Tyler Wallis. Over the past 15 years, Tyler Wallis has led e-commerce and retail teams to remarkable success, including seven years at Amazon running multiple billion-dollar categories. In addition, he launched and grew the Amazon Renewed program from a modest $60K to over $100 million in sales, was responsible for launching Amazon’s Canada Grocery category, and led the Marketplace business across Amazon Canada.

Now, as the Founder and CEO of TripleLine, Tyler is on a mission to accelerate profit growth for brands that are better for people and the planet. He and his team work hand-in-hand with a select group of impact-driven companies to boost their online profit and presence.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Tyler Wallis, founder and CEO of Triple Line, an expert in e-commerce with extensive experience at Amazon. Tyler shares insights on identifying leading indicators for successful Amazon brands and how listeners can apply these strategies to scale their businesses. Key topics include the importance of Weekly Business Reviews, understanding and focusing on key input metrics, and assigning clear KPIs to team members. Tyler also discusses practical tools and resources, emphasizing data-driven decision-making and strategic prioritization for sustainable growth.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

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This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin Keene, Aaron Cordovez, and Michael Gerber, author of the E-myth. Today I’m speaking with Tyler Wallis, and today we’re going to be talking about the leading indicators of successful Amazon brands and how you can apply these same tactics into your own brand. Immediately, this episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure ecommerce brands to eight figures and beyond. If you’re an ambitious eCommerce entrepreneur looking for a coach or a consultant who can help take your brand to the next level, I bring hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is looking for a coach or consultant or an investment partner, reach out to me directly at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough dot com. That’s e-comm with two M’s and let’s turn your dreams into reality. Today I am excited to introduce you all to Tyler Wallis.

Josh Hadley 00:00:47  Over the past 15 years, Tyler Wallis has led e-commerce and retail teams to remarkable success, including seven years at Amazon running multiple billion dollar categories. In addition, he launched and grew the Amazon Renewed program from a modest 60 K to over 100 million in sales. He was responsible for launching Amazon’s Canada grocery category and led the marketplace business across Amazon Canada. Now, as the founder and CEO of 999, Tyler is on a mission to accelerate profit growth for brands that are better for people and the planet. He and his team work hand in hand with the select group of impact driven companies to boost their online profit and presence. So with that introduction, welcome to the show Tyler.

Tyler Wallis 00:01:24  Thank you. Josh, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Josh Hadley 00:01:26  Tyler, excited to have you on the show. I always enjoy speaking with former Amazonians so they could give us a real peek under the hood. Like what’s really going down at Amazon. What what can we what can’t we do and how that is then applied to what they’re currently doing in their own brands.

Josh Hadley 00:01:40  And there’s so many amazonians that then start up, whether it be agencies or their own Amazon brands, that I think is just like a fascinating story to hear, like what lessons you learned at Amazon and why you’re still back in that e-commerce space. So, Tyler, maybe let’s start right there and tell me more about your experience at Amazon and kind of what got you to Amazon. What then led you into triple line?

Tyler Wallis 00:02:00  Sure. Yeah. And let me just start off by saying, Josh, you’ve got a great radio voice. It definitely puts me at ease being here, knowing that you know how to conduct a good conversation. Excited to go into the topic with you. So yeah, my journey, I guess taking a step back. I joined the Amazon in 2013 and I guess it’s been almost 12 years. And so a lot has changed since then. But Amazon was by no means a small company at that time, and I had recently left an online grocery delivery company, a startup similar to what many would probably recognize with like Amazon Fresh or Instacart.

Tyler Wallis 00:02:30  But this was, of course, before either of those businesses were around. And so I had that in my background, knew that, hey, like, this whole idea of buying and selling goods online is pretty cool. And I went and did an MBA program at UCLA. At that time, Amazon was one of the recruiters that came to campus to talk about their program and actually hit it up with one of the Amazon employees who was part of the recruiting team that was on the Amazon Fresh team at the time. It was like kind of this invader project, and we were chatting about the experience. So one thing led to another. It was, I think we both had a really good conversation. And long story short, I ended up doing a summer internship with Amazon up in Seattle. Had a blast. That was actually the time that I was leading the launch for the grocery category. And Amazon Canada so quickly got into the weeds and learned how to be scrappy and trying to get something done. And for months that was going to turn into a big category business and, you know, had such a good time that when I got the offer to come back full time after completing my MBA, couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

Tyler Wallis 00:03:25  So moved back to Seattle from Los Angeles in 2014, and from 2014 until the end of 2020 was up in Seattle managing a few different businesses for Amazon. So, as you alluded to, spent some time in consumer electronics. That was really where the fun program I got involved with is in was launching the we called it Certified Refurbished at the time, but it was later rebranded to renewed and then moved over to lead a buying team for smart home and home improvement. And that was actually right after Amazon released the first Amazon Echo. And so there was this whole platform or network of connected devices that are coming onto the scene. So that was really fun. One of the early stage startups that I helped get started on Amazon was this little doorbell company called Ring Doorbell. And by the time I left that role, about two and a half years later, Amazon just acquired ring for over $1 billion. So kind of just showing the fast growth of the category at that time. And then from there went over actually back to the Amazon Canada team, which is still run out of Seattle because it’s, I guess, close enough to the Canadian border that it counts and led the marketing team for consumer electronics and then the marketplace team across Canada, and had a great experience up until the pandemic, which actually opened up the door to move back to Southern California.

Tyler Wallis 00:04:34  And around the time kind of knew that didn’t want to be going back and forth to Seattle. And it might be a good time to look at doing something different. And so I made the switch in early 2021, did a bit of consulting work for some eight figure brands on Amazon, and then decided to open up a shop with Triple Line and really focus on driving profit growth for better for CPG and sustainable brands. So really, you know, the name Triple Line is a nod to the triple bottom line of focusing on the value growth in both profit as well as people on the planet. So that’s that’s in a nutshell, I guess the last decade or so of my experience in e-commerce.

Josh Hadley 00:05:06  I love that as as you were consulting with the eight figure brands before you then transitioned into triple Line, what were the things you learned at Amazon that you are helping consult and coach these other eight figure brands towards?

Tyler Wallis 00:05:19  Yes. So I feel like I had it really easy, Josh, because a lot of things that I took for granted didn’t take for granted, but that were becoming second nature.

