Scaling a Technical Ecommerce Brand Through Automation and a Lean Team With John Ibbetson

John Ibbetson is the CEO of trueCABLE, a company specializing in low-voltage and fiber optic products. Under his leadership, trueCABLE has developed a comprehensive end-to-end solution, emphasizing reliability and customer support. With a background in business development, John previously held sales and account management roles at Distributor Wire & Cable, Bortek Industries, Inc., and Omni Cable.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:33] John Ibbetson shares how trueCABLE evolved into a one-stop-shop for low-voltage solutions
• [4:10] How to automate order entry through ERP integration with Amazon and Shopify
• [6:07] Leveraging customer inquiry volume to prioritize automation opportunities
• [7:40] How trueCABLE reduced support tickets by building the Cable Academy
• [10:41] The value of serving content at the right moment in the buyer journey
• [13:14] Lessons learned from failed attempts to automate live chat support

In this episode…

Managing growth while keeping operations lean is one of the toughest challenges for scaling ecommerce companies. As teams expand, so do inefficiencies, repetitive tasks, and customer support burdens. How can brands streamline their operations without compromising customer experience or team agility?

John Ibbetson, an ecommerce automation expert, shares how he tackled these issues by prioritizing intelligent automation from the beginning. John automated order entry through ERP integrations, which allowed his team to stay small and focus on strategic growth initiatives. He emphasizes using customer feedback to guide automation decisions, especially in areas like returns and content support. John also discusses how building a rich library of educational content not only reduces support tickets but also strengthens brand trust. He warns, however, that automation must be balanced with accuracy and authenticity — particularly when content is technical and customer-facing.

In this episode of Minds of Ecommerce, Raphael Paulin-Daigle interviews John Ibbetson, CEO of trueCABLE, about leveraging automation for strategic growth. John explains why automation is a business multiplier, reflects on failed automation experiments, and shares insights on building educational content, optimizing the customer journey, and staying lean.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle: LinkedIn | X
• SplitBase
• John Ibbetson on LinkedIn
• trueCABLE
• Brightpearl
• Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire by Dan Martell
• “From Awareness to Consideration: How Onewheel Boosted Conversions by 65% With Eric del Valle” on Minds of Ecommerce

Quotable Moments:

• “Automation gives us the ability to stay lean so that we can be as profitable as possible.”
• “We look at every touchpoint, try to answer questions as best we can on the front end.”
• “Content is king, queen, and everything in between.”
• “If you’re not willing to fail, you’ll never learn your true potential.”
• "Nothing is ever on a set-it-and-forget-it mode here. Everything is always under the microscope for improvement."

Action Steps:

1. Automate time-consuming operational tasks early: Freeing your team from repetitive work creates space for strategic growth and higher-value initiatives.
2. Use customer inquiries to guide automation priorities: Using real user friction to inform your process ensures your solutions address the most urgent pain points.
3. Develop educational content for your product: Teaching customers how to use your offerings builds trust, reduces support load, and improves retention.
4. Integrate helpful content into the shopping journey: Surfacing answers contextually increases conversions and enhances user experience during decision-making moments.
5. Reassess and optimize automation efforts regularly: Continuous evaluation ensures your systems evolve with business needs instead of becoming outdated or inefficient.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we design, test, and manage high-converting landing pages and on-site experiences for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle ecommerce brands. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix that.

The result? Increased conversions and profits for our clients.

With our team of conversion optimization specialists, performance marketers, and conversion-focused designers, we've got your back when it comes to testing and optimization.

Request a proposal on SplitBase.com today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Don’t miss out on our exclusive podcasts at Minds of Ecommerce.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:06

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat. In a 15-minute episode, founders and executives take us through a deep dive of a strategy so you get to learn and grow your online sales.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 00:28

In the last episode, you heard from Sean Agatep, who's the co-founder and COO at Vincero Collective, and we talked about scaling through personalization and thoughtful optimizations. Now, today on episode number 52, get ready. John Ibbetson is CEO of trueCABLE. They're a leading retailer of low voltage and fiber optic cables. And today we'll be talking about leveraging automation to keep your team as lean as possible and unlock more time to do what makes you even more money.

