[00:00:00] Hey there, welcome to the eCommerce Coffee Break. I'm your host Claus Lauter and you're listening to the podcast that helps you become a [00:00:10] smarter online seller. In this podcast episode we discuss how optimizing the 8 pillars of running an eCommerce business can drive sustainable online growth. Joining me on the show is [00:00:20] Sabir Semerkant, Founder & CEO of Growth by Sabir at Growth By Sabir
so let's dive right into it. Hello, welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Today, we will discuss [00:00:30] strategies for sustainable online growth in your business. Joining me on the show today is Sabir Samarkand. Sabir is a leading e commerce growth strategist who has helped more than 150 [00:00:40] brands scale to success over his 25 year career.
So he's in a game for a very, very long time, like I do. And his clients include Ashley Stewart, Canon, and Tommy Hilfiger. [00:00:50] As the founder and CEO of Growth by Sabir, he has driven over 1 billion in additional sales and is a trusted advisors to top entrepreneurs and investors. Endorsed by industry leaders like [00:01:00] Gary Real, Neil Patel and Shark Tank's Matt Higgins, Sabir continues to transform Incomer's brands, guiding 29 companies across 17 product categories in 2024 alone.[00:01:10]
So that's quite a CV and I'm happy to have him on the show and that's welcome. Hi, Sabir. It's exciting being here, Claus. And I'm going to enjoy this coffee break. [00:01:20] We'll definitely do. Sabir, let's dive right into it. So we want to discuss strategies for growth. What do you think are the biggest challenges brands face right now in [00:01:30] 2025?
I think that the number one problem that, uh, Ecom brands face, uh, in 2025 is that, because I keep on hearing this [00:01:40] from entrepreneurs, right? Want to do the right thing and but what they end up doing is they go out and they seek out Not the right consult, right? [00:01:50] It's key I mean even Warren Buffett says you you have to always find the best person that can help you with that thing that you're facing With right, right You're not gonna [00:02:00] just ask your friend if you're having some sort of an issue from a hell, you know, a psychic psychology standpoint You're not gonna I ask, uh, just your friends, you're going to go seek out professional [00:02:10] help.
Somebody who lives that stuff on a day to day basis so that they can, they can help you with that in the e comm field. It's not that rigorous. You know, that's the problem with it. You, they [00:02:20] go and they try to see, Oh, you know what? Well, this person can get me backlinks on SEO on Fiverr for 50 bucks, 50, 000 backlinks, what a [00:02:30] disaster that.
I help a lot of brands actually undo that mistake. You know, that's a, that's a very expensive mistake, you know, and there are things like that, that they invest in net net for [00:02:40] the year. If you look at it, they invested quite a lot, right? If they, after you sum those, those numbers up, if they were to be asked that instead of giving that money to that capital for that [00:02:50] project for 50 different random people on Fiverr or.
Or Upwork or LinkedIn or something like that, instead of find the three people who would have made a [00:03:00] huge dent in your business, right? In a positive, in a positive manner, that's when they, you know, they, they spend this money, they don't get the results because not everybody is going to be an expert [00:03:10] on on the things that they want to help to solve.
But the time they actually, and ironically, I have so many correspondences in my inbox, right? Where the entrepreneur is going [00:03:20] like, I wish I had come across this program that we will talk about, right. That if I had come across it like six months ago, things would be so different. I am in [00:03:30] such a bad shape right now.
Like we're thinking of closing down the brand and I've actually helped, you know, you mentioned that I've worked with a lot of entrepreneur I've worked a lot of branch or couple of firms that [00:03:40] actually go and buy bankrupt companies from From bankruptcy court and then I'm one of the first calls to hey, I just bought this thing It was distressed and now we're gonna revive [00:03:50] it I need you to help us like rebuild this on the right foundation so it doesn't go bankrupt again, right?
But unfortunately, I've seen bankruptcies. I've seen a lot of brands go through [00:04:00] bankruptcies and that's sort of a decision where you're not making the right decision from the get go to say, you know what? Let me find the best person that can do this for [00:04:10] me. And, uh, you know, I'm going to find out how much it costs.
Can I afford that? Because what you cannot afford is a bad decision and then a year has passed and you have wasted money and you're [00:04:20] wasted time. That's a, that's an advice that has nothing to do with conversion rate optimization or meta ads performing on a better ROAS. This is a number one [00:04:30] advice I would give.
To every listener that you have. I think it's very important. I'm in the business for 25 years. I started my first startup in 2001, and we were lucky [00:04:40] back in the time to have a business angel who helped us not only with money, but with advice, with experience, with expertise. And I think that's what boils it down.
And you have seen many, many [00:04:50] businesses over the time. And as I said, some of them went bankrupt because of these. Yeah, maybe not advisor in the background at all. And with growing [00:05:00] businesses, um, you come to different levels of growth. And then obviously you need to have the right person on your side. So you came up with a framework and I [00:05:10] want to dive right into it because I think it's quite interesting.
It's a holistic approach. It's called the eight D method and talk me through it. What does it [00:05:20] contain and what topics does it scratch on? Oh, by the way, it's great that you've, you've gone through this 25 years of journey, right? With the, with the, with the businesses you have been involved in similar [00:05:30] to that.
When I. Touched all these businesses, right? You, you mentioned in my bio that it was 150 plus brands, right? And, and you can see some of them are who's who of the brands in the world, you [00:05:40] know, like Canon and Tommy Hilfiger and so on. So what I learned was being very methodical about growth and being very purposeful.[00:05:50]
Like you have an intention, this is what I need to fix and fixing that, right? It doesn't have to be very big. People like to make big [00:06:00] explosions, right? Because they want to see a big blast. No, it doesn't have to be that fancy. Right. There are 365. 25 [00:06:10] calendar days on in a year. We're all human beings. We work Monday through Friday because we have other times, right?
With your as a parent, as a husband, wife, girlfriend, [00:06:20] boyfriend, whatever you give that time off your weekend to your loved ones and so on. So there are, and there are federal bank holidays, you know, [00:06:30] vacation time. I'm going to take all of those out, right? I'm going to do the math for you. It's 220 working days.
When, when you take time off for vacation, when you take [00:06:40] a sick days, you get sick. It's fine. Right? So 220 days are left in those 20, 220 days. If you are very much purpose driven where [00:06:50] you say that, look, uh, today it's Monday morning. I have an issue with my open rates on email today. The only task I'm going [00:07:00] to do is I'm going to focus on making that better just today.
And how much better do you want to make it? The bar is very low. I want to improve it by 1%, [00:07:10] right? Not 10 points, not 50 points. I don't care about any of it, right? I care about just 1 percent improvement. If you do this every single day, [00:07:20] not just on email marketing, you do it for your product pages, you're doing it for better order delivery.
You figure out that, you know, if you start accepting [00:07:30] mobile payments and stuff like that, those decisions every morning you wake up, what is that one thing I'm going to do? Focus on that one thing. The day ends, you're going to feel good about [00:07:40] finishing that one thing, right? Some things obviously take time, like if you send an email out to test your open rates.
That's going to take time. Maybe in the first 24 hours, you're going to get [00:07:50] some results, but up to 72 hours, that's the life of an email basically. Right? So it's going to take that that much time. But if you focus on 1 percent improvement in [00:08:00] 220 days, that means you have improved your business 22 X. X, not percentage 22 X 22 [00:08:10] folds.
If it was a 1 million business, you're looking at a 22 million business, right? Okay. You go like, well, severe, not everyone is a robot like you, right? [00:08:20] So that's not going to happen, right? You're not going to get 1 percent improvement every single day. All right, let's cut that down. Let's cut that down to less than 50%.
[00:08:30] And you're right. Let's make that 10 X growth. So businesses I've seen businesses grow in my career from 10 X [00:08:40] within 12 to 18 months, that's reality, right? That takes into account being a human, making mistakes, not getting always a 1 percent improvement. But you know, [00:08:50] Claus, that when you, when you work that obsessively on email subject line, for example, you're not going to improve it by 1%.
You're going to see 12 and a half percent increase, but you're going to work on something [00:09:00] that a promo code that you thought is going to work gangbusters. And it just falls flat on its face or a meta ads campaign that creative that showed your beautiful [00:09:10] daughter petting the dog. And it's such a, you you're so proud of it.
If you put it up and you put money behind it on meta ads failed. Right. So there will be things like [00:09:20] that, you know, and that takes into account and you can grow a business, you know, from there. And one example of that is, uh, in two years, Ashley [00:09:30] Stewart grew from less than 3 million to 30 million. Not only top line, you have to grow it profitably.
So it went from a gross margin of 35 percent to more than 65 [00:09:40] percent gross margin. Where the cashflow from the growth was fueling future growth. I think that's very important. And I think that the really important takeaway there [00:09:50] is the word focus. And I think that's where a lot of people struggle with.
