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How to Achieve Long-Term Success For Founders and CEOs | Mayur Sethi cover
How to Achieve Long-Term Success For Founders and CEOs | Mayur Sethi cover
The Marketing Misfits

How to Achieve Long-Term Success For Founders and CEOs | Mayur Sethi

How to Achieve Long-Term Success For Founders and CEOs | Mayur Sethi

1h18 |30/04/2025
Play
undefined cover
undefined cover
How to Achieve Long-Term Success For Founders and CEOs | Mayur Sethi cover
How to Achieve Long-Term Success For Founders and CEOs | Mayur Sethi cover
The Marketing Misfits

How to Achieve Long-Term Success For Founders and CEOs | Mayur Sethi

How to Achieve Long-Term Success For Founders and CEOs | Mayur Sethi

1h18 |30/04/2025
Play

Description

What if the secret to scaling your brand lies not in doing more, but in letting go?

Unlock proven strategies, expert insights, and game-changing tools to grow your brand and boost your sales here: ➡️https://marketingmisfits.co/


Uncover the mindset shifts, systems, and stories behind 8-figure exits with this Marketing Misfits episode featuring the electrifying Mayur Sethi. Discover why founders who focus only on their strengths could be holding themselves and their companies back.


Join us as we dive deep into:

- The three things every founder should focus on, and what you MUST delegate

- Battle-tested lessons from billion-dollar boardrooms

- Why instant gratification is killing e-commerce potential

- Real talk: how to build lasting teams (and avoid the VA trap)

- Powerful networking strategies most sellers overlook

- Creative product growth using psychology, partnerships, and leverage

- Hard-won cash flow lessons no one else will tell you

- A blueprint for transitioning from 7 to 8 figures…and beyond


Don’t miss the stories, laughs, and actionable gold you can use starting today. Listen, learn, and lead like a misfit!


⏰ Timestamps:

00:00 - Founders’ Fatal Flaw Exposed

00:34 - Hot Dogs & High Stakes Hustle

03:53 - Smart Money Moves & Lessons

07:40 - Small Brand, Big Leverage

09:26 - Inside the Boardroom Numbers Game: Myth or Mindset?


This episode is brought to you by:

- House of AMZ: Elevate your brand today at https://www.amazonseo.com/

- 8fig: Get 25% off 8fig off at https://8fig.co

- Stack Influence: Use code MISFITS for 10% off at https://stackinfluence.com/

- Levanta: Get 20% off Levanta's gold plan and book your call today - https://get.levanta.io/misfits


Ready to unlock the next level for your business?


Join the Marketing Misfits crew for weekly breakthroughs in marketing, creativity, and game-changing innovation. Don’t miss out!


Hosted by Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    People like founders have this weakness. They will focus on what they're really good at versus focusing on what is really good for the company. Your job as a founder, as a CEO, is to be the visionary or architecting systems or coaching your teams. If you're doing anything besides these three things, you need to hire someone and delegate it to them. Your watch of marketing misfits,

  • Speaker #1

    known for our...

  • Speaker #0

    from Kevin King.

  • Speaker #1

    Mr. Farrar, good to see you again. Back for another episode of the Marketing Misfits.

  • Speaker #2

    I've had many a hot dog between our last visit.

  • Speaker #1

    No, and you have. And you even got a website up for Marketing Misfits now, which is pretty cool. I mean, people can go to marketingmisfits.co and actually see, learn all about it. There we go. Watch us at work. See that we actually do work. We don't just have fun eating hot dogs in Iceland.

  • Speaker #2

    That was kind of fun, though.

  • Speaker #1

    Come on.

  • Speaker #2

    We have fun. We only have fun. That's all we do.

  • Speaker #1

    Sometimes that's all we do is have fun, but sometimes it's a little bit of work, too. That was a lot of work. Fun for you, but a lot of work for me. Hosting an event. Most people don't realize hosting an event is actually can be exhausting. it's a It's not just the behind, even though people are doing the behind the scenes stuff, just actually being the host. You know, you go to one of these Oscar shows or something, you see the host, the comedian up there. That's real work. You know, people think, oh, they're just up there saying a few lines. But you got to stay on point on everything that's going on. You got to be thinking on your feet. You got to be dealing with issues, introducing people. A lot of people, I didn't have an appreciation for that. Really, until I started doing it. Now, it's like, man, that's a real job.

  • Speaker #2

    It's a real job attending.

  • Speaker #1

    You're just getting yourself up. Like, what time are we starting? Norm's like, what time? 9 a.m. Well, I'll see you about noon. That's the time. I was up until 4 last night, eating, drinking, eating a hot dog.

  • Speaker #2

    Story of my life.

  • Speaker #1

    I sleep to kick in. And so... You did like that hot dog place, though. I told you. Remember, I told you in Iceland, it's across the street. It's actually one block across the street. But I told you you'd like that place.

  • Speaker #2

    So you know what? We should have a podcast with that guy. You know, marketing. He's got one little hot dog stand so famous that there's actually a hot dog stand in the Iceland airport. I don't know if you saw that.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I did. Yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    so I had another one leaving.

  • Speaker #1

    A replica. Did you get one in the airport too? Yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    Ashley Armstrong and me went over and grabbed a hot dog.

  • Speaker #1

    Did you? I thought of that when I was leaving. I was like, I bet Norm stopped there. I bet he did. I meant to text you, but I got busy looking for my gate or something. But I was like, I bet he stopped there and got one.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. Talking about events and going to events and, you know, just being part of an event, not only hosting, but actually taking part in the event and doing some networking and getting to know people. That's how we got to know, at least I got to know our next guest, which is kind of cool.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, he came to MarketMath, the last BDSS MarketMasters that I did. And I actually sat in the hot seat and I had his business analyzed by a group of experts. And then we started talking to this guy. And it's like, you know, sometimes the smartest people always are looking to get that edge. You know, there's people out there that think they know everything. And they're like, I got this. I don't need any help. I don't need a market master. I don't need a consultant or I don't need to hire. I know what I'm doing. But the smart people always are looking for that edge. And like, what am I missing here? and that's that's mayor our guest today he's been extremely successful in the corporate world then he decided to get out of the corporate world and uh go uh do entrepreneur stuff uh along with his wife and he's like i'm doing pretty good i have a pretty good idea what i what i what i know and we're executing well but where what are we missing where's our blind spot and that's why he came uh to market masters and i hope he got something i think i think he got something out of it. I'm pretty sure he did. uh that that's always i always like it when i see see that uh what i always say when you when you stop learning you stop earning uh and and i think that's that's wow that's good kevin you that's not that you meet me or did you come up with that no that's uh that's i don't know i heard that from somebody else i stole that from okay okay somebody else along the way uh i don't remember who but uh but it's it's true uh and that's why um some of us like you go to a lot of events i go to a lot of events where and i read a lot of newsletters you read a lot of different things, and we're always trying to... Make sure we maintain that edge. And I think that's what our guest today is doing. And it's going to be cool to talk to him. He's got a cool story.

  • Speaker #2

    All right. Well, why don't we bring him in?

  • Speaker #1

    We can do that.

  • Speaker #2

    Let's bring in Mayor Sethi. Hello, sir.

  • Speaker #0

    Hey, Norm. Hey, Kevin. How are you doing today?

  • Speaker #1

    We're doing great. As my buddy Mark would say, we're alive and kicking.

  • Speaker #0

    Great.

  • Speaker #2

    Or as I would say, I'm alive.

  • Speaker #1

    Hey, Norm's not kicking. If you see Norm kicking, you need to call 911. There's something. He's involved in convulsions or something. He brushed his teeth with the wrong tube.

  • Speaker #2

    I did.

  • Speaker #0

    Read the newsletter.

  • Speaker #1

    I did. I see. I read your newsletter. Ah,

  • Speaker #2

    there you go.

  • Speaker #1

    Hemorrhoid cream instead of Colgate, I see.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    That's branding. That's a branding issue because those two look the same. I mean, that's a marketing thing because I can see how you can make that mistake, the red and white. And if you're not paying close attention.

  • Speaker #2

    Did you hear about this, Mayor? I got home from Marketing Masters, so where I met you. And when I got home, I was really tired. It was like 3 a.m. And then I got up early and I walked into the washroom, bathroom. And I bought a tube of Travel Colgate when I was down there. I got into the bathroom. There was a tube. I put it on, same thing, white, started brushing my teeth. And when something feels really funny here, turned out it was hydrocortisone. Same tube. Same tube.

  • Speaker #1

    Is that what they call Bengay?

  • Speaker #0

    Don't start. Yeah. You had a very memorable brushing experience that day, let's put it that way.

  • Speaker #2

    I did, I did. But we're here for you. So, sir, you have a huge story. Like, I was sitting down, we started talking, and we ended up talking, I finished talking about an hour afterwards, but you have a crazy story. Can we get into it a little bit?

  • Speaker #0

    Absolutely. Absolutely. so I'm an engineer, that's what I am by profession and education, and I spent about 17 years in Silicon Valley designing things, doing stuff that touches almost everyone's life on a daily basis. And after, you know, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the industry and doing some billion dollar exits, I was kind of done. So my wife, who is a doctor, she's a psychologist, we both decided that let's focus on our kids and quit our jobs. And I remember the day I quit my half a million dollar job and I got a call from my mother-in-law and we had a very interesting conversation. But lo and behold, a few years later, we now own a multi-seven-figure brand. We are doing great. I have learned a thing or two during the last six years of my Amazon selling journey. And now I'm a angel investor in some of the brands i also have started a whole brand accelerator to help other small businesses leverage what secret sauce exists in these fortune 500 boardrooms and give them access to that and you know just help the common person grow versus making my billionaire venture capitalist and pe firms a few billion dollars more so i'm just taking a different direction in my life. after this 20 years of what I've done so far.

  • Speaker #1

    Well, you said secrets in these corporate ballroom rooms. Corporate selling and entrepreneur selling are two different animals. So how does that translate from a corporate secret? Or what's an example of a corporate secret from the ballroom that an entrepreneur can play? Because there's two different financial levels, two different, you know, it's a it's a rule by committee and rule by this and that. Can you give me an example of what you mean when you take these secrets from the corporate world and put them into this Amazon entrepreneurial world?

  • Speaker #0

    Sure, Kevin. So honestly, the secrets are more for a small business owner who is not in the C-suite of corporate world. But in the corporate world, it is something very common, right? So the rule of 40, that's how you buy companies, right? But if you bring some of that in the small businesses, a case in point example is understanding your P&L really well and figuring out what exactly are your leaks in the system and then going and fixing that. So half of the entrepreneurs do not even understand EBITDA. And then we start getting into... Gross margin less Amazon fees, gross margin less Amazon ads, gross margin less this, less that. You have all these ratios that in a second, anyone who has been in corporate for 10 plus years in senior roles will see that you have a problem in marketing, sir, or you have a problem in supply chain. But for a small business owner, they're still living in some software dashboard or some half-baked report from Amazon and believing that they're making so much money. or assuming that they have a problem in this area of business. And typically those areas of business are areas where they're either not comfortable or they are really like, you know, have no clue and they're dependent on others. And they believe that that is why it is wrong, because I don't know it. So it's a mind shift thing that happens for the small business owners.

  • Speaker #2

    You know, I sat in on a ton of business presentations with this uh, fairly well-known VC out there. And I was just lucky enough that I got to know him and he let me sit in on these meetings. And the turning point, you could see a great presentation, people not knowing what they're asking for, what they want, but hesitation when they didn't know their numbers exact. Like it could be a great meeting. And then all of a sudden it's like, are you kidding me? And it would turn the meeting just like that, you know, just forget it. that one goes in the trash.

  • Speaker #0

    Yep. Yep. And I recently had a brand that approached, applied to work with us and they wanted to grow 2X. And my team did an audit. And after that, I came and told them, listen, we can help you grow not 2X, but 3X. But that means you will have to invest in the next 180 days of inventory. Do you have that kind of capital? And the answer was, was no I do not. Can you raise that kind of capital? The answer is no, I cannot. Then stop dreaming about 2x, 3x growth because growth comes at a cost. You need to plan for it. It won't happen because of an accident or you wished for it, right? You need to put all the pieces in play to do that. And that's where I see a lot of small business owners, especially Amazon brands, are struggling. They're too distracted by the noise out there versus focusing on the four fundamental things and stop worrying about the vanity metrics.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, they're more focused on short-term than long-term. A lot of them don't have the patience or the funding to actually do long-term stuff. Or maybe you have to invest $10,000 in some sort of advertising campaign now that's going to only bring back $10,000 now. But the long-term, those customers are going to buy from you, hopefully, over and over and over. And a year from now, they're going to be profitable. But you've got to get from point A to point B without going under. And you've got to have a plan. And like you said, a lot of people, it's pie in the sky. I just want a 3X, but they don't understand what that takes. And why do you think that is? Do you think that's because a lot of people get into selling e-commerce, whether it's Amazon or Shopify or whatever it is?

  • Speaker #2

    I'd hustle, Kev.

  • Speaker #1

    Without business experience? They just want to quit.

  • Speaker #0

    they want to work for themselves and they just don't understand that stuff or you think they just so caught up in just running the business and wearing 27 different hats they just don't pay attention to it because it's not the sexy stuff i think kevin it's a combination of both like let's look at something very basic in order for me to get a minimum wage job uh right i still have to be of a certain age i have to go through certain schooling education right to get to the to get there. So, to get an entry level job, somebody is willing to invest 18 to 20 years of their life, learn language, maths, numbers, all of that, and then get a 40K job a year. And now you want to make millions but are not even willing to invest three years of your life. Isn't that a joke?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. The younger generation wants that instant gratification. They want to be rich now and not have to work for it.

  • Speaker #0

    Yes. And e-commerce does not work like that. Like if you want that instant gratification, maybe play on meme coins. And once you're broke, you know, take money from parents. But if you want to build something sustainable. You have to understand what market you're playing in. Is this a zero-sum game market? Is this a different kind of market? Is it a market for all? And then you have to take those actions, right? So if you're in e-commerce, understand this. On Amazon, unless there is a population explosion in the United States and we become like 600 million people tomorrow, the market is only so much. People will spend money. I'm not even talking about macros of recession or anything. You have a fixed population to which you have to sell a product. And now you want to expand into Canada and you start believing that, oh, I'm successful in the US. I will be equally successful in Canada. No, you will not. Because population of Canada is less than that of California where I live. You don't have as many people to buy products. So once you start paying attention to those fundamentals. you start to realize that a e-commerce is not complicated it is actually pretty simple but because people are so distracted with the new ppc strategy or new this or hidden that or or a shortcut that promises them the dream

  • Speaker #1

    outcome they're unable to focus on what makes a business money what's up everybody your good old buddies norm and kevin here And I've got an Amazon creative team that I want to introduce you to.

  • Speaker #2

    That's right, Kevin. It's called the House of AAMZ. And it's the leading provider in combining marketing and branding with laser focus on Amazon.

  • Speaker #1

    Hey, Norm, they do a lot of really cool stuff if you haven't seen what they do. Like full listing graphics, premium A-plus content, storefront design, branding, photography, renderings, packaging design, and a whole lot of other stuff that Amazon sellers need.

  • Speaker #2

    And guess what? They have nine years active in this space. So you can skip the guesswork, trust the experts. There's no fees. There's no retainers. You pay per project.

  • Speaker #1

    So if you want to take your product to the next level, check out House of AMZ. That's House of AMZ dot com. House of AMZ. I think on Shark Tank, they say the thing that's the two killers of any deal on Shark Tank. is when you don't know your numbers and you just said you need to know your numbers. And when you come in and you say, oh, this is a $1 billion market and I just need to capture 1% of it and we'll have X. And that's an instant deal killer to the sharks as well. So when you say that's a limited size market, what do you mean by that or how do you address that?

  • Speaker #0

    So Kevin, you brought up a great point. So let's go to that shark tank and I will weave it into the whole story. You know why an investor kills that I just need to capture 1% of the market and this will make us millions? That 1% market capture is the side hustle mindset. He is in it for himself or she is in it for herself to make that 1% and become financially independent. It is not an investment. It is a lifestyle business. What an investor is looking for is how well you transition. and make my money worth something for TX. Because not only you have to be successful, as an investor, I know that out of 10 of my investments, six will fail, two will be average, one will be good, and one will really knock it out of the park. So the one that has to knock it out of the park has to essentially pay for the other nine ventures I invested in. And if somebody does not...

  • Speaker #1

    mindset, right? And there a book about that 500 companies or something like that, where the guy buys 500 companies and he just hopes one of them becomes the next Uber and the other 499 doesn't matter.

  • Speaker #0

    Like SoftBank, look at their investment in Alibaba. And basically the investment in Alibaba funded the billions of dollars lost in WeWork. So that's how all these VCs and me coming from that Silicon Valley where you go through an aisle of shopping, you will meet four VCs. It's really a different world. We live in a very different bubble, but I'm trying to build some of that mindset to the small business.

  • Speaker #1

    So does that mean it should be a numbers game for the small entrepreneur where they should launch a lot? I mean, some people are subscribed, launch a lot of products and a couple of them will hit and the rest won't. It's that 80-20 rule. how do you do this on a small scale to leverage you leverage yourself i mean norm and i do this we have multiple businesses and multiple things or if one of them goes under we can still put food put macaroni with ketchup on the table um but if and get our coke zeros but a lot of people don't have it all their eggs are in like one basket or one product

  • Speaker #0

    So here's the thing. When you and Nam started, you did not have 20 businesses. You started with one, you scaled it, and then you start replicating it across. Where a small entrepreneur fails, even on Amazon brand, where they fail is they will be married to a product or a brand. You need to understand this is a relationship. The job of the brand or your business is to make your life better, not the other way around. that you are investing all of your eggs into one brand and if someone is starting someone who has not done like a 100k annual revenue i will say just focus on one thing learn from it make it great and then start replicating it people will be stuck on oh i have made this thing great let me replicate more of this like the exact same product and that's where you will hit stagnation and sometime you will be successful you won't lose money but you will not make you know millions and millions of dollars either so start from one brand and then once you have figured out the fundamentals of advertising of copywriting of psychology of selling pivot quickly to repeating that team as a lego block and going to another brand out of the whole market like we have one product which is card games and board games and i come from an app world right so for me going from up to analog was a switch that hey i'm pivoting all of our investments are in apps let's go into analog right people will still play card games and board games in future and then from there we pivoted into supplements right now we are pivoting into things which i know are guaranteed to happen like there is a guarantee that 50 of population will be women right always that's how nature works So if we can create products around women and pregnant women. We have a very high guarantee of people being available. That market will always exist. So launch there. Any brand that comes to us, we just classify them in a quadrant. People will spend money on relationships. People will spend money on getting ahead of everyone else. People will spend money on themselves. Or people will spend money to look great and shine, outshine. The fifth reason is charity where people just give away money to feel good and follow their spiritual path. Where does your brand fit? Figure that out. And then scale from there. And then launch the next brand in the second category. That way you create a perfect moat around your life and your bunch of companies that can grow. We started selling card games for couples. And then we created a game for married folks. And then we created a game for families. And now I have over 500,000 families that have bought our games. Guess what? I can remarket to the same set of companies if I'm selling a pregnancy product or a woman's product. So think how your next brand will build up on the current brand and start planning it out. And you have to plan out in terms of years, not weeks or quarters. If you are a business owner and you're still thinking in terms of quarters, you have not scaled enough.

  • Speaker #2

    So when you were planning your card game, had you already thought about the supplement?

  • Speaker #0

    No, the supplement game, like the whole supplement thing came into picture after I was having my card game at multi-million dollars. So my ARR was way around... three four million dollars that's when i said that okay now let's get into the next phase of life we have taken care of relationships where people spend money the next place where people spend money is health so can we create the best supplements out there and i got super lucky to you know come across friends in my you know circle who were medical doctors practicing in the States, they had supplements but they did not know how to sell it. So it's like, okay, let's partner up. You make the best clinically researched product and let me and my team sell it. That's like a marriage made in heaven. And yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    that's how we're seeing that a lot right now with partners like Shopify collective is kind of doing that. You know, that's exactly what they're doing. You've got a product. Let's, let's team up. They sell and you're seeing that, you know, a lot more on Amazon as well. But I think that was a really good play.

  • Speaker #1

    Nexus 2 at Dragonfish.

  • Speaker #2

    There we go. Coming soon.

  • Speaker #0

    And see, this is a very tried and tested model in the tech world, right? Pick any large technology company, they have literally stopped innovating everything from scratch because it has a lot of inherent risk. So what everyone is doing is they're acquiring smaller companies for their intellectual property and then bringing in the whole of their kimono of people and skills to expand it. Look at ChatGPT, for example. How many of us knew ChatGPT before Microsoft pumped in $10 billion into it?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, they did that after it kind of broke on the scene shortly after it, but that really blew them up. And now you got SoftBank, you mentioned they're putting $60 billion into ChatGPT. And then ChatGPT just gobbled up, was it Cat, not Casper, is one of these no-code softwares and they've gobbled up a bunch of people and rolled them in. as well. And then one of the guys at ChatGPT just went off, one of the co-founders started something six months ago and now he's about to get bought for something like $6 billion. It hasn't even come to market yet. The product even hasn't come out yet. They're just buying it because it gives them good technology and it gives them a leg up and gives them a jump start on everybody else in a hyper-competitive what-did-you-use-for-me-today industry.

  • Speaker #2

    Hey, 2000s all over again.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah,

  • Speaker #0

    it is. And it is no different than Amazon. Like none of the Amazon sellers like own their factories. So we have outsourced manufacturing as a service to China or now other countries because of all the tariff wars. Same way you can outsource innovation as a service where a small business or a small company is doing all the innovation, grunt work, proving that this thing can work, and then you go acquire them. It is way cheaper to run your own R&D versus just outsourcing innovation. Just for us, like if we were to set up a factory to build our own supplements, we will never launch them, right? So it's not...

  • Speaker #1

    It's all about leverage. Like you're leveraging these doctors and these people that your relationship, it's relationships and leverage that have a good idea and they developed some sort of pill or whatever it is. They just don't know how to market it. You know how to market it. So that's... That's how you grow quickly in business is by through partnerships and leverage.

  • Speaker #0

    Yes. And one thing which people forget about is investing in themselves. Like a lot of people told me that, oh, Kevin's market masters is too expensive. I cannot afford it. And I'm like, guys, you cannot afford to not attend it. Because while sitting there, not only on my hot seat, I learned about, you know, what to change in my businesses, listening to others. I still remember that memory that someone was talking about supplement space and I texted my cousin. She is a veterinarian and she does research in the States. And I said, listen, can you help me put together some great combinations for pet supplementation that has clinical research because you're doing all this research today. And with you and I and the money I have, we can create a company and launch a new whole brand, which is based on clinical trials on pet supplementation. Like go on Amazon, how many pet supplements exist that are clinically tested and tried on real animals? There is no regulation for it as well. Like for humans, at least we have FDA and stuff. For pets, we have very simple regulations. So whenever I see...

  • Speaker #1

    It's their property. So it's a different risk profile. Yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    Exactly. But I could not have come up with that multi-million dollar idea had I not chosen to invest in myself and building my network and attending your market masters. So honestly, I took 10 times more value just being there than from my hot seat. And my hot seat, it has not changed my life. It has changed the life of 10 other people. I've ended up hiring nine more people and building a whole team. man, and, implementing all those things that I have learned and that is showing up in my bank account.

  • Speaker #1

    I think that's a good point. I mean, Norm and I do this. I don't know. I have to look at my P&L, what I spent, but Norm and I spend a lot of money going to events. Me more probably so than Norm, or not probably, me more than Norm. But that's something that both of us, sometimes we both like, oh, we got to cut back.

  • Speaker #0

    We got to get our head down, but we keep getting drawn back to it because exactly what you say is where I get some of the best benefit, not from what the person on stage is saying or what it's from, what they might say, plus what I heard at lunch, plus what Norm and I were talking about last month. I'm like, wait a second, if we put this and this and that, it's a brainstorming thing. But if I wouldn't have put myself in that situation, these ideas would have never come or these opportunities would have never come. And that's... the big benefit and is that worth you know you paid for market masters the example you're giving there is that's five thousand dollars and you know next year it's going to not it's going to nine thousand dollars um and a lot of people are going to be hesitant to pay that like nine thousand dollars you got to be freaking out your mind uh

  • Speaker #1

    there's no way i can go to some of you on the scale at even twenty thousand dollars i i i appreciate that people need to get that right like Like we call this in the boardroom as network effects. Right. Understand this, to get close to someone, people will donate $100,000 to a cause or charity just to be invited to a dinner. Why are we going in those dinners? To get access to people. Yeah. You won't get your next life-changing idea at a metro station waiting for your train or buying a hot dog. But your chances of getting that idea and people who can change your life is way higher if you are in a room with 70 other entrepreneurs who each can spend $50,000 or $10,000 to be in a place. And you have to surround yourself. Amazon selling is a very lonely world. We are all living in our own small bubble of thinking, oh, this is good and this is bad and letting Twitter or Facebook messages. Facebook post decide your mood for the day that, oh, why did Trump do this? Like everyone is crying so much about the new tariffs. I see this as a big opportunity.

  • Speaker #0

    I do too.

  • Speaker #1

    Right. It's going to screw a few people,

  • Speaker #0

    but there's a few people that have something in transit where they could, you know, it could upset the status quo briefly. But I see it as a massive opportunity.

  • Speaker #1

    So, Kevin. I had three shipments in transit before when Trump started increasing tariff all the way to 245%. My next shipment will come sometime in the next 20 days. Guess what? The total impact for my business is hardly transferring 18% of my selling price to the customer. Just by increasing that price by 18%, I am making same amount of margins as I was making in the past. So it is very easy to be, you know, distracted by all these news and media and get it. Like news sells because of distraction. And if it is happy, it is not news. It has to be sad and bad to be called a news, right? But look at the opportunity. All the Chinese sellers that were undercutting large businesses, they would now be under scrutiny. They will be pivoting to other countries where it is easier to sell than in the United States. They are making a budget. They can sell it in the UK as well as they can sell it in the US. So Trump literally outsourced some of our business problems to the rest of the world by putting such tariffs on China. My brand lost $1.2 million due to Temu and people literally copywriting, copying my copyrighted stuff and selling it for like $5 on Temu. Now we won't have to worry about all of that. A lot of small players on Amazon will fold shop. The cost of PPC will go down because if I have to put money from my P&L for tariffs, guess where it is coming out of? I do not control the 15% of Amazon. I do not control the fulfillment fees of Amazon.

