{"id":327055,"date":"2025-12-02T03:41:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T03:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/analytics\/kevin-hillstrom-minethatdata-scarne-on-cards\/"},"modified":"2025-12-02T03:41:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T03:41:07","slug":"kevin-hillstrom-minethatdata-scarne-on-cards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=327055","title":{"rendered":"Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData: Scarne on Cards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div id=\"post-body-144782432212996453\" itemprop=\"description articleBody\">\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Scarne-Cards-John\/dp\/0451094468\" target=\"_blank\">My parents bought this book for me in the mid-70s &#8230; apparently they believed I had potential to be a gambler or loved card games, or both<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Turns out I enjoy statistics. And this book had a story in it that resonated with me in the 70s and the story sticks with me in my day job in 2025.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">The author talked about playing a poker game in a casino. Each of six players starts with $100 (the specifics are likely different). At the end of each hand, the dealer would take $2 from the pot as the &#8220;house cut&#8221;, the winner earned everything else. After fifty hands, $100 has been removed from the players. After one-hundred-and-fifty hands $300 has been removed from the players, leaving just $300. Assuming everybody had equal odds of winning, it meant that each player had $50 of their original $100. Everybody was losing money. If somebody was winning, it meant other players were broke.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">His advice? Don&#8217;t play games where the house gets a consistent and repeatable cut. You can&#8217;t win.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">There are times when I look at the profit-and-loss statement of a brand and this story comes to mind. You know the company, they spend 25% of net sales on marketing expenses. Those are dollars going out of the pot, a cut to the house (Google, Facebook, etc). They get money, Shopify gets money, Listrak gets money, your favorite AI vendor is about to get a slice of your pie. In the catalog ecosystem, it&#8217;s worse, because everybody in the e-commerce ecosystem gets a cut PLUS the paper people get a cut, your printer gets a cut, the USPS gets a cut, your boutique catalog agency gets a cut.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Is it any wonder that I tell you that you need ORGANIC orders, orders that don&#8217;t happen because of marketing &#8230; and when I tell you that the vendor ecosystem comes-a-fightin&#8217;???? They&#8217;re the casino when the 1-800 number tells the gambler to stop gambling!<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">I&#8217;m not stupid (on this topic). You have no choice but to develop clever stuff that doesn&#8217;t cost anything. That&#8217;s your job! That&#8217;s how your p&amp;l works. That&#8217;s how ownership keeps things going. That&#8217;s how your Executive Team earn bonuses. That&#8217;s how your Manager and Director make a credible living. That&#8217;s how the analyst gets enough experience to eventually work in a Leadership role.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Profit funds everything.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Think about it this way. You have a $50,000,000 brand that employs 125 people &#8230; 75 of &#8217;em are essentially earning $35,000 a year and the remaining 50 earn an average of $100,000. Multiply that out and it&#8217;s around $7,600,000 in salary. If your brand is paying 25% of net sales in advertising costs, it means the vendors figured out how to get $12,500,000 while the actual employees &#8230; the very ones who pay the vendors &#8230; are only getting $7,600,000.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">On what planet should your &#8220;trusted partners&#8221; earn 60%+ more than your employees earn? You&#8217;re the one paying THEM!!!<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: arial;\">Your job is to generate ORGANIC orders, orders that happen without the aid of marketing \/ advertising. Your co-workers depend on you to do that. So does ownership.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My parents bought this book for me in the mid-70s &#8230; apparently they believed I had potential to be a gambler or loved card games, or both. Turns out I enjoy statistics. And this book had a story in it that resonated with me in the 70s and the story sticks with me in my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12033],"tags":[933,13773,13772,13774,153553],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-327055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analytics","tag-cards","tag-hillstrom","tag-kevin","tag-minethatdata","tag-scarne"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData: Scarne on Cards - Som2ny Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=327055\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData: Scarne on Cards - Som2ny Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"My parents bought this book for me in the mid-70s &#8230; apparently they believed I had potential to be a gambler or loved card games, or both. 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