Gard Rogne

i scale businesses

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

Are you struggling to scale your E-com brand?

Then send me a dm.

Do not waste time.

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

Open your brand's website on your phone right now.

Not on your laptop.

Not logged into Shopify.
On your phone.
In incognito.
Like a complete stranger seeing it for the first time.

I do this with every brand before we start working together.
And almost every single time I find the same problems within the first 30 seconds.

Here is what I look for.

Can I tell what you sell in the first 3 seconds?

Not after scrolling.

Not after reading a paragraph.

In the first 3 seconds from the hero image alone.

If the answer is no you are losing a percentage of every single visitor before they have even started.

Can I find the price without clicking anywhere?
If I have to hunt for the price I am already annoyed.
Annoyance kills purchases.
The price should be visible immediately on the product page.
No mystery.
No prestige pricing games.
Just clarity.

Is there any social proof above the fold?

Not buried at the bottom.

Not in a separate reviews tab.

Right there where the customer is deciding.
A review count.
A star rating.
A real testimonial from a real person.

One strong proof element near the top of the page changes conversion rate immediately.

Is the add to cart button impossible to miss?

On mobile specifically.

If I have to scroll to find it you have already created unnecessary friction at the most important moment in the entire purchase journey.

Does the page load in under 3 seconds?

A 1 second delay in page load time reduces conversions by 7%.

Most brands have never checked their mobile load speed.

Most of them would be horrified if they did.

Most brands spend everything getting people to the site and almost nothing making sure the site actually converts them when they arrive.

Do the phone test right now.

Fix what you find.

If you want more value like this follow me.

-Gard Rogne
CEO, Sumendit

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

Your strategy determines your ceiling.

Your execution determines how fast you reach it.

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

Think longer.

Execute faster.

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

Think like a CEO.

Execute like an operator.

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

POV: you just got to Miami

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

Working harder won’t fix a bad strategy.

The best founders spend time thinking before they spend time doing.

Think first:
• Where should we invest?
• What is actually holding us back?
• Which opportunities have the biggest upside?

Then execute with speed.

Strategy first.
Execution second.

The companies that scale the fastest know exactly where they’re going before they start running.

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

When I started my first business, I had zero experience.

Today, we’ve helped generate a little over $100 million USD in e-commerce revenue for our clients.

People often ask what changed.

The truth is, I didn’t try to become the best at everything.

I focused on three things.

1. Hire people who are better than you.

This is one of the biggest mindset shifts every founder has to make.

Your job isn’t to know everything. Your job is to build a team of people who are world-class at what they do. The better your team becomes, the less your business depends on you.

2. Obsess over marketing and sales.

Without attention, nothing else matters.

The companies that consistently win are the ones that generate the most demand. Be innovative. Test relentlessly. Build better campaigns. Improve your messaging. Create systems that consistently bring in qualified leads.

3. Improve your systems, products, and operations.

Every week, ask yourself:

How can we deliver a better product?
How can we improve our service?
How can we automate more?
How can we make the business run without constant intervention?

The best businesses are built on great systems, not constant firefighting.

That’s what I focused on, every single day, for the last four years.

It wasn’t just hard work. I also had the privilege of working with incredible people, and yes, there was some luck involved too.

But if you consistently focus on hiring exceptional people, building world-class marketing, and improving your systems every single day, you give yourself a much better chance of building something extraordinary.

As a CEO, your job isn’t to do everything.

Your job is to build the people, the marketing, and the systems that allow the business to grow without you.

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

HEIAAAA NORGEEEEEEE 🇳🇴🇳🇴🇳🇴🇳🇴🇳🇴🇳🇴🇳🇴

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

I have spent over 15 million NOK on google ads.

Here’s what i have learned.

-GR

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

I have spent over 15 million on Google Ads and generated more than 75 million in revenue for clients.

After managing campaigns across dozens of companies, I keep seeing the same expensive mistakes repeated over and over again.