  • Speaker #0

    the only thing i control is my ppc costs and i don't know how many people have told you this but we are seeing across the board in my agency the cost per click is going down hey what's up everybody kevin and norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors eight fig let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for amazon sellers that's right it's called eight fig on average sellers working with a fig grow up to 400 percent in less than a year

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  • Speaker #0

    That's 8-Fig.co, 8-Fig.co. See you on the other side. Well, you had, was it Timu and Sheen just pulled all their advertising from Google? Yes. I think it was, was it Timu or was it Sheen? I can't remember. One of those was running 600, no, 60,000 campaigns, 60,000 different ad campaigns on Google. And as of yesterday, at the time of this recording, they were down to four, from 60,000 down to four. And the same thing, I haven't, I was not unaware of the same thing happening on Amazon, but you just. confirmed that the same thing is happening on amazon uh where these guys are they're bailing out and going elsewhere now they're just getting creative on but on on reducing the value of shipments and playing games around around uh how they value these things and that's just going to they're just going to get caught in a in a web of uh problems there you can see a lot of these chinese people doing that uh chinese sellers doing that that are going to get their stuff confiscated held up at the border um So, yeah, it's interesting times. I think this is a time for great opportunity. What's it, Warren Buffett or whoever always says that the down times are always the best times to invest. That's true. Something along those lines. And you look at even what happened with Apple. Apple's down, I think, 4% year over year right now. But recently, when the tariff stuff was announced, their stock took, what was it? I forget, it was a huge hit. Hundreds of billions of dollars value disappeared. And then as soon as the hold was put on, 90-day hold on electronics or whatever it was, almost all that value came back instantly. The people that bought on the low just made a boatload of cash.

  • Speaker #1

    Apple switched some of their manufacturing during COVID from China to India. And when when the title floor was announced. They airlifted 1.5 million iPhones, iPads, MacBooks from India just to get over that threshold of 12 AM.

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, really? Did they?

  • Speaker #1

    1.5 million devices. That's like worth six weeks of inventory for what sales we do in the States. And that gives them enough time to do all the, you know,

  • Speaker #0

    While everything's sorted out.

  • Speaker #1

    Prepared for the sorting things out. Like how many of us knew about bonded? warehouses before the tariff war.

  • Speaker #0

    Most people didn't. They never even heard of a warehouse where you could store it. Or these DTZs, these trade zones like in Dallas, it's a big one.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes.

  • Speaker #0

    Where you can just store stuff tax-free.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #0

    I was just at a mastermind and one of the people there, she was like, I live in one of these areas in Dallas. You know her, Norm Rachel. She's like, I live in one of these free trade zones. If anybody has some pallets they want to store in my garage, I think I can store six pallets for you in my garage, so just let me know. It's tax-free. I was like, you go, girl. Shout out for brother out.

  • Speaker #1

    And essentially, Kevin, this is warehouses and companies pivoting as well. So we in the corporate boardroom know this thing exists for many, many years.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    When you invest into art and physical products, you don't bring that art onto US soil because then you will incur taxes. So you keep it in these tax-free zones to not pay any taxes or duties or tariffs on whatever art you're investing in. And art gives you a 37% return versus, you know, S&P 500. Suddenly these companies figured that, oh, with this new tariff war, we have...

  • Speaker #0

    hard but we can we have the license so we can add it to more buildings in the same vicinity and you know offer it as a service to others and that is what is happening today everyone is hearing about them when you look at even was it medicine uh most generic medicines in the united states come from india and china but that's by volume by sheer number of units sold it's india and china but by dollars actual dollars it's ireland Ireland provides most of the medicine, the quality medicine to United States. Ireland and Germany are the two big ones. They supply actually dollar-wise the most, not China or India. So there's a lot of these things that are out there that people... The corporate world has people studying this stuff and they know these trends, they know all this stuff and they get ahead of it. Versus the individual entrepreneur, this is new to them and it's like a new thing and they're not prepared.

  • Speaker #1

    Absolutely, Kevin. I know people at Dell and Amazon and then just how you fold a box off a laptop to ship it out. When you do it at that volume, you can save millions of dollars. Like when we designed an algorithm for FedEx where no FedEx turn will take a left turn, we designed the route in a way that it always turns right. Just that no left turn for any FedEx truck reduce their fuel cost by $80 million a year.

  • Speaker #0

    FedEx does the same thing, right? I mean,

  • Speaker #1

    sorry, UPS. Eventually every IP is sold to others. So we created a curbside pickup for Home Depot when COVID hit and then sold that solution to Walmart and Lowe's and Best Buy and everyone else, right? So when you build an IP, you then package it and resell it. That's what tech companies do.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, airplanes did that too. They took out, was it EasyJet or whatever, Ryanair? They took out the magazines, the little catalogs that are in the back seats and took out the... the holder or whatever, and just that alone adds millions of dollars in savings of jet fuel because of the weight or something. These little things make big differences long term.

  • Speaker #1

    They do. They do. And how do we bring that to the small Amazon seller? Look at an Amazon seller, just asking them, how much do you spend on software? I'm like, if you give me the right answer, I will give you one month of service free, because I know you won't be able to answer it right. People are spending tens of thousands of dollars because they sign up with this software and that software and that software unable to do anything right right they will have these swiss army knives and whatnot and then at the end of the year they did not have the dashboards they wanted they did not have access to the data they wanted they tried out a bunch of shiny new software for one feature or two features and they wasted so much of their dead weight right it's the magazine weight on your aircraft So then... If you can just optimize your software stack in an agency, if you can just optimize your PPC spend, your operations, the way you're running your supply chain, you can easily add 8% to 10% of EBITDA for a million-dollar ARR company.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, but what about a lot of sellers? They'll go and they'll have this magical VA. So a lot of these apps are being used by these magical VAs that soon as you hire them for $4 an hour, they're an expert in Facebook, Google ads, everything Amazon. So I think there's a fallacy there that people think. They hear, go and get a VA. Also, when you see all these ads, just recently, just watching YouTube, what pulls up on my ad or on my feed, is always, always something to do with rags to riches in 30 days. And that's bringing in all these people, like we were talking about a bit earlier on, about these people and their expectations. Well, your expectations are going to be so high because of these stupid videos that are out there saying that you could do it in 30 to 60 days, but they don't show you the systems. And I do want to get onto systems in a second, but these VAs, I think people have to show people about VAs and what they can do, because you might have a whole series of part timers, not just one general VA that is super VA. You know, I don't know what you think about that. But then let's talk about systems rather than SOPs.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes, Tom. So... Just like there is no magical pill that I can eat and become healthy, I have to do like five other things in five areas of my life. Same way, there is no magical VA, no magical person that can make your business successful, right? You have to first, like when I was building my accelerator, the first person I hired was an HR person. Because the only job was to find the top one percentile of people that work at our agency or our accelerator, right? You need, when you're going and hiring out a VA, most of the people, what are they doing today? If they're super cheap, they will just post off a job on Facebook groups and hope and pray that they will find someone magical. Or if they are a little sophisticated, they will go and go on onlinejobs.ph or Upwork and try to post their jobs there and get someone in hopes of a magical person shows up that will change the business. Now, some of them do get lucky because they would have offered a lot of money, not knowing what the market rate is, and accidentally picked up an experienced person who comes with their own processes and kind of improves the business. But in 95% of the cases, what happens is you are hiring someone who is not very experienced. You have no systems in place to hire in the first place. So you hire someone random. And then at best, you will have an SOP, which is nothing more than a linear set of instructions that do this, do that, do that, and get the work done, which is what you're doing today. So there is no enhancement in your business. It is just maintenance of your business. I recommend people working with a different mindset if you are planning. And this is where I think agencies, accelerators and brands have a place of coexistence. We need to educate the business owners on how to approach hiring. how to spend a thousand dollars in just hiring someone good before you know onboarding someone onto your company that thousand dollar may seem like a lot of money but it will seem like nothing when you onboard someone who's charging you you know 1500 to 2000 dollars a month so that's like a 18 to 25k annual salary and that someone is delivering new business worth half a million dollars Will you care if I got half a million dollars in extra revenue that, oh, I invested a thousand, two thousand dollars and doing the culture fit and the assessments of the real skills before, you know, feeling for it and figuring it out. Oh, I think this person can do it. So that's the big difference. People are not thinking in hiring system. They're just thinking of hiring as a task. It is not a task. You're getting people that will build your life. like if you treat your business as your baby, then your employees are like the mothers of that baby.

  • Speaker #2

    Okay. I saw, I'll give you an example. I don't know. I think it was the first marketing masters. So I sat there and there was a person, no names, taking a ton of notes. And I got talking to them over a couple of days, like the first day they spent there taking notes. Second day, they took a lot of notes and I was asking them about it. they had no clue how to implement it's great that you came and i'm saying this is for anybody who goes to an event or whatever but if you're in a hot seat or if you're taking notes and you're taking all the notes and you're only going to be as good as if they're like you that you put it into play like there's a few people that put it into play but i can guarantee you that there's going to be a few people that go spend a lot of money and do nothing with it they're intentions are great, but they have no actions. And part of the actions is getting a system in place where you get the right person to understand, go out there and try like you did with the HR person and then hire the right people. And a lot of smaller, even intermediate sellers don't understand that. There's people doing a million, 2 million, $3 million a year. They're happy and they still don't have a VA and they don't understand that they could bring that up to 10 million or whatever it is with just a system to put in place. And like you said, not an SOP, a standard operating procedure is nothing except the steps on paper, how to do it. But nobody has buy-in, nobody has the definitions of how to do it, who to report to, quantification, and that's a big problem. But they want to do it on the cheap and that sucks.

  • Speaker #1

    It's again understanding the difference between I'm doing an investment or I wanted something as a cheap. And the biggest challenge is a lot of small business owners do not believe in themselves. They feel that they were lucky to be successful or, you know, some things happened and they were successful. Like if I was to believe in myself, if I can take the right decisions, you know, two years in the past. to create a $3 million business today, I must be taking the right decision by working with a system, implementing a system and spending $10,000 today that will result in $10 million tomorrow. We tend to forget that story really quickly, like learn from your own success. You started from zero and created a multimillion dollar business. You can create a 10, 20, 100 million dollar business. It is not difficult. These people who are running billion dollar companies that do not have a horn on their head, like my exits are worth over 8 billion dollars. Do you see a horn on my head? No, I'm just the same as you are like anyone else. Believe in yourself and if you bought in the right point, norm like when I was on the hot seat I realized after taking all those notes that I do not have these skills what did I do I spent the rest of the three days talking to all the smart people in the room figuring out who are your resources how are you hiring I got someone to hire my first employee because I did not have that skill of hiring someone in HR I know how to hire an engineer but not an HR person so guess what I go to an agency pay them a money to get the best person onboarded and then I use this person to onboard the rest of my team. There are so many great agencies out there that can help you find the right talent with the right skill set but then do not expect a $700 VA. Good resources cost money in every economy in every country. Invest in that and you will see the return immediately. It's like within 90 days you see your returns so do it.

  • Speaker #2

    And make sure you have the cash flow, right?

  • Speaker #1

    If you're a business owner who does not understand cash flow, then you are nothing more than a drunk driver driving a Ferrari. We are waiting for an accident to happen.

  • Speaker #2

    I got a story about not only cash flow, but one of my first businesses that I was going to sell. And this is one of the things you don't expect. So we had no idea this was happening, but every night we'd be working late. Okay. We'd be, that's, Hey, that's what we did. We got in early. We worked extremely late all the time, five days, six days a week. We didn't realize that that just killed our deal. And the reason why they came over and they said that it was an unrealistic number. If we were the people driving the company and we were working that hard. that they thought that the numbers at the end of the day were driven by the wrong numbers and they canceled the deal on us, which was unbelievable to me. But I understand it now.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes. And I think all the business owners, right, anyone who is doing less than, you know, 50 million a year. This is what they should focus on. Your job as a founder, as a CEO, is to be the visionary or architecting systems or coaching your teams. If you're doing anything besides these three things, you need to hire someone and delegate it to them. I still know people who are like in the top three in baby product category on Amazon, doing millions and millions. and still having trouble giving up on the design part. Oh, I like this image like this. And I'm like, why on earth are you spending your time in this design of your images? I know it worked for you five years ago when you started, but today you should just have a creative strategist do all of that for you. And you should worry about only one thing. How many stacks did you test this month? What was the change in my click-through rate and conversion rate? If your graphic designer cannot answer these two fundamental questions, please fire your graphic designer. I do not care how great they are in Photoshop or Canva or whatever. We are here running a business. We are not here running an art shop selling an artistic thing. Like if you want to do that, change your business. And when I showed how her competition, which was like ranking 6 or 7 in the top 10 in baby category, is now breathing on their neck. by capturing all of the market, that's when she realized, oh, I should have focused on other things of business. People like founders have this weakness. They will focus on what they're really good at versus focusing on what is really good for the company.

  • Speaker #2

    Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Lavanta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it.

  • Speaker #0

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    So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta, L-E-V-A-N-T-A dot I-O slash misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits. You know, back in 1995 is when I had a hyper growth company, first hyper growth company. And I was going crazy. So I went through the E-Myth Academy and tried to systemize everything, right? And one of the first things I realized is delegate, delegate whatever you can. And the hardest part for me was I'm a perfectionist. I still am, but I have to let that go. So I'll give it to, you know, whatever it is. And if there's a mistake, if it's not the right color, I let them own it. They know what they need to have. They know what the brand story is. They know what the creative brief looks like. But if it's slightly out, if they make a spelling mistake, I speak up, you know, but I just got to let them do it. And my perfectionism has to take a backseat.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes.

  • Speaker #2

    You know, but. They still have the guidelines of trying to be a perfectionist. But, you know, it's just if you try to do it all yourself and nobody can do it right, then you got a big problem. You'll never grow.

  • Speaker #1

    And this is the second step. Like after people have hired their one or two VAs and they get into hiring like remote specialists or employees, the biggest challenge is you will try to micromanage them because you feel imperfection. And guess what? If someone is really good at their work, they will hate being micromanaged. Even if you were able to implement systems to hire someone great, you won't be able to retain them. And as a result, you will lose that person, you will lose that momentum. Like I have this game in my background, this is like one of my wife's game. We had a spelling mistake on the box.

  • Speaker #2

    On the box?

  • Speaker #1

    On the box. The main image has a spelling mistake. Somebody spelled procrastination. We had a game called productivity versus procrastination. And the graphic designer spelled procrastination wrong. If I was managing all of it, it would have never happened. It did happen. Do I care? No, I care more about the hours I saved and invested in other parts of business. That even if we had a mistake like that, it is all right. We will fix it on the next lot. So get out.

  • Speaker #2

    Unless it was the first letter.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #2

    It's like with an M.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. I have had zero Amazon complaints on spelling mistake on my packaging. Like we think of it too big because we are living in that bubble. People don't care. We are all under that spotlight effect. And that's what is, you know, making us micromanage and focus on things that do not matter. and ignoring things that will really decide the fate of your business and your life.

  • Speaker #2

    That's so important.

  • Speaker #0

    What's that saying? An imperfect product now is better than a perfect product later or something like that?

  • Speaker #1

    Absolutely.

  • Speaker #0

    Something along those lines.

  • Speaker #1

    I'm getting all these sayings from today. You've been really, what, you got a custom chat TPT sitting there? Say, oh.

  • Speaker #0

    No, I just, I read, you know, in my newsletter, I have something called parting shots. And so I'm always looking for little sayings. I'm always looking for little sayings.

  • Speaker #2

    I guess it's this effect. All of us are bored. There is no insulation of, you know, thoughts, plans, money.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #2

    It's all hyperactive network.

  • Speaker #0

    So, and now you decided when you left corporate world to sell on Amazon, you didn't need to do this. I mean, you are financially set based on what you've said, but you wanted something new to do, something, you know, a way to help other people in life. And I think that's one of the reasons you've told me that you started this is that you wanted to give back and like, how can we help people? Your wife was a psychologist. She knew how to do this. So you started. a game games are big on amazon but it's also super competitive there's tons of these relationship card games and and you know i went through uh counseling with my ex-wife and stuff and we had some of these games and she would never play them because it made her feel uncomfortable so that's probably one of the reasons we're divorced right now but um but they they they there's a ton of so how did you use psychology to market this um differently than what other people are doing on Amazon and to grow this into millions of dollars in a highly competitive marketplace. And I think you said your wife really didn't want to go on camera. I think you said your market master, she didn't want to be the face of the brand. And so you're struggling with some ways to handle that. What did you do that other people missed? Made you success highly successful pretty quickly

  • Speaker #2

    Kevin. It was just sticking to the fundamentals So when we launched are you right up me or my kids do not have to work for their life We have made enough from tech. I wanted to give back to the world and we had some divorce going on in person family and Tanya was seeing those lines, you know in her clinic and we said let's help people here this is where we'll have a lot of impact if we can give the gift of beautiful relationships that's the most impactful thing we can do like i can write a six-figure check to some charity but that is not impact it will have you know i just gave away something i have too much of but giving my time energy and life and thoughts to you know solving for something is what we did so we never wanted to be the number one you know brand on amazon or anything like that This was all how can I reach to 1 million families and help them live a more fulfilled life in their relationships. All of our card games, they were tested with psychologists and therapists in their clinic doing counseling before we even placed the first mass order to China to give it out in production. So we created a beautiful... product on day one before we even launched it. We had real human feedback that we incorporated into our games. So having a great product is essential if you want to sustain your success. Otherwise, we will all end up with, you know, those fidget spinner kind of stuff. They go and dump. Now, once we had our great product, we focused a lot on ranking on Amazon. on how do we get in front of and again the objective was not the ego stroke that my product is in the top three the objective was how can i get in front of a lot of people and the only way to do that was organic ranking so we did a combination of how does algorithms think and that's where my you know engineering and data background came into picture where i understand how algos work how well How will a software developer write an algorithm? What kind of checks and balances they will put in an algorithm that has to scale millions of people? And it is very basic. You need to have the right set of keywords. You need to be desirable and discoverable. You know, if I was to put it in one phrase, how do you make it desirable? Do a visual storytelling. All of us are so focused on the best image quality. What we are not focusing on is what is the visual story you're telling with your images. You can have, you know, I can take an expensive camera and take a nice angled shot, you know, for a product. It will not convert if I do not have good visual story. So focus on, you know, your best image quality should be on main image. That is like the hook for your click through rate to get people on your listing. But my design team has one rule. If there was no text, no bullet point, no description on the listing, how will you sell this product with just images? And humans are lazy. Like, we do not have the patience or time to go through all the bullet points. Like, all those bullet points and titles and descriptions are written for AI to figure out what this product is. You are basically training the AI first so that your AI understands what this thing looks like. And then you take it forward to, you know, your people. Norm, you were saying something before I said my thing.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I was going to say, Kevin does a... a great presentation on psychology and one of the things is sound the other is just visuals and if you ever have a chance take a look at Burt's Bees and they do images like this goes back five six seven years ago where they never put any no bullet points no nothing was on no text copy was on their images it was just if you wanted chocolate it was the more savory unbelievable looking image about chocolate. or honey or whatever it was. And yeah, that should just stand alone. So I agree 100% with what you're saying.

  • Speaker #2

    Thanks for validating that, Norm. The second thing is a lot of- Send me a certificate in the mail.

  • Speaker #0

    You'll get a certificate. Do I?

  • Speaker #1

    Do I get Mayor's certificate of validation? There we go.

  • Speaker #0

    You can put that on your LinkedIn profile. Certificate of validation from Norm Farrar. You've made it now. You've accomplished everything you could accomplish in life.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. The other thing is, you know, feeding A9 with the right signals. So a lot of us look at any, you know, YouTube guru trying to sell their course on how to sell on Amazon. They will say buy 500 units and you can make it a million dollar game. Amazon only cares about them and their branding. The Amazon.com brand, right? If you do not have enough inventory in place, Amazon will kill your traffic because they do not want their customers disappointed with the stocked out product. So most of us are. not keeping enough inventory within the Amazon ecosystem that Amazon is aware of. Like I have four warehouses and I consolidated everything into AWD. And I only have one warehouse for, you know, if things were to go south. But everything else is either an AWD or FBA. When you have that level of inventory, you can scale up very quickly. One of my products got suppressed due to a dull thing and it was like a whole black hat attack on my brand. But the minute the search suppression was removed, we went from selling 10 units a day to 800 units a day. And you can do that. Anyone can do that. All you need is a good product, decent reviews, and a well-thought-out PPC strategy. And people are only thinking in terms of keywords when it comes to PPC. Think in terms of context, not keywords. So for our supplement client, they have a supplement which protects eyes from the blue light, which comes from the screens. Instead of focusing on the blue light blocker keyword and making a $13 bid on it, we created a campaign, a sponsored display campaign, where you can target people who are buying blue light blocking glasses. It's a sunglass industry thing. It has nothing to do with supplementation. But guess what? My customer's intent is to protect their eyes from blue light. They do not know it today that there is a capsule that they can pop to get the same desired effect. They're only aware of blue light blocking glasses from their optometrist. So we started targeting that audience. The ACoS of that campaign was 2000% and we don't really care. The result, the number of subscriptions went up by 250% in less than 4 weeks. Overall, we operated that one ASIN at a healthy tacos of 16%. So you have to think outside of the box. Do not over-rotate on keywords or writing the perfect... title or bullet points the ai is way smarter than you or i will ever be to do that that has like a thousand minds behind it the ai knows that shit hey

  • Speaker #0

    kevin king and norm farrar here if you've been enjoying this episode of marketing misfits thanks for listening this far continue listening we got some more valuable stuff coming up be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say.

  • Speaker #1

    I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes! That being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.

  • Speaker #0

    Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm.

  • Speaker #2

    Focus on what is the intent of the customer? How can I serve the customer? with the problem they're trying to solve. Do that with your images. Put some words in your listing so that AI understands that context. Like the text on your listing is basically to train AI. And then use all the free tools or paid tools like PPC and traffic to communicate that to your engine. And once you figure out one engine of Amazon, start thinking about how does TikTok work? What is the business TikTok is into? You can take some of your learnings and implement it to TikTok. Like I learned so many things from YouTube and then started implementing that on Amazon because, you know, like Dan was there at your event. I missed that, Kevin. but End of day, it is the same set of engineers. There are only like those, you know, 10,000 engineers who are writing these code, whether they work for Amazon or Google or, you know, Meta, they're just changing jobs. The way in which they think, the way in which they were taught and trained does not change. And once you figure that out, you can transfer a lot of logic from one platform to another to be successful in whatever thing you're doing it. And that can only happen when you free yourself up focus on three roles of being a visionary or an architect or coaching your team and not worrying about being having the perfect you know image or the perfect words and keywords and all of that you have to delegate all of that to your team trust your hiring process that you've had the good people and then focus on all these other things you can do as a entrepreneur That's where the transition happens between seven figures to eight, nine figures. That's the transition point.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. I guess we should leave it at that. We're at the top of the hour, and that was fantastic. We're actually past the top of the hour. So I got one question for you, Mayor. At the end of every podcast, we ask our misfit if they know a misfit.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. I will recommend getting in touch with the Karen. Karen attended one of the BDS's events as well. She was in the first think tank, Market Masters think tank. And her story is so inspiring. She's a cancer survivor, started her company after, you know, hitting in her late 50s, early 60s, and scaled it to a multi-million dollar brand. And she's doing great. Like, she's an inspiration. And such people belong in this marketing disputes podcast.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. So we'll reach out for you to get her information. And that's it. Kev, anything else to say?

  • Speaker #0

    No, that's been great. The only thing we didn't talk about was that Netflix algorithm. That's getting me to watch that crazy stuff. So I'm not sure who's behind that, but that's for another day.

  • Speaker #1

    We'll bring you back for that one. Yeah. All right, sir. We're going to remove you and us, but don't click off because, uh, uh, we got to bring you back in a second. Okay. All right. I'll see you in a bit there. Perfect.

  • Speaker #0

    Always interesting on the Marketing Misfits. You never know what direction we're going to go or what we're going to talk about. We have some really good guests that come in, some really, really smart people like Maior that have a really interesting background and are applying that to the e-commerce and marketing world in big ways.

  • Speaker #1

    And just think about the guests that are coming up. They're going to be- I know.

  • Speaker #0

    They're the guests.

  • Speaker #1

    We got a whole bunch.

  • Speaker #0

    We got a lot coming up. If you are... Not familiar with the Marketing Misfits podcast. You should be. We've been doing this coming up on a year now. This actually, I think, might be episode 50. Yeah, it's April 30th of 2024 is when we launched it. You know, the average podcast makes it to seven episodes. And Norm, we should give ourselves a pat on the back. We made it to 52. I can't reach.

  • Speaker #1

    I'm lost. I hurt my shoulder doing that.

  • Speaker #0

    Connie. Pass you on the back. Okay.

  • Speaker #1

    Okay.

  • Speaker #0

    But no, you should go back and listen. There's been some amazing guests on. And even I've gone back and listened to a few of them. Like, wow, that was a really good conversation. Because when we're doing this, you know, you and I are in the moment where sometimes we're thinking, like, what are we going to ask next? Or where is this going? Or where can we take this? But when you just sit back and you just listen to it, whether you're in the car or you're working out or just chilling at your house, smoking cigar. It's a whole different perspective. And, you know, some of these episodes are like, I've actually been like, damn, Norm, that was a pretty good episode.

  • Speaker #1

    There is gold.

  • Speaker #0

    That we did there. And soon, if you don't have, you know, some of these episodes, we go over an hour. And I know not everybody can listen to an hour, even if you're doing it in 2X. And if you've made it this far, that means you're a dedicated listener. We're actually going to be having a newsletter come out this summer, Marketing Misfits newsletter, that will actually summarize some of the content. from our guests as well as some additional content. So be sure to keep a lookout for that at marketingmisfits.co. It's not CO, right, Norm?

  • Speaker #1

    It's not CO. It's been a year. It's been a year.

  • Speaker #0

    I finally got it. I'm like a dog. You've got to train me with a treat over and over and over, and then I finally figure it out. But if you want to check out some of those back episodes, Let's just look on... Check them out right here if you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple Podcast or maybe you're watching this on YouTube. There's tons of episodes just right down there below or over here somewhere where you can check out additional episodes. And if you like this episode with my or any other episode, be sure to forward it to a friend who you think might get interested in listening to it or gain something from it.

  • Speaker #1

    And guess what, Kev?

  • Speaker #0

    Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    we're going to go mining for that gold because we're redesigning, reformatting. Even the old episodes, and we're going to be recreating them. We're going to be extracting some of those gold nuggets and putting them onto a separate channel just for the gold.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right. We were just at Elevate360, and we had Daryl Ives, the number one guy in the world for YouTube. He's the guy behind Mr. Beast, partners with Mr. Beast. what is this what do you say 93 billion downloads or views or something like that that he's been responsible for and luckily he made a nice presentation and taught us a few things that confirmed a few things that we were going back and forth on that you and i were like well someone said this and someone said this which way is it and he's like no it's this way and i believe him over over some of these other people and then you know he was kind enough to hang out a couple times at lunch and you know he always had a crowd around him and i think You and me and Kelsey and Gracie, we took advantage of that to get some questions in and get some free advice. So we're going to be implementing a lot of that stuff. And it's exciting times ahead for marketing misfits.

