Joshua Chin 7:55
Yeah.
Justin Christianson 7:56
And they’re starting to realize that there’s still a few that think that it’s like, they can’t see the instant, immediate improvement, that they think it’s all a failure, and it’s a scam, but it’s those that stick it out and understand it and are patient with that process. Because just like SEO, CRO takes time. It’s just a not a luxury we have it’s not, I’m good. But I’m not a miracle worker, you know, I can’t I swing for the fence and try to win every time. But it’s that shift that’s happening that people are looking at it from a long term scalability and usability factor. And I like to think of it as instead of conversion rate, optimization, more conversion, you know, or experience optimization. And we feel that if we can understand what really drives and motivates the audience, whether it be rearranging something on a page or adding something or removing something that’ll help alleviate friction, if we can do those things and create that better experience. That’s where the real magic happens. And the real growth happens instead of just throwing stuff up and hoping something sticks. And we see a little bit of a bump, I always tell people like I can get you a bump in conversion rate. I’ll just throw some fake fake timers, some fake urgency, we’ll play a little gray hat, we’ll do some of the little things that I’ll see a bump in conversion, but you might not be around at the next six months, you might blow out your offer, you might you know irritate your audience and piss them off. And then email stops working and all of the domino effect and we saw it during when COVID hit. We saw brands lose 90% of their revenue, just because they were so focused on the next promotion or the next buy one get two free or you know they were just so driven by that side of it. And the bottom fell out of ad stop performing and there’s no amount of optimization you can do to fix that downward spiral. So And then I’ve also seen brands with 100% month over month growth. So you see both sides of it. And I think those that embrace that process and are patient with it, when the long game, and I’m seeing it day in and day out, and it’s those that try to rush it. And then for something that’s not there, and they think that more and more and more faster, faster, faster, are those that lose, and get frustrated with it? And, you know, don’t see the improvements that they need, but it’s necessary. Now more than ever. So I don’t know if that answer your question. I tend to ramble. But.
Joshua Chin 10:38
I love that you, you talked about experience optimization, kind of looking at the big picture of how a customer journey looks like on the website versus just CRO, and optimizing for conversions in the vacuum.
Justin Christianson 10:54
Yeah. I mean, like, makes everything you know, I can answer a question. You know, something we’re testing right now is a lot of FAQ’s, you know, adding adding FAQ’s throughout the site. And, you know, if I use the example of abandoned checkout, or abandoned cart oftentimes is so often, you know, the the joke in the ecommerce world is you want to discount just abandon the cart? Yeah, you know, it’s not. And sometimes you get the email before you’re even left the cart, or you get the notification or something, or the text message comes through. And but what if you change your thinking around that? You know, what if you would have answered the questions better, or positioned the product better? In the experience leading up to check out that you answered their frequently asked questions, they knew what the refund policy was, they knew how to contact you, if they have a problem. You know, they understood the benefits of the product. Now, all of a sudden, you don’t have an abandoned checkout issue. You have an experience issue, or you have friction leading up to checkout? Or to take it a step further, to play into the email side. Which, what if they had a question? They don’t care about a discount price is almost never the issue. That’s never almost never the objection. And people don’t understand that. They people think it is, but it’s never an even visitors think it is. It’s not it’s just positioning of the value. But what if you instead of race to the discount on the abandoned Checkout, you all of a sudden told your company story. Like, hey, we founded the company because of that. And here’s our principles and our values. And here’s another frequently asked question. And here’s some testimonials. Here’s what goes into our manufacturing process. Here’s our facility. Here’s all of the things that make people feel warm and fuzzy, and comfortable doing business with you. Now you’ve created a brand loyalist, yes, not just going to hurry up and get your 10 or 15%. discount that five to 15, or $20 isn’t the issue. It’s Yep. And then now you’ve got somebody that’s going to come and buy from you time and time again, because they understand what you’re about. The experience is seamless, it’s flawless. And if you make them happy in that process, you’re going to win the long game.
Joshua Chin 13:23
Love that. Love that. Now, what are some of the biggest mistakes, or if you can share a case of brands kind of thinking about conversion rate optimisation, or optimization in general? What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see recurring?
