Episode 35

Why Most E-Commerce Brands Are Measuring the Wrong Metrics (And Paying for It)

September 2, 2026 · 60 min

marketingleadership

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The Short Answer

ROAS is not a health metric. It is a signal. The metrics that actually drive e-commerce growth are lifetime value, average order value, and new customer acquisition cost. Most brands obsess over ROAS at the account level while missing the levers they can actually control, and agencies exploit that gap by optimising for the wrong targets.

What You'll Take Away

ROAS is a trailing metric that tells you what already happened, not what to do next, and treating it as a target hands agencies a blueprint for smoke and mirrors.
The holy trinity of metrics is lifetime value, average order value, and new customer acquisition cost, because those are the upstream levers you can actually move.
A rational business can spend $300 to acquire a $100 customer if lifetime value is $1,200, because the three-to-one CAC to LTV ratio is the scale button.
Cross-channel attribution is being double-counted across Meta, Google, and email simultaneously, so blended MER matters more than account-level ROAS.
AI is not taking away humanity, it is giving humanity permission to be human again by doing the 80 percent of work that used to require people to behave like robots.
The only limitation we have now is imagination, and the new hiring filter is intellectual curiosity, not credentials or experience.
Entrepreneurs are wired ready-fire-aim, which makes them vulnerable to the metrics game agencies play, because they look at the bank balance more often than the financial statement.

The Breakdown

ROAS is the fever, not the diagnosis. You walked into the doctor's office with a number, and the number told you to look deeper. But most e-commerce brands stop at the symptom, set a target, and hand their agency a playbook for manipulation.

Mark Young has spent twelve years watching this play out. He is the founder of RYZE Agency, a PhD in functional medicine, and the author of a five-book series called the E-Commerce Guide to the Galaxy, written specifically so founders never get burned by the wrong agency again. He has seen brands lose not because their product is bad or their ads are off, but because they are measuring the wrong things and making decisions based on data that was never designed to tell the whole story.

The conversation starts with a story that will sound familiar to anyone who has ever hired an agency. A client walks in with a hard line: 1.7 ROAS or we are done. The agency before Mark hit that number every month. The problem is they hit it by putting the entire budget into remarketing campaigns, acquiring hardly any new customers, and slowly killing the business. The client set a metric, and the agency optimised for it. The metric was wrong.

ROAS Is A Signal, Not A Target

Mark's position is blunt: ROAS is a terrible metric. It is a trailing indicator, a rearview mirror, a history book. By the time ROAS takes place, the work is already done. If it does not teach you what to do next month, it is just a record of what you spent last month.

The deeper problem is that ROAS at the account level treats all sales the same. It does not distinguish between a first-time buyer and a repeat customer. It does not account for lifetime value. It does not tell you whether you are building a business or just harvesting demand. A high ROAS can mean you are winning, or it can mean you are only selling to people who were already going to buy.

In Mark's model, ROAS is a symptom. It signals that something is happening, but it does not tell you what to do about it. The metrics that actually drive growth sit upstream.

The Holy Trinity Of Metrics

Mark calls them the holy trinity: lifetime value, average order value, and new customer acquisition cost. Those are the levers you can actually move. Those are the upstream decisions that determine whether your business scales or stalls.

Lifetime value is the total a customer spends over the relationship. If you can get someone to purchase one more time, you change the economics of the entire funnel. Average order value is the size of the cart. If you can move a $150 cart to $200, you shorten the payback window and improve cash flow. New customer acquisition cost is what you pay to bring in a first-time buyer, and it is the number that determines whether you can afford to scale.

Mark uses ProActive as the example. The brand spends over $300 to acquire a customer. The product sells for around $150. That looks insane until you factor in that the average customer stays for six to seven months, generating $900 in lifetime value. A three-to-one CAC to LTV ratio is textbook. That is the scale button. Push it until it breaks.

The problem is not every business can make that cash flow decision. If you only have $15,000 in the bank, you can only buy $15,000 worth of leads. If those leads only return $7,500 in the first month, you do not have the $15,000 for next month. That is an undercapitalised problem, not a marketing problem. But if you have the cash, the math is clear: spend $300, get $900, repeat.

ROAS to me, it's a false metric. It's terrible metric. It is a trailing metric.

Mark Young

Why Entrepreneurs Fall For The Wrong Metrics

Mark's read is that entrepreneurs look at the bank balance more often than they look at a financial statement. They are wired ready-fire-aim. They are high quick-starts on the Kolbe, meaning they move fast, trust their gut, and do not always wait for the data to catch up. That wiring is what makes them dangerous in the market, but it is also what makes them vulnerable to the metrics game agencies play.

An agency can manipulate ROAS by shifting budget into remarketing. They can claim attribution across multiple channels and double-count the same sale on Meta, Google, and email. They can present cost per acquisition as customer acquisition cost and make it look like they are bringing in new buyers when they are just reselling to the same people. The entrepreneur sees the number hit the target and assumes the agency is performing. The business is dying, but the dashboard looks fine.

Mark's solution is literacy. The book series is the travel guide. It is the common language. When a client walks in and says something that does not make sense, Mark points them to a chapter. Go read page 46. Come back when we can have the same conversation. The goal is not to turn founders into marketers. The goal is to make sure they cannot be taken advantage of again.

The Cash Flow Trap And The Waterfall Analysis

The conversation turns to cash flow, and Mark introduces what he calls a waterfall analysis. In month one, you dump all the money in and go negative. If you only have $15,000, you can only buy $15,000 worth of leads. Those leads return $7,500. How do you get the $15,000 for next month? You do not, unless you have outside capital or you change the unit economics.

That is where the trinity comes in. You can increase lifetime value by creating experiences that bring customers back. You can increase average order value by getting a bigger cart. You can decrease acquisition cost by improving the funnel, the creative, the offer. Those are the levers. ROAS is just the output.

Mark's example is the client with the 1.7 ROAS demand. Her average order value was $150. Her lifetime value was $1,200. Her cost of goods was under $10. The margin was a 12x. She could have paid up to $400 to acquire a customer and still hit the three-to-one ratio. But her ROAS target forced the agency to stay under $90 in acquisition cost. That is not a business decision. That is a self-imposed constraint that leaves opportunity on the table.

There are three things that I can pay attention to. And the three things that I always refer to as my holy trinity of metrics is my lifetime value, as we just discussed. What are the actions I can take to make somebody purchase from me one more time?

Mark Young

Attribution Is Broken And Everyone Is Lying

The attribution problem is worse than most people think. Mark's position is that cross-channel attribution is being double-counted everywhere. You see an ad on YouTube. Google counts an impression. You search the brand. Google pixels you. You land on Instagram and get remarketed. Meta pixels you. You watch a VSL and opt in. Klaviyo pixels you. You convert on the website. All three platforms claim the win.

The solution is not to fix attribution. The solution is to stop pretending attribution is clean. Mark's framework is to pick a rule and stick to it. First-click attribution gives credit to the channel that introduced the customer. Last-click attribution gives credit to the channel that closed the sale. Weighted attribution counts the assists, not just the goals. None of them are perfect. The goal is to count them consistently month after month so you are not comparing apples to oranges.

The deeper point is that not all sales are attributable to a specific channel. Someone might see you on Meta, Google you, land on the site direct, and convert. Who gets the win? The answer is it depends on the rules you set, and the rules matter less than the consistency.

The AI Shift And The New Hiring Filter

Mark had a meltdown about a year and a half ago. He looked at the way AI was starting to revolutionise the marketing world and asked himself whether he had a business in the future. The answer was yes, but only if he led instead of followed.

