New Amazon Strategies Working RIGHT NOW w/ Jeff Lieber

But our most successful clients, they end up getting more towards where Amazon's only 75 or 50% of their total revenues. But they don't always start there. So it's okay to focus on Amazon first because that is probably still the easiest place to launch a business.

You're listening to Freedom Fast lane presented by capitalism.com this is the show about building businesses and investing the profits so that you can live life on your terms. And now, your host, the future owner of the Cleveland Indians, Ryan Daniel Moran.

Hey, fastlaners, Ryan Daniel Moran here. Welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. Hey, if you sell physical products or have been thinking about it, you know that a lot has been changing here in the space. And what I am starting to see is some. Some brands win and some brands start to kind of die off. And those who are adjusting are growing and seeing what I would consider kind of a new golden age for physical product brands. And you're seeing more money pour into the space, and you're seeing more interest from private equity pour into the space. You're seeing more and more movement for the brands that are able to break through, but for the brands that are not able to break through, it's getting harder. So what this requires is for us to stay up to date on what is working really well and what needs to be discarded. So there's two things that I'm excited about. One is our Brand Builder Summit this August. If you sell physical products or invest in physical products, come to Austin in August. You can get details@brandbuildersummit.com I am moving over from just teaching this stuff to investing in this stuff. I'm putting my money into this sector. And so I'm doing this event to bring in some of my colleagues, some of my investment partners or potential partners, some of my advisors, and just teaching everything that we know because we're looking for more people to invest in. On the other side of things. The thing that I think you should do besides go to the branbuler Summit is you need to listen to this next podcast episode because with my new best friend, Jeff Lieber. Jeff is probably the best nuts and bolts guy that I have seen who just knows how to push the right buttons, tinker with the right things. And he has built and sold his own portfolio of physical products brands, and now does it as an agency. So he has a lot of data accessible to him and so he can see what's working, what isn't working. And so we're gonna talk about what Amazon strategies are working really well right now we're also gonna talk about some off Amazon strategies that can really help a business grow. And we're gonna talk all about what's working in the space in terms of short term versus long term. We're gonna talk about what strategies need to go away, what new platforms Amazon is releasing in order to help you increase sales. So, so if you are well exposed to Amazon or if you are a brand that is looking to take advantage of the platform, you're really going to get a lot out of this Chat with Jeff. Just so you know, he and I are dating, if you will. We're looking for opportunities to work together. We're looking for things where we can kind of cross pollinate our audiences and our expertise so there's a chance that we could be doing something together. And so we're starting to kind of speak a little bit more publicly because I, we would like to do more business together. Guys, I really respect what he is up to and what he has accomplished. So just full disclosure and I think you'll really enjoy this chat with Jeff Lieber.

Hey everybody, welcome to Freedom Fast Lane. Ryan Daniel Brand here today. I'm with one of my partners, one of my advisors, probably the person who is most well versed in my circle as far as what's working for corporate clients, what's working for brands that are doing well on Amazon and also turnarounds brands that are not doing particularly well on Amazon and turning them into winners. We're with Jeff Lieber on the show. Jeff, thanks for hanging out with us.

Hey, thank you, Ryan. It's good to be here.

So Jeff, I wanted to start off because there have been a lot of changes and scrambling over at Amazon and some brands are getting kicked in the teeth and some brands are doing better than ever. So I was hoping you could shed some light on what is working really well for you right now and where you're seeing some brands struggle and maybe they need to update some of their strategies. Let's start there.

Sure, yeah. Amazon obviously is the ever changing merry go round. You never know what change they're going to make next and so it's always important to stay on the cutting edge of it and stay up to date. So what's working right now? Well, for one, at least starting with the basics is still make sure that you have a very well optimized page, check your conversion rates, check testing different price points, check that you got all your image slots perfectly utilized and you've got great infographics and explaining the benefits and hitting on the pain points of your product. So still always make sure you have the basics right before you do anything too crazy or fancy or spend a lot of money on something else. Once you have those basic building blocks dialed in, obviously make sure that you're using Amazon Advertising's platform. That's still one of the best, most cost effective platforms that we've seen for advertising. There's lots of different ways to use the campaigns. They just came out with what's called headline search ads in Seller Central. So if you haven't tested that, make sure that you're using that because not everyone has hopped on there yet. So we're seeing very, very good cost per clicks and it has been very profitable for most of our clients that we're managing for them.