Justin Christianson 13:43
They try to copy everybody else. That’s one of the big ones. Yes, they’ll see a cool site. And I’m guilty of it too. I’ll sell steal ideas from all sorts of different brands me like, that’s really cool. But I think that they don’t use it on purpose. Meaning they don’t have a reason why they’re testing that other than it just looks cool. Or it seems cool. And I see that a lot. We’ll have clients come to us be like, hey, look, so and so has this on their site. Let’s test it. I’m like, Well, why do you want to test it? Just because it looks cool? Or what are we trying to learn from that experience? Because you got to either win or learn. And if you’re not improving that another mistake people make is thinking that a split test on their product page is going to all of a sudden magically improve their overall conversion point. You know, you we get so hung up on looking at our Shopify stats, which is absolutely terrible, by the way, don’t rely on that is your sole source of analytics, Please, God don’t. I’ve got clients that have. Shopify only show two and a half percent conversion rate whereas their actual Overall blended conversion rate, if you break it down is over 4%. So people get so caught up on that data Yeah, that it’s wrong. If you got any plugins whatsoever, your data is probably wrong to get a second set of data. So you can’t look at it from eecom is not linear. Meaning they don’t all have the, the inputs don’t come into the same spot. So people think that their output needs to be elevated if they improve one aspect of it, meaning, meaning their conversion rates going to magically go from three to 4%. Because we improve the product page, or we improve the add to cart rate. It doesn’t work like that. Numbers fluctuate numbers flow. Another mistake is they focus solely on the conversion rate metric. Conversion Rate metric is a relative number. If you have any growth whatsoever in your business, which I hope you do, your conversion rates gonna go up or down. Always. We see it constantly, I’ll get a message several times a week saying our conversion rate drop sits in the tank, it’s in the toilet. What do you guys do? And you’re the experts do this. It’s like, well, I’ll go look at Murph person, I’ll go look at his traffic. And I’ll see this traffic spike this way conversion rate went like that. Naturally, every single time. Yep. A metric has to give when you’re manipulating other metrics. And it’s almost always conversion rate. If or you did a promo that week, and all of a sudden your conversion rate elevated and shot up two points, or something silly. And then the next week, they’re like my conversion rates down 55%. It’s like, no, it’s not, it’s back to normal. So it’s it’s focusing solely on metrics that really don’t matter. Yes, conversion rates are important. But if you look at the grand scheme, and you’re looking at average order value, and you’re looking at, you know, abandoned checkout rates, and, you know, lifetime value in revenue, per visitor and cost per acquisition, and all of these other things, conversion rate becomes a secondary metric. And, yes, I’m a conversion rate optimisation guy, but that’s not the main number I look at, I look at things on a trend on a month over month basis, or a week over week basis, or a year over year basis. Versus, you know, I get, you know, companies that look at an hourly basis. And I’m like, you cannot do that you’ll drive yourself nuts. And I’m guilty of it. I’m, I’m the most impatient person out there. And I have to check myself on a regular basis to say just look at a bigger trend, because sometimes you could have an off day on traffic and conversion rate drops one day, or, you know, just happened last week, a client, a new client, like my conversion rates down 25%. Like, well, if you had a bad afternoon, it’s like, you can’t predict Facebook’s algorithm today. Yeah, it’s and if you if you settle in and are a little bit more patient and look at it on a week over week basis, or bigger sample size. And you watch how that fluctuates and grows as your top line scales. That’s where the real magic happens as long as you’re creating that experience. So back to mistakes. I would say that they’re not patient in the process. They focus on the wrong metrics. And they’re not optimizing. They might be split testing, or they might be trying stuff or they might be growth hacking, which I absolutely hate that term. Growth Hacking. Yeah, I’m just I’m not a fan is that they think that it needs to be you know, they just take the wrong approach optimization, they just assume something’s gonna work different or better. Another mistake is they think that the next theme or the next website design is going to be the Holy Grail. bigger changes don’t mean bigger results. It’s oftentimes the opposite. I’ve seen it far too many times.
