[00:00:00] Chase Dimond: The order in which you asked for email or phone number actually matters. So when we've tested email first phone number second, we've seen a higher adoption of both email and SMS. And if we ask for phone number first email second. So that's one, I put out a lot of thoughts out there about things that are working for us and things that we're trying.

[00:00:14] Chase Dimond: Um, and that creates this feedback loop of people that also try it. And if they get the same result, then great. And then if it doesn't work, people will give feedback on like, Hey, I tested a, but then I did B and B worked better. It's not isolated to our, and our own success.

[00:00:37] Jason Wong: Hey everyone. Welcome to our first show at the building blocks show I have here a really good friend of mine, someone really special someone I talk to you almost every day, Chase Dimond. He is currently a partner at Structure, a top e-commerce marketing agency, where he runs the email team. Um, he's been doing this for about three years now in, in the span of three years, he has done [00:01:00] over a hundred million dollars in actual email revenue. And, uh, those of you who have ever done emails, you know that it's, it's there on the dashboard. You can't really just go out and make it up on this number. Like it's there, it tells you exactly where you get it. The flow is the campaign. So like, I, I think Chase is definitely top of his game and I'm very, very happy to have him on the show today.

[00:01:20] Chase Dimond: Dude, I'm pumped to be here. This is the first one. I didn't know that.

[00:01:22] Jason Wong: Yeah,

[00:01:23] Jason Wong: I've, you're a top on my list. Um, I actually wanted to create the show for two reasons. One is I guess so many questions on like how I do things and why I do things and my respond to it is that I just do do things my way, but I think there's definitely more brilliant people out there.

[00:01:40] Jason Wong: So I want to create a show to ask how they do things and really the premise of the show since we're only the pilot episode, is I want to break down specific tactics and breaking it down to why you think it will work and how actually turn out and we can also talk about failures to let you know things that we tested and didn't work out.

[00:01:58] Jason Wong: So, um, the [00:02:00] topic for today is really. Um, Black Friday/Cyber Monday, you know, we're now at the end of December. Um, so we have some time to breathe, you know, spend some time with family and just kind of reflect back on the end of November, which is what was really the craziest time of the year for all of us.

[00:02:18] Jason Wong: So in terms of the email side of things, I might jump right into, like, what was it that you really did differently this year?

[00:02:25] Chase Dimond: Oh, man, there there's a lot. So for, for one, I mean, we're working with a lot more clients, so we had to get a lot more organized as an agency. And I think like the key for us and I guess everyone is like starting in early and over-preparing right.

[00:02:37] Chase Dimond: Like, do we started thinking about Black Friday/Cyber Monday probably like in September, we started preparing for it and thinking about it. We didn't actually launch it right until November. We started planning for it ahead of time really dialing in everything from the offers. So we started testing things on the popups, like percentage off versus dollar off, getting a sense of each particular brand, how customers and subscribers resonate with different types of [00:03:00] offers.

[00:03:00] Chase Dimond: And you'd say a product's $50, a 10% off versus at $5 off. It's the exact same discount. But like you see like a skew in one way or the other and different brands skew different ways. Um, so, so testing like offers in terms of like popups and within emails was really important for us ahead of time, that really helped shape the offers that we were going to do for the actual event itself.

[00:03:20] Chase Dimond: I think that's one. Two is like we started offering as a agency service SMS. I think SMS really was a nice lever to lean on for a lot of our clients in this time period. You know, inboxes are so crowded and obviously we still did well with email, but inboxes are so crowded when it comes to email. SMS is like a wide open channel.

[00:03:40] Chase Dimond: More, more brands are adopting and obviously over time, you know, people are only going to be, I think, on a handful of lists, cause they don't want to be blowing up on their phone, but I think by adopting SMS, that was huge going back and forth between email and SMS and really hitting VIP's and giving them first access on both channels was like some of the main takeaways.

