128: Goat Milk Stuff’s PJ Jonas on growing an eCommerce business to $1m and improving efficiency

PJ Jonas is the founder and CEO of Goat Milk Stuff. Yes, you guessed it they sell stuff made from Goats milk. It started with soap and has grown to all kinds of things! It’s a family business that started on the kitchen table, and now turns over in excess of $1million a year.

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About the business

• eCommerce Business Structure – Bricks and Clicks
• Product Range Scale – fairly niche
• Product is everything from soap to fluid milk, yogurt, cheese, gelato, fudge, and caramel
• On a highly customised X-Cart
• In the USA, selling worldwide

Getting Started

PJ originally got dairy goats because she wanted her eight children to have healthy raw goat milk, and she was unable to find it elsewhere. She began making the soap for her children because she didn’t want soap with a lot of chemical ingredients, but when her husband began using it, his fingers stopped cracking and splitting. PJ realized that if the soap could solve her husband’s problem, which he had struggled with for years without finding a suitable remedy, it could help other people as well.

With eight young children to raise and homeschool, eCommerce was the obvious choice for Goat Milk Stuff because of the flexibility to fit it into the family.

PJ is also using the business as an educational tool for her children. They learn math, science, English, concise writing with attention to detail, customer service, and professional people skills.

The Team

The children, aged ten to twenty, all help, and PJ’s husband works for the company full time. They also have six other full time employees.

Listen to learn why PJ doesn’t outsource the marketing of Goat Milk Stuff.

The Most Awesome Thing Right Now

Getting to teach her family, work together with them, and help people with skin and dietary problems are awesome. PJ gets emails from people with eczema telling her that the soap has relieved their symptoms, and the goat’s milk helps people with allergies to cow’s milk or lactose intolerance who can’t have regular cow milk or ice cream.

Their Demographic

PJ had expected their demographic to be mostly people like them, who simply wanted a more natural, less chemical product. While they do have a big portion of those customers, they have an even larger portion of customers who have skin issues that the goat’s milk helps resolve.

Listen to learn how customers with eczema or psoriasis became their biggest brand ambassadors.

Tips for Growth

Goat’s Milk Stuff received a lot of publicity early on due to their good story. Most people had never even heard of goat milk soap, so PJ and her family were one of the biggest players in the field very quickly. PJ prefers slow and steady growth over sudden spikes, which can be expensive and hard to maintain.

Listen to learn why publicity can be difficult, and why they don’t do publicity anymore.

There are three ways to grow a company

• get more customers,
• get your customers to buy more things,
• get your customers to buy more often.

PJ recommends focusing on one of those at a time for a set time.

Tips for Efficiency

When companies are trying to improve efficiency, there are two areas to look at. The first is small, incremental changes. These are constant small process improvements.

Listen to learn two examples of how small changes have saved Goat Milk Stuff hours of time.

The second is massive foundational shifts. These are looking at things you’ve always done in a completely different way, which is much harder than making small process improvements. PJ recommends bringing in someone outside the business and asking them what they would do differently. It sometimes takes an outside eye to have a new look.

Listen to find out about the mistake that PJ made when she shifted to adding a physical store to her internet store.

eCommerce Book Top Tip

• Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives by Richard Swenson

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

• Facebook Live

Listen to learn how Facebook Live helped grow their company during the kidding season.

Tool Top Tip

• Evernote Scanner

Start Up Top Tip

Have five diverse people, such as one older, one younger, one male, one female, and one minority, visit your eCommerce site, and then tell you what they did and did not like about the site before you go public with it.

Interview Links

• Business

Listeners can get a free bar of soap by visiting this page.