Jamie Davidson 6:11
Yeah, so essentially, a couple of things it was like, so my partner, Jason, again, who I have some of you guys, if you’ve heard any of her background, the past, because my next door neighbor, he’s a native from from China, was in the US for about 30 years. And he was a software consultant. And again, I was like this hired gun, CEO and other deal was as Chief Operating Officer, then a chief, and the CEO of these, these private equity firms, where they would hire me, dropped me into these companies they bought to either turn them around or to grow them. So this Amazon thing was different. But a lot of the fundamental principles apply, especially as you get to bigger scales, because the businesses I was a part of before were much bigger, I didn’t have a lot of startup experience, I’d been more kind of big corporations. And so a couple of things helped us one he had a he can, he was a software consultant. So he basically from Microsoft, or using Microsoft systems or an Oracle systems. So we had that mindset going in, which helped us early on, which was that the way we knew is like, Hey, we’re not necessarily experts on any given product, but we understand systems, we understand data really well. And, and we’re good enough to recognize that, you know, we need to become good at product, we need to understand how that works. But even from the beginning, we were pretty good at that in terms of setting up system, that’s part of the reason we were able to scale to even eight-figure. So quick, we said we used it is different now but you know, we used it still in existence, like so we use NetSuite pretty much to customize all aspects of our business. Because in Jason’s case, that was his expertise. So we essentially, you know, set up a process and a software process, outside of what you know, Amazon had for every aspect of our business. And we can go into some of those things. But so whether it’s the logistics, or whether it’s obviously logistics is a big one, but eventually even became, you know, as we expand product, but the two things that really changed. That allowed us to kind of break through to that next growth level was we decided to really build a team. So we had a team, again, about 20 people, eventually about 30-40 people here. And even that team was growing even bigger. This we actually built the entire team over in China. So Jason moved to China during these periods of time. And we built a large team, so you don’t have to do it the same way. Obviously, he’s from China speaks Mandarin. So it worked well, but basically built a 200 plus person team in Shenzhen, China that’s still in existence. And so which was unique, that helped us because the cost of the employee was about a third of what we were paying here in Atlanta, the retention of the employee was much greater. And, and the other thing that helped in China, I think it’s probably exists in the Philippines a little bit, but I haven’t done on a scale is there. There’s like a whole economy of people around Amazon. So the ability to hire people in Amazon space, like if we needed a fluent French speaking person that had experienced in Amazon, we could actually hire that in a week here in Atlanta, you know, it was very difficult way to train everyone on Amazon. So, the first one was definitely the team building. And we can dive into that around there. And the second one was, was the product side too, because we actually had never, we, I think it was one of our strengths. We never left the cell phone accessory space, you know, up to about the $60 million mark. So hence, we were one of the biggest players in the US in that space. But we never went into another category until after that, and I can talk about some of the reasons why we stayed so focused in our lane until we felt like it was time to go to the next level.
Josh Hadley 9:45
I love that there’s so much that we can break down there. Jamie, let’s talk about first you know, the team building aspect of it. So talk about you know, 200 people, what are the different roles and departments. So maybe that’s probably the best place to start, right is what were the core departments that you had. Because you also talked about, you know, having an ERP system. So you mentioned, you know, everything was running through NetSuite. So if people aren’t familiar with NetSuite, basically, what is that at a high level? Jamie?
Jamie Davidson 10:18
Yes. So NetSuite, which is owned by Oracle, is basically a tool that you can leverage, I guess, compared to in some ways, you know, if you guys are familiar with like Salesforce, essentially, it’s the ability to connect and automate, you know, every aspect of your business, but have a certainly a database. on your end, again, whether it’s everything you get from Amazon, whether it’s your sales, or could be customer data, reviews pulling into it, it could be your personnel. So kind of every aspect of our business, we try to connect into our own kind of data warehouse, or data mart, you know, outside of external systems that we don’t own, like Amazon, and other platforms. Yeah. So
Josh Hadley 11:01
it kind of helps like, plug everything together. Big enterprise system. Yeah. So that’s the first portion. Tell me about the overall team structure, then what were the different departments that you had that you hired, that really helped kind of escalate? Yeah, so.
