Trellis

Trellis is a full service eCommerce solutions that can provide everything from planning and strategy around your eCommerce website to launching a fully integrated global eCommerce website.

As CEO I oversee sales, marketing, finance, and client success of Trellis. The Trellis core competencies include:

Digital Strategy & Platform Selection
Magento, Shopify, & BigCommerce
iPaaS & Integrations
Headless / React
DevOps / AWS / Azure
Branding and Creative
UI & UX Design
Email & Performance Marketing
SEO / CRO

Co-founder and CEO

The Hard Truth About B2B eCommerce Podcast

We host the number 1 B2B eCommerce podcast with over 16000 downloads.

Co Host

PrettyDamnQuick

I am helping Pretty Damn Quick develop the first truly end-to-end logistics platform for eCommerce that allows you to display accurate shipping options on the frontend but also fulfill on the backend.

Strategic Advisor

Growth Spark

I will work with Ross to continue to grow the Growth Spark brand into a premium provider for the SMB space on platforms like Shopify, Magento, Wordpress and more. We are excited about the opportunity to help streamline digital applications to both SMB and enterprise.

Vice President of Strategy

Octane AI

I am helping Octane scale its Quiz functionality and grow into a broader AI and SaaS tool for eCommerce merchants.

Prima Board Games

John Cymerman and I created a new gaming company to develop games we can both enjoy and bring to the world for others to play. We have spent countless hours testing and perfecting our first game, Elementa Arcanum on Kickstarter now!

Gameplay Advisor

LEVAR

Levar is the first 3d / AR company that can help you scale 3d and augmented reality as a small business. 3d models and AR is no longer only affordable for major companies. With Levar any business can get 3d and AR working on their Shopify or BigCommece store.

Investor / Advisor

SuperMedia LLC

Develop media campaigns for small and medium size businesses, mainly through internet and mobile device marketing and recognition.

Digital Marketing Consultant

Elms Amherst

A beautiful estate built in 1813, almost 200 years ago by the famous Dickinson family.  Includes other properties on the land, with new remodeling all done in the last 5 years.

Property Manager

University of Wisconsin-Madison

I studied Economics and Psychology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, a top 20 school for both majors respectively. I received my Bachelor of Science for Economics and Psychology in May 2011.

Undergraduate Student

4x inc 5000, owner of four businesses.

I focus on creating scalable digital growth strategies and implementing such strategies for businesses of all sizes.

As co-founder and CEO of Trellis I help businesses grow by enhancing the information technology and online marketing components of their business. At Trellis, we strive to provide the most scalable and modular technology solutions possible. We have created a very strong team of highly skilled engineers that can develop small WordPress sites to some of the largest and most complex eCommerce sites on the Internet. 

I ensure that Trellis is moving forward in a positive direction on all major fronts such as sales, marketing, finance, recruiting, employee productivity, and product development. With a strong YOY 50+% growth rate every year I have been CEO I will continue to grow Trellis into a leading eCommerce solutions provider.

We recently lost a pretty significant ecommerce business opportunity.

We finally found out why.

The competitor who was quite well known came in with a more assertive pitch that they knew exactly how to fix the problem.

We believed we needed more discovery and did not come in with that level of conviction.

It turns out their strategy didn’t work and that company regretted it.

The next time someone comes in with such conviction for a complicated problem. You should be skeptical.

It often takes a lot of discovery and upfront work to figure out what the real problems are.

Isaiah Bollinger

Friends don’t let friends use WooCommerce.

Jared Shaner when he finally gets a prospect to understand the value of a high-quality process and reasonable timeline.

Generating new business at an agency is very hard.

We have been working on this flywheel concept for a while now.

A lot of these areas for us need improvement, specifically outbound / outreach.

We also have to constantly improve our sales materials and processes for when a lead comes in.

Some agencies got lucky and found the right partner that keeps them alive with new leads. In the long run, this isn't a sustainable growth strategy. It will eventually top out.

A new tax law that was never intended to make it this far is going to wreak havoc on small businesses if it doesn’t get overturned soon.

Historically businesses could expense R&D and even get an additional 10 percent tax break on R&D expenses.

In 2023 taxes and onward a business now has to amortize R&D over 5 years.

Lets say a small startup is break even, and has a million in R&D costs. It now has to pay taxes in 800,000 profit!

This will be crippling to any bootstrapped smaller businesses.

Large companies won’t be effected because they have huge balance sheets to absorb these short term costs.

Our government seems to keep getting in the way of helping small businesses.

We need more programs to help smaller companies, not hurt them.

Distributors will be the first to feel the pain in the coming B2B eCommerce adoption wave.

They don't make the product, and simply having relationships is not enough of a value prop anymore.

They will be obsolete in the coming decade if they don't rapidly become more digitally savvy around marketing, eCommerce, and integrations.

I think we will see a major wave of distributors going out of business from 2025 to 2035 who don't adapt.

Shopify will continue as the 800-pound Gorilla in eCommerce platforms with a massive lead over the competition.

It will be interesting to see who else rounds out the rest as viable competitors and the consolidation that comes with it.

Being more ruthless about what you say no to is one of the hardest lessons in business.

As you grow and your problems/vision becomes more clear, saying no to anything in the way of that is critical.

I still struggle with saying no.

It sounds like no one understands how to use GA4 and analytics in general.

We have a good process for making sense of all of this.

If you want a free audit hit me up.

Over half of all IT projects come in over budget or timeline. 

Generally, there are two failures happening. Incomplete or a rushed discovery leading to a lack of up-front due diligence on requirements. Bad resourcing and project planning to ensure the requirements will be completed on time and on budget.

Most companies have yet to learn they are taking a considerable risk when selecting an agency for a significant project.

Most agencies simply add a project manager, maybe a tech lead, and scramble to find resources to move the project along with very little process and procedures.

We have spent years perfecting our discovery and estimating process per ticket to track the trajectory of every project against those tickets and manage any out-of-scope work that comes in.

Our Gantt charts and project monitoring tools are incredibly accurate at this point.

We can automatically run budget reports on any project in real time and present that to the client. 

These reports show the existing budget used. More importantly, they show where we are projecting the budget to be based on Jira logs and estimates of tasks.

We can quickly adjust timelines based on actionable data in Jira, with clear priorities and swimlanes for what can be done before something else can be accomplished.

Just because a project is 1000 hours doesn't mean all of the work can be done simultaneously by throwing more bodies at it. Sometimes, more bodies can actually hurt the timeline.

Here is a screenshot of our project monitoring tool, which allows us to analyze the budget in real time for any project.

I get a lot of outreach from our podcast from people that only have b2c experience.

If you have direct b2b ecommerce operating experience we want to talk to you!

As the economy slowed down from the end of 2022 to now, many companies have resisted making long-term investments.

The companies that still made the right long term investments will have a massive competitive advantage in the coming years.

The problem is that if you have technical debt or other legacy problems, those problems are much bigger.

The companies that got leaner while addressing those long-term problems will be ahead of the game.

GDP growth slowed dramatically in Q1, and inflation increased slightly.

I don't think we are going to see the high-flying times of zero interest rates anytime soon.

It's time to get smart and adapt to a much harder business environment, and we should assume this isn't changing anytime soon.

One thing I think we will certainly see is the consolidation in the SMB space by private equity.

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