Driving Measurable Growth for Your eCommerce Brand with Jeremiah Allen, eCommerce Investor and Growth Strategist

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• How Jeremiah Allen manages his time and energy while running multiple organizations
• Jeremiah explains how his missionary trip to Brazil impacted his personal and professional life
• The value of prioritizing one important task at a time
• Jeremiah’s top three strategies for driving measurable growth
• What does the future hold for ecommerce marketing?
• The shift from optimizing conversions to optimizing experiences
• Jeremiah shares his favorite ecommerce brands
• Brand evolution and how to achieve long-term growth and success
• Jeremiah’s advice to listeners: treat your failures as learning opportunities

In this episode…

What does it take to run an ecommerce business in 2021? What about multiple businesses? For Jeremiah Allen, who currently owns and operates six organizations, it’s all about prioritization.

Jeremiah has been a top player in the ecommerce industry for over 20 years, and he isn’t slowing down anytime soon. According to him, the best way to drive measurable growth for your ecommerce brand is to focus on completing one important task at a time. Today, he’s here to share his top tips for balancing your priorities and scaling your business in the digital space.

On this episode of the eCommerce Profits Podcast, Joshua Chin talks with ecommerce investor and growth strategist Jeremiah Allen. Jeremiah shares his strategies for driving measurable growth, his predictions for the future of ecommerce marketing, and his advice for effectively communicating your brand’s value. He also discusses the importance of prioritizing one task at a time while growing your business. Stay tuned!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Fat Bullfrog
• Jeremiah Allen on LinkedIn

Special Mentions:

• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
• Justin Christianson on LinkedIn
• Conversion Fanatics
• Live Bearded
• Nena & Co.
• The Ohm Store
• Nomies
• Allbirds
• Bernardo Faria Academy
• The Tim Ferriss Show

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency.

If you are a direct-to-consumer ecommerce brand that wants to unlock the optimum customer lifetime value through email marketing, then look no further than Chronos Agency!

Our team of passionate email marketing experts have helped hundreds of brands generate over $70 million in return from email alone, and our clients receive an average of 3500% ROI from our efforts.

Chronos Agency has worked with a variety of brands, including Truly Beauty, Alya Skin, and many more. Our mission is to help real businesses achieve real results. 

If you want to take your revenue to the next level using email marketing, be sure to email our team at sales@chronos.agency or visit chronos.agency to learn more.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:04

Welcome to the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top founders and experts in the ecommerce industry and take an in depth look at the struggles and successes in growing ecommerce brands profitably.

Joshua Chin 0:21

Josh Chin here I’m the host of the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top experts and shakers in the eCommerce industry. And we go behind the scenes of the struggles and successes of growing a brand. Now this episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency. If you’re a direct to consumer eCommerce brand that is ready for next level growth and to unlock the optimal customer lifetime value through email marketing, Chronos is your company. We’ve helped hundreds of brands get over $17 million in return from email alone. And our clients get an average of 3,500% ROI from our efforts. We have worked with brands like Truly Beauty, Ally Skin, the UI and many more. Now, the next step is to email us at sales@chronos.agency. Or you can go to Chronos.agency to learn more. Today’s guest that I have with me is an incredible gentleman. Jeremiah Allen is an entrepreneur, strategist, advisor, owner and operator of multiple agencies, an investor in ecommerce brands. He has been driving the growth of ecommerce companies since 1997, before the internet was even cool. And when I was I think one years old. Outside of work, Jeremiah is a husband, father and outdoor lover. Jeremiah, welcome to the show.

Jeremiah Allen 1:45

Thank you. Thank you. It’s fun to be here.

Joshua Chin 1:47

And we’ll dive straight into it. So we were chatting a little bit before, before this. And you we learned that you actually run six organizations concurrently at like right now, not counting the ones that are at kind of a startup stage. My question to you is, how do you begin to kind of think about managing your time and energy across all six different organizations?

