Matthew Stafford: Managing Partner with Build Grow Scale

^{Joe Fox (00:00.788)}
Hey everyone, Joe Fox here, president at Growave. Welcome to another episode of Retain Grow Thrive. Super excited today. I have a very, very, very cool guest for you. Matthew has a very illustrious background in a lot of different things. He doesn't like the term CRO, so we're going to dive into that a little bit as well. But he's been featured in a ton of really cool publications. So Forbes, Inc., Business, Entrepreneur Magazine, HuffPost.

And he is the founder and owner of Build Grow Scale. Today he's going to dive into his framework, what helps businesses. And yeah, so I'm super excited to have Matthew on, Matt, welcome.

_{Matthew (00:44.642)}
Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

^{Joe Fox (00:48.039)}
Absolutely. would you be able to give, mean, I obviously gave you a, you know, really quick summary there, but just for the audience, being that this is a lot of grow wave customers who are in e-commerce, particularly in Shopify, a lot of businesses that are really looking to scale and grow. Are you able to kind of just give me a little bit of a background and how you got into where you are today?

_{Matthew (01:11.18)}
Yeah, so I'll do a quick Cliff Notes version.

actually had a commercial concrete business for 23 years. So I grew it to the point where I was traveling around the country. was on the road about 200 days a year. I went to a Tony Robbins event and he was selling a program called Money Masters. And what it was was once a month they would send you a DVD and a booklet about people selling stuff online. And to that point, this is 15 years ago, I was

^{Joe Fox (01:27.326)}
Wow.

_{Matthew (01:46.404)}
just using my computer for email and blueprints and sending proposals, never even thought about e-commerce or selling stuff online. But then these people were selling stuff online and they were talking about remote work and I'm like, wow, I instead of having 25 employees and a couple million dollars worth of equipment, I could work from my computer anywhere and I don't have to travel every week. So I started digging into it and I did SEO first, didn't enjoy it, ended up finding a

site called Teespring, which is where you would create a design for a t-shirt, you'd put it on there and you run ads to it.

And depending on how many you sold, they would give you a discount on printing, shipping, and fulfilling that. So I could do that from the road at night. I would literally come up with designs, put them on t-shirts, start some ads, and then monitor that. And the first three years, I ended up doing about $15 million in t-shirt sales. And I was like, OK, this is awesome. I'm going to sell the concrete business and get into e-commerce full time. And so about five years from the time

^{Joe Fox (02:44.881)}
Wow.

_{Matthew (02:54.606)}
I went to the Tony Robbins event to the time that I sold all the brick and mortar and I had a couple salons, etc. and went into online 100%. From there, I opened a Shopify site, started selling kitchen products, and I partnered with the founder of BGS, who we kind of, we partnered and then grew it into the agency that it is today where we work with big brands.

and we help them with their revenue optimization. And we call it revenue optimization just from the simple fact that if you call it CRO or conversion rate optimization, essentially that's a vanity metric. I can raise your conversion rate by offering a sale or only sending warm traffic. I can do a lot of different things to manipulate that. What we really care about is that the business works very good from when the customer lands on the website until they

^{Joe Fox (03:38.824)}
Yes.

_{Matthew (03:54.368)}
give you money and as long as we operate on that that aspect of it your net profit ends up being way better because if you do 10 million but it costs you 9.8 to do it you're just you're just adding to your ego if you do 10 million and only cost you 8 million to do it now you 2 million that's a lot better that's a lot more excited so we take home at night

^{Joe Fox (04:17.874)}
love that. And I mean, what a journey like that's such a cool story. And the fact I really love the fact, I love it when there's like people that come on and guests that come on that are absolute hustlers. And I can really tell, you know, from that mindset of like, doing what you were doing during the day and having a relatively successful business in that space, but then making that mind shit, mind set shift to say, Hey, I want to be able to create a lifestyle business for myself.

