An Entrepreneur’s Relentless Positivity and a Life Changing Product (Part One) – 226

There are so many inspiring stories from entrepreneurs that from time to time, they can blend together. This is not one of those stories. 

Today on the AM/PM Podcast, Tim Jordan speaks with Shavini Fernando, the founder of OxiWear. Shavini is a video game, VR & web designer and developer. But, more importantly, she’s the inventor of a device that she developed to help those diagnosed with severe Pulmonary Hypertension (PH).

Shavini suffered through multiple situations in which her heart stopped as a result of a sudden drop in her oxygen levels, necessitating that she use self-CPR to revive her own heart.

After several near-death experiences, she invented OxiWear as a tool for herself and the larger PH community. 

She received her second Master’s Degree in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University and is currently completing an Executive Certificate in Innovation and Entrepreneurship through Stanford University.

Her invention and new venture have led her to win awards from Ted Leonsis, Citi Ventures, and Georgetown University, which awarded her the Exceptional Masters Student Award for 2019.

Her attitude of positivity and resilience must be heard to be properly appreciated. 

This is part one of a two-part series detailing her story. I promise you that this is one (two, actually) you don’t want to miss. 

In episode 226 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim and Shavini discuss:

• 03:50 – Shavini’s Origin Story
• 06:00 – Cardiac Arrest Levels Up Her Health Concerns
• 08:30 – Next Up – A Hole in Her Heart
• 10:30 – A Trip to John Hopkins Hospital and a Stroke 
• 14:30 – Getting Back to “Normal”
• 18:00 – Looking for a Technological Solution 
• 22:00 – Designing a New Device 
• 24:00 – Staying Positive  

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Transcript

Tim Jordan: Today’s episode is a little bit different than what we normally do on the AM/PM Podcast. We’re going to listen to a pretty lengthy story about this person’s life. Our guest Shavini Fernando, who has some incredible insight based on some incredible experiences that she’s had. You’re going to love this episode. It’s extremely motivational. It’s extremely thought provoking. Stay tuned.

Tim Jordan: Hi. I am Tim Jordan and at every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous and the entrepreneurial veterans. We all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.

Tim Jordan: Well, this episode is going to be a big one. It’s two parts. It’s a long story, but there’s a ton of information here and a ton of things that we can glean. This guest had a medical condition that really hampered most of her childhood and even young adult life and hearing the story about how that happened, why that happened, how she overcame that. And then most importantly, seeing and understanding and hearing her positivity is massively valuable. I was so inspired listening to part one of this episode that I let her introduction to her story go on way too long, maybe not too long, but very, very long. So, we’ve created one episode that you’re going to watch right now where we talk about her story, and the kind of inspirational values and lessons that she brings us about positivity and keep on going essentially. And the second part of this series, we’re going to actually talk about her product, which is OxiWear. OxiWear was a product that she designed with no experience, no know-how, no engineering background. And now in 2021, they’re going to be launching this as a medical device. She talks about how she found resources to come up with a little money to get started, how she started working with advisors and boards of directors and how she started working with free resources, really to help her pull this off. Both parts are incredibly powerful, maybe for different reasons. So I hope that you’ll stick out both of these sessions in this series and gain some incredible value from it. Let’s get started.

Tim Jordan: Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the AM/PM Podcast. Today, we’re going to talk about medical stuff, which a lot of times seems super, super complicated to a lot of us that aren’t in the medical industry, but for context, we’re going to be talking about the development, the implementation, the marketing of a new medical device, which I’m actually kind of excited to talk about. For our guests today, we have Ms. Shavini Fernando coming to us from the great state of Virginia. How you doing, Shavini?

Shavini Fernando: Good. And thank you for having me.

Tim Jordan: Yes, ma’am. So, when I started reading the story about this product, that you’ve developed, you’ve invented a we’ll talk about that and how it could be a game changer to the industry. I was very intrigued by it.  I think that it’s exceptionally cool, but I’m not necessarily just intrigued by the product. I’m also intrigued by your journey, right? Because you have some sort of obvious medical knowledge. You have some sort of tech ability of some sort, but you also have this kind of entrepreneurial bug, which made you decide, Hey, not only do I have this cool idea, but I’m going to bring this sucker to the market and it’s going to be awesome. So I want to talk about how all of those intersect, but to start off, we have to know a little bit about Shavini, like who is Shavini, where does Shavini come from? I want like the five minute story of how Shavini ended up today on the AM/PM Podcast, sitting in Arlington, Virginia from Sri Lanka. So, give us like the five minute background of you.

Shavini Fernando: So, I’m originally from Sri Lanka. And I have studied computer science. I have my undergrad degree in computer science. Then I have master’s in computer science, an MBA, both from Australia. So, but I am literally a hippie. You can call me a hippie. That’s what I was before. And because I love traveling. I love – I’m an adrenaline junkie. I love all of these high adrenaline sports and I used to travel a lot. And so that was literally me from small days. I had breathing issues, but it was diagnosed as asthma. I have literally tried everything that’s available in the market. So – because every time I go to a doctor, they just keep changing my inhaler. They didn’t bother to do a second diagnosis as to why this was happening. So I have been on inhalers, like all my life and at least every other week, I used to go to nebulize in the middle of the night because I couldn’t breathe. So because of this, like even though I was a sprinter, my best less hundred meters, I couldn’t do 200 because after a hundred, I start feeling like tired because my heart couldn’t take it because I – there’s a hole in the heart that I had from small days. So, but the thing is I didn’t get done most for the hole in the heart. I got diagnosed last month.

Tim Jordan: Let me pause you for a second. For those of you that aren’t watching the YouTube version, like Shavini is so happy, she’s smiling. She’s like joyful and I’m like, I want to cry for you. Poor Shavini, this great, great swimmer can’t do the 200 meter because you’re out of breath. I’m thinking of all of these useless puffs of the inhaler that are supposed to help you, that aren’t helping you like this plague, you childhood, this misdiagnosis of your medical condition. And it’s sad. It’s terrible. So I’m sorry that happened to you.

Shavini Fernando: I started getting palpitations, like suddenly like randomly it’s like my heart rate goes, like just spikes up. And so I had two episodes that I couldn’t breathe. And now I know what happened was it was cardiac arrest that I had. I didn’t know then.

Tim Jordan: Wait, hold on. Time out, time out. You just said, I couldn’t breathe, later found out it was cardiac arrest. Shavini, cardiac arrest is a big deal. Your heart stopped working. This is terrible.

Shavini Fernando: I think that’s why I’m so good at it now because you’re like, it’s just like your common sense now. I know exactly what I’m supposed to do because it has happened so many times before. The thing was, every time it happened, once I go to a doctor, all I can say is I couldn’t breathe. There was so many like diagnosis, like what? It was all not relevant. And then in 2015, I went hiking with a friend and then I was going blue. And he was like, you’re turning blue. The thing is when your face turns blue, unless someone tells you, you don’t know it, right. And then I went back home. So with my parents, I said, okay. He says, there’s something wrong with the heart and what I was getting, they will not have petitions. They will arrhythmias. So this is what he said, like, so he said to go to a doctor. So, we took an appointment and went to a cardiologist. He listened to my heartbeat. And then he was like, I need to do echo, but stay in the echo room because I want to do it myself. And so I was waiting and he came, just doing the echo. So I could literally, like I could see on the echo, it was like the Indian traffic, like everything’s going right in the heart. Like blue, red, everything’s getting mixed. And he was like this, like he was doing the echo like this.

Tim Jordan: So when you’re, when your doctor’s doing an echocardiogram and his hand is on his forehead, that’s not a good thing.

Shavini Fernando: Yeah. He was like this. And he was doing the echo and I could see like, and I was like – so I literally asked him, is there a hole in the heart? Is that what mine looked like the Indian traffic. And he was like, do you know to read this? I’m like, I think it’s like common sense when the blood is mixing everywhere, there has to be a leak, right?

Tim Jordan: Yes, exactly.

Shavini Fernando:           And he was smiling. He said “If you get dressed and come to the office, let’s have a chat.” And then we went to the office. So he was like, did you have breathing issues when you were small? I said, yeah. My mom was like, yeah, every other week we used to nebulized. And he was like, didn’t anyone say that she has a hole in the heart. And my mom was like, when she was small, the pediatrician said he could hear mama. But when we took her to the cardiologist, the cardiologist said, there’s nothing like that. Just don’t take all these unnecessary things to your head. Just let the kids enjoy her life. Then I went and then they did a right heart catheterization. And, then they’ve been doing it. Literally my heart stopped. So they had to rewind me and like, get me back when I asked him all these questions. So he was like, literally the Sri Lankan doctor who did the procedure. He was like, so it’s like this, the news is very bad. And I was like, how bad? And he didn’t say like much. He was like, well, there is no treatment, but you can stay a bit longer with the medicine and then like, hold on. And then like, you will have about maybe two years. It was like, okay. So you’re telling me I will live just for two years. I was like, look, I have so much in my bucket list that has to be completed. And you can’t tell a person that they will live only for two years because not you, not me, no one knows how long a person gets to live. And I went back into wheels and I will say hi to you. And then I told my on let’s just leave. So then my sister said, okay, I’m going to get an appointment at John Hopkins. So let’s get you here. Then exactly on my birthday, October 11, I flew here. And then I came here and I went to John Hopkins because I flew, I ended up with a stroke.

Tim Jordan: Wait, what? You’re saying it like, it’s a joke, but it’s so you get, you just had a stroke?

Shavini Fernando: Yeah. So I ended up in, so I was at John Hopkins and they were doing echo. And then I ended up with AI. And so literally often they echo. So I asked her, do people feel funny on their face? And she was like, no, they don’t. I feel funny on the face. She was like, it must be from the whole thing procedure, just doing body. And my sister was seated there. So I took my t-shirt and I put it on my head. That’s all I could do. My hand just fell off. Like it just fell out. I literally felt like a mummy stuck. You can see anything, but you can’t move your eyeballs. And that was it. I could see my sister screaming and then I passed out. So when I woke up in the, after the stroke, like I could see the entire director board of the hospital standing around me. And they were like, rubbing my hands and screaming my name. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? It was funny. Like how all these VIP people standing around you and I was just laughing and the doctor was like, okay, she’s smiling, she’s laughing. She’s good.

Tim Jordan: This is so bizarre to me. I worked as a paramedic for 10 years and I’ve seen a lot of medical conditions. I’ve worked a lot of cardiac arrests. I’ve worked a lot of strokes, but I can tell you. And I even had some legit saves, you know, where people were clinically dead and we did CPR and got it back. I can tell you that not a single one of them was ever smiling after they regain consciousness. So, I’m pretty sure that the doctors thought you had just gone completely crazy by this point.

Shavini Fernando: And then I’ve been off the bed, they were like, can you hear me? I’m like, I can hear you. And then they were like, can you – they asked me to press the hand, but I didn’t have, like my left side didn’t have that full strength. So then they asked me to – they’re like moving me to the John Hopkins, Bayview ER. And then when I went there, like everyone was asking questions. I was answering them and smiling. And they were like, you’re the first patient who came to ER, smiling. So I ended up in the John Hopkins ICU for three weeks. Before they discharged me, I had to do a walk test and I couldn’t walk. I was athlete, but I couldn’t walk 500 feet. I was turning blue. So I was put on continuous oxygen. And they said, “we have to see how it reacts, otherwise be prepared for both lungs and heart transplant.” And what happened was because they did that invasive test. My whole body got disturbed because my body had come up with its own system to support my lifestyle. But when they went and did a the invasive test, it got completely disturbed. And that’s why I knew my – it’s like when you get used to a new environment, when you move from one country to another country, you need to get adjusted to the new environment. So it’s like, that might – you know they’re capable. It’s just the time to get back to them normally. So what I did was in the passage, in the apartments, I started walking in the day, like trying to get my lungs and heart to like function again the normal way. And then when I went for my six month test, I actually walked 900 feet. And then in six minutes, and then off the first, the first year I walked off for six months, I walked thousand and 100 feet. And now I walked 1,900 feet, six minutes. So I kept like doing everything. And I kept increasing my heart and lung function. And so I didn’t want to, so then after that I went and bought a portable oxygen concentrator. And then I was like, okay. I used to be a workaholic and I was not ready to sit at home and just, you won’t be trapped because of this. I was like, okay, I need to get out and do – start living my life again. Maybe I can’t fight freedom, but I can restart here. So then what I did was the best – see, even though you are qualified in US, it’s hard to find a job. So then the only option I had was, again, let’s study again. So then I got, I applied to Georgetown and I got admission to do masters at Georgetown. So what I did was I started a third master’s degree, I guess that was the only option to get my life back. And then I started studying. So, because I was a workaholic and say, my expertise is in project management then software development, so I worked four jobs, I worked for the office of deans. I worked for the maker space and I work on four departments on there with development and marketing, advertising materials, designing. And then in the evenings, I worked at the maker space because I loved all making stuff and doing stuff as the operations coordinator. So in summer, when I was working suddenly, like I was working for this school of foreign service program, for the summer internship. So as a programs officer, and then I got a call, so now I was not on oxygen at all times. I only brought it when I needed. And then I went to answer the call because my director was not there. And then when I was coming back, I literally felt like I couldn’t breathe. Like how it was before. I felt like my heart was not going and then I couldn’t breathe it off. And then my friend walked in and she was like, your whole face is blue. And then I figured like I couldn’t breathe. So first thing I did was I quickly went, luckily I carry my oxygen everywhere, even though I don’t need it. I put my oxygen on, crank it up to four liters. And I knew the drill because it has happened before. At that time only I realized, okay, all this time, they have a cardiac arrest, not just my chest. So I hit my chest, jumped on the same spot. And my friend was like, what am I supposed to do up there? Just call 911. But then out of that whole thing happened, the doctors and John Hopkins and everyone was like, you can’t live alone. Because at that time I was living alone. I moved in to my own apartment and I was doing everything on own and I was living alone and just literally I started my life back. And then they were like, you should think about changing the school because Georgetown is the most hilly school in the area.

Shavini Fernando: You should find a school which doesn’t have many hills. And I’m like, no way. I’m not changing Georgetown. I love that school. And they were literally questioning my independence and they were asking me to go back to where I was when I moved to US and I was not prepared for it. I bought like all the wearables, everything. And I was like, okay, I have this. They will work. Then the doctor was like, no, your problem is your blood oxygen. It drops down so drastically. He was like, you’re literally like a person living in Tibet. You can function with the most 50% oxygen without problem. You don’t feel it. Physically, you’re fine. But the thing is at that time, sometimes it comes back, but sometimes it doesn’t come back and you have no learning until you end up with a stroke or you end up with a cardiac arrest.

Tim Jordan: Let me time out and recap for a second. So, you were trying to live independently, but you are obviously having some pretty serious health problems. I mean, you’re having strokes. You’re having – your heart stopping because your blood oxygen levels dropping so low that your organs would just cease to function. Right. And what the doctors were telling you was that you needed to monitor this. You’re talking about Fitbits, like Fitbits will monitor heart rate, but they don’t actually monitor your oxygen stat. They’re not monitoring perfusion and things like that. And for you, the problem wasn’t your heart rate or your blood pressure necessarily. It was your oxygen levels in your blood were too low. And for those of you that like don’t understand the very simple version of how your heart works. And this is very applicable, is your heart receives blood from the rest of your body that the oxygen has been removed. And then it pumps it through your lungs where your blood is re-oxygenated and then your heart pumps it back out into the rest of your body. But when you have, like Shavini was saying, like the roads in India, like nobody’s staying in their lanes, everything’s mixed up. So the oxygenated blood from your lungs is getting mixed back in with the deoxygenated blood that’s coming from the rest of your body. And that highly oxygenated blood is not being delivered efficiently. Did I say all that right, Shavini? I think I did. So, essentially there was nothing on the market that would help you monitor your blood or your oxygen level correctly. Now, like when I was a paramedic, we had those little things that clipped onto in your fingers. Now they’re bulky, they suck, you can’t walk around with those stupid things. And honestly, they’re not very accurate. And in a different scenario, as you lift your arm up, you lift it down. Your hand gets cold. You’re positionally. Like you can sit with your arm in a funny position, like on the, of an airplane seat and it will drop, but the rest of your – the core of your body’s fine. There was a problem. 

Tim Jordan:                       Let me pause for a second. We’re going to have to do something I’ve never done before. Normally when I ask people’s like origin story of what they get into, we take five minutes, but your story is so interesting. You’ve died multiple times, Shavini and you’re laughing about it, which I think is amazing. I love your positive spirit. I don’t want to minimize your story because the background story is amazing, but we don’t have time to keep going in this episode. So what I’d like to do, if that’s all right, is I would like to go ahead and close out this episode and I’d like to get with you and schedule a follow-up episode. And the episode, the next episodes – we’ll have like a part one and part two of Shavini, right, is I want to talk about OxiWear, which is the company that you’ve started. And you’re obviously a smart cookie, right? So you took all these capabilities that you got 72 master’s degrees on. And what I think the story is going to evolve to is that you have a condition that other people have similar conditions that have other similar needs. You couldn’t find a solution to monitor your blood oxygen level while maintaining an active lifestyle. Right? You needed something. So I’m at a fast forward and say that the end of the story is that you designed and basically invented a new medical device that would do that. Right? And you, you did that based on this need that you have. So in the next episode, what I’d like to do is I’d like to talk about OxiWear. I’d like to talk about how you invented. I’d like to talk about the marketing process, like to talk about how you’re launching this, how you’re getting approval. That’s a whole another episode that I want to talk about, but I have to ask you this, like, as we wrap up this episode, look, you’ve had some crap going on in your life, right? Even stuff you haven’t talked about, just moving around, just being told, Hey, you’ve got a hole in your heart. You got two years left to live. Well fine, I’ll go to the US and you move over. And you know, you’re spending three weeks at John, I mean, like, there’s so much that you didn’t talk about, but like I’m picking up on it.

Tim Jordan: And it’s stuff that other people, well, that all of us, that humans would find very, very discouraging, right? Like extremely discouraging. And you have been slapped down and beat down. A lot of times you’ve been told you can’t do it, but you just keep getting up and doing it. You keep moving. And what I’m most impressed about, honestly, it’s just this positive attitude. As we wrap up this episode, I have to ask you this, and this can be very general, but you’ve had all this crap that’s happened to you. And you’ve been told no, all your life. You’ve always had these restrictions. You’ve always been told you can’t do this. You shouldn’t do this. We won’t let you do this. How do you take that? And not only turn it into something valuable, like a business opportunity, something you can do to help others, but how do you stay so freaking positive?

Shavini Fernando: Well, see my whole life. I think it’s because one thing is – so I’m Buddhist, right? So, something that we were taught when you were small is it’s like size that we’ve got in school. So even though I’m Buddhist, I studied in a Catholic school. Right. But in Sri Lanka, even though you studied in Catholic school, or the Buddhist kids. So one thing that we were taught when he was born is to think that you’re sick continuously. Okay. I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m sick. And then you actually fall sick. Right? Because your body works based on your thought process.

Tim Jordan: Yeah. And your mental habits can affect you physiologically. Sure.

Shavini Fernando: Yeah. Because if you’re thinking on negativities and you only feel like a magnet, right. That’s how I think. You’re like a magnet, right? So you’ve shown negative. You attract all the negative ones. When you feel positive, you attract all the positive ones. Right. And they say like, your line attracts your tribe, right? So it’s similarly like that. So for me, my whole life, I’ve been a person. If things have happened in life, just move on and you can’t change them back, like, what’s the point of all worrying about the things that has already happened. If there’s a time machine where you can go back and change them, okay fine. And if nothing is going to fix them, fine. But otherwise what’s the point in worrying about those. Because something I always thinking, don’t burn your blood over things that you have no control of. Because every time you worry, you burn another pint of blood in your body. Right. So, long as I knew what taken things in life seriously. So, I’m someone who lives for the day and plan for tomorrow. If things went wrong, okay, fine. It went wrong. But move point of pride over, it just went along, live your life. Something we think is, if things didn’t go the way you want, that’s not because you know that it was not meant to have them because something better is on the way. That’s how I look at it. Right. And it’s a good example. Like say, if I didn’t get diagnosed with this, I wouldn’t have met OxiWear. Right? So, things in life, all these happened for a reason. And the other thing is, none of us knows when we will die. Right. I might die tomorrow maybe by falling off this chair, not from my daisies.

Tim Jordan: Just don’t do it on camera. If you’re going to die by falling out of your chair, let’s turn the recording off first, because that would make the whole episode get, because we still got to do a second episode, Shavini. You can’t die before the second episode.

Shavini Fernando: My life is dramatic enough. I don’t think I need that episode. Dying falling off a chair.

Tim Jordan: Dying on a webcam. Yep. Amazing.

Shavini Fernando: And so, you’re worrying about what might happen tomorrow because we don’t know right now what might happen, you might just well live, enjoy life while you got it. Why worry about things you have no control of because the more you worry, you get old, you get wrinkles.

Tim Jordan: So, I can’t tell you how thankful I am for you to share your story. I know you’ve shared your story with other people, and I know you’ve talked about this a lot, but I’m certain that those that are listening to this episode are grateful for your positivity and your optimism and you’re tying that all into some life lessons at the end is so important. I love what you said about, I even wrote it down here, negative attracts negativity and positive attracts positivity. So, you being positive is helping you in a lot of ways, but also I love this, we don’t know when we’re going to die. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. All right. We have to wrap up this episode. Those of you that are listening, prepare for episode two, as soon as we’re done recording, I’ll figure out the schedule, Shavini when we can sit down and do that. But on episode two, we’re going to talk about the brainchild that came from all of this adversity, OxiWear, but again, thank you for sharing your story and thank you for sharing your outlook on life. And I mean, these last like 10 minutes have just been full of knowledge bombs that are applicable to everything, whether it’s our health, whether it’s our business, whether it’s our family, everything. So, thank you for sharing that with us. Those of you that are listening. If you found any value in this episode, make sure to leave us a positive review on whatever podcast platform you’re listening on. Give us a thumbs up on the video if you’re watching this on YouTube. And we’re going to sign off momentarily and we will see you guys on episode two, the follow-up episode with Ms. Shavini Fernando from OxiWear. Thank you guys for listening. We’ll see you on the next one.

The post An Entrepreneur’s Relentless Positivity and a Life Changing Product (Part One) – 226 appeared first on AM/PM Podcast.

Copywriting: Not Just a Necessity, but Also a Business – 225

There are so many different business models in e-commerce. Most of them revolve around written content. In this episode of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim Jordan speaks with an expert copywriter and content strategist about what it takes to be a good copywriter and why “good” might be all you really need to be. 

Jacob McMillen believes that most e-commerce sellers have what it takes to write good content. What’s holding them back? What Jacob thinks is that it comes down to valuing writing as a crucial skill then taking the steps necessary to create compelling copy that tells the right story.

In this conversation, Jacob tells us why this skill is important and how it can break down barriers to entry in e-commerce. A successful Amazon product requires both written content and cash. According to Jacob, with the right set of skills, you can do both! 

By building your own copywriting business you could also raise the start-up money to either get started in e-commerce or expand your brand. Wouldn’t it be nice to learn how to fully optimize your own marketing efforts AND make a little money on the side? 

Yep, me too. Listen to this episode and learn how to make that happen!

In episode 225 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim and Jacob discuss:

• 03:00 – Getting Started Writing Copy
• 05:45 – “Selling a Shovel During the Goldrush”
• 08:00 – Copywriting as a Core E-Commerce Skill
• 09:30 – What are the Components of a Good Copywriter?   
• 11:15 – Turning Writing Skills into a Business
• 14:45 – Adding to Your Revenue Stream
• 16:30 – Most Businesses Can Barely Afford an “Average” Writer 
• 18:00 – 5K in 48 Hours  
• 22:30 – Bankrolling Your E-Commerce with Writing  
• 23:45 – How to Get Started
• 29:00 – Growth Opportunities for Content Strategists
• 30:00 – Leveraging SEO Skills   
• 32:45 – How to Contact Jacob 

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “join” our Facebook Group and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on eCommerce and make more money? Follow these steps for helpful resources to get started:

1. Get the Ultimate Resource Guide from Tim Jordan for tools and services that he uses every day to dominate on Amazon!
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Transcript

Tim Jordan: As entrepreneurs, we often give ourselves limits. We make excuses. We talk about the reason that we couldn’t get started. We didn’t have the cash to get started. We didn’t have the experience to get started. Today’s guest is talking about a topic which may on the surface seem a little bit boring. Why is this applicable to us? But as you listen to episode, you’ll understand why this skill is so valuable, why it’s so important and how it can break down any barrier to entry. And it can help you eliminate those excuses that you’re using of why you can’t get started on your entrepreneurial journey. This is going to be a great episode. Stay tuned.

Tim Jordan: Hi, I’m Tim Jordan. And in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous and the entrepreneurial veterans, we all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.

