The stimulus check was a blessing in disguise. This gave us the ability to generate new customers with more ads and put in place an infrastructure that wasn’t possible. I’m sure most of you have already read my rants about it so let’s skip to our clickbait title. Did we really lose $60,000 in sales in 5 days? We sure did… but did we actually recover from it? Nearly overnight. So, here’s my chance to tell you why I made the executive decision to nearly tank our reputation on all social media platforms and put us into some seriously “bad” debt.

The best damn customer service is our first sentence in our company vision. We did over 1,500 orders in about a 6 week period, during that time, it was only me and one other individual. It became genuinely impossible to process all those orders in an 8-hour work schedule with myself staying up until 2 AM for countless numbers of nights. Long story short and a lot of Red Bulls later, I was able to get all of the orders in and get slightly caught up in our email box. What wasn’t prepared for was the enormous amounts of “back orders” that would be created in the coming weeks of people receiving their stimulus checks.

Fast forward to about 2 weeks before writing this.. the phone calls, the emails, the none stop DM’s and IM’s.

Hello!!??? Where is my order, I placed my order with you about 2 weeks ago and have not received a tracking number, is this is a scam!?

This is absolutely ridiculous, you guys clearly have no idea what you are doing over there and I want my money back and I will be leaving a bad review on your Google and Yelp

I have filed a chargeback with my credit card company as I have not received my product in a timely manner

Where the fuck is my front splitter? It’s been over 3 weeks and no one has answered me, I hope you know I am well known on the biggest Subaru Facebook groups and I’ll let everyone know to never buy from your joke of a company

Yes, these are real emails and quotes. This is literally just the surface of the deep ocean of negative emails and messages I received on a DAILY basis. Entering the Challenger Deep of messages, I made a decision. I said to my team during our Monday Morning Meeting,

Today, we will be shutting off our phones and not answering new emails or messages. We will go through our open order list and contact every single customer by phone with an email follow up informing them of their order status and current back order wait time. This is the only way to positively move forward in the bubble I’ve created.

Balls, balls man. You can only imagine the 5-day backlash. I started seeing the emails and voice messages that were starting to pile up by the 100’s. Starting at around 10:30 AM on that Monday, the team dove headfirst into the ocean of emails and voicemails. We ate shit, we were yelled at and we were brought to our knees.. but never for once second were we defeated. In my 13 years of working as a contractor, I’ve never fought a battle like this. I had to adapt and command my team with the confidence to know we would come out victorious… and we did.. but it came at a cost, a $60,000 cost exactly. I’ve never felt like more of a piece of shit in those 5 days than I’ve ever felt in the 29 years I’ve been on this planet. People are ruthless, they do not care, empathy is lost and 99% of the time, most could careless your situation, but I truly understand. I have your money and it is my fiduciary duty to deliver your product as fast and efficiently as possible. But I needed to step up as a true leader and CEO and do the right thing.

I said in the beginning that we would make it all back and we did just that. on the last day of our hiatus, I decided to open the phone lines for a fresh wave on new customers and calls. By the 2nd week after our mini shut down, the reduction in emails and phones that have been deemed “wheres my shit” slowed down to a near halt. Of course, we’ll have those calls and emails which I fully expect as an e-commerce based business but I believe my decision to mitigate our exposure to chargebacks, bad reviews, and poor customer satisfaction by contacting every single open order customer is one of the best decisions I’ve made as an entrepreneur.

Since then, profits are up 8% from our previous month and returns are down 9%. That means after the following week of our mini shut down, we were able to generate the $60,000 in missing gross rev but generate an additional amount of sales on top of that in the same week to match last month’s profits and exceed them by 5%. We closed out June with another record-setting month and believe that our new customer service implementations have really raised the bar for other e-commerce sites. My main focus moving forward will be more automation with tracking and I know I keep saying this but a better website.

Small updates

All Liquivinyl pricing has been updated increasing by 15%. This is due to new packaging, high-quality materials, increased warehouse space, marketing and overall creating a better Front Splitter for all of our users. We have been working for hand and hand with Liquivinyl for almost a year and we value their relationship as it has put us on the map as the number one Front Splitter vendor.

All 2015-2020 Ford Mustang Ecoboost cat-back exhaust and cold air intakes have been added to the website.

Charles
@ffperformanceaz