I really want to dive into this e-commerce space with both feet and grinding away at night to make that happen. And I think what's really cool, and I'm sure you find this with your clients, Matthew, is that a lot of them kind of sit there and say, well, this is someone who's actually done it and they've been doing it for a very long time. So that's super cool. What do you find, you touched on it a little bit there.

vanity metrics. know, know vanity metrics is something that come up a lot in e-commerce and it's something I talk about a lot with our guests. there are so many vanity metrics out there. Conversion rate is definitely one of them. think you touched on a very good point around, sorry, attribution. Yes. I was going to ask you that.

_{Matthew (05:24.078)}
I think at, yeah, because everybody claims they're the one that drove the revenue. if you actually made as much money as every app said that you were collecting, know, based according to them, you'd be about three times the volume of your store.

^{Joe Fox (05:42.459)}
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You answered that one perfectly. And also, I'd love to know. you know, let's say there's a merchant on here who's watching, you know, this episode, and they're kind of sitting there saying, hmm, you know, are my metrics that my agency giving me correct other metrics that I'm seeing on the background vanity metrics? What are the three metrics that you think that, you know, customers should

_{Matthew (06:06.382)}
Thanks for watching!

^{Joe Fox (06:10.53)}
really actually focus on.

_{Matthew (06:13.71)}
I would say revenue per visitor. that's consistently climbing, that means that your website experience is getting better and it's creating more value. Obviously...

^{Joe Fox (06:17.095)}
Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (06:25.883)}
Yup.

_{Matthew (06:29.154)}
you're going to need to know, it's not one number, but essentially what your add to cart is compared to your average order value, because that will tell you how your product page or your education is working. Then from your product page to your add to cart, that's the first one. And then from add to cart to proceed to checkout will tell you how your cart's working and then completing it so that your checkout. We always do something and

Once I explain this, it'll make a lot of sense. But most business owners come to us and the very first thing they want to do is work on their homepage. I convince them, let's start on your checkout so that then, and we'll move backwards from there to your car, then to your product page, then to your categories, then to your homepage. Because if I fix your homepage and it starts converting better, a conversion on the homepage means that they used the main menu navigation or clicked on a category

^{Joe Fox (07:08.028)}
Mmm.

_{Matthew (07:29.776)}
move to another page it didn't make you more money yet. If I go to your checkout and fix your checkout now that's converting higher you're making more money from day one. Then if I go to your cart and make that work better that means more people are going into the optimized checkout you make even more money and then if I go backwards to your product page get more people to add to cart so now every step that we do is actually adding money instead of having three steps that are all

^{Joe Fox (07:41.883)}
Yes.

_{Matthew (07:59.738)}
optimized before it's actually generating more revenue. So always start from the back and move forward and then that way it gives you more money so that you have a longer runway to figure things out and get stuff done so that you can you have a much better chance of success.

^{Joe Fox (08:16.937)}
I love that. That's such a valuable takeaway for our audience. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I agree 100%. I, in my prior sort of, SAS roles, Matthew, I've worked, I worked at a company called, fast. And the whole thing was about really making the checkout experience as fast as possible. And

_{Matthew (08:22.307)}
Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (08:36.198)}
you know, we were, you know, meant to be the the first one click sort of checkout providers. And I agree, I think that time and ease and that actual checkout experience needs to be so quick now because people's attention span is shrinking and shrinking. And if you can't capture that sale as quick as possible, it's nearly impossible. And I think

you know, things like shop pay have really enabled, know, customers to be able to do that as quick as possible. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. and, tell me a little bit more like what you've given a really, really clear outline of that working backwards from the checkout process, but typically what does it look like? Say for example, a grow wave customer who's watching this today wants to work with you, wants to work with the team.

_{Matthew (09:04.524)}
Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (09:29.488)}
wants to really, you know, step up their e commerce journey and their e commerce game. What's the typical process that you run through with them? What does it look like? Say, for example, if they contacted you, how does that sort of timeframe look from there?

