Amazon FBA Seller Round Table

PPC Mastery - How To Dominate Amazon PPC And Grow Your Amazon FBA Business - WIth Mina Elias - We go deep into the Amazon advertising (PPC) world and tell you what's working and what's not working in 2022!

Mindset Is Everything - Sellers, You Need To Get Your Mind Strait BEFORE Starting Your Amazon FBA Business - With Leslie Kooster. We talk a lot about mindset and how you need to level up your mind before you can level up your business!

1. Make sure your profile is complete and up-to-date. 2. Use keywords in your profile so you can be easily found by potential connections. 3. Connect with as many people as possible. Including local events  4. Join relevant groups and participate in discussions.  5. Share interesting and relevant content on your profile.  6. Keep your profile updated with your latest professional achievements.  7. Use LinkedIn’s advanced search features to find potential connections.  8. Connect with people you know in real life on LinkedIn.  9. Use LinkedIn’s InMail feature to reach out to potential connections.  10. Participate in LinkedIn’s Question and Answer feature to show off your expertise. The Ultimate Guide To Dominate On Linkedin - How To Use Linkedin To Up Your Growth And Marketing Game With Amazon FBA Products And Beyond! Introduction: Amazon FBA products are a great way to increase your online sales and marketing efforts. But what about the rest of your business? If you’re looking to take advantage of Amazon’s reach, you need to know about Linkedin. With Linkedin, you can connect with other entrepreneurs and businesses in a variety of industries. This way, you can collaborate on product ideas, share resources, and build relationships that will help your business grow.How to Use Linkedin to Build a Successful Business.LinkedIn is a social networking site that allows users to connect with other professionals and share information. When you use LinkedIn to build a business, you can increase your social media presence by sharing your products and services on the site. You can also use LinkedIn to Increase Your Marketing Ability by finding out about new businesses and their products, or by using it to network with potential customers.How to Use Linkedin to Increase Your Marketing AbilityBy using LinkedIn to increase your marketing ability, you can target specific markets and generate more leads and sales. You can also use LinkedIn to improve your skills so that you’re better able to sell your products or services.How to Use Linkedin to Generate More leads and salesOne of the most important things you can do when using LinkedIn for marketing is to generate more leads and sales. By subscribing to different LinkedIn groups, you can get a detailed understanding of the industry in which your product or service is concerned, which will help you find more qualified buyers interested in buying from you. Additionally, by sending out targeted email campaigns containing information about your product or service, you can increase your chances of selling through online channels such as email marketing or social networking.How to Use Linkedin to Achieve Your GoalsBy using LinkedIn to achieve your marketing goals, you can increase your sales and reach new customers. You can use the site to build a following, find clients in specific industries, or create powerful content that will help you sell more products or services. By using LinkedIn as a tool for business growth, you’ll be on your way to achieving success!How to Dominate On Linkedin.Linkedin is a social networking website that allows users to connect with one another. It’s a great place to find friends and make new ones, as well as build relationships with businesses. To dominate on Linkedin, you need to use the tools available to help you do so.tool such as the Add New Profile button, the Message Boards, and the Groups tab. You can also use tools like Linkedin Ads to reach more people and increase your visibility on Linkedin.Increase your engagement with LinkedinYou need to be engaging with your users in order to keep them coming back to Linkedin. Use features like the Grouping feature to organize your user data and make it easier for you to find and respond to comments and questions from users. And remember: never stop responding! Keep people engaged by regularly communicating with them through Linkedin.Increase your visibility on LinkedinYou need to be visible on Linkedin in order to get the attention of businesses. Use features like the Photo Uploader and the Posts tab to make your content more accessible and searchable. As well, use tools like the Bio and Social Profiles to write interesting, engaging pieces that will keep your users coming back for more.Use the strategies to increase your marketing reachBy using a variety of marketing strategies, you can reach a larger audience with Linkedin than ever before. Use features like the Ads tab and Grouping to target businesses with relevant ads and messages. And remember: never stop responding! Keep people engaged by regularly communicating with them through Linkedin.How to Use Amazon FBA Products and Other Amazon Services on Linkedin.One of the main ways to increase your sales on Amazon is by using Amazon FBA products. This is a service that allows you to sell products through Amazon. You can then use those products to sell on other websites, like Linkedin, and make money from the sale of that product.To start selling with Amazon FBA, you first need to create an account on Amazon. After creating an account, you can begin selling products through the Seller Central window on your account. You can also list your products in search results or within one of your categories on Amazon.If you want to focus on increasing your sales more directly, you can use tools like Seller Maven and Seller Chief to help manage your Selling process and grow your business even further. These tools will help you automate tasks and speeding up the selling process for you.Use Amazon FBA to grow your businessAnother way to grow your business with Amazon FBA is by focusing on specific areas of marketing that are important for online businesses: social media marketing, email marketing, and website design/development. By doing this, you’ll be able to bring more customers into contact with your product or service and increase conversions rates. Additionally, by using these marketing channels together with Linkedin, you can reach a wider audience than ever before.Use Amazon FBA to sell more productsThe final way to increase sales with Amazon FBA is by focusing on higher-value items that are not yet available on other websites or platforms. For example, if you have a unique product or service that only exists in one place and it’s not currently being sold elsewhere, then selling that product through Amazon FBA may be the best option for you! This will allow you extra income while also letting people know about what you have and how it differs from other options out there.ConclusionIf you're looking to build a successful business on Linkedin, there are many ways to do it. By using the tools available to us, we can help you reach your goals and dominate your field. Additionally, by using Amazon FBA products and other Amazon services, you can increase sales and grow your business. In order to manage your business successfully, use the Linkedin tools to keep track of your progress and make necessary adjustments.

Amazon FBA Businesses - Why You Should Look At This Alternative When You Look At Selling Your Amazon Private Label Or White Label Brand - How To Sell Your Amazon Brand And Capture All The Upside! This episode is sponsored by Society Brands. Visit their website at: https://bit.ly/3AaTtet

How to Set Yourself Apart In The Amazon Seller Business Wars - Using Social To Help Boost Your Brand On The Amazon FBA Marketplace - With Victor Aleck Dwyer. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe to this Amazing podcast! Remember to share this podcast with all your friends!

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_0: Welcome [00:00:02] spk_1: to the seller [00:00:03] spk_2: roundtable e commerce coaching and business strategies with Andy Arnott and Amy wees, [00:00:09] spk_0: Hey everyone, what's up, this is Amy Wiese and my buddy Andy or not is having internet troubles right now. So we hope he's gonna join us later on in the show, but we are on episode number 139 of the cellar roundtable and I'm so excited you guys to be here with my favorite brothers from another mother. And as Andy said before we hit the record button, coffee talkers from the east Coast, I'm here with David. Dion frank Acosta guys, welcome to the seller roundtable. It's great to have you. [00:00:49] spk_1: Thank you so much for having us. [00:00:51] spk_2: Thank you Amy. It's a pleasure to be here. Good to be with good people. [00:00:55] spk_0: Yes, definitely. So our first question on the seller roundtable is always for your blood sample or your D. N. A. Um we like to start off kind of learning a little bit more about you is as little as you want to tell us or as much as you want to tell us, but que es in on who you guys are and how you landed here on this seller roundtable podcast [00:01:20] spk_1: frank. I think we should switch it up. I think you should do my intro. I'll do your intro. What do you think about that? [00:01:24] spk_2: Oh no, no, no, no, no, I mean not even go there fine. So um David comes from a background of the aecom. He comes from the economic experience, he built his way up on the amazon ladder, working through agencies knowing the ins and outs of, of dealing with brands. Um I want to say some numbers, but David doesn't allow numbers. So I'm not going to go and talk about some of his status. But um he worked with a few agencies and climbed up the ladder eventually he decided to branch off and do it on his own, right? So um with the years of experience that he has on amazon and he went and structured an agency very different from others. He's a he's not your typical agency where he's always looking for the next customer. He's very detailed and who he wants to work with. And because of that, um the detailed is shown on the work. So they specialize in anything from listing optimizations to the content, writing to the a plus content and his agency has grown in the community and he's um you know, it's, it's hard to tell, give an intro about somebody else, but um he's definitely crushing it. But I think the most important thing is, you know, when you come from knowing um like you started from the ground zero, right? Some people just wake up and say, I want to build an agency every day. We see it more and more again where like new agencies are uprising and I think getting your hands dirty and and putting in the work that you did in the beginning stages um told him what not to do, right? And because of that he was able to grab all the things that he learned not to do. Um and convert them to what should be done and build an agency that is functional and yeah, I'm excited for amazon experts. [00:03:03] spk_0: So that's pretty, that was pretty good. David. Uh you know, frank frank, did a good job of talking, definitely, definitely did a [00:03:12] spk_1: good job, definitely did a good job. Thank you, frank um frank Acosta from creative person, what can we say? Creative first, you can see it in the name, right, frank, started out creative percent doing branding, website development and design. Um And more recently frank took his his, you know, his his run at amazon videos, product videos and brand videos. He actually started out before he was doing his creative percent branding and websites. He worked for a commercial company for a television channel. Um and he has a lot of experience kind of behind that camera. Um I mean I met frank about, I wanna say two plus years ago, um He was getting into amazon videos. I tried him out with some of my clients um Till today I've done maybe hundreds of videos with him and I've never even had one revision, never not even one. Um So that says something we do, we do our own services and we rely on the revision process frank comes with a story board. Um and always kills it with the storyboard and then always under promises and over delivers. Um, His, his, uh, you know, his videos are nothing short of commercials helping sell the product and every feature about it. And I am proud to call him a friend partner and reach out to creative percent if you're looking for any, you know, of the branding materials that you might need, because he's definitely, definitely leading in the industry of of those types of services. So that's, that's my that's my version of frank's [00:04:44] spk_2: intro. [00:04:46] spk_0: So I'm curious to know, I'm gonna, I love both of the intros by the way, I like that. Both of you are in kind of the creative agency side of things and I'm definitely going to pick your brain about all things um company. I mean, how do you make a video without revisions? We're gonna get into that, you know, that kind of stuff. Um what converts best? What are, you know, what are some of your favorite things? We'll get into all that. But before that, I have to know, How did you guys like, I guess I'll start with David since he was introduced first. Um, David, How did you learn about amazon? [00:05:25] spk_1: Okay, that's a good question. Um I learned about amazon straight out of high school. My first job in the amazon world was listing products. This is back when Arbitrage was the name of the game. Um, and I would, I would get paid, it was a summer job and I would get paid to list products, I get paid a flat fee for every product that would create every page I would create. Um I'm happy to say I broke the record for how many page, how many product pages were created in one day. Um I actually used to, I figured out that if I came in early enough and worked undistracted, I'd actually be able to like, leave before noon, potentially do more work than anybody else in the office and enjoy my summer. So it was like a very convenient job and I realized I was good at it, I had, like an understanding for it. Um ultimately what I ended up doing now has nothing to do with that, but that was just my entrance um you know, I remember once looking to see, you know, everyone I knew that was making money was doing sales and I was like, alright, let me let me go get a sales job and somebody like, drilled it into my head there, like, you're in the amazon space, it's an emerging, you know, world stay there and you'll be happy and I owe that guy a lot because uh you know, one thing led to another and I have an agency now and, and uh still in the amazon world, so [00:06:47] spk_0: I love it, you know? Okay, so along that line, before we get to frank, I have to know, are you a fan of flat files. [00:07:00] spk_1: Yes, [00:07:01] spk_0: tremendously. I want to know, like I need to see the battle between, like Vanessa Hung and somebody else who's just crazy about flat files. So I love it. I mean somebody who's figured out how to list that many products in a day and a very short period of time has to know a little something about flat files. So I like it. I like it a lot. We might just have to have another show just about flat files. The nemesis, right? Like amazon has changed so much to in terms of like listing products, I'm sure we can talk a little bit about that, evolving over the years as well. Well frank, what about you? How did you hear about about amazon? How did you get? [00:07:40] spk_2: Yeah, good question. So I look, I don't call myself an amazon agency, just there's so many people that have that title. I comment, I'm a branding agency, right? So I started creating logos in the beginning and I started branding everything from a dentist to an e commerce brand to to a law firm. And I started building my portfolio and I quickly saw that my best work was in the packaging space, right? You take a look at your portfolio and see what you do best. And I was like, my best work is in the product space. So I started, um, I wouldn't say I niche down, but I just said, you know what, I'm only going to take in product clients. Um and I fell in love with the aecom world, right? I fell in love with the process, the building and eventually 11 to amazon, right? Um David was actually one of the people that opened the doors to amazon for me, just because I dealt with a lot of DtC brands and it's very different from building a DtC brand and building an amazon brand from two different worlds and two different objectives. Um but because of like the nature of the business, and I fell in love with the process, I targeted it and I started doing it more and more and more and I quickly noticed that that's where our sweet spot was, right. Um and there's a promise that I've always made to myself when I built this agency is that I'm going to stick to what I'm good at and what ends up happening in in multiple agencies is that you're always looking for like the next service to add the next um the next um way of income, whatever, you know, and I said, you know what, let me stick to what I love doing this creating and that's where I live and I've made sure that I stuck my stuck to my rules, right? Um so in other words, amazon came to me, I didn't search it just happened to come my way and it just resonated with everything that we was doing with creating the brand, creating the name, the packaging and it's just, you know, you love what you're doing, you just bring some repeat, you know what I mean? [00:09:32] spk_0: Awesome. So my next question is for David, I would love to know David, how have you seen listings of amazon product listings evolved over the years and along that line? Um you know, what are your top tips for people when they're creating a listing on amazon? [00:09:54] spk_1: Okay. Um so first of all, the, the evolution of of creating listings is is it's a, it's really a night and day from back in the day. I'm just gonna touch on what you mentioned about the flat files when I started, when I, when I first, you know, my entry job in amazon flat files either weren't popular or non existent. That's what, that's what I'm gonna go with. And [00:10:17] spk_0: what year was it when you started? [00:10:19] spk_1: Um I have to look at my linkedin, hold on about 89 years ago, maybe something like that. Um maybe a little longer. [00:10:29] spk_0: Okay, [00:10:30] spk_1: so, so flat files I'm gonna go with weren't popular or just, you know, I wasn't aware of them and we would create everything manually. Um somewhere along the way it became a much more streamlined process by simply using flat files. Obviously, you know, when, when you're creating, you know, you have to set the flat file up, but I was actually fortunate enough to create some functions, some some excel functions to, you know automate that and, and and make it much quicker. Um we had, you know, at one point I had like a full team of developers, developers available to create whatever I want that I was like a kid in a candy store and I was developing tools ultimately, you know, there's other people out there who have everything and more that I created. But back in the day it was, you know, there was no, there was no software out there and uh it was something that you had to rely on, you know, whatever you built. So I would definitely agree with Vanessa and the fact that manually entering something um it's almost like a little bit more hands on, I want to say where on a flat file you're gonna have the ability to quickly understand what went wrong and quickly fix it. Um I want to say there's almost like less of a chance of something going wrong when you're doing it manually. [00:11:47] spk_0: She actually showed me the other day we did a live stream on flat files and she showed me how you can add a characteristic to a listing simply by copying and pasting a column from one category file to another. And I was like, what? Oh my gosh, now I know how my competitors are adding these other, if it was such a cool thing and it reminds me of what you said about, you know, how you kind of built Excel functions to do different things and help you over the years with this. Um So I never even knew that all these things existed with with flat files but you learn it over the years. So I love that. And what would you say is your your number one tip for helping you know for creating a listing. Like what what do you recommend? [00:12:35] spk_1: So that's one thing that has never changed. Um And it goes it has to do with pretty much anything you're going to do. Uh and that's do some research and prepare, make sure you're you're setting it up in the right category, make sure you're setting it up with the right keywords and make sure you're just everything you're setting is being done properly. I don't have to to start and and and scare anyone with the idea of soft holds on listings. Uh Today, more than ever, if you start changing things Um on on a list on the page you're eventually 1,23 tries they'll tell you you can't make any more changes for X. Amount of time. Sometimes it's an undisclosed amount of time and you don't wanna be locked out of making changes so you want to just be prepared and and all those changes you might make, [00:13:20] spk_2: go through them before [00:13:21] spk_1: you put anything online whether you're uploading it, you know through a flat file or manually you just have to make sure that you you know, cross your T. S. Dot your I's and don't make the changes after you upload it and let me test it out and all that. It's not worth it. Um Speak to somebody who gets blocked soft blocked on a listing or permanently blocked from making changes on the listing and they'll just they'll they'll scare you away from you know, deciding to to wing it. Um So the prep the prep and that's something that always was the same back in the day. It was just doing your due diligence and making sure that there was no mistakes and still that. Um But maybe it got a little more detailed over the years where you have to, you know, check more checklists and and make sure that literally everything is it is done properly because it only got worse when it comes to making changes after the [00:14:10] spk_2: fact you got [00:14:11] spk_1: more strict. [00:14:12] spk_0: That's such great advice. You know, one of the biggest mistakes I see people make, they'll come to me after they've launched a product they didn't use the right keywords on their listing. Their foundation sucks. We can't build a house on a shaky foundation, right? So it's it's so important to do that research ahead of time. I understand what you're doing before you go to put it in there because I've seen also so many times people mistyped their brand name and then they'll get bored [00:14:38] spk_1: and I was about [00:14:39] spk_0: to say that miss typing a brand [00:14:42] spk_1: name is by far the, like that's the point of no return like you back in the day again, we used to win brand changes. It was, it was not impossible today. I don't even think I would like confidently say we could win a brand change. Um, it's just not worth it. It's just just make sure you type the brand in the proper upper case and lower case and, and just don't, [00:15:07] spk_0: don't mess that up. Everything on a search engine relies on your relevancy and so that that ties into your keywords, that ties into your placement, that ties into how well your PPC works. So if you screw up your listing, everything else gets screwed up. So I love that piece of advice. It's something that people need to heed and frank. I'm, I'm ready to stump you with this one, although I think it's gonna be hard for a guy who never needs revisions to his videos. Um, my question for you frank, you're branding expert, You love branding, you speak it, you live it, you love it. Um what has been over the years, the hardest product for you to brand and why, [00:15:51] spk_2: wow, [00:15:52] spk_0: I'm gonna have a [00:15:53] spk_2: good, it's a good question. Um, wasn't expecting that, but wow. So, um, I would say a huge brand that came to me for rebranding and it was door handles and I underestimated the project so much. Um, they had different types of, first of all, it's such a competitive industry. Um, when it, when it comes to brands that already were already known and he wanted a unique name, but I always tie a name to something, right? And Brandon teaches us that when you make up a word, it's something more memorable than a word that already existed, right? So it's like, it's like Spanx, right? Everybody got the name, it was spelled differently. It was, it was short. So we all know the rules to create a good name, right? Keep it short. Try to mix towards all together and make it personal easy to find the domain. But this one was, it was just, I was like in a blank space and I was like, what the heck am I going to talk about door handles right? And it was, it wasn't like a unique brand where they were beautiful. It was just like, you know, it's, it's just um, you can buy these by the multitude. They, they're, they're good for um, if you're building a resort, if you're building a hotel, it's like you're comin go to the door handle right? And when I booked them the week we got through the branding phase, it took a little longer than expected. Um, creating the logo was easy. The strategy was the hard part, but when it came to video amy, it was like, I did not calculate how many doors, I had to purchase, how many holes I had to drill that I had to hire a professional to come and put all the door handles. It was, it was just so much that flew over my head. Um and I wish I would have contemplated things more, but it was definitely the hardest brand that I ever had to build, but um they success successfully exited two years ago, so we must have did something right. Um but it was, it was just such a challenging project, [00:17:52] spk_0: wow. Yeah, I can imagine, you know when it comes to branding, especially when you have that kind of common product that there's not really, it's not solving a huge problem for customers. Wasn't creative, [00:18:03] spk_2: it wasn't like, it wasn't like a beautiful looking product where we could go and put all the specs, it was just a simple manufacturing company that sold thousands and they wanted to get millions of products through. They were already in wholesale stores, right? And they wanted to get into the amazon world and it was tough. But um yeah, thank God um with headaches and screws we were able to come through with it. But that was definitely by far my hardest project today. [00:18:28] spk_0: I love it. Okay, and then my question for my follow up question, I gave David a tough question to it. The follow up. But my follow up question is what would be your, your number one tip for people when they're considering their branding right there, creating their brand, they're considering their branding. Um, what's your number one tip for them, like what do they really need to be thinking about? [00:18:50] spk_2: Yeah, so I always tell people do a lot of research before, before you want to hear everybody's opinions before you hire a branding expert, um, prepare yourself first, right? Um, read as much and and fill yourself with as much information as possible. Um, we have something called google these days where you can literally find anything and you know, like look up as much information as possible, look at the competitors, study the market, um, do your own research first because sometimes just from that information you, you can come up and bring from your own idea, right? So you don't, and you know, this is like shooting myself in the foot, but we like to keep it real, you don't always necessarily have to go to a branding strategist is something that you can start on your own, um because there's a lot of information out there, do your research and as the brand grows and you feel like it could grow to another potential, which you couldn't handle, then you get more people involved, right? Because we all know that starting a branding business is very expensive, especially when you're trying to brand the right way. Um, but, you know, it's a double is a double edged sword where if you don't do it right in the beginning and you don't do your research and you don't make that investment, it becomes more expensive down the road. So my, my number one advice is do your own research first. Um, and and dig deep to see what other people are doing and and give that. Don't skip that time. You know, it's very annoying and it is a stage that nobody wants to really deal with. There's a lot of reading, a lot of research um, put in that work, but in that time and you'll be surprised how much you can bring some on your own and how much creativity you can build up on your own. [00:20:20] spk_0: Yeah, branding is like the magnet that draws customers to your product or your service. And so it's like, it's it is that attraction because buying is a psychological process, right? It's an emotional process. And the colors mean things and the fonts mean things and they send a message that sometimes we don't realize when we're just kind of slapping a label on something and getting it on the market to your point. You know, that's that's how we can actually, you know, when we're bringing customers through the funnel, that's how we can actually bring more customers to our brand is when they're considering us, they're making that judgment whether they realize it or not when they see our colors and our fonts in our logo and, you know, we can command a higher price for our products if we do the right branding, um, it's like, it pays off so much and you know, I'm teaching a class this week, I'm teaching a class on updating your branding. Um and the one thing that I thought was really cool for considerations for branding is to consider branding before you even start product development, because if you were to, if you know who your customer is and you're like okay, we're starting this brand and we want to serve this niche of customers and you actually hire a brand strategist to study that niche of customers and the colors that they like and everything like that. You may develop your product differently based on that information and you're going to hit the mark because that right branding is going to lead to more conversions, better convergence, faster conversions, less paid ads, right? You're not gonna have to work so hard for it if you do the work in the beginning like [00:21:54] spk_2: 100% 100% and you know, Amy, I'm glad you said that because you brought me to one of our processes, right? One of the things that we do when we're creating the strategies that we create personas, right? We create like legit personas, we give them names, you know, um frank from Colorado, he's 28 we we build these personas so that you know who you're selling to and once you know who you're selling to now, you can market to them, right? You can speak in their language, you can speak in their position, your company in a way where you already know who's going to go and buy it. So that's what I meant by research, right? Where like before you even consider doing your pet products, go and look who's gonna be the consumer's right, who's going to be buying your product? And once you do that, you you're you're ahead of the curve, right? Because some people just want to, they want to go to Alibaba, they find a product that they want to slap their logo on it and, and and call it a brand, right? And you don't really even know um, who's who's like, who's the, who's the buyer, who are the people. So it's tough. It's not like it used to be right amazon back in the day. Um I had a friend that opened up a pet business, he's never owned a dog in his life And he was able to sell for 30 million to an aggregator not too long ago, but it's because back in the day on Amazon you were able to get away with things. Sometimes you are able to get away with not knowing just put the first product, your ratings are up. You've been in the game for a long time now with so many people in the space with so many users coming in daily new brands, you need to be up to par and um you can't get away with what people used to get away with before. [00:23:20] spk_0: Yeah, I love it. Okay. I want to get back to the listing optimization and listing side of things. Um, we talked about branding, we talked about like how you should prepare. I mean, your listing, you know, they say the eyes are the windows to the soul. Your listing is the window to sales. You know, making sure that you're making those sales. So, David, I would love to ask you about your process, like what is the process that you go through when you're creating a really good listing from start to finish and you know, what are those, those um, keys along the way that really make it great. [00:24:01] spk_1: Okay. Um, so I have a couple of, of just like pointers. The first thing I see even from other uh, you know, agencies that do optimizations is they'll provide you with five images, for example. Um when we optimize the listening, we're always gonna do seven images. Uh, sometimes we'll give eight or nine um, just because we want to have to have the ability to alternate something uh, you know, maybe during holiday season, you want to have a picture of a package under a christmas tree or on valentine's day. You want a picture of uh, you know, of, of a guy giving a gift to a girl or something and you just want to be able to kind of like play into whatever seasonality you might be able to ride the wave on. Um, but when, when we're creating a listing where we're gonna start with image, one of the strictest of all is going to follow the guidelines above all. Even if somebody requests, um, like, you know, to put swatches on, on image one, I'm always gonna just provide them with a backup without the swatches. Just because if or I might as well say when they get flagged and they need to put up a better image with no with no swatches of other colors available. Um, they're able to just go ahead and replace that image and not have to, you know, scramble to get a new image or do some Photoshop on the fly. Um, when it comes to, you know, the obvious, you know, the seven images that we're going to provide. We have like a protocol, like a structure that we follow. Um, we're always going to do a handful of lifestyle images. So that doesn't have to be with a real model. Through the use of simple shutter stock images, we can superimpose the product. Obviously you need the right angle. It all starts with the, with the, you know, the product photography, the ultimate image will only look as good as the product photography starts out looking. Um, you know, we have situations where someone will give us their 2-3 product images on a white background and it's just bad resolution and we'll say, Hey, we're sorry, but if you want us to do our job, we need you to give us better images. Like we can't, we can't do the work for for this unless you have, we have a certain quality. We need to be able to zoom up. I mean, you know, if we want to have a model holding it in their hands, we need an angle that kind of compliments that style and that. So [00:26:17] spk_0: it doesn't look like totally photoshopped and correct. Yeah. It's amazing what people expect Photoshop to be able to do right? Like can't you just Photoshop that elephant into my photo? What? Anyway? Sorry. Please continue. I [00:26:33] spk_1: always say that it's easier to Photoshop. Um a person into a background with the product than it is to Photoshop product into a person. Both can be done and trust me, Photoshop can do some pretty amazing things. Like there's some color correcting that I've seen that I could swear is a real photo. Um and there's some good, there's some good, you know, talent out there when it comes to to to graphic design. But I must say that it all starts with the quality of the image. Um so we're gonna always follow a structure of main image is gonna be a standard and following the protocol. Uh usually Image two and three is going to be a lifestyle image. Typically we're gonna go image four and five is gonna be more of an infographic um infographics are famous for like the you zoom up on a couple of things and put those circles and you know, you call out what it's what you're zooming up on. There's so many different ways to do that and so many different styles to do it in. Um We pride ourselves and always making sure that the infographic, I call it the virtual salesperson and you go to a store and you have a salesman to to help you, you know, buy the product, understand why you want to buy the product. Um The chance of you purchasing and purchasing the product is just going up. So the same thing goes for these images. You're gonna have the client looking at these images and you know, all of a sudden they come to one of the images and it shows you that this feature sets you aside from the competition and this is the spec and this is how it looks on your counter and you know, maybe have it compared to something that people have in their everyday life. So they know how big the product is and the questions that they're looking to answer during that shopping experience. You just want to do your best to answer those questions in the images. [00:28:17] spk_0: I have a question for you about the lifestyle of images two and three. So I I have a seven photo strategy that follows the customer sales cycle. So the mindset of the customer as they're going through and trying to make a buying decision. Our photos actually represent that. And so I'm curious as to why you put a lifestyle in the beginning because normally um the lifestyle represents their life now right with the product, happy, whatever they're doing right. Um and that is usually towards the end of the mindset um Where in the beginning they wonder is it for me, right? Like that's what they want to know first. Is this for me? Is this gonna solve my specific problem? And then, you know, so we get into that and then we go to quality and then we go to the infographics explaining like how to use or why user multiple uses. So I'm just curious as to why lifestyle upfront versus towards the end. [00:29:15] spk_2: Thanks for tuning into part [00:29:16] spk_1: one of this episode, join us [00:29:18] spk_2: every Tuesday at one PM pacific standard time for live Q. And [00:29:21] spk_1: A. And bonus [00:29:22] spk_2: content after the recording at cellar Roundtable dot com, sponsored by the ultimate software tool for amazon sales and growth seller S. C. O dot com and amazing at home dot com 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_0: Welcome to the seller, roundtable e commerce coaching and business strategies with Andy Arnott and Amy Wees. [00:00:10] spk_1: So I'm gonna also add that our lives every image we're gonna we're gonna make has his wording, we utilize strategic wording, uh so there's no lifestyle that's just gonna show a model holding the product. Um We're gonna showcase, like, let's say it's a shoe and we have the model pulling the let's say it's a boot pulling the boot on. Um we would say uh comes with pull up tabs so you can easily get it on and off. And it's it's not, I mean, traditionally lifestyle maybe doesn't have wording. Um I don't know, I'm not sure what everybody else does, but what we do is we're gonna utilize uh not a lot of wording because we we don't want to overwhelm them and give them too much to look at. Usually like a quick line, 2, 3, 4 words maximum. And the reason why we do the lifestyle first is simply because I have a B tested just about everything out there and I don't like, I love how you take the scientific approach to it. I I don't know if I have like a fact to throw at you, but I feel like customers want to see what the product looks like in their real life setting, so obviously I hear what you're what you're what you're saying about getting in the mind of the shopper and showing them, you know, um you know, like making an order out of it. Um I there are certain situations where we put the lifestyle second, we will do main image, infographic infographic lifestyle, lifestyle. And then the last two images are usually a spec image. Um I just I [00:01:40] spk_0: think you're doing something really similar to what we're doing in terms of like showing it in use because we don't start with an infographic, it's like too overwhelming, right? We start more with like the lifestyle, but with some strategic wording. So it sounds like we're doing very similar things, but it also sounds like what you're doing is you're really studying the product and the customer and you're designing your photo layouts based on what you think based on your research, they're going to want to see and it's gonna help them make that buying decision. And it seems like it's working for you. So, [00:02:13] spk_1: we always pride ourselves on two things. The first thing is when I look at the page and I say, all right, I took a nice crack at this category. Uh you know, not always. But if we didn't if we did the right job and we we had the right the right product, I could say that our product is the nicest in the category or at least I'll tell myself that. So again, we we we pat ourselves on the back when the project comes out looking good. But ultimately, when the when the performance is there, when the listing cells, when listings conversion rate increases. Um I definitely like there's no you can't argue with data. You know, you're, you're gonna have 10% conversion rate before you optimize and 30 after. And that's, I mean there's no real perfect way to, to say, you know, that's from that. But when all you changed was the images. It's a pretty good, it's a pretty good indication that that that's working. Um, the last image was a brand image and I find that a lot of people don't do that. Um, it's kind of like more accepted now with E B. C. And a plus. Um, you know, because that's, I mean, BBC enhanced brand content right in the name you're saying, give me more information about the brand. Um, we were doing brand images as image seven for a very long time before, you know, a plus was it was a thing, it was, you know, started out as a vendor central, uh, you know, tool and we take that seventh image to showcase the brand. Nothing. I mean sometimes we'll have the product in there, but typically we don't, typically, if it's like a shoe company and they like, like I said that boot example, we're gonna have maybe a bunch of girls hanging out and, and uh, you know, maybe their, their their legs are hanging off of a ledge and each each leg has a different type of a shoe on it. And now instead of just showcasing, hey, we sell boots. But with a simple easy image with, you know, half the images showcasing five different categories of footwear that the seller sells. We also have a three sentence about us saying that we're dedicated to customer satisfaction and we're here to, to make innovative designs and affordable products and all that good stuff. Um obviously you have the ability to put that down below, but there is still a certain percentage of sellers, I'm sorry, of shoppers who don't know about A plus or a. B. C. [00:04:31] spk_0: Yeah, they go through those main images and a lot of times they don't even scroll and I can't tell you how many listings I've reviewed. Well, I can tell you because you understand this, but I review so many listings and people will have amazing a plus content that tells the story of their brand and really sell the products and you go through the images and they are crap and you're like, they're not even scrolling to your a plus because they just went through your images and they're moving on. So you can definitely see the difference where people have paid for a plus and the designer did a really good job and their images are just terrible. So I love that you're adding that dimension of brand and a lot of people just think that it's amazon selling a lot of shoppers think it's just amazon selling all these products. So I love that you're, you're taking the time up there to establish that trust and tell that brain story. Amazing. Really good tips on images. Love it. Um, frank. I want to know about videos because you're doing this video's thing, you're pretty good at it. Um it just Davidson, we're good at it, but I would love to know when it comes to videos, right? Um what are your processes for making a really great converting video? And so, like, what are those elements that matter when it comes to creating a video that converts? And then I would love to know, like, your take on different videos. So, like, do you use a different video for, like, the product pages versus like a video ad? [00:06:03] spk_2: Sure, good question. So there are three things that my three steps, one to strategy to a strategy and three strategy, right, strategize before you do a video? I see a lot of people, like, they're like, oh, well, it's a simple product, right? The reality of the videos that you need to grab the attention. You have a very short span of person's attention when they land on your listing or your website, whatever it is. If you don't capture them in the 1st 345 seconds, forget 53 to 4 seconds. That's it. They're going off the video. They don't care about it anymore. So how do you make it exciting where they continue watching a video? Just like a great copywriter. Um, your main goal over the first sentence is to get them to go to the second sentence. And the only goal of the second sentence is making to go to the third, right? So in video we have the same process where we want them to continue watching. So what what strategy do you use to make them watch the video until the end? And that's what's important, right? Where you get into the largest of four for 45 seconds pre before working in this agency. My my parents owned the television channel. So I was working the ins and outs of the television channel and I've learned how how long 30 seconds were, Right? I that's where I really learned how long these 30, videos are. You can tell a story, you can tell everything in 30 seconds. So how do you make it? How do you make it engaging where people continue watching? So, I think one of the things that strategizing and the way that we strategize, is creating a story board, um selecting the right models. I'm going through the process of calling out every feature of the product. So, I think that pre production is a big part of it. Um a process that we don't skip. We don't just say, send your product will figure it out. We go through. Um We created, we create a brief from the brief, we go and create the storyboard. And from that we involve the customer right, finding the right model of finding the right thing. Um you know, there's a whole production versus just getting, grabbing a filmmaker and telling him to do the video. We have stylists there. I think one of the, one of the things important too is that if your product works well with props, make sure you get the best props, right? If you're doing a charcuterie board video, which is a new video that we got working on, we went and purchased the best cheese is the best salamis, right? You want to make it appealing? So sometimes it's not just your product is also getting the right props for the video, making sure that everything is up to par. And people can, I'm telling you, people can't tell the difference between a real video and a crappy video very quickly. Um, Why? Because either your competitor has a great one or they have or they have a worse one, it's never equal right there. They have a way better video than you or they have one that's the complete opposite. So, um, I think strategizing and making sure that you, you Create a storyboard that's going to attract the customer to continue viewing. So that's one. And the second question was, what's the difference between a page and add, right? I think I'm an adjective only around 15 seconds. So I would try to minimize as much lifestyle in the ads and go straight product product product. Um, just because when, when they're shopping for a product and a video pops up, um that's your attention, that's your time to grab, make your product stand out, right? So instead of adding so much lifestyle to it, I would go and focus on the product. I also found that throughout my customers and seeing their how the videos are playing and everything, um start the video with the product immediately. That way you don't confuse the buyer, they know that the video they clicked on is your product and um show that its full glory. If you, if you have a bicycle, show somebody riding a bicycle. If you have um a product show the product being used in the pet, instantly, right? So it's capturing that first initial play button and making sure that they continue to the end and the way to do that is to call out the features in a unique way, in a lifestyle way. I do believe that lifestyle videos are translating better than ever now. Um and if you look at the history of amazon, they went from a person speaking about the video, then they want to through um somebody narrating a video, then the unboxing right now, you start more and more seeing lifestyle videos and you start seeing how people can, once you have a product and you see how another human interacts with it. It shows you that you can, how you're gonna use that as