Tyler Wallis 00:05:26  After several years at Amazon. We’re still pretty innovative management practices outside of Amazon now. Since then, I think a lot of a lot more companies have adopted some of these best practices at Amazon. And by the way, I might sound like the biggest fanboy of Amazon. I’ll be the first to admit that there are things that I was happy to leave behind in terms of the culture at Amazon, so I think it’s a mixed bag. At Amazon, I often tell people is the best place to have worked. meaning that I’m happy to be doing something different today, but like, I wouldn’t have traded, you know, my time at Amazon and everything I learned and got to be a part of there for the world. So a few of the things that were really, fundamental and kind of taking some of these eight figure brands I worked with to the next level, where some of these same mechanisms and practices that we use on a regular cadence at Amazon. So one of the ideas that I’m sure some of your listeners have probably heard of is this concept of weekly business reviews, where you pull the whole team together and you have a very, like, it’s not meant to be a pop quiz, but you have a very structured experience where you go through and you look for any of the defects in the business and, and put those defects into proportion.

Tyler Wallis 00:06:27  Right. So it’s like you’re not wasting your time kicking tires on things that don’t really move the needle, but you have the right input metrics that you’re tracking to know when you can catch defects or trends before they become into, you know, grow into bigger issues. And so, just helping to put the right reporting in place and then get management involved in this weekly business review practice was really helpful in, you know, identifying those trends, both positive and negative. Right. So you might get into one of those meetings and find out like, hey, like sales are up. But as we look at, we look at our, like, conversion rate on this specific product line, we see that it’s up. And, you know, we’re noticing this trend in our promotion strategy, and it gives you a way to like quickly double click into that and make the decision of, hey, should we double down on this and do more of it? Or is this a one off anecdote. And then same for like the negative effects.

Tyler Wallis 00:07:16  It’s like, you know, hey, we we see that our return rate, spiked in this area of the business, you know, quickly double click into that. Is that an early red flag of a more chronic issue that we have in our supply chain, our QA process versus a one off anecdote. So, you know, Jeff Bezos was famous for always kind of focusing on some of those defects with and on core process taken from Toyota and other practices to really just jump in and see, like, hey, if there’s a defect, is this an early signal of something that if we jump on today, is going to save us a lot of money that we otherwise would have burned through waiting until it became a bigger issue in our business. So that’s one example, but I think we’ll get into more as maybe we get into this topic of input metrics. through the conversation.

Josh Hadley 00:07:55  Yeah, I love that. What we’re. So I’ve got two different paths that we can go down, but the first one is what what was kind of on the agenda for this weekly business review then?

Tyler Wallis 00:08:04  So, the Weekly Business Review, it can be customized to the business that you’re in, but oftentimes, you know, it would start off and it would focus on like a voice of the customer side.

Tyler Wallis 00:08:14  And for different businesses this would look differently. you know, for when we were at Amazon, we would look at things like, you know, customer even like seller tickets in Amazon, like how many aging seller tickets are there in our business? Like we all probably on the side of the Amazon tables have experience with our frustration with seller support and escalations that seem to not go anywhere. I now feel like Amazon could definitely do a lot more, but at the time, you know, we were doing things like having, regular interviews with top sellers to get their feedback and bubbling up top trends that came out of those interviews. And then we’re also looking at things like the defects. So how many of these seller support tickets were getting stuck. How many sellers were suspended on the platform and weren’t seeing a path to, you know, getting their cases escalated. And so it was looking at those trends and, you know, you’re always gonna have some defects in the business. But anytime that, you know, that goes from below tolerance threshold to above, that is a sign for concern.

Tyler Wallis 00:09:09  So we would always try to start the meeting looking through that customer lens. Now as a seller. And when we’re working with eight figure sellers that might be looking at, you know, how many of your voice of customer which again Amazon’s kind of adopted that term in seller central. How many of your products are below like a good grade or like fair or poor or very poor. it could look at your churn rate. It could look at these other indicators of the experience that customers are having with your brand and your products. And so I think that it’s, you know, one of Amazon’s leadership principles is customer obsession. And starting with the customer and working backwards from there. So I think that even with this business review process and the business review, the weekly Business Review meetings that you have, it’s always helpful to just take that first look through the customer’s eyes instead of just focusing straight on, you know, your competitors or the category or your own bottom line. Those things are important. But I’m a big believer that if you like, start with the customer first.

Tyler Wallis 00:09:55  You’re kind of setting yourself up for success in the long run, so that would be the first thing from there. It’s really, you know, the thing that has to come before having a successful weekly business review is identifying for your specific business, which are the most important metrics, controllable input metrics to focus on. And so from there, I would say the meat and potatoes of like the 80% of the meeting is really having dedicated slides with really, you know, clear everyone understands them. Metrics and reporting. one dedicated for each of these important input metrics you’ve identified for your business, like in the EOS system, maybe this is your rocks, but it’s really being able to look at, okay, if we if we’re saying that, you know, keeping days on hand of inventory between 30 days and 60 days is one of our most important input metrics, then let’s have a report. And let’s let’s look all together forcing function in this weekly meeting. What percent of our portfolio, if we have like 100 SKUs that we’re selling, like what percent is currently within 30 and 60 days of cover? And so it’s really kind of having a dedicated view of each of these input metrics that you’ve decided are relevant for really getting that early signal on what can you know down the road, become a sales or miss revenue because you ran out of stock.

Tyler Wallis 00:10:56  And so that’s that’s really, I think, where the kind of meeting of the meeting is. And then at the end, you know, it could be maybe some, some projects or some programs maybe in the case of like a seller business, it could be like our new product launches. Let’s have a check in on how we’re trending in terms of the indicators like, you know, review count, star rating, you know, etc. like maybe how many, keywords are ranking on for our new products that we’re launching. And so it can maybe have a little bit more of like a project view. But I think that that is generally less important than making sure that, you know, the the main portion of your business is on track with these important metrics.

Josh Hadley 00:11:28  Yeah. Tyler, I think you hit the nail right on the head here. And I think this is I’m going to double down into this because this is a very, very important aspect of leadership and managing and being a CEO of a business that a lot of seven figure entrepreneurs overlook.

Josh Hadley 00:11:42  Okay. And the reason being is this most seven figure entrepreneurs say, oh, hey, like, things are getting so busy in the supply chain world, I just need to go find somebody to hire and to go manage this. Okay, great. Guess what happens? They go when they find somebody. And then a month or two goes by and they’re like, this guy’s crap. He’s not doing things correctly. Okay. And guess what ends up happening time and time again? They just cycle through people and they have this common pattern of, hey, like, nobody’s good enough for our business. Now, a yes, there could be like, maybe there’s a fault in how they’re hiring people. That could be one issue. But I think the bigger issue is this they’re probably not attracting a level talent, and they’re also not creating a system in place to be able to help manage and show that team member when they’re winning or losing. And so one of the key things I talk about with anybody that comes to me asking for advice or whatever, and they want to go hire a team member, my first question I have for them is like, what is the specific role that that person is playing? And what are the top 3 to 5 KPIs or metrics that you are going to be measuring their success with? And these metrics cannot be subjective metrics.

