surefoot.me

We are proud of the long-term partnerships we have with brands like Peak Design, Hydro Flask, Brooklinen, OXO, Made In Cookware and more.

We strive to create a culture where superior service is our primary sales strategy, clients and co-workers are friends and hard work is balanced with play.

Our core tenets:

- Partner with brands and companies we believe in, who give more than they take, whether that’s in the way of charitable giving, happiness or health.

- Win with integrity and put people over profit in a world that often forgets how to do those things.

- Refuse to waiver on doing what is best for our clients, even if it means less upside for us.

- Only do what we can do well, providing strategic AB testing and personalization services, and partnering with others when we veer outside the realm of our core competencies.

- Be happy. As they say, life is too short to be anything else.

If our philosophy resonates, please give me a shout at brian@surefoot.me

CEO & co-founder

CROmetrics

As employee #1, I helped grow the company to $3.5MM in annual recurring revenue and wore many hats, handling everything from client management to data analysis, QA and process implementation for clients like Facebook, 99designs, Trulia, General Assembly, Weight Watchers and more. 

As the company grew from two people to 25, I was promoted to Director of Operations, where I led various initiatives, including implementation of back-end systems and automation that facilitated internal efficiency and client success.

Director Of Operations

Test My Marketing

This was the second company I co-founded, which I spun out of a 3-day startup event, even winning a MSN influential new business contest. True story. I’m still surprised the domain name was available. 

We offered an affordable copywriting solution to help businesses craft crisp, actionable and compelling messages before publishing to their audiences. As co-founder, I led all internal operations and marketing and managed a community of freelance marketers.

Co-Founder

Rockbridge Seminary

Directed technology, online and traditional marketing, and finance.

Vice President of Operations

Director of Operations

Operations Manager

Watch Dog Time

This was my first foray into the world of business ownership, an online luxury watch repair business. If you had a broken Rolex, Tag Heuer or Breitling, I had a fix for it.

• directed all matters of finance, marketing, and daily operations 
• handled all customer service inquiries, ensuring timely responses (see what I did there?) 
• bootstrapped company and reached profitability and positive cash flow within 5 months of launch

President & Co-founder

Justice Jewelers

In this role, I found diamonds in the rough (literally and figuratively), as I was responsible for directing the buying team, small diamond buying and jewelry appraising. This is where I got my first taste of the World Wide Web (as it was referred to then), as I  managed our company websites and the Inventory Management System. 

• responsible for planned merchandise spend of $6MM annually
• directed outsourced marketing activities with ad agency
• designed and implemented a system to control purchasing budgets 
• designed and implemented a website for sale of slow moving inventory, which led to increased profitability and faster turn
• designed and implemented a purchasing process to increase inventory turn; turn exceeded industry average by 186%
• earned Graduate Gemology degree from the G.I.A.

Buying Team Manager/Marketing Coordinator/Merchandiser

Growing ecommerce businesses through CRO, UX research, and data analytics.

We're a conversion rate optimization agency for eCommerce brands looking to grow to the next level, but know they need to a better job converting traffic. 

We talk to your potential customers, find out why they're not buying, and fix those issues through a/b testing, personalization, and data-informed UX/UI design.

We help you grow by leveraging: 
-> Full-website conversion optimization
-> Landing page optimization
-> Personalization and segmentation
-> Conversion-focused web design
-> User experience research
-> Website analytics and reporting

We’ve worked with brands you know, like JensonUSA, Osprey, PENN Fishing, and The Shade Store. We’re also fired up about helping growing brands reach the next level. Some brands we've helped make this jump include Hydro Flask, Made In, Mizzen and Main, and Peak Design.

Brian Schmitt

The CRO industry is full of 25-year-olds teaching "masterclasses" after running 10 tests.

I've been doing this since 2001. And honestly, almost all of what I see from newer operators today is straight trash.

Can someone be good at CRO in two years? 

"Good" is a loose term. Can someone do it? For sure.

But if you're coming in fresh at 25 with no business experience, you're not going to be proficient.

You'll end up copycatting wins you see posted online with no strategic thought and zero customer empathy.

I've stepped in for clients after they left younger agencies. Their biggest complaint is always:

"Our tests would win, but we wouldn't see revenue translate."

When I examine their "winning" tests, I find they hit significance in 3-4 days when the sample size wasn't big enough, creating false positives everywhere.