And what ad set is that?

It's called Headline Search Ads hsas. You should see it just in the advertising section of Seller Central.

Yeah, so advertising is still make sure you're putting at least some budget towards that. We've also seen that it can help with keyword rankings as well. So even if you're say, breaking even on some of your top keywords that are high volume, we have seen that it will actually help your rankings and organic rankings as well, because Amazon tracks all of that stuff. One other cool thing that we've been testing some different stuff on is Amazon actually has what's called Amazon Giveaways, but it's a totally legit giveaway that's actually done through the Amazon portal. So if you haven't seen that yet, there's different ways you can do it. But what we're doing with our clients is one example is they'll say, okay, how many units do you want to give away? So maybe let's just say let's elect to give away two units of our product and then you'll create the giveaway and you can change the settings of it. So one example that we're testing really well right now is you can elect to have over 3,000 people enter the giveaway. And all you have to do is give away two units. And in order for someone to enter the giveaway, you can say that they have to go watch your YouTube video. So upload one of your sales videos or product videos or Testimonial videos to YouTube and you get 3,000 people to watch your video and you only have to give away two products to two of those people that entered. And then the beautiful thing as well is that the other 2,998 people who lost the giveaway, you can have Amazon Give them a coupon code discount, like 10% or 5% or whatever you want to all the losers and say, hey, sorry, thanks for entering, sorry you didn't win, but here's a 10% off coupon on our product that you just watched our sales video for and we're seeing good conversions on that. So it totally outweighs the cost of those two units you had to give away.

Yeah.

Where are those people coming from? Those 3,000 people who go and watch the video, where is that traffic coming from?

They're Amazon customers. So, like they're in the Amazon.com portal. There's now lots of different sections where people can click on deals and promotions and giveaways and coupon clippings. And so it's just in one of those pages where you got people who love doing that stuff. So it's just a really good ROI is what we're seeing so far.

We think of giveaways as something where you're selling 500 units at $5 or 500 units at a dollar in order to spike Amazon's algorithm. But this is basically a contest, as I understand it.

Yeah, it should better be called a contest, but it's actually called Amazon Giveaways is what they call it.

Great. Okay, so optimization. We have the giveaway platform, the new advertising systems. What else is working really well right now or is not working so well and needs to be done away with?

Sure. So one tip is lightning deals. It's still good to test out lightning deals. We do see it work for most of our clients, but it doesn't work in every niche. So definitely something that's worth testing. And you should see the lightning deals in the portal. In seller central, there.

One kind of trick or tip, if you're not already doing it, is Amazon will approve your deal. If they give you an approval, they'll say you don't get to choose what time or what day that it's going to get promoted. So sometimes what Amazon will do is they'll give you a really, really bad or inconvenient time. Like one in the morning Pacific time is when it starts and it ends at 5 in the morning, you know, on a whatever on a Friday, if that's what they're approving you for, that deal is still going to cost you 150 bucks, is I think, what the going rate is right now. So what we do is we check those times at least. I think you need to Cancel at least 48 or 72 hours in advance because you're basically, you're probably not going to get great results there. So make sure that you can cancel those and not have to pay any fee. So what we do is we still book them every week for all the products that we want to run. But you want to check those times. Now if you get a time like say 10am on Monday morning, that's one that you're going to want to at least test out to see how it does track the results and see how many extra sales you got from it. You can do 15 or 20 or 25% off, whatever you want to do. But for some of our clients we can, you know, we can sell hundreds of units extra during those time frames. So it's worth testing. But you also don't want to, you know, be throwing money at it without tracking it because some clients, it's not a product that sells well in lightning deals portal. And so, you know, it's good to make sure you turn that off and don't be wasting 150 bucks per deal if it's not a viable option for your particular niche.

These different areas that are working really well, are they also helping drive organic sales or are these mostly nice spikes that we want to be running as often as we can in order to just get new customers?