Josh Hadley 00:12:40  They can’t be like, hey, make our supply chain more efficient if that’s your metric. I just saved you a dollar on the AGL shipment coming over because I click this cheaper option, it’s more efficient, right? Like arguably yes. But guess what. That’s very subjective, right? There’s so much more that goes into it. And so it becomes very, very important for you to be able to define and document what are the key indicators that are going to drive success in this role. And guess what? That person that is operating in that role, if it’s a supply chain manager, they have their 3 to 5 metrics. And they also know when they’re winning and when they’re losing. And then you as the CEO, you know when they’re winning and when they’re losing. And so it’s a meeting of the minds. Right. And guess what naturally happens if they’re not meeting any of those metrics. And that happens over the course of probably 4 to 6 weeks. They’re not going to be surprised when the conversation is like, hey, it doesn’t seem like this is working out right.

Josh Hadley 00:13:31  And so it makes like managing firing like ten times easier because like, everybody’s on the same page. We’re all reading from the same playbook. We know whether we’re winning or losing here. But with that being said, like easier said than done for sure. So, Tyler, my question to you is that as you’ve been working with all of these brands. And for our listeners that our seven figure brands and even eight figure brands that want to continue to scale above and beyond that. Can you give us maybe some of the metrics and maybe a mind map of here’s all the different aspects of an FBA business or an e-commerce brand that needs to be covered, is kind of like leading indicators to success and driving future growth of the brand.

Tyler Wallis 00:14:07  Yes, I think that’s a lot that we we can cover there. That’s going to add a lot of value for listeners. I do want to before jumping straight to that, just maybe for those a little less familiar. just share a little bit more context on kind of what I’m speaking to when I say output metrics or input metrics, because I’m going to say that a lot as I kind of answer your question in terms of what, you know, typical brand or ecommerce sellers should be looking at with their team.

Tyler Wallis 00:14:30  So when I say output metrics and input metrics, really the way that you think about is outputs are like at the end of the day, the things that, you know, potential investor acquire is probably going to ask for their the big things like revenue, net profit. You know, we all know that they’re important, but they’re not directly controlled. Jeff Bezos once was interviewed and he talked about this idea of input metrics. And I think he gave a great example. He said, for a company like Amazon, our output metric might be our, our share value or like the price of our stock. But if you were to go to your employee and say, hey, I want you to increase the price of our stock, that’s like a very empowering command to give them a directive. Like what? What you can do in big organization to directly influence the price of the stock. And so the way that you think about the inputs is they’re walking backwards from that output metric, closer to the controllable measurables that you’re confident are going to directly and relevantly influence the output.

Tyler Wallis 00:15:22  So if free cash sorry if, ahead of myself, if stock price is your output metric, you know what goes into that. And Jeff shares that free cash flow or return on invested capital would be inputs to that. That’s still not very directly controllable by an employee. So you would take free cash flow and you could walk that back further and talk about we’ll improve our free cash flow. We need to lower our cost structure. And if we want to lower our cost structure, one, you know, obvious area within the business. To do that is to reduce the defects in our picking process at our fulfillment centers. Now we’re starting to get to something that you can still measure, but is a lot more controllable. If I if I go to my fulfillment center general manager and say, hey, I need you to reduce the defects in your picking rate. They feel like they’re a lot more empowered to do that than if I say, hey, I need you to contribute to our company’s stock price going up.

Tyler Wallis 00:16:06  That’s a lot more difficult in your point. Like it can almost create a lot more uncertainty for that employee because, you know, like some of that is out of their control. So at the end of the day, they might feel that angst in terms of like, how am I being measured? So for now, talking Tyler.

Josh Hadley 00:16:19  Just real quick, before you dive into that, just as a practical example, somebody that we’re we’ve recently brought on to the team, right, is somebody that’s overseeing marketing. And one of their bigger KPIs is like $2.5 million in revenue from TikTok shot. Okay. That’s a that’s a very large that’s an output number. Right. There are a lot of that’s a lagging metric okay. The only way you get to 2.5 million is by doing a lot of things under that. So what we have is like, hey, here’s our output or We’re lagging metric that we’re measuring you on. We want to achieve this goal. But here are the leading indicators, the inputs that I’m going to be measuring your success on a weekly basis.

Josh Hadley 00:16:54  And so if I want to get to 2.5 million this year on TikTok, shop, the weekly input that they are being measured is how many influencers or affiliates and creators did they onboard for our brand this week? That is a very controllable thing. And so obviously there’s there’s even inputs into that. Right? Like how many times are you reaching out to people like, hey, did you have 10,000 outreaches in order to get 1000 people onboarded? Right. But now you could go micro, micro, micro, micro. And that’s why you need to have a level talent so that you could have a input that is general but also specific to say like how many new creators did we onboard? And it needs to be either a thousand or above. Right. And that it’s either yes or no, we hit this metric or we’re not. Because guess what? I know if I’m not having enough creators posting about our content or our products, there’s no way we get close to 2.5 million. Right? So the leading indicator there is like how many new craters did we onboard this week? So just want to share that as like a practical, like tangible thought is like because most people do just focus on the outputs.

Josh Hadley 00:17:49  Right? And it’s like supply chain. I want you to save us $500,000 this year. Okay? Like still, that’s a big output. But give them ideas like what are the week? Weekly daily inputs that need to be controlled. So Tyler, back to you.

Tyler Wallis 00:18:03  Yes, that’s such a great example. with the TikTok and the outreach, because the a few things that you mentioned there. Josh one, it’s very empowering to know your employee to know, hey, I can focus on my outreach and that’s something I can count. I can control that metric very directly. sure, I might run into obstacles and roadblocks, as we all do, but at the end of the day, like, that’s a lot more empowering than if you just said, hey, I want you to grow our TikTok business by this much. and but the other thing that I think is worth just reiterating is that you said I knew that if they did this, like, if they, you know, got the number of outreach up, that it would help the business.

Tyler Wallis 00:18:37  And I think that that I just want to peel back the onion a little bit because I feel like if you are going to take this approach as a leader, where you’re going to say, hey, we’re going to go all in on managing by the inputs because we know it’s going to empower employees, and we know it’s going to help us catch these trends and stay focus on these leading indicators of the business. The key thing is, as a leader, you have to make sure that you’re constantly reevaluating, making sure that you’re choosing the most relevant input metrics. Right. Because you could say, hey, I want you to go identify like the most popular TikTok influencers out there, and maybe now they’re going after the Kardashians and, you know, all these really popular influencers. But guess what? Like your yield is going to be super low. And at the end of the day, it’s going to do less for building your business than, you know, a different focus. And so I love that example.