They get, um, trapped into the busy work. They're all over the place. And for entrepreneurs [00:10:00] and growing businesses, um, that's definitely something where they can get distracted really fast. But if you really want to grow and I'm a hundred percent with you, you need to focus, you need to focus on the things to [00:10:10] build on your business and not eat.
In your business now with your framework, you're touching and you just were giving the example of email marketing, but there's [00:10:20] more things to it. What are the main pillars that you look into? So 80 method stands for eight dimensions of e commerce, [00:10:30] right? So as you know, you have, you have operated businesses over 25 years.
When you improve something, somewhere random has nothing to do with your ads, let's say, right? You fix [00:10:40] something in order of fulfillment. And then you go like, oh my god, why is our, why is our meta ads doing better now? We didn't change the creative, we didn't change the audience, the same [00:10:50] advantage plus, we didn't change the budget, nothing.
We just changed how we are delivering products, right? It used to take 4 to 6 days. Now it's delivered in 2 to 3 days [00:11:00] and all of a sudden you see ad performance going up. That's why, you know, this is a multidimensional game and there are eight dimensions to e commerce. So this is why when you touch [00:11:10] something and you go like, um, you obsess about meta ads and you just work on that obsessively with.
You're listening to Gary V and all of these amazing people, right? They tell you, you [00:11:20] have to put social content, UGC, this, that, that. You listen to that and you do that. And then you go like, what I'm trying to scale it. It just fails, falls flat. It doesn't, it doesn't [00:11:30] scale. What, what's wrong with it? Cause you're lopsided.
You're just focused on one thing. You think that that's the answer and you're missing the other seven dimensions that you needed to fix. Or [00:11:40] maybe two or three of those dimensions could have been a supporting pillar for this scaling that you're trying to do, right? Well, you know, let's go through the what if [00:11:50] scenario.
What if marketing was brilliant, right? They just took a thousand orders per month and turned it into 5, 000 orders per month. [00:12:00] But your operations cannot keep up with sending these orders out. What used to take within the same day by 4 PM or the orders would go out, right? And then they would have, [00:12:10] consumers would have a tracking number.
Those orders are getting pushed back and back and back. Now they're behind two, three days. Now it's back by one to two weeks. What do [00:12:20] you think is going to happen to that business? It doesn't matter how brilliant the marketing is. The thing is you're failing on the logistics side, your, your order fulfillment is suffering from that side of it, right?[00:12:30]
So that that's why you have to, when you think about your business, you have to think about the cause and effect of all of these dimensions on each other, right? So the first dimension [00:12:40] that we tackle is called performance optimization. All businesses have invested somewhat in their business. They have a product market fit.
But they're [00:12:50] seeing things like card abandonment, they're seeing that they bring traffic in, but it's not converting at the right, right number, right? They see that they do email marketing, but they hear that other people, [00:13:00] it represents 20 25 percent of their revenue from email marketing. Theirs is 2%, you know, things like that.
So the first three weeks of the [00:13:10] program and, and the implementation program for AD method is called Rapid2x. Because we rapidly implement these things in a 21 day window, the first I mentioned [00:13:20] right in 21 days. And then after everybody implements that, then they start implementing more intermediate tasks and advanced tasks.
Then they start the second part of the [00:13:30] program. But the first 21 days is literally 15 tasks. It's five tasks per week because I'm not expecting you to work on the weekends. So Monday through Friday. [00:13:40] every day. If you some people are very ambitious, so they will get all five tasks done right after my coaching call on Monday, right?
But some of the other [00:13:50] ones, they space it out. They work one on Monday, the second one on Tuesday, on and on and on Friday, they finished the final task. But the ones that actually implemented quickly and they do [00:14:00] it in in depth. They start seeing their, their revenue improve starting Tuesday morning, right?
That's how effective these, these things are. And they're very highly [00:14:10] optimized and prioritized based on the outcome of improvement in revenue, improvement in conversions, improvement in ROAS. Even though in the first week we [00:14:20] don't even touch, uh, any of the ad accounts, we don't do anything, we're just focused on the site.
The site, the Shopify site you have, we will optimize that. In one [00:14:30] week, right? We and there's five tasks. Literally, that's all you're doing. Five. These five tasks to improve your your site. Once you do that site and landing page optimization, [00:14:40] um, within that first week, quite a lot of rapid to exercise between 50 to 70 percent improvement in that week.
If you compare it to that week. Same week, last year, right? [00:14:50] 50 to 70 percent improvement. We didn't do promo codes. We didn't do couponing to that. We didn't do lower prices, percent off Black Friday sale in the [00:15:00] middle of February. We didn't do any of those kind of ridiculous campaigns. All we did was we did performance optimization of that.
And I'm sure that you're itching. That next [00:15:10] question always comes up. What are you doing in that first task? Right. Ask number one to cause this kind of a brilliant change, right? [00:15:20] It's all based on consumer attention span, right? Consumer attention span in 2025 is 1. 7 seconds. Right. [00:15:30] Don't blame me, blame TikTok, blame Instagram reels, blame Amazon app.
Your attention span as a consumer literally is to ignore things in two [00:15:40] seconds. And what do you do on TikTok? Boom, next, next, next, next. The same applies to e commerce. If [00:15:50] your site, when you run that, and this, these are the two tools, actually there are three of them, I'm going to give you two of the tools.
That are available freely. You could sign up [00:16:00] for their pro version if you wanted to. Right. I do. They're very useful. The first one is called GT metrics, G T M E T R I X. com. The second one is called [00:16:10] webpagetest. org. Both of them. I have pro accounts. It costs like it's funny. We're talking about coffee break.
It costs that cost less than a coffee per day, right? A fraction [00:16:20] of it. It's like. GTmetrix is like, I don't know, 30 a year or something. It's like ridiculously close, but the benefit of it is tremendous, right? You put [00:16:30] your site through that. It tells you, uh, time to interact. That's the KPI that I obsess about in that task one.
Time to interact tells you [00:16:40] the page appeared and the consumer can actually interact with the page, right? That number needs to be less than 1. 7 [00:16:50] seconds. Not the fully loaded time, 1. 7 seconds for time to interact on average. Whoever starts with the rapid two X program. And I do workshops also, [00:17:00] right? You know, what happens is when they run this report and I asked them to run it on three pages in this order, first on your bestselling product, number two, [00:17:10] bestsellers page, which is a collections page or category page, depending on the platform you're running.
And the least important of that is homepage. Your homepage is the least [00:17:20] important in that, in that pecking order, right? So when you run that, if your product page time to interact is any number above 1. 7 seconds, [00:17:30] I'm pulling, willing to put money on it. You're losing money on multiple ends, and I'll count it for you.
You're losing money from conversions. That's [00:17:40] actual revenue. You're losing money from paid ads. That's giving you the lower row ads because you're throwing that traffic. And how do I know that your bounce rate [00:17:50] is going to be very high, right? Those are the KPIs. It's going to be very transparent. And every second that is above that 1.
7 seconds, that every [00:18:00] second we have actually measured it across our Rapid2Xers as universe. Uh, it's close to a million dollars per second. That's how much you're losing. Depends on [00:18:10] the size of your brand. It depends on all that because it's possible that your site, your business is a smaller business less than 1 million per year.
Doesn't mean that every second is costing you a million. It's [00:18:20] costing you a hundred thousand, maybe 10, 000 per second. And if your brand is a hundred million dollar business or, or a billion dollar business like Canon. You're [00:18:30] losing, definitely losing few million dollars per second for every second, that's above that 1.
7 seconds. So you need to bring that number down. And what is the [00:18:40] average, uh, Shopify people that actually go through that before they make the changes? It tends to be between, uh, between seven to 10 seconds, those [00:18:50] seven X to 10 X difference. Meaning that that's how much money potentially you're losing.
And I'm not touching any of your ad accounts. I'm not [00:19:00] touching your Clayview account or anything like that. All we're doing is we're just changing this one thing, time to interact. And it's these, both of these tools, by the way, do [00:19:10] an amazing job of telling you what exactly is getting KPIs. So that if you look at that and you obsess about it, work with a web developer, if you're not a web developer or Shopify [00:19:20] developer and fix those things and bring that number down and, and you'll see that magically your role as starts improving.
And typically what we see [00:19:30] is the funniest thing. The agency that's working on that account, they go like, Oh, yeah, we have been improving things. No, you didn't touch anything on the ads. You didn't do [00:19:40] anything that don't take credit for things that you didn't do. Right. All right. And then you and actually the entrepreneurs realize that those agencies or [00:19:50] freelancers are lying to them.
And, and there's a, that's where a lot of the change starts happening also, because they wanna go back to what, what I said earlier, finding [00:20:00] the right people is important. Working with the right people who know what they're doing, and, and the guy who does. Or the gal that does Google ads is not also an expert in [00:20:10] meta ads.
