four years postgraduate. And so after that four years, we can go into practicing right away. Whereas an MD goes through their four years of training, then they'll go under their residency, and then they usually have a specialization after that. So MDs usually are in school for four years, but then they have the residency in training, that's usually another four to 12 years depending on what you specialize in. And so we don't have that, that's optional for us. We can go out and practice right after that. Four years.
Brett:
Nice. So, so you, um, went to optometry school, met your wife there, fell in love, got married, and then you guys started opening clinics, right? Started opening eye clinics. That was, that was something you did relatively early on?
Travis:
Yeah, so in 2010 and 2011 is when we graduated and we actually worked for my uncle who is in Columbus, Ohio. And that's where we graduated from was the Ohio State University. And, um, what happened is you just, I didn't know I was an entrepreneur at the time, but I just had this itch that I didn't wanna work for somebody else. And so we did the three things you're not supposed to do. We sold or we quit our jobs, we sold our house and we moved across the country and started two businesses. So we started two clinics from scratch in 2015. And that was the same year we got into this Amazon space too, because I went from seeing six patients an hour at my uncle's crazy busy clinic to seeing one an hour at my new startup practice. And so, like any new startup online, it's gonna be slow at first.
My uncle's been in practice for over 40 years now, and he bought the practice off somebody that had been in practice for 30 years. So this is a practice that's 70 years old, so you can imagine how crazy it is and how busy it is. And so that's like key point number one. I'm gonna just slam down on this podcast is time is your friend in any business, more time you have the bigger it's gonna go. So when I was seeing one patient an hour, I was extremely bored. And a course called Amazing Selling Machine came across by desk and
Brett:
Shout out to Matt Clark, friend of the show friend of mine, one of one of the, the founders of Amazing Selling Machines, which by the way, I believe it still holds a record. Highest selling, highest grossing info product ever. Amazing selling machines. There you go. Really?
Travis:
Yeah. Really that's, I believe because they've been around for a while. I think they're on like ASM like 15 now, so Yep. Yep. It's, um, it's a great, great product. And bought that and started selling sunglasses. That was our, our product. We did a product research and that was the one we went into. It was, uh, we just, we were looking at baby products like everybody does. And there was just something about like, it didn't feel right cause we didn't have a baby, and so we were like, let's just do what we know. Let's try sunglasses. So we ended up becoming this sunglass company and you know, we were building these three brands all at once from 2000 15, 16, 17. And what we saw is this steady ascent in our, um, clinics on lot our clinics. But then as you know, with Amazon, you just see this steady and then all of a sudden hockey stick growth. And we knew something had to give. We were running a 2.5 million company while running two optometry clinics full time. And so we knew we had to do something. And so that's when we started, you know, pivoting and focusing more on this online space completely. And we ended up selling all our practices. Um, and then 2018 we went full time into this and haven't regretted it one day since.
Brett:
That is, that is amazing. And and kudos to you guys. I know, I know you're smart, but running two clinics and running an online store, that's a lot of work. And so, uh, you made the right call, right? You made the right call by selling the clinics and, and going all in on online market or on, on your online businesses. And so, so you did sunglasses to begin with and that did really well. Explain though, what what is I love and and how did you make that transition from sunglasses to what you do now?
Travis:
Yeah, so we're selling pieces of plastic essentially from China, which is like the death wish of selling online in my opinion, because when you're selling pieces of plastic from China, you're not really building anything around it and you're just kind of selling it and you're inviting China to come in and undercut you on price. And so we were selling sunglasses and we were doing really well with that, but we weren't serving a need and there wasn't something there that like made you wanna get outta bed other than the money, right? And as you know, as I know, money will drive you so far, but until it doesn't, and then once it doesn't, you're gonna feel empty. And so we want to, and
Brett:
It's pretty hard to stir that up, right? If money is the only driving factor and that is no longer exciting, it's pretty hard to manufacture passion and, and excitement, uh, when it's not there. It's almost impossible.
Travis:
Yeah. So we were building this up and in my practice we were selling products, We were selling products for dry eye, um, eyelid sprays, eyelid wipes, eyelid masks, all these things that we were selling from other brands. And we were at a show, uh, capitalism.com conference. It wasn't called then. It's called the Tribe Summit back then. And there's a doctor on stage and he was getting drilled by this panel and this panel was like, You're the doctor, why are you selling all these other people's products and why aren't you selling your own? And I was just like, light bulb moment and so sweet. I went back
Brett:
To my the doctor
Travis:
Too. Yeah, exactly. <laugh>. And I went back to my clinic and I looked at all the products I was selling on my shelf, not glasses, but like things that were actually helping people, like eyelid, cleansers, eyelid wipes, like I talked about. And we were selling multiples of these per day. I'm talking 10 to 20 to 30 in our practice per day easily. And we didn't see a lot of patients, so it was a lot, it was high volume. And we decided that we wanted to start coming out with one of these in our own brand each quarter. And that's how we kind of started with the product side. But at the same time as this, what we noticed is fun, funny, funny story is we were gonna come out with a pediatric clinic and it ended up giving us, God gave us a geriatric clinic, <laugh>, and so exact opposite of what we wanted <laugh>, but
Brett:
What we, how did, how did that happen? So you're, you're going for peds and then you end up with geriatric. How, how'd that happen?
