Growing a brand from £6m to £50m with data

Speaker A: What do today's fastest growing direct to consumer brands all have in common? They use Klaviyo to personalize their marketing, build their customer relationships and automate their online sales. Whether it's a new subscriber or your most loyal customer, growing your e commerce business starts with creating amazing marketing experiences. Discover winning marketing strategies in Klaviyo's new video series, Ready Set Grow. Each week you'll explore key tactics of some um, of Klaviyo's more than 17,000 customers who use these to grow their business. To tune in to Ready Set Grow and to receive even more helpful content, visit klaviyo.comblend that's k l a v I y o um.com v l e N D. Data got sexy. Yep. I know for a fact that everyone listening right now has become far more interested in data from your store over the past 12 months. But the question is, are we actually using it properly and are we seeing results from what we're doing with it now? Of course I wanted to get someone on the show who give us perspective on this and um, well, we've hit the bloody jackpot today. Now not only is our guest a tech founder who's created a tool for retailers, but he's also the managing director of a multinational retailer that he grew from 6 million to 50 million a year. Pretty good, eh? So, ladies and gentlemen, it's an absolute pleasure to welcome Oliver Spark. He's the founder, uh, of SuiteAnalytics to the show. Oliver, great to have you here.

Speaker B: Thank you Adam. It's very nice to be here. Delighted to talk about data. Nothing better.

Speaker A: I suggested at the start, uh, is data's got sexy. And I think the reason I said that is because probably like you've seen, there seems to be a lot more in terms of conversations around data than there were maybe five or six years ago where it was kind of seemed a bit of ah, a, uh, nice to have. Now obviously now people are talking about it. Does that mean that we are all data pros and what we're sourced when it comes to data?

Speaker B: No, I think to be honest, little progress has been made. I know I'm not going to be on screen on your podcast, but I'm very old. Um, and so I've been around for a long time where data has always been core to uh, in my view on how brands have been growing. And so I think there's actually been less progress than you probably expect. It carries on being the sort of age old oil data, it just doesn't really Work quite like that. I still think actually people just feel a bit overwhelmed by the whole topic and there are more data sources, more bits of data. Um, so I don't yet feel that actually are people really driving their business with data, uh, any more than they were your example five years ago?

Speaker A: Do you think it's because there are, there seems to be a lot of tools and a lot of talk about it. But is the real crux of the matter then is that people are still missing fundamentally what they're supposed to be doing with the data? Is that, is that the core issue?

Speaker B: I think so. Uh, and I think the overwhelmed point exactly that there are a lot of platforms in the current bit. You've got GA3 changing over to GA4, that'll cause a world of confusion. But you know you've got the constant problem you've always had is that you've always had the native platform. So whether that's Google, Facebook, kvo, whichever of them, all reporting a different number and I think people's confidence in what that number is has actually gone down rather than up. So the age old analogy I've always given and being a retailer myself, I used to wander around going to my agencies and I'd walk out of each of them happy because they told me I'd got a million pounds worth of sales. But I then got home and I've been to three agencies, I got £3 million worth of sales but I only had a million in the till. So that's the same old problem that's never changed. But particularly with the Facebook changes and things like that, I think just actually some of people's confidence in the native platforms has taken a dive. People begin to think they're really sort of attribution can all be solved, um, when I know we're going to come on to that later on. But it's still really complex and it only gets more complex at the moment.

Speaker A: I think that's a good place to start in terms of stripping it back a little bit. There are so many different elements to what we're talking about here in terms of the data itself, the application of it, the use of it, so many different levels. But from a very basic perspective to those retailers listening, what do retailers generally miss when it comes to starting to look at data? Like are they jumping ahead to levels before they should do? Are they missing a particular area of data that is, is really valuable? Because look, you've been there, you've done it, you've been at the cold case. That's where I Guess where kind of sweet analytics came from? What is that thing that they need to revisit?

Speaker B: Yeah, the number one thing that I find the big gap in life is that they don't have a customer based forecast. So we call it the growth model in suite world. But you know, it's exactly how I grew the white company X years ago. And in those days I called it the magic spreadsheet because for me that was when I actually understood what I was doing. I had a really simple, um, incentive scheme when I joined the Wex company. I had to grow it at 40% a year and even I could go 1.4 times five because I had a five year incentive scheme. But you know, but actually how on earth do I deliver that actually only became clear when I understand about customer metrics. Because we all know that DTC businesses are a funnel. You keep pouring a whole lot in the top and what drops out the bottom, but actually how many you need to pour in at the top each year and then what's the impact of when you pour them in? Because actually they then that impacts your future years. And that for me is the fundamental that most people don't get. So so often I'm sure you do the same. You meet a founder and he wants to grow from 1 million to 5 million or 10 to 50. It's exactly the same principles or even 500 to a million. You've got to be able to understand fundamentally what the customer metrics of your business are.

