Automate Your Life

What's up guys, on this episode of Behind the Mindset with Jared Goetz, Jared provides valuable tips on automating your business and freeing up your day-to-day schedule. Stay tuned to hear how Jared was able to travel across the United States and launch a multi-million dollar e-commerce business at the same time. Enjoy.

Hey guys, Jared here, and today I have something really cool to share with you. I'm going to show you how you can automate your business so you don't have to spend more than 20 minutes a day on it. Now, before I jump into specifics, I want to share a little story with you. When I first got started with dropshipping, I was actually really lucky because I had to drive from California to Florida in 5 days, which means I had to spend about 10 to 18 hours on the road. And now you can imagine with the new business orders coming in every day. I was like, how can I handle this, right? I had customer service, order fulfillment, I had to run my Facebook ads, I had little problems here and there, I had to talk to my supplier. And I thought it would be really overwhelming, to be honest with you. So I had to drive 10 to 18 hours a day for 5 days straight, and I really didn't know what to do. So the first thing I did was I went on Upwork and I found a virtual assistant, and I basically just took all my customer support emails and I forwarded them to her, and you know, there's only so many different communications you can have with a customer. So she made a database of all my answers and started answering customers with the same answers as me. The next thing I did was I found someone to run my Facebook ads. And for that, I actually needed to just give him rules. I basically said, you know, if the cost per acquisition is lower than $5, you know, duplicate your ads. Or if it's over $10, kill the ads. And basically I gave him a set of rules to use. For me, this freed up about 4 or 5 hours a day that I was actually putting into the business. And with all that extra time, and while I was driving, it gave me a chance to really clear my mind. You know when you drive and you get on autopilot? Well, me, I was totally on autopilot. My business was running itself. So during that time frame, my store went from doing $2,000 a day, the second day we did about $7,000, the third day we did about $14,000. Fourth day about $35,000. By the fifth day, the store did $50,000 in sales. Now, I don't think I would have ever gotten there had I not automated my business because I would have been thinking about things. I would have been focusing my energy and my thoughts into the Facebook ad manager and to answering customers, and I would be too tired to think about creative ways to grow the business. So automating your business is not just important so you have more time to go play golf or go on vacation, although Of course, that's what everyone wants out of an e-commerce business. It's also really important because you get to free up that really creative energy that you have inside of you that you can use to actually grow your business. So let me give you some practical tips on how you can automate your business and actually spend 20 minutes or less per day running it. So the first thing, as I mentioned before, is virtual assistants. Now, there's a lot of different places that you can get virtual assistants. You can go on Upwork, on Freelancer, on Fiverr. They're all over the place, and a lot of the times people make the mistakes of just getting the cheapest ones possible. Virtual assistants range from $4 an hour to $20 an hour, and if you think about it, sometimes someone who's $4 an hour who takes 3 hours to do a task that would take someone else 1 hour who maybe charges $10 an hour, you would save money if you got the person who did it in 1 hour. Aside from just that, you mitigate your refunds and chargebacks by having really good customer support and really good moderation. So I'd actually rather spend a little bit more money on really talented virtual assistants than just get the cheapest virtual assistants I can because I know it actually saves me time, saves me money, and saves me the headache of having poor customer support. So cheaper is not always better. That's number one. So virtual assistants can do order fulfillment for you, they can process refunds, and they can main— they can maintain supplier relationships for you. During the whole process. Now, when I say that can free up— if you're doing 1,000 orders a day, that could take 3 hours alone going in and processing all the orders, making sure that you're paying for the right orders, making sure customers are getting refunds on time. If you guys are big dropshippers, you know a lot of people order products and immediately email you and ask for a refund, or 2 weeks later they'll hit you up and you have to go search and see if it got delivered yet, and it's a whole headache. Nobody wants to do that. So virtual assistants will do all of this for you. Actually, a giant tip I want to share with you for those of you who already have your own virtual assistants is being proactive with your customer support. What do I mean by proactive? I mean, don't wait for customers to come to you to complain before you reach out to them. What I'm saying is a little trick that we use, and this is something that I haven't shared yet, is right when a customer orders from our website, if we know that it's getting shipped from China— we ship some things from the US, but if it's getting shipped from China, we know it's going to take 10 to 15 days to get to the customer, we'll automatically email them and we'll say, hey, thank you so much for your order. Just letting you know that we're shipping this from overseas and it may take 10 to 15 days to get to you. And to be honest with you, the majority of people don't care. They say, oh, thank you for letting me know, as opposed to them waiting, you know, 2 weeks and being like, where is that order? And getting mad and then going, I have to go out of my way to reach out to this company and ask them where my order is. That gets people angry. But if you're proactive and you send them an email right away when they order from you, they actually really appreciate it, and that's something that will help your business a lot. Another thing that your virtual assistant can do is they can moderate your page, your social media posts, your Facebook Messenger account, uh, your live chat, and your email. Now, not all virtual assistants are created equal. Over the last 3 years, we've built a lot, a lot of standard operating procedures for our assistants so they know exactly what to do and when to do it. If you guys want really experienced virtual assistants, there's a service called ecomvirtualassistants.com where you can get trained, highly sought-after virtual assistants that will automate your business for you. Next, you want to figure out how to automate your ads because a lot of people spend all day in their ads and, you know, with the right help and the right software and the right tools, you really don't have to spend much time at all. You can't start by automating your ads. It's actually really important that you run your own ads first, and I recommend you do this for at least 2 to 3 months because it's important to understand the fundamentals and what to look for, and then create rules and processes that you can then pass off to humans or to softwares. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, you need to be familiar with what's going on. If you don't know an aspect of your business, you need to be an expert in every sector of it before you start hiring other people. So for me, when I was moving from California to Florida and I had to drive for 5 days, I had rules set in place and they were basically if this, then that rules. So one of my rules was, and don't take this specifically because it varies on every product, one of my rules was if our cost per acquisition was under $5, we would duplicate our ad 5 times. If it was over $10, we would kill the ad. And it allowed us to duplicate and scale really quickly. And I actually hired someone to do this for me who I paid $25 an hour, and he was hands-on all day. And to be honest with you, at the end of the day, I always ended up paying him at least $50 an hour because he made us so much money. Now, if you don't want to hire a human, there are software and tools out there, and there are also rules you can use within Facebook. Now, rules are cool because they're free, and if you're not doing much volume, they're pretty good. But the benefit of using certain softwares over cert— just Facebook rules are that the rules only update about every 30 minutes. You could actually miss out on things if you're waiting. Now, one of the softwares that we like to use is called Revealbot, and Revealbot is actually really good because they have such good customer support, and there's so many different automation options, and it updates every 5 to 10 minutes, so you're not missing out on things if your CPAs are rising, or, you know, if you're setting rules, it's getting cut, or things are getting duplicated, or things are getting scaled right away. You can also set your ads to turn back on the next day, as opposed to having to wait until midnight and then turn your ads on manually. You can do all that stuff through RevealBuddy. So another big factor, especially for dropshipping, is testing products. As you guys all know, if you watch any of my videos, part of my program, you want to be testing at least 10 products before you find a winning product. For us, we like to be testing at least 10 products a week, sometimes 20, depends on our mood, but I always recommend testing a lot of different products. Now that could be tedious, especially if you don't plan ahead. So what I like to do is every Sunday make a list of 10 to 20 products that we want to test for the week. So we'll go through our spy tools, we'll figure out what products we want to test, and then we'll put them in a spreadsheet. And in that spreadsheet we'll have our margins, we'll have all of our breakeven ROAS. Now that's really important. If you don't know when you break even on a product, you're not going to know when to kill ads or scale ads. So every one of these products in the spreadsheet, we have what return on ad spend we need to break even on that product. So if it's 1.5, we know that. If it's 1.2, we know we could spend more money, you know, and if it's 2.0, we know it's going to be kind of hard to make money with it. So every product needs to have their break even ROAS. Other than that, we like to have suppliers and a bunch of information as well, but it's important to have an organized spreadsheet that you're planning every Sunday so that when you wake up the next day or you're, you know, you don't have to use your brain to think of all that stuff because that'll deplete your energy for the day. Everyone has a limited amount of energy they can put into what they're doing. So planning ahead on a Sunday, putting everything in a spreadsheet is a game changer. Now finding products, there's a lot of different ways you can go about it. You know, you guys can go like people's Facebook ads, go to pages, there's a lot of spy tools. We have our own product called ehproductfinder.com. We're basically a syndicate of all the other spy tools out there. We have scores, rating scores, power scores for the product, videos you can use to advertise with. Descriptions, targeting details, and there's about 1,300 winning products in there right now where we're adding about 1 to 2 per day, and you can get started for only $7 a month. So if you guys wanna check that out, ehproductfinder.com, you can take those products, you can plan them for the week, you can get your spreadsheet going, and then you don't have to think about what you're testing. You just put your rules in place and you go. Now the last piece of the puzzle for automating your business is your bookkeeping. If you don't know how you're doing, How are you going to scale? How are you going to grow? If you don't know if you're profiting or not, it's going to actually cause a lot of different thoughts and anxieties inside of you. So you need to know how your books are doing. We use a service called Bench.co. We actually have a link below for 20% off. Basically, you get paired with a dedicated bookkeeper. Anytime you need, you can log in and talk to your bookkeepers. And then, you know, taxes kind of get confusing. By the end of the year, you get a financial summary that you can just hand off to your accountant. They can file your taxes for you. So sometimes bookkeeping can be a pain in the neck. If you're just getting started, you can have your virtual assistant do your bookkeeping for you and your spreadsheets. But if your business is growing bigger and you need a dedicated bookkeeper and you don't know who to hire, we recommend bench.com. So anyway guys, I hope that helped. I've used these exact same tactics to take a store that's doing $50,000 a day and only spend about 20 minutes per day on it. And these tactics we've used for the last 3 years. It's something that when we put a new store together, we know exactly what procedures to put in place so we don't have to spend our valuable time and energy doing the legwork, and we can actually use our creative energy and our brain power in how to scale and grow our business. Alright guys, if you enjoyed this podcast, all I ask is you share with your friends, your team, anyone who you think would get value out of it. And stay tuned because we're going to keep putting out valuable podcasts for you. Thank you very much.

What's up guys? I just want to say if you made it this far, thank you so much for listening. If you received any value from what you just heard, Please, please, please, I can't stress this enough, share this with your friends, family, and your team.

And keep winning, people.

We'll see you on the next episode.