Todd is an English major who made good as an entrepreneur. He has founded and bootstrapped two companies into 8 figure valuations and is currently working on his eCommerce brand Finer Form. That brand focuses on at-home exercise equipment and is one of that category’s top-selling brands on Amazon.

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

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast, host Josh Hadley chats with Todd Bairstow, CEO of Finer Form, about the brand’s impressive growth trajectory during the pandemic and the strategic moves that propelled them to eight-figure success. Todd shares how Finer Form preemptively tackled potential negative reviews by improving product design and assembly instructions, enhancing the customer experience. He also delves into the critical role of Amazon PPC expertise in their growth, emphasizing the importance of keyword specificity and campaign organization. Furthermore, Todd discusses the value of maintaining a white hat approach and building strong relationships with Amazon account managers. The episode also explores Finer Form’s unexpected success on TikTok Shop, outperforming other sales channels, and the benefits of influencer marketing on the platform. Todd recommends “The Big Short” for diverse business perspectives, ChatGPT for productivity, and the “Odd Lots” podcast for global business insights. This episode is packed with actionable strategies for e-commerce entrepreneurs aiming to scale their businesses.

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

Action Item #1: Embrace Adaptability and Strategic Decision-Making: Todd Bairstow’s experience with Finer Form underscores the importance of adaptability in the face of unforeseen circumstances like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Action Item #2: Prioritize Exceptional Customer Service: Building a loyal customer base is crucial for sustained success in e-commerce.

Action Item #3: Master Amazon PPC and Explore Emerging Platforms: Post-COVID, the significance of Amazon PPC advertising has surged.

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

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

I started my business 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 email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com and in your subject line say “strategy audit” for the chance to win a $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost!

Josh (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 King, Michael E Gerber, author of The E-myth, and Matt Clark from ASM. Today I’m speaking with Todd Bairstow. He’s the CEO of Finer Form, and he’s going to be sharing his remarkable story of how his brand exploded during Covid and the specific growth levers he has been using to scale his brand to eight figure valuations and beyond. But in addition to that, you’re also going to hear his strategies of how his TikTok shop sales are now surpassing Walmart.com sales. And he’s going to dive into the details with us today. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. Listen, Todd, I started my business back in 2015 and I grew it to an eight figure brand in seven years, but I made a lot of mistakes along the way. That made the path of getting to eight figures take a lot longer than it needed to.

Josh (00:01:02) – At times, I made bad hiring decisions. I had to take money out of my personal account in order to fund payroll because of cash flow constraintsI was stressed about whether our brand could survive during Covid because we saw a 90% decline in our sales when Covid happened. I remember wishing for a mentor who could help guide me through the maze of scaling my business. Someone who had been there, done that, and could share all the secrets to help me overcome those obstacles. And that’s why I’ve decided to offer one on one coaching and consulting, where I share the nitty gritty cash flow frameworks, the sales strategies, the operating systems that have helped me scale my own business. And because I believe in giving each entrepreneur my undivided attention. I only work with three clients at a time. But first, before we get to that point, I want to make sure it’s a perfect match. So I’m offering a completely free, no strings attached business strategy audit valued at over $10,000. And this audit is my way of showing you that how committed I am to your success.

Josh (00:02:06) – So to our listeners, if this is something that sounds interesting to you, send me an email at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough dot com. That’s ecomm with two M’s. And in your subject line say I want to pick your brain. And then let’s chat about how we can take your brand to the next level. Today I’m super excited to introduce you all to Todd Bairstow. Todd is an English major who made good as an entrepreneur. He has bootstrapped two companies into the eight figure valuations, and is currently working on his e-commerce brand finder form. That brand focuses on At-Home Exercise Equipment and is one of the categories top selling brands on Amazon. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Todd.

Todd (00:02:48) – Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me.

Josh (00:02:51) – Todd. We met at prosper just a few weeks ago, and we were doing one of the think tank sessions together. We were sitting at a very unique table where I was like blown away by some of the ideas and strategies that everybody was sharing.

Josh (00:03:07) – And I knew, I immediately said, you guys don’t go anywhere. When we’re done with this thing, I’m coming back. I’m getting your number. I gotta bring you on to the podcast because you’re a wicked smart dude, and I’m excited to have you here.

Todd (00:03:20) – Well, I think,, many of my family would disagree with you, but thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Josh (00:03:26) – Well, Todd, why don’t you give our listeners a little bit of your background? Why don’t you share that story of how things really exploded for you during Covid, and what were some of the strategies and levers that you would use?

Todd (00:03:43) – Yeah. So I have a bit of a different story. Maybe it’s not for some of the folks out there who are into Amazon and FBA, in that I had the final form brand along with my team. We were really small at home exercise and at home fitness equipment providers. So we would sell on Amazon, set up benches, weight benches, things that I had some connections with or my team had some connections over, with the manufacturer, and it was almost a sidelight.

Todd (00:04:21) – , it, it started in 2018 and it did, you know, modest sales to be kind, but it was it wasn’t,, it wasn’t lighting the world on fire., but it was enough to keep us going and to think maybe there’s something here one of these days. And in December of 2019, it’s the holiday season. We’re ready to see how it does. And we ended up doing,, just under a quarter million dollars in sales for that December and,, surprised the heck out of us., did not expect that to happen because we were relatively young. We were, you know, just almost a year old, and it suddenly became a more serious endeavor. Well, now we have to order more products, and let’s hope this is not going to fade and recede come January. So the timeline is important here because we all know what’s coming, you know, a couple of months down the road, January sales are good, February sales continued strong. And all of a sudden, wait a minute, this is really going to be something.

