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Welcome to the Million Dollar Sellers Podcast. I'm your host, Nick Shucet. Today we're doing something a little new. We've got a cohost on the show, Rolando Rosas.
What up? I'm ready for you today. I brought out some new sound effects just for today.
I've been excited to do this with you, Ro. This is the first episode of me and you do this little side thing, man, where we're gonna bring real talk from million-dollar sellers to our listeners and let them know how we deal with problems in the business.
100% because you're like me, you're out there talking to other folks, you're consuming media, you're consuming podcasts from other people you know in the space.
You hear all the rosy stuff, like I'm crushing it here and I'm crushing it there and this one's doing this and this hack here and this hack there. I doubt it’s all true and that's good to know but we don't get the nitty gritty.
This is, hold up, somebody else wants to jump in here. He wants to say one, two, three, four, five. Real life. This is real life, my man.
Oh, I like a little DJ Khaled action, all right.
DJ Khaled, this is real life. We're just gonna share some of the struggles. That's what I wanna do, is share some of the struggles. Also some good stuff. You went on vacation recently, which is great.
For me, it took me years from when I started the business to get to vacationing again like I was when I had my corporate job. 4th of July, I'm gone. Christmas, bye-bye, see you guys later.
Then once you open up your shop, your own business, you're just like, ooh.
I'm gonna have to put off that vacation for a while. Then it was great to be able to be like, I know that if I'm not sitting at the desk, that it's not gonna all fall apart.
I think folks that have an Amazon-based business or an e-commerce-based business, can all get there. You just may need to put some things in place for you to go on your break, because I'd love to hear how it went.
I'll dive into that and where I was at right before because like you said, you start your own business and maybe you start working more. You start skipping the holidays. It's a disservice.
You do need to get out of the way, let your team do things, let your team struggle a little bit. I know for me what I got into it for. It was the lifestyle that e-commerce offered me.
Before I went to Indonesia, I was very hands-on doing daily huddles and I'm on multiple Level 10s and I'm really driving the operations daily and wearing myself out honestly.
Those little things, just like what you're talking about the daily huddles, something that made a big difference for me there was a study that came out from Microsoft recently.
It looked at people who worked from home and had huddles or back-to-back meetings. They found that those were bad for your mind and bad for you as a person.
That the simple as building in an extra five to 15 minutes in between meetings as well as taking a five-minute break.
You probably get in the zone and you're back-to-back, I gotta knock it all out and you got six back-to-back meetings and you do that for weeks at a time. You're just like, uh oh, that's what happens.
Go ahead, Nick.
I was going to say you don't have any time to reflect on what you're doing.
No, you don't and you feel the weight and the pressure. If you're selling products, doesn't matter what category you're in, whether it's supplements or electronics or otherwise.
Selling products is not an easy thing when you want to get to the top of the mountain. If used as a side hustle and you're selling a couple of hundred bucks on the weekend and that's all you want to do, not a problem.
If you want to turn that into a seven or eight-figure business, there's no phoning it in for an hour a day. That's just not going to happen.
To be able to do that where you could take a break, you gotta give yourself the space, the mind.
I think we're starting to see more and more studies come out about just the mindset and the mind and what it takes to be in it for the long term so that you don't burn out because I did.
I was about to throw the towel in myself because I was completely burnt out.
I can relate 100% and it affects everything in your life, your marriage, your relationship with your children, your relationship with your friends, your relationship with yourself.
When all that's off track, you're not even doing that well at work probably, or at least not as good as you could be. I think that's the ticket.
It's it's like wondering what it's like to sleep eight hours when you only sleep five. you don't know until you do it.
Right, exactly. Something else that at the beginning of this year, I had a little bit of a medical scare. One of the things that I didn't realize was that I just wasn't as active as I thought I was.
In my brain, I figured I'm active because I'm busy and I'm doing things, I have a dog and I have a little toddler.
I'm active, but when I went and got one of these little step counter things, I realized, oh, I'm only getting a thousand steps.
All of the studies come out to say you run anywhere between six to 10,000 steps a day to stay healthy.
That's just walking, and I'm like, wow, I didn't realize. Again, you're so self-absorbed in your world that you think you're busy because your mind's busy but your body and paying attention to that, may pay dividends.
I lost a couple of pounds. I started feeling better, I had a little more energy. I wasn't nose-diving when it was two or three o'clock in the afternoon. A lot of us get that and you feel like you're falling off a cliff.
You get right through that to get to 5:30. My son comes in and he's like, Dada it's quitting time! I'm looking at the clock like, oh you're right it's quitting time, rather than feeling like, ugh, it is quitting time.
I think a lot of listeners will start to resonate with this. They'll probably start to realize okay, maybe I should think about dialing it back, but what about results?
Let’s talk about some things we have been able to accomplish by letting our hands off the wheel. I just came back from Indonesia. I was there for almost four weeks and I didn't do anything.
I was ignoring Slack messages left and right.
Did the house fall apart? Did the business fall apart?
It didn't and things are moving along just fine. The team ran into some problems, but they figured it out on their own.
Some things came to light of people and situations that did not, and some bad decisions were made, which is a good thing as well because you get to see maybe you need to get rid of someone.
Maybe someone needs some coaching.
That's also a good thing. That’s also good where you find the holes.
Just since I've been back, we wrapped up a project to fully automate reviewing wholesale catalogs where all the clicks that someone's doing on a Chrome page, we just automated all of them.
They're looking at an output sheet instead of doing research. This is for reselling on Amazon. So we get a catalog from a supplier.
This is on your website?
This is for reselling on Amazon. We get a catalog from a supplier and usually, we take the UPC, go to Amazon, search for it, find the product, and analyze the profits based on the cost of goods and sales volume.
All that stuff. All of those clicks that someone is manually doing are automated.
Holy smokes. I got to save a bunch of time.
It's going to save hours and instead of hiring more people, which leads to more managing, we've empowered an employee in the business who has done well for many years. It's a game-changer.
Hold up a second, I have something for that. Let me see if it comes through. Get ready for a pro tip. All right, Nick. Yes. That sounds like a pro tip to me if I ever heard one.
What I did was I set this up and this is what I'm good at. I have an idea. I have a vision. I see something that can be possible. I set the stage for it.
I hand it off and that middle part, all that execution and research and troubleshooting, you let the team do that. Then you come back and you finish up the extra 10%. I think Gary Vee did a video it’s like 10-80-10 or something.
You know how those guys always come up with some framework, but it's that.
He said something about that. As an owner to me, I struggle with this part. I know what it takes to get X done. I want it done up to 100% but Gary says you're probably going to get about 80% most of the time out of an employee.
They're not going to be like you and me, which is let me look for that the extra thing that's missing. Let me tie this piece to that. Oh, yes, I found it.
No, they're not gonna do that, generally. He says that's probably as good as it's gonna get and you got to accept that and I have a hard time accepting that.
I do too. I think it's those things that I do like pushing myself to go on a trip. We were in the Mentawai Islands and didn't even have cell phone service for four days so there's nothing out there.
Were your people flipping out when they couldn't get a hold of you and or they already knew I'm going to be in the middle of nowhere so don't flip out.
I don't know. I don't care. They knew I was going to be gone, but I think at the end of the day, it depends on what type of people you want working for you.
Do you want the type of people who are going to flip out when you can't give them an immediate answer, or do you want the people who go and figure it out on their own?
I know I need the people who are gonna go out and figure it out on their own because I'm in this to build a lifestyle in which I can pursue what makes me happy, pursue what makes my wife happy, and spend time with my kids.
That's why I'm in it, it's not for the money.
Well if the business you're doing can give you that, then you are a winner. You said something about the people, something that changed my mind.
It was at the beginning of the year, we hired her for a specific task and she's such a go-getter, she assumed the role of somebody else, and we had to let go of somebody.
She took over that role and we brought somebody else to replace the first role that she was in, but what I learned in that whole mishegoss was that hiring people solely specifically based on their skill set.
Especially if you're looking at virtual employees, is a mistake because this person had such a good attitude about learning, adapting, and doing new tasks that it changed my mind on, I've got to focus more for me.
Like what you said, resiliency, adaptability, I'm not gonna be around to give you everyday guidance. Here's what I'd expect. You do it and set the stage for, hmm, maybe we have been hiring not the right way here.
We gotta get more independent people, who were good fast thinkers and that can be like, I'm gonna roll with the punches because this month we gotta do something different.
Some people and the person we had to get rid of was very much entrenched in here's what I could do and that's all I do.
That was good for a while for us because where we were at, but where we're at today, that's just not gonna work.
We've done some executive coaching this year. We're probably in our ninth month of executive coaching, something like that. It's going well and she gives us a lot of simple ways to look at these things and challenges some of our beliefs on things.
Even what you said about a person that can do only one thing. There might be a place for them in the business. Hey, we don't want your ideas. Just do this. We don't need your thoughts, your opinion, your ideas.
Just do this one thing, copy-paste, whatever it is. There are certainly things like that need to be done because then on the other end of the spectrum, you have people who just go out and do whatever they want.
We had a guy raise our PPC budget without asking anybody from $25,000 to $36,000 a month.
You might want to check in with somebody about that.
You know, you're at, you know, so that's the other end of the spectrum. Uh oh, that's right. That was another lesson learned on the trip. I think it's important to realize that there's that spectrum.
There are the people who get frozen and won't do anything, but then there are these people who just do too much.
They don't understand authority and the areas where they can decide that.
I think it's important to know where you put that type of person who is going to take risks like that and where you put these types of people who are not going to take risks.
Maybe you see some examples of that, that could fit into what you've got going on.
I agree. Putting people in the right roles, I had this discussion this morning, with somebody that we've just brought on as a trainee. We thought, let's give her some data analysis because I'm into that right now.
Initially, this person said, yeah, I could do some of that.
Now that they're in it, and seeing exactly what we want them to do from an analytics perspective, brand analytics, and all this stuff that you have on Amazon that really wanna be able to digest but can't quite just do it the way we want.
This person, we've realized, no, that's not this person's strength. We're gonna put them back on doing catalog stuff. This person is an ex-Amazon person who worked with Amazon and understands the issues.
I didn't realize this, but this person also handled complaints on the Amazon side so there's some insight into, oh, this is the words and phrases you wanna use when you're submitting this to Amazon.
This person reviewed some of the complaints, and FBA shipment reimbursement stuff and all that. I was like, huh?
Understanding the mindset like, okay, we want this person working because we already have somebody that's dedicated to that. We have a dedicated person that's all she does.
We're gonna supplement what this other person does with this new person, this trainee, along with some other catalog-based stuff where as you know, you were talking about all this, clicks and analyzing what's good for the wholesale site.
This person is going to assist in a role like that as well.
All right so we got the 10-80-10. We'll go ahead and use Gary Vee's. That's one lesson I learned.
If you're a visionary type of person struggling with this type of thing, I think that's a great framework because the thing that got a lot of million-dollar sellers where they are is that they could do everything.
At one point we did everything and you wore every hat. That can only last so long. Now how do you break that habit of doing everything? You 10-80-10.
You let your team do that 80%, you set the vision, you come back at the end and you tighten that up. Then I think the second part of that is making sure you have the right people in the right seat.
Do we have any other lessons? We got a third one?
No doubt and I think one of the things is knowing your strength. For me, I hate admin stuff. I do. Some people have no problem.
They love sitting behind a computer and just working the spreadsheets and working the other things like this vendor and that and making sure all this paperwork, I don't like it.
Not one bit, but if you said, hey, we're gonna do a strategy session today, I'm the first one in the door. Let's do it. Let's dive in. Let's look at some of the numbers behind the numbers. Let's look at what the trends are.
Let's look at what our sales are. I'm there. I could spend all day talking about it. Knowing those things that I can focus on dial in and I'm really good, at doubling down. The other things, you know what?
I'm not a CPA. Okay, so we have an outsourced firm that handles all of our finances and all of our books. You know what? Let the experts do what they do.
I just heard a word from a guy that I'm gonna have on my podcast next week. He was the president of Blackberry and he said something to me in our prep interview about domain experts.
I asked him, so why did Sony Ericsson and Blackberry fail or some of these other companies? You get a person that comes into a company, let's say an Amazon company, they're not an owner operator, they're a finance guy.
They're not gonna have the domain expertise required to make that flourish. They're gonna understand numbers, they're gonna understand profit margin and whatnot.
Same way in the larger corporate world, you bring in a person who's not a smartphone person, a device person to Apple, to run Apple.
Maybe they were at another big consumer products company, and you make them run Apple, they could probably run Apple right into the ground because they're not domain experts in the device ecosystem world.
You want somebody that understands that world, that's just going to take it to the next level or a new dimension unless you're completely unprofitable and you need some change management kind of thing.
Domain experts, who can understand the problems at hand. Otherwise, things kind of just fall the way it's at. Like I said, I love sales, I love marketing, I love it.
Give all the other stuff to wherever you can peel stuff off, hand it to other people so they can take those things off of you so your brain is not like, oh, I hate when I get that email.
It's so much simpler too. Imagine being away, let's say you implement this and you're away, you take a trip, and you let your team handle a bunch of stuff. Let's break it down to one person.
If that person is only responsible for two things, it's a lot easier to process whether they're doing a good job or not.
If they're responsible for like 12 different things, well now you've just really made things way more complicated to process in your mind and theirs, more importantly. That's the other thing I've learned.
Hey, what if this person just did this? What if they just did this and we had 10 products to review every month potentially to new private label products? You completely outsource product research.
You just come in and look at a qualified list and we're gonna move in that direction as well because it just simplifies something and you know having a pipeline of products to launch just really helps the business.
Let me ask you something because when you say that I think of a few things about project management. What do you guys use internally?
I'm asking you this for a reason because I want to share something but do you use Notion or ClickUp or what are you guys using for that?
We're pretty heavy on ClickUp. I like to think of it as multiple things. Google, Slack, and ClickUp altogether. ClickUp for the long-term things or a reminder three months from now. Slack for that direct, back-to-back communication.
Then I live on Google Calendar. That's where my stuff gets prioritized.
Very similar. We've never talked about this, but I'm bringing this up for a reason because we are heavily now into ClickUp. We use Google as well for our inter-office chat communications. We have our own.
We use RingCentral for our external because we do external communications, but within the ClickUp side of things, it does allow you to put all the pieces together.
Just recently we figured out a way to allow our virtual employees to easily get the tasks that they were going to work on when they get notified, because normally, if you get a notification, you want to go into ClickUp, you gotta read the email.
That could take you at least, let's just say five minutes. Then you add that action as a task. That's at least another five or 10 minutes. Then it's in ClickUp. That's between 10 to 20 minutes.
Just one email will cause that person to do so. We've found a way to essentially get that into ClickUp from an email notification to ClickUp.
It creates a task and all they need to do is say, okay, this is my task that I've got to do.
It could save you some time especially if you're creating cases on the Amazon side, you have a really neat way to add yourself into a CC using a virtual email inside of ClickUp.
It keeps track of the communication that Seller Central is sending back and forth, which is a horrendous process right now trying to manage cases inside of Seller Central.
You can let ClickUp manage that for you. Having someone like you say that “role expert” does that makes life easier. That's one of the things that for me was aging me was seller central support.
I think I aged from I went from 30 to 85 in a matter of a year.
Oh man, that's such a good way to put it. ClickUp’s good for a lot of those things, man. We use it for shipment reconciliation, keeping track of the purchase order, and what shipment it was tied to.
When you get lost inventory and you have to prove to Amazon that you bought it and blah blah blah, all that stuff.
We have it all in one little ClickUp section and you can search the purchase order, you can sit, you can search the bill of lading number, whatever number you have, or maybe you create a unique identifier.
You just keep all that stuff linked. However you do it, ClickUp can tie all those pieces together.
We haven't been using it for purchasing. We use an ERP system. We use Extensiv which used to be the old Skubana but that's interesting.
I have my gal who manages our ClickUp to look into that because that's a very interesting way to use it.
Happy to send it over. We think we have a template for that too that I could share and check out.
This is why you have two owner-operators talk to each other because you give out ideas to
each other and hopefully other folks who are listening to us could also benefit from that.
That's the power of MDS. That's the real power of MDS because we're the ones trailblazing this industry, this lifestyle, this virtual working. A lot of people, including myself, including others in the group look at things like EOS.
Well, newsflash, EOS was built for people working in buildings. We're not in a building. We're working remotely.
You can draw inspiration from those things, but you cannot do that 100% and tell me it's working for your e-commerce business that has people working in India, the Philippines, Africa, and all over the world because it doesn't.
Trust me, I've tried. You have to add some secret sauce.
You're not wrong. I was talking to a guy who is a former HR Executive over at LinkedIn and he said something very similar to me the other day.
He said, you know what? Our way of work for the last 50, 60 years has been built around the office, built around teams inside an office, the communications, the cadence, the workflow.
All of the case management, the MBA studies, the coaches, the gurus, all of that has been to support the how do you build the team within the office, just like you said.
I heard that from the LinkedIn HR guy and he says, it's gonna take some new muscle memory to look at it completely differently because that's the world we're in right now, hybrid, remote, all the rest.
It's gonna require, like you said, trailblazing, new experiments, setting yourself up differently with a different way of working because there aren't a lot of the tools for what you and I need as an Amazon seller, some more coming online.
There aren't a ton. When you look at the landscape of coaches and speakers, it's still small compared to people talking about how to build a team 10, or 15 years ago.
Right. This circles back to where we started, Ro. How can you focus on those things? How can you blaze that trail if you're answering every Slack message you're getting from someone on your team?
You've got to be able to put yourself in a position to focus on these real-world issues that you cannot plan for the things that are coming up in the reality that we're facing as we blaze our way into this new world that we're working in.
That's right. Real life, DJ Khaled. He keeps it real. Man, I got a bunch more in DJ Khaled, but I love that real life.
Yes, you're right. It's something that we are trailblazing. I hate that for so many reasons because we're on the leading edge and there are no case studies for that. There's no manual for that.
You come across so many things, especially on the Amazon side, you're gonna come across some things that they've never seen, and all of a sudden, you're a bad guy for doing this and you realize, oh wait, a bot went crazy.
They ran amok on our listings or the software that I need, it doesn't have XYZ. It's so frustrating when they have, now you're like, I need two software to do what I want to do, but yes, that's the pain of being a trailblazer.
The flip side is that when you are a trailblazer, your competitors are always trying to catch up to you.
That's what I've found for me as well, is that the competitors will copy what we're doing, but that's what we did three years ago. We're already on version four of what we're doing operationally, strategy-wise.
It takes them a while and then you're like, frickin A, the BSR is dropping and not helping because of these clowns, and then you're like, wait a minute, today, somebody said we could probably create another variation.
Split that variation out, and put this other thing that we have been using over here and let it ride in the rear.
Your competitors are on your heels and then we realized hey there's a variation where we did some stuff over here, let's try that, and we did.
We found that we made a slightly different product, and raised the price, here's what's crazy, raised the price, and we sold more.
We're attempting to do the same thing on some other listings that we have to see if we can strike twice. Great. Create a variation, not too different. We already have the inventory there.
Raise the price, and see what happens. I'd love to get back to you on that. I know that on this other stuff, I'm tickled that we could sell more without doing too much more. That was the key.
That's amazing. It's always great to be testing those things, man. That's the exciting stuff to just have an idea, test it, learn from it, see what happens, and then do it again.
No doubt. You know what? There's somebody that would agree with you. He's in the Fs. Here's something you haven't heard today.
Hit me with it.
I'm gonna hit you. Oh yeah, you're gonna like this one. Where is he? Oh goodness. He left. There's only one little square for him. You know what? I'm gonna give you a little bad boy but that wasn't the guy I wanted.
Oh, God. Must have disappeared off of my soundboard. Oh, here he is. Way in the corner. Yeah, boy!
It's been a long time since I heard that, man. Love it. Yes, yes. My boy Flavor Flav, right?
Oldie but a goodie.
My boy Flavor Flav, right?
Yes. That's exactly right. It's only one little teeny square in my little soundboard. I’m having a hard time finding him, but a good way to punctuate exactly what you're saying.
Well, I feel like we talked a lot about a lot of good things, man. How do we wrap this up for the audience?
We talked about the 10-80-10. We talked about having the right people in the right seat and letting them do their thing.
I think the third thing is to realize that if you're in this world, this e-commerce world, this remote working world, you can only draw from traditional knowledge so much.
You've got to be willing to trailblaze a little bit and be confident in yourself, have an idea, put it into action, and then see what happens.
100%. I think you said you said it. Test new things. Don't be afraid to test. Something I've been hearing, I've heard it from Gary.
I've heard it from other successful folks, just the curiosity like, hmm, what if we, or can we, or has anybody?
Once you start asking yourself those questions, then those experiments start happening, then you're like, whoa, we killed it there, and we raised the price, who would have thought?
Or ooh, wait, we can't go in that direction because we got the opposite result which is just as good as finding out what works then you find out no, that doesn't work.
Let's go back to the drawing board and see how we can maybe create a new experiment.
That's where the magic happens. That's one thing I've realized. I went through a big time of being a planner and we have to plan this and structure. You miss out on that when you plan too much.
You do just have to let some things go out there, let them do their own thing, and not try to control too much of it and just see what happens because you'll learn some great things.
You'll also screw some things up and maybe that would be something good to talk about on the next podcast Ro because I've certainly screwed some things up.
I've had some bad hires and some bad investments that would go into thousands and thousands of dollars.
I also had some huge wins that resulted in two to three million in additional revenue over the next 12 months because we locked in an exclusive relationship with a supplier. There are those wins.
So there's those wins, there's those losses. I think the key is making sure that the win outweighs all those losses. You just have to be willing to take risks to do that.
I'm not even going to add to it. 100%. I agree with what you said.
All right, we'll see you guys next week. Thanks for listening. Ro, it was great having you on, man. I'm excited to get this going.
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