Gabriel Pfeifer and Kendall H. Shaw on the Keys to Growing Consumer-Focused Brands Online
Modern commerce is digital–and there are most likely hundreds, if not thousands, of brands selling products and services within the same industry or niche. The key to growing your consumer-focused brand then, begins with overcoming this competition.
Gabriel Pfeifer and Kendall H. Shaw have done just that. Together, they own, manage, and continue to grow three different companies. Their success comes from their attention to what the consumer needs and wants – it is consumer-focused. They overcome the competition by creating companies that meet more consumer needs.
Each one of their three companies plays off the other. They saw a problem in an industry, created a company to meet it, and then seeing where else they could meet related needs, created another company. And so on.
This is serial entrepreneurship at its most competent. So, if you are looking to grow your online consumer brand, follow these strategies that come directly from Gabriel and Ken’s success.
Make Your Products for the Customer
When you create your business, develop your products or services to solve a specific problem for the customer. It is about what you can do for them.
Before becoming a serial entrepreneur, Gabriel worked as a door-to-door salesman at a smarthome company. He saw that salesmen were struggling with certain problems, especially closing deals.
So, when he left, he made sure that the service he was selling would be a no-brainer for the customer.
When you develop your online brand to meet a specific problem, you will not have to worry about finding clients or customers, and closing deals will be much easier.
This applies to growing your online brand as well. See what other problems you can solve for that existing clientele.
“The easiest people to sell to are the people you’ve sold to before,” says Gabriel.
Gabriel saw that closing deals was a problem across industries. So, after connecting with Kendall, the two founded a call center that allowed clients to focus their time on closing the deals.
So, when trying to grow your online brand, it is not always about expanding your clientele base. It is also key to expanding your services for your existing clientele.
Do this, and you will find the customers will come to you.
Make Sure Every Job that Needs Doing is Accounted For
You can’t grow your online business when you are working in your business.
Gabriel and Kendall manage three separate endeavors. They can do this – while pursuing other opportunities – because they make sure everything is accounted for.
This means hiring the staff you need, creating the SOPs to make sure employees are performing their tasks correctly and with competency, and ensuring that discipline and vision are communicated.
By doing this, Gabriel and Kendall were able to build business after business. They did not waste time doing the day-to-day work; they spent their time creating partnerships, pursuing other opportunities for them to expand, and essentially “pulling the profit levers.”
As the leader, manager, owner, or CEO of an online brand, it is essential you work for your business, not on it.
Returning to hiring staff, Gabriel and Kendall also accounted for the modern digital age, which now permeates modern consumerism.
They found and hired their Head of Accounts, Head Salesman, and Operations Manager through social media.
Social media is no longer just a social and entertainment industry – it is a business one as well. When you can leverage your personal and professional relationships through them to fill in gaps in your business, you can focus on working for your business and not on it.
Vision and discipline are also something any online brand owner must account for. What is the vision of your business? What are the consequences of not meeting expectations?
In an age where people work from home, online, or just not together in a traditional office, it is easy for complacency to set in. As the leader, you need to provide your employees a vision of where the company is going and how they will benefit, and you need to let them know that there are consequences when they do not pull their weight.
This is how you become the owner of a brand that grows. Account for everything so you can work on your business, do this, and you can follow in Gabriel Pfeifer and Kendall H. Shaw’s footsteps as serial entrepreneurs.
Make the Initial Investments and Sacrifices You Need to Make to Get Started, Then Improve Upon Them
Before Kendall joined Gabriel in becoming three-business entrepreneurs, he had his own eCommerce store. To fund it in its initial stages, he worked at Chick-fil-A.
Kendall made the initial sacrifice and investment he needed to make to grow his eCommerce store. And he did. Within a few months, he was averaging over $30,000 in revenue a month.
So, when growing your online brand, it is essential to follow Kendall’s example. Make the initial investment, and accept the sacrifice needed to make it happen.
Once Kendall teamed up with Gabriel, that investment and sacrifice carried on. They continued to optimize it and hired a full team of employees. Through investing in their businesses, accounting for everything, and tailoring their growth to industries and clients they already had a relationship with, Gabriel and Kendall were able to scale quickly.
You make the initial investment to get you started, and that empowers you to do everything else.
Sacrifice is also part of that initial investment, however, and it relates to vision. When Gabriel and Kendall were building their companies, they made the sacrifice of a small profit in the short term for a larger profit in the long term.
They paid their employees more than themselves and reinvested a majority of their profits into their business. Without that reinvestment, there would be no growth. That is how you grow an online brand.
As seen by Gabriel and Kendall’s success, growing an online brand is more than paid advertising. It starts from the first ideation.
If you would like to learn more about Gabriel Pfeifer and Kendal H. Shaw you can follow them on their respective Instagram accounts.