Todd (00:05:29) – And then Covid hit and boy the whole business just went insane almost overnight., we within the span of two weeks went from went from, you know, fully having fully utilized our storage limits in Amazon to now they’re empty and we have to go to our three PL on the West Coast and try and get more shipments in, or we switch to FBM to try and sell, because all of a sudden everybody’s stuck at home. They can’t go to the gym. What are they looking for at home? Fitness equipment and existentially obviously Covid was a disaster for America, for the world. A lot of people really suffered. A lot of people, businesses, anybody who was in the event business really had a horrible time with it. And for other businesses, a lot of e-commerce businesses, it had the opposite effect. It was a massive implosion of sales. And we went we did, I think through 2020, if I remember the numbers right, we were up six x over the previous year sales.

Todd (00:06:43) – And from there it was. It’s just been an all out, you know, train to try and grow the business and grow the brand., and we have succeeded in doing that. It’s still growing today, even though Covid is, you know, more than two years,, in the rearview mirror by most accounts.

Josh (00:07:03) – Yeah. I love that, Todd. I love that,, you know, luck is where prepper preparation meets opportunity. And,, you are there at the right time and the right place, and you already had the right things going on.

Todd (00:07:16) – It’s weird to say luck because I’m like, boy, I guess it was luck. But by the same token. Oh, boy, I don’t know if I want to,, you know, you don’t want to dance too much when everybody is stuck and people are, you know, being sick and so forth. But the circumstances are what I think the circumstances were certainly there for us to do it. Well.

Josh (00:07:38) – Well, and that’s what I think is so important in business. That’s why I call it luck just because, you know, nobody could forecast that. Right. That’s not something you could plan on. And that’s what happens so much in business. Right. You had the opposite,, you know reaction and Covid I, I was down 90%. Yeah. Right. And so that’s something I could never have forecasted that we were more in the event space at that time. And we got crushed. We got crushed. And so what I am saying though, is as a business owner, you have to always be ready and anticipate being able to adapt, right? You need to adapt. If something happens with shipping lanes, right, coming over from overseas and all of a sudden, you know, bridges collapse or the Suez Canal or whatever it is.

Josh (00:08:29) – That backs things up, it’s a constant adaptation, but it’s having a team of people that are trying to grow something. And again, it sounds like, again, your preparation met that opportunity.

Josh (00:08:41) – And you guys. As for taking the bull by the horns and really growing things really well.

Todd (00:08:46) – It’s funny you say that because one of the things I’m a big improv comedy fan, I love improvisational comedy, and not that I’m that funny, but what I found. As an entrepreneur, one of the things that is really important is to be able to improvise and change your direction, or pivot your ideas, or come up with something new almost instantaneously based on circumstances. And Covid was one of those things,, where I wasn’t expecting that to happen, had no sense that this was going to be there for the brand. But the ability to adapt and for me personally,, and my team, to just switch completely into growth mode and to make decisions and to execute quickly was just as important as any enterprise, enterprise planning or ERP systems or projections. You know, I generally don’t work with systems like that as an entrepreneur, but I think that ability to work ad hoc and improvise around the circumstances was super, super valuable, for us back then.

Josh (00:10:02) – So what I’m getting from you is that people need to go take some improv classes to be successful business owners.

Todd (00:10:07) – I swear it has helped me more in my career than anything else I can, I can imagine, so.

Josh (00:10:13) – I love it. I love it now. Todd, I would love to unpack some of those growth levers. Okay, obviously Covid and everybody being, you know, the lockdowns and all that stuff, not something we can plan on. You are able to take that opportunity and do well. But since COVID’s now in the rearview mirror, what have you been able to do to continue to grow your brand? Because we have a lot of seven figure entrepreneurs here that want to scale their business to eight figures and beyond. So, Todd, give us some of those levers that you have pulled in order to continue that successful growth.

Todd (00:10:47) – Sure.

Todd (00:10:47) – So I’m going to point back specifically to 2020 and Covid to some decisions that we made then that are still paying off for us now. And I think the core of our success really points back to a couple of the decisions we made back then.

Todd (00:11:05) – So if you go back to,, April, May, June, July of 2020, when, you know, the world was in freefall and nobody really knew what was going on,, a lot of our competitors on Amazon were out of stock. And their supply chains, you know, the just in time supply chain, the hyper efficient supply chain that they had cultivated to get their products on suddenly was cast, was thrown into doubt, and they could not get product onto Amazon. They couldn’t get product over quickly enough. And that gave us an opportunity to sell through just on a per unit volume, way more product than we ever would have thought. We just kept reordering and reordering and reordering almost on a daily basis to have enough inventory over the course of that time. And we did stock out a few times. But what we did, and this is one of the key things, is we had the opportunity to really jack our prices if we wanted to, and we saw other folks doing it where, hey, a set of dumbbells is now $500 or $1000,, weight benches are going for double the price because people want to work out at home.

Todd (00:12:23) – And we made a very different decision in that we decided to maintain our pricing more or less. We had a small price raise there, but we focused more on moving volume at that point and getting really strong numbers of units to customers and then trying to get their reviews. And so it worked to generate the sales velocity. You know, back then sales velocity wasn’t new, but it was new ish. And so getting that velocity up was important. But then getting so many reviews from the added number of units that we put out really cemented our products in terms of being,, leaders on Amazon and leaders in the category. I think if we had raised our prices and really tried to make every last dollar that we wouldn’t have moved that many units be, we wouldn’t have seen the reviews that we did and see. I think that we would not have had the solid foundation from a review standpoint that a lot of our products have today, if that makes sense.