well. So once you create the human factor into it. I think it's a huge difference. [00:10:24] spk_0: Yes, definitely. I think that it's so important to really help the customer imagine um that product in their life, help them answer that question is this for me, right? Um it's it's awesome. What would you say is the secret sauce to getting the customer to watch the video from the beginning to the end? [00:10:51] spk_2: Yeah, so number one is quality. Um make sure that you have very sharp um make sure the video looks crispy. Um you know, when you click on some of those videos and they look blurry instantly, whether it's a good video or not, um they're no longer interested in watching. Well, I'm no longer interested in watching, so make sure that the quality of the camera is good. Um the lighting is good so that they can see the product and like I said, um show the product in his glory. Show show all of its potential. Um you know, we we had a bath caddy that we were doing a video for and when we first did the video, we showed the bath caddy empty and then we showed like the model placing it in and we quickly realized that um like the video wasn't getting a lot of traction. We switched it up where we showed the product and its full essence in the first two seconds of the video and realized that more people were watching and that it was translating differently, right? So whatever the product it is, the first two seconds find a unique way to show it. Um, and showed that the smoke glory. So if you're, if you're selling a wine cup, make sure there's the perfect red wine and it's those little details that that go side and side with your product. [00:12:02] spk_1: Thank you. Just brushed over something that I heard you kind of stress a little bit more in the past, which was the first couple of seconds. The first couple of seconds literally set the tone for the video. I've heard you explain that a bunch of times to people who asked and I think that that's very true as well, like those, you know, the customer, if you lose him in the 1st 345 seconds, he's gone, he's not giving you more than that. So it's very important to, you know, take advantage of that and and just start with with your best. Um, I was actually looking at the chat, I saw scott asked about the image on, I mean the image one with wording. So I saw you responded that one of your favorite hacks is putting the packaging and the image one, which is technically it's not illegal. Um, I have a version of that that I've come across. I don't love it and, and I have like a tendency, we won't say no, like it's your business, you're, you're listening, you can do whatever you want. I'm gonna always let you know like my favorite way to say is what I would do if it was my listing. Um So if it was my listing, I still feel like I wouldn't put um any any risk on, on getting flagged, because even getting flagged for one day, um it's just not worth it, but I've seen a hack where somebody designed image, one with the product and a label. So imagine if you have a product and you added a label to the product, and if there's a label on the product, then you're allowed to showcase the product with a label on it. But what happens if there's actually no label on the product and you just showcase the product with, with like [00:13:48] spk_0: a [00:13:50] spk_1: Photoshop label with your logo and maybe like a quick wording that helps, you know, showcase what the product is. Um And again, personally, I don't like love this strategy, but it's technically a hack and technically something that I see people get away with, like I said before, I would always provide a secondary main image without that, just just in case, because I'm just worried about one day, maybe they'll make a change and and it won't be allowed to do that. Um But technically, I'm just, you know, I figured I'd throw that out there, it's definitely a hack, I've seen it work [00:14:26] spk_0: and I love just, and what I mean is it's not necessarily a hack. I like to make sure that we build retail ready packaging from the beginning because customers associate the packaging with something they've seen in stores and they trust stuff they've seen in stores. So even if you have a private liberal product that you're not selling on in retail yet, if you build that packaging from the beginning and you put that in your main image, you can call out some of those amazing features, you can get that, you know, that same intention you get on the shelf, but it can really really up the quality of your product and your conversion rate and it can help you stand out against competitors who just have that plane main image with, you know, just a product there that it doesn't look at all like a real brand right from the main image. So that's it's not really a hack for me, it's more like when you're in your prep phase and your branding and you're doing your product development and you're designing your packaging, you should be designing retail ready packaging from the beginning because that's going to help you make more conversions in the long run, [00:15:33] spk_1: correct. [00:15:34] spk_0: I [00:15:35] spk_2: want to answer some of scott's questions because I was just reading them. Yeah. [00:15:39] spk_0: Unboxing video. [00:15:41] spk_2: Unboxing unboxing. Um, they're great videos, right? I do also see a lot of my customers using them as a secondary video. Um, I have seen in some cases, so I'm not an amazon agency. I'll leave this up to David for him to answer. I'm not sure. I've seen listings that have two videos I've also seen when you click on one of the images, other images show up as well. And there's like secondary third videos as well. So, um, a lot of my customers are doing both and I think sometimes it's better for you to just tackle if we're doing a lifestyle video to instantly tackle an unboxing video right then and there the product is there, the model is, there doesn't take too much work to, to add an unboxing video. Um, so whoever whoever does your videos, I would, I would see if you can negotiate them to do an unboxing as well and whatever their radar. Um, lately we've been doing that, but I think the main video should always be a lifestyle video and impressing the client with someone actually using it. You know, when people go on your listing, if they didn't come through the video ad their senior images, they already read your bullet points. The last thing they needed somebody repeating that over and over again. They just need something exciting to make them buy the product. So I would focus on more of a lifestyle and I'll give them the option of, Um, for them to see an unboxing when you click on one of the videos and then more pictures show up. So that's that as for MP four. Yeah, Amazon has weird requirements. Um, I would suggest every video you do to put them on a dropbox or what will drive and you wouldn't have that have to download them from Youtube every time it's in the link. Um, Amazon does want to embed their own um, back and cold. So it just stops, like you said, it stops them from looking at going to a link on Youtube and going to another product. You know, amazon wants to stay king and they want everybody to stay on their website. [00:17:28] spk_1: They don't want anybody going anywhere else they want to, [00:17:31] spk_2: this is where it goes, you're not going to another um, platform. So, um, yeah, but I would suggest just just keep on going to drop on the dropbox. [00:17:40] spk_0: I love that tip that you mentioned about just when you're making your videos be thinking about all the different types of videos you could make, you've already got the people there. It's not that hard to make another story board to get the filming done. You know, you can do different clips that you can mix and match over time to, you know, make different videos for different purposes. Such a great tip. So before we get out of here today, I want to talk to you guys about this project that you guys have been working on for a long time and something that I've been able to be part of um, at some of your events that you guys have put on. Um, and that's the aecom cooperative. Uh, you guys started this, um, this e commerce cooperative, which is, you know, but maybe I'll just let you you talk about it, but I just have to tell you guys the listeners, I went to an event the last event. Where were we? We were in um Oh geez, where were we? [00:18:37] spk_1: Were [00:18:38] spk_0: we were in Miami. Yes, these guys got this restaurant, it was like a meat carving restaurant and they had the whole thing, like rented out. It was incredible. They had waiters walking around with the most amazing appetizers, open bar, really incredible, like just beautiful crafted cocktails. Um, and just the most amazing atmosphere. And then we all sat down to dinner and I had this like buffet of the most amazing meets all these carvers, everything and just the greatest people. They're so much fun. We had like birthday celebrations going on and just filled with e commerce sellers. Oh, and just really fun. Really just great times and and nothing. No, no. Conference, we weren't there to, to learn anything. We were just there to network and you guys made that possible through this thing that you built the Aecom cooperatives. Can you tell everybody like a little bit about that? And and why you made it and how you pull off these incredible events, David, [00:19:46] spk_2: I'll let you talk about, let me talk about the fun stuff. I'll let you talk about the structure and how it came about, but just to touch on the dinner real quick. Um we we wanted to change networking, we wanted to bring something different and before the calm, cooperative me and David were we we've done so many dinners, it's something we did with our customers, we would take them out to have a great steak and um throughout those dinners we just looked at each other, we're like, wow man, we need to make this into a real thing. Um and we were like if we can create an environment where it becomes memorable and we're not so much about um too many people talking or the next speaker, we wanted to create something fun and interactive and we said you know what, let's let's try a dinner, let's try doing the dinner. And um we're from new york, we believe in going bold and going strong and doing things right, doing it the right way. So just renting out the table wasn't an option for us, We needed the whole restaurant and as you saw man, it was just, it was just us trying to change the networking environment in the e commerce space and obviously there's a lot more to it, but the main vision was to create something memorable and different that nobody else was doing. [00:20:58] spk_1: I'm glad amy to hear your feedback on on that evening because we had a lot of fun and and it was definitely a lot of work. Um It's just ironic to know the how that came to be. Um we reached out to that restaurant, which was the only rest only kosher restaurant that could hold 250 people. Um anywhere else could maxed out at about 80 or 100 people. We wanted to be kosher because we had a lot of big jewish audience. Um and we called them up and they said no, they said, we don't rent out our restaurant for events and I mean, I can't go into the whole story now, I don't have enough time for it, but we willed it into existence for the most part. Um, we didn't take no for an answer. We got the, we went to a different restaurant and asked the chef to connect us to a food critic who was friendly with the owner, got the guy's cell phone number, I begged him for a phone call and then pretty much didn't take no for an answer when we got on the phone with him. Ultimately, we were, we were right with wanting that venue. Um, like you said, it was, it was the right place, the right environment, the right atmosphere and ultimately all we wanted to do, like frank was saying was create something unique and different. There's enough conferences out there with speeches and tons of content and booths and all the good stuff that you get at every other conference [00:22:18] spk_0: and you guys just keep getting better. I think this is my third aecom cooperative dinner that I've been to. And it just like everyone just keeps getting better and like, oh, it's gonna be that you guys are gonna have to like how are you going to top that? We [00:22:30] spk_1: don't know right right now. We were supposed to have our next dinner already, but we couldn't top it. So we just didn't do it yet. We're doing it, we're doing it right. We're not just doing it to do [00:22:39] spk_0: it, but [00:22:40] spk_1: a little bit on how the economic cooperative started. Um, everyone in the service provider and the solution provider industry has has companies, you know, people friends that they work with, that they trust that they, that they, you know, uh connect their clients with and that's how the calm cooperative started. Very organically. The four founding members, um, yoni from to or Jason and Lenny from the cellar kit frank from creative percent and myself. Um, we, we were just out to dinner one night and we wanted to do some co marketing initiatives. We decided to do a giveaway of services little by little that blew up and 44 companies became 40 $10,000 and give away became 100. And we realized two things when we finished that give away. One was that we clearly needed to build this community and to was that we had nothing to call this a community and we had to get to work on building the community. Um, and we did, we, we built out a whole bunch of resources and tools, uh, in person events, virtual events. Um, the goal is to just continue to give our audience and amazon sellers and providers a chance to learn and connect and grow together. Um, and we're very proud to be part of it. We're very proud for the explosion that it had over the past year. We were about a year and change in existence at this point. And thankfully it's growing fast and, and uh, it's, it's good people trying to do the right thing. So it's free to join for amazon sellers. You can go to the Aecom cooperative dot com and sign up, uh, and getting, getting involved and in tune to our next events and, and, you know, nothing to lose and everything to gain. So [00:24:18] spk_0: Now, now that I know that there's, I'm here, by the way, finally, after about 10 reboots and driver issues and all kinds of fun stuff now that I know there's a plethora of meat at your events. I'm going to have to, you know, I'm gonna have to make it out [00:24:30] spk_1: 100%, We wouldn't have it any other [00:24:33] spk_0: way. I love it. Well, it's so good to have you back Andy Oh man, yeah. You know, all part of, of moving, you know, moving and we went from, I went from satellite internet to being in the city where I got solid, you know gigabit internet back to the country where now I have t mobile home internet which actually has been fairly good. But I think I'm gonna have to run a hard wire down to my office here. So we're working through, we all know what it's like process. So before we let you guys go today we should probably um ask you how people can get in touch with you or how people can follow you [00:25:18] spk_1: frank. [00:25:19] spk_2: Yeah, so um frank, I created percent of my email creative percent dot com. Um and if you're on thin, thin is the platform that I live in the most um we can reach out there or um amy you could also if they want to reach out to your first few collectors is also an option. [00:25:36] spk_1: And then I'm gonna, I'm gonna say the same thing linkedin is the platform I frequent most. Um and you can reach out at David at amazon experts or amazon experts dot com and we're always happy happy to help [00:25:50] spk_2: amazon experts with an X. [00:25:52] spk_0: E. Love it. Yes, I love it. Yeah, I have to agree linkedin is is super underrated and I keep telling people it's it's growing every single day. And you know, I keep telling my wife's a real estate agent and she keeps talking about like getting leads and I'm like, have you been on linkedin? No, no no for like six months. She's finally on linkedin. She's like I'm like that's where the people who actually have good jobs live. They're not the people who are right, they're not the people who are on facebook who don't have jobs who are just trying to kill time. [00:26:23] spk_2: I love [00:26:24] spk_0: it. Well thank you guys so much for being here today. We've appreciated all your amazing tips on listings and branding and everything else and we appreciate everything you guys do for the e commerce community definitely and and uh we just enjoy having you on the show and and yeah, don't forget everyone who's out there to rate, review, subscribe. Uh Andy and I love when you give us your opinion, even if it's not good, although we don't get a lot of those but um but yeah, we we love to hear from you um and we this is one of our favorite things to do every week, so thank you guys so much for being here and uh well don't forget to join us in the zoom every week, every Tuesday we're here at three p.m. Central time one PM pacific. We're here in the zoom so you can go to sell a roundtable dot com forward slash live and we will see you guys next week for episode number 140. Oh my gosh yeah yeah and I hopefully will be, will participate here for my computer and internet will will will cooperate and amy I just thought of the best. The title for this episode is we Have the Meats, Right? I mean that's that's gotta be it. It's right there. I love it. Alright, you guys well, thank you [00:27:49] spk_1: guys. Thank you so much for having us. [00:27:51] spk_0: All right, see you later. Bye bye bye bye. Thanks for tuning in, join us every Tuesday at one PM pacific standard time for live Q and a. And bonus content after the recording at cellar roundtable dot com, sponsored by the ultimate software tool for amazon sales and growth [00:28:08] spk_1: seller S C o dot com and amazing at home dot [00:28:12] spk_0: com. 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_0: welcome to the seller, roundtable e commerce coaching and business strategies with Andy Arnott and Amy Wees. [00:00:10] spk_1: Yeah, there's, there's a handful of things, there's there, you know, I did podcast this morning and I pretty much laid out all the potential options and, and, and it's a lot and we'll cover a view, right? It's not necessarily just choosing your wholesale pricing, You gotta have it, but what's within that? Right? It's not just a price, right? It's not just 50% off of of retail. You need to think through that long term strategy, where do you really want to take this? Do you want to be in Walgreens? Fantastic. That's a different discussion. Uh If you're like, hey, you know, not really, but I do want to be in a ton of independent retailers because that's kind of my brand. Fantastic. That's a different version as well. You're trying to think through what's the volume that you can expect on average, right? Because you might want to have volume based discounts. This is very common when I was a retailer, right? Um 0 to 100 you're paying 10 bucks, 100 1 to 2 50 you're paying 9 50 you need to think through that, right? This is why coming into your wholesale pricing and having enough margin is incredibly important. If you get this too low, you run the risk of a very large regional retailer as an example coming in and saying, hey, we want to buy 1000 units. It's a ton of money, You're super excited, but the price we're willing to pay his ex, well, one, you're a small brand compared to a massive regional retailer. So they have the power in this power dynamic situation. So it's pretty much like either accepted or don't and you don't want to find yourself in a weird position where you go, I could accept it and get the cash flow. But the issue is I'm not gonna make any money and by the way they're probably gonna want net 30, net 60, net 90. So now you got to cover the cash flow within that period of time. That's a problem. Right? So we want to think through like are you really positioned and ready Got for going B two b. So I I tend to recommend like the average benchmark and every industry is different luxury tends to have much higher mark ups and margins, but 40 to 60%. It's very common in B two B um as a margin. So I would say try to be a little bit on the higher end there, either through reducing cogs or getting your your retail price in a in a good good spot there. And obviously that's a lot of strategy there as well. The point here is you want to be able to have a flexible pricing structure. That makes sense for most retailers because you don't want to have a million dollar contract on the line and not be able to take it simply because the pricing doesn't make sense. And I've talked to enough brands that listen, like I talked to one the other day where they had a massive grocery chain come in and negotiate and she's like I'm taking that money like it's overnight, there were 75% of their wholesale B two B orders. I mean that's huge. And like of course they want that terms and you know, special discounted pricing because the volumes that they're gonna pull right, you're talking about going from an average of let's say 250 units B two B wholesale order too A 1000. I mean it doesn't seem like that big of a leap but it can be [00:03:03] spk_2: sometimes containers full of product from your supplier, which is [00:03:09] spk_1: correct. It's [00:03:10] spk_2: huge. You know, my client has a deal with the distributor and in another country and that distributor orders straight from there, they're one of the major distributors for their line of products um in in all of europe. And that distributor just orders straight from their their supplier. [00:03:34] spk_1: Get [00:03:35] spk_2: a check like it's just like stupid money right? So now, you know, they're starting to compare their what they sold on amazon with what they were able to do in wholesale and it's just it's like 80 20 and they're like for all the extra work that amazon is compared to the work that we had to do to get in with this distributor. Like it's a lot of work up front, like you're talking about with your pricing and getting everything ready. But now, once they get that, that pipeline going and they can keep it filled up. It's like a mailbox money. Its stupid, right? Sure? [00:04:10] spk_1: Sure. And a lot of the brands we've talked to, so all the brands, we talked to our direct to consumer, but they also happen to directly sell wholesale to retailers. That's like our sweet spot with the new product we're working on. Um you tend to see a process and systems issue as well, right? So, you know, amazon, you know, direct to consumer, you get that figured out, you're good, wholesale is a little different, right? So we already talked about, you gotta figure out pricing and make a few decisions there. But the process for a retailer to pay you money oftentimes gets overlooked. There's so much friction. Right? Listen, I've been a retailer, a small online retailer, um, buying directly from brands. Every brand was different and that's a problem because I would forget to be honest, like, I don't even know if, like, my pricing is up to date that this is an issue. And so some, I'm like, oh, that's right, I have to call you and give you my credit card number to place an order. This other one. I have to be fact, then this other one, there's a web portal. And so it becomes a problem. Right? The simple fact is you are in competition with other brands that that retailer could carry. So which one do they prefer, assuming profits and all that stuff is is equal. They prefer the one that has great communication that has a very clear process and structure in place for placing orders to where there is no guessing there is no, I know your price sheet says 20 bucks, but we negotiated an extra 10% off. Where do I see that? So we're just gonna remember, Okay, I hope you're you don't miss a day and then your team member doesn't apply that for me. Now, we got to go back and forth and now we're risking potentially the relationship itself, there's a whole lot here, right? Like you can you can see, I mean, do you want to accept net terms, can you afford to, is it net 30 net 60 net 90. What makes sense here? Right. When do you win? Don't you, are you going to run credit checks? Great. How are you going to do that? Right. How are you invoicing? Because you're not just getting an order, you're getting a purchase order, you gotta convert that over to an invoice and that's gonna come back and get paid, but it's a lot. And so what we're trying to work on with the new product is streamlining that process. So it is standard and it's just way easier. I mean, listen, placing a B two B order should be just as simple as placing a direct to consumer order. If I'm on Shopify, it should feel the exact same as if I'm on vin dr placing an order and that's kind of what we're looking at here, right? We're trying to say, listen, if you already have, you know, the relationships and wholesale in place, that's fantastic. Come on board will streamline things for you, but if you're brand new, we have a little bit of opinions built in so that it is much more clear cut and you don't have to worry about it as much because there is a lot to manage [00:06:36] spk_2: making it. Yeah, definitely. I mean what we do when we get wholesale orders, we just manually invoice in quickbooks [00:06:47] spk_1: and like you [00:06:47] spk_2: said, it's going to be getting those repeat orders and remembering to follow up and all of that is um it isn't easy, you know, it's a no. So yeah, I think making it easier is good. There are I know you guys are working on a product where you're building a wholesale side of Shopify so that people can basically take B2B wholesale orders on their Shopify, which is really, really powerful, so not [00:07:18] spk_1: necessarily um sorry to cut you off, not necessarily on Shopify. So basically, you know, we're Shopify is just an assumed thing for direct to consumer, right? If you're gonna go build your e commerce site, you're using Shopify, we want to build the B two B version of that. So it's its own application, it's its own whole thing and so there's it's a platform really and so there's two hemispheres. One hemisphere is the platform where you're able to manage your current relationships. Your retailers are able to see pricing specific to them if there is volume discounts, if you've pre negotiated anything, they can see inventory levels in real time if you have that connected as well. Right? So that side we're trying to reduce the friction of them placing a wholesale order while also reducing the friction for you to process it. Right? So we'll integrate with Quickbooks as an example. So you know, workflow here would be you would receive a wholesale order, you would review and say this all looks good to me, approve it, create the invoice and then that could be automatically sent over and and handled in quickbooks if you wanted. We're actually doing payment processing on platform. The second part there is how do you find retailers? Listen, this is a major major [00:08:26] spk_2: hurdle. So what I do right now is um I have a wholesale um section of my website and you can create an account all of that. But most retailers that I work with don't use that like they prefer to not have an account somewhere that they have to manage, right? They prefer to just invoice, you follow up with me. It's all good. Right. So what we've actually found um to work really, really well, but there's there's a there's a kind of either use a platform like Fair, where, where there's a lot of retailers that are already looking for you and they can, they can place an order right on platform and they can find you and place an order right on the platform. But a lot of retailers are not unfair. So then that's when that outreach comes in and you have to like find those things. So we use a system where we search, we scrape different platforms, right? We look at like yell for local businesses, that kind of thing. And then we have this database called any biz that has over 15 million businesses in it and we can search for various types of retailers around the world. And then it actually sends email campaigns out, but still you still have to follow up. You still have to do that. So, I would love to hear how you guys are finding the buyers. [00:09:58] spk_1: Sure. So this is interesting, This is hemisphere too. So, this is a marketplace you mentioned Fair. Fair is going to be one of our competitors. So Fair is very similar to amazon. Uh, the, the customers, the retailers are unfair affairs, customers, not your customers. Hence why they charge commission. Right? That commission eats into your margins, right? We already talked about margins already being slightly tight. We're not taking that approach here. So we're fundamentally against Commission were saying, hey, that's not the case here. What we are instead doing is a like a slack model if you will. Right? So it's based on active retailers. And so we were, you know, like Shopify, you don't say, hey, go to my Shopify site and buy my things talking to end consumer. You say go to my site. We want then drive to be that as well. We want you to say buy directly from me. So a lot of the brain's, we've talked about will say you can buy directly from me or you can buy unfair. What we want to say is you can, you know, when you say buy directly from me, you're actually talking about the van driver platform. Right? So there's some white labeling going on, [00:10:58] spk_2: correct. Exactly correct. [00:11:02] spk_1: We're the platform exactly. Now. We do have a marketplace. I think this is important. A lot of the brands we talked to when we asked them, how do they go about finding retailers? They're like, I kind of google and like, you know, but here's the thing, a lot of retailers don't have websites, massive ones do, but that's, you know, you're not going to just go to Walgreens dot com and be like, hey, I'd like to talk to you guys and they have a completely different process. Right? So You have good inbound on sites like fair because retailers are trying to find you, what when we looked at the data after talking with like 300 brands is you have a lot of first orders. But hardly any recurring. 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th orders and the order volumes [00:11:41] spk_2: as well. [00:11:42] spk_1: And here's, here's the interesting bit I would ask you. Okay, so how much is your average cart total if you will for direct versus fair dramatically different? We're talking like 1500 bucks. 150 bucks. Okay, that's not a that's not a wholesale order. 100 50 bucks is not a wholesale order. That's just a very large bulk in retail discounted order. Right? So we don't have that incentive because we don't make money based on commission. We don't need you to lower to increase sales, don't need it to, I don't really care. So what we're saying is we charge based on active retailers. So if you work with 300 retailers, retailers in a year, but only 20 of them tend to place an order every single month. We only charge you for the 20. So now we're incentivized to say, hey, you tend to place an order every month, but it's been three months. Maybe you should place a restock order here. Right? So you mentioned retailers don't want to have an account. Let me explain that because I've been there. They don't want to have 1500 accounts. This is the problem because you're like, what was that long again? Oh my gosh, was it this way we are structuring then drive so that a retailer has a retailer account, there's a retailer side and a supplier side or a brand. A retailer can have connections. Just like a supplier can. [00:12:59] spk_2: So it's kind of like fair where they have that account and they're able to then search and they're able to pay right there and they don't have to correct it. And [00:13:08] spk_1: but we have connections. But here's the interesting bit, Fair says you're taking the order Right? Unless you can, unless you're going to cancel it. Like you don't, you don't, there's no relationship. It's purely transactional. But you know, as well as I do, B2B is relationship based. It's not transactional based. So for us, we said, Okay, there needs to be a layer where you both opt in just because somebody's willing to give you money doesn't necessarily mean it's good. This is a lot of what we heard with with the fair people we talked with where they're like, I'm getting orders, but it's like going to a farm, I sell things that are not farm related, just buying it in bulk, right? It's not whole. So I'm not really helping my brand. So for us we say, okay, a retailer can find a brand but a retailer, I'm sorry, a brand can also find a retailer. So it's very difficult for a brand to proactively go find new retailers to have conversations with and start sort of relationship with, it's easier for a retailer to find brands all day long. Right? I can just go on amazon and find brands but do the inverse. Hence why you have to scrape so much [00:14:12] spk_2: data like reach out on linkedin. We do different things. You know, you make phone calls, but you have to find out like a person who is going to be interested, you know, so it's, it is very difficult. [00:14:25] spk_1: But what if on the platform you go and you find a retailer and you know, the types of retailers that your brand and products do very well with, it could be a certain category, a certain size, certain geographical location. And you can go in search and find as many of those as you can that are on the platform and you reach out to the person who is in charge of that. It's no longer about trying to use hunter dot io to find the right email address and, and, and you know, hacking linkedin to figure out who's in charge here, The person who's running wholesale is running that account. And so what's great is you get to reach out and say, hey, I'd like to request to connect a connection. Once you both agree, it means you have a relationship now and they can be severed at any point, right? So if things go wrong and be like, hey, like this is not good. You can no longer buy from me, but you get to reach out. And so there's this interesting problem where when you're getting started, especially as a smaller brand and you're wanting to get one to go B two B wholesale, you don't have enough brand recognition yet to have retailers search for you. They might be looking for products like yours, but we want them to look for your brand, your products that's different. But how do you get there? It's a lot of outbound to be honest. It's a lot of sales when I talk to brands, they're like, I hit up the trade shows, I do sales, I hired a sales person to do it right. But what if you could just sit down and have a straightforward process where you can say, I know what does well what kind of retailers we work with that, that has super high throughput all that stuff and just go find more and start having great conversations and eventually over time they start to find you as well because you've built up that brand recognition, here's what's interesting as a second order effect. You do that enough with the small the medium retailers, large box retailers start to take notice. Yeah, because [00:16:04] spk_2: you're getting traffic in the store that they're not getting because they have interesting products. That's the reason that they all hate amazon because there's so many cool products and that are not available in their stores and the brands that are on amazon are not big enough to sell in their stores and are not set up to sell in their stores. So that's it's really interesting. So you're still in beta, we can, I love your passion about this platform and a lot of our listeners are going to be excited about checking it out when it comes, but what is your advice for, you know, we're, we're almost at our our today, What's your advice for folks right now, where they're at um about getting, getting started in that B2B relationship, like, what do they need to do? So when your platform is up and operational and great, what do they need to do? What are some D I Y methods for getting started and getting moving in, selling your products, BTB? [00:17:14] spk_1: Yeah, there's three major pillars in my mind that that really will set you up for success and that don't need to be perfect, but need to be at least somewhat thought of one is your pricing strategy, right? This, this is like fundamental, if you get this wrong, a lot of second order things start to go wrong as well, right? You don't, you don't want to find yourself saying, oh, this is an incredible opportunity, I want to go that route, it sounds fantastic and then realize you just don't have the margin for it, it's not going to work, right? So if you're, if you have a current product line and you want to make wholesale work, they're great start there and see if you can make it work. If not, unfortunately, you might neither need to raise your price. Which you might have needed to do for a while anyways lower your cogs, Maybe you are paying too much. It's always a good conversation to have and to think through um or launching new products that are a little bit more tailored to be able to go. So here's a second, you know, kind of strategy here is you have wholesale items that are really meant for branding to get people to like your brand to then search your other things and then by your other things directly to you. As in consumer. Right? So you have a lot of opportunity here, but I think you need to get it right, you need to think it through, right? And it's not just the price, it's recommended M. S. R. P. Do you want to have something like a map if you're you know um at well anywhere really map is applicable, but you know that makes sense if you want to have volume based discounts because you anticipate being unable to sell 1000 units a month to a retailer. Great. Think that through, you don't have to get it perfect, but think it through and there's a lot of different methods here, but there's no need to make it super complex, You know, dual pricing is very simple, right? This is why we charge for retail across the board, whether you're buying it for me or one of my retailers and this is what I charge for wholesale and it all makes sense where, you know, everybody's getting enough margin. # two is really the systems you need to think through, how are you going to receive the order? What you don't want to have happen is a retailer get excited that you, you sourced yourself and say, great, how do I, how do I submit in order to go? Um, send me an email, right? It's like it, you know, it can work. But listen, you're stepping into a different world now, this is not just amazon, this is, you're talking to professionals now, you, right? So like every interaction is a reflection of you and your brand that you're building and you gotta think through that, right? Because if that retailers like, it wasn't really that good of an experience, it seems kind of risky. Well maybe they're not going to come back and that becomes a massive blow 12, You know what you've been working on, but to the business itself. So you want to think through, how do I make this easy as possible? Enroll player? Right? Set up a simple process to be like, okay, that was a retailer, I go to pay me money or, you know, submit a P. O what does that look like for me? How many steps am I having to do and let's work to reduce that. And obviously you're gonna do a basic beta, if you will, and you're gonna launch that and you're gonna say, okay retailers that I've found, you can submit orders and then you have feedback with them. Hey, what did you like about the process? What did you hate? What was too time consuming? Right? You got to think through all these things. And then the third one is really thinking through how you're finding retailers, right? You gotta go get them. You know, it's sales 101, it's not the sexiest thing. But if you want to jump start that, you're gonna have to put in a lot of time and a lot of effort to find retailers, it does take time and it's not just get a retailer, you're trying to find the right types of retailers, right? You don't want hundreds of retailers that place one order and then never come back. That's not how you build a sustainable business. And that's what we're seeing a lot on with the brands that we talked about with, some of these marketplaces, like I get a ton of orders. But if I look at the 2nd and 3rd, they don't exist. I'm like, great, that's not a relationship, right? Because now you're constantly have to find new retailers instead. It's kind of like a portfolio, right? You really want to build a nice relationship with a handful of retailers that are consistent [00:21:05] spk_2: And that's the Amazon because sales are consistent. So if we want to have the consistency off of Amazon, we have to work towards that. And I love that 1,000%, I think all the way through the process, okay, someone wants to make a wholesale order for me today. What the heck do I do? Right, inventory located, How do I even invoice for that? How do I collect a credit card payments? [00:21:29] spk_1: What if they ask you for 30? [00:21:31] spk_2: Right? [00:21:31] spk_1: What if they ask you for net 30? Are you gonna be like, oh let me figure that out or hey actually we don't do that right? You got to think these things through. Um you know, I was talking to that, that retailer or the brain, I was talking about earlier where they had a massive regional brand or retailer come through place a huge order and they want net 60 and she's like one cash flow is going to be tough to inventory. That's dramatically more than like they doubled basically the volume she moves and she's like, I don't even have that right now and it's like in covid, right? So like logistics supply chain issues exist and she's like, but this is my only shot at making this relationship work, right? So if you can foresee some of those pitfalls, you can put things in line like that, you know, having a cash flow buffer, you know, slowly starting to increase your inventory [00:22:18] spk_2: levels. Exactly, exactly think through what if I got in order to actually we got an order from wal mart on the shelf and we couldn't we could not fulfill it because it was too much for our logistics team. We were not set up to keep this shelf stocked. So that was the thing is they really wanted us to like stay in and keep visiting and keep the shelves stocked and I was like huge opportunity but we're not ready for that, right? We would have to change a lot of our supply chain would have to change the way we handle logistics. And so you know for us the smaller retailers are better because we can we can fulfill small bulk orders, right? Um but then that allowed us the opportunity to really think through okay, when we grow to this level, what does that even look like? You know and how what would we need to change in order to fulfill a container load. Especially one of our products that's partially made in the usa partially made in china are packaging comes from somewhere else, it's like yeah, you know [00:23:33] spk_1: a [00:23:34] spk_2: lot, we have to change all of our operations, move everything over to our factory in in Dallas texas and get all that going right? So I love what you're the example you gave of think all the way through it. Run a beta, get it going, start small, get moving, think about your pricing strategy first, what do your quotes look like all of that? Okay and then start making your first sales right, pretty much start reaching out, but you sometimes only get one chance to make that first impression. So you want to think all the way through this before you go ahead and start Dylan, it's been so great having you on today. I'm so stoked about what you guys are working on in this unique um, market opportunity. And I love that you thought all the way through this and you've really thought, what is going to make you different from the fairs of the world, you know, and those types of things and I think that you've nailed it. Um, and I'm excited to see where it goes. Um, so tell everybody, how can they find you, how can they check, follow this opportunity to drive this building? Um, tell everybody how they do that. [00:24:54] spk_1: Yeah. So if you're, if you are a reseller by happenstance, come check us out at dot or dot com, that's G O A U R A dot com um, for, for the wholesale side, it's just been dr E N D R I V E dot com. Um, News site is launched, you can't join quite yet. Um, basically what we're doing is we're in a closed beta with a handful of brands that we've been having beta test as we've been building out prototypes. Um, but we have a public launch date for 2 to 22. So in february early, february will be going live, where any brand, any retailer is able to jump in And that's when we'll really start pushing for attraction. So yeah, you know, just keep keep an eye out. We don't have a form for you to sign right now, but keep an eye out on been dr.com, we'll do a big push of course, um on 2-22. [00:25:40] spk_2: Amazing. And we'll have to have you back on the show, you get that going. But your advice today has been incredible for brands. I think that all of us, you know, we want to make more sales, especially where a lot of us are trying to get all of our eggs out of the amazon basket. I love that um that you're offering this opportunity and that you've given us a lot of great advice and some things to think about so that we can be more ready to do that. Um awesome. Well, anything else, any other piece I love to ask what is your your we always ask at the at the end of our shows what is keeping you motivated right now. So, are you listening to any podcasts? Did you read a book recently that was just like ah ha moments. [00:26:31] spk_1: Yeah, interesting. I really like it's going out of style. It it's actually a spending problem because it's like just books arriving, you know, the biggest thing that's been helpful for me is is building the right routine. So I'm going through a flow of course right now. So, steven Kotler talks a lot about flow. Um I I was was a researcher and then discovered the flow inflow and just being like in the zone. So he has this incredible course and a lot of it's related to flow, but a lot of it also covers like productivity and good habits. And so one of the things that they talk about is the, the motivation stack and so basically what you're doing, if you're taking your MTP, which is a massively transformative purpose, this is like if I can do this in my lifetime, holy crap, life is amazing, massive. Then you break that down into a high, hard goal, which is like within the next 5 to 10 years, right? So you're reverse engineering from a very high level and so my process there is each week um each month, each year I set another layer here and then I'm trying to make sure that my weekly goals basically link all the way up. So I know that I'm on the right path, even when it's tough. You know, listen, we're all in business. It's tough at times, but it's nice to know that I'm not just working for today. I'm working towards this incredibly massively transformative purpose. Um that gets me super fired up. [00:27:55] spk_2: Yeah. Which research has shown if your goals aren't big enough, you're just going to procrastinate. So I love what I do is that um is the best year ever exercise every year. Every year. I look at Ok, what would make this the best year ever? Really think through that on a personal and business and and you know, growth level and then I work backwards from that and I set up my goals and then I do my quarterly planning, monthly planning, weekly planning and even chilly planning to get things moving. So I love that, I'm going to definitely look that up. What was that called? The program that you're going [00:28:34] spk_1: Through? It's called 00. Too dangerous. [00:28:38] spk_2: Zero to dangerous. [00:28:40] spk_1: It's pretty, it's like eight weeks so it's like very intense but it's great. It's been insane actually. Yeah, it's really cool. Like it goes super in depth on a lot of things like burnout um proofing. Um you know, it goes a lot over, you know, positive psychology basics like it covers it quite a bit. So it's pretty cool. [00:28:59] spk_2: I love it. Anything that challenges your thought process and your goals I think is a really positive, awesome thing. Alright everyone. Thank you Dylan for being here. Thank you all for being here on the show and thanks for listening. Thanks for rating, reviewing, subscribing to the podcast and we will see you guys next time on the seller roundtable. Bye. [00:29:26] spk_1: Thanks for tuning in, join us every Tuesday at one PM pacific standard time for live Q. And A. And bonus content [00:29:33] spk_0: after the recording [00:29:34] spk_1: at cellar roundtable dot com, sponsored by the [00:29:37] spk_0: ultimate software tool for amazon sales [00:29:40] spk_1: and growth seller s [00:29:41] spk_0: c o dot com [00:29:42] spk_1: and Amazing [00:29:43] spk_0: at home dot com. 