Josh Hadley 6:07

Yeah, fortunately, not. I actually worked in American Airlines when I first started my career, right, which you would think, you know, in the airline industry, I would be traveling a lot. Fortunately, all of my accounts that I was managing were all Dallas-based. So traveling Nisar, but yeah, I know a lot of management consultants, and I have heard their schedule, and you get paid well, but it also comes at a price, right?

Mike McClary 6:33

It definitely did. And so you know, next thing I know, we’re my wife, now we’re engaged to get married. But I’m traveling all the time. And that time, my first project was worth a Monsanto now called solution, I believe, but we were switching up time between either New Orleans fun or Muscatine, Iowa, not so fun. I apologize for anyone joining us from Muscatine, but it’s commonly known as the armpit of Iowa up there. Unfortunately, it’s not a bad town, but they at the time, and maybe it’s not this way anymore at the time, Anheuser-Bush had a lot of their hops and grain refineries up there. So every morning, when we drove in to the Monsanto plant, there would be a yellow bog rolling over there, which if you’ve ever smelled the fermentation of hops, it’s not a good smelling thing. Is this sweet, pungent, more pungent than sweet smell. And so working up there was not ideal. And so I was the new guy at the company. And all of us in the team, were splitting time between Muscatine and New Orleans, you can imagine what they sent me more, it was Muscatine, Iowa, traveling all the time up there. Now, I loved Ernst and Young, it was actually, you know, I look back in my career have one of the jobs that I think gave me the most knowledge and business skills, that was definitely the start of it all, because of working with these huge companies, Monsanto, Boeing, those like two the clients Charter, another client that I ended up working for later on full time, gave me all this experience to like really use my skills in technical skills, finance skills, in order to help them generate more revenue. But the travel was really taking a toll on me. And so within a couple of years, I actually started working as a consultant for Charter are now known as Spectrum in the St. Louis area, with the reason being that I wouldn’t have to travel. So still doing some consulting work for them out there. But I wouldn’t have to travel at all. And at that time, I was able to become an independent consultant for them. So were, you know, big, big six at the time consulting firms, they went down the Big Five, now, their big four, I don’t know what the number is today. But they love going by going but those monitors, I was able to charge a much smaller hourly rate for me, and he has a young guy with you know, wife and the time like soon to be another kid. It was a lot of money, even though for them was it was a bargain. So was a really good mix for us. However, after doing that corporate gig for a while actually was part of the revenue assurance department. It was again, had a great team loved was doing. And the way that we kind of found our special mark on the company was we would look for lost revenue. And so again, I was part of this, I’d say support team. But I knew that I had to be a part of a team that generated revenue for a company, if you’re ever going to make money, you have to be on the revenue generating side of it. And so our team would go out there and find areas where we were losing money. And the way that we kind of made our mark there was think of pay per view movies. That’s how these companies make a lot of their money out there. And you would think that when you watch a movie on TV, and you rent it, whether it’s the UFC fight, whatever it is, you push a button, and it’s so simple that everything just works smoothly. It shows up on your bill, the next month, there’s about 14 steps in between that between your remote and between that bill comes in the mail. There’s all types of failure points. And I think at the time we’re about 99% accurate on making sure that everyone got billed what they should be. Sounds great 99% that, that 1% was millions of dollars. And so our team went to work on filling those gaps. And that’s how, you know, we became like a really sought after team inside the company. And I knew that, you know, I could have a really good career there, which eventually, I did the same job part of this team for 10 years, you know, part of the corporate structure. The last year, they had finally said, Mike, you’ve been a consultant for us in this department for a decade. When are you going to come on board as a full time employee? It’s kind of like dating. I don’t know. How long did you and your wife date, Josh, before you guys got married?

Josh Hadley 10:32

Well, she dated multiple people while she dated me. So it ended up paying over the course of a what, 18 months or so.

Mike McClary 10:40

But okay, yeah, not 10 years, not 10 years. Okay. So that’s kind of how I felt with this company. I’d like mandating pretenders every year, when it comes to budget time we’d have a conversation is this the year become a full-time employee or not? Every year, I was able to hold them off until 2012. And finally, they were making some moves, they’re moving corporate headquarters around, I spent a lot of time in Denver, awesome, awesome place out there. They’re moving more to the, to the east coast. And there was a chance that I might have to move or lose my job completely. And let’s say came on as an employee. And so in 2012, I came on as an employee during the exact same job, there was nothing Josh different all about my job, still the same team, I worked with great people, I still talked to them today, still did the same job, plug holes in the gap, we’re still, you know, always finding leaking revenue and make sure the company was good financially. But the moment that I became an employee, my entire mindset changed. I just, I didn’t feel like the same person, you know, again, no different job, no different. The pay was kind of the same. We’ve made it all work out. But I just felt like I was now trapped into this corporate job. And I almost immediately started thinking, how can I get out of this, I can’t go back to being consultant, that’s not going to work. And I was kind of a, I don’t, it’s kind of like dating, marrying your wife. And it’s like, I don’t go back to dating you. Again, it doesn’t work that I haven’t tried it. But I’m assuming it doesn’t work. I knew that wouldn’t work for me. And so I started thinking about other ways that I could make money on the side. And I tried a couple things over the years. And none of them worked out until I got an email around January of 2013, from the stupidest name possible, of a program called The Amazing Selling Machine. And it seemed like spam, and I almost didn’t open it. One of my friends, Sherry, who actually works for me, now forwarded to me, and she says, this looks legit, you might want to try it out. And against my better — against my own judgment, I thought it was gonna time I opened it. And I started watching this business model, but at the time had not become very popular, basically, private label. And these two guys, Matt and Jason had a video about how you could build your own private label business. And once I saw the first video on what’s possible, it did open my eyes to what is possible, building your own brand and selling them on Amazon. I had no idea this is a possibility. I thought that every product I bought in the world, that company was a manufacturer, whether it was Rayovac, making batteries, or Duracell making batteries, or Kleenex making tissues, I thought they had plants all over the world, they own these plants, and they’re making these products. And then I realized they’re kind of like an idiot. Most of these companies don’t own the manufacturing plants. They’re outsourcing that part of their business. They may have long term contracts with them, but they’re hiring the best plants to do this for a living to make their products for them. And that we can do it too, just like you do now, Josh and so many people, you can hire these manufacturers to make products for you and sell it under your brand name. In essence, you become the manufacturer in the eyes of companies like Amazon and your customers. And once I realized that simple concept, a switch was just flipped for me that this is something that I would love doing and so many people could love doing as well. So I joined up didn’t tell my wife at the time it was you know, several 1000s dollars, ended up telling her a month later right before the refund date. Because I wanted to make sure that okay, I did this. I think it’ll work. I can get a refund right now if you want me to what do you think? And she was awesome. She was like, Heck no, I haven’t seen you happier in the past 30 days. I know why keep doing it. And so I you know, stuck with it. Within 60 days or so we had already ordered our products. Our brand was launched by the end of May of that year. I think may 30 was the day that our product launched on Amazon June 1 was the day we made it for sale. My brother was working with me at the time we kind of went in this together he was more creative than I was so he would do like the graphics design and things like that. And then products just took off like gangbusters I actually shared my first product at our recent seller con it was a leather conditioner called leather afterlife. And you know it did really well low ticket product and I loved selling it but it wasn’t I didn’t think at the time it could turn into a big moneymaker for us and then I go see other people out there crushing it with these consumer products. Hold another one I guess a whole nother story. So we quickly got into the LED camping and lighting space, and then launched the brands of lanterns, flashlights. And within a year, I was at a point where I could quit my corporate job that I now had, and do this full time. And it was, I’d never been more happier in my life other than, you know, married, getting married and having kids, that moment when I realized, I am now making enough to quit this job that I don’t want to do, and do full time, what I really have now have a new passion for and so I told my boss that January, I believe that I was going to quit, gave him plenty of notice that I could transition somewhat into my role, and then ended up retiring or resigning from that job a few months later, all within a year of launching my first product. And I’ve never looked back, I’ve looked forward and done lots of other things, as you mentioned when you’re reading off of but it has been a life changing event for me. Yeah, that gets me to hear. Hopefully, that was brief enough for my little history there.

