Podcast Overview
“PPC doesn’t stand for pay-per-click anymore… it stands for ‘please, please convert.’”
Welcome to another practical and insight-packed episode of eCom@One with Richard Hill! In this episode, Richard hands the mic to two of our PPC pros, Alex and Eleasha, for a deep dive into what’s working right now in paid search for eCommerce brands. Drawing on years of hands-on experience across B2B and B2C accounts, they share actionable strategies on feed optimisation, campaign structuring, landing page testing and how to scale past revenue plateaus. Whether you’re running campaigns in-house, working with an agency, or just looking to squeeze more performance from your PPC spend, this episode is loaded with expert takeaways, plus why channels like Microsoft Ads might be your next secret weapon. Hit subscribe and get ready for a conversation that gets right to the heart of driving better returns and smarter growth in eCommerce PPC.
Time stamps:
00:00 Paid search tips for eCommerce
03:38 Starting out in the marketing field
07:35 Social media and branding strategy
10:23 Appealing to a younger market
13:27 Exploring diverse marketing roles
18:35 Optimising ad campaigns for profit
21:53 Changing product IDs impact feeds
23:48 Optimising Microsoft Ads Strategies
27:56 Trying Microsoft Ads for clients
31:57 Testing landing page effectiveness
32:46 Hitting the 3 million milestone
36:50 Book recommendation: Good Vibes, Good Life
How AI Is Helping This Automotive Brand Grow 70% Year-on-Year
eCom@One with Richard Hill
[00:00:00] Richard Hill: You're working for a huge brand and with the various brands in the UK. So
[00:00:04] Tom Doherty: we've got a team of 18 people now. It's the biggest internal e-commerce team that I know of in the automotive space.
[00:00:14] Richard Hill: 1,000 new products a month. I'm really intrigued how you, how you've done that.
[00:00:19] Tom Doherty: The company's really pushing AI.
[00:00:21] Richard Hill: Is there anything maybe right now you're building?
[00:00:23] Tom Doherty: Yeah, so we're building a lot of it's ad-focused because it's easy to see the savings straight away.
[00:00:28] Richard Hill: I'm really specifically quite keen on the operational side. Not just okay, we spent another million quid on ads.
[00:00:35] Tom Doherty: I think probably the biggest thing that's helped us grow is the building the culture. And what I always say to my team is, I need you to make a decision. If you make a decision and it's wrong, that's my fault.
[00:00:46] Richard Hill: All things automotive marketing growth. Hi everyone, Richard Hill here. Welcome back to the Ecom One podcast. Now this week. I'm joined by Tom Doherty from the team behind My Motor World, who's helped grow the group's e-commerce sales to just shy of £40 million. But one of the biggest decisions along the way was cutting the website's monthly PPC spend from around £400 grand to £20 grand and getting it profitable. We talk about knowing which products deserve your ad budget, moving away from constant discounting, And building a team you can trust to make those decisions. Tom also shares how they're using AI to manage huge, huge catalogs and why smaller marketplaces deserve a proper commitment. Now, if you're scaling now, if you're growing sales but questioning how much actually you're keeping, there's plenty to take away from this one. Now, do me one quick favor, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening so you're always the first to know when a new episode drops. I'll just interrupt this episode with a quick note from our sponsor. Now, peak season is coming. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the pre-holiday shopping craze, and with it comes competition for every single click, and a lot more money is on the line. So if you're spending more to compete, you want to make sure your budget's working as hard as it possibly can. And the place we always start the product data behind the campaigns. Now, we've used Data Feed Watch for more than 7 years to keep our clients' data fresh and optimized and group products around what's selling, what's profitable, and what we actually want to spend budget on easily with no technical hurdles. Because when prices, promotions, and stock are changing left, right, and center, you really don't want your feeds letting you down. So get them sorted before the peak season begins. And exclusively for Ecom 1 listeners, Data Feed Watch is offering 2 months free for new users across every single plan. Link to claim the 2-month free trial is in the show notes. Go to ecom1.com/datafeedwatch. Now let's get back to this fabulous episode. Well, Tom, welcome to the Ecom 1 podcast. How you doing?
[00:03:06] Tom Doherty: Yes, really good. Thank you. Thank you for having me on.
[00:03:08] Richard Hill: No problem at all. I'm really, really, really, really, Really looking forward to getting into this. Automotive, all things automotive marketing growth and all the things that come along with a certain type of product, product set that I like to think we know a thing or two at EcomOne about. But obviously you're working for a huge brand and with the various brands in the UK. So I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into it. So thanks for coming on.
[00:03:35] Tom Doherty: Perfect. Yeah, no, hopefully we'll give you a little bit of a different sort of view on automotive because Most automotive companies will specialize in parts or chemicals. We do absolutely everything. So yeah, there's quite a breadth to talk about.
[00:03:47] Richard Hill: Yeah, straight away it's like, yeah, a lot of probably quite unique challenges and ways that you look at things that are probably quite different to other automotive brands listed in. So I think if my, if my numbers are correct, when you started there, the e-com side was doing a few million a year.
[00:04:03] Tom Doherty: Yes.
[00:04:04] Richard Hill: And then looking now in, where are we, sort of August, September of '26, you're circa £40 million a year.
[00:04:11] Tom Doherty: Yes, just shy of that actually. So yeah, we'll just be shy of that. And yeah, it was in single-digit millions and we've grown it quite substantially in the last sort of 3, 4 years.
[00:04:20] Richard Hill: So circa— trying to do the maths now— a lot. Yeah, about 1,500%.
[00:04:25] Tom Doherty: Yeah, we've grown 70% year on year for the last 3 years.
[00:04:28] Richard Hill: Yeah, so 70% year on year.
[00:04:31] Tom Doherty: So annually compound is massive.
[00:04:32] Richard Hill: Yeah, so that's where we're going to dive in. You know, how— you know, walk us through how you've done that. Sort of, I'm really specifically quite keen on the operational side. Not just, okay, we spent another million quid on ads, or we bought this business, or— I'll be really— I'm really intrigued how you've done that.
[00:04:50] Tom Doherty: Cool. So those 2 things you mentioned, we have done that. So we have bought businesses and we have spent more on ads, but that's not where we've seen sort of £30 million worth of growth. Yeah, in 3 years. So I suppose the— when I first started, we had a tiny e-commerce team. So I think it was 3 of us. Yeah. And so the first thing we did was build the team. So we build the team with expertise, mainly started focusing on Amazon because that's where we saw the quick impact. Amazon's obviously massive. So we focused on that, we built the team. And I think probably the biggest thing that's helped us grow is building the culture around it. So we've got a team of 18 people now.