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_0: Welcome to the seller, roundtable e commerce coaching and business strategies with Andy Arnott and Amy Wees. [00:00:08] spk_1: What's [00:00:10] spk_2: up everybody? I'm hanging out here with my friend Dylan carter. We haven't hung out in a while and Dylan's been working on some crazy stuff, so I'm excited about that, I'm super tired today, I don't know why, but I'm drinking coffee this afternoon to try to stay awake [00:00:29] spk_1: for me too. Are you really? We get these triple shot La colombe coffees and they're delicious. They're really and they're small but it's, it's supposed to be like [00:00:44] spk_2: you're in florida now, [00:00:45] spk_1: right? No, no, so so we're in boston. Um no, it's a pretty big, I mean there's a there's they're not like super out there, but they have a few cafes here. But yeah, you can get on in most grocery stores now. They are. And saying like I just got another shipment of three boxes of 24 because we go through them so frequently [00:01:06] spk_2: your way past the single cup. Yeah, for me, I can't have more than like two cups a day, two cups is like my [00:01:18] spk_1: mask. So I've [00:01:20] spk_2: got my seller meet up cup that says being a Ceo is easy, it's like riding a bike except the bike is on fire, you're on fire, everything is on fire. That's so true, so accurate, so [00:01:37] spk_1: That's so cool. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, I think I got 45 minutes of sleep last night, if I'm being honest, so I'm like nice and wired up. Yeah, it was a weird night, like went to bed, you know, we're so we, we pushed out some something new last night and we were up pretty late and so by the time I got home and I took a hot bath, started to relax, I was like alright, I'm good, I'm sleeping now and uh I have this habit of laying on an acupuncture mat while watching star trek next generation to fall asleep. It's like, it's a beautiful mixture and uh lay there and just Laid there for like seven hours and then my alarm went off. I was like, this is terrible, but it happens not frequently, but it does. So yeah, it's all [00:02:20] spk_2: good. So I'm doing this thing lately because I was not getting a lot of sleep either and I was just, my routine was just sucking like I wasn't taking good care of myself and you know, it just, we we get out of a good routine sometimes and um and so I was like getting up in the morning and I'd be like right on facebook on my phone and I was just like, not taking again, not taking care of myself whatever. So my husband rashid and I, we came up with this strategy because we wanted to also show our kids that, you know, it's before we mindlessly escape into video games or our apps or whatever. We wanted to make sure that we're taking care of ourselves, our environment and our mental health and our commitment. So those are the four things. So mental health is number one. So we read or do like prayer, meditation. And then the second thing is self care. So exercise, taking care of your body, all that kind of stuff and your, your hygiene, all the stuff that kids sometimes need a reminder on. And us adults sometimes need not as strong of a reminder when it comes to the video department, but, but our kids, you know, need that. And then our number three thing that we're doing is taking care of our environment, taking care of the things around us, making sure that where we are is nice and then finally our commitments and once we're done with all of those things, then we're allowed to like mindlessly escape into video games or netflix or whatever. But it's been tough. It's been like every time I want to get on facebook around social or whatever and just get that quick dopamine Tiktok, I'm like, okay, crap, I gotta take care of myself first. Fine. [00:04:14] spk_1: It's funny you mentioned that. So I struggle with that as well. I do active recovery protocols and each person has their own thing. So I have one in the morning, which I call my power our kind of thing. And so it's, it's a cold shower. I meditate for 15 minutes and then I do uh, the five minute journal. I do, I do the app actually. So I'm doing a bit of gratitude and just kind of like preparing myself for the day from like a, a uh what's the term, I can't think of the term now basically [00:04:47] spk_2: before your, before you get stressed feed your like putting things into perspective for. [00:04:56] spk_1: Exactly. And I've deleted facebook, deleted instagram, haven't jumped on Tiktok. So I have no social media apps outside of Pinterest on my phone. Um And then midday I do another Active recovery Protocol protocol. Typically I'll do like box breathing, I'll do another 15 minute meditation session. It's basically like, you know, as you come into the day, you have a ton of energy and then it just hardcore depletes and then you need to replenish it, especially like with what we're doing, we're moving so fast right now and I'm managing so many different things that, you know, it's, it's draining at times, right? Just because there's so much volume of it and it's never ending that I'll take a midday I'll eat and I'll go do this. And then in the evenings I have like a power down ritual kind of thing where like the whole next day planned out all my task for all my calendar, like even broken [00:05:41] spk_2: down all night thinking about correct. Yeah, that's the plan. Exactly. I'm going to bed [00:05:49] spk_1: and just go to bed Exactly. Which did not happen last night, but that's okay. [00:05:54] spk_2: Well, I suppose we should kick on off this pocket. I just want to join us. We're going to actually talk today about um a lot of fun stuff we're gonna talk about pricing because Dylan created re pricing at, which is cool. But in pricing has changed and so has reselling on amazon um lately. So that's cool. But Dylan is also working on helping people sell their products B two B wholesale. So we're going to talk about that and that's one of you know the topics that's near and dear to my heart as well. So I love that. We get to nerd out about that today if you guys want to join us in the zoom. I'm here with caramel, scott and Vlad um as well as Dylan and um and you guys can join us at cellar roundtable dot com forward slash live. We're here hanging out and I'm going to hit the recording button and we're going to get this party started. Are we ready? [00:06:49] spk_1: Let's do [00:06:49] spk_2: it. [00:06:51] spk_1: Game face. [00:06:52] spk_2: Game face. Hey, what's up everybody? This is Amy is here and my buddy and we are not is not here today. He has a sick kid. So you know, he's excused today. There's a lot of sickness going around lately but we're here with our friend Dylan carter and we're on episode 138 of the cellar roundtable. I'm so excited to talk to our old friend Dylan again and find out what he's been up to and what's going on in his world and there's some really exciting things. Um So we're going to talk today with Dylan about pricing, Like pricing is a thing, right? We've noticed it on the private label side. We've noticed it on the reselling side. So we're definitely gonna talk about some pricing trends today. We're also going to talk about setting up B2B channels, wholesale channels for your private label products. Dill is working on a special project there, so stay tuned. Let's get into it. Welcome. Dylan. Please tell us a little bit about you for the folks. Sure don't know who you are. [00:08:05] spk_1: Yeah, that was a lot of build up. I like it. I'll see if I can live up to it. Um Yeah, a bit about myself. So, it was an amazon seller for a number of years, like most amazon sellers, I started with R. A. Just to kind of test the waters right? Um I kind of wanted to just prove that it was real because I'm like, I heard it on podcasts and we'll see improved. It was real. I was like, all right, this is cool at the time. It was a full time personal trainer and I would spend every free hour I could sourcing and that was fun. But I got to a point where um with the personal training side I I decided to move away from that. Um One, it just, for me, my life always comes down to the scalability, right? So it's hard to scale your time. And I had this weird conundrum where I built relationships with my clients, but the only way to make more money was to charge them more money and that wasn't really a route I cared to go, it just felt kind of conflicting. And so I was like, you know what, I want to find something a little bit more scalable and physical products was that thing, and so I quit that, you know, triple down on retail arbitrage and then just spent 10 hours a day sourcing. Then he quickly realized, okay, it's still my time, right? Like I might be able to get sales in my sleep, but I'm still having to spend 10 hours a day sourcing and it, you know, it wasn't a whole lot less hours that I was working compared to being a personal trainer. So I was like, what's the next most scalable thing? Well, in my mind it was online arbitrage, right? I can do it from my home, like I don't have to jump around and you know, it's easier to buy and then shipped to, you know, my house and deal with everything. So it went that route and it was interesting, you know, I wasn't that great at online arbitrage if I'm being honest, um and then hit a fork in the road a major win, 1st 1st 1 in this story where I was like, okay, this is cool, but it's not something that I think I could grow into like a sustainable great business, so I need to figure out what I want to do business model wise. And so I thought, okay, I got wholesale or private label for me at the time, private label was, you know, going to cost a lot more money than I had available and it was going to test, right? It's like, I realistically had one at bat and I was like, listen, I'm paying the bills with our a right now and you know, not living lavishly. So one Abbott doesn't work for me, I need multiple. And so that's when I started to consider wholesale and I realized with wholesale, I could cash flow more quickly, right? So I could, I could be paying myself actual money in the salary within 30 60 90 days, depending on how quickly I could figure it out. And so I said a rule for myself, I said, I'm not allowed to buy inventory even if it's profitable unless it's also you gotta figure it out, burn the bridge, that's what I did. Um And you know, struggled for 3 to 4 months, It was really tough and eventually I did figure it out and grew that business where I was self sustaining, you know, it wasn't a lavish life, but you know, I at that point decided to go back to college full time as well. I had left a toxic relationship and was like, I gotta work on me, you know, So I went back to school full time actually as a finance major um at U. N. F. Did that full time while running the amazon business and it was great, life was awesome. And then I was talking with as many seven figure wholesale amazon sellers that I could find and I was like, hey, I'll pay you for your time, it's all good. And only one of them responded back and that was my now co founder James, he's like, hey, don't worry about it, let's just jump on. And jazz was like, all right, sounds good. So we started to meet once a week just holding each other accountable kind of like a mastermind, right? Just just him. And I, and initially I found out he actually had a degree in computer science and he was a full time college student as well. Um and so he kind of teased the idea of software, I'm like that sounds interesting, you know, we'll see here. And he had built out been dr crn dot com already and it was cool because you know, independently we had built our own systems for managing how we find suppliers, you know, using spreadsheets, tremolo for me. And he basically built a web application that did that but pulled in case and information, which is fantastic. And so we joined forces. We actually met on instagram, which is funny, we worked together for a year and a half on the business before meeting in person. Um and we learned a lot, We build a facebook group, we taught, we, we used to teach wholesale sourcing live for free, every Tuesday, I mean for 22 plus years I think. So we, we built up a nice audience. We, we had learned a lot. We failed tremendously on the software side because we had no idea what the heck we were doing within dr crm, it still exists, which is cool, you know, we stopped paying customers there, but uh, we decided we wanted to kind of up the ante, we wanted to take on a larger challenge and that challenge ended up becoming re pricing. We realized, you know, the area that needed a little bit more innovation um and could be done better and was within the wheelhouse that we were capable of achieving was re pricing and that's when we started working on aura. So James pretty much locked himself away. That's actually him right right back there, um, locked himself in the room for 80 hours a week for eight or nine months and built out the entire thing himself. Like I'm not an engineer, so I couldn't help, but we, you know, I flew out to his college between semesters on winter break and we launched aura Together and then I flew back and went back to two classes and yeah, so we, that took off, we've been growing that like crazy. Now we're a team of six, we gotta have our own office in boston, you know, so we're all co located here. Um, and we've got some stealth stuff I guess you can call it that we're about to launch. So it's been a lot, it's been a lot. [00:13:28] spk_2: I love it. So you're right down the road from taking metrics and [00:13:34] spk_1: so there are two blocks from my apartment actually [00:13:40] spk_2: I'm with have, you don't know, you haven't [00:13:44] spk_1: met [00:13:45] spk_2: e commerce chris. [00:13:48] spk_1: I don't think so. [00:13:50] spk_2: He, he does a conference called seller velocity. Um, and his company is e commerce chris and he is a former Amazonian and so he has a lot of connections and he helps sellers with reinstatement, suspensions, that kinds of things, account management, that kind of stuff and he's just really, really cool guy to know. So I'm going to have to make that introduced. I mean I just got a christmas gift from e commerce chris and it was honestly the coolest christmas gift that I've ever gotten from that one. And so you know, he's a good guy to know because he sends christmas gifts anyway. No, he's just a good guy to, he's been on the podcast a couple of times, a good friend of ours but I'm gonna have to make that I'm going to write it down, I'm gonna [00:14:44] spk_1: make you appreciate [00:14:45] spk_2: it because you got to know him and especially with what you're working on because I spoke with, I spoke at cellar velocity all about selling your private label products in retail stores in brick and mortar and that was a big hit. And so with the project you're working on, that would be good to go. You know, let's just talk about pricing for a moment on the private label side, pricing has actually become a thing. It didn't used to become a thing, but it just didn't used to be a thing. Um, but now amazon is starting to do competitor research and starting to look at other, like if you're selling on walmart For whatever price and then you drop your Amazon price or you raise your Amazon price. Um, you can get kind of a pricing violation alert in the skin cause problems. The other thing with private label is if you change your price any more than 2% of the last buy box price and you're not using the sale field, you can lose the buy box to yourself. People are like, well I'm the only one in the Bible. Amazon doesn't care. They're going to put you in the other sellers category and people have to click other sellers. So that's what's been going on in private label. So pricing is important in private. [00:16:13] spk_1: We can talk about that too because I think there's a lot to talk about just for that. Let's [00:16:18] spk_2: talk about it. What have you seen on that? [00:16:21] spk_1: So it's less about what I've seen and just more like what I've what I've noticed with a lot of sellers. So I've never done private labels. So take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt, please. Um I know a lot of private label sellers that do it full time. And there's this interesting issue where people, somebody will say I'm a private liberal sailor. I don't fully know what that means. Sometimes because sometimes it means you're building your own brand, it's good. Sometimes it means white labeling, meaning you took the exact same product and you threw your label on it and that's like there's no differentiation, right? So let's talk about that because that fundamental assumption is incredibly important. A brand exists. The term brand exists for a reason that's why people pay other people for brand marketing, it increases the perceived value. So here's what's interesting you have, I think a lot of people that are really doing white label, they're not really creating a company, a brand. And so [00:17:18] spk_2: taking a commodity products and they're slapping their label on it, which is white labeling an existing product. And suddenly you have many people competing for the same by box. [00:17:31] spk_1: And it's not even just that, it's like now you're competing solely on price [00:17:38] spk_2: and reviews. [00:17:38] spk_1: So here's an issue here is an issue I jumped on the podcast this morning, talking literally about wholesale pricing strategy, right? You don't just sit down and say, okay, well my cogs are this I wanna charge X. And like that's a cool gap. Like you need to think that through a little bit more strategically, especially if you want to go B two B. Now, you gotta factor in that, that margin hit, right? And that's okay. But what I find is a lot of people get a little too focused on the amazon side and they basically create a brand that is over fit for amazon, [00:18:09] spk_2: right? [00:18:10] spk_1: And that becomes a problem. Look at anchor, anchor started [00:18:13] spk_2: on amazon, [00:18:14] spk_1: correct? And you end up shooting yourself in the foot right? Anchor started on amazon and they did it right? But they also got off amazon as well, right? It wasn't just like I'm gonna be on amazon and like that's the whole shebang. I think that's a great launch thing, right? It's a great way to build a brand, get buzz, there's demand built in. You don't have to go build that out yourself. But here's the thing when you, when you transition, when you shift over from white label too, let's not even call it private label, let's just call it building a brand. That's really all you're doing when you do that, you approach things completely different. It's like what I tell people with wholesale when you just approach a brand and say, I want to give you money and buy your things and sell them good luck when you approach it as a relationship and you go more deep into the business aspects of it. The game is different. You're playing a different game, right? So a lot of people say, oh, there's so many sellers on, on amazon it's saturated. No, it's not. There's a ton of sellers but there's nobody really competing. It's a very small number and you gotta keep that in mind, [00:19:08] spk_2: control your price because you're offering something that a customer cannot get elsewhere and that something matches the pain point and that something is something you can protect. You. Now own your price point and you own your strategy um and you can build in the margin to be able to [00:19:29] spk_1: scale very quickly. You can position the brand, the product, right? So I'll give you a great example. I just brought brought, just bought a new dock kit Because I want to see a little bit smaller because I travel once a month and I'm like, I'm sick of packing a suitcase. I'm just gonna do it all. It's a weekend trip. Anyways, I'm gonna pack it into a briefcase and I was looking in, listen, there's there's a ton of private label options on there that are 12 and 15 bucks. I paid 50. Why? Because I went to, I found Bell Roy which is a brand and I could tell that the quality was good and it felt like a brand, not just some something, somebody put up, it's different. I literally think about that as a consumer. I literally paid dramatically more money for a product, it's not, it's not cost anymore. Right? That used to be the case and I don't think it is anymore. But think about what that enables brand or bell Roy to do. They can go wholesale now. It probably cost them $15 to manufacture, They're selling it retail for 50. Absolute. A retailer will say, Hey, I'll buy it and I'll make a $20 profit on it. Cool. There's, they sort of profitable margins. Right? So your pricing strategy, when you're, when you're talking about creating and bringing on a new product line needs to take a little bit more time. In my opinion, I, I see a lot of cells when, when I asked, how do they approach it? They go, oh, I see the market and then I see the price point. I'm like, I get it logically, but I think you're missing the point a lot of times, right? It's not just, well they seem to be around 20 bucks, But like what could you do to make it worth 50 and people be excited for it? That's interesting. Right? Right? [00:21:01] spk_2: And you also have to be careful with that too though because There are certain there's certain markets that, that don't do well if you're just because you're building a brand doesn't necessarily mean somebody's willing to pay $30 more for your particular toilet. [00:21:19] spk_1: So [00:21:20] spk_2: It's very important to make sure that you are, that you can actually meet that price. And what I love to tell people is look at the market price. The the you know, if I'm selling something that is, you know, a fancy coffee mug or something or a fancy water bottle, whatever, right? And if I'm selling this, I'm going to look at the market price for stainless steel. Really nice. Okay. Probably around $20 for something like this, right? And now I'm going to differentiate it in a way that matters to the customer and in a way that I can protect my brand and my price and I'm going I might go a little bit higher price. But what I want to do is I want to make it so easy for that customer to [00:22:05] spk_1: choose me? [00:22:06] spk_2: I want them to go, oh my gosh, look at that. Yeah, it's almost the same price. It's just a little bit more, but it needs my need and it's a real [00:22:17] spk_1: brand, right? It's the value relative to what I'm paying, right? [00:22:21] spk_2: Exactly. If you feel like they got with the value that they paid for that product. So, you know, if if they're unboxing experience and they get it, it's like that expectation versus reality [00:22:35] spk_1: thing, exactly [00:22:36] spk_2: what is this? It's terrible. Right? So, I love it. And how was your unboxing experience with Delroy? Was [00:22:44] spk_1: it was great. Yeah, honestly, it was fantastic. Like, at no point was was I like, paid too much for this, I was like, that's about, right? I'm not like ecstatic, it's a toiletry kit, right? But I'm like, no, that's that fits my needs. I'm good like, and I'm happy with it. And I'm glad I didn't get something cheaper because that's what I currently have. Well [00:23:03] spk_2: that you bring that up though in terms of pricing, I agree. Like so many people are the other problem that I see people do with pricing, especially when they are white labeling or private labeling, is they'll pay too much to the supplier. So they're basically shopping on Alibaba, right? And they're reaching out to all these suppliers and they're like, how much is it? That's not the conversation you want to have with the supplier and then you're immediately telling that supplier that you're a Nube and they're gonna give you a crazy price because they're not going to expect to get a reorder from you and you're going to pay this crazy price. And then I have people coming to me going, I hope I can sell it for $50. And I go, well, wait, this toiletry bag looks the same as this $12.01. What makes you think you're going to be able to sell it for 50? I don't know, I'm hoping I can do better photos [00:24:00] spk_1: okay. But the [00:24:02] spk_2: price is $12 for this type of toiletry bag, right? So that's the that's the other thing that I see people doing. So when you're when you're thinking about your pricing, you need to look at the market price, you need to look at the value you offer, you need to make sure it matters to the customer and then you need to what we do and our program is divided by seven. And if we can't source that product at scale divided by seven, then we go this is not the product for us, right? Unless it's a more expensive product, then we'll go down to like a five X. [00:24:36] spk_1: Right? Makes sense. Makes sense. But [00:24:39] spk_2: That way we have that that built in margin to not only Amazon margins now, like it's like 40% for fees and everything else. It's crazy. So [00:24:48] spk_1: but but pause on that for a moment, right? So a lot of people complain about fees and listen, I get it, I paid them a lot as well. My thing is like it's it's all about perspective, right? Like what you're really doing is you're giving amazon a B two B commission to get your sales. That's all you're really doing. So it's like if you look at um brand or a retailer Margins, it tends to be 40-60 of a markup. That sounds about right. So actually it's actually on the cheaper end of what it would be if you go B two B. But but what's interesting is we have no no qualms about saying, oh well this retailer that's brick and mortar, wants a 60% margin. Yeah, I'll pay that all day long. Wait hold on. There's no difference. The only difference is amazon can command far more demand then your average retailer cam. Yes. Well your perspective [00:25:48] spk_2: but they can't command as much demand demand as a major retailer totally different shelves. Like that's life changing money. That will make [00:25:59] spk_1: your [00:26:00] spk_2: sales look like a [00:26:01] spk_1: penny. Yeah, I mean a [00:26:05] spk_2: Lot to go to get there right, we're not just gonna start just like we did on Amazon with one product, one you know one little market. You know, we're going to start with one little brick and mortar retailer. One online retail, one small online retailer. Um So I love that. So as far as pricing goes on the, you know, you guys have the aura re pricer um what's going on? I want to know what's going on on the reseller side because I've noticed that amazon really is putting a a premium on making sure that you're a registered brand. Like if you're not a registered brand on amazon, your life is hard. You can't advertise in half the places you can't and now they're starting to really lock down brands and make it very hard for resellers. So what are you seeing in that market and how does that work? [00:27:02] spk_1: So let's on the brand registry side more on, I mean this is just everybody but like the insurance side. I think everybody kind of got caught off guard where they're like prove that you have insurance right now. And so there's a lot of anxiety. [00:27:12] spk_2: Right? [00:27:13] spk_1: Sure. So for us the the interesting thing is during covid the algorithm for the buy box kind of shifted. So you started to say okay well people can't ship things into FB. A. So that's a no go merchant fulfilled is an option. So we're gonna prioritize merchant fulfilled. So we had a lot of sellers that were basically what the strategy used to be is if you're F. B. A. And the current by box price is FDA you would either match re price below by penny. We can talk about that. Um And why? That's not a bad thing. I know it's a misconception but um if if if it was a merchant fulfilled you actually re price above by 2 to 3% and you'd be able to pull the buy box up because technically you're a better offer based at least on the shipping time right? Shipping and handling time that changed though. And covid, I mean most of our users transition from FDA to merchant fulfilled and they're like I can still offer two day shipping, I can't do it nationwide obviously but there is such thing as a regional by box yes we typically only see the one like for us because we're using the amazon M. W. S. A. P. I we only see one by box, there is no like concept of regional but they exist. And so what's interesting is um a lot of sellers once that started to shift back over in favor of FDA once once the logistics problem was was kind of solved sort of flooding inventory in. Well why would you do that? You get more distribution which means you get more access to regional buy boxes. So wholesale is a great example. If you're you know moving let's say 100 units a month on average bump it to 1 51 75 most likely you'll find as as long as you're going into new fulfillment centers, you get access to new um regional buy boxes which is super important. Right? If you look at the algorithm there it hasn't changed a ton. I mean you know the biggest thing that that we recommend and we've unfortunately had to tell a few users hey like no repressing tool can help you right now because your seller feedback is so bad. Right? So repressing is a thing where it's not a silver bullet, nothing ever is, It's a multiplier. Right? So if you have amazing seller feedback, if you have, you know goodbye cost. If you have enough skews, it's a no brainer. It totally makes sense and it's gonna pay itself off within a few days. But if you come in you're like I have to skews um I overpaid on all of them. The buy box is below my buy cost. Um and I have 20 seller feedback. Yeah I can't do anything for you. You have deeper problems, right? So like most things in business it comes down to the fundamentals right? Like it's just getting the fundamentals [00:29:41] spk_2: right where you can move the needle right? [00:29:43] spk_1: Yes. Absolutely. [00:29:45] spk_2: Okay, that makes sense. And then um the other thing that I wanted to ask, you owe something that's really cool for private label sellers and um brand registered sellers is the pricing strategy. That is a lot of fun. Is you know that big red banner that shows up over a price, That's when something is at its lowest price in 30 days. So if you guys want the banner over your over your sales you can and that can that can sometimes make a big difference. Um Just make sure you just lower the price slightly so that it's the lowest price in 30 days. Um If you're going to lower the price more than 2% of the last five box price though, make sure that you're using the sale. Um The sales field in the offer tab of your listing so that you don't lose the buy box to yourself. Um So that is something to think about in terms of pricing. Um We talked about wholesale pricing like leaving enough margin, how you should think about pricing your products in the market, awesome. Anything else about pricing um that we should know before we move on to adding a b to B channel. [00:31:06] spk_0: Thanks for tuning into Part One of this episode, join [00:31:09] spk_1: Us every Tuesday at one [00:31:10] spk_0: PM, pacific standard time for live Q and A. And bonus content after the recording at cellar Roundtable dot com, sponsored by the ultimate software tool for amazon sales and growth [00:31:21] spk_1: seller s c o [00:31:22] spk_0: dot com and amazing at home dot com. 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: Website: https://retail-empire.com/ Email: info@retail-empire.com Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_0: welcome to the seller, roundtable [00:00:03] spk_2: e commerce coaching [00:00:04] spk_1: and business strategies [00:00:05] spk_0: with Andy Arnott and Amy Wees. So you just mentioned you were selling shampoos and I think a lot of people have the misconception that their product has to be special and it has to be patented and it has to be different to sell to retail. And that was the number one thing that I learned from you that shocked me is that you can have the most basic product ever because every retail store needs stuff for their, you know, so as long as you fit into that store, but let's talk about what makes a good product for retail, what's a good product, what's a bad product? How does, how should people look at their products? Um when they're analyzing them for retail opportunities? [00:00:50] spk_1: Right, so I have, you know, I have a good example for that. Before we go to the basics, I heard someone approaching me with ceramic knives. Now we all know knives, there's so many knives out there, what's so special? So ceramic knives apparently is a little bit different from the others, although it exists, but going down to this niche, I understood quite fast that this is something that is, you know, with a huge potential in the market because it's ceramic, those ceramic knives, they cut much easier and much faster. I didn't know that I have never used that kind of knife until I met the guy and he was literally giving me samples like try it at home and see it, which was amazing. So I found that you know, it has an amazing market. So sometimes you look at your own products and saying, you know, it's not feeling special here. No, I don't think like that. But then there are principles, I have to say that like first of all, there's more excuses you have, it's better. That's for sure. If you're coming up with like 56 for seven SK us, it's gonna be hard unless unless you have something special at them now, something special doesn't have to be patent, it doesn't have to be a product that nobody has seen before. It could be the same very box that everybody else has with the same product inside. But then you have something special about the branding with crazy colors or with super boring colors, something different. Something that the market has yet to see. Okay. And if it, if it's something that the market have seen before and have seen a lot, you know, grinded products, I would call that, then you have to come up with a lot of SK us. Okay, because a lot of SK us, why am I talking about? Why am I saying a lot of sqs? Because if you look at the buyer side at the end of the day, it has limits limited sources to handle suppliers. He cannot handle like 100 suppliers. He could handle 50 or 40 or 30 depends, you know, so then if one supplier come up and gives him the solution for like 30 40 20 different sK us, that's very good for them rather than taking three different or four different suppliers for five sK us each. Right? But at the same time if if that vendor is coming and saying, you know what, I only have five sqs but look how beautiful they are, then you have something enhance. Alright now. Yeah, the looking good is like, you know, it it differs from from a brand to brand. But basically those are the terms obviously those are the principles obviously if you have patent or patent pending on your product then you have, you know, something that is easier to move in terms of not having something to special in terms of the design or branding and at the same time not having too many sK us that would be fine as long as you have, you know, again, pattern or something like that. [00:03:36] spk_0: Got it. So the bottom line is we don't have to have a unique patented product to sell. The retailer is quite the opposite. We just need to have something that fits and we need to have margin. That's the other big problem that you and I have seen when we re we have like a retail review service where we kind of review people's products of whether or not their retail ready and you guys can take advantage of that, you can go to amazing at home dot com forward slash retail and you can look at that and just fill out our form and we'll look at your product and tell us your retail ready. But the biggest thing that we see is that they're either not ready for packaging and branding because there isn't anything special that's gonna stick out on the retail shelf or we see that they might not have enough margin. Um because a lot of people are selling with just like, you know, they're sourcing it for um you know, half of what there are, they're sourcing it for wholesale prices and there, you know, it's that's really hard to to be able to have enough margin to set something up. So I love that. Okay, my last question before I turn you over to my podcast, co host. Andy over here is finding and talking to buyers. I think that's one of the biggest things that people are struggling with because they're like, okay, I just do I just fill out this online form, How do I get, how do I get to the lows buyer? I want my tool and lows, how do I talk to the, you know, the Home depot person or how do I find a buyer and and talk to them? [00:05:06] spk_1: Right, so, I mean, one of the main things that I'm saying all the time. Do not waste your time on online forms. They don't go anywhere. Just trust me on that. I know what I'm saying, I don't like, I don't want to sound, you know, whatever, but it is what it is that do not waste your time feeling that I've seen people feeling that again and again with no results. I feel those forms myself just to make sure that I'm not wrong. When I say do not do it, okay. I wanted to make sure that I'm not doing any mistake. I don't want to mislead anyone about anything, don't do it. I have an internal information from some retailers that those forms are going nowhere. If they would, you know, go to the FTP service and they could find it there. But I mean, what a buyer would go to the FTP FTP server when he has 600 emails waiting for him on his inbox. Right. Anyway, that's about yeah, the online forms, how do you get to them? I mean, linkedin is a good tool, is a great tool. I I think that linkedin in general is like, it's heaven. It's really a heaven. But you have to spend a lot of time in order to put your hands on the right person and to get him to be responsive and to get his email and eventually to get him to see your samples and order and everything. It's not something that you do in a day. It's quite, you know, quite um how would I define that? It's quite hard, just quite hard. So linkedin is one is one option and other option is yeah, obviously research in the internet of different, you know, different functions of people in in in the market. I know it sounds strange, but small retailers sometimes put their own emails on their website. It's very rare. It doesn't happen a lot, but there are small retailers. It doesn't, you know, when I say small retailers, I'm talking about 10, 20 maximum, 30 different stores. Okay. Normally they wouldn't do that. You wouldn't be able to find online, same club emails or whatever, you know, free people, uh, West L. M. Or whatever. But yeah, I mean, most of my contacts are based on, you know, history because I was moving from thing to thing. Like if I knew people in Macy's, then I was pulling, you know, um, pushing it to get some more context there when they left Macy's and they went to Nordstrom, I went together with them to Nordstrom. So we stayed in touch. That's how I built my contacts. And there are quite a lot of them out there and then there are, you know, other tools, external tools. But yeah, I mean, it's not it's not an easy thing. There's no magic in that. [00:07:42] spk_2: Yeah, Taylor, I think linkedin is a huge uh, it's super undervalued in terms of getting great connections, especially in the retail world. Um, you know, one of the things you're talking about, you know, it can be difficult, but if you put us, you know, take a couple of hours, right, A quick system for a visa from the Philippines and let you know, give them your login info, they can go out and and touch a lot of people in terms of, you know, say like you said, Costco right, is one of, is one of your target retail destinations, right? Uh, then you would go in and use linkedin search to find, you know, people in those job titles that would most affect your ability to get there, you know, to get attention there And connect with them and then just start messaging them. Uh, you know, 90% will probably not reply, but you might get one or two and, and at least get a foot in the door. So I think that's, that's, that's a really good technique and it doesn't work. You know, not only for retail, but like any type of business. Like I said, um, you know, I've been booted off of facebook multiple times and whenever that happens, I end up going super deep into Lincoln and I keep saying, I was glad that that's happened because now I've built like a massive following on linkedin, tons of great connections there. Really, the people that you're meeting on linkedin are people who are in business right there, not just like tire kickers on facebook were like, oh yeah, I'm interested in amazon retail, I'm gonna kick the tires, Oh, I, you know, I sourced this one product that was a failure and I moved on. The people on linkedin are established right? They've been doing it. Um, or at least they're, they're more serious in, in getting things done. So I think that's an, that's an awesome uh, tip there. So I want to pivot a little bit too on the more professional side of things. You were talking a little bit about like branding and packaging and things like that. But I think that that's an afterthought right? When somebody starting, especially if they started on the online world and they want to transition into retail, packaging on amazon is usually pretty basic. Um, and not very exciting. So do you suggest that people should try to start out with some really great packaging, um, and branding? Or do do you think you should prove the concept, you know, on the, on the, on the other channels and once you prove that concept, then maybe go into new iterations on, on packaging and branding. [00:09:53] spk_1: So I think here's what I think, I mean, if you're already having a brown or whatever, blank box for amazon, why don't you brand it? Why don't you do it? Something, you know better? And if you're already doing it better and becoming like, you know, day by day becoming a better, better brand or more, you know, microbial brand, then you should also keep in mind that you're gonna have retail at some point either tomorrow or yesterday or in the air. It doesn't matter. But thinking about that you might want to think, okay, is my product something that is going to be on the shelf or it's going to be hanged or it's going to be stuck, how it's going to be presented. And if it is hanged, then you would want to, you know, create an option at least for J Hook so that they can, at the end of the day being hooked. You know, Or if it, if it's not, then you have, you would want to think about what attributes you want to show on the box, on the outer packaging and everything. And that's something that is easy to do. So on your next batch on Amazon. Uh, coming to Amazon, you might want to say, Okay, I'll take whatever, 2030 pieces and I'm gonna put them in in my warehouse and their gonna be packed with the new packaging. All right. And I'm going to have them as simple as two up and ready for whatever happens for retail space. Okay, that's on that side. As for branding. I mean, I think the most basic thing and the most, you know, beginner point is to look at at colors. Now, colors is something that you can, you know, there's a color per persona or persona per color, you can find it very easily in the internet in terms of, you know, if you look at, For instance, if I'm selling like baby products, what are the colors that baby lives, right? And it's not necessarily those green, yellow and red that everybody sees on toys. There are more colors and better colors. So if you search a little bit in google, you can find those colors and they say, okay, here is where I start to build my story. I'm going to play with those Colors and I'm gonna look what is going to be the train's this year and next year. And the trends are all over Google, all over the place, trends. You can say some people are predicting for 20, Okay, so you're gonna know what's coming up next and you're gonna say, Okay, I'm building my brand on that direction. My logo is going to be related to that. My packaging is gonna be related that and obviously the website is going to be related to that. So, you know what? I'm trying to give you a quick view talking about a catalog. So this is like, this is like a typical written catalog. Not really exciting. And those products are super basic. I actually didn't didn't, I wasn't sure I'm gonna work with them because it's too basic. But we ended up doing create cells. I don't really know how it happened. But anyway, you know, the lifestyle images here are very basic. As you can see, it's a little bit, it's even like trying to be boring, okay, they're trying to be boring? But in between, you could understand And I built that, that catalog with them. Um mostly on my side. But you can see that all information that needs to be here is here. Immediately. They realized that there is colorful options on the, on the side here. And they see all the, you know, attributes that they need to see and everything in pricing and whole surprising and so forth. And if I look, but this is something casual. Okay, because these products are cardio. And if I look at the last catalog I did on my own private level, this is this was my own brand. You can see here, Dad, it's different in terms of, you know, it's trying to get you attracted all the time and it's trying to surprise you all the time. It's trying to be unique all the time. The colors are, the background is changing everything is changing all the time. There's, you know, those infographic or whatever you call it. Uh images in between and and you know, the whole focus here is showing like, I'm sorry, what did I do? I clicked something wrong here. I think I clicked something I shouldn't hold on the screen sharing is power. Oh, okay. We're good. It's [00:13:52] spk_2: recording. [00:13:54] spk_1: So anyway, the thing with that, that I was trying to say is that you have to match your catalog and your branding and your website to your products to what you saw. It could be boring. It could be exciting. It could be crazy. You know, dogs, cats, stuff like that. It has to be something funny. It has to be something like, because that's what dogs are about. That's what cats are about. That's what, you know, animals in general are about giving us good feelings. So that's what, you know, light feeling. So anyway, I think you got the point. [00:14:21] spk_2: Yeah, no, I love that. And some of the other things that, you know, people might want to look into when they're coming up with those kinds of things are industry leaders, right? You know, if you're in the technology space maybe looking at Tesla or you know, looking at people in the industry that are kind of leading on the, on the bleeding edge of design and, and, and branding and get some great inspiration from them. Um, the other thing that's I've looked into before that I think I find it super interesting is coloring in terms of driving emotion. Right? So I guess red is a very strong color when it comes to food products. Right? So like coke is red. Um, you know, a lot of red and like Mcdonald's santa [00:14:58] spk_1: claus is red. You know why santa claus is red? [00:15:00] spk_2: You [00:15:02] spk_1: ever heard the story? [00:15:04] spk_2: You [00:15:04] spk_1: know the first time they did the, the image with him and everything, it was with coca cola and since then it stayed, it stayed like white and red. I just heard this week never. [00:15:14] spk_2: You know what I might have heard that? Yeah, that's interesting. But yeah, so I mean I just searched food, retail, marketing, color red and, and I got a, you know, a bunch of articles, so just do some googling, there's some really interesting stuff in terms of psychology when it comes to coloring. Um, and, and things like that and then, you know, also like I said, check out industry leaders to, to get some really cool ideas in terms of, of forward thinking, colors and designs. Uh, you know, for like you said baby or whatever kind of niche that you're in. Um, I'd like to go back to, you know, a lot of the people listening probably are not doing retail right now. Um, and you know, don't even know where to start. So what are some, you know, major perceived hurdles, you know, when you're, when people are just starting their journey about thinking that they want to start getting into retail. [00:15:58] spk_1: So again, it's built on the six points that I mentioned, but you have to, I'll answering two points, you have to consider yourself as a micro brand. Even if you have the most basic items on earth, like whatever, you know, stupid cable to charge your phone or whatever it is, you want to look at it as a, as a brand, you don't want to look at it as a product and when you look at it as a brand, it's your own baby, you want to develop it. You said, okay, I have this cable, what else can I do? Oh, can I do a denim denim color cable? Can I do whatever Pink and red cable, you know, with lions going across it or something special? Can I just do a special packaging? Can I do something different? This is branding. Now, that's number one. Number two, I want to share with you guys that I mean the majority of my business and I'm a little bit glitch in from the, from the, from the topic. But the majority of my activity right now and that's where my business focuses on sales selling the brands like getting orders. That's where I do my money. But then at the other hand, from the