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker B: And ultimately once you understand what you might get from the existing pot, it normally comes down to how many customers do you need to recruit? And that is the number one number that most people, I reckon about 80% of my conversations I say to someone, do you have a budget? Yes. Do you know how many new customers you need to recruit uh, to get that budget? And I reckon probably 20% of people are uh, able to answer that question and the next one which is do you know how much it costs to acquire a customer?

Speaker A: I, I wanted to actually go into this a little bit more you because one of the things that I've noticed from I guess agency life is over the past probably, I would say two years. I'm now talking to where it used to be like go and talk to the E Commerce Director. Now I'm talking to the head of acquisition, head of retention and then I've also probably got the chief Commercial Officer and then maybe an MD or a CEO as well. It's a, a very odd scenario I think when you've got Head of acquisition and head retention, you say, right. What is the KPI? What is the metric that you wanted to try and hit as an agency? Both of um, them kind of saying different things. Do you find that when you're talking to these guys and how do you kind of deal with that? From being a platform that can probably show them all, but how do you sort of, how do you get them to speak and get together? Uh, so they both win out of that scenario?

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a, it's a really good scenario. Exactly that. It's a problem that we all come across, um, and I think even you know, on a smaller business level in people's heads, if you're, if you're a single one man band, you got to have that same conversation. Just, just got less people, less people, um, in the mix. And it all comes down to me from, from that base understanding of what the metrics are. So the real, the real benefit of a growth model is it when you understand that last year's number of recruits, if you're a fashion business, you might get 26% of them back, 20, 30% of them back. They're going to shop 1.5 times, they're going to spend X amount. That for everybody needs to be on the same page working to the same metrics. Because otherwise the retention person, if he doesn't understand what he's been handed over in terms of acquisition, then the numbers don't add up. So it's really important that that conversation, and we still do talk about a spreadsheet, everybody has to buy into the same spreadsheet. And effectively whatever you're wanting to grow to, you need to be able to look at that every single week and answer the question of am I not hitting my goal or am I not growing as fast as I want to because I don't have enough new customers or my retention's not good enough. And you've got to have visibility on all those numbers, um, in my opinion, in order to coordinate across all those people. And then when you get the commercial director involved as well, he wants to know how much money you're spending to get there. So commercial director, finance director. So though, uh, I think for me it's all about just getting everybody onto one plan where everybody understands the actual metric. So for retention, it's how big to that cohort, what's the retention percentage, what's the aov, what's the average ordered numbers you're going to get from them. And that's the granularity you need to be drilling down to.

Speaker A: What I wanted to ask you as well on that front is for me as an agency owner, uh, we've always struggled with that about trying to get that alignment. And I think when we really kind of started switching onto lifetime value a couple of years ago, I think LTV gave us that metric because it didn't really matter who you were dealing with. You had, if you had that as kind of the people talk about North Star metrics, basically the big number that we're looking at, it could kind of please both parties. What's your kind of view on, on ltv? Because look, it's uh, not perfect absolutely. But I uh, just wonder what your thoughts were.

Speaker B: Uh, I mean it's, it's the vital metric. So, so the setting, the commercials for the business going back to that debate is, is you really have to understand what you. Well you have to understand lifetime value and I'll, I'll expand on that a bit more, but you basically have to understand what can you afford to recruit a first customer at, uh, or loss and then what does the lifetime value. So going back to my white company experience, I knew I could lose 15 quid a customer because I got the money back in nine months time. And then beyond that I began to, to deliver profit from those customers. And my own thing there was, I had a, it was really well constructed way we were, we worked that uh, I was incentivized to grow the business in, in shares and options and I was incentivized by how much I was paid each year, by what I drove from the bottom line. And I tell you that's a really good discipline to understand those two, those two things and to have those two metrics all the time because that makes you focus. So it mattered to me when I, when I lost my money, I, when I made my money because you have to understand how it works and how it plays out over time. So customer lifetime value is the key thing that I think. Uh, it's great how you feel as an agency that switched things on for you. I think too often people just don't understand that metric. Um, because you can afford to lose money if your cash flow allows it to. And you understand, if you don't understand you can't afford to do it. But if you do then you're in control. And that's exactly in my own experience that's how I was able to grow and grow profitability because I genuinely understood how those metrics worked.

