Will Haire is the Co-founder and CEO of BellaVix, a marketplace management company helping D2C brands increase sales on leading e-commerce platforms. An e-commerce expert, Will holds various marketing and advertising licenses from Amazon, Alison, Hubspot, Hootsuite, and Google. He delights in assisting brands to become market leaders in their respective categories.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Will Haire shares what inspired him to start BellaVix — and how he adjusted to being a business owner
- What should you look for in a business coach?
- The value in recognizing your product’s worth and knowing when you’ve reached capacity
- How BellaVix distinguishes itself from competitors
- When should a manufacturer seek the expertise of an e-commerce management expert?
- Will reflects on the challenges he encountered early in his marketing career
- Using predictive analytics during the hiring process
In this episode…
eCommerce platforms have been on the rise for the past few decades — a result of the advancing digital age and marketing initiatives. Industry titans, including Amazon and Walmart, attract millions of consumers to their online stores monthly. There’s no arguing these e-commerce giants have paved the way for digital retailers. What marketing strategies can smaller brands implement to drive more digital traffic to their sites?
If you desire to scale your e-commerce business, understanding the value of your product and business capacity is crucial. When launching a brand, it may feel advantageous to provide clients with a remarkable deal to kickstart business deals, but as your clientele expands, you risk shortchanging your product’s worth. You can maintain competitive pricing without diminishing the value of your services.
In this episode of the Top Business Leaders Show, Bela Musits welcomes Will Haire, Co-founder and CEO of BellaVix, to discuss his experience launching a company and the unforeseen challenges that occurred in the early days of the business. Will also shares the value of knowing your company’s worth, how to differentiate yourself from competitors, and the benefits of leveraging predictive analysis during the hiring process.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Bela Musits on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Email the team at Rise25: support@rise25.com
- Will Haire on LinkedIn
- BellaVix
- BellaVix’s Blog
Sponsor for this episode…
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We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses build strong relationships with referral partners, clients, and audiences without doing the hard work.
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Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show. Powered by Rise25 media, we featured top founders, executives and business leaders from all over the world.
Bela Musits 0:20
Hello, listeners Bela Musits, co-host of the Top Business Leaders podcast, where we feature CEOs, entrepreneurs, and top leaders in the business world. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. We help b2b businesses cultivate and reach their dream relationships, and connect with more clients, more referrals and strategic partnerships to get your business return on investment through done-for-you podcast. If you have a b2b business and want to build great relationships, there is no better way than to profile the people and companies you admire on your podcast. To learn more, go to Rise25.com or email us at support@Rise25media.com Today’s guest on the podcast is Will Haire. He is the Co-founder of BellaVix, a full-service marketing marketplace marketing agency for direct-to-consumer retail brands who want to aggressively grow sales on the world’s largest marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. Welcome to the podcast, Will.
Will Haire 1:32
Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here to chat a little about my journey and what we do as a business.
Bela Musits 1:38
Yeah, super. So let me ask you this question. If you’re at a social event or a non-work related social event, and you get introduced to somebody, and after the introduction, they say to you, Oh, very nice to meet you will, what do you do? How do you answer that question?
Will Haire 1:57
Yeah. So it goes a couple of ways. I usually tell people I run a marketing agency because that’s the easiest way for the layman. My family and friends think I work for Amazon or Walmart. They just, they don’t understand the differences. They’re just like, I’ve ordered something from Amazon. I can’t say I’ve had my mother call me to complain about her package on Amazon as some magic wand and I can fix whatever issue it is. So for all intents and purposes, but for the layman listening to this podcast, I run a marketing agency, we just happen to focus on marketplaces.
Bela Musits 2:31
Super, super. So you’ve worked in sort of e-commerce businesses for quite a while? Yeah. What What was the motivation for starting BellaVix?