[00:05:29] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:05:30] Tom Doherty: So it's quite a sizable— it's the biggest internal e-commerce team that I know of in the automotive space. There might be some out there, but it's pretty big.
[00:05:37] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:05:38] Tom Doherty: So building the culture that allows people to feel empowered to make a decision is probably the biggest thing.
[00:05:43] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:05:43] Tom Doherty: Um, it's from what I've learned in the past is when there's a lot of control over stuff, it slows it down. And Texel is quite a traditional business.
[00:05:51] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:05:51] Tom Doherty: And it doesn't need slowing down. Yeah. Speeding up.
[00:05:54] Richard Hill: And so giving that team the, the runway to, to learn, to try and when maybe things don't go quite right, it's got a very good culture that embraces things that change and trial and—
[00:06:07] Tom Doherty: Exactly. I mean, what I always say to my team is, I need you to make a decision. If you make a decision and it's wrong, that's my fault. It's not your fault. That's the biggest thing I want them to take away because they know better than I do in their areas. They are better than me in their areas. I can't make the decision for them if it goes wrong. I will take the fall for it. But generally, people think about it, they know what they're doing.
[00:06:31] Richard Hill: Yeah,
[00:06:31] Tom Doherty: they can make the decision better than me. So that's probably the, the big point is build that culture and then build processes that allow you to scale huge catalogs. So we have 70,000 products on our D2C site, My Motorworld.
[00:06:48] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:06:49] Tom Doherty: We have 1.5 million SKUs on eBay. We have 70,000 ASINs on Amazon across 13 marketplaces. It is massive. It's a huge operation. So building processes that allow you to scale that size is probably the third point on how we've actually done it.
[00:07:09] Richard Hill: So £1.5 mil on Amazon, £70K on your main site. Is there a, maybe a snippet, an insight in how you've managed to do that? Or, you know, thinking of the listeners that are listening in that are, you know, traditionally a lot of automotive listeners, they've got big catalogs, maybe not quite 1.5 million. Yeah, we do know a few with similar actually, when you take into account sort of a few regions and so forth. But yeah, have you sort of, what are some of the key things within that then that you've focused on?
[00:07:40] Tom Doherty: So the biggest thing for us is AI, to be honest, is is how do we use it to make sure that everything works across all of the platforms that we work with? So I mean, we integrate with maybe 15 different softwares.
[00:07:56] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:07:57] Tom Doherty: And then having AI layer over all of them to create quicker translations for localization.
[00:08:04] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:08:04] Tom Doherty: Help with compliance checks in regions. Yeah. Uh, customer complaints, AI scrapes all of them, checks which ones are fitment data so we can check the fitment against it, check which ones are delivery issues so we can go straight to the courier. That is effectively how we've done it.
[00:08:20] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:08:20] Tom Doherty: Um, content now— I said this at a conference I did a few months ago— is it is inexcusable not to have good content now because AI can do it.
[00:08:30] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:08:30] Tom Doherty: So quickly and as good really now as a graphic designer can.
[00:08:35] Richard Hill: Yeah. Interesting. Um, Interesting, that one. So do you have dedicated people that are purely there with sort of that AI hat that are building for the teams, or, and do other people just empowered to go explore his budget, his tools, and make this better?
[00:08:55] Tom Doherty: It's basically the managers or the people doing the job. Yeah. They build the softwares that they need themselves. So we give them the facilities to do it. So we have Claude and we have like the subscription for Claude so they could actually get in and do it.
[00:09:08] Richard Hill: Um, you've been enjoying your sort of free tokens the last month then, and then you're waiting for a big bill to come.
[00:09:13] Tom Doherty: Well, I mean, we— the company's really pushing AI.
[00:09:15] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:09:15] Tom Doherty: So, but my view on it in, in my team is that I can't build a process for one of our catalog managers because I don't do what they do. They need to build it to make their life more efficient.
[00:09:26] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:09:27] Tom Doherty: So, uh, yeah, effectively we set it up and we allow them to build what they need.
[00:09:32] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:09:32] Tom Doherty: Um, so we're going through that at the moment. We have check-ins against, right, I'm building this, I'm building this, and we can build sort of an overall dashboard that everybody can effectively use.
[00:09:44] Richard Hill: Is there anything maybe right now you're building that you think the clients would be interested in, specifically around the AI piece that you're building?
[00:09:51] Tom Doherty: Yeah, so we're building at the moment pieces for like, so a bit of ad tech. So looking at campaigns, looking at which ASINs on Amazon are underperforming on either conversion or just that the campaigns are generally underperforming, and then matching the content against that automatically. So you don't— I mean, like I say, we're doing this on 70,000 ASINs. So you don't manually— you're not manually able to check 70,000. So we're checking that and then it automatically can generate new content to perform A/B tests effectively.
[00:10:25] Richard Hill: So poor performing products, then look up the content, see if there's challenges with it. And then on the fly AI rewrite based on what we're looking at, what is ranking and what is selling from other manufacturers or other competitors and Google and so on, other platforms, bringing that back, getting the best of everything, right? This is definitely the best content for that product. Rerun it, test the 2. Oh, we've got a winner. And then keep going until it hits a sort of threshold that is an acceptable conversion rate.
[00:10:55] Tom Doherty: Exactly. Exactly that. We've also built stuff like A lot of it's ad-focused because it's easy to see the savings straight away. So stuff like linking our production plans to ads so that we're not pushing products that we know there's delay in production.
[00:11:11] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:11:11] Tom Doherty: Or there's a manufacturing issue or it's a bought-in product and it takes 6 weeks to get there. That sort of thing.
[00:11:17] Richard Hill: So you'll never find an out-of-stock product then, or you'll never be able to buy incorrectly an out-of-stock product. Or you won't be running paid ads to an out-of-stock product.
[00:11:24] Tom Doherty: We won't be running paid ads on an out-of-stock product. Yeah, that's the one. Or something we know is going to go out of stock. Yeah. I mean, that's such a
[00:11:30] Richard Hill: such an old school thing, but you still see it, you know, you still see it unfortunately, don't you? A lot of products that are, you know, they get into feeds still even on Google Ads, which, you know, you shouldn't be allowed, et cetera. But you've got this sort of bit of a few weeks window where they can slip through and stay through. Um, but yeah, obviously that can, can be on a 70,000 SKUs. You've probably got quite a lot of products out of stock at any one time. So if that's not taken care of, yeah.
