Good morning and welcome to another week of the Method - where we share how we’re bootstrapping 7 figure businesses.

Carrying on from last week’s Black Friday ad deep dive - in part 2 of this series we’re looking at:

• Black Friday sales boost method 📈

• Finding hidden inventory problems 🏦

How We Boosted Our Black Friday Sales By 33%

We're seeing many big and small brands go early this year. Noel Leeming, for example, is already a week into their "Black Friday" sales.

They believe that by going first, they will capture the consumer's impulse spending budget and win that wallet share before we even get to Black Friday.

However, they're doing so at an unnecessary cost. Discounting products that people likely would have bought anyway - and offering Black Friday-level discounts for 20+ days, killing their margins.

Instead, we're building an email waitlist to get people interested and warmed up for Black Friday without giving discounts to customers who would have purchased anyway.

Last year our waitlist generated us an extra $15,000 in sales. And as of writing, we've already got 1149 people signed up for this year at 23 cents a pop.

We're doing this by running Meta ads and leading peeps to a TypeForm, which captures their name and email address.

Our ads follow the exact same format we broke down last week.

Social Proof & Urgency

Our #1 tool for making this happen (beyond our actual number 1 tool, which is our audience) will be our Black Friday Ads.

Here is a breakdown of the exact ad we will be running this year.

Call To Action

To improve our ads' effectiveness, we've taken advantage of Meta's audience targeting by creating a look-alike audience based on our website traffic for the past 180 days.

Notes:

Whether you go early or use this waitlist tactic should depend on your business's position.

With the recession and all that, consumer demand has been weak this year, so many businesses are holding more stock than they’d like. Black Friday is an opportunity to correct course.

Your Inventory Problem

On that note - if you're a product business, you're probably sitting on a pile of cash hidden in plain sight called stock on hand.

A shockingly high number of businesses we've spoken to about inventory either have no idea how much they're sitting on or don't see why high inventory levels are a problem.

Imagine if someone came along and took all the money out of your bank account and said hey, I need this; I'll give it back in a year; you won't earn any interest on it; in fact, it'll only be worth about 90% of its value when you get back.

That'd suck, and it'd be a big handbrake, right. Well, that's the same as holding excessive amounts of inventory.

We made this mistake at Rugby Bricks - at one point this year, we were sitting on 1,000+ days of inventory. We effectively had ~$50,000 worth of stock (cash) locked away and not deployable in our business. 

In a fast-growing business like Rugby Bricks - $50,000 in unusable money = $ 100's of thousands of dollars in lost growth and opportunities.

This disease is killing many businesses, and they don't even know it.

The first step to avoiding it is being aware of it.

Then, as the widely cited Peter Brucker would say, you have to measure it to manage it (fix it). Inventory days is that measure.

And once you know what you're working with, take corrective action to fix it.

If we take big brands like Nike and Adidas as an example, then around 100 days is a healthy target. Smaller, more agile brands with slick ops teams like Gym-Shark can get this down to about ~30.

A Black Friday promotion on slow-moving lines is a good place to start.