Meet Logistics, Sales and Operations Expert Paul D’Souza

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand. With guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazzard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey, product launchers, welcome to another office hours and this one is our chance to meet Paul d'. Souza. And Paul is a logistics, sales and operations expert. So when we talk about the launch process, this all stuff you don't want to leave till the end, you actually want to plan for it from the beginning. And so Paul is really instrumental in helping you understand that sort of planning process. Not just the tactics side of it, but the strategy side of it. So let's get into it with Paul and dive into all of his experience. So, Paul, thanks so much for joining us as an expert on the product launch hazards platform.

Thank you. Thank you. This is so much fun. First, congratulations. I love what you're doing. It's such a needed resource, if you would, because we talk to people every day with what I do and there's.

So much they don't know. Right?

They don't know. And we tell them, please come early. Which is why I also mentor so many incubators, helping the company founders think about the strategy of getting your product to the market. So, yeah. So first, congratulations. Love what you're doing. Happy to be on the show. Let's make this happen.

That's right. So. So you wear a lot of hats. So let's start with the hat of. I'm going to call it the logistics side of it. Okay, so the Source select is the name of your company, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And it is sort of that side of like warehousing, distribution, logistics, like has a big operational how you're going to get it to the consumer, right? And so talk a little bit about how that side of the business works.

Okay. So it's very important for the founders, right, the people, the CEOs, that you got a product idea. It's got to be made. It's got to be made somewhere, right? Once the product is made, you've got the next problem of moving that product from the manufacturer. 9 out of 10 is somewhere in China, Indonesia. These are all the sources I'm going pulling product from Israel, Canada, whatever. And you bring into the United States or wherever you need to warehouse it. We start there all the way from the manufacturer. I don't care where the manufacturers on the planet. My guys will go pick it up, box it if necessary, put it in a container, coordinate all the origination documents, shipping documents, custom documents, moving it through customs at the destination, trucking it to the warehouse, warehousing it. So you gotta unload the containers and all that. We warehouse it and then work with you and your Kickstarter, the backer kits and your CSV files, your Shopify for Amazon, Amazon Woocommerce, whatever the platform, wherever you're selling the product, we have multiple entry points where orders come from. We process all those different orders, even the onesie twosie emails, and then pick and pack product and then ship out to wherever the customer is. 180 countries. Wow.

That's pretty comprehensive.

Right, right, right. And then I can manage all the returns because X percentage will be returned for various reason. Most buyers or what have you, situations like that, people move lost addresses. And then you got to manage your B stock because that's real money. Right. You manage the bee stock, you got to do testing.

Okay, so some people on here have never heard that term before. I'm so glad you actually said that because I was like, you know, sometimes I'm afraid of introducing vocabulary too soon. But I think it's really important because we've actually done quite a few little episodes on costs and the complexity of. And B stock is one of them. But we never defined it. So define that for our listeners.

So basically right. We recently had a client that where Amazon sent back 2,700 units of their product.

Wow, that's a lot.

Some were untouched, some were just, you know, when Best Buy and all these big boxes, they return product. They don't necessarily rehandle them and put them neatly or customers don't neatly put them back in a box. We'll just get an open, literally an open box. Tub in a pallet, open, not even closed. But that's valuable product that you've spent your hard earned money creating for resale. Right. For sales. So what we do is we go and meticulously look at them, treat them like your babies and figure out can this be salvaged? Is it damaged? Is it battery missing? Put a battery and do some repairs if necessary. Sometimes we keep a stock of new package and it was good to go back. We then complete the product, put it as finished stock, and then maintain it as a B stock, second stock. So when you have other returns that people want, exchanges, you send them the B stock. Exchanges, not brand new products.

Yeah, I mean many of us may be very used to this when we get Our phones, sometimes they're refurb phones. Like, you know, whenever you get some kind of promo phone, or they're pulling from their B stock, which means the package was opened at some point. It's probably perfectly fine. Right.

And we test it for them. We do that functional testing. Sometimes we are updating firmware so that even the B stocks in sync from the software updates with the latest product and things like that. We do those extra services touching the boxes because very often our customers, not the customer that's buying the product, but the product company owners are sitting in Germany or India or Israel, and they have no presence in the US and we manage all that for them.

