Stop Leaking Money: The 3-Step Revenue Fix for eCommerce With Erik Christiansen

Erik Christiansen is the Co-founder and CEO of Justuno, a conversion optimization SaaS platform. With over 20 years of experience in e-commerce and tech, he specializes in sustainable growth and product development. Before co-founding Justuno, Erik scaled Sierra Snowboard from $0 to over $20 million in annual revenue.

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

[2:15] Erik Christiansen’s motivation for creating Justuno and how he rebuilt it after nearly running out of cash
[8:24] Justuno’s three-step revenue formula: capture, identify, convert
[11:56] Why cart abandonment is the largest source of lost revenue and strategies for mitigating it
[18:46] A beta testing case study that boosted SMS phone number submissions from 50% to 80%
[24:26] How on-site conversion optimization makes ad spend and campaigns more profitable
[30:33] Targeting return visitors to boost conversion rates
[36:28] Revenue-boosting strategies for e-commerce brands, including protecting your margin
[42:30] Vanity versus revenue metrics for lead capturing and SMS marketing
[51:12] How Erik would rebuild a $10 million e-commerce business
[56:39] Erik shares personal stories on family influence, entrepreneurship, and how yard work supports mental health

In this episode…

Many website visitors leave without purchasing, and abandoned carts represent millions in lost revenue for e-commerce brands. Even as traffic and ad spend grow, conversion rates often stagnate, and customer acquisition costs continue to rise. How can online retailers capture more value from existing website traffic?

According to e-commerce expert and entrepreneur Erik Christiansen, improving on-site conversions can unlock immediate revenue gains. His three-step revenue approach, which includes capturing, identifying, and converting leads, prioritizes real-time engagement, visitor segmentation, and actionable promotions. Additionally, techniques like cart abandonment campaigns, shopper preference pop-ups, and high-quality SMS collections boost conversions and strengthen margins by maximizing the lifetime value of each visitor.

In this week’s episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Erik Christiansen, Co-founder and CEO of Justuno, about driving revenue through smarter on-site conversions. Erik also discusses creative cart abandonment strategies, the difference between vanity metrics and meaningful KPIs, and why hands-on entrepreneurship builds resilience.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

“You're not a true owner until you've been responsible for payroll every two weeks.”
“If we engage that visitor in real-time, well, we can ratchet them up to 35%.”
“Anyone listening to this podcast, ask yourself right now, are you running a specific promotion for people abandoning carts?”
“It's quality in, quality out, trash in, trash out, so those are two metrics.”
“I love making money, like, I love figuring out ways to like earn money, sure.”

Action Steps

Implement cart abandonment campaigns: Engaging visitors before they leave can recover lost revenue and significantly boost sales conversion rates. Real-time pop-ups or exit offers encourage customers to complete their purchase, reducing the leaky-bucket effect common in e-commerce.
Leverage shopper preference pop-ups: Asking visitors what they’re interested in personalizes the experience and increases lead capture. This also allows for more precise segmentation and more relevant email or SMS follow-up campaigns.
Optimize SMS and email collection forms: Capturing high-quality contact information builds a more effective retargeting funnel. Improved list quality reduces wasted marketing spend while boosting engagement and conversions.
Use visitor segmentation for personalized promotions: Tailoring offers to specific traffic sources or behaviors increases relevance and conversion potential. Segmentation helps brands speak directly to their customers’ needs rather than delivering generic, one-size-fits-all campaigns.
Focus on meaningful revenue metrics over vanity metrics: Tracking the actual revenue impact of on-site efforts ensures marketing decisions are data-driven and profitable. Avoiding inflated metrics, like duplicate email counts or low-quality leads, protects margins and long-term growth.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show. Hey

William Harris 0:15

everyone, I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Today's guest is someone who didn't just spot a problem in e-commerce. He built a business to solve it, scaled it nearly lost it on the weekend of his wedding. We'll cover that, and then rebuilt it better than ever. Erik Christiansen is the co founder and CEO of Justuno, the platform trusted by 1000s of DDC brands to capture more revenue from the traffic you're already getting before founding Justuno, Erik was an e-commerce operator himself, growing his own store to over 20 million in revenue, and along the way, he discovered something most founders learned too late. If you don't engage visitors while they're on your site, you've already lost in today's episode, we're unpacking the three step revenue framework that's helping eight and nine figure brands scale smarter, not just louder. Erik Christiansen, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Erik Christiansen 1:07

William, thank you. Quite the intro. Appreciate it. Yeah,

William Harris 1:11

I want to give a shout out to my heart friend, literally heart friend and amazing karaoke singer Delia Askar. He's the one who made the intro so we could bring this knowledge to the world. Thank you. Dillard,

Erik Christiansen 1:22

dillyar, has he launched dillyar comm? Yeah,

William Harris 1:25

I don't know. We might get in trouble for mentioning that, but I know that he's around the corner from doing that. Yeah, we'd say

Erik Christiansen 1:31

what it is, right? No, that's true, but it

William Harris 1:34

actually means heartfriend. For those that are wondering, that is literally what his name dillyard means, heart friend, which I thought that was pretty cool. One quick interruption, then we're gonna jump right into the good stuff here. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that IPO. You can learn more on our website at elumynt.com, which is spelled Elumynt.com, okay, let's rewind a little bit. You were running your own e-commerce business before you started Justuno. What was the pain point that made you say, I got to build this myself.

Erik Christiansen 2:15

Coupons, simply coupons and a desire not to pay out affiliate fees to RetailMeNot and other websites. Okay, also the fact that we knew our visitors that would leave and Google Sierra snowboard coupon code would come back, and they had a sales conversion rate between eight and 11% sure. So okay,

William Harris 2:45

so you were running your own store, but then you self funded Justuno. You recently built the platform after scaling it once. Why did you rebuild it?

Erik Christiansen 2:56

That's that's a question you can ask any, any co founder, like, why did you do that? Or why didn't you? We did because we wanted to be able to build faster. After 10 years, our platform hit a point where we had, we had too many choke points that were holding us back from from growth scaling the product feature set. So that's one of the main reasons. Yeah,

William Harris 3:23

I think that's what a lot of people don't realize, is that even when you're investing, a lot of times you'll see people talk about you're not investing in the idea as much as you're investing in the founder, because the inevitability of a pivot down the road is, is is high, right? Five years from now, 10 years from now, and that's true for systems, right? Like, things change. The systems change. What's working changes. And so there is need for that ability to say, is what we're doing. The same thing, Blockbuster would have had an opportunity to make some changes, right? And so it's like being able to see that, recognize that, and make those changes. I think that's huge.

Erik Christiansen 3:59

Yeah. I mean, we saw, you know, we saw band with privy. He added, he was pop ups, then he added SMS, email, and was able to to tack on transactional revenue, you know, expansion from the current customer base. And so that's something we're always looking at ourselves, is, you know, and most companies right now in in today's market is, rather than going after new business. How can we expand our current business?