We've found "losses" that were actually wins when re-run correctly and "wins" that were flat or actual losses.

Real experience teaches principles, not tactics.

CEO at Surefoot.me | Driving ecom growth w/ CRO, Analytics, UX Research, and Site Design

The most expensive mistake $10M+ ecommerce brands make:

They spend millions on traffic.
But 98% of those visitors leave without buying.

CRO is the lever they ignore.

Acquisition builds reach.
Optimization builds revenue.

Without CRO, your ad budget is a leaky bucket.

Recent wins from Surefoot clients:

 • Free Shipping Threshold → +$516K annual revenue
 • Centaur LP → +8.3% cart adds
 • Category Clarity in the Nav → +$149K annual lift

Different brands. 

Same pattern:
Disciplined experimentation beats design trends.

The most expensive phrase in eCommerce?

“We want to redesign the website.”

Full redesigns do not deliver the ROI you think it will, and it is almost always a waste of time and resources that brands could be putting towards what ACTUALLY drives a substantial impact: 

→ Removing friction where it counts
→ Fixing leaks in the customer journey
→ Tapping into buying psychology
→ Running smart, strategic A/B tests

Chasing shiny new designs is looking for gold at the end of the rainbow. 

Double down on what works and optimize the rest.

Most people think CRO is about button colors and call-to-actions.
It’s not.

It’s about truth.

When we run a test, we’re asking:
“What actually drives buying behavior, not what we think drives it?”

Sometimes that truth hurts.
It shows your $82k redesign was vanity.
It proves your CEO’s favorite headline does nothing.
It humbles teams who “knew” their customer.

But that’s why it works.

CRO turns “we believe” into “we know.”

And once you operate from truth, every other part of your business compounds faster.

When a brand tells me “it should be working,” I know we’re about to find revenue.

“Our PDP should convert better.”
“Our new landing page should outperform the old one.”
“Our loyalty program should increase retention.”

The problem?
None of those sentences include proof.

We’ve run over 9,000 tests across ecommerce brands.
Roughly half the time, the “better” version loses.

That’s not failure.
That’s the tuition you pay for certainty.

You can either spend millions building what should work…
Or a fraction testing what actually does.

If everyone follows “best practices,” who’s left to stand out?


So many CRO audits start with the same sentence:


“We follow best practices.”


And that’s usually the problem.


Because “best practices” mean “what everyone else already tried.”
They’re safe. Predictable. Easy to copy.


But optimization isn’t about copying. It’s about discovery.


Your audience, product, and price point are unique.
Your winning version probably breaks at least five “rules.”


If your pages look like your competitors’, you’re fighting for scraps.


CRO is how you break away, safely.
You earn permission to zig while they all zag.

How's it going today? 

Feeling the anticipation or feeling the heartburn?

Every brand has one assumption about its customers that has never been tested.

What’s yours?
(Serious question.)

Chris Keith

Founder of HIREXE

The Future of Work = People (leveraged) + AI Agents (specialized).

Building Hirexe to bring infinitely (∞) scaled productivity to the global workforce.

PEOPLE are a vital part of the equation, those who figure out the best collaboration of ppl + tech will win.

VP - Sales and Marketing

Uncharted dinner, >20 AI Execs, 2+ hour discussion 

5 biggest takeaways:

1 - We’re still early
And nobody agrees on where this goes. Even in a room full of builders, there was zero consensus on AI’s “end state.” 

That’s usually the tell that we’re in the very early innings. Michael Louis

2 - History is a humbling benchmark
In the late 1800s, you could be born in a horse carriage and die having flown on a plane. 

We’re obsessing over LLM prompts, but the real change will be at the systems level over decades, not quarters. Matthew Fitzpatrick

3 - Work will get more complex, not disappear
For the last 100 years, ~50% of the jobs people did in high school didn’t exist or looked totally different 10–20 years later. 

AI won’t eliminate work; it will reshuffle it into new roles that sit on top of more complexity. Michael Loeb

4 - WOW moments
The wins in AI won’t come from mildly better “smart” products. 

They’ll come from simple products that create a real WOW moment and are easy to verify: “Did this actually help me do my job better, faster, cheaper?” Deborah Buresh Jackson

The next generation of Advil vs multivitamin, only a lot more extreme w/ the use cases!