Speaker A: Ah, thank you and I appreciate you sharing that. And I think that I did want to talk actually about obviously what happened with the white company and I guess from a point of view of uh, your role as managing director and I know you talked about the growth that you had. There was data uh from the outset something that you were pushing to use or was there kind of like not an epiphany moment but something that made you go actually right, we need to get a bit more serious about this stuff. Or was it always, I'm just curious like were you always that way or did things change?

Speaker B: Uh, I suppose, I'm afraid a factor of being so old and long ago we came from a mail order background. So all the metrics that everyone talks about now were fundamental to mail order. And actually the big switch for us was moving into multi channel was opening stores because then you stopped having um, visibility of 100% visibility of data. In the old days you, everything was coded, everything was direct response. We never did a brand ad. We only ever did direct ah response ads. We genuinely knew data. Data was what a business like that was about.

Speaker A: So what would you say that you missed and I guess on the converse, what don't you miss about being a retailer?

Speaker B: I think the thing that really hit me when I stopped being inverted comm was a proper retailer was the retailers um, work seven days a week. And I don't think I realized that there were jobs that actually people stopped on a Friday because um, as a, as a retailer particularly I can tell you when you sit, when you're in a furniture business that is um, massively weekend dominated. Um, my weekends were always sort of impacted by what happened on my Saturday sales. Um, and there was always a terrible, um. Unfortunately um, no correlation between sunny day, poor sales or rainy day and good sales. So it was very difficult to ever be happy because if it was sunny I was sad because there'd be sales. If it was rainy, I'd be sad because it was rainy. So um, I think that's the real thing. I just sort of, I don't think you know, having been a retailer for 20 years, I don't think I realized that seven day grind that actually comes from being a D2C retailer.

Speaker A: And what would you say, do you. What, what elements of it do you definitely do miss is the kind of stuff m that you think like oh, I just, I don't get that buzz that I used to get from XYZ thing.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean the, the other side of that is obviously if you like numbers I suppose and having a great day, there is nothing better. And in the, in the new world of Shopify, if your pocket's going ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping all day, I don't think I've met a retailer who doesn't think that's the best sou of of their life. And I think when you get a bit bigger and maybe your Shopify is not going ping, ping, just having a great day. Sales, um, where, you know, you materially move the number and I have the, the joy of winning clients and all those kind of things, but there's nothing quite like that. There'd be masses of customers who've come in, liked what you're doing and the tills are ringing. That's a great feeling, I bet.

Speaker A: And I, I, I think that's probably the thing I was, I was curious over you, as you know, is that obviously in a retail setting, like you say, you've almost got those sort of hourly m. Almost minute by minute numbers, I guess at certain times of the year where you're seeing kind of those numbers fluctuating, you're playing your next move. Obviously. Now with suite analytics, I imagine the sales cycle is a little bit longer than a couple of minutes. Um, so is that kind of something that is you kind of wish would move a bit quicker sometimes?

Speaker B: Well, I suppose anyone trying to grow a business would like it to go a bit quicker. That's definitely the case. Um, yeah, I do, I mean, exactly that. Being a, being a retailer and driving a sales number, delivering growth, um, I think is the lifeblood of most retailers. I think they're retailers who are sort of entirely product focused. And then there's a sort of, you can't disassociate from the product. But there are others of us who I think probably are quite numbers focused. Um, and so for me it's success is always about driving the number. And it doesn't matter if you're a retailer growing from 100 grand to 200 grand or 5 million to 10 million, there is a genuine, um, satisfaction in my view on hitting your numbers. And though that's sweet, I have the same thing, we have numbers to hit. It's just not quite so immediate in that how it all happens, I think.