other hand, I always want to see more brands in my field and I want to sell more brands because it's never enough. So what I do is I look at different brands from amazon and I'm like, you know, some of them are not really ready. And I was thinking for a long time about it until I established the service and the service I do is like taking them putting them into a to you where they are getting on one side as an online, you know, online oriented uh, brand and pulling them to the other side of the tunnel with my sources as an offline and online brand meaning I'm doing as a service, the rich already thing and why am I doing it? So I'll be able to sell more brands because if I don't do that, I will just sit there and wait for people to do that themselves, some of them would do, but some of them would not. So I'm just saying that, but you have to think and again, as a brand on your products and I don't, I wouldn't be bothered about finding contacts because you know, as long as you're heading your brand into a certain direction, you know how it is. I mean, I mean it's a little bit, a little bit strange to say it, but the universe is there and he's listening to you and saying, okay, that's where you wanna go. I'll give you the solution, you know, to open the door. Don't worry about the door. Just keep going to that direction, the doors will get open. Um, that's it. That's how it happened to me because I was like, you know, I didn't know those whole 60 retailers when I started this whole thing, they just, you know, one thing led to the other. So yeah, [00:18:29] spk_2: yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love that my wife and I are just finishing up some miracle morning and you know, and you know, things like the secret and all that kind of stuff. All that stuff. It seems really hokey and kind of weird, but a lot of it really works. So, you know, as long as it works then why not? You know, [00:18:46] spk_1: Right, [00:18:48] spk_2: so the other, the other thing I'm interested in is in terms of, you know, especially with the thing we weren't going to mention on this podcast, you know, people are all freaked out about it again. Um how is that affecting, you know, supply chain and not only that, but you know, the relationship between you and the retailers. So you know, the retailer calls you to say, hey, we want 10,000 units of, you know, widget X and you say, okay, well I'll get on that. You call your supplier. They say, oh yeah, it's going to be three months. How are you kind of, are you trying to find new manufacturers? Are you trying to find go to India and diversify your, your supply chain? You know what countries you're sourcing for kind of how are you navigating that right now? [00:19:30] spk_1: Okay. So I'm I wanted to run away from production sites so I'm not dealing with that. And I think there's so many information at least that I know that amy could give everyone about suppliers in general. It's always good to have more than one supplier. And when you get an order from retailer, that's not the point on the line where you want to start and go ahead and search for suppliers because you're gonna get, you're gonna get, it's gonna get screwed, that's for sure. You want to be up and ready when you, when you get yourself to the retailers and here's the thing if you get your foot in into retailer stores and if you do something wrong you're gonna be kicked out at least for two years and you don't want that to happen. You want everything to go smooth. So that's why you have to have a very good, you know, split chain up and ready. So I I don't want to talk that much about the supply chain because again there's so much so much information out there, especially on amazing at home that I know that is there. Um But yeah you want to have everything up and ready when you get in terms of talking about, you know the correspondence with the buyers. Most of the correspondence I would say 95% is by emails. Another, I mean it depends on the retailer but some of them are using E. D. I. Which is you know an online system that is transmitting orders and packing list and all these, you know paperwork between both sides because they don't want to count on emails if anything goes wrong. And E. D. I. Is something that also can connect from you to them and from them to their warehouse directly through the L. And everything. Um So that's the majority of the correspondence. The important thing is in the beginning until the point where you get the purchase order is to communicate properly and when I work with my vendors, I'm doing it like, you know, hand in hand with them in a matter of that. Sometimes they send an email, but normally they would show me the email before that if they're not really sure how to respond or if they respond is good. But at the end of the day, you know, it's people behind those computers and it's not, you know, it's not robots. And even if you do some minor mistakes or using, you know, some ridiculous language, which are things that is happening too happening to me with vendors, it's still okay. You can always, you know, move forward. Although that so yeah, but emails is the majority [00:21:44] spk_2: cool. So what we always like to wrap up with our some personal development, uh, you know things that you're doing right now in terms of personal development for you, you know, any books, podcasts, any, anything that you, you know, some kind of special meditation kind of just uh, you know, general life boosting that you're, you're doing right now. Anything like that [00:22:06] spk_1: on my side. Uh well the only thing I'm doing, I wouldn't call it spiritual besides praying because I'm jewel and I'm praying every morning. I think, I mean look my morning looks very very, I don't know strange to other people at least I started my morning well five am my guy is waking me up like daddy, I want to drink something. But anyway, 8:00 I'm in the gym and doing crossfit the same. Well Amy does, she's doing it at 6:00 I think I'm doing it am I'm lazy. Um, and when I'm done an hour later I'm in the synagogue for an hour. So I'm like getting, you know, I'm getting like pants right out in the morning, like getting having family first of all, then I'm having, you know, everything I need from my body, you know, getting in shape and you know, struggling with, with barbell and stuff like that. And then the third thing I'm getting the salt side from the synagogue. I'm sitting there one hour praying everything in school and then boom, I'm on my computer at 10, 10 20 yeah, that goes until well now it's 12 12 At night, so it's not, it's right, [00:23:08] spk_2: right. Yeah, I know, I don't know many entrepreneurs that, that, that aren't working, you know, late into the night. I know my wife and I are always, you know, we, we try to at least get out of the office at home and you know, sit up on the couch but where both of us are on our laptops, making calls, you know, doing emails and that kind of stuff. So I totally get that. Alright, well taylor, we've come to the end here. It's been awesome. Avenue, Thank you so much. Let people know how they can get a get a hold of you. [00:23:33] spk_1: Well there's my website, retail dash empire dot com. Uh, if you look at the website and I think amy, I believe you have the link, but does retail ready service on the left side if you wanna, if you want me to look at your, you know, brand and tell you what I think. If it's, you know, if there's an opportunity and start to communicate with me or there's also the contact me, the contact page on my site that, yeah, you can contact me in so many different ways. Very easy. I have a US number, an Israeli number. What's a telegram you name it? Wait, [00:24:06] spk_2: wait, wait. There's still people on twitter. You haven't been banned yet. [00:24:11] spk_1: Well, I'm, no, I haven't been banned yet, but I'm afraid to be so, So that's why I had to get, get our, whatever the name of that is. [00:24:19] spk_2: Get yeah. Get, get her, get her, get her. Yeah. I don't know. There's so many of these days is like a new one every day. That's, you [00:24:26] spk_1: know. [00:24:26] spk_2: Yeah. It's hard to keep up. It sounds like, uh, you know, Tiktok is the only one that, you know, you can get on and kind of get away with just about anything, [00:24:36] spk_1: right? So I don't have. Yeah. [00:24:41] spk_2: Yeah. It's, it's one of those ones where I, I guess I'm getting too old to like understand it. Right. I'm like, I don't quite get it. So that's when you know you're getting old. Hey Taylor, thank you. Thank you so much for being on. Really, really appreciate having you and um yeah we'll we'll we'll have to have you on again. I know that we could have, we could have kept going here uh because there's so much to talk about there so we really appreciate it. [00:25:09] spk_1: Yeah, something got stuck in his microphone. You're muted. Amy [00:25:12] spk_0: oh no we lost Andy, I don't know what happened that was okay. Well good thing that I am recording this session and you know, thank you everyone for being here on the seller roundtable. We're gonna hit stop on the recording and the live stream and um thank you guys so much for reviewing, rating and subscribing. We love you guys, thank you for your votes in the cellar pole. We appreciate you so much and we'll see you guys next week on the civil roundtable. Bye everyone. [00:25:45] spk_1: Bye everyone. Thank you. [00:25:47] spk_0: Thanks for tuning in, join us every [00:25:50] spk_2: Tuesday at one PM Pacific Standard time for [00:25:52] spk_0: live Q and A. And bonus [00:25:54] spk_2: content after the [00:25:55] spk_0: recording at cellar roundtable [00:25:57] spk_2: dot com, [00:25:58] spk_0: sponsored by the ultimate [00:25:59] spk_1: software tool for amazon [00:26:00] spk_0: sales and growth seller S C. O dot com and amazing at home dot com 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: Website: https://retail-empire.com/ Email: info@retail-empire.com Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_1: Welcome to the seller [00:00:03] spk_2: roundtable e commerce coaching [00:00:04] spk_0: and business strategies [00:00:05] spk_1: with Andy, Arnott and Amy Wees, hey, what's up everybody, this is Andy are not with And this is seller round table # 137. We are super privileged, excited, ready to go with Taylor offered. Taylor, thank you so much for being with us today. [00:00:24] spk_0: Thank you for having me today. How are you doing everyone? [00:00:27] spk_1: Yeah, it is awesome to have you here. Um you know, Taylor, you have been my retail mentor for years now and we've done a lot of great things together and I'm just honored to have you on the seller roundtable here with Andy and I and um, you know, we're excited. You have an incredible story, but we always start off the show by asking you to give us a blood sample or whatever, you know you as much or as little as you want to tell us about, about you, tell us about you, your background, where you're from. You know, we require not only a blood test but a negative Covid test as well. You have to have that to be honest. I started, oh, we can talk about that later. I can go all day with that taylor. We have to put my tinfoil hat on, we can talk all day. [00:01:21] spk_0: Yeah, definitely for hours. That's the most smokable spoken topic on earth right now. Right Anyways, um, let's let's forget about Covid for at least for an hour if we can, we'll try our best to do so, but it's hard because it's like related to everything, but anyway, I'll start from the, from the end and then I'll go back to the beginning because I just, I'm just trying to do it more interesting in terms of how how I present myself and and you know with the time being a guest in in several podcasts, all of them, we're at the end of the day made by Amy because she was like, you know, introducing and doing the whole stuff for me. So as much as she's calling me a retail mentor, which I don't allow her, but she still calls me like that because I don't like the term mentor, I see her as a general mentor for me for so many things, so thank you for that in that chance Amy. Um so right now I'm working with a different uh a bunch of retailers in the USa mainly for the physical stores. I do also other channels as well and I'm selling like various different brands, the majority of them are actually amazon brands um or e commerce brands. Um we will explain later how that happened, but going back to the beginning of, you know, speaking about myself who really I am uh you know I have this very strong memory um I think it was, I don't know well quite a lot um quite quite many years ago when I was at about six years old or seven, something like that and my father was doing like he was dealing with education in schools. He was running schools and stuff. And we've been living in a school that is like internal one where you know that the students are sleeping in the school and we had volunteers coming from the U. S. A. They were coming you know to to learn about the country and the culture and so forth. All I knew that we have americans in this you know school and the school was home for me because we were literally living inside school because again it's like you know a small village. Um so anyway my father comes one day and says you know it's almost summer vacation by now and you have two options. Either you just spend your time doing nothing in the vacation and watching tv or you know hanging out with your friends or if you want you can work and earn money and I was like oh I want to work, I want to make money. And I was like six years old. And then he goes you know I thought about it, I think I'm gonna open like a small kiosk, you know a small store like grocery store or whatever you call it. And we're gonna sell some you know basic stuff to those american volunteers and two others as well. But mainly we're going to target them. What do you think about that. So I was like yeah dad I want that, I want that to happen. So in like no time he opened it in like a few weeks and then on the first day that it was open I was literally sitting there six years old knowing zero english and I was supposed to sell a lot of chocolates and and coke and sprite and stuff like that to americans, I don't speak the language, I don't know what's happening, not to mention that, I don't know numbers, I mean they could fool me all around but you know these were different days, not like unlike today but anyway that's where I started my my business road as far as I see it because I was like learning english and I was learning how to sell and how to communicate plus and that's the biggest I think thing like an um asset that I took from there is that I learned my english because if you, if you roll forward in my life and I was in school and I was quite doing quite good but the only thing I wasn't doing pretty much is going to english um you know english lessons because I thought like okay I know english, I don't need to learn that and indeed, I mean my english is not wow but it's quite good enough you know to manage in my life and it's funny because I never learned english in school only in that store anyway we were running that story for years and years. Yeah so moving forward the I did like the normal the road that we're doing back here in Israel. I live in Israel. I stay in tel Aviv that's my hometown. I was traveling around I think 12 years traveling plus living in different countries. I was living in China for seven years and Japan three years in Spain and the states and so forth. Um And yeah, I mean I was rolling um somehow into retail because when I got to, to to China and I was just coming you know, for a few days just to find a factory that was 2003. I think I was just searching for one factory for bags and then I ended up staying there for seven years because I was like you know, I was looking at what I'm seeing and I was like oh my God everything is here. Like this is this is like this is the gold, it's here [00:06:02] spk_1: and where were you in china at the time? Where did you live in china? [00:06:06] spk_0: I was living in Guangzhou. I don't want to say bad words about Guangzhou but I do have a lot of bad words because it's like it's one of the roughest place to live in. It's really, really tough, especially back in those days. I mean now it's a little bit more like shanghai in Beijing. But back in those days it was like you know and I it's hard to imagine because one million factories were existing only surrounding Guangzhou, not inside the city and inside the city you had a lot of you know pirates uh factories unregistered and stuff. So think about it, how much pollution and how much mess in the city. Anyway, I was somehow engaging with with a friend and he was working with big labels in the States, he was doing private label for walmart and he was doing for BCBG, he was also doing um darien jeans who was still belonged to Beyonce. Um So I was joining him and I started you know to learn how you do the little stuff because I knew about production because I was doing production even before that when I was living in Japan, I was producing in other countries in Thailand and Korea and so forth. But then I had you know my big lesson of how all right, you can produce, you can do everything uh in terms of the production and and and supply chain, but what about the selling side? Um So that's where I think [00:07:29] spk_1: people would say if you're, if you don't sell your nothing right? Because you can you can make products all day long but if you can't sell them then you're still stuck. Right. [00:07:37] spk_0: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I was coming actually from the sales part because what I was focusing on Japan was actually the cells not the production, the production was a side issue. It wasn't even an issue, you know, especially when I worked with Korea was much easier than than the chinese one, it was more expensive but much easier anyway, so I learned how to do the business with those retailers and I learned a lot and then rolling to 2000 I think 67 more or less, I started my own private label at the same time and I was doing electric items and I was selling them at Canada and Usa to Costco mainly. Um And then rolling again to 2010 I got back to Israel with my wife which I got to meet in China and she's literally living like 15 minutes from my house here in Israel but we met in China, it's funny like so anyway I just a side side note I offered her um a week after we met and to be honest with you I had at the same day we met we sat down and we were talking for like five hours I think and I was at the end of that I was like looking at her and and saying like you know I have something to tell you but I'm gonna wait for a week until I say that, I don't know why I said that. But anyway a week later I proposed her and and yeah, so anyway we got married [00:09:06] spk_1: a [00:09:07] spk_0: month, a month after that we were married in Israel anyway I got back to Israel and I thought you know I'm gonna travel obviously back and forth to the States and to china because of my business and everything and then I started to build a few other brands um and during those about 67 years between 2010 and 2017 I worked with approximately I guess 50 to 70 different retailers in the States, more or less we're talking about Macy's and target in Costco and obviously walmart a little bit, I don't like walmart that much but anyway no strong Neiman Marcus, you name it um [00:09:43] spk_1: Cbs your cbs, funder, Officemax, I've seen your, I've seen your invoices, I [00:09:54] spk_0: cannot mention all of them but right yeah definitely your [00:09:59] spk_1: your retail invoices make our amazon sales look [00:10:02] spk_0: sad, [00:10:05] spk_1: come on, [00:10:07] spk_0: I'm jealous of you guys, I mean you did the right step obviously but then you know I was I was looking at those, you know amazon things and e commerce things when they all started bucket I think 2000 and eight um and I even had a dinner and I had a good relationship with the made in china dot com owner, they were supposed to be the second alibaba but alibaba went you know super becoming a super high end, not high end but super successful company while made in china just went down and down, I don't know why but anyway Lawrence was one of the owners and I was in a good relationship with him but I couldn't, I couldn't get myself into read into the online thing because I was like all about retail because that's, you know, you know how to say, but you do something and you want to do it good, you have to go deeper and deeper rather than just, you know, spreading all around and you know, starting to do different things and then you don't, there's no like no focus anyway. So 2017, my last brand that I did, which was wearable tech accessories, was not really relevant anymore because like a lot of vendors came in and a lot of things happened. So I was like, all right, let's let's, you know, let's just close it step by step, Everything is good. We'll see what happens. Uh, and I really, I was wondering what's going to happen next because I have all these connections with the retailers and I want to use them. But I don't, I really wanted to produce because I also got tired from china. So luckily a few amazon sellers approached me hearing about me from other friends saying, hey, we have this beautiful products and we want to sell them in retail and we know that retail is huge. So we don't know how to sell them and who to talk with and all this stuff. You have any money, any idea about that. So I was like, yeah, sure why not. So I started to realize that there was a lot of potential with online sellers because when I was doing what I was doing and they were doing, you know their own online platforms, it doesn't matter amazon or Shopify whatever it is, they were learning the same thing that I was learning about supply chain, they know how to handle the chinese, they know how to do branding, at least basic one, they know how to pack the product, they know how to defer it from what is in the market, they know the language like it's it was the same language that I was speaking and I had no one to talk with about with that language until all the amazon seller came and in 2018 I was starting to expose myself to more sellers and I was like oh my God wow, there are so many of them out there. I I didn't have any idea about it. You know I wasn't, I mean I I never thought about it like what do I have to do with amazon and apparently a lot of brands, I just took them and started to see how I help them to become rich already brand because we'll talk about rich already, but just in general and in short if you want to sell your products, you have to be rich and ready if you're not really ready they're gonna smell oh this is an online vendor and they're afraid when I say they, I mean the retailers okay buyers, whatever title you choose by your assistant, it doesn't matter, there's like general merchandise officers and many different talents. But anyway, what they try to smell in the very first place, when you approach them is what what exactly is this company doing? Okay? They are showing us nice products, they look good, but then do they understand what it takes to be in retail? And that's, you know, something that I felt strongly. And it's funny because last week I got an email from ST club and I presented them a line and I was moving from bio two bio because I didn't have contact with a certain category, I needed a kitchen category and when I ended up finding the right person, she was like, the first question, she was like, hi, can you tell me who are you working with? Only in the brick and mortar? And she was like bowling that. And then she was putting on this side note, not on amazon, like I don't care what you do in amazon, show me what you're doing the brick and mortar and was like, oh my God, this is what I'm talking about for years, this is exactly and she, she nailed it in one sentence. She was a little bit rude, but I forgive her as long as she's giving me business. Uh so [00:14:05] spk_1: so I think that's what we have to focus on today is you know, it's it's all culminated to this is you know, you have this language that we online sellers, for the most part don't speak unless you teach us, right? But the the retail, brick and mortar wholesale sell your products wholesale language is different than the language we speak on online, right? And, and the business model is slightly different as well, because the pricing is different, the logistics are different. Um, but as you mentioned, the production is mostly the same. So, um, I think that we should talk about what are those key differences. So, in terms of, um, you know, if I'm selling online and I want to move my products [00:14:57] spk_0: to [00:14:58] spk_1: other channels, and and my next question is, what are those other channels? But if I want to move off of the amazon besides Shopify, right, we're talking about all the dot coms were talking about subscription boxes, we're talking about brick and mortar channels. Were talking about all of retail that isn't amazon, which is like 90% right? Not amazon and not dot com. So, you know, if I want to do that, what are the key things that people need to be focused on at a high level? [00:15:28] spk_0: Alright, so the way, thank you for the question. So the way I see it, and again, I'm not taking myself as a mentor or anything like that, and by the way, I'm trying not to do coaching or to teach anyone because I find that as a service, it's much easier for both sides. So six points is what I see as something that you need to consider. And to look at when you go to retail. It doesn't really matter if you go with me or with someone else or by your own. It doesn't really matter. And I encourage people to do so. And that was six points are points that I, you know, it's the way I see it from my experience. But most points, not most, all of them are being spoken all the time in the retail space. So the first thing, the first topic you will have to look at is branding. And I divide branding to mainly two things. Number one is your website and number two is your catalog. Now, the majority of us do not have any catalogs. So then you say, okay, catalog, no big deal. I'll create a catalog. But then there are, you know, certain principles that you want to have in that catalog. Now, it's very hard to find. I didn't manage to find until now an example of how a retail catalog looks like. And I was looking like insane for that online because I thought, let me try to refer to this as if I was an online seller. And I don't know what is written. I wanted to see how it looks from the other side. So, I was looking for the basics, right, for a retail catalog to show me an example. Let me find an example how that catalog looks like. And I'll do something creative, but I'll at least know what I should have tourists, right? Um, and I couldn't find, I couldn't find, I was doing a lot of different tests. I was trying to trigger and find like, you know, private label, good companies, very small one micro brands not huge. So that I could maybe, you know, trace their catalogs somehow. Nada, nothing. It's all happening, you know, under the ground. That's how it is. It's insane. Anyway. It's not it's not a bible. It's not, you know, something huge. But there are principles. You need to know both about the website and the catalog. We'll get to that later if you want. But then moving forward to the other four points. Then you have the brief and the brief is a term that I'm using for years to describe. How do I describe my brand now? I don't want to come up and say for instance, if Amy is my buyer and she's working at, let's say Williams Sonoma. I don't want to write her an email. Hey Amy, how are you doing? Can you check my, what do you think about those products that I have here. Do you like them? You want samples? No, it doesn't work like that. You have to talk at some kind of, you know, you have to give some kind of presentation and you want to give it, not about, you know, not about the products you want to give it about the brand, you want to explain in a very short sentence that this is a brand, like a micro brand, rather than just another company selling products importing and selling. Okay. And we all know the difference. The difference is branding, the differences, you know the mindset. The difference is that you don't buy from the chinese companies, factories, whatever a product and wrap it in in a shrink and just put it on your warehouse in the States, you're doing something different. That's why we have this amazing term that I love called rise of the micro brands, because most of the people who are selling on amazon or online in general are actually part of the rise of the micro brands. So yeah, the brief is another thing, Number four, we have to look at the packaging when you walk into a store, Doesn't really matter what store Bloomingdale or urban outfitter, you look at the products, some of them are naked on the shelf, That's right. But most of them, in most cases they're gonna be packed in a package. Now, if you are sending on online and you have whatever poly bag in your warehouse for your product, it's fine because nobody, nobody knows, nobody cares. As long as they get the product, when they get it, they already know what they're getting. That's what I'm saying. Well, when you walk into the store and you look at the product and if you see a box like that, normally you wouldn't know what's inside. Right? If there's no picture of the product here, for instance, you wouldn't know what it is. And even if there is a picture it has to be a very certain picture for a person to understand in a second what is inside. So the thing is, [00:19:47] spk_1: most amazon sellers just have like a brown box or white box or it's very it's it's not something that you could just put on the shelf and a lot of times it's meant just to protect the product and shipping. And so that's that is a big consideration. Right. [00:20:03] spk_0: Right. Exactly. So that's the packaging part. Again, we can go into details but I want to go through the six points in general for for the time being. Uh and the the other two points are actually kind of going together. So number one uh number five, I'm sorry is the research, like if I look at the product that I want to sell the brand. Okay, and I'm seeing your brand Isaac Jessica scott, caramel, Christine Vladimir, I'm looking at your brand and I'm thinking okay, I want to sell it. I know that it's good for retail now. How do I know what's happening in the retail space before I start selling it, I have to make a research now, I have to know who is my competitors, that's number one and number two, I want to know the competitors from the offline physical stores area, not from the online because these are two different platforms. I mean, I mean, yeah, when, when TJ Marks is buying goods that are buying it on one in one team, in one purchasing team for both online and offline. But they are kind of unique because if you look at Macy's, they have separated teams for the online and offline and singles for the most to most of the retailers, they're trying to separate, I mean, they do buy for both platforms, the same products, but not exactly there. Yeah, difference. Uh So that's the research we're looking for. We want to know what is our competitive competitor are doing in the offline side and that goes to the second to the six point, which is the last one, which is pricing, we want to know how to price our goods. Now, Amy knows pretty well about pricing, like normally MSR which is the retail price, the price you have an amazon uh is something around doubled in the wholesale price, meaning if you're selling a product for $50 msrp p $50 to the consumer on your amazon listing, then We start to calculate from $25 as a wholesale price. OK. We start, it depends on what, with what retailer we're talking with. So for instance, just for the for the example, TJ Marks are paying 25 of em srp up to 30 30 30%. Okay 30% out of $50 you can you're gonna get in somewhere into 15, around 14 $15. Now if your cost landed in. Usa for instance is $18 then you have no chance to work with DJ right? You're not gonna lose money anyway. If you look at Macy's they're working 50%. So you're gonna get 25% for 50% $50. Uh $25 or $50 product. And if you're looking at Neiman Marcus for instance, they work somewhere between 35 the lowest up to 60% I. M. U. Which is um initial markup. That's how they mark up the product. So at the end of the day you're gonna sell it for around 40 to 50 more or less off your M. S. R. B. Again it's deferring, it's it's different from from retailer to retailer bed bath and beyond are doing it's simple to just walk half an srp what I'm trying to say is that when you when you come to the table to them, you want to know the price up front. You don't want to give them price. That would be far from what you can get or far from what they would pay. Right? You want to be somewhere almost into the target as higher as you can as high as you can. So anyway that goes with the research because if I know how the pricing goes and looks like should look like I have to look at the at the at the research as well because if I find in the research that someone is selling much lower than me and I know more or less what's his whole surprise and I'm trying to to offer it for like 20% more than what am I doing here. If I have something special that's different. If I have a patent product or something super well designed, okay, it's different. But if I had more or less the same thing, I have to think, you know, strategic wise, I have to think about the right pricing and not to lose the buyer or the other side. So those are the six points. My answer is I [00:24:03] spk_1: love it. That's that's great. Six points to consider. Um So we gotta have the right website, we gotta have the right catalog, we need to have a brief understanding how we present ourselves to buyers. We gotta have packaging that is retail ready. And we need to do the research of our how our competitors products look in that store because we're not going to pitch a buyer without understanding how we can fit in their store. And we got to understand the pricing because we're gonna need to give them a quote and we don't want to be losing money. So we've got to we've got to look at it so that we can price it so where we're making money but we're also offering something competitive for them if we're selling bluetooth speakers and there's already a bluetooth speaker on the market that's taking up most most of their shelf space and we're not doing anything special, we're stuck. Right? So, um, that's, that's really, we gotta, we gotta have somewhere where we can edge ourselves in and that's why after all that, we've got to do the research and the right pricing. So love that. What about retail channels? Let's talk about. I think so many people just assume, you know, you mentioned you worked with CVS, Costco, Neiman, Marcus, Macy's, all the, all the brick and mortar channels. But what I've learned from you, um, is that there are so many cool channels you can sell in like gypsy, for example, a subscription box that you introduced me to That has like three million subscribers and their minimum order quantity is like 50,000 units. I don't think that people even realize, um, what this could do for their brand. Imagine getting an order. And I've seen, like I said, I've seen your invoices. So imagine getting an order of over $100,000 that comes straight from your supplier or come straight from your warehouse in the US if you're working with a smaller retailer, um, that's, it's just, it's really good. But let's talk about all the different channels, what are some of your favorite channels to to sell it. [00:26:01] spk_0: Okay. So yes, as you just explained like subscription box is a channel and it's a huge channel. We have to keep in mind that the retail space in general, all of those special channels on normal channels or whatever you call them, apart from the online, there are More than 80% of the market, the written market in the states, in the USA. Okay. And I'm looking only in the USA because obviously that's my market and, and that's it's huge because if you're selling, you know to 10 15% of the market and you're doing good, what would happen if you multiply that by 678. Alright. So anyway, uh, yes, subscription boxes are something very good because they have subscribers and for those who are not sure what is a subscription box, It's just companies that are sending monthly or do a weekly a box of gifts inside a box to like hundreds and thousands and millions of subscribers. Okay. On the top of them, you have tipsy and you have all true and you have a glossy box. And, and literally, I'm working with the top five or six, I think on the, what they do is they have those subscribers and they're selling them gifts. And that is based off demographic. Like it's not just, you know, if you amy would be signed to, let's say a gypsy and they would think that you are, I don't know, at that age and that gender, that, you know, certain type of person. Uh they would send you the wrong stuff that they're doing their homework and they know exactly how to catch what you like. So there's a whole thing about it. And if you open youtube and you click unboxing subscription, only those two terms, you would see tons of millions of videos with billions of views because it's, it's a big thing in the States at least. And I'm seeing that it's coming up in other countries as well. Um, I just had this email, I just was looking at it as you spoke about quantities. I can show screen. Um, Just to give you a quick idea. This is an email from Lindsay, she's from ultra. It's a very nice subscription boxes she's describing what's happening on 20 2022. This is from uh january 3rd, it's from yesterday, um, partner opportunities. So they have between 220,000 units as the one opportunity and then they have the deliveries, whatever in 23 months, you don't have to deliver it tomorrow. Obviously they give you time to prepare to produce whatever you need, budget and everything, how it works. Again, um, they give you like, typically they would give you one P. O. For one date and and they divided, like as a blanket order for 67 or sometimes even eight different dates, but at the end of the day, again, it's between 20,000 and 100,000 units. Typically with this company, with other companies, it's even more, I've seen much more than that in terms of quantities, but that's one channel to another channel is the dot com. Like if you look at the top 10 dot com channels in the states, obviously you're selling in the, in the number one amazon dot com, but then you have walmart, which again, walmart is not my field. I have to say that. I mean it's there's a lot of, you know, very talented people who is doing specifically with walmart. That's not, I'm not the address for that. I can work without walmart online. It's not a problem for me because I know the offline buyers, but it's not something that I uh [00:29:22] spk_1: well, and on walmart dot com, it's, it's just like amazon, it's third party fulfillment where your other dot coms like close dot com Home Depot dot com. A lot of those channels, Macys dot com there, you're selling your products wholesale to a buyer. It's, they're still doing the, the old fashioned. Uh, well, I don't want to say old fashioned, but the, the traditional brick and mortar side of things for the most part and some of them are moving over. I know like recently Home Depot and Lowe's Move to that 3rd party fulfillment as well. But for the most part, the top what 50 retailers in the us top 50 brick and mortar retailers also have websites. [00:30:03] spk_0: Right? And they buy and they and they shipped as exactly as you mentioned. And again yes home people is now doing the third party seller thing. And also um Macy's they also have that thing uh TJ Maxx, no T. J Maxx Marshalls HomeGoods I think even Tuesday morning I don't recall for sure. But most of these you know low end, I would say low end price or discounters, they would not do that. They would just buy from you and sell it on their own channel, the dot com and the offline as well. So this is like another block. Um Another another thing you have is like media and tv. I'm saying media because there's different opportunities in the market but if I focus on the T. V. Which is the main thing uh there are tv segments and I'm not talking about you know um those channels where they sell you 24 7 products. I'm talking about different stuff. For instance there's a show and let me know about that show because I'm talking about it a lot because I've been doing fun with them. Uh There's a show called Good Morning America in abc channel in the States. Quite known by Tory johnson. I happen to know her assistant were in a good relationship. So I'm showing her products from time to time and inside this um show Which is I think I think it's going to somewhere around the crowd. Yeah it's something around 100 5200 and 70 million in the States which is quite, you know huge in terms of how many people is gonna are going to see your products. And anyway, in that Good Morning America there's like a segment called deals and steals. There's another segment called The View and there's a third one. I don't recall the name. But anyway, showing your products in those in those segments is gonna bring you crazy traffic and you're gonna sell products in like crazy numbers in no time. Okay. It's [00:31:51] spk_1: and Q. B. C. As well, right? [00:31:53] spk_0: You have right write Q. B. C. A. Just sent us a lot of them. But I'm just talking about those that I constantly work with. Okay. I used to work with Q. B. C. I lost contact from some reason with them. But then yeah, with the Good Morning America is still going on. It's going good. Um, so this is another channel. Obviously there's also the traditional channel, which we spoke about quite a lot again, Amy and Me, which is the moms and pop stores. When you say mom and pop stores, um, Some people call it specialty stores in the States. You're referring to a standalone store, like a family store. You know, that's why they call it moms and Pops like mommy and Daddy has a store, they go in the morning, they opened the store, they sell toys, they sell gifts, They say whatever. It's a cute story. It's not a change story, you're not talking, you know to something huge. But the good thing about those, those stores that if you collect whatever, 102 3, 400 of them and each and one of them is ordering typically between five $100 to $3,000 a month because that's normally what, you know, they can scale. We'd then you have a nice business with them. And the good thing about them is that they have different payment terms, payment terms I guess is another question Amy is going to ask me at some point. So anyway, they're paying, they're paying cash before delivery. Okay. Cash before delivery means you can charge their credit card or bank wire or whatever it is. But they pay before they get the goods. And that's normal in terms of mom and pop stores, unlike the returners, [00:33:22] spk_1: which is next. So like they're paying you for your product wholesale price plus they're paying you for shipping and they're paying you up front. So all you're doing is delivering a pallet of goods to them or a couple of cases of products to them. And that's, it's just, it's wonderful to work with them because it's a very easy deal. You can get on the phone, you can call them up. Hey, you know, I've got a great product for you, send them a catalog, get in order that same day, ship it out and they pay for shipping. So it's it's a great versus like a big box retailer where you're gonna, there's a different payment terms. There's sometimes you have to wait for that payment. Sometimes there's different contracts, everything's negotiable as I've learned from galore, but but no matter what I mean, there's I looked just in my region, in the south region for pet stores and stores that sell independent retailers that sell um Pet supplies. And there was over 10,000 just in my region. So if I just go for if I cast a net just for 10% of those stores, right? You know, that's a significant income if I can, you know, multiply, like you said, you have yourself a nice little business if you're if you're supplying a few of these stores on a regular basis. [00:34:37] spk_0: Um [00:34:39] spk_1: So I love that. Okay, so we've got subscription boxes, we've got other dot coms. We've got um, Mom and Pops, and then of course we have chains and big box. Right? Um Anything else you want to say about channels before? I mean, there are [00:34:58] spk_0: more channels, but I just try to focus on on the interesting one. There's also flesh sites that you can do a nice business with and some other, you know, local wholesalers and it depends what you're saying, because I'm seeing [00:35:10] spk_1: distributors, right? Yeah. [00:35:16] spk_0: Yes. Sorry, I'm starting I started to sell a brand, which is like, you know, selling quite basic stuff, you know, shampoo and and stuff like that for the shower and and face treatment and stuff and all of a sudden I don't know from worse someone from my team came up with selling to Herod's and I was like what do I have to do with Herod's? They don't buy such things but it turned out that they do okay. So you have to think what I do think is trying to encourage people to think wider. Don't just think about you know only amazon or only retail or only both or whatever. It's open your mind. There's so many different businesses that might be good for your products. Sometimes you even miss that you don't even think about it and I'm I'm you know I'm struggling with the same thing, I'm like standing with my brands out there and thinking like where else could I sell? What did I not think about until now And I always find that there are more opportunities in channels selling schools selling kindergartens selling like you know there's so many options with different products out there in the market so just open your mind. Thanks for tuning into part [00:36:21] spk_1: one of this episode, join us every [00:36:23] spk_0: Tuesday at one PM Pacific [00:36:25] spk_1: standard time for live Q. And A. And bonus content after the recording at cellar roundtable dot com sponsored by the ultimate [00:36:32] spk_0: software tool for amazon sales and [00:36:34] spk_1: growth seller S. C. O. Dot com and amazing at home dot com 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: Website: ecomcfo.co Email: sam@ecomcfo.co Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_1: Welcome [00:00:02] spk_0: to the seller roundtable e commerce coaching and business strategies [00:00:05] spk_1: with Andy Arnott [00:00:07] spk_0: and Amy [00:00:07] spk_1: Wees, Hey everybody, what's up. Welcome to the seller roundtable episode number 136 and this is Amy lease and Andy or not is moving houses today. So he's out today. But I'm here with my friend Sam Hill from com CFO and I'm so excited to talk about what we're going to talk about today because as I was talking about on the livestream before we hit the record button, you know, we often on this podcast have talked about, you know, things we need to figure out with our business in terms of accounting. We've talked about, we've talked about profit. First, we've talked about those types of things, but we haven't gotten into the weeds about what it means to have a CFO in your business and to really scale your business to that level and what you need to be paying attention to. These are things you need to know now before you scale before or as your scale and maybe you've already scaled maybe you're already in the seven figures and you don't have a CFO. Well maybe you should. So we need to talk about that today and I'm so excited to have my friend Sam here. Sam Welcome. [00:01:28] spk_0: Thank you so much for having me AMy. This is, this is awesome. [00:01:31] spk_1: It's great to have you. I'm stoked. So we always start our podcast by finding out a little bit more about you. So you know, you can give us a blood sample or your entire life history, whatever you prefer as much or as little as you want. But let's talk about how you ended up here on this podcast today. [00:01:51] spk_0: Yeah I just did a food sensitivity test. Uh My first one a couple of weeks ago and uh found out I was sensitive to chicken cinnamon and bell pepper. So there you go. But yeah my name is Sam Hill. I run um Aecom CFO we do outsourced CFO bookkeeping and bill pay services for e commerce brands specifically. Uh EECom CFOs two years old. Uh And before that I was just a general consultant for e commerce companies. Uh Some sass cos I did some real estate work and kind of a hodgepodge and really fell in love with e commerce and um it was a great cultural fit with all of my e commerce clients and that's honestly how becomes CFO. Was born before that I sold my soul a little bit to corporate America and was working in Pricewaterhousecoopers and their mergers, mergers and acquisitions practice working on like multi billion dollar deals. And I wanted to try and do those