Travis:
Where we moved, we didn't realize where we moved and it was very old and it was like old South Carolina. Um, lots of, lots of disease, diabetes, hypertension, um, high blood pressure of course. And then, uh, glaucoma and dry eye and with dry eye is debilitating. It keeps people from working, keeps people from driving. And it's just the debilitating disease that we were helping people with quite a bit. And we saw this and so we were just like, this is amazing. Like we're making a big impact with dry eye, why don't we create a community around this? And so we ended up creating a Facebook group. We're still just a sunglass brain at this point. Create this Facebook group called the Dry Eye Syndrome Sport Community. And I did promise Ryan, I would never say this again, but Ryan ran, said it was probably the dumbest thing we could ever do to come out with this dry eye.
Brett:
Shout, shout out to Ryan. Yeah,
Travis:
Ryan is one of the greatest mentors. He's
Brett:
Fantastic. One of the best entrepreneurs you, you or I have ever been around. I totally agree.
Travis:
And he's been a mentor of mine for five years and that was the one piece of bad advice he ever gave me. But the rest has been amazing and I just like to harp him on that. So <laugh>, um, we ended up coming out with this dry eye syndrome sport community and I think August of 2016. And no dry eye products at this time, just sunglasses. And we just started wanting to serve. And that's all we did is we just served inside this community. Um, went live every single week and talked about something regarding dry eye and absolutely nobody showed up now, one single person. But what happened was, I think the Facebook algorithm started seeing some activity in there of us going live every week in that group. And about six months later, we were starting to pick up people and it started snowballing after that.
And people were asking questions, we'd go live and answer those questions and we just kept doing that over and over again. And now the community's about 20,000 people strong. And it grows. That's crazy. Drastically. I mean, it's a dramatic growth curve because like everything, it starts out slow, then you hit this hockey stick and it just, it grows really, really quickly. And unfortunately we can't do videos anymore, but that's how we built our Facebook group, which then turned into products, which then turned into a YouTube channel, which then turned into a blog and it just kind of snowballed into all this content that we could put out there to reach more and more people. So the Facebook group's really what started it all. Um, and we can kind of dive into that a little bit more if you want, or we can kind of
Brett:
Keep going. Yeah, would love to. I wanna talk, um, first though about just kind of the, the idea of the shift in focus of the business, right? You went from selling pieces of plastic from China to selling to a group of people, right? Or to an individual customer, someone with dry eyes. And, and you talk about how like if someone has dry eyes and, and I don't, so I I don't necessarily relate and probably a lot of people listening don't have dry eyes either, but for those who do, it's debilitating. Like you can't live your life. You can't do things with, with dry eyes. And so that product that you eventually developed was a, was a game changer, was a life changer for a lot of people. Um, and you were seeing that in the clinic. So, um, talk about that. Why is that an important shift going from just selling a product to really reaching a, an individual customer, reaching a, a person.
Travis:
Cause when you serve a person, they can change your life with just one simple sentence. And that's what happened to us is we were serving this dry eye community. We were answering their questions, We were selling products in our clinic that we were eventually gonna make our own products, but we didn't know which one we wanted to do first or how to find a manufacturer for that. Cuz these were things that were going in the body and on the body and we had to find somebody here in the States. We didn't wanna go to China for that. Right? And when you serve a person, they tell you what they need. Yeah.
Brett:
And
Travis:
When you, you don't even have to write copy. Like I'm, I'm a good copywriter, I'm not a great copywriter, but I'm a good copywriter cuz I listen to my customer and I literally write down what they say and their pain points. And if you're struggling with copy, pick up the phone and call 10 customers. Ask 'em why they bought your product. You're gonna have a whole sales page from that. And that's the beauty of listening to your customers and building that customer. Where with sunglasses, Why'd you buy my product to block the sun? Oh, thanks <laugh>. Why'd you buy our product though? So
Brett:
It's cheaper? Yeah,
Travis:
Yeah. There, there wasn't anything there. There was no substance. So, um, story around our, our hero product. The first product we came out with called Hydrate Limb Lash Cleanser. We had to change our brand name because we were in a lawsuit. The, the year we released it, um, over the name I love, which we won against the pharmaceutical.