Yeah, I mean, so example, the lightning deals are also coupon clippings as well. I mean those are external pages that are on Amazon where there's other shoppers that are going to drive traffic to your listings and any of those sales that come through that, that is helping to spike the Amazon algorithm because you're, you know, say get an extra 10 sales that day. Any sales that you're getting are going to help your metrics and will help overall your success on Amazon. So again, it's also kind of one of those strategies where even if you're kind of breaking even or, or a little bit better, you know, it's worth at least doing it occasionally to get a spike.

Yeah, I mean I'm of the opinion that anything that breaks even or better you should be running as often as humanly possible just to drive up volume and get more reviews and, and get as much exposure into Amazon's machine as possible. So you start showing up on other people's frequently bought with listings. The more you can shove through that algorithm, the better off you'll be.

Exactly. And then coupon clippings is another one that is working pretty well right now where it's not the normal traditional coupon codes that have been around for years on Amazon. This one's relatively new. I think it came out earlier in 2018. But that one actually, it's a coupon clipping that's advertised on a deals page of Amazon where there's just hundreds of products listed there by category. And shoppers that are looking for coupons or deals, they go there first, see what coupons they can clip and you don't have to pay anything. At least as of right now, you don't have to pay anything. If a customer sees your product and clips it, you only have to pay, I think it's like 60 cents or something like that. When someone actually successfully checks out and buys your item and goes through the whole checkout process and say you can give them a dollar off as a coupon clipping, that's all you got to do. And you only got to pay when somebody uses it. So again, it's just like, you know, it's not going to like triple the size of your business, but like those little things all add up and like you said, if it's doing better than break even, why not do it?

All right, let's flip it. What are the things that need to be discarded that used to work that we probably should stop paying attention to?

Amazon has really been cracking down. I mean, every year they've been getting more and more aggressive with sweeping across their new policies and slapping sellers on the wrist, even canceling or suspending their accounts. Also they're removing lots of reviews. So Amazon compliance is so important today. So just make sure that a lot of those gray hat, black hat, whatever hat stuff that was people could easily do three years ago, you know, just like buy 1,000 reviews from a review club and just boom, all of a sudden you have the most reviews in your category and it only costs you 1,000 bucks. Those stuff, they're just too risky anymore and we've never recommended them. And so that's a good way to get kicked off of Amazon. People have seen obviously that Amazon has been sweeping reviews and just deleting hundreds of people's reviews over the last year, really, but especially in the last couple of months. And so it's just not worth it. It's just not worth what you're building in your business is so long term, if you're thinking that way. And that's how you should be. So don't let those short term hacks or strategies that you know are a bad idea or not compliant, don't let them get in the way of your long term success.

You mentioned reviews. There's been a lot of scramble here in order to keep up. And you're right, a lot of people are getting reviews deleted. So what is your take on this and what are you suggesting or focusing on in light of those changes?

Sure, yeah. Reviews is one of the most drastically changed arenas of Amazon over the past couple of years. And so we do help our clients on that front. We use a multitude of strategies, probably over a dozen different strategies depending on the client and what assets they have or what they want to do with their business. But at the end of the day, if you own the customer or you control the email or the audience, no matter where they are, if you have their email address because you ran a sale on Facebook and you got them to opt into their email and then you know that they probably bought following up there, whether it's through email or Facebook or just through the old fashioned Amazon autoresponder, just make sure you're following up with the customers. But when possible, try to control the email or the audience or the customer first before they come onto Amazon so that you can follow up with them in a multitude of ways. And again, don't be non compliant, like make sure you're asking for an unbiased review. Don't just say, hey, give me a 5 star review if you're not happy, don't leave one, don't say that stuff because that will get you slapped. And then we do have a list, an internal list that we use for our clients that we can get a boost of sales and reviews that we've built over time. But you can do that yourself as well. At the end of the day, if you're delivering a great product, a great customer experience, and then following up with them in a respectful way to ask for a review, then at the end of the day, over the long haul, you will get those reviews. But if you live and die by the number of reviews, then you don't really have a business, in my opinion.