Josh (00:13:36) – Yeah.

Josh (00:13:36) – No, that makes a lot of sense. One thing I think that’s important is, like, you obviously had some foresight in that decision.. There’s a lot of people that I think are too shortsighted, right? It’s about how much money I am making now and how I can get more of it, whereas you will make better decisions if you can say, hey, you know what the. He’s going to come in 3 to 5 years if I do these business actions now, that’s a lot harder. It requires a lot of patience, a lot of determination on your part to be able to do that. But that is how successful businesses grow, right?, if you can say, hey, you know what, this thing doesn’t need to make money now, but this is a five year, ten year plan., that’s where business really starts to take off. And I’d be interested to hear from you, Todd. Like, what did you see happen to these competitors that did raise their prices? They doubled their prices.

Josh (00:14:39) – Are they still around now? Where do they fit in the competitive landscape now?

Todd (00:14:45) – , you know, a couple of them are still around the folks who we saw back then. There were a lot of legacy providers in the workout space. But their supply chains, you know, these are companies that are used to making two orders a year to make it as cheap as possible. We’ll store it over here, in warehouses. They just could not turn their supply chain around to get product there. The folks who we did see were more of the FBA and the e-commerce centric players. They were able to,, to turn around and make some of their assignees real superstars, fairly similarly to us., they raised their prices a little bit, but not a ton. And so I think the e-commerce players in our space certainly did better than legacy brands or brick and mortar brands that were also online. That’s certainly, I think, what we saw.

Josh (00:15:43) – Interesting. Very fascinating.

Josh (00:15:45) – What other levers have you been pulling? So obviously reviews, getting a big review moat and having, you know, really good velocity has been something that’s carried you through continual growth. What other levers have you been pulling?

Todd (00:15:59) – So the other thing in this one more time back to Covid, because it’s something that we’ve continued to this day, is we handled our customer service in-house, and we have a team that responds to every email, every Amazon message, every phone call,, we send replacement parts. We do all of this super, super fast, but not in an automated, not with a customer service automation tool. You know, you’ll never get a ticket from us. You’ll actually get an email from a human being if something rips and is shipping a piece of leather on a bench, back or whatever, just let us know. We’ll send it out immediately, and we’re going to tell you we’re going to send it out immediately. That way you’re not in limbo wondering what’s going to happen. And so we have,, we instituted that back then, and you’d be amazed at how grateful people were just to receive an email or to ask a question and to get a response.

Todd (00:17:00) – It’s almost anathema these days for a lot of companies. We generated a lot of our really good reviews from customers who got a product that was ripped in shipping, or a piece that didn’t fit properly by just getting back to them quickly and then sending them a replacement. We got so many five star reviews just from being that responsive. And so that’s something I think about as brands think about ways to grow, that’s one of those things you don’t assume like, oh, that could possibly help my growth to be better customer service? In our case, we’re fervent believers in that. We absolutely believe that if you get back to people and you provide a quality product, people will read those reviews, know that a mistake was made, but a company actually tried to make it right.. That carries a lot of sway with people. And so that’s something we continue on with to this day. That is, one of the pillars of the company.

Josh (00:18:01) – Yeah, I love that.

Josh (00:18:02) – You know, Amazon took away the ability to like to respond to reviews and at the time was like a way to show like, hey, we actually care. We want to take care of our customers. Right now. That’s gone. It makes it even more difficult to showcase, hey, we have good customer support, but I love that strategy of super quick response times, letting people know where things are at. Hey, we shipped a replacement part or we’ve got this other order coming for you and letting people know and if they have a positive experience especially I feel like in customer service, it’s not hard to go above and beyond because 99% of companies have just absolutely horrendous customer experience. Right. And so,, you do you go above and beyond and people will start mentioning that in reviews, even if they have a problem. Yes, I had this. It ripped. But I reached out to them. They sent me an overnight shipment or whatever it is, and people are going to be blown away.

Josh (00:19:04) – And that does go a really long way.

Todd (00:19:07) – Yeah, we’re all we.

Todd (00:19:08) – We are all everybody in the e-commerce business, everybody in the Amazon business, everybody who does. Tick tock. We are all at the mercy of our shipping partners. We’re literally all at the mercy. There’s nothing I can do about it. You can do something about it. We are at the mercy of whoever is physically putting that onto a truck and then delivering it to a customer, and so forth. Weird stuff happens all the time, and you just have to understand if you have a product that is susceptible to, you know, odd handling and so forth, you’re going to have to work that into your business model. And so being able to respond and to get back to people is super, super important. It just made a ton of difference for us.

Josh (00:19:51) – You know I love that. Love that.

Josh (00:19:53) – All right Todd what else?

Todd (00:19:57) – What else? Okay.. You know, one of the things. I’ll get into PPC in a minute.

Todd (00:20:04) – But one of the other things that’s super important, and this is really where our team, I think does a great job, is we were able to cut off a lot of negative reviews just by formulating the product to be friendlier. And so when you think about weight benches or exercise benches, they require some assembly. They require some putting together. The more we could. Cut, cut problems off for the customer ahead of time by maybe adding an assembly step or making the directions a little bit clearer,, or simplifying the process in any way. The insertion slips call us first to,, with any issues. All of these things matter. They all say you can’t pinpoint specifically this matter 3% or this reduced reviews to. But cohesively being able to formulate the product in a way that will eliminate bad reviews, I think is one of the things that goes really overlooked,, by a lot of folks. They just, you know, ship it to me from the manufacturer, I’ll get it into FBA and then I’ll go.