Speaker A: So on the subject of suite analytics, then how did it all come about? Oliver, from this prolific career in retail, you then got into tech side, into data. Like where the idea come from? What were the channel events that led to it?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, um, it happened actually. Real consequence of two things. One, I had, um, leukemia and I was off work for a while and while I was off work for a while. An agency called More2, which some of your listeners will know. They were the sort of godfathers of teaching. I call it the middle class mail order pack. Sweet sweaty chirruts, Bowdoin, all of us how to use data. And that sort of gave me a stimulus to think I hadn't been hugely satisfied by what they'd done for me in the past. Um, and I thought, well I will try and do something better. Um, and that really comes from what they were bringing to retailers like us at that time was that actually data was really important and if you understood your data you had a greater chance of success. So I'm trying to do the same thing with Suite, um, and very much wanting to things I've learned over my retailing career, plus the sort of extra point of knowing it's been quite hard to get to these numbers. And that's really what I'm trying to sort of join together in Suite. We make it an out of the box solution for SME retailers. Um, because I always believe that if you don't know the numbers and you don't understand the data then you're less likely to be successful.

Speaker A: Oliver, thank you so much for sharing that obviously about your health and it's a lot for you to come in and tell the world that. I guess one of the things that I would like to ask you about though is did having those health issues change your perception on what was important from a, uh, career and I guess sort of work life perspective?

Speaker B: Uh, I think something like that obviously has a, does have an impact, um, whether I made the right choice of going for a tech startup, um, as a stress free um, easy, easy reliance. I'm um, not sure. Um, I definitely sort of sign over grand about it. I did think, uh, God, if I do survive this I'm going to do something different. If I'd quite understood what doing something different, um, involved because I think probably no tech startups are exactly, um, smooth and um, easy. I might have come to a. If you think that there's an element, often stress is seen as a cause of cancer. You probably wouldn't sign up as a tech entrepreneur, uh, if you um, want to avoid stress.

Speaker A: Okay. So I think it's always an interesting one, isn't it? Because there are, there are different things that happen in people's lives that lead them to different paths. And I think that's one thing I find so interesting about the kind of world that you and I are part of is that a lot of people have entered I guess kind of this E commerce forum, um, after having long careers, after living the life a certain way and then obviously things change that whether it's career, relationships, health or it might be. Um, and that's kind of why I love E Commerce because I think there are a lot of people who are, who are effectively look moving to maybe their second, third, fourth careers. I think it gives a lot of richness to the industry that we're in.

Speaker B: I agree with you. And as we know with your days, you know that that's a room when, when I see you in London on, on the uh, the um, E commerce events. There's a rich, rich tapestry of people there that you normally find, have got various stories. Um, I think personally I'm trying to tell my children, do it early, don't wait so long. But um, and you may say that makes the, the stories less rich but um, I think um, you know exactly that most of us have got some. You've normally started a business because you've had some reason to think that that was a good idea and something normally has to have changed for you to think that's a better idea than, than having a job and doing something a little bit more, not easier but just a little bit more structured.

Speaker A: Uh, I mean in terms of that thing, I guess like you say about doing something different from the perspective of suite analytics, what's different about what you guys are doing versus the competition that's out there?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think the real thing that really differentiates us is providing that framework for growth. You know, and I'm not trying to, you uh, know it's not just about producing metrics. Of course the metrics are really important, but actually then it's how do I grow from 100,000 to 200,000? How many new customers do I need to achieve that? What can I afford to spend on it? So it's not. The metrics I would like to say are relatively standard across a variety of different platforms. I think what we try and do as suite is we try and think of as retailers because we are all pretty much from that background. And whether that's articulating in the way I say it, whether it's either talking to yourself or your, your colleagues in a management meeting, first thing you normally have to do is articulate why we're doing well or not so well. And then you have to sort of say ultimately then your next thing is are you going to hit your budget? I mean that for most people should be almost be the focus of uh, what you're trying to achieve because, you know, that's what you set out to do. Uh, and I think we, in my opinion, do a clearer, better job of articulating how the metrics fit into that everyday reality of being a retailer.

Speaker A: I mean, this is the, the bugbear that I have with how I think data has kind of become sexy, as we kind of spoke at the start of the show, in that there is a sense to me that there's this feeling, okay, well, look, if we have lots of different metrics that are cut different ways and we have these amazing, um, dashboards that show us what the data is, then we're kind of going to be okay. And it always kind of confuses me when you have, you know, you have meetings with brands and, well, you look at this dashboard we've got and they say, yeah, but what's the actual story behind that? And it goes kind of quiet. I'm sure you've had plenty of those me. So is that frustrating for you as it, as it is for me, yeah, I think so.