Will Haire 2:41
Yeah, so I worked at different agencies for a long time. And I’ve always been in advertising, I started off as SEO and it’s just a very slow game. And I, you know, I love SEO. But I’m a guy who has, like, terrible add. So I need things that move around a lot and are very dynamic. And I found that satisfaction with advertising. So I started doing that a little over 10 years, probably closer to 12 years now. But I started doing that a long time ago. And I started working with small businesses. And I really enjoyed the experience. And as I matured in my career, started working with larger agencies and larger brands. And what I found that drove me a little crazy, because I’m somebody who really cares about the experience of working together as it’s a true partnership. I’m a steward of the finances you give to me. So it’s important that I represent my brands well, and we have good expectations. And more importantly, we have good returns, because you’re not going to work with somebody who just spends all your money. And what I found in my previous environments, and as I grew in my career, it was more of a numbers game. So my last agency I worked for, for example, it was me and I managed to people. And we managed 50 accounts. So it was, it was bananas. The only way to describe it, it was crazy. It was hard to keep organized. And it was hard to be a good steward of the brands I represented. So in 2018, I just had enough of it. I was like, You know what, this is not what I want to do for the rest of my life. Nor is it what I want my legacy to be. So I quit in 2018 and decided to run my own agency. I found my Co-founder shortly after quitting. And together, we decided to open a marketing agency that’s focused on marketplaces but delivers a very personalized service. And we’re able to offer services that cut across operations and advertising. And that’s kind of just a story of how we got started and what has been some of my experiences working in the marketing industry for 10 plus years now.
Bela Musits 4:50
Yeah, great story. So let me ask you a question. You know, a lot of people who are working for a company, they’re there for a period of time they get frustrated, they don’t Like the way things are going 98% of those people will leave that company and go join another one. Yeah, but you decided to start your own. What was sort of the trigger that said, You know what, I’m going to do this on my own, because I think I can do it better by myself.
Will Haire 5:15
That’s a good question. I’ve always been entrepreneurial. So the original plan was just to fund our own e-commerce business. We wanted to do something in the beauty space. And what I found out because I always side household, I always consulted on the side and made some extra cash around holidays and stuff, it always helped. I decided that in order to fund the e-commerce business, because we didn’t want to take on any debt, I would just take on more side hustle. And I took on so much side hustle, it just became a full-time thing. And my first 10 clients, for example, were people I worked with at different agencies in the past. And when they found that I left and I was doing my own thing, they came out of the woodworks and said, hey, well, what would it be like to work together and of course, being young and not knowing my prices were ridiculous compared to the services they were getting. But we learned a lot really quick. And it enabled us to get started to be able to afford the current lifestyle we were living, and as well as start to hire some employees. So right off the bat, because I did work in agency, it’s all about Systemising things, putting processes in place, and then hiring somebody at a third of your cost actually to execute a lot of the concepts. So that’s, you know, it was almost a neat because I was doing it so long. So unintentionally, it turned into a business, we still aspire to open an e-commerce business. But we’re having a lot of fun with what we do. Now we get to work with some really cool brands. We’ve worked with Instapot. In the past, we work with Children’s Place; we’re in their portfolio of companies, and they work with them across multiple brands. So for a guy like me, who has terrible add, it’s great. It’s a very dynamic environment. And I get to work with a lot of people that I enjoy their company and we overcome challenges together. So it’s, it’s a really fun, fun lifestyle.
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Bela Musits 7:11
Yeah, so it sounds like you know, it’s really a good testimonial, that one you leave the agency you are with, and you Blaze out on your own. Some of the people you worked with in the past, say, hey, we want to work with you. So that’s got to give you confidence. But I still I still want to kind of poke a little bit about what was that first. Several months, like, right? I mean, you leave, and it’s like, Okay, now it’s just me, you know, and I gotta open the mail, I gotta take out the garbage, I got to do everything. So talk about that a little bit.
