Simon Hammer is the VP of Product at Vimbly Group, a New York City-based business-growth company that scales and invests in technology-enabled businesses. Simon runs nine of Vimbly’s business units, including e-commerce. With combined studies in human biology, health, and society, pre-med, and finance at Cornell University, where he holds a bachelor’s degree, he was able to use all of his talents as a healthcare investment banker at Madison Williams and Company before pivoting to the Vimbly Group.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Simon Hammer discusses his education and career background
• Boxes to tick off before acquiring a business
• Simon’s thoughts on scaling up a business piece-by-piece
• The importance of knowing the market size of your business
• The most overlooked detail during the due diligence process
• Why your brand needs a cohesive story
• How to get back to the basics of listing optimization
• The effects of changing a keyword in a title
• Simon shares his favorite productivity tools and resources

In this episode…

As an e-commerce entrepreneur, it’s easy to get complacent when business is doing well and earning a profit. But what happens when that complacency starts to affect your bottom line?

Business leader Simon Hammer suggests getting back to the basics, especially when you’re trying to scale up your business. So what’s a good starting point if you’re trying to grow a business? You may want to lead with identifying the market opportunity for your product. Are you in a small market or a big market? Once you’ve identified your product market, learn to listen to your customers by actually reading their feedback. Simon is also a proponent of getting back to the basics by continuing to test product success and your market. Interested in learning more?

Tune into this episode of the eComm Breakthrough Podcast with host Josh Hadley as he sits down with the VP of Product at Vimbly Group, Simon Hammer. The two discuss the art of scaling a business through sales optimization and mastering the basics of e-commerce. Additionally, Simon explains a successful process when acquiring a business, his thoughts on scaling a business piece-by-piece, how to properly conduct the due diligence process, and more.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Josh Hadley on LinkedIn
• eComm Breakthrough Consulting
• eComm Breakthrough Podcast
• Hadley Designs
• Hadley Designs on Amazon
• Simon Hammer on LinkedIn
• Simon@VimblyGroup.com
• Vimbly Group
• Billion Dollar Seller Summit

Special Mention(s):

• Steven Pope on LinkedIn
• Steve Simonson on LinkedIn
• Kevin King
• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
• Ōura Ring
• Workflowy

Related Episode(s):

• “Four Critical Pillars for Amazon Listing Optimization”
• “Actions You Must Take To Prepare Your Business for a Recession”
• “Kevin King’s Wicked-Smart Tips for Building an Audience of Raving Fans”

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven figure ecommerce owners grow to eight figures. Of course…

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

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

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

As a special bonus to my podcast listeners, this month I’m giving away one $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit session at no cost. Email me at josh@ecommbreakthrough.com with the subject line “Strategy Audit” and tell me why your business should win the free audit for the chance to win and don’t worry, if you don’t win the free strategy audit this month, you’ll automatically be entered for future months.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:04

Welcome to the eComm Breakthrough Podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level. Join Josh Hadley, an eight-figure e-comm business owner and investor as he interviews highly successful business owners. Get ready because you’re going to learn specific actions you can take today to help your business reach its full potential and leave a lasting impact on the world.

Josh Hadley 0:37

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, Steve Simonson and Steven Pope. Today I’m excited to be speaking with Simon Hammer, the VP of Product at the Vimbly Group. And we will be talking a lot about sales optimization and mastering the basics of e-commerce that allow you to scale. This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting, where I help take seven-figure companies to eight figures and beyond. Listen, Simon, I started Hadley Designs 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 to getting to eight figures take a little bit longer. There were times where I doubted whether our business could survive, whether it be could become a real brand, or whether I myself could actually be the CEO of a successful e commerce brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid a lot of those stumbling blocks. If you’ve hit a similar plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level. Then go to eCommBreakthrough.com. That’s e COMM With two M’s to learn more. And as a special bonus to my podcast listeners. This month I’m giving away one $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit at no cost. All you need to do is email me at Josh@eCommBreakthrough.com with the subject line “strategy audit” for your chance to win. Tell me why you think your business should be the one that’s selected. And don’t worry if you’re not selected this month because you will be entered for future months to come. But today I’m excited to introduce you to Simon Hammer. Simon is the VP of Product at the Vimbly Group, a New York City based firm that scales and invests in tech enabled businesses where he has worked for over 10 years. He currently runs Vimbly Group’s e-commerce business unit, as well as having his hands involved in a number of Vimbly Group’s eight other business units. Prior to the Vimbly Group. Simon was a healthcare investment banker at a boutique investment bank in New York City, where he focused on raising capital and midmarket mergers and acquisitions involving biotech, healthcare technology, and healthcare service companies. He has a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, and I met Simon at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit earlier this year. And Simon, I’m excited to welcome you to the podcast. Welcome.