So building and controlling your own audience, who would have thought that that was a good strategy? Jeff? If only there was a podcast warning us about that for the last, oh, three years or so. Jeff, you have had some success doing what I would call turnarounds. That, that might be a bit of an aggressive term, but you have seen a lot of stores that were struggling that then really exploded after applying some systems to them. What are you usually going through when you are fixing up a neglected store or a neglected listing? And who are the types of brands that seem to be able to be turned around?

Sure. So when we, when we help out and start taking over somebody's listing and they want us to help them out. We always start with actually before we even change any sales copy or do anything like that, the first area that we look at is their competitors. So what we do is we do a full competitor analysis. And again, you can do this yourself if you're listening. It's always good to go study your competitors. Go look at your top five competitors that you think are doing a pretty good job on Amazon specifically and really just read every single word of their sales copy, look at every single image and take notes on what do you like about what they're doing and what are they not doing well, and use that to your advantage. Also read through their customer reviews. That's one of the most valuable places to learn from the actual customers. You can learn what a customer's pain points are for your product by reading either your own customer reviews or your competitors customer reviews. If they have a similar product, we actually start there. That's basically the first step is study the market, study the niche, study the competitors, and then find a way to put your own spin on it and do it better than them and incorporate all of those things into your sales copy into your images. So it's really cleaning up and overhauling the listing. And hopefully we can increase the conversion rate by say 20 or 30 or 40% sometimes meaning like if they're at 10%, we can get it to 12 or 13 or 14 if there was a lot of room for improvement. And then keyword research as well is often something that is kind of half done or a little bit neglected by a lot of the sellers that we've helped out. So making sure that you really have the keyword research nailed down and optimized and spread throughout both the front end of your Amazon listing and the back end as well. So that's the first place that we start.

So you're looking for places that have been fully optimized, including where they could be ranking better organically. And so when you turn on kind of the machine, its conversion rate is healthy and it's well optimized to get the most organic exposure. Is that a fair summary?

Yes.

Hey guys, this is Ryan. We're going to take a quick, quick break and we'll return to the show in a second.

Hey, a quick plug for those of you who sell on Amazon. One of the things that worked really well for me when I was starting as an Amazon seller was I went hard into Amazon pay per click and there's, I don't think Enough conversation that goes around about how much upside and opportunity there is in optimizing your Amazon pay per click strategy. For example, one of our backroom members, his name is Travis, he was given a quick crash course to me over brunch one day about, you know, how they grow so quickly and he was just saying how aggressively they go into Amazon pay per click. There's just, there's so much real estate to be had and Amazon keeps rolling out new opportunities with Amazon pay per click to the point where it kind of makes sense for you to not do this yourself and you to either have a team do it or some software do it so that you can just connect with some of the new opportunities that exist as Amazon expands their ad platform. And out of all the services that I have seen do this well, PPC Entourage is my favorite. And, and I'm totally biased because PPC Entourage is founded by a couple members of our backroom Mastermind. So these are guys who are doing it and building brands and building the software for themselves to automate and to optimize. Specifically their Amazon pay per click strategies. Their metric that they go for is profits per click, getting higher profits for for every click that you send to your listings. So this is a service that will help you automate and optimize the ad platform at Amazon. And if you've seen Gary Vaynerchuk has actually rolled out an entire new arm of VaynerMedia that is helping people do this through people PPC Entourage is doing it at scale, which is really impressive. So if you are leaving sales and profit on the table by not going all in on Amazon pay per click, I'd highly encourage you to give a click over to ppcontourage.com or just search for PPC Entourage. They're the best that I have seen that does this well.

