The E-Comm Show
The E-Comm Show
Shopify Growth Tips from Grill Your Ass Off: Scaling a Veteran-Owned Brand to 7 Figures | EP. #201
Looking for Shopify growth tips that actually work? In this 201st episode of The E-Comm Show, host Andrew Maff chats with Jason Murff, U.S. Army veteran and founder of Grill Your Ass Off, about how he scaled his veteran-owned seasoning brand into a seven-figure Shopify business.
From launching with just four blends to managing 65+ SKUs across retail, ecommerce, and BBQ communities, Jason shares what it takes to grow a brand with personality in a crowded market.
We cover Shopify apps that actually drive profit, balancing B2B and D2C, UGC-powered marketing, Q4 planning, and diversifying beyond Shopify. Whether you’re a founder or marketer, this episode is packed with practical growth strategies you can put to work.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why Shopify beats Squarespace for scaling
- How to balance B2B and D2C on one platform
- The Shopify apps actually driving ROI
- Turning loyal customers into UGC creators
- Q4 planning with Shopify segments
- Diversifying beyond Shopify into retail & marketplaces
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And now we're working with someone that we're not trying to sell on the brand. They've already bought into the brand.
Narrator:Welcome to the E comm Show podcast. I'm your host. Andrew Maff, owner and founder of blue tusker, from groundbreaking industry updates to success stories and strategies, get to know the ins and outs of the e Commerce Industry from top leaders in the space. Let's get into it.
Andrew Maff:Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the E comm show. As usual. I am your host, Andrew Maff, and today I am joined by Jason Murff, who is the founder and CEO over at Grill Your Ass Off. Jason, how you doing, buddy? You ready for good show?
Jason Murff:I'm wonderful. Let's kick it off.
Andrew Maff:Beautiful. Super excited to talk to you. Very cool brrand, very fun brand. Love the overall messaging, the approach. So definitely know this is gonna be, this is gonna be a fun one. Love starting these off super stereotypically and just kind of give you the floor. Tell us a little bit about your background, how you got started with grill, your ass off, and we'll take it from there.
Jason Murff:Yeah. Thank you again for having me on here to try and condense it down into a quick story. Always wanted to be in the military my entire life, took the entrepreneurial route directly while I was in high school, did that for a while, and then ended up getting denied to community college because they said, basically I wasn't smart enough for that, and then ended up selling and getting rid of one of my businesses, and then, following a lifelong dream of going inside the military, wanted to do a career with it. Never thought that Grill Your Ass Off would ever be on the career path for me, went in as 11 Bravo, so infantry for the military, and then ended up destroying my left ankle, getting a botched surgery over at Walter Reed and yeah, just kind of went downhill from there. Had a pretty aggressive career change and life change for me, forcing me to be medically retired out of the military. And at that time, I was super big into fitness, doing fitness competitions, dieting down super lean, so eating a lot of bland, boring food. And then on top of that, being from Texas and being stationed in Washington, DC, there's a severe lack of flavor up north. Sorry for anyone from up north. So I had a roommate at the time, and we were making our own, like, pre workouts and supplements and everything like that. And that kind of occurred to me of like, you know, I could just make my own seasonings, like it's no big deal. Never thought of anything for it. And then once the medical discharge happened, I had to reassess. What did I want to do for a career and life? So I'd actually, at the time, one of the guys that I was serving with that was also getting medically discharged. We found a school in Waco, Texas that we could actually use our GI bill for a commercial aviation license. So I had actually separated from the military and started going to college, a technical college at TSTC in Waco to get my commercial pilot's license. And pretty quick into that, I realized flying a school bus in the sky is pretty boring. Whenever from being infantry and having a very active lifestyle. So I finished getting my private pilot's license, I was actually expanding my firework business while I was getting my instrument license, scheduled everything with the college to basically allow me to take a summer off to expand my firework business. At this time, I had just started putting together some seasonings. Didn't really know what I wanted to do with it, what to call it? The you know, name girly or ass off actually came from my dad's suggestion. I thought it was a name at the time, and then everything kind of just like spiraled very aggressively after that, because right around the time of getting the first season seasonings kind of bottled, getting the original Grill Your Ass Off logo was whenever I was taking that summer off, and the school ended up failing me for having too many absences that they approved me for which made no sense whatsoever. So in that time, I finished basically building the website, developing everything that I wanted to to be able to kick off the business, put my apartment back on the market in Waco, moved back to Houston, and then once we got to the school, back to passing me for the approved days that they gave me off, I told them that they could just fail me for the course, and I was done with them. And then so dropped out of, you know, college and jumped in grill your ass off with both feet. Here we are coming up, October will be nine years.
