Driving E-Commerce Growth Through Strategic Digital Transformation | Taylor Jones – Wishbone Advisory

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Hey everybody. Welcome to today’s episode of Pathmonk Presents. Today we are joined by Taylor Jones. He’s the founder and CEO of Wishbone Advisory. Taylor, welcome to the show.

Taylor Jones: Thanks for having me.

Rick: Great to have you. And I’m excited to get into it and maybe talk about what you guys do. What’s the heart of what your company does, Taylor, and how would you describe it to someone new?

Taylor Jones: So my background, I’ve been in digital marketing my entire career out of school. I’m really passionate about it. It’s not something I studied. I learned a lot on the job, so helping the next gen.

But with Wishbone, digital marketing and e-comm to me represents for so many companies significant untapped potential, much like an unbroken wishbone. And that was the story of the name.

And we’ve dedicated ourselves to being a really nice boutique e-commerce marketing agency, focused on delivering value always, being transparent on what you can expect from us and accountable, delivering against what we say we’re gonna do.

Rick: I like that little origin story right there. Pretty cool.

Taylor Jones: Yeah.

Rick: Taylor, are there certain types of businesses or industries where you feel your services really shine? Or maybe there’s a key problem you help them solve at the moment—patterns you see?

Taylor Jones: From my experience, I’ve happened to be in-house in the home furnishings world, so I have a lot of connections there just by osmosis—from being at many trade events. And I really like the industry. Great people, great product. I come from the bedding and mattress world, so I sleep well at night.

But I would say the problem for that segment that I really help from an e-comm perspective is multi-channel orchestration and really digital transformation. Many manufacturers are great at making the product, but not great at how to sell it and finding the secret sauce in all of the different retail marketplaces.

There’s a lot of SEO underpinnings of each retailer’s website that needs to be optimized. And it’s very challenging if you’ve never done that before. Many manufacturers have a strong brick-and-mortar or wholesale distribution, but lack some of the tools to be digitally sophisticated.

And then on the other side, for B2B marketing, similar problem, but maybe not digital is so important, but it’s not just an e-commerce conversion, it’s a B2B sale. Showing up. It may be a specialized niche.

I work with clients in the performance chemicals industry or other very specialized niche components that go in finished goods. They need to be visible to product development managers when they’re searching—AI tools, etc. Similar problems: SEO, typical trade marketing on social, B2B email—it’s all about being visible to your target market.

Rick: Totally. I’m curious—I’m one of those people: I’m a manufacturer, making great products. How do I find out about you? Is there any channel that’s working really well for you right now for bringing in business?

Taylor Jones: Trade events—being visible, going and talking to people in person—is back. I just got back from the Las Vegas furniture market and had a number of great conversations.

Digitally, I get a lot of interaction to my LinkedIn content. I’m not necessarily trying to be salesy, I’m just posting useful stuff, tips and tricks, and it gets attention from folks in my network. So I would say LinkedIn and in-person have been really strong as of late.

Rick: Makes sense. LinkedIn has been booming, and I get the “not trying to be salesy” angle—because we get pitch slapped every day on LinkedIn.

Taylor Jones: Yeah. All the different automated messaging tools, absolutely.

Rick: You can totally tell when it is.

Taylor Jones: A hundred percent.

Rick: How much of a role does your website play in all of this? Is there anything about it that’s working really well for getting people into the pipeline? Or something you’ve got your eye on improving?

Taylor Jones: I think it’s a very integral part because say someone finds out about me through a brief conversation or—honestly—I have a lot of referrals. People might tell someone, “Hey, in a sentence, you should check out this guy.”

So from there, the website is a big anchor point in that journey to explain what we do very quickly. And for me, as an owner, it has to be the comprehensive home for all the things that we do. We’ve layered on a number of things for different folks over time.

So our website seeks to be that repository of information such that as people are credential verifying, they can see, “Oh, they do all of these things,” because they may only know about a subset based on their exposure to us.

In terms of weakness, it certainly can always be improved. A lot of times we’re service providers, and it’s like the cobbler’s shoes parable—cobbler makes shoes for others, but his own children have the worst. I don’t think my website is the worst, but I wish I could spend more time on it.

Rick: That saying is always relevant. And referrals never went away. Trade shows are back, but referrals were always there—the oldest channel.

Taylor Jones: Your personal brand matters. And I would give the advice: no matter where you are in your career, always do good work, be a good person, don’t burn bridges—you never know where things will lead you. That’s certainly been true in my career.

Rick: Great point. Let’s switch gears. Give us a glimpse into your day. What does a typical day look like for you? What are the main things you focus on day-to-day? A day in the life of Taylor Jones.

Taylor Jones: A couple hours a day are dedicated to prospective client calls that are coming in. Then the rest is strategic management and oversight—working with my team internally to make sure we’re delivering against all the KPIs and milestones for our projects.