Yeah. So product launchers. This is like a really good problem to have in a way, because if you've got 2700 returned, hopefully it's because you really had a ton sold, Right?

Exactly. Usually it's 2%, 3%. Right. You have to plan for that. Yeah.

So, so valuable to kind of hear those things. But these are things that you should plan from the beginning. And so I think that, you know, that ties into your other hat that you wear, which is Chief Revenue Officer as a service, which I think is a really interesting idea because, I mean, at the end of the day, we're here to make money on our products. Right. We're here to make money on our brands. And so it isn't just we need a cfo, a financial officer. We wanted to have something to do with sales and making money. So I really like that term. How did that come about?

Well, you know, it's the first book I wrote, almost finishing. My second book is titled the Market Has Changed, I have youe, and it's all about sales strategies. But now that I've been mentoring so many product companies, I've been working with Source select, really got into the fulfillment space, the logistics space. I realized that revenue is the result of many things coming together.

Yes, right. Yeah.

Then you have the nugget of profit that comes even after that. But it's not about sales, it's about profit. And revenue is a better indicator. So what I'm really cautioning people and I'm teaching people and advocating that when you think of your revenue team, it's actually a multidisciplinary team. So your marketing people and your sales people and your product design engineers, because they're getting feedback from the customer, right?

Yeah. You're speaking to the choir here on that one. Because cost is designed in, Right?

Exactly. What does version two look like? Even version one should have been Collaboratively designed with your customers, not with your customers in mind, with your customers. Big difference, right?

Yeah.

And then your solution, your product delivery and then your sales support, your customer support. All that impacts revenue.

All of it does. So many companies find themselves not just making sales, but not making profit because they didn't look at it from a bigger picture of all those factors. Right.

If you look at it just as marketing and sales, you'll go for the transaction of the first sale and then you will assume, the salesperson will assume they're done and the marketing person is going to assume they got enough MQLs that converted to SQLs that became sales. That is an incomplete perspective. That's a selfish, irreverent perspective. The company has to think about revenue and then profit. And when you fine tune revenue, you get the profit. So the marketing people should be marketing to and creating the right MQLs and the right SQLs so they convert.

So define those.

For those that don't know, an MQL is a marketing qualified lead where based on the campaigns you do, you get conversions and say, oh, this is a really nice offer, I'm interested. And if an M, so that'll be an MQL and they opt in for an offer and then they go through the next thing and they qualify and then actually are interested in making a purchase, they would be considered an SQL. Right. Especially this is when you.

And that's a sales qualified lead.

Yeah. Then a salesperson is qualifying them. Right. A person is calling back and saying, hey, you did this, you did that, or what have you.

Or if it's a little more passive, it might be in an email program.

In an email program or whatever. But now they're getting closer to a transaction and then they're really in. When a salesperson accepts the lead and starts saying okay, they're close, they sort of qualify. They want to make a purchase, you know, within 90 days or what have you. That becomes a sales qualified lead. Right. Becomes a sales accepted lead actually is another level. And then you go through the funnel until they became a customer. But what I'm interested in is not that, that is table stakes. You have to do that. But the CRO as a service idea came about when I got 20 years I've been doing this and I've been trying to tell people, guys, break the walls down. I'm interested in sale number 4 and 5 and 19 and 20 from the same customer.

From the same customer. Yeah. I keep saying this is like it's hard to get a new lead.

Very Hard.

But people leave so much money on the table by not mining the clients they and the customers they already have.

Exactly. And it takes a lot of reverence and respect of who your customer really is to get to the second and the third and the fourth. It's not just about giving them another fancy discount. Yeah. Because discounts are not your friend. They're going away from the bottom line.

Well, you know, speaking of discounts, because like, you know, a lot of people think of Kickstarter rewards as like the cheapest price you're ever going to buy. You and Source select. You do a lot of work with Kickstarters and that kind of startup stage. And you know, we have a lot of differing opinions on this platform about when Kickstarter is appropriate and when it's not. But assuming that it's appropriate. Right. And you're going into it and you've got a good plan and a marketing program and the whole thing that's going to support you. Though there's so many things about those rewards and the delivery of those words that just trip those Kickstarters up. Because they didn't plan the dollars. Right. And they didn't plan for all the costs that go into that.

