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Well, hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the eCommercer.
Most of the exit stories we hear are told from the finish line. Side hustle to seven figures, sold in under three years, cue the photo on a beach somewhere.
This week's conversation is the same story told from the inside, and it's a different story.
Jayden Clark built a high-ticket garden products store in the evenings around his job at Sky. Year one, seven figures. It got him out of the job, and his wife out of hers not long after. Two and a half years in, he sold it for £500,000 (about $700,000).
He also reckons another eighteen months of work would have made it a seven-figure exit. He knew that at the time. He sold anyway.
The gap nobody builds for
Jayden is a marketer. Demand generation, ads, SEO, everything right up to the point of conversion. That's what he's good at and what he enjoys, so that's what he did.
| | "What I am not very good at and what I don't enjoy is what happens after the sale. And so you keep doing this, this, this with the demand, and the gap between what the business is doing and what the business can realistically sustain just gets bigger and bigger and bigger."
Jayden Clark |
Two salaries had gone, and the business needed around £10,000 a month to replace them. So every time profit went up he had the same choice, which was hire someone at £3,000 a month to carry the operational load, or keep the money and work another twenty hours a week.
He kept working the twenty hours.
Then, two years in, he and his wife married. UK ceremony, spa day afterwards, and a ninety-minute massage he'd booked as a treat.
Ninety minutes in silence with nothing to think about except every liability in the business and every hire he'd onboarded badly. He came out of that room and said he needed to sell.
Not because the offer was right. Because he'd worked out what it would take to make the business sustainable and knew he didn't have it in him.
Why 0.3% is the plan
The second business, Camper Nation, is built differently, and the number that gives it away is the conversion rate.
They convert at 0.3 to 0.4%. Everyone quotes 1 to 2% as the benchmark. Average order value is around £2,000.
At that price, conversion rate is simply the wrong scoreboard. Nobody spends two grand on a first visit. So the metric Jayden actually runs the business on is traffic to lead, not traffic to purchase.
Here's how that works in practice. Someone wants an awning for their camper van. The thing stopping them isn't price, and it isn't that they need to see the product another eleven times. It's the fear of ordering the wrong one and finding out on the first trip that it doesn't fit.
So Camper Nation asks for the registration and the vehicle type, and sends back a list of products guaranteed to be compatible. If it's still wrong, they sort it and pay the return shipping.
Compare that to the standard approach, which is showing someone the same awning again and again and reminding them they left it in the basket.
One of those solves the actual problem.
Jayden also makes a point that's easy to miss. Lead magnets don't rescue bad traffic. When people bring him a conversion problem, he says at least two times out of three the real issue is the intent of the traffic arriving. Someone searching for a sleep supplement with two specific active ingredients is a completely different buyer from someone searching for help sleeping better.
Why this one makes sense to me
I've been drawing a quadrant on whiteboards for years that says the same thing from another direction. Trust along one axis, knowledge up the other.
Customers high on both know you and know what they need. They're your best, and always will be. The ones where you can actually move the needle sit low on one axis or the other.
What I like about Jayden's version is that his lead magnets work both at once. Tell us your van and we'll tell you which awning fits builds knowledge. And if we get it wrong, we'll pay to fix it builds trust.
I've said for years that the primary job of an ecommerce website is to make the sale, and the second job is to get the email address of the person who isn't ready yet. Lead magnets built around what people are genuinely anxious about are the best way I know to do the second one.
Have a listen. His last two minutes are a step-by-step for building one.
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