In this episode of the 2X eCommerce Podcast, Kunle Campbell speaks with Matt Putra, fractional CFO and founder of 8X, about strategies to scale eCommerce businesses profitably in 2025. With experience across 60+ eCommerce and CPG brands, Matt shares the transformative power of scorecards for operational clarity and accountability. These simple tools help businesses identify issues early, enabling them to solve problems before they impact performance.
Matt also explores the growing role of AI in boosting business efficiency—from reducing customer service headcount to automating creative processes and training teams. The discussion emphasizes how businesses can achieve more with existing resources, offering practical steps to improve ROI, scalability, and team alignment.
Listeners will learn actionable strategies to create and implement scorecards, effectively track metrics, and leverage AI agents for specific use cases. This conversation is a must-listen for operators looking to build lean, efficient, and high-performing teams while navigating the complexities of 2025.
—-
Exciting news for our listeners! Kunle Campbell, your host and e-commerce expert, has just released his new book: ‘E-Commercer Growth Strategy.’ This essential guide is packed with strategies for attracting shoppers, building community, and retaining customers in the e-comerce space. Drawing on insights from the 2X eCommerce podcast and Kunle’s extensive experience, this book is a must-read for anyone in the e-commerce industry.
This episode is brought to you by:
1️⃣ REVIEWS.io
↳ Drive Sales & Reduce Marketing Spending with REVIEWS.io
REVIEWS.io offers an affordable, all-in-one platform for collecting and displaying customer reviews. It’s easy for you to set up and simple for your customers to leave reviews, helping you boost both trust and conversions from anyone discovering your brand on Google.
With REVIEWS.io, you can increase your Google conversions by up to 26%, improve click-through rates, and lower your ad costs—all with a platform built for busy eCommerce operators like you.
To find out more, head over to Reviews.io
Get 10% off your first year—use the could ‘2x’ when you sign up or click here.
New customers only. Terms and conditions apply.
[00:00:00]
Matt Putra: basically the fulfillment center had a problem that no one foresaw and stopped fulfilling and it took them two weeks to notice, one week to fly there, one week to fix it. But if they have a scorecard, they’d see it in the same week where fulfillment dropped off, fly there faster, fix it faster.
They may be, they cost themselves 150 grand by not having a scorecard
Mhm.
Matt Putra: If everything is green, the business should feel like a dream to run. And if things are red, ideally, if something’s red, it predicts a problem two to four weeks away
Mhm.
Matt Putra: The name of the game for 2025 is squeezing more ROI from every area of the business. I would say another thing people would be doing. Is going, how do I get more from what I have I think to me, that feels like one of the big questions for this year, we’ve been working with doing some AI automation and stuff
mhm.
Kunle Campbell: So in this episode of the 2X eCommerce podcast, we dive into the power of [00:01:00] scorecards, AI driven efficiency, and proven strategies to help you scale profitably and navigate 2025 with confidence.
This is the 2X eCommerce Podcast hosted by Kunle Campbell.
Kunle Campbell: Welcome to the 2X eCommerce podcast.
Kunle Campbell: The show where we bring you actionable insights and proven strategies to help you grow your business and thrive in today’s fast paced e-commerce landscape on today’s episode, I’m joined by Matt portray. Who’s a fractional CFO and founder of eight X. He’s worked with over 60 brands across e-commerce CPG and beyond. With his wealth of experience, much shares how business owners can maximize their ROI. And efficiency using scorecards. A simple, yet very transformative system that brings clarity. Accountability and operational [00:02:00] alignment to your team. We also dive into the cotton edge role of AI in e-commerce operations, from reducing customer service headcounts. To generating in creative assets and even training your team. More effectively, you’ll hear actionable strategies that will empower you to scale profitably. And avoid costly mistakes and squeeze every bit of value out of your existing resources.
So if you’re looking to exit or scale in 2025, this episode is packed with takeaways you can implement right away. Before we jump right in, make sure you follow 2X eCommerce podcast on your favorite platform. Your support always allows us bring on exceptional guests like Matt and deliver impactful content week after week.
Let’s get started.
Hey, Matt, welcome to the 2xEcommerce podcast.
Matt Putra: [00:03:00] Thank you so much for having me, couldn’t we?
Kunle Campbell: Brilliant. It’s been, what, we’re in 2025 now. And I think the last time we properly got to catch up was in 2022 over one of those commerce Excel conferences, I guess.
Matt Putra: Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.
Kunle Campbell: And it was all virtual. So, so how are you? How are you, my friend? How’s it going?