_{Matthew (09:45.196)}
Yeah, so essentially I want to do an audit because I think that websites are contextual. People behave different based off of what demographic they're in. so assuming that everybody acts the same is only going to capture a very small, minute portion of the audience. So first we'll do the audit, figure out who their competitors are, and then do a deep dive into that. We'll also make sure that all of their data is accurate.

shocking to me because we're very data driven. It's really shocking to me how many stores that do a large volume really don't know where their numbers come or what's working and what's not working. And by the time they get to us they're like man we should be doing way better but we just don't understand and when we can deep dive into accurate data it's really easy to start.

problem solving and cleaning up the little levers that create that growth that they're looking for. I'm gonna share one tip with you that anybody in your audience can use and it's responsible for probably six of our 10 biggest wins of all time over the last 10 years. Millions and millions of dollars worth of, maybe $100 million worth of revenue. On the thank you page, after somebody buys, we put a little pop up.

^{Joe Fox (10:57.519)}
Wow.

_{Matthew (11:09.448)}
and it asks a question and the question is what was the one thing that almost made you not buy?

And by asking that, the person who just gave you money now will tell you what was the thing that almost kept them from buying, or what they didn't understand, or what they felt was not clear, or what was a friction point. And then we use the information from those surveys, and we go back and we clean those up, and always it generates a lot more revenue. So it's way to take the guesswork out. It's an actual customer that just gave you money, and they just

on your site, if they want to see you win, they give you exactly what the problem was and you go back and fix it, you'll make more money.

^{Joe Fox (11:53.853)}
I love that. Thank you so much. You're giving away so much to that to our audience. I'm really, really grateful about you. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. And I do see a lot of top performing sites do that. And I think it's so true because the interesting thing, you know, that we find at GrowWave is once you impress a customer or you or you generate a customer, and I'm sure you find this, it's so much

_{Matthew (11:57.08)}
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (12:21.162)}
easier to get another sale or to get feedback or to get content or to get something out of a loyal customer versus trying to get something out of someone who hasn't converted at all or trying to generate, you know, a whole bunch of new customers. So I think, you know, being able to provide that we have a lot of like feedback and survey tools with GrowWave that I think are really powerful for that. So I really, really love that. And

Matthew, I'd love to dive in a little bit more kind of, you know, you're obviously a very revolutionary person in this e-commerce space. You've had a ton of experience in this. You've been in the e-commerce space for a very long time. You've obviously worked on the brand side. You've worked on the agency side. I'd love to gain your insights into what you think is coming in 2026 for e-commerce. What are some of the big changes we're going to see in the,

you know, Shopify ecosystem and the e-commerce ecosystem in general.

_{Matthew (13:24.13)}
Yeah, I strongly believe that the agentic engine optimization, AEO, is going to be the biggest, have the most impact of anything that I've seen since I've been in e-commerce. And I've been in e-commerce for about 15 years, so since 2010.

^{Joe Fox (13:41.152)}
wow.

_{Matthew (13:46.898)}
SEO came out in 2004, 2002, 2004, kind of created a self-fulfilling prophecy. You rank good, you get more sales, you have more customers, you rank good, and it kind of drove up that. And so these legacy brands all worked very hard on SEO to dominate their markets, and the small guys couldn't compete. The very cool thing about these LLMs that are recommending people...

is that they convert, and the LLM recommends them, they convert about five times the average of a Google click.

So and the other thing is right now in the last 12 months, we've seen about 56 to 60 % of Google searches result in no click. the way Google was serving the information wasn't working anymore. And so now these LLMs have taken so much of the organic traffic. And when they make a recommendation, most of the people that ask inside of an LLM, they have this relationship with whichever one they use.

^{Joe Fox (14:21.838)}
Wow.

^{Joe Fox (14:31.086)}
Mmm.

_{Matthew (14:51.408)}
And it's almost like it's a trusted advisor because they're sharing things about themselves. They're sharing things about their business, stuff like that. And it learns and memorizes that. So now when it recommends back to them, it feels like almost like a warm lead to them. And so they go buy it and it converts really high. So I think getting your site set up and operating in a way that those LLMs can crawl it and then use your information to make recommendations is

going to make a huge difference because even the little guys can now get that, you know, past the legacy SEO people.