Joshua Chin 19:32
I want to dig into that a little bit. So I saw a post that you made and I think a couple days ago, just because it looks better, doesn’t mean that it is better. Tell me a little bit about that.
Justin Christianson 19:45
That company just emailed me literally as we’re talking.
Joshua Chin 19:50
Can you share the name of the company?
Justin Christianson 19:52
No, I’m a little too private for that. But I hear this often be like, yeah, optimization would sounds good, but I’m going to redesign my site first, and then we’ll do it. And I cringe every time I hear that it almost never works out in the favor or the way that you think you’re going. It’s going to, if you exhaust incremental improvement, and you understand the behaviors of your visitors, and you follow that data of both qualitative and quantitative approach to optimization, and you’re creating a better experience, then redesign elements, redesigned parts of pages, redesign entire pages, you’ll never want to redesign an entire site, unless you just have serious issues. And it’s bugs. And it’s just, it’s a pain. Case in point, my posts from a couple days ago on social media company approached us. It’s a lead gen company, pretty much specific, do a lot of phone and chat and form submission, but they redesign their site. couple months ago, cost per acquisition went from like 100 to over $300, in some cases, super high value leads. And we were testing and seeing improvements, we just could not get the cost per acquisition to come down, we could get it to come down to like 250, or 230. But we couldn’t ever get it to really come down to, you know, even to close to close to 150. We got to looking in deeper into the data. conversion rates in a lot of cases on the new site that they thought was based on data literally paid a whole bunch of money to a web design firm. That said it was all based on data. This site was going to be awesome, it was going to be SEO friendly, it was going to do all of these things. conversion rates as a whole were down 55% over the previous website. So I just said enough was enough. And I told the company I said roll it back to the old site, like pull the plug, do it conversion rate almost instantly doubled. And then when it leveled out. Day one, we saw cost per acquisition at $177. down from like $290.
Joshua Chin 22:33
From $300 effectively, wow.
Justin Christianson 22:36
So, conversion rates settled in at about a 22% improvement. So now we’re going back and and optimizing a better starting point, because it has all of the key touch points that had a ton of social proof that they left off the previous site. They had a lot of elements, like videos of the founder on news programs, and all of these things that were could build credibility and trust in a very kind of jaded, niche specific market, meaning there’s a lot of scams in that market. And you’re not one of them. So they got to cut through the clutter, their new site did not reflect that. So just because it looks better, doesn’t mean it it is better. And in what you are, I think at the end of the day does not matter. You know, so many people get checked in on their ego. That makes it hard to see the forest through the trees and see the the improvement process that can happen. I get asked all the time, what do you think Justin? Well, it doesn’t matter what I think it matters, who’s got the credit card out? Let’s test it, let’s find out how much weight it actually hold. You know, do they care about that video? Do they care about that tech? Do they care about that description, those images? You know, the price the do they care about free shipping? You know, all of these things? Doesn’t matter what I think? Because I’m not I’m not normal? I see 100 sites a week. It’s not. And I understand marketing and psychology and all of these things. So I see things differently than a lot of people. Then the general mass market that you’re selling your toothpaste to, you know and that are browsing Instagram constantly. I don’t think like that. So what I think on what’s going to work better. Is it a viable option to understand why or to add something or remove something that’s going to help alleviate friction in the journey? I can tell you that what am I going to tell you how it’s going to perform? No. Only the visitors can tell you that. All I can do is put my best experience forward and help try to you know Use testing and optimization to prove whether we’re right on our assumptions or not. But yeah, design, I get this a lot is especially somebody new that comes into our marketing circle. Be like, Well, why are you hiding the quantity selector button? Like that seems so simple? Like, or why are you just changing that text? or Why are you just moving that those reviews up on the page? Instead of I want to redesign this entire page? It’s like, Yeah, you do. But you’re not going to be happy with the results. And it’s going to take us two months, two and a half, three weeks to design it, and code it and then do all of these things, and then hope we’re gonna win. In that time, I can get you to win, you know, if with the way we’re testing and why not understand. So incremental. Small changes usually have higher impact. And when people understand that, they usually win. Instead of just, you know, I work with a very, I work with very large brands, and one of them in particular hired at us about a year ago, because they were just throwing stuff up on the site and hoping something stuck. Yeah, they do $150 million a year now. But, but they didn’t do that before. And they were just tired of trying stuff and not understanding whether it was helping or hurting or not. Right now we’re proving it. Like one of the tests, we’re running for them right right now is pulling the animation out of some icons. That’s it. That’s it. And let me pull it up real quick. I just looked at it this morning. And I think it was double digit improvement by stopping the animation.