Josh Hadley 15:59

No, that’s, that’s amazing. Well, I love that you’re you can preach, because you actually went through the course. Right? You actually started something. And I think all I think everybody has the stigma of Amazon gurus, right, that are like flashing these, you know, nice cars and whatever. Right? And it’s like, but they’ve never actually made money on Amazon. Right? And so I think that that, like speaks volumes that like you actually went through it, right? You didn’t come out initially as like a guru trying to tell people how to, you know, sell online, like, No, you went through the process. You’ve been there, done that, and you’re actively doing it, which I think makes all the difference. So, Mike, I am curious, though, to hear, you know, you’ve got 10 plus years of selling on Amazon, you’ve seen Amazon change drastically over those 10 years. And I feel like the amount of change coming on Amazon is only getting faster and quicker. And it’s hard to keep up with everything. So, Mike, I’m interested to hear of all the things that Amazon’s currently changing and working on right now, what are some of the things that come to the top of your mind that you’re actively working on?

Mike McClary 17:12

So I think the biggest change that I’ve seen is that when I started selling, there was no such thing as advertising on Amazon, if there was no PPC, when they came out with it, it was a little scary, like, I kind of pay for advertising, I’m gonna have to pay for advertising the previous year, you know, you just throw a product up there, you know, rub your hands together, like Mr. Miyagi, and it started selling, as long as you did the things the right way. And now there’s this new feature called Amazon sponsored products. And I believe at the time, it was just auto, I don’t think you had even any control the time was like, Do you want to give us money or not? Those are the two options at the time. And so that was, it was an interesting feature to try out. And we did it and it worked great, because no one else was advertising. It was cheap. I remember the days, you know, 10 cent clicks on Amazon. And of course, you know, once Amazon started doing that, and who knows they’re really smart over there, they probably you know, for saw that this will become a huge moneymaker for them. I think anyone who’s on Amazon would say pretty much advertising and Amazon advertising has been the biggest change over the past decade. At first, I would say the biggest positive change for sellers. And then I’d say over the past couple of years. I’m sad, negative. But I’m thinking that it’s made things more challenging, because it now is a pay to play system. If you don’t advertise. It’s incredibly difficult to actually make sales. I’m not saying impossible, but it’s very difficult to compete with the big companies out there. And so I think that’s like the biggest change. On the positive side, though, including Amazon’s advertising system. They have really upped their game over the past couple years on the different tools and features they’re giving us the different ways you can advertise. Now the different reports, you can see, I believe it was just in the past, you know, six months or so they released the reporting byproduct, which is something I’ve always wanted to see you’ve always had to use an external tool. But I want to know, for this particular lantern, I got 20-50 campaigns running, how’s it doing, I don’t want to go in there, pull down all the reports and look at it, you can very quickly see that now that was a really great like dashboard feature, the ability to go out there and create, you know, display ads now and really do much better at targeting. They were horrible. The first, I believe the first time that I spoke at a live event and I talked about Amazon PPC. And they had just released display advertising. I gave a presentation on it. And my presentation was one slide. Don’t do it. Because I lost my butt on it the first time it came out like I love trying on the new features and I can feel like that’s in my role. That’s something that I need to do. And he always try these new features out, even to my own detriment. And I remember trying it and it was terrible. either. I’m incredibly dumb, which you know, it’s always up on the table as a possibility or just wasn’t there yet. And at the time, it really was not there as a good channel. There was so little controls were pretty much at Amazon’s whim. Now it’s a much better way if you really know the way that these funnels work, you start at the top and work your way down. There’s a place for all the different types of advertising that Amazon gives us. And they give us so many other tools as well, Josh, I mean, you’ve seen everything inside of brand registry. That menu keeps getting bigger as more and more features on there. I don’t know if you’ve tried it yet. Like, I know what you’re talking about the it’s brand, something I can’t think of a second name to it. You’ve sent emails to customers, tailored brand

Josh Hadley 20:23

Brand-tailored promotions, right?

Mike McClary 20:25

Yeah. What a great, amazing feature they’ve released. And I have not heard a lot of people talking about it. Like we have the ability now to do abandoned cart emails to send emails to our best highest spending customers to reach customers we think would be good first actual emails, and give them a coupon as well, in order to incentivize them. I saw I tested out, I saw this weird looking coupon on my own listing the other week, and like, I didn’t create that, where’s that, and it’s part of brand tailored promotions, they look different. And only if you’re one of the people they’ve targeted, we’ll see it, because everyone else that asked to look at my listing didn’t see it. And they thought it was crazy. They’re right. But not because of that is because I use that new feature on there. And I think there’s many, many more features, I’m sure there is that Amazon were releasing to us. So for me, the way the different tools they give you to promote your business inside the platform is probably the biggest change that I’ve seen over the past couple of years on Amazon.