Tim Jordan: Hey everybody, Tim Jordan here with another episode of the AMPM Podcast. And one thing that I have noticed in this entrepreneurial world is there are a lot of different business models. There are a lot of different ways to make money. There are a lot of ways to adapt and change and run down different rabbit trails of multiple streams of income and all that good stuff. But one thing that continues to be true is that no matter what re-advertising, how we’re advertising, how we’re selling, written media is exceptionally important. And I think back to like my college composition classes, writing in those stupid notebooks, ones like the black and white, blotchy covers that can no one’s ever going to use this. Like now, even in a high tech digital realm, almost every sales funnel involves written content. And today we have an expert in that this is Jacob McMillen, who is dubbed as a “copywriter,” a content strategist. So thank you Jacob, for being here and hope you’re doing well.

Jacob McMillen: Yeah, thanks for having me, Tim. Great to be here.

Tim Jordan: And one reason that I want to have Jacob on here is because, like I said, every marketing approach, every sales approach right now requires written content. And it’s a little bit like business agnostic like this, doesn’t just apply to one business model. It applies to all of them. So no matter what you do in this world for a job, for extra revenue, for extra income writing is important. And Jacob’s going to talk to us a lot about some different aspects of writing, including how to build a business just with writing or how to raise startup money just with writing. And I thought this is an exceptionally cool topic because a lot of people have great business ideas and don’t know how to get started. They don’t have just a little bit of capital to do that. So Jacob, before we get into all of that, tell us how you came to be an expert copywriter.

Jacob McMillen: Yeah, so I think ultimately I started in college. I ended up doing a door to door sales job, to pay my way through school and going into it. It was just like, it seemed like an opportunity to go in and make some money. I had no clue what to expect. But I ended up learning the sales process and I ended up learning how to sit down one-on-one with someone and close them on a product. And then after I got out of school and I got an accounting degree and by the time I graduated, the only thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to be an accountant. So, sort of exploring other options, like what do I really want to do? And I sort of started to come across the world of online marketing, and SEO, and online business. And I found it super intriguing. So I sort of started to dig into it. And I pretty quickly within about a year came across the idea of copywriting. And as I started to dive into it, I realized this is basically just sales, but instead of having a one-to-one conversation, instead of having that give and take, you sort of have to anticipate what the person you’re speaking to is thinking, you have to anticipate what they’re looking for, but other than that, it’s just sort of like asynchronous sales. You’re just – you’re going through the sales presentation. And that was kind of – I didn’t love direct sales, but there was aspects of it I loved. And when I came across copywriting was like, Hey, this is everything I love about sales minus everything I hate about sales. And I’d always been a relatively good writer. Like I wasn’t in love with writing, but I was a big reader and I would get good grades in writing class. So, I started, I was like, okay, I’ll kind of dive into this and quickly fell in love with it, and knew almost immediately, like, this is what I want to do. And then, yeah, did started discovering there was a freelance market for it. And that I could literally just go write something and someone would pay me like, literally that simple. It just blew my mind. So, I ended up doing that for – I’m still doing it to this day, but I did it pretty much exclusively for about six years. And then at a certain point, I was like, Hey, if someone’s paying me for this, it means they’re making more off of it than I am. So, why don’t I look to sell my own products, build my own business using this writing. And so I started doing that and have been doing that as well over the last two years.

Tim Jordan: So, it sounds like this one skill you’re using in a lot of different ways. So, I know that you have an agency. I know that you do consulting. I know that you write content for your own product sales for all of this stuff, right? So, because you’re doing so many things, you have this cool bird’s eye view of like different ways to make money. And you talk a lot about this concept of selling a shovel during the gold rush, right. And I’d like to kind of dive into that. And the first time I heard this was actually from the original host of this podcast, Manny Coats. We were talking about how and why he built up Helium 10. He’s like, man, I was selling a lot of products, but I also knew there was a lot of ways to succeed by selling the shovels essentially. So, talk to me here and our listeners a little bit about what that means and why you think that’s applicable to us.

Jacob McMillen: Yeah. So I grew up in California, obviously we had the California gold rush. That’s sort of what founded the state back in the day. And one of the things that – when people think of the gold rush, they think of people striking it rich by discovering gold. And there were absolutely examples of that. But the vast majority of people who moved out to California to panhandle for gold did not strike it rich. And the people who really made it on average, the people who reliably made the most money were the merchants, the people who are selling all the equipment, selling the shovels, selling the things that these prospectors used to go mine. So, they basically didn’t have any of the risks and ensure they missed out on maybe the max end of the reward, but they were the ones reliably making money because they had something that everyone needed. And so to me, that’s very similar to sort of the current e-commerce landscape. I would say e-commerce, and online sales probably is a little more reliable than panhandling for gold was back in the day, but it’s kind of a similar model of you have some massive winners and then the vast majority of people aren’t making nearly as much. And you have a lot of people who try and fail, who failed many times before they ultimately succeed or give up. But the scale that all of them are building their businesses on the sort of core piece that all of online business runs on is this copywriting. And so, to me, it’s like, that’s the shovel. That’s the thing that maybe you’re not going to strike it crazy rich by offering it, but if you can get in there, and do this writing portion, even just delivering it to people who are using it to prospect and on any commerce, you can reliably make more money than a lot of people building e-commerce businesses are making. And so to me, that’s just what makes it really intriguing. It’s kind of it’s that shovel on which the e-commerce landscape has been built. And so, if you can be the one in there you can, you can do well for yourself and very reliably. And so that’s kind of what I like to talk about.

Tim Jordan: I know that when it comes to writing, a lot of people are intimidated because we think that, or when I say we, a lot of people think that to be a professional writer, you have to have exceptionally high levels of education and you had to have studied this for a long time and be like the perfect writer. Is that the case, or is it more important to be able to just understand how to convey a feeling, or convey a thought, or convey an idea? What’s what makes you a valuable copywriter?

Jacob McMillen: Yeah. So, it’s sort of two pieces from just to kind of a conceptual, if you can sell, you can be a copywriter. It’s the same process. It’s the process of having a conversation with someone and being clear, making a clear offer, being persuasive has nothing to do with your literary abilities. In fact, I find that a lot of my students who come in with a lot of education, in terms of writing a lot of time spent in academic writing, they often struggle to write in the way you need to write copy, because it’s a much lower level of literary prowess, so to speak. And then the second thing, it’s sales, but then it’s also, it’s just written communication. And I will say, not everyone, can communicate through writing. Well, it’s something that like, either, you struggle to put your thoughts into words or you doubt. And so, there’s sort of that aspect of someone who comes in who really struggles to communicate through writing, copywriting may not be for them. They may want to use other strengths. But a lot of people – there’s tons of readers out there. People who tend to read a lot, typically don’t struggle with written communication. So it’s a pretty widely held skill, different people excel more than others, but I would say, a fairly good chunk of the population can reasonably communicate clearly through writing. And if you can do that and you can go through, and you can learn the sales process and anyone can learn to sell. You can combine those two things. That’s literally all you need to be a copywriter.

Tim Jordan: And if someone has those very basic skills, how can they create a business model from this? Right. We know that there’s the traditional freelancer, Upwork and Fiverr, and things like that. But I suspect it’s more broad than that. And you’ve made statements before, like anybody that has any writing skills can turn it into a business. So give us like the high level, how does that work? And prove that statement to me.

Jacob McMillen: Yeah. So, on the one hand, when we talk about the lowest score, the easiest business model to build in 2020, 2021, in my opinion is a freelance writing business. So, just on that level alone, we’re talking about a zero overhead business, offering a service that every business in the world needs right now. So right there, it’s basically just, if you can get that offer in front of a high enough volume of people, you’re going to find people that need it. Guaranteed. I typically find that people who come in with like no traction, no experience just starting from scratch. If they pitch 50 people on hiring them to do freelance writing, they’re going to land one, at least one client. And you just, you don’t find that anywhere, you can hustle your way and brute force your way to a lot of types of success. But for it to be that reliable, that consistent, even just 50 pitches to land a client. So, that’s the first way is to build, to just sell it as a service, as super attainable. I see people literally every month who are starting have only been doing it for a few months, build 2000 per month, 3000 per month, 8,000 per month businesses just selling writing as a service. That said, there’s also other ways. So, you see a lot with people who maybe they’re looking to become thought leaders in their career, or maybe they have already started another business. And they’re looking to attract people to the business. Marketing is a baked in part of every business these days. And you see a lot too in sort of where e-commerce, where entrepreneurship is heading. You see a lot of, kind of the product led the growing public, the Hey, we’re going to – we build the audience first and then create the product for the audience. And that all comes down to some sort of content. And for some people, it can be visual content for some people, it can be audio content, but for a lot of people it’s written content. And whether we’re talking short form written content on Twitter, or LinkedIn, or social media, or long form via blog posts. If you want to build an audience, writing is one of the most consistent ways to do it. In that model, it’s less of, Hey writing is the product and more writing is the hook that brings people to your product. But it’s just, it’s so widely applicable to so many people with such a wide variety of goals.

Tim Jordan: And this is important because in the entrepreneurial world, there’s a lot of people that are just looking for a way to make money, right? There’s a lot of side hustles. There’s a lot of ways that we can adapt that we can change. I know people that started off selling on Amazon and now have fulfillment businesses. I know people that started off trying to do affiliate marketing, and now they’re doing freelance website building. And someone who’s interested in starting a business or making money, whether it’s a side hustle or their full-time hustle, they’re usually interested in multiple ways to do that. Multiple streams of income. I think that’s super important. And what’s interesting about copywriting is a lot of people do it. A lot of people are learning about it. A lot of people are getting better at it as a necessity for their other business or for whatever else they’re doing. And a lot of times we’re not thinking about, Hey, this is a value that we can, or a valuable commodity. This is a valuable skill that we can also monetize. And there are so many people out there that are bad at it. But you don’t actually have to be an exceptionally good one to be valuable, right. There are people that are dying. The example I use is like name selection for Chinese people that want a Western name. Okay. And in China, if you’re studying business or you’re studying anything international, usually give yourself a Western name. And I feel like there should be a business for that. Right. So when I had my kids, me and my wife deliberated constantly, like, what are we going to name our kids? What are we going to name our kids? What are we going to name our kids? And it was like this huge discussion we had to pick the perfect name. But in China, they’re picking these terrible names. Right? So, in one context in the US, you better be really creative with a great name to really stand in the crowd. But anybody that can figure out just a basic name would be valuable to these students in China. Right? So my point is as an analogy, even if you’re not one of the best writers in the US, in the digital marketing space, even if you’re average, you’re super valuable to people that English isn’t your first language, right? There are a million people out there that are in different countries that are trying to put websites together, or marketing content together in English language, that you are light years ahead of them, right? So don’t compare apples to apples. There is value in what you’re doing.

Jacob McMillen: Just to expand on that too, even businesses in the US, 95% of businesses can’t afford me, and I’m not, I’m probably not even in like the top 5% of rates that people charge. The reality is that for a lot of businesses, they can’t afford someone better than you whoever’s listening to this right now, if you were to spend a little time practicing writing, there’s a huge chunk of businesses and startups where people just aren’t competent writers. And even at a low rate, you’re going to do a massive service for their business by coming in and helping them communicate clearly, even if you can’t get into the persuasive side of things, just helping a business owner that can afford to pay 5k, to have their website rewritten, you can come in and do it for few hundred bucks, and that’s the best they’re going to get. And it’s going to be a huge improvement on what they have now.

Tim Jordan: We’re not saying go out and sell yourself. It’s okay if you suck. What we’re saying is you may not suck as much as you think you do, right? A lot of times we place this burden on ourselves in this pressure of being the absolute best that we see. And we forget that like, Hey, we may actually be pretty good at this. So, we’re saying all this to be encouraging, like don’t devalue yourself because you’re not as good as so-and-so YouTube expert who talks about copywriting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked into a restaurant and seen misspellings on the menu. I can’t tell you how many websites I’ve gone to that just don’t make any sense. And I think I’m not a great copywriter, man. I do 10 times better than this. So it’s supposed to be encouraging. It’s supposed to be empowering. You have more value potentially than you think you do. Right. And as far as being able to make money this way, I know Jacob that you’re “pro”, and you’ve got a lot of experience and you’ve got a lot of credibility in this area, but I know that at one point on a dare, I think it was after, look at my notes. There’s a Twitter dare you made $5,000 in 48 hours. Tell us about that. And let’s take some value from that little story.

Jacob McMillen: So this was – I talk a lot about pitching to my subscribers and readers, and pitching is one of those things that until you get out and experience it, it’s just really hard to believe that it works as well as people say it does. Because it’s just like most of us haven’t had the experience of buying something off of a cold pitch, or even a warm pitch. So it’s like – so people kind of – I’m always looking for ways to like reinforce the viability of some of these things I teach with real case studies. And anyway, so I had one of the guys that I follow on Twitter. He likes to do these little thought experiments. And so one time he did this thought experiment, Hey, you have 48 hours to make 5k online. And you can’t use a existing audience that you’ve built, what do you do? And so for me, I was thinking, Hey, I charge a minimum of about 1500 bucks for a blog post. So I was thinking, I bet I could go out and do like a package of four blog posts for 5K. I bet I could get someone to buy them because sort of like a minor discount. And so, I wrote that and most of the, you know, most of the answers to this dare were like, kind of making fun of that. You need to cheat or you’d need to spend 500K in ads, or all these things kind of sarcastic responses. And so I put that one in and then I was looking at, I was like, well, shoot, why don’t I just go do that and see if I can make this into a cool case study. So I went out and in the specifications of, I said I’d pitched 10 people. And this was into my career to where, like this wasn’t at the very beginning, there was the very beginning. I would be like, Hey, I’m going to go pitch 50 people. But this was at the point. I was like, I think I could do this in 10 pitches. So I went out, I pitched 10 people, 30 or 47 hours and 30 minutes later, I had 5k in the bank, basically I got only four people responded, six people never responded. Three said, no, one paid. That’s simple, 48 hours just reaching out. In this case it was a little bit more, it was kind of a mixture of warm and cold pitches. I was messaging some people that no one who had ever hired me before, a few people I thought, might be in the market for it and see people, I didn’t know. One out of 10, that’s simple 48 hours off of just sort of a, Hey, this would be fine. And just kind of to demonstrate what’s possible when you’re willing to get out there and put yourself in front, create opportunities for yourself.

Tim Jordan: And this is important because I hear a lot of people make excuses. Now I’ve got a great product idea. I’ve got this great business idea, but I don’t have the money to start. Right. And `I see a lot of people even say, Hey, if I just had $5,000, if I had X amount of money, I could get this thing started and rolling, we make those excuses. And when it comes to selling a physical product, a lot of times it is true. Unless you look at like drop shipping and things like that. And you’re like, you have to make money or you have to have money to make money. You have to spend some upfront, but when it comes to a service like this, that everybody needs, and everybody uses, I think this starts to break down the barriers that we put in front of ourselves telling ourselves we can’t do this. We can’t make this happen. We can’t get this off the ground because it literally takes nothing. It takes just reaching out to people and doing this. And it doesn’t take long to charge two or $300 for a blog post before you can start raking up some pretty serious money pretty quickly. And you can use that to reinvest in this new business model that you’ve now found, or to bank roll other businesses in which your copywriting skills, your just ability to communicate. I don’t want to call them copywriting skills. I want to say your ability to communicate via or written medium, because that’s what it is. Sometimes we mystify this whole concept of writing by calling it copywriting. Let’s just talk about communicating. Right. So, have you seen other examples of where people have used some freelance copywriting or something like this to bankroll the start of another business?

Jacob McMillen: Yeah. So a good friend of mine, he just got his affiliate blog up to 60K per month. The first three years of that blog made him zero money and he was probably working on that thing like 20 plus hours a week. And so to pay the bills, he was doing freelance writing the whole time. Didn’t really consider himself a freelance writer. That wasn’t his goal. His goal was to build these affiliate blogs, but they didn’t – when you’re looking at some of these longer term business models, they don’t pay anything upfront and you got bills to pay. And so he paid him basically just by selling, writing, wherever he could. And then that bought him the time to continue working on these affiliate blogs and build them into a pretty successful business. So, I mean that right there, but it’s kind of like any business model you’re working on that takes time to build. And you need cashflow. We see a lot in the space of people, kind of focusing more on the bootstrap model and getting away from the VC model, which I love. But in that, like sometimes you need cash and that’s the beauty of freelance writing is that you can go deliver a writing asset in a relatively short amount of time, get paid for it and sink that money into whatever else it is you’re building.

Tim Jordan: So, if someone is going to get started and just try to make a little extra money doing this. What do you recommend they do as their first step? Do they start just pinging Facebook friends, cold calling people local businesses, or do they actually get on a platform like Fiverr or Upwork and start going about it that way?

Jacob McMillen: So, this is where we get into sort of the idea from like the personal training space of a perfect plan that you aren’t going to follow through on, is worthless. Right. So I would say, in kind of going through, I’m going to kind of mention what I think is the ideal approach. But what I find is that a lot of people find – I’ll try to caveat in there things that some people find easier than others. But my personal or personal view is that you want to go through the process of creating an actual writing asset that you want to sell. One, two times max as a practice run. So say you want to deliver blog posts as your writing service. Go through the process of writing two blog posts, start to finish, that no one’s paying me for just – go through the process of writing or do you want to do website copy, go through the process of writing a website page. Do that once or twice, just so you kind of know exactly if this is my process to go through it. It’s not going to be optimal. You’re probably going to be slow. Your copy is probably not going to be that great. And that’s okay, because then what we’re going to do is we’re going to go start pitching. As soon as we kind of have our internal process, then you go out and start pitching and you’re going to learn 10 times more working in real client situations than you would just practicing or reading about writing or researching, which is what a lot of people do when they think about this process. They spend months and months reading and trying to feel like they have mastered writing. When it’s kind of like anything you write in the lab has very little, translation to what you’re going to actually write in the field. And so I recommend one to practice projects immediately again, and to start pitching warm network first, like you said, friends, family, anyone you know with the business, you don’t need to make them pay X amount and you could say, Hey, can I rewrite your website homepage? And if you like it, use it. Or if you like it and you can pay me for it, if not, it’s just great practice and I appreciate you letting me do it. It can be as simple as that. And then again, as you’re pitching, you can start pitching real paying clients too, but again, we’re not talking about people who can afford to drop five to 10K on an experienced copywriter. We’re talking about people who – their alternative is just to leave their own writing that they did themselves on the site. And they’re just not very comfortable writers. It’s awkward, it’s confusing. It’s not communicating their value. So you come in and even as a new copywriter, who’s not that great yet you can do a better job. And for a few hundred bucks, that’s worth like, that’s a very good value to these business owners. And so it’s literally, it can be as simple as that. And if some people just for whatever reason, they feel a lot more comfortable pitching gigs on Fiverr, gigs on job boards. I did a lot of that too earlier or early in my career. If you want to go that route, if it allows you to take action, great. I feel like pitching really comes into its own when you’re doing that one-to-one reach out to a business. If you’re willing to play the numbers game, knowing that, Hey, 30 out of 31 might not even read or respond to my pitch, but all I need is one. If you’re willing to embrace that mentality, then you’re – as a new copywriter, you’re in a one-to-one, they’re not comparing you against 30 other writers who are all trying to underbid you. They’re just talking with you. And so if they need writing, and everyone needs writing at some point, so your odds are good at finding someone. So, that’s what I mean, it’s really that simple. I just recommend do one or two practice projects, start pitching, start trying to work with real clients. And you’ll be shocked at how fast you grow.

Tim Jordan: And a lot of people also make excuses about, Oh, I don’t have the experience. I can’t pin something. I haven’t done it. There’s people who accept free writing projects. And it’s not like you’re investing a mountain of money or a mountain of time to start getting that portfolio up and get that practice. I mean, there’s people that want writing constantly, and you could spend a few hours do some practice stuff and start building that portfolio to try it out. So, where do you think the future lies, Jacob, for copywriters? Right. And I don’t mean necessarily on like the global timeline, but on the individual timeline, let’s say, I find I have a knack for writing is my framework, my roadmap, continuing just to increase my value, start automating, start getting bigger ticket clients. Or do you think that there is a future business model for experienced copywriters that’s different than that?

Jacob McMillen: So, I think it comes down to your goals. For me, I always had relatively modest income goals. And so to me, once I hit those pretty quickly, within two years of going full-time as a freelancer, I had hit what my kind of high-end personal income goal was. And so then for me, it was kind of like, okay, what next? And I was like, well, I’m selling my time for money. It’d be really cool if I could make the same amount, not selling my time for money, building something else. And so for me, that then became the next step that became the future model was what can I sell using my writing, using my writing skills, my web, all of the copywriting, the content writing, all of that. At that point I had developed some SEO skills as part of my writing services. And so it was like, what can I build here to allow me to not have to trade my time for money? And so, that’s one option. You can kind of – one of the things I realized over time, just being kind of in a sales mentality, was that a lot of people who hire a lot of small businesses or even businesses who hire copywriters, they really have no framework for marketing. They almost look to the freelancer as more of a consultant. And so, if you can kind of position yourself that way and look for the problems that they’re dealing with, that’s one route that I see a lot of writers go is like, they kind of turn themselves into more marketing consultant slash copywriters. You can scale up. Once you get the – one of the things I did after using pitching to build my career the first few years as I started kind of leveraging those SEO skills to build an inbound channel of leads. And once you build more leads than you can handle personally, then you have the option to start building an agency, which I did as well. And then you start looking to tackle broader writing and marketing services. Then you could handle individually, work with bigger budgets. And the bigger the budget, the more convenience, the more responsibility you’re taking off the client’s hand, the bigger margins you can charge. You can go the route my friend did of using his writing to build an affiliate marketing business or affiliate business. There’s just so many options and kind of, as we alluded to earlier in sort of the cashflow mentality, any business out there is going to depend on some level of writing, some level of copywriting. So whatever your business dream is, if you learn the copywriting skill and you learn it good enough to sell it to someone, there’s a very good chance that you can leverage it into whatever business model you want to take. And if you just love writing and you just want to write forever, you can do that too.

Tim Jordan: Yeah. Well, and I do think this is important and you’ve given me a lot of ideas that I wasn’t aware of before for this. And I think that for me, the biggest takeaway as we kind of wrap up is this is one of those things that a lot of us do. And we don’t realize that it’s monetizable or it’s things that we can do to a moderate skill level. And we assume that isn’t valuable enough, which isn’t true. And it’s one of those things that is probably worth investing in practice and learning, because whether we do it for a side hustle, for a separate monetizable business stream, or we just have to be good at it to do the other things better, our affiliate marketing or digital marketing, or e-commerce selling, right. It’s all like a backbone to all of this, right. So I think that’s one of the big takeaways is we need to invest in this personally, because it is so valuable in so many different ways. So, I appreciate you sharing this. I think that there are a lot of people that probably started listening to this and were like, Oh man, how boring we’re talking about copywriting. But then when we think about it as a separate business venue, or as a monetizable skill, not just a skill that we should outsource and get away from it, I think that it becomes more valuable things. So those of you that are still listening, I hope that you found some value in this episode, and we’d love to hear about it. Leave a review or leave a comment if you’re watching on YouTube. That would be excellent. So Jacob, if someone wanted to find out some more content about how to become a better copywriter, how to get started, make a little money as a copywriter, what resource would you send them to start reaching and get started? Or start researching and get started? Sorry.

Jacob McMillen: Totally. If you head over to my website, jacobmcmillan.com, I have over 175,000 words of free content. I do a podcast every Monday where I just do a 10 minute quick hit on something related to improving your writing, freelancing or marketing. Basically, I’ll take you from zero to wherever you want to go. And it’s all right there.

Tim Jordan: That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for being on. I know that you’re a busy guy and you have a lot of writing to get to. So, appreciate you being on the podcast and sharing those wisdom and guys make sure to check them out, jacobmcmillan.com and based on his writing capabilities and SEO, like he said, he’s ranked highly on Google just for copywriting. So, I think it’s pretty impressive, pretty cool, knowing what to do about Google SEO. So, thank you all for listening to another episode. We’ll see you guys on the next one.

The post Copywriting: Not Just a Necessity, but Also a Business – 225 appeared first on AM/PM Podcast.

Is Dropshipping Dead as an E-Commerce Business Model? – 224

Over the last few years there’s been a tremendous wave of interest in private label selling. If you weren’t paying attention, you’d think that’s the only thing happening in e-commerce. 

But that is far from the truth. When it comes to selling products online, there are a lot of business models that work. Today on the AM/PM Podcast, Tim Jordan welcomes Mike Weiss, the Chief Community Officer for a company called Dropified that supports a thriving community of over 30,000 dropshippers. 

As the e-commerce space becomes more compartmentalized, many skilled sellers have made the mistake of overlooking dropshipping as a possible avenue of growth. Because you don’t have to worry about developing new products or purchasing and storing inventory, dropshipping has a very low barrier to entry. In fact, many Amazon private label sellers got their start with dropshipping. Recently, the dropshipping business model has changed to allow more room for creativity and partnerships with brands as well as introducing cutting-edge products with a higher perceived value. 

Is dropshipping a good side-hustle idea? Who should be interested? How does someone get started? 

Mike answers those questions and more in this conversation. You never know, dropshipping might just be a great way to quickly raise the funds to level-up your Amazon brand or help you to branch out to a niche you’ve always been interested in. 