Here are the biggest ones:

❌ Broken conversion tracking.

If Google is optimizing with bad data, you’re teaching its AI to find the wrong customers.

❌ Optimizing for cheap leads instead of profitable customers.

A $20 lead can lose you money.
A $200 lead can make you millions.

Focus on profit, not cost per lead.

❌ Weak landing pages.

Many companies spend months improving their ads while sending traffic to pages that convert at 2%.

Your landing page often matters more than your ad.

❌ No negative keywords.

You’re paying for clicks from people who were never going to buy.

This is one of the fastest ways to waste your advertising budget.

❌ Constantly changing campaigns.

Businesses panic after a few days, change everything, and reset Google’s learning process.

Patience backed by data beats emotional decision-making.

❌ Ignoring CRM and first-party data.

Google performs dramatically better when it knows which leads actually became paying customers.

If you’re only tracking form submissions, you’re leaving performance on the table.

The companies that win with Google Ads don’t necessarily have the biggest budgets.

They have:
• Better data.
• Better offers.
• Better landing pages.
• Better systems.
• Better decision-making.

Google Ads isn’t about buying clicks.

It’s about building a machine that consistently acquires profitable customers.

— Gard Rogne
CEO, Sumendit

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

"what if i fall?" bro what if you fly

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

A life without risk is not a life worth living.

If you never take chances, never fail, never feel uncomfortable, what story are you actually creating?

The best moments in life rarely come from playing it safe.

They come from starting the business when everyone doubts you.
Moving to a new city.
Making the call you’re afraid to make.
Asking the question.
Building something that might fail.

Without risk, there is no growth.
Without challenges, there is no character.
Without uncertainty, there is no adventure.

Especially when you’re young.

This is the time to experiment.
To fail.
To learn.
To build.
To take swings while the cost of failure is still relatively low.

Too many people spend their youth trying to avoid discomfort instead of using it to become someone extraordinary.

One day you’ll look back.

You won’t regret the risks you took.

You’ll regret the opportunities you were too afraid to chase.

Life isn’t meant to be watched from the sidelines.

Get in the arena.
Take the risk.
Live a life that’s actually worth remembering.

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

Just start bro pt.2

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

Just start bro

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

There is a problem quietly killing ecom brands right now that almost nobody
is talking about.

It is not rising CPMs. It is not iOS changes. It is not platform volatility.

It is creative fatigue. And it is happening faster than it ever has before.

Here is what it actually looks like in an ad account.

Month 1. A creative starts winning.
ROAS is strong. CPM is low. The algorithm loves it. You scale the budget. Everything looks great. You feel like you cracked it.

Month 2. Performance starts softening.
ROAS dips slightly. CPM starts creeping up. You tweak the audience. You adjust the budget. You tell yourself it is just volatility. You keep running the same creative.

Month 3. The ad is dead.
Your target audience has seen it an average of 9 to 11 times. Relevance score has collapsed. CPM is now 60% higher than when it started. ROAS is half what it was. And your team has nothing ready to replace it because they were too busy managing the winning ad to build the next one.

This cycle is happening to most brands every 6 to 10 weeks right now.

The brands that survive it are the ones with a systematic creative production machine that is always building the next winner before the current one dies.

The brands that do not have that system are stuck in a loop of finding one winner, riding it until it dies, scrambling to find the next one, and losing momentum every single time.

Creative is not a campaign. It is a machine. Build it like one.

If you want more value like this follow me.

— Gard Rogne
CEO, Sumendit

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

A bad agency does not just waste your ad spend.

Here is everything else it actually costs you that nobody talks about.

6 months of wrong data driving wrong decisions.

When tracking is broken and attribution is wrong every budget decision made on that data is compromised.

You overspend on channels that look good but are not actually working.

You underspend on channels that are working but not getting proper credit.

By the time you find out you have made 6 months of expensive decisions based on a lie.