Josh Hadley 21:20

Yeah, yeah, I think that Amazon is definitely leaning more into brands, right. And they want brands to actually, like adopt their platform and be kind of their main platform to get your products out to customers, right. And I think that your perspective is going to be really unique as we dive into this, too, because I know that one thing that you and Matt are working on right now is like how do you diversify off of Amazon? Right? And do you put all of your eggs in the Amazon basket? What are some of the pros and cons? But before we get to the whole diversification conversation, Mike, I’m interested to hear your perspective of what do you feel like Amazon sellers, specifically, right now should be focused on if they want to grow or scale their business from, you know, maybe seven figures now to eight figures and beyond.

Mike McClary 22:10

So I think it depends on if you just want to focus on Amazon, or you want to branch out and diversify. And I have to preface this by saying, I think anyone who’s at that point, there are seven figures, you need to be thinking about diversification right now. Not before it’s too late. Because you’re, you’re always at the whim of someone else’s platform. And I wouldn’t want any business of mine to be at the whim of anyone else’s platform right now. So I would immediately start having a plan for diversification. But on Amazon, I would really lean into a couple things here. One would be building your brand, like you talked about Josh, they’re giving us these tools for a reason. And most of the times those tools are only available to brand owners, because they want the brand approach. They don’t want people going out there, I don’t believe they want people out there just gaming the algorithm that’s been happening too long now. And every time that someone does that, they try to switch it up. So you can’t game it. But if you have a really strong brand, with great products, great service and great pricing, that’s who they want. So give them who they want and what they want. And I think Amazon will continue to reward you Great products, great brand, great pricing, still make a profit, you have to profit otherwise, there’s no point being in business, and great customer service, you do those things. And I think the risk of your business not doing well. Lower a lot. And then I think that Amazon will continue rewarding you as well. You may never own the customer, because that’s their customer. But I think you have a pretty good chance of being successful on Amazon and growing to the levels you’re talking about, even if it’s just on Amazon.

Josh Hadley 23:40

Yeah. So your recommendation is just to kind of lean into all of the, I guess the new features that Amazon is providing brand owners the brand tailored promotions, and premium A plus content, right. Anything else that you’ve seen is like a, I guess a good tool that you’ve been able to implement, because you are a brand owner experiments.

Mike McClary 24:02

There’s a reason they want us to experiment because they can’t continue to experiment with all of our products, but they’re giving us the ability to, I recommend experimenting every week. You know, once you find a winner, let that winner be your new title, your new image bullets, a plus content description. But once you do that, find another one to test you should always be testing. I just had a conversation with some other folks that I think the future of AI is going to be continual testing and improvement. And I think AI will allow us to do that. I would imagine Amazon’s probably got their eye on that as a matter of fact, so that you can continually test new images, product descriptions, bullets, titles i plus and continually optimize, but I don’t think it ever ends. I think optimization using Amazon’s experiments is a continual process, not something you do once every year or once and you’re done. Yeah,

Josh Hadley 24:50

I think that’s a great perspective. Because yeah, it’s never just set it and forget it. In fact, if you set it and forget it on Amazon, it’s six months from now, you’re going to start just declining, right? Because there it is an active management of, of a business really. And I, I always laugh at the people that preach this make passive income on Amazon, Amazon business owners know that it is far from passive right. And I think that they all you know, I think it’s a good mindset shift though, in general, that if you are a business owner, you want to scale to that eight figures and beyond, you have to actively be doing something with your business every single day, whether it’s testing a different image or price or bullets. Mike, I’m curious, like from the tests that you’ve run, have you seen one of those, you know, variables be more influential than others? Whether it be the title image pricing, what, what do you see from your side?

Mike McClary 25:50

Yeah, the biggest per testing is by far the image, because that’s going to get their attention. And if you don’t get their attention, then nothing else down the funnel matters. So testing the image is what you really want to do. The next would be not so much the title like the title, it’s interesting, because for me, the title is combination of traffic and conversion, you have to have the right features in the title, get the traffic, but if it doesn’t convert, then it’s not going to work. So that’s really an art. But what’s more important to me is pricing. And when I talk a little bit about that silicon is being able to get the constant strikethrough pricing. Now I don’t like the game systems, like that’s not a long term business strategy to me. But it seems to me that 90% of the top selling products all have strikethrough pricing, which you know, is like you have a standard price, which is your list price or MSRP price. And then it’s now your discounted price, when you see that when a customer sees that, they immediately believe they’re getting a good value, and they’re getting a discount off of it. And if you’re comparing two products, doesn’t matter what the price is. But if I’m looking for two different products, and I see one of them has a huge discount, right now, I’m more prone to go for that product, because I think I’m getting a much better value. So I have seen pricing be the biggest determining factor other than the image when it comes to optimization. And I immediately know when I lose my my strikethrough pricing, I can go check my ads, and they’re performing like crap, because I’ve lost it, my conversions going down, people are just clicking a mark and going away. And so you need to constantly be trying to get that really good strike through pricing, whether it’s just a sales price, whether it’s a prime exclusive discount, whether it’s a deal, you can run like the best deals, they switched over 70 deals the best deals now. Or it’s just a normal. I don’t know a coupon using on there, which isn’t the same, but it also helps you get the pricing discounts the customers that you really need that you have to be good value on Amazon right now. Otherwise, I think that you’re really missing out on sales that other cost products are getting. Yeah, yeah.

Josh Hadley 27:45

And Mike, I was there at your seller con presentation. And one of the things that was I guess, mind opening for myself, was you talked about the conversion bomb. And I have loved that since the day I heard it, we’ve implemented it in our business, we’ve actually been able to see kind of the average number of units per order go up, because we’re incentivizing people to buy multiple units now. So Mike, I would love for you to share. You know, I think this is one of the quickest wins. If people are not doing this today, it’s going to increase your conversion rate. It can also influence and also help boost up your number of units sold per transaction, which is more profit as well. And then overall, like it’s this flywheel, it’s going to help your ranking at the same time. So exactly. Mike, drop the conversion bomb.