His agency is now heavy in AI. They are using Claude bots, GPT, autonomous agents running on Mac minis. Every bot has a name, a personality, a voice. Conor McGregor manages Meta and emails with an Irish accent. Angus MacGyver does Google research. Leonard McCoy writes medical blogs. The team is smaller, but the output is higher. The people at the top are playing puppet master, steering the bots, reviewing the work, catching the anomalies the machine misses.

Mark's hiring filter has changed. He does not need someone with extensive experience or a resume full of credentials. He needs someone who is smart and intellectually curious. That is the new non-negotiable. If you have an above-average IQ and the intellectual curiosity to want to learn, you can do anything you want in the world right now. There are zero limitations other than time and imagination.

The shift is that AI is doing the 80 percent of work that used to require people to behave like robots. The 10 percent at the front is the prompt, the scope, the strategy. The 10 percent at the end is the review, the human-to-human delivery, the decision about whether the output actually makes sense. The middle is automated. The humans get to be human again.

For a $1,200 lifetime value, if cash is not a problem, I'd pay up to $400 to buy that customer.

Mark Young

The Ten-Eighty-Ten Model

Mark calls it the ten-eighty-ten model. In the past, you came to work and your boss had done 10 percent of the work before you got there. The KPI was set, the leads were generated, the task was on your desk. Your job was to do 80 percent of the work throughout your eight-hour day and hand it to someone else to review. If it was good, it shipped. If it was not, you did it again tomorrow.

That 80 percent does not need a human anymore. AI does it faster, cheaper, and without complaining. The new job is to understand the 10 percent at the front and the 10 percent at the end. You need to know what you are asking for, and you need to know whether what you got back is any good. The middle is the machine.

Mark's position is that AI is not taking away humanity. It is giving humanity permission to be human again. For a long time, people have been behaving like robots in the workplace. Now the only reason to have a human is because they do something a robot cannot do. That means strategy, imagination, relationship, the things that only humans can do.

The New Limitation Is Imagination

Mark spent a weekend in the office alone, no interruptions, just him and his army of bots. He estimated he got about a month's worth of work done. His team walked in on Monday morning and found a backlog of assignments, tasks, outputs, data dives. He was not pushing a button and getting output. He was collaborating. AI gave him input, he gave it input back, it gave him more, he gave it more. Opinion versus opinion versus opinion until they both agreed.

The word Mark uses is collaborator, not tool. A tool is input-output. A collaborator is a shared analysis, a shared synthesis. You are working with the world's greatest collaborator with a 135 IQ and a PhD in everything. The limitation is not the machine. The limitation is your imagination.

Mark's thesis is that we are living in the first time in history where the only limitation we have is the one in our mind. If you have intellectual curiosity, you can do anything you want. There is no limit to what anybody can do today. The people who are still baffled, who are still saying you are so smart, are missing the point. It is not about being smart. It is about knowing how to use the machine.

AI is not taking away humanity. I believe that AI is giving humanity permission to be humans again because we have spent decades behaving like robots in the workplace.

Mark Young

What This Means For Operators

I have spent years building sales teams, and the pattern Mark describes is the same one I see in every market. The operators who win are the ones who know the difference between a signal and a target. They do not optimise for the dashboard. They optimise for the business. They do not hand their agencies a metric and walk away. They understand the levers, they ask the right questions, they hold the line.

The holy trinity is not new. Lifetime value, average order value, and acquisition cost have always been the numbers that matter. What is new is the speed at which you can move them, the tools you have to test them, and the cost of getting them wrong. If you are measuring ROAS at the account level and calling it strategy, you are flying blind. If you are hiring based on credentials instead of curiosity, you are building for a world that does not exist anymore.

The operators who scale are the ones who know that the only limitation is imagination. They are the ones who treat AI as a collaborator, not a tool. They are the ones who understand that the game is not to work harder, it is to work on the right things. And the right things are always upstream. If you want more conversations like this one, listen to the full episode.

Questions This Episode Answers

Why is ROAS a bad metric for e-commerce brands?

ROAS is a trailing metric that tells you what already happened, not what to do next. It does not distinguish between first-time buyers and repeat customers, does not account for lifetime value, and can be manipulated by agencies who shift budget into remarketing to hit a target while acquiring hardly any new customers. It is a signal, not a health metric, and treating it as a target hands agencies a blueprint for smoke and mirrors.

What are the three metrics that actually drive e-commerce growth?

The holy trinity of metrics is lifetime value, average order value, and new customer acquisition cost. Lifetime value is the total a customer spends over the relationship. Average order value is the size of the cart. New customer acquisition cost is what you pay to bring in a first-time buyer. Those are the upstream levers you can actually move to change the economics of the entire funnel.

How can a business rationally spend $300 to acquire a $100 customer?

If the customer's lifetime value is $1,200, spending $300 to acquire them delivers a three-to-one CAC to LTV ratio, which is textbook. The customer generates $900 over six to seven months, making the upfront loss a rational investment. The constraint is cash flow, not the unit economics. If you have the capital to cover the payback window, the math works.

Why is cross-channel attribution so broken in e-commerce?

A customer might see an ad on YouTube, search on Google, get remarketed on Meta, opt in via email, and convert on the website. Every platform pixels the customer and claims the win. The result is double-counting across Meta, Google, and email simultaneously. The solution is not to fix attribution but to pick a rule, first-click, last-click, or weighted, and count consistently month after month so you are not comparing apples to oranges.

How is AI changing the way lean agencies operate?

AI is doing the 80 percent of work that used to require people to behave like robots. The new job is to understand the 10 percent at the front, the prompt and the scope, and the 10 percent at the end, the review and the human-to-human delivery. Fewer people are running more sophisticated operations, with intellectual curiosity replacing credentials as the primary hiring filter. The humans get to be human again, focusing on strategy, imagination, and relationship.

What is the new hiring filter for e-commerce agencies and operators?

The new non-negotiable is intellectual curiosity. If you have an above-average IQ and the intellectual curiosity to want to learn, you can do anything you want in the world right now. Credentials and thirty years of experience matter less than the willingness to collaborate with AI, figure things out, and move fast. The only limitation is imagination, not knowledge or pedigree.

Full Transcript10,737 words

Kayvon Kay0:00Most ecommerce brands are measuring the wrong things. They're tracking ROAs like it's a health metric. It's not. It's a signal. And if you're building a business off a signal, you're flying blind. My guest today spent twelve years in the trenches of digital marketing, built an agency that works predominantly in health and wellness, earned a PhD in functional medicine, and then wrote a five book series to make sure ecommerce founders never get burned by the wrong agency again. He's got a framework he calls the holy trinity of metrics. And by the time this episode is done, you're going to look at your ad spend completely differently. Mark Young is the kind of operator who hands you the playbook before you even ask for it. This is the Vault. Let's unlock it.