Jeremiah Allen 2:18

That’s a good question. You know, organizations have this kind of demand on entrepreneurs, they want everything to be – organizations think that everything is really, really important, it has to be done immediately. And I found that if I allow organizations and teams to tell me what’s most important, I never get anything done. You go from one problem to the next problem, the next problem, everything seems really urgent, and you burn out. And so a long time ago, I had to make the decision that I was going to be in charge of what I thought was important, and do those things. And what’s interesting is the things that are most important to me actually have nothing to do with the organizations that I run, they have to do with my family, they have to do with my, you know, my personal life and, and other things along those lines. And so by really deciding that those things, I don’t start work until 11 o’clock my time every day. And that’s because there are a number of things I do, either personally or with my family in the mornings, that I’ve just decided to have to come first. And by putting those things in their proper frame, I show up at work already having done the things that are most important to me for the day. And so now I can show up at work and, and have a great conversation with you on a podcast, right? Or work with customer support problems that are happening in eCom that I help run or something like that, you know. And so I think that, if I were to say that the key to being able to run multiple organizations, is to really know what’s important to you, and force everything kind of into its proper place. The reason why I don’t run 10 organizations right now is because six is all that I can manage within those things that are important to me. And it just comes down really, I think to hiring the right people partnering with the right people that have the right skill sets and knowing what you’re really good at. What I’m really good at is driving marketing growth. I’m not good at product development. I’m not good at customer service. I’m not good at building websites, right? So I really focus on the things that I know I’m really good at, to the exclusion of everything else. And sometimes that turns into a negative. But because I’ve got my priorities arranged in the way that I do, there’s bound to be some negatives somewhere and you just live with them and you deal with them and you hopefully can overcome them. I don’t – does that answer your question?

Joshua Chin 4:48

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s, you know, personally, it’s super interesting to kind of learn about because, like I mentioned, dri -, just building one agency and operating one agency is driving me nuts already, so. It feels like I never stop working. And so that’s super insightful. Talking about what’s important in your life and your life in general. So this conversation is gonna go kind of all over the place, but it’s just going to be what’s interesting. At the age of 19, to 20, you mentioned you were in Brazil, on a missionary trip.

Jeremiah Allen 5:26

Yeah.

Joshua Chin 5:27

Tell, tell me a little bit more about that.

Jeremiah Allen 5:29

Great question. So I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And as, as a church, we believe in service, we believe in helping others within the importance of families. And so I had the opportunity when I was when I was 19, to go and spend two years working with people in Brazil and Sao Paulo, where I just got to do so many wonderful things I’ve met, so many people have had lots of service opportunities work to strengthen families, shared some of our religious beliefs with people. And what was really neat that I think something that helped and benefited me a lot is I learned through that experience, that by focusing on others and their needs, and really trying to serve and be helpful, in every way that I could, it prepared me for a lifetime of, you know, for my career of, of serving people helping people, because really running an agency running an eCommerce company, whatever you do, if you really are focused on the needs of others, and, and identifying what those most important needs are, and really being able to help them and attend to those needs, it makes it it makes all the difference. It strengthens relationships with clients with customers, and, and you know, kind of makes you feel good too. And I learned as a missionary, that if I would just kind of forget myself, and go to work and serve others, it was so incredibly rewarding. And fortunately, I’ve been able to take a lot of that belief into my life, you know, not just in a religious way, but with a career with everything. And I just go around looking for opportunities to be helpful, right? And it’s worked out. I don’t know if there’s, if that’s a magic formula, but really, if you just look for the helpers, you’re gonna find people who can, who can who are worth aligning with, I think, yeah, but it was a great time. I love Brazil, about the people of Brazil. I would love to take my family there one day, I’ve been back once since my mission service and a great place there, they’re struggling with a lot of things, right? My heart goes out to, to the people, they’re good friends that I still have. But yeah.

Joshua Chin 7:48

That’s incredible. That’s, that’s incredible. Um, so that was a, I guess, one of the more pivotal moments in your in your life?