Are you doing anything off of Amazon in order to try and juice up Amazon's algorithm? For example, are you working with any outside traffic sources and driving them to Amazon? This is a question that I often get with people who are coming through our ranks.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's honestly one of the best ways. And some of our most successful clients, they're not just a one trick pony on Amazon. Like often they have other assets that they're building outside of Amazon, whether that be they have a 10,000 or 20,000 person email list or they have social media following or a Facebook group. If they have those assets. That's what we kind of take inventory of. First we ask the client, what assets do you have or what assets are you building? And it's kind of funny, a lot of times their answers are either we don't have any, or they say, oh yeah, I have them, but we're not using them at all. And so that's often the first place. And yeah, we help them to utilize those assets, but by giving them, if they have an email list, we'll give them the email campaign templates and they can tweak it as they want. So that's like number one is use the current assets that you have. And then we do highly recommend that you're also using some source of external paid traffic. That's a common theme between most of our successful clients, is that they're not just reliant on just organic or paid Amazon traffic. It doesn't matter what medium you're using, if you're great at Facebook ads, or if you have another agency or in house person that can do Facebook ads or YouTube ads, or Instagram ads, Pinterest, it doesn't matter what source it is. Like, we're agnostic to where the traffic is coming from. But having some of that, we do recommend that you point at least a portion of that external ad budget towards Amazon because Amazon tracks what traffic is coming from within Amazon and which traffic you're helping Amazon with by sending it externally. And they want to reward those people who are sending, you know, thousands of dollars a month towards Amazon. They're able to track that and they love that, so they will reward you for that. And so those are some of the most basic areas that some of our most successful clients are doing a good job of.

For most of the people that you work with that are doing really well, what percentage of sales or focus is Amazon to them? And the reason I ask is because a lot of people who listen to the show would consider themselves Amazon businesses. So it becomes about releasing products specifically on Amazon with very little other exposure. And I always cringe when I hear that phrase Amazon business, because that just to me means that you don't have a real business, you're dependent upon Amazon. So what type of focus is Amazon for the clients that you're doing really well with?

Most of them it's either some of them, they've started out where they were say 90 or 95% on Amazon. But a common theme is that they know that they need to be building at least a second or third sales channel, whether that be on their website through Shopify or something like that, or whether it's selling it on social media or going retail. But Our most successful clients, they end up getting more towards where Amazon's only 75 or 50% of their total revenues. But they don't always start there. So it's okay to focus on Amazon first because that is probably still the easiest place to launch a business. And it is good to build that base first because it makes everything else so much easier to build those other sales channels once you have a good base there. But even though I love Amazon and we want Amazon sales to keep growing, we recommend to all of our clients and we help them to, to make sure that they're building their own lists and building second or tertiary sales channels. Absolutely.

And what do you see those clients doing to be less dependent on Amazon? Is it now that they don't have to worry about the daily Amazon maintenance, they can focus on other areas or is there some sort of system that they're following in order to be more Amazon independent?

They just need to find a way to automate Amazon or at least automate parts of it, like the most time consuming parts, so that they can hand it off either internally with their own internal team or hiring someone that's an Amazon expert, or hiring an agency like us, or, you know, it doesn't matter where they get it, but they need to have some systems in place that kind of automate that Amazon is dialed in and it's operating efficiently so that the owner and their key team members time is freed up to focus on building those other sales channels, whatever they may be.

Yeah, I mean, selfish plug for you, Jeff. One of the conversations we've had internally recently was, you know, we tend to have Amazon managers internally and we were having the conversation, well, you know what? How would our lives be different if we just let an agency handle Amazon and report to our manager and that manager was now in charge of opening up different channels. You know, you have to go out and you have to build the other sales systems. And so as a result it's kind of freed up some capacity to think about, well, where would we put our energy if we didn't have somebody who was completely focused on Amazon and we had an agency that was taking care of it? So that's kind of how we've been thinking about it. And if you can automate that sales channel and move into other areas, well, now you're starting to build a real business.

No, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's what I think most of our clients are so happy with is like Amazon is handled and they know that they don't really have to worry about it. Like we report to them and you know, they give us their feedback or say, hey, whatever, you know, we're short on cash right now, can you lower our ad budgets? And we say, okay, sure, we lower the ad budgets and you know, do what we have to do to meet their goals. But, but the day to day management of it is kind of off of their plate. And so. Yeah, but then they're able to then grow some of our clients. They were doing 2 million on Amazon and a million off of Amazon before hiring us. And then now the non Amazon side of the business has overtaken Amazon. 4 or 5 million off of Amazon and we're still growing on Amazon. But their whole business as a whole is now two, three times as big. I'm not saying it's just because of us. They did great, great stuff in their own right off of Amazon.