  • Speaker #1

    And who knows? Maybe he'll even be a misfit one of these days.

  • Speaker #0

    I know. That would be great. That would be awesome.

  • Speaker #1

    All right, Mr. King. That's it today.

  • Speaker #0

    That's it. We'll be back again next Tuesday with another episode. So mark your calendars. Hit that subscribe button. so you get notified and we'll see you again next week see you later ciao

Description

What if the secret to scaling your brand lies not in doing more, but in letting go?

Unlock proven strategies, expert insights, and game-changing tools to grow your brand and boost your sales here: ➡️https://marketingmisfits.co/


Uncover the mindset shifts, systems, and stories behind 8-figure exits with this Marketing Misfits episode featuring the electrifying Mayur Sethi. Discover why founders who focus only on their strengths could be holding themselves and their companies back.


Join us as we dive deep into:

- The three things every founder should focus on, and what you MUST delegate

- Battle-tested lessons from billion-dollar boardrooms

- Why instant gratification is killing e-commerce potential

- Real talk: how to build lasting teams (and avoid the VA trap)

- Powerful networking strategies most sellers overlook

- Creative product growth using psychology, partnerships, and leverage

- Hard-won cash flow lessons no one else will tell you

- A blueprint for transitioning from 7 to 8 figures…and beyond


Don’t miss the stories, laughs, and actionable gold you can use starting today. Listen, learn, and lead like a misfit!


⏰ Timestamps:

00:00 - Founders’ Fatal Flaw Exposed

00:34 - Hot Dogs & High Stakes Hustle

03:53 - Smart Money Moves & Lessons

07:40 - Small Brand, Big Leverage

09:26 - Inside the Boardroom Numbers Game: Myth or Mindset?


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Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    People like founders have this weakness. They will focus on what they're really good at versus focusing on what is really good for the company. Your job as a founder, as a CEO, is to be the visionary or architecting systems or coaching your teams. If you're doing anything besides these three things, you need to hire someone and delegate it to them. Your watch of marketing misfits,

  • Speaker #1

    known for our...

  • Speaker #0

    from Kevin King.

  • Speaker #1

    Mr. Farrar, good to see you again. Back for another episode of the Marketing Misfits.

  • Speaker #2

    I've had many a hot dog between our last visit.

  • Speaker #1

    No, and you have. And you even got a website up for Marketing Misfits now, which is pretty cool. I mean, people can go to marketingmisfits.co and actually see, learn all about it. There we go. Watch us at work. See that we actually do work. We don't just have fun eating hot dogs in Iceland.

  • Speaker #2

    That was kind of fun, though.

  • Speaker #1

    Come on.

  • Speaker #2

    We have fun. We only have fun. That's all we do.

  • Speaker #1

    Sometimes that's all we do is have fun, but sometimes it's a little bit of work, too. That was a lot of work. Fun for you, but a lot of work for me. Hosting an event. Most people don't realize hosting an event is actually can be exhausting. it's a It's not just the behind, even though people are doing the behind the scenes stuff, just actually being the host. You know, you go to one of these Oscar shows or something, you see the host, the comedian up there. That's real work. You know, people think, oh, they're just up there saying a few lines. But you got to stay on point on everything that's going on. You got to be thinking on your feet. You got to be dealing with issues, introducing people. A lot of people, I didn't have an appreciation for that. Really, until I started doing it. Now, it's like, man, that's a real job.

  • Speaker #2

    It's a real job attending.

  • Speaker #1

    You're just getting yourself up. Like, what time are we starting? Norm's like, what time? 9 a.m. Well, I'll see you about noon. That's the time. I was up until 4 last night, eating, drinking, eating a hot dog.

  • Speaker #2

    Story of my life.

  • Speaker #1

    I sleep to kick in. And so... You did like that hot dog place, though. I told you. Remember, I told you in Iceland, it's across the street. It's actually one block across the street. But I told you you'd like that place.

  • Speaker #2

    So you know what? We should have a podcast with that guy. You know, marketing. He's got one little hot dog stand so famous that there's actually a hot dog stand in the Iceland airport. I don't know if you saw that.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I did. Yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    so I had another one leaving.

  • Speaker #1

    A replica. Did you get one in the airport too? Yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    Ashley Armstrong and me went over and grabbed a hot dog.

  • Speaker #1

    Did you? I thought of that when I was leaving. I was like, I bet Norm stopped there. I bet he did. I meant to text you, but I got busy looking for my gate or something. But I was like, I bet he stopped there and got one.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. Talking about events and going to events and, you know, just being part of an event, not only hosting, but actually taking part in the event and doing some networking and getting to know people. That's how we got to know, at least I got to know our next guest, which is kind of cool.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, he came to MarketMath, the last BDSS MarketMasters that I did. And I actually sat in the hot seat and I had his business analyzed by a group of experts. And then we started talking to this guy. And it's like, you know, sometimes the smartest people always are looking to get that edge. You know, there's people out there that think they know everything. And they're like, I got this. I don't need any help. I don't need a market master. I don't need a consultant or I don't need to hire. I know what I'm doing. But the smart people always are looking for that edge. And like, what am I missing here? and that's that's mayor our guest today he's been extremely successful in the corporate world then he decided to get out of the corporate world and uh go uh do entrepreneur stuff uh along with his wife and he's like i'm doing pretty good i have a pretty good idea what i what i what i know and we're executing well but where what are we missing where's our blind spot and that's why he came uh to market masters and i hope he got something i think i think he got something out of it. I'm pretty sure he did. uh that that's always i always like it when i see see that uh what i always say when you when you stop learning you stop earning uh and and i think that's that's wow that's good kevin you that's not that you meet me or did you come up with that no that's uh that's i don't know i heard that from somebody else i stole that from okay okay somebody else along the way uh i don't remember who but uh but it's it's true uh and that's why um some of us like you go to a lot of events i go to a lot of events where and i read a lot of newsletters you read a lot of different things, and we're always trying to... Make sure we maintain that edge. And I think that's what our guest today is doing. And it's going to be cool to talk to him. He's got a cool story.

  • Speaker #2

    All right. Well, why don't we bring him in?

  • Speaker #1

    We can do that.

  • Speaker #2

    Let's bring in Mayor Sethi. Hello, sir.

  • Speaker #0

    Hey, Norm. Hey, Kevin. How are you doing today?

  • Speaker #1

    We're doing great. As my buddy Mark would say, we're alive and kicking.

  • Speaker #0

    Great.

  • Speaker #2

    Or as I would say, I'm alive.

  • Speaker #1

    Hey, Norm's not kicking. If you see Norm kicking, you need to call 911. There's something. He's involved in convulsions or something. He brushed his teeth with the wrong tube.

  • Speaker #2

    I did.

  • Speaker #0

    Read the newsletter.

  • Speaker #1

    I did. I see. I read your newsletter. Ah,

  • Speaker #2

    there you go.

  • Speaker #1

    Hemorrhoid cream instead of Colgate, I see.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    That's branding. That's a branding issue because those two look the same. I mean, that's a marketing thing because I can see how you can make that mistake, the red and white. And if you're not paying close attention.

  • Speaker #2

    Did you hear about this, Mayor? I got home from Marketing Masters, so where I met you. And when I got home, I was really tired. It was like 3 a.m. And then I got up early and I walked into the washroom, bathroom. And I bought a tube of Travel Colgate when I was down there. I got into the bathroom. There was a tube. I put it on, same thing, white, started brushing my teeth. And when something feels really funny here, turned out it was hydrocortisone. Same tube. Same tube.

  • Speaker #1

    Is that what they call Bengay?

  • Speaker #0

    Don't start. Yeah. You had a very memorable brushing experience that day, let's put it that way.

  • Speaker #2

    I did, I did. But we're here for you. So, sir, you have a huge story. Like, I was sitting down, we started talking, and we ended up talking, I finished talking about an hour afterwards, but you have a crazy story. Can we get into it a little bit?

  • Speaker #0

    Absolutely. Absolutely. so I'm an engineer, that's what I am by profession and education, and I spent about 17 years in Silicon Valley designing things, doing stuff that touches almost everyone's life on a daily basis. And after, you know, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the industry and doing some billion dollar exits, I was kind of done. So my wife, who is a doctor, she's a psychologist, we both decided that let's focus on our kids and quit our jobs. And I remember the day I quit my half a million dollar job and I got a call from my mother-in-law and we had a very interesting conversation. But lo and behold, a few years later, we now own a multi-seven-figure brand. We are doing great. I have learned a thing or two during the last six years of my Amazon selling journey. And now I'm a angel investor in some of the brands i also have started a whole brand accelerator to help other small businesses leverage what secret sauce exists in these fortune 500 boardrooms and give them access to that and you know just help the common person grow versus making my billionaire venture capitalist and pe firms a few billion dollars more so i'm just taking a different direction in my life. after this 20 years of what I've done so far.

  • Speaker #1

    Well, you said secrets in these corporate ballroom rooms. Corporate selling and entrepreneur selling are two different animals. So how does that translate from a corporate secret? Or what's an example of a corporate secret from the ballroom that an entrepreneur can play? Because there's two different financial levels, two different, you know, it's a it's a rule by committee and rule by this and that. Can you give me an example of what you mean when you take these secrets from the corporate world and put them into this Amazon entrepreneurial world?

  • Speaker #0

    Sure, Kevin. So honestly, the secrets are more for a small business owner who is not in the C-suite of corporate world. But in the corporate world, it is something very common, right? So the rule of 40, that's how you buy companies, right? But if you bring some of that in the small businesses, a case in point example is understanding your P&L really well and figuring out what exactly are your leaks in the system and then going and fixing that. So half of the entrepreneurs do not even understand EBITDA. And then we start getting into... Gross margin less Amazon fees, gross margin less Amazon ads, gross margin less this, less that. You have all these ratios that in a second, anyone who has been in corporate for 10 plus years in senior roles will see that you have a problem in marketing, sir, or you have a problem in supply chain. But for a small business owner, they're still living in some software dashboard or some half-baked report from Amazon and believing that they're making so much money. or assuming that they have a problem in this area of business. And typically those areas of business are areas where they're either not comfortable or they are really like, you know, have no clue and they're dependent on others. And they believe that that is why it is wrong, because I don't know it. So it's a mind shift thing that happens for the small business owners.

  • Speaker #2

    You know, I sat in on a ton of business presentations with this uh, fairly well-known VC out there. And I was just lucky enough that I got to know him and he let me sit in on these meetings. And the turning point, you could see a great presentation, people not knowing what they're asking for, what they want, but hesitation when they didn't know their numbers exact. Like it could be a great meeting. And then all of a sudden it's like, are you kidding me? And it would turn the meeting just like that, you know, just forget it. that one goes in the trash.

  • Speaker #0

    Yep. Yep. And I recently had a brand that approached, applied to work with us and they wanted to grow 2X. And my team did an audit. And after that, I came and told them, listen, we can help you grow not 2X, but 3X. But that means you will have to invest in the next 180 days of inventory. Do you have that kind of capital? And the answer was, was no I do not. Can you raise that kind of capital? The answer is no, I cannot. Then stop dreaming about 2x, 3x growth because growth comes at a cost. You need to plan for it. It won't happen because of an accident or you wished for it, right? You need to put all the pieces in play to do that. And that's where I see a lot of small business owners, especially Amazon brands, are struggling. They're too distracted by the noise out there versus focusing on the four fundamental things and stop worrying about the vanity metrics.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, they're more focused on short-term than long-term. A lot of them don't have the patience or the funding to actually do long-term stuff. Or maybe you have to invest $10,000 in some sort of advertising campaign now that's going to only bring back $10,000 now. But the long-term, those customers are going to buy from you, hopefully, over and over and over. And a year from now, they're going to be profitable. But you've got to get from point A to point B without going under. And you've got to have a plan. And like you said, a lot of people, it's pie in the sky. I just want a 3X, but they don't understand what that takes. And why do you think that is? Do you think that's because a lot of people get into selling e-commerce, whether it's Amazon or Shopify or whatever it is?

  • Speaker #2

    I'd hustle, Kev.

  • Speaker #1

    Without business experience? They just want to quit.

  • Speaker #0

    they want to work for themselves and they just don't understand that stuff or you think they just so caught up in just running the business and wearing 27 different hats they just don't pay attention to it because it's not the sexy stuff i think kevin it's a combination of both like let's look at something very basic in order for me to get a minimum wage job uh right i still have to be of a certain age i have to go through certain schooling education right to get to the to get there. So, to get an entry level job, somebody is willing to invest 18 to 20 years of their life, learn language, maths, numbers, all of that, and then get a 40K job a year. And now you want to make millions but are not even willing to invest three years of your life. Isn't that a joke?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. The younger generation wants that instant gratification. They want to be rich now and not have to work for it.

  • Speaker #0

    Yes. And e-commerce does not work like that. Like if you want that instant gratification, maybe play on meme coins. And once you're broke, you know, take money from parents. But if you want to build something sustainable. You have to understand what market you're playing in. Is this a zero-sum game market? Is this a different kind of market? Is it a market for all? And then you have to take those actions, right? So if you're in e-commerce, understand this. On Amazon, unless there is a population explosion in the United States and we become like 600 million people tomorrow, the market is only so much. People will spend money. I'm not even talking about macros of recession or anything. You have a fixed population to which you have to sell a product. And now you want to expand into Canada and you start believing that, oh, I'm successful in the US. I will be equally successful in Canada. No, you will not. Because population of Canada is less than that of California where I live. You don't have as many people to buy products. So once you start paying attention to those fundamentals. you start to realize that a e-commerce is not complicated it is actually pretty simple but because people are so distracted with the new ppc strategy or new this or hidden that or or a shortcut that promises them the dream

  • Speaker #1

    outcome they're unable to focus on what makes a business money what's up everybody your good old buddies norm and kevin here And I've got an Amazon creative team that I want to introduce you to.

  • Speaker #2

    That's right, Kevin. It's called the House of AAMZ. And it's the leading provider in combining marketing and branding with laser focus on Amazon.

  • Speaker #1

    Hey, Norm, they do a lot of really cool stuff if you haven't seen what they do. Like full listing graphics, premium A-plus content, storefront design, branding, photography, renderings, packaging design, and a whole lot of other stuff that Amazon sellers need.

  • Speaker #2

    And guess what? They have nine years active in this space. So you can skip the guesswork, trust the experts. There's no fees. There's no retainers. You pay per project.

  • Speaker #1

    So if you want to take your product to the next level, check out House of AMZ. That's House of AMZ dot com. House of AMZ. I think on Shark Tank, they say the thing that's the two killers of any deal on Shark Tank. is when you don't know your numbers and you just said you need to know your numbers. And when you come in and you say, oh, this is a $1 billion market and I just need to capture 1% of it and we'll have X. And that's an instant deal killer to the sharks as well. So when you say that's a limited size market, what do you mean by that or how do you address that?

  • Speaker #0

    So Kevin, you brought up a great point. So let's go to that shark tank and I will weave it into the whole story. You know why an investor kills that I just need to capture 1% of the market and this will make us millions? That 1% market capture is the side hustle mindset. He is in it for himself or she is in it for herself to make that 1% and become financially independent. It is not an investment. It is a lifestyle business. What an investor is looking for is how well you transition. and make my money worth something for TX. Because not only you have to be successful, as an investor, I know that out of 10 of my investments, six will fail, two will be average, one will be good, and one will really knock it out of the park. So the one that has to knock it out of the park has to essentially pay for the other nine ventures I invested in. And if somebody does not...

  • Speaker #1

    mindset, right? And there a book about that 500 companies or something like that, where the guy buys 500 companies and he just hopes one of them becomes the next Uber and the other 499 doesn't matter.

  • Speaker #0

    Like SoftBank, look at their investment in Alibaba. And basically the investment in Alibaba funded the billions of dollars lost in WeWork. So that's how all these VCs and me coming from that Silicon Valley where you go through an aisle of shopping, you will meet four VCs. It's really a different world. We live in a very different bubble, but I'm trying to build some of that mindset to the small business.

  • Speaker #1

    So does that mean it should be a numbers game for the small entrepreneur where they should launch a lot? I mean, some people are subscribed, launch a lot of products and a couple of them will hit and the rest won't. It's that 80-20 rule. how do you do this on a small scale to leverage you leverage yourself i mean norm and i do this we have multiple businesses and multiple things or if one of them goes under we can still put food put macaroni with ketchup on the table um but if and get our coke zeros but a lot of people don't have it all their eggs are in like one basket or one product

  • Speaker #0

    So here's the thing. When you and Nam started, you did not have 20 businesses. You started with one, you scaled it, and then you start replicating it across. Where a small entrepreneur fails, even on Amazon brand, where they fail is they will be married to a product or a brand. You need to understand this is a relationship. The job of the brand or your business is to make your life better, not the other way around. that you are investing all of your eggs into one brand and if someone is starting someone who has not done like a 100k annual revenue i will say just focus on one thing learn from it make it great and then start replicating it people will be stuck on oh i have made this thing great let me replicate more of this like the exact same product and that's where you will hit stagnation and sometime you will be successful you won't lose money but you will not make you know millions and millions of dollars either so start from one brand and then once you have figured out the fundamentals of advertising of copywriting of psychology of selling pivot quickly to repeating that team as a lego block and going to another brand out of the whole market like we have one product which is card games and board games and i come from an app world right so for me going from up to analog was a switch that hey i'm pivoting all of our investments are in apps let's go into analog right people will still play card games and board games in future and then from there we pivoted into supplements right now we are pivoting into things which i know are guaranteed to happen like there is a guarantee that 50 of population will be women right always that's how nature works So if we can create products around women and pregnant women. We have a very high guarantee of people being available. That market will always exist. So launch there. Any brand that comes to us, we just classify them in a quadrant. People will spend money on relationships. People will spend money on getting ahead of everyone else. People will spend money on themselves. Or people will spend money to look great and shine, outshine. The fifth reason is charity where people just give away money to feel good and follow their spiritual path. Where does your brand fit? Figure that out. And then scale from there. And then launch the next brand in the second category. That way you create a perfect moat around your life and your bunch of companies that can grow. We started selling card games for couples. And then we created a game for married folks. And then we created a game for families. And now I have over 500,000 families that have bought our games. Guess what? I can remarket to the same set of companies if I'm selling a pregnancy product or a woman's product. So think how your next brand will build up on the current brand and start planning it out. And you have to plan out in terms of years, not weeks or quarters. If you are a business owner and you're still thinking in terms of quarters, you have not scaled enough.

  • Speaker #2

    So when you were planning your card game, had you already thought about the supplement?

  • Speaker #0

    No, the supplement game, like the whole supplement thing came into picture after I was having my card game at multi-million dollars. So my ARR was way around... three four million dollars that's when i said that okay now let's get into the next phase of life we have taken care of relationships where people spend money the next place where people spend money is health so can we create the best supplements out there and i got super lucky to you know come across friends in my you know circle who were medical doctors practicing in the States, they had supplements but they did not know how to sell it. So it's like, okay, let's partner up. You make the best clinically researched product and let me and my team sell it. That's like a marriage made in heaven. And yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    that's how we're seeing that a lot right now with partners like Shopify collective is kind of doing that. You know, that's exactly what they're doing. You've got a product. Let's, let's team up. They sell and you're seeing that, you know, a lot more on Amazon as well. But I think that was a really good play.

  • Speaker #1

    Nexus 2 at Dragonfish.

  • Speaker #2

    There we go. Coming soon.

  • Speaker #0

    And see, this is a very tried and tested model in the tech world, right? Pick any large technology company, they have literally stopped innovating everything from scratch because it has a lot of inherent risk. So what everyone is doing is they're acquiring smaller companies for their intellectual property and then bringing in the whole of their kimono of people and skills to expand it. Look at ChatGPT, for example. How many of us knew ChatGPT before Microsoft pumped in $10 billion into it?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, they did that after it kind of broke on the scene shortly after it, but that really blew them up. And now you got SoftBank, you mentioned they're putting $60 billion into ChatGPT. And then ChatGPT just gobbled up, was it Cat, not Casper, is one of these no-code softwares and they've gobbled up a bunch of people and rolled them in. as well. And then one of the guys at ChatGPT just went off, one of the co-founders started something six months ago and now he's about to get bought for something like $6 billion. It hasn't even come to market yet. The product even hasn't come out yet. They're just buying it because it gives them good technology and it gives them a leg up and gives them a jump start on everybody else in a hyper-competitive what-did-you-use-for-me-today industry.

  • Speaker #2

    Hey, 2000s all over again.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah,

  • Speaker #0

    it is. And it is no different than Amazon. Like none of the Amazon sellers like own their factories. So we have outsourced manufacturing as a service to China or now other countries because of all the tariff wars. Same way you can outsource innovation as a service where a small business or a small company is doing all the innovation, grunt work, proving that this thing can work, and then you go acquire them. It is way cheaper to run your own R&D versus just outsourcing innovation. Just for us, like if we were to set up a factory to build our own supplements, we will never launch them, right? So it's not...

  • Speaker #1

    It's all about leverage. Like you're leveraging these doctors and these people that your relationship, it's relationships and leverage that have a good idea and they developed some sort of pill or whatever it is. They just don't know how to market it. You know how to market it. So that's... That's how you grow quickly in business is by through partnerships and leverage.

  • Speaker #0

    Yes. And one thing which people forget about is investing in themselves. Like a lot of people told me that, oh, Kevin's market masters is too expensive. I cannot afford it. And I'm like, guys, you cannot afford to not attend it. Because while sitting there, not only on my hot seat, I learned about, you know, what to change in my businesses, listening to others. I still remember that memory that someone was talking about supplement space and I texted my cousin. She is a veterinarian and she does research in the States. And I said, listen, can you help me put together some great combinations for pet supplementation that has clinical research because you're doing all this research today. And with you and I and the money I have, we can create a company and launch a new whole brand, which is based on clinical trials on pet supplementation. Like go on Amazon, how many pet supplements exist that are clinically tested and tried on real animals? There is no regulation for it as well. Like for humans, at least we have FDA and stuff. For pets, we have very simple regulations. So whenever I see...

  • Speaker #1

    It's their property. So it's a different risk profile. Yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    Exactly. But I could not have come up with that multi-million dollar idea had I not chosen to invest in myself and building my network and attending your market masters. So honestly, I took 10 times more value just being there than from my hot seat. And my hot seat, it has not changed my life. It has changed the life of 10 other people. I've ended up hiring nine more people and building a whole team. man, and, implementing all those things that I have learned and that is showing up in my bank account.

  • Speaker #1

    I think that's a good point. I mean, Norm and I do this. I don't know. I have to look at my P&L, what I spent, but Norm and I spend a lot of money going to events. Me more probably so than Norm, or not probably, me more than Norm. But that's something that both of us, sometimes we both like, oh, we got to cut back.

  • Speaker #0

    We got to get our head down, but we keep getting drawn back to it because exactly what you say is where I get some of the best benefit, not from what the person on stage is saying or what it's from, what they might say, plus what I heard at lunch, plus what Norm and I were talking about last month. I'm like, wait a second, if we put this and this and that, it's a brainstorming thing. But if I wouldn't have put myself in that situation, these ideas would have never come or these opportunities would have never come. And that's... the big benefit and is that worth you know you paid for market masters the example you're giving there is that's five thousand dollars and you know next year it's going to not it's going to nine thousand dollars um and a lot of people are going to be hesitant to pay that like nine thousand dollars you got to be freaking out your mind uh

  • Speaker #1

    there's no way i can go to some of you on the scale at even twenty thousand dollars i i i appreciate that people need to get that right like Like we call this in the boardroom as network effects. Right. Understand this, to get close to someone, people will donate $100,000 to a cause or charity just to be invited to a dinner. Why are we going in those dinners? To get access to people. Yeah. You won't get your next life-changing idea at a metro station waiting for your train or buying a hot dog. But your chances of getting that idea and people who can change your life is way higher if you are in a room with 70 other entrepreneurs who each can spend $50,000 or $10,000 to be in a place. And you have to surround yourself. Amazon selling is a very lonely world. We are all living in our own small bubble of thinking, oh, this is good and this is bad and letting Twitter or Facebook messages. Facebook post decide your mood for the day that, oh, why did Trump do this? Like everyone is crying so much about the new tariffs. I see this as a big opportunity.

  • Speaker #0

    I do too.

  • Speaker #1

    Right. It's going to screw a few people,

  • Speaker #0

    but there's a few people that have something in transit where they could, you know, it could upset the status quo briefly. But I see it as a massive opportunity.

  • Speaker #1

    So, Kevin. I had three shipments in transit before when Trump started increasing tariff all the way to 245%. My next shipment will come sometime in the next 20 days. Guess what? The total impact for my business is hardly transferring 18% of my selling price to the customer. Just by increasing that price by 18%, I am making same amount of margins as I was making in the past. So it is very easy to be, you know, distracted by all these news and media and get it. Like news sells because of distraction. And if it is happy, it is not news. It has to be sad and bad to be called a news, right? But look at the opportunity. All the Chinese sellers that were undercutting large businesses, they would now be under scrutiny. They will be pivoting to other countries where it is easier to sell than in the United States. They are making a budget. They can sell it in the UK as well as they can sell it in the US. So Trump literally outsourced some of our business problems to the rest of the world by putting such tariffs on China. My brand lost $1.2 million due to Temu and people literally copywriting, copying my copyrighted stuff and selling it for like $5 on Temu. Now we won't have to worry about all of that. A lot of small players on Amazon will fold shop. The cost of PPC will go down because if I have to put money from my P&L for tariffs, guess where it is coming out of? I do not control the 15% of Amazon. I do not control the fulfillment fees of Amazon.

  • Speaker #0

    the only thing i control is my ppc costs and i don't know how many people have told you this but we are seeing across the board in my agency the cost per click is going down hey what's up everybody kevin and norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors eight fig let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for amazon sellers that's right it's called eight fig on average sellers working with a fig grow up to 400 percent in less than a year

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  • Speaker #0

    That's 8-Fig.co, 8-Fig.co. See you on the other side. Well, you had, was it Timu and Sheen just pulled all their advertising from Google? Yes. I think it was, was it Timu or was it Sheen? I can't remember. One of those was running 600, no, 60,000 campaigns, 60,000 different ad campaigns on Google. And as of yesterday, at the time of this recording, they were down to four, from 60,000 down to four. And the same thing, I haven't, I was not unaware of the same thing happening on Amazon, but you just. confirmed that the same thing is happening on amazon uh where these guys are they're bailing out and going elsewhere now they're just getting creative on but on on reducing the value of shipments and playing games around around uh how they value these things and that's just going to they're just going to get caught in a in a web of uh problems there you can see a lot of these chinese people doing that uh chinese sellers doing that that are going to get their stuff confiscated held up at the border um So, yeah, it's interesting times. I think this is a time for great opportunity. What's it, Warren Buffett or whoever always says that the down times are always the best times to invest. That's true. Something along those lines. And you look at even what happened with Apple. Apple's down, I think, 4% year over year right now. But recently, when the tariff stuff was announced, their stock took, what was it? I forget, it was a huge hit. Hundreds of billions of dollars value disappeared. And then as soon as the hold was put on, 90-day hold on electronics or whatever it was, almost all that value came back instantly. The people that bought on the low just made a boatload of cash.

