Introduction Hello, e-commerce friends. Today on this show, I have an old friend of mine, it's Ben McAdam, who used to be one of my first coaches in my beginnings when I just started out as an entrepreneur. Ben is the founder and owner of Profits Collective. He is a profits coach and a fractional CFO. He helps business owners to earn more profits without confusing jargon, and he has been advising a lot of other business owners in the online space across all industries for more than a decade. Ben, welcome to the show. If you want to connect with Ben, we have a Facebook group. Ben will be also part of that group. And this is only for e-commerce owners so feel free to join us.  Highlights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH0lC_wz3KUIf you have a question of, what if we invested more in marketing and bought more inventory? Are we going to go broke? Or what are the best case, worst case, most likely scenarios? You would talk to a virtual CFO or a profits coach about that. If you're thinking about acquiring another company or selling a company, or you're thinking about launching a new product and you want to crunch the numbers on it, that's the kind of advice that a virtual CFO or profits coach would do. (8:35)  I call it the 80/20 of profitability. What we're talking about here is not net profit margin after all the expenses, it's the gross profit margin. We'll go into details of how to calculate it later, but basically the idea is, somebody's paying you some money for a product and then it costs you a certain amount of money to create the product and ship it around the place and fulfill the order. And if you don't get the ratio between those two right, it's not the dollar difference between them, it's the ratio, if you don't get that right, you can't grow. It slows your rate of growth, getting this wrong, and it also caps how high you can grow. Because with that gap in between, you pay for marketing, you pay for a team to help you, you pay for managers to help you manage a big team. It also helps you fund more inventory purchases. If you want to grow really fast, then you need good margins in order to self-fund the inventory, otherwise you have to go get a loan from somewhere or investors. (12:07) Being the cheapest is a nightmare. It's really, really difficult. Everything has to go right, you have to do a lot of the work yourself because you can't pay amazing people because you don't have the margins to do it. There's a lot of volume, and if something goes wrong and you can't make that volume, like there's a supplier delay or shipping challenges or your factory closes for a bit and you can't make that volume, things can suddenly be very bad in the business. So it's a very stressful position to be. (28:51) Introduction: Who Is Ben McAdam? I'm Australian, so g'day, mate. Live in Sydney, Australia with my wife and four kids, but we travel a lot, and I've got clients all over the world, mostly Americans, it turns out. Speaking about doing this stuff for over a decade, I realized the other day I've helped over 1,000 people. I'm like, wow, really? Again, feeling old, but also that feels pretty cool. It's a large sounding number. I normally help people with growth, profits, and clarity around the numbers, either profit coaching or virtual CFO, particularly online businesses, and a lot of my clients are e-commerce. And I tend to find that people in the online business world think a lot like I do in terms of, we want to write our own script, we want to travel, we want to see the world. Lifestyle is important, but also growth at the same time is important. So I love what I do. I love who I work with. DOWNLOAD THE PDF TRANSCRIPTION Online Business: The Begginings Yeah. So the online business world... When I was young, I heard about these things called jobs and careers and corporate ladde...