William Harris 4:25

Yeah, I want to talk one more thing about, like, your journey before we dig into this revenue formula, because I thought it was pretty interesting. You You almost ran out of cash for the business right before your wedding, like, two weeks before the wedding or something, what was going on. And, like, How did you solve that? Then, how did I solve it? Yeah? Like, I mean, two weeks before your wedding, I mean, your wife's probably just like, No, we gotta go, like, you know, buy cake or whatever is going on, right? And you're just like, No, I have to handle this. Yeah? The Well, the one

Erik Christiansen 4:56

is, you understand what? Roles you fill in life, you know, and you know, work, husband, parent, and prioritize importance and urgency. And sometimes you have to balance those out. And this was definitely a balancing act. Yeah, you being a self funded company. You're always you don't have millions in the bank, and so it's all about cash flow. That's you're not a true owner until you've you've been responsible for payroll every two weeks, and having that money in the bank and making payroll. And for us, we were, we were growing and growing our team reinvesting. But we started to hit a point where, yeah, the day of our wedding, the Saturday, you know, we had payroll coming. The following Wednesday, the funds were going to be pulled, and we didn't have the money for payroll. And the way we solved it was through lighter capital. We did a a SaaS loan, yeah, through them, and it, it helped us. It was very expensive, but it saved us.

William Harris 6:02

Yeah, I think cash flow is one of those things that's just underrated for a lot of businesses, like you said, you get going into it and you're like, Well, I know that I'm selling this for more than what it cost me to make it, but I don't get the cash until 30 days, or whatever it could be, from this platform. And so you're like, the cash flow can just get really tight, and you don't realize that it's not a problem. A lot of times when you're smaller, when you're just getting started, because you're just hustling, but then when you get a little bit bigger, you can really

Erik Christiansen 6:29

start to feel that crunch. It's really the the difference between, it's night and day, between a self funded company and a funded company, sure, here in the Bay Area especially, and having lived through the last 15 years in San Francisco and watching companies come and go and the lack of understanding and respect for cash flow, it's been refreshing to see, you know, VCs now even talk about the word profit. You know, they businesses are forced now to actually respect the dollar and learn how to build a sustainable business,

William Harris 7:07

it's been refreshing. I agree to see that where it's like, oh, there's a lot more focus now on cash flow and profitability. You said there's a big difference between being self funded and being VC funded. Would you still go the self funded route, and if so, or if not, why or why not?

Erik Christiansen 7:28

I've thought about this because now that I just turned 47 I have a family happy birthday. Thank you. At this point in my life, I would go fund it, because I know what it's like to go through, not just risking your own money, but also the stress and strain to have no money in terms of operations. So I, at this point in my career, would rather put money in the bank and really accelerate past and go that route. If I was young, I wouldn't, I wouldn't do any any other

William Harris 8:03

way, sure? Yeah, that's a good point. The life stage that you're in, almost can determine which one of those makes more sense for you. I want to dig into this three step revenue formula that you've put together. The landing page that you sent me is this, is this officially live, or am I seeing like the backdoor version of it, or is it? Is this the real one?

Erik Christiansen 8:24

That's my mind that I put together instead to designer, after running it through, of course, Claude and chatgpt, and then taking five versions and putting it into one, and then putting it back into chatgpt, and waking up at 530 this morning, scratching my head and like, no, I really should adjust this and because, so, yeah, what you see is what's going to be live next week. It's what we've been building the last three months. And it's really, you know, 15 years worth of running Justuno and learning and learning, and the last three months being very much hands on and reshaping our company now that the new platform's live and current, where we are in the current market. Okay, it's pretty exciting.

William Harris 9:08

Take me through it. It's capture, identify and convert. Take me through briefly like, what, what? Like, just define each one of those real quick for me and why they matter. But then what I really want to know is, what was the epiphany? What was the moment that you were like, Oh, this is, this is what's been missing. This is it

Erik Christiansen 9:28

the epiphany? The Epiphany has been there just for one reason or not. Haven't just, I have not been hands on to, like, deliver this, sure. And you know, where it comes from is, is understanding the the what customers needs are, and their concerns and how to make them happy. And you know, clients today, they care about performance, about time to go live. They want it done for them. They don't want to commit too much. And. And and so if, if you can say, I'm going to solve this for you, this problem, and just say yes, and we'll get it done, businesses are much more likely, and agencies to say, yes, I want to work with you, for sure. And so the other side of it too is, what is the problem that we're solving and the the problem that we've that I've recognized, that's been this underlying issue that we haven't just hit straight on is the simple fact that every day, visitors come to websites and they don't buy and for the last 10 years, if you look at the statistics of cart abandonment rate, uh, anonymous visitors new versus returning. Um, 97% of visitors don't convert. 95% are anonymous. 80% of shopping carts are abandoned. And in all of this equates to the opportunity of $18 billion like we are, retailers are leaving $18 billion on the table every year, a lot of so how do we create a a formula that that is we taking this overwhelming problem that conversion is, is not an easy thing to solve. So what we've done is we created a highly effective system, like a 123, to solve it, and we've broken it down into three main categories.

William Harris 11:28

Within these three categories, where do most brands lose the most money?

Erik Christiansen 11:35

On site, real time, cart abandonment

William Harris 11:37

promotions. Okay? And like, so like, cart abandonment has been a problem from the beginning of the internet. We've talked about a lot. How is it still such a big problem that people are are not addressing are they addressing it? Just not addressing it? Well, are they just not addressing it? Like, what's going

Erik Christiansen 11:56

on? Isn't it insane? It's insane that you can go to I'm work. I am hands on, working with some of our best clients right now, and I'm logging into their accounts, and I see they don't have a cart abandonment promotion block. I say, Look, we're testing the action support brand right now. I say, hey, look, don't give me all your traffic. Just give me 30% of your traffic that's abandoning, either browse abandonment or cart abandonment, and let me test and we put up the exit offer. You can see immediate like results like traditional like the average cart, the average percent is 17 to 22% someone that adds an item to their cart that they will convert. If we engage that visitor in real time, well, we can ratchet them up to 35% so that's a

William Harris 12:53

massive difference. And

Erik Christiansen 12:58

anyone listening this podcast ask yourself right now, are you running a specific promotion for people abandoning carts or viewing products right now? The answer is no. Turn one of these on, you will see an instant increase in sales, and this is well supported based off of the known email marketing flows. The number one revenue generating email marketing flow is card abandonment. Emails, sure. So if we've proven it off site, why aren't we doing it on site? And the answer that question, I don't know. It's because I think the market people are trained by, you know, the where is the money for the outside service agencies and the ESPs? It's they need them to send more emails, and they want to show revenue. And conversion has always been this black box and overwhelming thing that that people, either no one in the company owns it, or it's an afterthought, or it's so cheap to acquire new customers and do the the off site marketing, customer customer acquisition costs used to be really cheap, but forget the past. Listen to where we are today, because we can solve it and we are

William Harris 14:18

so you've said that the biggest low hanging fruit in DTC, for the most part, is still current abandonment. How are we solving that on site? Then, is it? Is it just a coupon code like, or are there more other creative ways, like, what are some of the best ways to

Erik Christiansen 14:36

solve for that? Well, obviously the coupon codes can be the number one. Sure, without fail. So if we then step back and look at consumer psychology and understand all the different reasons people abandon carts, you can speak to those without discounting shipping being the number one concern when it comes. Items to cart abandonment. You can run dynamic promotions based off of CART value, whatever you can speak to that consumer to keep them on the site, let them know you understand their needs. And it varies with every business in terms of what the details of that are, whether it's like, can we expedite your shipping, speaking to those needs, those are things that can keep someone on the site, in the funnel, reduce bounce rate, increase page views, and get them through the funnel,

William Harris 15:35

outside of a coupon or shipping, let's say that this is a high AOV product. What are some other ways that we can

Erik Christiansen 15:45

personalize this for them? So obviously, free gift with purchase. Sure they're buying a high ticket item, reinforcing the warranty, reinforcing the customer service, you know, reinforcing the fact you understand this is a big ticket item, like you're probably going to view this product page five to 10 times before you make this purchase, sure ask them what's holding you back today? You can ask that question in a pop up, hey, you're leaving. Is there anything we can help you with today and offer shopper preferences of buttons, you know, is it shipping? Is it warranty? Is it, you know, payment. We have 0% finance with a firm speaking to the consumer in that regard.