[00:03:58] Jason Wong: I have two followup [00:04:00] questions on that. Number one is testing. I think everyone talks about testing is super important. It's what I preach too. But, um, how do you test, like, do you test it on a live site? Like testing the offers that you would have run on Black Friday but in September is like, what, what's your cadence for testing?

[00:04:16] Chase Dimond: Yeah. So, uh, as an even marketer, like we do testing a couple of ways. One is through, um, onsite forums. So whether it's a pop-up or a fly out, some kind of form, we'll literally split the traffic based off of, you know, 50/50 or whatever we're running, where, you know, 50% of the people that are going to come on the site are going to receive pop-up with a 10% off.

[00:04:34] Chase Dimond: And then different than percent of people are going to receive it with a $5 off in the case of the $50 AOV example. And then we'll basically be able to see, you know, this welcome 10 code versus this welcome five code. How many people took it? What was the overall revenue? Um, what does that look like?

[00:04:49] Chase Dimond: Right. Like what was the number of people entered their emails, everything from like on the offer, like the form submission all the way through like the conversion. So what did that look like? So that was in the case of a form, but we also [00:05:00] get testings within an email itself where say, for example, you know, the subject line, everything, that's the same.

[00:05:05] Chase Dimond: The only thing within the email that's different could literally be the office. So the call to action or the kind of incentive within the email could be the 10% off versus the $5 off. And obviously if you're doing that on the forms, that would carry through over to email. So for, for us as email marketers, primarily we're testing things onsite through forms or things actually within an email. You know, other things we're testing as things that everyone tests, everything from you know, from name to subject line to preview text, uh, plain text versus, you know, beautifully designed emails, you know, those types of things.

[00:05:35] Jason Wong: And obviously there's a myriad of things that people test, like you said, the firm names and subject lines. And I think it's very hard for any one of us to say, this is the thing that will always work, right?

[00:05:46] Jason Wong: Like from names. I've heard that a million times, but after testing it across all my brands, it's, it's a hit or miss. It's really, depending on the product, it depends on the audience too. Is that something that you've seen on your end too? And I mean, [00:06:00] you definitely touch a lot more brands than I do. Is there a pattern of testing that makes it easier for you to test things now?

[00:06:06] Jason Wong: Or are there things that makes you jump into the next step a lot faster?

[00:06:10] Chase Dimond: Yeah. You know, I think when you were in able, because obviously you have to isolate variables, right. And with that, we basically focus on a specific variable for a specific amount of time. And then we moved to the next one. So there's only so much testing that you're gonna be able to do on a, from name.

[00:06:22] Chase Dimond: Right. You know, in the case of you, you know, it could be Jason, it could be Jason Wong. It could be Jason at Doe, it could be Doe Lashes. It could be someone else on your team. Right. But there's like, you know, more of a limited number of things that you can test on a from name than on a subject line. Like on a subject line, right there's going to be an infinite number of things that you could test and emojis, no emojis. So what we basically do is, you know, we'll kind of go one at a time. We'll start with, let's say the from name, we'll get that really dialed in. And obviously over time, we'll kind of re revisit and come back to that.

[00:06:50] Chase Dimond: But I don't want to test the from name for six straight months. I want to test it for a handful of weeks, see what moves the needle, stick with it. And then we move on to subject lines. You know, we [00:07:00] want to get a sense of, you know, are subject lines serious? Are they kind of intriguing? Are they mysterious?

[00:07:05] Chase Dimond: Are they, are they actually serious? Like what does that overall tone and voice that people like within your subject line? And it varies by brand, you know, emojis, no emojis, caps, no caps, um, you know, putting the discount within the subject line or not. Those types of things, right? So we spend a decent amount of time on subject lines, just cause that has a pretty big variable effect on people actually opening it.

[00:07:25] Chase Dimond: And then we also test the preview text or the pre header text as some people call it. And if you look at your inbox from left to right, you have the from name, the subject line, and then this part of text, and that's called the preview text of the pre header text. Um, and most people don't really think about that.