It's not. Yeah. Let me cut in there. So I think it's very important for our listeners. I think you need to listen to this three times because this was so valuable. These are so golden nuggets here. And this [00:20:20] shows you that Sabir has 25 years of experience. I can totally relate to what you said. I'm using GT magic also for ages.
And this is really money in the [00:20:30] bank. If you start from there, what I like on your framework, and you mentioned a implementation program. So it comes, it's not just an online course or something you read. It's really [00:20:40] accountability. I personally coach it live. Yeah. So you take people through the journey on, on optimizing, talk me through how long does it take?
[00:20:50] How many tasks does it have? What can I experience when I'm in, in the implementation program? So the entire program is called rapid two X. And for your listeners, by the way, I know [00:21:00] that you worked with my head of partnership to. Uh, work on a special deal. So for your listeners, we have a special link. It's growth by severe dot com.
Uh, [00:21:10] severe spelled S. A. B. I. R. And you would include it in the show notes, right? Slash coffee. So put in the slash coffee for that special deal, right? Uh, so that they can go and [00:21:20] explore. They can book a call with my team who can actually walk you through that, right? I'll give you a higher high level. The entire program is called a rapid to X.
There are two parts to it. [00:21:30] What we call rapid to X. If first part of it is first dimension, it lasts about 21 days, right? And everyone, when they're part of that rapid to X program, they [00:21:40] actually move into what we call beyond rapid to X, which is that beyond rapid to X is just a flag that says you finished the first dimension.
You did the performance optimization. Now [00:21:50] you're part of. Intermediate dimensions and advanced dimensions that we will be implementing, right? So that everybody finishes that 21 days and then they move into beyond [00:22:00] rapid to X. That's phase two. And then they start implementing customer journey, optimization, you know, marketing and storytelling and all the all of these other seven dimensions that are, [00:22:10] you know, there are part of the A.
D. Method, right? So that would takes about, you know, first month is on rapid two X, which is 21 days, [00:22:20] uh, performance optimization. Then after that, everybody moves into the second part. That's, uh, that's run on a, every month we have a schedule every, each month [00:22:30] we focus on one dimension and each dimension, just like we did for a month.
We focused on performance optimization. Second month, we work on, um, marketing and storytelling. Then we [00:22:40] work on the next month. We work on customer UX. Because it does take, it's not just optimizing those things. It's also possible that there are so many brands that have Klaviyo, [00:22:50] for example, right? They have Klaviyo, but they just use it as MailChimp, right?
They just do campaigns. Uh, Klaviyo is a lot [00:23:00] more than a MailChimp, right? And it's not just because everybody uses. Klaviyo with Shopify that it means the same thing like, oh, I was using MailChimp, but I moved over to Klaviyo. [00:23:10] No, Klaviyo gives you all these event driven automation, amazing, amazing things that it gives you.
A lot of people don't use it, you know? So in the customer UX, [00:23:20] for example, that automation and the strategy behind the automation is actually covered with specific prescription of what do you need to do to implement it. Right. So [00:23:30] every session we do, we focus on one task. First it's defined. And then we, we workshop it with one of the brands that, that, that we choose on the calendar.
So everybody [00:23:40] goes through that calendar, different, different brands, up to four or five brands per month are chosen. Actually, uh, up now we're up to 10, eight to 10 brands are chosen to [00:23:50] actually, uh, live workshop that task. Right, and then you're seeing it live being implemented with a brand so that you're taking notes You're seeing exactly what's happening [00:24:00] in addition to all the tutorials that you will get and and and the exact prescription in writing Exactly what you need to do, but you're actually seeing it happen right in front of you live One [00:24:10] example, I, this is what I would like to share with you.
Aurum brothers is a men's jewelry brand. You can think of it, how niche can that get? Right. Uh, it's based in Netherlands. Uh, their number [00:24:20] one market is the U S secondary market is EU UK. And then they also do global business to global e commerce business. In their case, they were stuck at 1. 5 million [00:24:30] for years, right?
And they kept on spending more money and you've seen this chronically happen with entrepreneurs. They want to spend money. They think that, Oh, spending more money is going to solve the problem, but [00:24:40] they're not looking at and where do they spend it? Most of the time they're sending the check to meta ads, right?
They're increasing. Oh, our problem is acquisition. They were stuck and their net [00:24:50] cashflow went to negative. They were taking loan out from the bank to actually support the business, right? Because they had a whole infrastructure of people for a 1. 5 million business. [00:25:00] You have people working in your operations, in your products, in your customer service, you have to pay their paycheck and their salary.
In addition to [00:25:10] buying inventory and those kinds of things, 1. 5 million business loans out negative cashflow business. They started last year in January and within the first [00:25:20] six weeks, 112 percent improvement in the business, right? And what happened was we kept that pace. September 9, 2024 [00:25:30] was the date. It was 1 p.
m. is when our own brothers surpassed their entire 2023 revenue. Not only that, they [00:25:40] surpassed it with a positive net cash flow in the business, right? So every penny that we earned in revenue and in profitability starting at 1 [00:25:50] p. m. on September 9th at 101 p. m. onwards was pure growth. Was pure growth and we finished a year off.
So [00:26:00] imagine 1. 5 million from January 1 through September 9 and then from September 9, 1 oh, 1 p. m. Friday to [00:26:10] including Black Friday, December 31st. We got another 1. 5 million because the momentum, you know what I said to you, the [00:26:20] effort that you put in has to be compounded. You have to compound that effort.
10 X. You're going to get to 2x, you're going to get to 10x, you're going to [00:26:30] get to 30x. That's you want to work on things that are tangible things that are going to give you that sort of a, you know, compounded effect. By the end of the year, [00:26:40] we finished a year off at 3 million. Not only did we turn the ship around and also they paid off all of their business loans.
Uh, now the growth [00:26:50] and profitability is actually fueling our future growth in that business this year. We started the year off with a setting a goal from 3 million to 10 million for this year. As [00:27:00] I said, compounding is a very important keyword there. Um, it's all these little things that you need to screw and to fine tune to get the [00:27:10] best outcome at the end of the day.
So it's a lot of tasks and you need to do them right. And I think the example that you just gave is a perfect specifically on the timeline on what you can [00:27:20] achieve. I mean, it's always bad. And I think a lot of. DTC brand specifically out there, their net profit might be negative. Um, a lot of them are cash driven, cashflow driven [00:27:30] businesses with very low profit margin, depending on the industry.
So there's a huge risk there, but I think there's also a huge chance if we start optimizing. So tell me who's your perfect [00:27:40] customer. So the perfect customer is, is the one that has. tested their product. So this is a very, you know, base criteria, right? [00:27:50] Uh, they have tested their product. Uh, they may have tested it selling on, on Amazon.
They may have tested selling on Shopify, but they have gotten a product market fit, meaning [00:28:00] that the consumers like their product. They have given them feedback. They went through a few iterations of the Off product improvement and stuff like that. So if you have solved that [00:28:10] problem, right, then you're a perfect candidate for, for this business, right?
For, for this program, for the rapid two X program, we have, we have a brands. I I'll [00:28:20] give you two different, three different types, right? We have folks that come in because they learn about the program and they have had other e com businesses in the past. Maybe they're [00:28:30] starting out a brand new business, but they're a serial entrepreneur, right?
They want to start up this next business correctly. So they come in, not that we start up the business, we optimize the business. [00:28:40] But they know that as they, we are teaching them these optimizations, they're working on their launch plan on, on that business. So we have several people that fall into that, right?
Several [00:28:50] brands, like 10 or 15 brands that fall into exactly that scenario. Then we have businesses that are between 250k per year all the way to like start up [00:29:00] off a side hustle that it's proven that this side hustle is going to work, right? Uh, but they're dedicated to the business, meaning that they don't have like a full-time job.
This is their full-time [00:29:10] job, right? To all the way to like 3 million. That's like bucket two. And then we have examples of another. That's the middle part of it. That's a sweet spot. That 250 k [00:29:20] to $3 million. Then we have people who are above 3 million all the way up to like $20 million, uh, brands also. And those are, so if you think of it like from a bell curve [00:29:30] perspective.
like zero revenue. Then we have 250 K to 3 million. It's, it's, it's at the peak of it. And then this tail end of it, we still, we also have brands that are 3 [00:29:40] million plus they hit what I call a gap, right? It went up like this. And now it's not going anywhere. Our own brothers is an example of that. It just [00:29:50] went like it's a flat line, right?
And worse, if you put in the profitability, not it's not going up like this, it's going down like this because you're spending a lot more money to come back to the days of [00:30:00] glory you had in the past, right? That that's the problem with it. And then you need to do some things different to in order to for it to actually go back up to the top.
And, [00:30:10] and you actually brought up earlier, like what got you here doesn't get you there, right? So if you, if you grew a business to 500 K, you think that I'm going to keep on doing the [00:30:20] same thing. I'm going to get to a million. No, it's not. It's a different journey. Cause I, with 1 billion under my belt and hundreds of brands across many, many [00:30:30] categories, almost every category.