Speaker B: I mean, I work on the principle that people aren't really, uh, interested in my dashboards as a sort of base principle. So what we're trying to work a lot on suite is trying to get the story more clearly articulated for people. Because unless you're doing something different, then the data is pretty irrelevant, to be honest. Again, going back to, we'll talk about attributions, I'm sure in a moment, because, um, it's like all these things, unless you're going to do something different about it, then it's pretty pointless. So for us at Suite, we're really trying to make sure that the really simple questions are, in life are how many customers do you need to recruit, hit your budget? And how much can I afford to spend to recruit those customers? And almost you don't need a lot more metrics than knowing whether you're on track on those two points. Of course you want to understand retention and all the rest of it, but retention, uh, most businesses are incredibly, normally incredibly new, some customer sensitive, if you're trying to grow fast. So those are the two things you

Speaker A: have to know on the, I guess, the metrics questions. There's two things that I always end up having either, uh, a lengthy conversation about or a heated debate about, depending on how far we go. One is Roas, uh, and the other one is attribution. So I want to ask you about Roas to start with. Then is it even worth bothering with?

Speaker B: Now I go the other way, uh, is you have to understand your blended roas. If you do not understand your blended roas and your cost of acquisition, they're different versions but the same concept, then you don't even have a start point. And the reason why I think people dish roas is because they think they've looked in their Facebook dashboard and it's told them they've got a ROAS of 97,000 or whatever it is. Complete nut of bollocks. Um, and yeah, then they've looked in Google and they've got another 97,000 bollocks ROAS and as a result people start dishing ROAS as a basic metric of, you know, I've got £100 worth of sales and I've spent £10 to get there. Uh, and of that hundred pounds worth of sales, 50 of it came from new customers. Yeah. And you probably spend most of your money to get those new customers. Then that first time customer ROAS in my opinion is an absolutely crucial metric. Uh, and so I, I don't. We'll go into attribution in a moment but you know I, I really the idea of Roas being dead and I think I remember one of your emails coming out one day and I think I, I coughed and spluttered and thought what a ridiculous. But you know, and I do, but there is that view in the market. Roas is dead. Etc. Buff the two hard numbers for a retailer. How many, what are your sales and how much you spent and you just need to have a really firm handle of those two. Those two. Um, and you need the new customer number in the middle to convert. Create a first time customer ROAS which in my opinion is key. Now give me a contrary view to that.

Speaker A: No, I mean I completely agree with you but I think this is the thing, it's a bit more nuanced than, than just Roas is dead and all these other lovely uh, terms that we, we come out with with these witty emails about. But I think that's the thing for me is when ROAS is talked about in the general term is talked about as okay, the, the only metric that it comes down to when you are looking at acquiring new customers and ultimately like you said there you are looking from that, okay, the cost to acquire a new customer. Uh, but then obviously I imagine also with that is that then what is the lifetime value of that customer beyond that first sale and then how does the CAC then spread across that CLV over the course of maybe one to two years and what is the relationship between those two numbers? And I think that that's the problem I have here is that when. When these numbers use in isolation as my ROAS has fallen from 8 to 2, which is what I keep hearing at the moment. Well, it has, but what proportion of your sales is that for? Is that just actually for your first customer? Uh, or is that for actually the lifetime of the customer? In which case then, okay, the situation is a lot more dire than you're painting it to be.

Speaker B: I think you raised a really important point and I perhaps answered a bit too into shorter sort of version on that first ROAS point. The. The first thing you have to understand when I'm talking about ROS is what your target ROAS is. Yeah. M. Which. And target ROAS has to be based on lifetime value, not average order value. So when I talk about ROAS and why it's so important, you. We have a thing called a margin calculator which effectively gives you that what, as a business, what can you afford to spend in order to get your first order? Uh, and then what happens over the lifetime value of that. Of whatever you deem to be lifetime value. So going back to my old white company days, I could afford to lose 15 quid a customer because I knew I could got the money back within nine months. Now in our margin calculator, we translate that for businesses to say, what do you want to do on your first order? And what does that mean over the next 12 months in order to set that, ah, I call it target ROAS is the key thing. And that is for me the key metric along with number of new customers that you need to be monitoring. Um, so I don't know if I've articulated that really clearly, but I think we aren't far apart in what you were saying about joining customer lifetime value to roas. When I talk about roas, customer lifetime value is baked into the concept. Um, because you know that that's how it has to be in my view. And you have to look at lifetime value, so you have to join lifetime value into your view on what your target rare asset.