William Harris 16:35

I like that, because it feels like when you're in a store and you're not sure what to buy, going to just, you know, regular store, the inevitability of somebody seeing that You look lost, saying, can help you find something? Is there some way that I can help you? And can I help you with something? It's very high. That's a very normal thing. And so I could imagine that if you're browsing a website, there are times when we feel the same way, where it's like, hey, if somebody just said, Can I help you with something, you're like, actually, yeah, I do need some. Maybe you don't. Maybe there's a lot of people that don't, but some people that don't, but some people do. Have you noticed that there's a difference in the pop ups effectiveness when it's almost like, accompanied with some like, the face of a person that's like, hi, let me help you, versus just like a generic pop up where it's not associated with a human

Erik Christiansen 17:18

being in terms of human face and connection. I'd be lying if I said gave you an answer on that Sure. What we do know is it's all about engagement. So when it comes to lead capture, we just finished an AB test with another action sport brand where we had their traditional form field get, you know, get 10% off against a shopper preference. So they had four main product categories, and so we presented, Hey, what are you interested in today? You know, would you like 10% off one of these categories? And then they, when they click the the category, we're able to store that hidden value and send it back over to Klaviyo to then put them in the right email marketing flow. Sure, along with increase the lead capture by 114% Wow, from our two week AB test we ran, we went from 1600 emails on the control to 4100 that's and that's and that's not just 4100 emails. That's 4100 emails with the shopper preference tagged to it

William Harris 18:29

so it has higher relevance. There's more likely that they're going to feel like you've actually connected, you've understood them. That helps, that helps with a lot of things. What are some other examples of case studies like this? I think you'd mentioned one about an increase in S must, like, 80% or something like that. Who am I? What am I thinking of there? So what's

Erik Christiansen 18:46

so, as we go back to the revenue, revenue formula, like, what's different, what's the epiphany is, so Travis, my co founder, and I, we've been working together for 15 years on Justuno, and then five years building the snowboard companies. Over 20 years, we've been working together. And, you know, three months ago, we finished a riff, unfortunately, with our company, and it forced Travis and I to really get more hands on. And so the last three months, we've been back to, like, startup mode, and it's been really in, like, it's been a really, you know, interesting time for us, like really getting our hands dirty again, and they realize how much we love this stuff working with a bunch of clients. And so what we've we've recognized is that, you know, we, we us working in our product with clients directly. There's so much learned value, and that's what we see with some of these young startups, is you have, like, it's a new company, and you have like, young, young, fresh minds, and so they're super proactive. And, you know, 15 years it's natural for us not to be as aggressive. Well, we kind of had this. My kids are older now, and now we have this, like, forced, like, getting. Do it so. Long story short is that when you have Travis in our minds on a project together, like Like we've been running a company, you as founders, you start spreading apart. We've been back together. And with this one client, we recognize that with the SMS form field capture page because you have email and then SMS on that frame, we removed the No thank you, and then had the Close button up top continue to the success screen. That simple addition increased them from 50 to 80% phone number submission rate, wow. So what we're doing is Travis and I are taking the learnings from every client in this revenue formula that we've been beta testing and applying it to our templates and every other client. And so by we way over, built our platform, so we brought our platform way back down and focused in on the best possible lead capture for email and SMS with traditional form field. So like, you know, one to 3% is industry average, we now like to peg it like between five and 15% and so that's actually better. Percentages aren't the best way to go about it, because when we talk about vanity metrics, I can get you to 20 by hyper segmenting. So it's better to say, you know, we're gonna, like, one to 2x your current list growth simply by, you know, these, these tactics with our what we're learning. So then by building out these templates that are hyper scalable, so I'm working with the designers hands on to like, think about design theory and scalability, how can we design something with different containers that have use cases, and then visual branded elements that can swap out easily, that will make every client happy for speed. And then you look at the latest and greatest with the anonymous visitor identification. So not only are we leading with the best practices, lead capture through forms, we are now able to identify and build your your email lead capture with 20% of your anonymous visitors. Those were able to capture high intent visitors and also bring those into your your email retargeting. And then we finish this with car demand in real time and and also bringing back this the highest quality and quantity email leads back to your site. So

William Harris 22:53

company like us, Elumynt, we're running the ads for you. We're running, you know, ideally, best traffic we can to your website. We're getting them there. We're saying they're qualified. They have self qualified themselves to a point, right? Like they liked your ad, they engaged it with it, they've clicked on it, like there's, there's some qualification that's taken place there. But they're leaving for whatever reason, right? They browse, they leave. And so you're saying, okay, great, before they leave, though, let's at least capture them. Let's identify some of the other anonymous ones that we couldn't capture. Now we have something that we could try to convert, and we can convert, like you said, potentially twice as many people. Then that makes, all of a sudden, your advertising campaigns that much more effective as well. And so if we're running right on the rail of what you can afford from a cash standpoint or an M, E R standpoint. Now if you're getting, you know, one and a half 2x more, we have the ability to scale and be a lot more aggressive on the advertising side too. So you're you're converting more, which gives you the opportunity to convert even more than down the line as well,

Erik Christiansen 23:56

exactly. And that's why we love working with agencies, because we can fill your bucket up more. Yeah.

William Harris 24:04

What about within the capture identify, convert, sequence that you've figured out here we talked about convert being one of the most important ones within the capture and identify piece. What are some of the more unique approaches that you've seen either your clients take, or that you wish somebody would take, that you're like, I really want to make sure that we're doing this to help capture, or this to help identify,

Erik Christiansen 24:26

well, that that's where we get into like, we have our foundational revenue formula, where it's, you know, 123, and under the conversion side, that's where, you know, I mentioned, we have cart abandonment, and Then we have retargeting. Well, when it comes to conversion, you're there's unlimited optimization you can do. And so we do have, you know, I mentioned a, being card B, being retargeting. We have C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, element, all the way up to z, of strategies that we can we can sure. Employee to engage visitors, and so you talk about, like, bringing traffic in. That's when we get into visitor segmentation, which email marketing has figured out. You have all your different, you know, email marketing segmentation that you're sending to we want digital marketers to think the same when it comes to on site. So if you if elements running ads, let's say Google paid ads, and that traffic's coming in, we want you to engage that traffic with unique promotions, because you already know who they are. So personalized promotions, that's one one element. So understanding your your visitor segments, traffic coming in, speaking to them in a personalized manner.