Matt Putra: I’m good. It’s been ups and downs past year. Past two years but we’re feeling really good now. Yeah.
Kunle Campbell: Okay. Amazing. Amazing. So, so most people may not have sort of heard or know you. Some, some may, some, some of you not. Do you want to give a quick intro as to what you do and what 8x is all about?
Matt Putra: You got it. So I’m a fractional CFO, right? I was a CFO and a senior partner in a private equity group. And then a friend of mine in the e commerce asked for some help with their business. So I helped him and his wife. And then their friend asked for help and that friend asked for help. And anyway, that was way more fun than corporate.
So I left this private equity group. I left my senior [00:04:00] partnership. And I started working as a fractional CFO prominently for e commerce companies. And so since 2020, 2020 is when I left that full time. I’ve now worked with 60 brands in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia. I work with e commerce and CPG companies.
Basically, The owners have a vision and my job is to make sure they have the resources it takes to get to where they want to go and a lot of people want to exit and so helping them through that process, helping them deal with their acquirer. We usually have a broker as well but we help them manage all the different ups and downs of getting from where they are now to where they want to go.
Kunle Campbell: Okay. Makes sense. So if I, for instance, wanted to sell my business, have this goal to sell my business in the next two years, I bring you in and you get that financial engineering in place. So that I’m at the best valuation possible for that exit in the two year horizon. So we’re really [00:05:00] maximizing that a bit down and, you know, the seller
Matt Putra: Exactly. And it’s good that you mentioned two years that’s probably the best amount of time to bring me in or my company in before you exit. One year is okay. Two years better because then we can do things like we can increase your valuation by adding operational items as well. Do all your teams meet weekly?
Does everybody understand the plan, the vision? If that’s true, you actually can get more sort of points in your valuation.
Kunle Campbell: Hmm.
Kunle Campbell: So you, you, you touched base on the fact that you work across three, three major geos, which is Canada, United States and England, what’s a, what’s a nuance of Businesses across the board. How do you adjust when you’re speaking to a Canadian e commerce team versus a UK or are you one in the same? What?
What?
Matt Putra: No, it’s not the same. I would say that Canadians and people in the UK [00:06:00] are a bit more conservative and even in the UK, a bit more conservative than in Canada it’s probably, a bit of a stereotype that people in the U. S. They are gunslingers and they’re cavalier, but, and they are not in a, in a worrisome way or anything, but I would say people in the U.
S. Are. Just ready to go all the time. If an idea sounds good, if it looks good, they’re ready to go. People in Canada and the UK typically want to make sure they understand all the ins and outs and nothing wrong with that, just a bit different. But it does, we mean to tailor our approach a little bit.
Yeah.
Kunle Campbell: Interesting. Interesting.
Kunle Campbell: And then how you were speaking earlier, you’re like the head counts of your, of your eight X, which is the agency name, the fractional, you know, I’m CFO agency name is grown. Where have you made these hires? W how have you grown to tell us that growth trajectory to 24 members?
Matt Putra: Yeah. When we met Kunle probably I had three or four of [00:07:00] us and now we have 24 people. We have been hiring the best we can find from anywhere in the world that they are. Right now we have probably 10 people in the Philippines, maybe a bit more. We have four people in Argentina. We have one guy in Australia.
We have three of us in Canada and I don’t know what that adds up to but we’re all over the place. We. We use workable for hiring, but a lot of my best hires were made through recruiters and or referrals. And now we’re starting to figure out how to hire through like a platform software effectively, but that’s been a growth journey since day one, that one.
Kunle Campbell: Hmm. Super impressive.
Kunle Campbell: And so what kind of businesses do you work with? And besides building for exits, what are, what’s other objectives to founders come to you guys for for help? Mm
Matt Putra: kind of businesses? We’re talking e commerce. We work with a number of verticals in e commerce. [00:08:00] We don’t really choose really, but we have beauty. We have kids apparel, health supplements, like a number of different
Kunle Campbell: hmm.
Matt Putra: even cleaning products. And we also work with CPG businesses, again, the same different verticals, and we’re starting to work with a bit of clean tech and green tech as well.
I find that really interesting people doing better for the world. And I would say like size of businesses anywhere from 2 million to a hundred million now. So we have a couple of clients that are around a hundred million a year in U. S. dollar revenue and presents its own challenges when you work with people that big, but.
It’s been really great. And again, most people want to exit at some point and the other time people come to us typically is when there’s an issue. Maybe they’re. They’ve been growing and they’ve been managing it all really well now. And as they’re continuing to grow, they’re starting to, there’s more confusion.