Speaker A: But I suppose this is the thing is with data and generally, I think in E commerce, the terminology that we use because we've got to that level where the market's matured is there are, there are lots of variations in terms of how people look at similar things, like the pure calculation of a number and then we all talk about it to another as if we're talking about the same thing, but in reality we're not. And I think, yeah, that's probably one of the reasons why everyone sort of at some point will sort of rub up against it the other wrong way because we're talking about fundamentally different things. Um, we're in a lot more complex situation. I think we were maybe sort of seven, eight years ago where people were just kind of going for it with E commerce and seeing what happened. You know, it's truly like a core part of people's businesses now. Whereas I think before it perhaps wasn't. Um, I mean the thing on attribution.

Speaker B: Can I close off on that before we just do it? I just think this is M before we go, because it informs my view on attribution. You have to do three things M, in my opinion to. I understand about the language and even in our conversation I started talking about blended grass and target grass. You know, it makes it complicated for users. But the three things that a brand has to do is they have to have a customer forecast, uh, based model, we call it growth model. Yeah. So you have to know how many new customers you're going to recruit in order to hit your target. You have to have a margin calculator which effectively gives you that understanding of how much can you afford to spend on a new customer. And that's based on the whole economic model of your business. So going back to that, you've got your number of new customers, you've got how much can you afford to spend. And then you do actually then have to monitor it on a day by day basis of whether you are achieving that target. And those three things are not ingrained in every E commerce business that we all talk to. And I'm very happy to talk about attribution now, but what I always say to a business, unless you've got those bits cracked, let's not spend our uh, time talking about attribution. And probably let's not even talk about attribution until you've got CRO right. Because of things that are value adding. Those things I've talked about are growth, uh, framework. You really can't exist if you don't know those. And we can probably debate between the two of us, but for me again, the thing about why I love SMEs is they've got so many more things within their control than your big market leader. And CRO is a much more important topic than attribution. I'll talk about attribution now, but just in terms of what do I believe, um, an SME has got to do? First order priorities, get the first bit done, get some CRO Done. And then we'll talk about attribution.

Speaker A: I guess what you say, look, ultimately it's about taking action first before you get to that sort of, okay, you've got to analyze, analyze, analyze. You've got to, you got, you got to make some things change before you start getting obsessed with the uh, numbers. And I think that's, that's a really good point to labor. And obviously there are a lot of agencies, a lot of tech partners out there who will, will, will maybe kind of say the converse sometimes. But like you say, for me that's, that's kind of first principles. And on, on the subject of attribution. Yeah, we've heard a lot about this, haven't we? Again, it's become sort of one of the, sort of the buzzwords over the past 18 months when you were kind of as a retailer, were you did it borderline obsession with attribution away your sales come from or was it different? I mean like what's the story then and what's the story now in your eyes?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's really funny. So actually one of the other formative things about why I started Suite is um, one of our investors used uh, to run an agency called the Specialist Works. A big, a big agency. And I was lucky to be running a brand with multi million bound, um, advertising budgets, TV, etc. Etc. And we went to the Specialist Works because he sold me, he used to sell me inserts. So it came from good old direct response. And you know, he sold me this model that uh, I could have shopping list of all these different channels I could shop from. And then he would have a brilliant data data layer below. And so effectively I could be channel neutral and he would just, we'd all just choose which were the best ROI channels, which is exactly the same as the attribution problem that everyone has today, which is do I spend a pound on Facebook or do I spend a pound on Google? And I was just doing it at a greater level. The data layer between that media, below that media buying was absolutely rubbish. And I never, we could never even get to a numbers that added up, let alone the numbers that explained. Then we would sort of do expensive econometric modeling which never left me that much clearer as to where I was. So I've always been deeply, deeply aware of attribution and deeply aware of the retailer problem, which is ultimately which where do I spend one more pound or where do I spend one less pound? Which is, that's the decision you're wanting to make from Attribution as a fundamental.

Speaker A: I mean, that's the thing is that I think what. And one of the things that has, I, uh, think is blighted particularly the relationship sometimes between agencies and merchants is the fact that there seems to be this kind of attribution fighting going on between, that's my sale, that's my. So that's my sale. And I kind of feel in a way that that that's something where, you know, I do care about attribution a lot more because it's a real difficult situation, I think, for a retailer, for, uh, a brand to be in when they've got four different groups of people telling that that dollar has come from us and that dollar's come from us and you can hang on over, well, there's not $4 there, there's $1, so who's it come from?