Will Haire 7:45
Yeah, the first honestly, the first two years are pretty stressful. It’s, you’re doing everything you know, in the business, technically, myself and my Co-founder, we worked in every single position. So it was, you know, managing accounts also like, like when you get started, like you don’t understand pricing. Also, like, you do your accounting, or you do your own bookkeeping, you enroll your own payroll, you’re just like, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re like I’m being proactive. And one of my business coaches told me later on when we mature, to bet that your time or your money, and early on, because you don’t have a lot of money, it’s all your time. So it’s a it’s a lot of late nights and early mornings. I’m an early guy. So I would wake up and start working at five 530. In the morning, I take a break at seven o’clock to drop the kids off at daycare and everybody do breakfast, grind out till five or six then do some family stuff, put on the bed, and then work from eight to 11 and and rinse and repeat Monday through Friday, I worked most weekends, to be perfectly honest with you. And a lot of it was just not understanding how to delegate properly. There’s one thing when you’re somewhere where there’s infrastructure because I was used to project managing, but when you’re building that infrastructure from the ground up, and when you’re thinking of how can I do it differently? What will what will be my vision, what will be my mission, and it has to be like we do marketplaces, now we’re primarily focused on marketplaces. But when we first got out that first six months to a year, you know, I did social media marketing, I did influencer marketing, copywriting, like, I did whatever I had to do. And through that process, I learned what I don’t want to do anymore. What I’m gonna hire out for and what I enjoy the most, then slowly but surely, because we originally wanted to do e-commerce, we found ourselves kind of shifting in that direction, helping with brands, networking with brands, and then brands would refer us business and we got better at understanding how to price our services, because a lot of marketing of sales and a lot of the pain points early on was much too affordable compared to what we aspire to be. So it’s definitely an evolution. And I would say again, Game Changer early on. So we spent the first year or two just working in that situation and making like incremental improvements. But I was at a dinner with a couple other agency owners, I met through a Slack group, and we were all local. And we were talking about mentorship. And I was getting some support from an entrepreneur organization at EO mentor that I met through an event any he was just giving me free advice. And he was giving me some really solid guidance. But, you know, it was spotty. And it wasn’t always catered to my needs and where we were, as a business. And when I was talking to these other two agency owners, they mentioned that they have coaches. And I was like, that’s cool. Is it free? And they’re like, no, like, why would you use a free coach, you need to pay for good services, you know, would you want free X, Y, and Z? And I’m like, No. And that’s when it kind of came to me. So the advice they gave was, find somebody who runs an agency that’s much larger than yours, and then reach out to that person, see if they’re interested. And I found Frank Colwell, they get the time, he just sold out of his agency, but they were, you know, 20 million in gross revenue. So like Frank knows a thing or two about running agencies. So I reached out to him and said, Hey, would you would you be interested in taking on another, another mentor, mentee, and he had too under his belt? And he said, Sure, I could take on one more, show me your books, what are you guys up to. And from there, he helped us implement the EOS system, the entrepreneur operating system, which is where we got a lot of our standards and processes in place. And he had me do a ton of reading. But one of the most impactful books was traction by Gino Whitman, and kind of incorporating a lot of the l 10. Meetings, the rock, so on and so forth. And now that we’re five years in the game, that department heads that ball work towards the vision and mission of BellaVix. So it is quite a journey. And I I you know, I enjoyed the early stages, but I enjoy these stages much more. I have a better work-life balance, and I’m able to enjoy my kids and my family a little more than I was a few years ago.
Bela Musits 12:11
Yeah, very nice. So I’d like to talk a little bit about coaching. You know, it always struck me as interesting as almost all athletes, whether they’re individual in their in an individual sport like golf, or team sports, they have coaches, some of them have multiple coaches to sort of help them and hone their skills. But in business, it’s really not a well-used resource. Yeah. And I’ve always wondered by that. So it sounds like you’ve had some really great experiences there. And what are some lessons that you could share with our listeners about how to look for a good coach? And what should the relationship be like?
Will Haire 12:50
Beautiful? That’s a great question. First thing I’d say is Aspire somebody who’s where you want to be. So if you’re running an agency like mine, I was looking at agencies who were larger. And I looked on LinkedIn, and I looked at the number of employees they had, and I went right up to the CBO, essentially, and I shut blank LinkedIn messages, essentially, you know, just cold emailing. The other thing is, I didn’t want somebody directly in my space, I didn’t want to know, getting agency who does Amazon or Walmart, because I didn’t want to be threatened, get bad advice, not really interested in getting bought out right now. So it didn’t really make a lot of sense. That’s more of a peer group, which I recommend if, if you’re open to it, I work with agencies that we’re direct competitors with. And we’re part of a mastermind, where we share information, there’s enough work to go around regarding the coaching. So the first thing I did is identify a list of businesses that not only from an employee standpoint, than I was able to estimate what the revenue was, but also from the look and feel of the brand. So like we, for example, were going after we’re more of a premium service, and we’re going after mid-sized businesses. So like 10 to 20 million is like a typical revenue of a brand new works with us. So like it wouldn’t make sense for me to go after somebody who services small businesses, the advice I get wouldn’t be relevant. So we made a list and we identified 20 of them. And I reached out about 10. Before I heard back from Frank, we interviewed Frank, like a typical interview. What’s your philosophy? What type of results can we expect? How long does it take to get results? You know, what does it look like working with you? What’s the cadence? Also, like, how much bandwidth do you need from me as the owner because that the time we started with training, you’re still doing a lot of the day to day operations. And also, what is the end goal for the brands you work with? So like, in