Joshua Chin 26:41
Really? Wow. What does it actually do, is that just load speed, overall experience that people have or?
Justin Christianson 26:52
So I hate movement on pages, unless it’s intended movement, if you’re naturally unless it’s just super specific and highly intended, okay, I’m on mobile, it’s showing a 23% improvement on desktop and shown 30% improvement. Just making those icons static.
Joshua Chin 27:12
Wow, that’s huge.
Justin Christianson 27:16
It is, and we’re talking, that test is not even a day old. And we’ve got 200 some orders on it on mobile alone. So that kind of shows you how much volume that company gets. But, um, and that’s only on like, 25% of the traffic to so I mean, it’s stupid, stupid, high. But yeah, it’s a difference. 25% rpv in crewmen revenue per visitor just by making the icon static revenue per visitor is what our PV stands for. That’s crazy. It is. And that’s the kind of thinking So could I have redesigned those icons or redesigned that part of the page? Sure. But is it a friction point that’s distracting? You know, icons, to me are a supporting function. You know, they support your overall marketing message, your, your free shipping your money back guarantee, or, you know, you know, your GMO free, you’re gluten free, your all of your supporting benefits that you have for your product should not be the main focus of your product, unless that should support your overall marketing message. I mean, there’s a time and a place. Obviously, if you’re marketing to gluten intolerant people, you want to make your product, vegan friendly, gluten free, whatever. And that’s just an example that isn’t even that company, but I am just just give an example of it. But if they they’re flashing on the page, and they’re, they’re animated, that’s taken away from the overall marketing message, and getting them engaged in the shopping experience, which should be what the purpose of your homepage is. It shouldn’t be to tell the story. It’s to help the visitors understand who you are. And then engage them in the shopping experience.
Joshua Chin 29:13
That’s really, really cool. I mean, how often do you come to a win Like this? Like, how, what can people expect?
Justin Christianson 29:26
From me?
Joshua Chin 29:27
I mean, obviously, obviously, it’s Yeah, from from you and what what typically happens you because I’m not expecting this to happen every single day, right? Well, 20% improvements every single day. That’s, that’s bonkers.
Justin Christianson 29:39
No I wish, I wish I I try to win every time. And obviously, I’m in the business of improvement. If I don’t do that, I don’t have a business. People don’t refer me naturally. I don’t get invited on podcast. You know, I don’t you know that stuff doesn’t happen. And I’m very grateful and fortunate that I’ve had the career that I’ve had, you know, over the last 20 years, and the last seven doing CRO as a service, but it’s we see measurable level of improvement, whatever that might be. And this is a loaded question, too, by the way, not every business has the same key or certain KPIs measurable level of improvement on about 45% of the experiments that we run. That could be, but that’s not the bottom line always, that’s not just revenue, that’s not just conversion rate. That’s Add To Cart rate, that’s, you know, abandoned checkout rate, that’s all of the metrics. But if we would do a spray and pray approach, which is a lot of companies think that they just need to run 100 tests, and they need to hope something sticks test a bunch of different ideas, they will win on average of about 12 to 13%. We see better than that, but we also test less. So I might only test six to eight ideas a month, sometimes less than that even some and but I’ll win more. If we embrace the process. So to expect, I’m going to give a damn about your result, I’m going to try hard, we’re gonna give it our best