In episode 224 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim and Mike discuss:

• 01:50 – What’s a Chief Community Officer?
• 03:30 – Rescued by Dropshipping
• 08:00 – Breaking Rules Professionally
• 09:45 – Branching Out to Toys on Private Label   
• 12:00 – An Amazon Suspension Forces a Change
• 16:30 – What Exactly is Dropshipping? 
• 20:30 – Mail Order Dropshipping 
• 22:00 – Popular Dropshipping Misconceptions   
• 24:30 – Big Changes to the Platform  
• 28:45 – Best Case Scenarios 
• 34:30 – Dropshipping from US Manufacturers
• 37:45 – Why are We Choosing These Specific Markets?  
• 41:30 – Partnering with Manufacturers 
• 45:00 – Where to Go to Find Additional Resources   
• 48:00 – Using Dropshipping to Product Test

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “join” our Facebook Group and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to our podcast.

Want to absolutely start crushing it on eCommerce and make more money? Follow these steps for helpful resources to get started:

1. Get the Ultimate Resource Guide from Tim Jordan for tools and services that he uses every day to dominate on Amazon!
2. New to Selling on Amazon? Freedom Ticket offers the best tips, tricks, and strategies for beginners just starting out! Sign up for Freedom Ticket.
3. Trying to Find a New Product? Get the most powerful Amazon product research tool in Black Box, available only at Helium 10! Start researching with Black Box.
4. Want to Verify Your Product Idea? Use Xray in our Chrome extension to check how lucrative your next product idea is with over a dozen metrics of data! Download the Helium 10 Chrome Extension.
5. The Ultimate Software Tool Suite for Amazon Sellers! Get more Helium 10 tools that can help you to optimize your listings and increase sales for a low price! Sign up today!
6. Protect Your Amazon Brand with a Trademark! Protecting your brand from hijackers is vital. SellerTradmarks.com provides a streamlined process for obtaining a trademark for your business and shielding your products from fraud!
7. Does Amazon Owe YOU Money? Find Out for FREE! If you have been selling for over a year on Amazon, you may be owed money for lost or damaged inventory and not even know it. Get a FREE refund report to see how much you’re owed!

Transcript

Tim Jordan: When it comes to selling products online, there are a lot of business models that work there’s some that can’t work. And one of the ones that’s gotten a little bit of a bad reputation, a little bit of a stigma attached to it is drop shipping. Today, our guest is going to be talking about drop shipping. We’re talking about how the industry’s changed, what works, what doesn’t work and where it may actually be good for you. Check it out. You’re going to like this episode, here we go.

Tim Jordan: Hi, I’m Tim Jordan. And in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous and the entrepreneurial veterans, we all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.

Tim Jordan: Hey everybody. And welcome to another episode of the AM/PM Podcast. Today, we have a special guest with us, Mike Weiss. I just learned that it’s not Weiss, which I’ve been saying in my head for the past, like three months. It’s Weiss. And Mike is the chief community officer of a company called Dropified, which supports somewhere around 130,000 drop shippers. It’s pretty big deal. So welcome to the show, Mike, glad to have you here.

Mike Weiss: Thanks man. It’s great to be here.

Tim Jordan: So the reason I want to have you on is I want to talk about drop shipping. And the reason I think that’s important is because you know, myself and a lot of the audience come from the e-commerce world and it’s very siloed. It’s very compartmentalized. We have the arbitrage people. We have the Amazon people. We have the Shopify people. We have the affiliate people. We have the drop shippers, and I know very little about drop shipping, but I know that a lot of ways, it’s extremely similar to a lot of the things that I’ve done or the things that I am actively involved with. But I think there’s a lot of misinformation about drop shipping. And I think that there might be some missed opportunities and there might be some people jumping into deep and maybe paths that aren’t going to be very fruitful. So I’d like to talk kind of a lot about drop shipping today, as it pertains to, is this a relevant side hustle? When would this be applicable? Who should be looking at this type of business model, things like that. But first off, let’s start off with you. So, I already gave the punchline away that you’re now the chief community officer of Dropified. First, tell us what chief community officer even means, because it sounds like one of those cool corporate names you make up when you can’t really find a typical description.

Mike Weiss: You know what, and I think that’s pretty much it, the whole point when I came on with Dropified was – so Chase Bauer and Lowell Rempel are the two co-CEOs here at drop a fight. And if you ever meet chase or Lowell they’re both awesome guys. Um, but both admittedly don’t really kind of want to be out there and be the face of drop a fight. And so what they were looking for was somebody that experience in, it doesn’t have to be like 30 years experience or anything like that, but just, they had to have enough experience in both just e-com dropship, arbitrage, private label. To be able, just to speak to the general community about what is dropified doing with their new tiers and how are we advancing a growing, which I know we’re going to get into later in the show. ButI won’t bother anyone with that right now, but yeah, so then they had interviewed something like, I don’t know, 10,000 people, I think, which is a pretty obscene number actually. And then when they got back, it was like something like 10,000 resumes they got. And I didn’t know that until after I had gotten the position here, but I just actually had such a dream for Dropified because there was a time when I actually needed to drop ship in order to actually get my family out of a really nasty situation where we were stuck in the United States. And by the way, we’re from Canada. That’s why I say stuck. This isn’t some weird political thing, but yeah, we were stuck in the States for about six months and man, we were trying every which way to get out. And we just couldn’t because financially we didn’t have it. And so I needed to use drop shipping and Dropified was the platform I chose because it just, there’s a lot of great things that helped me make the money quickly. And I was able just to quickly put together about 20 grand in a couple of weeks and we’re able to make our way back home. And so why, what the chief community officer position is, it’s really someone that was a lot like me, it’s someone that none of us really fully understand what’s coming in e-commerce, everyone can always predict what they think is going to happen. But a lot of people are kind of stuck in this same situation where they’re like, well, I know what I’m kind of doing, but I don’t really know how to prepare, or there is some people that are even a little bit further behind that. And just saying, man, I have no idea what I’m doing. All I know is I just kind of lost my job. Right. All I know is I kind of just want a side hustle, but man, this is super confusing. And so my job is to come in and say, Hey guys, listen, there’s been very few things that you are going through that I haven’t gone through. So let me just take you by the hand, let me actually show you how it’s not, instead of just being another person talking, I actually want to jump into your site, jump into your products, help you understand maybe what a smarter route would be and Dropified’s really done a great job on kind of opening up that kind of master coach, if you will position. And so I would probably chop it up as a chief community officer as like a master representer, or master coach, or an ambassador and evangelist for the company, but that actually knows what’s going on and is willing to help people.

Tim Jordan: Well, I think it’s cool that you have this position with a company that you actually used as a client. You actually used it as a resource before you started working for them, which is pretty cool. So I’d love to hear more your story about this being stuck in the US but basically it sets up a lot of the context that I think is interesting about drop shipping in that, it is on the surface level. And I want you to explain this more, a business model that doesn’t require a lot of capital. You said you use drop shipping to raise money cause you were broke, and if you’re broke, you can’t go out and buy inventory. So before we get into that, tell me what’s your career been before this? What led you to this? Oh, crap. I’m strapped for cash. Oh, there’s this crazy thing called drop shipping out here. It’s going to help me.

Mike Weiss: Yeah. Because people are like, let me stay away from that career. Right?

Tim Jordan: What left you broken stranded?

Mike Weiss: What left you broken stranded? So over the last 20 years, uh, I have had the privilege of working with a number of different companies really to focus around their sales departments. Right? So, anywhere from the online security to finance, to telcos, to Amazon companies, to restaurants, whatever, the component was they wanted to bring somebody in that was kind of a fresh perspective. And so I’ve had the privilege of actually having more of a consulting type gig that would hop in and out of these longer contracts with folks. And really, it was just to say, poke the holes. Right. And I love, I mean, to be honest, it started back when I was in a front – when my first, first, first job in corporate was I think I was just a phone salesman at a telco up here in Canada. And I mean, unfortunately the way that you’re trained sometimes is to kind of grease the wheels if you know, and so, it doesn’t matter how it got there, the fact is that it got there kind of thing. And I just started realizing, man, there’s a lot of ways to break rules in big large corporate environments, because there’s just the checks and balances aren’t the same as when you’re super lean. And it’s like every decision that you make has a consequence. Right. And so, I just actually had a – it was actually a really bad start, I guess, but I actually really enjoyed breaking rules, but then reporting those broken rules back to my boss after there was a couple of times where maybe I stuck in a broken rule environment, a little too long, but then I would bring it to my boss and say, guys, I have an eye for just poking holes and stuff and breaking rules and helping you understand where you’re going to be losing a lot of money and where people are capitalizing on this opportunity here. And that actually earned me a couple of nice promotions in that position, in that company. And I just realized, man, I love doing this. Like I love helping people understand where holes are, but then I also was also doing very, very well in the sales side of it and helping my sales teams grow. And so I thought, man, there’s a right and a wrong way to doing this. There’s an old way and a new way to doing this. And I kind of just hitched my wagon onto the new way. And that’s what brought me out of telco. And I started getting into – I got into online securities, which was a world I did not understand. I mean, I knew how to play halo and stuff, but there was, there was a world out there that people on the day-to-day do not know about.

Mike Weiss: And that is that online, gaming online chat, online securities world. And so anyway, I spent a year just really helping a company grow and develop. And that was really maturing because I was like, Holy, like, this is lean. Now this is, I need to actually get this thing moving. And so there was a definitely a couple of months where it’s like, well, if I don’t sell $200,000, then the company’s going under and it’s like, Holy, that’s a lot of pressure. And so I just went back to those strategies of just, what’s the best way of selling. What’s the best relational way of selling? How do you story tell this thing properly? How do you go through the points that you need to all of it. Right. And then finally I ended up with the financial company and then my wife and I decided that we wanted to kind of stop working for exclusively just for other people, like just to line their pockets with money. Although it was great. I mean, I really enjoyed the experience, but we kind of wanted to do that for ourselves. And so we thought, why not bring that over into our world and start doing this ourselves? And that’s where we started creating our own companies and our own private labels. And we started with selling toys and that kind of branched into a number of other things. So right now, my wife – and then my wife fired me because – get this is my wife. She’s like, get out of the house. I can’t deal with you all the time. I’d go do something else. We’re fine. The company’s doing really good just now you go do something else. So, anyway, so yeah, so then she’s doing great. I mean, the company’s selling tens of thousands of toys, had a killer Q4 so far and, and so then yeah, Dropified kinda of was just another project. And it was one that I was really passionate about and I just choose not to jump into projects unless I really enjoyed them. So, the whole getting like losing money, we had actually taken a bit of a trip together as a family. And so what we had done is we had gone down to the States. We went to the big family vacation. It just really came after spending about 50 or 60 hours a week working at the financial company. And it was just a high demand and we just said, forget it. So we decided to take this big, long trip down and while we were down there, my wife’s company, she was selling exclusively on Amazon and Amazon had thrown a hazmat dangerous goods in hazmat stall on her.

Mike Weiss: And so we had like literally tens of thousands of, sorry, we had hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in this dangerous goods and hazmat, which is really kind of all the money that we were kind of bankrolling, because again, at the time I wasn’t working at right at that point. And so as it got stuck, I mean, as anyone that sells in Amazon knows there’s storage fees and everything else. They don’t pause. Like they don’t say, Oh, okay, well, we’ll hold off on that while we’re holding off on you, that I kept going. And so we were at a point where our season was hot and we actually – Amazon came in and they froze everything. And for six months they were charging us storage fees, which obviously incrementally got bigger, but this was over a time when IPI – the IP score came in. And so, because we had such a crappy IP score because our inventory wasn’t moving, then we got, we started getting charged through the nose on storage versus what it was prior to, and all that money was coming out of our personal stores. And so if you think about something like 10 or 15,000, very large box units that are getting charged storage fees every month. I think we were kind of losing, I don’t know. I think it was something like, I don’t even know what the number was anymore. I think it was like a few grand for sure every month just in storage fees and then over and above that there were other fees and stuff that they’re trying to take us on for. And so all of that actually started coming off of our personal stores as well, because like our personal money, our personal funds, credit cards, everything else that we had attached to the personal side of that business account, which we were using for things like gifts or whatever prior to, because we were homeschooling our kids. And so we needed to get our Amazon, it was faster for us to use Amazon than anything else to get our stuff, to help them home, to help them homeschool them. And so anyway, these days they just took all of our money, essentially. That’s kind of where it all came down to is Amazon just literally took all of our money. Now, granted, we owed it in storage fees, but we also were locked in being unable to sell. And so then last, sorry. And then yeah, at the very end. We got to a point where we literally only had, we had less than $10 in the bank. I mean, luckily we had some friends that were helping us out with their house and so they let us use their house, which is – they’ll always be a blessing in our lives. And I remember my wife find out and she went out and she spent the last $9 we had on, I think it was a carton of eggs, some butter and then some rice or something like that, just to stretch as much food as we could, because that’s where we’re at. And I thought, man, there’s got to be a way to actually sell something. And I didn’t have time to private label. I didn’t have the money to private label. And I thought, how the heck am I supposed to do? I can’t go out and consult because I’m a Canadian, I can’t work in the States. I mean, I was kind of freelancing as like because I’m a musician. So I was freelancing at churches and anywhere else that I could just to play piano or just to sing or whatever, just to get some money. But I mean, that was drying up real quick and we thought, Holy, how are we supposed to do this? Well then, I mean, I had done Shopify and drop shipping before, but I just, I was, I made the mistake of doing the whole, Walmart thing where I’m just like, Hey, we’re going to pretty much copy and paste all the Aliexpress and put it onto my Shopify store. And everyone will come to me instead of Aliexpress. It’s what it’s like the common mistake. Right. And so I spent thousands of dollars and just it wasn’t working. And so then this time I thought, okay, I can’t do that. I have to be really specific. So I actually ended up finding a number of different products for dropship that I knew people were looking for over the Thanksgiving holiday last year. And yeah, I was able to actually sell it to them and then do a lot of customer orders and then jump onto Facebook and jump in and just do whatever ad spend I had left for a couple of hundred bucks we had left. And in that process, it was like I said, it was a two week process, lot of research on the front end. But after two weeks, I was able to put together about 20 grand and which helped us actually get home. And then that’s where we kind of reset and said, okay, what do we need? And then obviously Amazon unlocked and we got a chance to figure that out. So, sorry, that was a long answer to your question.

Tim Jordan: It’s really good because you have so much context, you have so much background because you have done different types of e-commerce selling. You’ve done private label, you understand all this stuff, I love Amazon private label and I even hate the term private label. I love building a brand and selling it like will say that. But there are some downfalls like getting your money tied up in inventory. In Q4 is tough because those of us in the industry, everybody thinks that we’re raking it in Q4. You make all this money. Well, Q4 you’ve been leaned for four months because you bought mountains of inventory to get ready. And now you’re depleting your inventory. You got turned around and push all that money back out to buy new inventory for Q1 and prior to the Chinese new year and all that good stuff. So drop shipping is very interesting because it is a business model that doesn’t necessarily need massive amounts of cash upfront. And I know there’s some caveats to that, but for the people that are not familiar with drop shipping, can you just define what drop shipping is? I know we’ve said the term probably 374 times this episode already, but what is drop shipping?

Mike Weiss: Yeah, I know it’s a good question. So, ultimately in drop shipping has a really nasty stigma attached to it because it comes across with quality. But, I’m sure we’ll talk about that here in a little bit, because I think that there’s a lot of false beliefs that come with that. But essentially what drop shipping is, this is it’s basically shipping products to your customers directly from your suppliers and what essentially that means is that you’re never holding any inventory. So how it works is that you’re going to create your own online store or you are going to do your own direct mail order, or you’re going to whatever, like whatever it is that you’re going to do for your medium, for people to purchase, you’re going to create that. And then whenever someone buys it, essentially the order comes to your store, okay, which then you are then going to place the order directly with the supplier, because now you’re holding the money and then you’re going to order directly from the supplier. And then that’s, you’re going to be buying it at a much lower cost than what the person paid you for. So you’re paying the margin or, sorry, they’re paying the margin, and you’re paying costs and then they are going to ship it to your customer directly. So you never touch the inventory, but you get all the profit. That’s essentially that’s it. And it’s in its simplest form what a drop shipping is.

Tim Jordan: Yeah. And just some examples for those that aren’t familiar with it, the three most common examples of drop shipping I see, and if I leave one out, Mike, let me know. But I started seeing drop shipping the first time when I was selling first products on Amazon 2015, 2016, and my products were showing up on walmart.com, right? So what people are doing is they’re just copying and pasting my product information, listing it on Walmart as if it’s their own. And if they got a sale, they would go buy it from me on Amazon and set the shipping address as that client that just purchased it. And they would Mark the price way up. And I would see people all the time, like in the Facebook groups, Oh, I’m selling my product for 20 and someone else is selling it for 40 on Walmart. Hijacker, no, it’s not a hijack. They are just drop shipping your stuff. Second example. I know guys that were selling, they’re still doing it like $10,000 hot tubs, steam showers, thing like that. So what they do is they find manufacturers that have new, a nice product and they go out and they build their marketing funnels and they build Facebook ads and social media ads and Google ads. And if you go to their website and you buy the product, then it’s shipped and maybe even installed without you ever having to touch it. And then you just pay the supplier, the manufacturer, the one that sells. And then the third one, the one that gets a lot of, I guess, bad rap. And what you’re saying, there’s a little bit of a stigma involved is this drop shipping straight from China. And where I’ve seen that specifically, like on Amazon is people will list products on Amazon. You’ll see the delivery time is two weeks, three weeks, four weeks sometimes. And they’ll ship it super inexpensive. And these sellers will have 3000 listings. And all they’re doing is copying and pasting the information, the images, the product stuff from Ali express, which has Ali baba is like B to C platform. Right? And that’s where a lot of these bad stigmas came, I remember. And it doesn’t just have to be Amazon. It could be Shopify sites. It could be social media. I remember my wife found this. Yeah, eBay, my wife a few years ago found this amazing sweater on a Facebook ad. And it looked great on the model. And this is going to be the nicest sweater she’s ever bought. She’s like, Oh, this thing’s amazing. She buys it. Where is it? Where is it? Where is it in like three weeks later, it shows up and, wat it up, packaged with Chinese writing on it. And she opens it up and it is not what she expected. I mean, it’s like light years different from what the images were. And she was so upset, but she only paid $9 for it.

Mike Weiss: Probably for a doll.

Tim Jordan: Yeah, exactly. So, those are like the most common types that I’ve seen of drop shipping. Are there any other big ones that I’ve missed?

Mike Weiss: I mean, China is kind of the big, big, big one right now. I think I’d probably say the only other one that I would throw in there is something like mail orders. Right. So for example, when you look at traditional MLMs, that’s a perfect example of what drop ship could be, right. So if you have like, I mean, I don’t want to throw any brand names out there, but let’s just say like a makeup or a shake or a vitamin thing, that would be an example of like more of a drop shipping, because essentially if you think about, you have an agent that is going to be making the margin or the commission, or a lot of the margin or commission, if anything, it’s like a glorified affiliate program. But, they are going to be making like a lot more of the margin of commission based off the packages that they sell, because there’s more margin there. And then when that happens, they say they go to their friends and they have a party or whatever, and they showcase all this great stuff. Then people say, great, I want to buy one of those. Then they’re going to go in and place the order for them, like face to face. Because that’s the strategy. And then that order, like they’re not touching the inventory. Right. So that order literally is going to go around that person and they’re going to go directly to that person’s house. And then the beautiful part is now they’ve signed up on a subscription model. So now they become whatever a seller or they’re going to become a client. I know that they’re going to have discounts.

Tim Jordan: Yeah. So, a lot of people assume that the hardest part about selling online is having the product. No, there’s a million products out there. The hardest part is getting people to buy it. So you do that with marketing, Amazon school, because there’s a huge platform, but the reason you can’t sell everything on there is because there’s either no market or too saturated market. And there are so many manufacturers out there that have great products and they just can’t sell the stinking things because they don’t understand marketing. So drop shipping is a great, a great way for people that have some marketing prowess that knows how to access audiences that knows how to build funnels and knows how to tell a story and connect the manufacturer, the end user. Right. So what are some of the biggest misconceptions about drop shipping as a business model? I think the first one talked about that. Yeah. It’s all a scam or that it’s all junk, right?

Mike Weiss: Yeah. It’s a scam It’s junk. It takes too long to ship. Am I even going to get it? Poor customer service. Because I mean, if something takes 60 days to get to you, that’s not like a chandelier or something that’s like big enough to actually merit a 60 day delivery date, or handcrafted. There’s just lots of issues when it comes to customer service tracking, lost items, can be coming through pretty big. On the, I think on the that’s on the customer side, on the seller side, it could be that again, same thing, long tracking times, the fact that they actually have to pony up the money first before they actually even get the money, because depending on the actual merchant provider that they get, it can be something like five days before they actually receive the money that the client had actually given them. And then, but they can’t wait five days to actually wait for the shipping because it would just, that would delay it like crazy. So they usually front the money and then they get paid afterwards. So that’s a big pain in the butt. Sometimes tracking numbers, track getting tracking information is really hard. They have to work with a number of different tools to get out there. And I think the biggest part, and you’ve said it already is marketing. Marketing is very, very difficult sometimes for the seller because they were selling the same stuff as everybody else. And so how do you, how do you sell something that’s the exact same, and try and sell it a little bit differently. And that’s always a big trick for people and everyone that jumps in dropship and they do it because of the super, super low cost barrier to get into it. And there’s a truckload of learning that comes with it. I’m not talking about it. It’s a lot to learn. I mean, like there’s so many resources that people can pull from. It’s not like a very hyper niche. Do you have to spend two grand just to get this amazing course? It’s free. Everything is out there and then you can learn from the best. But, these are a lot of the negative stigmas that at least people are told before they want to come into drop shipping.

Tim Jordan: So what are some of the biggest changes that have happened in the industry? Give us like an overview, because I know that three years ago, the drop shipping “scene” was very different than what it is today.

Mike Weiss: Yeah, definitely. So if we were just to stick in the last few years, then I think the biggest one is a presence, right? So for example, we have so on Amazon, like you said, people were everywhere selling this stuff on Amazon. I mean, I remember even our toys, people were trying to hijack our toys. Now, thank God. It was customized, but people are trying to hijack like a lot of the components of our toys that we were getting from China as a private label. And they were selling them at cents on the dollar. Like it was so brutal. And so as a reaction to that, I mean, you would know this, you would know this as well, but as a reaction to that, people are getting super pissed because, and think about it. Amazon is at a position where they have hundreds of millions of customers that are coming onto Amazon for one thing, it’s not to consume content. That’s not to write blog articles, that’s literally to shop. And if they have a crappy experience because the product quality is bad, well guess, I mean, Amazon also as being a seller on Amazon, they take over the customer service component or a lot of the customer service component. So if they’re the one fronting all the questions of my product is crap. I want a refund or I want a new one and all that stuff. Well, I mean, Amazon’s not going to, I mean, what are they going to do about it? Like the Amazon, the product is crap and they go back and they find out where it’s sourced from. And that’s why they’re actually asking people, where is this sourcing from now that they require that on so many different categories in, is tell me who your manufacturer is. And because I want to know, is this going to be something that’s drop shipped, or is this actually your own brand? And it feels like Amazon has really taken a big push on to branding. Like I want, I only want real branded products, real companies, not just these fly by nights or these drop shippers that are coming on. And I’m telling you that last year alone, that drop ship component like where people were allowed to jump in last, I remember it was last December. I saw it everywhere. And I was just like, I was blown away. I was like, Whoa, man, Amazon is going to tank. There’s no way. There’s no way that they’re going to survive if they keep allowing these people on here, because everyone is selling the crap, but for like a few pennies more or a few pennies less, and it’s the same thing as every other commerce site out there, every Facebook ad that you see for whatever the product is, it could be anything that is coming from AliExpress. So that’s one big change, I think is the actual gating to drop shippers on Amazon. And I think that was a pretty bold move for Amazon because, but I think it was necessary because a lot of people were coming in and just really defaming this thing, like crazy, which is not the purpose of drop shipping. It’s not to sell crappy products is to get people products that they want at a discounted rate because you can, I don’t know, like that’s kind of the beauty of it is you have these people that are super ambitious and super lean and super young, and they want to come in and give you the best experience possible. And sometimes on Amazon, you don’t get that because you don’t have such the, you don’t have the heavy customer service component that you would if it was outside of Amazon.

Mike Weiss: Right. So that’s one, I mean, two, you could date it all the way back to the sixties and seventies, when it actually started. But I mean, we don’t have a lot of time today, I think, to dive into all that. But I mean, the thing is the evolution of it since the sixties has been crazy, even from direct mail from JC penny or Sears, all the way to the .com, all the way to when eBay and Amazon kind of first surface, I mean, it is that it has really evolutionized across the way here. And it’s been pretty fascinating to see, even just in this last few years kind of what it’s done. So anyway, so that to answer your question that’s because Amazon was off the table, which is a ocean of buyers. People had to go back and they had to say, okay, I need to get really smart with how I’m going to market this thing. And now people are looking to, how can I actually put my own brands on these things? And that’s changed the game wildly as well, because you need to drive volume in order to create those private label brands, which again comes into just the traditional private label model. Anyway, hope I answer your question there.