[00:11:53] Tom Doherty: That, that's the thing. It's, again, it's different to a small sort of beauty brand that maybe has 15 products. We're doing this on 70,000, 1.5 million. You, you can't manually check effectively. So,
[00:12:05] Richard Hill: so you've talked about a few things there. I feel like we've got about— we can, we could, we've got a good, good, good start. So my notes tell me that when you, when you sort of got in there, there was a big, big spend on PPC and then you sort of wound that in and sort of unraveled some things, shall we say. Maybe step us through that because I think, you know, pretty much I know most of the listeners will be PPC heavy in automotive, for example. Yeah. And sometimes, you know, it can be hard to really grasp what's working, what's not working to a point. You know, how did that look? How did you sort of unwind this fairly chunky spend and then bring it in? But obviously now you're flying. So was there a moment where you have to sort of step back, step back and then go again? Or how did that work?
[00:12:51] Tom Doherty: Yes. So we— the way our D2C site works is we sell a lot of our own branded products. So we've got 35 brands covering pretty much the whole of automotive, but we then also have brands like Castrol and Bosch that are traffic drivers, effectively.
[00:13:06] Richard Hill: Brand products. Yeah,
[00:13:07] Tom Doherty: exactly. So what we were doing was we were spending £350,000, £400,000 a month on PPC. So an enormous spend.
[00:13:16] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:13:17] Tom Doherty: And what we have brought it down to is £20,000, something like that, some around that.
[00:13:23] Richard Hill: Still there, is it, sort of thing?
[00:13:25] Tom Doherty: Yes, so it's still there. We are scaling it, um, we're bringing it back up. But I mean, we were looking at like the maths of it were just horrendous.
[00:13:32] Richard Hill: So
[00:13:33] Tom Doherty: we were looking at like, uh,
[00:13:34] Richard Hill: that's a lot of Claude tokens.
[00:13:36] Tom Doherty: Yeah, but, uh, our customer acquisition was £48 and our lifetime value was £60. It just— the math wasn't adding up. Yeah. When we— when I went— so that was when I took over the account.
[00:13:48] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:13:49] Tom Doherty: Was the first thing, look at the P&L.
[00:13:51] Richard Hill: And that was mainly on Amazon ads?
[00:13:53] Tom Doherty: No, that was all— so, so we have a different platform. Yeah, we have another £400 grand a month for Amazon. Yeah. Um, but yeah, the ROAS was like, what, 118, something like that? Really, really low.
[00:14:05] Richard Hill: So 1.2 times. Yeah, I mean, that's a lot.
[00:14:08] Tom Doherty: It's, it's tiny.
[00:14:09] Richard Hill: Unless
[00:14:10] Tom Doherty: So the initial plan was to scale the customer base. So acquire, acquire, acquire.
[00:14:15] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:14:16] Tom Doherty: But it gets to a point where, I mean, we were probably— the site as a whole, if you look into like dev costs, the amount we've spent on it over the last sort of 3 or 4 years, probably looking at high 7-digit loss.
[00:14:32] Richard Hill: I
[00:14:32] Tom Doherty: mean, we would have made an enormous loss this year if we'd have gone ahead with the initial plan for
[00:14:39] Richard Hill: it. Yeah.
[00:14:39] Tom Doherty: So, um, that was just on the D2C site. So we've scaled it back and now it's profitable. I honestly think we went through a bit of a phase generally in e-commerce, probably 5 or 6 years ago, where the focus sort of went away from margins. I'm not sure if you've experienced this, but it went away from margins and now we're starting to come back into—
[00:15:00] Richard Hill: Absolutely.
[00:15:00] Tom Doherty: Margin focus.
[00:15:01] Richard Hill: So the COVID um, hit, if you like, it was just like a lot of firms just didn't think they could do anything wrong really, but I just bid, bid, bid, spend, spend, spend. In certain industries, yes, that was— but now it's very much about profitability and, you know, not what is the ROAS. Well, no, hang on, what is the profitable ROAS? Because this product we're making 10p, this product we're making £800. So hang on a minute, the ROAS on that needs to be a bit different to that.
[00:15:26] Tom Doherty: Exactly. And that's what we looked at. So we moved away. So we don't advertise any third-party products now. So we don't advertise Castrol, Bosch, any of these big names.
[00:15:34] Richard Hill: On paid ads?
[00:15:34] Tom Doherty: On the paid ads.
[00:15:35] Richard Hill: Yeah. You've got the margin.
[00:15:36] Tom Doherty: We've got the margin more because it's on our own brands. So that was sort of the initial thing we did. And now, I mean, we're looking at a ROAS of between 7 and 8 every month. So it's significantly better than it was, but obviously the spend is significantly smaller than it was.
[00:15:52] Richard Hill: Yeah. Well, I appreciate you sharing that because I think a lot of people have this sort of quandary where to go with it, what to do with it. But I think, as we say, it sounds very similar. Ultimately, obviously a 1.2 RAR, I think we're saying, that's a loss in anyone's world. Doesn't matter what you sell, whether you, you buy something, you know, you make it yourself or whatever, it doesn't matter. That's still— but ultimately it's so easy to get caught in that trap. Just turnover, turnover, turnover, turnover. But hang on, we're losing money and we're paying, you know, we're, yeah, we've got this turnover of, you know, 1.2 on 4. You've got about 600 grand's worth of turnover there on 400-odd grand or whatever, maybe less than that. Um, but ultimately it's cost you more than that, then you've got, yeah, you're losing money and you can only sustain that for so long. Obviously some companies do that to buy the market or whatever, but it's not really, you know, the, in the biz, my previous business, there was a player that did that and they were one of the wealthiest firms in the UK. They were, they were always in the top 10 richest families in the UK when the Times list comes out. They're still in it now. But when I was doing my business, you know, they came in and really destroyed a lot of businesses because they could, they were just losing money.
[00:16:58] Tom Doherty: Yeah.