They’re not sure what they’re, what the right next step is. There’s confusion about like, where do they go next? Where do they invest their money? What [00:09:00] part of the business do they invest their money in? Some people are running low on cash and freaking out and they call us and we help them solve that.
And some people are again, really they, Thinking early about problems. So they come to us, they go, we want to exit in two to four years. Let’s work together now to make sure that we understand how to do this the best. So that happens as well. And people that everything’s a okay, they don’t need us, of course.
Usually not,
Kunle Campbell: So, so it’s, it’s just down to efficiency, you know, just getting that efficiency in place. separates a, so I’m assuming everybody’s profitable, right? Just, just on that baseline. So what separates a good, say 5 million in revenue business from a great 100 million in revenue business. And just assuming that there’s profitability on both sides.
That’s what. From a financial point of view, what, what, what is the, the difference?[00:10:00]
Matt Putra: Good question.
Matt Putra: The bigger companies have figured out, pardon me, how to delegate Decision making to other people than the owners, of course, that’s, if you look at a 5 million company, typically the owners are involved in almost everything and that’s just how growth happens. But to go from there to a hundred million, there’s a lot of steps along the way.
One of them though is product market fit, right? Like at a hundred million, you have product market fit. People love you. They love what you have. You don’t need to have many products to get to a hundred million. You do need to your audience needs to love what you do. And in terms of running the business, people like to think that the bigger guys have it all figured out.
They don’t, we don’t, everybody’s figuring it out. But the diff, one of the differences is that the CEOs or the owners of those businesses have figured out how to [00:11:00] hire and find very smart people and let them do their thing. That’s one of the big ones is just how do you get that talent and how do you let them do their thing?
That would be the, that would be the biggest thing that I would notice as a difference, right?
Kunle Campbell: So, so people supported by, by I would assume very strong systems, very robust systems.
Matt Putra: sometimes not honestly, sometimes not. Yes, I would say not all cases that obviously there are, like, you can’t just get to a hundred million without systems, right? You have systems, but it doesn’t feel like a lot. They’re robust always, and maybe that’s the difference. Maybe they are more robust than the 5, 000, 000 company.
They probably have to be right, but it doesn’t feel like it’s all under control. It really doesn’t. Yeah, I think you’re right. The, by necessity, the systems have to be better, of course, because you’re selling multiple orders, magnitude more, but it doesn’t feel like it. It still feels like you’re [00:12:00] putting out fires.
It still feels like you’re running around with a chicken with your head cut off. It still feels like people don’t know what you really want from them. Yeah, but the big difference is that, when I worked with, there’s an 80 million company I work with. They had a team of five executives, including myself.
They let us do our thing. They let us do what we thought was best for the company in our departments and our verticals. And it worked really well. Yeah. And they held us accountable, right?
Oh, are you muted?
Kunle Campbell: I’m sorry. I’ll just fix that. I’ll just fix that and we’ll edit this out. Speaking of accountability, how What, how do you hold people accountable, particularly when they’re high performing, a high performing, you know players,
Matt Putra: That is a really good question. The best answer I have to that is using scorecards. [00:13:00] And when I say scorecard, I don’t mean that you just, pick any number of things that you can measure. I don’t mean you let them pick all their own things. But when I talk about scorecards, I mean for each department or team, there are 5 to 15 things that are the most important things for them, and they measure them weekly with weekly targets.
And if you do that, and if you then review them and the all team, so what you do is you start with an executive team one, so you get your executives together and use this very simple thought experiment, but you get them to pick five to 15 things that they care about. And it’s things like cash balance could be on time fulfillment, but whatever the 15 things are where.
If you were on an island with no Wi Fi or cell service and you got a letter with the scorecard, you could decide effectively, do you go back home to help or do you just stay on the island because everything’s okay, right? If everything’s green, it’s great. If things are red, you have to go home and help.[00:14:00]
And if you choose those effectively at the executive level, it’s easy then to roll them through every other team. So let’s say the executive team has one, the marketing team might have ones that match some of those or support some of those. The operations team would have supportive metrics. And so everybody will know.
And you measure these things weekly and they’re red or they’re green. Nothing else, no yellow, no, nothing. They’re red or they’re green. And so let’s say customer NPS is on the executive scorecard and let’s say our target is 8. 2 out of 10. If it’s above or at 8. 2, the thing is green. We don’t talk about it.
If it’s below 8. 2, we talk about it. Somebody has to solve the problem. And if you do that with five, 50 different things for the executive team, And every team, typically you can let them do their thing and you’ll know when things go red because your system will flag things as red and they’re supposed to automatically solve them.