Tim Jordan: No, you did. You definitely did. And that’s going to lead me to my next question is considering all the changes, considering all the misconceptions, but considering the opportunity. Because it has worked for a lot of people. It does work in certain scenarios. It obviously worked for you at a time when you needed it. Can you give us just a high level overview of the business model now that does work in drop shipping?

Mike Weiss: That’s getting, yeah. I was like, that’s – I don’t even think it’s evolving right now. And we’ll see kind of what that looked like, or it looks like, I think here’s the thing drop shipping. The best way of dealing with drop shipping, is really this a if you can drop ship with your own private brands on it, which there are ways of doing that with print on demand. And there’s a lot of really great ways to like customize drop ship stuff. Now you’re doing it at a premium, which means you’re not going to be making as much margin. But again, the ultimate question you’re trying to answer is what are people willing to buy? And how do I know that, how do I have enough data to prove that this is what people are willing to buy and how can I bring it to them where the quality is there. So, the one model is customization. Okay. And I think that’s a super powerful way because it’s something, it’s unique. It’s something that no one else will have. And it’s what someone else it’s what everyone wants. And so, for example, things like, if you have like a journal, a journal is not unique, but a journal with your name on it, or a journal with a verse on it, or journal with a specific saying that you and your friend always say, that’s unique. The journal isn’t unique, but it because it personalizes it with that individual message that only you and some other people only you and your family would understand, that’s what makes it special. So that’s what actually drives people to be able to do that. Now, how do you do that at a volume base? Well, you don’t open the doors to that message to everybody else. You do. However, say, Hey, customization available, right. And all we need is a picture, all we need, all we need is your writing, all we need is this right? And then that’s it. And then you’re good to go or the other way of going about it. So, you opened the doors for customization was a lot of work on the drop ship side, but it’s still going to open up the doors for how you could sell it. I think the other model is looking for designs. If you’re sticking to the print on demand side is looking for designs that already responding to people. A lot of people want to express themselves on things like Merch, right? So that’s why Amazon Merch is out there. That’s why you have companies like Printful out there, Viralstyle, Teespring, whatever it was because people want to be able to express themselves.

Mike Weiss: So how are they wanting to express themselves who’s already kind of hitting the market right now. And in what way, and how can you kind of take that, take inspiration and actually transfer that into another audience. So outside of print on demand, the other, so if you’re not going to do anything with customization, the tried and true method with Dropified, not dropified, sorry, with drop shipping is you’ve got to find products that have a high perceived value, but are actually low cost. Right? So for example, jewelry is always going to be something that has high perceived value, but is always going to be a low cost. And it’s great because when it shifts, it’s going to ship super cheap because it’s so light, right? So if you can get, I mean, you go out there and you see all these freaking rings and you have tungsten rings. You have titanium rings, you have rubber rings. Now you have like wooden rings. Like you just, whatever it is, you have to make sure that it’s a high perceived value. And then if you can get it into bundles where it’s not just one at a time, but you can get two or three at a time. Right. And you do that by figuring out which manufacturer is going to do that for you. And again, trust me, there isn’t a manufacturer in China that won’t make exactly what you want. If you can show them that the market is going to be really hot for it. So again, you want to get things that have high perceived value and then have, and that have but low cost. I think the third model, and this is what I recommend is, not just high perceived value, but it needs to be something that’s literally cutting edge that people really haven’t seen it. They would love to be able to add to their world. And that could be cool lamps that could be a carpet, that could be different towels that people have. Like it could be anything, it could be a dress that no one’s ever seen before. I mean, one easy way of doing that is if people were to go into places like wish, which essentially is kind of like the major competitor against all drop shippers is a–, because literally it’s the manufacturer going on there and they think they’re upselling it by like 5% or 10% or something like that. So you’re getting so many cheap things on wish is being able to get something that’s local, right? So, the only competitor competition that you can have with someone, like wish it was going directly from China, most of the time is be able to go onto places like Ali express, or even Alibaba and asking for like low minimum order quantities, if you don’t really want to jump into full dropship, but just do that where they actually have presence in.

Mike Weiss: And if you’re in the United States, in the United States. United States is growing like crazy with the local suppliers that are available. And it’s because the one area that you’d be able to kill them on is shipping, especially when it comes to Q4, people don’t have two months to wait for their Christmas presents. Like they have maybe, maybe you have two weeks. And so if you want to get in there and make sure you can get shipping done in seven to 10 business days, then you’re able to go in and do that and you can push it really hard over the next two weeks and people, they will get it for Christmas because it’s locally supplied.

Tim Jordan: So now that we’ve looked at some of the misconceptions and we can bust those up by saying, Hey, you can offer good products. You can make sure that it gets there on time. You can do marketing correctly. And we’re talking about a lot of the ways in which it works well has to do with supply chain. So fast delivery, personalization, ability, and high quality products. And that leads me to kind of come back full circle, to talk about dropified, which has done something very interesting. And it’s really why it dropified caught my attention on the industry, which is you guys have created a model now where people can drop ship from US manufacturers with like a one unit minimum order quantity with personalized branding. Can you talk about – you don’t have to give the drop fight sales pitch, but talk about why you guys felt like it was important to go on that endeavor to allow US manufactured products and how you’re seeing that change the industry now.

Mike Weiss: Yeah, no, it’s a great question. And so I would probably say this, Dropified started as a drop ship product hub, right? So like we were out there, I mean, similar to what you’re seeing out there with overlo and Spock, I mean, we definitely had a lot more features, but the key is, is that we were in that hub where, I mean, it’s a great business model for folks, and there’s lots of commissions that Ali express pays out on and other suppliers. But the thing is we were seeing the same thing over and over and over again. And because dropified took over a lot more of the helping with customer service and helping with fulfillment. We did just kind of leave it to the end seller to deal with all that. We were getting the same questions over that you’re talking about over and over and over again. So a couple of years ago, Lowell and Chase, they made a pivot and that pivot was, how can we actually do some, how can we disrupt the industry enough where we can, we can actually be chartering new territory that very few people have actually even thought of if anyone has ever thought of, and that way we can actually combat all this stuff. We can combat the long shipping times, we can combat the poor quality. We can combat the generic branding that everyone else is kind of selling. Right. So how do we do that? And so what we did is we realized that there’s actually a lot of people that had the same desires as we did, but they didn’t have the resources like we did. And what I mean by that is these were people like folks like manufacturers or fulfillment centers that were just saying, Hey, listen, if you could just like, let’s talk about fulfillment centers.

Mike Weiss: If you could just give us the products, we would make sure that the shipping is done in one to three business days because of the high volume that we have, we get to negotiate with the shipping companies, crazy rates, because we’re dealing with tens of thousands of orders a day. And so we can get very, very, very low shipping costs and we can make sure it’s done when we’re talking about shipping costs about priority, right? So one to three businesses, we combat that. So we thought, awesome. All we need now is the product, right? And so, we believe the product really is the most important thing, because the one problem, especially with the types of products that we’re talking about, messaging and delivery is a massive component. But if your product sucks, you can be the best marketer in the world, but you’re only going to get that customer once. And then, word of mouth is going to travel way faster than your marketing. And then it’s going to slowly, slowly go down. Right? So what we did is we went after the product and we said, okay, what’s the right product to do this with. Well, it’s not rings. It’s not towels. It’s not dresses. It’s not because these are all single purchased items. No one’s ordering a dress every month, you know? Not the same dress. That’s right. Yeah. And so, I mean, you do get some kids like that that are out there, like Fab Fit Fun does a really great job on really creating these kits and sending about the great stuff for kids out there that do the same thing. And it’s really cool. But the thing is, we wanted to bring something that brought a lot of value to folks. And especially when it came to the health industry and we saw the health industry booming, and it has been booming for a very long time. And so when we’re talking about health industry, I was talking about supplements, right. But then we couldn’t ignore the skin care market, which was coming close to about half a billion dollars by the time that we got into it a couple of years ago. And I think right now it’s almost a three-quarters of a billion dollars. It’s crazy how much has been growing. And so we’ve thought great. Now we’ve got to get skin creams in there. And then pet industry was on the rise and CBD was the Wild West. And we thought, man, but everyone’s stupid if we, sorry, everyone in our company would be stupid to not jump into the CBD side of things because this thing is going to take off.

Mike Weiss: And we believe that that’s why we opened it up. And so we said, why are we choosing these markets? Well, it’s not just because the quality of these are easier to gauge because it’s all certified, right? You need certifications in order and testing and quality assurance to make sure that these are high quality products, if you’re going to the right manufacturers. But it’s because our end seller not only is going to get a quality product, but they’re going to be able to do it with their own labels, their own brands, their own designs. And why is that matter was because when they do all their heavy marketing, that’s going to help them huge on their marketing side because they get to literally target people where they are. They’re not asking people to come to them. If they want to find a golden retriever owner in Wisconsin, that’s a cheese head. Awesome. They can actually create a very specific label if the market was big enough there for them to do that. Well, actually, sorry, I’m going to recant that it doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter if the market’s big enough, this as long as it’s someone that if, even if they can get 50 people or a hundred people or a thousand people that fit that demographic profile, then you know what, as long as they can have people, when they see that they’re going to be like, Oh my gosh, this is exactly for me. Especially if it solves the problem that I’m trying to solve right now, which is golden retrievers have heavy joint support issues over in Wisconsin. And you know what, I’m just the only thing that I’m kind of breaking out is are they a cheese head or not? Right? They could be a factory worker. They could be a stay-at-home mom. They could be a teacher. It doesn’t matter, but I can break out as many of those labels as I want and target. And that’s the whole purpose was to help them market so that they could find what that winning label that winning design and winning demographic would be. But the key here was not just to find and get them to buy at once, like the dress that we talked about it. So that, because the market that we’re in is, is heavy ribeye because they’re consumables. When someone has done their multivitamin pack, they’re going to want another one because they are trying to supplement those vitamins, nutrients, and minerals and whatever it is that they’re trying to put in their body, or on their cream, or on their skin for their creams, they want to suck. Like they want to rebuy there.

Mike Weiss: They need that again, especially if it’s a high quality product. And so now we’re thinking, this is where it’s going to take off is because this is a high, these are high rebuy markets. So when we tell people to sell this thing, we’re telling them, if you do not have a subscribe and save set up, get it, because this is your bread and butter, because that’s how you get your recurring revenue and your overall cost of acquisition going down. And everything after that initial purchase is sheer profit. And you’re getting profit for months and months, and months, and months, and months from each customer that comes in, which is going to add to your budget for marketing, testing out different markets, and these untapped markets and untapped niches that no one has ever gone after. So what we did is we said, okay, well, here’s the arrangement we’re going to make with you. We will actually take these from you. So dropified will buy these from you at cost, and then we’ll negotiate the wholesale with you. We’ll put in these fulfillment centers that have the printers in them. And then at the end of the day, whenever someone orders something, it’s going to come through our platform, go right to the fulfillment center to print this label, or these labels of whatever products that they have, because we’ll always carry stock there. And, then they’ll be able to put it all in the same box, ship it out to the person in one to three business days, but then they would talk about the stock issue. Well, actually there is no stock issue because if you have a constant, it’s kind of like a water faucet, right? Is you can’t run your from your water main outside into your house because that’s just an obscene amount of water that will constantly be flowing. What you need is a valve, right? And so think of what we’re doing as the valve is when we need to turn on more or get more water in the tank, we’re turning the valve on. And it’s just as simple as doing that water fills in super quickly, boom, we turn off the valve, we did care. We use the waterfall where you need to, and if we need more, we’ll turn on the valve and keep coming through. So this is the beautiful part of having all these manufacturers partnered with us, is we have all these water mains that are coming in and saying, man, we love this because we’re getting high orders because the volume is pushing out like crazy. And as long as we’re continuing to bring high quality products, that’s the only way this is going to sell is people are only going to choose our sellers. Now have the pick of the cream of the crop to be able to go from that. Sorry, I didn’t want to do too many plugins for Dropified, but it is a really exciting opportunity because the only other way around this is a lot of people are trying to do this as well, is they’re limited by how many products are allowed to do this with. And we’re just not because we don’t, we’re not limiting people to one brand or two brands or three brands. We’re not limiting people to because that just takes away the point, right? If you have to it, because it’s the same thing. As private label, you have one chance, you have to do so much research to get your one brand figured out. And I just don’t believe that people today or even the world today is going to respond to that. Because if you fail on that one brand, it means that you’re done. Right. And it’s a lot of time, a lot of work, a lot of effort. And we’re just saying, well, take it, take the pressure off of that. Why don’t you create 50 brands? Do your research, put 50 brands out there, figure out what one’s going to land. And if someone comes in and buys even one, then we’ll fulfill it because there’s no minimum order quantities because it’s that traditional drop ship model that we’re trying to go after on the order fulfillment side. But we’re bringing in the power of private label, similar to what you would see with something like print on demand for apparel and things like that.

Tim Jordan: Well, I think it’s interesting that so many people get a perception about an industry and they lock that into their brain. So example drop shipping is Alibaba to Amazon or Ali express to Amazon. And what’s cool about an industry that is full of entrepreneurs is that even the companies that support those entrepreneurs are entrepreneurial too. You guys saw this opportunity for drop shipping. You knew the need for it, but you knew that you had to change the game. And I think there’s a lesson to be had about being told no, all these manufacturers that you went to. No, no, no, we don’t do one-offs. We don’t do one product. We’re not going to do this, do this, do this. And there’s a lot of times you could’ve said, okay, give up let’s let’s keep going back to the old model. Let’s figure something else out. But somebody was able to figure out, we’ll find, we’ll just buy this stuff from you and we’ll ship it to somebody else who will actually fulfill the orders and do labeling, which is a great solution. So I think it’s a good example of ingenuity and not taking no for an answer and being able to just keep grinding till we figure it out, which is something that we all have to do, but it generally is worth it. So kudos to Dropified for pulling that off. I think that’s really cool. So I know we’re running short on time. This has been a little longer episode than a lot of them, but there’s so much information I wanted to get here. Let me ask you this, Mike, there are a lot of people that have multiple businesses, they’re doing all sorts of online, offline, whatever. And those of us that are very entrepreneurial. A lot of times we do multiple, I was looking for the next thing. So if anybody listening, that’s not familiar or maybe they are, but generally not familiar with drop shipping is a business model. Where would you tell them to go to find some resources, to learn about drop shipping, to determine if it’s something they need to add to their entrepreneurial arsenal, so to speak or not?

Mike Weiss: Yeah. Actually one thing I would probably recommend, I mean, there’s so many resources out there, dude, like freaking Shopify alone has I think is leading on like drop shipping education. Just because, I mean, that’s kind of where their bread and butter is as well. Right. Private label goes to Amazon drop shipping is kind of sticking with Shopify. And they’re huge. Right? And so, I mean, I would definitely, you could freaking Google like how to drop ship and you’ll see a whole, like pretty much the whole page is going to be Shopify as blogs and how to articles. And they actually do a really solid job there. So it’s not a plugin for Shopify for any personal reasons, but it’s just I want to bring the best information to people. I mean there’s a lot of a number of courses and stuff that you can take out there as well. But again, it’s really kind of based off of what you feel comfortable putting in and how much investment you want, what I would probably, if I could here Tim is, I would say that when you’re looking at drop shipping, you need to think of it as a tester, right? So, what I mean by that is this, if you already have your own products, if you’re on Amazon like me, right. Don’t think of it as being another product necessarily of man. I’m going to just focus a hundred percent on drop shipping and I’m going to make that a whole another business model. I wouldn’t do that. I would say understand the power of drop shipping. The power of drop shipping is this, you can have access to literally what the entire world of products are out there. Right? And what you need to do is consider what is going on with your brand, right? What is happening with your brand right now? And how can you compliment that brand? You can compliment that brand by doing things like free giveaways drop shipping is a really easy way of creating free giveaways because it’s super low cost. And I mean, it’s a way to kind of get it out there to your clients to actually test it, right. Another way that you can use drop shipping is to figure out what your next product needs to be. Right? So use drop shipping as an opportunity for you to do your product testing. Right? If you’re going to use something like Dropified, where you can do the customization, then use it to help test what your brand is going to be, test what your design could look like, tests what could this look like? And who’s interested in it because the thing is every company is going to die if they stay static. Right. And that’s, I think that’s just universal until you reach a certain level where your brand can sell itself and like Coca-Cola or Pepsi or whatever, but even then they’re not even remaining static. They’re always out there and they’re changing and manipulating, growing and engine. But the thing is, they don’t deviate from what’s working. If you’re in a position where you’re like, cool, I have a seasonality product right now. And I need to look for an evergreen product. Well, I mean, one of the best ways you can do that is to actually go out there, do your research and on finding out like, what is selling and how is it working and then get those samples for yourself and say, how has this feel? How has this actually, Like, is this a good quality thing? Do I want this, will this be a good part of my brand? And then even asking your existing customers, Hey, listen, if you were to buy something like this, would you be interested in it? Or, Hey, here’s five products that we’re interested in right now. We want to give you one of them for free or two of them for free. And then we’re looking for feedback on it. None of them are going to have your brand on it yet, but it’s all dropped yet, right? This is a very powerful way for you to actually do your research. And this is where I think a lot of folks that do drop shipping, fail to jump into private label. But a lot of people that private label fail to do with drop shipping is they don’t see it as a product testing environment.

Mike Weiss: They don’t see it as a brand testing environment or a design testing environment. They just say, that’s evil. This is where I am. And I’m going to stick with what I know and there’s wisdom with that to some degree to shifting your business model. But there is it, you would be foolish to not adopt both business models, because what I mean by that is say that you have the product that works. There’s nothing stopping you go to that manufacturer and saying, Hey, I want this to look like X, Y, Z, with my brand on it. And I want to order a thousand of them. So you can bring that back into private label really, really, really quickly, but to actually jump out there and say, man, this isn’t working for me, for drop shipping, because of all these negatives with, I mean, you’re missing out on so much opportunity for folks like our 130,000 customers that are saying, thank you, please don’t stay out because we’ve figured this thing out here. And because we know exactly what Mike’s saying, and this is exactly what we do. And we can flip in and out of products without any inventory, like that. It takes me a day to change my entire catalog and how – for Amazon, you just can’t do that. I can’t go to my wife and say, let’s change your whole catalog of toys tomorrow. And she’s like, what, I’ve invested a hundred thousand dollars in my toys. I can’t do that. Right. So what I would say is this is, yes, look at the learning. There’s lots of great resources and tools out there. I mean, I’ve kind of named a couple like Shopify would be one really great one. Jump into Facebook groups that are currently doing drop shipping right now. And really just of feel the presence of what’s going out there. There’s a lot of starter Facebook groups out there that are just how to get started in drop shipping. So you don’t have to jump into like these Facebook groups that have just master levels of range, where you’re going to get overwhelmed by e-pack it, if you have no idea what the heck that means, and you’re just looking at product research. So yeah, I think that’s a beautiful world that we live in right now is that you can literally jump in and put yourself in the silo that you feel like you’re going to learn best from. And there’s going to be a lot of people in there that are experienced. I know, I hate the answer of saying, go to Facebook and jump into Facebook groups. I hate that myself, but I do think that don’t just go to one resource would probably be my big answer. Listen to what I’m saying, listen to, look for what trend, people that are leading in their thought pools are saying, and just make sure that you kind of figure out what that means for you. And then just go out and do it, go out and try it, go out and start with like five drop-ship products, which takes literally 10 minutes to figure out like it’s not difficult to get started.

Tim Jordan: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing this. Those of you listening, I know it’s been a long episode, but we tried to pack in a whole lot here. There’s a ton of stuff we could talk about with drop shipping, but we’re trying to pack in as much as we can on one episode. So just forgive us for the length, but Mike, thanks so much for sharing this information with us. Thanks for doing what you do. Thanks for sharing your kind of origin story in the industry as well. And for those of you that want more information, you can go to dropified.com. They’ve got a lot of good information. You’ll see Mike floating around out there and yeah, I guess that’s it. So, Mike, thanks again for being on. Any final, last single word of wisdom for the listeners here.

Mike Weiss: Start.

Tim Jordan: Just start. Awesome. Well, thank you guys for listening to another episode. We’ll see you on the next one.

The post Is Dropshipping Dead as an E-Commerce Business Model? – 224 appeared first on AM/PM Podcast.

A Look Back at a Challenging 2020 – Soaring E-Commerce and Important Life Lessons – 223

I don’t have to tell anyone that 2020 has been a wild ride. Though, when it comes to entrepreneurs and e-commerce sellers, we have a lot to be grateful for. E-commerce business is absolutely booming throughout the entire online-selling ecosystem. 

As we gradually adjust to a new (and hopefully temporary) normal, as entrepreneurs there’s a good chance that our lives have changed less than most of the population. Because of that, in this episode of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim Jordan takes the time to walk us through his experiences in the last year. 

While on that entrepreneurial walk, Tim goes into depth on what he’s learned since the COVID pandemic hit. Yes, selling online is increasing exponentially, but it’s the kindness, and resilience of people that have made the greatest impression on Tim. 

If you’re a fan of positivity and good news, this episode is for you! 

In episode 223 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim discusses: 

• 02:30 – A Year of Challenges (and Exploding E-Commerce)
• 04:15 – Online Selling is Increasing Exponentially
• 06:15 – Lesson Number One: People are Absolutely Amazing
• 09:15 – A Bike Shout-Out Business is Born of Resilience   
• 11:30 – Entrepreneurs Don’t Just Create Income, They Also Create Opportunity
• 14:00 – Mixing E-Commerce Mortar 
• 18:00 – Obstacles are Leading to New “Verticals” 
• 21:30 – Focusing on What’s Important
• 25:00 – A Family Health Crisis Makes Tim’s Priorities Much More Clear
• 33:45 – Success is More Than a Perfectly Built Sales Funnel
• 36:45 – Does Your Job Define You? 

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “join” our Facebook Group and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or wherever you listen to our podcast.

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Transcript

Tim Jordan: Hey, everybody, normally on episodes of AM/PM Podcast, I’d bring in special guests that have some thoughts to share, but fortunately, I get to learn a lot as well, and sometimes I have a few things to share as well. So in this episode, we’re going to be talking about some thoughts that I have kind of wrapping up 2020 going into like the prime of Q4 and also some thoughts leading into 2021, some lessons we’ve learned along the way, especially as I think back to some of the past guests that we’ve had some valuable lessons that I’ve learned getting to do the host. I hope you liked this episode. Stay tuned.

Tim Jordan: Hi. I’m Tim Jordan and in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous and the entrepreneurial veterans, we all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.

Tim Jordan: Hey everybody. Welcome to the AM/PM Podcast. First. I want to thank you for being here. I want to thank you for listening. This has been a crazy year in a lot of ways. And for me, there’s been some pretty high highs and pretty low lows, but one of the highlights was becoming the host of this podcast. And I know it’s not the end of the year yet, but we’re wrapping up to the end of the year where, month and a half out, my opinion, like once you hit Thanksgiving here in the US, you’re basically wrapping things up. So as I’m kind of musing and reminiscing about this year, I just realized that I need to thank you guys for supporting amp and podcast for being part of the community for listening. I appreciate the opportunity to be the host here. And I really honestly hope that you guys have found some value. If you’re listening to this, I suspect you have found some value. Otherwise you wouldn’t be back listening to another episode, but one of the great joys for me getting to be the host is learning along with you. I’ve had some very candid conversations on camera, sometimes off camera that have substantially helped improve my life, my business experience, my wisdom, as little of it is there is.

Tim Jordan: And just my perspective, I think that some of you that follow this podcast regularly have got to witness me having some breakthrough moments, talking to these guests. So it’s been a real joy for me. I hope it’s been a joy for you, but I just want to take a second and thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting. And as we wrap up this year, push into the busiest time, which is December for us, e-commerce sellers and then move into 2021. I hope that we continue providing really high content or high levels of content, really high value, and that you guys stick along for the ride and keep listening in. So as I think back to 2020, I think it’s an understatement to say that a lot of ways it’s been pretty rough year. We’ve had, you know, obviously the pandemic, which has led to lockdowns, which has led to family issues, which have led to friends, family, we’re all either scared or some of us have been sick.

Tim Jordan: I personally know people that have died of coronavirus. And I know a lot of people that never got the virus, but were locked in their house for six or seven months. There’s been riots. There’s been political unrest in many places. We see on the news a lot of talk about the US but there’s been stuff going on all around the world. There’s been extreme poverty, which has gotten worse in places that are near and dear to my heart. Like Central America, didn’t get to make the headlines, but it’s a real deal. We had this crazy election cycle in the US that as of what is today’s date, 11/26, it’s not quite over, we’re still battling some of the stuff going on. There’ve been a lot of bad headlines, right? And going into this year, I had high hopes.