I'm your host, Raphael Daigle, and I'm the founder of SplitBase. This is Minds of Ecommerce. Now, this episode is also brought to you by SplitBase. At SplitBase, we help leading eight and nine-figure brands such as Dr. Squatch, Hyperice, and Amika, and Once Upon a Farm go through customer-focused conversion optimization programs.

Our programs pinpoint exactly where your store is losing money most, and then, well, we help you fix it. The result? Well, you get increased conversions, higher AOV, and of course, more money, which in return allows you to scale advertising profitably. We've been at it for over a decade and can help you manage CRO from A to Z, from customer research, conversion design, strategy, copywriting, and development. Our focus is all about growing your ecommerce sales while you get to focus on what you do best.

Now request a proposal today on splitbase.com to learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend. All right, John, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

John Ibbetson: 02:05

Yeah. Raphael, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be on your show today.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 02:08

Yeah. And as you know, this podcast is all about going deep, right? It's about taking one strategy, dissecting it as much as possible so our listeners can get the most value right away. Now I just want to maybe start with some context for people who are not familiar with Drew Cable. So can you tell us just a bit about, you know, how long have you been running the business, and what are some of the milestones maybe, that you guys have achieved along the way?

John Ibbetson: 02:33

Yeah, yeah. So we started we're on year ten actually this year. And what started as just a Ethernet cable manufacturer, we quickly realized that we have an opportunity to be an end-to-end solution. Right. So we recognize the box of Ethernet.

Might as well be a box of rope if you don't have the connecting hardware to pair with it. So through many years of working with customer feedback and recognizing the opportunity within our industry. We've developed a and we continue to develop an end-to-end solution so that our customers and the low voltage and fiber optic space can come to us for a reliable product backed with customer support, technical support, and have that one-stop shop for all things low voltage.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 03:19

And I love talking with, you know, people like you that run a business like the one you run. Because when we think of ecommerce, sometimes we forget that there are these, you know, we think of apparel, we think of homewares and and products, you know, everyday goods. But we forget that there are things like cables, which I mean are technically all around us at any time of the day, you know, like those products are also, you know, can do great on ecommerce. And you guys have had a lot of success with it. One of the things that you told me that really led you to that success and that's been, you know, a massive lever has been automation.

So maybe let's just start with the bases and I'd love to know. When did you realize that you guys needed to be smarter around automation? And then I'll have more questions for you.

John Ibbetson: 04:10

Yeah. Well, I think right out of the gate. Right. We we said we want to be a technology company selling low voltage products. And what I mean by that, and you hear that a lot more now than ever is right.

We recognize we want to stay lean so that we can be as profitable and successful as we possibly can. And automation gives us the ability to do that. So, you know, in the infancy stages of the business, one thing that was taking a lot of time, our sole ecommerce sales channel out of the gate was Amazon. And as Amazon picked up, right order entry became so demanding and so time consuming, and without finding automation for that, we would have had to grow our team tenfold to support order entry. Instead, we found a solution in our ERP that directly integrates with with Amazon and Shopify and other ecommerce sales channels that we're on today to fully automate a time consuming, tedious task that we feel that that gave us the opportunity to spend elsewhere in the business.

Higher level strategic opportunities like growing the brands, introducing, you know, go to market strategies to help us level up the business year over year.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 05:20

Amazing. One of my friends and one of my closest mentors. His name is Dan Martell, and he has this great book, by the way, which I'll I'll shout out, which is I don't have it in front of me and I want to see the Martell method, but I know that's not the name. I'll post it in the show notes. But he says, you know, before you delegate, always look at automate, always automate.

And in your case. So that's been key to staying lean. But where do you start. Because obviously you think of an ecommerce business and you've talked about, you know, content. You've talked there's always ads, there's marketing.

There's you know, like you said, the logistics. So what is your process. Because obviously automating things also takes some, you know, effort and time. So how do you prioritize and how do you decide what to do first?

John Ibbetson: 06:07

Yeah, we kind of great question. We've kind of used the rinse and repeat method and have done a great job, I'll say, of prioritizing our opportunities accordingly. So again, you know, in the early stages what we look to automate first was order entry. While it quickly led into right with every business you've got a returns process. And what I think we do so well in one of our core values is customer-obsessed.

