Anything, Anywhere: Matthew Bertulli
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Have you ever tried to make a living by selling things online? Matthew Bertulli, author of Anything, Anywhere, will give you his personal playbook for making a six to seven figure income by selling products and advertising them on Facebook.
Even if you find the eCommerce world intimidating or overwhelming, this episode will give you the confidence and knowledge you need to succeed.
Key points from this episode:
What scares the hell out of digital born retailers.
How to decide on the right platform for your brand and when.
Why you should stop looking at your analytics every day.
Get Matthew’s new book Anything, Anywhere on Amazon. Find out more at MattBertulli.com.
Matthew Bertulli’s Journey Back to Retail Matthew Bertulli: I started my company, my main company, ten years ago. Before that, I’ll call myself a person in a little bit of denial. I say that because I quite literally grew up in a retail family. I was raised in the back room of our family’s retail stores. That was my babysitter as a kid. When I was getting into those years where you’re going to go university and try to figure out what you’re going to do with your life, I was really into software and computers.
I was a self-taught programmer, and I’m thinking, “I’m never going to go into this retail thing, because that’s what my family does. That’s super boring and nobody wants to do that. I’m going to be a software engineer.” This was when I was 19, 20.
When I look back in my career up until the point where I started Demac Media, all I ever did was just get software development jobs in some form of freaking retail. It never really clicked.
I never got that far from what I was raised in. Then, when I started working at a company called Net Suite, before we went public, it really hit me, “Jeez, I’ve never really left this industry. I never really left the space, it’s actually something I really enjoy. I love everything trade and commerce.”
I’ve been building DMAC for almost 10 years now, and some other companies that have spun out of it, that’s laid the foundation for everything. I no longer live in denial. Now I’m all in on anything that has to do with trade, with commerce, with retail, with manufacturing.
The world of physical stuff is sort of my happy place. Once I accepted that, the whole book thing just became super easy to get my head around.
Charlie Hoehn: How did retail become your passion and “happy place?”
Matthew Bertulli: That’s actually a really good question. I like retail, and I don’t just like it because it’s the bedrock of the economy and most other businesses bolt on to the world of physical stuff.
That’s not it for me. What I like about it is, because of its sheer size, it is a great vertical or a great industry to have a large amount of impact in.
Because retail is so damn big. What I mean by that is, what most people don’t know about me is I’m also a bit of a tree hugger. One of my passions in life is mountain biking and hiking. Anything outside. I grew up in northern Ontario where I spent my entire life. My entire childhood was spent on the water, near the water, on a trail, in the bush.
The planet is important to me, and I see commerce now—especially eCommerce, which is the version I focus on—as this great way to make retail better, to help it evolve, to improve the supply chain, to reduce packaging, to make better stuff, to make better everything.
Because commerce is so big, I like that the individual can have a pretty good impact on this planet and leave it a better place than I found it. It’s an industry that needs change, and I can actually help it.
Who Needs Anything, Anywhere? Charlie Hoehn: How would you identify a company that could benefit from your work and what would the before and after look like?
Matthew Bertulli: You know, I think what’s happening right now—what I tend to do and what I’m involved in—is a lot of digital-born, direct-to-consumer brands. That’s what I’m really sinking my teeth into right now.
What we’re all hearing about in the news is your brick and mortar retailers, and some of your manufacturers that were born decades ago, closing up shop. Their business models are old. They’re dying.
Frankly, the vast majority of those mid-size and larger retailers, they’re not willing to throw away the old way of doing things. They’re just going out of business.
I focus my time and my study—because that’s how I look at it, I’m a student of retail—in these companies that have started in the last decade. I call them digital-born because they were born in this era of commerce that seems to be okay at figuring out, “This is my customer. I know it’s a narrow definition of a customer and I’m probably not going to build a billion-dollar brand, but maybe I’ll build a 20- or 30-million-dollar brand.”