multi billion dollar deals for myself and for my clients. So um I left been on my own ever since and I've been absolutely loving it. [00:03:05] spk_1: So it's interesting that you were more of a general consultant before and what I guess. So that's what you said you you said you kind of saw some of those big deals come through and you were like, wow, this is what it takes to get a big deal, like I wonder if I can help other people do that. Is that what really inspired you to start Aecom? CFO? [00:03:28] spk_0: Yeah, absolutely, I mean, I just um I got to the point where I wasn't passionate about Coca Cola's earnings per share increasing by 10 cents every quarter. I wanted to feel like I actually had an impact on businesses and real people and so um when I left PWC and went out on my own, as you mentioned, I started doing general consulting finance and operations work and when I looked back at all of the businesses that I had touched e commerce, just really spoke to me because I feel like there's so many levers uh in the e commerce world that finance has traditionally not been a part of, because e commerce has been a little bit of Wild West, let's figure it out. How do we like configure the, our game, the amazon algo, or how do we launch this new product on Shopify or something? And frankly finance people don't start e commerce brands, generally speaking, the really smart marketers and product and operations, people generally start e commerce brands and finance, just kind of like we'll figure it out when we make it. And um so I, I just saw so much opportunity to add value in the commerce space and um wasn't as passionate about sass and real estate and, and I just really got along with all of my e commerce clients and yeah, it's been great, [00:05:00] spk_1: I think it's so interesting because something you brought up, I don't think we typically think of CFO when we think of these smaller micro brands and um, you know, e commerce brands, we don't really think of big money deals like that, but as you grow and as we see our aggregators doing right there, raising money there, you know, and cash flow is something that all of us realize as we grow and scale our brands is a major issue that has to be dealt with, and it's just like not hiring people ahead of when you need them and ending up just, you know, being stuck in your business. I feel like finances the same way, you know, you, you you don't figure out your cash flow ahead of time, you need inventory to fill orders and you're just, you're just stuck and you get stuck in this loop and it prevents you from growing. So I'm excited to learn from you today about some of those things that brands that are utilizing CFO services like yours are doing and they're getting ahead of those problems that some of the rest of us who aren't even realizing that, you know, this is even a possibility for us are struggling with, right? I know for me [00:06:18] spk_0: it's [00:06:19] spk_1: constant, it's like, you know dealing with and helping clients as well, you know there are always trying to deal with cash flow issues and with just trying to stay ahead of their growth and that's I think so so important. Something that we have to master, so I'm excited to talk with you about that today. [00:06:40] spk_0: Yeah and and we should view we should view finance the same way that we do all the functions in our business, whether it's HR marketing or operations, like the the complexity of that function should be pretty directly correlated to the level of complexity of the business and level of scale overall. Like if you're just launching a product on amazon and you're selling you know a couple of $1000 of product per month, you're not going to go hire a full time operations manager, you're not gonna hire an an HR manager and you're not going to hire a full time marketing person. And so you shouldn't be hiring a full time finance person either. Like the business just doesn't support that and there's not as much complexity uh to support that. So the level of all of these functions should align with the scale and complexity of your business. And I think that's some of the issues that I've seen um with other clients is either they you know they wait too long, it's like oh we should have done this a year ago or even sometimes I think um hiring someone a little too early and I think I think that that does exist um because you have to have some foundational knowledge of yourself and and understanding what's going on to make a relationship with someone like us that much more fruitful. [00:08:06] spk_1: Yeah, that makes sense. So let's just start at the beginning, can you define what a CFO is in terms especially in terms of an e commerce business? [00:08:18] spk_0: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean you hear so many different names and titles of people in finance or accounting getting thrown around. And I think it's super important important to define these terms. You have, you know accountant, you have bookkeeper, you have maybe a financial analyst have a CFO, you have maybe a tax accountant or a tax attorney. All these people do different things and some of them overlap and some of them don't. And I think starting at the lowest level of a bookkeeper, a bookkeeper is primarily responsible for the transaction level. They're not asking anything of the data, they're just producing the data and making sure that uh banks are reconciled and generally stuff lines up in quickbooks or zero or whatever you're using. Then you've got uh an accountant which an accountant may or may not be C. P. A. Um But generally the accountant is asking some, they're asking more questions of the data and some but not all accountants will also do your taxes. Uh But I think it's it's important to separate kind of those two parties from a CFO and the way that we think about a CFO is how do I maximize your long term profitability period? And um we make the distinction of, I don't like doing taxes, I don't like touching taxes. And so I think the tax people's primary job is to help you keep more money more of your own money and um avoid taxes if at all possible. My job is to make you more of it. And whether that's, you know, launching new channels, um, analyzing a certain business decision that you have, of creating projections, analyzing your margins, all that kind of stuff really fits into our view of, of what is that is, [00:10:32] spk_1: I love that, you know, because that's the thing is we need as business owners, we need that, we need an understanding of all those things that I can't really go to my accountant for, right, I can go to my account and say, hey, you know, um, what loans are available to me right now or, you know, have you have, is anyone else doing this right? That's one of your clients, but she can't really help me make complex financial business decisions or really decide whether or not to move into. Um, you know, a global channel, Like often I see people, they'll launch in to many channels before they've scaled their, their first channel and then the the cost of expanding, for example to europe and Canada and Mexico and all those things actually cost them more than they're making because they expanded too quickly and they think oh I'm going to make more sales this way, but you also have to take all those other costs um into consideration. So I love that what you do is fill those gaps, those gaps. That's the one thing we all wish we had that that person that could tell us. Yes, this is a good financial decision to make for your business. Yes. This is what an eventual buyer would be looking for. Yes. This is how you cut those expenses and maximize your profitability. Like period all of us could benefit from that. So it's it's so important to know that these types of services exist. And you know, all of us, we start by first trying to do accounting on our own. Nearly all of us, right? Unless we have a significant, we've built a brand before, you know and we have a significant business experience background. Um We normally we start, you know fresh, we're we're just starting, we're just getting into um you know, building our business staying lean right? And we um and and we try to do our own accounting and then we quickly realized that we can't do all of our own accounting because this is just bananas and we're probably making mistakes until we hire an accountant and in my case my accountant fixed years of taxes that I did incorrectly and you know, she immediately paid for herself, right? Um but then but then we reach another level where okay we've got our books in order and we're doing well, right? And this is something that that we talked about often or that I've spoken on in many kind of end of year podcast and end of year time periods is we get to a point where we're like, okay, well I have my numbers down now, I'm doing my bookkeeping, I know that I'm profitable or not profitable, but I'm not really sure what to do now. Right. I think that maybe I should expand or I think that maybe I need capital, more capital to you know, move these products further, but I don't really know how to take that data that my accountant put in quickbooks and really turn it into like strategic business decisions are going to help me grow my business. And so this is so wonderful to kind of have this. So I would love to get into um some of those things that you guys help people with that are really strategic. So what are some of the struggles that you see people have like when they're first um coming to you, What are the scaling struggles that people have? What are the mistakes that they're making? What are, what would you say are like the top Top two or 3 things that most people are not getting right. [00:14:21] spk_0: Yeah, absolutely. And um to take a step back for a second, it's really important, so make sure that you as the business owner, take ultimate responsibility for your numbers. And I think um the bad relationships that I've had with with clients is when you're asking a CFO to tell you what to do our job is to present all of the pros and cons and the financial impacts of all these different decisions. But at the end of the day it's, it's on you to grow. You're the business owner and you need to take ownership of that to say like, okay, well I'm thinking about opening up an amazon France store. Okay, great. There are a lot of qualitative elements of that decision, what products you're going to launch, who are you competing against other supply chain issues, all that kind of stuff. But then there are a lot of quantitative elements of that. How much is it gonna cost to get product over there? Where is the product coming from? How did how did the fees differ? And we're gonna have to do v 80. Do I have additional reporting with brands or that or that other country. And those are really important for us to hone in on and present that to the owner to say, hey, here's what I think the, you know, the budget is going to be here are the contingencies here, the thing that you look out for financially, but ultimately I'm presenting those to you as like a pro con list and you're ultimately making the decision. You shouldn't be relying on your CFO or a business advisor consultant or board member whatever to make those decisions for, you need to take responsibility for this. I think that's really important to say, but some of the common mistakes are um really simply number one is just not knowing your numbers and um to take it up a level down from that is I see a lot of businesses right now that have been doing their books on a cash basis historically and they want to double their business the next year or they really want to scale. And it is extremely difficult to do that from my perspective if you don't switch to accrual accounting and it's it can be complex. Uh Now if you're an amazon only business, it's a little bit easier. You can use a program like a two X. Or something. Um but having the awareness of setting up your books on an accrual basis and why that is important is like a huge huge topic and something that the union to be aware of. So um I would I would think that's one of the first issues and especially when you're again going from a smaller store to a larger store that that's critical when you're smaller or Yeah, like you can produce valuable information, like all spreadsheet, but as you cross hundreds of thousands of dollars and certainly that million threshold you need to switch to a cruel, yeah. Um, other common mistakes is related to that, Not just knowing your numbers in terms of, am I making money, but knowing what my cash flow is going to be next month, two months from now, three months from now and how much inventory I'm gonna need and how much cash cash I'm gonna need and where am I going to get it from? And especially with all of the supply chain issues, I see some of our clients just buying more inventory to say, okay, well I used to buy three months, but now I'm, so now I'm going to buy six months. Okay, that's great. I understand you know why you're doing that to maintain inventory levels of course, but that obviously has a significant impact on not just cash flow, but other costs for storage. If you're storing it within amazon or if you're storing it in a preliminary warehouse and then you're gonna ship it to amazon, there's additional costs involved. And that is going to have a significant burden on cash flow and understanding what your deficits deficits are and when and then how you're going to fund it. And then, and I think related to that, if you don't do that planning, then you get to the end of the road and then you say, okay, well the only funding options available to me are now a Shopify loan or an amazon loan or a paypal loan or a clear bank loan, which there's nothing inherently wrong with those, but they're expensive and so if you can get ahead of it and understanding, okay, am I gonna take investor equity capital? Can I go to, you know, friends and family or ideally can I go to a bank to get a line of credit or you know, some of their funding source and you put yourself in this like vicious cycle um of, you know, very costly decisions. And again, those decisions continue to compound as you grow and instead of those decisions being $1000 decisions or $5000 decisions, those decisions quickly turned into $100,000 decisions, half million dollar decisions. Uh, and so it just, it's really worth the investment of paying someone like me to help you understand those decisions and begin planning uh, for all of those really awesome new challenges in your, in your life as an entrepreneur. [00:20:14] spk_1: So why do you think, I mean, I guess we should explain accrual accounting and why accrual accounting is so important. So what is the type of accounting that most people are, many are using if they're not using accrual based accounting and why is making the move to accrual based, so important for your overall financial outlook? [00:20:38] spk_0: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, I think the, To spend 10 minutes on this is probably not worth it worth our time. You can just as easily Google it and and see cash vs a cruel and I think just having the awareness of what a cruel is, um, when to switch, um, is really important for your listeners. But in general, cash basis of accounting just means I recognize an expense or a sale at the time it hits my bank account. Accrual basis means you're recognizing the expense or sell of a product in the period In which the sale occurred. So I mean the best example is inventory. If I write $100,000 check to my supplier, then I'm recognizing all of this cost of goods in that particular month. Whereas I could have sold zero product, but I still recognize all $100,000 of it. Um, and that just doesn't help us make any strategic decisions ideally what you want to do. This is what you know, larger companies do. That certainly applicable to smaller companies. I mean we do it every day, but recognizing the expenses and sales in the month that they occurred. Um, so you can match all this together and understand if you're actually profitable or you're not? And if you're not, where are the areas that need to improve? Is it a gross margin problem? Is it a marketing problem? Is it a fulfillment costs and shipping problem? And you just simply cannot do that? Um, with cash basis period. So that's the two minutes? No, [00:22:18] spk_1: that's perfect. I think that it's important to point that out and I agree, you know, we don't need to get in the weeds. People can use use the googles, we're going to [00:22:28] spk_0: lose your entire audience. [00:22:30] spk_1: But it is important to understand why, you know, and that makes sense. You know, we want to make sure that that we're understanding when we sell that unit if we're profitable, right? Not just looking at, okay, well I spent $100,000 on inventory and you know, so I'm down $100,000 this month. No. What, what is that for that sale? You know, um do I need to, because you can't improve, You can't move the needle if you have no idea um what your actual cost is, what you're advertising and marketing costs are what the cost is when you're, when you're selling that product and you're taking into account, you know, like you were talking about storage fees, everything else right across your business, but of course also looking at those types of things that you have control over there are certain things we have no control over like amazon fees, you know, other than changing our our packaging, making it a little smaller or you know, making our product collapsible, those kinds of things. We can control, we can control the size of our product, but we can't always control certain fees, right? So we have to look at what we can control what we can budget for and if we don't have the right accounting in place, we have no idea what those things are that would move the needle for us. So I think that that's so so important to recognize. Um And then the other thing that you mentioned was just thinking ahead, like knowing okay I'm gonna I'm gonna have to order six months of inventory because this this is a mess right now, right? And what does that, what is that going to mean for other areas of my business, such as storage fees, such as Especially if I'm storing it at Amazon during Q4, you know, that's insanely expensive. Um so I think that's so so important. Um so I love talking about these mistakes that people make and how they can kind of correct them and how they can think ahead. Um Can we talk about 2022, right? We're we're about to hit a new year And people I believe should take the time to kind of look back at the previous year, look back at 2021 and kind of assess what happened. Um and then they should start looking at 2022 and setting up that vision and the things that they want to improve. Um So can we talk a little bit about that from a financial perspective, what are the things people should be looking at in terms of their budget, things that they should cut, things that they, you know should be tracking more closely um that contribute to or hinder their growth. Let's let's talk about that. What kind of things are end of your things besides taxes that we should be focusing on To get us the most profitable that we can be into 2022. [00:25:32] spk_0: Thanks for tuning into Part One of this episode, join us every Tuesday at one PM pacific standard time for live Q. And a. And bonus content after the [00:25:41] spk_1: recording at cellar Roundtable [00:25:42] spk_0: dot com, sponsored by the ultimate software tool for amazon sales and growth [00:25:47] spk_1: seller S C. [00:25:48] spk_0: 0.com and amazing [00:25:50] spk_1: at home dot com. 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: Website: ecomcfo.co Email: sam@ecomcfo.co Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_1: Welcome [00:00:02] spk_0: to the seller roundtable e commerce coaching and business strategies with Andy Arnott and Amy Wees. Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, I think it starts with you, the entrepreneur and what you're trying to get out of your business, are you the type of more lifestyle entrepreneur where hey, I'm kind of happy where I'm at, I want to grow a little bit, I want to grow 10 20% and I don't want to like take a bunch of risk and launch new products or, or launch on a new channel or um, you know, make any drastic changes and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But I think it's the realization of, are you that type or is 2022 do you have these master plans of, hey, I'm going to launch five new products and I'm gonna launch on in a different country or a different platform. I'm gonna try out Tiktok ads and um, I'm gonna blow it out of the water this year. So because those are two very different sets of decisions. Um, and assuming that you're, it's more in the latter camp of, Hey, I really want to grow next year over, you know, over 30%, 100%. Um, then yeah, I think there's a few core assumptions that you need to put into your projections or mindset or model, I think number one ads aren't going to get any cheaper. So you're not, you're gonna not be able to continue to just put in a dollar and get back five and how does that change your calculus of your business if you're not able to scale your amazon ads or facebook ads or google ads effectively and we've seen that obviously play out in the last two years, but assuming that's going to continue maybe not at the pace it did for the last two years, but what are you gonna do about it? I think the second assumption would be stuff always takes longer than you think. And I think myself and my clients have, it seems like they have to relearn that lesson over and over and over again. And specifically, specifically I'm referring to a new product launch or a new hire. Whereas hey, this year I really want to pull myself out of the op or some out of the operations of the business. I want to hire someone else to to take that over and I wanted to do that in january and if you're starting now you're not going to, that person is not going to start in january, I promise. Uh so we should assume that and plan for longer time periods and bigger budgets about whatever you plan to, to spend on hiring that person, you should increase that budget or whatever timeline it is. And I think the same goes for for new products. I mean see several of our clients with uh, you know, marketing calendars with, hey we're going to launch this new thing Q. One, we're gonna launch two new things in Q. Two and five new things in Q. Three And it depends on the product if it's a complementary product that you've already had in the works manufactured um and everything. Yeah, sure, like you could probably reach that timeline, but the question is, what if you don't and is the success of your business contingent upon you doing these things? And if it is, I think we should take a step back and say, okay, well, again, what, and it is my business still gonna succeed if I don't accomplish these things? And um so I think it's kind of like over inflating our timelines and schedules, and everyone always says it, but no one doesn't, everyone thinks it's not gonna happen to them, and then it always does, and they're like, oh well why didn't I grow 100% this year? It's like, okay, well like all these things happen later later than you thought, and I think related to that is uh ignoring the balance sheet, and we don't necessarily think, we always think everything is going to happen in the best case scenario, and again, that's pretty uncommon, so we need to look to our balance sheets and understand them just as much as we do our profit loss statements. And what I mean by balance sheet is how much cash do I have in the bank? What is my, what is my burn rate if the, if I get kicked off of amazon or if I get deactivated or my listings get pulled down for whatever reason, um, am I gonna be able to pay my employees? Am I gonna be able to pay myself, um and what does that look like and what am I, what's actually at risk? And how much risk do I have on the table? And then, you know, other balance sheet KPI S like um your current ratio or your quick ratio or it's also called an asset test ratio, What does that look like and what, what are my assets to liabilities and debt to equity and and all that kind of stuff. Um and understanding, um again, what, what the strength of the balance sheet is and what can I endure if, if things don't work out exactly as planned. [00:05:34] spk_1: I love that. So I want to get into each one of these meeting points that you gave the first one you talked about, you know, you need to have a plan but also include your finances in that plan. So, you know, if you, you want to launch 12 new products this year, I mean, that does go into your second point of everything is gonna take longer, especially if you don't have the staff to do that or you know, you need to think through that, right? But also having a financial plan for that and understanding the financial implications of doing that and then kind of all three things that you mentioned play off of each other, right? Because if we're looking at our balance sheet and our burn rate and, you know, our our assets and all of that. Um but we're if we're ignoring the balance sheet, but then we have this plan to launch 12 new products this year and, you know, we just, we have no idea how we're going to make that happen. And we're just, I think so many of us, business owners are a little bit reactive, right? We're like, okay, I'll just across the bridge when I get to it and then we're like, okay, I'm out of money and now my best seller, that I need to buy more inventory for my money is tied up over here in this thing that I didn't think about, I didn't think ahead for this other thing. Right. So everything that you do, in terms of your plans, of course it's going to take longer than you think it will. And then also, you know, you need to think ahead in terms of finances so that you go, okay, if I'm truly gonna grow, what is that going to look like in terms of revenue and expenses? And will my burn rate allow me to actually achieve that or do I need to look at funding and then do I have the assets to get that funding? Am I gonna be, you know, in the right place to do that? So I love how everything that you're talking about when it comes to planning, um also needs to be, we need to think ahead. Um we need to think about the implications on our balance sheet and whether or not we need some help and then if we need help, what is that going to look like and what is that person going to care about? Right? Like we need to get money from a bank or money from a loan um What are, what are they going to care about? Are they gonna like our balance sheet is all that going to be good. So I love that. I think it's it's really smart, I think I want to add, you know, one of the key things planning is for me it's so important. Um but the key thing that I think that people and I would love to hear your your take on this as well, but I think the key thing that people do when they're planning or don't do is they'll plan kind of at like the beginning of the year and you know, or maybe the beginning of a quarter and they kind of they don't revisit their plan and make adjustments and then, you know, look at lessons learnt, things that aren't going the way that they're going that they want them to go and they're not being held accountable for that plan along the way. Um and that ends up, they just kind of get upside down and they forget what they, you know, plan to do in the first place, because they're stuck in that one product launch, that isn't going well, or the one, you know, whatever it is, right? But um, but I think that that is key, is consistently revisiting your plan and looking at those metrics and making sure that you're measuring those things and keeping track of them. Do you find that that's a common mistake that people make? [00:09:12] spk_0: Oh, absolutely, and and I'm I'm guilty of the two of my own business? Uh and I think the question is, how do we, how do we move past that, or how do we deal with it? And uh for me, I think, and it's so easy as a solo preneurs, or if you're the 100% business owner, you don't have a partner. Uh and you don't have anyone to really be accountable to other than yourself. It's really easy to hide, it's easy, easy to hide, and like, well, I know that that's kind of in the closet somewhere, but I'm not gonna deal with that. So at least I've found helpful for myself is I need to somehow either pay for the accountability or say it publicly in some way to to hold me accountable whether that's a CFO or a business advisor or, you know, in the early stages it could be a friend or something, um, or posting it on social media or something, uh some way to have a little bit of almost shame component to say, okay, this is what I wanted to do and this is my progress towards that and when you have to present your financials or some financial data publicly we start to clean it up pretty quickly and and actually monitor it and actually track it and and again I'm guilty of this too and I I have to protect myself from myself and hold myself to the plan that that I set in whatever form or fashion that takes and get around other business owners and to say hey this is what I said I was gonna do, do it and I think that's the most vulnerable that [00:11:06] spk_1: I've ever been in my business is when I've been preparing to sell it because like I really have it's like you have to be ready for that pitch every day, you have to know your numbers, you have to be on top of it and I feel like you know that's why I always encourage people to go get their business value because that way they can understand like okay what am I doing wrong and what am I doing right and what do I need to actually track because your your balance sheet or your P. N. L. Is not the same as what a buyer or somebody who values your business is going to look at and so you need to know what those things are and for me like since I've been on the journey to potentially sell my business, I've like really had to clean up a lot of things like, oh wow, that's bleeding and I didn't even realize it because I was just looking at you know my quickbooks, right, okay. That's actually an ad back. Um you know, but an expense I need to watch. You know, those are all I just, I track my business finances in a different way. And so I think that it's so important to always think about our businesses from a perspective of um from value, you know, what is this business worth because if it's not worth anything then we have a problem, right? We're not growing our business. Um so yeah, I would encourage everybody out there to not only know your numbers as SaM has encouraged you to but also to know your numbers from a what a buyer cares about perspective and keep those metrics straight and be tracking those on a regular basis. [00:12:39] spk_0: Yeah. And and again, I know this is a finance conversation but this applies to every function in your business for operations. If you had to explain what your operations processes, is it a disaster? And you're like, well this is what I should be doing, but this is what I actually do and all of my supplier email or supplier conversation is buried in an email somewhere and it never gets updated a spreadsheet. I don't know what's coming in or when I'm sending stuff to amazon, I don't know what I paid. I don't, like, I'm not keeping track of all my costs and it's just a hodgepodge of whatever. I kind of feel like doing that day finances the exact same thing or, you know, marketing or if I'm running ad campaigns, can someone off the street open my google ad account and determine what my campaign naming means? [00:13:40] spk_1: Yeah, same with Amazon, right? I'm like, what do you have going on here? You have 1400 campaigns and I don't understand any of this and they don't either. Right? And yeah, I agree. Every aspect of your business, It's like being organized, right? Getting organized, understanding it, holding it accountable because ultimately it's going to reflect on the financial side to if you're, if you're, you know, you're not keeping your suppliers organized, you don't know what's coming in, you don't know what's going out. You don't, you don't understand any of that. Well then your books are going to be a mess too, because your account is not gonna be able to keep track of your inventory numbers or do your accrual based accounting. It's just gonna be, it's gonna be a mess. And those are all lessons that all of us have to learn. So it's, it's good, you know, like you said, I don't always do it perfectly in my business? You know, it's, it's about being aware of, okay, what do I need to do better and I think, you know, we can always think of our businesses, okay if somebody else is going to take it over tomorrow, like how would I, could I actually hand it off? Is am I running my business or is my business running me right? That's that's kind of a good measure to go by. So I love it, I love it. Okay so let's talk from the let's let's I always ask you know advice in terms of if you have somebody that's just getting started, they're just getting started in econ, they're just building their brand um what would be your advice for them to set them up for success on the financial side? [00:15:15] spk_0: Yeah if you're just starting again if you're just starting don't even sign up for an accounting software and I know I shouldn't say that as the owner of a finance and accounting firm but um make sure that you're proving traction on the product side and on the sales side and and marketing side and making sure that you're that product is selling and you've got the right product in place before you add all of the admin stuff and finance stuff because you know your intuition as an entrepreneur is usually good um And it's more about supplementing that intuition with people like me to either validate an assumption or provide you a little bit deeper financial insight or operational insight or marketing insight but in general like follow your intuition and don't try and overcomplicate business, make sure you're selling a product that people want profitably and you're going to have a good sense of whether or not that's true if you're just starting and then layer in the complexity as you grow. But I think I've made that mistake in the past racism, entrepreneur of trying to add too much infrastructure too fast and and it gets really overwhelming really quick and I didn't necessarily focus on the core of the business that that I needed to and like all the peripheral stuff is fun. It's and it's necessary but at the right time. So that's what I would give to someone just starting out. [00:17:00] spk_1: I love that advice because it also forces them to know their numbers as well before their hiring someone else or just outsourcing. And I often see people like I just want to outsource my PPC, I want to outsource and it's like you have one product can we can we just like make sure that you understand your profitability and your, you know, your basic advertising on your primary platform, like you should have those basics down, you know, before you're completely outsourcing everything and like you said, adding in those complexities. So along that same note, when is someone ready to hire a CFO, when is someone ready to work with somebody like you, how do they know when it's time to move beyond that, you know, we've we've, we've scaled beyond ourselves now, we've hired our bookkeeper, we've got that stuff going. We're good. How do we know when it's time to hire a CFO. [00:17:54] spk_0: Got it. Yeah. And it's um, I think it's a little bit more nuanced than that because there are plenty of people on up work or available for on project basis on on an hourly basis. So I think the question is as you scale, how do you know when to add or more capability or more and more dedicated resources from finance and again, marketing operations is the same. So in general I say that you know when you're selling 50 to $100,000 of products, assuming that it's more than one skew, Then you need to have someone look at your numbers, do a general review, spend maybe anywhere from like 5-20 hours kind of look at stuff, and and point out um some weak points there. But that's about all you need. And I'm assuming we're just selling on, on amazon. So that's pretty straightforward. Once you start to cross into the $200,300,500,000 in sales, that's when your, your decisions get more and more costly. If you screw something up and your inventory purchases get larger, the checks that you're writing for ads get larger. So that's when you need someone like us on a more regular basis of, hey, we need to switch to accrual accounting, We need to do monthly growth margin and contribution margin analysis. We need to have an understanding of what your ad performances by skew or by product type or by geography or however your businesses is structured. Um, and if it's a multi channel understanding, you know, how's my amazon profitability, look from my Shopify profitability or my walmart profitability. So yeah, I would, once you, once you get into that a few $100,000 half million dollar um, range, you definitely need to have someone more regular and then once you start to cross the seven figure multi million dollar business, that's when you absolutely need someone on a monthly basis. Um, providing you with all of that reporting as well as discussing higher level strategy of, hey, well what should I do to, you know, hedge my amazon risk, my platform risk or what is it gonna cost me to the launch in France or um, hey, my supplier terms have all has been 70 30 and my lead times are eight weeks and I need to go negotiate with them. What do I need to negotiate for? What are the most important levers to discuss with them. So that's Why don't you cross into that? That seven low seven figure range is really when you need um, more dedicated support. And then Once you've reached the $20, $30 million dollar mark, that's when you need a full time person that is, uh, you know dedicated to you full time. They only care about your business and they're thinking about your business in the shower. Uh and and and because and and the business can support a full time person at the, at those revenue levels when you're, you know, when you're a million dollar seller, that's amazing. But assuming you're making, I don't know, 10 20% of, so let's say you're you're netting $200,000 you're not going to pay a CFO 150 period. So you need someone, you you need the support, but you need it fractionally just the same, making the same argument for, again, operations and marketing. So that's kind of how I think about the different levels of scale and different levels of support that you need? [00:21:53] spk_1: That's awesome. That's really good in terms of helping people navigate those financial needs as they grow and as they scale and from start all the way to, you know, that big brand full time CFO um awesome. So before we wrap it up, I love to ask and we love to ask um what is it that is keeping you motivated? Are you as a business owner? Are you reading certain books? Are you listening to certain podcast? We love to take people's suggestions there and hear what you're doing to stay motivated. [00:22:31] spk_0: Are these business only books or can we share personal as well? [00:22:35] spk_1: It's it's whatever is personally for you, keeping you motivated, keeping your mindset in the right place, helping you as a business owner um to be there. So we've we've heard so many different things from different people have been on the show and I think it's it's all beneficial to hear from the different perspectives. [00:22:54] spk_0: Yeah, absolutely. Um I'm trying to make sure that when I do in my laptop or start my day that uh it's more intentional and I don't, I'm not just opening my laptop because I feel anxious and I somehow feel comforted that I opened my laptop and I'm not very productive. So I think keeping that in mind has been super important for me uh in terms of reading and motivation, um one thing that's really keeping me motivated is connecting with other people and it's face to face as much as possible. There's a good little group here in Austin of of other agencies that do various things and um you know, they're either larger or smaller than we are and it's just really motivating to be around those other people and I get a ton of energy from that. But in terms of reading I really like lately, I normally just read one book at a time. I feel like I'm reading for it at a time and one of them is the hard thing about hard things. Ben Horowitz's book, I love, I really loved Ray Dalio's principles as an entrepreneur, although they're not really commerce related, but I think it's have been really interesting and I've I've read more fiction as well and more sci fi and I think those books have helped me just as much as the business books because we can only take in so much data and there's there's 1000 business podcasts out there and different business books and and everything and they all have great advice, some better than others, but at the end of the day you need to decide what's good for you and what works the best for you and your business and just go implement it and just go do it. Uh and I don't know, stop consuming and start producing. I've tried to be cognizant of that as well. [00:24:55] spk_1: I love it. All right, last but not least, SAm how do you define listeners? Get in touch with you? How do they get themselves in Aecom CFO, [00:25:07] spk_0: awesome. Yeah. Check us out at dot com's CFO dot co dot com. But dot co or you can email me directly sam at Aecom CFO dot co. Uh We don't really do social media, but uh you're welcome to schedule a call on our website. Would love to help out your listeners and got this has been awesome. Thanks so much for having me. [00:25:31] spk_1: Yeah, thank you so much for being here and thanks everybody for listening in today and hopefully you took something away today that you can do better and you can always reach out to uh to SAm at aecom CFO dot Co um to get more advice or um an audit of whether or not you're ready for that and I'm sure no matter what, you're going to get some really great information there. So thank you so much SAm for just being here today and for helping us understand all of of the financial and business matters that have to go along with running our businesses and in a better way. And again, thanks everybody for listening. We appreciate you guys so much. Don't forget to rate, review, subscribe and we will see you guys next week on the seller roundtable. Bye everyone. [00:26:26] spk_0: Awesome. Thanksgiving. Thanks for tuning in, [00:26:32] spk_1: join us every [00:26:33] spk_0: Tuesday at one PM Pacific Standard [00:26:35] spk_1: time for live Q. And [00:26:36] spk_0: a. And bonus content after the recording at cellar roundtable dot com, sponsored by the ultimate software tool for amazon sales and growth seller. S C O dot com. And [00:26:47] spk_1: amazing at home dot com. 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_2: Welcome to the seller Roundtable E Commerce, Coaching and Business Strategies with Andy Arnott and [00:00:07] spk_0: Amy Wees. [00:00:08] spk_2: Yeah. [00:00:09] spk_1: Hey, everybody, what's [00:00:11] spk_0: up? [00:00:12] spk_1: This is episode 135. I can't believe I can't believe how long how many episodes we've had of the celery round table. And I'm Amy Wiese and my co host and, er not is not here today, but that's okay, because we're going to go on without him, even though it's snowing and I don't know right now, he says he's embracing it. Last week he covered for me. Well, I was in Colorado, where our guest, Tammy, is from enjoying the snow, enjoying the clean, clear mountain air and the cold. So, you know, we're back in the warmth of San Antonio now, and I'm excited to be here. So, uh, Tammy, it's so good to have you and you guys you you're going to learn so much today from Tammy because she has a really cool story as a seller. But she's also learned to do things with Kindle direct publishing with using publishing books on Amazon that I promise. Like I said in the Livestream earlier, I promise you haven't learned Yeah. So, you know, because she kind of, like, figured all this stuff out on her own. So, um, yeah, it's really cool what she does, and we're going to learn from her today. And Tammy, welcome to the show. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about you and your background? As much as little as you want to tell us. Sometimes we ask for blood samples. You know, I just want to just that kind of stuff. [00:01:43] spk_0: Right? Your curlers. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me, Amy. I appreciate everybody joining us and being here with us, and and, um, yeah, she said, My name is Tammy, and I have been I've actually been in an entrepreneur about 30 years, So I once I was five, I figured, but I had a brick and mortar business for many, many years. And as our lives were starting my husband, I was starting to transition out of the parents or daughter's graduating college. And we lived in California. We lived in I grew up in Sonoma, California, which is by Napa Valley. So I grew up in a very beautiful area, but we decided to move to another beautiful area and moved to Colorado, where Amy was just visiting, which it was just awesome to see everything that you were doing up here and and in great on Facebook. But so I had run a brick and mortar for 30 years. My daughter was graduating from college and we decided to move to Colorado. But before that, so my brick and mortar business was going to be done. It was a hair salon. I owned a salon for many, many years and, um, did that and it was fantastic. Loved every minute. But moving meant I was leaving my business so it could not follow me with my clientele. So in 2014, we got it. My husband decided to check into doing, uh, retail arbitrage, flipping the products on Amazon. But, you know, kind of. I think a lot of people start out that way. Is just the retail advertising, I would say. So we got into that, and so that would carry this out to, uh out here to Colorado. And my husband still had his corporate job, so we were able to transition him out of that and about a year into it. After we moved to [00:03:25] spk_1: Colorado. [00:03:26] spk_0: So I have been in Katy Perry into Amazon selling for quite a while. So 2014, we did that, and I I I liked it and everything, but I started, um, had that creative field, that I really wanted to try something. And my husband said you should get into the KDP, and it was merch and kdp Merck, which came out, I think before kdp anyway. Where? So I just I'll dabble in that a little bit, you know, with my Amazon business. And then I'll do the KDP, and I found that I really, really enjoyed it. And so I started creating books and putting up on Amazon and thinking they were just gonna magically sell [00:04:08] spk_1: anybody who's ever done. KTT is like, you take all excited about creating a book, and you're like, Okay, I'm going to create this, but I have a couple of books here, You know. I've got my little books over here. Yeah, the [00:04:23] spk_0: little journals, you know, and all that stuff. [00:04:25] spk_1: Yeah, and then you realize that the listing capabilities on Katie are not the same as listing a product on Amazon. And then you realize that you pretty much. You're never going to get traffic unless you drum it up yourself. Correct? [00:04:41] spk_0: Correct. And then you realize that [00:04:43] spk_1: advertising is completely different for books than it is for anything else. So there's like this whole cycle and process to selling books on Amazon, and I think it's so cool that you figured out how to bundle books with your products and we'll get get in in a minute. But yeah, I mean, was that a big surprise for you when you started creating these books and you realize like, Oh, this is not not the same. [00:05:15] spk_0: It was definitely a shocker because, you know, our Amazon business was doing well and we were flipping doing all this stuff and, you know, and I think that the books up thinking it was going to happen. And it was like cricket nothing. Nothing was happening. I was like, And then I found one of my books sold, and I thought it was my sister, of course. And I was like, Well, that was nice of her. But in the big picture, you know, it's kind of like, well, not be paying the mortgage with these books, so so taking all of that and my background being in business, I started kind of leaning towards more of branding booklets for businesses, and so I kind of went down that place and and started creating these Brandon booklets. But then what will be great for you guys is branding these booklets for your products, and this is where I'm where I want to lead you guys with. This is because there was a way where I said I was branding for businesses. But then why not for Amazon sellers or or other people are selling on different platforms to create Brandon Booklet for their product? And so I started looking at that and how that would really look for people and started asking questions about branding booklets for businesses and using them and putting them in your product. So let's [00:06:29] spk_1: talk about let's back up and talk about how you. So you discovered that just selling a book on Amazon was not easy. You had to drum up your own traffic. How did you come up with this idea of making books for local businesses? Talk about how you came up with that idea and what your first, your first book was for local business. [00:06:55] spk_0: All right, so one of my first books, I started getting into health and nutrition. So I was at a lot of gyms and I was working with a lady who owned a nutrition company, started going to gym for my personal self. And I started thinking about if I could sell these books to a business, so if I could brand these books to a business. So I started using gyms. Gyms were my first one nutritionist gyms that kind of thing in my local area and ask them the question. Would you consider having a brand new book for your business? And it happened to be [00:07:25] spk_1: this business here [00:07:27] spk_0: anytime. Fitness, which is a franchise, uh, fitness company, because I was noticing and taking a look around as as a business person. We're gonna look around and everyone was writing things down because I know a lot of people think, uh, no one used books anymore, you know, it's all digital. But that wasn't the case. Everyone had some type of notebook was tracking there. You know, reps on how many weights they were lifting all these things that they were tracking. So I asked the business owner, You know, do you have anything from your company? And he said, No, I just had a piece of paper. They print off and you know, a new client would come in and they go through all the machines and check. And so when I asked him, what would you think of having your own branded booklet for your business? He was over the top like it was He's like, how? How and how can you do it and all these things. So I said, yes, I can. And we sat down and mapped out a whole plan. And he has this great Brandon booklet for himself that is ordered off of Amazon and KDP. So that was my first business that I started thinking about. [00:08:31] spk_1: Wow. And so you had already created a couple of books in KDP and yes, on your own. So you'd already dabbled in it. So you knew how to do it. You knew the process. Then you go to anytime fitness because you're a member there and you're getting into health and fitness, and they give you this booklet of this manually printed thing. [00:08:51] spk_0: And it was just you know papers. You know, we have papers, [00:08:53] spk_1: and just [00:08:54] spk_0: you're letting us out like [00:08:55] spk_1: this. Could be, like, more legit. Like hope you make this world. Exactly. Yeah. So [00:09:04] spk_0: that's kind of that That So I thought, Well, we sat down. What would you like in that? And that's sort of how the KDP for me to be was sort of, um, started was basically in a gym and, you know, watching everybody track everything. And I thought if I could create this brand of booklet for them, it's under my KDP account. And then they get the the business is buying the booklets from Amazon or a call host sale from Amazon, and they're driving traffic to the book. So I make a recurring income stream from them every time a book, a book is published. [00:09:39] spk_1: So that was your first way. That was my first way. Driving traffic to books is you had a client that needed I did this with Amazon merch. So I found on Amazon merchants the same thing, like you create a T shirt. But there's 50 million other people who create the same T shirt on the same right, and you're like, Okay, How am I supposed to sell this thing? So I started going out to like, um, local sports teams and stuff like that that needed T shirts. And I'm like, Hey, I can make this shirt for you. Actually, I did this with my daughters so they can make this shirt for you. And, um, you can just buy them on Amazon. They'll be ready within 72 hours. And, you know, we can price them. However you want to price them, and And I would give my minimum, right. So I'm making a little profit, right? That's what you do with the books. And then they would they would do it, too. And what's cool about KDP and what's cool about Amazon merch is you can order either samples or you can just put it on Amazon and you set the price over the cost. So, yeah, that was my way of driving traffic. Yeah, T [00:10:43] spk_0: shirt. Yeah, it's the same principle as that. And and then what's great is once you create the book and you know then that the business owner is driving all the traffic, so you have to have to do the marketing anymore. You don't have to do. Even the listing doesn't really even matter because it's not driving the traffic by either buying them themselves or their customers buying them, and we'll get into more. But it's like Q R codes worked really well to drive the traffic right to the book from the business side. So you have to remember this [00:11:13] spk_1: is through the business side, [00:11:15] spk_0: so it's been a really great way of doing that. But then the other part of it is adding this into your product because that's that. I know that's how your audience is waiting to hear that because, you know, it's exciting to know [00:11:30] spk_1: that work for them. Tell me a little bit about how you decided to start bundling, because this is actually kind of hard to figure out. I was unable to figure this out how to actually be bundle a book, and I know so many people are wanting to know how to do that. So I create a book in KDP, and I want to sell it alongside of my product, like bundled with my product. How do I do that? And how did you discover how to do that? [00:11:59] spk_0: Well, I found out a few friends. You know, a lot of friends do, uh, private label and, um, also do what we call bundles. But we're just calling a bundle because you're adding a book to it. So, um, so this is one of the examples here. This is a coffee, um, coffee booklet, a tasting booklet. And so, um, we we branded this booklet for Alexa coffeehouse and you can see, you know, we got a little, you know, q r code on there. So they can, you know, customer can go right to their stuff. And then so let me back up before we get too far into it. But so how I decided that would work well is I found out that a lot of people were jumping on other people's listings. I would hear that that rumble since being in the Amazon business. I hear that rumble, and it's like, Well, I've got this great product, but that gets tanked because people are jumping on my listing, I think cause Amazon You know why we're in it. For a long time ago, it wasn't as hard as it kept moving forward. It kept tanking people's listings and they were like, Well, what do I do? You know, how do I How do I add something that's different? And sometimes people add promo cards and things like that. So I just kind of was, you know, hearing that rumble out there and, um, the lady who has this, uh, this book here She has a whole course on bundling. And so we got to talking a lot about how to bundle this book. She's all what do I do? You know, And how can I add this to it? So basically, you create a KDP booklet, and then you're going to have them sent wholesale to yourself, and then you're gonna send them in with your product at the same time and bundle that together. [00:13:38] spk_1: Okay? Got it. So in order to do it so there's no way to basically list that book on. You can list it separately on Amazon as well. You can make money. You can sell this refill. Yeah, exactly. But you would make it on KDP and you would order a sample, and then you would bundle that with your product. So if your if your folks, if your stuff is in China you might create that book and then just have you could have sample sent to yourself because most of our listeners are private label sellers or white label sellers. So they're going to one of two ways the first way would be create that book on KDP and print. Have it printed. Have the sample sent to your place, right and then or to your prep center or wherever they're going to bundle it with the product and send it in under one barcode, right or the other option would be to to finish that book. And then you could actually work with your supplier in China to print to go to their printer and actually print the books and put it in the package with you right then and there. Because once you create it in KDP, you also have that ESPN number. Everything else there. Um so you could also send it there for them to print. Am I right there? [00:15:06] spk_0: Yeah. You could do something like that. You can get Spn numbers is just You can only use it with Amazon or you can purchase. I ISBN numbers and and have it, um, sold other places or sent to other places. So there's there's, you know, there's a little bit of a wiggle room in those ways that you're, you know, depends on your audience and how they're, um, suppliers and how they're getting their supplies. But basically, yes, that I think that is a perfect example is they could have it, um, created in in China and then have it sent to their prep center, you know, and have it or whatever they're [00:15:43] spk_1: doing. Like if their supplier princess in China, then they can. Their supplier can bundle it right in with the box with their best. But going through this process to actually create it on KDP will be super helpful, because that way they kind of understand the templates and how it works, because any printer is going to need the same thing. So I had a client that creative books and wanted to have them printed in China. And so she was able to go, I believe on who was the other one besides KDP, where you can get a free I S D N number. It's a [00:16:20] spk_0: Ingram spark [00:16:21] spk_1: Ingram Spark. Yeah, I believe. I believe that's it. There's a few different ones. There's a few different ones angry. I s p n. So that's what she ended up doing, is just skipping the KDP route. And she went and got a free I ISBN number. And then But she went through the process on KDP because you can learn how to actually format that book and set it in a template and understand what the popular sizes are for books and all of that. And then once she kdp you guys is free to join, and they provide free templates for all the different sized books and everything. So you could literally create your book on Amazon KDP on its own, get a free I E S P n number, publish it for free and then you could take that same, um, you could either take the ISBN number that's already been given to you for that same book and have it printed elsewhere and have them just put that bar code on it or once you go through the process and you learn it. If you want your supplier in China to find a printer and print it so that it's bundled right there in China, then what you do is go through that template process. Create your create your book, right, your template for the book. You're going to send that to your supplier the template intact. They'll find a print or get printed off for you with the proper ESPN number on it, and it will just get listed right there with your product. So you'll have two different ways that you can do that, Um, and either bundle it on your own and sell it separately on Amazon for free. It doesn't cost you anything except for your time, you know. And so let's talk about designing. Let's talk about the actual process of creating a book, Tammy. So you have all these different books with these beautiful covers, and my first book cover was horrible, by the way. But let's talk about the process of actually creating a book like What's your process? Kind of from start to finish. If you had to kind of dumb it down for us. What's the process that somebody needs to follow to create a book? [00:18:26] spk_2: Thanks for tuning in to Part one of this episode. Join us every Tuesday at one PM, Pacific Standard time for live Q and A and bonus content after the recording at cellar roundtable dot com, sponsored by the ultimate software tool for Amazon Sales and Growth seller s eo dot com and Amazing at home dot com. 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_2: Welcome to the seller Roundtable, E Commerce, coaching and Business Strategies with Andy Arnott and [00:00:07] spk_0: Amy Wees. Yeah, first of all, I want to let you know I am not a graphic designer. So, you know, my books got I've gotten a bit better, but I'm still not to the level of a graphic designer. But you don't have to think of these books or covers or anything that are going to have to be, um, that spectacular. It can be very You know, uh, we use a lot of Camba. We use a lot of a duty, which is a book creator. There's book Bull. There's a lot of different places you can use different, um, places to create the books and then uploaded into KDP. KDP also has their own, um, graphics and some things you can use inside the platform. But it's not. It doesn't have a lot to offer, so a lot of us use other other services that you can create a cover and an interior pages and different things like that. So my process is to basically use a canvas. Uh, you can use a free camp if you don't want to pay for it, but the paid one gives you a little bit more, you know, gives you a little more to use, like different ways to upload it and do different things. But you can use a free free camera and then upload right into KDP after you've designed it in the in the camera and then go there. Now, if you're really good at, you know graphics you you would definitely use in design and people who are a graphic artist, they use that. You can also go and have somebody create these for you. You don't have to. You know, if this is something like I don't want to, I don't know how to design a book. I don't have the time because I know as a business owner, you know, I don't want to learn one more thing. I just want it done for you. And you know, I have some of those services available as well. We can just create the book for you, get it done and and go from there so there. And you can use, you know, five. Or sometimes if you just need to cover created, there's lots and lots of tools for you to use so I don't want anybody gets stuck on book creation and layout it. Um there's some really great ways to kind of use different tools, like I said and create these brand of booklets. And, um, you know, basically, you could just think of it as a very low content books and the pages can repeat you don't. Once you create one page, you just repeat it. So don't think that these have to be some type of, you know, very intense books with all these, you know, ideas. It's like, very repeatable way. I call this more of like a low to medium content. We call low content lines like a line journal, maybe a prompt. This would be sort of a medium content where there's a little bit more to it, but basically just copy the pages and then we upload those same pages right to campus. I mean to ktb and and you create the cover back in front and you're off and running. And yeah, I also do [00:02:59] spk_1: mind 100% in Canada. It's very easy to do. And, you know, like you said, if you're doing a low to medium content book, you're just you can just hit the copy button. Once you design that page, you can hit the copy button, Um, and then you can also design your covers in Canada, and they're really easy. They're pretty easy to do. You can. You can get some. You can literally just Google on YouTube. There's lots of tutorials, but as you mentioned to me, there's a lot of people that are out there that can help you. You can fiver, you can contact Tammy. You know I [00:03:33] spk_0: have ways to play that as well. I can help you in those in the design as well in different ways. And I really streamlined a couple ways to do that in different courses that I have extreme lined them so that you can just go from just You know, you don't want to be a book publisher because that's a whole another level. You just want to get a brand of booklet for your product. I just streamline that and of course, that I have that will just take you from a to B quickly, and you can get those books up and ready to go. [00:04:01] spk_1: Another question for you is the size of the book. So I noticed that most of your books that you've created are a certain size. So can you tell me what size you usually use? [00:04:13] spk_0: It's usually a A book for something like a product would be a six by nine, a six by nine book and you can create There's multiple sizes in KDP. It just depends on what I want you guys to think about when you're thinking about what kind of book what is your product? What what are you? What is the customer going to use that booklet for? You know this is a coffee tasting booklet, so if that's what you have, then you create a little tasting tasting booklet and you can find things on. You know, Pinterest. I suggest just getting ideas. Don't take other people's stuff because there's copyright infringement. So you have to be aware of copyright infringements. But you can go and get ideas on Pinterest Google things like what is coffee tasting? It's the basics, you know. It's going to be Where did it you know, What's the date of the coffee when where was it roasted or not roasted? Where did it The beans come from, You know, that's the basic concept of a tasting book, and it could be for chocolate. It could be for, you know, any products that you're using. It can be a guide. It can be an informational. So first you need to think about what it is that you're selling and what is what is going to benefit your client because you're adding value to your product by adding this booklet. So what's going to give that value to them? You know, And and so that's why I need you guys to think about is what? What is that for you? What is that going to be for you? Let's just [00:05:42] spk_1: run through like I love this. Let's run through some ideas. Okay, what we could do with products. So if you have a fitness product, let's say you're selling a yoga mat because there's not enough of those on animals. Little people getting into that right. You could do a a journal of different yoga poses that that person has learned, which would just be like, you know, pretty much kind of like you were saying, you know, you could actually look up existing journals that that are out there and see, Like, what are the different at the time you add your vibe to it? Obviously not. Copy it, but add your vibe. Make it a little different. Um, you could also do a book of the various yoga poses, right? You could, You know, the most popular yoga poses. You could do a book where you have opposed on each page and you're taking people through the sun salutation or, you know, that kind of thing. [00:06:37] spk_0: Let me showing you a little bit here is like we just used the machine. So it's the same idea. So if this was opposed here, you know, then you can just put that in and what they will be tracking in different ways to use that. So I didn't help you, but I was just kind of, you know, showing that, you know, and then how much you know, people love the track, you know? How many? How many? How much time did I spend in yoga? Did I do my meditation? Just a little check box. Did I meditate? Did I, um, drink enough water? You can just do a little water boxes and go. You can even just go online and look at like you said all the books, you can go to a local bookstore and just there's yoga books everywhere, but you're absolutely correct. But before we go to the sizes, it just there's all different sizes you can go from, you know, an eight by 11. This is my favorite sizes that 855 by eight by five. But this is You have to remember about weight, too, because I know it costs you more when you're with your product. So think about. Could you just put an six x 9 and 24 pages is the minimum, So 24 pages is all you need. And if you can't fill it with 24 pages, add a note page at the end and add, you know, if you you know pages in the back or something to complete that book. But I just want to catch up with you really quick on that, Amy, because I think that for your clients or your you know your audience, it's the weight you have to be careful with two. So you don't want to do 100 pages and, um, have a weighted book or a bigger book. If it's not necessary, don't do a larger, larger book. Do a smaller right. [00:08:09] spk_1: Yeah. I mean, I think for like a full picture book, you know, And so, like, this was my first book. And obviously people listening can't see the screen right now, so I'll talk about it. It was just a very simple What I did is every day when I was working for the military, [00:08:24] spk_0: I make [00:08:26] spk_1: my own books because in the building I worked and I couldn't bring my phone in or anything. So I would make my own books, and I would write the same things in my notebooks every single day. So I'm tired of making my own notebooks. I'm going to make one on KDP. So I gave myself a challenge and I said, I'm going to do this in a weekend. I'm going to finish a book in a weekend, and I'm sure that I, like created in Canada, just copied and pasted the pages right. And I created the cover, uploaded the template to KDP assigned the I S P n, which is automatic automatic process on KDP and published it, and it was for sale that week. So it's [00:09:09] spk_0: amazing how fast lunch over [00:09:11] spk_1: the weekend to get it done. So there's no reason that you guys, if you're wondering about this and you're like, Oh, it's just too far I can't create a yoga book for my yoga mat. Create something. Give yourself a weekend to create something. It doesn't matter if it's ugly, Go through the process. And that way you can kind of learn what it is, and you can order yourself a sample and then, you know, you can kind of see Oh, okay, this actually is pretty easy, right? [00:09:40] spk_0: Yeah. And the prices of the of the books are very reasonable. And I've done a lot of research on different type of pricing. The best thing is, you know, as as we know, the Amazon world is the shipping, so they really take care of the shipping costs. And so when you go to printers, a lot of times, if you have to ship the books out, sometimes that gets a little you know, they're shipping them to you, then your shipping them back and you know it's the price starts adding up, but just keep, keep an eye on that. So that's another great thing with Amazon KDP. But like you're saying all were for you guys. All we're trying to do is come up with it. Could be a line journal. It does not. It could be a notebook. What we want is you to have. No one can create this book, but you. This is your product. You're putting it into your product and making a bundle out of it's adding value to your product. It's giving a customer you know, some way to see your brand. So the brand recognition right there and it could be lines lines inside. Don't get too caught up, and I have to create this whole thing for your client you just have. It's just a way to add value and they run around, you know, $2.15. It depends on the pages you put in, but around 2 15, and then there's a little shipping costs and some other costs, but about $3.18 for each book. So adding that value there and you could probably get you know, at least a $10 value perceived value for these books in your bundle in your product, and it helps with keeping people off of your listing because it can't. No one can duplicate this. And, um, I get this question a lot from other people, too, is like they use promo cards, and I think promo cards are great. I don't have any problem with that, but they tend to throw them out with all the packaging. They don't tend to throw these away. They don't tend to throw your little books away. It's something about a book and throwing away, but you're also giving them something that they can use. So it's not just a toss away. It's something they can. Even if you're just providing [00:11:43] spk_1: a notebook with your branding on, it was like for me, that's a cat products, right? I mean, I could provide a really cute notebook with a cute cat on the front, and people are going to keep that. It's going to be in love it right? So even though I'm not giving them a guide of how to do something right and just write your notebook with acute cover of a cat on the front, right, maybe I could do like the most popular cat breeds like a little cartoon on the cover, you know, And yeah, it's just a gift from us. And you know, I could bundle that even with my private label, unique product. And people will be like, Wow, you know, they're going to keep it. They're going to put it on the shelf, but they're going to write in it. They'll use it for something. The kids will steal it if it's cute, right? Yeah. So you really don't have anything to lose from that side? And I would love to come up with some other ideas. So, like if you have a fitness product, obviously it's pretty easy to do a journal. But let's say like, I just gave a cat product idea where you could just provide a really cute notebook. What about if you have a kitchen product? What if you're selling a French press [00:12:49] spk_0: coffee coffee? You could even create the book, too. So you're a French press. You could do the tasting book. Obviously, that would work well. Or you could just say, you know, give some instructions and I'm sure your product has instructions anyway. But if you just create them in the book maybe that you have to clean the French press. How do you clean a French press like it could be something very simple like that. Maybe a check off list of When did you clean at last? [00:13:17] spk_1: Oh, that's so That's so good. Because every time I buy an appliance, a kitchen appliance and it comes with a decent book, I keep it. I put it in my kitchen with my recipe books. And then when it comes time to maintain that product or if I have problems with it for troubleshooting whatever, then I pull it right out of the cupboard. And again, I have a way to contact the brand you could also that could be your instructions, and you can have them sign up for your warranty. From there, you can kind of combine your insert with this book, which would be very value added for them because they're not only getting really nice instructions. I can't tell you how many brand owners that I've unboxed their products and they have no instructions. And when I asked them about it, I'm like, Okay, well, you know what's going on here or they have a high return rate and the big thing is they're not paying attention to the customer experience when they get that product. And so just taking that extra time to provide some extra instructions, we do a booklet with our With our litter box singer. We do a booklet that says, Welcome to the family. Here's some tips for using this. Reach out to us with any questions. We're here for you, you know all of that. And we actually do have people keep that booklet, find us on Facebook. Reach out with questions. Yes, you know, it's like the [00:14:46] spk_0: branding poor part portion of it, too, is so good for you guys because they're seeing Oh, and not a lot of people use this technique, and so it's it's get people get excited when they open a package. And, oh, I get a book, too, And it's, you know, I like to call him booklets because they're small. That's just my fun little name for them, but it really does. You know, you could do cookbooks. You can do a little recipe. You can't copy people's recipes, but you can actually create. How do you use the machine? You can add a QR code right to a video of how to use the particular machine you're you're selling or or a product you have. So you can use these Brandon booklets in multiple ways. It's not just, you know, giving, um, you know, keeping you off. You're listening. But that is one of the big advantages. But it's also giving value. And people, you know, how do you stand out? How do you stand out from the crowd If it's something that multiple people have and you know Oh, you know you'll see you, Could you? I would definitely post a picture of what's in that box, and this is part of what's in that box. Oh, I get a booklet, too, and I Oh, that's great. I can track you know who's cleaning the cat box or whatever you're doing or, you know, or who's feeding the cat or it's a new kitten or it's you know, it's a new kitten, and now you have a little booklet. It's like, Oh, my kitten did this or the weight of the cat could be a veterinarian book. It doesn't have to all go right with your product as well, but it could be a veterinarian book. Just, you know, my cat had shots. When did they have the shots? Just to check off the list of those. [00:16:19] spk_1: Something that adds value to the product into the customer experience is really like I said, You know, you could even just do a notebook with a really cute cat on the front. And that just comes And your branding on the back, and that just comes with it. You know, you could do anything really and make it a lot of fun. So I love it, Danny. Very, very cool. Okay. [00:16:43] spk_0: Thank you. [00:16:44] spk_1: So let's talk about mhm. Just the one question that we like to ask. So you're you're not You're not doing this anymore, right? You're not creating books anymore. You're now teaching others how to do this, right? [00:17:01] spk_0: Yes. Yes. Well, that kind of started out. I've been doing this. I still you know, I have a few clients and things that I create. Just a therapist here with the journal. Here's my line journal. She sells this like hotcakes to her client. She actually uses this as a gift for them a lot of times, but yes, I do. Um, I do still create books, but I have a lot of people have asked me, How do I do this? And that's when Amy and I are discussing This is how do I do this? So I have put together something very special for you guys, but it's just basically I wanted to accelerate this KDP process because I was thinking as a business owner, like I said before, I don't have the time. I don't have the time to another thing to learn. So what I did is I took and put the process super quick, super easy. You could do it like Amy said in a weekend and and create these brand of booklets, and I give you ideas and places to create the books for you and and all kinds of ideas, sizes of books, what? How to choose a book, how to how to pick one for your product. And, um, I created all of that for you and put it in a a quick little course for you. [00:18:17] spk_1: Amazing. So, yeah, I'll be sharing that in the show notes. Um, okay, question. From a business owner perspective, we always ask, you know, what's your piece of advice for people just getting started, [00:18:32] spk_0: I think is just don't critic. Don't be so critical on yourself. Just do it. You know, I like I said, I I wasn't a graphic designer. I just decided I'm just going to try doing these books. And what it led to was a whole another business for me because I started creating now Brandon Booklist for businesses. And now I'm talking to you guys. So my best advice is you will not be perfect, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Just just take one step forward. And I think a lot of people just I I know. I was thinking I'm not a graphic designer. I don't have this background. I'm not an author. I don't It does not matter because you can't, you know, you will get better. You will find people that will guide you like myself. There's a lot of us, you know, out there helping you and and guiding you. But you do. You have to just take the step. There's no one else that can do it. So that's my best advice for all my students is just Get one book done like he did in the weekend. So [00:19:35] spk_1: that's right. Challenge yourself to get it done. Take a step forward. Don't worry about being perfect or having it all figured out. You know, I think that [00:19:42] spk_0: happens a lot to us entrepreneurs. We get a little stuck in the perfection world, and, yeah, you know, we wanted to look good, but you have to take one step. That's all you need to do is one step every time and [00:19:55] spk_1: love it. And then what about what's keeping you motivated? So are you listening to any podcasts? Are you reading any books? Is there any anything that you do to kind of keep you motivated and keep you moving forward? [00:20:10] spk_0: Well, I love thing that motivates me is actually sharing these ideas with people. And when I met, you know what I was talking to, Amy. It just gets you so excited. But books I love, um, any kind of book I love. You're a badass by Jensen Shero. She's one of my favorite authors, and, um, just sort of those kind of things, too. Um, to read is just sort of that. How do you make the world a better place to live in and share it with everybody. So, um, I love your podcast, Amy. I always love what you're doing. I love people that inspire others. So anything that inspires people to be their best is my favorite thing to hear or read. [00:20:50] spk_1: I love it. Um all right, so I guess the last question that we have for you before we hit stop on the recording button and, um let other folks that are in here in the room ask their questions. Um, is how can people get in contact with you? Of course. We're going to share our offer in the show notes. But how can people get in contact with you and connect with you? [00:21:16] spk_0: So, um, you know, I have my multiple platforms have a, you know, Facebook group as well as under YouTube's channel. All those things. But we in the show notes This is going to be where you want to click on that link because that's going to give you take you right to my website. So all of this is at my website, and that's tammy Quran dot com. And my name is T a m m E C h r i n dot com But it's, um Yeah, in the show notes, I would click on that. That link that will be the best. But the website has multiple, um, multiple things for you to look at and have templates and ideas and courses and all kinds of stuff for you in there and how to. So, um, just search my name and you'll find me. [00:22:04] spk_1: It sounds great. Well, thank you so much to me for being here. And thanks to everyone for listening today, reach out anytime with any questions you guys have. I want to thank you on behalf of Andy and myself for voting for us in this year's seller pole. Once again, we, you know, ranked in the top, uh, 10 podcasts that are out there. I think we were in the top five this year. I think we were number four, which was amazing to us. We're so happy about that. So thank you guys so much as always for subscribing and listening and giving us your feedback. And this is one of the best things that I do every week as I get to meet with amazing people like Tammy and I get to hang out with amazing awesome entrepreneurs who are getting it done like caramel and Marina and glad we're here in the chat with us. And, you know, I just appreciate you all so much for being here and for listening, and we are going to hit Stop on the recording here and we'll see you guys next week on the seller Roundtable. Thank you so much. [00:23:10] spk_0: Thank you, Byron. Thanks for tuning in. Join us every Tuesday at one PM, [00:23:18] spk_2: Pacific Standard Time for live Q and A and bonus content after the recording at cellar roundtable dot com, sponsored by [00:23:26] spk_0: the Ultimate Software [00:23:27] spk_2: tool for Amazon Sales and Growth seller s eo dot com and [00:23:31] spk_0: Amazing at home dot [00:23:33] spk_2: com. 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjleonard/ Website: https://www.ecombrokers.co.uk/ Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_0: Welcome to the seller. Roundtable e commerce coaching and business strategies with Andy Arnott and Amy Wees. [00:00:11] spk_1: Absolutely, I love that. So um you know when when you uh when somebody's thinking about uh selling their business um you know how do the how would they be able to figure out kind of what they might be able to get in terms of offers from uh from people wanting to buy them out. [00:00:28] spk_0: Sure. Um So I guess this comes down to a couple of things, It comes down to how we value a business, but also what makes a business valuable. So we should start with what makes what makes your business valuable. Um So as I alluded to in the first part of the conversation, you really need to have a defensible brand. You can't just be selling stuff a defensible brand with some sort of I. P. Um so you need to have trademarks ideally, um not only in the territories that you're selling him, but also where you're manufacturing and if you can get some additional intellectual property, like a patent or design registration, perhaps on a part of that, you've designed them even better. Um I mentioned before that you wanted to be growing but not maxed out. So there still needs to be some some fruit on the tree for the potential buyer to pick. So that could be growth where you're selling now, but it could be the opportunity for them to take the brand internationally, for example, the business used to be stable, so what I mean by that is not risky, so not selling in a great area and not using any black hat strategies. Um, I need to be transferrable. You need to be able to hand over the keys. So a great test of that is the hospital test if you fall down the stairs tomorrow and break both your legs and end up in hospital for a long time. Will your business run without you? If the answer is yes, then you have a pretty transferable business. That's great. If it's not, that's okay. You just need to do some work to build out some systems and processes and probably some automation and documentation. Have you got everything neat and tidy? All the teas dotted and I's crossed, no eyes dotted and T. S crossed with regards to accounts, iP systems and processes, tax filing, you know, all the stuff that you would expect from, you know commercially financially illegally for your business needs to be in order and then you know on the face of it than more with product and market wise you want to have diversification. You can't have all your eggs in one basket because a buyer is just going to look at that basket and say, well that's a bit risky. So you can't just rely on one or 2 products. You can't just rely on one sales channel and you can't rely on one source of traffic. So for instance if you're selling on your own website and all your traffic is coming from a facebook ads account. What if your facebook ads account get suspended, then you're in a pickle so no one's gonna want to buy it. And then the next part of what you mentioned was about really comes down to think how we value a business. So we value a business based usually not always, but I'll try and keep this as broad as I can for a broad audience who will have many different businesses usually Based on the trailing 12 month performance. And we take that performance which is usually measured either is something called sailors, discretionary earnings ste or so something called Ebitda. Let's just talk about STD for a minute ste is basically your net income plus add backs and adjustments and add backs and adjustments are wonderful. Things that a good broker will do for you too maximize the value of your business. So we take your trailing 12 months performance and multiply it by and multiple. And the multiple the moment in e commerce is ranging from anywhere from between about two to about seven. And there's outliers can be higher than that and that's how we land on the value of your business. So for somebody at home wanting to do a quick dirty calculation, take your net profit, add back any of your discretion re earnings that wouldn't apply to a new owner. You're what you're paying yourself, your internet, your phone, travel, health insurance, Then think about any other costs you've had in the last 12 months, which a new owner wouldn't need to pay for. So maybe you paid for some trademarks. Well it's done. It won't need to be done again. Photography, videography, it's done. He won't need to be done again. Maybe some consulting fees then think about some recurring costs, which you might have, which a new owner probably wouldn't need to take on because they probably already have them. So software, that type of thing. Okay. Maybe legal fees, accounting fees and then where the broker part of where the brook will really earn their money is they'll go in and do a deeper analysis to identify opportunities to maximize the business by adjusting things like your colleagues based on situations that wouldn't apply for a new owner. Like for instance, suppose you've recently negotiated a lower price on your product, but you only did it two months ago. Well we could adjust. So that that applies across the whole 12 months trailing period rather than just the last two months to maximize that sale of discretionary armies. So if you're sitting at home, take your net your net income, do those adjustments that I just just just said and apply a conservative multiple. So let's say 3.5 right? Typically multiples at the moment are a bit higher than that. But let's just be conservative and you've got a rough idea of what your business is worth. But really you need to have that seller's discretionary earnings calculated by a professional who's an accountant and an M and a expert and understand the e commerce and understands the opportunities to find and squeeze out extra value by for instance adding back the right costs that can be added back and adjusting colleagues where they can and that's just scratching the service, you know, when accounting gets in there and does the work, they can really add six or seven figures to the value of the business. [00:06:14] spk_1: Yeah, I love that. That's great advice. Um going back to kind of my example about building house when you were first starting out um on this e commerce journey. Did you have any big like aha moments where you thought of, wow, if I knew this when I started out, it would have really changed the journey for me in terms of growing your business uh you know just upping the, just, just getting to another level with your business in terms of you know, profit or vision or in anything that that really stood out. [00:06:46] spk_0: Yeah, yeah, I did. Um it was this when I first wanted to sell my products in mainland europe, this is pre the UK leaving the european union, which was a pretty dumbass thing that we did recently. Um I needed to register for vat in France, Germany, Italy spain Poland and the Czech Republic and it was a real pain in the asked to do and I nearly didn't do it, but I had to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to do it. I, I even had to, this is hilarious to register for vat in Spain. Not only did I have to have a whole bunch of documents translated, but only by a particular translators on their specialist of translators. I had to have the document notarized, whatever that means by somebody called a notary. And when they do it, this is great. They take account, they take a piece of wax and they melted and then they stamp it like, you know, like a medieval wax seal. They used to use to, to, to seal envelopes, They actually do that. It was like something out of the dark ages. So I had to jump through all these, these bureaucratic hoops to register for vat in all these countries so that I could sell across europe and most of my competitors couldn't be bothered to do it because it was too much effort. So when I jumped through all the hoops and did it, I practically doubled my sales overnight. I felt like I was like a hunter gatherer who just like bothered to climb this ridge into the neighboring valley and I emerged into this lush valley of resources and I was leading my tribe then. And so the aha moment for me was jump through the hoops like when you see an obstacle coming up in the road, the easy thing to do is either find another path or just give up and go home. And I'm not saying that you want to make your life difficult, you want to have a look through the hoop and check what's on the other side. The hoop needs to be see through, right? Imagine you're sonic the hedgehog. Mhm. But if the reward on the other side looks good enough, go to the effort of doing it. And so I kind of applied that across the board then for the rest of the business. So like for instance, I got into Australia when they opened that up. I got into the Middle East when they opened that up, I went to the effort of designing my own products and having them patented jump through a lot of hoops and added value to the business because the potential buyer when they were doing their due diligence to see that this was building the moat around the business. [00:09:25] spk_1: Absolutely. And I think some of the, one of the biggest things that I've learned forever being in many different businesses for many different years is the people who take the effort to to do the ship work right? Like I always call it eating the ship sandwich, right? It's the it's the people who know it is though, it's like the like one of that show, what is that dirty jobs? I don't know if you've ever ever seen that show, but like you know some of the most well paid jobs in the world are you know, people who like clean like sewers out and stuff, you know, or do underwater welding or you know, it's a lot of jobs and things that other people just don't want to do, right. They're not either not glorious or their tedious or you know, some of the worst things working with an amazon business is dealing with like stuff like that, right? Like I remember one Q four, we're pretty much our entire catalog was hijacked and this was back in like, you know, 13 2013 2014 where um, you know, they really didn't have seller support in place. They don't really have any anybody to help you. So, you know, in in the first few weeks I was just losing my mind, right? I mean it was one of those things where it's just you feel so powerless and so you know able to just not do anything. And then finally I realized, okay, well I can either just do this or I can send an email every single day morning and night to sell our support to different, you know, to email addresses. I could find to, you know, just in other words, instead of giving up and throwing your hands up, like you said, the people who succeed are the ones who go through the work and go through the hassle of trudging through and really figuring out a way around the problem or if you can't figure out a way around the problem to take that energy and redirect it to something that, you know, instead of, you know, sitting there just frustrated and not doing anything, I could have been like, okay, well next year, what am I gonna do differently to try to, you know, make sure that this doesn't happen, you know, can I take that interview to maybe find new products? Can I write systems like what, what else can I do with my time and energy that will have a better outcome than me just hitting against this brick wall over and over again? So um yeah, I absolutely love that um the other thing that I would love to hear and uh I don't know if you've had this before because I know that you kept your brand fairly small skew wise and things like that, you're not one of those, you know, sellers who is like trying to find opportunistic products, but um you know, did you have any failed products along the way? And what did that journey look like in other words, you know, how long did you keep that product alive? [00:11:52] spk_0: Uh you know, what do you think [00:11:54] spk_1: were the mistakes that you made in launching that product? We always talk about all the successes and all the tips and tricks and stuff like you said, but I think that there's also a lot to learn in losing, right, when you lose you really learn a lot. So [00:12:06] spk_0: any, any, you [00:12:07] spk_1: know, failed product launches or failed business, you know, efforts that you, you uh, you know, you gleam, uh any value from in terms of, okay, I'm not gonna do it this way next time. [00:12:19] spk_0: Yeah. Um so I'm for, I was fortunate in that I didn't have any products that just kind of like flopped and I think the reason for that is I was always very careful to make sure that I was creating another product that made sense in terms of my brand and in terms of what would work with regards to what my customers wanted. So I hadn't, like, I hadn't like seen an opportunity or there's a, there's an opportunity there on ambulance to sell something that we do that, let's go and try that. And then it doesn't work, it wasn't quite like that, but I did have a product that didn't work out for a lot of different reason and it was this um, it was a liquid chalk product. So this is uh, it is basically chalk suspended in an alcohol solution which you rub on your hands, much like what we're all rubbing on our hands these days, alcohol, you know, jail because of the pandemic. And so the alcohol evaporates and left with chalk on your hands. So you get less mess in the gym. Great. Uh, sourced a really great product tested a whole bunch and, and find a solution that was fantastic. And then amazon wanted me to enroll in the Hazmat program, but none of my competitors were in the Hazmat program and then Amazon wouldn't let me join the Hazmat program and I couldn't figure out why. So I had this product that I had the merchant fulfill because they wanted an enhancement program but they wouldn't let me in. But none of my competitors were required to be in it and