Jamie Davidson 11:16
So yeah, it goes back, I was starting to say about, you know, what is the reason why besides that we wanted to grow more. But what’s the reason why we didn’t just keep building the team here in Atlanta, and we still, you know, our warehouse down the road, it’s about 15 minutes from where I am now, you know, we’ve got a you know, right now, it’s about a 30. It’s about a 35,000 square foot warehouse. And, you know, there’s warehouse guys all through that place. And that’s kind of a little bit of a staging area for us, we can fill some international orders, and we also sell on a lot of other platforms besides Amazon. So it’s essentially our own three PL. And again, when we started this two, there wasn’t really, you know, three PLS, other people were, so we had to do it all ourselves Anyways, if I was doing it again, today, I’d probably, you know, probably would not necessarily build our own or lease out our own warehouse and build a team and manage the team. But so we have to have that in the US. So what we figured out is, what things do we need here, and what things do we not. And so the challenge, for example, an easy one is, let’s say, Our marketing team, so all of our marketing team was always here. So PPC management, the listing optimization, the, you know, any kind of besides, you know, we’re good size business, so we’re working with Amazon, we did a lot on the vendor central side as well, too. So we’re managing all of that here. And what happens a lot of times when we were hiring people, is, first of all, they’re fairly expensive, like, we pay that to pay, let’s say, $55,000, for a marketing person here, and that has no experience with Amazon. But you know, they have some other experience in the in the marketplace here, we train them up, they want to get course, they want to get paid more money, and often, we can’t retain them, because they’ve they’ve developed these skills, now they want to go, you know, make 80,000 or 100,000. And, or they’re just like, not as focused, you know, so they’re just not interested in what it takes here. So part of it was understanding, you know, there’s a retention ability and, and the cost of it. The other one is just, you know, we’re gonna grow out the team is Yeah, what do we need for the team? And so, to your question, there, a couple things is, and this obviously, depends on your product, but in our case, our products, you know, part of the beauty of our product is, well, it’s not a consumable that you order every month, it is a consumable, that periodically, you know, pretty much every, at least every couple, two years, most people are upgrading their phone, if they’re an otherwise just buying new devices. And so we had this built-in cycle, right, every time there’s new iPhone, launch, a new galaxy, etc, that there’s this massive launch. And so for us product development is a really big deal. So we had basically built out a 20-plus person, product development team. And again, all based in China. And I’ll say anytime I’m saying based in China, what I would say for anyone else is, again, consider other markets, you could do the same thing doesn’t need to be China, like said it, maybe it’s the Philippines. Or maybe it’s you know, maybe it’s Costa Rica or somewhere else. But or for development, maybe it’s Ukraine, around certain things. But so that was big for us, because we kind of made ourselves, we force ourselves to view ourselves as a product development company, that if we came out with good products, good designs, we knew we’d have the systems and everything else, you know, the Amazon model is amazing. So we knew we could be really successful, but for us product was, you know, first and foremost, because it’s a very competitive industry that we’re in it’s that and supplements are like the two most competitive spaces. So you know, we had to have creative design. So it’s like the equivalent of the top college graduates in the US like out of like, here in Atlanta is like Georgia Tech. We basically have graphic designers and people go over there big monitors with all sorts of crazy designs and for doing so, that’s unique to that, you know, our products and so, you know, that’s one or the other one approach we had this was interesting and now at scale is interesting is whether you have so many partners that want to manage things for you. So like, obviously PPC, there’s a lot of great agencies out there, everything else. We never outsourced our PPC. So there are certain things we want to keep in-house. And we’ve had some discussions with some of the biggest players out there, we always felt like we wanted our eyes on everything. So we have a really big kind of PPC slash account management team. And that’s like, time, it was like 40, by probably close to 50 people managing like eyes on individual listings, accountable for what’s going on. So you know, it’s a little bit nuanced in terms of what’s pure PPC, what’s kind of like account or listing optimization. But those two, those two are big, just because again, we just never felt we could completely automate it. And it was such a big factor. There’s a bit of an art and science to like, when we’re getting ready for a rollout the iPhone is coming out, are we’re willing to spend more on a cost to get a certain rank, and, and so forth. So I’ll pause there, but you know, we can I can continue on more of the team as needed.