Including like categories, odd categories like plumbing supplies, right? I've touched that. And many fashion brands, luxury brands, and so on and [00:30:40] so forth, right? It's, it's that 500k is a different business than a 1 million. It's different than a 1. 5 million. When you go to 3 million, it's different. If you are 3 million, you [00:30:50] think that, oh, shooting to 10 million is going to be the same journey.
No, it's not. You're going to go from 3 million to maybe 5. You're going to get stuck there. You're going to fall down, right? [00:31:00] So you need to understand, like, as you're growing, what, what, and having the right foundation and this AD method with the Rapid2x program implements [00:31:10] the right foundation for you and you're seeing results.
It's not theoretical stuff. You're actually seeing results from it. And as you're scaling now, now you're scaling the business. And one of the [00:31:20] dimensions is team. Also, it's not, it's not just very technical things that we're doing. Team optimization is one of the advanced, uh, uh, things that we discuss. And then only on a [00:31:30] weekly basis, when we are.
Meeting with all the entrepreneurs always, there's always a question about who I need to hire. Do I have the right people? [00:31:40] So we actually even formalize the rapid to X approved partners program, right? So we actually recommend implement people who implement rapid to X. And if you don't have the [00:31:50] people, because you might be great at Shopify liquid code, right?
That's not in your wheelhouse. So there are people that that implement those [00:32:00] things for you so that you are armed with the right people to be touching your business, not some random people that you go out, even though you're getting the right prescription and advice, but you [00:32:10] hire the wrong people and they don't even implement the right things.
Yeah. I think that's so important. And I think there's, there's two ways you can do it. So either you can do it for 25 years, like the two of us, or you find [00:32:20] somebody like you who helps you to expedite this whole process and go step by step through it. Now, if somebody wants to join your program, um, do they have to do any kind of homework?
Is there [00:32:30] an onboarding process? How does that work? So first, because we have this special thing with you guys, I would say for your listeners, go to growthbysevere. com slash coffee. [00:32:40] Right. So that's the special URL. So go to that and which the process is pretty simple. You, you, one of my team members are going to get in touch with you, [00:32:50] right?
You know, you'll book a time with them. They will make sure that you are the right fit for the program because not everybody is right. Because the thing is, if I'm telling you that you're [00:33:00] wasting your time with the wrong people. If we are not the right fit for you, we will tell you like, no, you're not the right fit at this time.
I do have a community that they could join, but my team will [00:33:10] explain that and they could go and join that community where I do live events. It's just it's not the rapid to X program, but I do live events where I answer questions, right? And we do have quite a [00:33:20] few. We have over, I think, close to 1000.
entrepreneurs in our open community that we have where they come in. Uh, actually every Tuesday, uh, Thursday, [00:33:30] I, I do a live events, uh, where they can come in. We workshop things on, on Tuesdays and we do a live Q and a on Thursdays in that community. So they will [00:33:40] point them in the right direction, making sure that.
They're they're they're being handled properly. Not not just that. Oh, we want to sell the program because not everybody is a fit, you know, even though you [00:33:50] could be blue in the face. Tell me that you're a fit. If you're not a fit. My team says that you're not a fit. You're not a fit, you know, for the program.
And we have a certain criteria for that. Um, and then [00:34:00] once they go through that, the sales process and they get to know the program, Some of the folks are invited to actually join, uh, the workshop, you know, if they want to learn more so [00:34:10] they can actually workshop the first dimension with me, and that's that's complimentary to those people who book, uh, who book with my team, so they're invited to come to those [00:34:20] and and they go through it and I explain in detail this performance optimization, these 15 tasks and they can They can start going through it.
And a lot of folks that show up there, they [00:34:30] realize that, Oh, you know what? This is a great program. Now I want to formally join it because I want to have access to all the resources, you know, not just me, but all the resources. And we have partners [00:34:40] that do amazing tutorials, very, very talented people in paid media and conversion rate optimization, email marketing, clay view optimization partner we have.[00:34:50]
That's exclusively, that's what they do. And they have been scaling businesses like this using email revenue, for example, influencer marketing, and so on. And as well as what is the right tech [00:35:00] stack for your business that you should be, because you may have installed random stuff. Average Shopify store installs 20 to 25 apps.
And [00:35:10] that's, that's one of the reasons, Claus, that the Shopify billing is not 79 a month. It's, when you get it, you go like, oh my god, why is this 450 a month? [00:35:20] Because you installed 20, 25 apps, that's why. How many, how many is the right number? Seven, seven to nine is more than enough, right? Nine would be [00:35:30] too much, more, more closer to seven in an extreme case, right?
So anything above that, you're, you just installed too many apps. I mean, I've had one [00:35:40] example of a Rapid2Xer, when they were evaluating the apps that they had installed, they had installed three live chats. And the irony, when you went to the site, there was no [00:35:50] icon for live chat. They were paying three monthly bills, not using it.
Because three different people had installed it over the years and [00:36:00] and the poor owner was paying a monthly fee for each one of them. Some apps are 10 a month. Some are 150 a month. So you can imagine those kind of that's part of [00:36:10] the optimization. That's why we clean up all of that stuff in the first 21 days.
Okay. Cool. Perfect. I love that story. I think that happens more often than one might think. [00:36:20] Sabir, before we come to the end of our coffee break today, what is one final thoughts that you want to leave our listeners with? You actually nailed it earlier. You get so distracted with so many bad [00:36:30] ideas that come to you, right?
And where does it come in? You feel bored. You sit there on the sofa and you have your phone out. You go on to tick tock. Some random guy is going to [00:36:40] tell you, Oh, if you do this. It's going to improve your meta ads, right? And then you go like, Oh my God, I just got the holy grail of a tip. Let me [00:36:50] go and do that.
What you fail to notice is that video was seen by a hundred thousand people, right? At least. And those a hundred thousand people have already tried it. [00:37:00] Uh, by now, whatever that novelty that you thought was an amazing tip is garbage. Basically, you need to focus your time on [00:37:10] tangible strategies that keep on paying dividend over time.
The compounding effect is real, right? And if you do these kind of waste [00:37:20] of time and waste of money, because what does that person do that implement? Oh, maybe I didn't implement it right. Or maybe, uh, you know what, uh, that's creative. Let's, let's give it, let's give [00:37:30] it some money. Let's spend like 500 bucks or a thousand bucks.
Let's see what happens with it. 500 dollars on a mistake is a mistake. It's a bigger [00:37:40] mistake. First, it was a organic thing that you wanted to do, which would have been just effort or time. Now you spend money on top of it. You made two mistakes [00:37:50] now, right? And you do these things, these bad decisions over time in a year's time.
Maybe you did those decisions 20 times, that 500 [00:38:00] times 20 adds up very quickly. And some of these mistakes are, I'll tell you from the entrepreneur that I work with entrepreneurs that I work with. It's not 20 times. It's like [00:38:10] 50 times is a hundred times. They just keep on doing the same thing and thinking that, Oh, that's the problem there.
That's the next creative is they're off by one creative. [00:38:20] If they got that one creative, right? Magic will happen. No, you need to look at your business and make the right decisions in your business. That's what you need to do. And that's what a D method [00:38:30] does. Like it's very methodical people who like that kind of, uh, adrenaline, uh, executing bad ideas.
Right. We'll hate this program, but people who are [00:38:40] very methodical, they want to do this one thing at a time. And actually this is a commentary on not on ethnicity or racism. I'll tell you the, the, the group of entrepreneurs I really [00:38:50] love Dutch entrepreneurs and German entrepreneurs. Very methodical. They love this program because as our brothers is Dutch as the end, we have several Dutch Dutch entrepreneurs [00:39:00] also as they implement one thing at a time.
They're actually laser targeted. They're looking at the KP eyes and seeing what is it improving and they love it. And they just keep on going through this flywheel [00:39:10] and they just keep on getting the results compounded over time. Right? If you are that type of a personality, you will love this program. But if you are adrenaline junkie, That wants to find a [00:39:20] tick tock, the next thing that you are obsessed with, and you do that and it fails and you want to move on to the next thing, this program is not for you.
Okay. No, that makes perfect sense. [00:39:30] E commerce is a business and it needs to be treated as a business. And the internet is a dirty place with a lot of distractions. So rather focus on things that have. Shown to work [00:39:40] for a business and not for a fashion trend or a TikTok story. And I think Sabir is the right place to start there.
And um, if you're in interest [00:39:50] for getting better in your business, you will find the link in the show notes and then reach out to Sabir directly and take it from there. Sabir, thanks so much for your time today. I think we can talk for hours about e commerce and our [00:40:00] experiences. Maybe we'll do this as a later point where we just share stories.
Um, that might be also a very interesting episode. Thanks so much for your time today. Yeah. Thank you very much for having me. And definitely we [00:40:10] should do a follow up. I have a lot of stories that I'm sure with 25 years of experience from yours, I think we can, we can have a fireside chat. How about that for the next one?