effort to improve that overall experience and understand your visitor. If I could guess what the outcome is going to be, I’d have a much bigger agency. But I still cannot predict I’m proven wrong every single day. But I get to see, but I get to see a whole bunch of data, I get to see what’s working, what’s not, I get to see all the promotions, the sales, the emails, the flows, the advertisement, all of that from 50 different brands, at any given time. So I could see a lot of cool things. So if it doesn’t matter, and I get this question a lot, well, what have you worked with such and such type of industry? It’s like, yeah, I have you sell the people. Perfect. Yeah, I’ve worked with people. Because that’s the end of the day, I don’t care if you’re selling toothpaste, or you’re selling car washes, you know, it’s all the same inputs and outputs, it’s data, because it’s still a female 25 to 34 that likes shopping on mobile, that browsers, Facebook and Instagram that, you know, uses an iPhone 11. You know, it’s all of those same things, I don’t care what you’re selling. It’s, it’s all the same, we’re dealing with people at the end of the day, it’s understanding their behaviors, their wants, their likes, their dislikes, where the friction points are at and solving the friction. And you mentioned, I’m a little bit of passionate about this, it’s so you can a little bit kind of tell, I get fired up on this topic. I see a lot of people make a lot of mistakes in this space. And they think that just there’s the next best app, there’s the next best the next best something out there, and it’s not out there. My favorite theme is the free one that Shopify gives you I can customize it, I can optimize it, I can make it do what I need to do. Yeah, you don’t need 55 plugins and post checkout upsells that lead to this and this campaign and this flow. You don’t need any of that. Have a good product at a fair price, understand the pain point, help the visitors find what they’re looking for, and lead them down to checkout picking up a few goodies along the way. That’s that’s optimization. It’s in a nutshell. And yeah, there’s some science to it. And there’s some some methodology behind it that’s needed. But at the end of the day, it’s just understanding behaviors of people. And with that you’re gonna grow and scale. And if people can embrace that, and be patient with that, they win.
Joshua Chin 30:19
Love that. Now, I’d like to move on a little bit to kind of learning more about you. I mean, we’ve spoken on. So we have had a couple of events together. We’ve spoken a couple of times. But I never really gotten to know you as a as a person. So I’m curious what you’re currently obsessed with. I mean outside of CRO and business in life.
Justin Christianson 34:52
So me personally, so I’m a father too, families, very important to me, and it It’s become more of a priority this last year, I realized I used to think, in business, I needed to have the big office and all of the staff in office and the school work environment and all of those things. Well, that all changed in the last year, where I’m standing in my office right now, within our office, the rest of the lights aren’t even on in here. And I’ve got the big office with the name on the building and all of this, and it’s not needed. So my priorities have shifted a lot into just creating a good, stable, fun, enjoy horrible place for people to work. But what I’m passionate about most is really, as of late investing, so I’ve been kind of big into real estate investing in the last kind of few months. I’ve been absolutely Well, I say I’m a little bit more than obsessed with it. I’ve I’ve picked up 13 rental units so far this year. Whoa, yeah. Multi unit. So I’ve got a duplex that three Plex and two, four plexes. That I picked up this year.
Joshua Chin 36:09
That’s pretty cool. Just this year, it’s only like three months in.