Josh Hadley 15:59
Yeah. I mean, this is so juicy. I think the product development is so key, right. And I think we’ll double down on that, because that is the lifeblood, I think of any business. And then, you know, the 40 to 50 account managers, PPC managers, you know, I’m a big believer in that as well doing it internally, we formerly had an agency that was doing our PPC ads, and to be honest with you, like, we have 1200 SKUs. And there’s just not enough time in the day for them to care. At the end of the day, they’re just trying to make sure that the A cos is somewhat in line tacos is okay, so that when they show up and present my report, it doesn’t look bad, right? That’s their job. As long as it doesn’t look bad, they’ll keep me around. But they’re not fully optimizing everything that possibly could, they’re not looking at my keyword ranks, they weren’t looking at, hey, here are the next opportunities for growth. There’s just let me keep the lights on for you. Right. And so I think that that is something that although it can be time consuming, and there’s some some learning and growing pains in order to bring that internally, but I think those two things that you just touched on product development, and then your PPC management, listing management, like those are, I think the core essentials, that any Amazon business, like they need to internalize all of those systems, if you want to really like get every, you know, squeeze the juice out of every lemon that you possibly can, you’ve got to do that internally. Would you agree with that? Jamie?
Jamie Davidson 17:30
Yeah, 100%. You know, it’s, it’s funny, I thought of an analogy doesn’t apply just to Amazon, it’s kind of as an entrepreneur, through business, just what you said, it reminded me of it, there’s an I’ve heard a cruder way of describing this analogy, but I’ll, I’ll go with one that’s more fitting to me, which is, like there’s, you say, like in your personal life, there’s, there’s a lot of things that are not worthwhile for you to do like, as, especially as you get busier and you make more money, your the time the value of your money goes up, or that sorry, the value of your time goes up. So maybe cleaning your house or maybe help cooking or maybe whatever it is, it makes sense to outsource things, or let’s say your yard work, right. So those things make sense. But like taking your wife out on a date, like, you don’t want to outsource that, right. So like, so using that extreme example, like there’s certain parts of your business, that should be kind of kind of what you were alluding to, that, even if it’s like not your core expertise, personally, you should try to find a way to, to have it internal, as much as possible, because it’s just what you described. And I’ve lived and learned this experience, and failed enough times where a lot of times where it’s something you don’t it’s kind of painful, it’s hard, you want to outsource and hope it’s going to be a magic bullet. And you always realize, because just what you said, no one’s going to care more about your business than you and or you and your team. And so it’s just, it’s just difficult. So yeah, you know, 100%, you find that balance of trying to like, you know, you don’t want them to be in the stone age’s, where they’re doing everything manually, but you try to find ways to augment their productivity as opposed to shift the responsibility outside your organization.
Josh Hadley 19:04
Yeah. And I think that there’s a time and a place for everything, right? It’s like, okay, you might be able to, you know, offload something to an agency to begin with, but you better have a plan of how I’m going to bring this in internally. Right. And that was always the thing that we had is like, in the back of my mind, I knew that PPC would be best optimized with our own internal team. But let me give this to an agency to at least get it good enough to where we could build out the rest of the team and then start breaking things internally. So it is kind of stepping stones there. But I like your analogy. Yeah.