Todd (00:21:17) – I think that process of the actual consumer experience. Is the product easy to understand when you take it out of the package? Can I put it together properly? What are the common issues? The more of those you can get rid of, the easier your life is going to be and the better the reviews are going to be. There, there., yeah, that’s something that should go without saying at this point. But I think it really matters more than folks think, particularly if they’re spending our average sales $250, they’re spending money there. They have an expectation that they’re going to get a quality product. And that’s something that we take pretty seriously.

Josh (00:21:57) – And I would assume it helps with the word of mouth. Do you get referrals or do you track that at all?

Todd (00:22:03) – A lot of that comes from the reviews where people write in there. Oh, it only took half an hour to assemble something. I mean, some of our things have 20 or 30 parts and they have to be put together.

Todd (00:22:13) – If you can make it easier that reflects in the reviews and not just on our not just on Amazon, but also, you know, in the other places that you find reviews online. So, it definitely is part of our brand now. And I say that only because people reference the other reviews when they come in and they and we talk to them.

Josh (00:22:36) – So fascinating. I love that. All right, Todd I’m going to keep probing. So what other growth levers have you been using? Because you’ve got a lot.

Todd (00:22:47) – Well these are all lessons learned during you know, kind of that Covid period., you know, post Covid. Anybody who’s going to be on Amazon, as far as I’m concerned, has to become a PPC expert and really understand how to use advertising on Amazon. We’re big advertisers. We spend a lot of money every month on the product. It’s baked into our,, cost of goods and the product,, and we’re believers that more is better and not less is better.

Todd (00:23:24) – , to be fair, my background and our team’s background, we had a big PPC background from Google prior to Amazon, and one of the things that lured me into Amazon was how their PPC system was starting to follow Google AdWords. And if you think about 2018, 2019, that’s when Amazon PPC started to,, really develop a little bit further. And I thought that our background as PPC buyers would help with Amazon. And, you know, I think in 2018, it was just maybe Amazon was doing $1 billion in ad revenue. I mean, it’s 40, 50 times that now. So, that is a big part of our success and is part of just our operating model that we have to have a core, not just competency, but expertise in Amazon PPC. And that is, when folks say, I don’t, I don’t want to do PPC, I can’t, you should just not go on Amazon then. That’s my opinion. It’s just there’s so much to be gained by learning to do that.

Todd (00:24:39) – Well, that,, it’s a key to be the key to everybody’s strategy once they launch.

Josh (00:24:46) – So a couple questions on that topic then for PPC. What are your tacos right now?

Todd (00:24:54) – , you know, tacos, we try to stay. I don’t want to give away too many numbers because we do have competitors there. But it’s in the mid-teens, you know, or low maybe somewhere in that area., and that we can build into the, into the product and still maintain margin and so forth. Yeah. We will overspend when we launch a new product and everybody will do that just to cement sales velocity and drive those reviews., but there is, there’s, there’s a science as well as an art to buying PPC, and you have to get into the weeds if you want to shave those 4 or 5 extra points of margin out of there, it can be done. In a lot of cases. I think the more competitive a product is. For jewelry stuff that’s easy to ship in small dollars.

Todd (00:25:53) – It is harder to find those extra points from a PPC standpoint., but when you have a higher, higher price product and maybe not an addition, you can certainly,, certainly by being a great PPC buyer, find those extra points there.

Josh (00:26:12) – Yeah. No, it makes a lot of sense. And I’ve heard that,, you know, Amazon’s kind of taking a page out of Google’s PPC playbook. So I’m interested to hear your thoughts then, Todd, like, what are some of the things that you had learned from Google PPC optimization that you’ve now been able to employ to Amazon PPC optimization? That does help you shave off a few of those percentage points.

Todd (00:26:38) – So the specificity of the keywords that and this is in my prior life, I bought, you know, we’d spend a couple million dollars a month with Google. And it’s not just what keyword, it’s which keyword in which phrase type, in which geographic location, with which ad, with which landing page. That’s the old Google, you know, conversion method is you had to factor all of these different elements into your cost per your cost per conversion.

Todd (00:27:13) – With Amazon. It’s very similar to, you know, what are the match types. What are the advertising types there? Do you have different elements within a video campaign or sponsored brand campaign or etc., etc.?, and how do you organize campaigns to generate sales at a reasonable rate? Will you take it? Sales at a higher cost., for, you know, your, your, your broad keywords or your, your, your most popular keywords and make up the difference with these long tail or very specific purchases that may only generate a couple of sales a month or even a couple of sales a year, but they’re at a fraction of the cost. So,I’m digging very deep. And it would be another whole show to go into how that’s all done., but digging very deep is generally worth the worth, the time and the effort. If you have products that are top sellers and are going to generate a lot of top line revenue for you.

Josh (00:28:22) – Makes a lot of sense. So do you feel like you’re utilizing more exact match campaigns, auto or broad? Which ones are.

Todd (00:28:30) – We’ve done it all.

Todd (00:28:32) – If we do all of them. And so, you know, back when I did Google, we didn’t just run a campaign. We ran an exact phrase, a modified broad and a broad, and we do versions of that with Amazon as well. And so being that specific I think is important., we use some AI tools. I don’t want to name them here, but I think everybody would have heard of them,, to help manage some of that,, on an ongoing basis., but managing within those tools is even, you know, something that I think is,, core to what we’re doing. I think a lot of PPC tools that are out there, they want what they really want more than anything in life is for you to just pay them every month to set and forget your campaigns. You can’t do that.