Brett:
Kudos to you buddy. Look at that. David taken on Goliath. <laugh> won that one.
Travis:
It was not fun number one. And Goliath had a lot more resources. <laugh>,
Brett:
But,
Travis:
But they went up for sale and they had to close the lawsuit and
Brett:
See Nice.
Travis:
And so it, it still was eight months of drain out of us. But anyway, so hydrate Lynn Lash cleanser, we came out with that because we were selling a product called Anova. And this ANOVA product was $30 a month and very affordable pharmaceutical company sold it and they upped the price from $30 to $300 a month.
Brett:
Whoa.
Travis:
You can, it's now down to 40 again. Um, no, it sounded 30 online now. And at that time a customer came up to me and this is in my clinic and dry ice sufferer. And she said, Hey, they just upped this from $30 to $300. You're an entrepreneur, figure out how to make this
Brett:
Nice.
Travis:
That was on a Tuesday. By Sunday we had it in manufacturing.
Brett:
Wow.
Travis:
Because we just started reaching out to, to manufacturers of this product. This product's very specialized, it's very hard to make and there's only two people that can make it right in the world. And we have one of 'em and Anos the other. And so, um, our competitor and that all came from listening to our customers. Yeah. And I think you get good at that as a doctor is listening to your customers cuz they're there face to face and you're trying to address their problems. And if you don't address the problems, you're going somewhere else. Same thing with your customers online. Listen to them. Why they buy your product, What is the problem that they're solving or you're trying to solve? That's your copy, that's your bullet point sets everything that you build around. And then all we did from there on out as this community started building is we asked them, what else are you using for your dry eye? Yeah, that was the next product and the next product and the next product. Now we're up to about 14 skews and we're pretty soon gonna come out with, I think gonna be our best selling product. Um, we've never done eyedrops and we're finally coming out with an eyedrop cuz we've found two different eyedrops that we truly believe in that are completely different than what's out on the market. And they're truly gonna make an impact on somebody's life. So
Brett:
That is awesome. When, when did the eye drops hit? When can we be expecting the eyedrops?
Travis:
Uh, January, hopefully of 2023. Okay.
Brett:
<laugh>. Okay. Awesome. Awesome. Love it. So a couple things I wanna underscore there. When you, when you shift to serving a customer, serving a person, instead of just selling a product, then really everything becomes clearer, right? Where you know what to offer next. If you ask and if you listen, your customer will tell you what to launch first, what to launch next. The product roadmap becomes much clearer. I love what you said about good copy. I also fancy myself as a bit of a copywriter, don't do too much anymore, but took a copywriting course, used to write radio ads to did stuff like that. I enjoy it. But the most powerful copy comes from the customer, right? And then I, I can't remember who I heard said say this, but the most powerful tool that a copywriter can use is copy and paste, right? I copy this winning testimonial, I paste it into my ad.
Like that's where you really win and where you can create some breakthroughs. So, uh, love that. I love the shift. You know, you know, some, some companies really are a product first customer to a certain degree and, you know, to use a a really well known example, obviously Apple, you know, they just create amazing products and it's got mass reach, but I think you could probably drill down to the, the person they're serving too. But I think for most of us it's a clearer, more profitable, more predictable model to be a, a person first company rather than a, a product first company. So, so kudos to you guys on that. Any other comments on that piece?
Travis:
I think that you guys have a great client as an example. Um, I've followed Ezra since I started this company. Ezra and Ryan have been my two Ryan, It's actually been my mentor. Yeah. Ezra's been my digital mentor. I don't think we've met twice. Maybe he probably doesn't know who I am. But, um, he is, you guys do great with his ads because his ads, even though I don't see him, because you guys don't target me anymore. Yeah,
Brett:
Yeah. <laugh>
Travis:
Focus on
Brett:
That. You're not a 50 plus year old female, so you're not, you're not in the target market. Of
Travis:
Course the testimonials, the problem based marketing is just, it's, it's perfect and it works so well.
Brett:
Yeah. Yeah. And boom by c Joseph is really all about the person, right? It's, it's pro age. It's, hey, you are in this stage of life where society tells you you need to be anti-age society says, you know, your best days are behind you. But we say no, that's bs You are powerful. You're strong, you wanna look your best of course, but embrace where you are, right? So all the products are are pro age to make you look and feel great. But also, you know, a lot of the models are not coloring their hair, they're letting it go gray and they're, they're just, they're embracing the stage of life they're in. So, yeah. Uh, they do a brilliant work. Uh, we get to be a part of that and you get to help execute, but it's really all about that, that person more than it is the, the product, which is beautiful. So, um, that's, that's fantastic. So, um, uh, a few questions. I guess, you know, what, what are, what are some of the, uh, what are some of the, the, the biggest lessons along the way? I know you've already touched on some of them, but what are some other high points that you like to share with other entrepreneurs that, that you learned along the journey?
