Selling Naked by Jesse Horwitz

Author:Jesse Horwitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

In any executional area, stay alert. If you don’t find enticing options, there might be a business opportunity for you if you can improvise a workable solution.

OVERSEEING VENDORS

If you outsource to the extent that I am suggesting, you might wonder what’s left for you and your teams to do yourself. The answer is quite a bit. Hiring third-party services doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for the business’s functioning. You still must coordinate your partners, track their performance, and hold them accountable. Dave and his team at Bombas did plenty of that, bringing on people with expertise in a range of areas to help. For example, nobody on the team had much experience in online marketing, so they hired Kate Huyett, Bombas’s current CMO, who had successfully scaled a business across multiple marketing channels. Kate made certain that the company’s marketing partners focused on what mattered most to the business, including metrics like cost per acquisition, and lifetime value. “It’s important,” Dave says, “to make sure that for whatever third-party providers or technologies you’re leveraging, you have somebody internally who at least understands what success looks like so you can best utilize and manage those teams.” Oisin O’Connor, founder of the third-party subscription management vendor ReCharge, agrees, noting that this person doesn’t have to be technically expert in the field in question. “You just need someone on your team, either in-house or an agency, who is strong enough to understand the solutions out there and how they can push the business forward.”3

More generally, founders and their teams have to function in some sense as the brains of the operation, developing strategies and handling key executional issues in collaboration with vendors. At Bombas, the team initially “leveraged outside agencies to help on the actual execution” of marketing, while Kate “really drove the strategy.” Meanwhile, two of Dave’s co-founders—Randy Goldberg and Aaron Wolk—helped generate the initial creative strategy for Bombas and oversaw agencies executing against it, having previously worked in agencies themselves. A third co-founder, Dave’s brother, Andrew, was an MBA specializing in finance and operations. He oversaw areas of the business that were “numerically and operationally intensive,” including third-party logistics and shipping providers. Among other questions, he decided “how many orders are we going to do a day, what kind of turnaround time should we aim for, [and] what should we pay for shipping.”

Although your team might divvy up relationships with key vendors like Dave’s team did, as a founder, you’ll probably involve yourself at least somewhat in all the big operational decisions. When challenges arise, your vendor partners have to understand that as long as they do their job, they have your full faith behind them, and you’re not privileging other partners or internal teams. Rivalries can emerge, for instance, when both employees and external partners are handling Facebook marketing for you. Your job is to make everyone feel fairly treated, even if not everyone loves each particular decision. Make external media buyers understand that they have your support, and

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