Jamie Davidson 19:36
And like I said in the it’s interesting, I’ve just learned that in pieces. And again, even if we were talking about podcasts earlier, like personally, I just like to learn enough to be dangerous for something. So it’s not that I want to become a podcast expert, but I want to know enough. So if we do have someone externally, we know the right questions to ask. And like I said, it’s you have the right oversight, otherwise, you can’t do it. And the other thing I’ll add to that we did, again, because of the size of the team, we did hire more senior managers to so we basically hired, basically called them GM, GM. So we had like three general managers that we hired over there. So we had like a GM ahead of just product design, as well to basically we had the head of marketing over there. And then we had an overall kind of country, GM, who they kind of tied into as well, that was managing because you know, when you start scaling, if you guys were at when you mentioned 1200, SKUs, right, we had, we had a little over 2000 skews. So when you’re dealing with that number of people, then there’s becomes a lot more. Again, you have to have an HR department, you got to manage the team. And so there was there certainly on the ground leadership that we have over there, to this day, in order to make all this work.
Josh Hadley 20:51
Let’s keep diving a little bit further into that team structure then. So we talked about product development team, PPC account management team, what other teams and departments did you have set up? Yeah,
Jamie Davidson 21:01
so there’s also a logistics team. So the logistics team. And again, I guess the number doesn’t really matter, because you should just hire the number of people that makes sense. And over time, you know, you can hopefully can do more with less. And so, you know, again, the numbers aren’t necessarily apples to apples for what’s needed for for someone else. But you know, so we had a 20 plus person logistics team. Because when, you know, we’re selling in, you know, we’re selling the marketplaces globally, obviously, amazon.com, the US was, was big for us. But we’re pretty much in every market that we could be in. We’re also selling on other platforms. Recently, we use like ChannelAdvisor. But we’ve been with Walmart for a long time, we had retail, we’ve kind of gone back and forth with retail to go in or go out of different places like BestBuy or Lowe’s. But anyways, all of that requires that each of those, you know, whether it’s a whether Amazon or off Amazon, or Amazon within different countries, requires a lot of coordination, obviously, to get the product where it needs to be whether it’s going to Amazon, whether it’s going to, you know, a warehouse are going to our warehouse here. So a lot of that. So we have that team there. But we also had, where it makes sense, we kept the teams in the US too. So we have a logistics team here in the US that’s on this side that manages this side. And so again, where the pieces where we thought we needed both on the China side, and the US was really the logistics side. And then on the marketing side, as well to see, again, this 20 person team, the marketing side over there, took some of that maybe design, like the any of the graphic design or how the products going to look. But there’s also an element of the language and how things are presented the copy. So all of that we have a process that goes from the China team, it goes to the US team, the US team has final review of everything, because of the native language nuances. And as you know how bad it can be if you’re off, not just in English, but if you’re selling in any country, and if you don’t understand the proper English or the proper, proper language. So yeah, so we basically have redundancies in certain areas of the business where it makes sense. So like logistics big over there. But we also have that here in the US. The marketing, what we did not have in China, but we kept here in the US was all the influencer in social media marketing. Because we felt like That was an area that really our China team just wasn’t equipped to be to understand it to be as effective at it, compared to our team here in the US. So you know, says instead of a big market team in the US, we had a small, you know, a group of like four or five people here, that we’re working with all the influencers, YouTube, Instagram, all those things, but we felt that was more much more important to be, you know, us facing within the within the market. Yeah.
Josh Hadley 23:47
Makes makes a lot of sense. What were some of the key drivers of revenue for you, right, if you could boil down everything, which I mean, you had so much going on, you’re selling globally into multiple marketplaces. Right? You’re also you’ve got a marketing team that’s doing influencer campaigns, you’ve got new product development, what would you say was like one of the most important levers out of the entire business? Yeah.