Let me explain. Thank you for bringing that up. I mean, seriously, it's a bad word, passionate. But I care about this. I'll tell you why our best customers come to us before they launch on Kickstarter. Because logistics and all the money associated with getting moving a product, direct and indirect. Direct being the freight, direct being the warehousing fees and the picking and packing fees. The indirect being the customs duties. The value added taxes that differ from country to country. Right. That's real money. I recently like yesterday have a client with an upset customer in Canada because they didn't listen to us, we shipped the product and the Kickstarter company did not inform the customer of all the duties and taxes that Canada has. And they have a very complex tax system.

Yes, they do. I've had to deal with that before.

Three different taxes. Right. You go to Europe, you have the value added tax. Now we can prevent a lot of that and tell them in advance which country. And based on the country, we can give you the accurate for countries that are stable for Europe and Canada and stuff like that. We can give you preemptively so you can tell the customers, if you're buying from the Netherlands, it's going to be XYZ, I think it's 8. But Germany is 23%.

Yeah.

And you have to collect the money up Front. Right. Or you have to tell them when you go pick up your product, or FedEx, you'll have to pay the 8%, but you can give them the number upfront.

Yeah.

So it's all about managing customer experience.

Yeah.

So what I do is I preempt when I want my Kickstarter companies to start with us before, get our quote before they go on a campaign. So it's actually very costly for me because if I spend a lot of time educating them early, early stage, they use our quote and my consulting, we offer the free consulting service as a pricing strategy.

Yeah. And then. And so you do spend a lot of time and some of them never launch. And so you've spent a lot of time in that.

But it's important for them to do it right up front so there are no surprises. Because again, I care that they sell many, many units and then their backers then buy product for their friends. And they all backers should become evangelists.

Right.

It's very difficult to make a backer an evangelist if they get upset when they receive their product and they have to another 40% or 30% or whatever.

Yeah. And sometimes it costs so much more than the product itself that it's really. Yeah, in Canada.

Exactly. The product was 250 and they paid 140 in fees and taxes and brokerage and all kinds of things for one product.

Yeah.

And you know, first it's too late. If you come with. I mean, we can help you with moving forward. But my point is use what we give you early up front so you create the right pricing strategy so you can convert these leads and deals if you have increase sales and have a good customer experience.

Well, and Kickstarters are renowned for being late. Right. And so if you wait till the end to figure out who you're gonna work with to do this delivery stuff, and then you're gonna be surprised by all those costs. So this is what I've seen happen is then they go shopping around thinking they'll do better, wasting more time, and they don't do better because it's not a cost that has anything to do with which warehouse you're choosing. It's duties and taxes.

My worst story is a gentleman that called us in the last minute. We had an E bike with the lithium batteries. Lithium batteries are a big problem shipping across the world now. Right. I live with this every day. Right. And we have all the certifications. We know how to do this, we know how to coach them. But he came to the last minute and he didn't realize he was $150 off on what the real cost to move a product.

Oh, yeah.

He was losing $150 just on shipping per product. That was 15, 20 points because his bike was $900 to $1,300.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

Right. And we lost the deal because I can't fix that problem. Right?

No.

And he wanted me to eat that money, and I won't. So, I mean, that should have been upfront, and you should have addressed those real costs in your pricing strategy before you went for the launch to set the right customer experience. Because what is the true cost of your goods? It's not just what the factory gives you, but it's all these other shipping and packaging and.

Yeah, so much of that and customs.

And all these other fees that you may not think of, but we do, and we can help you do that.

So, again, this is guys and girls on this platform. This is why you're here. You're here to tap into this knowledge of having done this. And I was trying to look at the numbers. Oh, you guys did Pebble Watch. Yes. Which is pretty popular. And if you know anything about Kickstarter, if you explored anything, you had to have heard of Pebble Watch.

Right, Right.