William Harris 25:42

And I love that I would have hit on that one before you go to the next, because it reminds me of back in my SAS days. So before I was in e-commerce, I was in SaaS, and we had drawn a blank on it right now, whenever you launch an app, it still, still use it all the time, whatever. What am I? What am I thinking of whenever you launch What's that when you like, there's like, a website that

Erik Christiansen 26:03

you can't believe that I rate somewhere, you get popular ones. Yeah, what am I thinking? It'll come to me. I know what you're talking

William Harris 26:10

Yeah. Okay, so anyways, right? And it's like, so anytime I can't believe I can't think of that so annoying, but anytime that

Erik Christiansen 26:16

everyone wants to get on it's like, the hot list, yes, exactly like the hot list, which

William Harris 26:20

I'm like, you know, yeah. But anyway, so you're there, you get ranked. Traffic comes from there. You already know something about them that they came to you from this. So they're, they're experiencing things a little bit differently. So there was an opportunity for you to engage them differently. And so it's like, you know, use like, uh, the Hello Bar at top. We would use different things to make sure that your experience was different,

Erik Christiansen 26:40

yeah, the Hello Bar. You remember that, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, ad shoppers back

William Harris 26:48

then, yeah. But like you said, it was just, it's a unique, you know, something about the traffic that's even come to you now. So do something different that's for them. Here's the

Erik Christiansen 26:59

thing is, it goes back to Donald Miller and his story brand framework is like understanding the problems. The problem is, 97% of visitors that come to your website leave, right. So how do you reduce that? The second is, it's so overwhelming to try to create an experience for all the segments, yeah, and all the different interactions, millions of different interactions happening on, you know, a single day on some sites. So that's why we say, let's start here with foundational lead capture, foundational identity, foundational conversion. And then let's start then what's 30 days in, let's start ticking away. Yeah, let's find out what's your number one abandoned item, you know, you talk about AOV. Let's look at what products are being abandoned and start thinking about, Okay, well, that's where the money is, sure. Well, let's chase the money. It's all comes down to sales and retail and money. Just like with advertising, you're looking at margins to see which products you want to advertise. Extra pay money to advertise, because you don't want to market a $3 sock. Yeah, doesn't make any sense, right? You want to, you want to figure out where the money is. So then, you know, with, with, you know what's, what's, you know, C strategy. Well, guess what? I want to figure out which product I want to take from a 30% to a 35% sales conversion, sure on your site, and that's where you mentioned, when you get into the high aovs. What's unique about this product? Because certain clients, you know, they they offer different warranties, they offer different free gifts, etc. So really, kind of go one layer deeper, and I'm taking the mindset of, I'm in working with specific clients, is, if I worked at this company, what would I do? And that's where it's kind of, like, exciting to be back in the retail trenches. Of like, this isn't my company, but I if they allow me to come in and think about it that way, they have a partner that's like, gonna make them more money. I almost wish I was working for a single retail store so I could go ahead and, like, do this, but totally for a

William Harris 29:21

bunch. So I looked it up, Product Hunt. That was what I couldn't think of, is product time. But, you know, it reminds me of the idea. It's like, let's say that you ran a coffee shop, and I'm just thinking of us all the cuff. So it might be a stupid idea, but we'll just say it anyways. Haven't thought it through, but you run a coffee shop, and you were hosting, you know, an open mic night for poetry or something, right? And you the people who are coming there are coming there because they're interested in poetry, if you actually did something else at your coffee shop about poetry that night, right? Where it's like, hey, all of your drinks are, you know, named after poets, you're like, oh, like, such a small little joke. Gesture now that people are just like, hey, you need to buy, you know, the Edgar, Allen, Poe, blah, blah, blah, right? And you're like, it's, it's such a small little gesture, but you already know that about the people that are coming there. So why not differentiate that? What are some other what are some other ways? Let's say that we're going beyond foundational $10 million brand. They've got foundational good. You've already optimized their foundation. They got a through g, what are some of those other smaller things you're like, hey, maybe you should think about you know, st and R here a little bit.

Erik Christiansen 30:33

Return visitors, someone that has left your website with a product in their cart when they return to your site, being able to present, hey, here's your cart.

William Harris 30:46

Or is today that Sure?

Erik Christiansen 30:50

Like when I was shopping for away furniture, I must have gone to that that product page, like I said, seven or 10 times, like if they had just been like, look at look Erik, we know your first name like we know, we know where you live, because we can do data enrichment. You know, we can have this to your house by Friday, if you Plus, we'll throw in free shipping. Click now, let's get it done. That's one the more very realistic is the dynamic for free shipping banner. So when someone, when you know someone, arrives on site, you have the banner up top where we're communicating various things. Oftentimes it's free shipping with orders over $100 well, as soon as you add an item to that cart, we're gonna dynamically update that. Let's say I add a $50 item. Say you're $50 away from free shipping. Sure that is a highly effective conversion tool.

William Harris 31:50

We like to win. Like, it's almost a game, right? And it's like, we get there, like, Hey, you're 50 like, I can do that. That's pretty easy. I can just click this button, and now I'm there and I win, right? You know, ding, ding, ding. So

Erik Christiansen 32:01

what's unique is we getting back to the reason why this doesn't happen. I'm curious your thoughts on this, being on the agency side, and frustrations you might have of like, look, I'm driving this traffic to your business, but you're not converting it is that we are part of the on site experience. So if something goes wrong, leadership sees it. They're pinging somebody. And also, companies don't have, I like to call them CROs, like chief sure conversion officer, not a Revenue Officer, but like, I want conversion. I want someone in the company. And so things don't happen. Who do you work with? Like, brands that you're working with, larger brands, and you're, you know, they're looking at your your your performance, they're saying, Great, you send us this traffic, all this paycheck, but look how much, how many sales you got. Like, how we're going to move on to another agency? How do you how do you have those conversations, not to turn it around? But I'm kind of curious.

William Harris 33:07

No, that's a good question. So I can't speak to other agencies, because I've actually never worked at another agency before starting my own right. So I know how we do things for us. That's the whole reason why we have growth strategists that are a layer above the media buyers. And sort of, I don't consider ourselves to be media buying agency as much as a growth strategy agency that builds off of media buying. The growth strategist job is to look at the P and L, and when I started the business, at the time, I was a growth strategist, and I remember people saying, Oh, they don't understand my business. And I thought, that's interesting. That's interesting. Do you mean the niche? Or they don't understand business? And I found out that a lot of times what they really meant is they just don't understand, like, my agency didn't understand business, right? Like, go beyond the niche, they didn't understand what was the P and L, what was profitable was actually helpful to the business. And so by making sure that everybody, all of our growth strategists are trained on understanding if what we're doing is driving the business forward from a profitability standpoint, it makes a difference. And so we're looking at things well beyond the paid media side of things. We're looking at CRO. We do not do CRO, but we're looking at your conversion rate. We're looking at your email, we're looking at your influencers. We're looking at a lot of other things outside of our purview, because that's what the growth strategist job is to do, is to say, not even just on your website. So I'm going to take you back to another example. There was a golf club brand that came to us, and he was like, I have fired nine agencies in nine months. It's a red flag. First of all, you know, but nobody can figure out what's wrong with our Facebook ads. And I looked through his account, and I was like, it's, it's a beautiful account, like, I actually don't think there's anything wrong with your account. Started looking offline, and around the time when he saw this dip in performance, there were a couple of really bad reviews on YouTube that had millions of views on his on his again. This product, right? And so your conversion rate issue had nothing to do with your website or your price or your offer or your actual setup or your ads. It was something going on not even in within your control. So now, how do we work backwards from that? How do we, you know, reach out to those influencers, see we can get them to do a different review, you know, find some way to kind of fix these things. So coming back to your question, like, our goal with our strategist is to think way outside of all of the normal things you're seeing, not just within the paid ads. And so when we see that there's an issue from a conversion rate standpoint, that is what we call out. We say we're doing this, this, and this, this, this for you. But here's the opportunity cost. And I think, to your point, the reason why a lot of brands maybe don't get on board with this is because is because they say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that we can always convert better, but, like, I don't know. It's kind of like industry standard, isn't it? Like you're never gonna convert 100% of people, and you're saying, but if we can convert 10% more, just 10% more, we'll be able to do this, this, this with your numbers, and when you can show them that opportunity cost of what is possible, then I think it makes a little bit more sense. And so I think that a lot of people struggle with actually quantifying in real financial terms what that means.