But if they don’t, you’ll see it [00:15:00] on their scorecard. You know what I mean? So that is first and foremost, the best way to get accountability throughout your teams.
Kunle Campbell: how does it compare to a dashboard because it’s the,
Matt Putra: Yeah, great
Kunle Campbell: the dashboards have have numbers that they’re also metrics in a dashboard for, for each department.
Matt Putra: That’s a good question, because most people have dashboards first. Everyone that I work with, most people have dashboards first. The thing about dashboards is this. You have pie charts, you have trend lines, you have bar charts. But there’s, most people can’t look at a dashboard and know what to do and know what’s wrong.
Only the very best and brightest people in your company can look at a dashboard and know what’s wrong. And sometimes that’s only the owners. Because there’s nothing to you that says fix me or something’s wrong, right? There’s no flashing red lights on a scorecard. There’s flashing red lights. It’s very simple.
Anybody at any [00:16:00] level in your business can use a scorecard. Only the best and brightest in your company can use a dashboard effectively because they’ll understand. The pie chart looked like this last month, looks like this month, something’s wrong. But if you don’t know that context or that nuance, you don’t know if anything’s wrong or the trend line.
The trend line’s doing this, it dipped. Do we talk about it? Do we not? Someone’s got to know Contextually, does that signal a problem? Does it not? Is it seasonal? Is it not? What does it mean? And if you have to ask all those questions of a chart, only the best people can use it. And it loses its effectiveness for keeping people accountable on a scorecard.
It’s red or it’s green. If it’s red, the owner of that number must jump up and down it and solve it. Or tell the executive team or their own team, Hey, something’s wrong with my number. I don’t know what’s wrong. I need help fixing it. You love to hear the stuff like that.
Kunle Campbell: yeah,
Matt Putra: And as an [00:17:00] executive or even the owner of a business.
You don’t use scorecards to beat people up with them. But if someone’s metrics are read consecutively weeks in a row and they can’t fix it, it could signify a people problem as well. So there’s a lot of uses for a scorecard where they are my favorite tool to get people accountable.
Kunle Campbell: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and what I’ve picked up is the simplicity for not just the stakeholder. But the operator who’s sitting there, which means that you could potentially manage different e commerce teams. Just imagine if you, you have multiple brands and multiple teams, you can essentially every Monday or whenever you have those calls, the weekly accountability calls, the meetings are just much more efficient in my opinion.
If, if you, you have a, you know, a green and red lights, you know, system and there.
Matt Putra: I have, it’s revolutionized how I run my own business. It has [00:18:00] revolutionized other people’s businesses that we work with as well. People just know what’s expected and they know when there’s a problem and they know when they have to talk to somebody about something and it just makes it so easy and the only thing then is have you picked the right numbers?
That can be harder to do, but as long as you’re willing to evolve over time, that will solve itself. Because ideally, right? If everything is green, the business should feel like a dream to run. And if things are red, ideally, if something’s red, it predicts a problem two to four weeks away, Sometimes it’s a live problem, fine.
If you can, begin to query the numbers. This one turned red and we had a problem right now. What would have turned red two weeks ago that signified this problem? And if you can ask those questions, get your place to a scorecard where it predicts problems, you’re laughing.
Kunle Campbell: Amazing. Amazing. Super interesting. So just to recap what you said, and please correct me [00:19:00] if, if, if I made any mistake on your scorecard, you, you have like you know, match, you’d have at least five metrics for, for operations, finance, marketing, any other categories? How would you categorize them? That that’s 15.
So, you know, metrics I’m, I’m counting now, would you, are there any other categories I’ve missed?
Matt Putra: I would say start with all the major functions of your business. So marketing, finance, sales, ops, start there. If you have a business that has other major things going on, add something for that. If there’s a team to do something, that scorecard. Start with the top and work your way down. So if you’re the owner, And you meet with people every week, that’s your executive team, make one for that team.
If those people have a team, make one for each of their teams. If there’s teams below that level, [00:20:00] make one for one of those teams. Every sort of manager should have a scorecard for their people. Anybody that’s managing a group of people should have a scorecard for that people, those group, that group of people.
And it would roll up all the way through.
Kunle Campbell: it makes sense. It cascades. Okay. Okay. And looking at it from again, just using the size, a what, what does a scorecard system look like for 5 million? Dollar and revenue e commerce business versus one doing 50 to 100 million. How, what complexities come into play or would, would that system for score cutting system for, for 5 million sort of carry them through as a scale 10 X over a period of time.