Kayvon Kay1:00Mark, we're live here. Welcome. Welcome to the show. I appreciate that. I appreciate the invite, buddy. Yeah. I think anyone that's listening right now, this we are gonna be deep diving into, I would say, all things ecommerce. So if you have an ecommerce brand, if you're ecommerce business, this is gonna be the episode for you. I know Mark, we were just talking for the show and you said that you came out with, this new book called ecommerce guide to the galaxy. Is that correct? Yeah. It's actually five books, Kevan, because I actually started writing it as one book and literally I was like, okay, this is like a 600 page book. No one's gonna read that. So

Mark Young1:38so I ended up breaking it up and doing this stuff. So it's like, it's actually a five book series. And really, it's about ecommerce, but here's my angle. I'm an agency owner. Like, I'm just gonna sell out and tell you, like, I I own an an agency that deals with ecommerce brands by and large. But one of the things that, if I can say pisses me off, is that every single time I'm talking to a potential new client, I end up having to drudge through the baggage of what they've been through already. And, you know, it's like I end up having to take them through triage and then through the ER before I can even get them into the hospital. And and a lot of that is their misunderstanding of the metrics that move their business. And and the agency did something and they thought it was wrong. And sometimes I'm like, no, actually, what they did was right. I'm sorry. You don't like it, but the agency wasn't wrong. And sometimes it's the agency just started using smoke and mirrors to to make it look like they were performing and they weren't. And here's the reality. Business owners this is my thesis. I'll wrap it up here. Like, my thesis is the business owners get into businesses because they're really, really good at people. And as my friend Ben Hardy says, this is a who not how situation. Right? Like, so when it comes to marketing, find your who. Yeah. The problem is is that business owners, they they they don't know how to do the marketing. And if they did, they wouldn't be running their business. They'd be running marketing companies. And my entire goal in all of this was I want to write a book that literally becomes this is your travel guide. Never be taken advantage of by an agency again. And at the same time, this is my if you're going to work with me, you need to understand all of these terms and all of these strategies because now nothing I tell you is going to be a Like, I'm literally handing you the playbook. You wanna run it by yourself? Great. It cost you $12.95. You want me to run the playbook for you? Cool. You know in advance what you're getting.

Kayvon Kay3:44Yeah. I I I love it. I I could tell you're the passion and the the same thing that I deal with is just there's good agencies, there's bad agencies, and there's there's good business operators, there's bad business operators. And when you may have them all mixed mixed in, good things come out, bad things come out, ugly things come out. It's a nightmare. So I can understand the pain. I'm gonna call it the pain you've probably gone through from like just discovering what was not working or what was working, but it wasn't working because of x y z, and we're gonna get in all of that. So let me before we go into the power of the books and the power of what you do, I think it's gonna be a service to tell us a little bit of how you got here. Like, what what's the background? What what's behind the vault that got you to where you are today to have the power to be able to bring ecommerce to another level for a business?

Mark Young4:43So I'm a bit of an unusual animal as I think most entrepreneurs are. And I always say I love love working with entrepreneurs. They're all crazy. Like, they're they're they're absolutely all crazy. And as much as I prefer sanity in my life, I also love a little crazy. I even live downtown because as much as I complain about it every morning and I drive to the office, I still choose to live downtown Fort Lauderdale because it's crazy. It's busy. It's traffic. It's all that. So I do love it. And entrepreneurs are are my passion. And I'll say entrepreneurship is my passion. Like, they're all nuts. You know this. You work with the with this this audience too. Right? Yeah. And they all get defensive and then they all kinda chuckle and go, yeah, I guess we are. Like, it's just kind of the way that goes. So I've been in an entrepreneurial family and I laughingly say that entrepreneurship is kind of like a nationality. Like, you're just born into it and you can do nothing about it. And and once you get the bug, you're just you're part of the part of the machine. My father actually ran an advertising and marketing agency. He's owned his for thirty years. I swore I would never be part of the family business. That is not what I wanted. I went to college a lot and ended up becoming a college professor, worked in education, ran private colleges for ages. And what's really funny is I I worked in private and public education. I loved private education more than anything. And part of the reason was because it was entrepreneurial. It it was very granular in the way we ran the business. It was it was it was education, so I got the philanthropic high from actually helping students and seeing outputs and people that had nothing go to people who had established careers. Like, that was exciting to me. But I loved the grid of the entrepreneurship. How do how do we hit enrollment goals the next start? Like, all this kind of stuff. Well, I ended up getting out of that. And what's funny is, like, I did end up going and working with my dad for for a little bit after I got out of education because I was like, I don't know what I wanna do when I grow up. And that's a weird question to ask yourself when you're 39 years old. Yep. Yeah. And my dad's like, well, look, I need some help right now. We're working with some some giant clients right now, and one of them happened to be in the health and wellness space. And I'm like, well, I'm not doing anything. Like, I'm just, you know, sitting on the beach in Florida. So sure. I'll come back to Michigan for a little while. Didn't take me very long to decide several things. One, I didn't wanna work for my father. Two, I didn't wanna live in Michigan. And three, I not only fell in love with the marketing side of the business, which I had grown up around, but I also fell in love with the health and wellness side of the business. And I have subsequently come to the point that I even went back to school and earned a PhD in functional medicine. And what I find is entrepreneurs and longevity are probably the most overlapping Venn diagram I've laid eyes on in a really long time. Yep. It's huge. It because partially, we're all crazy. We love experimentation. We understand the value of time. So sickness is not about health. Sickness is about time lost. And I'll overlap that to say that we all love looking at dashboards and figuring out how to make them better. And that's all longevity is about. Whether I'm logging into an AuraRing stats in the morning or I'm looking at my labs, it's no different than me looking at a digital marketing dashboard and going, okay. If I make this one change, I can do this. Like, how do I get my HRV to move? Like, it's the same thing. It it's it's gamified, and I think entrepreneurs love gamified things.

Kayvon Kay8:31I get it. I love it. So and now you as a result of working with your father and then moving over, you really got into what it sounds like is the online game, the ecommerce game, and working with big brands. And specifically in health and wellness, or have you kind of expanded?

Mark Young8:48I would say that's probably 75% of our of our clientele falls in the health and wellness, you know, CPG, direct to consumer marketing. Not everything we do is ecommerce, but everything we do is online. So we do online support. As a matter of fact, just before this, I was working on an analysis for a international brand, rebuilding their US market, but it's not direct to consumer at all. So it's not necessarily direct to consumer, but it is very much e commerce in so much as it's online marketing. So, yeah, we we dabble in other things. Like, we certainly have expertise in other things. And where I thought you were going with that was that for me, focus in the digital world. My father's agency actually is the exact opposite. Like, it is such a compliment to what we do. Their television, their radio, their their brick and mortar. Like, they're the people who have all the buying relationships with Walmart and Target and so on. So it kind of is somewhat organically turned into the step one, step two, where what we're finding is sometimes he'll get leads that come into his agency, and he he's like, you're not you're not ready to go national TV. Like, we need to get all your other stuff under control. Let me make an intro. And then we nurture them and then pass them back. Nice. Sometimes we're working with clients that expand to the point that they're ready to go national. They're ready to go into retail. They're they're ready now. They've hit that maturity in their business life cycle. So it's a great partnership. And what's been fun about it twelve years later, because it's it's been that long, which is crazy to imagine. But twelve years later, like, we're we're back together working hand in hand, but working as partners, not as subordinates. And it's it's a fun handshake. So for anybody who listens to your podcast, who works in the family business Yeah. I had to tell you it actually can work.

Kayvon Kay10:44I love it. Yeah. Well, it seems like you guys are running two adjacent, like, kind of businesses, but in parallel with each other to support each other. A one man. Yeah. You have your autonomy. You're not underneath your dad or your 100%.

Mark Young10:56Well, and I gotta tell you, like, for a lot of people out there, and I'll I'll speak to the the children of entrepreneurs. And I will say that if if mom or dad was successful in that world, there is a shadow that that is always cast. And again, I say this at 51 years old, but even even at 39, 40, 41 years old, it was like, sorry, you got a twenty year head start on me. So you're of course going to be more accomplished than I am in that respect. But at the same time, there there is an element of, I believe, and I'm speaking from, you know, n equals one, that there's a need to make sure that you're able to prove your own muster on your own. And as an example, like, even in this partnership that we're working on between the Rise Agency and Jekyll and Hyde is even his team, like, all of a sudden, the boss's kid is back around, you know, and it's like, there's a natural bent for people to, you know, to assume nepotism. Mhmm. And, you know, and and the laugh for me and it's like, great. Let's just pull out your resume, pull out mine. I have absolutely no problems with it.