[00:07:38] Chase Dimond: And that's essentially like a secondary subject line. So long-wineded: each thing that you want to test in terms of getting people to open outside of where you land. You know, it's going to have a limited number of time that you can test it. And obviously every three or six months, you want to kind of refresh and come back in as you build your audience and have more people you want to retest those things.

[00:07:57] Chase Dimond: So that's how I think about it in terms of actually getting people to open it. And then [00:08:00] similarly to actually getting people to click and engage. You want to test, you know, plain text versus HTML, you know, for plain text do you want to have really large fonts, ripe or larger fonts? Like 16 to 20 point font is worth testing, you know, easy to read fonts.

[00:08:14] Chase Dimond: Um, there there's a whole suite or whole host of things that you can test actually within the email itself.

[00:08:18] Jason Wong: Yeah, absolutely. Um, that's what we're seeing too, but like, like I said, you touched on so much more brands than I do. So I'm curious to see if anything changes on your end. The next thing I want to touch on is actually SMS.

[00:08:28] Jason Wong: It's been, I will say the hottest topic of the year next to personalized emails, which I want to jump into next. Um, but SMS, the biggest thing that I've heard from people in our spaces at what if a jeopardizes emails, do you collect emails and SMS at the same time? Do you send them the same exact message?

[00:08:45] Jason Wong: How do you approach email and SMS to make sure that they're not butting heads?

[00:08:50] Chase Dimond: Yeah. So for, for one, um, I think you have to collect both, right? And from our testing, again, maybe you're testing or other folks testing is different. The order in which you asked for email or phone number actually [00:09:00] matters. So when we've tested email first, phone number second, we've seen a higher adoption of both email and SMS than if we ask for phone number first, email second. So that's one, we definitely want to collect both, um, test the order. For you it might be very different, but for us pretty consistently, that's been the same. Do you have any quick thoughts or any feedback on that one?

[00:09:17] Jason Wong: Yeah, we were advised by, um, our rep at Postscript to do phone number first and an email second, just because in terms of earnings per message SMS has been able to outpace emails. So they're like, you know what, if you're making more on SMS, just collect more SMS. Um, but whenever we have switched, made that switch, we saw a lower conversion rate because phone number for lot of people is a lot more intimate. It's this is where you can call me. Whereas email, you can't call someone on email, you have to email them.

[00:09:47] Jason Wong: And so we found that people are generally more willing to put out their email first and then maybe SMS than SMS versus an email second.

[00:09:54] Chase Dimond: Yeah. And I heard that too from Postscript and some of the others, right. That they say that the phone number is harder to collect. So they [00:10:00] collect at first, and it has more revenue per recipient.

[00:10:02] Chase Dimond: And again, like, I love Postscript. Obviously they have a lot of data, you know, they, they want you to use the platform, right. And you should use a platform. It's a great platform. So I think they pitched that first, just from our testing to the point that you made last. By having someone to give you their email, that's kind of like one step towards trust.

[00:10:18] Chase Dimond: Right. And that's kind of reducing the friction. So I, I just seen by doing the email first phone number second, that you actually get more overall emails and phone numbers, but again, you have to test both, you know, there's not one size fits all. I think there's a lot of legitimacy to that. It's just in our own testing I've seen the other.

[00:10:34] Chase Dimond: And then in terms of like the two together, um, you know, I guess it depends where I like, you know, from an agency's budget perspective, if you're only doing email, you're not doing SMS. Sure. You want more attributable revenue towards email, right. It makes you look better. It allows you to keep your fees. But the, the honest answer is like, I think a brand should be doing both.

[00:10:50] Chase Dimond: And if it steals a little bit from email and adds to SMS, but the overall net of retention is bigger in terms of a percentage and a dollar that's a win. Right. So I think you have [00:11:00] to use both in tandem and I think there's times and places to use the two. Finding the right cadence is important also. So for most of our brands on the email side, we're sending two to four, maybe three to five email campaigns a week.