Travis:
Yeah, I mean, so many and 2017, 2019 have been the biggest learning years is things will happen to you in your life. And when you have a why in your business, like serving a who and having a why behind it. So we wanted to, to heal 1 million dry eye sufferers. Naturally that helps get you through the tough times cuz tough times will hit. And I say 2017 and 19 as examples because 2019 was the, or 2017, excuse me, was the year we were in a lawsuit with a pharmaceutical company and we knew our bigger why and that's what got us through that. But we also lost $50,000 to trying to expand to Europe. We also got a $100,000 inventory order stuck at customs and they were going to destroy it during our peak season, which was sunglasses. All of that was, we were able to get through that.
Brett:
All of that happened in one year.
Travis:
That was happening in six months. Yes. It was all
Brett:
Compacted right there. That brutal, that's brutal. And
Travis:
This was at the same time as we were pregnant with our first child. So there's a lot coming down on us at that, that time. And it was funny cuz when we gave birth to him, not me, my wife,
Brett:
You had the easier role in that process for sure. Yeah.
Travis:
I don't know. I delivered the baby. It's not that easy down there. <laugh> <laugh>.
Brett:
And did you go to bed? Did you really deliver the baby? You caught the baby? Yeah,
Travis:
We did it. We did it at home.
Brett:
Nice. So we, we actually did, um, all but two of our births, uh, with a midwife at home. I did not catch though. I was like more, I was more the doula, uh, although we had one of those too. But I was more the support. But kudos to you for catching. That's awesome.
Travis:
So when that happened though, that was like the release point. The lawsuit dried up, the inventory got released, everything just kind to lay down. But that all goes back to just having our why. Yeah. And having that why and knowing that we're here to serve that dry eye suffer. And we had just released our first dry eye product in 2017. And so that was what got us through it. We knew there was something bigger at play here than just these little things, but we were running outta money. And so it taught us a lot about money. It taught us a lot about positioning. And so really honing in on your strength. Hmm. And at that time I was doing inventory. I'm a ceo, I'm not an inventory guy, Right. And I over ordered inventory, took our cash flow down to nothing. When that inventory order got stuck, we had to order more to get it in for season.
And then we were stuck with so much inventory, which is cash on the shelf. And so we were cash strapped. But that learning lesson from that was, I am not a logistics operations guy. My wife stepped into that role. I stepped into the CEO role, visionary marketing sales, and that division was what kind of led to the next wave of our company taking off. We went from, you know, a multimillion or two, one to $2 million company all the way up to about a four and a half million dollar company as a result of just shifting into our roles and picking what we're strong at. And then really emphasizing that that was a big point that we learned from 2017. And then also we got into Profit First, which is a book by Mike Mcow. Itz.
Brett:
I've heard of that. Yeah. I know a few, uh, small business owners that use that and, and speak really highly of it.
Travis:
It's, it's brilliant when it comes down to it. And what you do is, it's the envelope model. So you get a hundred dollars, you divide it into 10% for ti for church, 5% for charity, uh, 10% for inventory, 10% for, or 50% for opex. Um, but the goal of it is you profit first, so you take your money out for profit. So you don't go through all your expenses and then figure out, see
Brett:
What's left.
Travis:
Yeah. Yeah. You figure out your profit, you figure out your payment to yourself, you figure out your taxes and then after that you then go into your opex and what can I afford to do? We even took it a step further and made an inventory account too. And so when we, we had these allocations for all this, what what that did for us is it just cleared our mind because inventory bill came, you just paid out inventory account. When the inventory account becomes too excess where we have too much cap capital in there, we then come out with a new product cause then we can't. And so it was a amazing learning experience just of from 2017 of role playing, of knowing where you're supposed to be in the business. Yeah. Uh, how to manage the money and then just how to grow. And those were kind of the biggest lessons that we learned during that stage of the, of the business. And then ongoing, we could talk about 2019, which is another.