[00:16:59] Richard Hill: They did it for so long, even they couldn't afford to keep doing it. Keep them, they did it for a long while, don't get me wrong, but they weren't very profitable and they lost, you know, tens of millions a year to buy the market sort of thing. But then they,
[00:17:10] Tom Doherty: yeah. But we're in this space, I mean, we're competing against players that have 300, 400 stores across the country that they can do click and collect to. And we have 42, I think, something like that.
[00:17:23] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:17:23] Tom Doherty: We're, we're not on that same level. We can't we don't have the same offering as the same players in the market. So yeah, that was effectively what we did. We really focused on profitability versus let's just spend and buy the market.
[00:17:37] Richard Hill: So we've cut the spend on non-owned brand products. And obviously you save 400-odd grand on ad spend is one thing. Obviously you've then maybe lost some turnover-ish, maybe not. Um, what else did that sort of teach you about sort of, um, how to split your products and where to market them? Is there anything else you learned from that?
[00:18:04] Tom Doherty: So in terms of how we actually split them, it is always tricky because we have 35 brands. I mean, we sell 9 different snow foams. Yeah. So I think I've got 4 of them in my garage. So how do you sell 9 different— Talk about that. Yeah. Um, so I mean, what, what do we actually focus on?
[00:18:23] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:18:23] Tom Doherty: Um, really what we— our main focus on how we split stuff, um, into— without getting really technical with it, because in all honesty, I, I don't do the technical side of things. Um, we focus on— I mean, our owner wants us to sell everything.
[00:18:37] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:18:37] Tom Doherty: Like absolutely everything all the time. Um, we focus on margin as a secondary point. And then the third point that we focus on is what is the likelihood of us getting this product into retail stores? And if we as a business believe that that's—
[00:18:50] Richard Hill: Into other retail stores, not your own?
[00:18:52] Tom Doherty: Not our own yet. So yeah, your supermarkets and the trade. What is the likelihood of us getting that product in? If it's high or we believe it's high, we will then push more on those products. Um, we've had some feedback from, uh, some of the retailers in France because we have quite a global business. Um, in France they get sent this is going back to Amazon, but we, we focus on this across the board. They get sent the best sellers in the automotive category, the retail buyers do, every single week. And so it mattered if you were in the best sellers in that category. Um, so we focus on that across the board. So,
[00:19:34] Richard Hill: so you would see that samples of the best sellers?
[00:19:36] Tom Doherty: No, they get sent like a spreadsheet.
[00:19:38] Richard Hill: I got you.
[00:19:39] Tom Doherty: Of literally their top 100 best sellers, and if there's anything creeping into it and Yeah, so it matters to us if we are in those 100 bestsellers. Yeah,
[00:19:47] Richard Hill: yeah,
[00:19:47] Tom Doherty: because yeah, Amazon's massive, our D2C site is pretty big, eBay's massive for us, but getting into a retail store is just a different level, to be honest, in terms of volume.
[00:19:57] Richard Hill: 300 stores, 1 product,
[00:19:59] Tom Doherty: boom. Yeah,
[00:19:59] Richard Hill: 2 products, 10 products, just—
[00:20:01] Tom Doherty: yeah, exactly.
[00:20:02] Richard Hill: It's like a 400 times multiplier or whatever it is. Yeah, depending on the stores. And there's a lot of brands, isn't there, out there that have got a lot of stores? You only gotta go around any town center around the world, really, haven't you? And there's the usual corporates, I guess. Yeah, exactly.
[00:20:16] Tom Doherty: So we have quite a joint-up approach. Uh, Aaron is actually brilliant at that. He has a really joint-up approach to everything we're doing. So he really focuses on the, the online side of it as a marketing tool, not just a sales tool, but a marketing tool to get us into the retail stores. Because the first thing you do when you speak to a buyer is, is How are you going to sell this product? If I list this product, how are you going to sell it? Are you gonna— how are you gonna drive traffic to our stores? Well, if you're showing that you're spending X amount on TikTok, X amount on Meta already, and these products are already selling, it makes it a much easier question.
[00:20:51] Richard Hill: Well, thanks for sharing that. So you sort of touched on it, but like, I think obviously 75,000, 70,000+ SKUs on the site, obviously a lot more. And when we start looking at the other areas When it comes to discounting certain products, obviously you've alluded to the fact you've got more margin in your own products, and then you've got other brands where it'll vary from not a lot of margin to maybe some really good margin and different deals and different stock deals. And oh, we've had this a long while and, you know, there's a lot of variables, but how do you sort of handle discounting? I'm quite intrigued with 70-odd thousand SKUs.
[00:21:27] Tom Doherty: So when I looked at the account, I first took it over, we were discounting everything all the time, pretty much. So we'd have— so we'd have maybe brakes, brake discs, brake pads,
[00:21:39] Richard Hill: like
[00:21:40] Tom Doherty: a flap discount. Yeah, 15% off was pretty much it.
[00:21:43] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:21:43] Tom Doherty: 2 weeks one thing, 2 weeks another thing. 2— basically, I mean, I had a look at the, the media plan for the year, the promo plan, and there was no week where we weren't on promotion at 15% off. Dangerous. Huge, yeah, huge ranges as well. So you're looking at like 10,000 SKUs on promo, or I mean, sometimes we would have had like the entire catalog just promoted for as long as we possibly could.
[00:22:07] Richard Hill: And probably some SKUs going out at a loss.
[00:22:09] Tom Doherty: Exactly. Yeah. So what we did—
[00:22:10] Richard Hill: quite a lot actually.
[00:22:12] Tom Doherty: So what we did was we had a look at it and we thought, right, let's— what are our real traffic drivers? What do people buy? Because we're trying to hit the retail customer, we're also trying to hit the B2B trade buyer for automotive. What do they buy? What do they actually want? So we have about 10 to 15 products that we put on what we call hot deals.
[00:22:33] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:22:33] Tom Doherty: So instead of 15% off everything, we go big, 40, 50% off these 15.
[00:22:39] Richard Hill: You've got the margin there to do that? Yeah, always.
[00:22:41] Tom Doherty: Not always, but, um, I mean, we're close. We wouldn't make a loss on those lines. Um, but yeah, we, we push it for those specific products, but it's stuff like brake cleaner, screen wash.
[00:22:52] Richard Hill: So they'll keep buying that sort of
[00:22:54] Tom Doherty: stuff.
[00:22:54] Richard Hill: Exactly.
[00:22:55] Tom Doherty: Yeah.
[00:22:55] Richard Hill: So there's a lot of demand for it.