While these entrepreneurs and these retailers—because they’re still retailers—are good at that, where they fall down is adapting and using some of the old ways of doing things. A digital-born brand is terrified of wholesaling.
They see that as, “Well that’s what the other guys did and that’s why they’re failing,” and that’s not true. They don’t want to sell to other people who then sell their product to customers. That scares the hell out of a digital-born commerce or retailer.
Charlie Hoehn: Why do you think companies don’t want to embrace the concept of wholesaling?
Matthew Bertulli: I think it’s just because supply chain is scary. Think of it this way: it’s the reverse problem. A manufacturer from the ‘90s has no problem at all wrapping their head around shipping pallets of product out to a Walmart or a Target. They’re scared of shipping a single thing to a customer. Because they think, “How the hell am I going to service that?”
It’s the reverse problem. You got all these kids, these young, hungry entrepreneurs building great brands, and they’re super comfortable selling to their customer, the person that they are serving.
But when a retailer comes along that wants to buy 5,000 of their thing, they think, “Well how the hell do I do that? Now I’ve got to service this business, and I don’t want to do that. I’m really about servicing my customer.”
It’s a part of the old guard. It’s a part of the old commerce operating system that still applies today that is super valuable to a modern day, digital-born brand. That’s just one example of something I talk about with an entrepreneur who has built a company and is trying to go from one to 50.
That’s usually something that I point out. “Yeah, you’re trying to do it all on your own, and there’s this huge network of merchants out there that want to help you and who need your help. Why not actually use them?”
You’re going to get there a hell of a lot faster.
What Readers Get from Anything, Anywhere Charlie Hoehn: What is the #1 idea from your book that readers can take action on this week?
Matthew Bertulli: The idea for Anything, Anywhere is a bit abstract. It’s foundational. It’s that we’re quickly coming to this place where all of us can buy anything we want, anywhere we are.
You’ve got to think of it further than the mobile phone, always in your pocket and you can just click and buy something. It’s bigger than that now. It’s going to be that if you’re in a restaurant and you like the chair you’re sitting on or the light fixture you’re looking at, you will be able to buy that right there. At that moment.A lot needs to change in order for that to happen, but it’s happening really quickly. That’s the idea. Now, when I unpack that into something that people can take action on, I start to—that’s where we need to get into the nitty gritty of things.
Most people reading this book are probably going to be mom and pop retailers or brands—owner-operated entrepreneurs trying to grow their business from a million to 20. This isn’t for the big, huge companies.
The big takeaway from the book is to start thinking less about all of the noise. By noise, I mean there’s a million things that we can all Google and find to do to grow our business. That’s not the problem now.
Figuring out what to do is not the problem now. That knowledge is free. The real challenge is—when do you do these things? On the start of a business and growing a business.
Especially if you’re a Shopify store owner, it’s really easy to “get an app for that.” If you want to add an email platform or a loyalty thing or you want to use Amazon for fulfillment, there’s all these little pieces now that are really accessible to the average entrepreneur, the average retailer.
It’s less about the what and more about the when. The order in which you actually do those things is really important.
If you’re an entrepreneur in your brand and you’re not very savvy with inventory management and you’re more of a brand person, you should not be going and selling your product on Amazon marketplace. That is a nightmare of an ecosystem to navigate. It is more about operations and logistics than it is about the brand.
People have to play to their strengths.
Not only their strengths but they have to look at their business. If they’re a million-dollar business now and they’ve done it all on their own, moving to Amazon may not be the next logical step. That might be three or four jumps away.
When I talk about sequence, I like to make entrepreneurs stop and think. Should they be doing that one thing now, or should it be something they do later?
How Matthew Bertulli Builds Brands Charlie Hoehn: If someone has a product, and their strength is in marketing and branding, what should they do first, and where does Amazon fit in?