Tyler Wallis 00:19:20  And I think it’s, you know, if there’s kind of a prerequisite to all of this is that, yes, it’s identifying and measuring those leading indicators. As a leader, you have the additional role of also pushing the team to constantly reevaluate, are these the right indicators or are we just chasing our tail because we’re focused too much on something and ignoring a different opportunity that would more directly lead the business and lead ultimately those output metrics of the business. I love that great example.

Josh Hadley 00:19:46  Okay, well, Tyler, let’s dive in because I know I interrupted you. I know you’ve got a lot more to share. I guess my question to you would be like, well, what are the input metrics for an Amazon based brand?

Tyler Wallis 00:19:56  Yeah, so I’m pulling up for those that are watching this visually can see and and happy to share this with your listeners that are just tuning in via podcast. But I have here, just an example. This is what we call the Amazon sales formula. And it’s not an exhaustive list, but I think it starts to put this concept of managing by the controllable inputs into practice for your typical FBA seller business on Amazon.

Tyler Wallis 00:20:18  And, what we have here is, you know, and for those just listening, we have basically a hierarchy. It’s a chart that shows a hierarchy. And at the top you have kind of these blue bubbles that show these output metrics. At the very top is your ordered product sales, because who doesn’t want to grow their sales. But that’s not a very empowering goal to give somebody on your team. And I want to introduce this idea of a retail formula because this is actually something that was, really, kind of developed out at Amazon and used across Amazon leadership. So there was actually a whole workshop series on retail formula or sales formula trainings that as leaders, we would go to Amazon and learn about, this formula. And so, this is a little bit of a sneak behind the scenes in terms of this concept, which we’ve now adopted to an FDA cellular business. But the idea being that it’s not just that you think a controllable input contributes to an output, but you can actually break this down mathematically for a cell or business.

Tyler Wallis 00:21:10  So we have these output metrics at the top ordered product sales. And we can break that out. And you know there are a lot of reporting systems out there. You could actually kind of build your own out of business reports and seller central for this. But contributing to order product sales is unit sales times average selling price. So the product of unit sales times your average selling price is your total revenue or product sales. But unit sales can then be broken out as the product of your pageviews times, your buy box percent, or you know, featured offer percent times your conversion rate, times your units per order. And this is maybe a little bit more granular than some of the other formulas that are common in our space, which is look at sales as you know, your traffic, your sessions times, your conversion rate, times your AOV. It’s not different, it’s just more granular. But the reason that I find value in this is that the more granular you get with these measurable output metrics, the easier it is to tie them to these controllable input metrics.

Tyler Wallis 00:21:59  So here you know in this diagram we then have in the hierarchy page views where you can break down pageviews to like your organic pageviews you’re getting. And then your influence traffic you’re paid page views that you’re getting. And then like paid you could you can have like your influencer marketing traffic that you alluded to. Josh, you could have Amazon posts, you could have PR, you can have your PPC advertising, your DSP advertising. And then within each of those you can break those down further. But really now we’re getting to these these measurable input metrics. If I know that, hey, I need to increase my pageviews because that’s the most important lever right now in my business to increase my sales, then you should be managing or monitoring and measuring these metrics of, well, what is my paid traffic. And what is my organic traffic? And specifically with my paid traffic. Like, how much of that is, you know, sponsored products versus, you know, programmatic ads versus influencer traffic, etc.? you can use attribution links and other ways to measure this, but that’s really the second level in this three level hierarchy.

Tyler Wallis 00:22:53  So at the top you have the outputs. In the middle you have these these measurable input metrics. It’s still very measurable but maybe a little bit opaque in terms of what you’re actually going to do on a day to day basis to, to improve this metric. And so really from there, this third level at the bottom is the tactical actions that you can take in your business. And this is where look like what we have here in this diagram is nowhere close to an exhaustive list. I think we have over 50 tactical actions here. The reality is are probably like several hundred that you could take. And they’re constantly evolving. And so the idea isn’t so much using a resource like this as the final sale in terms of those actions, but it’s to help get you thinking and maybe brainstorming or ideating on what are the other actions that we can be trying or testing to help improve this controllable input metric that we’re tracking and focusing on as a business? So your example of like influencer outreach for TikTok is an action that somebody can take to then increase their traffic on TikTok, which hopefully increases your overall traffic and your sales.

Tyler Wallis 00:23:45  Right. So happy to go into this, but I think this is really kind of getting to the bridge between this idea of managing by the controllable inputs of your business and then how you tie it all together to not just chase after inputs that sound nice, but the actual inputs that you can back out all the way to the output metric, mathematically, are going to drive your business forward, and there might be times in your business where you’re improving your business through things like improving your in-stock rate or removing resellers is the most important thing in your business right now. And chasing more paid traffic isn’t the answer. And so it’s really being able to have the right measurements in place to know, okay, which input as a leader, do I need to get my team focused on right now? And then from there, you can help unblock all these obstacles in terms of, okay, what actions are we going to be taking? What are we going to prioritize to help improve this metric?

Josh Hadley 00:24:29  Yeah man, I absolutely love this.

Josh Hadley 00:24:31  And I think this this is something that gets overlooked way too often in the Amazon space specifically. Look, at the end of the day, your sales yesterday or the sales that you’re generating today is an output metric, okay. And it’s the inputs that Tyler just walked us through that are the things that you probably did six months ago that are leading to where you’re at today. And oftentimes a lot of us just panic of like, oh, my sales are down like that. A lot of people start blaming external factors, right? They start to say, oh, well, it’s because we must be in a recession, or it’s because of the politics, it’s because of who the president is or whatever it is. Like, I can’t tell you how many Facebook groups I’m in that people truly are attributing, hey, my lack of success. The reason why I had a bad day yesterday was because, like, there’s a new president elected or we’re in a, we’re in a downturn economy like you. Everybody laughs at that.

Josh Hadley 00:25:24  But like truly like there are Facebook posts all over that. Talk about that. Here’s another thing I think I want to talk about real quick here. Tyler is a lot of brands get really anxious to move off the Amazon platform. In my opinion, way too early. Okay, as that was one of the mistakes that we made in our brand was trying to, quote unquote, diversify ourselves. way too early. Like we had crossed 3.5 million and we were doing 5 million and we said, oh, we need to get Shopify going because, you know, we just never know when Amazon’s going to suspend our accounts. Like, well, do we have a reason to be suspended? No. But it’s like this, this fear in the back of your mind that everybody talks about, it’s like look like if something happens and you’ve not done anything illegally or with outside of the toes, you’re going to get it back. You might have you might be down for a week or two. Yeah. That’s that’s hard.