Kayvon Kay12:09The funny thing is, I'm I mean, I'm a capitalist, so when I hear about nepti yeah. I have no I have no problem with neptiism because you're the business owner. You started the thing. You started it for a legacy for your family to work into. Like, to me, it just doesn't make sense. It's hopefully, right? It's when it comes to challenging is if the child or the young one is not good and they're in the seat and they're destroying the company, that's a different story. But Yep. If they're pulling their weight, I I mean, why not? You're right. Why would you hire outside when you can hire within someone you know you Well, yeah. Because there's there's there's a trust factor that's somewhat just inherent in that, and there is a legacy as you said. But I think that even goes one layer deeper to that, that is they're my chips. I can bet on whatever number I want. Well, that's the thing. Right? But I guess, you know, as an entrepreneur and an owner, I mean, I see that. I always think you have options in life. Right? So if you walk in I'm in a business right now with mass nepotism, and I know what I'm dealing with. I don't complain about it. You can't complain about it. You either deal with it or you move on. Right? So one of Do my clients

Mark Young13:27you know Dan Sullivan? I know Dan Sullivan. I know Dan Sullivan. Dan's a good friend, strategic coach, the the whole deal. And Dan has a philosophy called guesses and bets. Sorry? Guesses and bets. Oh, guesses and bets. Yeah. And his philosophy is that throughout your life, you've just made a lot of guesses. And all of those guesses had some kind of bet that you put on them. And then however it turned out, you learned from it, you guessed the next time. And but every guess you take has chips on the table. And and I think in this particular one with with entrepreneurial families, it's like, yeah, is is your is your kid the most qualified person to, you know, create legacy? Maybe. But that that's up to the business owner to take that guess and take that bet. And and if and if the business owner loses everything because the kid was the wrong person to run the company,

Kayvon Kay14:23it's his money. That's exact like you said, it's his chips. So let's circle back. So let's circle back to the to the to the series, the book series, because I think it's very interesting. Sounds like you're giving away the keys, aka giving some stuff behind the vault in these book series. Where did you where did you get to the idea of this, or where was it that you decided, hey. I need to get this information out there and or I wanna protect. Because I think you came from a place of also protection for younger startup businesses not working with the wrong agencies and or going down the wrong rabbit holes.

Mark Young15:00Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, as is most things in my life, they all come from moments of frustration. And the frustration was twofold. Mostly it was because I was sitting on the telephone on Zoom calls all day long, as I'm sure you are too. And as I spend my life on Zoom, but 45 out of every sixty minute meeting is spent having to fix a a client or a would be client's worldview, mindset, whatever word you want to assign there because and and I'll give you a very tangible example. I had a client once upon a dream, correction, once upon a nightmare, who said on a call, 1.7 ROAS. That is the number. If if you can't achieve 1.7 ROAS on on every month, we're we're done. And I'm like, well, that's a really interesting first thirty days conversation that okay. And and and, of course, I'm an educator. Remember that. And I'm like, but that's a terrible metric. And she's like, no. I said 1.7. I'm like, but that's a terrible metric. And, of course and I'm trying to be kind about it because I don't like necessarily calling people's babies uglies or calling people stupid. But I'm like, let me explain how ROAS works. Like, this is a this is a trailing metric, but you're measuring ROAS at the account level, which means you're not measuring campaign level ROAS or ad set level ROAS or anything. And I'm like, and be and you're not at all measuring blended MER, which means each of your channels that you're using for marketing don't behave the same way, but they do behave together. And and trying to explain this that I need a 1.7. And and I said to her, I'm like, look. Here's what I'm gonna tell you. I'm looking to your data. The way your last agency always got you 1.7 ROAS was that the remarketing that they are putting your budget is all in remarketing campaigns. So making your demand hurt you because they're acquiring hardly any new customers. And the only reason they're not acquiring new customers is because you told them they have to hit a metric, so they went to the easier sales. It's always easier to sell to somebody again than it is to sell to somebody the first time, and you've set that standard for them. And, like, I can manipulate all of your data to get you to a 1.7. I said, I would never do that, but I wanna teach you how that shouldn't happen to begin with. And it really it had me unpacking something that I call my holy trinity of metrics. And I'm like, ROAS to me, it's a false metric. It's terrible metric. It is a trailing metric.

Kayvon Kay17:47It is Interesting. I hate it. I hate the I hate the I come from a world where all people look at us bro as on the market That

Mark Young17:56is that is most people in the world, and I will I will debunk that for you right now, K. Let's deep now we're the guts. I told you at the beginning, we're gonna get somewhere. We're going rounds here. We got it. For

Kayvon Kay18:09those of you that have been living your business off of ROAS, let's go. Now you I wanna I wanna just for me to calm my brain down, we're talking ROAS, you said at the account level, but we can be talking about ROAS at the,

Mark Young18:26you know, campaign level and or product level. So ROAS to me is a signal. It's not a health metric. So if if I mean, and again, I I also have a medical background. So I'm gonna make some some health metaphors and analogies here because that's the way my life moves. Roastomy is you came into the doctor's office with a fever. K. A fever is not a diagnosis. It's a signal. The only reason you went there is because there was a signal that told you to look deeper into something else. ROAS is a symptom. So you've I got agree. Okay? You you have some ads, for instance, that are getting very few sales. ROAS is telling you that's the return on ad spend that you spent $500 in this ad, this ad set, this campaign, whatever you wanna call it. You spent $500, you've only gotten $200 back. Here's the problem. In some business models, to spend $500 and get $200 back, that's okay.

Kayvon Kay19:23Well, now, yes. I I agree. You can actually lose money to get a customer if you have back ends. Right? And actually, lot of companies do that because if you're on a subscription base or whatever it might be, I am yeah. Correct? We should we unpack that or does that make sense? I would love to unpack that. And you are correct. But and part of that is based on ROAS targets being correct because there is lifetime value to consider.

Mark Young19:46But outside of lifetime value, what what I always talk about is that's a downstream metric because by the time ROAS takes place, it's a trailing metric. It it is kind of like looking at last month's financial statements. And I can look at last month's financial statements, but if they don't teach me what to do with next month, it's just a history book. And I have no interest in doing my business in the history. I need to be looking out the windshield, not the rearview mirror. There are three things that I can pay attention to. And the three things that I always refer to as my holy trinity of metrics is my lifetime value, as we just discussed. What are the actions I can take to make somebody purchase from me one more time? Because and I'll use an example of a company called ProActive. You're familiar with them, I'm sure. The skin. Yeah. ProActive spends over $300 for every new customer acquisition. Well, if you're familiar with the brand, the whole product get only sells for a 100 and some odd dollars. Why would a company do that? Well, two reasons. One, they're very cash positive, which means they can afford to take a loss on a customer acquisition, And they also know that the average person who gets onto their subscription or repurchase, as you said, that person stays around for six to seven months. So if I spend $300 to get a customer, but I get a $150 out of the customer every month for six months, spending $300 just got me $900 in lifetime value. And a three to one customer acquisition cost to lifetime value ratio is perfect.

Kayvon Kay21:22It That's a textbook. I I call that the scale button.

Mark Young21:25100%. Push the push it until it until it starts slide. Yeah. But that's not a that's a business decision, which I always make a distinction. You and I understand business decisions. Not every company can make that cash flow decision.

Kayvon Kay21:41So it's interesting you said that because there's I think there's two decisions there. Right? The a, the cash flow, meaning can you have the cash flow to support it? Because it takes well, I'm gonna say two, three months You're get running negative. Payback window. But then there's also the entrepreneur mindset challenge. The business owner who doesn't like, they get it, but they they don't get it. Like, they they when it comes to like and you could show them the mind. You could literally show them the on paper, but their brains just won't add up one plus one equal two because all they're seeing is, well, it cost me $300, but I only make a $100. No. I'm negative. That's not how you run a business. How do you get around that mindset? How do you actually train somebody and or get people to realize what has actually happened? Because as a smaller business, it could be scary. You are putting you said we're making guesses. We're putting chips on the table. Putting a lot of chips on the table.