Erik Christiansen 36:13

The business mind, right? The other that wasn't Tyler by chance. You're talking about millions of golf video views.

William Harris 36:23

I would never say who that was or wasn't.

Erik Christiansen 36:28

So that's really interesting. And it's, you know, I think what's fascinating is tracking it down to a negative review every everything is intertwined. Yeah, in our industry and the on site experience, again, has been this black box that no one's really been able to craft something that that works for the general public in a way that we can plug it in and see some immediate impact to sell the teams on the see the light of, like, Aha. Moment. Of like, oh man. And then, like you said, what else can we do? We love that question, like, ooh. Like, what else should we do? And then then you start ticking away. But it's, it's the key of of two things. One, it's not just being pop ups. It's being able to speak to the top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel. And that's, that's where we where we're talking about with step one and three. And then two is really this brand new ability to to to identify who's on your site, which has been a horrific problem with 95% of visitors being unknown. And then the the underlying third component is the business, one, which is, if you look at, I analyze the entire industry, and there was one word that stood out across the board, and that is revenue. That is the word of 2025 for sure. If you start shopping around when you go into like different SaaS sites, the word revenue is in the headline everywhere, for sure, and the fact we can immediately increase revenue with the card abatement stuff on site, that's the message I'm trying to really get out to speak to retailers.

William Harris 38:24

And I'd flip that even a little bit more and say you're not just increasing revenue, because there, there are ways, let's just say, on the ad side, you can increase revenue very easily by just spending three times more. Right? That doesn't mean that you've increased it profitably, though you're increasing it profitably like because the cost to do these incremental changes. It's almost, I don't know, let's say high, but it's very, very, very high margin on that. Which brings me to something else that you have talked to me about that I really appreciate, which is that protecting your margin as you grow so you're getting to be an eight-figure business. What are your thoughts about protecting your margin

Erik Christiansen 38:58

then? So I've always been a self funded company, so sustainability has been always in my DNA. I even studied environmental design in college along, you know, so it's like the customer acquisition costs are so high now, and so if we can convert a visitor into a customer, it's worth so much more now, the cost to re target those visitors to come back to the site, because that's a very hard it's a question that doesn't get answered or asked is, how many visits does it take to get to a sale like you know, how Many looks to the center of the

William Harris 39:42

ticket? I was side? I was thinking the same thing when you said that. I was just like,

Erik Christiansen 39:46

talk about how overwhelming conversion is, you know, it's like, these are questions you can get to once we've gotten the baseline out of the way. Yeah. But, you know, you talk about margins, you know? So it's like, if we can reduce the number. Of page visits, the number of emails sent, the number of texts sent, the number of contacts in your marketing contact, the number of contacts in your paid media, the quality of those contacts in your paid media, if we can build a very healthy pipeline and customer experience on site, the company is going to be much healthier and profitable.

William Harris 40:25

I mean, it's, you know, the leaky bucket effect, to a point right where it's like, if you're constantly taking a bucket and you're dumping out the water, but then you're filling it. It's filling up with, you know, two more buckets. You're not getting anywhere there. I've just mixed two metaphors, but you get the idea of where I'm going with that. But it is. It does make sense, where it's like, if we're actually sending traffic and you're converting that traffic, everything that you're doing is much more effective and efficient, therefore your margins are in a much better spot. Therefore you can spend more to do these other things that are gonna continue to grow your business.

Erik Christiansen 40:55

And what we what our job to what I've really learned is you have to be able to quantify this. You know, vanity metrics are reality in our industry. We want to not just, you know, we don't want to be a vanity metric company. We want to give you data. And, you know, attribution is another tricky one in our industry. So if we can start with your cart abandonment dollar values and show that that direct this customer was touched this one wasn't. Here's the two sales conversion rates on average. That's a clear win, right there. And so for us really getting that in front of our customers and our agency partners to present to the customer along with the lead capture success, and then it's your job to show the retargeting ability for the row as there, which can easily be done. Yeah, that's another kind of real eye opener of simplifying analytics. We we always scratch our heads when we go into like big products, and you get a report, and you go to try to click on it, to go deeper into it, and goes nowhere like we way over built like people don't need that. We need to get these high metrics in front of them so they can go to their boss and say, Look what we've done and move on from there.

William Harris 42:21

So what are a couple of the vanity metrics that we need to be aware of and watch out for, and what are the couple of metrics that we should actually be looking at?

Erik Christiansen 42:30

So when it comes to lead capture, we want to look at quantity first, sure we also then want to look at quality. So versus opt in rates. So look at what you're capturing. Look at where benchmarks is to industry average. Each industry fluctuates a few percentage points. But the nice thing is we can test so we have a full multi variant testing software where we can put in your current put in our strategies and AB tests, so that you can easily go to your boss or yourself and be like, here's the value vanity metrics. What was? What was further? What was the next question?

William Harris 43:15

Just, what are the vanity metrics that we need to be aware of, to watch out for? They're like, Oh, these are the ones people are going to try and trick

Erik Christiansen 43:21

you with, yep. So with the email to making like, duplicate emails, you know, allow duplicate submissions. So these are running up numbers, sure. And then we're also seeing practices where you're an email marketer and your your simple goal is your KPI for your own job is email list growth. We have companies that go, Hey, we need to get to 500,000 this year, and they'll do whatever they can to get to that number. Well, that's a vanity metric, because remember, like Facebook likes used to be like you could go buy Facebook likes, yep, and this is where it gets into sustainability. You know, you need an email verification field in your lead capture. You need duplicate email option to allow or not allow, because this is all costing your company money by pumping them into your CRM, because you pay per contact for sure. And this also goes along the lines with the anonymous visitor identification. We don't want to try to identify everyone on your site, because the quality depending on which Id resolution company you're using, the quality ranges quite dramatically in terms of match score. You know the match rate is what you hear. So you want to make sure you're looking for a partner that is not trying to match 100% of your traffic, just the high intent, and that the actual match rate is is not 10% but higher up into the 50 to 70% so you're putting quality in. It's quality. In quality out, trash, in trash, out. So those are two metrics. Then you when we talk about conversion rate, you have to be careful about the lead capture side, because if you're too heavy on the lead capture, you can affect your sales conversion rate because you and your bounce rates because you scare people away. For sure, you want to if you're doing, if you're not doing, focusing on sales conversion, you want to ask your pop up vendor, ask them how it's affecting your sales conversion rate. And no email marketer is going to ask that because they don't care. That's the CMO needs to be asked. So it's like, what questions should a CMO ask the other, other one is with SMS. I could go all day on this stuff, but I'll finish with that. With SMS is that, you know, last three years we've seen this flood of, you know, with a 10 of post script, Klaviyo is now in it with SMS. This when you hand off your lead capture to a specific SMS company. They're going to trash your email subscription. Then they care about one thing, SMS. And so when I mentioned we increased the client to 80% SMS growth is because we, we, we one. We were being well, hold me back up there. We were able to do it because we removed some barriers. But as a consumer, ask anyone that's used a two step pop up, which is email and SMS. They don't give you the coupon code if you don't submit a phone number, but they don't tell you that, and I think that is horrific, because it affects the sales conversion rate. If I give you my email, I expect, regardless, to get a coupon code, sure that customer experience is is heavily affecting your conversion rates. And anyone that's CMOS, look at that experience on your site, and it's problematic if you're doing

William Harris 47:04

that, that's where there's the balance isn't there, because you can do things that are effective mathematically in the short term, but damaging in the long term, but you don't know what that is, unless you look at it from the lens of, how is this perceived by my customer?