Josh Hadley 00:26:11  Thus you always should have a rainy day fund. But too many people try to say like, oh, the grass is greener over here. And what ends up happening is like, there’s still so much untapped potential in a channel that you’ve already had proven success with. Why not double down in that channel in Tyler, everything that you showed us here, when people start to say like, oh, well, I launched a bunch of products on Amazon, like, now it’s time to go do something different. It’s like, well, before you go build Shopify, before you go to brick and mortar or wholesale or doing whatever. Have you maximize the channel that’s providing the most juice worth the squeeze here for your brand and all everything that you have here as inputs? I mean, you’re talking about things as simple as like, hey, how do we improve our forecasting? Right? For our in-stock rate, increasing our weeks of coverage. What about off Amazon traffic to your Amazon listings? Are we doing influencer collaborations? Are we maximizing creator connections on Amazon? What about launching Google Ads via Amazon? What about coordinating social media posts? Right.

Josh Hadley 00:27:05  Our own social posts directing people to Amazon, right? Like it just goes on and on and on here of PPC ranking campaigns, updating your titles, refreshing your keywords like you have enough stuff on here to last. Any brand owner that’s on Amazon, like that’s a full time, that’s full time work, just constantly optimizing all of the little tools and levers that Amazon has given us to control this business. And so my overall recommendation and kind of like this is like my rule of thumb. Now don’t start venturing into other channels and trying to look at the grass is greener in these other marketplaces or whatever, until you’ve already crossed eight figures on one platform. Then when it crosses that that that far a you should have the team in place, that is then going to be able to continue to double down in that marketplace for you. Then you can go divert your attention somewhere else. But if you start diverting your attention too soon, you don’t maximize the current channel you’re finding success with, and then the other channel that you’re going to try to go into.

Josh Hadley 00:27:56  You’re not all in because you’re trying to do both things all at once, and ultimately you just get lackluster results. So, Tyler, I love that this just provides a more comprehensive framework. When you’re having issues in your brand. It’s like, well, go check all of these 50 things first before we throw call it a day and say, oh, sales are down because of it’s a recession or something like that.

Tyler Wallis 00:28:14  Right? Yeah. And I think it’s a question that I hear a lot too, especially with brands that have been selling on Amazon for a while. You know, there can be this organic question of, hey, we maxed out our potential, especially if they’ve seen their sales plateau. And one thing I would just add to what you shared is, again, even what we have with these 50 plus actions Here again is nowhere close to an exhaustive list, and I think that there there could be a trap here if somebody focuses too much on the actions instead of really starting kind of with identifying the right input metrics.

Tyler Wallis 00:28:43  because you could talk to one of those, you know, brands and they might say, well, either, hey, there’s no way, even if I hire five more people, that we can be doing all 50 or 100 of these actions every single day. There’s just too much work. Or they might say, oh, we tried that already. It didn’t work. We tried that. It didn’t work. We tried that as well. It didn’t work. And I think that not all of these actions are going to be important in a given time, to even be best in class as a seller. I’ll give a quick example, like we worked with a betting company and they really felt like, you know, they didn’t have the market share they wanted on Amazon. And they really just felt like, hey, our content isn’t good enough. Like we just need to improve our content and look like everyone can always improve their content. There’s not really like an end state to that, but it was really digging in and seeing, you know, actually their conversion rate and their click through rate is well above their category and subcategory average.

Tyler Wallis 00:29:28  So they are already, you could say quote unquote best in class in terms of their content and how it’s converting, but they had a bunch of other issues that were impacting profitability that were impacting retention and repeat purchase. And so it was focusing on other parts of the business and maybe not investing all the resources in developing and constantly testing and creative, even though that that always will have some value. But it’s really identifying, okay, where should you be focusing and then making sure, yes, that there aren’t defects that you’re not like, completely taking your eye off the road in some of these other areas. But maybe they don’t deserve the majority of your resources right now. And that’s where I think a lot of brands. Again, they might to your point, Josh, think, hey, maybe I’ve tapped my potential on Amazon and ensure there are other, you know, values that you mentioned for diversifying. But, you know, I often like to ask him, like, well, are you best in class in your return rate? Are you best in class in your customer lifetime value? Are you best in class in your click through rate? are you already, you know, do you already have the number 1 or 2 spot in your subcategory in terms of market share? and if you are then then like what other categories are you looking to diversify into.

Tyler Wallis 00:30:30  So usually when you go down this line of reasoning, you can quickly realize that, oh, there are these other areas that maybe we just have to focus on or, or we threw some spaghetti at the wall, but it’s really just identifying, okay, where should our business be focusing now and then diving really deep into the actions to to improve that metric. But I feel like if you don’t have the compass, you can spin your wheels like trying 50 plus different actions and prove a metric just to pull your head up and realize that you were chasing. You know the wrong goal all this time, so just have to throw that in here. But yeah, plenty of plenty of examples where I think, you know, we’ve we’ve all seen brands maybe chased the wrong, the wrong goals for too long at the expense of growing their business the right way.

Josh Hadley 00:31:04  Yeah. So I think that leads into another really good segue, which is. So how do you stack rank all of these different competing priorities in a business? Right.

Josh Hadley 00:31:12  Because it’s like, yeah, that’s great. I have 50 things to do. It’s like, well, not all 50 of these are equally weighted in their importance. And I love the analogy of or the case study that you shared with like a brand that thought, hey, we need to have better creative or better A+ content. It’s like your conversion rate is already best in class. It’s already above the market average. Like, what are we going to be trying to change here? Is it going from a 10% conversion rate to a 10.5 conversion rate at this point? Like, is the juice truly worth the squeeze? What else could we be doing in the business that could actually provide a better return on investment? And ultimately, like I went to Alex Hormozi’s workshop, and one of the key takeaways that I had from that was that you, as the CEO, need to put on your investor hat, okay? Which means this would you would you rather own a stock that is going to provide a 100% ROI, or a stock that’s only going to provide a 200 or a 20% ROI? Obviously the former, right, or the earlier, the 100% ROI is what you’re looking for.

Josh Hadley 00:32:05  So are you looking at all the different tasks or, I guess, priorities in your business? And are you stack ranking them appropriately with good hypotheses and with, you know, assumptions to be able to say like, hey, I truly believe if we revamp our A+ content conversion rate can double right? And then go all in and test it out with one product to see if your hypothesis is true, and if it is, then go scale it out for the rest of your products. But you’ve got to compare that to A+ content to double my conversion rate. Well, what’s the return on investment like dollars and cents? What does that actually mean to the brand? Versus what about influencer campaigns? Right. What if I can ten x the amount of traffic coming to my listing okay. What does that do. Even if I just maintain the same conversion rate I have today, is it better to lean more into the influencer stuff? So that’s the way I would approach this from my standpoint is like any initiative I have my team Rundowns like, all right, well, what’s the ROI right for this? Is the juice worth the squeeze? What return am I actually looking for with this? So that’s my question to you, Tyler.