And so, you know, we could have a whole episode on what we think all think about Pebble Watch because they made a whole bunch of mistakes. But, you know, that's in and of itself. But that was like 2 million units or something like that. Right. That's a huge, huge amount to have learned over and had a lot of experience and understand when you have that kind of critical mass of shipments and you start to understand what that means.

Exactly. And that is one of our true value adds, which is why we've had customers that have stayed with us for 12 years. Seoul has been with us. Swivel right now, Started on Kickstarter as well. Been with us for six years. We start small. We started with pebble with one campaign and then another campaign. Right. Second campaign, I think was 80,000 units or something like that.

Yeah, it was big, right? Yeah.

And then it was multiple countries. And so we then opened up your VIA facilities in Europe, in Hong Kong, in Australia and in Canada. And we then learned, and be frank, I mean, honest about it, we learned through Pebble. Right. So now we were actually getting their large, complex, multiple country, 100 something outcome 150 countries order list. And we built a system that would automatically disperse the product, and we would send that file to the manufacturer and they would package them according to the orders, and we would drop ship from China to all our five locations across the world.

And that's a really good point, that you have that capability to work with the manufacturer. And so for some people, this is what I found is. So I've been talking with a few brands that are on the platform here, and they were like, yeah, our biggest problem is UK and Australia and some of these other countries that we're doing. So I said, well, tell me a little bit about why. And they were like, well, it's all coming into our. Our warehouse in the US And I went, okay, stop right there.

Big mistake.

Right, Stop right there. Why are you bringing it from China to the US and not going directly there?

That's exactly what we do. I mean, right now I'm processing orders here, cleaning up. We do the processing of the orders here in the US because we have our account managers here and a customer service team here. And then we're sending the new CSV files and we're activating the different locations across the world. But the product is going directly. We're doing freight orders at night with Hong Kong and stuff and our freight forwarders, and we're moving product directly from Shenzhen to Europe to Australia, to Hong Kong to Canada, and it's not coming to the US So we're saving the bulk, Getting tremendous savings in bulk shipment and then doing the last mile from the local.

Yeah, yeah. It's so important because these factors are all impact that profitability. At the end of the day, when you start talking extra touching, you know, extra time. Time, extra time.

And then also, it's very difficult. This lady that I'm signing up right now, she's out of Bali, and I got to pick up product from Bali, Indonesia, and she knows her product and she says, paul, I've been so frustrated trying to learn about freight. And I'm like, you will never learn what we have developed. No. After 21 years in the business, I said, don't do it. Learn to trust me.

And there's also a difference, though, because it has changed over the years. Right.

It's constantly changing. Like with Trump coming into power right now and all his threat on tariffs, that is a threat. But what he's done, which is a huge shift, first time in 20 years, our brokers said they've never experienced this before. The customs now is getting very smart at putting the pressure on the broker to make sure the duties are declared on the right value. On the retail value.

Yes.

Oh, everybody's been skirting around using false numbers and False HTS codes and things like that, harmonization codes, tariffs and the wrong product codes. So they want to reduce that percentage based on the law. And that pressure is now on the brokers. Just like a CPA is going to be held accountable when you process your taxes to make sure you're doing the right taxes, the customers have switched that way.

Yeah. And that is an area that has been very, very sneaky. And those that need the system were kind of skirting it and those that didn't, didn't. And there was a profitability discrepancy in that.

Not anymore. So that's impacts your cash flow. So that impacts the cost of goods now that impacts your retail value, that impacts your bottom line. And we are here to help you make those right decisions. We're doing that kind of coaching.

There is so much that you could be coaching people on. And so, you know, the other thing that I really wanted to talk about is that, you know, people think, oh, it's just a bunch of boxes garage, it'll be fine like. And it's so not fine. The complexities of it keep you from doing the stuff you need to be doing in your business that could be growing that brand. If you are wearing hats and something that you are constantly learning and having to keep up on all the standard changes and all the document changes and all the things that are going on, that's going to become in and of itself a full time job for you and growing your brand will not be. And that is not a sustainable business proposition.

Exactly. And finding the right vendor.