[00:22:57] Tom Doherty: Exactly. So they drive a lot of traffic to the site and they're our own brands. So we're pushing our own brands rather than selling like a Castrol oil that does bring traffic in, but nobody makes money off it.
[00:23:06] Richard Hill: You might have got 15% on that back in the day, whereas now you're getting a lot more on our branded one, but you're still making more money, or at least you're breaking even.
[00:23:15] Tom Doherty: Yeah, exactly. So we use those. Um, what we really noticed before was that when we, when we were doing a flat 15% off, our conversion rate when we weren't on a deal was a huge drop. So people, the customers just knew that, well, why would I buy it now when I can wait? Because I know you're going to be on a deal. And I think our message was just getting lost.
[00:23:36] Richard Hill: I'm seeing— we see that, we see that. We— I'm just nodding along because we've— that really resonates with a lot of other automotive brands that we know and work with that have just historically gone, you know, their email campaigns are just discount, discount, discount, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat. And then fast forward to now, they're not like that now. And they can't be because it's all about profitability really now. It's obviously a little bit, a little bit different to maybe 5, 6 years ago when it was, you know, it was easy, easy street maybe to a degree. Well, thank you. So you've got Premium brands, you know, the sort of higher-end brands, the mid- brands, and maybe this lower, lower tier. How do you decide, you know, a new brand maybe approaches you, how do you decide what to take, you know, and how does that sort of factor in where it goes or that type of thing?
[00:24:30] Tom Doherty: So if a new brand approaches us, we will generally, will, it depends what it is. If it's a, if it's a product that doesn't match ours or it sits at a different price point or we will take it, um, and, and list it on the site, but we won't put a load of spend behind it to push it.
[00:24:46] Richard Hill: It'll start and sit in the category, subcategory, whatever, or collection, however you call it, um, and just bubble along for now. Yeah,
[00:24:55] Tom Doherty: but if we build a new brand for us, then we will put a lot of spend behind it. We'll really try and push it. I mean, we launch— you'll probably find this ridiculous, we launch 1,000 new products a month, and that's not hard parts, that's not this brake disc for this Volvo.
[00:25:14] Richard Hill: That's separate.
[00:25:16] Tom Doherty: That is 1,000 chemical products. It might be a new car shampoo, it might be a new lubricant. We, we launch so many products, so they will always get a bit of a priority to give them a chance to see whether they will grow. Um, again, our owner is Very inventive. Um, so there's loads of new products that we launch all the time.
[00:25:38] Richard Hill: A lot of those are your own.
[00:25:39] Tom Doherty: They're our own brands. Yeah.
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[00:26:55] Tom Doherty: Pretty much all would be our own. So out of that 1,000, it would all be our own. So we sell automotive mainly. We also have DIY brands. So we've got Bartoline, which is one of Europe's biggest DIY brands. You might not recognize the name, but you'd know the logo. It's in B&Q. It's in like, you'd know it.
[00:27:12] Richard Hill: Is that automotive or DIY? That's DIY. Sorry.
[00:27:15] Tom Doherty: Yeah. Then we've got Tetrion, which is another DIY.
[00:27:17] Richard Hill: I recognize that name.
[00:27:19] Tom Doherty: Yeah. Yeah. Which is, it was the first all-purpose filler. So it's quite a well-known established brand. Um, so we, in those, we just launch products all the time. Um, so yeah, we have a lot of brands to play with in a lot of spaces.
[00:27:34] Richard Hill: Okay, well, I think change of direction. Um, marketplaces.
[00:27:37] Tom Doherty: Yes,
[00:27:37] Richard Hill: big, big part, I understand, of what you—
[00:27:39] Tom Doherty: That's my bag.
[00:27:40] Richard Hill: That's your— that's your— you know, we was chatting before and you obviously did a lot of that before you worked at Touch of Soul. Now, I think, you know, a lot of options when it comes to marketplaces. You know, most people think of Amazon, but of course there's, you know, lots and lots and lots of other marketplaces and lots of other territories times the marketplaces by territories. You've got 300 or 400 or probably 3 or 4,000. Um, so I think a lot of people listening, you know, go, yeah, we're on Amazon, you know, and then they're probably on 3 or 4 others. But the reality is, you know, we could do a whole podcast, of course, or several just on marketplaces and So forth. But what advice would you give to people that are listening that are looking to go on to some of the more sort of, how can I put it, lesser-known ones to ensure it's a bit more smooth sailing? What do they need to avoid and what do they need to really prepare that they might not think about till it's too late?
[00:28:33] Tom Doherty: So the biggest thing is use a software that can integrate with them all. So we use Limeworks as sort of our warehouse management system. Yeah, yeah. We use that in the UK. In France, we use a software called Lengo, which is a very similar system to Limeworks, but they integrate easily with all of these marketplaces.
[00:28:49] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:28:49] Tom Doherty: If you have that, it's so much easier to do it. If you don't have that, you— the bottom line is, is you're not gonna— you're just not gonna be able to launch in these places.
[00:28:58] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:28:58] Tom Doherty: Um, you could use like a— if your 3PL has a direct integration with these, uh, sites, then you can use that as well. So yeah, we've used that in the past. Um, the biggest thing really is there is a market for it. So you know that if you're selling on Amazon, you can sell on Tesco.
[00:29:14] Richard Hill: Yeah,
[00:29:14] Tom Doherty: you can sell on—
[00:29:15] Richard Hill: If it sells on there, it'll sell on any other one.
[00:29:17] Tom Doherty: It will, it'll just be a smaller size. But I mean, they all add up. So I mean, we have probably 25 different marketplaces that we sell on, and all of them combined, if you took out Amazon, would be about the same size. Yeah. So
[00:29:33] Richard Hill: it's doubled it if you didn't do it effectively. You're doing quite a lot more work for the others, but still.
[00:29:38] Tom Doherty: Yeah. Use that. And then use a, um, customer service, again, another software that can integrate with all of these because otherwise it's just a killer.
[00:29:45] Richard Hill: What's your go-to on that?
[00:29:47] Tom Doherty: We use eDesk. Okay. Um, so it's easy.
[00:29:50] Richard Hill: I thought you were going to say another, so I won't name drop it. But yeah.
[00:29:52] Tom Doherty: Yeah. So yeah, we use eDesk. Um, and again, it's easy. It's got APIs out of it, so it's easy if you want to build it into any AI sort of systems that you're building yourself, which to be honest is a big driver now for us.
