Grow A Small Business Podcast · Troy Trewin

From Concrete to $15M Online Sales: Matthew Stafford of Build Grow Scale on E-Commerce Growth, CRO+, Scaling Teams, Cash Flow Challenges, and the Real Mindset Behind Long-Term Business Success. (Episode 761 - Matthew Stafford)

·24 min·1 clip

Before COVID, one lead source powered the business; when events stopped, Build Grow Scale had a year and a half with none.

1. Grow A Small Business Podcast centers on Matthew Stafford and Build Grow Scale, with the conversation focused on e-commerce growth, CRO+, team scaling, cash flow, and mindset. 2. Troy Truen hosts the show and Matthew Stafford is the guest, and Stafford matters because he built Build Grow Scale after running a commercial concrete business and a T-shirt business. 3. The episode asks what actually improves long-term small-business growth when a company already has traffic, sales, and a team. 4. Stafford says Build Grow Scale works on what happens from the moment someone lands on a website until they give money, and he describes the service as “CRO plus.” 5. He says the team does not drive traffic or do SEO beyond onsite work, and instead focuses on trust, copywriting, product images, layout, and email follow-up. 6. Stafford says the company has worked with about 1,200 clients over 10 years, spans the globe, and relies on data and analytics rather than gut feel. 7. He explains that he started in a commercial concrete business in Michigan and looked for winter work by running Facebook ads for T-shirts. 8. He says one winning T-shirt design produced a little over $100,000 and that the T-shirt business reached about $15 million in sales over three and a half years. 9. Stafford says he later sold his concrete business, helped build a software platform for upsells, and then learned that a Shopify store required more than traffic alone. 10. He says a Google-analytics tutor charged him $1,000 for six phone calls, and those sessions helped him understand how store data could show what was wrong. 11. Stafford says Build Grow Scale grew to almost $3 million a year, later became a “good one person business” with about 20 employees, and had reached about 70 people before COVID. 12. He says the hardest year was the year his partner split from the business about three and a half years ago. 13. Stafford says success means waking up excited to work, solving problems, and helping entrepreneurs build something that fulfills them. 14. He says the best advice for a fast-growing business is high-level coaching for the owner because the owner is usually the bottleneck. 15. He argues that most businesses do not have a business problem, but a people problem, and that self-limiting beliefs often block growth. 16. Stafford says one of the most stressful lessons came from relying on live events and workshops for lead generation before COVID shut them down for about a year and a half. 17. The interview style is practical and direct, with Troy Truen asking about numbers, team size, funding, hiring, balance, mentors, and exit advice. 18. Stafford’s tone is reflective and candid, especially when he talks about cash flow, self-belief, and the limits of simply working hard. 19. People running e-commerce stores or scaling service businesses will likely get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners looking for celebrity-style business stories or quick tactics-only advice may skip it.

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