Not coffee [00:40:20] break. That sounds like a plan. And I think that will be very entertaining. Thanks so much. Talk soon.
so let's dive right into it. Hello, welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Today, we will discuss [00:00:30] strategies for sustainable online growth in your business. Joining me on the show today is Sabir Samarkand. Sabir is a leading e commerce growth strategist who has helped more than 150 [00:00:40] brands scale to success over his 25 year career.
So he's in a game for a very, very long time, like I do. And his clients include Ashley Stewart, Canon, and Tommy Hilfiger. [00:00:50] As the founder and CEO of Growth by Sabir, he has driven over 1 billion in additional sales and is a trusted advisors to top entrepreneurs and investors. Endorsed by industry leaders like [00:01:00] Gary Real, Neil Patel and Shark Tank's Matt Higgins, Sabir continues to transform Incomer's brands, guiding 29 companies across 17 product categories in 2024 alone.[00:01:10]
So that's quite a CV and I'm happy to have him on the show and that's welcome. Hi, Sabir. It's exciting being here, Claus. And I'm going to enjoy this coffee break. [00:01:20] We'll definitely do. Sabir, let's dive right into it. So we want to discuss strategies for growth. What do you think are the biggest challenges brands face right now in [00:01:30] 2025?
I think that the number one problem that, uh, Ecom brands face, uh, in 2025 is that, because I keep on hearing this [00:01:40] from entrepreneurs, right? Want to do the right thing and but what they end up doing is they go out and they seek out Not the right consult, right? [00:01:50] It's key I mean even Warren Buffett says you you have to always find the best person that can help you with that thing that you're facing With right, right You're not gonna [00:02:00] just ask your friend if you're having some sort of an issue from a hell, you know, a psychic psychology standpoint You're not gonna I ask, uh, just your friends, you're going to go seek out professional [00:02:10] help.
Somebody who lives that stuff on a day to day basis so that they can, they can help you with that in the e comm field. It's not that rigorous. You know, that's the problem with it. You, they [00:02:20] go and they try to see, Oh, you know what? Well, this person can get me backlinks on SEO on Fiverr for 50 bucks, 50, 000 backlinks, what a [00:02:30] disaster that.
I help a lot of brands actually undo that mistake. You know, that's a, that's a very expensive mistake, you know, and there are things like that, that they invest in net net for [00:02:40] the year. If you look at it, they invested quite a lot, right? If they, after you sum those, those numbers up, if they were to be asked that instead of giving that money to that capital for that [00:02:50] project for 50 different random people on Fiverr or.
Or Upwork or LinkedIn or something like that, instead of find the three people who would have made a [00:03:00] huge dent in your business, right? In a positive, in a positive manner, that's when they, you know, they, they spend this money, they don't get the results because not everybody is going to be an expert [00:03:10] on on the things that they want to help to solve.
But the time they actually, and ironically, I have so many correspondences in my inbox, right? Where the entrepreneur is going [00:03:20] like, I wish I had come across this program that we will talk about, right. That if I had come across it like six months ago, things would be so different. I am in [00:03:30] such a bad shape right now.
Like we're thinking of closing down the brand and I've actually helped, you know, you mentioned that I've worked with a lot of entrepreneur I've worked a lot of branch or couple of firms that [00:03:40] actually go and buy bankrupt companies from From bankruptcy court and then I'm one of the first calls to hey, I just bought this thing It was distressed and now we're gonna revive [00:03:50] it I need you to help us like rebuild this on the right foundation so it doesn't go bankrupt again, right?
But unfortunately, I've seen bankruptcies. I've seen a lot of brands go through [00:04:00] bankruptcies and that's sort of a decision where you're not making the right decision from the get go to say, you know what? Let me find the best person that can do this for [00:04:10] me. And, uh, you know, I'm going to find out how much it costs.
Can I afford that? Because what you cannot afford is a bad decision and then a year has passed and you have wasted money and you're [00:04:20] wasted time. That's a, that's an advice that has nothing to do with conversion rate optimization or meta ads performing on a better ROAS. This is a number one [00:04:30] advice I would give.
To every listener that you have. I think it's very important. I'm in the business for 25 years. I started my first startup in 2001, and we were lucky [00:04:40] back in the time to have a business angel who helped us not only with money, but with advice, with experience, with expertise. And I think that's what boils it down.
And you have seen many, many [00:04:50] businesses over the time. And as I said, some of them went bankrupt because of these. Yeah, maybe not advisor in the background at all. And with growing [00:05:00] businesses, um, you come to different levels of growth. And then obviously you need to have the right person on your side. So you came up with a framework and I [00:05:10] want to dive right into it because I think it's quite interesting.
It's a holistic approach. It's called the eight D method and talk me through it. What does it [00:05:20] contain and what topics does it scratch on? Oh, by the way, it's great that you've, you've gone through this 25 years of journey, right? With the, with the, with the businesses you have been involved in similar [00:05:30] to that.
When I. Touched all these businesses, right? You, you mentioned in my bio that it was 150 plus brands, right? And, and you can see some of them are who's who of the brands in the world, you [00:05:40] know, like Canon and Tommy Hilfiger and so on. So what I learned was being very methodical about growth and being very purposeful.[00:05:50]
Like you have an intention, this is what I need to fix and fixing that, right? It doesn't have to be very big. People like to make big [00:06:00] explosions, right? Because they want to see a big blast. No, it doesn't have to be that fancy. Right. There are 365. 25 [00:06:10] calendar days on in a year. We're all human beings. We work Monday through Friday because we have other times, right?
With your as a parent, as a husband, wife, girlfriend, [00:06:20] boyfriend, whatever you give that time off your weekend to your loved ones and so on. So there are, and there are federal bank holidays, you know, [00:06:30] vacation time. I'm going to take all of those out, right? I'm going to do the math for you. It's 220 working days.
When, when you take time off for vacation, when you take [00:06:40] a sick days, you get sick. It's fine. Right? So 220 days are left in those 20, 220 days. If you are very much purpose driven where [00:06:50] you say that, look, uh, today it's Monday morning. I have an issue with my open rates on email today. The only task I'm going [00:07:00] to do is I'm going to focus on making that better just today.
And how much better do you want to make it? The bar is very low. I want to improve it by 1%, [00:07:10] right? Not 10 points, not 50 points. I don't care about any of it, right? I care about just 1 percent improvement. If you do this every single day, [00:07:20] not just on email marketing, you do it for your product pages, you're doing it for better order delivery.
You figure out that, you know, if you start accepting [00:07:30] mobile payments and stuff like that, those decisions every morning you wake up, what is that one thing I'm going to do? Focus on that one thing. The day ends, you're going to feel good about [00:07:40] finishing that one thing, right? Some things obviously take time, like if you send an email out to test your open rates.
That's going to take time. Maybe in the first 24 hours, you're going to get [00:07:50] some results, but up to 72 hours, that's the life of an email basically. Right? So it's going to take that that much time. But if you focus on 1 percent improvement in [00:08:00] 220 days, that means you have improved your business 22 X. X, not percentage 22 X 22 [00:08:10] folds.
If it was a 1 million business, you're looking at a 22 million business, right? Okay. You go like, well, severe, not everyone is a robot like you, right? [00:08:20] So that's not going to happen, right? You're not going to get 1 percent improvement every single day. All right, let's cut that down. Let's cut that down to less than 50%.
[00:08:30] And you're right. Let's make that 10 X growth. So businesses I've seen businesses grow in my career from 10 X [00:08:40] within 12 to 18 months, that's reality, right? That takes into account being a human, making mistakes, not getting always a 1 percent improvement. But you know, [00:08:50] Claus, that when you, when you work that obsessively on email subject line, for example, you're not going to improve it by 1%.
You're going to see 12 and a half percent increase, but you're going to work on something [00:09:00] that a promo code that you thought is going to work gangbusters. And it just falls flat on its face or a meta ads campaign that creative that showed your beautiful [00:09:10] daughter petting the dog. And it's such a, you you're so proud of it.
If you put it up and you put money behind it on meta ads failed. Right. So there will be things like [00:09:20] that, you know, and that takes into account and you can grow a business, you know, from there. And one example of that is, uh, in two years, Ashley [00:09:30] Stewart grew from less than 3 million to 30 million. Not only top line, you have to grow it profitably.
So it went from a gross margin of 35 percent to more than 65 [00:09:40] percent gross margin. Where the cashflow from the growth was fueling future growth. I think that's very important. And I think that the really important takeaway there [00:09:50] is the word focus. And I think that's where a lot of people struggle with.
They get, um, trapped into the busy work. They're all over the place. And for entrepreneurs [00:10:00] and growing businesses, um, that's definitely something where they can get distracted really fast. But if you really want to grow and I'm a hundred percent with you, you need to focus, you need to focus on the things to [00:10:10] build on your business and not eat.