^{Joe Fox (15:31.16)}
Yeah, I love that. And it's, it's such an interesting thing to think about, you know, even stepping out from a, from an e-commerce perspective for just a second. It's interesting. It's almost like that, the relationship with the LLM is almost like getting a recommendation from a trusted friend, trusted advisor. It's, it's like the ultimate kind of word of mouth now, but it's powered through technology. And I mean, that, that sort of.

click through rate conversion rate that you kind of mentioned is staggering. mean, if I think if, if we went back to 2003 and told SEO people that that could be what the future looks like, that they wouldn't believe us. But yeah, that's, that's fascinating. And I think that's really powerful. Do you think that from a, you know, LLM perspective, obviously Shopify has, you know, a really strong partnership with chat, GBT and open AI and those sorts of things.

Do you feel that that's where brands are best focusing on their optimization or would you suggest, you know, that they kind of spread out that, I guess, budget or spread out their efforts to optimize across multiple LLMs?

_{Matthew (16:47.278)}
That's a good question. What I think is we've seen, because we deal with a lot of very large brands, we've seen about 30 % of their organic traffic fall off. they're all, and organic traffic typically is high converting and worth pretty good because it's a direct surge or comes right to them based off of what they typed in.

^{Joe Fox (17:02.07)}
yeah.

_{Matthew (17:14.156)}
We're not seeing that now, so I believe capturing that through the LLM, which is going to convert even higher, is probably one of the bigger levers because it's going be very, very profitable traffic, even though the volume of it won't be as high right now.

^{Joe Fox (17:31.082)}
Hmm. Yeah. So it's, it may not be higher amounts of traffic, but it's going to convert a lot higher, which is in turn going to create more revenue and everything like that. And I'm assuming too, it's more profitable revenue, right? Like it, because it, it's more qualified.

_{Matthew (17:46.062)}
100 % because that's the one that the cost of acquisition is not there. Yeah.

^{Joe Fox (17:51.051)}
Yes. Yeah. And do you find because of that, that a lot of your merchants are kind of, you know, saying, calling you up and saying, or I'm sure that you're, you're a lot more proactive, but let's say, for example, members of your team are reaching out to merchants and saying, Hey, we are seeing this on a large scale across a large scale of our merchants. This is the direction that you need to be pivoting. We can pull some money from your, you know, Google spend as an example.

really focus on some of this LLM is that typically what you're focusing on for merchants at the moment?

_{Matthew (18:24.938)}
Yeah, 100%. I genuinely believe it's probably the biggest thing that we've seen since I've been in e-commerce as far as the transfer of.

of traffic. Google searches, 60 % of them result in no click, where a click from an LLM is almost five times more likely to convert. it's going to take one fifth of the traffic to equal the same amount of revenue as it used to. So now if you can go in there and dominate that traffic, because a lot of people aren't even thinking about how to do that, you can take the lion's share of this organic traffic that's disappeared.

^{Joe Fox (18:36.5)}
Wow.

^{Joe Fox (18:46.837)}
Wow.

^{Joe Fox (19:05.59)}
That's, yeah, that's, I'm kind of blown away by those statistics, to be honest. I mean, I understand that from a logical perspective, but that is massive and it makes so much sense. And I think, yeah, this is incredibly powerful for our audience. Matthew, you've given so much value today. So I just want to be thankful for, you know, for your time initially. And I just have a couple, couple more things that I'd love to dive into.

_{Matthew (19:08.546)}
Thanks.

^{Joe Fox (19:31.607)}
predominantly for the for the benefit of the audience, but also for curiosity for myself. So what do you think you know, we've spoken about, you know, you obviously work with a lot of larger brands, we've spoken about kind of what medium brands should be doing when they're looking at shifting and adjusting budgets, working backwards from from checkout all the way to homepage. And the the curiosity that I'd love to kind of dive in now is

If you were say, a entrepreneurial person, you were just getting into the Shopify ecosystem, you wanted to start your e-comm journey. What is the, what is the top thing that you would have that person focus on?