it didn't matter how many cases I opened saying, hey, these competitors need to be kicked off. You need to let me know as my program, Nothing happened. And I was incredibly frustrating. And so that product never fulfilled his potential until by the time I sold the business and in fact, I don't think the new owners are even selling it anymore. So that was really frustrating. And so I think the moral of the story there is that you've got to remember that amazon is just a sales channel and you are beholden to what happens with them if you're putting all your eggs in one basket. So fortunately I was also selling on my own website. And so sales of the liquid chocolate, my own website were great. They weren't as great as what they would have been through amazon of course because the vast majority of myself were coming through amazon, but I had gone to the effort to diversify my business and recognize that amazon was just a sales channel and you can't just assume that everything's going to, you know, be tickety boo and I'll work out selling through amazon. You know, you have to recognize that there will be bumps in the road and some of those bumps, you're not actually going to find a new road and I didn't for for that particular product. [00:15:10] spk_1: Yeah, that's a that's a great example. There's so many men that has met, I would say that's the last few years, like one of the biggest issues that you even had that issue and we're like all the, all the, you know, all the ingredients in this product were completely natural based. You know, like, I mean you get sick if you like chugged the whole bottle but it wouldn't kill you. You know what I mean? It was like all natural stuff and yeah. And and we just kept getting wrapped under the stupid Hazmat thing and we'd submit the documentation, like even their own documentation would say, hey, you know, if it's X, Y or Z. You don't need to be hazmat, but you have to file an exemption, which we did. And then they're stupid, ai bots would pick up all the product again and flag it and we'd have to like go through it again and again and then finally they're like, oh no, you need to be FDA approved. And so yeah, we, we pretty much gave up on it at that point because just like, you know, there's some, I guess the moral of the story here is sometimes you do need to know when to pick your battles, right? I mean, sometimes if it's just completely out of your control, you might be better off to just, you know, pick up and walk away and and put that energy towards something else. So, uh, some great lessons there. Yeah, [00:16:20] spk_0: yeah, definitely. This has just been so awesome so far. Like everything that you've brought to the table, then, I think it's great to hear. It's one thing to have somebody from an aggregator come on the show and talk about, you know what it's what you need to do to sell your business. But it's another thing to have a seller who's been through what you've been through and has built what you've built and who has now helped others do the same. Um, it's a whole different perspective because we can actually get in the weeds on some of these things and talk about what real pain points that we small business owners have to deal with when we're, it's a little bit intimidating, you know, thinking that giving ourselves permission to build a brand and become successful. You know, it's it's hard sometimes. So it's great to have these kinds of conversations. Um, now when it comes to selling your business and really getting the best offer that you can possibly get what are some things that some things people should be thinking about, you got to take your business through the right process. So we're in kind of a new, crazy situation with amazon. Well, E commerce at the moment, I remember when we talk about e commerce and particularly amazon being the Wild West, you know, I think like you said before, when you could kind of sell anything and it would work on amazon right back in the day, but we're in kind of a new Wild West now because mergers and acquisitions in the e commerce space is so young, so what's happening is a lot of people are getting very exciting emails land in their inbox from an aggregator saying, hey, we want to buy your business and this is incredibly exciting because you put your blood, sweat and tears into your business and you spent last night banging your head off a brick wall in tears trying to talk to someone to sell support because you've got a problem and now somebody wants to give you a decent amount of money for your brand. It's really exciting. And what's happening is the aggregators will dangle a carrot in front of you and it's pretty big carrot and it's possibly more money than you ever imagined happening having. But in reality, your business isn't worth it carrot, it's where the whole sack of carrots. If only you would do what we do in every other industry, which is, take it through a process, there's no rush, there's no need to to rush this. Have your business strategy mapped out and get help with it from experts. We use experts for our PBC. We use experts for our translations. We use experts for S. C. O. We use experts for trademarks. We use experts for photographs. And yet when it comes to our most valuable asset, our business itself, people want to try and sell it themselves which is just bonkers. So find out what your business is worth because even if you have no intention to sell it, you might as well find out what it's worth. So you have a reference point. Otherwise you're trekking through the jungle without a map or a compass. So find out what it's worth and then ask yourself whether you would sell it for that or whether you have a bit more work to do to get to where you want to be and take it through a process to maximize its value through some of the things we discussed earlier with experts who have kind of lived experience on all sides. They're business owners, their mergers and acquisitions experts. They're accountants who will work with you until you're ready to sell your business and not the other way around and they need to be adding value to your business, like whatever fee they're charging you needs to more than be paid for by the work that they've done to add value to your business and then they need to be actively marketing your business to a pool of the right buyers so that you end up with a competitive environment of several buyers wanting to buy your business. Yeah, that's really, you know the way to do it. Um be wary of if you get direct offers, that's fantastic. That's great. But then what you say to them is you say that's great, thanks so much for your offer. Um If you're the best option for me that I'm sure you'll be the preferred option that my broker finds okay, basically, um that's kind of the way to do it. Um and that's kind of why we ended up existing because we we saw that the services that were available for sellers to plan and then execute their exit strategy, we're not good enough. Yeah. Cool. Um And then I guess the hard question is, how do I know when it's time to sell, yep, you've there's a few red flags, right? Yeah. Have you lost your get up and go for the business? Right. As austin powers would say, have you lost your mojo, like, because if you have that's fine, but you might no longer be the right person to take it forward and there is a risk that the business will go into decline because you've lost your mojo and you're not up for it anymore and that's okay. Maybe the business has reached a point where it actually just needs others with more resources and we take it forward, you might just you might you might you might want to retire. We just sold a business for a guy who bought a yacht and has gone to sail around the world. That is a perfectly fine reason to want to sell your business. Maybe you know the most exciting part for me of building a business is kind of like the From idea Phase two just getting into orbit right? And maybe even have been in orbit now for a few years and you're just kind of done and you have a new idea. You want to sell the business, get some capital for a new idea. Perfectly valid reason to sell your business. There's lots of good reasons to sell your business. But the key is to plan what you can't do is wake up tomorrow and say I want to sell my business because you're gonna have a whole bunch of work to do. What you can do is wake up now and say I want to have everything in place so that when I am ready to sell my business my life is a lot less painful. And that means some of the things I spoke about earlier having all your documentation in order your accounts in order your intellectual property, your S. O. Ps. Getting your business valued by an expert now so that because they might value your business for you and say well we believe you know currently this would sell for I don't know half a million and you might say well I don't want to sell it for less than a million and what they can do this for example is something that we do is actually mentor you on route to an exit, help you stack up the dominoes. These are the things you need to do to get to where you want to be, keep a constant track and what your business is worth and then when you're ready and only when you're ready and not the other way around pull the trigger and go to market. So if you plan ahead your life becomes a lot easier later on and faster. Yeah, I would agree. It's good stuff. Um awesome. So we always asked this question before we wrap up, what are you listening to and reading to stay motivated? Okay, a couple things right now, I am listening to an audiobook called your next five moves moves your next five moves by. Um Patrick, uh David, I think his name was pretty cool book. It's very, very motivational. Um That's the factual book, fiction. I I listened to pretty much on repeat most nights, Stephen fry reading harry potter and I am not ashamed. [00:23:50] spk_1: I love it. [00:23:52] spk_0: I love it. And then um caramel had a question, she said what is a reasonable horizon to plan for in terms of beginning to end um for selling. So maybe she's asking about a timeline. Yeah. Um Yeah, it depends on where in the process we're talking about because the timeline from say going to market to the deal being done can be very fast. It doesn't need to be amy there's definitely, always, always, we, you know, we take an approach of more haste, less speed, let's get this right rather than rushing in. But in particular circumstances it can be necessary to move fast. So if we're talking about going to market to the deal being done, uh you can be a matter of a few weeks if you're really pushing it, but more like a few months. Okay, 23 months. And the reason for that. So you'll see a lot of claims from certain brokers and some of the aggregators sell your business in 14 days or something. Absolutely, you know, insane like that. And I'm just saying to people, you've spent a long time building a fantastic business, why on earth would you rush the most important part of it? If you take your time to actually properly analyzed the business, a significant amount of value can be added. You can cast a wider net to find a pool of the right buyers and then you can take the time to actually thrash out the right deal rather than just rushing to get a few bucks in your bank account. You can take a little bit longer and get a lot of bucks in your bank account definitely. Alright. And the last question before we wrap up is how do people get in contact with you? Sure you can email me Ben at aecom brokers dot co dot UK. You can go to our website which is a con brokers dot co dot UK were in the UK, the UK domain, but we're working all over the world. Yeah, I'm on linkedin. Just look me up, Ben Leonard uh and my social handle is at Ben Leonard pro for instagram and twitter, [00:26:02] spk_1: awesome. Thanks Ben really appreciate you being on today. [00:26:05] spk_0: Thanks for having me. That was fun. [00:26:06] spk_1: Hey guys, and as usual if you haven't done so yet, please rate review, subscribe, join us live Tuesdays one p.m. pacific time. We really love to have you guys. We had a we had a decent crowd here today, thank you guys who came in loud to ask questions that always brings a ton of value to us to our guests, to everybody else listening. So thank you guys who joined us live. If you haven't done so yet, please do join us live And with all of that we were going to stop the live stream, we're gonna stop the recording and we are going to interact with just the people in the in the meeting. So that's a bonus if you guys join us live. So thank you so much and we'll see you next time on the cell a round table [00:26:44] spk_0: mm thanks for tuning in, join us every Tuesday at one PM pacific standard time for live Q and A. And bonus content after the recording at cellar Roundtable dot com, sponsored by the ultimate software tool for amazon sales and growth seller S EO dot com and amazing at home dot com. 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjleonard/ Website: https://www.ecombrokers.co.uk/ Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_1: Welcome to the seller roundtable e commerce coaching and business strategies with Andy Arnott and Amy Wees, [00:00:10] spk_2: hey, what's up everybody, this is Andy are not with [00:00:12] spk_0: Amy Ruiz and [00:00:14] spk_2: we're super excited to have Ben Leonard back on Ben, thank you so much for being here, [00:00:18] spk_1: Hey, good to be here. Thanks for having me. I [00:00:21] spk_2: almost, I almost re butchered it, I'm so used to that last name, being my friend from college college, I had to really, really think about that one. [00:00:29] spk_1: It's cool, you can call me whatever you like. I've been called a lot of bad things, so you know, I don't want to do that, we'll [00:00:35] spk_2: stay with the niceties. [00:00:36] spk_1: Um [00:00:37] spk_2: then on that note, I would love if people haven't watched the episode that you were on previously, you guys should go back and listen to that, but if you have not then give us a quick little synopsis of kind of your journey to where you are today. [00:00:50] spk_1: Cool. I'll try and keep it brief. Um My background is science. I'm an environmental nerd, um studied, studied ecology, was working as an environmental scientist when I started my first e commerce brand back in 2016 and it was a fitness brand. It turned out I was pretty good at it, so I quit my job and I scaled that brand up and by late 2019, we were doing about $6 million bucks a year in sales and I sold it. Uh this was right before the explosion in mergers and acquisitions that we're now seeing in e commerce and I sold it through a broker and the experience with that broker could have been a bit better. So at the end of that, my accountant and I put our brains together and decided to combine our skill sets me on the e commerce side and Allison on the mergers and acquisitions on the accountancy side, we created a better brokerage and now I'm kind of doing three things, I'm doing a bit of consulting, helping big brands to be a bit more like the little guys, because it's us that's crushing it in e commerce and not them. I got the brokerage helping e commerce business plan and then execute their exit strategy and I'm still building brands partly because I love it, partly because now I know how to build a brand into something valuable that I can sell. And partly because I still need to have my, my feet in the trenches as it were, so that I can properly advise people because of course this space is moving so fast and that's a really quick rundown on, on me and how I got to what I'm doing now, [00:02:21] spk_0: awesome. And how did you learn about amazon? How did you first learn about it? [00:02:28] spk_1: Yeah, so I came at it a bit different than a lot of people. For me, it was never about all I need to sell stuff on amazon it was, oh, I'm starting a brand of fitness equipment, I need somewhere to sell it. I was one of those people that thought that when you bought something on amazon, you're buying it from Jeff Bezos, like I didn't know that third party selling was a thing. I just knew that I was developing these fitness products and I would probably want to sell them on my website and I might want to sell them somewhere else like either or something. And then I discovered all you can sell on amazon. So for me, it was just a sales channel and that's how I got into it. And the approach, [00:03:03] spk_0: I think that's so smart and whenever I see people that are building a brand first and brand focus and customer focus first, they always do really well on amazon because they are very, they're not dependent on amazon for all of their traffic and sales, they're just looking at amazon is a very strong sales channel and they're doing all the rest of the customer. Follow up customer market research, all of that kind of stuff very well. So I think that it's always nice to hear that not everybody who builds a brand first does well on amazon because sometimes they don't understand e commerce, but I think today you just, you have to understand e commerce to really, you know, to grow faster. So speaking of that though, you know, you started this brand of fitness equipment by, oh, by the way, that sounds like hard, like oversized, like heavy, you know, what was the hardest part about growing and scaling that business [00:04:10] spk_1: a few things, I guess. Um, it was quite competitive. Um, so it was important to stand out from the crowd and I did that through brand identity and building direct relationships with customers off of amazon through social channels. Um, I ran into a few intellectual property issues which we can touch on if you want. Um, one of the biggest challenges, it was just the, the status quo of the fitness industry, like it's all about, um being the biggest, strongest, fastest, the slimmest, the most, mostly the skinniest. And so I actually use that to my advantage, I kind of dig it where everyone else is act. So I made the kind of somewhat unorthodox decision to make myself and averagely fit normal guy, the face of the brand. And so the whole idea was if you're an averagely fit, normal person, you're provided, you set some goals and you're working hard to get after them. You're a beast. Welcome to our tribe. The brand was called Beast gear. Um, you know, welcome to our tribe at the same time. If you're really unfit and you're just trying to get off the couch and run your first 5K, you're a beast. Welcome to our tribe. And if you're going to be the next heavyweight boxing champion of the world, you're also a beast. Welcome your drivers, like everyone is welcome fitness kit, high quality fitness kit at a fair price is for everyone and we're kind of going against the elitist image of the fitness industry come along and it worked because people buy from people, not brands like until your Tesla or Nike, no one cares about your brand, they just want to solve the problem. So eventually people did care about my brand, but only after they bought two or three products and they became like a big fan. So until that point I just had to kind of present myself as hey, I'm Ben, I'm the guy that started the skier. I'm a normal guy like you uh come by my stuff and it worked. [00:06:01] spk_0: Mm I love that technique in it. I love how you brought up that people buy from people, they buy to have their problem solved? They don't care about your brand in the beginning, that doesn't mean that your brand messaging and what you're communicating doesn't matter. As you proved with making sure that you actually had a brand persona and you are connecting with the customer, which is really important and awesome. Um what in terms of choosing those winning product, You talked, you talked a little bit about how you had some intellectual property issues and I think all of us, if you have not had some intellectual property issue, you have probably not been a brand owner or in e commerce for very long. But but yeah, how did you pick winning products? Was it more important to pick the winning products or to build the brand? Was it a balance, talk to us about that. [00:06:58] spk_1: So I'll tell you what I didn't do first because again, when I started this and even when I had my first idea of what the first product was gonna be, I wasn't coming in from an amazon point of view, so I hadn't played around with just 2016, right, I don't think helium 10 existing Java Jungle Scout did hadn't played around with Jungle Scout. I wasn't trying to figure out what the search volume on certain keywords was and what should I sell it was about, I'm gonna build a brand of this, I'm interested in this, this makes sense, I'll go and do that. And for me then it was just about scratching my own itch. So I was looking through my fitness hit in my gym bag and I did a lot of boxing and crossfit at the time and my jump rope wasn't very good, so I decided to make a better one. So I developed a better one and the first product for the brand be skier was called the beast rope. Eventually I brought out 3, 3 jump ropes. And so for me it was about, well what problems do I have and how do I solve them? And then it was about creating products which solve related problems for the same group of people, it was never about gaming the algorithm or finding some opportunity through amazon in that way, I'm not saying you can do that, you absolutely can do that and then build a brand around that, but it really helps if you're passionate about whatever it is that you find, so for me that's, you know that that's how that worked, I just created more products that made sense for my customers to solve related products problems for them, always trying to either be as good as or better than the competitor products that were already available. [00:08:35] spk_0: Yeah, and in terms of your marketing strategy um when you're building that brand out, I love how you mentioned, you know, you picked yourself as the persona and you said hey I'm just a normal guy and I'm making, I'm solving my own problems and these are your problems too, you know come along and be part of our tribe, how much of growing your brand um had to do with what you were doing off of amazon [00:09:04] spk_1: a huge amount um so I think more and more brands and even amazon themselves now are paying attention to the off amazon part of the equation, but I think I was pretty early to do that, so for example a lot of this is like straight out of like the Gary Vaynerchuk playbook and you know love him or hate him, he's got some pretty cool ideas and it's doing stuff that on the face of it, you think doesn't scale, but when it starts to work, you eventually find a way to make it scale. So let me give an example, right? And it really helps if you have a brand that lend itself well to social media, either because it's photogenic or people like to talk about it and fitness is a good example of that, but other brands work. Like you could have like a knitting brand. I would work really well, like Pinterest or instagram. So, you know, let me get a new picture. Um, Dave buys, Mind You weightlifting belt and he posts a photograph of himself on instagram using the hashtag for the brand. And he tags the brand and in the beginning it was me doing all this, but eventually it was a team search the hashtags and search for who's check his tank. This. Not only would we comment on their post with a meaningful comment, not some generic rubbish, but actually something relevant to what they posted about. We would click on their profile and spend a minute scanning back through their last several posts and learning a little bit about them and then have a conversation with them in the D. M. S. So it's oh, hey, Dave great job with your squat personal best the other day. And I saw your post from a few weeks ago where you absolutely nailed your dad lift. Great job. I see you're from, you know, I know Edinburgh, it's my favorite city in the UK and then you just build a conversation with them, Right? And you're building a relationship. David's delighted because you've paid him attention. That's why he's on instagram. People on instagram for attention and whether they admit that or not, that's why they're there. And so you paid him attention. He's blown away because the brand that he just bought from is deeming him. You don't get that with Nike. And then you just you just start out there. Well, because you're awesome. Here's 10, off on our website. So now you've moved him over to your website. So amazon's top of funnel. You've moved into your website. He might or might not buy from you, but you've got a good chance of at least getting his email address from your lead magnet. So now you can market to through email. Mhm. And you can then just ask him a simple question at this point, you've built up so much goodwill. Right. He's delighted purely because you've been you've paid him attention and you've shown interest in his life, by the way, where did you buy the weightlifting film? And you know what the answer is going to be? Well, I got it on amazon. You wouldn't mind just heading back over to your account and just living as a quick review, would you? And then you get the review and then here's a great bit. So he's brought a weightlifting belt from you. So what I would do is I would save all my customers post in different collections. So that, that post would go into collection called like UK customers weightlifting. So in two months later I'm launching another weightlifting product back to that collection, Back to every person who's posted back into the DMZ catch up conversation, how you doing, what's been going on? How's your life, how is your training and they can help you with, you know, keep it cool, keep it natural, show interest, empathy. By the way, we're launching a new product and then you can see where we're going from here. So then you can launch new products to an audience who cares about you. And this is how you build raving fans and people will be [00:12:37] spk_0: micro influencers and brand ambassadors. [00:12:40] spk_1: Yeah, so you get your user generated content would never have to pay for any content. You get your reviews which are all verified and real like you're completely with in terms of service, you're not saying, hey, you know, if you didn't [00:12:52] spk_0: give him a free product, [00:12:54] spk_1: nothing like that [00:12:55] spk_0: reached out to just [00:12:58] spk_1: it just so happens that unhappy people tend not to post on instagram, but you're, you know, it's not, it's not against terms of service. So you're that is how you do it. And then um they become raving fans and they tell their friends and so on and so forth. So to answer your question yes, they play a huge part and we did that in every country right? We were selling in U. K France, Germany italy spain and we would I use really not google translator translating tool called deep L. Deep L dot com I think it is check it out. It's really good to actually put together scripts and even just on the fly just put in whatever they're typing at me into deep L and translated and right back in their native language I it really really really worked to build those relationships and after a while it became unsustainable for me to do it myself. So I built out the scripts and I handed them over to a team and they did it. [00:13:55] spk_0: I love that, I love that from the very beginning you started by with the intention of connecting and following up with your customers which is brand 101 that's [00:14:08] spk_1: awesome. Killing my mic there. I couldn't have done that if I found some random thing on amazon to sell and even if I then try to build a brand around that let's say I found like some, I don't know plumbing component and I built some plumbing brad. I have not the smallest interest in plumbing so even if I built a brand around it, I wouldn't have had, I wouldn't have got out of bed in the morning, excited to go talk to people in the DMS about plumbing right? It has to be something that you're passionate about or at least someone in your organization needs to be [00:14:43] spk_0: Yeah, I mean you can sell plumbing [00:14:46] spk_1: parts, but not as much, [00:14:48] spk_0: you can sell plumbing parts on amazon all you want and you might even find a really underserved niche and you might make some good money, but it's gonna be really hard for you to build a brand around that, especially if you don't know anything about it and actually make it a sellable brand. So that being said, you know, you talked about all this, it's just so interesting to me because this is one of the biggest pain points that I noticed when people come to me and ask me about, you know, hey, I can't, I can't get this thing to sell and it's like, well that's because you're one of 400 other ones like why why should the customer by this? Right? What's your vision, what are you doing with this brand? You know, and people just feel stuck and I think it's because they start with this model where they pick a product that they think is, you know, low competition, high demand and then everybody else does the same thing and you know, we end up in this lovely, you know chasing tails thing. So speaking of that, I mean amazon has changed that actually used to work a while ago, you know that that was like you could sell a man, but people are still teaching that and it's just, it's not as effective [00:15:55] spk_1: anymore, it's [00:15:56] spk_0: definitely not effective for selling, so that being said then what do you recommend for people, you're still building brands today? What do you recommend for people who are getting started there listening to the story, they're listening to this amazon opportunity and what do you recommend for them? What should they be doing? [00:16:14] spk_1: The first question to ask yourself is not what to sell, it's who to sell to and ideally you want to scratch your own itch and all the best brands start from somebody scratching their own image for example, Airbnb was okay, it's not physical products, but it's cool, it's a big brand was started by some people who were broke and they inflated some air beds in their spare room and rented it out. Right? And so they created a platform for people to run out of their spare rooms and it's grown from there, Shopify was started by Tobias Luca who needed a platform, a website to sell his snowboards and in the process of building and discovered that actually he was scratching an itch there to build a platform for people to sell products on their own dDC website, you get the idea right? So it needs to be something that you identify with and you're passionate about and you want to build a brand which to me a brand is A suite of products and you don't need to end up having a lot of products right, if you, if you end up with five skills, that's absolutely fine. I would say a sweet spot is between five and 25 suite of related products that solve related problems for a particular group of people, whether that's motorcycle fans or, you know, people who like crochet, whatever, um, and make it something you're, you're interested in. Start with, that is what I would do, and then it's the classic stuff, you know, identify what's your first product going to be, that's going to get people hooked and ensure that there's something about it that differentiates from the crowd. Now, that might, that might be difficult at first, might be difficult to either improve upon the competition or create something novel, but as a minimum, you have to then make it all about brand and make your brand stand there and potentially take a slightly different view on it. So go niche to target a particular niche group within that group of people, if that makes sense? Yeah, [00:18:26] spk_0: that's where I would start, I think that's really great advice and, you know, people can get very overwhelmed because they see this opportunity and they go, okay, you know, I want to, I want to leave my job and I want to go after this opportunity, but then they get stuck in this kind of loop where they're like, I don't know what to sell and they don't feel confident enough in scratching their own itch and, you know, so then they're just like uh just I'm just gonna sell this other thing because it looks like it has good numbers right? But then it's really hard to grow something that you're not interested in right? Because you're like okay where do I go from here? So I think just starting there and not being afraid to just start small and grow from there is just such great advice. [00:19:06] spk_1: I think at the start a lot of people because of a lot of the topics in the blogs Youtube podcast is people coming on to talk about and what's the latest tactic or hack or shiny object for doing A. B. C. But newbies hear that and they're like oh I need to be doing that. And then the next episode We'll be doing that as well and that and that and that and that and they get pulled 1" in a million directions rather than just thinking strategically, forget all that stuff. Forget about the latest hack to rank on amazon you don't have an amazon business? Only Jeff Bezos does and think about the wider strategy right what's my first product? What would what would what would a suite of four products right now for this particular people, Group of people look like write that down and then ask yourself okay who are these people what are their values? What are their challenges? What are their pain points? What do they need, what would their objections to buying from me be and how do I bust those and where do they hang out and then get in front of them like ali on Pinterest. Great go there. If they're not on Pinterest then don't go on Pinterest. Are they on youtube? Are they on instagram? Are there on Tiktok or on the facebook groups wherever they are, Get in front of them and start building the audience now before you even launch, there's a great book on that topic actually. I wish I'd written, it's called 12 months $2 million dollars by Ryan Daniel Moran. Um, it's, it's great book because it's quite straightforward and simple strategic without getting too caught up in the wigs. So I would recommend everyone reads that. [00:20:45] spk_0: Alright, 12 months to a million by Ryan Moran, awesome. Okay, so you sold your business? [00:20:53] spk_1: I did [00:20:54] spk_0: what made you decide that it was the right time to sell [00:20:58] spk_1: well? Um, so it was early 2019 when I made the decision, so completely different landscape now. Right. I've heard a few whispers, you know, within the e commerce community that there was some money coming into the space to acquire e commerce brands and that buying and selling e commerce businesses was becoming a little going to become more mainstream, you know, previously, if somebody had said they wanted to buy an e commerce business or selling e commerce business? You know, you would have got looked at like you had two heads? People believed that an e commerce business wasn't a real grown up business because it didn't have a roof and a door and walls and I came to realize that I was sitting on a pretty valuable asset. My wife was pregnant, we wanted to move house and the business was at a turning point where either I build a bigger team either remotely or locally and got a bunch more resources to take it where it could go or I could take some legacy money off the table and do something different and give us a bit more security for life. And I decided that the right thing for our family at that point, what we collectively decided was to sell and perhaps if I had already had an exit under my belt, already had that kind of safety net, financially I would have potentially stayed along for the ride because I loved the brand still do on the ground, but it was the right time for us. And there is kind of a qualitative way of looking at this, a quantitative way of looking at it and a really wishy washy emotional way of looking at it. And I received some wishy washy emotional advice whilst I was thinking about this, it was actually really, really helpful. Yeah. Um and the advice was this, it was sell your business at the point of peak romance and what that means is you've built up a whole bunch of potential, stored energy in your business as to where it might go. Its got a lot of potential, but that's only potential, it might not be achieved. It might not be realized if you get out now you're a really great spot because you have a lot of potential which you can use as leverage to negotiate a great deal and you can potentially in addition, um, capitalize on the upside if you structure the deal right as well after you've sold. But if after you've sold, it doesn't quite reach the potential that you think it has then you got out at the right time, which is a pretty interesting way of looking at it. I also felt like it was the right time to sell just because I was growing, but I hadn't maxed that growth. So there was still some meat on the bone to attract a potential buyer and I think that's something that everyone should take account of. You want to sell your business when you've got your on an upward trajectory, you've got growth history. But you haven't maxed out growth because whoever buys your business wants to enjoy some of that growth to an accelerated and then if there are financial buyer, they're going to want to exit themselves a little bit further down the line. [00:24:05] spk_2: Yeah, absolutely. Um, I love some of the points you made there. One of the things I really like that you mentioned is you know, if you wanted to, if if, you know, because a lot of people see their businesses like their babies, right? They have this emotional kind of attachment to their business, right? Almost like a child. And I love the fact that you mentioned that, you know, if you structure the deal right, if you still want to be involved, you can, you can take, you know, some money off the table in terms of, you know, percentage of ownership, um, and still stick around if you, you know, if you believe in the company or you want to continue to grow the company or like you did take it off the table and go on to the next thing and take what you've learned and, you know, sometimes it's, you know, I'm do, I do a lot of software and sometimes it's better to just start over rather than try to rework code that you've done before, right? Because you all, you have this knowledge of the journey now that you can take And, and kind of start from, it would be like, uh, you know, like being a contractor and building houses, right? If it's the first house you ever built, it's not going to be nearly as good as the 10th or 15th house you're gonna build, right? Because you're going to have that experience and those tips and those tricks and those, all those different ways of doing things that are going to evolve and get better. So to take that first house and maybe try to remodel it. You know, you might not get that that perfect house that, that dream house that you really can envision unless you start from the foundation and work your way up. [00:25:28] spk_1: Yeah, you had a great point there actually, which is a lot of people are asking now they're saying, hold on a second with all these aggregators in the space buying brands and all the resources they have, aren't they just going to start their own brands and how compete me and I'm not gonna be able to compete. And the answer to that is no, because most of these aggregators know diddly squat about e commerce, they know how to raise money, but their operational capability is pretty poor if we're being frank And many of them won't exist in the next 9 to 18 months anyway. And their expertise lies in taking what you have already built and sticking some big resources behind it. They don't have, they are a cruise ship. The cruise ships are great, they have tons of entertainment on board, you can eat as much as you want and they take you to interesting places, but they take half a day to turn around and you can't just change the itinerary when you want, but when you're on a speedboat, you can choose, Oh, I'm going to go swimming, dolphins are going to go shark fishing, I'm going to go scuba diving, you can still end up in the same destination at the end of the day as the cruise ship and probably faster. So you can still, you can exit your brand and then with the resources that you've got, buy yourself a new speedboat and still beat the cruise ship and and then sell again and again and again. And that's kind of the model that I'm following and I would encourage others to follow. And you know what you mentioned before as well about deal structure. I mean that highlights why it's really important to work with. Not only a great broker but a broker who will partner you with a really good mergers and acquisitions attorney to help structure the deal such that uh it protects you from the potentially poor operational capability of whoever buys it. Um, but also whatever in a way that suits you. So if you want a bit of an in and out because you can see where this could go and great if you want to consultancy agreement, so you can help advise on the running of the thing. Great. If you want to take a profit split of new products that you launch after you sold the business because you've still got a big list of products that you could launch. Great if you want to retain some equity, Great. But you've got to have the right representation to help you do that. Thanks for tuning in to part one of this episode, join us every Tuesday at one PM pacific standard time for live Q and A. And bonus content after the recording at cellar Roundtable dot com, sponsored by the ultimate software tool for amazon sales and growth seller S EO dot com and amazing at home dot com. 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritujava/recent-activity/ Website : https://www.ppcninja.com/ Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_1: Welcome to the seller roundtable e commerce coaching and business strategies with Andy Arnott [00:00:07] spk_0: and Amy Wees, you know, you just mentioned about indexing and I think that's one of the very important things that we pay attention to. So we we do a pretty thorough job of keyword research when we're researching keywords to put into our titled bullet points back and the back end is the one that kind of gets ignored because you know you yeah, there's a tendency to think, okay, I've mentioned everything on my listing, like what else can I put and then ends up having a bunch of random words that are maybe, you know, they're not making sense, right? So they're not uh maybe not as uh important to the success of the product as it could be. So I think the strategy of um indexing for as many keywords as possible in the back end begins with, you know, making sure that you have. Uh so this is a technique that I picked up from Stephen Pope and he really talks about it in depth in a lot of places, but his strategy involves uh you know, making sure that the maximum number of permutation and combination of keywords happens early on, and then once those keywords kind of become sticky with more conversions, then you can kind of rotate them out and have more keywords go into the back, right? So that's like the whole process and I'm sure you guys can find his, you know, his video is yeah, he's got some three or four videos on that, we can look it up, but that's what we've been testing and we've seen good results with that. So I think um the I mean I personally do not have any um I don't need to kind of do any other ranking strategy outside of amazon other than maybe just encouraging external traffic to kind of get those initial kind of get the organic kind of listing up. I think Amy you're better at that rate. You're, your whole world is about you know, finding out which keywords can we rank for the, finding those gems earlier. And I think that's something that you're pretty good at. But yeah, in our case we try to make sure that we're including as many keywords as possible. Making sure misspellings of spanish words using the back end of our a plus images and so on. All of those are good places to kind of uh stuff keywords that you will then start to rank for overtime. Love it. Cool. And then um yeah, I agree. Organic. It's really important to have that amazing S EO foundation. So um what about seasonality? Right. Were in queue for, we're in this situation now where we need to be thinking about seasonality for our targets bidding and budget. Did you want to say anything about what people should be considering for seasonality? Yeah, I think so one of the things that really stands out every single time. The spirit of Frank this Q4 comes around. We look at the data and it says so much about whether or not your you know your products are going to convert. You know or not. So basically what we see in the data is gift doubles versus non gift herbal. There's such a big difference between um how these to perform during this time of year. So if you have any kind of product that is not a gift herbal or not something that someone is likely to buy on the black friday, cyber monday or even the holidays. Then the recommendation that we give up to our our audience is to kind of protect yourself because this is the time when you're cpcs are going to be extremely high and so you don't want to get caught in that mad holiday rush of people just clicking around the click through rates are crazy by the by the way right now it's like going through the roof conversions are down, click. The Raiders are probably they're just stocking up and making just you know making lists or adding products to their um to the basket and so on. But I'm not buying yet right waiting for for black friday to uh to come around but you know by and large this time of year is going to be more expensive because people are in the mode of shopping in the mood for shopping and in the mode for shopping so if you don't have a gift of will protect yourselves. Well actually I just went to yesterday I went and download uh decrease all of our budgets to $9 for any product that was not a gift of all, Which we know is not going to convert. It has a history of not converting during Q4. Why would we waste money? Amazon's recommendation at this time of year is always the same. It's increase your bits, increase your budget, but it's not gonna make sense to uh you know, to most people. All right, so definitely protect yourself if you're in that category if you are a gifted, although you've got to be smart about, you know, showing up having, you know, visibility, so making sure that you have coupons running, you have some sort of deals running because these are what will help you get visibility. Um and um yeah, don't miss the traffic. It's it's it's for you to take at this point. [00:05:24] spk_1: Yeah, that's a great point. Um you know, one of the things that I've told people for many, many years now and it continues to be true is, you know, especially right now, like this week before, black friday and cyber monday is like you said, everybody's window shopping right? So right now you're really, you know, and I've heard of tons of people like you said amazon will be these things like raise your bids, you know, get the most sales and all the but honestly, in terms of return on investment, it's probably gonna be negative. Um So that's great advice. Um The other thing that um you know, I would love people to know and I've said this many times before as well is, you know, if you're ever budgeting out right and you have and you have a target that's converting but not converting. Well in terms of our oi right then the fix for that, the easy fix for that is to start scaling the bids back and raising the budget right until you until you get to the sweet spot where you're but not budgeting out And that's a net positive in terms of return on investment. So just a few things like that, especially going into Q4, those are, you know, a couple of points to really really think about on that same note, what are some of some other big roadblocks for Amazon sellers to get to profit profitability when it comes with, you know, dealing with the ads in PBC. [00:06:38] spk_0: Yeah, so I think um you know, in terms of roadblocks, um I think just knowing that it is a very competitive space and also this is a very competitive time when I think the big guys have all the budgets to spend and it's it's not gonna be for everybody, right, if we're talking specifically about Q for black friday and the holidays. Um I think that, you know, knowing that these are, you know, these are just games that the big boys can play and it's not for everybody just being cognizant of that is important. Um There's one strategy though I just like to mention which is re marketing and retargeting, so there's two but uh amazon gonna combines them into the same bucket and they just call them re marketing and I just want to mention that you know you have the ability to reach back to people who have some sort of brand loyalty. Like if you've sold anything for let's say a year you probably have enough people that you can re market to, right? So um using certain ad types like the sponsor display um purchase your marketing. That is one of the greatest ways to going to get them back because they are nine times more likely to buy from you if they have