Right.

I mean, right now I have another company. So to that point I chose not to work with the company because they were still after the Kickstarter campaign. They only got 250 orders. And he said, yes, I can do it from my basement in my garage in Alabama. Go ahead and do that. The other company though, on the other hand had a lot of orders, went with somebody else. I spoke to them in October, went with somebody else because they gave them a very flat fee. Oh, we don't charge you for storage because you're coming from Kickstarter. The product's going to come in and products going to go out. I'm going to give you a flat $1.50 pick and pack fee. Right. Cheaper than me all day long. But we can't handle returns. We don't know how to create the labels. We don't have the relationship with FedEx and UPS to manage that effectively. Right. We don't have the relationships to be able to change an Order on the fly. When it leaves my warehouse, I can change the destination of FedEx order on the fly before it hits the customer because they moved in there in the.

Summer vacation house, which happens on Kickstarters all the time. By the way, guys, if you don't know this, like this stuff happens, like figuring out where your packages are going to be going when you started your campaign is one thing, but all sorts of stuff and people don't respond.

People, they move, they lose jobs, they get divorced, right? All kinds of things happen when suddenly an address is no longer valid.

Right. Because this is a long term delivery system on Kickstarter. Right.

So expect 10% or something x percent of your orders. Not a big number, but it adds up if you're successful. Literally we are calling, we process orders in the first two hours of our day. The rest of the four hours, my customer service is processing orders on the fly. Problematic order.

You're making me write down the. Remember that I have not responded to an email on a Kickstarter that I backed quite a while ago and I still have not gotten my flip flops that come from this. It's a great 3D printed flip flop company called Weave Wearables and I forgot to respond to this email. The problem was, is in their case and it's a consumer problem. Right. They didn't work with their consumers on this is I don't have an iPhone, I have an Android and their app doesn't work on my phone. So I have to go borrow somebody else's phone, download their app, measure my foot and give it to them in order to get my shoes. Right. And to order to get it. So this is a problem. And this is why I guarantee you they have like three times the number of lack of response. Exactly. To do with them not having a great product.

It's a hassle for me to process the order, you know, and give them what I need non stock.

So you got to find the right vendor if you're growing. Now I've got a client who's coming to me because they have a lot of returns and their first three pl, which seemed easy and very cost effective, cannot handle the complexity of managing your orders and keeping your customers happy. And then also they don't do international and now the company's got to go scramble. Oh, we want to go to Europe. How do we go find a 3 pill in Europe? How do we go?

Well, and this is something that I think that is really good to point out to people is that look, I mean we're here to build a big brand. I mean, that's why you're here. That's why you're on this platform. You're here to build a bigger brand. So just cutting corners to start. Look, I'm all for doing lots of market proof testing and doing all of these things at the beginning, but not being realistic about what those costs are going to be, pricing them in, properly understanding them and having the right resources that can grow and handle the complexities as you grow. That's actually a strategy for more profitability later. Yes, it's going to cost you a little bit more now when you don't have as many orders, but it's still relative to how much you ship and how much you make.

It's always relevant. There's no extra fee because I only charge you for what I do. Right. Say logistics and fulfillment is way more than just a shipping rate. Right. DHL and FedEx, they've got these nice. They've got some cool. If you've got enough volume, one price for global chip fulfillment. But oh, by the way, you can't call and change orders on the fly. They're not going to manage returns for you. They're not going to any warehousing, they're not going to do any kitting, they're not going to do any product testing. I mean, there's a ton of things. There's so much more than just the shipping.

Okay. And so let me tell you that just straight off, guys, this is a problem. Ongoing being unable to go into your box and fix something. I have seen it happen time and time again from the biggest brands in the world.

Absolutely.

That if you don't have an ability. So I have seen companies have to send salesforce into all reps across the country, into staple stores to undo the boxes, open them up, fix something, add a part, close it back up, tape it back up and in the stores. So big brands make these mistakes too. To think that you're not going to come across these problems, you're kidding yourself. Especially when you're new to this process. There's going to be issues. You know, the lithium batteries. Oh my goodness. Like we wanted to test a product and you can't ship the battery across China.