Jeremiah Allen 7:56

Yeah.

Joshua Chin 7:58

So tell me a little bit about your philosophy and in your, in your agencies and in service. And obviously, you carry that same philosophy to the brands that you build. But you know, what, what makes you different from my perspective is that you’re not just an agent, you’re not just an agency, you’re also a principal, you have brands that you’re growing at the same time. So it gives you a really unique perspective on what’s the realities of growing a brand in the struggles of growing a brand, versus what it’s like coming from the outside looking in, and being kind of like a strategist, looking at the big picture. So tell me a little bit about how you kind of shift in your mindset between the two, when you were working on the brand versus on someone else’s brand.

Jeremiah Allen 8:49

Yeah, that’s a great question. And what’s interesting is there actually is no shift. I work with them all in exactly the same way, in everything I do. And I think this is one of the things that allows me to manage multiple organizations at any given time, is I look for the single most important thing that I can do to drive growth, right? Because I don’t worry about I mean, like I worry about building a website or things like that, but I’m not doing it. So I’m always looking for any organization. If I’m working as an advisor to to like, for example, I was on a call just yesterday with one of the companies that I advise, and we were working to identify the single most important thing we can do to increase their profit per order, right, which is a great way to drive growth for a company and so we we talked about all sorts of different things until we came to the thing that we decided was the most important. I think a lot of people make the mistake of having 30 things that are the most important. But really the way that you make actual measurable growth is by beginning and completing really important things. So I’ll identify if I, if I step in as an advisor, or if I’m looking at one of my companies, or whatever, I try and find that single most important thing to move the needle. And then I, well, I don’t ignore everything else, because there are other things that come up that need to be dealt with that most important thing gets my primary focus for, you know, for what that job is. So if it’s a company that I own, or a client that I’m advising or, or something different, that’s just where I start, I and I, once we find that single most important thing, I almost won’t let us talk about other things until that thing is done. Once that thing is done, or nearing completion, you know, we’re close to the finish line, it’s time to start talking about the next thing that we can, but not to the point where it just detracts from that most important thing. And I’m sure you’ve seen that I mean, you run an email agency, right? When you’re looking at how to build, and I don’t know how you do it. But when I’m trying to drive email growth, for example, I’ll look and I’ll say, well, what’s the most important thing that we can do to take this client from $50,000 a month in email revenue to $75,000 a month? And it might be okay, well, we really need to work on the automated flow sequences, right? Automated sequences are struggling, we’ve only got two welcome series emails. And thank you one new customer, thank you email. And so I’ll go look and find those things that we can do within the flows to strengthen it. And we just go, we figure out what the most important one is, maybe the welcome series needs to be built out better. And we work on that and work on that work on that. And then once it’s done, we’re like, okay, what’s the next most important thing, that’s probably having a good sunset flow, or a good browser ebb and flow, or whatever it’s going to be right. And you can really, I at least, maybe, maybe it’s my weakness, but hopefully, it’s my superpower is that I can only focus on one thing at a time. And so I just have to make sure I’m focusing on the most important thing, every single day.

Joshua Chin 11:58

I think that’s a superpower 100%, I do think that superpower, it’s, it’s so easy to get distracted by the next. It’s one thing to get distracted by the next shiny object. But it’s also another thing to get distracted by the next shiny problem, which often happens in the you know, in an entrepreneur’s mind, it’s like, solve this problem, and the next the next. But we often kind of end up in this circle of just, you know, a cycle of problems that don’t move us forward significantly.

Jeremiah Allen 12:29

It’s easy to come up with problems that will keep us busy. But that won’t bring about measurable results. And that’s hard.

Joshua Chin 12:37

And I think we’re all to some degree addicted, well, I am for sure, addicted to being busy and taking things off a to do list, or like a checklist. It fuels that dopamine, but doesn’t necessarily move things forward in an impactful way.

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