Jamie Davidson 24:13
And so I was thinking like the period of Amazon, it changes in terms of like, the tactics or so the tactics of what you could use. And so kind of transparent enough share this for like, it was definitely the Wild West, we talked about Blackhat and things like that. That was like the standard operating process. And again, we’re kind of like a US competitor. We’re a US based company. But we’re have my fellow founders are Chinese as well, too. So the tactics are very aggressive if people think of the Chinese tactics and we were competing against the most competitive people in the space early in the days and gamma like we’re way ahead of Amazon, like they don’t understand the tactics that you’re doing. But they also have strict rules around certain things. Like you couldn’t have any multiple accounts back then. So you know, so a lot of the things that to happen in the space, and you guys have heard of things that it was a lot of the top players were people that had software backgrounds, computer science backgrounds, because there was like intense, painful process we’d go to, to launch a product where we had 100 computers buying our products we had like, all through VPNs, like there was just, you know, so it was all very kind of, quote unquote, against Amazon’s Terms of Service, not stuff that we can do today, or anyone should, should recommend doing otherwise, still does go on. But literally, that was across the board. Every competitor was doing it. So it was kind of a crazy, we’ve met with Amazon, I remember at the CES conference and told them like, hey, if we followed all your rules, we wouldn’t have had a business. And they’re like, Yeah, we know. So but because, you know, we’re just we’re not say we, but people were just figuring stuff out ahead of time. So the reason I bring that up is the tactics were what helped us is that we could continually adapt and understood what the next kind of wave brought to us. But to your question, you know, one of the approaches, and I remember, my partner, Jason was always good about this. So if we talked about branding, like how we’re gonna brand, like the name of our product, whatever, we knew the Amazon platform, like we did not, you know, we did not give a damn about brand. And all we want to do is just sell art, the way we’re going to build our brands, we’re going to sell a crapload of our product is going to be good. And the platform does it. So it’s not like a traditional business. And in other ways we didn’t want to spend money, the only thing we did is we really didn’t want to focus, even though we basically had a guy that with a small, very small team that manage Walmart, manage the other platforms, we wanted, like 100% of the focus really to be on the Amazon platform. As much as possible. We didn’t care that our margins were higher on our own website, what we cared about was the keyword rank, and the volume and the reward we got from amazon for being that so I think strategically that that helped us but then tactically, yeah changed, like the influencer stuff. We didn’t do that until, I mean, actually, on the 100, we basically didn’t figure that out till like 2018 was when we pivoted and started, you know, going to that approach. But the, you know, I think nowadays we’re talking about, like tactically, it’s, you know, it’s a lot more about in different way about external traffic. And we can talk about some of these things, but it’s just, it’s in a different way than we did it back originally, there was a period of time where Google worked, and then a lot of the external traffic didn’t work as well. And now Amazon has a different perspective, they want more external traffic. And they’re, they’re making sure that doesn’t all go to Shopify. So again, certainly the tactics today are different. But ya know, the big lever for us was, was establishing this keyword rank and Q4 was like, like, we kind of knew that most the year that we were planning our, our little seed, and then we were just harvesting from October to sometimes we turn PPC off during during Q4, and we’re just raking in the profits as much as possible through that last period.
Josh Hadley 27:49
Fascinating. Fascinating. You also touched on you know, the two big things that you said, you know, kind of grew your business from that 50 million to that nine figure mark was team building. We talked about that. And then product development. Tell me a little bit more about why did you have a team of 20 plus people just focused on product development? Why do you feel like that was such an important factor in that growth to 100 million plus?