Tim Jordan: I thought everything was going to be awesome best year ever. And then COVID hit. The good news is e-commerce is booming. And if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re at least familiar with e-commerce, whether you’re an e-commerce seller or not. It is one of those sectors that is growing like crazy. My role at sellers funding, one of the companies that supports sellers in multiple marketplaces, I was just looking at data minutes before recorded, talking about how the e-commerce industry in itself is up like 40 or more percent. Your target, their Q3 report is they’re up 180%, Walmart up 80%, Amazon up over 50% from Q3 of last year, looking at Q3 reports. But as much as the e-commerce marketplaces are growing, what’s interesting looking at the data that sellers funding has is that e-commerce sellers are growing at an even higher rate, right? So I don’t have the exact math in front of me. It’s something like overall e-commerce industry has bumped up 40% from this time last year, where e-commerce sellers have bumped up like 80%, which is crazy. So, I know that there’s been some bad headlines. There’s also been some good ones, going back to bad headlines in the e-commerce industry. There are a lot of things that were wrecked. I mean, restrictions to logistics systems, fulfillment centers being locked down, fulfillment centers, being slow to receive stuff, shortage of shipping containers in China, all sorts of crazy stuff happening. So even on top of the bad are on top of the good, the good news of e-commerce sellers. It hasn’t been easy. There’s been a lot of struggles for me. I can tell you that this year has been topsy turvy. I had a business that was completely wrecked the end of last year.

Tim Jordan: And I started off this year trying to overcome some broken up business partnerships, but I had really, really high hopes for the business that does events. And we do trips to China and things like that. That was completely wrecked. And we were looking at a seven figure year, potentially in that business and it’s done. It’s dead. But other initiatives were started like the AM/PM Podcast. I’ve recovered from some bad business dealings, some bad relationships. I’ve started new partnerships. I’ve got other ventures going on and I’ve got deals in the works for 2021. They’re going to start me off even stronger. So, as I think about this year, and I think about like the good things and the bad things, I start thinking about some of those thoughts that are relevant to all of us entrepreneurs, right?

Tim Jordan: And that’s what I want to share with you today. As we enter the heart of Q4, as we enter like depth of Q4, I want to be thinking about exactly how we can take some of these lessons that we’ve learned good or bad and apply them to the end of the year as we wrap up. So, some of the thoughts in no particular order that I want to share, I hope you’ll grant me the time to share those with you now. The first thought that I’ve had one of the first lessons that I’ve learned from this year is that people are absolutely amazing, right? The headlines are occupied by the bad guys. The guys that aren’t necessarily those that their mothers are proud of, but really people are amazing. In the midst of the lockdowns, this entire meeting education industry. I mean, it transferred online. There has never been as rapid and swift of a transfer of focus and capabilities as there was when all of this– not just hospitality, but like the education, the events, the conferences, it was amazing. Zoom, the company zoom that we’re all familiar with, they handled like a 2000% growth in one month. There’s never been like an infrastructure built for a SAS company, a software company that was able to handle a 2% growth because people are amazing, right? People are able to pivot. People are able to change. It was nuts. I know people whose businesses were wrecked because they were in the Airbnb space. They had a lot of properties there. They rented out through Airbnb. And when the lockdown started happening and people weren’t traveling and the vacations were stopping instead of going home and crying about it, they instantly transitioned their business to setting up capabilities for medical staff to utilize their homes.

Tim Jordan: Carlos Alvarez, buddy of mine down in Miami. He had a ton of Airbnb properties. And that’s what he started doing is he started advertising to nurses and healthcare workers that maybe were traveling to the area, or didn’t want to take a potential virus back to their home. They immediately rotated. They immediately transitioned. I think that’s amazing. There are companies that, right at the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns that had giant banquets, they had all sorts of events planned and they were canceled. They had all this food. And so instead of letting the food spoil, they spent extra time, effort, energy to take all this food, to help others, to give it to homeless shelters. Big businesses like distilleries. They turned on a dime. And instead of making vodka and whiskey, they started making hand sanitizer and selling it oftentimes at a loss just to support the local communities. That’s huge. There is a– I was reading a news article a few days ago about a Baltimore hotel who it’s restaurants closed, right? They had to close the restaurants and instead of just keeping those offices or those restaurants, that space vacant, they open it up to let people come in and prepare packaged meals for those in needs. So they opened it up for all these nonprofits to come in, utilize the assembly lines and the food preparation areas and just the floor space to package prepared food, to take it to those in need. That’s huge, right? Like it costs a hotel, a lot of money to open up their doors, let people in, reconfigure these restaurants, utilize social distancing and things like that. Like that’s huge. And there are some other cool people that have done some cool things. I was reading a story about a guy named Matthew Fleming in Tacoma, Washington. Dude was bombed, bombed, bombed. When the pandemic lockdown started, he lost his job. He was discouraged to you as depressed. He was sitting at home and he thought, what I can do is I can create a business and spread some cheer. And he started a little business called bike shout outs, where what you do is you pay him a few dollars. And as long as it’s within a bike ride distance of where he was at, he would literally ride his bike by and shout anything. I saw videos of this guy. He would ride past a house and scream. I love you, mom. There were jokes. There’s all sorts of funny stuff. You’d pay him just to say anything. And it just, it reminds me of how amazing people are and how resilient they are. That even just something as silly as doing bike shout outs, like that’s getting off your butt.

Tim Jordan: It means we’re not sitting on the couch, wallowing in our sorrows because our business or our livelihood has come to a pause. I won’t say to a complete halt, but to a pause. Here’s my point. My great grandma, not my great grandma, but my grandma who is great. My dear old grandma, she always used to say all crisis come to an end. Right? All crisis. They always come to an end. And when I look back at 2020 and kind of the dumpster fire, that it wasn’t a lot of ways. It’s easy for it to seem like everything was bad news, right? Because that’s what we’re inundated with is the negatives, the negatives, the negatives. But when you look underneath the surface and you look at what people are doing in response to the political unrest, what people are doing in response to businesses needing to make true swift transitions, or when you think about the responses that people had to helping others and helping those in need, I see that people are awesome.

Tim Jordan: And I can honestly say that entrepreneurs are absolutely on the top of that list. Entrepreneurs, we’re not just about making money. I heard someone say that entrepreneurship isn’t about creating more income. It’s about creating more opportunities. I think that this year has been an extreme example, like, like very clear to me why entrepreneurship is so important, the big businesses, the big box stores, you know, they’re transitioning slower than e-commerce sellers, but the awesome people, the awesome entrepreneurs, they awesome hustlers and movers and shakers of the world. At least that I know are the ones that not only just took advantage of different opportunities this year, but really made big changes for those around them, right? It’s not just about money, but it’s about creating opportunity, helping those around us and overcoming adversity, which we’ve all had to do at some point this year. And I’ve just been amazed at how fast people are able to do that. Again, thinking about wrapping up 2020, we know that this too shall pass. That I’ll quote this too shall pass and that we’re going to get through this. And I’m a hundred percent encouraged that I’m in the middle of an entrepreneurial world, that I get to work with entrepreneurs and amazing people every day, because they are the ones that are going to get us out of this, the rough year, the fastest. But they’re also the ones that have allowed me to have an incredible year personally. And this entire ecosystem of e-commerce has had an incredible year as well because of those people, those movers and shakers.

Tim Jordan: Another thing that I think about, kind of a second point that I want to share is that life is not always easy when it comes to business. The note that I made for myself was mixing mortar sucks. All right. And I’ll tell you what that is. One of my first businesses was a masonry company, a construction company. We did really high end outdoor kitchens and fireplaces and stuff like that. And I loved laying the rocks, right? I loved, and I’m creating an outdoor fireplace and arranging these stones just dry and like, knowing that this is permanent, right. But to get those stones light, I first had to go to wheelbarrow. It makes mortar, sand and Portland cement, and this wheel barrow. And it sucked. It was the worst. You never know quite how much water to put in. If it’s not enough water, then you’re just shoveling dust, which sucks. And that’s a pain. If you put on too much water, then crap. Now I got to go put in more cement and sand and it’s just backbreaking work. Because you’re literally standing. I never had one of those big mixers. I had a wheelbarrow and I had a hoe and I would just mix mix and manages. It just wrecked your back. But if I didn’t go through that effort of mixing that mortar and getting dust in my face and blowing concrete boogers for the next week, from all that stuff that got sucked up my nose. Like, if I didn’t do the hard work, then I couldn’t take that wheelbarrow for a mortar over and start laying the stones and create something beautiful. Right? Mixing mortar sucks, but it’s massively important if we don’t do it, we’re not going to get to the good stuff. We’re not going to be able to create something wonderful. And when I think about this year, and I think about my business, I think about the business of those around me. One thing that I have, like one thing that I’ve started following this year is that we need to start thinking long term, right? We get so frustrated mixing that mortar. We get so frustrated having to do the hard work and those in our business life are the little hiccups, they’re little mistakes, they’re little issues, right? They’re the things that like resonate, and resonate in our minds is one of the biggest problems, but we have to get through those. Right? So as an example, in my coaching program, um, I tell people, in fact, last hours on coach call, we were talking about this. If your first product you break even, that’s great.

Tim Jordan: And that first product, like over the first six months, you just break even, you don’t even make any money. You’ve mixed. A lot of mortar. You’ve been frustrated. You’ve had listings de-indexed on Amazon. You’ve had all this crazy stuff happening, but if you’re not putting time and mixing that mortar, you can’t build something better. But we like to think short term a lot of times, we like to think of the little struggles, a little headaches, a little mistakes that we make. And we’re not thinking about this beautiful stone wall that we’re building, right? This beautiful structure later. I tell people like mixing that mortar is not fun. It’s not sexy. It’s not glamorous. Sometimes we end up dirty and sometimes, we don’t get to go lay that stone. It dries before we make it right. All these reasons I’m maybe I’m stretching the analogy too thin, but we have to be doing something. We have to be moving along. When I think about some of my biggest mistakes in business, or maybe even some of my business mistakes in life, my personal life, like my biggest screw ups. What I realize now was that those biggest mistakes whether they’re my fault, whether it’s bad luck, whether it’s I had this great product I was selling and someone else just completely tanked it, or maybe even a mistake that I made, I made a boneheaded decision. I made a, you know, I hurt somebody. I hurt myself like those screw ups, those mistakes, those bad misfortunes, all that they were was my mixing mortar. They were just preparing me for better things. Right.

Speaker 1: When I look at sometimes, even the most frustrating elements, especially the first half of this year now I’m kind of thankful for them. I was just mixing mortar. I was preparing, I was going through the dirty hard work to be ready for something better. When something fell apart, something didn’t work out a product that I wanted to launch didn’t work. A business relationship I had fell through a personal relationship. I had disappointed me. I always think about those in kind of hindsight. And I can see a clear path of where that helped me somehow, whether it helped me gain wisdom, helped me gain experience. It just cut something from my life that was dragging me down, gave me opportunity to go to something that was going to lift me up. Right. I think about this all the time in the e-commerce business, we’re all hustlers, right? But sometimes we get so dead set on. I have to sell a product and sometimes our chosen vertical. It may just show us another one that’s even better. Right? An example of that, I’m going to talk about my buddy, Carl Jacoby, down South prep. He has a prep and fulfillment center for e-commerce sellers, specifically Amazon businesses. And Carl started off selling online, right? That wasn’t his calling, his chosen verticals. He’s going to sell online. I know he still sells a little bit, but when, especially when COVID hit and all of these FBA, fulfillment centers for Amazon started slowing down on their receiving and they’re shipping out. And the logistics system was really, really getting kind of stressed.

Tim Jordan: People were looking for 3PLs, people looking for fulfillment centers. People were looking for options. And guys like Carl, who probably a year or two ago, I don’t know this and to speculate, but a year or two ago, defined themselves as an e-commerce seller. Now we’re defining themselves as someone that supports e-commerce sellers and that’s his new vertical like that’s where he’s going to do exceptionally well. It’s where he’s going to make his money. That’s where he’s going to impact his family and himself for the better, because that business. But my point is like he had to go through those tough times. He had to go through the struggles of, Hey, I can’t get maybe I can’t get enough business or do I need to upgrade to a warehouse? And then the time came– or a bigger warehouse, then the time came where he upgraded and he moved along. Right. I’m speculating a little bit, Carl. I didn’t tell you, I was going to talk about you, but you’re just like an example of people that are in my life that I see, basically on a day-to-day basis that we’re able to transition and move. So here’s my point, when we think about the tough times this year, what I want you to do is think about them as investments, right? You’re doing the dirty work. You’re mixing that mortar. You’re building foundation. You’re putting in the work for something better, whether that’s better experience, better wisdom, better business opportunities. You’re being pushed out of a bad situation, maybe forced fleets you don’t like. It’s all worth it. When you think about, or when I think about like past guests on this podcast this year, the first one I think of is Marcus Whitney. Marcus Whitney was, I mean, incredible guy to interview and you guys can go back several episodes and listen to that. You can search at Marcus, Whitney but, I mean, this guy was living downtown Atlanta. He was in a night by night hotel. He was serving tables. He wasn’t getting by. He had kid on a way. He had people he was trying to support and life was tough, man. Life is tough, but dude never quit. Dude never got into any shady business. He just kept hustling, kept educating himself. He was mixing mortar every night. I know when he walked into that $30, $20 a night hotel, that was probably not in the best part of town. There was all sorts of shady folks around and he kept telling myself, I’m going to keep pushing. I’m going to keep working. He was mixing that mortar. And what that allowed him to do is gain the experience and the wisdom to push through any adversity.

Tim Jordan: And now the dude owns a professional soccer team. The guy runs one of the biggest VC firms and most successful firms for medical technology, like who would have thought. Right? So when I think about this world of negativity around us, and here’s kind of the final point, like when we think about all the negative stuff that’s going on in the world, and we start thinking about the negative stuff that’s going on with us, the product launch didn’t work. This relationship fell apart. I can’t figure this out. I was talking to my buddy Norm Farrar yesterday and he’s like, Tim, I’m so tired of being in my desk chair. He just wants to get out and socialize. We all need that right now, but this too shall pass. This is all a short-term crisis. And we start thinking long term and we realize the world isn’t falling apart. The sky isn’t falling. We need to take a deep breath. We need to breathe. We need to keep moving. And we need to realize that this year, if it’s been tough for you, which for a lot of us, it has a lot of us have been blessed. A lot of it’s been a tough year. Just realize that all you were doing was mixing that mortar, which is now going to let you start stacking those beautiful stones and create something permanent. You’ve been investing in yourself. You’ve gone through the struggles. And as long as you keep pressing forward, you don’t give up. You don’t get discouraged. You don’t stop moving your feet. You’re going to be able to take those hard times from this year, especially from this year and utilize them to continue improving, making something better, lighter.

Tim Jordan: The third point that I want to make today and kind of my final point is not contradictory to the other things. I’m talking about moving forward, I’m talking about keep fighting the good fight and get over the hard times and all that. So I’m not contradicting that. But in addition to that, what I want to say is that we need to make sure that we’re focusing on what’s important. Okay. What we’re focusing on needs to be the important things in life. I’ve had kind of a recent revelation and it was really through interviewing people on this podcast. We think about success. We think granular, we think success is selling a product or creating an agency or whatever it is. I don’t believe that anymore. I don’t believe that success for us is becoming a seven figure Amazon or Shopify seller, or creating this great digital marketing agency. Those may be what lead to success, but success is actually creating freedom, creating time for yourself, creating a financial stability, creating freedom for others, creating jobs for others, creating opportunities for others, right?

Tim Jordan: Success is not the vehicle that gets you to the end. Success is the end. The vehicle can change. Right? A lot of times, especially me, like I get this crazy tunnel vision. I like it. So focused on one project or I get so focused on one product, or get so focused on one business vertical that I forget that what I’m working on for success, isn’t making that vehicle successful. I just need to get to the other end. Right. And by being so focused on this tunnel, I forget that like success is time. Success for me is creating more time when maybe I’m missing that time right now. Maybe I have the flexibility right now to spend time with my kids. And I’m so focused. I’m not going to get this product launch so I can retire in four years and then have time with my kids. But I’m freaking, like, I could still have time with my kids right now. Right? We get so singularly focused that we lose focus. Does that make sense? I’ll give you an example. This is one that I’ve never talked about, but it’s real to me. I do trips to China. I’ve been going to China for like five or six years now and I’ve gotten pretty good at, I know the methods. I know the culture really well, all that good stuff. And before I started doing large-scale trips, I take sometimes 40, 50 people at a time. I would go to China and I would have just clients, occasionally come with me, Hey, tag along, you pay your way and all, kind of let you shadow me. And about a year and a half ago maybe. Maybe two years now, I had a client that was going to China. And I had a trip. I had a meeting set up and the meetings that I had set up were very important to my business. I got to get to these meetings and get these purchases done and get these prototypes figured out because that’s success. Right. And I felt responsible to this client because while this client came with me, my plan was to help facilitate her business. Right. That was going to be another vertical of my success was helping this client. And about three days before going to China, I’m still at this time working as a firefighter, I’m just sleeping at the fire station. I wake up one morning at like four 30 and I’ve got like 20 missed calls from an aunt out in Denver. What the crap she’s texting me and she’s scared and she’s got voicemail, she’s crying.

Tim Jordan: Something’s wrong with my mom. So I call her and I’m like, Amarita, what’s up? Like, what’s going on? She’s like, I don’t know what to do. She’s like, we think your mom’s had a stroke. And my mom is she’s divorced, lives by herself in Denver. And so, what are you talking about? She says, well, thinks she’s had a stroke. Oh my gosh, is she conscious? No, she’s not conscious. She’s on a breathing tube. I don’t know what to do. So I immediately bought a plane ticket for like two hours later. I went and told my captain, I got to go. I got a plane flew out to Denver. Now I spent 10 years as an EMT. I am fairly confident in at least triaging medical situations. Right. So, I get to the hospital in Denver and I walk in and my mom’s in ICU and she’s got a breathing tube in her throat. And it turns out she’s had a very massive stroke. Right. Very massive. And I remember the neurosurgeon walking in and pulling up a scan of her brain. And you could see the discoloration where this stroke had occurred. It was actually a full stroke, like blood loss stopped. And there was necrotic tissue in there. And it was like half of her brain. And like I realized, this is serious. She’s not coming back from this. And, of course, I was holding it together because my other siblings were flying in and I’m like the guy that has to hold it together. And I remember I’ll never forget seeing that image and knowing like this is not recoverable. And seeing her there in that bed and the reason she was in the hospital to begin with that, she had just had a surgery on her abdomen the day before. Right. So she had, long story short. She had a little abdominal surgery, not a big deal that she had been cut open. And while she was in the hospital, she had a stroke. And I remember walking up to her and we didn’t know if could hear us or anything. And she had her hands bound, like in these Velcro straps, I said, what are these for? They said, well, she keeps trying to pull the tube out of her throat. And her breathing tube, we can’t do that, all this. And she was fighting him and she didn’t have any eye movement or anything, but she was fighting these straps. And I can just tell from body language, she was in pain. And I said, do you have pain medicines? We can’t give her pain medicine. She’s had a stroke altered level of consciousness.

Tim Jordan: And I said, you can’t give her pain meds? And like, we can’t give her pain meds. And I’m like, Oh my gosh, like, she can feel pain. She can’t talk to her. She can’t clean up. She can feel pain. And I wonder her left arm. And I removed the Velcro strap. And instead of her hand going up to pull the breathing tube out, it immediately went and found me and it grabbed me and it grabbed my chest and worked. She felt around and grabbed like behind my waist. I’m standing there beside her in the bed. And she just pulled me and she would not let me go. I’m talking about iron grip. And she was still just riding in pain and I’m crying. I’m like, Oh my gosh. I can’t do anything for her. And we’re an ICU and she’s got a breathing tube in, but she’s conscious enough that she knows it’s me. I know she knows me because she physically grabbed me and now she’s not letting go. And they can’t give her big sedation because of the strokes. They’ve got her in like this weird Twilight thing with it’s awful, God awful. And I’m just trying to keep it together, but not doing a very good job. Finally, I begged the doctors. I said, you’ve got to give her pain meds. You can’t do this to her. You got to give her medicine. You got to give her medicine. They said, we can’t give her medicine. We can’t give her like an opioid or a narcotic, but we can put her in an induced coma. And what that’ll do is it’ll give us several days for her stomach start healing up. We can ease her off. We can start doing some different therapies. See if some of the blood we can regain some of the blood flow to those places in her brain, yada, yada. And I made the decision. I’m like, do it. Like, I don’t care. You’ve got to get her out of pain. We can’t do this. And I said, all right. So, it was going to be like two hours before they could do that. They had to do a bunch of checks, get blood pressure stabilized, all that stuff. And I stood there with her, with her arm around me for two hours. She would not let me go. And like the whole time, I’m just in agony. This poor woman is laying here in pain. She can feel it. She knows I’m here, but she can’t speak to it. She’s had a massive stroke.

Tim Jordan: She can’t communicate. She can’t do anything. She’s just riding in pain. Finally, they gave her a sedative. She instantly relaxed, induced this very light coma. I don’t even know what it was, but they were actually able to take the breathing tube out of her. She’s just lying there and I had this trip to China coming up and I remember my two sisters flew up from Tennessee and they’re meeting with me and I just went to a room and just lost it. I had to go find a room by myself and just cry for a while. Come back, got my head in the game. I’ll be the leader. I’ll be in charge of this. I’ve got a lot of responsibilities. I have a responsibility to my mom. I’ve got responsibility of family. I’ve got a responsibility to my business. I’ve got responsibility to this product, I’ve got a launch, got responsibility to this client that wants to come to China with me, I’ve got a responsibility to all these things, right. And I was laying them all on like an equal footing. And I started using logic. I started rationalizing things. And one of the things that my sister said, she says, you got to go to China. I said, yeah, I got to go to China. She said, well, you’re going to lose your plane ticket. You’re not going to get this deal done. You’ve got a client. That’s going to be upset because you’re supposed to guide her on China. And I said, you’re right. And mom’s going to stay in this coma for two weeks. There’s nothing I can do here anyways. There’s nothing I can do. Like, I’m just going to be dead way. And I’m just going to get in people’s way. And I started justifying what I later did, which was left. And I left and I went to China and I remember thinking I was kind of relief. I’m not just sitting in a hospital. There’s nothing I can do there. And as I kept justifying it, justifying it. About six days into my China trip with jet lag, I wake up and it’s like four in the morning and I’ve probably got 40 or 50 missed calls on my cell phone. And it’s my wife just calling, calling, calling a texting. Please answer, please answer. Please answer. Please answer. She didn’t know what hotel I was at. Because I was moving hotels. She couldn’t call hotel. And I called her. I said, what’s going on? She said, I’m driving to Nashville to meet your sister. We’re getting, we’ve got plane tickets. We’re flying to Denver.

Tim Jordan: They’re bolusing your mom with fluids. All that means is when they’re bolusing, they’re basically pumping fluids in your system. Your system’s collapsing, right? Your heart stopping the pump or you can’t keep your blood pressure up. They’re literally just injecting your fluids to try to hold you a little longer. And she said, they’re bolusing your mom, hopefully until I can get out there with your sister and say goodbye. Man, you talk about lonely. I’m 7,500 miles away at 4:00 AM in a Chinese hotel by myself. And like I realized this, like she’s about to die. My mom had a pretty rough life. She had a few unfortunate events we’ll say happen. And she was just starting to come around, living her best life, as I say. And she was supposed to be flying out to meet my youngest son, grandson that she hadn’t met yet, who was a couple of months old, like just a little time later. And all this stuff was starting to come together for her. And she was dying in that bed and I’m 7,500 miles. And so, I’m calling the airlines trying to change flights, but I know it’s going to take me 40 hours to get home. It’s going to be a nightmare and I’m not going to make it. About an hour later, my younger sister who was there at the hospital, she texted me. She said, she’s gone. I remember sitting there in my bedroom and didn’t have anything else that I wanted to the gym and started working out or like I hardly ever workout, but I remember working out and it was all just logistics for me. I got to get home, got to start planning a funeral. I got to deal with the estate, all that stuff. And there’s no way I could even get on a flight till like 5:00 PM that night. So I had 12 hours to kill. Right. So I went down to breakfast and met my client there.

Tim Jordan: And she said, well, how was your mama? Well, she knew my mom was in the hospital. I said, well, my mom died. She said, geez, your mom died? I said, yeah. I said, she died a couple hours ago. And that lady, she’s the one that made me realize this point. She was like, you should have been there. And I was like, well, we didn’t know she was going to die. We didn’t know what was going to happen. We thought she’s had a coma, she’s getting out of the way. And she never said anything, but like, to this day, Hey, I realize, man, I really got my priority screwed up. And I know it’s an extreme example, but we all do this. We all justify a little more time and research. We all just find one more phone call. We all justify, Oh, I got to do this and this and this. And we’re missing out on the things. They are important because success for me. And I think for most of you, and if it’s not a should be. Success isn’t another product. Success. Isn’t more clients in your agency. Success isn’t a perfectly built funnel. Success are the things that you have more of when you do those things well. Success is more time, more freedom, more stability, more family interactions, more friendships, more deeper relationships, more helping others. For me, I was so focused on success, being a good trip to China, a good product launch, a good prototype development, good meetings in China that I was forgetting that success is being there when people need you, being there for your family, being there for your friends, creating stability, creating freedom, all of those things. And I got those misaligned. I got those mismatched. And to this day, that’s a lesson I’ll never forget.