Mike McClary 28:36

All right. I love that name, by the way, not because I came up with because I came up with it just like out of the blue because Matt Clark, my business partner always tells me I have to come up with a cool name. You can’t just tell them, You’re going to tell them how to really get a good optimized listing has to be a cool name. I’m like, Well, what about the conversion bomb, he’s like, I love it. And I was joking. But it’s stuck. I’ve been able to create really good mid journey images for conversion bombs. So the conversion bomb is all about increasing sales conversions. And it all starts with the strikethrough pricing like we just talked about, when I analyze the top sellers from almost any category looked at all med strike through pricing. So the first step is to tweak Amazon’s, I guess their brain that goes out there and looks at pricing to make it realize or think that you’re giving a discount at all times. And so you need to be selling at a higher price your list price. And the way to get that to work is to sell at your list price but have either a coupon on there because the coupons do not factor into that you could have a 50% off coupon. And Amazon still sees that as a full price sale what your higher price is. You do that for a couple days. You can also do with a prime exclusive discount as well. Because prime exclusive discounts only give people a discount who are prime. So that means your other customers are not prime. They’re also selling at that higher that’s called the list price. Once you get a few days of sales and it may need to be longer if you’ve been selling for years may need to be a week or two be at the set that reference price. So what Amazon calls it, then you lower the price via prime exclusive discounts again, or a sales price, and you will get the slash through pricing. And that usually sticks between 30 and 90 days, because that’s how their algorithm looks at, it looks at what’s the prevailing price of the reference price over the past 90 days, I’ve seen it lower to 30. But they say 90, once you lose that, you repeat the process, go out there, raise your price, offer a coupon or products with a discount, except reset your reference price. And then a few days later, have that sale price or prime exclusive discount again, to continue getting the slash surprising. That’s the first part, then the second part is to add as many converting badges on your listing as possible. The first one is going to be a coupon we all know how to create these just create a simple coupon, it can be as little as 5% off, but you need the coupon because the coupon show up in the search results, people will see that pretty little green Save 5% $5 $1 Whatever it is, you create the coupon on there, then you can create more badges the show right up at the very top, so they don’t the scroll down. Back in the day, Josh, when you are selling something years ago, if you’re creating what’s a promotion, which is different from a coupon, no one saw those, they had to scroll down to the bottom of the page, they might see special promotions offered by the seller. Now, they’re actually putting them right up at the top. So the next promotion I would create would be a money off promotion on two products. So if they ordered two products, I’ll give them 10% off. And most of us selling the space, if someone buys two products, you get enough margin to offer them 10% off, if you don’t raise your prices, or lower your costs one of the two. But because people will see then at this point, then they’re gonna have that slash the pricing we created, they’re gonna see the coupon you put out there, and then below that is going to be another badge that’s gonna say save 10% on two products. And then you can create another promotion. And what I do is give them 15% off for three products. And it’s super simple, you can create these right inside of the standard Amazon promotions advertising part of the menu. And then you have those four different conversion factors slash the pricing, the regular coupon, the discount at two for two products or more, and the discount for three products or more. Now these do stacked together. So be aware of that, that they will all add up, however, you’re able to set the discounts on both a coupon and on promotions to only be for one unit. There’s a checkbox to check in there. So if they buy a lot more, they’re not going to continue getting every discount for everyone they buy. So be sure to set that in there. However, I’ll tell you what I did this morning, when I was getting up, I analyzed lots of stuff here, I knew we’re gonna talk about this, I pulled down the last couple weeks sales for one of our products where we have a $5 coupon on there. And I have the conversion bomb enabled, less than half the people are taking advantage of the coupon and everything else. So it’s crazy, like the coupon every once you get the people who just buy on Amazon aren’t seeing this, because they’re gonna remember to always click that coupon box. But most people don’t realize most shoppers don’t realize that in order to get that coupon, they have to check that box, less than half are using that right now. Now if the order, if you give them 50% off on just a coupon, that number goes up, probably closer to like 80%. But I have a I have a $5 coupon it’s about 5%. Right now testing it out, less than half were using it. And even less than that went ahead and ordered two or three. But with those numbers just count on that only half the people use that coupon, you’re only really giving that big of a discount to them to half the art half of that amount goes to all of them, or the full amount, how are we gonna look at the math there, up. So you’re really not giving up as much of a margin as you think and should always have enough margin to make these things work for you. Otherwise, you know, you like I said, you need to look your numbers. But the beauty is, even if I account for everyone using every single one of those discounts on my product, let’s say I make that a break even scenario. I’m okay with that. Because I’ve just sold a lot of units. I’ve got another customer, that’s going to increase my BSR lower my BSR whatever you’re looking at, increase my sales, and then the flywheel you talked about Josh, just keep spinning where I get more and more sales. Because the more you sell, the more Amazon’s going to promote you as well.

Josh Hadley 34:10

Yeah, that is the conversion bomb. Mike, I love that conversion bomb. I love it. I think the other thing to add on to this, because we we have a SKU catalog of over 1,300 SKUs. Right. So it’s no small feat to actually roll this out across all of our skews. And we have different like product categories. One of the things that I’ve loved about adding these extra promotions where it’s Hey, save 10% off if you buy two or more, or get 15% off if you buy three or more. The nice part is Amazon actually gives you a dedicated landing page for those products to shop at right so if people are like, oh what two products it’s not, let’s say it’s a product that you’re like people only need one of these like if they are getting two of these they genuinely like they don’t use it. which is a lot of our products, they don’t need multiple of the same product. Right? What happens though, is it will show you like applicable products right on Amazon, and people can click that URL, and then it will load a whole landing page, that’s just going to be your products only. And these are the only products that are applicable for that promotion. So in my case, I don’t throw all 1300 ASINs on to that page, because it would just go on forever. And then people would just get lost and PC good.

Mike McClary 35:32

But you could. For those who have large catalogs, if you want to make this simple, you don’t have a third dinner, like, like Josh was, you can select your entire catalog if you want to. But you’re more thoughtful than that we’ve

Josh Hadley 35:43

been a little more thoughtful. And I think it’s led to better results. Because what happens is, we’re going to share, you know, maybe it’s a calendar, right? And then it’s going to be a matching meal planner, right? And like, people are like, Oh, I didn’t even think about this, right? And so then it’s also starting to influence that frequently purchased together section, right? And so rather than just saying, Hey, do you also want some appointment cards for your dentist office or something like that? It’s like, I don’t even have a dentist office or whatever it is right? Instead of seeing those products, we’ve been more methodical and saying, Hey, with these products, offer these promotions, and we’ve seen really good success that way. So I want to

Mike McClary 36:27

Cross selling upselling. That’s fantastic. I love hearing that.

Josh Hadley 36:31

Love it. All right, Mike, I want to steer our conversation back to advertising, which you said was one of the biggest changes that has happened over the last decade on Amazon, and Amazon’s changing advertising at a very quick pace right now. They’re partnering with a lot of off site, I guess sites right now, right? You’ve got Pinterest, you’ve got BuzzFeed. And Amazon is going to start showing your ads there. Maybe a little concerning, I guess my question to you, Mike is what should a seven-figure seller that wants to continue to scale their business be focused on in regards to Amazon advertising right now, because it is certainly pay to play, things are only getting more expensive. People believe that it’s part of the ranking algorithm at the same time. So where should people be spending their time and money on Amazon advertising?