the case of working with Frank, there’s lifestyle agency owners, it’s like I just want to run an agency enough to maintain my lifestyle. And then where, frankly, it’s people as I want to, I want to run an agency and get it to a point where it runs itself. So I can jump on to my next passion or project that I’ll be working on. And he’s done it two or three times already. So we had the no referral of how to do that. So that’s how we identified Frank, we interviewed Frank. And then when we started working together, the first 90 days, we met weekly, and he pretty much gave us a lot of homework, we read a lot of books, and then we would read chapters, we would meet with him. And then during that week off, we’d have to read the chapter, another chapter and execute from the previous chapter. And it was a lot, but a lot of it was essential. Like, we didn’t have a clear vision or mission. We didn’t have clear expectations, we didn’t have world class onboarding, like there were all these aspects that were missing. And what was crazy is like, when we started putting these pieces in place, basic infrastructure stuff, like we had the strategies down, we can execute, but we didn’t have a business around what we were doing. And as we started doing that, affirmation or whatever you want to call it, like, we started getting businesses that met our ideal customer profile, we started closing more businesses, we started this segment things into departments, we started having KPIs based on departments and based on positions. And we started to get to a point where, you know, the business I like, John Maxwell writes, a business leaders book, I think, 360-degree leader, but he has a quote in there, I’m a turtle on a post, and I became the turtle on a post, how does the turtle get on top of a post, he doesn’t get there by himself, because he’s got to pick shell, it’s the team that lifts them up on top of the posts. So a lot of that concept, empowering people. And I, I still, you know, we’re 334 years later, and working with Frank, I meet with them every two weeks. Now, he flies out once a year to do our annual planning together. And he’s been with us since early conception to now and we haven’t needed nor want to move off him because we’re still getting a lot of value. And as we’re hitting these different roadblocks, because it changes as the business matures, we do get some really solid advice, and we’re able to execute and you know, so far knock on wood, it’s helped us get to the next level.
Bela Musits 17:24
Yeah, that sounds like a great relationship. So early, earlier on, you touched on pricing, and how in the beginning, you learned a few things about pricing. And I think one of the most challenging things for any entrepreneur who starts a business, whether it be in the services area, or whether you’re making widgets, you’re putting in boxes, hot, you know, thinking about pricing, what that means to your customer, how it has to do with positioning and how you position yourself in the marketplace. What have you learned? Or what things can you share with our audience about what you learned about pricing?
Will Haire 17:55
Yeah, what I learned pretty early on, especially when I got separated from operations, so you know, it’s a maturity thing. And when you’re working in the accounts, you’re going to charge what you need to charge in order to make payroll. And what you’re targeting is like a net of 20%, give or take, and in any service industry. So once we kind of figure out where we needed to be, and once we got some reps in, because like early on, it’s hard, like, you look at some accounts, you look at the size of the catalog, and you’re like, I think it’s gonna be, you know, under 40 hours a month, let’s, let’s see what we get. And sometimes you’re, you’re drastically right. And they’re like, we’re really profitable on this account, and other times, like 180 hours, and you’re like, oh, this quarter that one. But what you do pick up as it ends up being more jet. So my wife,, an employee of mine has this quote, she’s on the operations team. And she says, I sell the dream, and they lived the nightmare. And that’s something we learned really quickly is if I miss price, something in the sales process, it’s always, you know, roses, sunshine, and all that good stuff. But the operations team has to execute on that vision, and what I’m actually selling. And what we found is like, when you go to the lowest common denominator, when you’re competing on price, when you’re doing outbound sales, especially we found that, you know, people are gonna be more price conscious, they’re gonna want a deal. And they’re not always going to pre-appreciate the nuances of what, what makes you different. And so it took a little time to get there. What helps and what we did, you know, pretty early on with our first set of clients is we realized that our pricing was very flawed, and that there was no way we were going to get out of it. And the clients we were working with had a killer deal. We were delivering results. We were doing it for a very affordable rate. And we had to go through and just started by raising prices. And naturally, some of the brands were like no, we’re not down with that. But it wasn’t enough and unfortunately, we had to Let some brands grow up. So we have difficult conversations around. You know, this is what our vision is. And unfortunately, we can’t service you anymore. But we did transition them, we’re trying to transition them to other agencies that specialize in small business. Once we created that bandwidth, and had a better idea of how we should do pricing, the next round of sales and clients, we onboard, we were more aggressive in how we priced items. And a lot of what it comes down to, as well as, as we hit certain capacity. You know, if we know we can handle give or take 25 to 30 clients, as I approached that number, it’s easier for me to just raise prices and test the elasticity of the market. And that’s what a lot of it is. And we’re at a point now where I get I have a discovery forum that people will fill out prior to booking their first sales call with myself or a sales representative on the team. And we’ll have an idea of like, okay, you know, roughly they do this, their catalogs this size, you know, they’re, you know, elasticity wise, they’re going to be able to afford between A, B, and if we don’t think we’re going to be a good fit, we don’t even have to take the phone call, we’ll refer them out to one of our partners, but it took, yeah, it took like, three, four years to get to that point. So I don’t know if I have any good pricing advice other than that, when you’re at capacity, be aggressive. laying off clients and raising layoff clients was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. But it ended up being a blessing because we were able to be more economical and give my employees a better a better work-life balance. And we do raise prices annually. So generally between 10 to 20%, depending on the size of the catalog. And we do that every year, you know, they have inflation we have inflation surely goes up. So that’s, that’s what I can share about pricing.