Todd (00:29:23) – You have to dig in, and you have to get within the framework of whatever PPC tool you’re using. Get into the guts of that and find ways to optimize within those tools. It will make a big difference.

Josh (00:29:36) – Yeah, no, that that makes a lot of sense. So it sounds like you have a software tool that does some automations for you, but do you have a team member whose entire job is to manage the PPC? Or tell me about your team structure, like who’s making sure that that software is running properly?

Todd (00:29:55) – Yeah.

Todd (00:29:55) – So we have we have we have, my partner,, is a PPC wizard and is really amazing,, at, at building our campaigns and making sure that we drive,, as much we have to balance top line versus, you know, EBITDA as you would imagine., and I would love to spend I would spend more time with that. But I think there are other parts of the business where I have to, you know, spend more time,, but my partner does a lot more of that and then works with our software team or the with our software team to work within their system to make sure that we’re targeting the right keywords and we’re spending enough.

Todd (00:30:43) – I think a lot of folks are on the side of not spending too much, and we look at it the other way, which is are we spending as much as we possibly can,, on this at a profitable rate? And so one of the things we tell our software partners is we will be the most upset when you’re delivering, you know, low cost, low tacos. But you’re not spending enough.

Todd (00:31:11) – You know.

Todd (00:31:12) – If we run out of budget for DSP and you wait, we’re going to be really, really upset. Don’t ever let that happen to us, because those are dollars that we can’t go back and make up.. Everybody has situations where, hey, we spent too much, we have to peel bids back. We have to get back, you know, to be profitable on these sets of ad groups on this product. And that can be done. You can fix that. What you can’t go back and do is, hey, we already spent your $7,000 this month on DSP. We ran out on the 17th.

Todd (00:31:51) – We’re going to wait 13 more days to go back and do that. We hate that. We would much rather have you talk to us and say, hey, we’re going to run out, but the numbers are good. Do you want to increase the budget? The answer is always yes if ACOs and tacos are right. And so, what everybody I thought in the provider space once was what’s your monthly budget. We don’t think of it that way. And it’s a tweak in the thinking that’s important. It’s not what your monthly budget is, it’s how many sales you can get at these ACOs and tacos that are important to us. And we want to spend every dime we can there.

Josh (00:32:30) – So you’re just looking at it from a pure profitability standpoint. If we can be profitable on the front end sale, I mean figuratively unlimited budget.

Todd (00:32:39) – Yeah. And that’s exactly what I tell them is we have an unlimited budget at these tacos and tacos ranges. And I think that folks who,, you know, we’re reasonably well capitalized.

Todd (00:32:53) – We reinvest in the business a lot. That is how we are comfortable running the business. And it’s a way that we can grow and be and maintain our aggressiveness. I think,, you know, you said earlier I was worried about every dollar, you know, and I understand that particularly if you’re a bootstrap business or you’re not making a lot of money,, on a net basis, overall, we found we’ve had a lot of success by just being more aggressive and making people focus on the ACOs and tacos and taking that whole what’s the budget out of it has been more successful.

Josh (00:33:31) – Love, love that. I think that’s a great methodology, a great framework and a good mindset shift.

Josh (00:33:37) – I think it’s a mindset.

Todd (00:33:39) – It really is a mindset. It’s a mindset shift. And it’s so the opposite of how your internet is. PPC management agencies think, or the agency world in general thinks they think about what’s the budget and we’ll figure it out from there.

Speaker 3 (00:33:53) – Yeah.

Todd (00:33:54) – It’s just it’s easier for the agency to understand, but we’re not here to make it easy for them.

Todd (00:34:01) – You know, they’re supposed to be helping us make money, and we’re not supposed to be helping them have an easier time managing things. Yeah.

Josh (00:34:08) – 100%. I love that. Todd, any other growth levers that you feel like have helped you continue to grow off of that success from Covid?

Todd (00:34:20) – , we, you know, they’re little things day to day. You know, we try to. And this was successful in my last business as well. When I was with Google, we tried to follow in my last company to follow Google’s instructions or follow Google’s lead as much as we possibly could. And so, you know, when Google says, try this, this and this or format campaigns that we would do that, we would we would make wholesale changes to really follow their advice because ultimately, their algorithms and their, their ability to show our campaigns was going to was going to improve based on our compliance with their terms. Amazon’s the same way. Everybody loves to complain about Amazon.

Todd (00:35:10) – And they did this and they did that and I understand I have lived it. I have lived it and died with it. It’s been very difficult sometimes. But the idea of really focusing on what Amazon wants from how you treat a customer to how you handle shipments, to how you,, do PPC, all of these little things. I think that they ask, we try to follow as close as we possibly can to their guidance, because ultimately they’re the ones who have to show our products, and they’re the ones who have to to get us to the top of the page when somebody is making a decision. And so the more closely we can hew to their,, guidance in their, their terms of service, the better we found things,,, have been for us.

Josh (00:36:00) – That makes sense. Are there any specific, you know, developments that you’ve been, you know, paying more attention to and putting more emphasis on than maybe some of your competitors or not?

Todd (00:36:14) – The one thing, the one thing.