  • Speaker #1

    Apple switched some of their manufacturing during COVID from China to India. And when when the title floor was announced. They airlifted 1.5 million iPhones, iPads, MacBooks from India just to get over that threshold of 12 AM.

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, really? Did they?

  • Speaker #1

    1.5 million devices. That's like worth six weeks of inventory for what sales we do in the States. And that gives them enough time to do all the, you know,

  • Speaker #0

    While everything's sorted out.

  • Speaker #1

    Prepared for the sorting things out. Like how many of us knew about bonded? warehouses before the tariff war.

  • Speaker #0

    Most people didn't. They never even heard of a warehouse where you could store it. Or these DTZs, these trade zones like in Dallas, it's a big one.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes.

  • Speaker #0

    Where you can just store stuff tax-free.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #0

    I was just at a mastermind and one of the people there, she was like, I live in one of these areas in Dallas. You know her, Norm Rachel. She's like, I live in one of these free trade zones. If anybody has some pallets they want to store in my garage, I think I can store six pallets for you in my garage, so just let me know. It's tax-free. I was like, you go, girl. Shout out for brother out.

  • Speaker #1

    And essentially, Kevin, this is warehouses and companies pivoting as well. So we in the corporate boardroom know this thing exists for many, many years.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    When you invest into art and physical products, you don't bring that art onto US soil because then you will incur taxes. So you keep it in these tax-free zones to not pay any taxes or duties or tariffs on whatever art you're investing in. And art gives you a 37% return versus, you know, S&P 500. Suddenly these companies figured that, oh, with this new tariff war, we have...

  • Speaker #0

    hard but we can we have the license so we can add it to more buildings in the same vicinity and you know offer it as a service to others and that is what is happening today everyone is hearing about them when you look at even was it medicine uh most generic medicines in the united states come from india and china but that's by volume by sheer number of units sold it's india and china but by dollars actual dollars it's ireland Ireland provides most of the medicine, the quality medicine to United States. Ireland and Germany are the two big ones. They supply actually dollar-wise the most, not China or India. So there's a lot of these things that are out there that people... The corporate world has people studying this stuff and they know these trends, they know all this stuff and they get ahead of it. Versus the individual entrepreneur, this is new to them and it's like a new thing and they're not prepared.

  • Speaker #1

    Absolutely, Kevin. I know people at Dell and Amazon and then just how you fold a box off a laptop to ship it out. When you do it at that volume, you can save millions of dollars. Like when we designed an algorithm for FedEx where no FedEx turn will take a left turn, we designed the route in a way that it always turns right. Just that no left turn for any FedEx truck reduce their fuel cost by $80 million a year.

  • Speaker #0

    FedEx does the same thing, right? I mean,

  • Speaker #1

    sorry, UPS. Eventually every IP is sold to others. So we created a curbside pickup for Home Depot when COVID hit and then sold that solution to Walmart and Lowe's and Best Buy and everyone else, right? So when you build an IP, you then package it and resell it. That's what tech companies do.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, airplanes did that too. They took out, was it EasyJet or whatever, Ryanair? They took out the magazines, the little catalogs that are in the back seats and took out the... the holder or whatever, and just that alone adds millions of dollars in savings of jet fuel because of the weight or something. These little things make big differences long term.

  • Speaker #1

    They do. They do. And how do we bring that to the small Amazon seller? Look at an Amazon seller, just asking them, how much do you spend on software? I'm like, if you give me the right answer, I will give you one month of service free, because I know you won't be able to answer it right. People are spending tens of thousands of dollars because they sign up with this software and that software and that software unable to do anything right right they will have these swiss army knives and whatnot and then at the end of the year they did not have the dashboards they wanted they did not have access to the data they wanted they tried out a bunch of shiny new software for one feature or two features and they wasted so much of their dead weight right it's the magazine weight on your aircraft So then... If you can just optimize your software stack in an agency, if you can just optimize your PPC spend, your operations, the way you're running your supply chain, you can easily add 8% to 10% of EBITDA for a million-dollar ARR company.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, but what about a lot of sellers? They'll go and they'll have this magical VA. So a lot of these apps are being used by these magical VAs that soon as you hire them for $4 an hour, they're an expert in Facebook, Google ads, everything Amazon. So I think there's a fallacy there that people think. They hear, go and get a VA. Also, when you see all these ads, just recently, just watching YouTube, what pulls up on my ad or on my feed, is always, always something to do with rags to riches in 30 days. And that's bringing in all these people, like we were talking about a bit earlier on, about these people and their expectations. Well, your expectations are going to be so high because of these stupid videos that are out there saying that you could do it in 30 to 60 days, but they don't show you the systems. And I do want to get onto systems in a second, but these VAs, I think people have to show people about VAs and what they can do, because you might have a whole series of part timers, not just one general VA that is super VA. You know, I don't know what you think about that. But then let's talk about systems rather than SOPs.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes, Tom. So... Just like there is no magical pill that I can eat and become healthy, I have to do like five other things in five areas of my life. Same way, there is no magical VA, no magical person that can make your business successful, right? You have to first, like when I was building my accelerator, the first person I hired was an HR person. Because the only job was to find the top one percentile of people that work at our agency or our accelerator, right? You need, when you're going and hiring out a VA, most of the people, what are they doing today? If they're super cheap, they will just post off a job on Facebook groups and hope and pray that they will find someone magical. Or if they are a little sophisticated, they will go and go on onlinejobs.ph or Upwork and try to post their jobs there and get someone in hopes of a magical person shows up that will change the business. Now, some of them do get lucky because they would have offered a lot of money, not knowing what the market rate is, and accidentally picked up an experienced person who comes with their own processes and kind of improves the business. But in 95% of the cases, what happens is you are hiring someone who is not very experienced. You have no systems in place to hire in the first place. So you hire someone random. And then at best, you will have an SOP, which is nothing more than a linear set of instructions that do this, do that, do that, and get the work done, which is what you're doing today. So there is no enhancement in your business. It is just maintenance of your business. I recommend people working with a different mindset if you are planning. And this is where I think agencies, accelerators and brands have a place of coexistence. We need to educate the business owners on how to approach hiring. how to spend a thousand dollars in just hiring someone good before you know onboarding someone onto your company that thousand dollar may seem like a lot of money but it will seem like nothing when you onboard someone who's charging you you know 1500 to 2000 dollars a month so that's like a 18 to 25k annual salary and that someone is delivering new business worth half a million dollars Will you care if I got half a million dollars in extra revenue that, oh, I invested a thousand, two thousand dollars and doing the culture fit and the assessments of the real skills before, you know, feeling for it and figuring it out. Oh, I think this person can do it. So that's the big difference. People are not thinking in hiring system. They're just thinking of hiring as a task. It is not a task. You're getting people that will build your life. like if you treat your business as your baby, then your employees are like the mothers of that baby.

  • Speaker #2

    Okay. I saw, I'll give you an example. I don't know. I think it was the first marketing masters. So I sat there and there was a person, no names, taking a ton of notes. And I got talking to them over a couple of days, like the first day they spent there taking notes. Second day, they took a lot of notes and I was asking them about it. they had no clue how to implement it's great that you came and i'm saying this is for anybody who goes to an event or whatever but if you're in a hot seat or if you're taking notes and you're taking all the notes and you're only going to be as good as if they're like you that you put it into play like there's a few people that put it into play but i can guarantee you that there's going to be a few people that go spend a lot of money and do nothing with it they're intentions are great, but they have no actions. And part of the actions is getting a system in place where you get the right person to understand, go out there and try like you did with the HR person and then hire the right people. And a lot of smaller, even intermediate sellers don't understand that. There's people doing a million, 2 million, $3 million a year. They're happy and they still don't have a VA and they don't understand that they could bring that up to 10 million or whatever it is with just a system to put in place. And like you said, not an SOP, a standard operating procedure is nothing except the steps on paper, how to do it. But nobody has buy-in, nobody has the definitions of how to do it, who to report to, quantification, and that's a big problem. But they want to do it on the cheap and that sucks.

  • Speaker #1

    It's again understanding the difference between I'm doing an investment or I wanted something as a cheap. And the biggest challenge is a lot of small business owners do not believe in themselves. They feel that they were lucky to be successful or, you know, some things happened and they were successful. Like if I was to believe in myself, if I can take the right decisions, you know, two years in the past. to create a $3 million business today, I must be taking the right decision by working with a system, implementing a system and spending $10,000 today that will result in $10 million tomorrow. We tend to forget that story really quickly, like learn from your own success. You started from zero and created a multimillion dollar business. You can create a 10, 20, 100 million dollar business. It is not difficult. These people who are running billion dollar companies that do not have a horn on their head, like my exits are worth over 8 billion dollars. Do you see a horn on my head? No, I'm just the same as you are like anyone else. Believe in yourself and if you bought in the right point, norm like when I was on the hot seat I realized after taking all those notes that I do not have these skills what did I do I spent the rest of the three days talking to all the smart people in the room figuring out who are your resources how are you hiring I got someone to hire my first employee because I did not have that skill of hiring someone in HR I know how to hire an engineer but not an HR person so guess what I go to an agency pay them a money to get the best person onboarded and then I use this person to onboard the rest of my team. There are so many great agencies out there that can help you find the right talent with the right skill set but then do not expect a $700 VA. Good resources cost money in every economy in every country. Invest in that and you will see the return immediately. It's like within 90 days you see your returns so do it.

  • Speaker #2

    And make sure you have the cash flow, right?

  • Speaker #1

    If you're a business owner who does not understand cash flow, then you are nothing more than a drunk driver driving a Ferrari. We are waiting for an accident to happen.

  • Speaker #2

    I got a story about not only cash flow, but one of my first businesses that I was going to sell. And this is one of the things you don't expect. So we had no idea this was happening, but every night we'd be working late. Okay. We'd be, that's, Hey, that's what we did. We got in early. We worked extremely late all the time, five days, six days a week. We didn't realize that that just killed our deal. And the reason why they came over and they said that it was an unrealistic number. If we were the people driving the company and we were working that hard. that they thought that the numbers at the end of the day were driven by the wrong numbers and they canceled the deal on us, which was unbelievable to me. But I understand it now.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes. And I think all the business owners, right, anyone who is doing less than, you know, 50 million a year. This is what they should focus on. Your job as a founder, as a CEO, is to be the visionary or architecting systems or coaching your teams. If you're doing anything besides these three things, you need to hire someone and delegate it to them. I still know people who are like in the top three in baby product category on Amazon, doing millions and millions. and still having trouble giving up on the design part. Oh, I like this image like this. And I'm like, why on earth are you spending your time in this design of your images? I know it worked for you five years ago when you started, but today you should just have a creative strategist do all of that for you. And you should worry about only one thing. How many stacks did you test this month? What was the change in my click-through rate and conversion rate? If your graphic designer cannot answer these two fundamental questions, please fire your graphic designer. I do not care how great they are in Photoshop or Canva or whatever. We are here running a business. We are not here running an art shop selling an artistic thing. Like if you want to do that, change your business. And when I showed how her competition, which was like ranking 6 or 7 in the top 10 in baby category, is now breathing on their neck. by capturing all of the market, that's when she realized, oh, I should have focused on other things of business. People like founders have this weakness. They will focus on what they're really good at versus focusing on what is really good for the company.

  • Speaker #2

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  • Speaker #0

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    So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta, L-E-V-A-N-T-A dot I-O slash misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits. You know, back in 1995 is when I had a hyper growth company, first hyper growth company. And I was going crazy. So I went through the E-Myth Academy and tried to systemize everything, right? And one of the first things I realized is delegate, delegate whatever you can. And the hardest part for me was I'm a perfectionist. I still am, but I have to let that go. So I'll give it to, you know, whatever it is. And if there's a mistake, if it's not the right color, I let them own it. They know what they need to have. They know what the brand story is. They know what the creative brief looks like. But if it's slightly out, if they make a spelling mistake, I speak up, you know, but I just got to let them do it. And my perfectionism has to take a backseat.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes.

  • Speaker #2

    You know, but. They still have the guidelines of trying to be a perfectionist. But, you know, it's just if you try to do it all yourself and nobody can do it right, then you got a big problem. You'll never grow.

  • Speaker #1

    And this is the second step. Like after people have hired their one or two VAs and they get into hiring like remote specialists or employees, the biggest challenge is you will try to micromanage them because you feel imperfection. And guess what? If someone is really good at their work, they will hate being micromanaged. Even if you were able to implement systems to hire someone great, you won't be able to retain them. And as a result, you will lose that person, you will lose that momentum. Like I have this game in my background, this is like one of my wife's game. We had a spelling mistake on the box.

  • Speaker #2

    On the box?

  • Speaker #1

    On the box. The main image has a spelling mistake. Somebody spelled procrastination. We had a game called productivity versus procrastination. And the graphic designer spelled procrastination wrong. If I was managing all of it, it would have never happened. It did happen. Do I care? No, I care more about the hours I saved and invested in other parts of business. That even if we had a mistake like that, it is all right. We will fix it on the next lot. So get out.

  • Speaker #2

    Unless it was the first letter.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #2

    It's like with an M.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. I have had zero Amazon complaints on spelling mistake on my packaging. Like we think of it too big because we are living in that bubble. People don't care. We are all under that spotlight effect. And that's what is, you know, making us micromanage and focus on things that do not matter. and ignoring things that will really decide the fate of your business and your life.

  • Speaker #2

    That's so important.

  • Speaker #0

    What's that saying? An imperfect product now is better than a perfect product later or something like that?

  • Speaker #1

    Absolutely.

  • Speaker #0

    Something along those lines.

  • Speaker #1

    I'm getting all these sayings from today. You've been really, what, you got a custom chat TPT sitting there? Say, oh.

  • Speaker #0

    No, I just, I read, you know, in my newsletter, I have something called parting shots. And so I'm always looking for little sayings. I'm always looking for little sayings.

  • Speaker #2

    I guess it's this effect. All of us are bored. There is no insulation of, you know, thoughts, plans, money.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #2

    It's all hyperactive network.

  • Speaker #0

    So, and now you decided when you left corporate world to sell on Amazon, you didn't need to do this. I mean, you are financially set based on what you've said, but you wanted something new to do, something, you know, a way to help other people in life. And I think that's one of the reasons you've told me that you started this is that you wanted to give back and like, how can we help people? Your wife was a psychologist. She knew how to do this. So you started. a game games are big on amazon but it's also super competitive there's tons of these relationship card games and and you know i went through uh counseling with my ex-wife and stuff and we had some of these games and she would never play them because it made her feel uncomfortable so that's probably one of the reasons we're divorced right now but um but they they they there's a ton of so how did you use psychology to market this um differently than what other people are doing on Amazon and to grow this into millions of dollars in a highly competitive marketplace. And I think you said your wife really didn't want to go on camera. I think you said your market master, she didn't want to be the face of the brand. And so you're struggling with some ways to handle that. What did you do that other people missed? Made you success highly successful pretty quickly

  • Speaker #2

    Kevin. It was just sticking to the fundamentals So when we launched are you right up me or my kids do not have to work for their life We have made enough from tech. I wanted to give back to the world and we had some divorce going on in person family and Tanya was seeing those lines, you know in her clinic and we said let's help people here this is where we'll have a lot of impact if we can give the gift of beautiful relationships that's the most impactful thing we can do like i can write a six-figure check to some charity but that is not impact it will have you know i just gave away something i have too much of but giving my time energy and life and thoughts to you know solving for something is what we did so we never wanted to be the number one you know brand on amazon or anything like that This was all how can I reach to 1 million families and help them live a more fulfilled life in their relationships. All of our card games, they were tested with psychologists and therapists in their clinic doing counseling before we even placed the first mass order to China to give it out in production. So we created a beautiful... product on day one before we even launched it. We had real human feedback that we incorporated into our games. So having a great product is essential if you want to sustain your success. Otherwise, we will all end up with, you know, those fidget spinner kind of stuff. They go and dump. Now, once we had our great product, we focused a lot on ranking on Amazon. on how do we get in front of and again the objective was not the ego stroke that my product is in the top three the objective was how can i get in front of a lot of people and the only way to do that was organic ranking so we did a combination of how does algorithms think and that's where my you know engineering and data background came into picture where i understand how algos work how well How will a software developer write an algorithm? What kind of checks and balances they will put in an algorithm that has to scale millions of people? And it is very basic. You need to have the right set of keywords. You need to be desirable and discoverable. You know, if I was to put it in one phrase, how do you make it desirable? Do a visual storytelling. All of us are so focused on the best image quality. What we are not focusing on is what is the visual story you're telling with your images. You can have, you know, I can take an expensive camera and take a nice angled shot, you know, for a product. It will not convert if I do not have good visual story. So focus on, you know, your best image quality should be on main image. That is like the hook for your click through rate to get people on your listing. But my design team has one rule. If there was no text, no bullet point, no description on the listing, how will you sell this product with just images? And humans are lazy. Like, we do not have the patience or time to go through all the bullet points. Like, all those bullet points and titles and descriptions are written for AI to figure out what this product is. You are basically training the AI first so that your AI understands what this thing looks like. And then you take it forward to, you know, your people. Norm, you were saying something before I said my thing.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I was going to say, Kevin does a... a great presentation on psychology and one of the things is sound the other is just visuals and if you ever have a chance take a look at Burt's Bees and they do images like this goes back five six seven years ago where they never put any no bullet points no nothing was on no text copy was on their images it was just if you wanted chocolate it was the more savory unbelievable looking image about chocolate. or honey or whatever it was. And yeah, that should just stand alone. So I agree 100% with what you're saying.

  • Speaker #2

    Thanks for validating that, Norm. The second thing is a lot of- Send me a certificate in the mail.

  • Speaker #0

    You'll get a certificate. Do I?

  • Speaker #1

    Do I get Mayor's certificate of validation? There we go.

  • Speaker #0

    You can put that on your LinkedIn profile. Certificate of validation from Norm Farrar. You've made it now. You've accomplished everything you could accomplish in life.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. The other thing is, you know, feeding A9 with the right signals. So a lot of us look at any, you know, YouTube guru trying to sell their course on how to sell on Amazon. They will say buy 500 units and you can make it a million dollar game. Amazon only cares about them and their branding. The Amazon.com brand, right? If you do not have enough inventory in place, Amazon will kill your traffic because they do not want their customers disappointed with the stocked out product. So most of us are. not keeping enough inventory within the Amazon ecosystem that Amazon is aware of. Like I have four warehouses and I consolidated everything into AWD. And I only have one warehouse for, you know, if things were to go south. But everything else is either an AWD or FBA. When you have that level of inventory, you can scale up very quickly. One of my products got suppressed due to a dull thing and it was like a whole black hat attack on my brand. But the minute the search suppression was removed, we went from selling 10 units a day to 800 units a day. And you can do that. Anyone can do that. All you need is a good product, decent reviews, and a well-thought-out PPC strategy. And people are only thinking in terms of keywords when it comes to PPC. Think in terms of context, not keywords. So for our supplement client, they have a supplement which protects eyes from the blue light, which comes from the screens. Instead of focusing on the blue light blocker keyword and making a $13 bid on it, we created a campaign, a sponsored display campaign, where you can target people who are buying blue light blocking glasses. It's a sunglass industry thing. It has nothing to do with supplementation. But guess what? My customer's intent is to protect their eyes from blue light. They do not know it today that there is a capsule that they can pop to get the same desired effect. They're only aware of blue light blocking glasses from their optometrist. So we started targeting that audience. The ACoS of that campaign was 2000% and we don't really care. The result, the number of subscriptions went up by 250% in less than 4 weeks. Overall, we operated that one ASIN at a healthy tacos of 16%. So you have to think outside of the box. Do not over-rotate on keywords or writing the perfect... title or bullet points the ai is way smarter than you or i will ever be to do that that has like a thousand minds behind it the ai knows that shit hey

  • Speaker #0

    kevin king and norm farrar here if you've been enjoying this episode of marketing misfits thanks for listening this far continue listening we got some more valuable stuff coming up be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say.

  • Speaker #1

    I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes! That being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.

  • Speaker #0

    Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm.

  • Speaker #2

    Focus on what is the intent of the customer? How can I serve the customer? with the problem they're trying to solve. Do that with your images. Put some words in your listing so that AI understands that context. Like the text on your listing is basically to train AI. And then use all the free tools or paid tools like PPC and traffic to communicate that to your engine. And once you figure out one engine of Amazon, start thinking about how does TikTok work? What is the business TikTok is into? You can take some of your learnings and implement it to TikTok. Like I learned so many things from YouTube and then started implementing that on Amazon because, you know, like Dan was there at your event. I missed that, Kevin. but End of day, it is the same set of engineers. There are only like those, you know, 10,000 engineers who are writing these code, whether they work for Amazon or Google or, you know, Meta, they're just changing jobs. The way in which they think, the way in which they were taught and trained does not change. And once you figure that out, you can transfer a lot of logic from one platform to another to be successful in whatever thing you're doing it. And that can only happen when you free yourself up focus on three roles of being a visionary or an architect or coaching your team and not worrying about being having the perfect you know image or the perfect words and keywords and all of that you have to delegate all of that to your team trust your hiring process that you've had the good people and then focus on all these other things you can do as a entrepreneur That's where the transition happens between seven figures to eight, nine figures. That's the transition point.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. I guess we should leave it at that. We're at the top of the hour, and that was fantastic. We're actually past the top of the hour. So I got one question for you, Mayor. At the end of every podcast, we ask our misfit if they know a misfit.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. I will recommend getting in touch with the Karen. Karen attended one of the BDS's events as well. She was in the first think tank, Market Masters think tank. And her story is so inspiring. She's a cancer survivor, started her company after, you know, hitting in her late 50s, early 60s, and scaled it to a multi-million dollar brand. And she's doing great. Like, she's an inspiration. And such people belong in this marketing disputes podcast.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. So we'll reach out for you to get her information. And that's it. Kev, anything else to say?

  • Speaker #0

    No, that's been great. The only thing we didn't talk about was that Netflix algorithm. That's getting me to watch that crazy stuff. So I'm not sure who's behind that, but that's for another day.

  • Speaker #1

    We'll bring you back for that one. Yeah. All right, sir. We're going to remove you and us, but don't click off because, uh, uh, we got to bring you back in a second. Okay. All right. I'll see you in a bit there. Perfect.

  • Speaker #0

    Always interesting on the Marketing Misfits. You never know what direction we're going to go or what we're going to talk about. We have some really good guests that come in, some really, really smart people like Maior that have a really interesting background and are applying that to the e-commerce and marketing world in big ways.

  • Speaker #1

    And just think about the guests that are coming up. They're going to be- I know.

  • Speaker #0

    They're the guests.

  • Speaker #1

    We got a whole bunch.

  • Speaker #0

    We got a lot coming up. If you are... Not familiar with the Marketing Misfits podcast. You should be. We've been doing this coming up on a year now. This actually, I think, might be episode 50. Yeah, it's April 30th of 2024 is when we launched it. You know, the average podcast makes it to seven episodes. And Norm, we should give ourselves a pat on the back. We made it to 52. I can't reach.

  • Speaker #1

    I'm lost. I hurt my shoulder doing that.

  • Speaker #0

    Connie. Pass you on the back. Okay.

  • Speaker #1

    Okay.

  • Speaker #0

    But no, you should go back and listen. There's been some amazing guests on. And even I've gone back and listened to a few of them. Like, wow, that was a really good conversation. Because when we're doing this, you know, you and I are in the moment where sometimes we're thinking, like, what are we going to ask next? Or where is this going? Or where can we take this? But when you just sit back and you just listen to it, whether you're in the car or you're working out or just chilling at your house, smoking cigar. It's a whole different perspective. And, you know, some of these episodes are like, I've actually been like, damn, Norm, that was a pretty good episode.

  • Speaker #1

    There is gold.

  • Speaker #0

    That we did there. And soon, if you don't have, you know, some of these episodes, we go over an hour. And I know not everybody can listen to an hour, even if you're doing it in 2X. And if you've made it this far, that means you're a dedicated listener. We're actually going to be having a newsletter come out this summer, Marketing Misfits newsletter, that will actually summarize some of the content. from our guests as well as some additional content. So be sure to keep a lookout for that at marketingmisfits.co. It's not CO, right, Norm?

  • Speaker #1

    It's not CO. It's been a year. It's been a year.

  • Speaker #0

    I finally got it. I'm like a dog. You've got to train me with a treat over and over and over, and then I finally figure it out. But if you want to check out some of those back episodes, Let's just look on... Check them out right here if you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple Podcast or maybe you're watching this on YouTube. There's tons of episodes just right down there below or over here somewhere where you can check out additional episodes. And if you like this episode with my or any other episode, be sure to forward it to a friend who you think might get interested in listening to it or gain something from it.

  • Speaker #1

    And guess what, Kev?

  • Speaker #0

    Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    we're going to go mining for that gold because we're redesigning, reformatting. Even the old episodes, and we're going to be recreating them. We're going to be extracting some of those gold nuggets and putting them onto a separate channel just for the gold.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right. We were just at Elevate360, and we had Daryl Ives, the number one guy in the world for YouTube. He's the guy behind Mr. Beast, partners with Mr. Beast. what is this what do you say 93 billion downloads or views or something like that that he's been responsible for and luckily he made a nice presentation and taught us a few things that confirmed a few things that we were going back and forth on that you and i were like well someone said this and someone said this which way is it and he's like no it's this way and i believe him over over some of these other people and then you know he was kind enough to hang out a couple times at lunch and you know he always had a crowd around him and i think You and me and Kelsey and Gracie, we took advantage of that to get some questions in and get some free advice. So we're going to be implementing a lot of that stuff. And it's exciting times ahead for marketing misfits.

  • Speaker #1

    And who knows? Maybe he'll even be a misfit one of these days.

  • Speaker #0

    I know. That would be great. That would be awesome.

  • Speaker #1

    All right, Mr. King. That's it today.

  • Speaker #0

    That's it. We'll be back again next Tuesday with another episode. So mark your calendars. Hit that subscribe button. so you get notified and we'll see you again next week see you later ciao

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What if the secret to scaling your brand lies not in doing more, but in letting go?

Unlock proven strategies, expert insights, and game-changing tools to grow your brand and boost your sales here: ➡️https://marketingmisfits.co/


Uncover the mindset shifts, systems, and stories behind 8-figure exits with this Marketing Misfits episode featuring the electrifying Mayur Sethi. Discover why founders who focus only on their strengths could be holding themselves and their companies back.