A creative system that was never built.

Most agencies run the same 6 ads for 3 months and call it testing.

No systematic hook testing.

No volume.

No framework for producing winners consistently.

The creative learning that should have been built during that period is gone. You cannot get those months back.

That competitive intelligence has a real cost.

Email revenue that was never generated.

If email should have been driving 28% of your revenue but was actually driving 6% because the agency never built proper flows, that gap over 12 months is a very large number.

Calculate what 22% of your annual revenue looks like.

That is the real cost of a bad email setup.

Not the retainer.

That number.

Momentum and team trust lost.

When an agency relationship fails badly it damages the founder's confidence in external partners.

Some founders become so burned they pull everything in-house and slow their growth by 18 months trying to rebuild.

The psychological cost of a bad agency experience is real and it compounds in ways that are hard to quantify but very easy to feel.

Most founders count what they paid the agency.

Nobody counts what they lost while the agency was failing them.

Add both numbers together and the real cost is usually 3 to 5x the retainer.

This is why we tie our payment to your growth.

Because we cannot afford for this to happen to our clients. Literally.

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

The brands that will be impossible to compete with in 3 years are building something right now that most brands are completely ignoring.

It is not a better product.

It is not a bigger ad budget.

It is first party data and owned customer relationships.

Here is what I mean and why it matters more right now than almost anything else you could be building.

Meta can change overnight. Your email list cannot.

Every brand that relies entirely on paid acquisition is one algorithm update away from a serious problem.

The brands with 200k engaged email subscribers and 80k SMS subscribers can survive a platform change because they own the relationship directly.

That ownership is worth more than any ad account optimisation you will ever do.

Your creative data is a proprietary asset.

After 12 months of systematic testing you know things about your customer that no competitor can access.

Which hooks convert.

Which angles resonate.

Which offers work on cold traffic vs warm.

That knowledge compounds every week you keep building it.

Brands that test properly for 2 years develop an unfair advantage that is almost impossible to replicate quickly.

Customer relationships at scale are a moat.

A brand with 50,000 loyal customers who buy 3 times a year and refer friends has something that cannot be bought with ad spend.

That community, that trust, that word of mouth is built over time through product quality, great service, and consistent communication.

Brands that invest in this now are building something that gets stronger every year while competitors keep paying to rent attention from platforms they do not own.

The best time to start building your moat was 2 years ago. The second best time is right now.

If you want more value like this follow me.

— Gard Rogne
CEO, Sumendit

[Gard Rogne @GardRogne]

I had a call last week with a founder doing €10M a year.

One question.

Why is my profit margin shrinking every time my revenue goes up?

I hear this more than almost anything else right now.

And the answer is almost always the same four things happening simultaneously.

CAC has been rising for 6 months and nobody caught it.

Revenue kept climbing so the warning signs were invisible. But the cost to acquire each customer quietly went from €24 to €47.

Every order is now half as profitable as it was.

The business grew itself into a margin problem while the dashboard looked completely fine.

Discounting became the growth engine.

Running a sale every month to hit the revenue number feels like strategy.
It is not.

It is margin destruction disguised as growth.
And it trains customers to never pay full price again.

No retention system means every customer has to be re-acquired.

When customers only buy once the entire business runs on acquisition spend. CAC goes up.

Profit goes down.

The brands with real margin are the ones where 35 to 40% of revenue comes from returning customers.

That changes everything about what you can afford to spend to acquire new ones.

Fulfilment costs scaled faster than the margin could absorb.

More orders means more warehouse, more shipping, more returns processing, more customer service.

These costs jump at certain volume thresholds.

Most brands never modelled what happens to unit economics at 3x current volume.

By the time they find out they are already in trouble.

Revenue is the headline.

Profit is the truth.

The brands building something real are the ones obsessed with the second number not just the first.

If you want more value like this follow me.

— Gard Rogne
CEO, Sumendit