[00:11:11] Chase Dimond: And you can get away with that. You can't really send two or four, three to five text messages a week, right. You know, an exception of maybe Black Friday/Cyber Monday, you can. But outside of that, you know, we found like one, maybe two a week is kind of that sweet spot. Unless again, you preface up front that you're going to be sending a daily text.

[00:11:27] Chase Dimond: That's the, really, the key with email and SMS is if you're going to be sending daily, you have to preface that you're going to be sending daily. Or else people have the wrong impression. They're going to opt out. However, if you're not doing that, if you're only sending once or twice a week or a handful of times, I think you're okay not saying we're going to do this.

[00:11:42] Chase Dimond: In terms of how they work together. We'd like, for example, like in an abandoned cart, we like kind of going back and forth between the two we might send, let's say like, you know, an email and then follow up with an SMS if someone doesn't open or convert. And then if someone doesn't open the SMS, we might go back to an email.

[00:11:56] Chase Dimond: So we kind of try to alternate. So that, that first email might go out [00:12:00] within, let's say 30 minutes to four hours after someone abandons their car. And if someone doesn't open or convert within the first, let's say 12 or 24 hours, we're going to then follow up with a text message. Right? Because that window of time to try to convert someone's probably, you know, somewhere in the ballpark of like 24 to 72 hours give or take right anything after 72 hours, you're probably not going to get them.

[00:12:22] Chase Dimond: So we'll kind of go back and forth. And then outside of that, in terms of the question around like the content, the content is complementary, you know, we don't typically ever send the exact same thing, but we can talk about similar things. If we're obviously sending a sale, you know, there's going to be pretty consistent things.

[00:12:38] Chase Dimond: We try to exclude, you know, SMS subscribers and email subscribers in the same go. And then we might do a follow-up to whatever, you know, one and whatnot. So that's kind of like a, high-level rapid firing through some of those things.

[00:12:49] Jason Wong: I love that. Um, and I, I think putting them in like a specific order makes a lot of sense because you don't wanna just blast them same message in two different channels.

[00:12:59] Jason Wong: Um, but I [00:13:00] guess my question here is. How, how do you properly segment the phone number and email to make sure that after you send an email, they don't click it. Then we know to text them because we use Postscript and Klaviyo for email Postscript for SMS, they don't really talk to each other or maybe they do. I just don't use it properly. How do you properly go about that?

[00:13:19] Chase Dimond: Yeah, I'm not as much like doing this stuff and the Postscript and whatever other platform I do most of my stuff, at least personally, within Klayvio for both SMS and an email. Um, so typically what I've noticed is because most of the people that are opting in first with an email, uh, that phone number that when they opt in second is being tied to that email profile.

[00:13:38] Chase Dimond: So I collect emails and phone numbers in a few ways. So, uh, I have like a form right where it asks for literally email first. So I get the email, get that profile and then phone number second right. I don't know if it's cause it's in one go, but like I'm able to associate, you know, Jason and then phone number XYZ.

[00:13:54] Chase Dimond: And then I also collect, um, phone numbers for people that are already on my email list by just sending them to text me at this [00:14:00] number or to opt in on here. And then it does a pretty good job at tying back phone numbers. So I don't know necessarily how that works on all the other platforms. I don't know if it's because you know, you're using Klaviyo and they're opting in the same go or, you know, it's associated with a profile and whatnot.

[00:14:13] Chase Dimond: Um, but for me, I've been able to pretty accurately I wouldn't say it's a hundred percent, but maybe like 90 plus percent exclude or kind of include phone numbers and email folks where I noticed for example I send an email out about some sale I'm then able to go send to phone numbers and exclude the emailers.

[00:14:30] Chase Dimond: Right. And obviously a lot of times I exclude emailers and I have phone numbers. Most of the people are going to exclude because I've got email plus phone number. So it's kind of interesting. I think there's a couple of different ways and that's probably not the best answer, but in my personal usage of it and experience of it is that's a pretty decent job when you're using the same platform for associating the two as one.