In your business now with your framework, you're touching and you just were giving the example of email marketing, but there's [00:10:20] more things to it. What are the main pillars that you look into? So 80 method stands for eight dimensions of e commerce, [00:10:30] right? So as you know, you have, you have operated businesses over 25 years.
When you improve something, somewhere random has nothing to do with your ads, let's say, right? You fix [00:10:40] something in order of fulfillment. And then you go like, oh my god, why is our, why is our meta ads doing better now? We didn't change the creative, we didn't change the audience, the same [00:10:50] advantage plus, we didn't change the budget, nothing.
We just changed how we are delivering products, right? It used to take 4 to 6 days. Now it's delivered in 2 to 3 days [00:11:00] and all of a sudden you see ad performance going up. That's why, you know, this is a multidimensional game and there are eight dimensions to e commerce. So this is why when you touch [00:11:10] something and you go like, um, you obsess about meta ads and you just work on that obsessively with.
You're listening to Gary V and all of these amazing people, right? They tell you, you [00:11:20] have to put social content, UGC, this, that, that. You listen to that and you do that. And then you go like, what I'm trying to scale it. It just fails, falls flat. It doesn't, it doesn't [00:11:30] scale. What, what's wrong with it? Cause you're lopsided.
You're just focused on one thing. You think that that's the answer and you're missing the other seven dimensions that you needed to fix. Or [00:11:40] maybe two or three of those dimensions could have been a supporting pillar for this scaling that you're trying to do, right? Well, you know, let's go through the what if [00:11:50] scenario.
What if marketing was brilliant, right? They just took a thousand orders per month and turned it into 5, 000 orders per month. [00:12:00] But your operations cannot keep up with sending these orders out. What used to take within the same day by 4 PM or the orders would go out, right? And then they would have, [00:12:10] consumers would have a tracking number.
Those orders are getting pushed back and back and back. Now they're behind two, three days. Now it's back by one to two weeks. What do [00:12:20] you think is going to happen to that business? It doesn't matter how brilliant the marketing is. The thing is you're failing on the logistics side, your, your order fulfillment is suffering from that side of it, right?[00:12:30]
So that that's why you have to, when you think about your business, you have to think about the cause and effect of all of these dimensions on each other, right? So the first dimension [00:12:40] that we tackle is called performance optimization. All businesses have invested somewhat in their business. They have a product market fit.
But they're [00:12:50] seeing things like card abandonment, they're seeing that they bring traffic in, but it's not converting at the right, right number, right? They see that they do email marketing, but they hear that other people, [00:13:00] it represents 20 25 percent of their revenue from email marketing. Theirs is 2%, you know, things like that.
So the first three weeks of the [00:13:10] program and, and the implementation program for AD method is called Rapid2x. Because we rapidly implement these things in a 21 day window, the first I mentioned [00:13:20] right in 21 days. And then after everybody implements that, then they start implementing more intermediate tasks and advanced tasks.
Then they start the second part of the [00:13:30] program. But the first 21 days is literally 15 tasks. It's five tasks per week because I'm not expecting you to work on the weekends. So Monday through Friday. [00:13:40] every day. If you some people are very ambitious, so they will get all five tasks done right after my coaching call on Monday, right?
But some of the other [00:13:50] ones, they space it out. They work one on Monday, the second one on Tuesday, on and on and on Friday, they finished the final task. But the ones that actually implemented quickly and they do [00:14:00] it in in depth. They start seeing their, their revenue improve starting Tuesday morning, right?
That's how effective these, these things are. And they're very highly [00:14:10] optimized and prioritized based on the outcome of improvement in revenue, improvement in conversions, improvement in ROAS. Even though in the first week we [00:14:20] don't even touch, uh, any of the ad accounts, we don't do anything, we're just focused on the site.
The site, the Shopify site you have, we will optimize that. In one [00:14:30] week, right? We and there's five tasks. Literally, that's all you're doing. Five. These five tasks to improve your your site. Once you do that site and landing page optimization, [00:14:40] um, within that first week, quite a lot of rapid to exercise between 50 to 70 percent improvement in that week.
If you compare it to that week. Same week, last year, right? [00:14:50] 50 to 70 percent improvement. We didn't do promo codes. We didn't do couponing to that. We didn't do lower prices, percent off Black Friday sale in the [00:15:00] middle of February. We didn't do any of those kind of ridiculous campaigns. All we did was we did performance optimization of that.
And I'm sure that you're itching. That next [00:15:10] question always comes up. What are you doing in that first task? Right. Ask number one to cause this kind of a brilliant change, right? [00:15:20] It's all based on consumer attention span, right? Consumer attention span in 2025 is 1. 7 seconds. Right. [00:15:30] Don't blame me, blame TikTok, blame Instagram reels, blame Amazon app.
Your attention span as a consumer literally is to ignore things in two [00:15:40] seconds. And what do you do on TikTok? Boom, next, next, next, next. The same applies to e commerce. If [00:15:50] your site, when you run that, and this, these are the two tools, actually there are three of them, I'm going to give you two of the tools.
That are available freely. You could sign up [00:16:00] for their pro version if you wanted to. Right. I do. They're very useful. The first one is called GT metrics, G T M E T R I X. com. The second one is called [00:16:10] webpagetest. org. Both of them. I have pro accounts. It costs like it's funny. We're talking about coffee break.
It costs that cost less than a coffee per day, right? A fraction [00:16:20] of it. It's like. GTmetrix is like, I don't know, 30 a year or something. It's like ridiculously close, but the benefit of it is tremendous, right? You put [00:16:30] your site through that. It tells you, uh, time to interact. That's the KPI that I obsess about in that task one.
Time to interact tells you [00:16:40] the page appeared and the consumer can actually interact with the page, right? That number needs to be less than 1. 7 [00:16:50] seconds. Not the fully loaded time, 1. 7 seconds for time to interact on average. Whoever starts with the rapid two X program. And I do workshops also, [00:17:00] right? You know, what happens is when they run this report and I asked them to run it on three pages in this order, first on your bestselling product, number two, [00:17:10] bestsellers page, which is a collections page or category page, depending on the platform you're running.
And the least important of that is homepage. Your homepage is the least [00:17:20] important in that, in that pecking order, right? So when you run that, if your product page time to interact is any number above 1. 7 seconds, [00:17:30] I'm pulling, willing to put money on it. You're losing money on multiple ends, and I'll count it for you.
You're losing money from conversions. That's [00:17:40] actual revenue. You're losing money from paid ads. That's giving you the lower row ads because you're throwing that traffic. And how do I know that your bounce rate [00:17:50] is going to be very high, right? Those are the KPIs. It's going to be very transparent. And every second that is above that 1.
7 seconds, that every [00:18:00] second we have actually measured it across our Rapid2Xers as universe. Uh, it's close to a million dollars per second. That's how much you're losing. Depends on [00:18:10] the size of your brand. It depends on all that because it's possible that your site, your business is a smaller business less than 1 million per year.
Doesn't mean that every second is costing you a million. It's [00:18:20] costing you a hundred thousand, maybe 10, 000 per second. And if your brand is a hundred million dollar business or, or a billion dollar business like Canon. You're [00:18:30] losing, definitely losing few million dollars per second for every second, that's above that 1.
7 seconds. So you need to bring that number down. And what is the [00:18:40] average, uh, Shopify people that actually go through that before they make the changes? It tends to be between, uh, between seven to 10 seconds, those [00:18:50] seven X to 10 X difference. Meaning that that's how much money potentially you're losing.
And I'm not touching any of your ad accounts. I'm not [00:19:00] touching your Clayview account or anything like that. All we're doing is we're just changing this one thing, time to interact. And it's these, both of these tools, by the way, do [00:19:10] an amazing job of telling you what exactly is getting KPIs. So that if you look at that and you obsess about it, work with a web developer, if you're not a web developer or Shopify [00:19:20] developer and fix those things and bring that number down and, and you'll see that magically your role as starts improving.
And typically what we see [00:19:30] is the funniest thing. The agency that's working on that account, they go like, Oh, yeah, we have been improving things. No, you didn't touch anything on the ads. You didn't do [00:19:40] anything that don't take credit for things that you didn't do. Right. All right. And then you and actually the entrepreneurs realize that those agencies or [00:19:50] freelancers are lying to them.
And, and there's a, that's where a lot of the change starts happening also, because they wanna go back to what, what I said earlier, finding [00:20:00] the right people is important. Working with the right people who know what they're doing, and, and the guy who does. Or the gal that does Google ads is not also an expert in [00:20:10] meta ads.
It's not. Yeah. Let me cut in there. So I think it's very important for our listeners. I think you need to listen to this three times because this was so valuable. These are so golden nuggets here. And this [00:20:20] shows you that Sabir has 25 years of experience. I can totally relate to what you said. I'm using GT magic also for ages.
