The Machine: How We Back-Check Every Q4 Plan Before BFCM

Garrett Hord (0:00)

I just want to reiterate, for some brands that we work with, even larger ones, not some of the smaller eight-figure stores or even seven-figure stores, it definitely can be more extreme, but even some of the larger eight to nine-figure stores, close to 50% of their revenue is coming from Q4, and sometimes even higher. So the point is, more than half of the year's revenue potentially, and a huge chunk of the contribution margin is coming in a three-month period and really even more concentrated around that.

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Randall (1:26)

All right. So I did my first ever podcast with Jar not too long ago and here's the second one. The first one I feel like went pretty well, but here we are, Garrett Hord.

I guess I should even ask, am I saying Garrett Hord? I'm the new guy, so I don't even know if I'm saying that name right.

Garrett Hord (1:44)

You got it, Ben.

Randall (1:45)

You got it. Oh, sweet. Yeah. And then it's my understanding one of the longest tenured people at CTC.

Is that fair to say?

Garrett Hord (1:54)

I think so. It's actually funny. Today is my eight year anniversary on the day. So September 17th, 2018

And most of the people that were at CTC or not most, but a large part of the core group back then are still here today. I'm lucky enough to be one of them.

Randall (2:16)

So you've seen it all, 2018 roughly is when you started?

Garrett Hord (2:20)

Yep. Yeah.

Randall (2:22)

So e-commerce in 2018 wasn't super easy at the time. You know, like 2015, 2016, it was relatively easy. And then you had the COVID boom in 2020 and then the COVID doom in 2022

So you've seen all sorts of landscapes and everything's kind of stabilizing now and we're actually seeing some really good operators emerge. So you've seen it. You've seen it all.

Garrett Hord (2:45)

Totally, man. It definitely felt a lot easier back then, scale up an account on Black Friday and then it does to me.

Randall (2:55)

Yeah. And one of these things that I kind of live with is I go, I'm sure you've heard the quote that like, the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. And like the harder things actually get. And me kind of living in the COVID doom, the boom area, or boom to doom era, I really had to put my hat on and really learn. And then as I was learning, I was like, man, I really don't know anything. And then I'm thinking to myself, am I just making this more complicated than it needs to be, or does it really need to be this complicated?

But yeah, so anyways, I'm going to start you off with kind of like this, I guess this hook, I guess this could be a marketing hook.

But the idea is that in life, we constantly make big decisions, and we always run those big decisions by some sort of third party before actually diving into them or getting into them. And then there was kind of this realization that Q4 from a business perspective is the biggest decision, Q4 carries the biggest decisions that a business is going to make. Millions of dollars of inventory, millions of dollars of ad spend, beefing up your OPEC. And the idea is that your internal team or your agency goes and builds this plan of what Q4 is going to look like, and then nobody back checks it.

So then from there, and I'm getting to the point here, but from there I thought to myself, okay, who's the guy at CTC that's seen some shit over time? And all fingers pointed towards you. And so we created this thing called the machine that essentially you, the brand takes their Q4 plan, they put it through, they put it through the machine, and the machine outputs a better Q4 plan, or where it could be soft, or where it could be strong, and then they go and execute against that. So the idea here is to take your, all the shit you've seen over the past eight years, and try to point towards patterns that are maybe common, that brands could learn from here. So with that said, it seems as if that Black Friday, Cyber Monday, let's just start there, even though Q4 doesn't necessarily start there, but let's just start there. It seems like there's this trend that happened, that's happening in e-commerce that everybody is trying to pull that revenue forward. They're starting Black Friday, as soon as November 1st hits, they're pulling Black Friday, Cyber Monday forward. Is that a trend that you see on your side? What's the upside of that? What's the downside of that? Is there a better way of going about that? What's your point of view on that?