Josh Hadley 00:33:02  Like how would you go about stack ranking these priorities to know which one to actually focus on? First and foremost?

Tyler Wallis 00:33:08  Yeah, it’s the important question that you have to ask and answer. So I mean, again, at a fundamental level, the math here in this formula help tie everything out so you can know, hey, if I make a 2% improvement in my conversion rate versus a 2% improvement in my inbox, you know, win rate versus a 2% increase in my traffic, what is that going to do for my revenue? and depending on how optimized that that sub metric is, can help you kind of stack rank at a high level. But I think ultimately, to answer the question, you obviously need good measurement, right? Like you have to have good reporting on these metrics. And then you need good comparables. And generally again I like this weekly business review. You can also do a monthly business review by like this regular cadence to look at these. And there are kind of three types of comparables I would recommend people consider.

Tyler Wallis 00:33:50  Ideally you use all three. Try to have at least two. One is the first one would be again this idea of best in class, or at least like how am I versus the category average? And I feel like Amazon has come a long ways in, you know, through, like the, product Listing Defects report, Product Opportunity Explorer category reports. Like you can kind of tease out a lot of subcategory averages. So if if I’m selling tumblers like what is the average conversion rate for a tumbler. And so that can help, you know, at least in my better or worse in average. Now there are third party tools that incorporate a little bit more like category market research that can do a little bit more. and then of course, like working with a trusted consultant or agency that maybe has purview across dozens of brands, they can have a better sense of like, okay, what is actually best in class? So one is just knowing how am I doing versus my competition. Not that you’re focused on your competition, but just to be able to kind of know, am I good, better or average? Two would be admittedly a backwards looking metric, but how are we doing period over period? So is my buy box rate versus a month ago or versus last week or versus the trailing six week average? Is it getting better or is it getting worse? This is really helpful for more identifying those defects, because you never want to be ceding ground in an area and have that be a blind spot.

Tyler Wallis 00:34:57  So, it’s usually easy if you have the right data reporting to look at these backwards, kind of historical metrics, but just making sure that you’re trending better period over period. And then the third would be just having good goals. And this is where again, to my first answer, kind of knowing, okay, which of these metrics is going to most help towards my ultimate output metric that I’m optimizing for? but if I know that, like, I have a poor buy box rate, like, what is my goal for the next six months or the next quarter or the next year? Am I trying to get that from like a 90% to 95% or for my conversion rate? Am I trying to get that up from like a 22% to 25% having those goals, which is a little bit more aspirational and should be, you know, rooted in first kind of doing that. Is this the right metric to be to be trying to focus on? But I think if you have all three of those, if you have kind of how are we doing versus the category and versus the competition, are we best in class or we kind of average, or are we below average two or we actually better than our historical cells? And then three are we actually making progress towards these goals.

Tyler Wallis 00:35:51  Are these forecasts we’ve set? If you can incorporate all three of those into your reporting and in your regular review of the business cadence, I feel like, you know, you’re going to be well set to identify, hey, is there a opportunity to improve here or not? And is this the right area to focus on? You know, again, if your buy box rate is 99%, trying to get 100%, probably not the right focus. You know, if your conversion rate is below the category average, that’s probably where you should focus. So it’s having kind of some of these, I guess just a milepost to know am I prioritizing the right metric. And that’s going to look different for every business. I can share a quick, anecdote on this if you’re interested. We, recently, about six months ago, I started working with a beverage company on Amazon, and, they had a healthy business by all standards. two of the frustrations were, like they wanted to make more margin, some more profit.

Tyler Wallis 00:36:34  Who doesn’t? And then two was that, replenishment supply chain was really challenging, like sending an FBA shipments because they felt like it was just very inconsistent in terms of the demand signals that they got. And so it was hard to forecast they had a seasonal business. But on top of that, there’s just a lot of fluctuation in the category and, you know, sales. And so it was hard to stay in stock without being overstock, of course, because it’s a beverage. And so it has an expiration date on it. And the obvious metric you would think would be, okay. Well, you know, let’s just try to check all these boxes and save a dollar here. Save a dollar there for profit margin. And then, you know, let’s try to send in as much inventory as possible without incurring too much long term storage fee to help with, you know, the out-of-stock issue. But what we found looking at it is they actually were well under index in subscribe and save penetration versus, you know, most of the other brands in their category.

Tyler Wallis 00:37:19  They had at the time, I think about 600 subscribers. And this was a, you know, a healthy seven figure business in a consumables category. And so we’re like, hey, we’re going to focus on this because we know that you’re under indexed. And by increasing your subscribe, you’re subscribing, save your subscriber penetration. It’s not only going to help your your profit margin because you’re not spending to reacquire new customers every time you have a base of repeat customers. But it’s also going to help smooth out your demand because you’re going to have these repeat, you know, regular orders coming in on a frequent on a set cadence. And so we made that the priority. We identified a few actions like subscribe and save coupons. you know, adjusting some of the advertising to focus on remarketing and, getting the right incentives in front of the right repeat customers. And over about four months, we increase them from about 600 to over 3000 subscribers. That has done so much to improve both their margin and their demand consistency.

Tyler Wallis 00:38:09  They’re having a much better time forecasting and sending an FBA shipments, even after just four months, because we made that input metric the priority, which again, going back to the beginning of our conversation, like we’re not saying, hey, we need to improve profit, we need to improve sales like these hard to measure items. We’re saying, hey, let us, you know, try to increase our subscriber count by this much each month. And these are like the three levers that we’re going to do, you know, on a regular weekly basis to try to do that. And we’ll reevaluate how efficient we are at these actions that we’re taking. And so it kind of just focus the team on this important input metric of subscriber count. And we knew that, you know, having done the thought work in advance, that was going to solve these two goals that the client had.

Josh Hadley 00:38:44  Yeah I love that. And I love the practical like application of we can talk about the metrics and the theory all day long, but seeing how this is actually translating into success with these brands I think is so key.

Josh Hadley 00:38:55  So Tyler, maybe do you have any more case studies of other brands that have started to manage their business by these leading measures, or these inputs that have had that have had further success that you could share some examples of?

Tyler Wallis 00:39:06  Yeah, there are a lot. And again, I would say that, you know, every brand is going to be at a different stage in this process. You might be at the stage where you’re really trying to figure out, okay, what is our strategy for this year and what are those input metrics that are important right now. And then you might be in pure execution mode like, hey, we have our reporting, we know our marching orders, and we just need to like be taking actions on as many of these specific tactical actions as we can to support that goal input metric. And it’s it’s like a recurring process, right? Because you’re constantly like pulling up and resetting goals. Re measuring yourself. but another example of a brand that we worked with, this was a HomeGoods brand.