Bela Musits 21:58
Very nice. Very nice. Excellent advice. So one of the things you do is you help e-commerce companies or you help companies sell their products, on places like Amazon, Walmart, and all these various different marketplaces. So I’ve always said, you know, one of the great things about today’s world is that if you have a business, you can sell your product these days to almost anyone in the world. Whereas 50 years ago, you sold it within 100 miles that where you made that product or service. That was it. So that’s the good news. The bad news is everyone else can do that, too. So you have a lot of competition. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the things that you do some of the specific things that you do to help a company get their products noticed on a place like Amazon, or Walmart, or any of these other, you know, large e-commerce sites. Absolutely.
Will Haire 22:50
So when it comes to leveraging Amazon and Walmart, even target to some degree, it’s the relationships you have. So we work mainly with brands. So I’m going to talk to private labelers. And manufacturers, there is a way to be a reseller and to do a wholesale model. Unfortunately, we don’t service brands like that. So any of the advice I give may not be relevant to those types of sellers. But if you’re a brand and you’re a private labeler, and you made a really good point. It’s a level playing field 50% of e-commerce happens on Amazon and the United States 62% of people start their product searches on Amazon. So Amazon is you know, the what is the 800-pound gorilla in the room, it’s certainly not going anywhere. They’re doing same-day shipping now. And they’re expanding their their warehousing and their fulfillment capability. You know, 80% of Amazon’s products are under five pounds, and can be delivered by drone. So if you’re not seeing them now, if you’re in Texas or California, you might be seeing him already dropping off packages. So the way e-commerce is going is absolutely insane how our kids shop for products is so much different than how we grew up with it, which you know, to your point going to the store, picking out the shoes or whatever you’re into. It’s it’s all online now. So as an agency specializing in marketing, essentially and helping these brands kind of scale. It’s to start off, it’s about relevancy. And it’s about brand building. So we have something called full-funnel marketing and advertising and it really, really sexy, but it’s based on the Amazon’s Better Together philosophy. And so the concept we came up with, which is really basic, you want to have operational excellence. So we want to make sure across each of the marketplaces that we’re we have a presence, you know, we have good account health. We have accountability with the logistics companies, we’re leveraging fulfillment centers when available. So obviously we’d rather do prime which is FBA Fulfilled by Amazon or Walmart fulfillment services wfs. But in cases where doesn’t make sense. If you sell large furniture, for example, you’re probably going to just build that yourself. But you want to leverage that you want to play that the algorithm game and fulfillment is one of those pieces that pertain to that the other piece is text relevancy. So we want to make sure my favorite text Relevancy is SEO, my favorite SEO joke. Let me know if you’ve heard this before. But where’s the best place to bury a body. Second, place the search results. The goal is to make sure that I’m relevant searches you show up on the first page. And there’s lots of tactics, there’s long longtail keywords, there’s targeting route keywords, there’s split testing listings, and something we do a BellaVix is incremental improvement leads to long-term growth. So a lot of working with a company like us is split testing different aspects of your listing. But the goal with Tex Relevancy is just to make sure that you have relevant keywords inside your product detail page on your listing, so on and so forth. And then the third piece is sales, you want to make sure you have good sales velocity. And then there’s all these different other factors that attribute to sales, which is conversion rate on your listing, the number of reviews on your listing your price point. So it’s important to make sure you’re in a position that you are able to kind of honor these, and you don’t necessarily have to be the lowest common denominator, the cheapest products generally sell the brands that are building audiences. And the brands that understand the value and the unique selling proposition tend to do really well. We work with companies that are luxury brands, and they’re certainly not competing with some of the more cost-effective options that are out there. But the strategies for those brands to get in front of the right customers is a lot different. Also the budgets available that these companies have is just going to be a lot different. So when we’re talking about working together, we will help you optimize your operations. We’ll help you with from a marketing perspective, make sure your your search engine is you’re optimized for search engines, you have good fulfillment methods, you’re running promotions, your listings, your assets, your storefronts, so on and so forth. All resonate with certain types of audiences. And then we’ll drive traffic via advertising, starting from the bottom of the funnel, getting baseline data, how much does it cost to acquire customer and market? How much does it cost to acquire customer expose your brand? And then work your way up? How much does it cost to get somebody in? I’ll How much does it cost to get somebody contextually or demographically. So there’s lots of different ways to dial around. And you need a team and a full-funnel approach. So my team handles end-to-end services. And that’s kind of where we specialize.
