Steve Simonson 4:29

Yeah, it’s a funny thing. So I remember being at an event somewhere in Austin Texas, and I we were there with the founders of Helium 10 MANNY coats and and some of the other Helium 10 guys but I remember talking to Manny and going, Manny, you have such a great tool for product research and ideation. Why don’t you guys just pop some ideas over to my Symo Global team, you know, we have him in China and beyond you know, now, Vietnam and India and so forth. And I said that the team will you provide these ideas that the team will go source of, and then you can, you know, give access to these kind of bundled product ideas from great research and great things all the way into the feasible sourcing and manage like that. We’re selling software. I’m not that into it. But Kevin’s like, yeah, that’s, I love the Safari, I love the hunt. Let me do the ideation stuff. And who better right Kevin such a great ideation guy. So we kind of centered around this idea, we call the cabinet steve.com At the time, and kind of crafted our way to make it into a business that is both fun and rewarding. And, you know, we want to help sellers solve those two, top two problems. What’s a good idea in today’s market? And it’s a dynamic thing it changes, right? Yeah. And then secondly, can I source that at a feasible and, you know, stable and a sustainable level. And that’s, that’s what myself and the team do. And every Monday we still meet, the whole team has, you know, meetings and so forth. Going through the ideas, and, you know, there’s a lot of chaff separated from the very little wheat. It’s a hard, it’s a hard thing, but we enjoyed doing it. And it’s, you know, largely a labor of love.

Josh Hadley 6:11

That that’s fantastic. And you have sounds like a great network in terms of supplier relationships, because of your vast experience with Symo Global, you’ve already got so many different contacts and those different manufacturer countries, for different manufacturers. And so you have a wealth of knowledge there. Something that I want to dive into Simon, err, Steve, is that as we we’re in a difficult economic period right now, right? We have inflation that’s been going up, Amazon fees continue to go up, right, margins are getting squeezed. And then we have this pending recession on our hands where consumers are starting to pull back on some of the consumer spending, I think we’re seeing that, I want to ask what you’re seeing, from your perspective. And then for our audience that are established brands that want to take it to the next level, what should they be doing? What strategies should they be employing over the next little while?

Steve Simonson 7:10

Gosh, yeah, that’s there’s a lot in there. And the truth is, like we’re already in a recession, right? It doesn’t matter what the politicians say. It matters only what the numbers say. And the numbers are very clear, right, there is a slowdown, not just a slowdown, or reduction of economic output. And that doesn’t mean the world’s coming to an end, it just means there are some economic reasonable laws that have to be dealt with, right? It’s like gravity, you can’t argue whether gravity is exists or not. It’s there, and you have to deal with it. So what that means to us is like dealing with, you know, a reducing kind of economy and an increasing level of inflation. This is the ultimate squeeze. Nobody wants to see it, but where it’s upon. So we’re, we approach this from a very disciplined mathematics perspective, like we especially we look at the balance sheet, it’s like, what is the biggest thing on the balance sheet we need to manage? And for private label sellers, it’s all about inventory, right? There’s nothing bigger on your balance sheet. Typically, that inventory, you know, maybe got some cash here and there. But if you’re a growing business inventory is dominating that balance sheet. And that means that inventory, which you know, may exist as a single line item on your financials, I don’t know. But we get granular we want to know every line item, we want to know every asin every SKU however you refer to it. And we want to know its profitability. We want to know what people are going to do when it comes to crunch time. Right? If demand goes down, I’m, here’s a little insider secret. It’s already gone down. Right. Yeah. Units Sold are already down the the cost or the pricing that in other words, the sell through may be higher. But that’s that’s a misleading stat. Yeah, even if sales are up a percent, you got inflation units are down for sure. Right. That’s not in every category, but many categories are experienced. And so we’ve got to get scrutiny to level 10. On every every line item on that inventory sheet.