purchased in the past, that's just one uh tip, I want to kind of throw out there. Um The other one is retargeting. Retargeting is basically about, you know getting people who have maybe not completed their their order, they may be just abandoned card or whatever and you want to just get them back. Uh There is ways to do that also to sponsor display, right? You can do um really targeting even though they call it something else, they got reviews your marketing, you can get them back. The only caveat is for views re marketing, I would recommend like a short window I think go for the seven day window if possible and for purchases remarketing, go for the long window the 3 65 days because it's, it's cool that amazon allowed that. I mean it was, it was, It used to be there, then they took it away and then they brought it back but slowly. So 365 days back, we look back windows are amazing to get all the people who have purchased from you in the past to come come back to you and this is the best time to kind of do that. So yeah, I'm not sure if I answered your question about roadblocks. Uh, CPCS are rising. Competition is rising. There's also like so many look alikes like, I mean I can search on anything on amazon and find a whole page full of stuff that is just the same. I mean they look the same, they're almost in the same price range. How does one pay? Great. And it's very hard. So I think how do you differentiate your product from others? That's the other whole thing, which is not anything to do with PPC by. I think it's important because um, you know, even with PPC are showing up on top of the, of the search results page, but you're competing with very similar looking items and maybe items that are perhaps cheaper than yours maybe better. Maybe have thousands of fake reviews, but you know, that's the reality of, of amazon. [00:09:52] spk_1: Yeah, it's interesting too because I feel like amazon is trying to push back right now on the creep to amazon becoming more like Ebay right? People kind of abandoned Ebay because they didn't trust the purchase, they didn't trust the quality, the seller's etcetera. And I feel like you know, as much of a pain as it is because amazon these days will flag listings and do all kinds of crazy things um which are frustrating but I think what they're trying to do is to try to boot off some of these non professional sellers and these kind of like scam artists or people who are just literally copying like you said the same product that's already been done 100 times. They don't want that. I mean the price, the competitiveness is already there. So it's not really giving anybody a benefit. Uh it's not giving the shopper a benefit because there's already so many options. So at that point, you know, amazon is kind of like, you know, now we're, why are we showing these, you know, thousands or you know, it's the first pages where people are going to purchase. So um I have noticed with the algorithm though as well is they are now starting to pare down result pages, right? I mean there might be 100,000, you know uh dual insulated cups on amazon but when you search now it's like 2 to 3000 or you know a much shorter, a much smaller number because I think they're starting to realize like we don't need to show that many pages of results. Um You know, all it's gonna do is get people like walmart to steal our data. So it's, it's an interesting kind of what they're working with. Um One of the things that's not really new anymore, but it's still new in terms of the PPC kind of lifespan is video ads and I still see so many sellers not utilizing video ads and it's still one of the best performing if done correctly. You have so many, you know, a couple of tips maybe for people have not done video ads yet how they can get into the game and kind of best practices for video ads. [00:11:41] spk_0: Yeah, absolutely. Um so I think video ads have a very high kick through it compared to any of the other at types. They have a six X click through it minimum. Right? Um and so that just gives you a lot of advantage over all the other at types because it stands out. You know, there's like a engaging moving uh, you know, visual there that is so eye catching. Um I think that, you know, you're right. I mean not too many people are doing video ads and you know when I ask people are you doing video ads, they will say yes. And if I asked them, how many are you running? They might say something like one or two, which is kind of interesting to me because if you're running like 30 or 40 sponsored product, key word based ads, why aren't you running 30 or 40 video ads that are using the exact same keywords. You can just replicate whatever you're doing on the sponsored products side of things into video, including product targeting and category targeting. So um that's, I totally agree with you. I mean it's underutilized and it's also your opportunity because if others aren't doing it, then you can maybe what throws people off is the minimum uh CPC, which is 25 cents. I think that's the floor that people gonna get intimidated by. And I think one of the tips I have is um you know, try with exact match and trees match instead of broad because broad on, you know, the sponsored brand side of things is very different from broad on sponsored products. Right? The matching is a little bit, little bit more broad on the sponsored brand side of things. Um and so what I've been doing is I've been using broad match modifiers and that's one way you can kind of forget cleaner data. So try to have broad match modifier instead of broad match. Try to have more exact matches and more phrase matches. But with this, I think you can get easily get closer to the number of campaigns that you're running on the sponsored products side of things on the video outside you just need one asset and you can just replicate those ads. Uh it doesn't need to be, you know, you don't need to spend a lot of money on it. Um, in terms of what these video ads need to look like. I don't think there's any clear, um, you know, consensus on, you know, just run this type of ad or that type of ad does, you know, pan and zoom type of ads that do quite well. There is um very high end kind of videography based video ads that are also doing well and then there's animation style video ads that can cost a little bit, but they're, they can be pretty effective when, especially when your product, there's certain aspects of your product that cannot be shown to duty or through a video. Like for example, if you want to show that you're selling masks and there's like six layers in your mask. Maybe an animation style might help to illustrate that point better than just duty or just saying it in words. Right? So I think with those three styles you can pick and choose, but we've, we've been testing and I think all three at types are doing equally well. Um, what you combine it with, like in terms of keywords or targeting actually is what makes our breaks a video ad, but definitely Go for it because uh four extra real estate, there is no other at type that gives you so much room on page one. [00:15:09] spk_1: Yeah, absolutely. And what people don't realize and and I think amy and I've mentioned this before is Canada now has like built in video editing and like you were saying, if you're just doing like, you know, we're like the text kind of zooms in and you can have a picture of the product and kind of do a little explainer video on your own. The barrier to entry now is really, really low. And you know, the other thing is to just do a search for some of your keywords and if you're not seeing video ads, then there's a huge opportunity, which I do quite frequently and there's still a lot of people who are not, you know, and what's funny is it's, it's uh, you know, usually the big brands are the ones who don't jump into this stuff early, but I feel like the most video ads I'm seeing are for bigger brands and the opportunity though is for the little brands because you know, that's where they actually might be able to compete on that real estate. So that's interesting. Um the other thing that I I love that you mentioned is, you know, is to go, you know, a little tighter on your targeting the other thing that's really cool video ads is using a system like Canada where, you know, you can make edits fairly easily, you can do like five or 10 different variations where you're not changing a whole lot, but maybe it's just like the background color or and you would be really, really surprised how certain colors, certain fonts, certain picture size is the way it's laid out. Can make a huge difference visually for people who click and then convert um, a lot of people don't think of that. So if you took a basic template of an ad you make and then you change the background color to five different colors and you, you know, maybe make the image on the top right on one and maybe in the top left on the other things like that little changes. You can then go out deploy those in testament, see which 11 is gonna after awhile gonna gonna be the clear winner and then you can dedicate more of your resources to that add. So so some great things that you can do there with video ads. Um we were talking, it actually goes great into my next question. You're just talking about match types for people or maybe not super experienced amazon PBC um can you maybe explain the different kinds of match types and how you see them working the most effective in terms of, you know, maybe stage of a product or large or you know, just kind of success with match types. [00:17:16] spk_0: Yeah, sure. So the way we, you know at PP SINGER, we have a system where we um do our keyword research and then going to sort the entire list descending by popularity. So um, so the most popular would be in terms of let's say um keywords that have made it to Brandon analytics and they're in the top 50,200 thousands of frequency rank followed by helium 10 or merchant words or jungles card, whatever you're, you know, tool of choice is um, you know, sorting them descending um in this long list and then and I do this in google sheets by the way. So it's very easy to insert checklists or check boxes and then just go check, check, check, check. And so my my um strategy is to first kind of get exact matches in. So that's my very first like I will make sure that the popular keywords are going to be covered by my exact match campaigns. The next I go to broad matches, I will try to collapse my broad matches into as few as possible so that I don't create data spread. For example, if I have bluetooth headphones and I have another keyword Bluetooth headphones for something or Bluetooth, green bluetooth headphones or whatever. I'm going to try and minimize the broad match keywords to just the core keywords so that I do not spread my data and I want those quirky words to get as much momentum as possible. So that then amazon will start to recognize them indirectly as you know the right keywords uh to show. Right. So that would be my next kind of phase and I go check, check, check, check collapse, collapse as much as possible. Now I might make some exceptions to that rule when I really want to make sure that a word uh that is very specific and it talks to a specific intent is covered in blood match. So to give you an example if I did bluetooth headphones for mac. Now mac is an important word and I want to make sure that I capture all the intent that includes that that word in it. Um so I will include that as a broad match keyword. And then once I'm done with my broad matches, then I go to my phrase match column and I look for any opportunities for, you know, words that are likely to be used together um and then identify those and I check those off and then make sure that they're you know present because they're not, I'm not I'm not bothered with the order. I need to make sure that they're in the exact same order. Um so that's kind of how I do my research and I make sure that um you know, my campaign sizes are small enough. I don't add more than 20 keywords per per campaign and that's just to make sure that the budget is um distributed evenly, even though, you know, you can't really direct that most of the times amazon is going to give the early data points a lot more preference. Um but by and large, you know you want to make sure that your campaign sizes are small. Um if you have like 500 keywords which no one I believe no one in this day and age does, but there's some people out there that will put a lot of keywords into a campaign. Um um what we see is that a majority of those keywords will not get any impressions and they will simply just stay there uh ignored, completely starved of any attention. Uh and only a few, a handful of the few that did get any kind of movement at the beginning, we get exponentially more and more impressions, right? So you want to make sure that your campaign sizes are small, You want to split them out by match type. You don't want to mix broad match with an exact match because broad match will move faster than your exact match and take up your budget. So that's kind of how I, you know, design my campaigns. Uh Now, one more thing I want to add there is with the broad match modifier. I actually use broad match modifiers across the board. Um even though I know that the you know sponsored products tend to have um a lot more uh you know cleaner match when it comes to brown matches. I still do the broad match modifier there as well. [00:21:39] spk_1: Yeah, I love and a lot of people are you know aren't even familiar with with the broad match modifier and like you said in terms of like bluetooth headphone right? In that phrase, you know, bluetooth is less important than headphones, right? Because somebody can buy it on headphones when they search headphones. You know they may not be looking for bluetooth but nowadays majority of people who have devices bluetooth built in, so that would be a modifier that you probably want to include in your broad match, right? So the plus um headphones and then some bluetooth plus plus headphones that people don't really know, you know what we're talking about in terms of modifiers. So that's that's some great tips. Actually one of my best performing keywords of all time is a broad match modifier. Um You know I've been doing this since 2012. So the other day I like pulled up my accounts you know in sorted by uh you know sales and spending all that kind of fun stuff and I just kind of went in just just for fun. Um And uh yeah so so that was an interesting thing to look at. So definitely if you don't know what those are, make sure that your um you know make sure you're diving into those um a few quick things here um as we wrap up is um you know you always hear this one and it's like oh I'm already on page one. Should I turn off my PPC and uh you know you kind of mentioned in the beginning how organic uh you know, rank is getting pushed further and further down. Um you know what what's your response to that? [00:22:59] spk_0: Yeah, no, I I wouldn't turn off the pc, that's uh even if I'm ranking number one, um if I see two of my products showing their one as an ad and one as an organic listing, I would rather take that it's more real estate on the on page one, it's less um you know, chance for someone else to kind of get in and steal my sale. I would rather play defensive than uh you know, be um you know, more short term about my approach, I would I would look at it as the only way to kind of stay there um you know, long term and um for that reason I would never cut back on my BBC. Even if I'm already showing up on page one position one, because that can change anytime, you know, that can change. If you, if you lose it, then uh there's people who are paying up to 900% of the of what you're paying through a placement modifier, right? Anyone can get into the first pot if they have a modified running. So that would that would just mean you have one less spot on page one, so I wouldn't do that, [00:24:06] spk_1: yep. Absolutely. And the other thing, you know, the analogy I always like to use is like, you know, I'd be like being in a store and be like, oh I got the end cap, so I'm gonna go take my products out of the, you know, my, my, my my laundry detergent on the end cap, so I'm gonna go take it out of the, the aisle where you know, where it stores that shows up, you know there because oh I've got the, I've already got the prevalence of that end cap, right? It's like, no, you wouldn't do that, you want your product to appear as many times as possible, be in front of the customer as many times as possible in order to get as many conversions as possible, right? And the more times people see your product, the more likely they are to convert, just like hearing a brand name, right, it's the same kind of thing visually, if you see the same product multiple times on that page for some reason can be like, oh did I look at that one, is that the one that I thought I wanted? You know, it's just more chance for you to convert. So um I absolutely agree with that. We get to the another favorite part of the episode where we love to ask our guests, you know what they're currently into right now in terms of books, podcast, personal development, motivational materials, kind of, anything that you're into right now or anything that's really affected uh your growth either on amazon or you know in the software or your own business, et cetera. We would love to hear if you have any tips there. [00:25:18] spk_0: Oh yeah, sure. So I love listening to this business podcast called Business lunch. I don't know if you guys have heard of it, but it's by Roland Frasier and I just love all the strategies that he talks about with, you know, things like buying businesses with zero down or uh you know how to kind of structure your day, things like that. So I'm really into listening to that podcast. Um you know, you know, driving around, I've got, you know, important, um you know, you know, tips coming in, you know, from this podcast. So I think one of the things that um I learned recently is um, you know, again from this podcast, which is, you know, making sure that I structure my day um in a, in a way that is kind of uh meaningful. I start my day with a list with the to do list, which is kind of one of the simplest things to do. I guess you sit down and write what you want to do during the day. But I'm trying to organize those, you know, to do into like these squadrons the urgency and the urgent and important cordons just to make sure that I know where the priorities lie because it's so easy to kind of skip that and kind of just go with the flow, just go with whatever comes to you. And I think social media is kind of trained us into being very kind of reactive to whatever is thrown at us. And so I would I would rather kind of just be very intentional about what I pick up. Um and it's also going to help me to shut off social media. Um to a certain extent, like I kind of tell myself okay, I've listened to all the, you know, I've seen all the posts, I've seen all the little videos, I don't need to be scrolling and listen, I need to stop, right? So I think putting everything into priority and also kind of saying no to a lot more things than than yes is what can help. And it is helping me kind of stay focused throughout the day and accomplish a lot more. [00:27:19] spk_1: Yeah, I love that advice. I keep telling people I've taken about six months off of business books because I've read so many and uh you know, at some point you have to kind of decide, you know, there's so many different books, different ways of doing things whether it's business, you know, accounting systems, all these different things I've read so many. And and I think I've gotten to the point now where it's like, okay spending more time and that's probably not going to help me, right, because I've got the basis I've got kind of that more down so now it's like, okay, what's next and you know, that's where it's more like personal development um you know uh strategic, you know, long term planning, trying to be blue ocean on whatever you're doing. Um So I think that's great advice. Absolutely. All right, here's the other time that we give to you to let people know where they can get ahold of you. You know, if you're doing anything new, what you have coming up, anything you want to let people know about, Please let them know about that, [00:28:09] spk_0: wow. Absolutely. Um So you can follow me on linkedin. I kind of post a lot there. Um So it's just my phone memory to java on Lincoln. Um And then coming up in january is our 25th mastermind. So if anybody's interested there's a few criteria that you need to clear. Uh and then you know on our website. So if you go to BBC ninja dot com and look for BBC mastermind, you will be able to get details about that. It is a free mastermind program, it's four weeks long. Um And so that was one and then the other thing is we're also kind of um opening up our software to agencies because it's got a lot of cool agency features and so if there's any agencies out there no matter how big or small, we're actually giving a pretty good kind of cash back discount of $5.500 paid over like five months. Um So if anybody's an agency out there and interested in, you know, evaluating our software, we also have a 14 day free trial. So please go ahead and sign up and um let us know if you have any questions we can handle your question that support at BBC nature dot com. So yeah, with that I guess back to you. [00:29:23] spk_1: Awesome. Thank you so much for you too. It's really great to meet you. Great to have you on today and if anybody has any questions, uh make sure you join us live every Tuesday one PM pacific time sell around table dot com forward slash live. That's when you actually get into the to be in the zoom meeting with us. We don't charge you anything and we stopped alive. We stop the recording and then we answer questions if you jump into the meeting so make sure you do that. You haven't yet done so as well. Please rate review, subscribe share this podcast with someone you know, who might find it useful. We really, really appreciate you guys, the people on the livestream. If you still have a chance, please go vote for the seller roundtable podcast at cellar poll dot com. I think we were last in second place. I would love to to eke out a win. If if you guys feel like you got value from us. We really, really appreciate that guys and that is all for the seller roundtable. Thank you guys. We'll see you next time. [00:30:16] spk_0: Thank you. [00:30:21] spk_1: Thanks for tuning in, join us every Tuesday at one PM pacific standard time for live Q and A. And bonus content after the recording at cellar Roundtable dot com, sponsored by the ultimate software tool for amazon sales and growth seller S EO dot com and amazing at home dot com. 

Things we discussed in this session: A. Part B. Part 2 Things we mention in this session of Seller Round Table: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritujava/recent-activity/ Website : https://www.ppcninja.com/ Join us every Tuesday at 1:00 PM PST for Live Q&A and Bonus Content at  https://sellerroundtable.com Try the greatest Amazon seller tools on the planet free for 30 days at https://sellerseo.com/ Transcription in this episode: [00:00:01] spk_1: welcome to the seller roundtable e commerce coaching [00:00:04] spk_0: and business strategies with Andy Arnott and Amy wees friend right, it was like a side hobby to start with but then soon this became my main thing, I was so excited by the whole prospect of e commerce and marketing in general um and that's when I moved to the United States and went back to school and I did a course and data science um was very fortunate afterwards to kind of get into the the amazon space um with a very large amazon uh electronic brand um and I you know kind of really fell in love with advertising amazon advertising and that's been about like 5, 4.5 5 years um and you know fast forward to today, I have been living in Canada for the past four years um and I am the ceo of PPC ninja and picks teenager is a software and services company so we manage uh BBC for 67 and eight figure brands are software is also used by agencies uh and also by sellers um it's a self service platform and you can kind of use it, get a lot of analytics about your BBC and also around a bit of optimizations and things like that, so that's kind of my story, I've really been fortunate to you know to know people in the space like Amy have really come close to her after like having attended a couple of conferences and you know just interacted in so many different ways, I really feel uh like you know this is this is kind of my community now, right sole amazon spaces like so tighten it and also like so encouraging, I really feel that there's so much that people are giving back to the community um and that's what kind of, you know, keeps us all together and you know, helps us to kind of keep moving forward. Um so in my own capacity, I've also kind of tried to do that, I run a lot of mastermind programs and uh you know, I used to run them more frequently, but Lately being busy, I've got to cut back on the frequency, but I'm still doing them, so at the end I'm going to introduce a little bit about about that, but for now I'm just going to mention that we've done 24 of these so far and each of them run for about four weeks and we go deep into PPC. So yeah, that's kind of my background, I went all over the place but I hope that was okay, [00:02:25] spk_1: It was awesome. So um let's get into the brass tacks of things. I love, I can see now if you, you know, being raised in Japan held the PBC ninja, you know, the japanese culture was probably an influence there and I grew up in Hawaii so there's a lot of Japanese influence and culture there as well. So I appreciate the Japanese culture a lot. I've never been to Japan one of these days, my mom was a flight attendant went quite frequently, so uh definitely interested someday I think I want to make it out, go see all the uh the katanas and, and [00:02:54] spk_0: all the [00:02:55] spk_1: cool stuff that's out there [00:02:57] spk_0: um [00:02:58] spk_1: but uh [00:02:59] spk_0: I would love to know [00:03:00] spk_1: kind of, you know, you said you kind of learn about amazon through Etsy and things like that, but what, what was kind of, what drew you to amazon and that ecosystem and uh you know, kind of, how did you, when did you first realize that like, hey, I might actually be able to make a business out of, out of the calm and the amazon [00:03:15] spk_0: platform, right? Yeah, I think you know, just having that e commerce background with etc. And also you know, failing at it um many times because you know it was so I think the biggest failure was um just the cost of shipping, like it was just eating into my margin, like I couldn't manage to compete with very cheap chinese um equivalent of what I was producing and that was kind of the time when I kind of thought this is not for me, I mean this is not gonna work, I need to do something different and I started looking at advertising as a way to kind of make uh, you know, a lot more sales so that I could have a lot more volume and so therefore I could kind of cover my costs because all of this 11 offs for was not going to work right? Those were not going to be sustainable for very long. So I think the stars were aligned because when I walked into this company they had an amazon, you know, um existence and they also had at presence globally. So it was kind of just a perfect fit because um uh what I was looking for at that time was a way to kind of make things work like things uh like you make stuff and then you sell it and it actually gets sold and do all of this profitably. So I think having been kind of burned out by my own experience and then finding this opportunity where there was so much data uh that I could kind of play with and kind of learn a lot of tricks very early on uh is what kind of help me stay on and be excited because then I could, you know replicate the success over and over again through multiple launches and also then started helping other clients who were kind of stuck and they were like not sure what PPC is all about, I'm not sure whether it's worth it. I mean there's a lot of people that give up on PPC because it's just so expensive. I think that's also some of the things that we're gonna be talking about today, like just how expensive it is and how to make it worthwhile. Yeah, and I think that it can be made work while um based on how you design your PPC strategies and how you, you know what your focus is with when it comes to keywords and product targeting and other types of targeting on amazon and exactly, you know, knowing where to spend our, you know, focus on where to spend your energies on is probably what separates the the ordinary PPC are with someone who is more advanced. [00:05:47] spk_1: Yeah, absolutely. [00:05:50] spk_0: Speaking on the uh you know, separating the PPC beginner with somebody who's more advanced, how do you recommend people get started with PPC for maximum success? Yeah, that's a great question. I think at this point it's just inevitable, right? Using PPC is something that you have to kinda include as part of your strategy. So I think one of the things that you wanna make sure you, you know do when it comes to pricing your product, make sure that your pricing is right so that you can afford BBC because you're not going to be able to do without it, right? That's just a given in these times. Um and also just because of how pay to play Amazon has become um you know, now we're seeing uh the organic listing number one actually appearing somewhere around 15 or 16th position on page one which just makes it like irrelevant, almost right because all the sales are happening above the fold and those spots are just taken up by ads. So more than I guess. So the biggest shift now is more than focusing on, you know, how to get ranking on page one, which is also important by the way. Uh you know, it's now the focus is now on how to even show up, like how do you compete even with ads? How do you show up on page one but then also showing up not just at very high cpcs but very profitably. Like how do you do that? How do you make that switch? I think the thing I would like to say to people who are maybe just starting out is not to follow the crowd in terms of going aggressively after keywords that are, you know, um that have high search volume or are expensive. Um and I guess everybody knows about the long term and the short term and all that good stuff. But you know, even more so these days you've got to have other strategies, not just going after every kind of large keyboard in the space, but you know, finding low hanging fruit, having a diversified strategy so that you can compete because you've got to compete otherwise you're gonna get burned out and it's going to be unsustainable one year in and you'll be like, oh I can't do this, you know, so knowing those strategies from the get go might be your best chance at success with amazon. Yeah. And that's something that I love about when, when you present PPC at the different events, you're not just talking about general techniques, you actually get into really cool strategies. One of my favorite strategies that you taught me was to on the auto campaigns to actually split it out by um targeting groups. So just putting substitutes in one campaign, just putting complements in one and I've seen that do so so well um and even much better than product targeting campaigns. So I I love your how you kind of mix what's available in two different strategies for people. So they should definitely check out when one of your masterminds because a lot of your master minds are free, you know, and you're just you're just there to help people understand this stuff and implement some of these strategies, so it's really great but um along that line, so you mentioned, you know, getting started, not necessarily just following the mainstream but actually understanding it and having a strategy behind picking those certain keywords and going after that. But what about optimization? I think it's one thing to set up your PPC and use cool strategies. But another thing that people struggle with is optimization. So what optimization systems do you think people should have in place? Right. Um So I think with optimization there is yeah, a few different things that you can do to kind of make sure that you're not bleeding right? Um and there's you know, different approaches and people do things in different ways but it's I think optimization starts from your campaign design stage itself, like you're not optimizing after the fact but you're designing for success. I think that's one of the the ships that I want to kind of encourage people to, to make uh you know, you want to design your campaigns and your PPC strategies so that you have the best chance of success and have have an easier time optimizing um rather than, you know, just launching expensive campaigns and then trying very hard to kind of balance the rising cost per clicks and then also trying to balance your relevancy and your profitability and so on. So um I think uh the best way to go about this would have would be to have like a diversified ad strategy from the get go. And what I mean by that is, you know, when you have all the different ad types um you know targeted from the beginning, you have a better chance at finding out which of those is actually going to work for you. You know, it's like you can't see which ones are going to work unless you try it right? And and if you try it, you you're you're better off, you know, doing all of the data types and then finding out the ones that are actually working and double down on those and letting go of the ones are easing off on the ones that are not affordable, right? So however, most people will start with, this is a typical pattern, right? Most people will start with auto campaigns and manual cuBA campaigns, both of which are becoming the most expensive at types. Um you know, keywords are becoming more and more and more expensive and people look at product targeting or category targeting as an afterthought, like they think once let me get the keywords going, then I'll add product targeting or category targeting. Um I would encourage people to think slightly differently. You want to start with product targeting and category targeting from the get go. And the reason is because these are much more affordable but people don't realize that they are much more affordable. And they're also um, you know, the green fields at this point because not everybody is using product targeting and category targeting the way we could we could be right. So um I guess I just wanted to share an example um you know this morning as I was preparing for this, I was looking at brand analytics for one of the key words that is extremely, I guess popular. But so everybody sells everybody and everybody's dogs cells. Bluetooth headphones on amazon for some reason it's the most one of the most crowded uh you know, spaces and you've got like so many sellers selling bluetooth headphones ranging from $5 bluetooth headsets to $500 or whatever. There's a huge range there. But everybody wants to target that keyword, right? That bluetooth headphones, they want to be right on page one for a $5 product, that's, it's just not, it doesn't align the whole idea of uh, targeting keywords to show up on page one for a certain keyword. Um, you know, doesn't align with the margins you have on such a, maybe a cheap product. So I look at brand analytics. Right? And I see, um, for this keyword, what are the top three competitors? Right. So the top three winning competitors, one was some no name brand from china. Um, I think it was called JBl tune or something. It's less than a year old, right? It's, it was launched in february of this year. Their ranking number one for bluetooth headphones. Now, I don't know how they do it. Of course the stories behind that, we don't necessarily need to get into bed. Number two is um, beats, right, beats. So three. That's number two. And they have a legitimate reason for being number two because they're popular offline. But in this space, these two guys are at the top now, uh, you know, if I were to go, let's say I'm selling bluetooth headphones and if I were to start targeting couldn't code bluetooth headphones, I'm going to be, you know, wiped out. Like I won't have any budget to do anything, right? But if I target these guys, you know, they stopped three or four or whatever number of products that are already kind of attracting a lot of traffic for that product. And if I catch those people lower down the funnel, which means I've already cleared intent, I know that these people are interested in bluetooth headphones. Um I'm gonna win those clicks much cheaper. Now, the bottom of funnel, I do not mean like a page that is, you know, far further down on the search results page. I don't mean that um, it's not even just uh, you know, the product detail page, I am talking about intent by our intent or where they are in their shopper journey. So um, The boy I'm trying to make is that if you target these top competitors, you can actually show up on page one without targeting bluetooth headphones, you can just target these guys and just piggyback off of their traffic and show up on page one much much cheaper. And now, how, how do I know that this is, you know, going to be much, much cheaper? Well, if you try this experiment, I did it myself this morning, I opened up my own. So I started creating a new ad and I put the key word bluetooth headphones for a keyword targeting ad To see what the range was. That Amazon was giving me the Amazon recommended mid range that is calculated based on the past 14 days uh of data from our peer group, right. Whoever else is selling, that's the range they've been winning auctions at, right? So that range was showing up for me as going between uh $3.06 dollars. That's the range per click click. If you're selling a $5 product, one click and you're gone. Right? Nothing that better paid 20 cents for those. It's right, Right? And with 20 cents, you're not going to get impressions. Right? That's the other problem with these, the keyboard based bidding. Now I look at product targeting for the two products that I just mentioned, the JBL tune and then the beats solo, and I'm looking at how much would it cost to target them? And Amazon is giving me back 23 cents To a dollar, 43. That's the range. And the suggested range in between they're saying is 46 cents Not bad, right? Not bad. Compared this to $6. I can win this product target uh for just $0.46, if I if I set it up. Right? So that's the kind of difference I'm talking about. Like if you're smart about what you're going after, you can do the same thing that people who are spending a lot of money to be on page one through keyword targets are doing. So that's kind of one of the things that I wanted to touch upon to them. I love that. That's a really good tip for people. So just to summarize the point is that you're trying to make is for optimization. You really want to look at your strategies from the beginning and you want to try the different campaign types, So not necessarily match types, the different types of campaigns mash types or how you set those up within those campaigns because you don't know what you might be missing opportunities that you might be missing out on. And it's really interesting when you cast a wider net of ab types because then that also cast a wider net replacement, you know, and then you can kind of decide what's what's working for you. And uh you know, I'm just thinking of one of my clients right now, we casted a really wide net and we started with different ad types um and um and she her main keywords, the things that she was going after in her exact match campaigns and stuff like that. Um she wasn't converting well for those, but she was able to get in on a gifting keyword that the auto campaign picked up and it just flew like it just took off and she was on page one organically for a major gifting keyword and now she's just trying for dear life to hang on to that keyword, especially during this season, right? But she would have never known that or even been given the chance if she just did an exact match campaign for what she thought were her most relevant keywords by reverse searching her competitors or whatever, right? She would have never even had this opportunity um to get on page one for a major short tail gifting keyword and this and it's funny because we set up after that auto campaign took off, we set up another campaign to see if we could isolate that keyword right? And just really get a lot more traction on that keyword that other campaign never took off. Like the auto is just going crazy. So now we're just negative matching all the other stuff in that auto campaign. So it's just like without the techniques that you just talked about, people could be missing out on key words that they didn't even realize would be their top selling keywords. Right? I totally agree. It's all about finding gems in the data, right? Because you know, if you just talk about optimization, there's only very little you can do with, you know, certain formulas, you can easily everybody knows the formula, right? And it's easy to kind of work on the formula and see, okay if the cost is above target then reduced by so much if it's below target increased by so much. Right? So that part of it has limited um, I guess limited impact, but the other strategies of, you know, embedding your success uh, in an earlier earlier stages of design of product or sorry, your campaign design are what will give you the opportunity to kind of, you know, have a lot more going through your VPC, not just you know managing to a certain because to follow up [00:20:18] spk_1: quickly on your example, Amy um I've seen that a ton in my own campaign and other campaigns where if you try to take an auto campaign, what's converting, whether it's keywords, whether it's product targets and you break them out and do manual targeting for some reason it won't work. Um, and I think the main reason for that is the auto campaigns that amazon is now supplying are so good because they're using machine learning to figure out the intent of the purchase rather than just like, you know, it's one thing to have a target, right? It's one thing to say like, oh there's somebody shopping for, you know, a big pen, but then there's another intent that might be like, hey, this person is shopping for office supplies and big pen is one of the things on their list. So amazon is getting really, really good at automatically finding out, you know what the shoppers actually looking for and presenting that to them without your interaction. And that's why you're getting these, you know, really great performances on auto campaigns. The opposite can be true as well though, you know, you can break out some manual or even start out with some manual campaigns and it will do awesome and then the auto campaigns won't work. The other thing to do if that ever happens is kill the auto campaign and start a new one honestly, people don't realize, but that can work because it's kind of resetting what amazon thinks they know about your product and if you just launched it, they will now take probably, I don't know, I don't work for amazon. My guess is they're now going to take signals from some of your other campaigns that you may have had whether it's auto or manual and kind of mash them together on that new auto campaign. So that's something you can do to to kind of kick start those kinds of of um, you know, if you're having a bad experience or bad conversion on one type or the other. [00:22:01] spk_0: Yeah, so one of the follow up questions we have is obviously we've covered a lot of this already, but what about launch? Is there specific launch strategy that you use for PPC? Yeah. So, uh, so you know, when we launch our campaigns are kind of Okay and covering and touching every at type, we don't launch with just auto and manual. We actually run about 40 or 50 campaigns, poor Allison. Um, and that's basically for this reason, right? We're making sure that we're getting all the placements right. Um, and we're able to find gems wherever we can get them right. Um, so one of the things that has, you know, I've noticed that works the best at at launch for, you know, some of the, some of the brands that we work with our category, targeting ads now, these are broad based ads, they're almost like the equivalent of a broad match, but on the product side of things, this is going to help us discover new product targets, right? And those can be perfect for then launching new manual campaigns going specifically after. But then we also noticed that you know, we create like this um uh you know, um kind of momentum by setting up all different types going after a certain category or going after certain products. So you have the manual targets, right? You can go after um sponsored brands. Product targeting, you can do video ads with product targeting and you can do display ads. So all for ad types can you sponsored? Uh sorry, can use category and product targeting. So I think that's a great way of quickly establishing relevancy between your product and others because you're paying for it right? You're, you're making amazon, learned that hey, when someone saw the sad and they were on this page and then they bought it, it shows it's a signal to them that you know, these two products are related or there's an interest the invisible paths that are kind of laid out between all these different campaign, all these different products on amazon um they are not visible to us, but we are establishing them and strengthening those paths by paying for those uh you know, category targets and so on. So yeah, one of the things that we always do is we launched all ad types where we make sure that we're running category targets for sure. And then the other at type that works very well in the beginning, you know, Andy's point, I think auto campaigns are amazing and you know, if you set them up the way Amy was talking about in the beginning by splitting them out into like four different targeting groups. Each campaign has just one targeting group. And what that does is that it gives you very clean data. Um, and it also gives you the ability to manage those bids and budgets without kind of having them all mixed up into a single campaign because that doesn't give you much control over your cost. And your cost for auto campaigns could go really high if it's all mixed up. Right. So split them out and that will help you. I have a clean start. Now, the other kind of strategies at launch that Amy is also very good at external traffic and she talks about it a lot. Um, is basically to make sure that this diversified, you know, uh, stream of external traffic hitting your, your recent from all kinds of places including like pr or any kind of publication or um, you know, google ads, facebook ads, things like that, even your social media and emails and so on. So all of those kind of signals are important to kind of have a successful launch. Don't be surprised if you're a cost is extremely high in the beginning, it will kind of start to uh even out maybe two months in a month and a half to two months in and then you can start focusing on the cost but just be prepared for uh slightly higher than desirable. Uh because um in the beginning got it. Yeah, I completely agree. Diversified traffic is good. The only thing that I'm careful about what auto campaigns is when I first launched listing before it's completely indexed. Sometimes I will run like for a few days I'll run exact like an exact match campaign for like my top five key words before I start an auto campaign because I want to tell amazon what my product is and I want to kind of direct the traffic during those first few days. Well, my listing is getting index because what I've seen happen when people start an auto campaign before they're completely index, is it just amazon, I'll show it, you know, their product all over the place because it's not indexed enough yet. And then sometimes that can throw off their auto campaigns. So that would be the only thing that I would say about auto campaigns to be careful about in the beginning. But yeah, then right after that, once I know that I'm investing for like those main keywords and everything is looking good then with whip out that auto campaign, get it going and definitely use your technique to split up the targeting types inside of the auto campaigns. Love that. So what about organic ranking? Right. We talked about external traffic, which is so important. We talked about PPC. What are you using to rank your clients organically for certain keywords. Thanks for tuning in to part one of [00:27:33] spk_1: this episode, join [00:27:35] spk_0: us every Tuesday at one PM pacific standard [00:27:37] spk_1: time for live [00:27:38] spk_0: Q and A. And bonus content after the recording at cellar Roundtable dot com, sponsored by the ultimate software tool for amazon sales and growth seller S EO dot com and amazing at home dot com. 

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