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One of the coolest ecommerce jobs around!

HARRY’S COMMENTS: We are working with a profitable, growing private capital-backed specialty ecommerce 3PL in its search for a world-class Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to be based in the Southeast USA.

To be super clear: If you do not already live within driving distance of the firm’s HQ (which seems unlikely), then relocation will be required. There is NO flexibility on this issue. However, relocation assistance is available.

Having said that, please know that your new hometown is FANTASTIC.

I’ve been there many times, and it’s always on my family’s list of vacation destinations. And why wouldn’t it be? Sports stars and Hollywood celebs live there. It’s got fantastic food … four seasons … mountains … rivers … lakes … sports … excellent schools … and tons of live music!

The state offers America at its best, plus it’s insanely affordable.

Now then, if you are the right person for this job, then you already know what a 3PL is. But still there’s a chance you’ve never actually considered what a total pain it is to get sold product out the door.

See if you can watch five uninterrupted minutes of this conversation without wanting to pull your hair out …

Did you make it five minutes? (I didn’t.)

This video lays bare the headaches for one little USPS shipper on eBay. Small potatoes.

Suppose you ran a $3 million DTC widget business with a $150 AOV, where the customer buys one widget from you every other year. That’s 40,000 orders per year — or 160 shipments per day, assuming 250 shipping days per year. 20 widgets per hour in an 8 hour day. No mistakes. No bottlenecks. No stockouts. No substitutions.

An endless grind that only gets worse as the business grows.

I bring this up because I want you to understand just how soul-crushing it is for an ecommerce entrepreneur to manage their fulfillment piece. To the point where it can make an entrepreneur hate their job.

Three PL’s exist to take those nightmares off your hands.

As you may know, a 3PL is a fulfillment service that handles the logistical ops for a company. 3PLs can be responsible for supply chain functions like storage, inventory planning and management, packing, transportation, and in some cases, kitting and assembly.

They act as the bridge between the seller and the buyer by expediting order fulfillment.

Usually, online sellers using 3PL services have their inventory stored at special fulfillment centers. When a customer makes an online order, the product is pulled, prepped, and shipped directly from the fulfillment center to the customer’s doorstep. Fulfillment centers can also process B2B orders, including high-volume merchandise delivered to big-box retailers like Target and Walmart.

About the Company

My client is a healthy, growing 3PL specializing in large, cumbersome products that require special fulfillment services. Like fitness equipment, office furniture, bikes — and even chicken coops. (Ask me for a link to their YouTube channel.)

With same-day order fulfillment, accuracy guarantees, and strategically-placed warehouses, the firm’s average parcel weight comes in at 20 pounds, but they can ship heavier items, too.

The firm was built to suit the needs of the growth-minded small business owner, offering cost-effective solutions for international shipping, Amazon Prime, and Seller-Fulfilled Prime. Moreover, these solutions integrate with most ecommerce platforms, including Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Ecwid, and Volusion. Plug and play, baby!

This is where YOU come in.

The company is growing like a weed, but in order to make REAL money, its continued growth must be thoughtful. Meaning, it needs to target the right clients, with the right needs, in the right locations.

And it must do so opportunistically, based its capacity to service the accounts.

Having spent the first part of my career in warehousing and logistics, I can relate first-hand the importance of having the right customer mix. Not all business is good business! You want to be strategic about whom you target. Otherwise, you’ll find your company bleeding cash as you try to serve clients 1/ who don’t value what you offer, or 2/ whom you cannot serve profitably.

This means you’ll need to be good at MATH.

By that I mean you’ll need to be hypothesis-driven about the industries you target, marketing to ecommerce shippers who are 1/ identifiable, 2/ reachable, 3/ will value what you do, and 4/ can easily afford your service — relative to what they do and how they make money.

As the firm’s new CMO, your job is simple: GROW. THE. BUSINESS.

The company’s strategy revolves around three things: 1/ SEO, which it already does pretty well, 2/ Outbound marketing, and 3/ Lead generation and nurturing. We’re not looking for a hack in any of these areas. You must have a teachable pov and a track record of success in each.