Josh Hadley 9:11

Yeah, I think that’s words of wisdom right there. Because we are also seeing that, from our perspective, you know, a lot of our products are more in the, you know, consumer discretionary items here, and so they’re not essential for people. But we have also started to see year over year, sales declines in the number of units that are being sold. Now are the you know, top line revenue looks good? Well, that’s because we’ve increased prices to make up for the increase in Amazon fees and inflation, and all of that. So to your point, like, don’t just look at, you know, hey, this aggregate number amount of money that’s being sold or whatever, you know, Washington wants to, you know, state publicly, you know, with, oh, things are just fine, like, look at these numbers. At the end of the day, there are fewer numbers. have fewer units being sold, you know, the consumers are starting to pull back. So, Steve, what is something that you do as you work with, you know, your suppliers? Is there a way that you can reduce, you know, whether it be your cogs or reduce like your MOQ’s for certain products? Like, how do you navigate this delicate balance of like, I don’t know how big of the pullback this is going to be. But I don’t want to just, I’m not going to order and say, hey, whatever we did in 2021, let’s, let’s do that, because that’s what’s gonna happen. How do you do that delicate balance?

Steve Simonson 10:35

Well, it is. It’s the ultimate question. But it’s it also just goes back to the most simple basics is like, you know what, every controllable variable, you better push on, right? So currency is wildly shifted year over year between China and the US as an example, you better take advantage of that. And at least understand that many times if you try to just call your supplier and go, Hey, great news, there’s been a 10% shift in currency, that means I get a 10% discount on my products. Now, they’ll go no, no, no, we had a cost increase of labor and cost increase the COVID are, you know, there are plenty of reasons they want to, they want to fight against you. But I’m telling you proactively, that every point whether it is the inputs of raw materials, and checking those commodity prices, whether it’s currency, like every piece of that puzzle, you need to push back on in a, I would call it a professional way smaller, just throwing a fit and go your price is too high is ignorance, but having a market price, getting a price from other suppliers and understanding what the market price looks like, now you’re adding some sophistication into it a little bit of data into it. I can tell you that many of our Chinese suppliers right now are down 50% and purchase orders. Oh, my God percent. Yeah. So this is not a sign of strength. Right. So a year ago, we couldn’t get product to ship out to China, because the company PO’s, right? Yeah. Freight was also high last year, it’s crashing. Now, by early 2023, it will be a 2019 levels are below. And so all of these supply demand factors you have to balance in. But the the interesting thing I don’t think a lot of people fully understand or appreciate is, if you buy your inventory over the course of the last 12 months, your price at a higher level than your competition who’s outputting it now, most likely, right? Because you got a lower currency, you’re probably a little squeezed power on the supplier, lower freight, even just on freight alone, it could be a material impact. So this is where the discipline of you know what I can’t be emotional. I have to apply mathematics. And believe me, I’m the least of all do I like doing math every day. But this is an area where it makes sense, right? You got to know the score. And so that means either you need to take a write off on that inventory and devalue it based on the fact that you know what, if I bought it today, it would be cheaper, so that you can be competitive in the market, or you have to do what we call the trash to cash operation. It’s like, I gotta take this much inventory off the balance sheet, and move it into cash as quick as I can. And you see large, big companies, global companies like Target and Walmart doing this in huge firesale ways. So this is not just crazy. Steve talking, this is happening across the board.

Josh Hadley 13:20

Yeah. What are some of the ways that you can you know, liquidate some of that inventory? Right. And, obviously, I think you’re getting a hit, I think you’re lowering your price, right? So you’re gonna squeeze your margins that much more, but you’re talking like, it’s important to start doing that now. Right? What are the ways that sellers can do that?

Steve Simonson 13:39

Well, there are several ways, I may get it to a couple of here, one of them is just the reality that is Q4. So a lot of times we get into preservation mode, right? Here comes the margin, here comes the volume, let’s get let’s get nuts. I would say take a very practical look at it and decide it What if your sell through of last year doesn’t come to pass? Right? What if you don’t get that many number of units. And so now I’m going to be a little bit more margin. Flexible, if that’s the thing. So that might mean increased promotions and holding the price that might mean lowering the price and, and mixing in some promotional elements. It might mean finding liquidation channels, like you should really think of your inventory is kind of ABC. A’s the good stuff that’s gonna stay around B’s on the you know, on the tipping point, you’re not sure if it’s a if it’s a runner or not, but it’s still not enough to cut it and a C’s or less are like you got that’s gotta go. So the C’s you should be moving into immediate, fast focus on sales and take advantage of Q4 to liquidate at a quote unquote retail value. Maybe by the time Q1 comes around next year. Liquidation chances are now you know at or below cost. And you don’t want that reality setting because that’s pennies on the dollar.