Matthew Bertulli: I’m doing this right now with my own brand called Pelacase.com. When I talk about a competitive market—we are an iPhone case brand. Here’s where this is purely a branding and positioning play.
We are also a biodegradable compostable iPhone case. The product is very much built for people who don’t want to buy plastic garbage that they throw out. They’d like something that winds up zero waste. When you’re done with your phone and you’re going to get a new one, you’re going to be done with your case: you can actually just throw it in a backyard compost and this thing disappears.
That’s the stick. Great, we have our customer. Now, we’ve taken this in 12 months from zero to a seven-figure brand, and we did that almost entirely on one channel— Facebook. By proxy, Instagram, because Facebook owns Instagram.
A lot of influencers on Instagram reach out on Facebook media company. I don’t know if people know this, but there are media businesses that are entirely on Facebook. UpWorthy, your viral threads…There are tons of them.
We said, “Okay, we’re a small company, we have a limited amount of resources, we have constraints, we’re pretty good on the acquisition side, and we’re pretty good brand storytellers and copywriters, and we can get photography done and design.”
Let’s play to our strengths.
We also wanted to build some momentum so that when we were ready to enter an Amazon marketplace or Pinterest or wholesale, having one strong digital channel would give us leverage to start that wholesale conversation. We actually are doing that now.
Our Facebook presence, Instagram presence, and fan base are the reason we’re even in the door with big retailers. In the last 12 months, we’ve gone from zero to a seven-figure brand, and we did that purely with one channel. Everything that we read is telling us that you’ve got to be on Amazon, you’ve got to be on Pinterest or your Google paid ads. You should be retargeting, where’s your email marketing?
All this other crap. If you Google anything or go on any blog that talks about how to build a business, they tell you that you’ve got to do all this stuff, and I’ve done none of it. None of that other stuff.
I will. We totally will. It’s on our road map. We’re starting to test some of it, but we didn’t run out and buy 20 apps and to do all this other crap because it was not going to be effective unless we had this first channel as our jump off point.
Charlie Hoehn: How did you buy the business?
Matthew Bertulli: I met this guy at Mastermind Talks, and he had a great product idea but he didn’t know how to build a company. So I am like, “Why don’t I partner up with you, and I’ll put the capital up to hire the person?”
So the bigger story is that we just found a young woman who tried to build her own business, and it didn’t work out for a whole bunch of reasons. But she wanted to do it again, she just didn’t have the capital or the idea at the time.
So we’re like, “We’ll hire you. Come up with a plan saying that that you’ve got incentive to do this, but you’re going to grow this brand for us.” So that’s the only investment that we’ve made.
Is it profitable? Hell yeah.
Every profit dollar we get, we’re just pumping it right back into growing the business. Right now, it’s a bit of a rocket ship. But it’s only doing that because we were super focused on this one channel. That’s the growth strategy.
The right thing at the wrong time [can be worse]. That’s the frustrating thing—I often encounter retailers and commerce brands or entrepreneurs where I’m like, “Yeah, that is actually the right thing. You should be doing that eight months from now,” you know?
Charlie Hoehn: What comes after you’ve hit a certain threshold on building the brand on its own, once you have that asset in place?
Matthew Bertulli: I think the threshold is a little different for everybody. Now for us, let’s just keep using Pela as the case study. I think the key message is and the key strategy is that we’ve got one product, one channel, one customer, one profile, and one funnel that we are putting them through.
That’s that whole, “I spend a dollar, I need to make three, and if I can do that consistently and repeatedly, that’s a good business.” It scales up if the margin is there.
It’s got to be your own product. It can’t be somebody else’s, or there is no margin. I do it until I see a decent amount of traction, in that it’s starting to be less work for the revenue that we’re getting. Once we are comfortable and we’re feeling pretty good, then I want to move on to something else.
Because in a lot of companies, especially the ones that I know of, where everybody falls down is that they get way too comfortable in that one channel and they never create more leverage elsewhere.