[00:30:03] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:30:05] Tom Doherty: Is can we take that data and move it elsewhere?
[00:30:07] Richard Hill: So yeah, I mean, we, we, um, obviously talk to a lot of, um, brands and, you know, Google Ads is our sort of go-to, if you like, and most brands, um, but we always say, well, if you're doing well here, you're gonna get 5, 10% on Bing, for example, you know. And obviously if there was 20 Bings, if you like, TikTok, Meta, you know, but most brands we work with are not on Bing, for example. So it's just an easy 5, 10%. you know, you're never going to get, you know, 30, 40%, unlikely. I hope I live to regret that because that would be great. But there's usually more margin on the orders because the bids are a lot lower. So, you know, the turnover might be 5, 10%, but the profit usually is better. The ROAS is usually a lot stronger, or the profitable ROAS is usually a lot, a lot stronger. You know, a 10 on, on, um, Google may easily be like a 15 on Bing. It's quite a normal sort of thing, seems to be. So sounds like a similar analogy, really.
[00:31:00] Tom Doherty: Absolutely. And again, it's, it's, so it's probably having the softwares to be able to do it and, and having the team that can do it. Yeah. So you're still going to use like B&Q, use Citrus Ads. So you're still going to have to run Citrus Ads. So whether that's for an agency or whether that's internally, you're going to need to do it if you want to do it properly. So I think the thing I'd probably say is, is if you're going to do it, commit to it. Don't just stick them up and stick the products on there and think,
[00:31:24] Richard Hill: yeah,
[00:31:24] Tom Doherty: let's just see what happens. You will sell a few, but you're probably not gonna— it'll be the first thing to be pulled if your resources get—
[00:31:30] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:31:31] Tom Doherty: So yeah, if you're going to do it, really commit to it.
[00:31:35] Richard Hill: Okay, so we're going to do a quickfire round.
[00:31:37] Tom Doherty: Okay,
[00:31:38] Richard Hill: 5 quick questions. Yep, one word ideally. I might let you have 3. You ready?
[00:31:43] Tom Doherty: Yeah,
[00:31:43] Richard Hill: sure.
[00:31:44] Tom Doherty: Yeah, let's do it.
[00:31:45] Richard Hill: Okay, Amazon or MyMotorWorld, which gives you the best margin?
[00:31:48] Tom Doherty: Amazon.
[00:31:49] Richard Hill: Amazon. One word that kills marketplace launches?
[00:31:53] Tom Doherty: It's a great question. That is a great question. software.
[00:31:58] Richard Hill: Yeah. So if you're not using Limeworks—
[00:32:00] Tom Doherty: Not necessarily Limeworks, but you just, you just can't do it in automotive. You cannot launch in marketplaces if you don't have a software that can back it up and can scale. Yeah, everything needs to be scalable in automotive.
[00:32:14] Richard Hill: Yep. Okay. Magento, Shopify?
[00:32:17] Tom Doherty: Magento.
[00:32:18] Richard Hill: No,
[00:32:19] Tom Doherty: but I think it depends what you're using it for, to be honest. I think we So we acquired a company called Infinity Works last year and they use Shopify. So we've kept the Shopify site and kept it all on there.
[00:32:30] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:32:30] Tom Doherty: For My Motor World, it's quite a complex site. It needs to link into click and collect orders, just link into their stock feeds, huge catalog. It's just a lot more customizable for us. So probably would be Magento.
[00:32:43] Richard Hill: Yeah. Okay. Best-selling brand in the Tetrasol range?
[00:32:48] Tom Doherty: The best-selling brand is Car Lube, but the best, the most well-known brand would be Teacut.
[00:32:56] Richard Hill: Teacut. Oh, who doesn't know Teacut?
[00:32:58] Tom Doherty: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:32:58] Richard Hill: I remember as a boy when I got my first car and it was an absolute shed, I went down and got my red bottle of Teacut and spent about 3 days, and I was proud as punch. Yeah, yeah.
[00:33:10] Tom Doherty: So that—
[00:33:10] Richard Hill: yeah, who hasn't got a bottle of that in their garage? Whose dad hasn't got a bottle of that
[00:33:14] Tom Doherty: in their
[00:33:15] Richard Hill: garage?
[00:33:15] Tom Doherty: But I mean, that It's funny you say that because that's— that is becoming a problem for us, is we don't want T-Cut to be the WD-40. We don't want it to sit there in your cupboard. Yeah. You just have a tin of T-Cut in. We want it to be used more often, not just when you have a scratch, because it is like— if you have a scratch on your car, you say, I'll just T-Cut it. We don't want it to just be for scratches. We want it to be used for polishing your car, which is really what it— what it can do. So
[00:33:44] Richard Hill: Yeah, yeah, it's what I think. I— the one I've got in my garage has been there about 20 years, the original tin. I guess probably haven't got quite— I've got probably different cars to what I had 20 years ago.
[00:33:53] Tom Doherty: I don't even think we sell the original tin anymore.
[00:33:55] Richard Hill: Yeah, it's probably a collection. I genuinely remember I used to buy— I used to, um, have a thing about going to car auctions when I was like 20-plus, 20-ish. I was just telling the team earlier, when anybody new starts in our business, we have to share an interesting fact about ourselves and we go around the whole company. So there's like 25 of us on earlier. And people that have been here a while find it obviously quite a challenge to come up with interesting facts, or because somebody's starting every other week or whatever. So the interesting fact I gave today was, um, was that I was at an auction. It was like an auction of some, uh, an estate auction of someone's family estate, and there was a car for sale. And, um, I didn't even know what the car was because I was looking at something else. And the guy, the auctioneer's like, £80, a whole car for £80. I'm 20 years old. It's not now, you know. And I was like, I put my hand up and I won for £50. By the time I sort of registered, it was £55, and I won a Morris Marina in green for £55, and it had 8 months tax on it. So I was quite chuffed with that. So at uni, I had a car at uni. I don't think I would have had a car at uni if I wasn't at that auction. But I remember T-cutting that car because it had been in, um, some guy's shed, I guess, for probably 20 years at that point as well.
[00:35:09] Tom Doherty: But yeah, yeah. So, so yeah, that's the biggest brand. But like I said, we have an enormous amount. You'll see Carplan, which is a big sort of commodity type lines. You'll see De-Icer in Carplan.