Todd (00:36:16) – We don’t do anything that’s even a slightly black hat or even grayish. We don’t do any of that stuff. And,, you know,, we have seen competitors try to put different products on, on an existing PDP. And, you know, we had one competitor who went from 200 reviews to 20,000 reviews literally overnight., and hey, they got what they got from trying to do stuff like that was six weeks of increased sales and then they got taken down completely. So we stay as white hat as we possibly can, whenever we can. We’re constantly monitoring account health, voice of the customer, anything to do with brand registry. So we’re in there every day as a matter of process, trying to respond to and fix any issues that are there. If you have that kind of day to day resolve again, you won’t see, well, did that mean two points? Today doesn’t mean four points over a month. It doesn’t matter. It’s going to, in the end, help you scale out the business because you’re going to have, you know, knock on wood, a clean bill of health as far as Amazon is concerned.

Josh (00:37:30) – Yeah, I can agree with you more. We have a team member that is 100% dedicated to our Amazon account health. That is that is her title, Amazon Account Health Manager, as all she does is making sure that, you know, going back and forth with our SAS core manager and anything that ever pops up to make sure, are we compliant, are we doing the things that Amazon wants, and are we rectifying anything that does pop up? Right, because it’s bots. At the end of the day, it’s bots that trigger something. You review it. But at the end of the day, if you play nice in Amazon’s world and I think again, do you have a five year, a ten year horizon for your business.

Todd (00:38:11) – Even for as. Critical as it is to maintain account health and to go through every day. We’re not immune. I’m talking about my company and specifically for as strong a job as we do. We’re not immune to hiccups. Product listing gets taken down. Account health comes with an issue.

Todd (00:38:35) – , and what I have found is that if you can generate, you can build a relationship with somebody at Amazon. It’s worth a thousand emails back and forth with, you know, seller central and help and all this., it’s incredible the amount we were able to accomplish just by having a relationship with our account manager who could help solve some problems, who could give some advice, who could take a problem that may have taken weeks to solve., via emails, back and forth with wherever they’re being answered and just escalating internally with one person and the problems, they just get solved so much more quickly. Everybody has the same frustration about AI reading emails and then reporting on that to another bot, and finally to a person who doesn’t understand it. If you can develop a one on one relationship like we have had with a couple of our account managers, it really makes a huge difference and will reduce your headache by 90%. To be able to go to them, you’ll still have to put a case in.

Todd (00:39:54) – You’ll still have to go through the motions there. But knowing that there’s somebody who can read it and understand it and help you point you to a solution, if not, provide a solution,, it has been super helpful for us.

Josh (00:40:09) – Yeah, I echo those same sentiments. Are you saying you’re in the SAS core program? Is that the account manager you’re referring to?

Todd (00:40:17) – Yeah. We have an account manager that we have given a couple of account managers. They’ve been terrific. They really have been good. And we meet with them once a month. We don’t specifically try not to give them or go to them with anything that’s small or can be dealt with., through emails. We only talk to them about the really frustrating or difficult things. Issues are problems that we can’t solve through normal Amazon channels. So having one of these account managers is not a license to unload your to do list on them. Rather, if we’ve tried through a number of different avenues to solve a problem, we can’t get a person to understand something.

Todd (00:41:16) – We will then go to our account managers, and they almost always have a better solution for us, whether it’s because they’re trying it or because they have run into this before and they can point us in a better direction., yeah. So those when you get to a certain level of sales, I think it becomes worth the cost if you’re going to do it because,, I think a lot of people in the FBA world, the Amazon world,, they find a sense of odd fulfillment and bashing Amazon and a lot of their,, internal processes. You just have to know that’s part of the deal, doing business with them and finding ways to work within their system rather than trying to fix their system is going to be a better, a better solution for you.

Josh (00:42:08) – Yeah, I agree, I agree. Now, Todd, let’s point out directions in these last few moments here to the TikTok shop. So you had mentioned that TikTok shop is generating more sales for you now than even your Walmart channel.

Josh (00:42:22) – So tell us everybody’s going to be asking you this question. How are you doing this? So tell me, Todd, how did you get on?You know, when did you get to the TikTok shop? And then what are the things that you’ve been doing specifically in the TikTok shop that have gotten you to where you are now?

Todd (00:42:39) – Sure.

Todd (00:42:40) – So number one, I was never a TikTok believer. Completely not. I had watched the videos. I just could not wrap my head around it., but I saw my kids were on it and I saw their babysitters were on it. So it took me a little while to come around to reality. Whenever you get to be my age. I’m 51 now. This is the age where you stop liking new things. TikTok is one of those new things., but. We had heard anecdotally through some friends that,, TikTok shop was working., for their products, they were generally lower priced products. We weren’t sure if they’re going to work for our higher priced products.

Todd (00:43:25) – , and we did a couple,, we did some TikTok videos and we saw some minor results. And this would have been probably a year ago, maybe 16 months ago., and the TikTok shop took a little while to really have the functionality that I think was promised at first. And they’ve gotten better now., and we kept hearing about these other companies that were doing really well with it. And one of the things that we found was that, number one, we’re shooting our own content. So we turned my office into a social media studio and started to have some fitness models and even myself. God, God, God forbid,, doing some of the videos. And we could not specifically say, yes, it is having an effect on Amazon, but it felt like that. It felt like there was a bump. We got some things to go viral. We had one video that had 33 million worldwide views, and we were getting messages from all over the world, about some of our dumbbells.