[00:14:47] Jason Wong: Yeah. That's probably the best argument I've seen, um, for Klayvio SMS in Klaviyo email. Cause I I'm a, I'm a big Postscript fanboy. Um, but, but there's definitely a little disconnect in terms of like [00:15:00] trying to segment properly when you're collecting a lot of emails and a lot of phone numbers. So that makes a lot of sense.

[00:15:05] Jason Wong: And I definitely think segmentation is the key to emails and phone numbers. And, you know, if you guys aren't doing that already, definitely hop on that. Chase has an enormous amount of content on his Twitter about segmenting. I I'm a big fan of it. And actually I saw you post yesterday on the five tips that you would give on email marketing.

[00:15:25] Jason Wong: One of them is actually on the topic of personalization, which is something that I've been talking about a lot too. I use Octane AI to do a shoppable quiz to personalize it. And I think you guys definitely use something of that extent too. Tell me a little bit more about like, where you see personalization go in email and SMS.

[00:15:42] Jason Wong: Like what, what's your prediction, or even like, what are brands doing right now that you think we should really highlight?

[00:15:48] Chase Dimond: Yeah. There's, there's three of five things from kind of the post that you're referring to. I want to highlight I'll name them right now. And then I'll kind of tie them together. Uh, the first is personalization. The second is leveraging kind of [00:16:00] engaging and dynamic content. And then the third is also plain text emails. So kind of tying those all together. So, you know, we're all seeing what's happening with iOS 14, 14.5 iOS 15, right. Um, the ability to have visibility across the entire stack of data and attribution, this, that, and the other is becoming more challenging by the day.

[00:16:19] Chase Dimond: Right? It feels like the visibility that we have is decreasing by the day. So it's more important than ever, or just as important than ever to leverage personalization. Yeah. It's so much harder to actually leverage that personalization because we're going to be missing certain data points. Right? So it's so important that you leverage, let's say your Klayvio or whatever that you're using as your CRM or your ESP to tie back as much data as possible, right.

[00:16:39] Chase Dimond: Everything from where someone first found you, whether that was TikTok, facebook, SEO, affiliate, influencers, all the way through what are they doing on your site. You know, what blog posts are they reading? What products are they viewing? What are they adding to cart? Where are they starting on checkout? How much, how often they come into your site.

[00:16:57] Chase Dimond: Um, and then what are they buying? How often are they [00:17:00] buying things? What's the AOV. Are they buying products A but not B.. Right. So really aggregating and tying as much of that data in the better. Right. Because we need that to make emails personalized. And going to the next point. It's like personalization is beyond just leveraging first name or doing something like a gift, right.

[00:17:17] Chase Dimond: Creating like really personal, engaging content, in my opinion through technology like amp, which has accelerated mobile pages essentially allows an email to act much like a landing page. You can do cool things like scroll between a product carousel. You can click on something in the product and kind of drop out.

[00:17:31] Chase Dimond: Um, you can actually even like fill out surveys within an email, right? Or fill out a review within an email. So through amp and kind of some of the technological advancements, being able to personalize emails and make emails really engaging, I think is going to be a huge thing in 2022. I think the future.

[00:17:46] Chase Dimond: And I think we're some degree we're partially there, but going to get better, allowing people to transact with that within an email is going to make the conversion rates massive, right? Email is already a great channel for conversion. And imagine that people can fill out a review on one of [00:18:00] your products directly with an email.

[00:18:01] Chase Dimond: In some cases you can already do that. It's going to get easier. Imagine that people can, you know, drop you a quick note or a quick feedback on something, you know, imagine that people can actually buy through a one-click upsell from you within email and or SMS, right? Those are some of the things that I'm excited about.

[00:18:20] Jason Wong: We can dream for sure.