Matt Putra: the crazy thing about this is that the scorecard systems are essentially the same.
Kunle Campbell: Lovely.
Matt Putra: there’s more automated numbers. There’s probably different [00:21:00] types of numbers, but it’s the same system. At 5 million, you might have three, you might have a executive level scorecard. You might have a marketing one and operations, let’s say for 5 million, that would be enough.
If you do if people are doing sales, you’d have a sales one. And each one would have 5 to 15 things on it, right? And at the hundred million dollar one, you’re going to have executive. Marketing, sales, operations, IT, you’ll have customer service, you’ll have fulfillment, you’ll have logistics, you’ll have what else would we have?
Obviously finance one, you’ll have you might have one for brand, you might have one for retail, wholesale. So there’s just more scorecards, more of them, and sub ones below those you might have one for product development, R& D, things like that. So there’s more scorecards, but it’s the same system, the exact same system.
And that’s why this is a beautiful thing, because then everybody in the whole organization can know everybody has a number that they have to manage at least one, [00:22:00] right? And maybe in a bigger company where you have 200 people, not every single person has a metric, probably not, but in a 5, 000, 000 company, everybody has a metric, so that changes as well.
Kunle Campbell: So who owns the scorecards? I know you said, you know, every manager would own it, but who ensures that the scorecard system. Is robust enough for accountability. Is it the C O O C F O?
Matt Putra: Yeah, I would. Yeah, great question. Person number one, CEO has to be on board. Founder has to be on board. If they’re on board, someone else can do all the work and it’s not that hard. CFO or COO or both of them. If you have a COO typically that person would be the one that owns the scorecards throughout the organization.
The reason why is because typically, Yeah.
Matt Putra: They are more people than a CFO would be. They’re better at getting buy in and change management and all that [00:23:00] stuff. But if you don’t have a COO, your CFO, or even a fractional CFO can own these things for all your different teams, very short meetings, getting everybody on board is a few workshops.
It’s super easy and you get a VA just to fill it all in. Yeah, but somebody at the executive level would own the initiative and own the sort of system and the CEO just has to like sponsor it. And be okay with it. But yeah. Either one of those three people.
Kunle Campbell: It’s a good point. You just made with regards to the VA filling it because you know, garbage in garbage out.
Kunle Campbell: So what systems do you have in place to, to, to, to get in the most accurate numbers on time
Matt Putra: Great question. Everybody goes where do I get all the numbers from? Keep it simple. Do not automate first, get a VA, get them to find, and for each metric. You can record a video of you filling in the whole scorecard yourself And then you link the video at the top of the scorecard that the VA can do the same thing over and over make it really easy [00:24:00] And for each scorecard again Use loom record a video of you filling it all in one or two times Then your VA has an SOP done then just get a VA to do it Start simple.
I tell you, this is where everybody gets tripped up. They want to go, Oh, I want a super metrics or I’m going to use Looker or I’m going to pull data from Tableau or whatever. Don’t just get a VA or an admin person to put this in for you every week, once a week, start there. When you do that. Then you run this process for four, four weeks, let’s say as this process evolves, especially if you’re doing this for the first time, you will change metrics.
You’ll add new ones. Then maybe after two months, start automating some of it. If you want to,
Kunle Campbell: Okay.
Matt Putra: Biggest lesson I have there is I work with a very large company and I said, you guys need scorecards. I said, great, let’s do it. And I said, great. What are the metrics you want? And I did a workshop with their executive team of 10 people.
And we [00:25:00] got 30 metrics or so, and they said, cool, now we’re going to have a data science team put it all in two months later, it wasn’t done. And I said, fucking stop with data science team, excuse my language, get your VAs or admin team to do this by themselves. No more data science team. And the scorecard was done the next week, right?
Cause you just introduced complexity. Keep it simple. Just have an admin do it when the admins are too busy or when you’ve loved the scorecard Then have your data science team pick them off one by one But just get the numbers in because the faster you get it done the faster everybody spots problems you begin to predict better You catch problems faster.
There’s a client of mine where they lost probably 300 grand revenue Because their fulfillment center went to shit
Kunle Campbell: Hmm.
Matt Putra: basically the fulfillment center had a problem that no one foresaw and stopped fulfilling and it took them two weeks to notice, one week to fly [00:26:00] there, one week to fix it. But if they have a scorecard, they’d see it in the same week where fulfillment dropped off, fly there faster, fix it faster.
They might be, they may be, they cost themselves 150 grand by not having a scorecard.