So Jeff, I have got to teach you to start taking credit for things you didn't do, man. You're supposed to say that's all because of us managing Amazon for them. I'm curious, this is kind of an obvious question now, like, what are you seeing clients focus on off of Amazon in order to give them that audience and that sustainability and that growth elsewhere. That is not just that one trick pony. Where are they putting their energy once they have Amazon automated?

Yeah, the most common areas that we're seeing, it's still there, email. I mean, you love email yourself. They all still use it. That one. You will always own their email address until they opt out. And so that's still one of the best places to make sure that you're capturing. But a lot of our clients are moving into the Facebook messenger bot. That whole thing where they're opting in building a messenger list just because the open rates are just so insanely high over there. They're so much higher than email. So they're definitely focusing there. And then they're focused a lot on paid media, paid advertising, on whether it be Facebook or Instagram, YouTube, doesn't matter where, but they're at least focused on one of those things.

Yeah, I'm totally with you. And in my experience, when one grows, so does the other. Especially the non Amazon side. The faster you can put your energy into other areas of exposure, the more firepower you have to throw at Amazon and to get that multiplier effect when you marry the two channels.

Yeah, no, I completely agree with that.

All right, so Jeff, I feel like a mosquito at a nudist colony right now. There's so many things I want to bite into I'm not sure where to start. So I wanted to ask what type of businesses have you seen be able to have like that type of hockey stick growth? And the reason I ask is because there's a lot of people who listen to the show or are invested in Amazon that seem to hit a plateau and stay stuck and then there's others that just blast right through it and keep growing. And in my experience there's like, if you're a one man show, obviously you're going to bottleneck and you're going to plateau. If you have no product differentiation, obviously you're going to plateau and you're not going to be able to break through because you're just competing on price. For you, what type of businesses have you really seen have those big jumps as a result of using some of your systems versus those who kind of flutter around for a while and then die off?

Some of the common themes I would say is whenever there's a super competent leader at the head of the ship, you know, the business owner or the person running the operations, when that person is super competent and they understand the importance of moving fast and testing things and they're not, they're operating from a place of like aggressive, like let's grow mentality and they're willing to try stuff and they're not fearful like, well, what if that doesn't work? Or you know, oh, what was our ACOs today? And oh, can you adjust that? Or whatever. Like when they understand the bigger picture and that they know what their big goal is, that's to grow a large brand and a large company that's kind of just number one. So that's a great mindset and asset to have that our biggest clients have. And then also is that they're ready to focus on other things like they know and understand the importance of focusing on one of those other off Amazon things that we talked about and they will actually be working on that and developing that so that they can grow whether it's their product line or doing more Kickstarter. Some of our clients have great success on Kickstarters, if that's what niche they're in. Whatever they're great at, they're great at something else or they want to be great at something else, but they just, they wanted to hand off Amazon to somebody else so that they can go do what they're great at and what they enjoy doing. And they can either have someone like us do it or you know, have the systems that are in place. So it doesn't matter how you do it. They just got to find a way to get that off of their plate so they can focus on other stuff.

Got it. Jeff, I feel like we could keep going for a long time. I would like for you, before we go off the rails, talk a little bit about what you do at Turnkey. I mean, I've told the audience you and I have kind of been dating, if you will, and looking for more opportunities to work together. I love what you do at Turnkey. You know, we're considering using you pretty heavily and as a result, it'd be kind of interesting to get the audience's feedback on what they would like to see us do together as we consider doing more together. So would you talk a little bit about the different services or the different types of people that you work with and then we'll keep going?