Speaker B: I mean, that. Go back to that. So what I was explaining about my life then. I used to go to lovely agency meetings and I'd walk out and the PPC guys would tell me I had a lovely week. And the TV guys would have me, they'd done fantastically and I could have a lovely afternoon wandering around and then I'd go back and find I only had 10 pounds in the till rather than the 300 that had been expressed to me. Um, and that is the fundamental point. I think that's why those early points I was talking about, uh, are so key. Uh, but of course everybody has a responsibility to try and unpick the attribution question. And I know you're an agency, so I don't think agencies have, have done a very good job at actually taking responsibility for the overall top line. They, they all do respect. Most agencies are motivated by can I make my channel look good and will I get my monthly retainer at the end of it? Because that channel looks good. Rather than thinking about the overall value for the customer. Uh, and Google, Facebook, all these things, they are absolutely key part of, of most people's mix and absolutely people should be spending money on them. I'm 100% arguing you should always spend money on marketing. Um, it's just sometimes quite difficult to really get to the answer of which one it is. And I think as a retailer, what we're trying to do in suite is. In suite, we pull in all the native dashboards as well as the hard cash numbers of what's in the sales. So we effectively. Here's your sales. I've got £100. These are all the money you've spent. And or everything that everyone claims on a non attribute basis and then we bring it back down to the £100 and it's the art of how you bring it back down to £100 where despite US having trackers, despite having multi touch attribution, all those kind of things, it gets a bit woolly. Yeah. It's the art or science conversation and um, particularly for brands and this is many brands who have channels outside their ecom site. If you're a beauty business you're on cult, you're on look fantastic and you've got your own site probably a third, a third, a third the sales but the only place you're actually spending the money is on it shows up in your on what you spend on Facebook and Google. So you know you don't get the data back from Colton Facebook at a customer level. So you can't actually do true attribution because you just don't have all the data. And this is what I'm obviously we do lots of attribution work. M I'm probably not the best person for my own in my own business because I'm much more about concentrating on the fundamentals and really understanding what is happening in this business because it doesn't all show up in tracking whatever tracking system whether it's impression based, whether it's cookie based, whatever it is, you still only got a partial view. And what really gets me m upset is when people try and make slavish decisions based on whatever some dashboard might tell you that this is performing or isn't performing because if it was a, an exact science we'd all do it. Yeah. And there wouldn't be any mystery about it. Yeah. So why try? And you know what really upsets me is don't try and claim that you sold the iOS uh, 14 problem because it's bollocks being honest. The way the way this conversation goes is the board director says to the marketing director, can you justify your spend? Yeah. Marketing director goes well I haven't really got much of a clue. Um, I'll go to the agency because they're spending all the money they're supposed to be have lots of tools and be able clever at this kind of stuff. And they go oh my God, how on earth are we going to answer that question? We don't have all the data and as a result they'll go to a platform that supposedly answer the question. They can then go back to the client saying we're using X platform. It answers the question. The marketing director can tell the board director. He's forgotten by next month when we ask that question. Or not anyhow. But everyone feels good about it. But nobody makes a better decision, any better decision as a result of that.

Speaker A: I mean, I'm actually speaking. Sullivan, it's very, uh. You hit a few, uh, view chords of me there. Absolutely. Which I think was brilliant. It's been fantastic to have you here and. And like I said at the start of the show, I've. I've got to know a little bit over the past few months. And you're a great guy. You've got a great team. So what I wouldn't say is if obviously people want to find out more about Suite analytics, then obviously connect with you. Where should they go? What should they do?

Speaker B: Yeah, just, um. Oliver, sparksuiteanalytics.com gets to me or off the website, comes straight through to me as well.

Speaker A: So.

Speaker B: Yeah, and please don't take me. I have these very strong views around attribution and we also do a lot of attribution work and I really do. We do understand. It just it's what business is it? Right. That is really the thing that matters to me. Yeah. And I just don't want people focusing on at the wrong point in their journey.

Speaker A: No. We love when people come on the show and give us their true opinion and show some passion. So we thank you for that. And, um, guys, thank you so much for tuning in. If you've liked what you listened to today, do give us a like or review on the listening platform of your choice and we'll be here again same time next week. Shall fly across the pond.