Brett:
Yeah. Let's do get into that in just a minute. I wanna underscore though a few things you talked about, which, which were just brilliant. Um, really I love that if you, if you know your who right? And you have a clear and compelling why that's gonna kind of pull you through any how or in any, any difficulties, right? If, if the goal is just, I gotta make a couple extra bucks so we really like a new car, something like that. You're gonna probably give up when you, when you face a 2017, uh, in your business, which we all do. Um, or
Travis:
When you get the new car, it's gonna be like, Oh, this
Brett:
Is it. Yeah. So I'm done now I guess. I mean this car's even not, not even that great. Right? But I got it. Um, yeah. So, so you guys understanding roles and this, this is where we've had breakthroughs in our business as well as an agency. We've had, we've had a few inflection points, but when we identified the right person on our team to step in as coo, our name is Sarah. Like when we got her in that role a number of years ago, that really unlocked some things in our business where I could focus on my brilliance and, and my co-founder Chris Brewer code as well. And it unlocked a new level of growth, right? So getting the right people in the right positions, that's key. I think some of us as entrepreneurs, we, we are so focused, I think there's probably a higher percentage of us that are focused on the marketing and the sales and the growth and the creativity more than the financial health of the business.
Obviously we all wanna make money and we wanna be financial, he financially healthy, but we don't think about how important that is. Right. And when you, when you are financially stable, it just creates so many more opportunities, right? And especially as we're, as we're recording this, you know, kinda uncertain times in the economy and who knows what's gonna happen. But the companies that are financially sound, you know, when a recession hits, you get opportunities. Right Now you can go buy stuff and you can go buy other, other companies and things like that. When you're strapped, you are kind of stuck. Um, but I love that this is just kinda the way life works. It seems that sometimes it's, it's, it takes really difficult times to kind of force you into those difficult decisions of how to get the right people in the right places on the, on the, uh, the company, in the company. And then how do we get financially sound. So, um, yeah. Fantastic lessons. Super cool. Um, but yeah, let, let's, uh, let's unpack, uh, 2019 just a little bit. What, what, uh, what funds have transpired that year,
Travis:
The next, the next odd year? Um, you know, 2017 was the first one that was tough. 2019, we actually almost sold our company.
Brett:
Wow. And
Travis:
We almost sold it to an aggregator for nothing. I mean absolutely nothing. Not even close to what it was worth. And Ryan actually saved us <laugh>. And so we were shiny object syndrome really took over that year. And we were trying everything. So what got us to where we were was focusing on Amazon and really drilling down on that. The unfortunate thing is I joined a mastermind, not Ryan's, but a different one that was focused on direct to consumer and direct to consumer. There's nothing wrong with it. And if you're good at it, great for you. Um, it's very tough. It's a very hard business to be in.
Brett:
And it's a different skillset from building an Amazon business. I think both are extremely important, but the skills to build a d TOC business and the skills to build an Amazon business are quite different.
Travis:
So we wanted to build our Shopify website. And so we hired an agency that was not cheap and to build our Shopify and we kept them on for too long. But what happened was, is when we shifted to Shopify and all our focus and resources and money went to that, our Amazon business started shrinking. So we stopped focusing on what was, what got us to where we were and started focusing elsewhere. And so many entrepreneurs do that as they focus on something else. Or I'll go just specifically to an Amazon business. What I see a lot of Amazon businesses do is they'll have this hero product and 80% of their energy is going on their second product they're trying to launch, but they can't get it off the ground. And then this one starts to slip a little bit cuz they took their eyes off the prize.
So really focusing on what worked to get you there will really help get you to the next level if you just keep focusing on that. So 2019, we took it on over to Shopify. We ended up breaking even that year. We didn't even profit anything because we put out so much resource, so many resources into that. And what we realized is we were also doing other things. We started three other businesses that year and we were trying to do other things as well. And I remember the, I was in our Chevy Volt charging at a charging station and we were talking to Ryan Moran and he's just like, you know, you just need to stop doing everything and just focus on what got you here in the first place. He's, I was like, You want me to just quit the businesses? He's like, Yeah, just quit 'em. Do what happens. Are you really gonna forget about, Are you really gonna miss that business that's doing 10 to 20 to 30,000 a year when you have a multimillion dollar business over here?
Brett:
Yeah. Yeah.
Travis:
I was like, okay. And so we literally just stopped doing three businesses. Wow. And they were all doing decent Kudo
Brett:
And Ryan for giving the advice, Kudos to you guys for doing it. Cause that takes some courage to just say, Nope, we're just gonna kill this. We built it, we did all the work, but we're gonna kill it.
Travis:
And that was the first year we shrunk. So that was the first year revenue shrunk and then profit was break even After we did all that, we the next year took off again. We grew 20% and profit, of course, I can't even say it X because we were at zero the year before. So <laugh> Yeah. We had, we had profit and that was
Brett:
Infinity symbol there.
Travis:
Yeah. And then, um, and 2020 was the year that we actually ended up going for sale in 2021 based on the 2020 even a number. And so it's amazing. That led us to our sale in 2021.