Josh Hadley 14:59

Yeah, I think you’re dropping some really good words of wisdom as we look at going into the beginning here of Q4 of 2022. And things that people should be doing right now in order to prepare. So Steve, I also want to talk to you more about these liquidation channels, and different tactics that sellers can use, as they’re getting rid of inventory, should they be focused on launching new products right now? Or should people be pulling back in general with everything and just focusing more on profitability with existing products?

Steve Simonson 15:38

So again, that comes down to a contextual variable of what do you want in your business, right, and I don’t know what people individually want. But based on what they want, this is where they engineer the tools that they have to break out of the tool chest. So if you’re like, Hey, listen, I’m all about taking market share, I’m I have good appetite for risk, then this is a great time to take market share, but you should do it in a position of strength, which means all of the weak stuff, you got to clear that weak stuff off of the inventory list. Again, you can use to turn an urge to rank and yank them. And what I would do, or what we are doing is we take out all of the inventory items as fast as we can at the highest recoverable value, but I will sacrifice the recovery amount for the time. And I just can’t stress that enough. Sometimes we get too emotional in going, you know, I’ve got to get a margin, I’ve got to get this. But the truth is, just getting back to zero is not a bad position to be in other words, you you you got back the money you put into it, and you’re back to where you started. That’s a pretty good place to be because a lot of people in fact, Home Depot and target, which I referred to earlier, they’re selling at fire sale prices, they are not recovering, they’re they’re not making enough margin on that to even cover their overhead. So they’re selling kind of at a cashflow loss. But they know if they keep that inventory sticking around the carrying costs and the losses will be far worse in the future.

Josh Hadley 17:08

Yeah, I think that’s such a great point that you bring up getting, looking at all of your skews at a profitability level and an intimate level for every single SKU. And we’re starting to implement some of those practices in our own business where you kind of got to rank your products, A, B, and C products. And those C products have got to go. Steve, are there any particular tools that you use? Maybe their software tools or whatnot, in order to, you know, calculate profitability at a SKU level? Or is it a lot of just spreadsheets and your team members, you know, adding in various information, because there’s a lot when you’re selling, you know, on different marketplaces, and there’s lots of different advertising cost, how you’re going to attribute this advertising cost to which asin that can you tell us how you how you go about doing that?

Steve Simonson 18:01

Well, often it’s a combination. But the truth is, you know, many, many years ago, and I’m talking about the, you know, the late 90s, early 2000s, before Shopify existed before, you know, all the simple systems existed, we started building our own stuff we call the system Parsimony. And that that was because we knew that we needed to track things in a comprehensive way. And so, you know, we started building these tools, you know, decades ago, and only about four or five years ago, we said, you know, we should, we should allow this thing to be accessible to others. So we made it kind of a cloud hosted version for other people, including a free-for-life version that people can use. And so that software that will track inventory, it will track SKU by SKU analysis of, you know, p&l, or collection analysis, or brand analysis or company analysis, right. It’s all kind of multivariate, you know, that’s available to most people. And, you know, for the small guys, they can get it for free, the big guys have to pay a little bit of money. But, you know, given the millions and millions of dollars I put into the efforts, and not just me that you know, the entire team and the entire effort, it’s, it’s a valuable way to do it. But you don’t have to use that there are plenty of ways of you know, the QuickBooks and A to X and you know, then you layer in this. What I don’t like is I like to take a system and output something that’s, that’s a nice thing to view versus a million spreadsheets that I drownd in , those are ultimately they’re not very, you know, six months later, it’s hard to remember where’s that data? Whereas if it’s a system, and you’re running reports, by the way, I have some of my companies automatically every day just sends me inventory reports are automatically you know, there’s a trigger that will show me oh, this SKU is happening or that skews happening. So by knowing literally every location in Amazon, or in three peels or our own warehouses, every product every day, everywhere, that’s the power of actual information and not just data. Data sucks, information is awesome.

Josh Hadley 20:05

Yeah. I love that. And I love that you have this tool. I’m interested, Steve, what is the name of this software tool that you have that? Because definitely, we

Steve Simonson 20:17

Parsimony.com. So the law of parsimony is kind of a, the root is like Auckland’s razor, the most obvious answers the most likely the right answer. And another definition that we use is doing more with less like our whole vision with Parsimony is: what if you can have world class, you know, SAP or Oracle level, you know, NetSuite level skills and talent and and software and capabilities. True systemization is top to bottom and organization, but you didn’t have to pay, you know, a $100,000 to implement it and $10,000 a month, you know, and that’s, that’s kind of the vision behind it. So I certainly welcome people to check it out. It’s, it’s not for everybody. You know, when you’re using QuickBooks, it’s like, you know, rolling a boat. And when you’re using Parsimony, it’s like trying to operate an aircraft carrier. So there’s a, there’s a learning curve. But, you know, if you’re trying to go to war, you better bring the aircraft carrier not a rowboat.