Join us as we dive deep into:

- The three things every founder should focus on, and what you MUST delegate

- Battle-tested lessons from billion-dollar boardrooms

- Why instant gratification is killing e-commerce potential

- Real talk: how to build lasting teams (and avoid the VA trap)

- Powerful networking strategies most sellers overlook

- Creative product growth using psychology, partnerships, and leverage

- Hard-won cash flow lessons no one else will tell you

- A blueprint for transitioning from 7 to 8 figures…and beyond


Don’t miss the stories, laughs, and actionable gold you can use starting today. Listen, learn, and lead like a misfit!


⏰ Timestamps:

00:00 - Founders’ Fatal Flaw Exposed

00:34 - Hot Dogs & High Stakes Hustle

03:53 - Smart Money Moves & Lessons

07:40 - Small Brand, Big Leverage

09:26 - Inside the Boardroom Numbers Game: Myth or Mindset?


This episode is brought to you by:

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Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    People like founders have this weakness. They will focus on what they're really good at versus focusing on what is really good for the company. Your job as a founder, as a CEO, is to be the visionary or architecting systems or coaching your teams. If you're doing anything besides these three things, you need to hire someone and delegate it to them. Your watch of marketing misfits,

  • Speaker #1

    known for our...

  • Speaker #0

    from Kevin King.

  • Speaker #1

    Mr. Farrar, good to see you again. Back for another episode of the Marketing Misfits.

  • Speaker #2

    I've had many a hot dog between our last visit.

  • Speaker #1

    No, and you have. And you even got a website up for Marketing Misfits now, which is pretty cool. I mean, people can go to marketingmisfits.co and actually see, learn all about it. There we go. Watch us at work. See that we actually do work. We don't just have fun eating hot dogs in Iceland.

  • Speaker #2

    That was kind of fun, though.

  • Speaker #1

    Come on.

  • Speaker #2

    We have fun. We only have fun. That's all we do.

  • Speaker #1

    Sometimes that's all we do is have fun, but sometimes it's a little bit of work, too. That was a lot of work. Fun for you, but a lot of work for me. Hosting an event. Most people don't realize hosting an event is actually can be exhausting. it's a It's not just the behind, even though people are doing the behind the scenes stuff, just actually being the host. You know, you go to one of these Oscar shows or something, you see the host, the comedian up there. That's real work. You know, people think, oh, they're just up there saying a few lines. But you got to stay on point on everything that's going on. You got to be thinking on your feet. You got to be dealing with issues, introducing people. A lot of people, I didn't have an appreciation for that. Really, until I started doing it. Now, it's like, man, that's a real job.

  • Speaker #2

    It's a real job attending.

  • Speaker #1

    You're just getting yourself up. Like, what time are we starting? Norm's like, what time? 9 a.m. Well, I'll see you about noon. That's the time. I was up until 4 last night, eating, drinking, eating a hot dog.

  • Speaker #2

    Story of my life.

  • Speaker #1

    I sleep to kick in. And so... You did like that hot dog place, though. I told you. Remember, I told you in Iceland, it's across the street. It's actually one block across the street. But I told you you'd like that place.

  • Speaker #2

    So you know what? We should have a podcast with that guy. You know, marketing. He's got one little hot dog stand so famous that there's actually a hot dog stand in the Iceland airport. I don't know if you saw that.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I did. Yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    so I had another one leaving.

  • Speaker #1

    A replica. Did you get one in the airport too? Yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    Ashley Armstrong and me went over and grabbed a hot dog.

  • Speaker #1

    Did you? I thought of that when I was leaving. I was like, I bet Norm stopped there. I bet he did. I meant to text you, but I got busy looking for my gate or something. But I was like, I bet he stopped there and got one.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. Talking about events and going to events and, you know, just being part of an event, not only hosting, but actually taking part in the event and doing some networking and getting to know people. That's how we got to know, at least I got to know our next guest, which is kind of cool.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, he came to MarketMath, the last BDSS MarketMasters that I did. And I actually sat in the hot seat and I had his business analyzed by a group of experts. And then we started talking to this guy. And it's like, you know, sometimes the smartest people always are looking to get that edge. You know, there's people out there that think they know everything. And they're like, I got this. I don't need any help. I don't need a market master. I don't need a consultant or I don't need to hire. I know what I'm doing. But the smart people always are looking for that edge. And like, what am I missing here? and that's that's mayor our guest today he's been extremely successful in the corporate world then he decided to get out of the corporate world and uh go uh do entrepreneur stuff uh along with his wife and he's like i'm doing pretty good i have a pretty good idea what i what i what i know and we're executing well but where what are we missing where's our blind spot and that's why he came uh to market masters and i hope he got something i think i think he got something out of it. I'm pretty sure he did. uh that that's always i always like it when i see see that uh what i always say when you when you stop learning you stop earning uh and and i think that's that's wow that's good kevin you that's not that you meet me or did you come up with that no that's uh that's i don't know i heard that from somebody else i stole that from okay okay somebody else along the way uh i don't remember who but uh but it's it's true uh and that's why um some of us like you go to a lot of events i go to a lot of events where and i read a lot of newsletters you read a lot of different things, and we're always trying to... Make sure we maintain that edge. And I think that's what our guest today is doing. And it's going to be cool to talk to him. He's got a cool story.

  • Speaker #2

    All right. Well, why don't we bring him in?

  • Speaker #1

    We can do that.

  • Speaker #2

    Let's bring in Mayor Sethi. Hello, sir.

  • Speaker #0

    Hey, Norm. Hey, Kevin. How are you doing today?

  • Speaker #1

    We're doing great. As my buddy Mark would say, we're alive and kicking.

  • Speaker #0

    Great.

  • Speaker #2

    Or as I would say, I'm alive.

  • Speaker #1

    Hey, Norm's not kicking. If you see Norm kicking, you need to call 911. There's something. He's involved in convulsions or something. He brushed his teeth with the wrong tube.

  • Speaker #2

    I did.

  • Speaker #0

    Read the newsletter.

  • Speaker #1

    I did. I see. I read your newsletter. Ah,

  • Speaker #2

    there you go.

  • Speaker #1

    Hemorrhoid cream instead of Colgate, I see.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    That's branding. That's a branding issue because those two look the same. I mean, that's a marketing thing because I can see how you can make that mistake, the red and white. And if you're not paying close attention.

  • Speaker #2

    Did you hear about this, Mayor? I got home from Marketing Masters, so where I met you. And when I got home, I was really tired. It was like 3 a.m. And then I got up early and I walked into the washroom, bathroom. And I bought a tube of Travel Colgate when I was down there. I got into the bathroom. There was a tube. I put it on, same thing, white, started brushing my teeth. And when something feels really funny here, turned out it was hydrocortisone. Same tube. Same tube.

  • Speaker #1

    Is that what they call Bengay?

  • Speaker #0

    Don't start. Yeah. You had a very memorable brushing experience that day, let's put it that way.

  • Speaker #2

    I did, I did. But we're here for you. So, sir, you have a huge story. Like, I was sitting down, we started talking, and we ended up talking, I finished talking about an hour afterwards, but you have a crazy story. Can we get into it a little bit?

  • Speaker #0

    Absolutely. Absolutely. so I'm an engineer, that's what I am by profession and education, and I spent about 17 years in Silicon Valley designing things, doing stuff that touches almost everyone's life on a daily basis. And after, you know, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the industry and doing some billion dollar exits, I was kind of done. So my wife, who is a doctor, she's a psychologist, we both decided that let's focus on our kids and quit our jobs. And I remember the day I quit my half a million dollar job and I got a call from my mother-in-law and we had a very interesting conversation. But lo and behold, a few years later, we now own a multi-seven-figure brand. We are doing great. I have learned a thing or two during the last six years of my Amazon selling journey. And now I'm a angel investor in some of the brands i also have started a whole brand accelerator to help other small businesses leverage what secret sauce exists in these fortune 500 boardrooms and give them access to that and you know just help the common person grow versus making my billionaire venture capitalist and pe firms a few billion dollars more so i'm just taking a different direction in my life. after this 20 years of what I've done so far.

  • Speaker #1

    Well, you said secrets in these corporate ballroom rooms. Corporate selling and entrepreneur selling are two different animals. So how does that translate from a corporate secret? Or what's an example of a corporate secret from the ballroom that an entrepreneur can play? Because there's two different financial levels, two different, you know, it's a it's a rule by committee and rule by this and that. Can you give me an example of what you mean when you take these secrets from the corporate world and put them into this Amazon entrepreneurial world?

  • Speaker #0

    Sure, Kevin. So honestly, the secrets are more for a small business owner who is not in the C-suite of corporate world. But in the corporate world, it is something very common, right? So the rule of 40, that's how you buy companies, right? But if you bring some of that in the small businesses, a case in point example is understanding your P&L really well and figuring out what exactly are your leaks in the system and then going and fixing that. So half of the entrepreneurs do not even understand EBITDA. And then we start getting into... Gross margin less Amazon fees, gross margin less Amazon ads, gross margin less this, less that. You have all these ratios that in a second, anyone who has been in corporate for 10 plus years in senior roles will see that you have a problem in marketing, sir, or you have a problem in supply chain. But for a small business owner, they're still living in some software dashboard or some half-baked report from Amazon and believing that they're making so much money. or assuming that they have a problem in this area of business. And typically those areas of business are areas where they're either not comfortable or they are really like, you know, have no clue and they're dependent on others. And they believe that that is why it is wrong, because I don't know it. So it's a mind shift thing that happens for the small business owners.

  • Speaker #2

    You know, I sat in on a ton of business presentations with this uh, fairly well-known VC out there. And I was just lucky enough that I got to know him and he let me sit in on these meetings. And the turning point, you could see a great presentation, people not knowing what they're asking for, what they want, but hesitation when they didn't know their numbers exact. Like it could be a great meeting. And then all of a sudden it's like, are you kidding me? And it would turn the meeting just like that, you know, just forget it. that one goes in the trash.

  • Speaker #0

    Yep. Yep. And I recently had a brand that approached, applied to work with us and they wanted to grow 2X. And my team did an audit. And after that, I came and told them, listen, we can help you grow not 2X, but 3X. But that means you will have to invest in the next 180 days of inventory. Do you have that kind of capital? And the answer was, was no I do not. Can you raise that kind of capital? The answer is no, I cannot. Then stop dreaming about 2x, 3x growth because growth comes at a cost. You need to plan for it. It won't happen because of an accident or you wished for it, right? You need to put all the pieces in play to do that. And that's where I see a lot of small business owners, especially Amazon brands, are struggling. They're too distracted by the noise out there versus focusing on the four fundamental things and stop worrying about the vanity metrics.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, they're more focused on short-term than long-term. A lot of them don't have the patience or the funding to actually do long-term stuff. Or maybe you have to invest $10,000 in some sort of advertising campaign now that's going to only bring back $10,000 now. But the long-term, those customers are going to buy from you, hopefully, over and over and over. And a year from now, they're going to be profitable. But you've got to get from point A to point B without going under. And you've got to have a plan. And like you said, a lot of people, it's pie in the sky. I just want a 3X, but they don't understand what that takes. And why do you think that is? Do you think that's because a lot of people get into selling e-commerce, whether it's Amazon or Shopify or whatever it is?

  • Speaker #2

    I'd hustle, Kev.

  • Speaker #1

    Without business experience? They just want to quit.

  • Speaker #0

    they want to work for themselves and they just don't understand that stuff or you think they just so caught up in just running the business and wearing 27 different hats they just don't pay attention to it because it's not the sexy stuff i think kevin it's a combination of both like let's look at something very basic in order for me to get a minimum wage job uh right i still have to be of a certain age i have to go through certain schooling education right to get to the to get there. So, to get an entry level job, somebody is willing to invest 18 to 20 years of their life, learn language, maths, numbers, all of that, and then get a 40K job a year. And now you want to make millions but are not even willing to invest three years of your life. Isn't that a joke?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. The younger generation wants that instant gratification. They want to be rich now and not have to work for it.

  • Speaker #0

    Yes. And e-commerce does not work like that. Like if you want that instant gratification, maybe play on meme coins. And once you're broke, you know, take money from parents. But if you want to build something sustainable. You have to understand what market you're playing in. Is this a zero-sum game market? Is this a different kind of market? Is it a market for all? And then you have to take those actions, right? So if you're in e-commerce, understand this. On Amazon, unless there is a population explosion in the United States and we become like 600 million people tomorrow, the market is only so much. People will spend money. I'm not even talking about macros of recession or anything. You have a fixed population to which you have to sell a product. And now you want to expand into Canada and you start believing that, oh, I'm successful in the US. I will be equally successful in Canada. No, you will not. Because population of Canada is less than that of California where I live. You don't have as many people to buy products. So once you start paying attention to those fundamentals. you start to realize that a e-commerce is not complicated it is actually pretty simple but because people are so distracted with the new ppc strategy or new this or hidden that or or a shortcut that promises them the dream

  • Speaker #1

    outcome they're unable to focus on what makes a business money what's up everybody your good old buddies norm and kevin here And I've got an Amazon creative team that I want to introduce you to.

  • Speaker #2

    That's right, Kevin. It's called the House of AAMZ. And it's the leading provider in combining marketing and branding with laser focus on Amazon.

  • Speaker #1

    Hey, Norm, they do a lot of really cool stuff if you haven't seen what they do. Like full listing graphics, premium A-plus content, storefront design, branding, photography, renderings, packaging design, and a whole lot of other stuff that Amazon sellers need.

  • Speaker #2

    And guess what? They have nine years active in this space. So you can skip the guesswork, trust the experts. There's no fees. There's no retainers. You pay per project.

  • Speaker #1

    So if you want to take your product to the next level, check out House of AMZ. That's House of AMZ dot com. House of AMZ. I think on Shark Tank, they say the thing that's the two killers of any deal on Shark Tank. is when you don't know your numbers and you just said you need to know your numbers. And when you come in and you say, oh, this is a $1 billion market and I just need to capture 1% of it and we'll have X. And that's an instant deal killer to the sharks as well. So when you say that's a limited size market, what do you mean by that or how do you address that?

  • Speaker #0

    So Kevin, you brought up a great point. So let's go to that shark tank and I will weave it into the whole story. You know why an investor kills that I just need to capture 1% of the market and this will make us millions? That 1% market capture is the side hustle mindset. He is in it for himself or she is in it for herself to make that 1% and become financially independent. It is not an investment. It is a lifestyle business. What an investor is looking for is how well you transition. and make my money worth something for TX. Because not only you have to be successful, as an investor, I know that out of 10 of my investments, six will fail, two will be average, one will be good, and one will really knock it out of the park. So the one that has to knock it out of the park has to essentially pay for the other nine ventures I invested in. And if somebody does not...

  • Speaker #1

    mindset, right? And there a book about that 500 companies or something like that, where the guy buys 500 companies and he just hopes one of them becomes the next Uber and the other 499 doesn't matter.

  • Speaker #0

    Like SoftBank, look at their investment in Alibaba. And basically the investment in Alibaba funded the billions of dollars lost in WeWork. So that's how all these VCs and me coming from that Silicon Valley where you go through an aisle of shopping, you will meet four VCs. It's really a different world. We live in a very different bubble, but I'm trying to build some of that mindset to the small business.

  • Speaker #1

    So does that mean it should be a numbers game for the small entrepreneur where they should launch a lot? I mean, some people are subscribed, launch a lot of products and a couple of them will hit and the rest won't. It's that 80-20 rule. how do you do this on a small scale to leverage you leverage yourself i mean norm and i do this we have multiple businesses and multiple things or if one of them goes under we can still put food put macaroni with ketchup on the table um but if and get our coke zeros but a lot of people don't have it all their eggs are in like one basket or one product

  • Speaker #0

    So here's the thing. When you and Nam started, you did not have 20 businesses. You started with one, you scaled it, and then you start replicating it across. Where a small entrepreneur fails, even on Amazon brand, where they fail is they will be married to a product or a brand. You need to understand this is a relationship. The job of the brand or your business is to make your life better, not the other way around. that you are investing all of your eggs into one brand and if someone is starting someone who has not done like a 100k annual revenue i will say just focus on one thing learn from it make it great and then start replicating it people will be stuck on oh i have made this thing great let me replicate more of this like the exact same product and that's where you will hit stagnation and sometime you will be successful you won't lose money but you will not make you know millions and millions of dollars either so start from one brand and then once you have figured out the fundamentals of advertising of copywriting of psychology of selling pivot quickly to repeating that team as a lego block and going to another brand out of the whole market like we have one product which is card games and board games and i come from an app world right so for me going from up to analog was a switch that hey i'm pivoting all of our investments are in apps let's go into analog right people will still play card games and board games in future and then from there we pivoted into supplements right now we are pivoting into things which i know are guaranteed to happen like there is a guarantee that 50 of population will be women right always that's how nature works So if we can create products around women and pregnant women. We have a very high guarantee of people being available. That market will always exist. So launch there. Any brand that comes to us, we just classify them in a quadrant. People will spend money on relationships. People will spend money on getting ahead of everyone else. People will spend money on themselves. Or people will spend money to look great and shine, outshine. The fifth reason is charity where people just give away money to feel good and follow their spiritual path. Where does your brand fit? Figure that out. And then scale from there. And then launch the next brand in the second category. That way you create a perfect moat around your life and your bunch of companies that can grow. We started selling card games for couples. And then we created a game for married folks. And then we created a game for families. And now I have over 500,000 families that have bought our games. Guess what? I can remarket to the same set of companies if I'm selling a pregnancy product or a woman's product. So think how your next brand will build up on the current brand and start planning it out. And you have to plan out in terms of years, not weeks or quarters. If you are a business owner and you're still thinking in terms of quarters, you have not scaled enough.

  • Speaker #2

    So when you were planning your card game, had you already thought about the supplement?

  • Speaker #0

    No, the supplement game, like the whole supplement thing came into picture after I was having my card game at multi-million dollars. So my ARR was way around... three four million dollars that's when i said that okay now let's get into the next phase of life we have taken care of relationships where people spend money the next place where people spend money is health so can we create the best supplements out there and i got super lucky to you know come across friends in my you know circle who were medical doctors practicing in the States, they had supplements but they did not know how to sell it. So it's like, okay, let's partner up. You make the best clinically researched product and let me and my team sell it. That's like a marriage made in heaven. And yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    that's how we're seeing that a lot right now with partners like Shopify collective is kind of doing that. You know, that's exactly what they're doing. You've got a product. Let's, let's team up. They sell and you're seeing that, you know, a lot more on Amazon as well. But I think that was a really good play.

  • Speaker #1

    Nexus 2 at Dragonfish.

  • Speaker #2

    There we go. Coming soon.

  • Speaker #0

    And see, this is a very tried and tested model in the tech world, right? Pick any large technology company, they have literally stopped innovating everything from scratch because it has a lot of inherent risk. So what everyone is doing is they're acquiring smaller companies for their intellectual property and then bringing in the whole of their kimono of people and skills to expand it. Look at ChatGPT, for example. How many of us knew ChatGPT before Microsoft pumped in $10 billion into it?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, they did that after it kind of broke on the scene shortly after it, but that really blew them up. And now you got SoftBank, you mentioned they're putting $60 billion into ChatGPT. And then ChatGPT just gobbled up, was it Cat, not Casper, is one of these no-code softwares and they've gobbled up a bunch of people and rolled them in. as well. And then one of the guys at ChatGPT just went off, one of the co-founders started something six months ago and now he's about to get bought for something like $6 billion. It hasn't even come to market yet. The product even hasn't come out yet. They're just buying it because it gives them good technology and it gives them a leg up and gives them a jump start on everybody else in a hyper-competitive what-did-you-use-for-me-today industry.

  • Speaker #2

    Hey, 2000s all over again.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah,

  • Speaker #0

    it is. And it is no different than Amazon. Like none of the Amazon sellers like own their factories. So we have outsourced manufacturing as a service to China or now other countries because of all the tariff wars. Same way you can outsource innovation as a service where a small business or a small company is doing all the innovation, grunt work, proving that this thing can work, and then you go acquire them. It is way cheaper to run your own R&D versus just outsourcing innovation. Just for us, like if we were to set up a factory to build our own supplements, we will never launch them, right? So it's not...

  • Speaker #1

    It's all about leverage. Like you're leveraging these doctors and these people that your relationship, it's relationships and leverage that have a good idea and they developed some sort of pill or whatever it is. They just don't know how to market it. You know how to market it. So that's... That's how you grow quickly in business is by through partnerships and leverage.

  • Speaker #0

    Yes. And one thing which people forget about is investing in themselves. Like a lot of people told me that, oh, Kevin's market masters is too expensive. I cannot afford it. And I'm like, guys, you cannot afford to not attend it. Because while sitting there, not only on my hot seat, I learned about, you know, what to change in my businesses, listening to others. I still remember that memory that someone was talking about supplement space and I texted my cousin. She is a veterinarian and she does research in the States. And I said, listen, can you help me put together some great combinations for pet supplementation that has clinical research because you're doing all this research today. And with you and I and the money I have, we can create a company and launch a new whole brand, which is based on clinical trials on pet supplementation. Like go on Amazon, how many pet supplements exist that are clinically tested and tried on real animals? There is no regulation for it as well. Like for humans, at least we have FDA and stuff. For pets, we have very simple regulations. So whenever I see...

  • Speaker #1

    It's their property. So it's a different risk profile. Yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    Exactly. But I could not have come up with that multi-million dollar idea had I not chosen to invest in myself and building my network and attending your market masters. So honestly, I took 10 times more value just being there than from my hot seat. And my hot seat, it has not changed my life. It has changed the life of 10 other people. I've ended up hiring nine more people and building a whole team. man, and, implementing all those things that I have learned and that is showing up in my bank account.

  • Speaker #1

    I think that's a good point. I mean, Norm and I do this. I don't know. I have to look at my P&L, what I spent, but Norm and I spend a lot of money going to events. Me more probably so than Norm, or not probably, me more than Norm. But that's something that both of us, sometimes we both like, oh, we got to cut back.

  • Speaker #0

    We got to get our head down, but we keep getting drawn back to it because exactly what you say is where I get some of the best benefit, not from what the person on stage is saying or what it's from, what they might say, plus what I heard at lunch, plus what Norm and I were talking about last month. I'm like, wait a second, if we put this and this and that, it's a brainstorming thing. But if I wouldn't have put myself in that situation, these ideas would have never come or these opportunities would have never come. And that's... the big benefit and is that worth you know you paid for market masters the example you're giving there is that's five thousand dollars and you know next year it's going to not it's going to nine thousand dollars um and a lot of people are going to be hesitant to pay that like nine thousand dollars you got to be freaking out your mind uh

  • Speaker #1

    there's no way i can go to some of you on the scale at even twenty thousand dollars i i i appreciate that people need to get that right like Like we call this in the boardroom as network effects. Right. Understand this, to get close to someone, people will donate $100,000 to a cause or charity just to be invited to a dinner. Why are we going in those dinners? To get access to people. Yeah. You won't get your next life-changing idea at a metro station waiting for your train or buying a hot dog. But your chances of getting that idea and people who can change your life is way higher if you are in a room with 70 other entrepreneurs who each can spend $50,000 or $10,000 to be in a place. And you have to surround yourself. Amazon selling is a very lonely world. We are all living in our own small bubble of thinking, oh, this is good and this is bad and letting Twitter or Facebook messages. Facebook post decide your mood for the day that, oh, why did Trump do this? Like everyone is crying so much about the new tariffs. I see this as a big opportunity.

  • Speaker #0

    I do too.

  • Speaker #1

    Right. It's going to screw a few people,

  • Speaker #0

    but there's a few people that have something in transit where they could, you know, it could upset the status quo briefly. But I see it as a massive opportunity.

  • Speaker #1

    So, Kevin. I had three shipments in transit before when Trump started increasing tariff all the way to 245%. My next shipment will come sometime in the next 20 days. Guess what? The total impact for my business is hardly transferring 18% of my selling price to the customer. Just by increasing that price by 18%, I am making same amount of margins as I was making in the past. So it is very easy to be, you know, distracted by all these news and media and get it. Like news sells because of distraction. And if it is happy, it is not news. It has to be sad and bad to be called a news, right? But look at the opportunity. All the Chinese sellers that were undercutting large businesses, they would now be under scrutiny. They will be pivoting to other countries where it is easier to sell than in the United States. They are making a budget. They can sell it in the UK as well as they can sell it in the US. So Trump literally outsourced some of our business problems to the rest of the world by putting such tariffs on China. My brand lost $1.2 million due to Temu and people literally copywriting, copying my copyrighted stuff and selling it for like $5 on Temu. Now we won't have to worry about all of that. A lot of small players on Amazon will fold shop. The cost of PPC will go down because if I have to put money from my P&L for tariffs, guess where it is coming out of? I do not control the 15% of Amazon. I do not control the fulfillment fees of Amazon.

  • Speaker #0

    the only thing i control is my ppc costs and i don't know how many people have told you this but we are seeing across the board in my agency the cost per click is going down hey what's up everybody kevin and norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors eight fig let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for amazon sellers that's right it's called eight fig on average sellers working with a fig grow up to 400 percent in less than a year

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  • Speaker #2

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  • Speaker #0

    That's 8-Fig.co, 8-Fig.co. See you on the other side. Well, you had, was it Timu and Sheen just pulled all their advertising from Google? Yes. I think it was, was it Timu or was it Sheen? I can't remember. One of those was running 600, no, 60,000 campaigns, 60,000 different ad campaigns on Google. And as of yesterday, at the time of this recording, they were down to four, from 60,000 down to four. And the same thing, I haven't, I was not unaware of the same thing happening on Amazon, but you just. confirmed that the same thing is happening on amazon uh where these guys are they're bailing out and going elsewhere now they're just getting creative on but on on reducing the value of shipments and playing games around around uh how they value these things and that's just going to they're just going to get caught in a in a web of uh problems there you can see a lot of these chinese people doing that uh chinese sellers doing that that are going to get their stuff confiscated held up at the border um So, yeah, it's interesting times. I think this is a time for great opportunity. What's it, Warren Buffett or whoever always says that the down times are always the best times to invest. That's true. Something along those lines. And you look at even what happened with Apple. Apple's down, I think, 4% year over year right now. But recently, when the tariff stuff was announced, their stock took, what was it? I forget, it was a huge hit. Hundreds of billions of dollars value disappeared. And then as soon as the hold was put on, 90-day hold on electronics or whatever it was, almost all that value came back instantly. The people that bought on the low just made a boatload of cash.

  • Speaker #1

    Apple switched some of their manufacturing during COVID from China to India. And when when the title floor was announced. They airlifted 1.5 million iPhones, iPads, MacBooks from India just to get over that threshold of 12 AM.

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, really? Did they?

  • Speaker #1

    1.5 million devices. That's like worth six weeks of inventory for what sales we do in the States. And that gives them enough time to do all the, you know,

  • Speaker #0

    While everything's sorted out.