Tim Jordan: I’m not perfect at it. I screw up all the time. My poor kids have to deal with me in a lot of zoom meetings at nine o’clock at night when I should be having tuck them in or even 7:00 AM on Saturday when I should be on the couch, just watching cartoons with them. But I will never forget missing, not just missing my mom’s death, but not being there for my family and not being there with her arm around me for one more hour, because I was so focused on this next product to this next trip, or this next meeting or this next launch, right. We can get wrapped. So wrapped up in what we need to do that we overlook and forget what we should do when I was a firefighter. I had these crazy relationships to these guys, because you spend 24 hours a day in these fire stations. You either love them or you hate them. Or you do both at the same time. But you get like in these deep– you eat all your meals with these guys. Like it’s a tight knit and you start to like, see people’s personalities come out. And there was one guy that man, me and him just bumped heads like crazy. Gosh, it was awful. Mike, every day I walked in, saw him, I would dread it. He was a captain on neighboring truck at one station for four or five years in May. And me and this guy we’d have knocked on drag outs. And one day I was super frustrated and I was just like, ready to blow. I was so angry at this guy just saying something boneheaded. And it was all, we call it badge something, I’m a captain, look at my badge, go it just being a turd.

Tim Jordan: And his driver, a guy named Steve who I really respect. Steve sat me down. Steve said, Tim, why are you worried about this? Don’t worry about what Mike has to say. He said, we’re firefighters. I said, yeah. He said, Mike is a firefighter. Said, you just said the same thing. He said, no. He said, we are a firefighter. Mike defines himself as a firefighter. I started thinking about that. He said, Tim, we do all sorts of stuff. We collect old cars. We love watching football. We love go fishing occasionally. We do this and this and this. And firefighting for us is just a facility. It’s our job. And maybe something we love, but it’s still a job. It doesn’t define us wholly. Said, but Mike, it defines him wholly, like everything in life revolves around his success or failure firefighter and gosh, that is so much of what we do as entrepreneurs.

Tim Jordan: We define our personal success by our business success. And what we have to remember is that we’re not a firefighter. We’re just a firefighter. We’re not an entrepreneur. We’re just an entrepreneur. Right? Meaning going back to this whole focus, like don’t get caught up in everything having to be perfect. Because we forget to pay attention to the other things like our business, our entrepreneurship, our products, our agency, whatever it is, can’t be a hundred percent of our focus. We are not defined by our business success. We’re defined by much more than that. And when we get so caught up in this small piece and we don’t think about the big piece, we don’t take care of ourselves. We don’t take care of our friends. We don’t take care of our family. Right. And we end up being worse at all of it because when we’re not doing those things, we’re not going to be as good as our business. Right. So, those are the three points that I wanted to make to. I hope that this hasn’t been too sappy. I hope it hasn’t been too deep and weird. And, but I really feel this, like the strong desire to share this with you. When I think about everything that’s gone on over the past year and not just cause it’s still a month before the year ends, but not just what’s going on through the year, but the things that I’m keeping top of mind as I finish out Q4 and it’s like going to the beginning of 2021, like don’t forget that throughout all the headlines, the bad stuff going on and the disappointments and the discouragements. And like, remember that people one are amazing. People do amazing things. People have done amazing things. People are doing amazing things.

Tim Jordan: Also remember that a lot of the sucky stuff that we’re doing in life, we’re just mixing mortar. We’re just preparing for the fun stuff we’re preparing for building something great. We’re investing in ourselves, the mistakes, the losses, the money that we’ve lost, the discouragement, like all that is, is mixing mortar. We’re just preparing something great. You don’t have to love it, but you should be appreciative of it and respect it because if we don’t go through those hard phases, we’re never going to be able to capitalize on the great phases. And then also the third point was focused on what’s important. Don’t get so wrapped up in your business. Don’t get so wrapped up in this product that we forget that life is not defined by us as entrepreneurs. We’re just entrepreneurs. That’s part of what we are. And whether you have an extreme case or not, you don’t want to be the person sitting in China on some stupid products. It’s not even selling anymore. Right. And I’m not there for my family. When something crazy happens and something I’ll regret the rest of my life. So keep focused again. I hope this is valuable. I appreciate you guys listening to me. I know that one of the huge values to this podcast are the guests that we bring on. And I appreciate you guys letting me have an opportunity to share some of my own thoughts. I feel like I get exposed to a lot of different thoughts and ideas and content and experience and all that stuff. And sometimes I just want to wrap it all up and put it kind of– put a bow on it and leading into the Christmas theme. But no, like just recap some of that and consolidate and organize some of my thoughts that I have based on all this stuff. So, I hope you guys continue to listen as podcast. I hope you guys have a killer Q4. Well, we’re more than halfway through Q4, but killer December if you’re an e-commerce seller. And just keep on keeping on, remember that all crisis come to an end, this crazy year of good and bad is almost over. In 2021, I think will also be an incredible year. Thank you guys. We’ll see you on the next episode.

The post A Look Back at a Challenging 2020 – Soaring E-Commerce and Important Life Lessons – 223 appeared first on AM/PM Podcast.

A “Ditch Digging” Multi-Millionaire Talks About Serving Others (and Accidentally Making Lots of Money) – 222

Generally, on the AM/PM Podcast, we’re talking to e-commerce sellers. Not this time. In this episode we’re speaking with a guy who left high school to go into the paving business. Now, he’s at the helm of one of the largest paving companies in the United States. 

Today on the AM/PM Podcast, Tim Jordan speaks with Gary Rabine about how he started a “below average” paving company and turned it into a company that has set the standard for technological innovation. 

Gary says that one of the keys to his success was innovating in a business that, “doesn’t innovate.” His ability to find ways to differentiate his final product led to a rapidly growing business. He likes to refer to himself as a “hillbilly” and a “ditch digger.” Still, listen for a few minutes and I think you’ll hear a very sophisticated message about why everyone, entrepreneurs included, should focus on service and mentorship. 

Then, the way Gary tells it, the millions that follow are almost beside the point.  

 In episode 222 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim and Gary discuss:

• 03:20 – Knocking on Doors and Paving Driveways
• 04:55 – Innovating in an Industry that Doesn’t Innovate
• 08:50 – The Big Three – Serve, Differentiate, and Mentor
• 09:45 – Who’s the Best in the World?   
• 13:50 – How Did Gary Pace His Growth?
• 14:20 – A Union Battle Helps Push Gary Towards Entrepreneurship 
• 19:25 – Fail Fast and Learn 
• 21:45 – Honoring His Wife’s Memory Through Mentorship   
• 26:20 – Accidental Billionaires Serving Others (and Making Money)  
• 29:15 – How to Replace Yourself 
• 33:50 – What’s the Best Advice that Gary Has Received?
• 35:50 – Using Technology to Differentiate  
• 39:40 – Gary’s Business Advice for 2021 
• 40:35 – How to Contact Gary  

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Transcript

Tim Jordan: Generally on the AM/PM Podcasts, we talk to people that are digital marketers or e-commerce sellers. Today’s guest is not. He actually graduated high school, started a construction business, and now owns one of the largest paving companies in the US. In addition to dozens of other business, really, really cool story. He’s got some pretty strong convictions about the way he feels about things and some of his passions in life and how he connects the “failures” in life to his now his successes in life. Really, really cool stuff. It’s going to be a great episode. Stay tuned, listen to it. And again, we’ll see you in just a second.

Tim Jordan: Hi. I’m Tim Jordan and in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous and the entrepreneurial veterans, we all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.

Tim Jordan: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the AM/PM Podcast. We’ve got another excellent guest here today that has a little bit of business experience, and he’s going to share that with us. So today we have Gary Rabine, which is pronounced a little different than it looks. I had to practice that for a second. So Gary Rabine, who is actually a master in paving in construction essentially, and he’s got a few other things under his belt, but it’s a little interesting to have somebody that comes from a different industry than what we are typically focused on the listeners here with the digital marketing and e-commerce and things like that. And as we go through the episode, you’ll understand why I think this content is so relevant and so appropriate. And I’m super glad to have you here, Gary. Welcome.

Gary Rabine: Okay. Thank you, Tim. It’s great. Being here. Appreciate the fact that you think I’m worthy to interview, man.

Tim Jordan: There you go. As we get through your resume a little bit, it’ll be obvious to you listeners that there’s some stuff here that we need to unpack and we need to dive into because it’s going to be pretty valuable. So let’s start off Gary, with like your professional career. The short version was you left high school and you didn’t have much of a formal education and you had to figure out something and you got into paving, right?

Gary Rabine: Yeah. I worked for somebody through high school doing landscaping and paving driveways and before graduated high school, I kind of– a lot of my friends are going to college and have great plans. I was a captain of my football team. I’ve kept in my wrestling team. And a lot of these guys are my teams were all– many of them are going to college. Most of them actually, and that was 1981. And they kind of laughed at me because I said, I think I’m going to either start a landscaping business or a paving business. And they kind of laughed at me in one of mindset. So, you’re going to be a ditch digger. To be honest, they kind of laughed at me, said it really loud amongst a bunch of kids in study hall embarrassed  me for about five seconds. And then, I’ll never forget that five seconds I felt. Then from there on, in my mind, I said, that’s all right, someday, you guys might want to work for me. And either way. So, I was fortunate enough that I’d like the paving industry and I was able to start into the paving industry soon after high school.

Tim Jordan: And then? I feel like there’s so much more that you can get on.

Gary Rabine: Well, I started paving driveways and knocking on doors. The paved driveways had very, very lousy equipment, really, really antiquated, junky stuff that the only stuff I could afford to buy or use from other people. And, my quality was probably, maybe not really bad, but just bad probably, and not mediocre, we weren’t mediocre, but then, I was passionate enough and caring enough that I tried to solve problems when they happen. I tried to fix driveways that looked really bad, or customers that noticed the badness, right. And, uh, and eventually, I got to be better and better at it. And strive to be like a couple of the companies in the marketplace that were the best in the market, in the County, I was paving driveways in and I had some goals, right. I had a goal to be better than now. And it took about 10 years before I could be kind of their standard with better, better equipment, better technology and high quality. And I got there in about 10 years, got it from zero to a couple of million dollars in revenues in 10 years. The next 10 years went from $2 million to about $6 million. And so we tripled in size and in the next 10 years, so 20 years to get to 6 million revenues, which is probably similar to maybe today’s industry, the same industry, maybe be 12 or 15 million in revenues. And then we have this hockey stick type of thing. I started figuring out some things that really differentiated us. So, I talked about innovation and differentiation a lot. When I talk to young people, I mentor people in business a lot and young CEOs and startups. And I figured out how to innovate in an industry that wasn’t commonly innovative with some really cool stuff and that cool stuff got me to in front of customers. I wouldn’t have done business with otherwise. So let’s say, 15 to 20 years in really discovered some neat stuff and how to pave concrete super efficiently, as efficient as asphalt, how to really use more innovative engineering so that I could figure out how my customers could have concrete and asphalt pavements that would last longer with less costs to deliver. And, really figured out our best customer, where the big maintenance companies that own a lot of real estate people that on millions and millions of square feet of real estate that needed somebody to trust that can maintain it. So year 15, probably, probably 1996, 97, really got into paving for some big, big commercial property owners. That was really good. And we were also about the same time, figured out the new construction in our space, not the most rewarding in the world. You think of developers and contractors are kind of abusive sometimes. So even if they’re your friends, we want you to do it for the cheapest price. They want you to wait a little longer to get paid. And I found much better customer relationships with those people that own a lot of properties that needed me as kind of an expert right at their side, as they bought properties, sold properties, maintain them. And they always seem to pay me when I was done. It was kind of crazy, man, but I would do a job and they would actually want to pay me. I was like, Whoa, where do I find more customers like this? And so sure enough, that’s what I did. this is kind of the 80 20 rule. I figured that read the book about 80 20 back in the nineties and said, man, I got to start firing some customers. I got to start duplicating my top customers and my top customers where those people, those facilities owners that needed great relationships. And that would pay you when you’re done, man. So for sure, I really discovered how to dive into that space. I started to speak at their conferences. I started to– I started my own little Rabine university. So here’s a hillbilly kid that I didn’t go to school, never going to go to school. So I might as well somehow create my own university. And we did that. So we teach people about all the different types of pavements, longevity of pavements, life cycle cost of pavements. And that’s been a lot of fun. We have, like, we’ve got the most investment invested in a kind of a learning center for pavements and now roofs and many other things. Cause we’ve dived into many other businesses and the facility space, my passion, my expertise is still in concrete paving and asphalt paving. But, so we went from that, when I think about the hockey stick approach, the hockey stick thing that happens with great innovation, great, great service to customers and great mentoring and duplication of good things, people and processes. I figured it all out at all. It took a while, man, I’m a hillbilly.

Gary Rabine: So it took me a while to figure all this stuff out. But, years 15 to 20, I started figuring stuff out and sure enough, by year 30 in business, we were one of the biggest, if not the biggest in our space in the country. So we went from a local driveway company to a local, a regional parking lot company to a Midwestern parking lot company, parking lot paving company to a national paving company. And so, we paid for some of the biggest paid parking lots for some of the biggest owners of distribution centers, industrial property and commercial property today in the world. And it all happened because we figured out, I would say three things and, I do a podcast, also, Tim into my podcast. I kind of I put together what are these one percenters, these people that discover how to be the best of the best in their industry, what do they do differently? And gosh, it’s a lot of the same stuff over and over again. There’s some different things that I think people look at as their own laws of success. But the three things I hold on to that I know have been my product by far, our biggest success is this a, it’s a serve and level that people rave about, right. To serve your customers and create a customer experience that your customers just love. And remember, the other thing we think about is this differentiation, right? We have a slogan discover the difference because we want our customers to understand what makes us different when they do business we want to educate them at first, and then we want to make sure they feel it. And then we talk about it after hopefully, or they talking about it after. So differentiation is a big deal for us. We were every year trying to figure out how do we differentiate each company we have beyond the competition to be world-class. And so that innovation serve, serving and innovation are big. And then last thing is mentorship. So I’ve been one that I look out into my industry and say, who’s the best in the world. I try to seek them out and try to discover what they do different to be the best in the world. And, if we’re at first, it was, I think I mentioned in my local community, I was saying, how can I be as good as these couple residential paving companies? And I figured that out, they worked out pretty well, took me a while. Right then I said, okay, who’s the best in commercial paving in the Chicago land market. And I figured that out and I got to be friends with that person I thought was the best. And that worked out pretty well. 

Gary Rabine: So, then I said, okay, who’s the best in the country? And that worked out well, I got to be friends and started to kind of a network and a forum between the best commercial paving companies that I seek out. Some of them didn’t want to participate in it, but those that did, and we learned a lot and eventually it took me a long time. And I’ll tell you today, I would say to anybody, think like I thought in your probably 20, 38, 39 years in business now, but think about like I thought in year 25, probably not. Okay, this is great, man. Who’s the best in my community. Who’s the best in the market? Who is the best in the country? Well, who the hell is the best in the world? Right? I mean, if we look at every one of our business today, whether it’s a brand new business, we start up or it’s one of those older businesses, we constantly say who’s doing it the best in the world. And if everybody could do that. And I think almost everybody has access to do that, man. It’s amazing how fast you can go from A to Z. Right? So my thing and my businesses today, everyone, every business, we start including the– when we started here six months ago when we started a year and a half ago, in one’s a doors and docs company, one is HPAC maintenance company. Those leaders, my partners, I’m very confident, want to be the best in the world. They want to kick ass. They don’t want to be average and want to be the Gary Rabine that was just pretty bad and strive to be okay. They want us, they want to hit the ground running and they want to strive to be the best in the world. Well, it takes investment, it takes hard work. But if that’s your goal and you have competitive people leading that you’ll get there.

Tim Jordan: All right. So let me unpack a few things. Cause you covered a lot and some of these things are pretty valuable, I think.

Gary Rabine: Well, Hey, I stopped after the first two sentences, then you said, that wasn’t enough.

Tim Jordan: That’s it. So, one thing that’s interesting as you go through your resume here, you’ve done a lot. You didn’t put in these words, but you currently own the largest privately owned commercial painting company in the US right? That’s a–

Gary Rabine: So I have a hard time saying that because I don’t really know for sure, but we know that there’s about 40,000 people that do what we do that maintain and paid parking lots and concrete and asphalt, mostly just asphalt, some concrete, we do both, but we’re confident we’re in the top three or four in the country. And the ones that I know of that are our size are now owned by private equities and stuff. So, we think we are either way we’re in the top.

Tim Jordan: Let’s just assume you are. Because that sounds better. Right. And then you’ve launched some other businesses, you’ve gone through your ups and downs, but ultimately I would say that it’s pretty impressive what you’ve done, but the interesting point is this example use of a hockey stick. And for those of you that don’t understand what that is. If we look at like the line of growth, it’s pretty horizontal for a very long period of time, you know, you were saying 15 or 20 years, or it’s like, you couldn’t break free, like the real big growth that happened. And then all of a sudden, whether that the tides turn, you figured something out, the stars aligned for whatever reason it takes off, which is interesting because in the world that we’re at people are so impatient and business is tough because we put so much pressure on ourselves and we equate our business to personal success, and that impatience really messes us up because we can assume too early that this is not going to work long-term. So you went 15 or 20 years, through that 15 or 20 years before things really started booming. Did you always feel like you were just around the corner from that big upswing or were you shocked when that started to happen?

Gary Rabine: So, I’ll tell you Tim. I didn’t know what success was going to look like. I felt pretty successful when I was a $6 million company making over a million bucks a year. Right. And I didn’t, I had goals. I had a lot of goals in business that I was going to grow and continue to grow and be good, be great at what I do. But, I had to keep on seeking out a vision of success and what that would look like as I hit different stages. But my goal was probably beyond what I thought when I was a $6 million company, 17 years in, I think it was. And then, I had a union battle. The union battle forced me to do a lot of things differently. And I lost everything I had over that time. This was only 2001 to 2004, somewhere in that range anyway. But bottom line is at the end of the union fight. I was worth it. My wife and I were at five or 6 million bucks. And at the end of the fight, we were the negative million bucks, whatever that time I learned a lot because I had to take myself out of the field and fight the fight with the unions every day. Strategizing, how’s going to get worked on strategizing how it’s going to keep customers. They were scaring away employees and great teammates they’re scaring away. So I had to be all over then fighting labor charges that were false labor charges. So I had a lot of challenging things to happen over that time, but it was a blessing in disguise because I had to take myself out of the day-to-day. So my right hand guy, two couple of guys, they had to actually run the jobs. And I had to find confidence in them, otherwise I couldn’t have done it.  I had to sell the employees, knowing that come on board on my team, because if you like getting in fights and you like the rat blowing up on the job, I am the place to be, right. So I had to sell myself better than ever to teammates working for me to customers, wanting to work for me, to vendors doing business with me. Because they scared them away as well. So for me, that was a growth time, like never before in my life. I studied the unions, I studied politics and I learned a lot about that stuff. I was never involved in that stuff in my life at that point, by the time I’m 39 to 41 or two years old at that point. Right. And so I learned a lot and through that learning, I was able to say, okay, once we got through it, now we’re going to grow like hell. And we’re going to grow– quality growth than we did. We went from 6 million to 20 million in two years and then continued to grow it over 200 million. But again, as we did that, I understood they’re named my competitors cause I’d been then dragged through the ringer. So I grew in other parts of the country where I could understand the labor law, understand where I could do it efficiently and where I should sub out. Right. So either the lessons were incredible, but I also had to take myself out of the business and what that did was it, I had to scale and I had to duplicate to scale. And, and so then I, then I really became more of a real entrepreneur, a franchise minded duplicating minded entrepreneur. And so I might still be, maybe an eight or $10 million company doing fine, making good money. Right. Better than just a lifestyle company. Because I could sell it for a decent buck, but not where I’d never be where I am today without that union. That’ll probably, and more challenges happen over the next year. So, and every time I have a challenge, it costs me whether it be a few million bucks in some cases, 15 to 17 million, I had an eight month period. So whatever it is, what are those challenges are, I always say, okay, I got my butt kicked. My teeth are knocked out. I throw some new teeth in and get up and move again. What did I learn that could be way worth the lesson. So in every case I I’ve lost, it’s a business that I have to shut down or a battle I lose and cost me money. Always. I look at what’s the lesson I learned and how do I make sure the lesson is way worth that? How do I make sure. And the union lesson for sure, paid off many times over, the last loss that I had and these two, these two companies is paying off big now and forward. Because I, I know the lessons I learned and I’m going to make sure they don’t happen again. But, again, so I guess the scaly mentality is how do you duplicate good people and good processes? I’ve gotten way better at that than I ever would have been if I didn’t have, if I didn’t go through the battles I’ve had in my, in my businesses. Right.

Tim Jordan: Yeah. And it’s interesting, you’re talking about really good times that you’re talking about 2001, 2004 really bad times, you know, you even use the expression, you’re getting your butt kicked and only two minutes later you’re talking about that was one of the biggest blessings, I guess, that you had, because that struggle forced you to change the way you did business change, the way you operated. And that’s something that, going back to the impatience, I think entrepreneurs forget, and they don’t like cherish those struggles, if it were super easy, everybody would do it. And there are so many people that barely skate by and they don’t have a huge catastrophic problem or failure or crisis. And they think that they’re doing okay. But the people that do go through those crisis get back up, lace their roots back up and keep going. Usually find that that loss was not necessarily lost. It was just an investment into future success.

Gary Rabine: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. I mean, I believe that we’re going to continue to grow businesses and have fun doing it. We’ve got businesses that people want to buy right now that are very strong and tough times. We got a couple of businesses that are kind of flat and actually not going to make money this year because of the COVID issues we have in our state, in different markets we’re in right overall we have a net positive and in a very good way in our group of companies. But, and those ones that are suffering, were learning, right. And those ones that we’re growing exponentially in a tough time where we’re saying, wow, this is nice. So how do we get some of this and these other businesses? Right? So we’re constantly growing and no matter what, my opinion in entrepreneurship, you’d be ready to fail, be ready to fail as fast as possible. And then learn, right. Learn from every instance for me, I believe that a person that was a little more intelligent than me would probably have gotten through these times faster. Maybe not even have them, but I also believe people way more intelligent than me take no risk in their life. Right. They take very little risk because they’re smarter than me. They know that the risk is a little higher than they want it. And maybe I was too stupid. Didn’t understand the risk was higher than I thought. Right. So for me, I’m very confident that being the, the kind of the hillbilly guy that always thinks I’m one of the dumbest in the room. It has been a blessing to me because I’m listening. I’m learning, it may take me a little longer than the next guy, but once it’s locked in, I got it. And it pays off in the long run. And they’re just, some of my friends are super smart, really smart people, well educated. Probably not going to get themselves in a lot of trouble financially, but probably not going to be uber successful either in the long run. Right.

Tim Jordan: Yup. Yeah. It goes back to that whole rich dad, poor dad kind of mentality. Right. I can play by the rules and take a paycheck, or I could go a little bit rogue and maybe something big happens. So you’ve got these physical businesses, right? Your businesses are based on the construction and service and things like that, which is unique to the podcast world. Because most people that come in and they are guests on a podcast and they host a podcast, which you do. You’ve got, and I want you to talk about your podcast and second kind of framing the context for that. It’s just unique. And what I found interesting was I was asking you like, Hey, why do you run your podcast? You’re not using it as a digital marketing tool. You’re not using this lead magnet. You’re not trying to sell a service to these listeners, unless they need a commercial driveway or parking lot. But what was interesting is you were saying that you feel, I don’t know, not empowered, but feel like you have a responsibility to help people in different various stages of the entrepreneurial journey using lessons that you’ve learned, but also that you can consolidate from like your podcast guests. Is that an accurate state?

Gary Rabine: Yeah, well, a hundred percent. So my excitement in life is, I lost my wife recently a couple of weeks ago and watching her go through the challenges she went through with cancer, it’s amazing. She’s the strongest person I’d ever want to know. And to be your partner in life was amazing. But bottom line is what do we realize when your wife passes at a young age and goes through this four and a half years of the fight, this battle is life is short. I kind of knew this before, but boy, it really got highlighted. Life is short and she made amazing mark on the world. I mean, she was the most giving person in the world. We had couple of foundations that –she ran our main foundation that gives back a ton to communities. And all she cared about was how could she help whoever she was around. So for me, I’ve been the guy making, building businesses, supporting our financial side of our family while she’s been the one that’s been amazing giver also. So again, when you’re in the situation, 50, whatever, two to seven years old, and I read back, you really look back at your life and say, gosh, what am I done? I’ve made money. I’ve created some business, great opportunities. That’s been a lot of fun. And entrepreneurship has been a huge part of that. I’ve been blessed to be born in this great country and blessed it. So love a great God and all these things, right. But what am I going to do in the rest of my life to make sure that I’m looked upon as possibly, she was looked upon. And I believe that that giving back in the way of mentorship is a big deal. I think about my mentors in my life, Tim and man, they, I smile. I think of my mentors because without them, boy, I probably be nothing like I am today when it comes to business savvy and things like that. My vision has gotten very clear in my life as far as where I could take businesses because I’ve been around great visionaries in business. 