Mike McClary 37:25

You know, and I know that sometimes I’ve said things that you shouldn’t focus on ranking anymore. Forget about that. Forget about the, you know, the honeymoon period. I say that, like I do believe it in general. But it doesn’t mean that you should always ignore those things. I do believe there’s a time and place for those. I think that if you’re a brand that has a strategy, and you have a very good plan for I have the money to launch this new product, spend a lot of money on advertising, and I’m fairly confident that I can get this product ranking, then I think that’s the thing to do. You can use Amazon still in their advertising to rank products, it still works today, you just have to be able to accept the risk, and the risk is a financial risk. So if you have the funds to do that, and a good plan and strategy, believe you can do it, you’re not going out there and haphazardly bidding on low converting search terms, then that strategy can absolutely still work. So I don’t want to discount that for people. However, if you have limited funds, and you don’t really have a lot of confidence, that just by throwing a bunch of money to advertising, you can rank that product, I would be very cautious to do that. Again, you still can’t be have some people help you out who knows how to do that. But just be cautious because I haven’t seen as many ranking successes from new products as we used to in the past in the past seven to 10 days, focus on and have a big coupon on your product, focus on some longtail keywords, and then slowly start going to his more aggressive. That was the play, that still can work. I just don’t see as many successes, because we think about it. Everyone else is doing that right now, you have lots of sellers, particularly maybe manufacturers overseas who can beat you on price every day. And so they’re going to do more volume than you. And if someone above you is doing more volume for the exact same search term, you’re not going to be able to move ahead of them, no matter how much money you throw at it, which I just caution people, it still works. But you have to have the financial resources and a plan to do it. And the resources that if it doesn’t work, you’re okay. I don’t want to see anyone go out there and blow 10-20 grand on the launch and products and then that devastate their life. That’s not not the play that I would suggest anyone doing. If you’re a seven figure seller, chances are you know what you’re doing. And you probably have some resources to do this, you probably isn’t good experience creating your great well converting product page. I think you can still use Amazon to ramp up ranking. But I would just be more methodical I would really try to go out there and try to focus on the search terms that you believe are the best for you the best converting, you don’t want to just go after the most popular search terms. I know this is pretty common for anyone who’s done stuff on Amazon but really focus on the ones that you believe you can rank form and convert well for and look at the numbers, look at where you’re converting and Brandon the lift compared to everyone else. If your product isn’t as good or isn’t priced as well as your competitors, you’re not going to be able to beat them out. And so I wouldn’t waste money doing that, I would really try to optimize your ads. So I am tired of giving Amazon all my money for advertising, I still give it to them. I’m just tired of giving it all to them. And so I’m really focusing now on profitability, and growing smart. So I do know that there’s margins, I want to get out there. And there’s that price elasticity. And if I can only go down so low, and I know that I’m not going to convenience, anyone else who’s going down lower than where I’m willing to go, I’m not going to go any lower. And I’m not going to give up margin and, and profits just to try to outrank them, because eventually have to raise my price up to where I need to be in order, make a profit. And why waste all that time ranking at this low price, spending all this money eventually, and pretty quickly, you’re gonna lose that ranking. So I know my profit margins. I know my price range I’m willing to sell. And I stick to that, I go out there and focus on profitable sales and PPC, and I pretend, pretend that every sale is going to come from an advertising click, that’s not the case, you’ll start ranking everyone’s ranking, Amazon’s promoting you, you don’t even realize that they’re sending out emails they’re showing you on other sites without you paying for it. But if I pretend that every sale comes from a click on advertising, then have a pretty good idea of where I need to hit and when I can afford to spend, and then all the other sales are just gravy. And you know, a good strategy. I think Josh says, Make your advertising breakeven, whatever spending on at least breakeven, and then all the other organic sales or your profit. It’s not terribly easy to plan that way. But I think that’s a good strategy to use.

Josh Hadley 41:41

Yeah, Mike, I think that’s an important mindset shift for people to have, especially as Amazon advertising gets more and more expensive, as they start opening up these bigger kind of more display advertising, where you’re showing up on Buzzfeed and Pinterest. And that’s a very high level funnel, right? That’s like putting up a billboard. And if you’re just starting your business, you don’t need a billboard, let’s just say that, right? You don’t need to just create brand awareness. And so I would argue, I think the approach that you talked about, were focusing on the profitability assume every single one of your sales is going to come from Amazon advertising, can you still be profitable, or in your opinion, at least breakeven from all of those sales on Amazon ads, if that’s the case, then you can continue playing in that game. If not, then you’ve got to optimize those campaigns, back to where they’re going to be profitable. And I think this is important, because if people kind of turn a blind eye, and they just think about, well, I heard somebody else has 20% Tacos, and they consider that good, somebody else had 5% Tacos, it’s like, it doesn’t matter, you gotta stop comparing yourself to other people, like, you need to focus on your own brand, you don’t know their profit margins, you don’t know what other ranking stuff or other external ads that they have going on. And so I think the first and foremost, like, sellers need to get very clear on their numbers, and then make sure that those ads are optimized to turn a profit. Because yeah, I think that the game is just continuing to evolve on Amazon advertising. And if you turn a blind eye to it, I’m sorry, but you’re gonna get left behind. And it’s it’s not going to be very pretty a couple of years from now,

Mike McClary 43:23

I couldn’t agree more the way that I’ve never shared this analogy publicly. But here’s the way I look at it. Advertising on Amazon is like playing blackjack with idiots. Because you don’t have full control. You can be the smartest person on earth, you can count cards. But if there’s an idiot at either corner, and they’re making decisions that are going to totally mess you up, it’s out of your control. And there are a lot of people playing an advertising game on Amazon, that don’t care about you. It’s not that they should. They’re just, they’re just trying to throw money and get sales. And so if they’re willing to spend a lot more and sell the products for a lot less, you can have the best strategy on Earth. And you’re at the whim of everyone else out there. So like I said, pay attention to it. Keep you gotta keep every week I look at my multiple times throughout the week, look at your ads, optimize, see what’s working, what’s not working. It’s never done. It’s a constant process.

Josh Hadley 44:11

Yeah, I think the other thing just to double down on that real quick is that COVID was a good thing and a bad thing for Amazon. Yes, there was a lot of Amazon Prime adoption that happened, right? That’s a good thing. On the downside. A lot of those big corporations are like, holy crap, all of the sales are now happening on Amazon and not in retail stores. We need to be on Amazon. And so with that, that’s where you’ve kind of got if you want to call them idiots playing blackjack with you. You’ve got these guys that somebody, I don’t know, Hallmark or whatever has hired some MBA that has no idea what Amazon how to run the Amazon advertising program, but they hire them and then they just tell them to go for it. Right. They’re like, as long as you’re just making money. We don’t even care if it’s profitable because we’ve got all these other channels, right. And I think that’s the thing that private label sellers, where Amazon is their main and only channel, like they need to be very careful because they’re getting $5 CPCs, you’re not going to outbid some of those, you know, corporations that have very deep pockets. And in fact, they’re probably losing money on Amazon. But they frankly, don’t care 100%. It’s a great way to look at it. So, Mike, last thing, before we start wrapping up here, you talked about diversification. And I’m interested to hear your thoughts like, when is the right time for people to consider moving off of Amazon, right, or at least not off of Amazon completely, but like starting to launch more of their products on other channels? And which channels? Should people be focused on? Is it Walmart? Is it TikTok Shop? Is it Shopify? Give me kind of a breakdown of what you’ve seen working for existing sellers?