They’ve got one leg to stand on. What you’re hearing about and what you and your friends are experiencing around frustration is that a lot of people are doing this on Amazon, which is a channel they don’t even own and a customer they don’t even own.
It’s Amazon’s customer. When somebody else comes along and kicks them, they fall over and the business is done.
I am interested in building real businesses and real brands. That’s way more fun, and you sleep better at night. I move on when we are comfortable. Right now, we’re getting pretty comfortable with this one channel that we have. So we’re starting to have two discussions.
Already we’re starting down the Amazon path. Again, I’m cheating a little bit. I have Demac Media here on the side with 100 employees and a whole bunch of engineers. The Amazon thing doesn’t scare me as much because I can manage the technical side of that really easily, which is totally cheating. I get it.
On the other side, we’re pursuing wholesale now and talking to telecom companies. Anybody with retail principle is like, “Why are you talking to telecom companies? Go after Apple, go after Radio Shack or Circuit City or pick somebody who sells phone cases.” I don’t know, whoever is still around.
“Go after the retailers because the retailers have customers.” However, the retailers are also going to compete with me online, and I don’t want that yet.
If I can get a Bell or a Sprint or a Verizon or one of these guys to buy and sell to their customers through their distribution chain, now I have no channel conflict. So again, more leverage.
I am getting into wholesale without creating the channel conflict headache that most brands encounter. Even the wholesale move took us some time to figure out. Now that we’ve figured it out we’re like, “Well, duh.” But that took months of saying, “Who the hell can we sell this to in large quantities?”
Wholesale quantities are obviously at less margin because they need to make theirs, but who can put this in front of a bigger customer base without causing us an immense amount of headache in channel conflict? When I want to run a promotion, I don’t want them yelling at me because I am running a promotion and they aren’t.
Charlie Hoehn: So let’s say you did get picked up by Sprint. Great, what now?
Matthew Bertulli: So after wholesale, I’ll tell you we still don’t have very robust email marketing channel. We still do nothing on Google for SEO or PPC. We got some natural stuff that happened for SEO, but there’s been no focus there.
Nothing on Pinterest and no popups, no presence ourselves. We sell globally direct on our own site, but we’re still only just basically a North American company, that’s the majority of our business.
Charlie: Are the majority of your sales individual orders or do you get bulk orders?
Matthew: We just did a bulk order for a large company who bought a thousand cases for an event they’re sponsoring and they wanted to give out gifts to everybody attending. We get that stuff, and that definitely helps.
That stuff just comes in organically, and we are not chasing promotional channels, we don’t attack any of those. We are just getting them organically.
Our next logical step is going to be pushing Amazon marketplace pretty hard. That’s going to be a good win for us now that we have a brand and we have some presence. We have a customer because we can manage the inventory really well because we have the technology capabilities. Then, it’s wholesale.
What it Takes to Run an Anything, Anywhere Business Charlie Hoehn: What are the tools that you’re using on backend to run your business?
Matthew Bertulli: We’re a Shopify e-com platform. Shopify is the core, and we use a whole host of stuff that decorates and plugs into Shopify.
For the Amazon Shopify piece, we use Ship Station. That manages most of the inventory, or it manages the order management. So when orders come in from Shopify, we send them over to Amazon FBA and Amazon fulfills them.
When orders come in through Amazon, we can also pull those down and bring them into Shopify. Shopify has got a pretty good Amazon integration, and then we have some of our tech as well that we built just to pull and push data around. So that’s a little bit of an unfair advantage, but I’m going to use it because I have it.
Then on top of that, we have a bunch of other stuff that is pretty common. We have an email platform that we don’t really use. We use Zen Desk for customer support because it consolidates everything.
What else do we use? I don’t like buying a lot of stuff.
Digital stuff is no different than physical stuff. It just weighs you down. Charlie: How much does it cost to run your business per month on just those tools?