Simon Hammer 3:06

Thanks, Josh. Really, really appreciate that. Nice intro. Thanks for having me.

Josh Hadley 3:11

Well, likewise, we had a great conversation at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. And one of the things the first thing that we talked about when when I met you is you’re like, Yeah, I kind of have like eight different businesses that I’m involved in right now. And I was like, Wait, hold on, backup, like, let’s let’s dive into this further. And so from the moment we had that first conversation, I was like, this is a guy who’s doing some awesome stuff that I need to not only follow you, but we’d love to have you on the podcast. And so, Simon, you’ve got a lot of experience with mergers and acquisitions. You’ve been at the vimble group for a while, you know, why don’t you walk us through that journey and kind of how you got into the world of E commerce because prior to that you were an investment banker, right? So that’s definitely a different realm that I would say your typical ecommerce business owner doesn’t necessarily start in investment banking, but we’d love to hear kind of how that transition happened. And what the Vimbly Group is all about.

Simon Hammer 4:09

Yeah, so it’s, I guess, you know, from the healthcare investment banking side, admittedly is first job out of school. And at Cornell, you just happen to have the network that I was a part of just having to have a lot of people going into finance at the time. So in middle, we follow the herd, wanting to finance I was pre med at school, I realized I didn’t want to do that at some point towards the end of my college career and, and so it was kind of this nice little kind of merger of some things that I was doing with healthcare and then again, following the hurt but joy my time learned a ton learned a ton about that a shape basically the way I think about business now. And at the end I got linked up with Samak Chris, who are two guys who are tossing around this idea of starting this marketplace for people to find a book recreational activities called them wwe.com. There’s no website, you know, just kind of like an idea and linked up with them, we built out what was family.com and still is when we.com. It’s a marketplace where people find the book, things like wine and cheese tasting, skydiving, cooking classes, dance lessons. And then, after about a couple years, we started being able to license out that technology that we built. Long story short, we did that had a few successful exits, parlayed some of that into investing in businesses, and acquiring businesses and then growing our own. At some point, I don’t know, maybe five or six years ago, maybe seven years ago, we started doing a deeper dive into this whole ecommerce space, or what most people think about e commerce, where it’s, you know, Amazon, Shopify, things of that nature, and felt like as a good opportunity to support some of the growth that we were having with our other traditional software, businesses. And everything is kind of a tech focused, that’s kind of our kind of sweet spot where we can parlay our experience with different technologies and expertise on different SaaS products, to different industries. And we thought that ecommerce was a growing space, we thought we had this unique ability, where we had operational expertise from running some other businesses to you know, really start to kind of do like a role of strategy kind of akin to what aggregators do now, but a little bit before they really became popular. And the mission was never to kind of like buy grow and sell kind of traditional, like, private equity, but to really buy and hold and grow and use it to fund some other businesses. And, and kind of what we’ve done in other business units is where we built stuff, you know, see if that come from needs, see if there’s maybe something that we can build and grow from the software side out of our own needs, being operators of an E commerce business. And so, you know, fast forward to today, we’ve acquired a few brands, and we’re constantly looking at others, and trying to want some new products as well. So

Josh Hadley 7:32

I love today, I know that you we could probably deep dive into a lot of weeds there in that story.