Mark Young22:40That you're you're exactly right. And then that that literally becomes what I call a waterfall analysis. And that is, in this month, I'm dumping all the money in, and I'm going to be negative cash flow. But if I only have $15,000 in the bank Yeah. I I can only buy $15,000 worth of leads because that $15,000 is only gonna give me $7,500 back using that proactive model as an example. I only put $7,500 back on. How am I gonna get the $15,000 for next month's lead generation? And and it really becomes a game of cash at that point because a lot of businesses can't support scale because of their because of their cash position, and that's just an undercapitalized thing. Now for a lot of businesses, they don't have the the long term takeaway. Like, they they don't have the long term picture. And part of that is because I'm going to tell you most business owners and entrepreneurs that I know, and maybe your audience can prove me wrong, look at the bank balance more often than they look at a financial statement. Yep. And and because of that, like, I am the entrepreneur who looks at the bank account every morning. I don't know what I'm trying to accomplish by looking at the bank account every morning, but every single entrepreneur I know knows exactly how much money is in the bank today. But if you ask them what their contribution margin was last month, most of them would have to go ask the account. Yeah. Because that's just the nature of what we do. And using the Colby scores, like, entrepreneurs tend to be, like, seven, eight, nine quick starts. Like, we're we're ready, fire, aim, and all of these financial thing. I was gonna say, I wasn't gonna let you away from that. Yeah. I know. I'm I'm going back. But it all matters because lifetime value is something that I can help control. I can create experiences. I can I can create life cycle moments like emails and SMSs and all of the things that keep my customers engaged? The second thing, I can control my average order value. How do I get a bigger cart? If a $150 in cart value for a $300 acquisition is is too painful on my cash, great. Let's talk about how we get a bigger cart. Maybe I can get my 150 to a $200 cart, and then my payback window is only, you know, seventy days or whatever instead of ninety. The third metric, and this is my holy trinity, is acquisition cost. Because while while one mindset is increase the size of the cart Is that the other we're talking CAC? CAC. Exactly. Yeah. And I'm talking to NCAC specifically because we're talking new customer acquisition cost. This is the cost of a new customer, not just acquisition of a transaction. And that's also where this 1.7 ROAS is a problem.

Kayvon Kay25:35Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Hold on here. We just divided that up for a second. So there's CAC

Mark Young25:41and then there's NCAC, you said? So CAC is customer acquisition cost, which should refer specifically to the acquisition cost for a first time buyer. Buyer. Yes. The problem is is that many businesses actually don't necessarily cod call that CAC. They call that like CPL or CPA, which is cost per acquisition or cost per lead. Yeah. The cost per acquisition technically is referring, and this is where all these acronyms start to screw people up if you're not an industry expert, cost per acquisition is literally the cost for the sale, not the cost for the customer. Yeah. So I may have spent 170 or $150 just to get a customer to buy a second time because all of it was in the remarketing funnel. Well, that's a cost per acquisition. But if that's a customer who already bought from me before, I shouldn't be paying such a heavy penalty to bring them back on. My marketing cost for a second purchase should be significantly lower than than marketing cost for a first time acquisition, which is why I need to be looking at that lifetime value metric. What are you doing

Kayvon Kay26:58to off channel keep that relationship? Which goes back to I just wanna make sure people are paying attention here. Goes back to ROAS, which is I can get a ROAS when I'm looking at retargeting my customers. Right.

Mark Young27:14Can you get the ROAS when you're bringing in new customers? Yep. Can you hit your ROAS target if it's all in new customer acquisition? And that's where I'm telling you that ROAS is a bad metric. Because as an example, let's go back to that 1.7 crazy lady. 1.7 in that conversation is, like, you're fighting for a 1.7. The problem is her average order value was a $150. Her lifetime value of a consumer was 1,200. So ask me, Kevan, what would you pay to acquire a $1,200 lifetime value because the reorder rate is so high?

Kayvon Kay27:55I mean, I I don't know the exact math, but what I would be paying on 1,200, I'd be paying I can go up to six. You can go up to seven. Well, keep in mind our three to one.

Mark Young28:04CAC to lifetime value ratio, three to one. For a $1,200 lifetime value, if cash is not a problem, I'd pay up to $400 to buy that customer. Well, that's what I'm yeah. Exactly. Like I'd pay up to $400. But using her model of a 1.7 ROAS, that means that a $150 first time order needed to be benchmarked against a 100 1.7 ROAS, meaning that we could only acquire a customer for $90 or less. Which makes us so much Zero sense. Well, I mean, require a $1,200 lifetime value for less than $90 in ad spend.

Kayvon Kay28:44Tell me if this if I'm right on this, because I'm not saying I'm the expert. When I heard that, the first thing I thought was like, and making the marketers job so much harder than it needs to be, and leaving so many opportunities on the table. You're a 100 Like percent potential, like, whether you want to call them CPLs or even opt ins on the table. That's exactly And the issue is it's a scale issue because if you want to be You can't scale like that. Or you can, but you're scaling

Mark Young29:17slow and long. You're scaling five customers a month. Yeah, you can't. But with the kind of margins, and by the way, her margin

Kayvon Kay29:25Oh, I don't even wanna know this. The margin was like a 12 x.

Mark Young29:30So cost of goods was like nothing. Yeah. And for that $150 act that $150 average order value, the the cost of goods in it was less than $10.

Kayvon Kay29:43Oh my

Mark Young29:44Wow. And so those are the things you had the original question you asked me was, what caused me to write a book like this? And and the reality is is what caused me to write this book was trying to get a a level set conversation that when someone comes to me and says, but then I'm like, page 46. I want you to go to book two, page 46.

Kayvon Kay30:07Yeah. It was great. Understand mean

Mark Young30:09me, go to page two or go to book two, chapter three, go read this section so that when we get to a conversation, there's a common denominator. Because you're bringing language into the conversation, like for instance, the difference between CAC versus cost per acquisition. Those aren't the same metric. And yet they are used interchangeably. And I'll say two things. One, ignorantly by entrepreneurs sometimes, and I mean ignorant in a just lack of knowledge, not as a negative, but manipulatively by agencies. Because if an agency clearly explains to you that it was a cost for a new customer acquisition, those numbers are never going to be as good as a cost per acquisition, meaning just the attributable marketing towards total sales. And then the other side of that is channel acquisition is an entirely different issue. Because first of all, not all sales are attributable to a specific channel. And maybe I saw you on Meta, so I went and Googled you. Who gets the win?

Kayvon Kay31:21Well, is now you just opened up another item. We are opening up Pandora's box and we're staying here because it's so important. Because I've been in so many businesses where that becomes, especially online businesses, a higher ticket. I usually come from more the services side, so $51,015.20, $50,000 ticket. And the the marketing is arguing with each other of where, or the channels are saying. You're bad. The channels are arguing. That was my lead. That was my and I'm at a point where I say that there's you can't track it all. Like, there's no way you can track it. You can track you can try to track the first point of entry, but there is no way to possibly track. What you said is I saw an ad on YouTube. I went to Google, searched you up. I got busy with the kids. I went back on Instagram. You targeted me. I watched the VSL or I watched whatever. I went and read the Then sales the other kid pulled my leg, and then I just went straight to the website. I was like, know what? I'm going to to the website. Well, it's an organic sale. Your marketing efforts did nothing. Or you thousand. Yeah.

