How The Simple P&L Statement Can Be Key To Long-Term Success

How does a guy who used to sell fighter jets move on to build an Ecommerce company that sells single-blade razors? It’s an interesting question with an even more interesting answer, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Patrick Coddou tells the tale, and gives some insights into the world of Ecommerce along the way.

Patrick is the founder and CEO of Supply, and even though the company has been in business since 2015, has seen 80% of its total profits have come in over just the last several months. So what’s Patrick’s secret? In today’s interview, Patrick dives into the nitty-gritty of what changed, including how he finally discovered exactly what profit margins he — and most companies — need to hit in order to achieve sustained success. Learn what that number is and more, on this episode. 

Main Takeaways:

• Always Be Testing: To achieve the best user experience and optimize sales, you need to constantly test new ideas. Whether it’s pop-ups to showcase new items, implementing a legacy program, or experimenting with video, you learn something new every time you test. Plus, sometimes the failed tests are even more valuable than the successful ones.   
• It’s All About the Margins: Businesses live and die based on their gross margins. If you are not charging enough and/or pay too much to have your products made, you’re putting an unnecessary financial strain on your business that could break it.
• Riding the Ecommerce Waves: There is a ton of volatility in the Ecommerce industry. In order to achieve sustained success, companies need to be nimble and able to adapt to the changing tides. Keep overhead low, focus on your P&L and build processes that allow you to make quick shifts when needed.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Welcome to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles and today on the show, we have the founder of Supply, Patrick Coddou. Patrick, welcome.

Patrick:

Thank you for having me.

Stephanie:

Yeah, we're excited to have you on. I was doing a little bit of LinkedIn stalking and your background... At first, when I stumbled on your LinkedIn, I'm like, "Is this the right guy?" I saw a background in selling fighter jets and I wanted to start there with you of kind of like a little bit of your background before you founded Supply.

Patrick:

Sure. So I spent my education as a mechanical engineering and before starting this company, I spent eight and a half years in the corporate world. I worked in the aerospace industry and in particular I worked on military aircraft. We make some fighter aircraft here in Fort Worth, Texas where I'm from.

Stephanie:

Very cool. And what does that look like behind the scenes of working on aircraft? I saw that you did, I think an $8 billion deal. So I want to hear a little bit more details around that.

Patrick:

Yes. I worked on it. It would be very, very arrogant of me to claim that I was responsible for that deal. Yeah. So in general, and I'm happy to go deeper if you want to, but in general, the US government works with foreign militaries to arm and equip them with certain pieces of equipment that we think that are necessary for them to have and to support interoperability between allies. So one of those aircraft was called the F-35. And I think the deal you're talking about was maybe the deal with South Korea we did probably five or six years ago where the US government sold, I don't remember how many, 60, 70 aircraft to South Korea.

Patrick:

So that was a really phenomenal experience getting to fly there and negotiate with our partners over in South Korea and spent a lot of time kind of immersing myself in their culture. Just a cool, cool thing to be a part of. So I learned a lot there, but at the same time was ready to get out when I left.

Stephanie:

Yeah. So let's hear a little bit about you're almost a decade at, I think Lockheed Martin and you're starting to get the entrepreneurial itch. So what was happening while you were there and what had you make the jump.

Patrick:

Yeah. So as outrageously cool as the subject matter was of what I worked on in my previous life, it was... As awesome as the subject was, it was as equally terrible to work in a corporate environment like that one for me personally. Not for everybody, but for me. And especially working with the US government. Just procedures and processes and just layers of bureaucracy. It just led to boredom and frankly anxiety and depression personally. Just wanting to be fulfilled in my work and not finding the ability to be so in what I was doing.

Patrick:

I tend to plan and think ahead a lot. When I visualize the future of my life there, it was like I could literally see myself sitting at the same desk like doing the same things that I had been doing for like the next 30 years of my life. For years, I wasn't raised as an entrepreneur. I don't really have that in my family. I didn't know the first thing about starting a business, but for years I was always thinking about kind of what is kind of my path out of this life and kind of into the next one.

Patrick:

I always had ideas and never really kind of jumped on them because I wasn't a risk taker, I was an engineer. Taking risk was the furthest thing from what I was used to. And I finally have this idea for a razor that I wanted to invent, and we can kind of get into that if we want to, but in general I've always kind of struggled with irritation and ingrown hairs with shaving since the first day I started shaving. I came across this old style of shaving, shaving with a single blade safety razor and just fell in love with it and decided I wanted to try to kind of make a modern version of this old razor that I found.

Patrick:

Then in addition to that just decided like this is kind of... It's kind of now or never to make the leap from this job to doing something on my own. So it was kind of a perfect storm of the idea came and the necessity came and the opportunity came at the same time and just decided to go for it.

Stephanie:

Yeah, that's awesome. I think a lot of people probably have those same feelings of getting stuck somewhere. I know I have in the past. There was a point in my previous life when I was working at Fannie Mae and I had the same kind of thing. I'm like, "Oh my gosh. Do I want to end up in a semi-government job or corporate job?" And even at Google, it's like, "Oh, things feel so great right now. Should I leave? I feel like I'll stay here for a long time because it's so comfy." So I think a lot of people have the same kind of feeling of now or never. I better jump before I get stuck here for the rest of my life.

Patrick:

And the further you go in those career paths like the harder it is to leave. What can an aerospace engineer that has worked as an aerospace engineer for 20 years do other than that after they've been there so long?

Stephanie:

Yeah. I had the same feeling. What year did you start Supply or did you start something before then or was Supply your first company?

Patrick:

Yes, Supply is my first kind of real company. Prior to starting Supply which we started in... The company started in January of 2015, but we launched publicly in August of 2015 with our first Kickstarter campaign. And prior to that, I started a website with one of my best buddies called razorpedia.com and that was like, I think, we started in 2012 or 2013. Long story short, it was a kind of razor review website that really was kind of a... Just kind of a stupid fun thing to do with a buddy on weekends where we wanted to kind of test razors and try to find the best razor on the market. Actually, the website ended up getting pretty popular and we ended up selling it later. But that's really where the razor kind of story began with shaving.

Stephanie:

Yeah. I mean, I read that the Razorpedia was like the number one google search result and it had like 1 million organic page views over 30 months. So it sounds like it was actually a pretty big deal.

Patrick:

Yeah, it was pretty successful. We were fortunate enough to like... We literally launched I think the same week that Harry's launched.

Stephanie:

Good timing.

Patrick:

Yeah. It was good timing and we wrote a blog like the same week about Harry's. We ended up like kind of being... If you searched razor reviews online or Harry's razor review, we were right at the top of the search results. So it was kind of dumb luck. So we started to kind of monetize it with ads. We didn't know what we were doing. We were making it up as we went. The best thing that came out of that was the realization that all these multi-blade razors that we tested were all... In my opinion, were all trash and just not good razors. It was that website that actually led me down the path to find this old style of shaving, which is this single blade style shave.

Stephanie:

It's really interesting how marketing can really train us like "Oh, the more blades the better, and this one has two. Oh, this one has three." You wouldn't