Yeah, sure. So I mean the best place to start is we offer a ton of free content, like free stuff on our website that you can quickly download and like put it to use in your business and grow your business. You know, we're great at systems and we have great standard operating procedures, checklists, all that good stuff. That's how we manage so many different clients. And we actually offer some of those just for free so you can try them out and kind of get a taste of what it's like. So we have a lot of free stuff on there, free Amazon audits of your listings, free consultations. So that's the best place to start and hopefully that will be helpful for a lot of people in your audience. As far as what we do at Turnkey, so we have a couple different options on the full service side, we basically have a done for you model and we either do like a flat monthly fee where we actually will build the Amazon profit center for you and take it off of you, your hands. But if we see a company that has a lot of upside growth potential, we'll offer more of like a performance based pricing where we get paid more on a percentage of sales growth model with a minimum monthly fee. And so that's like the whole done for you. We manage setup, manage the listings, do the ad campaigns, the promotions, customer review strategies, all that good stuff. If that's not what you need then and you prefer to keep it in house, which is totally, totally cool with us. We have what we call our Turnkey business in a box program. That's where we basically take all of our Amazon systems, our strategies, checklists, everything that we do for our clients, we actually have boxed that into a plug and play model that other companies can apply that, you know, whether it's a one man show and, or one woman show and they want to learn to do it themselves or they can hand it off to their vas or team members. So that's been a really successful, fun way to help more people that the full service doesn't make sense and that comes with a complimentary like one on one implementation strategy session. So that's with one of our business coaches or one of our client managers. They'll actually do that for you. And if they want to continue with that afterwards, that's an option as well. So those are the models that we offer right now to help people.

So I wanted to get clear on what the business was before I asked you this question. And it's on the bigger vision side of things. Why did you decide to start an agency? I know that you built and sold at least one company. I know that this, you know, as an entrepreneur you were building up physical products brands. I think you still have some physical products brands. Why did you decide to go the agency route as an entrepreneur?

Sure. So I mean I started five years ago, I started a pet products company and then launched a couple brands. And so I actually exited all of those, you know, throughout the last five years and exited the last one a year ago. And you know, was able to sell that and make a chunk of change, which was great. But that whole time, actually it was four years ago I got my first consulting client. It was actually just one of my best friends. He launched a sunglasses company and he's like, how are you doing so well on Amazon with your stupid pet products? You know, we actually have a cool sunglasses brand and we have no sales on Amazon. And so, so I gave him some tips. I said, try this. And he's like, well, I don't know how to do that. Can I just pay you to do it? And I said, well, I guess, you know. And so he paid me to do it and that was our first client and they're actually still a client today. And yeah, and so we helped grow them quite a bit. So that was like our first client. And that opened my eyes. Like, wow, this is actually fun. I enjoy helping. I love Amazon and all the Amazon stuff. But part of the reason that I got out of the other companies and now I'm only focusing on the agency is because to be honest, I didn't love everything that comes along with managing a whole business. I didn't love dealing with China or Chinese New Year or quality control or inventory management. Or cash flow management. I wasn't great at those things and I didn't love those things. And when I realized that I could do what I love doing and build a team around that and build systems around that and help a lot of companies to grow their businesses and I get to do the stuff that we love doing and they get to deal with the other stuff that I didn't like, but they probably do like or they're great at, then we can help a lot more companies and grow a whole lot bigger in that model. And so it was just kind of a personal choice, I guess.

And do you have a long term view of what the agency will exist to do? For example? You know, I'm fascinated by Gary Vaynerchuk. I'm having dinner with him tomorrow night as we're recording this. And he would say that VaynerMedia just exists as a proxy for something much, much bigger for him to get the New York Jets. And so myself, as somebody who's out to buy a Major League baseball team, I see somebody building an agency that is something that I'm proud to represent and proud to be partnering with you on. I'm curious, is there a bigger thing at play?

Yeah, I mean, I'm not trying to buy the San Diego Padres or anything, but it's just a really fun business and it's a good lifestyle for all of our team members. And you know, we all, we built a great team and it's been really fun and honestly, like just building the network and all of our clients have become some of like good friends and great people to know. And so it's what I love doing and what my team loves doing. And so we're just trying to help as many companies as we can and you know, as Amazon changes, we're going to stay on top of Amazon and yeah, it's just what I like doing.

Well, Jeff, I love what you're up to. I'm super excited to be repping you and supporting you and to be partnering with you on this and I'm just proud of what you've done, excited for the success stories that have already come out, excited for people to discover you. I'm excited to see a brand builder summit this August. Keep on changing the world, buddy.