Mark Young32:37Sarcastically, I'm saying that the owner looks at it and says, well, they came straight to our website. That had nothing to do with marketing. Yeah, or social or

Kayvon Kay32:47So I mean, guess, yeah, you can't. You cannot tag somebody because unless they do an action, you can't tag them. Well, what we find is there's more

Mark Young32:56the bigger problem that we have in cross platform attribution is double attribution because there's, you know, again, in your scenario, let's assume that all of that happened within a seven day or a thirty day window. The issue is, your example was I saw you on YouTube, great, YouTube counted an impression. Well, then you Googled the person, Google just pixeled your machine. Now Google and YouTube are kind of the same story. But Google pixeled you, you went to Instagram and got remarketed to because Google's pixel shared with Meta, Meta just pixeled you. Then you ended up getting an email because you watched the VSL. So Clavio just pixeled you. Then you ended up going to the website and converting, but we just counted three pixels and all three of them claimed to win.

Kayvon Kay33:41How do you deal with that?

Mark Young33:43You you deal with what's I mean and again, I'm gonna arguably say it's just the rules of engagement because some businesses count first click attribution. Who introduced us? Last click attribution, who closed the sale, or what we call weighted attribution, which is let's assume and I I always say this is I'm I'm from Hockey Town. I'm from Detroit originally. So I always look this as we don't just count the goals. We also count the assists. Yeah. And and because of that, I mean, nobody in basketball ever got an assist. Right? Like, you got the you got you got the the score or or you didn't. Yeah. Hockey, we count the assists too. So when when we're looking at attribution, it's it's who got the goal, who got the assist, you know, who was the person that that stole the base versus who actually got home, like, in baseball. Like so there's every sport measures it differently. It just depends on what are the rules of the game and what are we counting. The goal for a business is not that any one of those are better than another. The goal is to just consistently count them month after month so that you're not looking at apples and oranges type type data.

Kayvon Kay34:58I was gonna say, yeah, there's not one decision you make. You you you track all, and then the decision comes from what is the most important metric

Mark Young35:07for that business Correct. Default. And and in in your world of a $15,000 ticket item, for instance, it's probably a very different metric than, like, a client this is so funny. I use this client as an example and I love him dearly. He's he's literally like the the world's kindest, most congenial human being, present company excluded. But he's just the nicest guy and he sells socks that have, like, bible verses and stuff on them. And it it's company called Bible Socks and it's just the funniest thing to me because they sell. And I think it's amazing and they're great quality socks and everything. But he's selling a $18 pair of socks or a $15 pair of socks. You're selling a $15,000 item. Like, it's such a difference. So the way that his business tracks, like, is no middle funnel. Like, there is no education sequence. No one needed to go through an education sequence or a VSL before they before they bought a pair of socks. Right? They're impulse buys. It's the convenience store crowd that, you know, I I didn't buy the gum because I was searching all over the place. I've never bought gum online. Yeah. No. I yeah. It's a gas station. It it's a whatever. So consumer behavior on those types of things are just very different. Very different. Yeah. So so what measures them should also be very different.

Kayvon Kay36:30Absolutely. But at the end of the day, we do I mean, in my world, we they do a lot of ROAS measurement. That's a big one in ours, but cost of book call is a big one. And then I run a sales agency, so mine is more of the sales metric, which is what we call as average appointment value. Meaning how many dollars does my sales guys make on every call or every booking that lands on their calendar, regardless if they show up good fit, bad fit, whatever it is, because it costs the company $152,100

Mark Young37:02dollars just to get a booking. It's a 100%. Back when I used to run sales teams, it was we always used to talk about lead to appointment, appointment to show, show to interview, and interview to start. And that's the education funnel. That's a the lead came in, how many of the leads that came in actually turned into the person on the telephone setting an appointment? Of the appointments that you set, how many of them actually showed up for their meeting? Of the people that showed up, how many of them actually signed paperwork and enrolled? And of the ones that enrolled, how many of them actually started classes when the semester began? Yeah. And and and literally looking at those five numbers, and this is a lot of what I did in my early days in education was fly all over the country and train teams on this because it was like, no, your your lead to appointment is down. And like, we have a script problem. Like, you're not following the script on a telephone call. And Yeah. Nine out of 10 times, I could listen to recorded calls and be like, there you go. You ended up talking about the about the student's dog. Well, the student was talking about his dog because the dog was barking in the background. Then you let the prospect control the call. The conversation. Yeah. We're getting some say, absolutely. Yeah. And and all of that training, like, why did the why did the person not show up for their appointment? Well, I can listen to the phone call and tell you why they didn't show up because you started, you used the phrase, well, when works best for you? Yeah. Or or you set the appointment two days from now or three days from now or sometime next week. Like, no. Here's the answer. I have an appointment available at 05:15 today or one at 09:30 tomorrow morning. Which one of those works better for you? Yeah. Like like, this is basic stuff. And that and that's exactly it. And if you understand your funnel, you understand the breakpoints and exactly how to fix the funnel. The levers. Totally AOV, CAC, LTV. I can move the levers. Those are all breakpoints in my in my funnel, if you will, that will pan out in my ROAS. My ROAS will change because those are my upstreams.

Kayvon Kay39:09The Trinity, LTV, AOV, and CAC. Or uncack. There

Mark Young39:16you go. That's exactly right, buddy. It's my story I'm sticking to. And

Kayvon Kay39:22for those that wanna learn more, I mean, you basically put this into a full book series.

Mark Young39:28Yeah. Go take my knowledge. Do what you gotta do. So where do you see

Kayvon Kay39:33marketing and all of this? Like, even LTV, AOV, all of these metrics, how are you seeing these gonna be changing the way consumers are buying, the way AI is being obviously implemented into all of this, where we are in the world today with everything that's going on? Are we going to be tracking the same metrics in the next five, ten years? Or are we gonna be tracking different metrics? That

Mark Young39:59that's interesting. So, yes, AI, we could go on for another hour because that's probably my next favorite topic. The reality is as as an agency, we're super heavy in AI. I would say that we are probably more advanced in AI than most companies I know because I had a meltdown about a year and a half ago. And it was it was not anything too dramatic and most people didn't notice, but I try to keep my panic attacks behind closed doors. But watching the way AI was starting to revolutionize the marketing world pushed me into a place of having to say, do I have a business two years from now? Like, is my skill set even valuable? And the truth is, I think every smart person in the world is asking that exact same question cross discipline. Like, doesn't matter. I mean, if you're a doctor, you're asking yourself that question because AI is able to diagnose better than most physicians.

Kayvon Kay40:55Hunt So The crazy thing is that physicians don't wanna believe that.

Mark Young40:58That's even the craziest part. That's called the evidence. Because

Kayvon Kay41:02we are gonna go down a rabbit hole here because I'll tell you, I'm all I'm ready for it. I love it. But it's sad because I'll I'll just take a whole step back for right now. It's like the 30 step view, the 30 k view of this is like, everyone's saying, oh, like, you know, AI is gonna take over humans. No. We're in a we're in a world right now where humans who are adopting, utilizing AI, implementing AI will 1000% take over the humans that are like, brakes are on. What's this AI thing? I actually my wife always puts her hand on my hand. Like, you know, when the, you know, the wife tells you to shut up, like, quietly on a daily basis if we're out in public. Because the first thing I'll ask, you know, are you are you into AI? When someone says, no, I don't do AI, or they they balk at it, like, I can't be in that conversation because I'm now in speaking to somebody in history. Like, I'm not going to be speaking to you in the future because you're not going to have a life in the future and you don't even want to accept that. I had a panic attack too. So a lot. I had the same panic attack and the same thoughts and I was running away. I was so scared because I wasn't I'm not a technical founder. Right? Like, I'm your high D, high I. I'm the sales guy. But when I made that commitment, wow. I would just say, wow. Nice. It's first time ever in history. Let me say this and then you got it. I believe we are now in the first time in history where the only limitation we have is the one we have in our mind.