Josh Hadley 21:10

Yeah, no, I think that’s good words of wisdom there. And I would also layer on to that, if you’re, if you have any intentions or plans to exit your business, you should probably be, you know, bringing that aircraft carrier to begin with, so that you know, your SKU level profitability so that you can maximize your ROI. When it comes time to exit. I think this is not only healthy if we’re going into a, you know, a recessionary period. But this is healthy, just for an everyday business, as you try to operate a healthy business, Steve.

Steve Simonson 21:44

Yeah, well, I would just add to that, Josh, sorry to interrupt. But like the whole point of, as we head into 2023 is getting tight. Like, we’re now you know, being kind of overwhelmed with with customers and inquiries and implementations, because people realize, you know, what, when time did the tides rising, everybody’s just kind of sloppy. And, yeah, we’re going along, we’re getting along, it’s all fun and games. And then people realize, oh, what happens if sales don’t increase the way we thought? Or what happens? If they actually go down? that would that would suck? Or what happens if we have a team that we can’t manage in a systemic way? You know, as we’re trying to grow? And I’ll tell you, you know, everybody always asked me, What’s the one thing what’s the one secret? And there’s no one thing that’s that’s the truth of it. But for me, scale, I never could achieve scale until we got the systems right. And, you know, we’re talking about going from, you know, 2 million to 6 million to 80 million to 33 million to 56 million and far beyond all because the systems were there. And we had some level of, you know, the old saying from E-Myth is the system runs the business, the people run the system. Yeah, we, we don’t just say those words, we made it literally come through.

Josh Hadley 22:58

I love that, Steve, I think that is great advice for again, our audiences are established sellers that want to take their business to the next level. And what you’re telling them is like, you’ve got to create some systems in your business, and then let your people then run those systems. And you know, getting detailed with your approach, SKU level profitability, I think is going to become more and more essential. So I think you shared some great words of wisdom there. Steve, I also know you also run the Empowery, in your part of that tell our audience more about what this Empowery is, you have an upcoming event. What is the Empowery? Yeah, so

Steve Simonson 23:37

Yeah,so, Empowery it is I’m kind of one of the co-founders and a funder of it, to get it started. But I’m just a volunteer there. I’m not a paid guy, because it’s run as a nonprofit kind of association of cooperatives. And the principle is, you know, in e-commerce, there’s a bunch of common problems, whether it is you know, sourcing, or freight, or copywriting or photos, like there’s, there’s ad problems, yet we’ve got the 100,000 entrepreneurs running around, you know, building their own wheels and trying to, you know, start fires for the first time. And it’s like, gosh, what if we just shared, you know, existing knowledge and wisdom with the folks who wanted it. And we did that in a way that was was seller-centric. So that’s why the nonprofit way. So Empowery, you check out on Empowery.com. But it’s it really is set up to just make sellers have a venue I almost think of it like if you ever wanted a corporate office without having to pay very much. It’s you know, there’s a small sign up and then it’s like 50 bucks a month. Yeah, you got a corporate office, you don’t know the answer call the corporate, right. The pay very much for that privilege. And so Festivus is just our kind of annual holiday get together where we have a few laughs and we bring in some some great talent. And and we do a little bit of content here and there, but mostly it’s about let’s hang out let’s talk about business. What are your challenges and and really allow people to have deep dives and deep conversations with a relatively small group, you know, less than 100 people is kind of our target for that. And it’s going to be in Sun Valley, Idaho, it’s going to be amazing. And for those who get the chance to get to come out, hang out with, you know, Steve, that’s me, who cares? But guys like Kevin King and Travis Zigler. And, you know, Matt Parker, and George, Marissa, and so many others that are brilliant minds, and just being able to hang out with them is really an extraordinary opportunity.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And Steve, we actually met each other at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit there that Kevin King put on earlier this year. And so I can’t, you know, echo that enough. It all comes down to those relationships, and being able to surround yourself by other people that are doing some wicked smart stuff in their own business. That’s definitely where I’ve been able to learn the most, and apply what other successful people are doing in their own business and applying it into my own. And, Steve, I also think you mentioned you guys do a few training videos or sessions, as well, like every month, right? There’s kind of like a huddle or powwow, so to speak, right? Where you’re kind of like teaching training, and people are sharing advice with each other. Right?