Yeah.

So you can't go from one location in China to the other. You have to truck it.

Right.

You have to have somebody drive it for you. You can't do that. And so we couldn't even test the product with the battery that was going to get shipped with it. We had to test it with Packaging.

And what about packaging? Same thing, right. I recently had a client that the packaging that we told would be a problem. A high percentage of products got damaged in shipping. FedEx wouldn't cover the cost because they're not packaged properly. So now we got more different company in China to make better boxes and foams for the corners. And then we trucked them. It was a big box. It was like three by two by three or so in 18 pounds. So we trucked the nuke manufacturer, we trucked the boxes and the foams from one factory product from another factory in China to our warehouse in Hong Kong, hired day labor in Hong Kong and repackaged in the new packing. Guess what? We did this from here, from the Silicon Valley.

Love it.

The company owners are sitting in India, the customers are here in the Europe, and we processed it in China because we have a facility in Hong Kong.

Yeah, see?

And then we drop to three locations.

So critical, because I'm telling you, you can anticipate the issues and the problems that you're going to have. And if you have people who have lots of deep experience, lots of things that have gone wrong before, lots of launch landmines, we talk about the hazards of product launching. Right. They have all of these things going on and understand that, and they've come to that background information. They're going to be your fastest path to getting launched, to being successful with that launch. And that critical path that's necessary, saves you money in the end of the.

Day, makes you money. And also, please don't build too much product until it's tested by the customer.

You are speaking to the choir, because that is my number one. Prove it first. Right.

I got to tell you a story. I hope we have enough time.

Yeah, go for it.

So there's. I'm not going to tell names, but there was a company, one of the few early companies that have the electronic doors with the buttons, you can manage on your phone and lock your door and open your door with the iPhone and stuff like that. And they built 10,000 products. The first 2,000 came in, we shipped the first 200 out. We got about 150 back. So we had to hire electricians over here to open the box and redo the circuitry and stuff for that and update the firmware electronics. We did that and then five other bugs were created. But long story short, we processed 2,500 of these units here and put them back in the market and saved that first batch and then stopped the shipping of the second part of the rest of the 10,000. Then they did the rest over there. That for the first 2500. That left China off the 10,000 that were ordered. But we had to do that over here. It was too much time to ship it back and forth.

Yes, too much time lost.

So we built such a good reputation of doing that for people fixing the product. In fact, now we've got a headset company that's $750 headset and brain stimulator. We're actually doing some kitting. They work for them here that China sending to us to do the fine work. And we're sending back to China. Then they're putting it in the product.

I love it. That's so great. That's great. So you know, but that's important because sometimes, especially when you're doing something early on, like we have a couple of things, we call them hybrid products when they're like that, where we might be putting in a 3D print component into something and doing that here is still a little easier and a little more control over that. And then we ship that 3D print product over to China to incorporate into whatever else it might be going with them. A good example of this is we've been doing these 3D print perfume bottles. So there's an actual glass bottle, which you can't 3D print glass right inside, but the outside of it is 3D printed. So it's in a form and a shape. Then you can order a custom topper.

Oh nice.

So if you want your mom's initials on it for Mother's Day, you could have bought it or whatever that might be. And it has a stopper that comes with it, but it's just sort of generic. And then you would switch it out. And so you get to order it. And it comes with a card on how to order that. So it's super easy. But in order to do it, it was like we could have brought the glass product here and used two and put the 3D print product and assembled them here. Instead we went. Because 3D print items are so light, it's like easier for us to air freight them there right to the factory. Have them do it. Have them put it safely in the box, have it be ready to go. And it went direct to a store. So. Cause this was an in store tap. So it went direct to a store. But that's another option for you to be able to really test your product. If you have custom components and standard components you want to combine together, contact Paul, because this is a great solution. And there Aren't a lot of places that allow you to do that. And sometimes when we're starting up a product line, these are the things we have to do because we can't pay for expensive tooling and we shouldn't, we shouldn't be buying 10,000 pieces till we know the customer wants it.