  • Speaker #1

    Prepared for the sorting things out. Like how many of us knew about bonded? warehouses before the tariff war.

  • Speaker #0

    Most people didn't. They never even heard of a warehouse where you could store it. Or these DTZs, these trade zones like in Dallas, it's a big one.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes.

  • Speaker #0

    Where you can just store stuff tax-free.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #0

    I was just at a mastermind and one of the people there, she was like, I live in one of these areas in Dallas. You know her, Norm Rachel. She's like, I live in one of these free trade zones. If anybody has some pallets they want to store in my garage, I think I can store six pallets for you in my garage, so just let me know. It's tax-free. I was like, you go, girl. Shout out for brother out.

  • Speaker #1

    And essentially, Kevin, this is warehouses and companies pivoting as well. So we in the corporate boardroom know this thing exists for many, many years.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    When you invest into art and physical products, you don't bring that art onto US soil because then you will incur taxes. So you keep it in these tax-free zones to not pay any taxes or duties or tariffs on whatever art you're investing in. And art gives you a 37% return versus, you know, S&P 500. Suddenly these companies figured that, oh, with this new tariff war, we have...

  • Speaker #0

    hard but we can we have the license so we can add it to more buildings in the same vicinity and you know offer it as a service to others and that is what is happening today everyone is hearing about them when you look at even was it medicine uh most generic medicines in the united states come from india and china but that's by volume by sheer number of units sold it's india and china but by dollars actual dollars it's ireland Ireland provides most of the medicine, the quality medicine to United States. Ireland and Germany are the two big ones. They supply actually dollar-wise the most, not China or India. So there's a lot of these things that are out there that people... The corporate world has people studying this stuff and they know these trends, they know all this stuff and they get ahead of it. Versus the individual entrepreneur, this is new to them and it's like a new thing and they're not prepared.

  • Speaker #1

    Absolutely, Kevin. I know people at Dell and Amazon and then just how you fold a box off a laptop to ship it out. When you do it at that volume, you can save millions of dollars. Like when we designed an algorithm for FedEx where no FedEx turn will take a left turn, we designed the route in a way that it always turns right. Just that no left turn for any FedEx truck reduce their fuel cost by $80 million a year.

  • Speaker #0

    FedEx does the same thing, right? I mean,

  • Speaker #1

    sorry, UPS. Eventually every IP is sold to others. So we created a curbside pickup for Home Depot when COVID hit and then sold that solution to Walmart and Lowe's and Best Buy and everyone else, right? So when you build an IP, you then package it and resell it. That's what tech companies do.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, airplanes did that too. They took out, was it EasyJet or whatever, Ryanair? They took out the magazines, the little catalogs that are in the back seats and took out the... the holder or whatever, and just that alone adds millions of dollars in savings of jet fuel because of the weight or something. These little things make big differences long term.

  • Speaker #1

    They do. They do. And how do we bring that to the small Amazon seller? Look at an Amazon seller, just asking them, how much do you spend on software? I'm like, if you give me the right answer, I will give you one month of service free, because I know you won't be able to answer it right. People are spending tens of thousands of dollars because they sign up with this software and that software and that software unable to do anything right right they will have these swiss army knives and whatnot and then at the end of the year they did not have the dashboards they wanted they did not have access to the data they wanted they tried out a bunch of shiny new software for one feature or two features and they wasted so much of their dead weight right it's the magazine weight on your aircraft So then... If you can just optimize your software stack in an agency, if you can just optimize your PPC spend, your operations, the way you're running your supply chain, you can easily add 8% to 10% of EBITDA for a million-dollar ARR company.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, but what about a lot of sellers? They'll go and they'll have this magical VA. So a lot of these apps are being used by these magical VAs that soon as you hire them for $4 an hour, they're an expert in Facebook, Google ads, everything Amazon. So I think there's a fallacy there that people think. They hear, go and get a VA. Also, when you see all these ads, just recently, just watching YouTube, what pulls up on my ad or on my feed, is always, always something to do with rags to riches in 30 days. And that's bringing in all these people, like we were talking about a bit earlier on, about these people and their expectations. Well, your expectations are going to be so high because of these stupid videos that are out there saying that you could do it in 30 to 60 days, but they don't show you the systems. And I do want to get onto systems in a second, but these VAs, I think people have to show people about VAs and what they can do, because you might have a whole series of part timers, not just one general VA that is super VA. You know, I don't know what you think about that. But then let's talk about systems rather than SOPs.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes, Tom. So... Just like there is no magical pill that I can eat and become healthy, I have to do like five other things in five areas of my life. Same way, there is no magical VA, no magical person that can make your business successful, right? You have to first, like when I was building my accelerator, the first person I hired was an HR person. Because the only job was to find the top one percentile of people that work at our agency or our accelerator, right? You need, when you're going and hiring out a VA, most of the people, what are they doing today? If they're super cheap, they will just post off a job on Facebook groups and hope and pray that they will find someone magical. Or if they are a little sophisticated, they will go and go on onlinejobs.ph or Upwork and try to post their jobs there and get someone in hopes of a magical person shows up that will change the business. Now, some of them do get lucky because they would have offered a lot of money, not knowing what the market rate is, and accidentally picked up an experienced person who comes with their own processes and kind of improves the business. But in 95% of the cases, what happens is you are hiring someone who is not very experienced. You have no systems in place to hire in the first place. So you hire someone random. And then at best, you will have an SOP, which is nothing more than a linear set of instructions that do this, do that, do that, and get the work done, which is what you're doing today. So there is no enhancement in your business. It is just maintenance of your business. I recommend people working with a different mindset if you are planning. And this is where I think agencies, accelerators and brands have a place of coexistence. We need to educate the business owners on how to approach hiring. how to spend a thousand dollars in just hiring someone good before you know onboarding someone onto your company that thousand dollar may seem like a lot of money but it will seem like nothing when you onboard someone who's charging you you know 1500 to 2000 dollars a month so that's like a 18 to 25k annual salary and that someone is delivering new business worth half a million dollars Will you care if I got half a million dollars in extra revenue that, oh, I invested a thousand, two thousand dollars and doing the culture fit and the assessments of the real skills before, you know, feeling for it and figuring it out. Oh, I think this person can do it. So that's the big difference. People are not thinking in hiring system. They're just thinking of hiring as a task. It is not a task. You're getting people that will build your life. like if you treat your business as your baby, then your employees are like the mothers of that baby.

  • Speaker #2

    Okay. I saw, I'll give you an example. I don't know. I think it was the first marketing masters. So I sat there and there was a person, no names, taking a ton of notes. And I got talking to them over a couple of days, like the first day they spent there taking notes. Second day, they took a lot of notes and I was asking them about it. they had no clue how to implement it's great that you came and i'm saying this is for anybody who goes to an event or whatever but if you're in a hot seat or if you're taking notes and you're taking all the notes and you're only going to be as good as if they're like you that you put it into play like there's a few people that put it into play but i can guarantee you that there's going to be a few people that go spend a lot of money and do nothing with it they're intentions are great, but they have no actions. And part of the actions is getting a system in place where you get the right person to understand, go out there and try like you did with the HR person and then hire the right people. And a lot of smaller, even intermediate sellers don't understand that. There's people doing a million, 2 million, $3 million a year. They're happy and they still don't have a VA and they don't understand that they could bring that up to 10 million or whatever it is with just a system to put in place. And like you said, not an SOP, a standard operating procedure is nothing except the steps on paper, how to do it. But nobody has buy-in, nobody has the definitions of how to do it, who to report to, quantification, and that's a big problem. But they want to do it on the cheap and that sucks.

  • Speaker #1

    It's again understanding the difference between I'm doing an investment or I wanted something as a cheap. And the biggest challenge is a lot of small business owners do not believe in themselves. They feel that they were lucky to be successful or, you know, some things happened and they were successful. Like if I was to believe in myself, if I can take the right decisions, you know, two years in the past. to create a $3 million business today, I must be taking the right decision by working with a system, implementing a system and spending $10,000 today that will result in $10 million tomorrow. We tend to forget that story really quickly, like learn from your own success. You started from zero and created a multimillion dollar business. You can create a 10, 20, 100 million dollar business. It is not difficult. These people who are running billion dollar companies that do not have a horn on their head, like my exits are worth over 8 billion dollars. Do you see a horn on my head? No, I'm just the same as you are like anyone else. Believe in yourself and if you bought in the right point, norm like when I was on the hot seat I realized after taking all those notes that I do not have these skills what did I do I spent the rest of the three days talking to all the smart people in the room figuring out who are your resources how are you hiring I got someone to hire my first employee because I did not have that skill of hiring someone in HR I know how to hire an engineer but not an HR person so guess what I go to an agency pay them a money to get the best person onboarded and then I use this person to onboard the rest of my team. There are so many great agencies out there that can help you find the right talent with the right skill set but then do not expect a $700 VA. Good resources cost money in every economy in every country. Invest in that and you will see the return immediately. It's like within 90 days you see your returns so do it.

  • Speaker #2

    And make sure you have the cash flow, right?

  • Speaker #1

    If you're a business owner who does not understand cash flow, then you are nothing more than a drunk driver driving a Ferrari. We are waiting for an accident to happen.

  • Speaker #2

    I got a story about not only cash flow, but one of my first businesses that I was going to sell. And this is one of the things you don't expect. So we had no idea this was happening, but every night we'd be working late. Okay. We'd be, that's, Hey, that's what we did. We got in early. We worked extremely late all the time, five days, six days a week. We didn't realize that that just killed our deal. And the reason why they came over and they said that it was an unrealistic number. If we were the people driving the company and we were working that hard. that they thought that the numbers at the end of the day were driven by the wrong numbers and they canceled the deal on us, which was unbelievable to me. But I understand it now.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes. And I think all the business owners, right, anyone who is doing less than, you know, 50 million a year. This is what they should focus on. Your job as a founder, as a CEO, is to be the visionary or architecting systems or coaching your teams. If you're doing anything besides these three things, you need to hire someone and delegate it to them. I still know people who are like in the top three in baby product category on Amazon, doing millions and millions. and still having trouble giving up on the design part. Oh, I like this image like this. And I'm like, why on earth are you spending your time in this design of your images? I know it worked for you five years ago when you started, but today you should just have a creative strategist do all of that for you. And you should worry about only one thing. How many stacks did you test this month? What was the change in my click-through rate and conversion rate? If your graphic designer cannot answer these two fundamental questions, please fire your graphic designer. I do not care how great they are in Photoshop or Canva or whatever. We are here running a business. We are not here running an art shop selling an artistic thing. Like if you want to do that, change your business. And when I showed how her competition, which was like ranking 6 or 7 in the top 10 in baby category, is now breathing on their neck. by capturing all of the market, that's when she realized, oh, I should have focused on other things of business. People like founders have this weakness. They will focus on what they're really good at versus focusing on what is really good for the company.

  • Speaker #2

    Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Lavanta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levanta, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high-quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right, it's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers, and media buyers, all in Levanta's marketplace, which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from.

  • Speaker #2

    So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta, L-E-V-A-N-T-A dot I-O slash misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits. You know, back in 1995 is when I had a hyper growth company, first hyper growth company. And I was going crazy. So I went through the E-Myth Academy and tried to systemize everything, right? And one of the first things I realized is delegate, delegate whatever you can. And the hardest part for me was I'm a perfectionist. I still am, but I have to let that go. So I'll give it to, you know, whatever it is. And if there's a mistake, if it's not the right color, I let them own it. They know what they need to have. They know what the brand story is. They know what the creative brief looks like. But if it's slightly out, if they make a spelling mistake, I speak up, you know, but I just got to let them do it. And my perfectionism has to take a backseat.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes.

  • Speaker #2

    You know, but. They still have the guidelines of trying to be a perfectionist. But, you know, it's just if you try to do it all yourself and nobody can do it right, then you got a big problem. You'll never grow.

  • Speaker #1

    And this is the second step. Like after people have hired their one or two VAs and they get into hiring like remote specialists or employees, the biggest challenge is you will try to micromanage them because you feel imperfection. And guess what? If someone is really good at their work, they will hate being micromanaged. Even if you were able to implement systems to hire someone great, you won't be able to retain them. And as a result, you will lose that person, you will lose that momentum. Like I have this game in my background, this is like one of my wife's game. We had a spelling mistake on the box.

  • Speaker #2

    On the box?

  • Speaker #1

    On the box. The main image has a spelling mistake. Somebody spelled procrastination. We had a game called productivity versus procrastination. And the graphic designer spelled procrastination wrong. If I was managing all of it, it would have never happened. It did happen. Do I care? No, I care more about the hours I saved and invested in other parts of business. That even if we had a mistake like that, it is all right. We will fix it on the next lot. So get out.

  • Speaker #2

    Unless it was the first letter.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #2

    It's like with an M.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. I have had zero Amazon complaints on spelling mistake on my packaging. Like we think of it too big because we are living in that bubble. People don't care. We are all under that spotlight effect. And that's what is, you know, making us micromanage and focus on things that do not matter. and ignoring things that will really decide the fate of your business and your life.

  • Speaker #2

    That's so important.

  • Speaker #0

    What's that saying? An imperfect product now is better than a perfect product later or something like that?

  • Speaker #1

    Absolutely.

  • Speaker #0

    Something along those lines.

  • Speaker #1

    I'm getting all these sayings from today. You've been really, what, you got a custom chat TPT sitting there? Say, oh.

  • Speaker #0

    No, I just, I read, you know, in my newsletter, I have something called parting shots. And so I'm always looking for little sayings. I'm always looking for little sayings.

  • Speaker #2

    I guess it's this effect. All of us are bored. There is no insulation of, you know, thoughts, plans, money.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #2

    It's all hyperactive network.

  • Speaker #0

    So, and now you decided when you left corporate world to sell on Amazon, you didn't need to do this. I mean, you are financially set based on what you've said, but you wanted something new to do, something, you know, a way to help other people in life. And I think that's one of the reasons you've told me that you started this is that you wanted to give back and like, how can we help people? Your wife was a psychologist. She knew how to do this. So you started. a game games are big on amazon but it's also super competitive there's tons of these relationship card games and and you know i went through uh counseling with my ex-wife and stuff and we had some of these games and she would never play them because it made her feel uncomfortable so that's probably one of the reasons we're divorced right now but um but they they they there's a ton of so how did you use psychology to market this um differently than what other people are doing on Amazon and to grow this into millions of dollars in a highly competitive marketplace. And I think you said your wife really didn't want to go on camera. I think you said your market master, she didn't want to be the face of the brand. And so you're struggling with some ways to handle that. What did you do that other people missed? Made you success highly successful pretty quickly

  • Speaker #2

    Kevin. It was just sticking to the fundamentals So when we launched are you right up me or my kids do not have to work for their life We have made enough from tech. I wanted to give back to the world and we had some divorce going on in person family and Tanya was seeing those lines, you know in her clinic and we said let's help people here this is where we'll have a lot of impact if we can give the gift of beautiful relationships that's the most impactful thing we can do like i can write a six-figure check to some charity but that is not impact it will have you know i just gave away something i have too much of but giving my time energy and life and thoughts to you know solving for something is what we did so we never wanted to be the number one you know brand on amazon or anything like that This was all how can I reach to 1 million families and help them live a more fulfilled life in their relationships. All of our card games, they were tested with psychologists and therapists in their clinic doing counseling before we even placed the first mass order to China to give it out in production. So we created a beautiful... product on day one before we even launched it. We had real human feedback that we incorporated into our games. So having a great product is essential if you want to sustain your success. Otherwise, we will all end up with, you know, those fidget spinner kind of stuff. They go and dump. Now, once we had our great product, we focused a lot on ranking on Amazon. on how do we get in front of and again the objective was not the ego stroke that my product is in the top three the objective was how can i get in front of a lot of people and the only way to do that was organic ranking so we did a combination of how does algorithms think and that's where my you know engineering and data background came into picture where i understand how algos work how well How will a software developer write an algorithm? What kind of checks and balances they will put in an algorithm that has to scale millions of people? And it is very basic. You need to have the right set of keywords. You need to be desirable and discoverable. You know, if I was to put it in one phrase, how do you make it desirable? Do a visual storytelling. All of us are so focused on the best image quality. What we are not focusing on is what is the visual story you're telling with your images. You can have, you know, I can take an expensive camera and take a nice angled shot, you know, for a product. It will not convert if I do not have good visual story. So focus on, you know, your best image quality should be on main image. That is like the hook for your click through rate to get people on your listing. But my design team has one rule. If there was no text, no bullet point, no description on the listing, how will you sell this product with just images? And humans are lazy. Like, we do not have the patience or time to go through all the bullet points. Like, all those bullet points and titles and descriptions are written for AI to figure out what this product is. You are basically training the AI first so that your AI understands what this thing looks like. And then you take it forward to, you know, your people. Norm, you were saying something before I said my thing.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I was going to say, Kevin does a... a great presentation on psychology and one of the things is sound the other is just visuals and if you ever have a chance take a look at Burt's Bees and they do images like this goes back five six seven years ago where they never put any no bullet points no nothing was on no text copy was on their images it was just if you wanted chocolate it was the more savory unbelievable looking image about chocolate. or honey or whatever it was. And yeah, that should just stand alone. So I agree 100% with what you're saying.

  • Speaker #2

    Thanks for validating that, Norm. The second thing is a lot of- Send me a certificate in the mail.

  • Speaker #0

    You'll get a certificate. Do I?

  • Speaker #1

    Do I get Mayor's certificate of validation? There we go.

  • Speaker #0

    You can put that on your LinkedIn profile. Certificate of validation from Norm Farrar. You've made it now. You've accomplished everything you could accomplish in life.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. The other thing is, you know, feeding A9 with the right signals. So a lot of us look at any, you know, YouTube guru trying to sell their course on how to sell on Amazon. They will say buy 500 units and you can make it a million dollar game. Amazon only cares about them and their branding. The Amazon.com brand, right? If you do not have enough inventory in place, Amazon will kill your traffic because they do not want their customers disappointed with the stocked out product. So most of us are. not keeping enough inventory within the Amazon ecosystem that Amazon is aware of. Like I have four warehouses and I consolidated everything into AWD. And I only have one warehouse for, you know, if things were to go south. But everything else is either an AWD or FBA. When you have that level of inventory, you can scale up very quickly. One of my products got suppressed due to a dull thing and it was like a whole black hat attack on my brand. But the minute the search suppression was removed, we went from selling 10 units a day to 800 units a day. And you can do that. Anyone can do that. All you need is a good product, decent reviews, and a well-thought-out PPC strategy. And people are only thinking in terms of keywords when it comes to PPC. Think in terms of context, not keywords. So for our supplement client, they have a supplement which protects eyes from the blue light, which comes from the screens. Instead of focusing on the blue light blocker keyword and making a $13 bid on it, we created a campaign, a sponsored display campaign, where you can target people who are buying blue light blocking glasses. It's a sunglass industry thing. It has nothing to do with supplementation. But guess what? My customer's intent is to protect their eyes from blue light. They do not know it today that there is a capsule that they can pop to get the same desired effect. They're only aware of blue light blocking glasses from their optometrist. So we started targeting that audience. The ACoS of that campaign was 2000% and we don't really care. The result, the number of subscriptions went up by 250% in less than 4 weeks. Overall, we operated that one ASIN at a healthy tacos of 16%. So you have to think outside of the box. Do not over-rotate on keywords or writing the perfect... title or bullet points the ai is way smarter than you or i will ever be to do that that has like a thousand minds behind it the ai knows that shit hey

  • Speaker #0

    kevin king and norm farrar here if you've been enjoying this episode of marketing misfits thanks for listening this far continue listening we got some more valuable stuff coming up be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say.

  • Speaker #1

    I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes! That being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.

  • Speaker #0

    Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm.

  • Speaker #2

    Focus on what is the intent of the customer? How can I serve the customer? with the problem they're trying to solve. Do that with your images. Put some words in your listing so that AI understands that context. Like the text on your listing is basically to train AI. And then use all the free tools or paid tools like PPC and traffic to communicate that to your engine. And once you figure out one engine of Amazon, start thinking about how does TikTok work? What is the business TikTok is into? You can take some of your learnings and implement it to TikTok. Like I learned so many things from YouTube and then started implementing that on Amazon because, you know, like Dan was there at your event. I missed that, Kevin. but End of day, it is the same set of engineers. There are only like those, you know, 10,000 engineers who are writing these code, whether they work for Amazon or Google or, you know, Meta, they're just changing jobs. The way in which they think, the way in which they were taught and trained does not change. And once you figure that out, you can transfer a lot of logic from one platform to another to be successful in whatever thing you're doing it. And that can only happen when you free yourself up focus on three roles of being a visionary or an architect or coaching your team and not worrying about being having the perfect you know image or the perfect words and keywords and all of that you have to delegate all of that to your team trust your hiring process that you've had the good people and then focus on all these other things you can do as a entrepreneur That's where the transition happens between seven figures to eight, nine figures. That's the transition point.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. I guess we should leave it at that. We're at the top of the hour, and that was fantastic. We're actually past the top of the hour. So I got one question for you, Mayor. At the end of every podcast, we ask our misfit if they know a misfit.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. I will recommend getting in touch with the Karen. Karen attended one of the BDS's events as well. She was in the first think tank, Market Masters think tank. And her story is so inspiring. She's a cancer survivor, started her company after, you know, hitting in her late 50s, early 60s, and scaled it to a multi-million dollar brand. And she's doing great. Like, she's an inspiration. And such people belong in this marketing disputes podcast.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. So we'll reach out for you to get her information. And that's it. Kev, anything else to say?

  • Speaker #0

    No, that's been great. The only thing we didn't talk about was that Netflix algorithm. That's getting me to watch that crazy stuff. So I'm not sure who's behind that, but that's for another day.

  • Speaker #1

    We'll bring you back for that one. Yeah. All right, sir. We're going to remove you and us, but don't click off because, uh, uh, we got to bring you back in a second. Okay. All right. I'll see you in a bit there. Perfect.

  • Speaker #0

    Always interesting on the Marketing Misfits. You never know what direction we're going to go or what we're going to talk about. We have some really good guests that come in, some really, really smart people like Maior that have a really interesting background and are applying that to the e-commerce and marketing world in big ways.

  • Speaker #1

    And just think about the guests that are coming up. They're going to be- I know.

  • Speaker #0

    They're the guests.

  • Speaker #1

    We got a whole bunch.

  • Speaker #0

    We got a lot coming up. If you are... Not familiar with the Marketing Misfits podcast. You should be. We've been doing this coming up on a year now. This actually, I think, might be episode 50. Yeah, it's April 30th of 2024 is when we launched it. You know, the average podcast makes it to seven episodes. And Norm, we should give ourselves a pat on the back. We made it to 52. I can't reach.

  • Speaker #1

    I'm lost. I hurt my shoulder doing that.

  • Speaker #0

    Connie. Pass you on the back. Okay.

  • Speaker #1

    Okay.

  • Speaker #0

    But no, you should go back and listen. There's been some amazing guests on. And even I've gone back and listened to a few of them. Like, wow, that was a really good conversation. Because when we're doing this, you know, you and I are in the moment where sometimes we're thinking, like, what are we going to ask next? Or where is this going? Or where can we take this? But when you just sit back and you just listen to it, whether you're in the car or you're working out or just chilling at your house, smoking cigar. It's a whole different perspective. And, you know, some of these episodes are like, I've actually been like, damn, Norm, that was a pretty good episode.

  • Speaker #1

    There is gold.

  • Speaker #0

    That we did there. And soon, if you don't have, you know, some of these episodes, we go over an hour. And I know not everybody can listen to an hour, even if you're doing it in 2X. And if you've made it this far, that means you're a dedicated listener. We're actually going to be having a newsletter come out this summer, Marketing Misfits newsletter, that will actually summarize some of the content. from our guests as well as some additional content. So be sure to keep a lookout for that at marketingmisfits.co. It's not CO, right, Norm?

  • Speaker #1

    It's not CO. It's been a year. It's been a year.

  • Speaker #0

    I finally got it. I'm like a dog. You've got to train me with a treat over and over and over, and then I finally figure it out. But if you want to check out some of those back episodes, Let's just look on... Check them out right here if you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple Podcast or maybe you're watching this on YouTube. There's tons of episodes just right down there below or over here somewhere where you can check out additional episodes. And if you like this episode with my or any other episode, be sure to forward it to a friend who you think might get interested in listening to it or gain something from it.

  • Speaker #1

    And guess what, Kev?

  • Speaker #0

    Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    we're going to go mining for that gold because we're redesigning, reformatting. Even the old episodes, and we're going to be recreating them. We're going to be extracting some of those gold nuggets and putting them onto a separate channel just for the gold.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right. We were just at Elevate360, and we had Daryl Ives, the number one guy in the world for YouTube. He's the guy behind Mr. Beast, partners with Mr. Beast. what is this what do you say 93 billion downloads or views or something like that that he's been responsible for and luckily he made a nice presentation and taught us a few things that confirmed a few things that we were going back and forth on that you and i were like well someone said this and someone said this which way is it and he's like no it's this way and i believe him over over some of these other people and then you know he was kind enough to hang out a couple times at lunch and you know he always had a crowd around him and i think You and me and Kelsey and Gracie, we took advantage of that to get some questions in and get some free advice. So we're going to be implementing a lot of that stuff. And it's exciting times ahead for marketing misfits.

  • Speaker #1

    And who knows? Maybe he'll even be a misfit one of these days.

  • Speaker #0

    I know. That would be great. That would be awesome.

  • Speaker #1

    All right, Mr. King. That's it today.

  • Speaker #0

    That's it. We'll be back again next Tuesday with another episode. So mark your calendars. Hit that subscribe button. so you get notified and we'll see you again next week see you later ciao

Description

What if the secret to scaling your brand lies not in doing more, but in letting go?

Unlock proven strategies, expert insights, and game-changing tools to grow your brand and boost your sales here: ➡️https://marketingmisfits.co/


Uncover the mindset shifts, systems, and stories behind 8-figure exits with this Marketing Misfits episode featuring the electrifying Mayur Sethi. Discover why founders who focus only on their strengths could be holding themselves and their companies back.


Join us as we dive deep into:

- The three things every founder should focus on, and what you MUST delegate

- Battle-tested lessons from billion-dollar boardrooms

- Why instant gratification is killing e-commerce potential

- Real talk: how to build lasting teams (and avoid the VA trap)

- Powerful networking strategies most sellers overlook

- Creative product growth using psychology, partnerships, and leverage

- Hard-won cash flow lessons no one else will tell you

- A blueprint for transitioning from 7 to 8 figures…and beyond


Don’t miss the stories, laughs, and actionable gold you can use starting today. Listen, learn, and lead like a misfit!