Simon Hammer 7:39

And that’s just one business unit, too. I mean, we have a few others. But I think you know, this being an e-comm podcast, keep it focused on that.

Josh Hadley 7:48

Yeah, no, this is great. And that’s what’s exciting. I think you’ve got your hands into so many different kinds of business ventures, you’re seeing what’s working, even outside of E commerce. And I think that’s one of the important things to do is like, you know, I think we all want to like specialize in E commerce. And we think like, hey, what’s the latest and greatest, like E commerce strategies, or hacks and things like that. But if you really like almost like step outside the box, and you say, what’s working for restaurant owners, right? How are they driving traffic? What’s working for them? How are they building their audience or less, right, and you start taking kind of the best practices from other industries. And then you can kind of get completely brand new ideas into, you know, e commerce, for example. And so I think that’s what’s interesting is you’ve got your hands in so many different things here, Simon, let’s talk let’s dive into some of those things. In E commerce that you’re looking for. So as you look to acquire other brands, and I love that you kind of were an acquirer or aggregator before the aggregator thing became, became popular, so you’re not on the bandwagon there. You can be like, No, we were doing this a long time ago. So what what do you look for when you’re looking to acquire a brand? So walk us through that kind of thought process?

Simon Hammer 9:10

Yeah, so I think one of the very first things that we always that we always kind of toss around and make sure about is market size. You know, I like to use the example of, you know, a few and what’s the true market size, right? Because a lot of time, you know, numbers are funny, you can use any sort of number and find a certain number to to affirm, you know, confirmation bias, right, affirm any sort of narrative that you’re portraying, but what’s the get really smart and be honest about what’s the true market size. And so I like to use this example you know, in terms of E commerce space, if you’re looking at a product and you have your main keyword and say it’s 50 you know, roughly 50,000 searches and you know, you’ll get your product or opportunity explore, you know, use helium 10 or Data Dive whatever and you see that you know, the 80% of the clicks are going to the top five products. Well, as you true market size, really 50,000 searches per month? No, probably not. Right? So let’s, you know, just use some of the math here and say, Okay, well, if 80% clicks are going to these top buy products, well, it’s reasonable to say, Okay, well, you know, right off the bat, you’re probably not going to enter into that market. So you really just have that remaining 10,000 searches. And then we can say, Okay, well of that, right, what’s what’s realistic? Can we take from the remaining portion? So I don’t know, a conservative basis, let’s say 10%. A, maybe you want to, you know, toot your own horn, you have this amazing product can take a little bit more with that. But you know, say 10%. So already down to 1000 searches, right? And then and then of that, what’s your conversion rate? Right? So let’s be conservative, say a modest 10%? Or you’ll get 100 searches from 100 sales per month, roughly? And is that sufficient size for your business? Right, for the time that you’re going to spend? I think what we’ve seen across businesses, and I’m sure, Josh, you’ve watched way more products than we have, you know what the time and effort that goes into your smallest product from a revenue standpoint is probably just the same, or almost nearly the same as for your Euro product. And that’s the case not just with E commerce where there’s the case with, with every business that we have, that we own, the amount of energy it takes to do small deals is just as great as doing big deals, right? And so it’s what space you want to play in. So market sizes, is really everything right? Especially if you start talking about you know, you have a more niche product, right. And so yeah, you may fit under this rabbit, maybe of a, you know, an interesting doorstop. Right. And doorstop. You know us again, 50,000 searches, but are you really playing and just the doorstop marketplaces, your your as a super unique, maybe not right. And so I think getting really smart about that is is, is pretty critical. Because that sets the stage for everything else that you’re going to do and how much energy is realistic, free to put into this and what you can spec, right? What’s your real ROI? After that? It’s it’s all about competitive advantage, right? I think, again, this isn’t unique to ecommerce or, you know, products. This is the case with SAS, it’s the case with, you know, a restaurant, right, what kind of competitive advantage, what is it going to attract people to buy from you? And I think we have some interesting things that we failed on on the E commerce side. And you know, again, when we all past 10 years, I think we’ve, we’ve messed that up a lot. But at the end of the day, you know, why is someone going to buy from you? What can you ask, can you answer that yourself? And if you don’t have a strong enough answer for that, you know, whether we’re buying, we’re starting new, we’re partnering up? Well, if you can’t answer that yourself, and you got all this knowledge in front of you, then that consumer of whatever it is that your songs product service, you know, what have you, it’s probably not going to be able to do that in the 510 seconds that they’re looking at what it is that you have to offer. So I think those two things kind of kick off everything that we do. And then from there, you know that we have some due diligence, and then I think everybody has their own kind of personal style in terms of how they value opportunities. But I think those two are absolutely critical. And without those two, and having really honest answers to those, you’re kind of setting yourself up to fail.