Brett:
It's amazing. Such a good lesson. And, and I remember, um, hearing, uh, I think it's in the book, um, the way Google works, it's, it's about, uh, uh, uh, Eric Schmidt talks about this and he used to be at Sun Microsystems and then at Google. But really you've gotta focus 70 to 80% of your time, energy, and attention on your core business. So where are those profits coming, coming from? Thinking about the profits, profits first methodology, Where are the profits coming from? 70 to 80% of your time's gotta be spent there, right? You do wanna expand, you do wanna do the next thing, but only 20% of your time can go to that stuff. Right. Or maybe it's 10 or 15. And so, but what I think what, what you guys did, cuz you just said it and I think what, what so much brewers do is yeah, but the old business, like the core business, that's boring.
Uh, I no longer get excited about that. I want the new thing, right? So I'm gonna spend 80% of my time on the new thing. And that's almost certainly a recipe for decrease in sales, right? And, and kind of getting to this year where maybe you can track or maybe you lose all your profits, you know, that, that type of thing. So, so yeah, you can't kill the core. You gotta keep doing, you gotta, you gotta focus on the core of why are you valuable? Why did you get here in the first place? Why do customers love you? What's the product that's hot? Um, so yeah. Really, really good advice. That's, that's fantastic. Um,
Travis:
The more boring you make your business, the better you're going to do. That's what I've learned. And it's, um, it's been a, so we've been able to expand the agency as a result of just making it extremely boring. Yeah. I love extremely boring. We do two things. Well we do Amazon PVC well and we do Google ads well to Amazon. And that's the two things we do really well. It was audience building, but when we got bought, we actually had to stop the audience building part because we couldn't build our YouTube.
Brett:
What part of your agreement with the buyout stuff. Yeah.
Travis:
Yeah. So it was a interesting time for that. But um, yeah, you make your business boring and then you focus on what you're good at. So for example, I see you doing it all the time. I always see you on stage, everywhere you go, you're traveling constantly to get in front of other people. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And that is your core job. Cuz you, I can tell you love doing it, number one. Yeah. And when you're in that, it attracts more people to the agency as a result. And I wanna be like Brett Curry when I grow up. So I'm trying to do the same thing. And my goal with my agency is the same thing. So I'm here talking to you right now, This is my 80 20, this is the the thing I should be focusing on to grow our businesses. Getting on other podcasts. I mean, I, I can't compete with Brett's agency yet, but we both have, we're both great agencies when it comes to Amazon ppc.
Brett:
100% for
Travis:
Sure. But Brett is great because he's expanded to YouTube, Google, Facebook, and then getting on stage. That's my next goal is to get on a bunch of stages just like you're doing. And that's kind of what I need to do to grow our agency. What is it that you're doing in your business that grew it so much and keep focusing on that? That's, that's key.
Brett:
Yeah. I love that so much. I think the, you know, we had to do this early on with the agency as well where we, we wanted to do everything right? So my business partner, Chris and I, we're pretty smart marketers and we understand direct mail and I used to do TV and we used to, you know, like we could come up with just a full marketing strategy for people and building websites. We don't know how to code, we don't know how to build websites, but we can pull people off of, uh, OES or whatever to build websites. Uh, now it's called something else. But anyway, um, yeah, we just did everything and it was so complex and it was such a pain and I hated life a lot, uh, at, at times in the early, early days of OMG back in like 2010, 2011. And then we decided, let's make it boring, right?
Let's just do paid search and seo. We're great at that and let's just sell it like crazy, right? And so sometimes when you make things boring, then you can think about your business objectively and you can think about it like an owner instead of like, you know, someone who's overly emotionally attached. And, and I think this, this is why sometimes you can give the perfect advice to someone else in their business, right? Just like Ryan could look at your business and say with certainty, just stop doing those other things, right? Where you couldn't see that yourself cuz you're too emotionally attached. But when you make your business a little more boring, you can look at it more objectively, right? And then, then, and then that works. And so highly recommend that. And then once you do that, then you can start expanding. So we did, yeah, we were SEO paid search exclusively and oddly enough we were like 80, 90% seo.
We used to be at SEO company. Um, and then we've evolved and grown and YouTube was a big hit and still is. And then Amazon and stuff like that. Um, so that's key. And then yeah, what you were talking about there with, you know, I enjoy speaking on Sages is something I do pretty well and I like it. Um, I think I gotta look at as an entrepreneur, what's, what's the highest and best use of my time? Like what's my superpower? What, what can I do that delivers an an outsized return, right? For the time and energy invested it delivers a huge return for my business and you gotta spend more time there. So super powerful. So now that I know you wanna be on stages and you did a great job at Capcom, I will help you get on more stages. Uh, I think you can totally do it. You did. That'd be great.