You will own the entire marketing function, from brand creation and value prop codification, to sales funnel construction and management, to building an SEO discipline that supports an integrated marketing vision, strategy, plan.

You’ll report directly to the CEO (who is a first-rate marketer in his own right), so it’s essential that you have an analytical bias to the way you make decisions and be able to defend them to the management team. No, I’m not saying that you’ll be armchair-quarterbacked to death in this role — but these are extremely rigorous business people, and at no point will you be able to just “wing it.”

To be sure, you will have the tech, talent, and vendor stacks to win in the role. But if you are interested in building an “empire” this isn’t the role for you. Think of yourself as leading a special forces team that is small in size but filled with absolute experts focused on creating impact.

Yet the nature of the opportunity will require you to lean more towards the scientist than the artist — with a nod towards the meticulous, detail-oriented, growth-obsessed entrepreneur who manages by walking around.

You won’t believe how much we know about this search …

I spent a ton of time on the phone with the client teasing out exactly what you’ll need to KNOW and DO to hit the ground running in this role. Some of the things I can share with highly qualified candidates include …

1. The “real” background requirements for this position, along with the top five things all resumes MUST have to be considered for the role.
2. The top five problems that exist due to this position being open. These are the little brush fires you will be expected to put out during your first month on the job. Every ecommerce job has these — and this one’s no different.
3. What your average day/week will look like in this role. There’s what you read in the standard ecommerce job posting … then there’s reality. We’ve got the reality.
4. The leading and lagging KPIs that will determine your success in this role. In a nutshell: How you’ll keep score.
5. The major projects you’ll need to complete by Day 100 to be considered a home-run in this position. We’ve got the lowdown on how you can plug-and-play and drive REAL value in this ecommerce job.

I have a massive amount of proprietary intel to share with qualified candidates. My industry research for this assignment exceeds 100 pages! Be sure to TEXT me, Harry Joiner, at (404) 281-2025 for this info. Or simply use the email link when you apply for the role below.

View Harry Joiner’s profile

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Help to define and drive the firm’s business vision, strategy, and execution in collaboration with other key executives.
• Embody the firm’s culture of humility, excellence, and respect.
• Grow the firm’s already-strong SEO profile in an effort to dominate relevant rankings by optimizing its website, creating best-in-class content, and generating quality signals;
• Build a systematic and scaled outbound marketing effort that will identify and connect with ecommerce retailers whom the firm should serve;
• Incubate a fertile field of leads and prospects and cultivate their understanding of the firm as an authoritative thought leader and trusted service provider.
• Grow, evangelize, and steward the firm’s brand within critical stakeholder groups, primarily ecommerce retailers and past/present/future team members.
• Enhance and oversee all brand assets, from website, to blog, to social media, to creative, to IP.
• Rigorously measure thee firm’s marketing performance through a matrix of robust-but-sensible KPIs, and then have the vision, judgment, and decisiveness to adjust when necessary.
• Partner with Sales to create a unified, consistent, best-in-class client acquisition machine.
• Partner with HR to market the firm’s brand to the type of talent whom the firm should recruit.
• Stay abreast of emerging trends in logistics and fulfillment operations and be an internal thought leader who will keep the team on the cutting edge of client service.
• Constantly pursue perfection in an effort to exceed the expectations of the firm’s clients and team members.

QUALIFICATIONS

• A thirst for learning, getting stuff done, and serving the firm’s clients and team members that will raise the collective bar of the entire team.
• An orientation towards growth and optimization.
• A curiosity (along with strong, well-informed guesses) about what the future will look like.
• Demonstrated ability to work with cross-functional teams to create “customer oriented” solutions.
• Ability to hire, mentor, lead, and promote talent.
• Strong oral and written communication skills, manifesting in respectful candor and thoughtful directness.
• Experience operating an ecommerce retailer a plus.
• Experience marketing to and connecting with ecommerce retailers a plus.
• Background in engineering, finance, economics, computer science, or similar a plus.
• Ability to code or bolt together software solutions a plus.