And then spending time personally on strategic channel build out, and deep consideration for proposal building or for existing clients—digging in with them on where can we win and add value.

Ultimately, about growth—that excites me every day. I love the concept of the 1% every day. For humans, we can strive for that. For companies, it’s about how can we create X factor growth. Compounding 1% daily can get you there, but when you get down to strategy and resources, you can move fast and put a really cogent strategy together.

Rick: With all that, there’s a flood of content out there. How do you stay focused and keep learning—how do you get that 1% daily? Any places, people, routines?

Taylor Jones: I have my favorite sites that I scour—news independently—and then my network of friends I trust and analysts I really love on LinkedIn.

I often spend a little bit of time before bed on the phone—I know, coming from the sleep industry, shocking perhaps—but I do it reading the news of the day, trends, etc.

I also try to stay current on professional platforms. Every year, I love to stay current on the Google certifications—doing those, staying current, seeing what features are out there in retail media, Meta properties, etc. It’s very important.

And then making time to go to conferences and sit on interesting webinars.

Rick: Coming from the sleep industry, that’s a big no-no. Lately I’ve been wearing blue light blocking glasses—that’s a compromise.

Taylor Jones: Yeah, that’s a new trend for sure with different frequencies and blue light. Absolutely.

Rick: We’re heading toward the back half. Before we wrap, rapid fire segment—few questions. Ready?

Taylor Jones: Yeah, let’s do it.

Rick: When it comes to content, do you prefer watching, reading, or listening?

Taylor Jones: Probably watching.

Rick: What’s the latest thing you watched? A course, YouTube, short—anything. Anything that stuck with you?

Taylor Jones: We’re big Netflix folks, and the Somebody Feed Phil series—Phil Rosenthal, created Everybody Loves Raymond—he’s just a delightful human.

We love the food he eats, but it’s more of a travel show. My wife and I love to travel. In fact, she’s in Bali right now—she’s a therapist and is on a retreat for continuing education.

But we love his zest for life. Even though we all have jobs and need our jobs to enjoy travel, seeing different cultures, experiencing life in someone else’s shoes is so important to a greater worldview, in my opinion.

Rick: Great point. I haven’t watched it, but I used to watch Anthony Bourdain.

Taylor Jones: Yeah. I know you’re in Italy—he visits Italy some. It’d be interesting to see if you agree with his take on where he went.

Rick: All right, I’ll check it out.

If you had a magic wand and could fix one frustrating thing in your marketing life with tech, what would it be?

Taylor Jones: I’m a very good strategist. As a creative person—going back to preschool—I’ve never been great with art projects. The teacher called it enrichment. I’d come out with her at the end of the day and she’d shake her head at my mom.

So occasionally I’ll use AI tools to help generate a visual. It’s so frustrating when you give it all the specs and it’s 95% there, and you ask it to fix something, and it cannot do the fine tuning yet. It’s close, but it irks me.

But I can hand off what I did to a designer on my team and say, “Hey, I got it to here. This is what I want,” and then they’ll make something even better.

Rick: So you revert back to humans. Good.

Taylor Jones: Yeah, exactly. It’s not just all AI slop for sure.

Rick: If you could go back and give your past self a quick pep talk at the start of your career, what advice would you give?

Taylor Jones: Staying hungry and gotta go fast—like Sonic the Hedgehog, man. When I started, I didn’t exactly know what I wanted to do when I grow up, and I still feel that way.

I’ve had a lot of rich experiences and I really like helping brands grow in whatever form that takes. I’ve developed specialties over time, but I think: stay flexible, and be open. Be open—in two words.

Rick: That’s a good way to close.

Taylor, thank you for being on the show. Last word: if someone forgets everything, what should they remember about Wishbone Advisory?

Taylor Jones: We’re here to help clients deliver X factor growth in their digital marketing and e-commerce. We want to be useful, transparent always, and accountable for what we deliver.

If we feel we can’t help you, we’ll tell you before we do anything, given your resource constraints, etc. We love being that sanity check for people as well. And if you’re interested, feel free to reach out.

Rick: How can people do that?

Taylor Jones: They can contact me by email: taylor@wishboneadvisory.com. Hit me on LinkedIn or check out our website and fill out a contact form.

Rick: Amazing. We’ll include everything in the show notes, but it’s good to know.

Taylor, thanks again for sharing your insights. It was really good to get to know more about you and Wishbone Advisory. Maybe we do this again soon, sometime before year end. In the meantime, I wish you a wonderful day.

Taylor Jones: Absolutely. If you ever get down to Austin, Texas, look me up. We’ll get some barbecue.

Rick: Alright, that sounds good. Thanks Taylor. Bye everyone.

Taylor Jones: Yeah, bye-bye.