Bela Musits 27:56
Super, super, you know, as you were describing that it sounds like a very analytical and tech-savvy, you know, you’re looking at numbers, you’re, you’re you’re doing a lot of sophisticated things. So if I’m a if I’m a manufacturer, and I sell a product, and I want to solicit some of your expertise and help, what what expertise and help do I need? And which, what do I offload on you so to speak, right? I mean, if it’s critical, it’s a critical thing to me, that I have to have some level of expertise in my house. But you know, I may have you do a lot of the real sophisticated stuff. Do you have any thoughts on where that balance should be?
Will Haire 28:39
Yeah, generally work with departments. So the person we’re working with has general marketing knowledge, they’re generally a project manager, we’re either working with the CMO and director or just a marketplace manager. So they’ll have some level of knowledge, where we really need help, especially early on, it’s just understanding the products, it takes time to understand the nuances. You know, we have worked with companies that sell gas meters and purifiers. And there’s molecular aspects of it, because we also do customer service. So to answer those questions. So understanding the product is a big part of it. And then somebody on operation that understands all the costs associated with getting the product manufactured, but also shipping it to fulfillment centers, what’s the cost there? As well as general marketing knowledge is somebody who understands, okay, working on SEO means they’re going to rank us better advertising, okay, I’m looking at tacos a coast row as cost per click, okay, these are, these are some of the numbers I have. And I need to share that with my board of directors and the CEO, so on and so forth. So generally, we’re not working with people who don’t know anything about marketing, but to work with at least general working knowledge. One more leaning on you for from a product aspect. Yeah, excellent.
Bela Musits 30:05
So let me ask you another question. How do you find your customers? Excellent, they actually find
Will Haire 30:09
us we don’t do any outbound marketing. So since I started, and my background being SEO, I started blogging. So at this point, we have over 200 pieces of content that describe different challenges that sellers face on the platform. And our blog drives 3000 unique users a month. And some of them are our clients take us five years to build, we post twice a week at this point. So it’s, that’s how that’s how they find us. And we’re, we’re blessed that people are looking. Yeah, yeah.
Bela Musits 30:47
So if you, if you reflect back on on your career, was there like a, what was sort of the biggest challenge, or something you had to overcome to sort of get to where you are something that sort of sticks in your mind? Was there anything
Will Haire 31:04
that had, there’s a whole bunch, I don’t know anybody who runs a business and doesn’t have it, I think, the biggest challenge a couple big challenges that stick out. Before I did marketing and white collar type services, I’m actually meaning that Ron, and I got out as a licensed electrician, and I worked in the power industry for 10 years while I went to school and graduated. And the big challenge was transitioning from that lifestyle to more of a professional service lifestyle. Another big challenge. Early on in my career, I worked with a lot of startups, and I made mistakes, like, I didn’t get things written down in contracts, I took people’s word, and I got, I didn’t always get honest treatment. And I learned, unfortunately, you have to get things in writing and understand people’s intent before you make moves. And then the last piece is as the CEO of a business now, trusting people is really important, and making sure that you have the right people in the right sense. So I am very emotional, I make decisions based on my gut. And thank God, my team doesn’t do that. But uh, what I learned that it’s better to be analytical about these things, like we incorporated predictive analytics into our recruiting process. And it’s improved our attrition rate, but also getting the right people on the team. So those are some of the roadblocks we had up Sure. If you have another hour, I can list out all those that come to mind.