And this is really money in the [00:20:30] bank. If you start from there, what I like on your framework, and you mentioned a implementation program. So it comes, it's not just an online course or something you read. It's really [00:20:40] accountability. I personally coach it live. Yeah. So you take people through the journey on, on optimizing, talk me through how long does it take?
[00:20:50] How many tasks does it have? What can I experience when I'm in, in the implementation program? So the entire program is called rapid two X. And for your listeners, by the way, I know [00:21:00] that you worked with my head of partnership to. Uh, work on a special deal. So for your listeners, we have a special link. It's growth by severe dot com.
Uh, [00:21:10] severe spelled S. A. B. I. R. And you would include it in the show notes, right? Slash coffee. So put in the slash coffee for that special deal, right? Uh, so that they can go and [00:21:20] explore. They can book a call with my team who can actually walk you through that, right? I'll give you a higher high level. The entire program is called a rapid to X.
There are two parts to it. [00:21:30] What we call rapid to X. If first part of it is first dimension, it lasts about 21 days, right? And everyone, when they're part of that rapid to X program, they [00:21:40] actually move into what we call beyond rapid to X, which is that beyond rapid to X is just a flag that says you finished the first dimension.
You did the performance optimization. Now [00:21:50] you're part of. Intermediate dimensions and advanced dimensions that we will be implementing, right? So that everybody finishes that 21 days and then they move into beyond [00:22:00] rapid to X. That's phase two. And then they start implementing customer journey, optimization, you know, marketing and storytelling and all the all of these other seven dimensions that are, [00:22:10] you know, there are part of the A.
D. Method, right? So that would takes about, you know, first month is on rapid two X, which is 21 days, [00:22:20] uh, performance optimization. Then after that, everybody moves into the second part. That's, uh, that's run on a, every month we have a schedule every, each month [00:22:30] we focus on one dimension and each dimension, just like we did for a month.
We focused on performance optimization. Second month, we work on, um, marketing and storytelling. Then we [00:22:40] work on the next month. We work on customer UX. Because it does take, it's not just optimizing those things. It's also possible that there are so many brands that have Klaviyo, [00:22:50] for example, right? They have Klaviyo, but they just use it as MailChimp, right?
They just do campaigns. Uh, Klaviyo is a lot [00:23:00] more than a MailChimp, right? And it's not just because everybody uses. Klaviyo with Shopify that it means the same thing like, oh, I was using MailChimp, but I moved over to Klaviyo. [00:23:10] No, Klaviyo gives you all these event driven automation, amazing, amazing things that it gives you.
A lot of people don't use it, you know? So in the customer UX, [00:23:20] for example, that automation and the strategy behind the automation is actually covered with specific prescription of what do you need to do to implement it. Right. So [00:23:30] every session we do, we focus on one task. First it's defined. And then we, we workshop it with one of the brands that, that, that we choose on the calendar.
So everybody [00:23:40] goes through that calendar, different, different brands, up to four or five brands per month are chosen. Actually, uh, up now we're up to 10, eight to 10 brands are chosen to [00:23:50] actually, uh, live workshop that task. Right, and then you're seeing it live being implemented with a brand so that you're taking notes You're seeing exactly what's happening [00:24:00] in addition to all the tutorials that you will get and and and the exact prescription in writing Exactly what you need to do, but you're actually seeing it happen right in front of you live One [00:24:10] example, I, this is what I would like to share with you.
Aurum brothers is a men's jewelry brand. You can think of it, how niche can that get? Right. Uh, it's based in Netherlands. Uh, their number [00:24:20] one market is the U S secondary market is EU UK. And then they also do global business to global e commerce business. In their case, they were stuck at 1. 5 million [00:24:30] for years, right?
And they kept on spending more money and you've seen this chronically happen with entrepreneurs. They want to spend money. They think that, Oh, spending more money is going to solve the problem, but [00:24:40] they're not looking at and where do they spend it? Most of the time they're sending the check to meta ads, right?
They're increasing. Oh, our problem is acquisition. They were stuck and their net [00:24:50] cashflow went to negative. They were taking loan out from the bank to actually support the business, right? Because they had a whole infrastructure of people for a 1. 5 million business. [00:25:00] You have people working in your operations, in your products, in your customer service, you have to pay their paycheck and their salary.
In addition to [00:25:10] buying inventory and those kinds of things, 1. 5 million business loans out negative cashflow business. They started last year in January and within the first [00:25:20] six weeks, 112 percent improvement in the business, right? And what happened was we kept that pace. September 9, 2024 [00:25:30] was the date. It was 1 p.
m. is when our own brothers surpassed their entire 2023 revenue. Not only that, they [00:25:40] surpassed it with a positive net cash flow in the business, right? So every penny that we earned in revenue and in profitability starting at 1 [00:25:50] p. m. on September 9th at 101 p. m. onwards was pure growth. Was pure growth and we finished a year off.
So [00:26:00] imagine 1. 5 million from January 1 through September 9 and then from September 9, 1 oh, 1 p. m. Friday to [00:26:10] including Black Friday, December 31st. We got another 1. 5 million because the momentum, you know what I said to you, the [00:26:20] effort that you put in has to be compounded. You have to compound that effort.
10 X. You're going to get to 2x, you're going to get to 10x, you're going to [00:26:30] get to 30x. That's you want to work on things that are tangible things that are going to give you that sort of a, you know, compounded effect. By the end of the year, [00:26:40] we finished a year off at 3 million. Not only did we turn the ship around and also they paid off all of their business loans.
Uh, now the growth [00:26:50] and profitability is actually fueling our future growth in that business this year. We started the year off with a setting a goal from 3 million to 10 million for this year. As [00:27:00] I said, compounding is a very important keyword there. Um, it's all these little things that you need to screw and to fine tune to get the [00:27:10] best outcome at the end of the day.
So it's a lot of tasks and you need to do them right. And I think the example that you just gave is a perfect specifically on the timeline on what you can [00:27:20] achieve. I mean, it's always bad. And I think a lot of. DTC brand specifically out there, their net profit might be negative. Um, a lot of them are cash driven, cashflow driven [00:27:30] businesses with very low profit margin, depending on the industry.
So there's a huge risk there, but I think there's also a huge chance if we start optimizing. So tell me who's your perfect [00:27:40] customer. So the perfect customer is, is the one that has. tested their product. So this is a very, you know, base criteria, right? [00:27:50] Uh, they have tested their product. Uh, they may have tested it selling on, on Amazon.
They may have tested selling on Shopify, but they have gotten a product market fit, meaning [00:28:00] that the consumers like their product. They have given them feedback. They went through a few iterations of the Off product improvement and stuff like that. So if you have solved that [00:28:10] problem, right, then you're a perfect candidate for, for this business, right?
For, for this program, for the rapid two X program, we have, we have a brands. I I'll [00:28:20] give you two different, three different types, right? We have folks that come in because they learn about the program and they have had other e com businesses in the past. Maybe they're [00:28:30] starting out a brand new business, but they're a serial entrepreneur, right?
They want to start up this next business correctly. So they come in, not that we start up the business, we optimize the business. [00:28:40] But they know that as they, we are teaching them these optimizations, they're working on their launch plan on, on that business. So we have several people that fall into that, right?
Several [00:28:50] brands, like 10 or 15 brands that fall into exactly that scenario. Then we have businesses that are between 250k per year all the way to like start up [00:29:00] off a side hustle that it's proven that this side hustle is going to work, right? Uh, but they're dedicated to the business, meaning that they don't have like a full-time job.
This is their full-time [00:29:10] job, right? To all the way to like 3 million. That's like bucket two. And then we have examples of another. That's the middle part of it. That's a sweet spot. That 250 k [00:29:20] to $3 million. Then we have people who are above 3 million all the way up to like $20 million, uh, brands also. And those are, so if you think of it like from a bell curve [00:29:30] perspective.
like zero revenue. Then we have 250 K to 3 million. It's, it's, it's at the peak of it. And then this tail end of it, we still, we also have brands that are 3 [00:29:40] million plus they hit what I call a gap, right? It went up like this. And now it's not going anywhere. Our own brothers is an example of that. It just [00:29:50] went like it's a flat line, right?
And worse, if you put in the profitability, not it's not going up like this, it's going down like this because you're spending a lot more money to come back to the days of [00:30:00] glory you had in the past, right? That that's the problem with it. And then you need to do some things different to in order to for it to actually go back up to the top.
And, [00:30:10] and you actually brought up earlier, like what got you here doesn't get you there, right? So if you, if you grew a business to 500 K, you think that I'm going to keep on doing the [00:30:20] same thing. I'm going to get to a million. No, it's not. It's a different journey. Cause I, with 1 billion under my belt and hundreds of brands across many, many [00:30:30] categories, almost every category.