Erik Christiansen 47:25

The bottom line, it's business, right? Yeah, if it helps us grow sales, great. What is the but when we do it, let's not just, let's put, let's think about lead capture and sales conversion together, and that's what that's what our formula is. And what we've recognized is these singular solutions aren't looking at the end goal, the bottom line of the business as a whole, and and that's where the sweet spot is.

William Harris 47:57

How are the best brands today utilizing AI within this capture, identify, convert, formula,

Erik Christiansen 48:09

how are the best brands doing it? How,

William Harris 48:13

if we How should they be? Would be even a better question,

Erik Christiansen 48:19

so and that comes into the tools you're choosing to use, and how to apply automation to the processes that that you're you're running. Yeah, so how can we, how can we as a system, figure out what is the right time to show a pop up, three seconds, five seconds, seven seconds, based off your industry everything. It's capturing that data and and applying the learning from all of our customers to your to your customer. Pre auto form fill with visitor identification. Like, how far do we go with auto filling the forms for you. You know, people just want things done for them, finding this balance of and I'm just thinking, you know, just talking through our products, what are, what am I seeing clients do on site? To be honest, I'm trying to think of a good political response to give you on this one, because I don't have a straight answer. You know, we're hearing a lot about AI, but I don't have a single client like, oh, AI did this for me when it comes to imagery, yes, so the product display page, we're using AI for product imagery, for product content, titles, description. AI can write those for us when it comes to, you know, back end operations. I know there's tools in there for us, personally, from a brand you know, we're using, Claude, chat, GPT, sure, different tools that are helping us become more efficient, CS, tools when it comes to conversion. You. We're not there yet. Yeah.

William Harris 50:02

Yeah. To your point, though, I think that one of the ways in which it can be is if you're stuck at coming up with some of these ideas for the imagery that you need or the copy that you need, like, great. Here's 20 new ideas that you can test out. Keep testing until you find the thing that's working better for you. So that's a great way to

Erik Christiansen 50:24

do it. The AI we have right now is Travis in our minds, yeah, working with our clients and applying these practices, best practices and learnings to them. And then through that, we're going to then we'll start plugging in the the AI stuff.

William Harris 50:39

If I handed you a $10 million e-commerce business, and this kind of like cheating a little bit, because you actually have an e-commerce business, but if I handed you one, that's not your business, because you've obviously done probably more to your business than others. Handed you a $10 million e-commerce business. They've already found product market fit. They've already done a lot of foundational elements to improve things. But I say, Here you go. You know, make it $20 million here next quarter. What are you What are you doing? What are like the first five things you like? Okay, I'm gonna do this, this, this, this, and this,

Erik Christiansen 51:12

the turnaround. And it's not to say turn around. It's like the growth, right? Yeah, yeah. First thing I do is I, I called Drew sanaki and deploy his discount ladder. If they're not doing direct mail, I'll probably plug that in. Sure. I'd analyze their direct mail is a good one. Yeah, I'm plugging you drew because I have a lot of friends that are like, asking me the same questions and different things, but like, let's say San Francisco gap calls me up. Goes, Hey, come on in. I would stop. And I put all the blinders on and look at their website analytics and all their their customer data, and go, Okay, who, you know, where, where's the money? Great. Now, who are, who are our customer segments and how, how are we engaging with them on our site? And I map out the customer experience and figure and put data, huge data, data points to all of them, and go, Hey, what's our conversion rates per segment? What's our AOV? What's our time on site? What's our bounce rate? And I build out these profiles, tribute revenue to them, and then increase the sales conversion rate for each one of those incrementally.

William Harris 52:26

I like that. I think we there. I forget who shared it this morning. I saw it on x, but they showed two people. They were talking about customer personas, and they had, I think it was like Prince Charles, and I don't remember who it was. Some Rocker I don't remember who it was. Like, it's so bad that I remember who it was, right? Some rock star it is, it's Friday, like, that's all I can blame it on. But they were like that you looked at like, their demographic details. And it was like, you know, born in 1963 and then they're like, you know, raised in the UK, wealthy lives in a castle. It's like they were identical on like these personas, but they were the complete opposite actual, like, psychographic people. And so to your point, it's like, sometimes we get a little bit too narrow in the way that we're trying to segment customers. If we can get a little bit more intelligent about way that we are segmenting customers, I think that we can be a lot more effective in the ways that we're communicating them, because communicating to, you know, a rock star versus, you know, Prince Charles, very different ways in which you're going to communicate them to capture their intent.

Erik Christiansen 53:31

So that's my plug. Like answering that question again, you know, I would say I would appoint myself their chief conversion officer, and I would go in and and optimize their entire conversion experience on the site. That is how your any 99.99% if not 100% of websites can be optimized better.

William Harris 53:54

Sure, that feels like one of those stats where it's like, you know, 87.35% of all statistics are made up on the spot, right? But, but I think that's almost like it's so, it's so, it has to be true that I think that you can get away with that, yeah, um, what's 1e-commerce myth that you'd love to kill for good?

Erik Christiansen 54:16

That's easy.

William Harris 54:19

Yeah, sure. That's good. It's not easy. Is it

Erik Christiansen 54:22

an e-commerce myth? Man, I mean, you're asking someone 20 years have a million what's like the that people know what they're doing for sure. I mean, retail is a, it's a, it's a, it's brutal. Retail is brutal. There, here's a myth. And I say I actually use this. This is that every single consumer thinks that here I'm going to speak to margins. That's the biggest okay, because consumers believe, when you go in and buy a product, that the brand is making 90% margin. Sure, I think that's the biggest myth. Like they think brands are these huge companies with all this money, but the truth of the fact is that, and I, when I worked in the snowboard industry, that was the biggest eye opener, is that I grew up with all these ski snowboard, snowboard brands that really exist, ski brands, you know, k2 you name it. And then I was all these, like, up and coming, small ski brands, and we're working all these snowboard companies. Is truth that matters. All these companies are broke, yeah, because all their money was in inventory. And so that right there, I think, is, is the number one myth. And I feel so sorry for these retailers that are brands that they some are doing well, some are making money, but you know, you they have a defective product. You know that costs them. You have to return something that's broken. You know they, they are fighting to protect margin, and everyone's trying to steal it, whether it's bad, you know, customers, vendors, you know, you name it. So that's my myth,

William Harris 56:25

man. That's a good one. That's a really good one. I want to talk a little bit about who is Erik Christiansen, because I like getting to know the human behind the machine. How old is your

Erik Christiansen 56:39

dad? My dad's 8484 years old, yeah,

William Harris 56:42

and I understand that he was wake surfing up in Tahoe recently. What was it like growing up with a dad who is 84 wake surfing and Tahoe? Like, how did that help shape you to be the business owner that you are today? Oh,

Erik Christiansen 57:01

yeah, it's a crazy story. The him asked me, like, Hey, I think I'm gonna give wake surfing a try. Okay, I love that. As an entrepreneur himself, my grandpa was too, so I've grown up around it. So that was a big influence. My dad was also, I'm not gonna say, was, he still is a software developer. He still has, really, that he, he maintains accounting software for which is, so, you know, what was it like? It's, it's, I couldn't, I couldn't ask for your greater father for like role figure he they live just up the street from us, so I could see him all the time. And so it's it provided me that confidence and pathway to be both successful in business and that personal life and family and everything

William Harris 57:59

I love that I feel like a lot of people that I talk to on this show have so much inspiration from their parents in order to be able to be the entrepreneur that they are. There's more often than not, I feel like there was a belief in a role model of hard work ethics and things like that. It feels like I can't remember the last time somebody told me that there was something different like that,

Erik Christiansen 58:21

yeah. How about yourself? Yeah.