Todd (00:44:32) – And when you see that, all of a sudden the bell goes off, like, wait a minute. This may not be a perfectly formed solution yet, but you just don’t get a reaction like this unless something is happening. And so,, we started to put more time into the TikTok shop, and by that I mean we hired many more creators. We started to figure out, how does TikTok promote a video? How do you get to a level of. Virality with videos that are going to make a difference for you. And we had a lot of individual creators. We sent them a free product. We had them shoot videos and upload to their TikTok channel. And it seems almost like the brute force method of going out to so many different folks and having them post in a fairly close period of time,, helped boost the amount of views and ultimately the amount of sales that we saw out of our TikTok shop. This is not a situation. This is contrary to my instincts. It would have been contrary to what I did, would have thought from, you know, my old ad agency background that you just do a couple of really well produced, well manicured TikToks and then hope that those go viral.

Todd (00:45:55) – We found that there’s a greater benefit to having more and having people from different,, from different handles posting about your store or your product that was able to generate sales that we weren’t sure were ever going to happen. But then they started to happen, and suddenly it’s 3% of sales and 4% of sales and 5% of sales. And over the holidays, we were just really pleasantly surprised at how TikTok was able to add to our direct sales to our Shopify site, which is TikTok shop through Shopify to us, but then also to, we think, add to our holiday sales as well. We had a really good Q4 last year.

Josh (00:46:48) – Amazing. So, Todd, let me unpack that just a little bit here. So you do post your own videos to your own account. Yeah. Have those videos gone viral like your personal ones you guys have posted on your own account.

Todd (00:47:04) – Some of them have. And this is, this is where it is, this is where it’s so it’s just so different for somebody like me where, you know, I used to work in an ad agency and you did a commercial for,, bank or,, car tire.

Todd (00:47:21) – And you hope that that did. Well, with TikTok, it’s much more constant. The constant nature of it is, yeah. You’re going to get 500 reviews on ten of your videos, but you’re going to get 20,000 on that 11th video. And then on that 125th video, you’re going to get a million. And then on that 500th video, you’re going to get, you know, 30 million. And my ability to predict the success of individual videos is almost zero. Almost zero.. You have to follow one of our most successful videos of all time. It is literally just a hand picking your weight up and placing it back and picking it up and placing it back. I can’t explain it. It doesn’t make sense to my autistic brain, but something within that movement and that format just works. And so we’ve had to follow that stuff quite a bit. There is an element of luck to it, as there is in everything, but with TikTok it’s the same way. You don’t know what they’re going to do, what the number of videos that they’re going to be hit with every day is going to be some number of million, and a certain portion of those is going to do well.

Todd (00:48:37) – You’re never sure which one it’s going to be, but it’s,, it’s been big enough so that it’s now bigger than Walmart., we had it’s bigger than our straight Shopify sales right now. So,, we have high hopes that TikTok is going to become, you know, what kind of Facebook and Instagram used to be in terms of driving traffic. And,,, we are putting a lot of resources into it. We’ve we’re hiring creators. And, it’s going to be an interesting way to develop over the course of we’re really looking to develop a program over the next six months so that when we get to October, we’re ready to really have a full blown TikTok effort for Q4 next year.

Josh (00:49:23) – What does that look like?

Todd (00:49:27) – , it looks like having a better sense of which videos are going to go viral, making sure that we have product in more creator’s hands,, so that we can start to we would love to be able to hire big name celebrities, but we’re just not that big of a brand.

Todd (00:49:45) – We can’t do that yet. But can we hire? Will we have the confidence to spend money on a bigger TikTok creator with a couple million followers?, for Q4 next year going to the holidays? I don’t have the confidence right now. I may have that confidence by going through all of this over the next 6 or 7 months and knowing, okay, here what we think the predictors are for success next holiday season. Based on the last 910 months. And will that become an investment that makes sense. We aren’t going to know until we go through all of this. There’s an element of trust that we think is going to be bigger. You got to hope the government doesn’t ban TikTok in that time., but I think we’re committed to it., and think even regardless of what the government does, TikTok will be around for a long time and become that a strong second channel to Amazon that I think we’ve been lacking a little bit so far.

Josh (00:50:49) – Yeah, I love that. And as you’re reaching out to influencers, are you seeing that and just giving away free products? Yeah.

Josh (00:50:57) – , are you having to pay them and like $100 per video or are they doing it just straight for commission and the free sample.

Todd (00:51:04) – There’s definitely an audience out there. So there are a lot of people out there who just want to be. Influencers and creators, and they’re willing at this point to do things fairly inexpensively. Our product is expensive. I mean, we’re going to send you a $175 weight bench., so there is,, there are folks who will do it for free. There are folks who will do videos for $30, $40. Right now, we’re looking at creators who will do 30 videos a month for us., and, you know, what are they going to charge for that we can’t afford high production values or anything. So it’s going to be, you know, we’re going to spend 30, 40, $50 depending on who it is. But to do 30 videos a month, we’re testing. We’re going to see what results that generates.

Josh (00:52:03) – Awesome.

Josh (00:52:04) – I love that. Great advice now. Todd, we’re coming up upon time here, so I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if you think I’m missing something here. Todd.

Josh (00:52:20) – Okay, so.

Josh (00:52:21) – Action item number one, I would say you need to look at your business and look at it from a lens of what do I want my brand to look like 3 to 5 years from now and stop making short sighted decisions for your business. Don’t look at those gray hats, tactics or a hack that you learn on some webinar or something like that and say it’s worth the risk. If I could squeeze out an extra $100,000 this year, that’d be great. Well guess what? What if that one thing that got you $100,000 blows up your million dollar business, right? And so doing things the right way, getting down to the basics of business, which is, look, you’re serving somebody at the end of the day, you’re serving your end user.