Travis:
Thank you
Brett:
<laugh>. Yeah, that's great. So, so let's talk a little bit about, uh, profitable pineapple and then we do, we do harass each other when we're in person cuz we're competing agencies. But also we've, we've, there's been a few times where I found out someone works with you guys and I'm like, don't, don't come to us security with Travis is he's gonna take care of you. Right? You've done the same thing for us in reverse, which is awesome. Uh, but why, why start the agency and, and what do you guys do and why are you called profitable pineapple?
Travis:
I don't know why the pineapple thing, it just kind of came to, I'll tell that story. H um, so yeah, we, you know, we are in the stage of growth where I was like, I was spending most of my time in Amazon PPC and I was like, I need to get out of this so I can focus on growing. I love again. And we went through six softwares in three agencies within a year and
Brett:
Sounds fun.
Travis:
The same problem kept occurring. Like they'd wanna implement their strategy, but they needed a high budget to get started and they just needed to pound the high budget to learn. And I'm just like, but I've got all this data. I, I know what I'm doing with the Amazon ppc. Like go to my search term report, find it, make it more efficient and grow it.
Brett:
But we use a proprietary system that really relies on this, this and that. Like, okay, I bet yeah,
Travis:
We, we went through those and nothing was, nothing was working. And so finally after the third agency, which was a friend of mine who I really trusted, who's very smart in the Amazon space, I'm not gonna mention his name cuz he's brilliant and he, his business has helped me a ton. But when I went to that agency and I saw that they couldn't do what I wanted him to do, I decided I had to do it myself. And it's, it's the pretty typical agency story. And we decided to build an agency that served my brand and we built the system around it and we ended up getting a couple people just due to the success that we had wanting us to, to run it as well. I, I didn't have time to do it though. So built the system around it and we got four clients and at the time we were running those four clients through my practice like that, I was like, I don't wanna start another business, let's just run it through my practice. E n. And so we were um, serving these four clients and we kept four clients forever. I mean four clients was a long time. And then finally in 2019 we decided to start growing it. Um, but we were having trouble with the scale part cuz as you know, agencies scale with people and it was
Brett:
Only me very, very labor intensive. Yeah. I can't scale without people the way we do it now, if you, if you're fully relying on software, then you can scale a little bit faster, but yeah, it's, it's capital in it's labor intensive for sure.
Travis:
Yep. So what we did is we found a software that works well enough for us along with the, the person and I. And so we were able to go from four to about eight clients, but then we capped out again and that's when we started taking it seriously. We started pushing things. This was the end of 2019, beginning of 2020. And we just started growing the agency as a result. But the real breakthrough in the agency came was when we hired a coo, just like you talked about earlier. And we went, we tripled our revenue that year, right? Wow. By just hiring a coo. And now we've been able to, to over double our team again from three to now seven. And we're still a very small agency, but we've got a good system in place that it's eight. We're able to, to really onboard somebody very quickly as far as like a manager.
And we like to hire entrepreneurs, um, people that are building their own brands. We never take on a client that would be competing with any of their brands. And we, that's how we built it. We've built it with a lot of people from the capitalism incubator and there are a lot of our brand managers. And my goal is to, to train them up so much that they leave me eventually because if I train them up, they're gonna build their brand and then hopefully they'll leave me. But hopefully they'll love it so much they'll want to stick around. So that's how we, we kind of morphed into the agency was just needing something and I love and then just kind of growing it from there. But the approach I took differently this time was I didn't wanna do anything I didn't wanna do. And like I said, this is what I wanna do. Talk to people.
Brett:
This's a really profound statement. It's a really simple statement, but very profound. I didn't wanna do anything I didn't wanna do and that, that's where we should be going as entrepreneurs, right?
Travis:
Yeah, exactly. And that's where the stages come in. That's where podcasts come in cuz I love doing this. I get to talk to people like you who are very successful in ahead of me and I get to learn from you as a result. And then I get to go to the masterminds like you do, um, the blue Ribbon masterminds probably No, your number one source of referrals and you probably have every single one of them.
Brett:
Yeah, it for sure has been Yeah. Over, over the course of, of the last seven or eight years. Yeah. It's been, it's been the number one or number two, probably number one source. Yeah. It's been fantastic. Yeah. So these, and, and they're just fun, right? Like the right mastermind is just, it's, it's enjoyable. Like you get a lot of benefit from it. Um, in addition to the business, which, which is uh, fantastic.