Mike McClary 45:57

No, I think the right time is right now. And even before you start selling, I would consider launching on another platform, even before you launch an Amazon. Here’s the reason why we end this is from experience, not just theory, we’ve seen brands and new sellers who when they’ve started selling on Shopify, and started running ads, let’s face it, like if you’re selling on your website, you’re gonna run Facebook ads, that’s kind of the that’s the game right now. And it works. It works pretty well. Facebook does have a way over time, give them enough data, they’ll find your customers. So if you do that you start off on Facebook, on Shopify, and using ADS from Facebook, I would then very quickly, then launch on Amazon, you can about the same time you want to. But I actually like starting on Shopify first, because what will happen, Josh is that people who see your ads, go to your website, they’re gonna go to Amazon and look for your product. And so what we do is we start launching brand ads right away on Amazon, and those performed like gangbusters. So be imagined people are people all the time want to shop around, they’re gonna see your ads, they’re gonna go to your website, they’re gonna want to know, if they can get a better deal on Amazon, they’re gonna go to Amazon. And this is where the game has changed. Before, when you launched on Amazon, there’s no reason to brand advertising because no one knows your brand does, you don’t need that billboard yet. But if you’re already spending money on ads, and sending people to your own brand website, people will start searching for your brand on Amazon. And that is an easy way to scoop up additional sales. And that’s what I would do, I would like launch on your website very quickly, within a matter of days. At the same time, it’s all a matter of your time, you have to also launch on Amazon, so that you’re going to scoop up those extra sales, it’ll make your launch on Shopify easier, because that advertising spend going to your website is going to be driving additional sales on Amazon, that will help offset the cost of advertising hard to track. But you can see brand advertising campaigns on Amazon and guaranteed those are coming from people looking at your other ads. So I would very quickly, Shopify, right on Amazon, that’s the order, I would recommend anyone go to my my son, my friends family. And then I would also after a month or two launch on Walmart, because you do need a little bit of history, you don’t need yours every month, they want to make sure that they’re only bringing on legitimate brands who are already selling other platforms. So within a month or so I would then launch on Walmart, it’s another easy platform right now, not very scalable. But I got a lot of faith in Walmart, when they do something, they may be slow. But they do ramp things up. And they invest in it. And we’ve worked with Walmart over the past year and a half, to understand their platform so we can teach people how to use it. And they are building in more and more features. If you go to their advertising, you’ll see it’s looking more and more like Amazon every time they release new features. And so it’s easy sales right now on Walmart, I would not launch on Walmart, because there’s not enough traffic right now I’m trying to get that going. But if I’m already paying for ads on my own website, I’d launch on Amazon and launch on Walmart, because the same is going to happen there, people will go to Walmart and start looking for your brand as well. Those are the three platforms that I would launch on almost simultaneously simultaneously. But I would start off on my own website, because I think at the end of the day, you’re going to own those customers, that’s going to be really valuable for you. If you realize that your products are taking off on Amazon, and your sales or your ads on your website just aren’t profitable, it’s not easy to do. You have to come up with different angles, tests those angles, it’s not simple to do, then go all in on Amazon. I would never say that you have to sell on your own website and forget about Amazon. If you realize after you’ve launched on those both those platforms that Amazon is working better for you, you’re making profit, that’s when you switch those funds over to there. But at that point you have you know, you have multiple channels going already. You can take the profits you’re then making on Amazon, if that’s working for you, and then test out new angles at Sony on your website is all about the angles and the hooks. And once you get it right then it’s just about scaling. But getting it right means it takes some time to get there. And so that’s the process I would do and then the wildcard you mentioned it is TikTok Shop like we’re not on there yet. But the next time that I’m on a podcast, I want to give you results because I plan on getting onto TikTok Shop. Because I believe that for the first time ever, we have a competitor for Amazon, we may say or think it’s Walmart, but Walmart’s a different game, different clientele, they’re slower to the game, they’ll get there eventually, tic tock is kinda like Amazon, they got lots of money, lots of cash, they’re very big into the newer younger audience, they want to go out there and become another place to shop. And I think their investments are going to mean, it’s going to be like Amazon 10 years ago, for us, it’ll be easy to sell for the first couple years, because not a lot of people out there, there’ll be incentives make it happen, they’ll, they’re gonna like help get everything going for you being very open to sellers, helping sellers, where, you know, Amazon’s not really that way, or they weren’t that way in the beginning, either. But TikTok, I think is going to be the next big thing. And sales, it could fall flat on its face, the biggest risk factor is going to be if they get shut down, and you can’t sell there. So I wouldn’t go all in and say I’m only going to sell there. But I do think that if I were selling now, once a month on my website, Amazon and Walmart, I would very quickly give up on selling on TikTok to be one of the early adopters because it may not work all you lose a little bit of time, maybe a tiny bit of money. But if it works, I have a funny feeling. We’re going to start seeing some really big success stories. Because things will just go viral over there when they don’t have that ability to go viral and other places.