[00:35:20] Richard Hill: Yeah, yeah. I always see—
[00:35:21] Tom Doherty: yeah, if I'm in people's cars. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, you'll see Carplan Demon, which is sort of a sub-brand, um, which is the best-selling retail brand in the UK. So there's so many huge brands. Yeah.
[00:35:36] Richard Hill: Wow. So last quickfire.
[00:35:38] Tom Doherty: Yes.
[00:35:39] Richard Hill: Click and collect, necessary evil or advantage?
[00:35:43] Tom Doherty: It's an advantage. Yeah, 100%. I mean, if we had 300 stores like some of our competitors do, we'd be significantly bigger and, and better than we're doing it at the moment.
[00:35:53] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:35:54] Tom Doherty: So, and we were a little bit late to it. We launched it last year. We should have launched it a while ago. And there you go. That's one answer.
[00:36:01] Richard Hill: That was well done. That was the quick one-word answer. So that was the longest quickfire round of all time.
[00:36:07] Tom Doherty: Thank you for that.
[00:36:10] Richard Hill: So I think, you know, automotive has a lot of, I said, fair unique challenges. You know, fitment being a big one that we talk about. But I think, you know, a lot of SKUs ultimately, you know, big catalogs and obviously inherently with big catalogs, lots of potential technical challenges, getting things right and so forth. But really, you've also got a lot of SKUs. I know you've got a lot of your own SKUs, but you've got a lot of SKUs, a lot of parts that are made in factories that your competitors buy from. You know, you're buying and selling the same stuff. No doubt as a group, you've got a massive buying power because you're, you know, one of the biggest. Sort of how do you sort of compete with some of these brands that have maybe, you know, they've got a lot more click and collect than you have, for example. So more people might prefer to go there because it's can just nip down the store and pick it up. Have you got any insights on how you sort of compete in some of those areas? Because I think we see that a lot.
[00:37:05] Tom Doherty: So our biggest thing with that is creating value, more value than our competitors. So we give stuff away for free, or we'll add a marginal amount on to give something additional away. So an example of that would be, um, if we go to like DIY, we'll give away scrapers. So like, yeah, scrapers, if we're doing If we're giving away like paint stripper, for example. But in the automotive space, we'll probably— the biggest example would be nitrile gloves. So if you're doing an oil change, you need gloves. We give them away with oil, for example, or a funnel, an oil funnel or an oil drain pan.
[00:37:44] Richard Hill: Same product as the competitor, but we buy it from you, you're getting this extra thing.
[00:37:48] Tom Doherty: Exactly.
[00:37:49] Richard Hill: Not bringing the price down because it's probably frowned upon, etc. Um, but they're getting the oil pan, the gloves, the scraper, depending on the product.
[00:37:58] Tom Doherty: Yes, exactly. Yeah. And we, we try and make the products a little bit quirky. So, uh, we've got an amazing new de-icer coming out later this year. So everybody's gonna need it this year. Yeah, I think so. De-icer generally is commoditized, so it's the same effectively.
[00:38:15] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:38:15] Tom Doherty: Uh, we're bringing one out which is like a powerful, like a blast de-icer. Um, which like can do your car in about 3 seconds. It's absolutely phenomenal. Um, so we're bringing that out and we will probably look at, right, how can we add value with that? How can we— can we give them away for free if someone places a £50 order?
[00:38:34] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:38:35] Tom Doherty: Because I think people are looking just for that more value in this space in particular, because price can't always be a driver. If you go down on price, you're not bringing it back up. Um, so that's what we really try and avoid, to be honest.
[00:38:48] Richard Hill: So it's almost like a bundle.
[00:38:51] Tom Doherty: Exactly. Yeah, we do so many bundles. That's why we have 1.5 million SKUs on eBay, because everything is bundled. So we have service kits.
[00:38:58] Richard Hill: So 70K has got lots of versions with extra bits. And exactly, buy this product on its own or with this or with this, with this. You've got 4 SKUs of the same product but bundled up with—
[00:39:09] Tom Doherty: Exactly. And, and you look at like, it's also the trust of it. So A lot of our competitors are very trustworthy, but you look at like Amazon, their VRM lookup, from the experience that we've seen from our customers, is it isn't as good. So the VRM lookup where you put your car registration in and you get, well, this oil matches my car. The Amazon version of it does make a few mistakes, whether that's because they've got so many people feeding into that one system and some people haven't fed in the data to it.
[00:39:38] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:39:38] Tom Doherty: So it's that building trust that, you know, generally that if you get one of ours, and like I say, we're using these tools to track fitment complaints.
[00:39:46] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:39:46] Tom Doherty: So we know about it straight away and we get it flagged and we'll fix it.
[00:39:49] Richard Hill: Yeah, yeah. I guess that's where we met you earlier at Auto Fix Alive in terms of, um, things you're thinking of fitment. Yes. And so forth. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
[00:39:58] Tom Doherty: yeah. So the fitment side of it is, it's really technical. So, um, I mean, just the, the cost to be in this space is super expensive.
[00:40:07] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:40:08] Tom Doherty: before we even sell anything, you're probably looking at 50 grand a month just, just to have this item play, basically, for
[00:40:15] Richard Hill: the tech.
[00:40:15] Tom Doherty: Yeah,
[00:40:16] Richard Hill: yeah, yeah. Well, it's been a pleasure. I'll ask a couple of questions.
[00:40:21] Tom Doherty: Yes.
[00:40:22] Richard Hill: So, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, in our agency when we talk to clients about sort of, um, it's a term I've sort of stolen from, from a very smart marketer, sort of owning the racecourse. Um, when it comes to, you know, owning the store and driving a lot of traffic to the store, you own the store and you've got different traffic coming in, you know, and then you've got a lot more ownership. You know, if Amazon decide to triple their fees tomorrow and you're 100% all in there or 80% all in there, you've got a problem. But you've got quite a balance going on there with obviously you're doing a lot of, a lot of channels, but you're doing a lot of marketplaces. Um, You know, where do you think the balance is going to go over the next, say, 2 or 3 years with, you know, marketplaces, owned, your own commerce, your own ownership of the store?
[00:41:12] Tom Doherty: I think that owned e-commerce sites now in the automotive trade are almost dead. If you're starting a new one, I think it's almost impossible to start a new one now. Because I think the cost to do it is so high. The investment in stock would be phenomenally high.