Yeah, I'm so excited. I've got a Kickstarter company right now. Yesterday we had a conversation. The first 200 he's sending us, right. And then there's 2,000 after the feedback and then there's 10,000 after that.

So you have a little time.

Even the 200, we're airlifting 100 here and 100 to Europe. We're going to do two markets right. Simultaneously. And he didn't even allow people from Latin America and Africa yet because shipping their customs is a nightmare. Right. He said, let's fine tune, let's make enough money from the markets that are stable and then we'll go to markets that are not so stable.

Oh, that makes such sense.

It's all about business.

Well, this is the perfect opportunity, product launchers, for you to use the entire platform here with all of the experts that you have access to and work in a collaborative way. Because imagine what you can do if you have your package designer working with Paul to make sure that everything is packaged properly, going to meet all the standards and going to work if you have your products and factories and sourcing side of it, working with Paul to be able to make sure that stuff is going to be able to go the fastest path and most direct path to consumer or to the countries or whatever that might be. You're marketing people to be able to work with Paul and his team, to be able to decide how you're gonna price your rewards when you do your Kickstarter campaign. So there's so many aspects here that you could be collaborating multiple experts together with and you and your team with all of each of our experts, especially with Paul, because the cost factor is very, very large on the logistics and all that. Shipping, delivering, handling, all of these things are very, very large portion of it. And just thinking that, hey, I've got my cost good to go, is so wrong. And I can tell you that from every company, every product I've worked on in every category, that is never the case. Sometimes the best we do is double our cost of goods. Yes, that's the best we can do. And that's a lot of money when you think about it. So I love to get it down. My goal is always to see If I can get my logistics cost to be a third of my cost of goods, it's nice if it can, but whoa, that's hard sometimes, depending on the product. So depending on the product. Right. It's hard. But I like to try to do that because then I know that I have a lot of room to play that if things happen, if you get surprised in certain countries, you have room to play with that.

But it's hard just there. This lady from Bali suddenly realized she's got a 20% on average cost retail. 20% of retail cost for customs and duties. That's going to add on top of it. And usually the customer pays for it, but some of it she's got to pay for herself. Right. So what does that number look like? But that's a real number. And even my shipping didn't until we got to the stage where I said, oh, by the way, have you considered cash flow? Because when you move product to Europe, you have to pay that 20, 21% for the entire shipment in advance before the customer gets. As soon as it hits the way out.

Yes. And so that's also.

That's a business cash flow issue.

Business cash flow issue and budget planning. Because so often this is what we see happen, and part of why a lot of Kickstarters start faltering is that they didn't plan for enough money, so then they don't have enough cash flow to do all the product development and all the things that they need and then support upfront fees that they have to pay on that. And so they didn't plan that properly. So planning it and pricing, pricing, pricing your products once you have all the information is so critically important.

That's one of my taglines. Yes, it's a pricing strategy. I help you make logistics and order fulfillment quoting as a pricing strategy.

And it should be so. I am so excited for you guys to have access to Paul every month on the platform here. And there are going to be lots of many, many little links in this blog post because Paul has given you offers for his consult, ways to contact him about how to figure out your Kickstarter pricing. All of that is in the blog post that accompanies this video, but also in his expert profile. So at any time I want to remind you that expert profiles have links to all of our experts. Exactly how to get in touch with them, reach them, contact them directly. You're not going through us, you're going straight to them. We're just giving you it all in one place on the platform.

Great.

So so don't forget to use it. That's what it's there for.

Awesome. Hey, this has been great. I love what you're doing.

Thank you.

I wish you and everybody on your network all the best because, you know, each out of huge respect for the founders, the CEOs, the people that are starting a product, you know, make it personal. One of my taglines is all business is personal. Your customers, your evangelist customers that you'll be signing at the early stage. People care about why you're doing it. It that's part of the narrative. Stories sell. So tell your story, you customers, contact us. We're here to help you.

That's right. Well, thank you so much, Paul, and thank you product launchers for joining in. And Paul will be back with lots of great deep dive topics and big question and answer sessions because I'm sure you're going to have lots of questions tomorrow. So thanks again and we'll tune into the next office hours.

All right, thanks. Bye, everybody.

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