Peter Pru and his wife just had their second daughter. So the proud poppa had another member of the EEB team, Ali Gulshan, interview their newest $10k per month client: a guy by the name of Russ Clark. Russ was no stranger to business, having done quite a bit offline, but this ecom stuff was all new to him. So he decided to invest in Peter and Ali’s Business In A Box service—to earn while he learns. Read on for a summary of this recent podcast episode.
“One thing I tell people that wanna work with us,” Ali begins, “is that what we deliver is one thing, but the real sort of value of the program is the access that you get to the team. So, before all of this was built, it was pretty much just Peter, right? And so when I joined the program, I was just a guy struggling with ecom, and I told Pete, ‘Hey man, I want just somebody to review my work.’ I just wanted to work with somebody who knows what they’re doing. Back then, there was no live chat; we would meet once a week.”
“And just that once a week completely shifted my mindset,” Ali continues, “in terms of what is possible and what is right versus what is wrong. And so the key to success that I see with most of our members who reach the $10k Club is that they show up to those calls every single week. But I’m curious, Russ, when you took the plunge and signed up for this service, did you have any friends and family you told, ‘Hey, I’m signing up with these guys’? If so, what was their reaction—what did they say?”
Russ said he did, in fact, tell a few people; and it was his son who wasn’t really feeling it. You sure you know what you’re getting into, Dad? Russ didn’t, of course, but figured, with the right team and the right training and plenty of hand holding, he could figure it out. So far so good. Russ knows he’d never be this far along if he tried to do it all himself. He just doesn’t have the time or the bandwidth to study, learn, implement, troubleshoot, and keep at it. Probably would’ve thrown in the towel by now.
“For the investment that I paid,” Russ says, “you guys saved me so much time, and plus now I have a team. So to me it’s like, ‘I invested X amount of dollars in a business that, if I was going down the street to buy a manufacturing company, I’m gonna buy the equipment and the assets. And then they’re already in place and I’m gonna take the cash flow.’ The only difference for this is I didn’t have any cash flow. Yet. I went in, here’s the investment, here’s the team, let’s figure this thing out.”
And that they did. Russ recalls, they launched his new store at 7 a.m., and by noon he already had gotten a few sales. Granted, he still had to pay for ad spend, so he wasn’t immediately profitable. But it was promising; now he just needed to do his part to optimize and tweak and get to where he could put $1 in and get $1.25 (or whatever) out. Sounds like Russ is just now getting to that point, where he’s enjoying a little bit of take-home at the end of the month. (I guess $10k Club doesn’t mean $10k in profit, huh?)
As the interview winds down, Ali asks Russ what he’d say to anyone on the fence about joining the Business In A Box program. “Get 10 questions written down,” Russ says. “Not just price but like, what else you’d wanna know. ‘What are my pitfalls? What am I gonna encounter? Where’s my head need to be?’ Get your 10 questions together, get on a call with the Ecommerce Empire Builders team, and see how they answer ’em. That’s gonna determine whether or not you wanna move forward.”