Travis:
You don't have to sell, you just, you just go and literally
Brett:
Just deliver value and then, and then good things happen. Um, really interesting. So a couple things that I think we, we can underscore that are just good entrepreneurial lessons. One, you had to solve your own problem, right? Just like the lady who came to your clinic and said, Hey, this used to be 30, now it's 300. You're an entrepreneur. Do something, right? You kind had the same chat with yourself when you're like, Hey, I've tried six softwares, three agencies, this isn't working, I gotta do fix this myself. But then you, like, then you look for innovations and I, I don't know many other people doing it the way you're doing it where you're saying I want the specialists or the managers, the PPC managers on my team to be entrepreneurs, right? People that are building Amazon businesses. And we found this to be successful too. We've got a few on our team, but that's like your focus. Like we want other brand owners to be running campaigns. It's brilliant. It's, it's, you can, you can create a a, a real value prop to attract them to your team cuz you're gonna make them better managing ads better, but in their own brand. And yes, some will lead, but some will stick around. And um, I know the benefit there, one of the benefits is they get, they go from zero to being effective in their job much faster Right? Because of who you're attracting.
Travis:
Yeah. That and um, you do have to be careful with that though because entrepreneurs, if you're, if you like profiles, we use the dis profile. Yeah. Entrepreneurs are dominance and influencers. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, if you get a bunch of Ds, nothing gets done
Brett:
<laugh>. So you do it. No, you do it. No, I'm, I'm management. You do <laugh>.
Travis:
So what we've, what we've learned from this is when we capped out the first time when it was just the two of us is we were both deiss and so the third person we hired was an sc, which is a steady compliance. Yep. Cause you need that, that steady compliance are the CEO types, the DS and I are the entrepreneur visionary types, the CEO types. So we had two Ds with one sc we tripled, then we hired three more all DI's And then we're like, okay, hold on. We did this once before mm-hmm. <affirmative> and we hired another sc Yep. Doubled. So it's, it's all about keeping that balance. And if you wanna go that route, you do do have to balance it and personality profiles, you cannot, like, they're, they're so important now for sure. Cause when you get to know somebody and what, how they like to be talked to, how they like to be scheduled, how they like to be managed, it can make the biggest difference between somebody accelerating and taking off in your business and helping your business take off to somebody just taking off and leaving. So that's a big difference. And that was such a key learning point for us, for the agency when we were hiring that.
Brett:
Yeah. It's so important. We, we've, we used disk now in our business as well, and I'm an ID my business part as a di uh, but we, we kinda went through a period where we hired too many scs, Right? This, this was early on and we had too many, like really hard working, but really compliant people. And so then it's hard to, like we don't have leaders, right? You need to have, you need to have, you need to have the proper balance there for it to work. Right. Just analyzing
Travis:
Everything.
Brett:
Yeah, exactly. And we can be kind of slow and, and, and things like that. And so yeah, you gotta have the right, right mix. Uh, absolutely. So, um, Travis, this has been an absolute blast. Love your businesses, Love what you've done, done with I love, love profitable pineapple. We're happy to send leads to you guys when not a good fit for us or we, we don't have capacity or whatnot. We, we'll continue, we'll keep that flowing and I'll keep making fun of you at events and stuff too. Uh, so don't worry about that. But, uh, if people are listening, they're like, okay, I I gotta learn more about what Travis is doing. How can they just kind of follow along with your brand and then how can they also get in touch with you for, from an agency standpoint?
Travis:
Yeah, so you can look up profitable pineapple on YouTube. We have a good YouTube channel. Um, we pretty much just, we give you everything on how we do it and you can learn exactly how the agency does. That was started selfishly because that's how we train when we bring on somebody nice. Is we have a Amazon PPC course that's free and we literally teach you exactly how we're doing things inside the agency. And selfishly, like I said, it's because I wanna hire you. Then once you become really good at the system,
Brett:
<laugh> and
Travis:
Smart system. So profitable Pineapple on YouTube. It's called PPC Pros by Profitable Pineapple. We also have an Amazon Facebook group or Amazon, a Facebook group called PPC Pros by the Profitable Pineapple. It's just where we, we release nuggets there. And then profitable pineapple.com is our website where you can get the free Amazon PPC course as well.
Brett:
Awesome. And then if someone just wants to see like, hey, how are you releasing products and how are you building the brand and what, what, what kind of market are you running? How can they find, uh, I love online?
Travis:
I love is I love the sun.com. Like I said, we were sunglass company first, so I love the sun.com was our url and that's eey not the letter. I i love the sun.com. And it's funny cuz everybody's like, why are you that? Cause oh, we're sunglass company when we started. Now we're a more of a eyecare and iHealth company.
Brett:
Nice. And then check you guys out on Amazon as well. So with that, Travis has been awesome man. Thank you so much for taking the time. Really enjoyed it. We'll have to do it again sometime,
Travis:
Brett, I always appreciate you.
Brett:
Thanks man. And with that as always, we appreciate you tuning in. We'd love to hear from you. What would you like to hear more of on this podcast? If you haven't already, leave us that review on iTunes, that would make our day. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.
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