William Harris 58:25

Neither one of my parents were entrepreneurs at the time. My mom was a teacher. My dad was an electrical engineer, is right? My mom's retired, though, from that, but yeah, my mom had a sign. I haven't talked about this, I don't think on the podcast, so my mom had a sign on her door that said, practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect, right? So Italian mom, perfect practice makes perfect. And so there was definitely a an air of, if you're going to do something, do it right? That says she helped us get a paper route when we were kids. So I was 11 years old when I had my first job. And so I learned entrepreneurship very, very early on, because in the weird way that was kind of entrepreneurship. It was a job, but you did it, but you had to go knock on the doors and, you know, collect money. And then that turned into where she said, you know, hey, come 11 years old with a checkbook now, so I'm thinking, I'm pretty doing pretty well. It's like, Hey, by the way, you can upsell them. That's not the word that she used, but it's like some of them probably need their lawns mode. Why don't you ask them if, anyway, needs their lawn mode? Oh, hey, in the winter time, some of them might need their, you know, their dry driveways shoveled. And so I got a really good taste of like, that ability to earn money. And then I can remember, like, hanging out in the backyard with our with my friends. We did not grow up in a very nice neighborhood at all. You know, most of the neighborhood that we grew up in was section eight housing. We were not but a lot of blessing there. But so, like, this was a neighborhood where an 11 year old kid, and I can remember ordering a pizza like that I paid for with my money for my friends in my backyard. And it's like, I am, I am a baller right now. Right? It's like, this is the coolest thing in the world. It's so like, that ability to be able to, like, make money, have some control over your your future, your destiny, your finances. There's a really, let's say, I don't know, addicting thing to be able to say there's some opportunity here. Like, you can go do things. You don't have to, like, overthink it. If you don't like the situation, go do something about it. I think it was a really, I don't know, very encouraging situation that my mom was able to put

Erik Christiansen 1:00:26

me into for that. That's awesome. Yeah, it's in those people trusted you. You built up the trust, sure, and it makes me think about coming full circle, and we're talking about revenue. In the last few months, I learned, you know, I realized, like, I love making money, like, I love figuring out ways to like earn money, sure, and digging into these different e-commerce sites, it's like, look, you can make money right here, right here. So now that we're not looking at just emails or used to be Facebook likes, we're talking about how to actually help them make money, yeah, changes the conversation you have with clients, and it's it's been really rewarding.

William Harris 1:01:08

I love that. Yeah, I also understand that you have an addiction. It's not something you've talked about before. You're laughing, because I'm not saying this seriously. You have an addiction to Junior Mints. When did this addiction start? How do you

Erik Christiansen 1:01:24

get up on me? You know, it's like, with kids, like, I, after 15 year break, I started eating nachos again, yeah, and like, and I found I was craving them. So like, and now my new craving is Junior Mints. I love chocolate, and so you think that like a cheap chocolate, whatever, but they've got, like, the perfect dark chocolate shell with like this. Yeah, here's the problem. I don't know what's going on. The Safeway here, I kid you not, is sold out of them, and not really. The CVS doesn't add me. So, like, right now I'm dry.

William Harris 1:01:59

Get you a supplier. I

Erik Christiansen 1:02:01

don't know what's going on in California, but Hershey's is not releasing Junior Mints. That's probably because nobody

William Harris 1:02:07

likes them. Now that's, that's, it's an unpopular opinion to like them. I actually do like them. When the kids get the Halloween candy, I'm like, I'll take your

Erik Christiansen 1:02:14

junior mint. Yeah. Give them a shot, people. They're great. Back to your paper route. I Yeah, for any young entrepreneurs listening, you know, age 11 High School, no one probably is. But if you have kids, I want to franchise this one, the garbage cans on whatever with Amazon and the boxes and like it's a tap. Ask anyone. It's a sure taking out garbage cans. Now it's a half hour sometimes, yeah, so breaking

William Harris 1:02:47

down all the boxes,

Erik Christiansen 1:02:48

yeah, looking for pools. People pay for gardening. I've talked to my neighbors people. People would pay money to a teenager to come take out the garbage cans, break down the boxes, stack them. You have to tie them up, yep, and then for an extra five bucks, they'll bring them in. Ooh, the next

William Harris 1:03:05

steps. That's a really, that's a really good idea. That is a that is a perfect idea for, like you said, someone who's young wants to hustle work hard. You could have 50 people just in your neighborhood, right, that you go to every day and you're doing this, oh, man, you could ride your bike, even if you want to go a little farther. Have more than 50 people. There's a Yeah, that's when

Erik Christiansen 1:03:27

I hear like, oh my, my teenager went and submitted an application. There's no jobs. This summer. It's like, there's

William Harris 1:03:33

go make a job. Yeah, make a job. I don't think I ever actually got hired for a job that existed. Like, I'm trying to think if I ever have every job that I ever applied for, they weren't hiring, if that makes sense, and they were like, okay, but like, I had a reason for why I was coming along to help their business out, until I eventually started my own business. I'm trying to think back, and I don't think I ever actually applied to an open position once in my entire life. So to your point, like, go make the job. Speaking of that, what, what quotes do you live by? Is there, like, a quote that you're like, I've got this framed on my office wall, or anything like that,

Erik Christiansen 1:04:17

need versus want? That's when I look at, I reference back to, quite often, that's, that's kind of more personal. Work wise, there's, and I don't even know if it's really a I'm sure it's, it probably needs to be updated if it's in years past, I did the sea Explorers program in high school and and the phrase on the on in the cabins we stayed in was, there are no great men, only great challenges or ordinary men must meet or face which present day you probably have to. Yeah, update, but it really speaks to the fact that, like, Look, everyone faces challenges. Like, it's all about just running into them that so in years past, that's been a good one that kept me going.

William Harris 1:05:15

I like both of those. That second one reminds me of something that I've heard Alex hermozi say that I've quoted a number of times as well. I don't know if he was the original person to say this, but it's like, we want our kids to be strong, but we don't want them to go through the things that make them strong. We want our kids to be patient, but we don't want them to go through the things that will make them patient, right? Like we want these characteristics without them having to go through the things that develop those characteristics. And that second one really reminds me of that, that it's like those hard things. It's like, celebrate those. Celebrate that you get to go through this. Celebrate that you get to figure out how to make payroll two weeks before you well, celebrate that because you're developing character that is going to allow you to do so many other amazing things in the rest of your life with that. Yep, and that ties into the need and want. Tell me a little bit more about this. Like you said, it's a personal line.

