Jim McCann
speaker
66 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Jim McCann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So Valentine's Day, middle of winter, toughest time of the year from a weather point of view. So I'm keenly aware of the pass in Northern California called Donner's Pass and whether or not there's snow on it because our trailer trucks have to get through that area to the airport.
And if that pass is closed, we have a nine hour extra drive down through the southern part of California to get to the appropriate airport. So weather is a variable that as we became much more involved in the agricultural part of the business through Harry and David at all, I became much more aware of. So I have more reasons not to sleep effectively at night.
Well, you know, this is a tougher environment to grow in, Nicole. Organic growth, which has been a The primary growth engine for us for these many years is going to be a little tougher in this year and maybe the year after and certainly in the last year. So then we say, OK, we have a nice balance sheet. We have a good platform.
So when we make an acquisition like Things Remembered, which we just acquired, a very small acquisition.
Sub $10 million acquisition. All we bought was intellectual property. We bought the brand, we bought the customer list, inconsequential amount of inventory, and then we relaunch it. So we already have the technology platform. We have the fulfillment facilities. We have the machines that do the etching and the laser cutting. We have the glop of the glop of the machine in place.
So there we would expand our product line a little bit because they had a different mix than we do. And so, but we already have the backend. So we can afford the body intellectual property, spend less than $10 million for it and have every expectation that we'll grow that brand to $100 million brand.
And we'll do that fairly inexpensively because we already have 30 million customers to introduce that brand to. And we can do that relatively inexpensively. We don't have to go out and acquire new customers. We already have 30 million affluent, gifting, thoughtful people who would most likely be interested in
when there's a wedding coming up in their family to get that beautiful bride's groom and wedding gifts that Things Remembered is known for. And all we have to do is introduce them that they can use their loyalty program with us and they can buy those. We don't have to build a new building. We already have a building that has plenty of capacity. We don't have to build a new technology platform.
We already have a terrific technology.
Exactly. We already have a legal department, an HR department, a finance department, a tech. All of those things are already in place. So we buy little brands. One of the ways we grow is we buy little brands that we know our customers would be interested in. And we have the ability, inexpensively, to grow them to about $100 million.
Then it gets a little bit more expensive to grow beyond there because we've used up what we call our house media, our customer database, our social media marketing efforts, our direct marketing, our catalogs. And we've done that with a company called Sherry's Berries. We're doing that now with a company we bought a year ago called Vital Choice, which is all about better for you foods.
And then we're also looking to say, if it's tougher for us to grow, it's really tough for the new companies you mentioned who require new financing because they're not profitable yet. So maybe they're a couple of years away from profitability. Well, if they have to go back to the market for capital now, Oh, it's painful.
In a couple of conversations, a term I've heard by those companies who are in the market saying we need more capital before we can get profitable. They're hearing that the terms to get that capital are punitive.
Well, you know, when everyone's nervous, if you don't have a very clear line of sight to profitability, if you can get capital and there's a real question as to whether or not you can, you're going to be paying 25, 30% cost of capital. And boy, you better have one heck of a business because how many companies, how many businesses have margins enough to justify that kind of cost of capital?
I don't know many.
Well, not the traction, get the capital. How do you get the capital? How do you get people to say, okay, I'm going to invest in this because capital is tight.
And you see in the private equity community, for example, when you have a shop that has both a credit side to it and an equity side to it, well, the private equity guys are saying, well, I work my tail off and I commit capital to these businesses for 30%. four, five, six, seven years. And I'm targeting 14, 15, 16, 17% IRRs, internal rates of return.
Well, I can do it through the credit side of the shop and get 12%, 13%, 14%, 15% be at the top of the cap table and have a lot less risk and have my money out sooner. So you're seeing when capital gets tight, it goes to the credit markets where they're more protected and they get almost as good a return without the risk of being in equity.
A lot more expensive.
Some will go away. Some will be acquired. Maybe some will muddle through. I'm not sure how. But you have two things working. Cost of your capital has gone through the roof. It's triple, quadruple what it was a year ago. So cost of capital. And your cost of customer acquisition has exploded. It's what people call CAC, C-A-C, cost of acquisition of a customer.
Showing 41–60 of 66 · page 3 of 4
← Previous
Next →