Including like categories, odd categories like plumbing supplies, right? I've touched that. And many fashion brands, luxury brands, and so on and [00:30:40] so forth, right? It's, it's that 500k is a different business than a 1 million. It's different than a 1. 5 million. When you go to 3 million, it's different. If you are 3 million, you [00:30:50] think that, oh, shooting to 10 million is going to be the same journey.
No, it's not. You're going to go from 3 million to maybe 5. You're going to get stuck there. You're going to fall down, right? [00:31:00] So you need to understand, like, as you're growing, what, what, and having the right foundation and this AD method with the Rapid2x program implements [00:31:10] the right foundation for you and you're seeing results.
It's not theoretical stuff. You're actually seeing results from it. And as you're scaling now, now you're scaling the business. And one of the [00:31:20] dimensions is team. Also, it's not, it's not just very technical things that we're doing. Team optimization is one of the advanced, uh, uh, things that we discuss. And then only on a [00:31:30] weekly basis, when we are.
Meeting with all the entrepreneurs always, there's always a question about who I need to hire. Do I have the right people? [00:31:40] So we actually even formalize the rapid to X approved partners program, right? So we actually recommend implement people who implement rapid to X. And if you don't have the [00:31:50] people, because you might be great at Shopify liquid code, right?
That's not in your wheelhouse. So there are people that that implement those [00:32:00] things for you so that you are armed with the right people to be touching your business, not some random people that you go out, even though you're getting the right prescription and advice, but you [00:32:10] hire the wrong people and they don't even implement the right things.
Yeah. I think that's so important. And I think there's, there's two ways you can do it. So either you can do it for 25 years, like the two of us, or you find [00:32:20] somebody like you who helps you to expedite this whole process and go step by step through it. Now, if somebody wants to join your program, um, do they have to do any kind of homework?
Is there [00:32:30] an onboarding process? How does that work? So first, because we have this special thing with you guys, I would say for your listeners, go to growthbysevere. com slash coffee. [00:32:40] Right. So that's the special URL. So go to that and which the process is pretty simple. You, you, one of my team members are going to get in touch with you, [00:32:50] right?
You know, you'll book a time with them. They will make sure that you are the right fit for the program because not everybody is right. Because the thing is, if I'm telling you that you're [00:33:00] wasting your time with the wrong people. If we are not the right fit for you, we will tell you like, no, you're not the right fit at this time.
I do have a community that they could join, but my team will [00:33:10] explain that and they could go and join that community where I do live events. It's just it's not the rapid to X program, but I do live events where I answer questions, right? And we do have quite a [00:33:20] few. We have over, I think, close to 1000.
entrepreneurs in our open community that we have where they come in. Uh, actually every Tuesday, uh, Thursday, [00:33:30] I, I do a live events, uh, where they can come in. We workshop things on, on Tuesdays and we do a live Q and a on Thursdays in that community. So they will [00:33:40] point them in the right direction, making sure that.
They're they're they're being handled properly. Not not just that. Oh, we want to sell the program because not everybody is a fit, you know, even though you [00:33:50] could be blue in the face. Tell me that you're a fit. If you're not a fit. My team says that you're not a fit. You're not a fit, you know, for the program.
And we have a certain criteria for that. Um, and then [00:34:00] once they go through that, the sales process and they get to know the program, Some of the folks are invited to actually join, uh, the workshop, you know, if they want to learn more so [00:34:10] they can actually workshop the first dimension with me, and that's that's complimentary to those people who book, uh, who book with my team, so they're invited to come to those [00:34:20] and and they go through it and I explain in detail this performance optimization, these 15 tasks and they can They can start going through it.
And a lot of folks that show up there, they [00:34:30] realize that, Oh, you know what? This is a great program. Now I want to formally join it because I want to have access to all the resources, you know, not just me, but all the resources. And we have partners [00:34:40] that do amazing tutorials, very, very talented people in paid media and conversion rate optimization, email marketing, clay view optimization partner we have.[00:34:50]
That's exclusively, that's what they do. And they have been scaling businesses like this using email revenue, for example, influencer marketing, and so on. And as well as what is the right tech [00:35:00] stack for your business that you should be, because you may have installed random stuff. Average Shopify store installs 20 to 25 apps.
And [00:35:10] that's, that's one of the reasons, Claus, that the Shopify billing is not 79 a month. It's, when you get it, you go like, oh my god, why is this 450 a month? [00:35:20] Because you installed 20, 25 apps, that's why. How many, how many is the right number? Seven, seven to nine is more than enough, right? Nine would be [00:35:30] too much, more, more closer to seven in an extreme case, right?
So anything above that, you're, you just installed too many apps. I mean, I've had one [00:35:40] example of a Rapid2Xer, when they were evaluating the apps that they had installed, they had installed three live chats. And the irony, when you went to the site, there was no [00:35:50] icon for live chat. They were paying three monthly bills, not using it.
Because three different people had installed it over the years and [00:36:00] and the poor owner was paying a monthly fee for each one of them. Some apps are 10 a month. Some are 150 a month. So you can imagine those kind of that's part of [00:36:10] the optimization. That's why we clean up all of that stuff in the first 21 days.
Okay. Cool. Perfect. I love that story. I think that happens more often than one might think. [00:36:20] Sabir, before we come to the end of our coffee break today, what is one final thoughts that you want to leave our listeners with? You actually nailed it earlier. You get so distracted with so many bad [00:36:30] ideas that come to you, right?
And where does it come in? You feel bored. You sit there on the sofa and you have your phone out. You go on to tick tock. Some random guy is going to [00:36:40] tell you, Oh, if you do this. It's going to improve your meta ads, right? And then you go like, Oh my God, I just got the holy grail of a tip. Let me [00:36:50] go and do that.
What you fail to notice is that video was seen by a hundred thousand people, right? At least. And those a hundred thousand people have already tried it. [00:37:00] Uh, by now, whatever that novelty that you thought was an amazing tip is garbage. Basically, you need to focus your time on [00:37:10] tangible strategies that keep on paying dividend over time.
The compounding effect is real, right? And if you do these kind of waste [00:37:20] of time and waste of money, because what does that person do that implement? Oh, maybe I didn't implement it right. Or maybe, uh, you know what, uh, that's creative. Let's, let's give it, let's give [00:37:30] it some money. Let's spend like 500 bucks or a thousand bucks.
Let's see what happens with it. 500 dollars on a mistake is a mistake. It's a bigger [00:37:40] mistake. First, it was a organic thing that you wanted to do, which would have been just effort or time. Now you spend money on top of it. You made two mistakes [00:37:50] now, right? And you do these things, these bad decisions over time in a year's time.
Maybe you did those decisions 20 times, that 500 [00:38:00] times 20 adds up very quickly. And some of these mistakes are, I'll tell you from the entrepreneur that I work with entrepreneurs that I work with. It's not 20 times. It's like [00:38:10] 50 times is a hundred times. They just keep on doing the same thing and thinking that, Oh, that's the problem there.
That's the next creative is they're off by one creative. [00:38:20] If they got that one creative, right? Magic will happen. No, you need to look at your business and make the right decisions in your business. That's what you need to do. And that's what a D method [00:38:30] does. Like it's very methodical people who like that kind of, uh, adrenaline, uh, executing bad ideas.
Right. We'll hate this program, but people who are [00:38:40] very methodical, they want to do this one thing at a time. And actually this is a commentary on not on ethnicity or racism. I'll tell you the, the, the group of entrepreneurs I really [00:38:50] love Dutch entrepreneurs and German entrepreneurs. Very methodical. They love this program because as our brothers is Dutch as the end, we have several Dutch Dutch entrepreneurs [00:39:00] also as they implement one thing at a time.
They're actually laser targeted. They're looking at the KP eyes and seeing what is it improving and they love it. And they just keep on going through this flywheel [00:39:10] and they just keep on getting the results compounded over time. Right? If you are that type of a personality, you will love this program. But if you are adrenaline junkie, That wants to find a [00:39:20] tick tock, the next thing that you are obsessed with, and you do that and it fails and you want to move on to the next thing, this program is not for you.
Okay. No, that makes perfect sense. [00:39:30] E commerce is a business and it needs to be treated as a business. And the internet is a dirty place with a lot of distractions. So rather focus on things that have. Shown to work [00:39:40] for a business and not for a fashion trend or a TikTok story. And I think Sabir is the right place to start there.
And um, if you're in interest [00:39:50] for getting better in your business, you will find the link in the show notes and then reach out to Sabir directly and take it from there. Sabir, thanks so much for your time today. I think we can talk for hours about e commerce and our [00:40:00] experiences. Maybe we'll do this as a later point where we just share stories.
Um, that might be also a very interesting episode. Thanks so much for your time today. Yeah. Thank you very much for having me. And definitely we [00:40:10] should do a follow up. I have a lot of stories that I'm sure with 25 years of experience from yours, I think we can, we can have a fireside chat. How about that for the next one?
Not coffee [00:40:20] break. That sounds like a plan. And I think that will be very entertaining. Thanks so much. Talk soon.