Yeah. So this is, again, just another effort to give people the access. And so if you go to EmpoweryMastermind.com, there’s, we had to add some stupid registration stuff, and a few barriers, because we were getting some trolls, I don’t know who takes the time for all an entrepreneurial nonprofit, but nevertheless, so the masterminds once a month, and we just kind of hang out, whoever wants to be on screen and, and chat with the folks can do it and whoever doesn’t, doesn’t have to, but you know, whether you’re a lurker or, you know, participator, we don’t, we don’t mind. It’s like, bring your questions. Bring your hardest problems, frankly. And there’s generally a wonderful group of brilliant entrepreneurs who go, Yeah, I heard that problem. And here’s what I did when I had I hope that’s helpful. Right? And that’s, that’s all you can ask for. It’s just people given their time and trying to help others.

Josh Hadley 27:05

Yeah, I think you’ve I think you’ve created some amazing things. And I love how you’re kind of giving back to the, you know, e Commerce Industry, so to speak. And, you know, this isn’t a paid thing that you’re doing, you know, and it’s, it’s a nonprofit. So I love what you’re doing for the industry. Steven, you have so much experience that, you know, you say that, you know, people shouldn’t care about you, I would argue people need to be following you more, because you have a wealth of knowledge and so much experience that, you know, you should be highlighted a little bit more often.

Steve Simonson 27:39

Well, that’s kind of it. Yeah, me, I hang out with myself constantly. So I’m bloody tired of that ding dong, Steve. But there is a good chance that I bent down a few roads, and I’ve had some experience that that may be useful to folks. And, and that’s it’s light lifting for me to share experiences, and if it’s beneficial for you. Awesome. And if it’s not, we high five. And we’ll tell jokes.

Josh Hadley 28:02

I love that. So Steve, as we wrap up here, I’m going to ask you a few wrap up questions at the end. But before we do the wrap up questions, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. So here are the three takeaways that I noted. Steve, let me know if you think I’m missing something here. Number one, first and foremost, people need to start implementing SKU level profitability analysis on their products, like figure out a system that is going to work for your business, it could be a bunch of spreadsheets, if that’s what you love. But you know, Steve offered up a software that he’s been, you guys have worked on for not only your own business and have spent, you know, millions of dollars in r&d and development in your own time developed, developing it that Parsimony.com People can check out that tool. I know that’s one thing I will be doing after this episode. And then action item number two is turning, you know, your trash into cash. I love that phrase, turning your inventory, trash back into cash. And, you know, going through your skews, and you’ve got to kind of lose the emotional feel that you have to each of your products. And you need to cut the ones that just frankly, aren’t making you money, or the ones that you know, maybe are trickling in a few bucks here, a few bucks here and there. But at the end of the day, they’re sucking up so much of your time, you need to be able to just cut those off. And then last but not least, is being smart with your cash as we look into 2023. Right? Not assuming this is what I did in 2021 and in 2022. So this is what I should project for 2023. I think people as they do their inventory forecasting need to be a little bit more cautious so that they don’t get hung out to dry so Sitting on large amounts of inventory on their balance sheet, that’s where you started this conversation is inventories, typically the largest thing on a seller’s balance sheet. So being wise with that, I think as we head into 2023 is something that everybody should be implementing and just being a little bit more cautious instead of bullish in their forecasting. Is there anything else that you think I didn’t mention that you want to leave with our audience here with actionable takeaways?

Steve Simonson 30:29

No, I think you nailed it, just that the you know, if I put a kind of a little cap on, on all of those topics that you just mentioned as takeaways, it’s getting your financials tight and well understood. If you’re not looking at your financials, by the 15th of every month for the preceding time, or even better, having kind of live access to it as as the month progresses, you’re not applying financial discipline, you’re not running the business as a business, you’re running it as a kind of hobby, right? Getting good financial chops and understanding what’s a cash flow statement? What’s a balance sheet? And then how does this balance sheet impact the p&l or vice versa? Understanding those components is a discipline and frankly, I hate financials, I despit it.