Justin Christianson 36:13
It’s yeah. And I i’ve been done since the end of February. So I literally did it in the first two months. Yeah, so I or December, I think I was part of it. But nonetheless, I’m obsessed with that I’m obsessed with time freedom more so than I probably ever have been. I used to be, I used to be the grind. Always be available. Work, Work Work, go go go. Yeah. But the last, particularly probably the last few months, my I’ve completely been the opposite. I’m like I’ll get to it. You know, it’s going to get done. It doesn’t need to be done this second. So even this morning with personal side, my son broke his arm this week, a couple days ago. So we’re dealing with that. And he’s very uncomfortable, my daughter decided to not do virtual school anymore. We’re planning on moving in the next couple months. So to be closer to family, and the same thing. You know, we’re closing on our dream home, and all of this fun stuff that’s becoming a better priority. So instead of rushing off to the office, after I got back from the gym this morning, I waited an hour, and I sat, saw my kids off, get off to school made sure my son was comfortable. And just my priorities shifted. So I came into the office, I’ve got into talking to you lined out the team on a few different things. I’m going to do some some strategy sessions here, then I have a couple more calls. And then I’m going to kind of be done for the day. available and but not so urgent. So what I’m obsessed with is really just that is, you know, my kids are now 10 and eight. I’ve been fortunate to build the career and success that I’ve been able to do and continuing to strive for better. And I’m not stopping that. But it’s embracing the processes and systems more so than just being in the grind every day. And I’ve got a great staff that’s more than capable that does all the things that I don’t need to have that so it’s being closer to family and having more of those experiences with him. And just being more there. And particularly, we just had the ice mageddon snowstorm from hell here in Texas. That doesn’t happen that basically shut us down for a week and a half, like no power, no water, no all of that. And I was forced, I couldn’t get to the office, I worked from home. And it was it was good, I realized I could do it even with some of the distraction. Hmm. And that kind of prompted the move, like what we’re coming up on here in the next couple months. And and it’s just like I could work, I could get what I needed to be done. If I needed to have importance, I could shut myself off from everybody else. And then when I wasn’t working or something wasn’t urgent, I could just go play with the kids or play game of cards or, you know, go through the football in the front yard or do something like that. So that’s kind of where we’re at that. So that’s kind of my, my passion.
Joshua Chin 39:28
I’m really interested in this because I think a lot of entrepreneurs go through a you know, cycles of just, um, so my mentor told me this and I was just starting out in business. In life. You have four burners and you’re still you have I think it’s health, social life, friends, your family and your business or career. And you have you have a limited supply of gas, gasoline or fuel You can only have like one or two on high at any point in time, you’re going to compromise on the other two. So I see myself going through a phase of compromising on health, and social, and family to focus exclusively on business in Korea, naturally at the beginning, when it’s all survival mode and figuring things out, and then it kind of gradually evolves into family and career and health and in family, and then a social inference kick come in. But personal struggle, I kind of struggled with kind of transitioning into that kind of the prioritization of, you know, it’s not so much of a business first anymore. It’s, it’s Yes, you know, this is important. It career is important, but it’s not, it’s not all survival anymore. We’re doing okay, now it’s time to look at kind of life and family and my health and stuff. But it’s hard to make that switch, especially mentally. Have you struggled with kind of making that transition? at all us?
Justin Christianson 41:10
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. My health journey has been a wild one. I used to be 80 pounds heavier. For a while I was functioning alcoholic. I’m coming up on eight years sober.
Joshua Chin 41:32
Congrats, man.
Justin Christianson 41:33
Well, my wife, April and last second to last week in April will be eight years for me. So one more month, yeah, literally one more month to the day, and it’ll be eight year. And my wife went through cancer a handful of years ago, which prompted me to really get in the best shape of my life. I’m 40 years old. So I, I, I’m in the gym six days a week, I eat healthy, nice, you know, I’ve got the single digit body fat I’m, I’ve got the health aspect of it. And I maintained that not it didn’t just happen. You know, I’ve maintained that for years now. And being 40. And, you know, running a business and being stressful. So I have had that. And it’s always a priority to me. Like this morning, I did not want to get up at 530 this morning, or 515 when I normally get up to go to the gym, because I had a long night with my son, you know, my son had, you know, with