Bela Musits 32:47
Yeah. So one of the ones you said there, really, I wanted to probe a little bit more. You talked about hiring and using analytics in hiring. Can you expand on that a little bit? Some of the things that you guys do?
Will Haire 32:58
Yeah, absolutely. So when we initially started hiring, you know, we went on up work, we put things out on LinkedIn, and we got all types of quality candidates. And what we found is that this is going to be no surprise you people lie on their resumes terribly, they actually will come to us and not have any idea what they’re doing. But they interview well, they speak well. And they have general knowledge. And we can only go so deep in the interviewing process. And what we learned, we signed up for something called the culture index. And the culture index essentially took predictive analytics, and allowed us to hire based on qualities of people doing the job really well. So when we onboard a non-culture index, we went through a week course where they kind of just explain what Predictive analytics is, and how they categorize different personality types and the culture and satisfaction with their current job role. And then we took that test and we roll that out to our existing team. And by then we had team members who were with us for a while and we consider rock stars were like if we can have, you know, 10 more Catalinas, we would be cruising. So once we got the different personality types inside of this portfolio, as we did our recruiting process, we had people answer some questions that were kind of culture oriented, how they approach work, how they think about challenges, what are they curious about, but we also had them take this predictive analytics test to get an idea of their personality type. And more often than not people that we thought would be a good fit based on their resume. And based on you know, just their initial email response. We looked at their personality, they just weren’t going to be a good fit because they weren’t detailed. They weren’t organized in the position call for that, or, you know, they were detailed and organized, but they weren’t creative, and this was a creative position. So it saved us a lot of heartache from just hiring people. Having a lot of NGO, also the impact that has on your culture and what your existing team thinks as you just have a revolving door around. And since we implemented that, you know, the first year we implemented it, our attrition rate approved by like 50 or 60%, it was crazy. Keeping a lot more people with us, and we did a lot less hiring, which was good, it just means we were more efficient. So it works. It was wild, then since then we’re still tweaking the process. I don’t think we have it down to a science yet. I don’t know if it’ll ever beat out to the science yet. But it’s a game changer. And we actually got that from other agency owners. There’s a couple of them, I can’t think of them off the top of my head, but other agency owners from our peer group would use predictive analytics to hire through different software’s or companies that they use. So that’s where we had the aha moment and decided to go with it and ended up being a game changer. Yes, super.
Bela Musits 36:03
Yeah. it lots of times you don’t realize how expensive turnover. Yeah, or a bad hire is, right? I mean, it’s, it’s not only financially expensive. I mean, it hits morale, it just hits so many different places, that getting that right and fine. Fine. Tuning that. And just making it a little bit better can give huge changes in the outcome.
Will Haire 36:29
Absolutely. Plus, it saves you a bunch of time, Nothing’s worse than spending a month with somebody than having to start over. Right,
Bela Musits 36:36
exactly. So if listeners want to learn more about BellaVix, where do they go?
Will Haire 36:42
Yeah, definitely. So check us out on her website, BellaVix.com, which has everything about our services. Our blog, as mentioned before, is very popular. So anything from getting started to advanced topics like programmatic advertising, you can find topics there. We have a newsletter that goes out once every two weeks. And it talks about the latest news and updates on the website and their impact on sellers tend to be a pretty popular list. And you can sign up for that on the website. And then me personally, if you wanted to reach out, Will Haire hair like on your head with an E. And I can be found on LinkedIn, I post every day and I’m pretty active. So we’d love to have yet a love to be connected with anybody in your audience. And they can certainly reach out with any questions about some of their e-commerce challenges. Sure. That’s great.
Bela Musits 37:33
We’ll make sure all that information is in the show notes. Now my last question, is there something that I have not asked you that you’d like to share with the audience? I’m sorry, I don’t have anything below. A lot. Yeah, it’s okay to say you don’t have anything there. So I just want to give people the opportunity. Like Did I miss something, right? Yeah, it’s
Unknown Speaker 37:59
a heck of an interview. Well, thank
Bela Musits 38:01
you. Thank you very much. Hey, well, thanks for being on the podcast. You were just a wonderful guest. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Will Haire 38:07
Excellent. Thank you so much for having me. You betcha.
Outro 38:10
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