Kunle Campbell: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, I see the, you know, the reason why you had so many categories for like the 50 million company versus the 5 million, because they’re essentially units of the business, the, you know, fulfillment is fulfillment now, and you, it has to have metrics to to, to work by. Which, you know, which sort of score, which scores it literally, which scores it.
Kunle Campbell: So this, this podcast is is video first now. So we, we were on YouTube and Spotify has actually started allowing us, you know, publish videos. So for those people. Who are watching this, do you have like a quick example? I’m a visual person. I understand the green lights, green and red thing, but it’d be fantastic to, to do that.
And I’ll, [00:27:00] I’ll share, I’ll probably share a screenshot of this in, in the show notes, but yeah, it would be fantastic if you could sort of share your screen and then let’s see, see what a.
Matt Putra: I will
Kunle Campbell: scorecard looks like if you can.
Matt Putra: I’m pulling it up now. Can you see this okay?
Kunle Campbell: Yes. So I could see a spreadsheet which has the first column is all metrics. So you have executive and then markets in those categories. You have an owner.
Matt Putra: And how’s the size for you?
Kunle Campbell: it’s fine. It’s huge. It’s yeah, it’s, it’s huge. So, so these are the dates, weekly dates, because I could see 13, 20th of December, 27th, so this is weekly.
Okay.
Matt Putra: Yeah, weekly. So again, scorecards are weekly because if you wait for your monthly financials, you’re actually getting them weekly. two weeks, one week if you’re awesome, but two to three weeks if you’re bigger after the month is over. So you’ve already lost a month. So get a scorecard. I would do [00:28:00] scorecards before you do before you do like financials and pants reports, do those first.
But anyway. So this would be an executive level one for a smaller company because typically if it’s a bigger company, you wouldn’t have like another marketing one here, but you have your what are the metrics are in the first column? Who owns them on second column? So you can see that you own a few of these actually I own some, John owns some. And the next column over tells you, do you want this number to be more or less than your target?
Kunle Campbell: okay. So it’s a Q. So it’s greater or lesser.
Matt Putra: yeah. So this target in column E, so let’s say we look at cash balance, right? We want $265,000, US as our minimum cash balance.
Kunle Campbell: the target.
Matt Putra: greater right, and what the greater or lesser does is it tells it when to go red or yellow or red or green.
So if I change this to this one, it goes other way around.
Kunle Campbell: Okay.
Matt Putra: So you want it to be greater than this number. There’s a cash conversion cycle one here [00:29:00] 90 days.
Matt Putra: We want it to be less than 90 days So this flags now when it’s over 90 days So the way that this works is on your weekly meeting if all you do is this give you a very simple icebreaker Always do an icebreaker always check in personally If you don’t do that, then you just get corporate and boring and terrible always do something nice, right? And then you go scorecard and you just go to the week that you’re on this one and you go green red. Okay, Matt. Why isn’t that cash flow red? I’ll go. Here’s why it’s red. They go. How are you getting it back to green? This is I’m getting back to green. How are you going to make sure it doesn’t go right again?
This is how I’m going to make sure it doesn’t go right again. Cool. And then we go, okay, green. Okay. Gabby contribution margin per order. What happened? Why is it red? How are you making it go green? How are you gonna make sure it doesn’t go red again in the future? Cool. Great. And yours, couldn’t they, you might say, guys, I’m trying to figure this out, but I don’t know what happened and I need some help.
And honestly, if someone tells you that, that’s [00:30:00] gold because you want transparency, you want honesty, you want people to put their hands up when they have a problem. And so if you say to them, look, I’m not sure what’s going on, then we go, let’s root cause this together. And then you do a root cause analysis and you figure it out.
And you move on and you go green, cool, green, cool. My NCAC not
Kunle Campbell: Clark landed. Mm.
Matt Putra: Yeah. Yeah. I have a blended CAC NCAC and new customer acquisition costs. And so that one’s red. And so we got to go what happened there, John? And he goes, I don’t know. So then we do a root cause together and we, then we go great.
ALV what happened here? And he goes, this is what happened, what I’m going to do, blah, blah, blah. And anyway, from there, you didn’t just document the to do’s. So what these people have agreed on to fix these numbers, we have a separate page where you say that look, people assist dues, but Matt is going to call the bank, Matt’s going to
call the wholesaler to get the money faster, whatever, then all those to do’s by the end of the next seven days, [00:31:00] those to dues should already be done.
And then this thing should be back to green. If it’s not, talk about it again. But if they’re all green next week, you go green, everybody’s green, great, done, meeting over. Move quickly.