Josh (00:53:09) – The better you are at serving that person. Word of mouth spreads. That’s what you talked about, Todd, with the reviews. And you start to see customer service impacting those reviews. And it builds people’s confidence. And thus the conversion rate for your product gets higher. And thus, your organic ranking will tend to improve over time. It’s not going to be a light switch that I went from 100 to 1 overnight because I had good customer service. But guess what? Over the course of three to 5 to 10 years, that will naturally happen because the cream always rises to the top. So that’s action item number one. Action item number two is PPC management. And you talked about having the mindset shift of hey, what’s my budget for PPC ads in any given month and focusing it focusing it on, hey, hypothetically, I have an unlimited budget. If these ads are coming in at my specific Taco’s threshold or an A cost threshold, you keep spending because if it’s profitable, I will spend all day long.

Josh (00:54:15) – I’m not worried about any organic,, you know, cannibalization because it’s still profitable, even though it might be a little bit lower because you’re going for that volume while still being profitable. And I think so many people are fearful of that fantastic mindset shift. And that’s coming from somebody like yourself who has decades of experience and comes from the Google PPC world., and he knows his stuff. So the last third and final action item is to get on to the TikTok shop. If you’re not already there, start creating videos for your own brand, but then at the same time, be reaching out to other influencers and affiliates and just giving them free samples. And here’s the gist that I took away from this. At the end of the day, nobody knows which video is going to do well. In fact, the video you think has the best chance to succeed probably is the one that flops. And the one that you’re like, this is stupid goes viral.. We’ve seen that with some of our own videos as well.

Josh (00:55:14) – And so it’s a mass quantity approach. You just gotta keep going. It’s a spray and pray. It’s a numbers game and you just have to keep doing it while also, you know, there needs to be some level of quality to the videos obviously, but continue to push out more and more content. And like you said, maybe it’s your 100th, maybe it’s your 500th video that goes viral, but that will make up for all the other 499 that you already created. Todd, anything else I missed.

Todd (00:55:45) – That’s that’s well said. I think,, you know, the thing I like to hit you with and I think this is overall you need to take the longer term viewpoint of so many things. This has been going on since the beginning of the internet. You know, I have this SEO hack or I can fool Google into getting my Serp, you know, Serp ranking up and so forth. All that is really short term thinking that does not last over the course of time.

Todd (00:56:12) – And so I highly advise people to stay away from that type of thinking whenever, whenever they can.

Josh (00:56:19) – Agreed.

Josh (00:56:20) – All right, Todd, we’re going to the lightning round. We got 60s for each of these questions here. Coming up, three final questions. What has been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Todd (00:56:32) – All right. So this is an interesting question because I was a writer for many years at ad agencies, and I used to want to be a novelist and so forth. So,, from a business standpoint, my favorite business book, and you can say, maybe this isn’t a business book,, is The Big Short by Michael Lewis, and it’s about the the collapse of,, of finance of the mortgage system back in the late aughts, 2008 and so forth. What was more interesting to me was his focus on people who are looking at the same business that everybody else is in, but from a completely different viewpoint. And to see how people from varied backgrounds can look at the same, can look at the same business environment, in the same business circumstances, and then turn their point of view completely differently was just so fascinating to me, and it’s been a real inspiration to me over, over the years.

Josh (00:57:33) – Love that.

Josh (00:57:35) – All right. Question number two. What’s your favorite productivity tool or new software tool that you think is a game changer?

Todd (00:57:42) – , so not not this won’t be a galloping shock to anybody, but ChatGPT is unbelievable., it helps me with so many things, I’ll tell you., I was a I was a copywriter and a creative director for almost ten years before I started my entrepreneurial journey. And I use a lot of these different writing tools just to see, like, how good is the actual writing? It was not good., when I had a new product that I had to put up,, I tried ChatGPT to write the text for my,, PDP’s, and the text that ChatGPT sent back to me was 95% there. It’s that good? It’s that powerful. If you can, you’re everybody. The whole world is going to turn into writers for ChatGPT messages. You know, if you can structure a query to give you exactly what you want, it’s just a super, super useful tool.

Todd (00:58:48) – We did a 40 page, we did a 40 page PDF as a giveaway for TikTok and for reels. Hey, here’s a guide to working out at home. ChatGPT. In two hours. Did what would have taken me two weeks. It was. It was that good. So I’m a big fan of your time? Yeah.

Josh (00:59:09) – Brilliant idea. Love that. All right, last question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Todd (00:59:18) – So the big thing, the big thing that I do is I try and talk to other ecommerce brand owners as much as possible. And I when I go to prosper, the roundtables that that we met at are super valuable to me, and to be able to speak to people in the trenches with you is incredibly invaluable., and I try and go to as many of these events as I can just to pick their brains and allow, you know, my brain to be picked., there’s nothing like talking to somebody else who’s doing exactly the same thing that that you’re doing.

Todd (00:59:58) – , the one podcast that I think would be valuable for a lot of folks in e-commerce is called Odd LotsIt’s a Bloomberg podcast, and it discusses the very odd business, very odd business situations, around the world that I think can help you understand the context in a lot of ways of what’s happening in America on Amazon from a business standpoint. So, odd lots. They just did,, a podcast about how piracy affects the supply chain and why that will result in increased costs for certain businesses. It’s tangential to what we do in e-commerce, but also, I think, super informative for folks who want to go beyond just what’s,, in the newspaper.

Josh (01:00:50) – I love that recommendation. Todd, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show.

Todd (01:00:57) – Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. And, best of luck with the podcast. This has been fantastic.