Josh Hadley 13:19

Interesting. I love that you talked about, you know, the market opportunity, first and foremost. So I guess at this point, you guys are kind of like swinging for the fences, so to speak, right? Like you’re gonna you want to move into products where there’s massive, you know, market opportunity, is that what you’re saying? Or are you trying to establish like, hey, there’s room for disruption in this market? And there there is, you know, some meat on the bone so to speak?

Simon Hammer 13:47

Yeah. So it’s a good question. I’ll keep this, I’ll keep this answer focused on E commerce, because that answer is actually slightly different depending upon the business unit, because of where different businesses are. But in terms of E commerce, we’re actually looking at a lot of different things. We’re not just looking at the ones with the largest market, because the ones with the largest market, and you’re trying to, you know, take market share. So you have an innovative product or not just a, you know, a different mousetrap, right, you have something new to bring to the table. We’re looking at some of those. But at the same time, we’re also looking at some to use a baseball analogy, right. We’re also looking at just some singles, right, because a lot of singles. He equals a homerun. Right. And so we’re kind of looking at things across the board, when we look to acquire generally looking at things that have a bigger, bigger market potential, because there’s a lot more things to get a deal done over the finish line then and then there’s kind of a lot of work to incorporate a business that you acquire, rather than starting a new product within your portfolio. Yeah. And that’s I think we’re starting to see across ecommerce space more people you know, especially awesome now are really starting to try to focus on brand building. And in those situations where you building a product line, and you actually building out a brand, having a bunch of singles is not a bad thing, because there’s a lot of different things that you can do with those smaller products. So it’s kind of a roundabout way of saying we kind of look at everything from an E commerce perspective. But going back to it in a market size, we have to know ahead of time, like, you know, if we are going after a smaller market, we have to know that in advance, because we’re gonna say, Okay, well, we know that this is a smaller market. So when we prioritize, when we do different things, we’re going to allocate it only the attention that this is going to deserve, because it’s never going to be bigger than that. Right? And so it’s a, it’s an ROI question at that point, you know, return on investment. And so maybe this is like the investment banker speech coming out in me. But I think, you know, even in those questions where we say, Okay, we’ll go up to the smaller market, it’s still about most importance, because then it’s going to affect later on how we view that ROI and how we view how we prioritize and how much time and energy we’re going to put into it, just because of the return that we could potentially get on that smaller thing. It’s not that we shy away from it, but just have to know upfront what the math is to make it actual add up to positive value.

Josh Hadley 16:21

Yeah, you know, I think that that’s so important. And I think you did a really good job, you kind of alluded to it earlier. But with our brand, you know, we have over 1300 different products. So we’ve had our fair share of launching different products and seeing what works and what doesn’t work, right. And not everything has been like a huge success, right? There are a lot of singles and a lot of bumps along the way that just get us those base hits, you know, going back to your baseball analogy, and then we have had a handful of those homeruns that do like just move the business further, that much further. But I like you know, especially as we’re moving into a more mature phase of our business, we are now finally kind of going into those bigger product opportunities that are going to require extra capital, and probably advanced strategies in terms of being able to market those products than we did before. So I’m curious to hear kind of your thoughts, Simon, you know, the way that we grew our brand was honestly, like, we probably did the opposite of what you’re doing in terms of like looking at market potential, we probably started with like, Alright, what’s the small markets that we can play in? And we honestly flew under the radar for the first four years, right? Like you would look at our portfolio and the best products doing like maybe five to 10 sales a day at best, right? But we’ve got a bunch of singles that are just like that’s compounded like it’s more it’s a multimillion dollar business. But yeah, granted, there are a lot of skew. So I’m curious, like in your experience, may be there at the WNBA group. Unless you’re VC funded, and you just come with a bunch of cash and you know, a bunch of connections where you can just hire a bunch of executives to go run things, do you almost recommend, you know, people just kind of like scaling up like piece by piece, and maybe it is okay to maybe start by playing in those smaller fields, right. But then understand that if you want to take your your brand to the next level, right, eight figures and beyond, then you do need to start really looking at the market size. And moving into more of those, you know, let’s say competitive spaces where you see opportunities. What are your thoughts on that break down there?