Tyler Wallis 00:39:41  They made, like kitchen items. And, just since I want to share more of the details, I’m not like mentioning brand names specifically here, but, you know, they, traffic was healthy for that brand, but, but we were finding that the, the growth was really expensive, to get more page views was really expensive for the brand. Didn’t didn’t feel very efficient based on kind of how we were trending with them. And so one of the things that we did by focusing on, okay, how are we going to improve page views, we, you know, broke that down further, from that being kind of the high level opportunity to, okay, we need to improve organic page views specifically. And and so, you know, we dug into a few things and we identified that, you know, they have an amazing Roas. So it looks like they’re very efficient on advertising, but their ads aren’t very effective over the long run and in growing their organic growth. And and so digging into then where their sources of traffic were, we identified that, hey, they weren’t getting a lot of off Amazon traffic and B most of their traffic was actually coming from their own branded terms, which is, again, something you can measure.

Tyler Wallis 00:40:41  And so we identified. All right. So we want to get more non-branded traffic both on Amazon as well as traffic from off Amazon. And so for that brand we then focus on two kind of controllable action areas or inputs. One was similar to your example with tick tock, but going after micro-influencers on Instagram, that it was a very demonstrable product and, you know, very nice looking. And so it was well suited for like a micro influencer strategy. And so we started doing that, got some really good traction. Again, the goals or the actions were how many influencers are reaching out to every week, how many collaborative posts are we getting every month? And then obviously, like the attributed page views and sales from the Amazon attribution links. And so that was one thing that we focused on. The second thing with the advertising Thing was, we used the Search Query performance report where you can see your share of clicks and purchases. And of course, you can filter that just your own branded terms to basically be this kind of audit mechanism to then test pulling back on organic, sorry, not organic, branded, advertising and reinvesting that into non-branded advertising.

Tyler Wallis 00:41:37  There was a big concern since like 40 plus percent of sales were coming from branded keyword traffic that, hey, are we going to like kiss 40% of our business goodbye if we just pull back entirely on this? And so we use that report as a way to track, hey, if we, you know, week over week test, pulling back 10% on branded advertising and reinvest that into non-branded, can we retain our branded sales? And what we found with this brand is that we we did. So we were able to use the Search Core performance report and see that our purchase share on those branded terms actually was a little bit counter-intuitive, actually went up like a half a percent over over the several week period, even while we pulled, I want to say it was about 70% of our spend on defensive or branded advertising and reinvested that elsewhere. But really, at the end of the day, like this was a success story because they were able to repurpose that capital and ultimately increase their organic traffic considerably because they brought in this new channel of micro influencer traffic from off Amazon using brand referral bonus like was not very expensive either, and then also repurposing this branded spend to more effectively using that towards non-branded keywords where they’re able to build up more of those new to brand customers, you know, and just reduce the reliance on their, their own branded terms and defensive advertising by increasing the pie going after, you know, non-branded where customers on Amazon.

Tyler Wallis 00:42:48  So yeah, that’s another example there where you know we first had to identify okay where should we focus. We’re clearly not doing as good as we could. And then what are the controllable actions that we’re going to measure on and tasks the team to go do to improve that controllable input metric?

Josh Hadley 00:43:01  Yeah man, I love that. I think that is a brilliant example of, you know, at the end of the day, though, you need to know your numbers. And I think that’s the takeaway I get from that is like you’re using data, you’re looking at your brand searches and you’re constantly measuring things. Right. And you’re measuring like, how many creators are we reaching out to, etc. so I love that approach. Tyler, as we begin to wrap things up here, is there anything else that you haven’t yet addressed that you feel like we need to share with our audience to help them scale their own brands?

Tyler Wallis 00:43:29  I would just say that, you know, this can feel like a lot, maybe to folks that haven’t been trying to use an input focused, input metric focused way of managing their business.

Tyler Wallis 00:43:40  I would say start small. Like, don’t try to like, even with, you know, this this PDF here that we’re showing that we’ll make available. Like don’t try to just like do everything tomorrow like identify. You probably have a sense most brands have a sense of like okay, this is one area of the business where either I’m actively working to improve because it’s a pain point, or I feel like it’s a blind spot because I’ve taken my eyes off, you know, for too long and, you know, assign somebody that you trust on your team to just incorporate this for that portion of the business. And then you can you can figure out over the long term, like how to maybe update some of the reporting or sass you use to, to be able to get to that, whether it’s a weekly business review or whatever cadence, you can kind of see the whole picture and how you’re doing against all of these comparables that we talked about. But if you try to just do everything tomorrow, I think this is going to be too daunting.

Tyler Wallis 00:44:21  That’s what I found consulting with brands. And so it really just focus on one area, Tesla’s concept. See if by focusing on those controllable inputs and your team there, if that doesn’t empower them and also ultimately drive the output metric. And then from there you will have won the buy in to then expand this to other parts of the business.

Josh Hadley 00:44:37  Yeah, Tyler, I think you summed it up really there really well there in relation to like look, this is a this is a process. This is going to take time to get this implemented fully into a business where you’re firing on all cylinders. So Tyler, as we wrap things up, I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are my three actionable takeaways. You let me know if I’m missing something. Action item number one is going to be to create a operating system, aka a meeting cadence for your business. again, time and time I hear so many people, even when they have team members, they are not actually meeting with their team members even via zoom, right? They are just sending email exchanges to their Vas back and forth, and they’ve got 5 to 10 different Vas doing different things in the business for you.

Josh Hadley 00:45:20  And one of the things that we have done is we started implementing kind of like what you recommended here. Tyler is like a weekly business review. That’s been something that we’re doing. We call it our level ten meeting in the iOS framework. Right. But we do this every single week, and we’ve been doing it for three years. And guess what? We have gotten better and better and better at it every single time. And it’s really helped us dial in. these are the true leading metrics for our own business, because it is going to be different for every single different business, right? It could be influencer stuff really crushes it for this brand, whereas it’s not so much for another brand. And they need to focus more on the internal Amazon advertising and opportunities that are there. So that’s action item number one. If you’re not having regular meetings with your team members and then having a structured agenda around it where you’re reviewing the actual data and the reports of the business, then I would be implementing that ASAP into my brand action.