It’s my least favorite thing to do. But it is the scoreboard for our business. And, you know, we have a saying no score, no game, right? You better know the score, if you’re going to understand if you’re winning or losing. And there are many opportunities, I want to just kind of stress this point, I started one of my first businesses in a recession, I didn’t realize it exactly, I didn’t know you’re not, you know, that wouldn’t be something that most people would advise. But I say the opposite. I’m like, get good in a recession. Because you have to get tight, you have to get lean, no fat on the bones. This is what gives you the discipline and the kind of the hearty upbringing to be better than average, right? We average is going to go away, you’ve got to be better than average, you got to be somebody or some thing as a company that stands out and can survive the the trials and tribulations of, you know, basic economics, that’s a really positive thing. So, you know, people can cry or moan or doom and gloom, whatever they want. But it’s like, this is an opportunity to really get good at being a practitioner of, you know, running a business.

Josh Hadley 32:19

I think that’s, that’s great advice in terms of, you know, let’s add it as our fourth action item, right? Get good with your financials. But also, don’t be scared. And don’t be fearful, right? Because when you’re fearful, you’re in the scarcity mindset, you start to actually make worse decisions, when you’re in that scarcity mindset, and you’re fearful, but instead, just go go through things with a logical standpoint with data on your side, right? I myself, I can understand numbers. But do I love you know, looking at numbers on a day in day out? I don’t enjoy Excel? Can I interpret data? Yes, I can. That I think is becoming more and more essential, like you talked about No, not having any fat on the bones there. So Steve, I have a few kind of rapid fire questions that I want to ask you. As we wrap things up here today. What is one of the most influential books that you’ve read? And why?

Steve Simonson 33:15

Gosh, I’m a reader. So I read lots and lots of books. I’ll give you two of them. One that kind of level sets the beginning, I love the E-Myth Revisited. Or if the original E-Myth that really talks about systemic thinking and the mindset within, and even though there’s some, I’ll call it some kind of hippie dippie stuff in there. That doesn’t resonate with me, the core of it is like I’m all about and really, we live systems as kind of a direct result of that from 20 to 30 years ago. The the most recent book that I read that was, you know, highly impactful, and gives me a real sense of what’s happening in the world. The book is actually called The End of the World Is Just Beginning by Peter Zeon, which is really a very deep dive into what is globalization? Why is it happening? Do you agree with it, disagree with it, lots of lots of data points. And these are things that are highly impactful to my business, I don’t study geopolitics or international trade for fun, I do it because it’s a direct input into my business and understanding those trends is critical to my business, and the world is changing. And in fact, I predict that in the next five years, it will change more than it has in the last 30 When it comes to global trade. So you better get good at that.

Josh Hadley 34:32

Interesting, interesting, any. You’ve left me with a cliffhanger there, Steve, what kind of insights do you have, like what do you foresee happening over the next five years then? And what should people be doing today? To kind of prepare for that shift, I think is the most important thing.

Steve Simonson 34:48

Well, you know, there’s a phrase that is common these days called the China plus one. I would have redundancy for China as quick as you can. It’s going to take time to build it. There’s easier place has to do it. Maybe Vietnam or Malaysia, it depends on the product you’re selling. But the truth is, it’s never going back to the way it was in 2019. When it comes to proper supply chain and predictable throughput. And unpredictability is the very worst thing that you can have in your supply chain. Having a little higher cost here, they’re much easier to deal with than unpredictability. And China has financial turmoil that most people have no idea about. And you know, if you guys want to do a deep dive, I did a China series on the Awesomers.com Podcast. And, and you guys can dive deeper, but I’ll just tell you, China will not operate in five years, the way it does today, it will no longer be the easy button, it’ll be the, I hope I get it, I think there’s going to be a lot of credit risk sending money there ahead of time, there’s factories closing constantly, there’s a lot of financial turmoil. And this is something that’s new, we, you know, 2019 It wasn’t like that and before, and now it’s going to be different. And I just I hope that people pay attention to this. And I hope they are aware of this.