Mark Young42:38It's imagination. I just did a group interview yesterday for a bunch of interns. I love this. I love came in. And it literally, I started the meeting with, okay. I'm talking to you all, like, college grads, you know, so on. So they're all just like, mhmm. Like, super eager. They just finished school last month or whatever. And I'm just like, look, I'm like, I'm gonna sell out and tell you, I'm so sorry, you spent all this money on tuition. And they're like, somebody was just like, you don't like college? I'm like, well, I'm gonna say this. Like, I've got a bachelor's degree, four master's degrees, and two doctorates. It's not about not liking college. K? I love college. Like, I'm here to tell you right now that nothing you learned is in any way comparison with what you could learn if you just have the intellectual curiosity to want to learn it. Like, I'm doing twelve, thirteen people's jobs on a daily basis. And one of the jobs I'm doing is building robots to do other people's jobs. And here's my philosophy here. And this is this is how I explained it to them. I'm like, if you have an above average IQ and an intellectual curiosity, you can do anything you want in the world right now. There are zero limitations on what you can do other than time and imagination. Yeah. But it it is a wide open field, and I intend to lead, not follow when it gets into that space. And and literally, that's our hiring criteria right now. Because the fact that I had a I had a call with a recruiter who's recruiting a COO for me right now, and that's clearly a pivotal position. So and and she's like, I need to know everything about you, the way you think, the way you behave. Like, I I need all of this. Like, what are your likes, your dislikes? What are your Colby scores, your Myers Briggs? And I'm like, first of all, I can be an ass. Like, let's be honest about that. I'm like, but here's part of my problem. And I spell all this out. I'm like, I she's thinking, well, you need a person who's this and this and this and who's you've done it. I'm like, I don't need a person who's ever worked in an ad agency. I don't need a person who's got thirty years experience. I don't need a person who who, you know, wears a suit to work every day. I don't care. I want someone who is smart and intellectually curious because there is zero limit to what anybody can do today. And and there is just an entire culture of people who are still baffled. And they're like, oh, you're so smart. And I'm like, nope. I just know how to use the machine.

Kayvon Kay45:20I love the intellectually curious. You have to and the keyword is there is the curious. Nonnegotiable. And I and I with you because an intellectually curious, person, guess what they will do? Take over the world. Well, I was gonna say, they'll figure it out. Yes. They'll research. If they don't know, they will go research deeper and harder than you and I ever will research and become experts in it in faster time than you and I will ever become experts

Mark Young45:49in it. And here's the deal. Like, you've lived your career, I guarantee, the same way I have. That is you say yes and figure it out. Yes. Every opportunity I had was something I didn't know how to do. You you hire me to do something. I'm like, can can you do it? Sure. Like, and as long as I figure it out before you figure me out, we're good. And by the way, you got what you paid for. Yep. As long as I figured it out and got the job done, it's irrelevant to you if I knew how to do it when I said yes. And right now, I've lived my life that way, you know, and always figured it out, which again, praise the Lord, I just got a good brain. I'm very happy about that and I do whatever I can to keep it in good shape. But here's the truth. That opportunity is available not just to the super smart people nowadays. It is available to anybody with the intellectual curiosity, even people with lower IQs. But here's the point of all of that. AI is not taking away humanity. I believe that AI is giving humanity permission to be humans again because we have spent decades behaving like robots in the workplace. And we're actually required to be humans in the workplace now because the only reason to have humans is because they do something a robot can't do. And too many people, particularly college graduates, because they've been trained to I mean, people who get a's in school are not out taking over the world. I would argue the same most of your audience didn't get straight a's in school because straight a students are conformists.

Kayvon Kay47:31Yeah. I I couldn't agree more. Well, what's the big saying they say, which is really true? The straight a students work for the c and d students.

Mark Young47:38Absolutely. Because the straight a students learned how to follow a system. The the c and d students learned how to survive. Yeah. Like and and the reality is is that the a students aren't the people I necessarily even want. Yeah. Like that that's that's the rub in all of this is trying to figure out, like, I don't need the people that everybody thinks I would need. But when I say the humanity, I I'll say this, and as in any interview I have, I'm like, around here, everybody knows what I mean when I say ten eighty ten. And and I kinda stole some of that from Mike Koenig, but the the the ten eighty ten logic is that, you know, I'll backtrack ten years. Ten years ago, I came to work. My boss had done 10% of the work before I got there because the KPI was determined, the leads were generated, all of that stuff existed on my desk. My job was to do 80% of the work throughout my eight hour day and give the work to somebody else to review to decide if that work was appropriate or not. If it was, it got shipped. If it wasn't, I did it again tomorrow. The problem is is I'm not hiring that 80% anymore because now I need you to understand what the 10% is, and people call that prompting. I I look at it as I need to actually have a clear scope of the work I'm looking for. AI is gonna do the 80%. My job picks back up at the end of the AI's work because now I need to decide if what the AI did actually makes sense. Mhmm. If it's applicable to the situation, what's the most appropriate way to human to human deliver it to a client. Like, I get to be more human. I get to strategize. I get to have relationship. I get to have meetings. I get to think on marketing, not about ROAS per se. I get to think about human behavior and purchasing behavior. I get to spend my time doing the things that only humans can do, like use imagination. AI is leaning on history. I get to spend my time in the future now where AI can't be because it can't imagine. It data aggregates.

Kayvon Kay49:52I could go on in this all day. Sorry, Kevan. I'm just going nuts here. I know. I I knew we were going to. I could tell, and I love it because you just even I just got a a moment where I realized what you're saying, and it's so many well, employees of these a students, these employees, they come in and they're working in the system. All day long, they're working in the system. And the business owner, when you're starting out of a business, you're always working in it, you always hear, Are you working on your business or in it? Yep. Now we're living in a world where every employee can actually work on the business because the AI is working in the business. Yes. And now it's not just the entrepreneur working on the business, it's every employee can actually have the strategic thinking, the intellectual curiosity as the mundane work that used to take forever and waste eight hours a day is now done in ten minutes. And here's the deal. With fewer people but the same top line, those fewer people can be rewarded with the same pool of money that the larger group of people used to have to share. I couldn't agree more, and I hope business owners hear that. It isn't about trying to cut the cause, make more money for yourself. It is how can you get Instead of having 200 people, how do you have 20 rock stars that are working 10 different jobs using AI and being handsomely rewarded for that? Handsomely rewarded. Yeah. I will I won't hire anybody unless they use AI. So I tell them, like, if you're if you don't use AI, I can't had a developer that I brought on. And I said, are you using AI? They're like, how how do you think we've been communicating? You know? That's great. Oh, How did I get your attention? I said, touche, you're hired. AI writes

Mark Young51:43my emails. Right? Yeah. You know, does most of my research work. Like, I just I spend my entire day. I this weekend, because I'm that guy I fell behind. I had a bunch of travels and stuff and just just, you know, the day to day stuff fell behind. And it's like this weekend, I'm like, that's it. Saturday, Sunday, I'm committing myself to being in the office early morning till late night, all weekend by myself. And at the end of my time, I actually I estimated that the amount of work that I was able to complete from non interrupted focus time got about a month's worth of work done. Yeah. And I I just sat there, like, I can't but, like, my team came in on Monday morning and was like, what in the hell? Because the amount of assignments and tasks and outputs and this is what I need and and data dives and just because I literally like, I've got not only my Claude, I've got my GPT because I use them for different things. I've got an army of Claude bots that are autonomously doing a 100 different things and I'm literally just having 16 conversations. I mean, I laugh and say, you can see the big glass wall behind me, I'm gonna get a grease pen and it's gonna look like the beautiful mind. I'm gonna, like, Russell Crowe this thing in a second. But, like, literally, just the amount of human output and none of those things would happen if I weren't human. And it's me understanding buying behaviors. It's me understanding the creative process. It's me understanding that when AI gives me an output and says, well, on this landing page, it needs to dot dot dot. I'm like, no. I'm a human and that doesn't speak to me. Mhmm. Like, we need to do that again and again. And it's it's not that I pushed a button and a bunch of output came out. It's that AI everyone refers to AI as a tool. And my my team knows it's a hand smack if you say tool when you're referring to AI. AI is a collaborator.