his broken arm, my wife slept on the couch with him last night. The last thing I wanted to do was go to the gym, and I struggled through my workout this morning. Even my trainer was like What are you doing? Like Like what it you’re, you’re usually have way more energy than that. And I did, I gassed my way through it, but I got through it. And it’s a priority for me is I find that everything else becomes easier and better. In the grand scheme, because I found a direct correlation to me personally, if I slip on my health, or I haven’t been to the gym and a lot while and I find myself eating garbage and just not really focusing on myself. Everything else suffers. You have brain fog, you don’t. You know, I’m exhausted right now. Like, literally I’m exhausted. And look for a reason. It’s not like I’m partying and stuff. But yet my mental clarity is on point. Because I don’t. Because I put that as a priority. And my everything else is a direct correlation. So if business is struggling, I’m really like, okay, what’s going on with my health, or family relationships going on? What’s going on with my help? Yes, something is something is, is different. And I find that a direct correlation. If I focusing on myself, everything else becomes easier. Because if I exercise and eat, right, my mental clarity, I have less stress, I have less. And sure you’re going to have those spurts of super stressful and you know the world testing you and trying to stop you from the next phase and growth and you know, the force of average or whatever you want to call it. You know, and you’re gonna have those setbacks and stuff. It’s just how you react to it. And the more the older I get and the perspective changing now, you know, more family and experiences and being less. Go go go win, win, win, be there all the time and always on call. I think the better it is I react to it. Like it’s kind of weird. It’s like You hit that certain place in business in life that no, you know, in the agency world, you’re gonna have clients come and go. They’re gonna be unhappy for certain reasons no matter what you do. No, we just had this, we just had one. And it’s just like, dude, I, I’m sorry. Like I retried, and I just can’t do it, we’re gonna go along our merry way. You know, here’s all of everything we did. And here’s the improvements, we got you. And I’m sorry, it wasn’t exactly the improvement that we needed to get you or that you expected. But before that would be like, Well, why did he leave, let’s do a survey, let’s do all of this. Like, we can’t let it happen again. And I’d yell at the team and be like, we got to be better. We got to do all of this. And now it’s just like, guys, here’s the reason. You know, we got to try it. And here’s why. Like, let’s try better next time. It’s like, what can we do to fix it? instead of reacting to it and, and becoming more tolerant of that, because clients are going to come and go and grew 125% last year. We’ve already grown 40% this year? Amazing. We’re only three months in. You know, and it’s you we’re gonna have some growing pains, and it is what it is. And I find that if you just care, and you communicate, everything else falls into place. And Yep. And it isn’t, yes, there is that survival mode. And I remember, I mean, hell, not too many years ago, where me and my business partner didn’t get paid for almost a year. But I didn’t miss payroll. You know, I didn’t, you know, there was a time where if we don’t bring on a handful more clients, we’re down to our last buck, you know, it’s like, I don’t, I can’t whittle down to our last few pennies in the bank, and I, we got to make it go. And if we can’t, we’re going out of business. You know, even when COVID hit, we thought we were going to lose 50% of our business when everybody freaked out, you know, went the other way. We were having conversations, like, what are we going to do? The business is going to close, like, what should we do. And luckily, that didn’t happen in a very fortunate it didn’t happen, and we push through it. But my reactions to that are a lot different than they used to be. Yeah. A few years ago, and I just think I’m getting older and wiser and maybe turning 40 did something to me, because I turned 40 in November, and I just said screw it. I don’t know if it’s a midlife crisis or what, but I’m very fortunate, and I just I still care, I still show up every day, I still try and I still, you know, want to see the improvement, and I’m still adapting and growing and scaling and evolving. And I think every day is just a journey. And, you know, the more we can embrace that the better, you know, without sounding too woowoo or fluffy. But you know,
Joshua Chin 48:04
It’s not. And it sounds It sounds like you’re happier.
Justin Christianson 48:08
You know, I am? I am and I used to be the you know, I’m not thinking I’m not overthinking things anymore. And I tend to do that. And, you know, we’ve we’ve hit a certain level of success. And yeah, I mean, they could take it away from us tomorrow. And I still strive to work towards that not happening, like, you know, and I just keep showing up and just try to be better, a little bit better than we were yesterday.
Joshua Chin 48:42
So essentially, what you’ve done is the youth apply your same principles and work to your life, you’re done. Basically a life experience optimization.