Kunle Campbell: It is so simple, but highly effective because the accountability cycles are weekly. So to, to the audience, to anyone listening or watching this, this is what you have to do in 2025. You have to start scorecarding in 2025. It’s. It’s, yeah, it’s a game changer. It’s a literal game changer. So glad to, to, to, to have you on.
Yeah. So, so glad Matt.
Matt Putra: And we’ve been running workshops for to get these set up for people. And for your audience, can they, if I’m happy to run, a couple ones for, at no cost for your audience if you’d like. And so I don’t know if I can give you a link, like it would be 8x. co slash [00:32:00] scorecard, but I can give you a link for your audience to click on.
And I’ll do, I can’t do everybody cause it’s actually all, it’s like Multiple hours and multiple days of work, but I’ll do,
Kunle Campbell: one to one or one to many to, to, to, to an audience?
Matt Putra: that’s an interesting question. I could do it as a one to many, but I was initially offering one to one, whatever you think, to be
Kunle Campbell: Okay. Okay.
Matt Putra: But yeah, I could do two of them at no cost.
Kunle Campbell: That’s phenomenal.
Matt Putra: give you a link. Yeah,
Kunle Campbell: I will, I will, I’ll share, I’ll share the link. I’ll share the link in the show notes. So, so to everybody listening, you, you can get Matt’s one to one. Essentially building out what your scorecard should look like for free. It’s fantastic, Matt. Thanks. I didn’t see that one coming.
Matt Putra: We, we’ve done a number of these workshops and people really like them and then they walk out of them with the executive one and any of their departments get done. All of them get done.
Kunle Campbell: Okay. Appreciate it. Nice. Nice one. Okay. So let’s jump right in.
Kunle Campbell: So in regards to the [00:33:00] outlook for 2025 what should operators and founders just Be cognizant of, to be more efficient.
Matt Putra: Yeah. , I think the name of the game for 2025 is squeezing more ROI from every area of the business. , And, , obviously we’re talking about , scorecards will help with that, but I would say another thing people would be doing. Is going, how do I get more from what I have or yeah, and that’s, I think to me, that feels like one of the big questions for this year, we’ve been working with doing some AI automation and stuff. People should be looking at how do they get more from what they already have. Don’t add more headcount. If you’re gonna get the tool, it should multiply many times over what the cost of the tool would be. But I think, we, you, while you and I both intimately know that banks are not very here for you right now.
In this, they haven’t been since 2022 and they’re still not really [00:34:00] there for you. And so essentially people should consider that they’re on their own in their business and they’re not going to get bailed out by a bank. And they’re not going to get bailed out by a lender. So your business has to get more for what it has.
You, if you’re not profitable, you have to get profitable. If you are profitable, you have to stay profitable and scale profitably. And so how do you get more from the people, from the tools, from the assets you already have?
Matt Putra: Obviously AI is a big part of that. Everybody should be looking at AI. People should be playing with it every single day.
You should be picking off small use cases and making agents to do those all the time. Somebody on your team should be thinking about AI all the time right now because you can get more, you can get more. We instead of hiring a sales coach for one of my team members, I built them a custom agent. And this agent acts like an e commerce owner and they text [00:35:00] it and it responds.
And if they ask for information too fast, it says, Oh, sorry, we’re done our conversation over. And then another agent will coach them on that conversation. So I could have hired a sales coach, but I just built an agent, an AI agent for this. So everybody should be looking at making agents for very specific use cases.
I don’t know when we’ll see agents do a lot of things broadly, but right now make a specific use case. Make an agent for it. It’s way easier than you’d think. You can use make. com Zapier. You can get your AI key from chat to PT. It is it is quite easy to do these things. AI generated creative you should be talking to the AI all the time.
Again, get more out of the same, assets and resources that you have today. I think that’s the name of the game for 2025.
Kunle Campbell: That’s a fantastic point you made about AI agents. Very, very, yeah. Very important. Very important.
Matt Putra: Yeah,
Kunle Campbell: Where would [00:36:00] you start? Like, so, so on a blank canvas, I’m assuming some people, where’s the first place to get the best bang for your buck. I I’ve, I’ve used AI. And in certain things I’m doing, and it’s, it’s, it’s an, it’s a game changer, but for, for, for an operator, where should they sort of start, start an AI agent right
Matt Putra: for e commerce, I would suggest customer service. There are people who’ve already made really good ones. You can probably buy the blueprint for them. People can build you one for 3 to 5k anyway. We actually have built some for 3k. But um, again, that’s where I’d start. You can look at make.
com. You can probably find someone’s blueprint and buy it. You can probably hire somebody from Upwork to make it for you. But again, you can pipe all this, all your reviews and you can gorgeous and all these different things can be connected to this agent. And that’s the first place that I would [00:37:00] start.