5 - Distribution beats product in the long run
Models are making product moats evaporate, quickly... Just look at Google's latest model... 

So, from TikTok live streams to LinkedIn content, the people who understand attention and distribution will out-execute those with “better” tech but no audience.

What stood out most though?

Simplicity Wins

Make one workflow 10x easier and undeniably better for real people

OpenAI + ChatGPT (AI had been around for years, ChatGPT was the most simple and digestible use case

But the same example is going to win in the enterprise, not just in consumer facing businesses... So build with that in mind! 

THANK YOU Michael Loeb Noah Sanborn Friedman Skyler Healy and Shutterstock for pulling the room together.

And fantastic to meet ya Mark Yackanich Matt Gevaza Tim Conrod Richard Ortega Fatima Yusuf Mandy Rosenthal Michael Antonovych Gustavius Smith Ina Herlihy Jessica April Glenn Ko Adir Ben-Yehuda Cathy Ross

NYC is a special place to be building HIREXE right now...

Onward!

MSP Owner? Business expanding?

Wanna find undiscovered talent?! 

Join us on Wednesday 12!!!

I'm teaming up with Steve Taylor (Alternative Payments) and of course, HIREXE, to talk through how how MSPs are shifting from guessing to a structured, repeatable hiring process that produces better-fit candidates with faster results.

What you’ll learn live:

Cut time-to-hire — how structured filters and global sourcing reduce hiring from weeks to days.

Reduce hiring mistakes — interview and vetting techniques that reveal long-term fit.

Hire for more than tech skills — spot communication and follow-through traits that drive success.

Build a repeatable hiring process — create a system that consistently finds the right people across roles.

Onboard for retention — early-support tactics that strengthen results and reduce churn.

Link to sign up in comments

Shake Shack and cheeseburgers 

A Masterclass on scaling in a 'crowded market' 

“There are already so many players. How will you stand out?”

The most common (and intellectually lazy) question I get about HIREXE

...Let's reframe

Come with me on a cheeseburger journey!!

Americans eat ~50 billion burgers per year
That’s about 3 burgers per person, per week
Roughly $170B+ in annual revenue
86,000+ burger restaurants businesses in the U.S. alone

So yeah, “the burger space” is crowded

Now look at Shake Shack:
- Started as a hot dog cart in Madison Square Park in 2001.
- Became a single permanent kiosk in 2004. 
- By 2010, it was doing $19.5M in revenue from just 7 Shacks.
- By 2014, pre-IPO, it was at $118.5M with 63 Shacks.

January 2015, it IPO’d:
- 5M shares at $21
- Raised about $105M
- Valued around $750M on day one

Now, imagine if Gramercy Tavern Union Square Hospitality Group Leonard Green & Partners (LGP) Select Equity Group, L.P. would have told Danny Meyer, Randy Garutti (director of ops)and Mark Rosati (culinary director), the hot dog and cheeseburger space was too crowded?

They would have been wrong - and it would have been a crime against humanity!

Fast-forward to 2025:

Shake Shack does around $1.3B in annual revenue

Benchmark that against a roughly $173.6B U.S. burger market → you’re talking well under 1% share

A sub-1% slice of one very crowded category turned into:
- A billion-dollar brand
- A public company
- A product people will happily wait in line for

And they did it selling cheeseburgers into a market with McDonald's, Burger King, The Wendy's Company, Five Guys Enterprises In-N-Out Burger, and tens of thousands of independents already there.

The point?

You don’t need to “own the category.”

Some categories are so big, its not a winner take all market

You need:
1 - A huge base market (like burgers… or hiring… or CRMs… or dev tools)
2 - A product that’s obviously better on 1-2 things customers actually care about
3 - The discipline to keep taking tiny slices of a gigantic pie for a long time

In SaaS, that might mean:
Getting to $10M, $50M, $100M+ ARR with single-digit % penetration
While 10, 20, 50 other players are “in your space”

So the next time someone asks me:

"Your space is crowded. How will you stand out?”

Get ready for a 5 minute rant about cheeseburgers!

taplio

The Battle

Brian Schmitt

Chris Keith

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreBrian Schmitt's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreChris Keith's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Brian Schmitt

Chris Keith

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Brian Schmitt's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreChris Keith's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreBrian Schmitt's LinkedIn Performance