Simon Hammer 18:37

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s, that’s probably really so I mean, the way you did it from, you know, for us, again, it’s a little bit different, because we were coming from a place where we were going to start by acquiring, right, right. And we did that because it’s a lot easier to acquire a business that’s already at one thing to go, you know, go from one to n is a lot easier. I mean, there’s some troubles Don’t get me wrong. But going from zero to one is a lot harder a lot of times. And so I mean, we see that, I mean, we want we lost some products, and it takes a lot of work. And it’s you know, watching is hard. And so I think it kind of depends on a couple things, one, your risk profile to how much capital you have to start and what you’re willing to kind of put up with because usually, in the bigger markets, if you’re going to play, you need a little bit more capital to play because you need to do you need to do a little bit more marketing, to get your name out there, you may need to, you know, run at tighter margins for a longer period of time to get your early sales. And if it’s a bigger market, it’s probably a little bit more established. There’s more players which inherently you know, macroeconomics speaking, there’s going to be thinner margins to begin with. So you it’s it requires much more kind of math right up front To be like, Okay, well, if I’m going to start at a bigger market place, or bigger market size, and I’m gonna go after bigger terms there, I need to be really smart on Okay, well, what is realistic in terms of my upfront capital investment? To say, Okay, this is how long I’m going to run out like a break even or even I’m going to run out a little bit of a loss. Right? And I’m okay with that. Because this is the purpose that I’m going to do that right, even today, right away. I mean, we we hate doing things at a loss, right? I mean, like, that’s just bad business, right? But yeah, sometimes we will, in the event that we say, Okay, well, I see why we’re going to do this for like a month, or a few weeks or two months, stretching a little bit, but like, I can see why we’re going to do that. Because it the potential gain after those two months is so large, and we can stomach that, right, we’re okay with losing X to make why. And so everything comes back to this, right, like, again, I think, you know, comes back to the market size, because you have to be sure on y or have a reasonable percent chance that like or outcome that you believe in that this Y can happen for you’re gonna make why make that return by investing X or losing x. And so I think, you know, again, comes back to that market size, where when you start smaller, right, and maybe your risk profile is a little less like, you don’t have to make some of those decisions, right? You could be a little bit more loosey goosey with it, or you don’t have to be as fine tuned in terms of, you know, what the actual, like loss is because you don’t have as tight margins in that market, potentially. So I think, yeah, I think you know, as you get as you get bigger, and you really want to take the next step, I think, eventually, you are going to have to take on some of those bigger questions, right, you’re going to have to take on those bigger market sizes, you’re gonna have to say, Okay, well, you know, I’m gonna have to invest a little bit more to actually grow that brand upfront. And again, we start talking about brands, I think as you get bigger, because it’s ultimately the way kind of E commerce is moving, where if you don’t have that brand that people can really latch on to you don’t have that product line that you can cross sell upsell, you don’t have something that really distinguishes you. And that’s ultimately what is your brand is helping out with, you know, your competitive advantage and helping you distinguish what it is that you have, well, then, you know, there’s a whole bunch of people or sellers out there that are gonna be selling something very, very similar for probably a reduced price, just because they’re trying to do the same thing says you are right, and acquire market share. So yeah,

[Continue to page 2]