Josh Hadley 51:20

Yeah. Mike, I love that breakdown. I think that’s a very like pragmatic approach to all of this. And you know, with TikTok Shop you I love the nickname you gave it truly as a wildcard like we have no idea this, it could either be wildly successful could fall flat on its face. But the one thing that TikTok has going for his got all the eyeballs right now, everybody say and that’s one thing that Amazon’s known for quick delivery speeds and stuff right now. Right? And so anyways, we could go into this whole conversation of, you know, what, what, what we believe tick tock needs to have in order to actually compete with Amazon, but it is true. That’s where a lot of eyeballs are. I wanted to add one extra kind of like, I guess food for thought for you here, Mike. And for our audience. Most importantly, you know, when we first started on Amazon, we saw a lot of success, right? We did seven figures, our first full year on Amazon. But then, you know, we had heard so many times like diversify, diversify, diversify, because you never know if Amazon’s gonna suspend you, you’re gonna wake up one morning, and it’s all gonna be down, right? And so we started trying to go on to Shopify. And initially it didn’t work very well for us. And then we’re, we said, well, now we need to create a blog in order to drive traffic to this, you know, Shopify store. And then if we do have a blog, we need to have these videos and tutorials in this YouTube channel, right? So all of a sudden, we started racking up these kind of like six-figure salaries across the board to support this channel, that actually wasn’t really producing much revenue at all right. But Amazon still continued to turn out good revenue for us, right. So Amazon was kind of feeding this, call it a passion project or diversification project, but it never really lived up to its full potential. COVID hit us right in the middle of the face. And then we said, Alright, screw the extra channels, right now, let’s make sure we fully maximize everything we can out of Amazon, and then start putting our attention to these additional channels. And so the one lesson that I think I’ve learned is that if you are going to experiment with these other channels, there is a lot of power in partnering with whether it be an agency, or other people, if you have deep pockets and you want to pay somebody six plus figures that knows how to run and drive traffic to Shopify storefront, then go do that right goes back to the book, who not how my biggest recommendation would be this. Keep focusing on Amazon, if you’re having a lot of success on Amazon, keep launching new products and keep keep your eye on the ball there. But don’t take your eye off the ball to think that you need to go figure out Shopify by yourself, or that you need to go figure out Walmart or even TikTok by yourself, make sure you’re bringing in experts. And I think you’ll have a better I guess outcome. Overall. I mean, Mike, any thoughts that you would have on that in terms of like, entrepreneurs only have a limited amount of time? Do you double down? Or do you need to diversify? What are your thoughts on that?

Mike McClary 54:30

I think that if you’re going to diversify, which I still think everyone should diversify, even if it’s not going all in. I think just having you know, being everywhere all the time. Makes sense. Like the movie came out. What is it? You know, everywhere? I don’t, I can’t think of him everywhere all the time. Whatever it is that the kung fu movie, we’ll call it. Yeah. That came out right when we were getting into Shopify, and I think there’s a lot of value in being everywhere because your customers will see you the look for you everywhere. Having that brand gives you more leads. So I think you do diversify. But do you have to like say that this next three months, I am going to put every effort towards a Shopify site, or Walmart, no, especially if you aren’t confident that it’s going to work for you, I wouldn’t do that if you have people that you can turn to to help you. And this is not a pitch for any kind of service out there. But you need, you need someone to guide you need training, you need people maybe to do it for you, those will shorten the timespan and lower the risk, those you can pretty much know exactly what those costs are going to be. If you do it yourself, you don’t know what your costs are going to be. Because you simply don’t know how much you’re putting at risk there. I think always finding trustworthy people to guide the way helps show you help do it if you need that is the way to do it. And if you realize that you don’t have the right brand or product to go and build on your own website, and Amazon is working for you stick with Amazon, like don’t, don’t give up what’s working for you. I’ve seen too many people launch products on Amazon, simply because we’ve been saying for a long time, I’m one of them says you can’t have one product, you gotta go out there and launch a lot of products. And it’s true, you need more than one because that one goes down, you need more. But if you take your eye off the ball on the one product that’s making 80% of your revenue, just because someone told you, you have to launch a product every month, that’s not a good formula for success. So stick with what works, never take your eye off what’s working, and then dip your toes into these other areas that we’re talking about. And once you see some movement, go a little bit deeper into it. If you don’t have time, like all of us being entrepreneurs, don’t find people who’ve done it who you trust, who aren’t just standing in front of a Lamborghini and try to get their services, try to get their training coaching services tool, whatever it is, you will lower your risk. And when you do that, because it can be a very tough business, there’s you know, there’s risk involved in every business, this is no different. It’s still the most amazing business out there. Because you can do it from your home, you got your office there, I got my home office here. I can’t imagine ever going into a physical office, again, this type of brand building business affords me the luxury to do that. And I want everyone to experience that. But you know, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy anymore. There’s money time risk involved in it. And being able to find who you trust to help you is invaluable, and will help save you. It’ll help you leapfrog, you know, years out into the future.

Josh Hadley 57:19

Yeah, Mike, well said, I really liked that I like the idea of like dipping your toe in the water, you know, and if you see something starting to hit, then go a little deeper, I think that is a fantastic approach to you

Mike McClary 57:32

know, one other thing I want to mention to Josh is that, in order to really build a brand and sell on your website, it’s different. You know, it’s different than just having a really good quality product to sell on Amazon on some other side as well. The week, the best advice to give to anyone was to sell on their website is only choose a product or only sell a product, that you can visualize how to stop someone who’s searching through Facebook to buy your product. If you don’t have a product that can do that, then I wouldn’t sell that product on our website. And it’s doing well on Amazon keeps on Amazon, because you can continue optimizing ads and do that. But the best way right now to get traffic on your website is Facebook, most people are scrolling through their feed on Facebook. And if you can’t get their attention, then that’s not the right product come back later when you have another product or focus on what’s working for you already. Because it is a different mindset for advertising. It’s interruption advertising, not you know, people are already looking for your product.

Josh Hadley 58:25

Yeah, yeah, I really liked that approach as well as think about your product and whether it could actually stop somebody in in their tracks. Fantastic. Well, Mike, as we wrap things up today, is there anything else on your mind that we haven’t yet addressed that you think our audience needs to hear to help them scale their business to eight figures and beyond?

Mike McClary 58:45

Always watch your risk. You know, don’t ever think that this is an easy business. It’s an amazing business. It’s a life changing business. I can’t imagine me not admitting this leap in the past, but I knew what I could afford. And I knew what I was willing to risk. I had good support from you know, my family here as well. And I had a high level of confidence with work but not 100%. So manage your risk. Make sure that if you’re doing this business, if you only have a few hundred bucks or a few thousand. Start slow, don’t go put money on a credit card. To try this business. You need to limit your risk. And I know that sounds weird to someone involved in selling e-commerce training and services. Firstly, I’m telling his limited risk, because I don’t want anyone to get screwed over and like to ruin their life. Not that that’s going to happen if you are smart about this and limit your risk. Go slow, do what you can do. Then you have an unlimited upside in this business. And you can get free training out there. You can go out there and watch YouTube just to make sure you know who to trust out there. You can get affordable training out there. There’s companies like us out there you can get great services out there from us Josh as well. Go for people you trust when you really want to build a business and even if it’s not us, just find someone you trust to guide the way don’t do this blindly. And then from there, the sky is the limit in this business, it still can happen. It’s just not going to happen overnight. anyone tells you that is lying to you, and they’re selling you something else.