Matthew: Our software costs in total are, I can tell you the exact number actually—so right now, about 2,000 bucks a month.
Charlie: What’s an estimated cost for people just getting started?
Matthew: 200 bucks a month. We were basically a Shopify store and nothing else. A couple of Shopify apps to help us to collect emails and some customization of the site. It started out just like any other startup: super lame.
Charlie: How much should somebody spend on Facebook ads?
Matthew: We started spending about 30 bucks a day, 40 bucks a day just to test, and then when we find the campaigns that work we start to scale them up bit by bit. We don’t start throwing,—we don’t go from 20 bucks to hundreds of dollars a day. It’s like 20 to 30, 30 to 50, 50 to 70, 70 to a hundred, and we clip it up. Every two days, we’re improving it.
We typically test campaigns for about a week to see if they work. If we’re getting the return on ad spend, we start to scale them up until they don’t work, and then we bring them back down. That channel just requires a lot of testing. That’s it.
Highlights from Anything, Anywhere Charlie Hoehn: What other information do you give your readers that would make it worth diving into?
Matthew Bertulli: I think the book itself is less about these really specific things—I definitely drop some names and some tools and some tactics—but it’s more about the framework and operating system.
“What’s my playbook? How do I think? How do we think as a team, and is it the only way?” Good god, no. It’s just our way.
I am not saying it’s even the best way. It’s just our way. If it’s valuable and somebody reads it and says, “Yeah, okay I like that”…I mean everything that I’ve ever read and every tool that we use in our companies or operating system is an adapted version of whatever the hell we read.
Our version works for us. It’s not verbatim somebody else’s. The book was always designed around the approach that we take and the questions that we ask to figure out, “Should I do this first or should it be second or third or fourth?” And the answers vary for everybody.
They really do. The book is just meant to give you a bit of a guide to say, “Hey, you should be asking these questions.” That’s the importance.
Charlie Hoehn: What is your favorite success story from someone who has applied the principles in the book?
Matthew Bertulli: I’ve got two that jump out because they have happened recently.
I have a longstanding client—he is going to remain nameless because he’d be pissed if I dropped his name and company. It’s actually a pretty big company that likes to stay under the radar.
He read the book on a flight over to Paris with his family. I’ve been working with him for over seven or eight years, and he sent me a one-line email.
“Holy shit, I really should start listening to you more.” He and I we meet regularly for lunch, and he does a lot of what I talked about. He is not an idiot. He’s actually a really good operator, but getting that it just made me laugh like, “Yeah, this is awesome.”
Then the second one was a guy I actually coached who owns a paid search agency. He sent me a really nice note saying that he got a couple of things out of it. He is not even in the industry, and he still read it.
I thought that was pretty cool.
Somebody who I’ve been working with for a long time and I know quite well, and he knows me quite well, enjoyed it. And then somebody who’s not even directly in retail also got something out of it. That was very satisfying for me.
Charlie Hoehn: What is one thing someone could do this week to potentially change their life and make them see the power of your book?
Matthew Bertulli: Stop looking at your analytics every day.
Build a list of seven numbers, seven metrics, that you look at weekly that will help you make forward-looking planning decisions. Not reactive.
We all jump from fire to fire, lily pad to lily pad, too much because most of us look at our business way too closely, every single day. It probably hurts us more than we think. That’s the gist. It’s hard to do.
How can people connect with you? Matthew: I make it really easy for people. There are not a whole bunch of places. We set up just a basic landing page with some links to everything else.
Go to mattbertulli.com.
It links out to the rest of my inter-webs stuff. Demac, Pela Case, Instagram, Medium.com, writing, everything. Everywhere that I am goes on that one site. It will hook you up with everything else.
Get Matthew’s new book Anything, Anywhere on Amazon. Find out more at MattBertulli.com. Listen to more about launching startups:
Explosive Growth: Cliff Lerner
Ari Meisel: Idea to Execution
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