We look at every touchpoint, try to answer questions as best we can on the front end of our website to eliminate a customer having to pick up the phone, go on to a live chat, or even email us whatever the preferred communication style is. But what we use as our vehicle to prioritize automation opportunities was the amount of inquiries we were hearing from our customers. If we if we heard something repetitively, we knew we had to focus there to put a or to make that process easier for our customer, but also it makes life easier on our internal team as well. It goes both ways. We want to make the experience world-class for our customers, but also here for our team at trueCABLE.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 07:17

I love what there's a couple of things you said that I thought was really interesting. One, you know, addressing everything in the front end helps prevent, you know, getting too many questions. And then it reduces kind of all types of inquiries. What are some of the things that you guys are doing, you know, to really increase that customer experience and reduce, you know, maybe those inquiries.

John Ibbetson: 07:40

Yeah. Another great question. So another thing right. I said earlier, we want to be a technology business that just so happens to sell low voltage wire. We recognize that that content is king, queen and everything in between.

And with us going to market with a more technical product and most ecommerce businesses. How do you portray how do you educate? How do you debunk some of the the wrong information being shared within our industry and right out the gates, we recognize an opportunity to go to market with a content strategy, bringing fresh content about our products, about our industry to the market every single week. And while we're certainly here to to make money, it's just as important to us to educate our customers that don't know how to use our products, or might need a refresher on how our products should be used as a solution. So we have our our cable Academy, which has it's now a few hundred blogs, and we've accompanied most of them with videos now to take it to the next level.

But content has been a tremendous vehicle for us to build customer loyalty, prove to our customers that, again, we're not just here to sell products, we're here to offer support for those who don't know how to use our products.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 08:57

Did that content marketing strategy start as an SEO strategy, or was it truly just to educate the customer? What came first?

John Ibbetson: 09:07

Yeah. Gosh, I wish I could say it was more customer related. I think it 75% SEO, 25% customer, but it's quickly flipped to to really focusing on the customer. We see many, you know, we look at our data and analytics in, in our platforms and see that some of the blogs we wrote in the infancy stages of our cable Academy actually draw the most traffic because of the most coveted SEO search terms. That being said, there's still so much value to the flip side of that, the you can't really measure the success of content from just a views and traffic perspective, because you might have some some blogs that don't get as much eyes on them, but are just as impactful to that one potentially large customer that reads it and says, wow, I trust trueCABLE.

I want to purchase their product now.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 10:05

That is so true. Content, you know, can have such a large definition. And I know that, you know, time to create content is often one of the biggest challenges and expense for brands. In your case, you're selling a very technical product. How do you determine what the next piece of content that you should create?

And then how do you make sure it doesn't get lost in that sea of content? How do you make sure it actually becomes part of the customer journey? Maybe throughout the website, or as they're shopping for a product that they might need?

John Ibbetson: 10:41

Yeah, yeah. So we've been really mindful as the the library is filled up with information, very thorough checklists of a tool, checklist of everything you need to buy, whatever the piece of content may be. We want to place that in front of the customer at the opportune time, wherever they are in their buying journey on our website. So if you look at our our menu structure, you know, if you hover over Ethernet cable, there's a section on the menu that highlights two of our most commonly asked questions as it relates to that product collection. And so it's being intentional about certainly you can go to our cable Academy, which is featured on our homepage and in our header and footer, but again, serving relevant content where it matters most in a customer's buying journey is is something that's constantly evolving through a B testing here at trueCABLE or straight feedback from our customers.

It's something that we're looking to improve constantly, especially as our content library continues to grow.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 11:46

Amazing. I want to circle back to automation. I know that automation was a way to give you more time to build more content, but have you guys also leveraged automation within that content creation cycle?

John Ibbetson: 12:02

Yes and no. And again, it goes back to one of our core values. Right. Customer obsessed. We recognize we likely could use AI to help right.

A lot of our content. But because there is so much misinformation out there, if you lean too heavily into technology and it pulls from the resources that aren't up to date and accurate, you can catch yourself in a in a peculiar situation or interesting situation rather. So our technical team works very closely with our marketing team to balance blogs that are both SEO, you know, chock full of SEO value, but also bring the the technical accuracy that we want to and need to maintain for our our customers.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 12:44

I know one of the when we think of automation, we think of all the possibilities. And it's pretty easy to get excited at. But I think there's also probably a lot of pitfalls in what you just mentioned. For example, All you know, automating content would come at the cost of authenticity and potentially accuracy. If we look at other areas in the business, you've successfully implemented implementation in some areas.