⏰ Timestamps:

00:00 - Founders’ Fatal Flaw Exposed

00:34 - Hot Dogs & High Stakes Hustle

03:53 - Smart Money Moves & Lessons

07:40 - Small Brand, Big Leverage

09:26 - Inside the Boardroom Numbers Game: Myth or Mindset?


This episode is brought to you by:

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Transcription

  • Speaker #0

    People like founders have this weakness. They will focus on what they're really good at versus focusing on what is really good for the company. Your job as a founder, as a CEO, is to be the visionary or architecting systems or coaching your teams. If you're doing anything besides these three things, you need to hire someone and delegate it to them. Your watch of marketing misfits,

  • Speaker #1

    known for our...

  • Speaker #0

    from Kevin King.

  • Speaker #1

    Mr. Farrar, good to see you again. Back for another episode of the Marketing Misfits.

  • Speaker #2

    I've had many a hot dog between our last visit.

  • Speaker #1

    No, and you have. And you even got a website up for Marketing Misfits now, which is pretty cool. I mean, people can go to marketingmisfits.co and actually see, learn all about it. There we go. Watch us at work. See that we actually do work. We don't just have fun eating hot dogs in Iceland.

  • Speaker #2

    That was kind of fun, though.

  • Speaker #1

    Come on.

  • Speaker #2

    We have fun. We only have fun. That's all we do.

  • Speaker #1

    Sometimes that's all we do is have fun, but sometimes it's a little bit of work, too. That was a lot of work. Fun for you, but a lot of work for me. Hosting an event. Most people don't realize hosting an event is actually can be exhausting. it's a It's not just the behind, even though people are doing the behind the scenes stuff, just actually being the host. You know, you go to one of these Oscar shows or something, you see the host, the comedian up there. That's real work. You know, people think, oh, they're just up there saying a few lines. But you got to stay on point on everything that's going on. You got to be thinking on your feet. You got to be dealing with issues, introducing people. A lot of people, I didn't have an appreciation for that. Really, until I started doing it. Now, it's like, man, that's a real job.

  • Speaker #2

    It's a real job attending.

  • Speaker #1

    You're just getting yourself up. Like, what time are we starting? Norm's like, what time? 9 a.m. Well, I'll see you about noon. That's the time. I was up until 4 last night, eating, drinking, eating a hot dog.

  • Speaker #2

    Story of my life.

  • Speaker #1

    I sleep to kick in. And so... You did like that hot dog place, though. I told you. Remember, I told you in Iceland, it's across the street. It's actually one block across the street. But I told you you'd like that place.

  • Speaker #2

    So you know what? We should have a podcast with that guy. You know, marketing. He's got one little hot dog stand so famous that there's actually a hot dog stand in the Iceland airport. I don't know if you saw that.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I did. Yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    so I had another one leaving.

  • Speaker #1

    A replica. Did you get one in the airport too? Yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    Ashley Armstrong and me went over and grabbed a hot dog.

  • Speaker #1

    Did you? I thought of that when I was leaving. I was like, I bet Norm stopped there. I bet he did. I meant to text you, but I got busy looking for my gate or something. But I was like, I bet he stopped there and got one.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. Talking about events and going to events and, you know, just being part of an event, not only hosting, but actually taking part in the event and doing some networking and getting to know people. That's how we got to know, at least I got to know our next guest, which is kind of cool.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, he came to MarketMath, the last BDSS MarketMasters that I did. And I actually sat in the hot seat and I had his business analyzed by a group of experts. And then we started talking to this guy. And it's like, you know, sometimes the smartest people always are looking to get that edge. You know, there's people out there that think they know everything. And they're like, I got this. I don't need any help. I don't need a market master. I don't need a consultant or I don't need to hire. I know what I'm doing. But the smart people always are looking for that edge. And like, what am I missing here? and that's that's mayor our guest today he's been extremely successful in the corporate world then he decided to get out of the corporate world and uh go uh do entrepreneur stuff uh along with his wife and he's like i'm doing pretty good i have a pretty good idea what i what i what i know and we're executing well but where what are we missing where's our blind spot and that's why he came uh to market masters and i hope he got something i think i think he got something out of it. I'm pretty sure he did. uh that that's always i always like it when i see see that uh what i always say when you when you stop learning you stop earning uh and and i think that's that's wow that's good kevin you that's not that you meet me or did you come up with that no that's uh that's i don't know i heard that from somebody else i stole that from okay okay somebody else along the way uh i don't remember who but uh but it's it's true uh and that's why um some of us like you go to a lot of events i go to a lot of events where and i read a lot of newsletters you read a lot of different things, and we're always trying to... Make sure we maintain that edge. And I think that's what our guest today is doing. And it's going to be cool to talk to him. He's got a cool story.

  • Speaker #2

    All right. Well, why don't we bring him in?

  • Speaker #1

    We can do that.

  • Speaker #2

    Let's bring in Mayor Sethi. Hello, sir.

  • Speaker #0

    Hey, Norm. Hey, Kevin. How are you doing today?

  • Speaker #1

    We're doing great. As my buddy Mark would say, we're alive and kicking.

  • Speaker #0

    Great.

  • Speaker #2

    Or as I would say, I'm alive.

  • Speaker #1

    Hey, Norm's not kicking. If you see Norm kicking, you need to call 911. There's something. He's involved in convulsions or something. He brushed his teeth with the wrong tube.

  • Speaker #2

    I did.

  • Speaker #0

    Read the newsletter.

  • Speaker #1

    I did. I see. I read your newsletter. Ah,

  • Speaker #2

    there you go.

  • Speaker #1

    Hemorrhoid cream instead of Colgate, I see.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    That's branding. That's a branding issue because those two look the same. I mean, that's a marketing thing because I can see how you can make that mistake, the red and white. And if you're not paying close attention.

  • Speaker #2

    Did you hear about this, Mayor? I got home from Marketing Masters, so where I met you. And when I got home, I was really tired. It was like 3 a.m. And then I got up early and I walked into the washroom, bathroom. And I bought a tube of Travel Colgate when I was down there. I got into the bathroom. There was a tube. I put it on, same thing, white, started brushing my teeth. And when something feels really funny here, turned out it was hydrocortisone. Same tube. Same tube.

  • Speaker #1

    Is that what they call Bengay?

  • Speaker #0

    Don't start. Yeah. You had a very memorable brushing experience that day, let's put it that way.

  • Speaker #2

    I did, I did. But we're here for you. So, sir, you have a huge story. Like, I was sitting down, we started talking, and we ended up talking, I finished talking about an hour afterwards, but you have a crazy story. Can we get into it a little bit?

  • Speaker #0

    Absolutely. Absolutely. so I'm an engineer, that's what I am by profession and education, and I spent about 17 years in Silicon Valley designing things, doing stuff that touches almost everyone's life on a daily basis. And after, you know, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the industry and doing some billion dollar exits, I was kind of done. So my wife, who is a doctor, she's a psychologist, we both decided that let's focus on our kids and quit our jobs. And I remember the day I quit my half a million dollar job and I got a call from my mother-in-law and we had a very interesting conversation. But lo and behold, a few years later, we now own a multi-seven-figure brand. We are doing great. I have learned a thing or two during the last six years of my Amazon selling journey. And now I'm a angel investor in some of the brands i also have started a whole brand accelerator to help other small businesses leverage what secret sauce exists in these fortune 500 boardrooms and give them access to that and you know just help the common person grow versus making my billionaire venture capitalist and pe firms a few billion dollars more so i'm just taking a different direction in my life. after this 20 years of what I've done so far.

  • Speaker #1

    Well, you said secrets in these corporate ballroom rooms. Corporate selling and entrepreneur selling are two different animals. So how does that translate from a corporate secret? Or what's an example of a corporate secret from the ballroom that an entrepreneur can play? Because there's two different financial levels, two different, you know, it's a it's a rule by committee and rule by this and that. Can you give me an example of what you mean when you take these secrets from the corporate world and put them into this Amazon entrepreneurial world?

  • Speaker #0

    Sure, Kevin. So honestly, the secrets are more for a small business owner who is not in the C-suite of corporate world. But in the corporate world, it is something very common, right? So the rule of 40, that's how you buy companies, right? But if you bring some of that in the small businesses, a case in point example is understanding your P&L really well and figuring out what exactly are your leaks in the system and then going and fixing that. So half of the entrepreneurs do not even understand EBITDA. And then we start getting into... Gross margin less Amazon fees, gross margin less Amazon ads, gross margin less this, less that. You have all these ratios that in a second, anyone who has been in corporate for 10 plus years in senior roles will see that you have a problem in marketing, sir, or you have a problem in supply chain. But for a small business owner, they're still living in some software dashboard or some half-baked report from Amazon and believing that they're making so much money. or assuming that they have a problem in this area of business. And typically those areas of business are areas where they're either not comfortable or they are really like, you know, have no clue and they're dependent on others. And they believe that that is why it is wrong, because I don't know it. So it's a mind shift thing that happens for the small business owners.

  • Speaker #2

    You know, I sat in on a ton of business presentations with this uh, fairly well-known VC out there. And I was just lucky enough that I got to know him and he let me sit in on these meetings. And the turning point, you could see a great presentation, people not knowing what they're asking for, what they want, but hesitation when they didn't know their numbers exact. Like it could be a great meeting. And then all of a sudden it's like, are you kidding me? And it would turn the meeting just like that, you know, just forget it. that one goes in the trash.

  • Speaker #0

    Yep. Yep. And I recently had a brand that approached, applied to work with us and they wanted to grow 2X. And my team did an audit. And after that, I came and told them, listen, we can help you grow not 2X, but 3X. But that means you will have to invest in the next 180 days of inventory. Do you have that kind of capital? And the answer was, was no I do not. Can you raise that kind of capital? The answer is no, I cannot. Then stop dreaming about 2x, 3x growth because growth comes at a cost. You need to plan for it. It won't happen because of an accident or you wished for it, right? You need to put all the pieces in play to do that. And that's where I see a lot of small business owners, especially Amazon brands, are struggling. They're too distracted by the noise out there versus focusing on the four fundamental things and stop worrying about the vanity metrics.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, they're more focused on short-term than long-term. A lot of them don't have the patience or the funding to actually do long-term stuff. Or maybe you have to invest $10,000 in some sort of advertising campaign now that's going to only bring back $10,000 now. But the long-term, those customers are going to buy from you, hopefully, over and over and over. And a year from now, they're going to be profitable. But you've got to get from point A to point B without going under. And you've got to have a plan. And like you said, a lot of people, it's pie in the sky. I just want a 3X, but they don't understand what that takes. And why do you think that is? Do you think that's because a lot of people get into selling e-commerce, whether it's Amazon or Shopify or whatever it is?

  • Speaker #2

    I'd hustle, Kev.

  • Speaker #1

    Without business experience? They just want to quit.

  • Speaker #0

    they want to work for themselves and they just don't understand that stuff or you think they just so caught up in just running the business and wearing 27 different hats they just don't pay attention to it because it's not the sexy stuff i think kevin it's a combination of both like let's look at something very basic in order for me to get a minimum wage job uh right i still have to be of a certain age i have to go through certain schooling education right to get to the to get there. So, to get an entry level job, somebody is willing to invest 18 to 20 years of their life, learn language, maths, numbers, all of that, and then get a 40K job a year. And now you want to make millions but are not even willing to invest three years of your life. Isn't that a joke?

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. The younger generation wants that instant gratification. They want to be rich now and not have to work for it.

  • Speaker #0

    Yes. And e-commerce does not work like that. Like if you want that instant gratification, maybe play on meme coins. And once you're broke, you know, take money from parents. But if you want to build something sustainable. You have to understand what market you're playing in. Is this a zero-sum game market? Is this a different kind of market? Is it a market for all? And then you have to take those actions, right? So if you're in e-commerce, understand this. On Amazon, unless there is a population explosion in the United States and we become like 600 million people tomorrow, the market is only so much. People will spend money. I'm not even talking about macros of recession or anything. You have a fixed population to which you have to sell a product. And now you want to expand into Canada and you start believing that, oh, I'm successful in the US. I will be equally successful in Canada. No, you will not. Because population of Canada is less than that of California where I live. You don't have as many people to buy products. So once you start paying attention to those fundamentals. you start to realize that a e-commerce is not complicated it is actually pretty simple but because people are so distracted with the new ppc strategy or new this or hidden that or or a shortcut that promises them the dream

  • Speaker #1

    outcome they're unable to focus on what makes a business money what's up everybody your good old buddies norm and kevin here And I've got an Amazon creative team that I want to introduce you to.

  • Speaker #2

    That's right, Kevin. It's called the House of AAMZ. And it's the leading provider in combining marketing and branding with laser focus on Amazon.

  • Speaker #1

    Hey, Norm, they do a lot of really cool stuff if you haven't seen what they do. Like full listing graphics, premium A-plus content, storefront design, branding, photography, renderings, packaging design, and a whole lot of other stuff that Amazon sellers need.

  • Speaker #2

    And guess what? They have nine years active in this space. So you can skip the guesswork, trust the experts. There's no fees. There's no retainers. You pay per project.

  • Speaker #1

    So if you want to take your product to the next level, check out House of AMZ. That's House of AMZ dot com. House of AMZ. I think on Shark Tank, they say the thing that's the two killers of any deal on Shark Tank. is when you don't know your numbers and you just said you need to know your numbers. And when you come in and you say, oh, this is a $1 billion market and I just need to capture 1% of it and we'll have X. And that's an instant deal killer to the sharks as well. So when you say that's a limited size market, what do you mean by that or how do you address that?

  • Speaker #0

    So Kevin, you brought up a great point. So let's go to that shark tank and I will weave it into the whole story. You know why an investor kills that I just need to capture 1% of the market and this will make us millions? That 1% market capture is the side hustle mindset. He is in it for himself or she is in it for herself to make that 1% and become financially independent. It is not an investment. It is a lifestyle business. What an investor is looking for is how well you transition. and make my money worth something for TX. Because not only you have to be successful, as an investor, I know that out of 10 of my investments, six will fail, two will be average, one will be good, and one will really knock it out of the park. So the one that has to knock it out of the park has to essentially pay for the other nine ventures I invested in. And if somebody does not...

  • Speaker #1

    mindset, right? And there a book about that 500 companies or something like that, where the guy buys 500 companies and he just hopes one of them becomes the next Uber and the other 499 doesn't matter.

  • Speaker #0

    Like SoftBank, look at their investment in Alibaba. And basically the investment in Alibaba funded the billions of dollars lost in WeWork. So that's how all these VCs and me coming from that Silicon Valley where you go through an aisle of shopping, you will meet four VCs. It's really a different world. We live in a very different bubble, but I'm trying to build some of that mindset to the small business.

  • Speaker #1

    So does that mean it should be a numbers game for the small entrepreneur where they should launch a lot? I mean, some people are subscribed, launch a lot of products and a couple of them will hit and the rest won't. It's that 80-20 rule. how do you do this on a small scale to leverage you leverage yourself i mean norm and i do this we have multiple businesses and multiple things or if one of them goes under we can still put food put macaroni with ketchup on the table um but if and get our coke zeros but a lot of people don't have it all their eggs are in like one basket or one product

  • Speaker #0

    So here's the thing. When you and Nam started, you did not have 20 businesses. You started with one, you scaled it, and then you start replicating it across. Where a small entrepreneur fails, even on Amazon brand, where they fail is they will be married to a product or a brand. You need to understand this is a relationship. The job of the brand or your business is to make your life better, not the other way around. that you are investing all of your eggs into one brand and if someone is starting someone who has not done like a 100k annual revenue i will say just focus on one thing learn from it make it great and then start replicating it people will be stuck on oh i have made this thing great let me replicate more of this like the exact same product and that's where you will hit stagnation and sometime you will be successful you won't lose money but you will not make you know millions and millions of dollars either so start from one brand and then once you have figured out the fundamentals of advertising of copywriting of psychology of selling pivot quickly to repeating that team as a lego block and going to another brand out of the whole market like we have one product which is card games and board games and i come from an app world right so for me going from up to analog was a switch that hey i'm pivoting all of our investments are in apps let's go into analog right people will still play card games and board games in future and then from there we pivoted into supplements right now we are pivoting into things which i know are guaranteed to happen like there is a guarantee that 50 of population will be women right always that's how nature works So if we can create products around women and pregnant women. We have a very high guarantee of people being available. That market will always exist. So launch there. Any brand that comes to us, we just classify them in a quadrant. People will spend money on relationships. People will spend money on getting ahead of everyone else. People will spend money on themselves. Or people will spend money to look great and shine, outshine. The fifth reason is charity where people just give away money to feel good and follow their spiritual path. Where does your brand fit? Figure that out. And then scale from there. And then launch the next brand in the second category. That way you create a perfect moat around your life and your bunch of companies that can grow. We started selling card games for couples. And then we created a game for married folks. And then we created a game for families. And now I have over 500,000 families that have bought our games. Guess what? I can remarket to the same set of companies if I'm selling a pregnancy product or a woman's product. So think how your next brand will build up on the current brand and start planning it out. And you have to plan out in terms of years, not weeks or quarters. If you are a business owner and you're still thinking in terms of quarters, you have not scaled enough.

  • Speaker #2

    So when you were planning your card game, had you already thought about the supplement?

  • Speaker #0

    No, the supplement game, like the whole supplement thing came into picture after I was having my card game at multi-million dollars. So my ARR was way around... three four million dollars that's when i said that okay now let's get into the next phase of life we have taken care of relationships where people spend money the next place where people spend money is health so can we create the best supplements out there and i got super lucky to you know come across friends in my you know circle who were medical doctors practicing in the States, they had supplements but they did not know how to sell it. So it's like, okay, let's partner up. You make the best clinically researched product and let me and my team sell it. That's like a marriage made in heaven. And yeah,

  • Speaker #2

    that's how we're seeing that a lot right now with partners like Shopify collective is kind of doing that. You know, that's exactly what they're doing. You've got a product. Let's, let's team up. They sell and you're seeing that, you know, a lot more on Amazon as well. But I think that was a really good play.

  • Speaker #1

    Nexus 2 at Dragonfish.

  • Speaker #2

    There we go. Coming soon.

  • Speaker #0

    And see, this is a very tried and tested model in the tech world, right? Pick any large technology company, they have literally stopped innovating everything from scratch because it has a lot of inherent risk. So what everyone is doing is they're acquiring smaller companies for their intellectual property and then bringing in the whole of their kimono of people and skills to expand it. Look at ChatGPT, for example. How many of us knew ChatGPT before Microsoft pumped in $10 billion into it?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, they did that after it kind of broke on the scene shortly after it, but that really blew them up. And now you got SoftBank, you mentioned they're putting $60 billion into ChatGPT. And then ChatGPT just gobbled up, was it Cat, not Casper, is one of these no-code softwares and they've gobbled up a bunch of people and rolled them in. as well. And then one of the guys at ChatGPT just went off, one of the co-founders started something six months ago and now he's about to get bought for something like $6 billion. It hasn't even come to market yet. The product even hasn't come out yet. They're just buying it because it gives them good technology and it gives them a leg up and gives them a jump start on everybody else in a hyper-competitive what-did-you-use-for-me-today industry.

  • Speaker #2

    Hey, 2000s all over again.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah,

  • Speaker #0

    it is. And it is no different than Amazon. Like none of the Amazon sellers like own their factories. So we have outsourced manufacturing as a service to China or now other countries because of all the tariff wars. Same way you can outsource innovation as a service where a small business or a small company is doing all the innovation, grunt work, proving that this thing can work, and then you go acquire them. It is way cheaper to run your own R&D versus just outsourcing innovation. Just for us, like if we were to set up a factory to build our own supplements, we will never launch them, right? So it's not...

  • Speaker #1

    It's all about leverage. Like you're leveraging these doctors and these people that your relationship, it's relationships and leverage that have a good idea and they developed some sort of pill or whatever it is. They just don't know how to market it. You know how to market it. So that's... That's how you grow quickly in business is by through partnerships and leverage.

  • Speaker #0

    Yes. And one thing which people forget about is investing in themselves. Like a lot of people told me that, oh, Kevin's market masters is too expensive. I cannot afford it. And I'm like, guys, you cannot afford to not attend it. Because while sitting there, not only on my hot seat, I learned about, you know, what to change in my businesses, listening to others. I still remember that memory that someone was talking about supplement space and I texted my cousin. She is a veterinarian and she does research in the States. And I said, listen, can you help me put together some great combinations for pet supplementation that has clinical research because you're doing all this research today. And with you and I and the money I have, we can create a company and launch a new whole brand, which is based on clinical trials on pet supplementation. Like go on Amazon, how many pet supplements exist that are clinically tested and tried on real animals? There is no regulation for it as well. Like for humans, at least we have FDA and stuff. For pets, we have very simple regulations. So whenever I see...

  • Speaker #1

    It's their property. So it's a different risk profile. Yeah.

  • Speaker #0

    Exactly. But I could not have come up with that multi-million dollar idea had I not chosen to invest in myself and building my network and attending your market masters. So honestly, I took 10 times more value just being there than from my hot seat. And my hot seat, it has not changed my life. It has changed the life of 10 other people. I've ended up hiring nine more people and building a whole team. man, and, implementing all those things that I have learned and that is showing up in my bank account.

  • Speaker #1

    I think that's a good point. I mean, Norm and I do this. I don't know. I have to look at my P&L, what I spent, but Norm and I spend a lot of money going to events. Me more probably so than Norm, or not probably, me more than Norm. But that's something that both of us, sometimes we both like, oh, we got to cut back.

  • Speaker #0

    We got to get our head down, but we keep getting drawn back to it because exactly what you say is where I get some of the best benefit, not from what the person on stage is saying or what it's from, what they might say, plus what I heard at lunch, plus what Norm and I were talking about last month. I'm like, wait a second, if we put this and this and that, it's a brainstorming thing. But if I wouldn't have put myself in that situation, these ideas would have never come or these opportunities would have never come. And that's... the big benefit and is that worth you know you paid for market masters the example you're giving there is that's five thousand dollars and you know next year it's going to not it's going to nine thousand dollars um and a lot of people are going to be hesitant to pay that like nine thousand dollars you got to be freaking out your mind uh

  • Speaker #1

    there's no way i can go to some of you on the scale at even twenty thousand dollars i i i appreciate that people need to get that right like Like we call this in the boardroom as network effects. Right. Understand this, to get close to someone, people will donate $100,000 to a cause or charity just to be invited to a dinner. Why are we going in those dinners? To get access to people. Yeah. You won't get your next life-changing idea at a metro station waiting for your train or buying a hot dog. But your chances of getting that idea and people who can change your life is way higher if you are in a room with 70 other entrepreneurs who each can spend $50,000 or $10,000 to be in a place. And you have to surround yourself. Amazon selling is a very lonely world. We are all living in our own small bubble of thinking, oh, this is good and this is bad and letting Twitter or Facebook messages. Facebook post decide your mood for the day that, oh, why did Trump do this? Like everyone is crying so much about the new tariffs. I see this as a big opportunity.

  • Speaker #0

    I do too.

  • Speaker #1

    Right. It's going to screw a few people,

  • Speaker #0

    but there's a few people that have something in transit where they could, you know, it could upset the status quo briefly. But I see it as a massive opportunity.

  • Speaker #1

    So, Kevin. I had three shipments in transit before when Trump started increasing tariff all the way to 245%. My next shipment will come sometime in the next 20 days. Guess what? The total impact for my business is hardly transferring 18% of my selling price to the customer. Just by increasing that price by 18%, I am making same amount of margins as I was making in the past. So it is very easy to be, you know, distracted by all these news and media and get it. Like news sells because of distraction. And if it is happy, it is not news. It has to be sad and bad to be called a news, right? But look at the opportunity. All the Chinese sellers that were undercutting large businesses, they would now be under scrutiny. They will be pivoting to other countries where it is easier to sell than in the United States. They are making a budget. They can sell it in the UK as well as they can sell it in the US. So Trump literally outsourced some of our business problems to the rest of the world by putting such tariffs on China. My brand lost $1.2 million due to Temu and people literally copywriting, copying my copyrighted stuff and selling it for like $5 on Temu. Now we won't have to worry about all of that. A lot of small players on Amazon will fold shop. The cost of PPC will go down because if I have to put money from my P&L for tariffs, guess where it is coming out of? I do not control the 15% of Amazon. I do not control the fulfillment fees of Amazon.

  • Speaker #0

    the only thing i control is my ppc costs and i don't know how many people have told you this but we are seeing across the board in my agency the cost per click is going down hey what's up everybody kevin and norm here with a quick word from one of our sponsors eight fig let me tell you about a platform that's changing the game for amazon sellers that's right it's called eight fig on average sellers working with a fig grow up to 400 percent in less than a year

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  • Speaker #2

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  • Speaker #0

    That's 8-Fig.co, 8-Fig.co. See you on the other side. Well, you had, was it Timu and Sheen just pulled all their advertising from Google? Yes. I think it was, was it Timu or was it Sheen? I can't remember. One of those was running 600, no, 60,000 campaigns, 60,000 different ad campaigns on Google. And as of yesterday, at the time of this recording, they were down to four, from 60,000 down to four. And the same thing, I haven't, I was not unaware of the same thing happening on Amazon, but you just. confirmed that the same thing is happening on amazon uh where these guys are they're bailing out and going elsewhere now they're just getting creative on but on on reducing the value of shipments and playing games around around uh how they value these things and that's just going to they're just going to get caught in a in a web of uh problems there you can see a lot of these chinese people doing that uh chinese sellers doing that that are going to get their stuff confiscated held up at the border um So, yeah, it's interesting times. I think this is a time for great opportunity. What's it, Warren Buffett or whoever always says that the down times are always the best times to invest. That's true. Something along those lines. And you look at even what happened with Apple. Apple's down, I think, 4% year over year right now. But recently, when the tariff stuff was announced, their stock took, what was it? I forget, it was a huge hit. Hundreds of billions of dollars value disappeared. And then as soon as the hold was put on, 90-day hold on electronics or whatever it was, almost all that value came back instantly. The people that bought on the low just made a boatload of cash.

  • Speaker #1

    Apple switched some of their manufacturing during COVID from China to India. And when when the title floor was announced. They airlifted 1.5 million iPhones, iPads, MacBooks from India just to get over that threshold of 12 AM.

  • Speaker #0

    Oh, really? Did they?

  • Speaker #1

    1.5 million devices. That's like worth six weeks of inventory for what sales we do in the States. And that gives them enough time to do all the, you know,

  • Speaker #0

    While everything's sorted out.

  • Speaker #1

    Prepared for the sorting things out. Like how many of us knew about bonded? warehouses before the tariff war.

  • Speaker #0

    Most people didn't. They never even heard of a warehouse where you could store it. Or these DTZs, these trade zones like in Dallas, it's a big one.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes.

  • Speaker #0

    Where you can just store stuff tax-free.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #0

    I was just at a mastermind and one of the people there, she was like, I live in one of these areas in Dallas. You know her, Norm Rachel. She's like, I live in one of these free trade zones. If anybody has some pallets they want to store in my garage, I think I can store six pallets for you in my garage, so just let me know. It's tax-free. I was like, you go, girl. Shout out for brother out.

  • Speaker #1

    And essentially, Kevin, this is warehouses and companies pivoting as well. So we in the corporate boardroom know this thing exists for many, many years.

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #1

    When you invest into art and physical products, you don't bring that art onto US soil because then you will incur taxes. So you keep it in these tax-free zones to not pay any taxes or duties or tariffs on whatever art you're investing in. And art gives you a 37% return versus, you know, S&P 500. Suddenly these companies figured that, oh, with this new tariff war, we have...

  • Speaker #0

    hard but we can we have the license so we can add it to more buildings in the same vicinity and you know offer it as a service to others and that is what is happening today everyone is hearing about them when you look at even was it medicine uh most generic medicines in the united states come from india and china but that's by volume by sheer number of units sold it's india and china but by dollars actual dollars it's ireland Ireland provides most of the medicine, the quality medicine to United States. Ireland and Germany are the two big ones. They supply actually dollar-wise the most, not China or India. So there's a lot of these things that are out there that people... The corporate world has people studying this stuff and they know these trends, they know all this stuff and they get ahead of it. Versus the individual entrepreneur, this is new to them and it's like a new thing and they're not prepared.

  • Speaker #1

    Absolutely, Kevin. I know people at Dell and Amazon and then just how you fold a box off a laptop to ship it out. When you do it at that volume, you can save millions of dollars. Like when we designed an algorithm for FedEx where no FedEx turn will take a left turn, we designed the route in a way that it always turns right. Just that no left turn for any FedEx truck reduce their fuel cost by $80 million a year.

  • Speaker #0

    FedEx does the same thing, right? I mean,

  • Speaker #1

    sorry, UPS. Eventually every IP is sold to others. So we created a curbside pickup for Home Depot when COVID hit and then sold that solution to Walmart and Lowe's and Best Buy and everyone else, right? So when you build an IP, you then package it and resell it. That's what tech companies do.

  • Speaker #0

    Well, airplanes did that too. They took out, was it EasyJet or whatever, Ryanair? They took out the magazines, the little catalogs that are in the back seats and took out the... the holder or whatever, and just that alone adds millions of dollars in savings of jet fuel because of the weight or something. These little things make big differences long term.

  • Speaker #1

    They do. They do. And how do we bring that to the small Amazon seller? Look at an Amazon seller, just asking them, how much do you spend on software? I'm like, if you give me the right answer, I will give you one month of service free, because I know you won't be able to answer it right. People are spending tens of thousands of dollars because they sign up with this software and that software and that software unable to do anything right right they will have these swiss army knives and whatnot and then at the end of the year they did not have the dashboards they wanted they did not have access to the data they wanted they tried out a bunch of shiny new software for one feature or two features and they wasted so much of their dead weight right it's the magazine weight on your aircraft So then... If you can just optimize your software stack in an agency, if you can just optimize your PPC spend, your operations, the way you're running your supply chain, you can easily add 8% to 10% of EBITDA for a million-dollar ARR company.

  • Speaker #2

    Yeah, but what about a lot of sellers? They'll go and they'll have this magical VA. So a lot of these apps are being used by these magical VAs that soon as you hire them for $4 an hour, they're an expert in Facebook, Google ads, everything Amazon. So I think there's a fallacy there that people think. They hear, go and get a VA. Also, when you see all these ads, just recently, just watching YouTube, what pulls up on my ad or on my feed, is always, always something to do with rags to riches in 30 days. And that's bringing in all these people, like we were talking about a bit earlier on, about these people and their expectations. Well, your expectations are going to be so high because of these stupid videos that are out there saying that you could do it in 30 to 60 days, but they don't show you the systems. And I do want to get onto systems in a second, but these VAs, I think people have to show people about VAs and what they can do, because you might have a whole series of part timers, not just one general VA that is super VA. You know, I don't know what you think about that. But then let's talk about systems rather than SOPs.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes, Tom. So... Just like there is no magical pill that I can eat and become healthy, I have to do like five other things in five areas of my life. Same way, there is no magical VA, no magical person that can make your business successful, right? You have to first, like when I was building my accelerator, the first person I hired was an HR person. Because the only job was to find the top one percentile of people that work at our agency or our accelerator, right? You need, when you're going and hiring out a VA, most of the people, what are they doing today? If they're super cheap, they will just post off a job on Facebook groups and hope and pray that they will find someone magical. Or if they are a little sophisticated, they will go and go on onlinejobs.ph or Upwork and try to post their jobs there and get someone in hopes of a magical person shows up that will change the business. Now, some of them do get lucky because they would have offered a lot of money, not knowing what the market rate is, and accidentally picked up an experienced person who comes with their own processes and kind of improves the business. But in 95% of the cases, what happens is you are hiring someone who is not very experienced. You have no systems in place to hire in the first place. So you hire someone random. And then at best, you will have an SOP, which is nothing more than a linear set of instructions that do this, do that, do that, and get the work done, which is what you're doing today. So there is no enhancement in your business. It is just maintenance of your business. I recommend people working with a different mindset if you are planning. And this is where I think agencies, accelerators and brands have a place of coexistence. We need to educate the business owners on how to approach hiring. how to spend a thousand dollars in just hiring someone good before you know onboarding someone onto your company that thousand dollar may seem like a lot of money but it will seem like nothing when you onboard someone who's charging you you know 1500 to 2000 dollars a month so that's like a 18 to 25k annual salary and that someone is delivering new business worth half a million dollars Will you care if I got half a million dollars in extra revenue that, oh, I invested a thousand, two thousand dollars and doing the culture fit and the assessments of the real skills before, you know, feeling for it and figuring it out. Oh, I think this person can do it. So that's the big difference. People are not thinking in hiring system. They're just thinking of hiring as a task. It is not a task. You're getting people that will build your life. like if you treat your business as your baby, then your employees are like the mothers of that baby.

  • Speaker #2

    Okay. I saw, I'll give you an example. I don't know. I think it was the first marketing masters. So I sat there and there was a person, no names, taking a ton of notes. And I got talking to them over a couple of days, like the first day they spent there taking notes. Second day, they took a lot of notes and I was asking them about it. they had no clue how to implement it's great that you came and i'm saying this is for anybody who goes to an event or whatever but if you're in a hot seat or if you're taking notes and you're taking all the notes and you're only going to be as good as if they're like you that you put it into play like there's a few people that put it into play but i can guarantee you that there's going to be a few people that go spend a lot of money and do nothing with it they're intentions are great, but they have no actions. And part of the actions is getting a system in place where you get the right person to understand, go out there and try like you did with the HR person and then hire the right people. And a lot of smaller, even intermediate sellers don't understand that. There's people doing a million, 2 million, $3 million a year. They're happy and they still don't have a VA and they don't understand that they could bring that up to 10 million or whatever it is with just a system to put in place. And like you said, not an SOP, a standard operating procedure is nothing except the steps on paper, how to do it. But nobody has buy-in, nobody has the definitions of how to do it, who to report to, quantification, and that's a big problem. But they want to do it on the cheap and that sucks.

  • Speaker #1

    It's again understanding the difference between I'm doing an investment or I wanted something as a cheap. And the biggest challenge is a lot of small business owners do not believe in themselves. They feel that they were lucky to be successful or, you know, some things happened and they were successful. Like if I was to believe in myself, if I can take the right decisions, you know, two years in the past. to create a $3 million business today, I must be taking the right decision by working with a system, implementing a system and spending $10,000 today that will result in $10 million tomorrow. We tend to forget that story really quickly, like learn from your own success. You started from zero and created a multimillion dollar business. You can create a 10, 20, 100 million dollar business. It is not difficult. These people who are running billion dollar companies that do not have a horn on their head, like my exits are worth over 8 billion dollars. Do you see a horn on my head? No, I'm just the same as you are like anyone else. Believe in yourself and if you bought in the right point, norm like when I was on the hot seat I realized after taking all those notes that I do not have these skills what did I do I spent the rest of the three days talking to all the smart people in the room figuring out who are your resources how are you hiring I got someone to hire my first employee because I did not have that skill of hiring someone in HR I know how to hire an engineer but not an HR person so guess what I go to an agency pay them a money to get the best person onboarded and then I use this person to onboard the rest of my team. There are so many great agencies out there that can help you find the right talent with the right skill set but then do not expect a $700 VA. Good resources cost money in every economy in every country. Invest in that and you will see the return immediately. It's like within 90 days you see your returns so do it.

  • Speaker #2

    And make sure you have the cash flow, right?

  • Speaker #1

    If you're a business owner who does not understand cash flow, then you are nothing more than a drunk driver driving a Ferrari. We are waiting for an accident to happen.

  • Speaker #2

    I got a story about not only cash flow, but one of my first businesses that I was going to sell. And this is one of the things you don't expect. So we had no idea this was happening, but every night we'd be working late. Okay. We'd be, that's, Hey, that's what we did. We got in early. We worked extremely late all the time, five days, six days a week. We didn't realize that that just killed our deal. And the reason why they came over and they said that it was an unrealistic number. If we were the people driving the company and we were working that hard. that they thought that the numbers at the end of the day were driven by the wrong numbers and they canceled the deal on us, which was unbelievable to me. But I understand it now.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes. And I think all the business owners, right, anyone who is doing less than, you know, 50 million a year. This is what they should focus on. Your job as a founder, as a CEO, is to be the visionary or architecting systems or coaching your teams. If you're doing anything besides these three things, you need to hire someone and delegate it to them. I still know people who are like in the top three in baby product category on Amazon, doing millions and millions. and still having trouble giving up on the design part. Oh, I like this image like this. And I'm like, why on earth are you spending your time in this design of your images? I know it worked for you five years ago when you started, but today you should just have a creative strategist do all of that for you. And you should worry about only one thing. How many stacks did you test this month? What was the change in my click-through rate and conversion rate? If your graphic designer cannot answer these two fundamental questions, please fire your graphic designer. I do not care how great they are in Photoshop or Canva or whatever. We are here running a business. We are not here running an art shop selling an artistic thing. Like if you want to do that, change your business. And when I showed how her competition, which was like ranking 6 or 7 in the top 10 in baby category, is now breathing on their neck. by capturing all of the market, that's when she realized, oh, I should have focused on other things of business. People like founders have this weakness. They will focus on what they're really good at versus focusing on what is really good for the company.

  • Speaker #2

    Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Lavanta. Hey, Kevin, tell us a little bit about it.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right, Amazon sellers. Do you want to skyrocket your sales and boost your organic rankings? Meet Levanta, Norm and I's secret weapon for driving high-quality external traffic straight to our Amazon storefronts using affiliate marketing. That's right, it's achieved through direct partnerships with leading media outlets like CNN, Wirecutter, and BuzzFeed, just to name a few, as well as top affiliates, influencers, bloggers, and media buyers, all in Levanta's marketplace, which is home to over 5,000 different creators that you get to choose from.

  • Speaker #2

    So are you ready to elevate your business? Visit get.levanta.io slash misfits. That's get.levanta, L-E-V-A-N-T-A dot I-O slash misfits and book a call and you'll get up to 20% off Levanta's gold plan today. That's get.levanta.io slash misfits. You know, back in 1995 is when I had a hyper growth company, first hyper growth company. And I was going crazy. So I went through the E-Myth Academy and tried to systemize everything, right? And one of the first things I realized is delegate, delegate whatever you can. And the hardest part for me was I'm a perfectionist. I still am, but I have to let that go. So I'll give it to, you know, whatever it is. And if there's a mistake, if it's not the right color, I let them own it. They know what they need to have. They know what the brand story is. They know what the creative brief looks like. But if it's slightly out, if they make a spelling mistake, I speak up, you know, but I just got to let them do it. And my perfectionism has to take a backseat.

  • Speaker #1

    Yes.

  • Speaker #2

    You know, but. They still have the guidelines of trying to be a perfectionist. But, you know, it's just if you try to do it all yourself and nobody can do it right, then you got a big problem. You'll never grow.

  • Speaker #1

    And this is the second step. Like after people have hired their one or two VAs and they get into hiring like remote specialists or employees, the biggest challenge is you will try to micromanage them because you feel imperfection. And guess what? If someone is really good at their work, they will hate being micromanaged. Even if you were able to implement systems to hire someone great, you won't be able to retain them. And as a result, you will lose that person, you will lose that momentum. Like I have this game in my background, this is like one of my wife's game. We had a spelling mistake on the box.

  • Speaker #2

    On the box?

  • Speaker #1

    On the box. The main image has a spelling mistake. Somebody spelled procrastination. We had a game called productivity versus procrastination. And the graphic designer spelled procrastination wrong. If I was managing all of it, it would have never happened. It did happen. Do I care? No, I care more about the hours I saved and invested in other parts of business. That even if we had a mistake like that, it is all right. We will fix it on the next lot. So get out.

  • Speaker #2

    Unless it was the first letter.

  • Speaker #1

    Exactly.

  • Speaker #2

    It's like with an M.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah. I have had zero Amazon complaints on spelling mistake on my packaging. Like we think of it too big because we are living in that bubble. People don't care. We are all under that spotlight effect. And that's what is, you know, making us micromanage and focus on things that do not matter. and ignoring things that will really decide the fate of your business and your life.

  • Speaker #2

    That's so important.

  • Speaker #0

    What's that saying? An imperfect product now is better than a perfect product later or something like that?

  • Speaker #1

    Absolutely.

  • Speaker #0

    Something along those lines.

  • Speaker #1

    I'm getting all these sayings from today. You've been really, what, you got a custom chat TPT sitting there? Say, oh.

  • Speaker #0

    No, I just, I read, you know, in my newsletter, I have something called parting shots. And so I'm always looking for little sayings. I'm always looking for little sayings.

  • Speaker #2

    I guess it's this effect. All of us are bored. There is no insulation of, you know, thoughts, plans, money.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah.

  • Speaker #2

    It's all hyperactive network.

  • Speaker #0

    So, and now you decided when you left corporate world to sell on Amazon, you didn't need to do this. I mean, you are financially set based on what you've said, but you wanted something new to do, something, you know, a way to help other people in life. And I think that's one of the reasons you've told me that you started this is that you wanted to give back and like, how can we help people? Your wife was a psychologist. She knew how to do this. So you started. a game games are big on amazon but it's also super competitive there's tons of these relationship card games and and you know i went through uh counseling with my ex-wife and stuff and we had some of these games and she would never play them because it made her feel uncomfortable so that's probably one of the reasons we're divorced right now but um but they they they there's a ton of so how did you use psychology to market this um differently than what other people are doing on Amazon and to grow this into millions of dollars in a highly competitive marketplace. And I think you said your wife really didn't want to go on camera. I think you said your market master, she didn't want to be the face of the brand. And so you're struggling with some ways to handle that. What did you do that other people missed? Made you success highly successful pretty quickly

  • Speaker #2

    Kevin. It was just sticking to the fundamentals So when we launched are you right up me or my kids do not have to work for their life We have made enough from tech. I wanted to give back to the world and we had some divorce going on in person family and Tanya was seeing those lines, you know in her clinic and we said let's help people here this is where we'll have a lot of impact if we can give the gift of beautiful relationships that's the most impactful thing we can do like i can write a six-figure check to some charity but that is not impact it will have you know i just gave away something i have too much of but giving my time energy and life and thoughts to you know solving for something is what we did so we never wanted to be the number one you know brand on amazon or anything like that This was all how can I reach to 1 million families and help them live a more fulfilled life in their relationships. All of our card games, they were tested with psychologists and therapists in their clinic doing counseling before we even placed the first mass order to China to give it out in production. So we created a beautiful... product on day one before we even launched it. We had real human feedback that we incorporated into our games. So having a great product is essential if you want to sustain your success. Otherwise, we will all end up with, you know, those fidget spinner kind of stuff. They go and dump. Now, once we had our great product, we focused a lot on ranking on Amazon. on how do we get in front of and again the objective was not the ego stroke that my product is in the top three the objective was how can i get in front of a lot of people and the only way to do that was organic ranking so we did a combination of how does algorithms think and that's where my you know engineering and data background came into picture where i understand how algos work how well How will a software developer write an algorithm? What kind of checks and balances they will put in an algorithm that has to scale millions of people? And it is very basic. You need to have the right set of keywords. You need to be desirable and discoverable. You know, if I was to put it in one phrase, how do you make it desirable? Do a visual storytelling. All of us are so focused on the best image quality. What we are not focusing on is what is the visual story you're telling with your images. You can have, you know, I can take an expensive camera and take a nice angled shot, you know, for a product. It will not convert if I do not have good visual story. So focus on, you know, your best image quality should be on main image. That is like the hook for your click through rate to get people on your listing. But my design team has one rule. If there was no text, no bullet point, no description on the listing, how will you sell this product with just images? And humans are lazy. Like, we do not have the patience or time to go through all the bullet points. Like, all those bullet points and titles and descriptions are written for AI to figure out what this product is. You are basically training the AI first so that your AI understands what this thing looks like. And then you take it forward to, you know, your people. Norm, you were saying something before I said my thing.

  • Speaker #1

    Yeah, I was going to say, Kevin does a... a great presentation on psychology and one of the things is sound the other is just visuals and if you ever have a chance take a look at Burt's Bees and they do images like this goes back five six seven years ago where they never put any no bullet points no nothing was on no text copy was on their images it was just if you wanted chocolate it was the more savory unbelievable looking image about chocolate. or honey or whatever it was. And yeah, that should just stand alone. So I agree 100% with what you're saying.

  • Speaker #2

    Thanks for validating that, Norm. The second thing is a lot of- Send me a certificate in the mail.

  • Speaker #0

    You'll get a certificate. Do I?

  • Speaker #1

    Do I get Mayor's certificate of validation? There we go.

  • Speaker #0

    You can put that on your LinkedIn profile. Certificate of validation from Norm Farrar. You've made it now. You've accomplished everything you could accomplish in life.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. The other thing is, you know, feeding A9 with the right signals. So a lot of us look at any, you know, YouTube guru trying to sell their course on how to sell on Amazon. They will say buy 500 units and you can make it a million dollar game. Amazon only cares about them and their branding. The Amazon.com brand, right? If you do not have enough inventory in place, Amazon will kill your traffic because they do not want their customers disappointed with the stocked out product. So most of us are. not keeping enough inventory within the Amazon ecosystem that Amazon is aware of. Like I have four warehouses and I consolidated everything into AWD. And I only have one warehouse for, you know, if things were to go south. But everything else is either an AWD or FBA. When you have that level of inventory, you can scale up very quickly. One of my products got suppressed due to a dull thing and it was like a whole black hat attack on my brand. But the minute the search suppression was removed, we went from selling 10 units a day to 800 units a day. And you can do that. Anyone can do that. All you need is a good product, decent reviews, and a well-thought-out PPC strategy. And people are only thinking in terms of keywords when it comes to PPC. Think in terms of context, not keywords. So for our supplement client, they have a supplement which protects eyes from the blue light, which comes from the screens. Instead of focusing on the blue light blocker keyword and making a $13 bid on it, we created a campaign, a sponsored display campaign, where you can target people who are buying blue light blocking glasses. It's a sunglass industry thing. It has nothing to do with supplementation. But guess what? My customer's intent is to protect their eyes from blue light. They do not know it today that there is a capsule that they can pop to get the same desired effect. They're only aware of blue light blocking glasses from their optometrist. So we started targeting that audience. The ACoS of that campaign was 2000% and we don't really care. The result, the number of subscriptions went up by 250% in less than 4 weeks. Overall, we operated that one ASIN at a healthy tacos of 16%. So you have to think outside of the box. Do not over-rotate on keywords or writing the perfect... title or bullet points the ai is way smarter than you or i will ever be to do that that has like a thousand minds behind it the ai knows that shit hey

  • Speaker #0

    kevin king and norm farrar here if you've been enjoying this episode of marketing misfits thanks for listening this far continue listening we got some more valuable stuff coming up be sure to hit that subscribe button if you're listening to this on your favorite podcast player, or if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, make sure you subscribe to our channel because you don't want to miss a single episode of the Marketing Misfits. Have you subscribed yet, Norm?

  • Speaker #1

    Well, this is an old guy alert. Should I subscribe to my own podcast?

  • Speaker #0

    Yeah, but what if you forget to show up one time and it's just me on here? You're not going to know what I say.

  • Speaker #1

    I'll buy you a beard and you can sit in my chair too. You can go back and forth with one another. Yikes! That being said, don't forget to subscribe, share it. Oh, and if you really like this content, somewhere up there, there's a banner. Click on it and you'll go to another episode of the Marketing Misfits.

  • Speaker #0

    Make sure you don't miss a single episode because you don't want to be like Norm.

  • Speaker #2

    Focus on what is the intent of the customer? How can I serve the customer? with the problem they're trying to solve. Do that with your images. Put some words in your listing so that AI understands that context. Like the text on your listing is basically to train AI. And then use all the free tools or paid tools like PPC and traffic to communicate that to your engine. And once you figure out one engine of Amazon, start thinking about how does TikTok work? What is the business TikTok is into? You can take some of your learnings and implement it to TikTok. Like I learned so many things from YouTube and then started implementing that on Amazon because, you know, like Dan was there at your event. I missed that, Kevin. but End of day, it is the same set of engineers. There are only like those, you know, 10,000 engineers who are writing these code, whether they work for Amazon or Google or, you know, Meta, they're just changing jobs. The way in which they think, the way in which they were taught and trained does not change. And once you figure that out, you can transfer a lot of logic from one platform to another to be successful in whatever thing you're doing it. And that can only happen when you free yourself up focus on three roles of being a visionary or an architect or coaching your team and not worrying about being having the perfect you know image or the perfect words and keywords and all of that you have to delegate all of that to your team trust your hiring process that you've had the good people and then focus on all these other things you can do as a entrepreneur That's where the transition happens between seven figures to eight, nine figures. That's the transition point.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. I guess we should leave it at that. We're at the top of the hour, and that was fantastic. We're actually past the top of the hour. So I got one question for you, Mayor. At the end of every podcast, we ask our misfit if they know a misfit.

  • Speaker #2

    Yes. I will recommend getting in touch with the Karen. Karen attended one of the BDS's events as well. She was in the first think tank, Market Masters think tank. And her story is so inspiring. She's a cancer survivor, started her company after, you know, hitting in her late 50s, early 60s, and scaled it to a multi-million dollar brand. And she's doing great. Like, she's an inspiration. And such people belong in this marketing disputes podcast.

  • Speaker #1

    All right. So we'll reach out for you to get her information. And that's it. Kev, anything else to say?

  • Speaker #0

    No, that's been great. The only thing we didn't talk about was that Netflix algorithm. That's getting me to watch that crazy stuff. So I'm not sure who's behind that, but that's for another day.

  • Speaker #1

    We'll bring you back for that one. Yeah. All right, sir. We're going to remove you and us, but don't click off because, uh, uh, we got to bring you back in a second. Okay. All right. I'll see you in a bit there. Perfect.

  • Speaker #0

    Always interesting on the Marketing Misfits. You never know what direction we're going to go or what we're going to talk about. We have some really good guests that come in, some really, really smart people like Maior that have a really interesting background and are applying that to the e-commerce and marketing world in big ways.

  • Speaker #1

    And just think about the guests that are coming up. They're going to be- I know.

  • Speaker #0

    They're the guests.

  • Speaker #1

    We got a whole bunch.

  • Speaker #0

    We got a lot coming up. If you are... Not familiar with the Marketing Misfits podcast. You should be. We've been doing this coming up on a year now. This actually, I think, might be episode 50. Yeah, it's April 30th of 2024 is when we launched it. You know, the average podcast makes it to seven episodes. And Norm, we should give ourselves a pat on the back. We made it to 52. I can't reach.

  • Speaker #1

    I'm lost. I hurt my shoulder doing that.

  • Speaker #0

    Connie. Pass you on the back. Okay.

  • Speaker #1

    Okay.

  • Speaker #0

    But no, you should go back and listen. There's been some amazing guests on. And even I've gone back and listened to a few of them. Like, wow, that was a really good conversation. Because when we're doing this, you know, you and I are in the moment where sometimes we're thinking, like, what are we going to ask next? Or where is this going? Or where can we take this? But when you just sit back and you just listen to it, whether you're in the car or you're working out or just chilling at your house, smoking cigar. It's a whole different perspective. And, you know, some of these episodes are like, I've actually been like, damn, Norm, that was a pretty good episode.

  • Speaker #1

    There is gold.

  • Speaker #0

    That we did there. And soon, if you don't have, you know, some of these episodes, we go over an hour. And I know not everybody can listen to an hour, even if you're doing it in 2X. And if you've made it this far, that means you're a dedicated listener. We're actually going to be having a newsletter come out this summer, Marketing Misfits newsletter, that will actually summarize some of the content. from our guests as well as some additional content. So be sure to keep a lookout for that at marketingmisfits.co. It's not CO, right, Norm?

  • Speaker #1

    It's not CO. It's been a year. It's been a year.

  • Speaker #0

    I finally got it. I'm like a dog. You've got to train me with a treat over and over and over, and then I finally figure it out. But if you want to check out some of those back episodes, Let's just look on... Check them out right here if you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple Podcast or maybe you're watching this on YouTube. There's tons of episodes just right down there below or over here somewhere where you can check out additional episodes. And if you like this episode with my or any other episode, be sure to forward it to a friend who you think might get interested in listening to it or gain something from it.

  • Speaker #1

    And guess what, Kev?

  • Speaker #0

    Oh,

  • Speaker #1

    we're going to go mining for that gold because we're redesigning, reformatting. Even the old episodes, and we're going to be recreating them. We're going to be extracting some of those gold nuggets and putting them onto a separate channel just for the gold.

  • Speaker #0

    That's right. We were just at Elevate360, and we had Daryl Ives, the number one guy in the world for YouTube. He's the guy behind Mr. Beast, partners with Mr. Beast. what is this what do you say 93 billion downloads or views or something like that that he's been responsible for and luckily he made a nice presentation and taught us a few things that confirmed a few things that we were going back and forth on that you and i were like well someone said this and someone said this which way is it and he's like no it's this way and i believe him over over some of these other people and then you know he was kind enough to hang out a couple times at lunch and you know he always had a crowd around him and i think You and me and Kelsey and Gracie, we took advantage of that to get some questions in and get some free advice. So we're going to be implementing a lot of that stuff. And it's exciting times ahead for marketing misfits.

  • Speaker #1

    And who knows? Maybe he'll even be a misfit one of these days.

  • Speaker #0

    I know. That would be great. That would be awesome.

  • Speaker #1

    All right, Mr. King. That's it today.

  • Speaker #0

    That's it. We'll be back again next Tuesday with another episode. So mark your calendars. Hit that subscribe button. so you get notified and we'll see you again next week see you later ciao

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