Happy Sunday,

Welcome back to the 18th edition of the Nord Media newsletter.

Wanting to learn about anything specific? Let me know, as always I appreciate all of you that reply each week and share feedback with me.

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This week, we're diving into what you need to do to take your brand from $1M to $5M+ in revenue.

It’s all about a mindset shift.

Growing your business is more than just scaling what you’re already doing.

You need to evolve your mindset, systems, and strategies. 

Let's break down how to get you there.

From $1M to $5M—A Mindset Shift

You need to understand that your brand will shift going past the $1M mark.

The same people, systems, and processes that got you to $100K or $1M won't be the same people who take you to $5M or $10M or $100M. 

Each of these is a fundamental mindset shift and requires new skills and ideas. 

The identity you’ve created (or if you’ve only been focused on sales up until this point) needs to be adaptable.

One of the biggest setbacks I see brands have at this point is that they stay too “on brand,” but they don’t fully understand, or even realize, what their brand actually is.

Past the theoretical part of things, the other aspect is you need to invest heavily into understanding and controlling your unit economics. 

The more you scale and the more you push revenue - the more your COGS, shipping, AOV, LTV all matter exponentially more.

Getting to $1M is a lot about generalists and people who are multi-faceted in their experience and roles. 

Getting beyond that becomes more about specialists and ensuring you have aces in their places and provide them the support needed.

This Week’s Tool of the Week 👉 Yotpo Email

The ecomm landscape is more competitive than ever. Acquisition is expensive, and customers demand personalized experiences to stay engaged.  

Yotpo email is the email that delivers on price, product and expertise to help you curate magically personalized experiences for your customers that won’t break the bank. 

Unlock revenue faster: 
Avoid siloed channels and disconnected data by consolidating Email and SMS marketing under one roof. Smarter segmentation and multi-channel orchestration yields higher ROI, and unique synergies with other Yotpo products like Reviews, Loyalty, and Subscriptions allow marketers to create even more personalized experiences at scale. 

Cut Back Costs:
With usage-based pricing, you only pay for what you send. No more profile-based pricing with constant upgrades each month. And 20-40% cost savings on average. 

Grow with Expertise:
Benefit from 24/7 chat support with dedicated migration support and ongoing strategy. 

Join 4,000+ brands that have already made the switch: Learn More

Oh, and Agency folks: On July 1st, Yotpo is launching their new partner program with revamped tiers, new managed services offering, expanded benefits, lead generation opportunities, and a whole lot more. 

No matter what your service offering is (design/dev, email/sms, full service), there will be opportunities to earn more revenue share across all Yotpo product lines with tiering requirements that are fair, not forced, and focused on client retention and/or revenue managed (not just referred).

On top of that, their product/R&D team is constantly innovating and creating solutions tailored to you (THINK: multi-brand management capabilities, advanced user permissions, cloning capabilities across ALL Yotpo products). 

In short: Yotpo is doubling down on partners. They don’t want to just support your success, they want to help you grow. 

Learn more about the agency program here.

You Need a Solid Foundation

Before you aim for $5M, make sure you have a solid foundation, team structure, understanding and support. 

This includes:

• Having clear SOPs

• Understanding your brand identity

• Knowing why your customers care about your product.

Here’s how to make sure your foundation is solid:

• Hire the right people

• Put systems in place that allow them to do their work exceptionally well

• Support their decisions and changes

SOPs need to be created as you work through situations. 

When you're trying to grow a lot of times you forget or ignore the little pieces that you learn or change.

Create new support documents and SOPs anytime you solve a problem so it can be referenced later and you can build off of it.

When it comes to understanding your brand identity, there is NO reason this needs to be an independent journey AT ALL.

Ask your past customers why they bought, what they like and don't like. 

Get their feedback and why they bought in.

Survey net new customers and people who don't buy. 

It's important to understand what STOPPED people from buying as much as it is to know WHY people bought. 

Take this information and build off of your previous identity. 

Be open to adapting and changing this over time to make sure that your customer persona and profile shifts as your market demand changes.

Building a Brand vs. Selling a Product

To move from $1M to $5M, you need to shift from simply selling a product to building a brand. 