Is there anywhere where you actually backtracked on automation?

John Ibbetson: 13:14

Yeah, yeah. Great question. I think we've tried to use it inside our live chat. You know, just how do we support a lean Customer success team or even our technical support team to see if we can provide real time answers without having to leverage a real person to do so? And it's it's come with some challenges and some bumps in the road.

That being said, I think a huge compliment to our team is anytime we've kind of stumbled upon a project or a task, we leverage that as a learning lesson and apply that moving forward to succeed on the other side. So while I didn't work within our live chat right out the gate, we're we're quickly shifting strategies and in finding something that will support both our team internally and our and our customers externally.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 14:02

I think that that's the exact spirit of experimentation, right? It's like if you try something and it fails, fine. But let's learn from it and let's see how we can make it even better based on those learnings.

John Ibbetson: 14:14

Yeah. I heard something once. Fail. You know, if you want to put a meaning to fail, first attempt in learning. And I think that's so powerful because if you're not willing to fail, you'll never learn what your true potential is.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 14:26

Yes, I love that. Now I'm curious. So the business. You've had the business for ten years now. So I'm curious at this point, though, when it comes to automation specifically, is there anything you would do?

Now you've had time to iterate and improve over time, but is there anything if you had to start that all over again, would your priorities with automation be different? Would you do anything differently when it comes to automation?

John Ibbetson: 14:54

Great question. You know, it's hard to say because again, the process we've taken, it's been recognizing opportunities as they come about. And I think we've done a great job of, you know, checking one automation opportunity off the list, moving on to the next. That feels like it's the right thing to do. Eliminating workload from our team and providing a better customer experience to our customers.

So no, I don't think that there's anything that we would backtrack and rework. If anything, we continue to look at something that was set in motion. If it's years ago or just months ago, we look at everything holistically and say, okay, that's still working, but we recognize there's an opportunity to optimize. Nothing is ever on a set it and forget it mode here at trueCABLE. Yeah, everything is always under the microscope.

Whether it's our people, our technology, our products, we're always looking for ways to improve so that we can bring a better experience, a better product to market, whatever may be the case.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 15:55

Awesome. I know that there are a lot of tools and very specific systems around automations that you use that really gives you a competitive advantage and that we're not going to get into in this podcast. But are there tools that you're willing to share that you just really love, that you feel really makes you know, your job, your team's job easier when it comes to automation?

John Ibbetson: 16:18

Yeah. Well, I will share. And it's no secret, you know, you can find it on their website. We've we've done webinars or or podcasts similar to this. Brightpearl is our ERP system.

And they we partnered with them long ago because they had a very robust integration with all the ecommerce platforms. We were solely focused on Amazon, Shopify and others. So that really gave us a solid foundation to roll out and build off of over time and and again with checking the box of automating order entry and many other things. It gave us time to focus on the importance of brand, customer experience, quality products, so on and so forth.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 17:04

Amazing, John. We're already out of time. I can't believe it. It goes so fast. But if people want to learn more about you or about trueCABLE, where should they go?

Where should they go?

John Ibbetson: 17:15

Yeah. Great question. So truecable.com. You know, we have all of our products for sale.

You can read a little bit about our team members and our mission here to provide an end-to-end solution for low voltage products and fiber optic supplies.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle: 17:31

Awesome. John, thank you so much for being here. One side note, I mentioned my friend Dan Martell's book earlier. The name is Buy Back Your Time. I had a blank.

Excellent book for people listening. You know that. Want to figure out where to start when it comes to automation? And no, this is not sponsored. Just a great book.

John, thank you so much for being here.

John Ibbetson: 17:52

Raphael, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Outro: 17:59

All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. And thank you so much for tuning in. Now, if you like what you've heard, and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast, and well, bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes store or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an ecommerce store that does over $1 million in revenue and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages, well, I've got some good news because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that.

Go to splitbase.com to learn more, or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions or comments, tweet me at @Rpaulindaigle, and I'll be super happy to hear from you. And again, thanks again for listening. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

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