_{Matthew (20:17.23)}
Man, think that, yeah, yeah, and I wanna give a really good answer. I think this is probably not what you would expect from me, but because I deal with so many entrepreneurs, I'll tell you what makes the biggest difference. It isn't just website optimization. It isn't just data and analytics.

^{Joe Fox (20:18.431)}
Broad question, I know. Sorry, I apologize for the broadness.

_{Matthew (20:46.604)}
What matters is the business owner being coachable and having the proper mindset. Because every single time that we coach the business owner and upgrade their mindset, the entire company does better. So we are all, I believe, as the owners, we're all our bottleneck in our company. And so what I would say is be coachable.

the moment that you think you know what's right and wrong.

you stop looking for a better answer. so be open to, this is the lie that I tell myself right now so that your mind will accept there's other opportunities or there's other ways to view it because that's gonna allow you to grow much faster. I can clean up your website but if you still believe that your value is only a million dollar a month site or a two million dollar a month site, you're not gonna surpass that until your mindset shifts.

^{Joe Fox (21:50.142)}
love that. And that, that is almost full circle to what we spoke about with how you moved into e commerce with that, you know, with, obviously Tony Robbins and the, and the removing limiting beliefs and all of those sorts of things. So I love that. What a, what a way to come full circle. Matthew, I, I have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I know our audience are absolutely going to love this episode. I, I, this is

This has been one of my favorites today. Matthew, where can the audience connect with you, get more information here? You know, you've been across a lot of publications. Um, you know, you speak incredibly well. There's obviously a lot of content that, that you've put out. Where can people best connect with you, particularly merchants who are looking to, you know, step into, into a better 2026.

looking to change their mindset, you know, all of those things and potentially even engage you for your services.

_{Matthew (22:51.234)}
Yeah, our website is buildgrowscale.com and my email is matt at buildgrowscale.com so you can go on our website, can book a call with me or you can just send me an email. I would be happy to jump on and kind of just do like a heuristic audit with you, talk through it and see if we can provide some value or at least I've been in the industry long enough I can point you in the right direction and get you connected with someone that would matter.

^{Joe Fox (23:16.746)}
Absolutely. Thank you so much for that, Matthew. I'll make sure all of that's linked below in the show notes. I'm sure you're to get a lot of emails from this. So I apologize in advance from that, but it's a very kind offer. I'm very grateful on behalf of Grow Wave and our audience that you would offer that. Thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. I'm really, really excited to continue to follow your journey. I think the insights that you've made around LLMs and

how all of that's gonna shift in 2026 is so spot on. My mind is still blown by those statistics. So I really, really appreciate your time and thank you so much for coming on. And I'd really love to have you on for a part two at some stage. I think it'd be really cool for us to revisit and rehash some of this data. And I'm sure our audience are gonna get a lot of value out of this episode and a future episode as well. So Matthew, thank you again. Thank you so much for coming on and.

Really, really appreciate your time and let's see what 2026 brings in terms of LLMs.

_{Matthew (24:21.058)}
Sounds good. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed the conversation too.

^{Joe Fox (24:24.659)}
Thank you so much, Matthew. Cheers. Audience, thank you so much for tuning into that episode. That was absolutely fascinating for me. Some of those statistics that were given by Matthew were just absolutely amazing. I am so excited for where everything is heading in e-commerce in 2026. As you saw, Matthew gave a lot of free value in this episode. So I really encourage you to connect with him if you're unsure of what you should be doing.

You want to look at making sure that your conversion pathways are done correctly and that your website is performing in the way that it should and your checkouts and all of that good stuff that Matthew had to talk about. Please check out the show links below and you'll be able to reach out to him directly and have a conversation about that. But thank you for tuning into another episode. 2026 is going to be a very, very exciting year for everyone in e-commerce.

Thank you from everyone here at Growave. Thank you for tuning into another episode of Retain Grow Thrive. I'm your host Joe Fox, and I'll talk to you soon.