This is when you start to create a lasting identity and connection with your customers.

Building Your Brand:
Once you hit the $1M mark, focus on developing your brand identity.

It sounds strange but if you have a good product and are doing a solid job on the fundamentals, people (customers) will start to build your brand for you. 

They'll post about your brand and products.

They'll share stories and will continue providing valuable feedback and insight. 

Take this information and build off of it - create a combination of what they're doing for you and enhancing what you've already built.

Don't focus on doing anything brand related until you are scaling profitably over $1M annually.

Focus on sales and developing systems before you try to build a brand.

Create the best product on the market at a good price and inform people what problems your product solves. 

Provide them the information on how it improves their quality of life or makes things easier and better for them.

Once this is all on lock - then you can build a brand.

The Role of Retention

Building a brand and scaling that brand is useless if you don’t also focus on retention. 

It's cheaper to get existing customers to buy again than to acquire new ones.

How you can make this easier on yourself:

• Develop strong retention funnels to keep customers engaged and coming back.

• Use data to understand customer behavior and personalize their experience.

What does this look like?

Surveys - understanding why people do what they do helps you prevent churn, improve LTV and creates a shift over time that continues to grow your business. 

Ask people.

Improve your CX experience. 

The better pre-purchase and post-purchase experience someone has (especially if they run into an issue) provides a foundation for them becoming a repeat customer. 

Make sure your customer service team has everything needed to succeed. 

I also highly suggest that all executive and senior leadership teams work in CX for 3-5 days a year. 

This will make sure they have a full understanding of what real customers are saying and working through.

Always and Continuously Improve

Continuous innovation and adaptation are the only ways to sustain this growth you’re chasing. 

But how do you get there?

Regularly review and refine your systems and processes to make sure they’re supporting your goals.

Always be testing, improving and tracking.

Focus on running valuable tests that have the ability to provide a big swing. 

At this level of revenue you shouldn't be aiming for a 1-2% lift.

You should be aiming for a 10-15% improvement. 

Take big swings, track everything and analyze what happens and why. 

Monitor your engagement metrics, on-site metrics, CVR, returning customer lift and profitability. 

Focus on driving an incremental change that can impact your bottom line profitability at scale.

Too many brands try taking small swings as it reduces risk, and they have this thought that 10-15 small tests is better than 1 large test. 

I completely disagree.

All these smaller tests do is provide less value and suck up more valuable resources. 

Focus your resources on things that have the chance of having a true fundamental change to your business.

One of the brands we work with identified that 83% of their revenue came from 7 of their 40 products. 

We developed a testing structure that limited exposure to just these 7 products and focused our marketing efforts on just these product lines and categories.

We saw that this simple shift improved revenue by 19% within 40 days and also dialed in their revenue to 96% yielding from these 7 products. 

This adjustment also simplified their website (we removed the other products) and overall improved their net margins as they had less waste on manufacturing and product inventory. 

Within 60 days of this change the brand saw a 9% lift in net profit with a 21% increase in revenue.

Understanding your unit economics and where to focus your marketing efforts and dollars has massive impacts (especially at the $1M - $5M scale)

Make sure that what you're marketing and where your effort is focused is where it needs to be. 

Too many brands want to have large product lines and diversified skus. 

Which is fine as you scale to $100M+, but focus on what's driving your growth and your overall revenue.

Reflect on your current strategies, ask yourself the hard questions, and be prepared to adapt and evolve. 

Taking your brand from $1M to $5M+ requires more than just scaling operations. 

It demands a shift in mindset, the establishment of strong foundations, a focus on retention, and continuous innovation.

Your journey past the $5M mark starts with the right mindset and the willingness to change.

🧠 My Personal Product Recommendations for You
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Chase Diamond’s organic LinkedIn growth marketing service is an absolute must for anyone looking to start building a personal brand online. He’s trusted by thousands of industry leaders including myself. Join Thousands of Other Brand & Agency Owners

Have a specific question or something I can help with? Shoot me a message on twitter and I’ll answer to the best of my ability 👉 Twitter 

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Thank you for reading! I appreciate you.

Best Wishes,
Kody