Hey, thanks, Ryan. You too, man. I owe a lot of it all to you. I've been following you for years and couldn't have done it with a lot of your advice over the years, so thank you.

Thanks so much, man.

So we actually are looking at possibly just handing over a lot of our Amazon operations over to Jeff so that his team can run all of this. Because I'm of the opinion that right now physical products brands need to be very, very heavily invested in things that are not Amazon related. Yes, you need to have exposure to the platform and yes, it's a eight figure platform if you play the game well. But what I mean is things move a lot faster and easier if you're well exposed on social media, if you have your email list built, if you have a raving audience and it requires more people, capital and creativity to go in that direction. And so I think you should automate and outsource anything that is not your genius. So if your genius is better spent building audiences, talking about your product and being out on a public platform, or managing your team, or developing new products, then you might want to consider either bringing on an Amazon manager or working with a team like Turnkey. His website is turnkeypro product management.com and hopefully Jeff and I will have some additional resources and trainings coming out for you real soon. If you want to meet Jeff and myself in person, as well as the rest of my partners and advisors and team members, you can join us in August in Austin, Texas, the 24th and 25th for our Brand Builder Summit. It is@brandbuildersummit.com and you'll be joined by some of the best in the world and investors who want to buy your business. And you'll be seeing what's working right now for both emerging brands, successful brands, sellers and your peers. So it's a great way for you to break away from the things that everybody else is talking about and to build up that independent sales channel that makes you a really successful, profitable company that is in a position to be acquired. You can head to brandbuildersummit.com for more to reserve your spot. We hope to see you in Austin this August. Thanks for listening to the show. Share it with somebody who you know needs help with Amazon and I will see you guys on the next episode.

If you've been listening to the last few episodes of the show where we featured entrepreneurs who have crossed the seven figure mark and are on their way to eight figures, then you undoubtedly have heard us talk about the Back Room. The Backroom is a group mentoring program where we cast the vision for getting to $10 million a year and beyond and being ready to sell your company because ultimately that's where the big payday is going to come from. We also open up investment opportunities so that you can put your Profits into places that give you more wealth and potentially more cash flow or even help you save on taxes. We have some pretty cool places where we put cash that give you sometimes all three. Plus you're in a room with people who are the best in the world at what they do. We bring in my team of advisors that help people get into retail. They help people clean up their systems, they help people clean up their books, they even help them reposition their companies so that they can be sold for more money. We also talk about what's working right now on Amazon and on other channels. But the focus of the group is on casting the vision to get to eight figures and beyond and clearing all bottlenecks that stand in your way while also opening up other opportunities for you to enjoy a life of freedom. Because that's what we're after here. We, we're not just after this to work hard and work 16 hours a day. We're doing this so that we can have freedom and we get freedom by making enough money so that we can invest into places that allow us to never have to work again and then building empires with people that we love doing business with. And that's what we're doing inside of the back room. And I could also tell you that we're looking to buy and buy into some of our students businesses through something else that we're doing pretty cool in the back room. But I will save that for another day because that is still in process. But if you have an idea that you're not sure how to bring to the marketplace, if you've got an audience that you know could be the fertile ground for a really profitable seven figure physical products brand or if you're selling enough product to be able to say, you know, I could step on the gas here if you've got that million in sight, or you're beyond the million and you know that it's time to accelerate the process to get to that eight figure mark. Because you're playing the review game. You're, you're playing price wars. You're tired of sacrificing profit margins. You're working way too long for too little result and you want to clear those bottlenecks so that you can grow faster and have a sellable company so one day you can have that ideal freedom lifestyle. We can help you inside of the back room. It's one of the more expensive things that we do. It's also the highest ROI thing that we do. So it is application only. You need to be ready for it and you need to be ready to move when you join. So you can go to freedomfastlane.com, click on backroom and see the application, see all the pricing details from there. Working with me one on one starts at about $100,000. Joining the back room is a little bit less than that. So just know going into it that it's a serious investment and it is only for people who either have funding, have sales and are ready to go once they join. So if that's you, go over to freedomfastline.com, click on the back room and you'll see the application and full details there.