Andrew Maff:Wow. That's awesome. So obviously, like, I mean, you, you kind of saw the need, started creating. It started growing with it, you know, it's obviously growing to this seven figure brand that's doing really well. Like, what? What was it that kind of, what was it that all of a sudden, like, sales started picking up and, like, what was kind of that turning point?
Jason Murff:Um, really, it was brand recognition and then narrowing in on the why, and, you know, our core mission statement, and that was kind of like a lost journey for me as I was starting it, because I was building the brand for myself and giving myself a why, and I just didn't really know how to portray that to the general public. And then as well, I thought, you know, hey, this is an awesome product. These are, you know, kick ass looking labels like we every store should sell this. And, you know, you you start off with the an idea, and you walk into a store and they just look at you and like, who are you? Why would I care to use stuff so and kind of having that rejection right there at the very beginning is what gave me a lot of the fuel and the motivation, and then figuring out, like, okay, like, not only is this my why and giving myself a mission and a purpose after I lost that for military service, but I can utilize all of this to where I can help give other veterans and first responders a why, once they leave service, or while they're in service, I can give them that connection of being with someone or brightening their day through humor. You look at our name, you look at her labels, you know you're going to laugh at that kind of stuff. But not only that, you get the connection through food. And that's how the mission statement that we have came continued camaraderie through good food is humor got us through our dark times of service, and then food brought us all together. So once I kind of honed in on that and started pushing that message and leading with that, things just started to, you know, kind of amplify and we started off with just four bottles of seasonings. We got a steak, a chicken, a pork and a Cajun seasoning. Now we have over 65 consumable skews. So it's drastically increased where I mean, we're making pickles, olives, salsas, ranch dips, beef jerky, like you name it. We have it.
Andrew Maff:Yeah. So tell me a little bit about like the business aspect. Is it primarily retail? Are you primarily online? If so, like, what channels like? Tell me a bit about that.
Jason Murff:Yeah. So we're currently, we're on Shopify, as with most of everyone else, we started off on Squarespace, and quickly got away from that.
Andrew Maff:Classic!
Jason Murff:Yeah. So, yeah, you think that it's good, and then you start growing and you're like, Oh, wow. Like, this is horrible. So we're on Shopify. We are currently about 50-50, kind of fluctuates throughout the year, on B to B to B to C on that so, but yeah, we're on there. We've been aggressively growing. We're utilizing, you know, some of the pretty standard stuff for email marketing. We're not on clay VO, we're actually with omnisend, because clay vo treated us just like another number and gave us a whole bunch of promises we didn't follow through on. We're on Amazon, Fair for wholesale. We do a lot of different direct shows. You know, we're, we're currently, right now, onboarding with Orgill for, you know, a huge hardware wholesale distribution. We're inside with Ace, inside of their distribution networks, and then hopefully we're going to be announcing a couple new ones here soon.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, interesting. Anywhere, any marketplaces you get into, like Amazon, Walmart, or anything like that yet.