[00:18:21] Jason Wong: Um, I, I think like as we see email becoming more of a actual platform that can encompass and tie in all these different things, um, that's going to just boost conversion rate by so, so much because you're already seeing email being like the central hub, like think of it like a train station for everything. Yet, it cannot do a lot of things. So I, I think they're just a step or two away from doing that. I'm quite excited for it. You know, chase. What I love about talking with you is that you're always able to pack so much good stuff in the span of like 15 minutes. Um, there has been a few times I've talked to you already and you always been able to do that, but I actually want to like, [00:19:00] take a little track here and talk a little bit more about you personally, because I think that's like, A hundred million dollar email marketer.

[00:19:05] Jason Wong: There's so many people who follow you on Twitter and people who are listening to this podcast, that wonder how to even get to that point. And like, I'm not here to talk about like the specific tactics now, but more so like on you that the mental framework that you follow, like what, what was that thing, that switch in your head and was like, okay, I'm now going to do things very differently. And that's what led to your success? What was that thing?

[00:19:29] Chase Dimond: Yeah, that's a good question. And one actually, two last things on the last topic I forgot to talk about the plain text emails, kind of going back to personalization by leveraging more plain text emails.

[00:19:36] Chase Dimond: I think for e-commerce and DTC brands, that's going to come across more, more personal. Right. And then the last, the last other thing I was going to say, like to your point of like the train station and having email be more of like a hub and a platform is, you know, a lot of the big email platforms Klayvio and others.

[00:19:50] Chase Dimond: Um, Omnisend, Drip , I think are talking about building almost out like, like Shopify has their own marketplace. They're talking about now building and allowing integrations and marketplaces within their platform. So that [00:20:00] way you can do all these types of things without having to leverage something like Zapier and being able to give more data enrichment and attribution.

[00:20:06] Chase Dimond: So there's a lot of really cool stuff coming, I think in 20, 22 and beyond.

[00:20:10] Chase Dimond: But moving over now and to kind of the more recent question, you know, I think for, for me, like growing up I played a bunch of sports and I always was pretty good at all these sports. Right. You know, I played club soccer, I played college soccer, I played soccer and I played a bunch of different positions throughout soccer.

[00:20:26] Chase Dimond: I played baseball, basketball, tennis, golf, like all these things growing up. And I was always pretty good. And I think if I had focused specifically on one sport, I would have been amazing. Right. Instead of being like a, B+/A- player, I probably could have been an A or an A+ player if I just chose soccer or just chose baseball or something.

[00:20:43] Chase Dimond: And I also was thinking about like, my career I was like man, I don't really want to be a generalist. Right. Like I don't want people to be like, oh, he's pretty good at this. And he's pretty good at that. I want people to know me as like, damn Chase is really, really good at this. And I'm kind of always looking at the thing that I'd done really well and consistently well [00:21:00] throughout my entire life professionally.

[00:21:02] Chase Dimond: Everything from when I was like raising awareness and fundraising for a charity, all the way to scaling online communities and software products and email was really like that underlying thing that I use both on acquisition, as well as retention and conversion. And I was just like, huh, there's not a lot of really like, well-known email marketers, right?

[00:21:20] Chase Dimond: There's a lot of really, well-known famous copywriters and there's a lot of really famous and well-known paid advertisers, but there's not really anyone that's really well-known and carved out this niche within. Why can't it beat me. And I really just went down this journey of like obsessing and focusing specifically on email and wanting to really understand the entire works of it.

[00:21:38] Chase Dimond: So I spent some time initially doing cold email for B to C acquisition for building communities. Then I built a travel newsletter that we scaled from zero to 500,000 emails. Uh, that was much like the hustle and the scams. I literally built a community around an email channel. And then Nick Shackleford, who's a buddy of both of ours, about four years ago got me into e-commerce email. Right. So I've been doing email now for [00:22:00] about eight to 10 years, and I've been really obsessed and focused on e-commerce email for the past, like three and a half, four years. So long-winded, for me, it kind of was tired of being pretty good at something and I wanted to become really good.