Gary Rabine: My ability to find people to execute on businesses is because I’ve got great mentors. I understand execution, and better than I did. Right. And so then I look at, so how can I affect change, not going to make the world a better place. And I believe that sharing experiences, good and bad, I’m not telling people how to do things, right. That’s not mentorship, but sharing experiences that I’ve had good and bad that I can share with young people in businesses. It is awesome because I know that I’m inspired many people in my own businesses to be entrepreneurs as we grow more. But I’ve also had more experience outside my business when just people in my industry or people outside industry to call and say, Hey, Gary, would you help me out? Could you mentor me? Right. They hear me talking about mentorship all the time. So I get a lot of it and I’ve had a lot of fun. So I started a mentorship organization called true mentors where I put together friends of mine that are successful CEOs and entrepreneurs with young startup minded people that, or people in business that want to be leaders in business and spend a lot of fun. True mentors is definitely inspired. A lot of entrepreneurs and leaders. So, now personally, I said, okay, well, what can I do to it to continue on this? Right. And the chip on my shoulders this, people that don’t know me, look at me as a, when I speak at different things or whatever, I’m confident that some people look at me as there’s the rich white guy, right? Hey, he’s a white guy and he’s a privileged white guy. Right. And he’s probably got his money handed to him, whatever. 

Gary Rabine: Well, I’m confident that the people that I know and their CEOs, I know thousands of CEOs and I’m friends with hundreds, right? Because I’m blessed to be amongst a bunch of leadership organizations regionally and across the country, YPO and many others. And so I’m blessed that I get engaged. I meet all these great people. And most of these people that have built something, built something because they’re awesome people because they love to serve an industry. They love to serve it better than anybody else like I was talking about before they usually have a higher purpose than making money. It’s not about making money. It’s about creating opportunity. It’s about serving their market in a way that nobody else has differentiating in a way nobody else has. So I said, I’m going to do, I want to do podcasts. I’m so blessed to have all these different people. I know I’m gonna do a podcast. I’m going to reach out to the people that I respect the most, a hundred percent of our givers. A hundred percent of them are world-class at serving their markets. And almost all my life of my 48 or 50 podcasts right now, almost every one of our top 1% in their industry. And most of them have built it from nothing. So when you can look at those individuals, you saying, wow, that guy, that gal there, they’re not so selfish, they build that visit because they really gave a crap. They cared about people, man. They believed in God’s message of serving others more than yourself. And so, again, it’s so much fun to interview people that I’m confident or that they’re all that. And many more billionaires, there’s a lot of more tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and probably got seven or eight billionaires on my podcast. But you’d never know it. If you met any of them, you wouldn’t know the difference from the billionaires to that person. That’s worth a few million bucks. So that’s what’s fun about it. I’m confident that we’re inspiring people to think differently.

Tim Jordan: So, for the rest of the time that we have in this episode, let’s kind of consolidate some of the lessons that you like to share that you’re passionate about sharing to entrepreneurs, but also kind of leaning on the experience and the advice from your, your 50 or so other guests, right? Like I want to really drop some, some knowledge here. And the first thing I’d like for you to hit on is something we talked about for set or ordering, is this concept of like business being validifies right. Like, I don’t know if that’s the correct word to use, but business is bad and I’m seeing this so much lately between my peers and just culture and I’ve run into it personally. Before I got into hardcore business, I was a civil servant. I was a firefighter and I’ll never forget, uh, when I decided having to start these side hustles and the side jobs, they started blowing up. Then eventually I decided to leave the fire department for 10 years. Like my father-in-law man, he blasted me and why would you do this? You’re just money hungry. You’re just selfish. You’re all about just, it was awful. So I’ve seen it. I know it’s in the culture, but I’d like for you to address your thoughts on the villain-ification of business in our society.

Gary Rabine: Yeah. So our country is great because we’re a country that believes in entrepreneurship innovation and solving problems. There’s a reason why America has 25% of the world’s GDP, right? Gross national product. Cash cashflow, right. 25% we’re 5%. And I don’t even think this under 5% of the world’s population and we have 25%. So, think about that five times more cash coming in than what it would take to serve ourselves. Okay. The only reason that’s the case is because we’ve been great at building business building and innovation ideas and solutions to serve the world. Right.

Tim Jordan: Yea. So let’s talk a little bit about another thing that I know you’re passionate about, which is replacing yourself, right? This is something that is extremely difficult for entrepreneurs because we’re in the middle of our business. We are fighting the good fight, so to speak, we’re wrapped up in the day-to-day operations and you several times have been forced to replace yourself essentially. And when you’re able to replace yourself and start delegating things like that, those ended up being times in which you were able to, more quickly and rapidly scale your business, right?

Gary Rabine: Yes, absolutely. So, when I mentor people in business, I’m in very fragmented markets that I like to be in. I say that I do business in markets that are often mom and pops. They’re very often, they’re anywhere from anywhere from, let’s say a half a million to a four or $5 million businesses. I love mentoring these people because I was there at one point.  I understand today what I did differently to change that.  I say change that, I was business in those years, that really just was, it was a paycheck for myself. If all things went to, check I would, I could be hurting as far as financially, I could be hurt. I don’t have a pension. 

Gary Rabine: Right. I built, I was building a business, that’s kind of just a paycheck. Right. So a lot of friends of mine and in my industries that we serve their mom and pops that just look to pretty much, just for a paycheck and that’s not very sustainable. Anything I do today, I want, if I’m valuable somewhere, I want to be, I want to be valuable for a little while, but then I want to get the hell out of the way. And I say that because the only way I create value, like we have a business right now with unsolicited offers to buy it as a great company. I’ve got a great CEO that worked for me in my businesses. We spun this business out from the businesses and he went from zero IBIDA to four and a half million of IBIDA in five years. Right. So this business in the South economy has a lot of buyers on solicited offers, and we may take one, we may sell some of it or all of it. Okay. But the only reason that business is marketable is because that, because I don’t run the business every day. And that CEO is a young person that will stay on board to run it if they want them to. Right. And if, and guess what, if that they don’t want that CEO, the right-hand guy to that person is just as good as he is. And every market that businesses in has a leader that is accountable, very passionate and accountable in running their operations. So he’s also built a boot camp, a boot camp to train people in that industry. And it’s a very technology maintenance industry, right?

Gary Rabine: There’s a business that they put robots in the ground. They televise the condition of pipe all over the country now, and that little business as ability to grow double or triple in the next five years. So it could grow to 10, 15 million of IBIDA in the next 10, five, six years in my opinion. So the value is really big on the same, but it’s only valuable, because I’m not the guy they’re buying and my partner. Yeah. They love him. He’ll be great. He’s a great guy, but he’s got this thing built to where anybody can step in his shoes, if they’re a good person and they’re entrepreneurial, and they got some vision and some operational skills and run that business. So that business is really valuable. So why do we want to build a business that’s reliant on my value or my partner’s value. And that it’s only worth what that person’s worth then, right. So nobody’s interested in buying a business. That’s not sustainable, that doesn’t have to duplicate its talent. And if that’s what you’re building, what if you’re not building that, then you’re building a check for yourself that goes away someday with no pension and selling your used equipment at auction someday. Well, that’s not so gratifying. So why not have a hell of a lot more fun building something and scale again, and by the way, think of all the people you’re giving opportunities to when you scale a great thing over and over and over again. Right? Think about all the partnerships we love to include people and shares of our business and stock and our businesses. And it’s so much fun when you can find somebody who’s passionate about something. They go in thinking it’s a job. And that, and 15 years later, they go out knowing that it was an amazing blessing that they capitalized on, and now they’re a millionaire, right? So that’s how, a lot more fun than staying small and, and, and operating the thing with all the controls you get by the one person leader in a small business.

Tim Jordan: So we’ve talked about two things here, being able to replace yourself and scale a business and not being the bottleneck. We’ve also talked about this concept of building a real business, because so many people just build a paycheck, right. And they may not be profitable like they think they are, they’re baby, no real value in the business whatsoever. When you look back at all the advice that you’ve received from your mentors and people on your podcast and experienced you have, what would be like the one or two biggest tips that you would give people when they audit their business essentially, when they’re thinking about their business and trying to determine, Hey, is this just a hobby with a paycheck? Or is this an actual business? Like, how do we know?

Gary Rabine: Well, I think, you know by if can you step away from that business for a month with no, do nothing in that business for a month. Can you step away for a month? And it doesn’t miss a beat, right? If you can do that, get you got a business that’s in great shape. And not saying a business that, some of the businesses are 10 months, a year businesses, eight months a bit, I’m not talking about that, right. It was a business. If you can step away in the peak season and you know, that it’s going to continue to move on and, and have no problems. I mean, you have little issues that somebody else asked that has to solve instead of you. Right. But if you can do that, you know, you’ve got value. And today, okay. At one point when we looked at our businesses building profits, right? How much profit can we squeeze out of that business, whatever, however size it was. Then at one point we’d like to, okay, how we looked at a top end, top line revenues have been, grow revenues, we’re growing value, right. In the last seven, eight years, we look at exclusively one thing, and everybody should, everybody should, I would recommend, or I would in my shared experience, I would talk to any of my friends and I do today, but I tell them to think about one thing, enterprise value appreciation, enterprise value, appreciation. So every business there’s people selling and every industry, there’s brokers that represent every industry that there is. Right. 

Gary Rabine: And so if you can go out and figure out, what should the enterprise value your business would be? If you are a business that you didn’t need you in it, right. That somebody could buy you and plug and play somebody else in place, whether it’s your number two person or somebody they have, right. You can then figure out what’s the enterprise guy. Again, if you’ve got it, if you’re taken out of it, it’s not worth it. The business operate, the businesses were basically zero except selling your equipment or whatever. So, nobody’s going to be excited about that, but again, if you could ever measure enterprise value and even quarterly, and you can figure out your adjustable enterprise value appreciation. And if you can do that and understand you’re growing constantly, that’s what you got to watch. Some businesses grow in the enterprise value, and don’t even have to profit. Now. One, I’m a technology company that’s kind of like that. Right. And then most of my businesses have to grow IBIDA to have value. 

Gary Rabine: But all of our businesses, no matter if they’re old school, paving, roofing, doors, and docks, whatever it is, all of our businesses that have great technology to enhance the productivity are worth more than those that don’t have. The technology companies, even that the pipe televising company is kind of half tech, half labor, half plumbing. And that business has great value because the technology is pretty extensive there. And we’re, and my partners mastered the data that that technology produces. I’ve got one company, Tim, that my son started. My son is 33 and is a CEO of one of our companies, actually, all of our companies. Now he was a CEO of one company. They’ll be spun out of our group of companies. Just like the five televising guy did this company probably will have the most value of any of our companies ever. And it’s a company that will, we think it will be a sass product eventually. So my son said, dad, we could do this engineering for our customers. We had civil engineers traveling across the country, looking at pavements and roofs and all that. And my son came in to run that company. So you measured all the costs we had and said, we could save all this costs and be way more valuable our customers. If we use drones to do all this, to capture all this data. Now we have experts flying across the country, gathering this data with video cameras and we’re delivering PDS to our customer. We can change that. And so sure enough, within five, six months, him and I budgeted the right money to test it. And within six months at the latest we had our biggest customers in the country, trying this product out piloting along with our regular engineering and consulting. And they loved it. That company spun out after about a year of him growing it with our national company and that company now it’s called site. Site is kicking butt, growing leaps and bounds. And the valuation there will be a multiple revenues and the multiple revenues will be 10 or 15 times revenues. And this business, we’re just touching the tip of the iceberg right now. And it’s going to grow up pretty fast in the future. We just hired a good CEO that’s going to run that. But again, the difference is two things. That business number one is great value to a sale someday. If we want to sell it, the enterprise value already is pretty extensive, but it’s also valuable to us because it serves our customers in the facility space like nobody else in the world does. So we use drones, artificial intelligence, and satellite imagery to capture every bit of a million square foot distribution center that the exterior of the building. So pavements, roofs, HPAC, everything outside landscaping. And this businesses is just a lot of fun because it introduces our group of companies talk to the biggest real estate owners in the world, not because we’re great at paving, right? Because we’ve got this other product that can help them manage their dollars better and think differently than they have in the past.

Tim Jordan: So, as we wrap up, and this is going to be a long episode, there’s just so much here to unpack. I don’t want to cut too short, but closing thoughts, what I’d like for you to do is think about some encouragement, right? You’ve been through some ups and downs in business. You’ve had some really good times, really bad times. And obviously 2020 has been rough. In the e-commerce space specifically, we’ve done pretty well, but those of us that are listening, we have a lot of stuff going on. We have family members that may not be in e-commerce. We have friends that are struggling, as a whole things are dicey this year. What encouragement would you give to people going into 2021 that may have had a rough year in business and maybe learned some hard lessons that they didn’t want to have to learn right now, and so on and so forth.

Gary Rabine: Yeah. So, I mean, my experience if I’m saying, what do I think about that’s experienced share that makes it makes the most sense for anybody? I think it’s, it when it’s day to day, day to day, I look at any meeting you go into and zoom meetings we have so often now, but any meeting you’re in, going to that meeting with a mind of a ten-year-old, right, the way you thought as a 10 or 11 year old, when you’re inquisitive and you’re learning something totally different. And you really were passionate about learning it, going to the meeting as a ten-year-old, even if you might be the smartest person in the room, never think that right. And it’s easy for me because I’m never the smartest person in any room I walk into. But even if you think you are, even if you’re, well-educated, I think entrepreneurship is about constantly educating yourself passionately about whatever industry you’re serving. And I think that’s super important.

Tim Jordan: Absolutely. So, if someone wanted to start following your podcast, listen to these other business leaders that you bring in, tell us again, the name of that podcast, so people can find it.

Gary Rabine: So the podcast is Ditch Digger CEO, and I’ve got some amazing characters on this show. I got the founder of Netflix, the founder of red box, the founder of Brightstar fastest growing woman, franchise store in the world. Good friend of mine, Shelly Sun. Got Jimmy John’s. So Jimmy John sandwiches and billionaire sandwich guy. Right. So, it’s so much fun to listen to these people, as well as the people that you don’t hear, the names you haven’t heard of before. Because they’re all passionate about serving. And in my opinion, it’s not just serving in business, it’s serving outside of their business, which is as fun.

Tim Jordan: Yeah. I’m putting it on my list, Ditch Digger CEO podcast. Well, Gary, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you for voicing your opinion and giving us some of this wisdom that you’ve accrued over the years through some pretty difficult lessons. It’s really important. Thank you for the responsibility you take for the industry, for the community and when I say the industry, I mean the community of entrepreneurs, right? There’s not a lot of people that have a calling to give back. And the truth is a lot of us make the same boneheaded mistakes that someone before us may, and sharing the good experience with the bad experience will definitely help all of us grow as an entrepreneurial community together. So I appreciate you taking the time and investing the resources to help do that. That’s really something I appreciate.

Gary Rabine: Thank you, Tim, and I appreciate what you do as well. You’ve got a cool podcast and you’re doing the same stuff, but you’re educating the industry that you love and how fun is that right? You were blessed to be able to do it. So, thanks. Thanks a lot.

Tim Jordan: Thank you all for listening. All of you there’s subscribing. If you’re watching YouTube, make sure to just thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you’re listening on your favorite podcast platform, please leave us a positive review that lets the podcast platforms know that you think we’re doing something right. And it gives us a little boost. So if you found any value in this, please drop us a good review. And we’ll see you guys on the next episode.

The post A “Ditch Digging” Multi-Millionaire Talks About Serving Others (and Accidentally Making Lots of Money) – 222 appeared first on AM/PM Podcast.

Tap Into The Benefits of Amazon Live Creator

Amazon Live Creator allows you to stream videos from Amazon’s homepage. It works similarly to QVC the only difference is instead of being aired on TV, you’re live streaming on Amazon. These live videos allow the sellers to show off the products they are selling and demonstrate how it works.

In today’s digital world, flexibility and adaptability are two of the most important characteristics a seller must-have. As an Amazon seller, you need to constantly adapt and find new ways to market and promote your products. Good thing, Amazon frequently releases new features for sellers to help them gain visibility in front of hundreds of millions of shoppers around the globe.

The latest?  Amazon Live. 

This is a highly engaging promotional tool for sellers as it simply allows you to showcase your products in a unique and powerful way through Amazon live streaming.

Amazon Live Creator

Brands and influencers can get started live-streaming on Amazon using the Amazon Live Creator app. 

The Amazon Live Creator app helps sellers create, capture and manage live streams. It greatly helps in building your followers on Amazon. Growing your followers will help in increasing your viewership, as your followers are being notified in the Amazon mobile shopping app each time you go live.

Amazon Live Creator is a fun and interactive live video bringing products to life by featuring them in your product carousel. Such features as product highlighting, chat, and live promotions are available to help you engage with your audience during your streams.

How Does Amazon Live Work?

Amazon Live allows sellers to promote products by hosting live streams on Amazon itself. It not only harnesses the power of video but also enables live social interaction with shoppers who can shop the products featured in your live stream and chat with you during the broadcast. Consumers nowadays are embracing social, media-rich, and live experiences. Amazon Live provides a way to ride that wave and shoppers can simply access it anytime and anywhere using their mobile gadgets.

As a brand that sells on Amazon, there’s no additional fee to use Amazon Live, making it a great way to enrich your ad funnel and build your brand.

Why Promote Products through Amazon Live Creator?

Live streaming is very popular today, so sellers need to take advantage of this new opportunity to reach Amazon’s massive audience. 

And the good thing about the Amazon live is it’s totally free! That’s right—streaming in front of thousands of potential buyers on Amazon is completely free. An important reminder, you’ll still need to be brand registered, which may entail separate costs.

Additional benefits to using Amazon Live:

• It’s a new way to get discovered

Live-streaming gives a unique opportunity to showcase your products to hundreds or even thousands of potential customers globally. This will help boost discoverability and brand awareness. 

Live-Only promotions

Sellers can promote a special deal that only viewers can take advantage of during your live stream. One great benefit to streaming live on Amazon is that you can interact and chat with your viewers. People can ask questions about your brand and product. This gives you a great opportunity to really sell and will enable you to provide value and award discounts to the customers who joined you live and encourage repeat viewership. 

You can also urge people to follow your brand page on Amazon so they can be notified every time you go live. What a great way to promote and launch a brand new product line and get those initial sales! 

Your live stream appears on your listing

Your stream will appear on your listing detail page every time you go on live. This means that people who discovered your product in search can learn more about what that product is or how it works. As you progress, your stream will eventually be featured on Amazon’s homepage which will increase your visibility.

Go live whenever you want

Go live on Amazon at your own convenience! You don’t need to secure a schedule for you to go live on Amazon. Here’s a tip: Go live during the time of day when you tend to see the most sales. If you can predict an increase in traffic, you can hopefully drive more conversions. 

Who Can Use Amazon Live?

You can make use of Amazon Live if you fit one of these three descriptions: 

• Influencer enrolled in the Amazon Influencer Program
• Amazon seller with brand registry
• Amazon vendor who has approval for an Amazon Store

Amazon Live creators can level up by going live and showcase their value to Amazon shoppers. Amazon designates each creator according to a three-level system of Rising Star, Insider, and A-List. You begin as a Rising Star, then move up and unlock benefits as you create live streams and attract audiences. To better understand the three-level system let’s differentiate one another.

1. Rising Star. Creators begin as Rising Stars whose content is eligible to appear in the “Live Now” row, detail pages for your brand’s products, and Amazon Live site in relevant product category rows
2. Insider. Steaming for at least 90 minutes within 30 days is required before moving on to the next level which is the Insider status. If you will be able to meet this requirement then you can apply to move to this second level. If your application is approved then your content is eligible to appear at the top of the Amazon Live homepage. 
3. A-List. You can apply for the highest level if you stream for 1,000 minutes and get $5,000 in eligible sales or sell 100 units of the product in 30 days. If you’re approved you’ll get a lot of perks and benefits that include access to Amazon Live events, priority support from the Amazon Live Creator team, and not to mention appearing on the Amazon Live site top-of-page placement

How to Set Up Amazon Live Creator

Several points have been discussed but before reaping the benefits of an Amazon Live let’s go dive deeper on how we can set it up for your own advantage. Get started with Amazon Live by making sure you understand the program and how it works (i.e. read this blog). Then when you already have the knowledge and ready to get things done, download the Amazon Live Creator app. Note that the app is currently not available for Android devices. It is optimized and works well for iPhone but can also be used on an iPad. The app is free to use and there are no fees involved in live streaming. 

Log in to the app with the email and password associated with your Seller Central or Vendor Central account.

Just by using the Amazon Live app, you can do live streaming, or if you have the equipment, you can use devices such as an external camera with your broadcast software for better quality and control over your video. It’s helpful to have more than one person on your team to install the app. You can do multiple simultaneous log-ins, so that when you go live, there can be one person on camera and another monitoring and responding to messages. It’s purely a team effort.

What to Do Before Going Live

Preparation will do the trick on this and will help you keep on track. Make sure that before you go live you need to prepare what is needed and practice everything about your live stream, from what you’ll say to how you’ll run the tech. You may utilize the Practice Mode in the app to polish your routine.

Consider having a list so you won’t miss anything before battle begins. Here are some helpful tips for you:

• Check and confirm if your internet connection is reliable at the time you want to do the live-streaming.
• Make sure your devices are fully charged or at least plugged in so you won’t run out of power before your stream is over.
• Set your phone to ‘do not disturb’ so you won’t get interrupted while you’re live streaming. Don’t try to use any other apps on your device while you’re live streaming or your stream will end abruptly. Please take note that If you need to receive messages or use other apps during the stream, you’ll need to use a different device to get you going.
• Make sure you are in a clean and quiet space and that you won;t be uninterrupted. Turn off any devices that may create background noise. 

Amazon monitors all live streams and they can be cut off if they violate Amazon’s rules. Make sure you are familiar with the Amazon Live community policies before you go live.

Streaming on Amazon Live Creator

Setting up and running a live stream on Amazon follows a simple process even a beginner can do.  If you aren’t tech-savvy don’t worry because this can work with you too!

Before you do any streaming, I suggest going through your competitors’ listings and others within your niche to see if anyone else is doing live streams. Study and observed how they do their streaming. Write down some important points for you to ponder. Create a script that talks about your product before you go live. Practice without the devices on and work on your speech. Good thing, Amazon has a practice mode for you to utilize.

When all are set,  download the creator app and link your seller account.  Here’s the step by step guide to help you get through:

Step 1

Download Amazon Live Creator (iOS). This will work on an iPhone or iPad. This is currently not available on Android devices.

Step 2

Create a Live account.

Step 3

Select your brand and add a profile name.

Step 4

Select the product you are adding to your stream.

Step 5

Set up your stream

You should spend some time in practice mode to prepare your talking points and responses to any customer questions you might receive. 

When you start the live stream you can post a message in the chat to alert viewers that you are available and will do live streaming.. You can view chat messages that come in and respond to them either in the chat or verbally on video. The chat feature can make the experience more interactive and personal.

Amazon Live is free. However, you do have the option of boosting your stream’s potential viewership through Amazon advertising. 

Enter in your stream title, start time, etc. 

Step 6

Share your beautiful face and product to the world!

The more frequently and the longer you stream, creates an opportunity for your shoppers to interact with you. The Amazon recommendation is to run a single live stream for at least 30 minutes so that shoppers have time to discover it. This is what Amazon will look at when you apply to level up:

1. Total overall streaming minutes ( length of stream)
2. Frequency of streaming
3. Consistency in streaming schedule.

Make use of your time streaming with meaningful content by introducing more than one product, showcasing the product’s best asset, and replying to customer comments. Make it fun and interactive. It might feel repetitive to you to reinforce those key points, but remember that you are doing a live stream and shoppers may be coming and going during the show.

You can also easily view the Analytics right from the homepage of the Amazon Live Creator App.

The Interactive Features of Amazon Live Creator

The Amazon Live Creator app will provide you with a link to your stream which you can share in advance with your audience from other channels. Sending this link through an email message is one sure way to bring attention to a live stream.

You may encourage your customers to follow your brand so they may be notified of future live stream events. Follow is a program that allows Amazon shoppers to keep up with the influencers, brands, and topics they care about the most. They will constantly received notifications through Amazon mobile app. Keep in mind that Amazon currently offers no way for you to count or track your followers.

During a live stream, engage and encourage your shoppers to type in their questions, read out those questions and give the answers enthusiastically. You can also reply directly in the chat and customers can react by clicking the stars button.

You might want to use a live stream when you’re running special promotions for your products. Alternatively, you can run custom promotions specifically during the live stream by creating special promotion codes in Seller or Vendor Central and then sharing those discounts during the live stream.

Tips for being on camera:

• Use only high-quality video and audio when streaming. 
• Make sure your videos are properly lit, either with natural light or bright photography lighting, so viewers can clearly see you and your product. 
• Show up smartly! Speak clearly, concisely, and confidently. Practice makes perfect, so be sure to practice speaking in front of the camera!  
• Create a thumbnail that’s unique and high-quality so you can capture viewers’ attention.
• Use a bright and clear backdrop or use a background related to your product. For example, if you’re promoting a kitchen appliance, set up your stream in your kitchen. 

Boost Performance From Live Streaming

One way to drive more traffic to a live stream is through careful planning. Scheduling it in advance and promoting it on your other channels is really a big help. Also, encouraging customers to follow your brand on Amazon can come a long way.