Josh Hadley 36:04

Awesome, awesome insights there. Steve. Next question, what is your favorite productivity tool or resource that you’ve been using,

Steve Simonson 36:12

Um, gosh, I don’t like to be too productive, I like to have a lot of time to think. So. I don’t know if this is a tool, but like, I do block time. And so my Mondays are all of my kind of business unit, you know, high level meetings, anybody who reports to me, I meet with them in a business unit has that as weekly reporting, they report I can see all the stuff on the dashboards, but I want to talk to the human. So my Mondays are my big meeting days. And that can go from anywhere from eight to 12 hours. And then Tuesdays are my kind of I do a half a day on Tuesday for kind of external meetings or follow ups. And then kind of Wednesday on is thinking time, and I don’t want to be in the grind. In fact, the best lesson I can teach entrepreneurs is stop doing it, doing it, doing it, and start managing it, managing it, managing it, and even better hire managers to do the management. And then you just are the vision and the kind of I call it the the visionary or the action taker, my team would say, the chief grenade dropper, right, I got mad, I dropped some grenades. And I’m like, good luck, and I leave. But that’s, you know, I’m the, I’m the chaos maker. And my managers are the ones who have to take that chaos and turn it into order. But that when you have it, right, that’s a good balance. Because you do need the nutty entrepreneurial energy to drive it organization and build a culture and make it fun and even unpredictable. But you need to manage it to make sure people don’t lose their minds. And it’s like, oh, Steve, read another book. Now we got a new mission. That’s not how it should be. Yeah, but I really would think about blocking your time as a productivity enhancement.

Josh Hadley 37:50

Yeah, I would 100% emulate everything that you just talked about. And it’s interesting hearing how you have things set up, and how you’re managing all the multiple business ventures that you have going on, I think we can all learn some great insights, just from what you shared. Their last question for you, Steve, who is someone that you admire or respect most in the e Commerce Industry? And why and and maybe who are the people that other sellers should be following? And, you know, keeping out on their radar?

Steve Simonson 38:20

Oh, gosh, that’s an interesting one. You know, I follow a lot of people in E commerce, but it’s, I don’t know if there’s such a term as like a casual follow, like, I’m not, I don’t have to go subscribe the, you know, everything I do or stalk them exactly. You know, there are lots of people that I watch when they build a company. So there’s a guy named Mark Vedant, he was the original founder of Blue Nile. And then he went on and founded Chewy, and you know, this is a brilliant high-level thinker. And that, you know, is able to take a dot com And, you know, turn it into something really special a couple times, and really in like 2010, or, you know, around that time, he looked at the landscape and said, You know what I should do? I should start an online pet store and sell against Amazon, right? Anybody who thinks that’s a good idea is a nutcase. Right. But here, you know, he’s brilliant and nuttyy. And sure enough, they did it and they he had, you know, skills and access and, and within four years, they sold it for a couple billion dollars to one of the big pet companies. But my point is to find people who are paradigm breakers, and just, you know, pay attention to him. I like to go to a conference down again, to see some of these folks or I like to read their books. Jay Steinfeld with blinds.com is another great mind. And he’s got a book out. These are smart, smart people. And you know, I learned a lot from from watching what they do.

Josh Hadley 39:49

Yeah, completely agree. It’s all about who you surround yourself with and who you’re learning from and expanding your mindset. So Steve, thank you so much. I know you’ve expanded my mind today, I’ve had a lot of different mindset shifts, and I hope our audience will have had those as well. But thank you for joining us again.

Steve Simonson 40:08

My pleasure, happy to happy to be here. And, you know, I love entrepreneurs. I don’t just like love quesadillas, right? I really love entrepreneurs. So I hope everybody out there understands it’s a, it’s a real honor and a privilege to be an entrepreneur. Just go be good at it and do hard stuff.

Josh Hadley 40:26

Yeah. And Steve, where should people follow you? If they if they want to contact you or follow what you’re doing after this?

Steve Simonson 40:33

Yeah, they could find me on the, the YouTubes or the Facebook’s, or the whatever there is out there. You know, the Awesomers.com Podcasts, I tried to record those from time to time we have some Q4 stuff that’s that’s pending. But to be honest, with my time is, is not always easy to allocate, even though I have the thinking time, that’s thinking time. So my best advice is I hang out on the Empowery.com Masterminds and I donate my my free time to Empowery. So find me there if you if you can.

Josh Hadley 41:06

Awesome. Well, we’re lucky to have had that an hour with you, Steve, thank you so much.

Outro 41:12

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