This is the year of efficiency and cost-cutting at Jones Road. Across the org, we have the initiatives of getting and staying lean and have improved both Gross Margin Landed Gross Margin considerably, and OPEX considerably. Here are 11 things we've done that will lead to multi 7 figures of bottom line improvements... 1. Price Increase - we launched in 2020 with super high inflation, but we've managed to hold our prices steady for the first 4 years. Fortunately our costs did not rise as scale offset and increases. But facing upcoming tariffs, we decided to get ahead of it and first rolled out some @Intelligems price testing; and then a full deployment in Feburary. This improved COGS overnight with a very small temporary dip in performance. I am glad we got out ahead of this before consumers got sick of it. 2. Vendor Negotiation - My supply chain team calls this Business Continuity and Value Engineering. That's too corporate for me so I call it negotiating. We try to take a collaborative approach and work with contract manufacturers to optimize supply chain and production. If we create a process that lowers their costs, it can be passed onto us. But there's also some good old getting 5 quotes and threating to pull our business that has to get done. For example, we started going straight to vendors and requiring our team to get 5 quotes for a new package; and have seen some 200%+ decreases in cost by doing so. 3. Freight Optimization - We grew fast last year; over 50%. Unfortunately we underforecasted in a few areas like international expansion and we had to rush air more than we should have. This gets costly; so we're doing everything we can to prevent air shipments. If we have to, we're air shipping the least we can get away with and putting the rest on boat. We're also consistently optimizing our store inventory levels and transfer cadence; which has allowed us to halve our number of shipments to stores. We found a better, cheaper messenger service for small transfers and have optimized local hub storage which had other considerable cost savings. 4. Set Up Second US Warehouse - Prior to this year, we shipped all US orders out of 1 East Coast distribution center. We finally opened a second one and it's saving around $2.50 per order, which is wild and has visible bottom line improvements over night. I also negotiated hard on this one; but savings are largely coming from reduced outbound shipping for 35% of our orders. We're now looking into a third distribution center in the middle of the country, as well as moving one of our UK dcs to this new partner which will save us almost $2 on each UK order. Besides some intial freight costs and systems integrations, it's straight bottom line. 5. Shipper Optimization - More brands should evaluate what they are sending their products in and optimize how they can improve efficiency. Sometimes cutting an inch off our a few ounces can qualify for a different shippigng rate that can have outsized impacts. Right now we're testing sending all eligible orders in a padded envelope instead of a box, and this should save several pounds per eligible order. It will only apply to a minority of orders, but it will stull have high 6 figure annual savings. We'll look at everything from boxes and vendor sourcing, tape, and craft paper. Every dollar we squeeze from these costs can either go to the bottom line or be put back into growth. 6. Payroll Optimization - You probably have too many people. We unfortunately did and had to make the hard decision to perform a small restructure. While sad, it was best for the business. Lower perfoerms and redundant roles were let go, and a new standard of efficiency and accountability was put forth. It's actually shocking how well our team functioned after this. In addition to cutting total headcount, we restructured teams for efficiency and placed more responsibilities and function under our strongest leaders. Less, but stronger leaders means less payroll, less people to manage, and improved communication. We also took our retail payroll to sales ratio down overnight. I thought this was going to be hard; but it was done with shckingly zero pushback and impact on sales so we're going to do it once again. 7. Outsourced to Freelancers, Agencies, and Remote - I used ot be very pro in house for most things. Then I became CEO and I realized how expensive this was once you factor in benefits, bonuses, 401ks; computers, etc. Not to mention all of the HR time, people mamnagement issues, etc. A good rule of thumb is to multiple salary by 1.3x to get a full cost. We're relying heavily on freelancers and agencies at this stage of our business, and have built a really great distrubuted workforce for all relevant roles like CX, video editing, design, and mid to low level marketing roles. We still have our leadership team and core roles in office, but this allows us to get the support and bandwidth needed at economical levels. DM me if you want an into to an excellent LATAM recruiter we've used for all these roles. 8. New Compensation and KPI Plan - We never had real KPIs and a compensation structure prior to this year. Performance Reviews were subjective and bonuses were largely tied to company performance. There was not a big enough gap in bonus between our best performers and lower ones, and our retention was too good, which is a thing. Everyone now has very clear KPIs, and we've set a culture of higher standards and accountability. We still want it to be a fun place to work; but success comes first. If someone is not objectively meeting performance expectations, we will address it. This has motivated the team, created some healthy turnover of lower performers self-selecting out, and led to overall higher performance. 9. Software Cutting and Consolidation - Legit my favorite thing to do is negotate. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at the list of all of our softwares and attempted to optimize it. The first thing you can do is make your team put it in two criteria; need to have and nice to haves. Cut all the nice to haves. We've also consolidated where it makes sense. I need the best of the best email and SMS tools, so those stay seperate. But if my tracking pages are 10% worse but I get them for free by consolidating, I'm doing that. We switched out any legacy, incumbent software that were overcharing to newer, smaller and AI enabled tools. Anything that was a variable cost is not fixed. And for the necessary list, I roll up my sleeves and negotiate. I am willing to sign a longer deal with a great partner to get a better rate. I also get 3-5 quotes and threaten to leave if we don't beat them. 60% of the time, it works every time. 10. AI Initiative - We just kicked off a big AI initiative where I am expecting everyone here to become really proficient with AI. I kicked it off with a Tobi style memo, I led an all hands showing a few things to blow peoples minds; we're bringing in 2-3 speakers to teach us, and we have a $7,500 bounty for whoever makes the biggest impact with AI. So far someone on our ops team has vibe codes 3 calculators that will save considerable time and money, so she is in the lead. Everyone is clear we are all expected to become more productive in this new world, and we will not be increasing headcount as quickly as previosuly planned as revenue grows. I'm sure there is a lot more. It's not just one thing; but it's a daily grind, obsession, and focus with clear priorities and checkings accross the organization. I guarantee there is as much or more focus on growth in our org; but the two don't need to be at odds with one another. If you enjoyed this, please give it a RT.