Jason Murff:Yeah, so we're on Amazon, we're on Walmart. They're fun to work with, because one of the things that you wouldn't think would be a pain is having the word ass in your name. So we've had to be very creative whenever it comes to like, paid advertising on Meta, Google, but as well as on Amazon and Walmart too. So one of the things that we've actually switched to that's helped us with SEO and keywords is utilizing really what the product is for, versus the name. Just grill your ass off on it and then putting a stamp that says bleep over the word ass, because people know what's behind it, and they also find it humorous. So we, as soon as we started transitioning to that, we saw a lot of really good engagement on it.
Andrew Maff:Awesome is that, is that kind of more one of the primary channels that does really well is the advertising side on Meta?
Jason Murff:Yeah, meta still our number one advertising platform on that, as much as I don't, I don't like it. That's still our best one. I know everybody else in E commerce feels the same way.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, what? What type of content is working for you using, like, influencer marketing, UGC, stuff like I would imagine. Obviously, in the cooking realm, there's hundreds of thousands of different like, quote, unquote cooking and influencers. So like, what's the what's the process with them? Anything?
Jason Murff:We do ug UGC, we're currently running a campaign right now, directing a lot of traffic to Amazon and getting ugcs with stack influence on that. We're about a month in on the project. It's been going well so far, not the best ugcs that we received, because it's kind of open to anyone and everyone, but what we've found that's actually worked very well for us is we get our core customers that are, you know, placing 15 to 30 orders in a year, and finding them on social media, which a lot of times, they just tag us right away, but seeing these people who are creating amazing content, and they're already core customers of ours, and then turning over to them, setting up, you know, Shopify collabs account, and then working on paid structures to where it's like, Hey, if you guys provide us all of this and we'll give them the, you know, definitions of it, then now they become basically a contract employee with us to where we can feature them in our newsletter blogs, we can put them on our recipes on our website, so they're getting amazing exposure from our customer group. And now we're working with someone that we're not trying to sell on the brand they've already bought into the brand.
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Andrew Maff:Interesting. Yeah, we, I actually had, think it was the founder of Stack influence on the show, I want to say, like a month or two ago, very interesting platform, but I could see how, so you ended up getting a lot of there's not as much control there. I guess?
Jason Murff:Yes, there's really no control on who you're going to get. So I mean, right now, we're getting close to like 200 influencers that have submitted things back, and we probably have like five that we would proudly put out there.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, jeez. Is that. Have you tried creator connections through Amazon?
Jason Murff:We have not yet. That's on our roadmap to do.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, and say that's a, I've heard relatively similar things of that one, but I think you've got a you've got a little bit more control, but I also think that there's not as many influencers and stuff signed up with it.
Jason Murff:And that's what we've kind of found like across the board. We worked with agencies before to try and do you know, outreach for ugcs, like Tiktok, meta, all that kind of stuff. And then it always just comes back down to it. It's like, our customers already love the brand, like, let's just have them utilize it, and then it benefits them, because now we can offer them crazy good deals for them.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, yeah. You know what? There's, man, there's a Shopify app that I need to remember the name of, and then I need to reach out to them, because I plug them all the time. But there's a Shopify app that you can actually obviously connect Shopify it will read all of your customer data, scrape their social media platforms and tell you what their following is. So you could literally just go into this app and see like, of everyone that's ever bought from you. You know, here's the ones with, like, the top followers and, like, the best engagement and what they spent. It's like, a great way to just be like, oh, I'll just reach out to so and so, and then be like, they've already shopped with us, so I know they're going to want to work with us. It makes us a lot easier, yeah, as opposed to going after people completely cold, which doesn't really have to
Jason Murff:Yeah, usually, like, let me know that out.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, no, I gotta look I gotta look that up again. And one of the brings up all the time.