Josh Hadley 00:46:10  Item number two is understanding the true inputs of your business. And I’m going to say this also incorporates having some type of reporting mechanism in your business. And Tyler, you said it well when you said like, hey, you don’t need to go implement all 50 of these inputs tomorrow or have like little reports for every single one of these measurements, but start with what you believe are the driving leading indicators or biggest inputs that you feel like you can control in your business and start downloading those reports, right? One of the key hires that we have made has been somebody that is, I call them like my data nerd, like the dude is a wizard with spreadsheets. He could run circles around me all day long, but he’s pulling data from Amazon. He’s pulling data from some of our third party software tools like Data Hoc. And then he’s merging everything into power BI, right? Which is then creating a custom dashboard for us to understand our business at a very granular level, so that we are focused on the actual leading measures of the business.

Josh Hadley 00:47:03  Because guess what? Any of the reports that you just get from Amazon, they’re typically just lagging indicators, right? You’ve got to then be able to interpret it. That’s why Microsoft calls it Business intelligence power BI right. Because the intelligence comes into take the data, be able to make intelligent decisions based off of what you see in that data. So if you don’t have that, start building it out. In the reporting structure we have now is a far cry from what we started with three years ago. So I’ll say that. So start with where you’re at today and just start adding and growing that. And then third and final action item here is when you do understand what the key inputs are for your business, make sure that you have those key inputs assigned to specific team members as part of their KPIs. You need to have a team member that is wholly responsible for those KPIs in order for those KPIs to truly succeed. So if you don’t make sure you go back, revamp your role profiles for your business to ensure that you have consistency for both you and the team member.

Josh Hadley 00:47:57  So Tyler, anything else that I’m missing here is an action item.

Tyler Wallis 00:48:01  I think that’s a great roadmap for brands. The only thing I would add to your step number two of getting the right reporting is that having been through that myself, where we also build power BI custom reports, I know how big of a lift that that can be. So I would just add that, yes, eventually, that probably makes sense for most bigger brands to do and invest in. But in the meantime, if you can’t build it, then lease it. And there are a lot of consultants and agencies and software providers that have things that probably get you 80% of where you want to be. So long term, have that like ideal state for your reporting, but don’t let the investment costs of that keep you from doing it this year. Like find something that you can lease or a partner that you can rely on to help get you most of the way in the meantime.

Josh Hadley 00:48:40  Yeah, 100% echo those sentiments. All right, Tyler, I’d love to ask each guest the following three questions.

Josh Hadley 00:48:46  So we’ll start from the top. What’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Tyler Wallis 00:48:50  So I knew you were going to ask this question. And my first thought was, was Atomic Habits, which I actually have right above me here, but I’m sure that’s been mentioned before. So, the one I actually want to suggest or recommend is a book that I read this last year called Buy Back Your Time by a great, you know, founder called, named Dan Martel. And, to me, it’s been I’ve gotten so much value out of those books. Like, my favorite books are the ones I paid $10 for, and then I feel like I get $10,000 of value in my life after reading, and it’s very practical. I will say there are some books that are kind of more theoretical. This is a book that has theory, but it’s very practical in every single chapter. I’m really helping you as the founder or leader in your business, although anyone can really apply the principles to immediately start, like buying back your time in ways that reduce uncertainty and just make sense, mathematically.

Tyler Wallis 00:49:36  So, as we all know, like time is the scarcest resource for many of us. so being able to just get more time to invest in the areas of the business that we want is usually a big breakthrough. And it has been for me. So definitely recommend Buy Back Your time.

Josh Hadley 00:49:49  Yes. No. That is a great book. Both of those book recommendations, I stand behind both of them. They are very good books. All right. Second question. What’s your favorite, AI tool or ChatGPT prompt that you’ve been using?

Tyler Wallis 00:50:01  I have been using ChatGPT quite a bit. I’m actually going to give a non ChatGPT answer. and this might be a bit of a surprise, but I would actually say loom, is a tool that has really helped with productivity. in our business. Just I found that I’ve been able to not have to teach something more than once because I can do a quick loom video. And loom now has an AI feature where after it records a video, which in and of itself is already helpful for sharing with your team, it’ll automatically generate, like an SOP, like it’ll put basically a transcript of the loom video, and it will use AI to format it into an easy to follow SOP.

Tyler Wallis 00:50:37  And you can just share that along with the video. So I’ve been doing that in the last few months with my team, and it’s going back to like buy back Your time. It’s bought me back a lot of time because I’ve felt like I haven’t had to teach the same thing more than once. I can quickly just record myself doing something once, use the AI feature, and now I’ve got an SOP for the team to follow.

Josh Hadley 00:50:53  Yeah, love love loom. And it’s also a great way to take meetings like we talked about meetings. Implement meetings, yes, but don’t get caught up in meetings, right. Oftentimes a meeting could be done asynchronously, which means have that team member share the report. And especially if they’re working in different time zones, have them share the report. And then guess what you’re able to do? Put it on to speed and really get into the meat and potatoes, and maybe wear things that you need to, like double down on. You could go slower in and really listen into those details.

Josh Hadley 00:51:17  So anyways, looms by my favorite for like asynchronous meetings. And there’s a lot that can happen asynchronously in an e-commerce brand. All right. Third and third and final question who is somebody that you admire and respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Tyler Wallis 00:51:30  There are many, but one that I’ll call out is Andrew Hamada. He is also a former Amazonian, and he is now the founder of a data company for Amazon Data called Reason Automation. Just a great guy. Like he’s worth a follow on LinkedIn just for his really thought provoking ideas and principles and applications for anybody in the e-commerce space. But he also knows Amazon data, both the vendor and seller side in and out. So highly trust them.

Josh Hadley 00:51:53  Awesome. Great recommendation. Haven’t ever came across Andrew, so I’m encouraged to look into him as well. So Tyler this has been awesome. If people want to learn more about you and Triple Line and also get access to this PDF resource that you created for us, where can people grab that app?

Tyler Wallis 00:52:08  Yeah.

Tyler Wallis 00:52:08  So at Triple Line you can find us at triple Line Brands. Com. we’ve got some resources on our website. I would say if you’re interested in more of these how to apply Amazon principles and practices to businesses outside of Amazon. it may be worth checking out a podcast that I, hosted for a few years called Think Like Amazon. So if you go think like Amazon Echo or you can find it online. And really, we just, through that podcast interviewed a lot of former Amazon VP’s and directors and, you know, teased out the principles and practices that they took from Amazon to apply to their businesses. Post to Amazon. but in terms of this resource, yeah, I would love for anyone interested to get their hands on this PDF that we went through here. they can go to Triple Line brands.com/breakthrough and download it from there. So if you’re interested you know I’m happy to share this. And if you have any feedback let me know as well. But hope it hope it helps empower a few brands trying to manage by the inputs.

Josh Hadley 00:53:02  Awesome, Tyler, this has been an awesome episode. Thanks so much for taking time out of your day and joining us.

Tyler Wallis 00:53:07  Great. Thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.