Paid promotion of a stream can also help increase sales from the live stream. Amazon sellers (not vendors) can boost their live stream for better placements across the Amazon desktop site and mobile shopping app, including product detail pages. Boosting can last up to 48 hours. You’ll pay for this promotion on a CPM basis, using the same payment method you have set up for Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Keep in mind you can only track boost performance in the Amazon Live Creator app, not in Seller Central. 

Post-Live Stream Tips

Your videos will be available on your channel page and can appear on Amazon.com/Live after your live stream. Both the Influencers and brand owners may see them on their product detail pages. If you want to edit your recording, you can download it from Amazon.com. You can also remove it. 

To track your performance over a 28-day period and plan improved tactics or prepare to level up use the channel analytics dashboard in the app. Amazon can track total views, unmuted views, average view duration, clicks, click-through-rate (CTR), and sales.

It is highly recommended that you have to set smart and attainable goals for your live streaming. It depends on your purpose and you have to work on it.

If your purpose is to begin brand-building, growing views and view duration maybe your focus. If you need the live stream to drive directly toward sales, you’ll also need to look at clicks, CTR, and sales. 

Prepare for Updates to the Service

For you to be always updated, you may turn on notifications within the Amazon Live Creator app for you to be alerted of any developments, enhancement,  and opportunities the app may have in the future. Amazon is leaning into the top of the funnel, video advertising, and social media-style engagement, so we won’t be surprised to see plenty of new developments coming for Amazon Live. They released three new Amazon Live features in September alone.

You can start experimenting with video promotions through live streaming instead of just sticking to Sponsored Products. To get a jump on this trend, consider also using Amazon Stores, Sponsored Brands video, or Amazon DSP. 

Final Thoughts

To sum up, Amazon Live is a great way for brands to creatively showcase their products and have a meaningful engagement with their customers. Amazon Live is a good promotional tool that enable product discovery, interactivity, and engagement, share brand updates, and promote deals. 

To get the most out of the program, keep the following tips in mind to get you going:

• Practice your presentation and check that everything works before you go live so the live stream runs smoothly
• Schedule live streams in advance so you can promote the live stream on your other channels
• Interact with viewers through the social features so you can encourage them to follow your brand
• Get creative when setting, inviting guests, and showcasing your products’ features 
• Make a plan to stream on a regular schedule for 30 minutes or more so you can grab customers’ attention and rise up in the Amazon Live Creator ranks to get additional features
• Strategically pair Amazon Live events with deals and consider boosting your live streams

Helpful Amazon Live Links

Are you ready to take on the leap and get started with Amazon Live? Here are the links to download the app and quick start guides from Amazon.

• Amazon Live Creator in the App Store
• Amazon Live Creator: The Basics
• Amazon Live Creator: Best Practices

The post Tap Into The Benefits of Amazon Live Creator appeared first on AMZ Advisers.

Amazon Extended Holiday Return Policy 2020: How Sellers Should Prepare

The 2020 Amazon Extended Holiday Returns Policy allows customers to decide whether or not to return a product.

This means that, from October 1^st until January 31^st 2021, Amazon sellers have to accept returns for any products they sell.

This is applicable to products bought until the 31st of December.

In anticipation of early Christmas shopping, this policy extends the standard 30 days return deadline temporarily. It can vary depending on the product category. FBA and FBM orders need to abide by this new policy. You can check the return deadlines for each category via the Returns Help page.

Make sure to update the Returns, warranties and refunds section of your Detailed Seller Information page to let customers know of the extended Christmas return policy.

Prime Day 2020

Amazon’s annual Prime Day allows Prime members to shop tech, fashion, outdoor gear, beauty and grooming, and household essentials. 

This year, the event took place during the holiday shopping period.

Instead of the standard 30 days return policy, customers have until January 31, 2021 to return most new or unused items. This will depend on the category and reason for the return.

Amazon’s full return policy and information on return shipping fees, policies for different categories, and other common questions and concerns can be found here.

Amazon Prime’s Return Policy

While the standard return window is 30 days, most items bought between October 1 and December can be returned up until January 31, 2021.

Handpicked content for you:

How Is The FBA Sell-Through Rate Calculated? What Sellers Should Know

Amazon Prime Free Returns

Most items delivered within the US qualify for free returns.

To check if an item qualifies, check if there is “Free returns” listed next to the price of the product.

Some exceptions include items weighing 50 pounds or more, fashion products bought from The Drop, and items purchased through third-party sellers. 

Returning Items on Amazon

Go to the “Your Orders” page under your account. Choose “Return or Replace items,” select your method of return, print the label, and package the item for shipping. There is also an option for  the Label-Free, Box Free option where you bring your unwrapped item to a dropoff point with a provided QR code. 

Items Not Eligible for Return

With the exception of damaged or defective items, some items cannot be returned.

Some of these items are groceries, customized or personalized products, gift cards, downloadable software, and subscription services after they’ve been accessed.

To check if an item is non-returnable, you can visit the “Your Orders” page. 

When can I receive my refund?

It can take around 2-3 weeks total to receive your refund. This includes the time it takes to ship, receive, and process the return.

Most of the time, purchases are fully refunded within 7 days of receipt.

Read about estimated return times here.

Concerns On the Extended Holiday Return Policy 

With the return window extended to four months for the holiday season instead of the standard 30 days, some sellers are not happy.

This has become a topic of controversy with some users even creating memes to voice their discontent with the new policy.

However, the Amazon 2020 Extended Christmas Returns Policy won’t necessarily mean that there will be an increase in returns and there is no real expectation that sellers will be flooded with more returns that usual when January arrives.

Extending returns has actually made customers more confident to buy products rather than be more inclined to return them.

This might even be an encouragement for customers to buy more instead of return because of how generous Amazon’s return policies are. What this Christmas policy does is acknowledge and encourage customers to do early Christmas shopping.

Encouraging this early shopping can even help alleviate some of the workload and other pressures associated with Q4 logistics of couriers. Because of the global pandemic and the subsequent rise in online shopping activity, the operating capacity of these couriers has been at maximum for the past six months.

Utilize the Amazon Seller Return Policy

In the case of unfair, extreme losses, sellers can charge restocking fees for damaged returns either by the customer or in shipping.

To review all information on charging a restocking fee, visit here.

It is also worth noting that customers have 90 days to give feedback on an item they have purchased.

This means reviews left on a returned product beyond the 90 day window won’t show up on a merchant’s Amazon seller detail page.

Final Thoughts

Because Amazons returns and refund policies are subject to change during the holidays, the Amazon Extended Holiday Return Policy 2020 is not all that surprising.

There are, however, a few ways sellers can prepare and protect themselves against returns that may be unjust or unfair:

• Sellers should educate themselves on the Amazon Seller Return Policy so that they know their rights and the risks involved.
• Assuming they meet the criteria, sellers can charge a restocking fee in order to keep customers accountable.
• If you’re currently FBM, be sure you handle return requests like a champ
• Optimize your listings to ensure customers know exactly what they’re getting

The post Amazon Extended Holiday Return Policy 2020: How Sellers Should Prepare appeared first on AMZ Advisers.

How Is The FBA Sell-Through Rate Calculated? What Sellers Should Know

Amazon’s Inventory Performance Index (IPI) is a score that determines how good sellers are managing their inventory. There are several factors affecting your IPI score and one of these is the FBA sell-through rate.

Amazon sellers are at risk of higher fees and storage limitations if they overlook their sell-through rate. To address this kind of issue there are a number of steps to take to increase or maintain your IPI score at an optimal level. This will also help make your Amazon fees lower.

In this post, we’ll learn more about what an IPI score is, how your FBA sell-through rate factors in, and how you can improve it to boost sales.

FBA Sell-Through Rate Defined

The FBA sell-through rate is calculated as units sold over time as compared to initial inventory. It is the number of units sold and shipped over the past 90 days divided by the average number of units stored at the fulfillment centers during that time period. 

To further boost your IPI score, you need to work on improving your FBA sell-through rate through constant monitoring of your stock.

To monitor and view your weekly sell-through rate, click on the ‘View inventory in stock’ link in the ‘SKUs to restock today’ section right next to the IPI progress bar in the dashboard. The report will also show you an estimate of how many more days worth of stock you have. 

Preparing Inventory for the Q4 Holiday Shopping Season

As the holiday shopping season approaches, and also in preparation for the second wave of COVID-19, Amazon fulfillment centers are getting ready to accommodate the demands of consumers.

In an effort to maintain their name in the industry, Amazon has hired more than 175,000 employees and also invested billions of dollars in COVID-related initiatives to continuously meet the increasing demands of the customers and protect their employees as well.

There are capacity restraints in fulfillment centers. Therefore, Amazon will hold from third-party sellers.

And due to the pandemic, Amazon sellers will face a series of setbacks. Given this situation, sellers have to work smarter and think of ways to improve their inventory management skills.

Therefore, you should evaluate your fulfillment capabilities in preparation for holiday shopping in 2020 and throughout the next year. Moving forward, a diversified fulfillment strategy of FBA and FBM is the key factor in reducing the risk in Q4 and in the coming year.

Amazon has also begun displaying Seller business names and addresses. This step clearly shows that the retail giant will continue to put measures in place to minimize the risk from third-party sellers.

This is of great help for customers to learn more about the business of the seller and the products that they are selling. Such measures can include more Seller information in the Buy Box or storefront.

Keep in mind that your suspension guidelines will come into force in response to Negative Customer Experience (“NCX”).

FBA Sell-Through Rate: What is Amazon’s Inventory Performance Index (IPI)?

Good inventory management helps you know exactly how much inventory you need to have on-hand. It helps in reducing costs, expanding profitability, and improving business growth for FBA sellers. A mastery of this will help you get through the challenges and will boost your IPI score. 

According to Amazon, the Inventory Performance Index 2.1k (IPI) measures inventory management over time including how well you balance inventory levels and sales for a good FBA sell-through rate.

To do this, you need to monitor your Inventory Performance Dashboard regularly and keep a close eye on influencing factors to make sure that you are maximizing your allotted storage space, which will also reduce your costs.

Limiting inventory at the ASIN level is a new strategy of Amazon’s. Established in March of this year, it continues as a way to help manage inventory during the fourth quarter and beyond.

All ASINs that are affected will be tagged ‘Limited restock’ and show the maximum inventory limits under the “Days of Supply” column. Sellers need to keep within these limits and plan FBA shipments accordingly to manage their FBA sell-through rate and overall IPI score.

How to Measure IPI

Tracking and monitoring your inventory will help maximize your profitability.

As much as possible, refrain from carrying too much stock. This decreases your profitability due to storage fees and holding costs.

Your FBA sell-through rate is calculated by taking your units sold and shipped over the past 90 days and dividing that number by the average number of units available at fulfillment centers during that time period. This FBA sell-through rate will help you to assess your inventory performance. 

Here are a few tips on how you can improve your FBA sell-through rate:

• Create and adjust your advertising strategy
• Create Sales / Markdowns
• Audit your product detail pages
• Remove some of your inventory (e.g. slow-moving inventory)

Your stranded inventory percentage is the amount of inventory that is not available for purchase due to a listing problem that resulted in inventory without an active offer. To address this kind of concern, Amazon provides the “Fix listing” option to help lower this percentage. The exact reason why your inventory has been stranded is stated in detail and provides you with the steps on how to resolve the issue.

Another way to measure your IPI  is through FBA in-stock rate. This is the percentage of time your replenishable FBA ASINs have been in stock during the previous 30 days. You may miss an opportunity to increase your IPI when you run out of stock of your best selling or popular items. When an ASIN is out of stock, you should flag that ASIN as non-replenishable in the Restock tool so it doesn’t affect your score.

Boost Your IPI Score

If your IPI score is 350 or under, it’s time for you to plan and execute what is needed. Here’s how to give it a much-needed boost:

1.  Increase your FBA sell-through rate

Your FBA sell-through rate refers to the number of products you sell in relation to how much stock you have on hand.

Work smart on increasing your FBA sell-through rate to make it as high as possible. Amazon wants each seller to have a high FBA sell-through rate because it means more stock is leaving their warehouses faster.

Ideal sell-through rates depend on a number of factors, including your industry and the types of products you sell. Consider the following to help increase your sell-through rate:

• Bundling products – increasing the number of products sold with each transaction
• Discounting items – enticing customers with product markdowns
• Removing inventory – moving stock from FBA warehouses if it’s not needed
• Reducing reorders for less popular products – making sure what’s in stock is likely to sell

2.  Avoid overstocking

Overstock refers to an excessive supply of a product. It means keeping more items in stock than is needed to meet demand. In most cases, overstocking comes down to poor inventory management practices that lead to excessive stock and poor ratings.

Here’s a formula to calculate the exact cost of overstocking products:

Cost of inventory on hand x excess inventory = annual overstock waste expense

Preventing overstocking is all about meeting (not exceeding) demand. With that in mind, overstocking can be avoided by:

• Forecasting demand – carefully plan for the future accurately. This will give you an idea of how much stock you’ll need at any given time.
• Pricing strategically – come up with a strategic plan for the correct pricing of goods. If the price is right the chances of selling more are high. Regular movement of stock from the warehouse will help avoid overstock. 
• Automating reorders – adopt a trusted inventory management system that will make it easier for you to know when to place orders by automatically calculating your reorder point

3.  Improve your in-stock rate for your best selling or popular items.

While you want to avoid overstocking, it’s also important to keep popular items in stock to avoid missed sales opportunities. It helps in improving your FBA sell-through rate over time.

Optimize your in-stock rate for popular products by:

• Utilizing key sales reports generated by an inventory management system to let you see the best selling products at different times of the year, and make sure those products are stocked when they need to be.
• Doing an ABC inventory analysis to categorize products and focus on keeping ‘A’ products in stock at all times. Find out more about how to do an ABC analysis of products here.

4.  Fix stranded inventory

Stranded inventory refers to stock being held at an Amazon fulfillment center that isn’t associated with an active Amazon listing. The reasons why inventory becomes stranded include listings for products that were not created or have errors, resulting in inventory that is accumulating storage fees but can’t be sold.

Amazon penalizes sellers for stranded inventory because it costs the company to hold stock that will potentially never be sold.

It also entails costs on your part to store that inventory at Amazon warehouses, so it’s in your best interest to fix stranded inventory as soon as possible.

To fix your stranded inventory, access the Fix Stranded Inventory page from the Manage Inventory tab to remove or manually edit and relist your items.

Final Thoughts

Sellers must always be mindful of their IPI scores.

They should be extra careful especially mid-month of every quarter (February, May, August, and November).

If you receive a storage limit notice mid-quarter, work your way up and make sure your IPI score is back on track by the end of that respective quarter.

Note that not all third-party sellers will be subject to these restrictions. They only apply to FBA sellers on Amazon.com and there will be exceptions because IPI is still a work in progress.

It’s also important to note that there is some lee-way for seasonal sellers, subject to negotiation, and Amazon is prepared to consider special circumstances. Make sure you reach out to Amazon if you think you qualify.

Keep growing and improving your IPI score. Learn the ropes and master the process to enter a world of endless opportunities.

The post How Is The FBA Sell-Through Rate Calculated? What Sellers Should Know appeared first on AMZ Advisers.

Helium 10 vs Jungle Scout | Product Review, Pricing & Recommendations

When it comes down to building an Amazon business from scratch or growing your existing Amazon business., there are a few suites out there that can help you keep track of your inventory, find niche products to sell, or just manage your everyday transactions. Two of them are Helium 10 and Jungle Scout.

These two powerful suites provide a set of tools with different functions to ultimately drive more sales.

Find out which software fits your business needs in the best way.

What is Helium 10

Helium 10 is an amazing software designed to help Amazon FBA sellers. It is made up of several features that can find high ranking keywords, identify trends, spy on competitors, and even optimize product listings.

Basically, it has everything you need to kickstart an Amazon business, expand it, and make more sales.

Most Popular Helium 10 Features

Helium 10’s Chrome Extension can collect and show you data like net profit, average sales, average rating or average price. In the Chrome extension you’ll find Helium 10 XRay, which includes these functions:

• Profitability Calculator: Calculate your profit and find out if your selling a product is worth it or not.
• Inventory Levels: Analyze your competitor’s stock level to calculate your own inventory.
• Review Downloader: Analyze all negative reviews from your competitors and avoid getting bad reviews yourself.

Helium 10 Magnet

Helium Magnet is the largest Amazon keywords database out there and the most reliable one.

Sellers can easily find high volume keywords that are relevant to their listing. Its broad recommendations will throw keywords you wouldn’t even consider otherwise.

Helium 10 Cerebro

Helium Cerebro works as a reverse ASIN keyword research tool. It gives you access to relevant information, like search volume and the quantity of contending items.

You can find the best keywords to target if you use Helium 10 Magnet and Helium 10 Cerebro combined. That is one of the best ways to drive traffic and sales by putting specific keywords in the product title or targeting keyword search terms for your PPC Ads.

What is Jungle Scout?

Jungle Scout is a set of tools that was created to help you easily find profitable products on Amazon. Jungle Scout is beneficial for sellers who are looking to import products, add private labels, and resell.

The takes important information like the number of reviews or best seller rank, to calculate the right number of estimated sales.

Most popular Jungle Scout Features

The Jungle Scout Opportunity Finder tool can help you discover emerging trends and profitable product niches.

Either if you’re a seller looking for their first product to sell on Amazon or if you’re a seller building a business around unique products, you can use the Opportunity Finder to find the most accurate keywords. You can set search parameters like product category, competition, LQS and opportunity score.

Jungle Scout Chrome Extension

Jungle Find and validate Amazon FBA product opportunities directly from Amazon. The Chrome extension works as a bridge between Amazon and Jungle Scout that is built directly into your browser.

You’ll be able to see opportunity scores, price, reviews, daily sales, sales history, and more, that will help make better decisions for your product ideas.

Jungle Scout Sales Estimator

Jungle Scout’s Amazon Sales Estimator is a free tool that allows you to check average monthly sales of specific Amazon categories. You can also have better product launches and it is a simple way to keep a close look on your competitors.

Jungle Scout Product Tracker

Jungle Scout Product Tracker allows you to analyze and track a product to get accurate sales data.

You can see how certain products perform over a specific time frame so you can detect the most profitable ones. You can also access information such as average price, daily units sold, average daily revenue, etc.

Advantages of Helium 10 over Jungle Scout

• Sales Dashboard – Keep track of your product performance. Jungle Scout still doesn’t have a similar feature.
• Competitor Keyword Spy – Find out your competitors’ ranking both via PPC campaigns and organically.
• Refund Genie –Identify Amazon’s mistakes when a refund takes place. As a seller, the refund genie can assist you in requesting your money back.
• Alerts – Immediately find out when someone hijacks your item, your product title changes, or images get altered.

Advantages of Jungle Scout over Helium 10

• Supplier Database – Sellers can find and verify suppliers. Discover who is supplying what, how frequently, and the volumes supplied. The feature allows you to search by product, company, or supplier. You can even see how much your competitors are paying for their items.
• Giveaway Platform – This feature helps you facilitate giveaways or other launch strategies to guarantee the success of your product.

Jungle Scout Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Easy to use Acces to supplier’s database Affordable	The tool set is not as complete as Helium 10 No mobile app

Helium 10 Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
All-in-one of every tool you need to grow or kickstart a business. Amazon training Workshops	It can be expensive You need a learning curve to use it to its full potential.

Pricing

Helium 10 does provide the option of a free plan with the Helium 10 Chrome Extension. You can perform 1000 search queries without paying anything.

If you already have an idea of the exact tools for your business, you can choose to pay only for the tools you really need with Helium 10’s “A La Carte Plan.” This plan can range from $17 to $97, depending on the features.

Otherwise, here are other options:

• Platinum Plan: $97 per month
• Diamond Plan: $197 per month
• Elite Plan: $397 per month

If you decide to pay annualy, you sabe some money:

• PLATINUM PLAN: $970 per year
• Diamond Plan: $1970 per year
• Elite Plan: $4764 per year

Jungle Scout has two versions, the Web App or the Chrome Extension, which have different prices.

Here’s Jungle Scout pricing:

• Jungle Scout (WebApp only): $49 per month
• Jungle Scout & Extension: $69 per month
• Extension: $39 per month

Or, you can get a discount when paying annually:

• Jungle Scout (WebApp only): $39 per month
• Jungle Scout & Extension: $49 per month
• Extension: $19 per month

Helium 10 and Jungle Scout: Which one is better?

Both are amazing software suites with their own pros and cons. Jungle Scout is a great tool with on itself, although Helium 10 is much more comprehensive. Jungle Scout is intuitive and simple, while Helium 10 requires some training.

So it all comes down to your business strategy and how much insights you need to start or grow your business. Helium 10 can help sellers who want to build an Amazon business from scratch and grow it in the long run. The main advantage of Jungle Scout is that it’s much cheaper and might be exactly what you have been looking for.

The post Helium 10 vs Jungle Scout | Product Review, Pricing & Recommendations appeared first on AMZ Advisers.

Amazon Manufacturer Part Number: What Is It For?

Amazon uses the manufacturer part number (MPN) as one way to uniquely identify specific products. Aside from MPN, Amazon also uses other unique identifiers such as  UPC, EAN, and GTIN. Let’s have an overview of what this MPN is all about and its significant uses.

What Is a Manufacturer Part Number (MPN)?

A Manufacturer Part Number or MPN is a unique code issued by the manufacturer to identify individual parts or products. It normally comes in a series of numbers and letters. MPN helps distinguish it from its counterfeit parts. This also assures the buyer that the parts or products they are buying are legitimate and 100% genuine.

Amazon provides an optional field for the MPN in the listing inventory as does not apply to all merchandise. It is often used for automotive/Powersports and consumer electronics

Some sellers use other product codes applicable for certain products. For instance, a jacket has an SKU instead of an MPN, and a book has an ISBN. Some also use a UPC as a product identifier. You may get confused hearing these terms simultaneously, so let us tackle the differences for your reference.

SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) – is a series of numbers used in tracking inventory or stocks.

ISBN (International Standard Book Number) – A product code used by publishers, booksellers for stock control purposes.

UPC (Universal Product Code) – this is a common barcode seen on physical products that is used for tracking retail items.

How the Manufacturer Part Number (MPN) can Dramatically Improve Your Amazon Sales

This unique identifier is also used in Amazon’s internal and external searches, so it is highly encouraged to provide an MPN for greater product visibility. Aside from this, having the manufacturer’s part number will help the buyer get the right item and may help increase conversions.

Image: Source Approach

In today’s digital world, shopping has never been so easy, and the internet made this all possible. Connecting to your buyers and suppliers from all over the world is now within reach. If you are looking for a specific part, you can go straight to the manufacturer and purchase from there. While this may sound good, some manufacturers are often hesitant to sell parts directly to the consumer:

1. The chances of parts return is high when the wrong part is ordered
2. Difficulty finding the exact or appropriate part that the buyer needs, resulting in poor user experience
3. Buyers are afraid to order the wrong part thus, reducing potential conversion to sellers

As a seller, you can use this to your advantage to increase Amazon sales.

Conversions

If you’re a seller who can provide a Manufacturer Part Number and include these details in your listing, then you’ll have an edge and you will find yourself with a unique and profitable opportunity. If they are looking for a specific MPN and find it, most likely they will buy the part on the spot. A higher chance of conversion is at stake. Also, these buyers are less likely to return unwanted items and are likely to come back in the future.

SEO and Discoverability

Buyers use search engines when looking for a certain part. To increase your discoverability in the digital space, having MPN is of big help. This field is indexed by both Google and Amazon’s A9 search algorithms. If you have it, there is a big chance you will be picked by both search engines and displayed in the results. This increases your chances of being seen by many more customers, and eventually generating more sales.

Fewer Returns

If you are a seller, you must aim for a lower return rate or better yet, no return at all for better ranking and ratings. When you sell the right and exact part or product to a buyer there is no chance of having it returned. You’ll be surprised by the amount of time and effort saved because of fewer returns.

Product Reviews

You will likely get good reviews from your buyer if you meet their expectations such as providing the exact part that they need, its functionality, and all. As sellers, we must be on top of the game and meet customers’ highly specific demands. Buyers will surely be delighted when they find a seller who can deliver. Then, they are more likely to leave positive product reviews.

Repeat Customers

If you can attain the above-mentioned advantages, there is a higher chance of getting repeat customers. They will not look for somebody else online because they already know where to go and get the exact items they want. You can build trust and they will keep coming back to you. This is one beauty of having an MPN on your listing.

Final Thoughts

To cap it off, a Manufacturer Part Number (MPN) is a unique code used to more easily identify parts. It helps unlock better opportunities for many Amazon sellers to boost their discoverability as well as improve their conversion rates. 

Put yourself in the shoes of the buyer or customer. If you are looking for a specific part with an MPN provided, chances are, you are getting the correct item. Time and effort spent is saved because it eliminates the guesswork that may eventually lead to a poor customer experience.

An MPN can dramatically improve your Amazon sales, so take the chance to go beyond by putting an MPN in the optional field on your listing, and perhaps also in the title or on product photos and see the difference for yourself. 

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