Kayvon Kay53:40A collaborator.

Mark Young53:41Like, this is a collaboration. It gives me input. I give it input back. It gives me more. I give it more. A tool is an input output. And it's like, this isn't an input output moment. This is a shared analysis and shared synthesis. And it's opinion versus opinion versus opinion until we get to a point that we both agree. And I'm collaborating. It's like a group project where everybody's participating for the first time. And it's like, this needs to be a collaboration because you have the world's greatest collaborator with a 135 IQ and a PhD in everything.

Kayvon Kay54:19Yeah. I it's it's like I said, we could keep going because that was the other thing too. I I I was just talking to somebody. I think I actually heard it on the the diary of the CEO, great podcast, by the way. And he was saying there was like there was an expert there going, like, I if you are hiring someone who's out of grad school, you might as well hire and this is where we get to that whole, you know, AI taking over. You might as well hire an AI agent because an AI agent is as good as somebody with four or five years of experience. So now it's about how and that's the biggest issue that's happening is how are these kids that have no experience, how are they going to be able to get the five year experience that they need that I'm looking for now before I hire anybody? And the way you do it, and this is why I said don't buck, is go become an experienced AI prompt engineer

Mark Young55:13and watch how your life will change. I my chief of staff, I I say that I've often said that if anybody was like me when I was her age, it's her. Like and I don't say because I was always intellectually curious. It didn't matter. I was disassembling just to see how it was built. And it's like, she kinda has that, although I'm very extroverted and she's very introverted. But she's one of those people where it's like, I will pass a project along, and she'll be like, okay. And then go about doing it. The next thing I know, she's running the world from a from a Mac mini. And Yeah. In the world is going on? And it's like, I've got a full time AI innovation manager who's like, that team just spends their day developing things. Now at our office, I'll give this away. I'm gonna be jealous if everyone else does it. Like, we're using a lot of, like, Claude Bot type stuff. So we we've got security guardrails, all the other kind of stuff, but they're all on Mac Minis. So one of our things that we laugh about is like every Mac mini, we've personified all of our robots. Yeah. So every Mac mini has a name, every Mac mini has a personality, we build the personality into it. So when you get an email from a coworker, coworker has a name and all of the names actually have Mac in the name. Okay. So it's kinda funny because like our like our meta media, you know, our our our meta manager, his name is Conor McGregor, but he always emails with an Irish accent. Yeah. Yeah. Like and and Angus MacGyver does Google research, and and Leonard McCoy writes writes medical blogs, and, like, just because we use this whole army. And it's like, I'll say that we used to do the work, work in the business, but our business now is it's a smaller group of people at the top that are playing puppet master. Like, we're just helping steer them. They're the they're the subject matter experts. We're reviewing their work. We're watching them work. We're pointing out anomalies that they may have missed because you know this, like, if you edit your own work, you do a terrible job. Mhmm. But I'm really good at editing other people's work. Yep.

Kayvon Kay57:28Yeah. Yeah. Mean, I love it because this stuff used to scare me, but now, like, I spent six months just all in attitude. And everything you're saying is like, yep. Yep. Greed doing that. Everything like that's set up in the business that I'm running right now, and you have to. For those of the for those that are still here listening, they wanna learn more how they can maybe work with you. If you have an e commerce brand, buy an e commerce brand, I know where I'm going. But for those that may not know where they're going or working with maybe an agency they're not so happy with, how do they find you? Yeah. So I will tell you the easiest way to find me is through my own website, which is themarkyoung.com.

Mark Young58:08Easiest way to find my books, everything about me, themarkyoung.com, social man handles, Instagram, I'm just themarkyoung. And then the only reason I have that is because I bought it before my dad did. Because he's got the same name, so that's even more confusing. My agency's name, as I mentioned, is RYZE Agency, ryzeagency.com. You're welcome to take a look at it, But reach out to me. Mean, to Mark Young, all my social handles and everything are there. Reach out. Love to talk to people. I just love chitchatting about this stuff. And we are actually waiting for this literally, this book series was supposed to launch two, three months ago. And this is gonna be terrible. But we did the entire audiobook recording because we're gonna be giving away free audiobooks. The audiobook, all of I did the entire recording. The editor mailed all of the notes, and USPS lost the edits. Oh. Yeah. Damn So post the the the audiobook edit is taking longer than expected, but here we are.

Kayvon Kay59:12Well, Mark, thanks so much for being here. Appreciate the wisdom and all the knowledge that you brought.

Mark Young59:19I appreciate it, buddy. Great connecting.

Kayvon Kay59:22Thank you.

This write-up was produced from the recording of Why Most E-Commerce Brands Are Measuring the Wrong Metrics (And Paying for It). Every quote is verbatim and timestamped to the audio above.

Show Notes

Most e-commerce brands are not losing because their product is bad or their ads are off. They are losing because they are measuring the wrong things and making decisions based on data that was never designed to tell the whole story.

Mark Young is the founder of RYZE Agency, a PhD in functional medicine, a career educator, and one of the sharper strategic minds operating in direct-to-consumer and health and wellness e-commerce today. His five-book series, the E-Commerce Guide to the Galaxy, is built for founders who refuse to be taken advantage of by agencies again.

ROAS is not a health metric. It is a signal. And the business owners who treat it as a target are handing their agencies a blueprint for smoke and mirrors. Mark Young, PhD has spent over a decade watching this play out in real time, walking into client relationships already contaminated by bad metrics, bad incentives, and the kind of blind trust that costs brands their momentum. He wrote five books on it because the problem is not a tactic problem, it's a literacy problem.

In this conversation, Mark breaks down the specific metrics that actually drive e-commerce growth and explains why the ones most brands obsess over are actively working against them. Kayvon and Mark go deep on the Holy Trinity of Metrics: lifetime value, average order value, and new customer acquisition cost. They walk through how a business can rationally spend $300 to acquire a $100 customer, why blended MER matters more than account-level ROAS, how cross-channel attribution is being double-counted across Meta, Google, and email simultaneously, and how the "ready, fire, aim" wiring of most entrepreneurs is exactly what makes them vulnerable to the metrics game agencies play.

They also cover AI, hiring, and the structural shift happening inside lean agencies: fewer people running more sophisticated operations, with intellectual curiosity replacing credentials as the primary hiring filter.

This conversation is for founders, operators, and marketers managing e-commerce brands or working inside them. It is for people who want to understand how to read a marketing dashboard like a business owner, not a media buyer. If you are running paid ads, managing agency relationships, or trying to understand why your numbers look fine but growth feels stuck, this one will reframe how you see the whole game.

Topics covered include e-commerce marketing strategy, return on ad spend, customer acquisition cost, new customer acquisition cost, direct-to-consumer marketing, lifetime value optimization, average order value, media efficiency ratio, cross-channel attribution, marketing analytics, agency accountability, e-commerce brand building, AI in marketing operations, digital marketing metrics, and health and wellness brand growth.

Questions Answered: