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Man, Ro, I tell you what, I was paying someone six grand a month, someone domestic, thinking I was making a good move, and we didn't get any work out of that, man. Have you ever faced something like that?
No. Oh my God, six grand? Are you kidding me? In the Amazon space, that can go a long way, my man. Six grand, wait a minute. Wait a, hold on a second. I know somebody who's got something to say on that.
What? My goodness, gracious. Nick, what's going on? What?
What? Yes. That's what I've been saying when I look back on this. It's all part of the game. You live and you learn. You've got to be willing to make mistakes at the end of the day because I learned a lot from that.
I didn't communicate clearly. I assumed a lot of things. This person's gonna tell me the people they need. They're gonna find the people they need. They're gonna interview them. They're gonna put the job descriptions together.
You think they think like you, Nick. That's what you would do and that's what I would do. All of the details. I think for me, it's eye-opening how many people, it doesn't matter how many people you're gonna bring in.
None of them are gonna think like you. You're gonna get at most 80% of you in them, and that 20% bugs you to death. Like you said, man, why can't they just do these other little things? I think about what Gary Vee says about this.
It's probably the best you're gonna get. Nobody's interested like you, the business owner, and it's just gonna be like, wait a minute, let me look back at yesterday's notes.
Yeah, Nick, yeah, I did talk to that person. This is how much they want. I've got three more on the list right now. I'm going on LinkedIn tomorrow. Do you want that?
It's tough to come by, man. Communicating is what I learned, the right expectations. Just like you said, understanding that, hey, I don't need someone to be just like me.
I need to figure out my new role in the business and what I have to be focused on and then bring these people in and set my expectations clearly and not assume any. That's the mistake I keep making in life, business, wherever.
Stop assuming things and just communicate.
You have to. Communication is the key to this. With my team, that's the one thing. I don't wanna say we struggle, we don't struggle with it, but we do have a large team of virtual employees from the Philippines.
The culture's a little bit different. They're not as aggressive as you and I, like what we were saying, what? What are you talking about, Nick? They are a little more genteel in their approach.
I love that about them. I say this to them all the time, I love that you all are genteel. That's endearing, but when you clock in, put a little bit of that to the side. Still have it. Put that to the side because you have a task to do.
You have a job to do. If you're not getting some from one of the teammates or colleagues or myself, press the button, get on Zoom with me or whoever the colleague is or the other team or the other department.
You gotta push the buttons. That's where understanding these kinds of cultural differences helps with different team members.
I find that for my team, that tends to be the case as well, but I tell them, to communicate, don't be afraid. You're not bothering me, you need something from me. Don't feel like you're bothering.
I think a lot of people at work sometimes think if I send Nick a message, I'm bothering him. You can't look at it like I'm bothering Nick or bothering somebody else on the team. This is what we need, the deadline is tomorrow.
I don't have it for me.
I struggle with that as well. It's all such a big balancing act because then I think some people start to see it as black and white and it's not that either. There's a time and a place, there's context.
There's a rhyme and a reason why you want to be more aggressive at these times and less aggressive at these times. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it's a bad thing. I always take it back to cooking, Ro.
I don't know how much cooking you do. Sugar and salt, man. They're two great things, but you put salt in a pie when it's supposed to have sugar and it's not such a great thing.
I do some of the meals around this house
Yes, it's sprinkled. It's gotta be a little bit in there. Otherwise, you get a bland pie.
Right. I think it's a lot like that. How can you use, what do they call that, man? I feel like they had it in school. It's like logic. Critical thinking. Think critically, don't just do.
Take a step back, analyze the situation, and then move forward.
I have this conversation with one of my team members, and the thing I tell her is I'd love for you to give me some candor around this. There are two kinds of people that I see when it comes to work.
There are those that I do well if you give me the direction and I'll follow. I don’t wanna do a ton of too much critical thinking. Then some thrive on figuring it out. Minimal directions and they're more your doer types.
Understanding which of those two categories that person falls in now sets the stage for, okay, this person, instructions, here it is, and they're gonna follow it just like you did it.
They're not gonna put a ton of like, hey, Nick missed step three B in here. Let's add, mm-mm, that's not how they think. I'm gonna do what you told me to do versus I can, wait a minute.
Nick missed a step in here, wait, let me, Nick, did you mean to put this in here or not? Oh yeah, you missed it, okay, that's right, I'll put it in, done.
That saves me from going nuts because now, okay, I understand, they're more of a follower. It doesn't come out right away, especially if they just join your team.
It's gonna take several interactions, several rounds of, and you're like, okay, this person is a doer, more critical thinking, this one is not.
Maybe this role isn't appropriate for this person. Let's see if we can transition them because they're still good, they're just not good at that. Let's see if we can put them over there.
I think it's a good way to look at it. I used to think of hiring as a function of human resources. I don't know why. I don't have a reason for that.
Then I was talking to someone and they were like, no, it's a function of marketing, and boom, my mind exploded. I was like, immediately I got it because if you think about a funnel.
Hmm. Tell me, how is that? This is the first time I have heard of it.
A marketing funnel and you have the top of the funnel. Your goal is to not sell at the top of the funnel. Your goal is to not get it right.
Your goal is to capture as much as you want and then qualify and get down to what you want hopefully. With hiring, it's the same thing. You've got to figure out, you got to cast that wide net first.
Think of a job application on LinkedIn. Now with marketing, I always take the approach of, all right, I'm not trying to catch what I want, I'm trying to get rid of what I don't want.
That's when I'll tell a copywriter, so now my head goes, I'm like, I'm gonna have a writer write my job description, and I'm gonna tell that writer, I want you, all these people I don't want, this job description should piss them off.
They see it and they're out, they're like, I'm outta here, man. I'm not applying for this job. That led to a form. You repel the people you don't want at the top of the funnel. Then you get some people you do want.
Now you qualify them with a form. Maybe you have a video interview that's automated with questions using a tool like VideoAsk. Then it comes down to that final stage, which is a job interview.
We do three job interviews now. We're bringing in a third party like an unbiased person to do part of that interview to try and get it right man because it's such a big investment up front.
Not just money-wise but time-wise and you want to find that like you said, the role. It's not the person. I'm trying to find someone that fits this role. Are they a doer?
Do they just need to follow directions or do I need someone who's going to be like, Hey Nick, what the heck were you thinking, man? This is a terrible way to do this. There's a time and a place.
Does that role take the sugar or does that role need the salt? Approaching it from that perspective. That was a big shift when someone told me to think about it as a function of marketing.
We hired somebody last year, so before January, and she came in to do a completely different role. We had to let go of a person on our media team, one of the people there. She took that role.
She assumed the position of the person who left. She's done a great job and she'd never done that role before ever in her life.
For me, it was enlightening because if you have adaptable people, they'll say they're more doer. I'll take that on and I'm going to learn about the person that we had to let go.
I only do these five things and you're asking me to do six or replace or think about replacing one and do what you're asking me. It's not really what I do. She served a role while we were in that stage.
As a company, and as an organization, we're somewhere totally different right now. Can you adjust? That person couldn't. This person who took over changed the way I hire.
I'm not gonna hire exactly based, I'm looking for an IT guy, yes, but if they have SQL experience versus AI, no. I'm looking for a guy that can, in this role, I want you to be able to troubleshoot.
I want you to problem-solve a little more. Can you think logically? In IT, crap happens. Something shuts down. I want somebody who can think about all the different IT problems.
Versus, in the role of using sugar or salt, I only want a guy that knows AI because I'm gonna put him in the place where all he's gonna deal all day with is AI.
No, I'm gonna have him deal with these 10 things and he's gotta be able to navigate these 10 things. If not, you're out.
I think it boils back down to communication being clear and not assuming anything because there's a place for everything. Nothing's good or bad, it's just like, do we need this right now?
What does this situation call for? What does this role call for? The executive coaching, our coach Susan from Consilio, had a good analogy of blinders on a horse.
For some people, you only want them to see the path forward, but then some people you want to open it up. Can they see the whole view of the business, the 360 view? Does it need to be 360?
Maybe it's 180, 270, whatever. That was a good analogy that helped me understand what I need from someone.
I like that. You probably can't control everything. That's the other human nature. We deal in IT more.
I always say it's much, much harder to deal with the human aspect when it comes to new technology, whatever, versus the technology itself. It comes with a manual.
You know when it's not working right, humans don't come with a manual, and the human aspect is so tricky. It can be so complex because people are complex.
Having the right team around you is more of an art than a science. I wish there was a surefire 10-point way to hire and fire the right people.
It can be tough. I think I certainly make it tough because it can also be simple, but I think that's where simple doesn't mean easy. There's a difference there.
Focusing on what you can control, because at the end of the day, that's what matters. The person I hired, six grand a month, I could be mad.
That person did this, that person did that, she should have done this, blah blah blah. Guess what good that does me? Nothing because I can't control that, but what I can control is how I do it next time.
You learned I would imagine a lot from that just like I learned from the person that we had to let go you and that's one of those things I think Gary Vee recently said in one of his videos.
Losing is not bad. It's just the way you look at it. If we lose an employee, what are we gaining? Which is valuable knowledge? Maybe we shouldn't do it this way. We've been doing this way for three years.
Well, time to throw that playbook out. You're not losing, you're gaining valuable information.
That's the best way to look at it with anything in life. There's always that light at the end of the tunnel and it only takes a little bit of light to get rid of the darkness.
You only need a little piece of light to brighten up that dark room and move forward. Gary Vee also said something that hit me. Someone asked me, Hey, how do I get better at hiring? He was like, you don’t.
You get better at firing. I was like, yeah, that's it.
Didn’t he say something like you hire fast but you fire faster or something like that?
Maybe. In my head, I'm thinking like hire slow, fire fast, but you know Gary Vee, he kinda goes against the grain. That sounds like something.
I think he said something like that. Fire faster. Hire fast, but fire even faster. It's tough but I think that's also for us that are in this space, ecommerce Amazon entrepreneurs.
I think that the job itself is not for everybody. I heard somebody that I like to watch on TikTok. His name is Rafi and he's out of New York City and he owns a candle business.
Somebody asked him, what advice do you have for somebody that wants to go into their own business? He said some just straight up blunt, he's like, this is not for everybody.
You're gonna have days where you may miss an important event. You may need to travel, and you miss a birthday, or maybe because of the holiday season.
You're paying attention to what's happening at the warehouse. All of these things require some fortitude.
When we're talking about side hustle where somebody's on the weekend doing something, that's one thing. It's just a side hustle.
It may not mean as much, but if your life depended on your income, your ability to pay the bills, and you're in all in, you gotta understand there are gonna be some rough days.
This is not for the weak being an entrepreneur because like you said you hire the wrong person and that's gonna cause some heartburn. It will cause heartburn when you hire the wrong person.
Do you want to deal with that? I was talking to Kevin King and he said to me that he used to have big teams. Too much heartburn for him. I'm paraphrasing now.
Kevin if you're out there, I'm paraphrasing what you said to me Maybe you're not cut out for a big team.
You structure your business if you want to jump into entrepreneurship. In a way so that you don't have to need a lot of people, you're automating more.
Maybe you have a very lean team or products that don't require a lot of hand-holding. He does calendars. There's not a lot of support that you need with calendars or IT or some other more complex products.
Understanding yourself as a person goes a long way to how you set yourself up for success and failure.
I think it's key to knowing yourself. This isn't 1975 or ‘95. You don't have to just chase money for the sake of money like a business, your business can be an extension of yourself.
It can be a vehicle for living the life that you want to live, and that doesn't necessarily mean you need a bunch of money. Maybe you just need more time to do the things you love.
Maybe you move to a country where your dollar goes a lot farther and now you can work less and be with your family, hang out with your wife, whatever it is.
I hear that from MDS people who are moving to Puerto Rico. One of the guys I know from MDS is over there.
He says he loves it and there's a budding community sprouting in Puerto Rico and I'm hearing more people talk about Portugal. It's a question I asked myself even more.
Hmm, what if I could get 30% more on my dollar living in another country? Some people have done it.
They’ve moved to other countries to stretch their dollar because like you said, maybe I don't want to try to run the eight figures. It's going to I'm going to lose way more of my hair trying to get there.
I'm good right here, so how can I live better?
I did a podcast with Jason from MDS, and he was talking about, how he does AZ Seller Kit, great software for Amazon sellers. He's from New York, a great guy.
That was a really good podcast, but he said something that stuck with me because he got into a position where I guess somebody wanted to buy him out.
He was weighing the pros and cons, and obviously, a pro was all the money and a con was a loss of how he spends his time, having to start over.
He was like, you know what? If I had all that money, I wouldn't even spend it. That stuck with me, because I had a money goal, I had a number. Now I don't have a number. I don't care.
I don't care from a personal perspective. The business, we have metrics we need to hit and stuff but from a personal perspective, dude, I don't care. I've had no money.
I've had negative money before like I'm in debt. How am I gonna pay the bills? How am I gonna eat? Where am I gonna sleep tonight? I figured it out. I don't need to worry.
That doesn't scare me anymore and now you just get caught on hitting this target, hitting this money goal, and I think you said last podcast, it was aging me.
I think you were talking about seller support. It was aging me.
It was, it added it adds years to your life man. I would echo again. If you haven't heard that go back and listen to that.
I would also remind anybody if you're gonna do Amazon seriously, you need to have somebody on your team who is devoted to tickets, and support because I'm gonna tell you.
For me, it was aging me dealing with Amazon. Man, we got lucky in hiring this person who worked in the Amazon side on the support team and she understood the nuances.
I told her recently, I don't know, I'd give you a virtual kiss if you were here because you've been valuable. I can sleep at night.
That stuff for me gives me heartburn. Then you see the email, wait a minute, man. I sent the information you asked. I know I'm not losing my marbles.
Everything you're asking for in that email, I sent the first and second time. They asked but it's just a copy-paste response.
Having to take that off my plate and let somebody else do it, and I meet with her now once a week, she says, well, this is what's happening. This is what I'm working on.
Here's what we were able to fix. It's so refreshing then, like you are in the trenches yourself, fighting hand-to-hand combat with seller support on Amazon.
It's not something I want to be doing for sure, man. I don't even think you get real people most of the time. I don't think it's real people. It's just a machine back there. Then they throw a really good name.
It'll be like, beautiful. You can't just end this message and tell me your name's beautiful or whatever. They always have some great name. No, this isn't popping off right now.
It's just bots now.
Oh, it's the name that got circulated in there. Something I learned recently from talking about support, is if we could just give some sellers some information that came my way. Health Assurance.
If you are in Seller Central, and you'll see this thing that says Health Assurance, and it's got a metric there, it says your rating is whatever it is, and it's got a green check mark.
A lot of people think that that's BS. Well, we had a case recently, Nick, where it was serious. One of our employees went a little bit beyond the pale, let's say, and Amazon didn't like it, okay?
At the end of the day, they gave us a clean bill of health. No wrongdoing, you didn't do anything wrong.
We submitted everything as they requested it. Well, come to find out, once this case wrapped up, I learned something.
Amazon's health assurance is an actual team that is separate from the enforcement people, which are like the Amazon police. You did something wrong, three years ago, cut your account, suspension.
You did one little thing wrong or we think you did something wrong. Boom, shut, shut it down. Now there's still that going on with listings.
That's a whole thing, but they would shut down accounts much faster because now this team, called Account Health Assurance is separate from the Amazon police. That's what I was told.
They act as the liaison to help sellers not get thrown off the platform like that. They gave you a window of time. They told me you have 72 hours to submit information to them. If you don't, then that's it.
Boom, they do shut you down, especially with something more egregious. In addition to that, they are the team to collect things holistically. Let's say, yeah, I did something, my bad, you caught me.
I did something wrong. They're going to try to take into account the entire big picture of what you have been doing wrong for the last 10 years. No, clean, clean bill of health.
You got something here that showed up, are you gonna address it, you gonna fix it? Yes, yes, and yes, but if you've had a record of wrong, it doesn't look so good for you.
As long as the health assurance rating stays on the good side of things, this team works on your behalf when shit hits the fan, if I could say it that way when a lot of it hits the fan.
For us, it kept me up at night because the first interaction with them was like, well, we could close your account, blah blah blah, I was like, oh crap, I've never heard this before.
In the end, keep your health assurance numbers, and address any violations within an adequate time, hit the ones that are either high or medium, because they did tell me, by the way, bots have gone wild.
Some of those are suspected IP complaints or other violations. They go wild periodically, he told me. Those come up as medium and high violations, especially if they're repeated. That's all due to the bots.
You can't ignore those. That's what he told me. Now, that wasn't the issue that we were dealing with but he did say as a side to keep the health number nice and healthy, address those even though that they're bots.
Okay, that's good information because there are always new things that Amazon's rolling out.
Maybe you get an email, maybe you don't but a couple of things come to mind that you need someone who's in there every day. You can't just be a hands-off Amazon guy at our level.
You need to be up to date on things.
Well, imagine you have 72 hours to respond, Nick. 72 hours, because they're giving you a grace period to say, yep, we're on it. That's all, we're on it, and I'm gonna get you the info.
Versus, oh shit, that was a week ago. Now you're like, ahhh! You're scrambling because your account says, and they tell you, yeah, we sent you a notification. Why didn't you respond to that?
I think that circles back to so many things we talked about earlier, like knowing yourself and finding the right person, because I'll go a week without checking my email.
If you want to get a hold of me urgently, email is not the way. Most people around me know that. Call me on the phone.
You need someone who is that type of person. I'm never going to be that type of person because it drives me crazy to be in my email all the time. After all, I get distracted from what I'm doing.
Email is so like the 90s. I don't like email. You may be more into Slack and we use Hangouts. We're more Google-oriented here, but hey, I tell them to put it into my Hangouts, I'm gonna get to it.
Email is just full of things I can't control.
You get pulled in too many directions.
All right, so let's wrap it here. We could tease on the data thing.
We've talked about a lot of good things that segue into that. How can you be a father, a mother, or whatever it is?
A caretaker and an entrepreneur when you have to deal with things like this 72 hours to get back to somebody?
I don't know about you, but it seems like we may need a little bit more time to dive into the whole of how to be a father or mother. Mothers have it even harder.
I know for me it's hard and boy we can get into this but I think we should maybe do a series or something because there's a lot to unpack there.
New father, have a teen, or growing the business and being a father or mother. I'd love to talk more about it too because it's not easy.
We're going to do it, man. We'll put together a three-part series or something and roll this out in a week or two. I've got four kids myself from 11 to one.
You're going to get a gold star at the pearly gates, my man. You and my brother, you're both in that same category.
It's been great. Thank you. I appreciate you saying that. I think one of those things. We can make it simple or we can make it complicated.
It boils down to really knowing yourself and being very intentional about what you're doing day to day.
That's what I think some of the things I can bring to the table and mention my mistakes, my changes, and my goals for that.
Well, I have nothing to add. That's so well said, Nick. I'm looking forward to diving into that because I'm seriously looking forward to seeing what you've learned and what you want to share.
Maybe I'll air just all my grievances with you.
All right, sounds good. Well, we'll do it next time. All right, thank you.
All right, Nick, thank you.
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