Jason Murff:While we're on the subject for Shopify apps, one of the ones that has, like, helped us tremendously. As you know how inaccurate Meta and Google tracking is, yeah, on the actual numbers is, we started working with the app called Little data, and we can actually control what data is getting sent to them. So say, if we have a draft order come through that my guys are, you know, typing into Shopify, it's meta is not going to take credit for that anymore. Yeah. So we're able to very, very clean up a lot of our information, which is been a pain, pain point for us for a long time.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, attribution is a it's going to be a pain for the foreseeable future. I know little data. I know there's a couple others out there that kind of do, like server side data adjustments and kind of can help with that. And then I know there's like, I won't say them, because I won't say too many nice things about them. But then there's, you have the other ones that are, like attribution trackers, and the more like just glorified UTM
Jason Murff:I have the same feeling. So yeah, you're good.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, you know, on the influencer thing, like, as an agency, we do it, and it's to your point, like, if you can do it internally. You should definitely do it internally. What we've always done from a UGC side, if we don't already have, like, a bank of certain influencers to work with, there's especially from a UGC perspective, there's so many different platforms out there between like trend IO and billio and those types of guys. We just start off with those to kind of speed up the process, vet the ones that we like, and then we just start talking to a moth platform and start to build up the library. From there, it makes it so much quicker, so much easier, cool. So, all right, so you, you we got into the paid ad side. We got into some of that. Any issues with the tariff side? Did that end up becoming a problem on your end?
Jason Murff:Some fluctuation. You know, all of our stuff is made here, you know, we blend our seasonings. Here we bottle everything. Here we do have a few items that are made overseas, like our thermometers, our heat resistant gloves, but a lot of people don't know that, like all of your garlic and black pepper primarily come from China. So thankfully, we try to buy everything in mass quantities to lock in prices, and then we're able to blend into smaller batches, keep good quality, uh, you know, good quality stuff. But yeah, um, as we were preparing for this q4 we have gotten some hits on tariffs that we've kind of had to adjust things and schedule some things out for that.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, yeah, I had a feeling, although I guess it's good that you got, you got you got ahead of it, so you're in a good spot. There anything that you like? Pre prepare for going into q4 now that you've kind of locked and loaded on inventory?
Jason Murff:Yeah. So we're actually we have a pretty sophisticated system to where most of all of our marketing is all automated. So we'll actually build out email and SMS flows based off of a segment and a user's interaction to where we will schedule those flows to be able to kick off on a certain date. So it's pretty much hands free. So currently, right now, we're finishing out building all of the flow charts for it so our team can fully understand it and then finalize all of our offers and be able to implement that our goal for this year, and we've been able to achieve it for the most part this year, is we're staying a quarter ahead on all of our marketing.
Andrew Maff:You should, you should do a talk on this. It's ridiculous. How many like So, for those of you that are listening, it's August. It's mid late, ish, August right now, by the time this goes out, I think we're into, like, mid September, like, it blows my mind. How many brands don't even think or look at q4 until, like, September, October. So it's awesome that you're in August and you're already planned, pretty much through the end of the year.
Jason Murff:I mean, the biggest thing that, like a lot of people don't realize is, you know, your win back and your warm ups are your main thing to kick off the holiday season, yeah, because you have all so many potential customers that you've been paying for for q1 through q3 that you have their information like, get them to convert, and you don't want to get them to convert, you know, a week before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and then the rest of the holiday season. So it's like, you know, we're sending out stuff, September, October, to these lists, and we're getting someone like yourself. Like, hey, Andrew, I know that you checked out our stuff, but I want to offer you a free sample pack. All you have to do is pay for the shipping and handling. You're like, All right, yeah, cool. I'll get six flavors for five bucks, no worries. And then now we can put product in your hand. You get to cook with it, see the quality of it. And I've also looped you into a new segment that is going to trigger a flow for a pre Black Friday, then Black Friday, Cyber Monday, extended. All that fun stuff.