There’s a company called Dewar jeans.
Kunle Campbell: Do a,
Matt Putra: Yeah, do her jeans. D U E R. They’re doing mid eight figures, I believe, and they have two customer service people because of AI. And there are brands that are drastically reducing their customer service headcount because of AI. That’s probably the easiest place to start from there.
One more use case would be maybe creative. I know that I don’t know how to do that myself, but people are using AI creative and to generate multiple creatives at the same time with multiple angles.
Kunle Campbell: yeah. I
You can even with, you can even use normal creatives, right. But you could, you could have like 50 variations of the hook with AI.
And plug it into, because if, if like an ad is working, you know, could it work more efficiently with better hooks? And that could be AI generated fairly quickly and very [00:38:00] decently.
Matt Putra: here’s one. So you could go. You could have an agent that receives your reviews and it analyzes reviews and it tells you when there’s a trend or it goes very good reviews. It goes, here’s a hook based on this good review and it just does this automatically. It does it all day, every day, whenever reviews received, it looks at that review plus others and goes, here’s a trend or based on this review.
Here’s the three hooks you could use for
Kunle Campbell: Yeah.
Matt Putra: that’s a very simple one.
Kunle Campbell: and the beauty of it is like, if you could then get the AI to monitor, if it’s been actioned or not, you could scorecard it. You know, you could scorecard that. So
Matt Putra: The AI could go, the AI could go here’s the review, drop it into Asana, your project management, and do something about it. Or it could go in Gorgias. Yeah, you can even have, probably, I think, that look at Gorgias and go, is there a trend of things not getting done? Or what are the types of things that are not getting done?
Or what’s the lag? And [00:39:00] there’s so many things you could do. But I would say people should start with a very specific use case. I started with something very specific. My first agent was a sales thing. I got a script from a business owner named Dan Martell, actually for their sales scripting.
And I told the agent, Hey, here’s the best way to do this. Please coach my team. And it did it like hyper specific, right?
Kunle Campbell: So, so this, this, this agent was, was, was listening in to calls of your
Matt Putra: No, you have to talk to it. Like you have to chat it on SMS or on, like on you have to type it, type to it. I don’t know how to make a voice one personally. I have people on my team know how to do that. I don’t want to do it. But yeah, you just make, you go to chat QPT, you get an enterprise thing. And you go create a custom agent, and then there’s a screen that pops up where you can tell the agent what to do. So it goes, Hey, what do you want me to do? And when you go, I want you to be a sales coach, it goes, great. How should I think about that? You tell it, think about it this way.
And then you can say, should I have any files? Give it this file. This is a file on how somebody should [00:40:00] communicate with a potential lead. I want you to act like that lead. They go, great. And it took me a couple hours of talking to it to figure this out and tuning it. But now my person can go, can pretend that this is a lead on LinkedIn and DM, DM the lead. if they do it right, they get a phone number. And if they don’t do it right, the lead goes, I’m sorry, conversation over. Yeah. So
Kunle Campbell: it’s literally training. It’s sales training literally. Yeah.
Matt Putra: Sales training, literally sales training, very specific use case. But again, I’m not like a AI expert, but
Kunle Campbell: What’s the starting
Matt Putra: if you start specific, just start with something hyper specific when you do that, you’ll go, Oh shit, I could do that.
And that, and you will then just do more stuff, but start with something easier, start with something specific, start with something you need right now.
Kunle Campbell: I agree.
Kunle Campbell: Matt, it’s just wrapping up. It’s, it’s been a, before it was, [00:41:00] it’s been a fascinating conversation. And I’m glad this is happening at the start of the year. And for people who want to find out more about scorecarding, I will link to, to, to link you provide me to, to, to the one on one really, really appreciate your time on, on the pod.
You know, and, you know, best, best of luck in, in 2025.
Matt Putra: This was awesome. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah
Mhm.
Kunle Campbell: Brilliant. Thank you. So thank you for tuning into this episode of the 2X eCommerce podcast. I hope you found my conversation with Matt. Intra as inspiring an actionable as I did. Whether it’s implementing scorecards for clarity and accountability or leveraging AI to boost efficiency. The insights shed today are designed to help you scale profitably and succeed in 2025.
If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review. Sharon gets with your network also helps us [00:42:00] contribute to growth. And bring you more transformative conversations until next time. Keep taking bold steps to grow your e-commerce business. And thank you for listening.