Erik Christiansen 1:06:04

Yeah, in college, I had a professor, babe Butler, in my economics major, little economics class, and like, the last one of the last days of school, he wrote on the board some, like, key, key takeaways in life and and that he lives by. And that was, that was one of them, if, like, if you're looking at at something, it's like, view, literally, and because it's all about, for me, living below your means, sure. And like The Millionaire Next Door type model. And he wrote, like neither one on board on the chalkboard, I still remember it. And he talked through it's like, Look, if you ask yourself, do you need this, or do you want it, it will change your perspective on on decision making. The most recent, recent ones that I've, I've been trying to work through is as we try to focus in at work. You know, a lot of people I talked to, it's like, God, like, I'm having a hard time focus and working from home, etc. Is, is, as we look at our task at hand and everything, like, you ask yourself, like, is this important or urgent? And if it's, if it's neither one of those, it's probably a distraction. And so that's been helping me prioritize my work days, especially working from home, when I have about a million distractions around here, for sure, if we can all relate to that, you know, like a barn to remodel well, so I

William Harris 1:07:38

was going to get to that, I was actually gonna call out. You know, living beneath your means doesn't mean living in a barn, but you are fixing up a barn, which, which I've done as well. That is, that is definitely a want, not a need, right? But like it can feel like there's some need to it, right? Where we live, our basement, our house is built in 1870 the basement's not really a basement that you can fix up and be like, Hey, here's our basement. So winter time, you know, in Minnesota, you're like, we need somewhere to, kind of, like, get away from, like, just the main living area sometimes. And so we fixed up the barn to kind of be like that hangout space and office space, and, you know, a lot of other things. And so it's a really nice thing. Feels like a need. It's still just a want. You know, you can live without it. Plenty of people that live without it is your, tell me a little bit about the needs slash once of your barn remodel here, that's going and you're because you're actively remodeling it, right?

Erik Christiansen 1:08:28

Yeah, I'm clearing it out now. Yeah, the ad hoc, as you know, storage, it's kind of a want. It's not necessarily need right now. But, you know, can add 800 1200 square feet. It's a lot of my office out there. Kids play room, get them out of the house, you know, in laws, etc. But then you look at like, how much do we need? Do we do it like with permits and do teams and, you know, spend 1000 1500 a square foot. Or do I do it myself, DIY and just kind of do it, sure it's, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I want to learn construction, so I'm gonna try to DIY it.

William Harris 1:09:15

I love that. I mean, I've done a lot now myself as well. You know, got a router. So again, house built in 1870 but a lot of the charm had been taken out of it over the years. And so it's like, I want to restore the woodwork. I don't want to just put up just fake wood in here. So you got a router with all the different bits that I needed, right? So it's like, we routed my wife and I some just beautiful woodwork that we've put in here, you know, 12 inch baseboards and stuff like that, that we've custom routed. And I think there's something to be said for people who are working behind a computer all the time, like you and I, to just get away from the computer and build something with our hands.

Erik Christiansen 1:09:53

Yeah. There's a lot of value to it, yeah.

William Harris 1:09:55

So what is the part that you're the most excited about for the construction and what's the part. You're the least excited about learning.

Erik Christiansen 1:10:04

Well, the you mentioned wood, there's some, like, our place was built in 1912 so it's super old too. Yeah, the horse stalls have an extra layer of, like, four inch wood that I can't wait to get out and, like, grief in it. So the woodworking, and then I think, what am I not looking forward to? Or learning? Like, I can't wait to learn, like, the electrical, yeah, foreign to me. And just again, it's one of those things like confidence, like I know I can, if I do it once, then I'll have that confidence, like I'm to get through. And that kind of goes back to, like, your parents and family, like giving you guidance. It's like, I know it's not complicated, but it's like, I've never done it scary, but just go do it. I even, I think I'm going to buy a kit on Amazon. This goes into, like, your quote about teaching your children, blah, blah, blah. You can buy a complete construction kit, mini kit on, really, where it's you can build a miniature model, like a full scale, like to scale. So I'm gonna order one just to like to build it, so then I'll feel comfortable and understand like a king stud versus blah, blah, blah. And I can do with my son so he can learn about it.

William Harris 1:11:25

That's I had no idea that existed. That's a great idea. My father in law was a home builder. He did pass away, unfortunately, pancreatic cancer, and so he wasn't able to help us with this project. But I remember I had a rental house back in Ohio when I lived there, and he came to visit me, and I had done a little bit, but, I mean, I was not handy, right? Like I was raised by my mom. I had done some drywall. That was about the extent of my handiness. Well, I actually I did some roofing, but I wouldn't have considered myself handy. I wasn't doing electric, I wasn't doing plumbing or anything like that. But I had a leak, I think, in the shower, and I remember him just walking me through it on the phone. He was like, Okay, take it apart. What's the worst that happens? What's the worst that happens? The worst that happens is you've wasted a few hours and a couple 100 bucks, and you call somebody out to come and fix it. That's the worst that happens. For the most part. That's not the worst. Okay, there are some extreme examples.

Erik Christiansen 1:12:20

Okay, if it doesn't go well or takes longer, you're going to hear about this from somebody else in your house.

William Harris 1:12:29

That is fair. That is now. Now you've got me doing flashbacks to home improvement. Tim, that told me on Taylor, right, and every time he takes something apart, and his wife, Jill is like, Tim, what are you doing? Yeah, that's fun. What about? What about yard work? I think you mentioned to me before that you really enjoy doing yard work too.

Erik Christiansen 1:12:53

Yeah, that goes in with really, kind of getting away from the computer, sure. Or I get in trouble with that too, because I'll just, I love yard work, and that's that was one of my jobs in high school. Was weed whacking. Yeah, you know, gardening straight cash paid for my first car with it in this neighborhood I live in now, actually. And so it's hard for me to pay someone to do that stuff on my property, because I love doing it, but being a little older and having, you know, wrecked my body's few time, few times, you know, the body aches, and so I'll go a little too hard for sure. Yeah, there's nothing more rewarding than clearing, cleaning up brush trees, whatever.

William Harris 1:13:39

I never verified this, but one of the doctors that I used to work with told me that there was a study that suggested that people who do yard work are more happy, right? Any you can extrapolate that, yeah,

Erik Christiansen 1:13:52

without a doubt, sure, the truth? Yeah, well, it's like you get extrapolated from

William Harris 1:13:56

all kinds of different reasons, right? One is, it's like you're getting the physical activity. Therefore, that's helping two you're just surrounded by nature, the colors, the sounds, the dirt, is helping to you know, you're picking up bacteriophages, which are killing the bad bacteria. Like, there's a lot of reasons, but it's like just plain and simple, doing the yard work, doing the gardening, you know, significantly increases your likelihood of being happy. Oh,

Erik Christiansen 1:14:19

you talk about mental health. I mean, I think it's really important. And we've, we've gotten to a culture where it's almost like looked down upon and also, you know, like I mentioned earlier, like, Oh, why don't we just pay someone to do that? Like, everything's like, why don't we just pay someone to do it? It's like, well, I enjoy doing this, yeah. And it's also healthy. So like, I think we're going to start people see people starting to get back into that a little, especially with how hard it is to find service providers as well in in in certain regions, and quality of service has gone down so much. Sure. It's kind of really empowering. So yeah, I encourage people to get out there.

William Harris 1:15:04

As Harley Finkelstein posted yesterday, high each, high agency, low eco, right? It's like, yeah, I can get out there. I can do it. Yeah, it's dirty, exactly. Erik, this has been a lot of fun talking to you, if people wanted to work with you, if they wanted to follow you, what's the best way for them to get in touch, stay in touch.

Erik Christiansen 1:15:24

Well, I'm on LinkedIn. Can always find me on there. Pretty accessible with Justuno, what we talked about today, just go to Justuno.com/revenueformula, or just Justuno, yeah, yeah. It's perfect.

William Harris 1:15:42

Well, again, I appreciate you sharing your time, sharing your wisdom with us. It's been a lot of fun to learn from you and learn about you and everyone for listening. Thank you very much for listening. I hope you have a great rest of your

Erik Christiansen 1:15:53

day. Thanks, William.

Outro 1:15:55

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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