Andrew Maff:That's awesome. That's genius. Yeah, there's a we do something similar. How would that work? So usually what we start telling brands, like, like, not really July, but pretty much August, September, we say, from an advertising perspective, like, now is the time to really focus, like, top of funnel, like, start to educate the new, new people, because come q4 it's expensive as hell, and you're not going to get anything. And it's, it just doesn't work out, and it's way less expensive to go middle of funnel. So you could even take that do, like a Meta ad through like a lead form, and just blast it out to new people of like, completely free try it, you know, free shipping kind of thing. And then maybe even lead with one of the UGC videos you got that you actually liked and just retarget people that watched what, like 50 plus percent of it kind of thing. Yeah, I love that you're actually doing it. It's it never ceases to amaze me how many brands don't touch anything for q4 until they're in q4 and it just blows my mind. Or they have the problem where they do no preparation for q1 until q1 and by then, because they're like, Oh, we just want to get through q4 and then it's like, you spent all this money acquiring these customers in q4 what are you what are you doing?
Jason Murff:Yeah. And I mean, I'm not gonna like, I didn't know that right off the bat, so it took me a few years to get all this kind of, one of the biggest movers for us last year and this year, is actually direct mail marketing that's been our highest ROI to date that we've ever had. I mean, we've had some postcards that have gone out that have gotten us close to, you know, like a 32 ROAS which is insane.
Andrew Maff:Yeah, I've heard we've done a little bit of it. It's really hard, from an agency perspective, to explain to brands like, just try it, but there's not as much competition in the mailbox anymore. There's more competition in email inbox. So it's like you've actually can really stand out, especially if you get kind of creative with it. So that's pretty cool. How often are you doing that?
Jason Murff:So what we've actually done is we've done a couple testing to where, basically we match what our email flows are going to be. So as soon as someone finishes going through a flow, if we hadn't gotten that person to trigger, then we're going to start post card. And then we do, typically, one campaign at least every six to eight weeks. And then we will do, like a massive, obviously, campaign towards the end of the year q4 we also do site match and mail match to where we can scrub your IP address to be able to get a home address. And then, if we have your email address, we can use their data to figure out a good home address for you on that for like, new leads. And then, I mean, even we had, we had one that was getting close to 12 ROAS, where we were just sending out a postcard that had a QR code for a free meal prep guide in January for q1 like, hey, let's kick this year off great, you can eat barbecue and stay healthy and fit. And so we're just giving them something free, and it just happens to be on that landing page for that free, downloadable, you know, PDF, the box of ass. Now they can get all the seasonings that are featured inside of this, you know, meal prep guide, in one box.
Andrew Maff:That's great. Who are you using? I imagine, because they pilot, integrate with post pilot. Okay, yes, I know there's a few of them out there, so I didn't know. I knew they integrated with Klaviyo. I didn't know they were integrated with omnisend. Now, that's makes a lot of sense.
Jason Murff:Yeah, and they their CSMs that they have on accounts are amazing and 100% worth it.
Andrew Maff:Cool. And this episode's not sponsored by them now, although maybe it will be. Reach out! Jason, this was great. I really appreciate your time. I know you're super busy. I don't want to take up too much more your time. I would love to give you the opportunity here let everyone know they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about Grill Your Ass Off.
Jason Murff:Yeah, so everything, all social media is just going to be Grill Your Ass Off. You search for it, you'll be able to find us. It's the donkey sitting on the grill. If you want to get a hold of me direct. It's just Jason Muff on Instagram, Facebook. I jump on LinkedIn every once a while, but most of it's all spam, so don't expect your fast response if you reach out to me on there. So but thank you again for this. I'm looking forward to hopefully doing it again and then go in some deeper dives and some fun marketing stuff.
Andrew Maff:Love it. We'll be here. Jason, thank you so much for being on the show. Obviously, everyone that tuned in. Thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ECommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes as usual, we'll see you all next time, have a good one!
Narrator:Thank you for tuning in to the E comm show. Head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTusker YouTube channel. The Ecomm show is brought to you by BlueTusker, a full service digital marketing company specifically for E commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com now for more information, make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of the E comm show!