Justin Christianson 48:55
Yes. I mean, in a sense. Yeah. I mean, it really is. And, you know, that’s all we can be is so many people make excuses and point blame or put something and all I do is focus on what I can control. And I’m doing more you hear it all the time, all this self development stuff. I followed it for years, but it’s really only in the last year probably that I’ve truly embraced it. Like I can only I can only control what I can control and how I react to certain situations. And I can only show up every day and try to be better. Yeah, but that’s how I built the entire company. If I look back, make sense? You know, we threw me and my business partner through 750 bucks each into a bank account and started Conversion Fanatics. Well, I had an idea. We didn’t like have a, you know, I had to had success though, did he? We just said hey, what if we tried it kind of as a side hustle and be like, hey, let’s see what we can do here. Here’s an idea. And it evolved into something you know, great. And, you know, I’m very happy with what we’ve created. And I strive every day to be a little bit a little bit better. You know, just, you know, we’ve already improved this week, we’ve already improved our onboarding process, we’ve already improved our reporting process, we’ve already improved a couple other key aspects to make sure that just clients are taken care of, and that’s what I work on every day, it isn’t the sales or that it’s just I make sure that our clients get results. And we continue doing that, you know, you’re going to win win most, and you’re going to lose some, but it is what it is, it’s just that service business, and we just try harder. And that’s life.
Joshua Chin 50:41
Justin, what are some books, or blogs or podcasts that that you have recently, that have recently made an impact in your life.
Justin Christianson 50:52
Um, believe it or not, I don’t read all that much anymore. I browse stuff, and I don’t like focus on certain podcasts. I’m not a podcast listener, believe it or not, not as much anyway, I do some, I listen to some audiobooks periodically. But I just kind of take it all in from a bunch of different sources. Some of the best books that I’ve read, probably in the last year, though, still do read some is Playing to Win by A.G. Lafley, which is a book that I’ve read pretty much every year for the last few years. Procter & Gamble, obviously a good direct response company to follow. And I just, I’m fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of great people that are very smart. And I’ve got a very small circle of influence. That just, we share ideas and bounce each other off. And I’m in a Mastermind for agencies, as well. So I get a lot of ideas and input there and eyebrows kind of, luckily, my social circles are good. And tight. Yeah. And I can just, you know, they share a lot of great insights and articles. And yeah, and I follow along that, and I just kind of take it in from multiple different sources, but I’m very much in it every day. So if I have questions, I know who to go ask if I have problems, I know who to go ask. And I can usually get some different perspective on it. And, yeah, luckily, I’ve got that kind of circle. And I get to see so much data and so much input from so many different sources that I don’t find reading just for the sake of reading enjoyable anymore. Even though I’m looking out here, and I’ve got a giant bookshelf of books in the office, and it’s just not, again, not a priority anymore. It’s I do read, but not in the truest sense of it.
Joshua Chin 52:46
Gotcha. Awesome. I do agree. I mean, learning from experience and learning from kind of direct mentorship, if you will, from people around that you respect and trust is, I still do learn way more just by doing that, then books alone. And combining that, you know, what, what we learned from books, podcasts, and just content we consume, plus the real life experiences. That’s that’s just beautiful. That’s that’s where magic happens. Justin, if people are interested to learn more about Conversion Fanatics, and connect with you, where should they go?
Justin Christianson 53:27
conversionfanatics.com is the best place to get a hold of me. My team you can read I I’d like to say we update our blog, but we don’t. Just because I’m like, we’re so busy in it every day that I’m just like, Well…
Joshua Chin 53:43
Yeah, exactly. That’s it. That’s a fair point. I mean, your site looks looks amazing, as well. So.
Justin Christianson 53:50
Yeah thanks. It’s a it’s likely relation of the website that we’ve had since we started or more, I think we’ve had probably nine or 10 different versions of it. But yeah, it’s I’ve honestly, I haven’t even been on it in months. My own site. We don’t blog. There’s a ton of great info on there. There’s a lot of cool case studies, a lot of relevant, timeless stuff. You know, you can find information about my book there as well. You can go find search me on Amazon, you can buy a copy of my book, I think it’s free on Kindle, if you have Prime or something. And then yeah, you can find me at onespotsocial.com/JustinChristianson and that has links to all my social kind of videos out there. Me on YouTube, sharing tips and topics and tricks and I’m available. So you know if anybody has questions or comments or wants me to take a look at something I you know, I do this all day every day, so I’m happy to help in any way I can.
Joshua Chin 54:51
Perfect. Justin, you are the CRO guy to go to I tell everyone that so thank you so much for being on the show.
Justin Christianson 54:59
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Outro 55:03
Thanks for listening to the eCommerce Profits Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