[00:22:11] Chase Dimond: And that's where I became obsessed with being best in class at one thing. And that was email. And I really believe in specialization, if you want to be, you know, an agency or a freelancer, I think for someone like you, that wants to be a brand owner and operator, you have to be pretty good at a bunch of things.

[00:22:25] Chase Dimond: And you kind of filled the gaps with people that are, are better than you at this one type of thing. So for, for me, and wanting to work with people and build services and what not,

[00:22:33] Chase Dimond: I wanted to specialize.

[00:22:34] Jason Wong: Yeah, absolutely. I read a quote recently from someone who interviewed hundreds of billionaires and other successful people.

[00:22:41] Jason Wong: And the common trait is obsession. If you want to be successful, you have to be absurdly obsessed about one particular thing. And whether that is discipline personal principles or investing, you just have to be so obsessed with it that you cannot be distracted. And it is something that I always think about like am [00:23:00] I too distracted by being a generalist.

[00:23:02] Jason Wong: Um, you know, it's, it's a struggle that I also like faced with. Right. But at the same time as a brand founder, like you said, I, I kind of have to be a generalist in order for me to know who to hire and how to hire for them, which brings me to like the next point on, like, what was something that you really wish you knew earlier in your career?

[00:23:20] Jason Wong: Because last time we talked, you talked a lot about hiring really good people and I, I just want you to leave on probably our last point for this show. Is that like, what was that thing? That you just wish you knew earlier when you're hiring really good people. And obviously we probably make some mistakes here and there, but your, your company is so large now, what is that

[00:23:40] Jason Wong: one thing?

[00:23:41] Chase Dimond: Yeah. Two thoughts, one run at the first point, the last point, I guess, would be one of the cool things that I realized, like that's come as the result of building a personal brand is I put out a lot of thoughts out there about things that are working for us and things that we're trying. Um, and that creates this feedback loop of people that also try it.

[00:23:56] Chase Dimond: And if they get the same result, then great. It's not isolated to, to [00:24:00] our, and our own success. It's also something that's highly replicable right. And then if it doesn't work, people will give feedback on like, Hey, I tested A, but then, you know, I did B and B worked better. So I think in terms of like becoming obsessed and getting this feedback loop, the more you put yourself out there, the more you create content like myself and yourself, Jason, the more that we share openly and candidly, the more that we invite people to share openly and candidly with us, which allows me to get smarter.

[00:24:25] Chase Dimond: Right. And then you build relationships with people and you build relationship with the platform for that. Klayvio feeds us stuff when it's an alpha and beta, because we give them feedback. Right. So I think like don't be afraid to share information with folks because it also comes back to in your favor because you learn as a result.

[00:24:39] Chase Dimond: To end on the hiring piece, I think one of the biggest mistakes that I personally made, when kind of scaling the agency initially. You know, I think it was my partner and I, in the beginning, we didn't really actually have the goal or aspiration of building an agency. We just were making money and we were basically taking every single thing that came in and putting it into our own pockets.

[00:24:57] Chase Dimond: Right. So we had like probably 90% profit margins. We were just paying [00:25:00] ourselves, whatever came in, minus the expenses. Right. And that was actually really difficult when we want to hire people, because then we actually had to either a cash back into the company now, which is really hard, right. Once it hits your account, it's really hard to put that elsewhere.

[00:25:14] Chase Dimond: Um, and then B also too, like we waited and so we had cash flows. So then instead of taking 90% of the profits, we started taking 50 and we started leaving in the difference to start building kind of cashflow. So that way we could hire. In an agency in a service-based business, like, you know, you're, you're offering is talent.

[00:25:30] Chase Dimond: You're offering is people and people cost money. Um, so I think for us that was like the biggest learning and the biggest misstep is I think we could be further along if we had let more money in the cash flow and not talking to everything on the business that would allow us to hire more people and better people more quickly.

[00:25:45] Chase Dimond: Other than that, you know, I think for us, like we brought in someone that's a head of HR and that we brought in. You know, HR admin type, assistant junior type people. I wish we had built that out a little bit earlier than we were ready for. You know, we dealt with a massive waitlist [00:26:00] all of 2021, just because we can not find enough good people.