Josh Hadley 1:00:08

Yeah. I love that. Good words of wisdom, Mike. Now as we wrap up the episode today, I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. So Mike, hear that three actionable takeaways I noted, let me know if you think I’m missing anything here. All right. So number one, we talked about one of the biggest levers in order to help scale your business, if it’s on Amazon right now to eight figures and beyond is optimizations and utilizing all of the tools that Amazon is giving two brand registered sellers, right, lean into the brand tailored promotions, lean into anything new that Amazon is giving us that could be the premium A plus content, maximize everything you can there. And one of the big ones is that the experiments, the AB testing experiments that Amazon is doing for you, all you need to do is simply upload, you know two different images and let Amazon run their analysis, right, they’re going to pick the winner, they’re incentivized to pick the winner because they want more revenue at the same time. So work with your partner, which is Amazon there and always be testing, don’t just do this once a year. Action Item number two, I’m going to argue should be implement the conversion bomb. We went into a very Mike elaborated in extensive detail how to set up that conversion bomb, and how impactful it can be truly like this is something that, as the name mentions, is going to increase your conversion rates and help blow up your sales in a good way. All right, so that’s action item number two. And then last but not least action item number three, I would say is going to be on the the Amazon advertising front, which is going to be optimized for profitability, right? Make sure and have that mindset that assume all your sales are going to have to come from PPC in the near future because they might well do that. And make sure you’re still profitable. Because if you’re not a maybe you need to be increasing your prices. The maybe those are more expensive keywords, then you can advertise on. And so go find those longtail keywords, but if you have that mindset, you’re gonna save money, but also be able to have money to be able to reinvest into your business and then continue to grow that for the foreseeable future. So Mike, is there anything else that you think I missed? That you would recommend?

Mike McClary 1:02:29

I think you summarized it. Well, those three, right? People take away those three items and implement them when they’re ready. And their business. Only positive things to come out of it.

Josh Hadley 1:02:39

Awesome. Well, Mike, now it’s time for you in the hot seat here with the three questions. Question number one is going to be what has been the most influential book that you’ve read and why.

Mike McClary 1:02:50

For me, the most influential has been the Three Simple Steps by Trevor Blake. I know for some people may think that he gets a little bit into the woowoo stuff, we’ll call it there. But the three steps that he teaches people, has helped change my life and helped me be more successful. And I recommend anyone who really needs to focus on being positive, growing their business, having more confidence, getting out of all of the negativity in the world. Read that book. It’s been a life changer

Josh Hadley 1:03:16

for me. That’s awesome. That’s one book I have never heard. So I’ve now got that on my list. All right. Awesome. Alright. Question number two here for you, Mike. What has been a new productivity tool or maybe software tool that you’ve recently discovered that you think is going to be a game changer? Well,

Mike McClary 1:03:36

it’s not new. Okay, so I’m kind of hard to say out here because I was gonna say, Google Keep it’s been around forever. For me, I use it all the time. Like I have it on my phone. I have it on my tablets. I have it on my computer. Anytime I have an idea or thought yeah, I’m gonna go I’m going in on this one. It’s Google Keep. There’s a dozen AI tools out there. There’ll be a dozen more tomorrow Google Keep is the place right now for me and it can be Evernote can be something else as long as you use it on every device you’re at whenever you have a thought an idea a website you see an ad come through on Facebook I do this all the time on my phone I see a great ad usually for a new age AI tool. I will snap a photo and put it in my Google keeps I want to come back to that later on. To me is the place I’m putting all my ideas and action items that right now so that I can be as productive as I possibly can my phone’s next to my bed. I don’t know about you, Josh. But if I have an idea at night, if I don’t write it down or capture it, I’m gonna be thinking about it all night long. And so it helps me sleep to pull up my phone jot it into Google Keep whatever use and then I can go to sleep because I know tomorrow I’m gonna be there review my notes on there, and it’s going to be there. So for me it is Google Keep it’s pretty good. It does the job. Multi-platform keeps me sane helps me sleep.

Josh Hadley 1:04:52

I love it. I love it. It sounds like you need to pitch, you need to be there sales ad.

Mike McClary 1:04:56

I know where’s the affiliate program for Google?

Josh Hadley 1:05:00

No, I love that. I think that is an exceptional idea. I think that too many people, they’re like, Oh, I’ll make a mental note of that, right? And then tomorrow morning, you wake up and you’re like, Oh crap, what was that guy’s had to remember. So I liked that idea a lot. All right. My last final question here, who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following? And why? Yeah,

Mike McClary 1:05:20

so I gotta give props to my business partner, Matt Clark. If you guys don’t know him, brilliant guy. I love how dedicated he is, and everything what he puts his mind to, but I can’t give him too many props, because we get a big head. So scratch that will still leave it in. Great guy, great guy to follow. I gotta like, I feel bad saying I shouldn’t say I feel that Alex Hormozi. Like, I used to think that he was over the top when it came to marketing. And the way his tactics, however, saw his last webinar got his last book, just wrapped it up a little bit ago today. It’s brilliant when it comes to like building a business and just giving away your best stuff for free. I love that. Because I love teaching people, I love sharing strategies, I want to see everyone be successful. He does that better than anyone I know, gives it all away. And that builds that reciprocity, people come back and still buy 10s of 1000s of books from him. His latest book is great, because it does talk about that give people your free stuff, the best stuff you have don’t hold anything back. And then when they asked to buy something for you, that’s when you sell and something I think is brilliant, and I’m gonna follow him more. I was always familiar with him. He’s got a lot more respect me already had a lot of spec naughty morth his latest strategy. And I think that’s something that anyone looking to sell anything could get a lot of value of..

Josh Hadley 1:06:38

Yeah. 100% echo that statement as well. Alex Hormozi. I follow his TikTok that’s always dropping knowledge bombs there, which is awesome. Well, Mike, thank you so much for your time today. If people want to continue to follow you, learn more about what you do even, you know, hear from you more, where should people be following you?

Mike McClary 1:06:59

Well, I am on Instagram. And you can see me there. I don’t post a lot out there. And when I do, it’s usually a dad joke. But every once in a while, I’ll just go and share some kind of strategy out there too. So I’d follow me on Instagram. They want to reach out to me just go to Amazing.com That’s our company’s site, shoot an email to Support@amazing.com. They’ll get it to me, I read all my emails, I respond to all of them. It may take me a little bit of time. Because there’s there’s quite a bit but Amazing.com is the best place to go out and find out about me about all the free training. We have our other products out there as well. And I love here for people so don’t don’t feel bad about reaching out.

Josh Hadley 1:07:37

Awesome. I love that. All right. Well, Mike, thank you again for your time. If people aren’t following Mike, I encourage you to do so, because Mikey shared a ton of knowledge with us all today. So thanks again.

Mike McClary 1:07:47

Thanks, Josh. I love being here. Can’t wait to do it again.

Outro 1:07:51

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