[00:41:32] Richard Hill: Yeah,
[00:41:33] Tom Doherty: I just cannot see how unless, unless one of the major players came into it and doesn't have a site and created a site, I can't see how anyone could stomach the cost of it.
[00:41:42] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:41:43] Tom Doherty: So based on that, I think everything's going to go down the marketplace.
[00:41:46] Richard Hill: Barrier to entry is almost unattainable. Oh, it's just too much.
[00:41:52] Tom Doherty: It's just too high. You can't— nobody can acquire 70,000 SKUs and have them stocked in a warehouse or have them stocked at 50 click-and-collect stores across the country. It's just such a difficult setup to get into. I can't see how anybody could come into that now. Um, I think eBay is, is massive. I think it's going to keep on growing. So parts and accessories on eBay is their biggest category. It's their biggest focus.
[00:42:18] Richard Hill: I was gonna ask you about that, actually.
[00:42:19] Tom Doherty: Yeah, so that, that's their biggest. I think eBay will keep growing. I think Amazon— well, I know Amazon are putting a lot of investment into their parts side of it, so their hard parts. I think you could probably set up your own e-commerce site if you were focused on what we call soft parts, so your 3 Bs, which is bulbs, blades, and batteries, um, because generally people can fit those themselves. So you can target a bit more of a retail customer for that. Um, but yeah, I think marketplaces are going to be the way forward, 100%.
[00:42:49] Richard Hill: Interesting, interesting. So, um, you touched on eBay.
[00:42:53] Tom Doherty: Yes.
[00:42:54] Richard Hill: And, um, we were both— obviously you were speaking at the event, I was in the audience, um, Auto Fixer Live, about 6 months ago, a few months ago. And, um, eBay were talking about live shopping. Have you had any experience of that yet?
[00:43:06] Tom Doherty: Yes, we did
[00:43:07] Richard Hill: do it on any, on any channel. Doesn't have to be eBay. I'm curious.
[00:43:10] Tom Doherty: So we did do live shopping, um, on eBay, um, I'll be honest, it wasn't successful. It— we didn't — I think we might have sold 2 items, something like that. It wasn't successful.
[00:43:21] Richard Hill: Yeah.
[00:43:22] Tom Doherty: Um, they did support us. They're really trying to push it, so they are giving like free— like you don't pay fees and things for anything you sell during those lives. They're trying to get us into that. Um, I know that it's successful for some categories. I'm not sure that for hard parts particularly.
[00:43:40] Richard Hill: I'm not sure. I don't— I don't think so as well, personally. But it's why it's not been proven. It's early days, obviously, but You know, we get a lot, we've had a lot of brands on that do very well on live shopping, but they're selling makeup and, you know, other, so certain products, yes.
[00:43:52] Tom Doherty: I think if you're doing incredible deals on it, um, you could potentially do quite well. I mean, we aren't great at gifting products, so we have some, we have some products that are like gift packs. So we have like a car, a car plan demon 7-piece kit where you get like a full car cleaning kit.
[00:44:09] Richard Hill: Yeah, cleaning kit or a winter pack, something which
[00:44:12] Tom Doherty: might
[00:44:12] Richard Hill: be good. Bundling things.
[00:44:13] Tom Doherty: But
[00:44:14] Richard Hill: you're quite limited on what you can do, I think.
[00:44:16] Tom Doherty: Well, you're not going to go on and put an exhaust
[00:44:18] Richard Hill: on,
[00:44:18] Tom Doherty: can you? Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly right. There are other options or whatever. So the car cleaning side, we could do. Yeah, that's what we try to push. Stuff like AdBlue, which is quite common. Yeah, everybody buys it. But unless you're doing an incredible deal on it, you just—
[00:44:32] Richard Hill: Just order it to do it though. AdBlue and oil and stuff like that. It's just sort of like sitting there watching a live. It's about oil. and add blue. It's just like for the sake of a quid, probably extra less or more or whatever, or less.
[00:44:45] Tom Doherty: Exactly. We will try everything. Yeah, we will. So if eBay, like I said, they asked us if we'll do it, yeah, we'll do it. We'll have someone sat there answering questions for an evening whilst they're on live and stuff. But I think we'll probably look back at this.
[00:44:57] Richard Hill: Well, we are going to get, we are going to get the, the guys at eBay on in a few weeks, so we'll see what the latest is from, from those.
[00:45:04] Tom Doherty: Tell them I've seen you. Yeah, yeah.
[00:45:06] Richard Hill: Well, thank you so much for coming on. Really been a pleasure. I think, um, final couple of questions. If we were sat here, say, in 2 years, you know, we get you back on, um, what do you think you'll be sort of chatting about then? Where do you— is there something that gives us a bit of insight into where you guys are going that you feel is a real area of focus, which is going to really accelerate the business in the next couple of years?
[00:45:27] Tom Doherty: Uh, our biggest focus is the EU, so Germany in particular, and the US. Yeah, the US market is just so big. So That's what we're trying to focus on at the moment. Um, in all honesty, the, the growth plans that we have, if we're sat here in 2 years' time, I would expect us to have at least doubled our sales. So it's that sort of the, the what we're trying to do.
[00:45:53] Richard Hill: Wow. Well, we'll see you in 2 years. That is crazy.
[00:45:56] Tom Doherty: Yes.
[00:45:56] Richard Hill: That's crazy. Brilliant. Well, well, I wish you all the best.
[00:46:00] Tom Doherty: Thank you.
[00:46:02] Richard Hill: Um, I like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. Do you have a book to recommend to our listeners?
[00:46:06] Tom Doherty: Yes, I actually don't read a lot, but I do listen to Audible. Yeah, the book that I like the most probably is a book called Manifest by Roxie Nafusi. So it's about manifestation. I'm not 100% sure I believe fully in manifestation, but I love the idea of you create own luck. So you do things that put you in the position to create opportunities. So it's kind of about that. It's kind of about believing that you're going to walk in somewhere and something's going to happen that's positive to you. And that's, yeah, I like that. So it's probably my favorite book at the moment.
[00:46:44] Richard Hill: That sounds great. I've not, I've not actually heard of that because you've heard of manifestation, but not the actual— yeah, great. Well, we'll link that up in the show notes. Tom, thank you so much for coming on the show.
[00:46:52] Tom Doherty: Perfect. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:46:53] Richard Hill: Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode, hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you are listening to this podcast. You're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Have a fantastic day, and I'll see you on the next one.
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