[00:26:03] Chase Dimond: We brought this chick in six to eight months ago, dude, she's hired 30 or 40 people for us since just because she's very meticulous. Just like we specialize in email marketing. She specializes in talent and HR and she's good at screening. She's good at reading through the resume and what's fluff and what's legit and what's BS and what isn't.

[00:26:20] Chase Dimond: So she knows the right questions to ask for, for us. Like we were doing it as like a second secondary job, right. Um, and you can't kind of half ass, your hiring that ends up letting a lot of the wrong people through the gates, which is actually pretty toxic and not great. So, so long winded, um, keeping enough cash in your account.

[00:26:37] Chase Dimond: So that way, if you have a down month or if you just need to kind of scale quickly, Or build out some tech or whatever it might be. Uh, cashflow is super important. And then B is like finding the right people and putting the right processes in place to kind of that talent to really make sure that, you know, someone kind of date them before you marry them.

[00:26:55] Chase Dimond: Right. To kind of get them maybe on a project or a contract before you actually bring them on full-time. [00:27:00] Uh, it's, it's super important.

[00:27:01] Jason Wong: Now I love that. It's actually the most common thing I've heard from talking to friends in the space is hiring the right people it's made or break your business. If you hire a bad apple, it really ruins a whole bunch.

[00:27:12] Jason Wong: Um, and you know, unfortunately, I, I was personally a person that didn't really realize that until like years down the line, like I thought I could do everything. Cause you know, I I'm a founder. I can do everything myself. No one can do it better than me. And then you get humbled. Because either you burn out or you break down and then you're like, oh, actually I cannot do anything.

[00:27:33] Jason Wong: And actually it's better to hire multiple people that can do it's 70, 80% of what you do, but at a larger quantity in order to eventually build them up to a hundred and then focusing on like the higher level stuff. So that's like my personal learnings and I I'm sure you learned it the hard way too. Um, But Chase, this has been honestly a great start to my show. I'm so happy to have you on the first, first episode of the building blocks podcast. Obviously you and [00:28:00] I- we post a lot on Twitter. So there there's an obvious place to find you, but is there anywhere else where people can get your thoughts, things that you like to, you know, just meet people that are listening to here?

[00:28:11] Chase Dimond: Yeah. Twitter

[00:28:12] Chase Dimond: is the best. And then in my Twitter bio, I have like a link that expands out like our free newsletter, YouTube channel, other things like that. Follow me at e-com chase diamond and there's no end diamond. It's just D I M O N D.

[00:28:23] Jason Wong: That's where I always get wrong. I always thought your name was diamond.. And then, then, uh, yeah, once or twice, I've definitely had a typo there, but, um, to end off, I, I just want to say a little off track here.

[00:28:35] Jason Wong: Chase, honestly, put out so much free content. Like that are you, you typically have to pay so much money from everyone else just to get what he puts out for free. And, you know, I feel like my personal take is that you're at a point where you're, you're very content with your life, with your business, with how you built it.

[00:28:51] Jason Wong: It's that you're, you're happy teaching. Right. And you don't need to make money off your teaching, obviously like once or twice here and there, we will, we'll make [00:29:00] courses that are a little more complex and you'll have to enroll into it. But for the most part, the stuff that you put on Twitter is so good for beginners.

[00:29:06] Jason Wong: So personally, thank you for putting out that content. Happy to call you my friend. And thank you for joining the first show.

[00:29:12] Chase Dimond: Likewise, man. Thanks for having me.

[00:29:15] Jason Wong: You just heard an episode of the building blocks podcast. If you like, what you heard subscribe below to keep hearing conversations that I have with brilliant minds founders and innovators on how they built their best ideas. Now, we want to learn how you can turn your best ideas and build something massive out of it. Visit my website, bbclass.co. Or follow my Twitter at @eggroli

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