Jamie Davidson 28:14
Yeah, so even though we didn’t have, you know, a background, a third partner with us was was with Coca-Cola and was a was pretty good product guy. But it was interesting, we did develop our and I think anyone can do this have your own product, write your own, say your own cell phone case. And the thing about our product is it has to be perfect. Meaning like if it doesn’t fit, right, if the specs are a little bit off, it’s kind of useless, right? If it doesn’t fit, then it’s no good. And so what was also unique is, So Amazon is or Amazon sorry, Apple specifically was very secretive about what the new product was that was coming out. And we’re providing, you know, we’re trying to the day they announced their new iPhone or any other phone that’s out there, we need to have a, it’s a race to who has the product ready to go first. And so a little behind the scenes area. So there was a good there’s a million plus people in China working probably more than that now, working specifically on the iPhone, to produce it and created there. And so there’s a black market to build a pay to get access to understand the exact specs of what the new phone is going to be, you know, and you know, we paid I think, to get like a real iPhone, I think cost like $80,000 to get one for like four hours of the specs. Interesting. You get a model of it, not an actual one, but just like a mock up of it for like I don’t know, $15,000. But so just to put that in context of like how important our product has to be. If, if it’s a surprise and we’re wrong, like initially, then we’re screwed because what we gave the manufacturer, if it’s the wrong size and feature so that’s one aspect is just making sure your product is is functional. The other one is, which I think is probably more applicable is just for anyone who’s selling product, again is how you’re differentiating your product. And so in our products case, first, were pretty kind of male driven, our designs were more, we found we had more men customers. And then some of our competitors had like, the other turning the iPhones into, or the cases into like a really high end purse, you know, like, or jewelry or accessories and all these things. So essentially, it’s like you needed a design team to come up with all these possibilities for your product. And when you find winning designs, it’s like, it’s very lucrative, right? So like, it’s not just this. So we got into like, the Nintendo Switch cases, something like that. And when you make, you know, a product, that’s really, really good, the market rewards you. So it had a lot to do with, yeah, differentiating, understanding, and we would be very critical of our own product. And just like, you know, hey, this isn’t good enough, send it back. A lot of its some of its guessing and testing, we have products that we have plenty of products that we thought were going to be home runs. And, and didn’t quite take off. And then we have some others were like, Oh, that did better than than we expected, especially as we got into some of the other categories.
Josh Hadley 30:56
Very interesting. And I think is one of the overall takeaways is that it was kind of like, you’re testing new markets, right? It was, we didn’t just stay here, you mentioned like, we stayed here in this specific accessories niche for a while, and then we started to expand Tell me about that aspect. And was that a big component?
Jamie Davidson 31:18
Yeah, so we say like, you know, we have a few 1000 different SKUs is just within that category is because, again, a couple reasons. One is our product. So let’s say the iPhone 6, while some people still own the iPhone 6, so even years later, like, you know, an adapter for the iPhone 6, we can still carry, obviously, the sales go down. And but you know, obviously, there’s cables, and there’s endless type of things you can have. So one of the brands we bought earlier was another, there was another case business that was a little more female, generated, and it became actually became bigger than our other other brand. But there was such a big opportunity that we didn’t want to, you know, there’s something called diversifying, there’s also a phrase called D worse define. So sometimes you can you diversify too soon, or try to go after other markets too soon, versus being like going really deep, really focused. The reason we went so deep is because the Amazon platform is crazy that we could sell in the US we sell in Canada, we could become we’re just a local, you know, we’re just some local few people here that built a team that is now a global business. And in a very short period of time, that we didn’t want to overly complicate it with to go into the pet space, which we didn’t really have a specific idea, the way we did it, and you can do it now faster. You know, I know people that launched three brands and three different categories from the get-go strategically, and then, you know, exit those brands, that wasn’t really the focus. And here there, there wasn’t like, we didn’t know if these businesses are sellable, or any of that stuff. So, you know, we’re building these for, to grow into to kind of cash flow, more so than as an asset. But the way we got into is when is when it made sense is a lot of times we had so many people approaching us about business ideas and offers. So for example, the first category went to his pets, besides our main one. And the way that came about was another person in our neighborhood, Chinese native, his family owns a manufacturing for like the pet for the poop bags over there. So we did a deal with them. So it’s like, Alright, so we have an edge, because we have a manufacturer we’re doing a deal with. It wasn’t super lucrative at first, like we were kind of breakeven for like a year. But then once we got into that market, then it was just, you know, then it was just recurring revenue and recurring profit. And because people order that, you know, they’re, they’re consumable, those products. So, notice, when we got into different products, eventually we got into fitness, we got to it was, we had some idea and angle, we did have the team in place. Going back to the team, we have a team that’s researching the market and going out up making a proposal and deciding which, you know, the branding, what’s the brand going to be if we go in the fitness space, it just became much more systematized and I always say it’s not that we put the odds in our favor wasn’t that 100% of products to be successful. But you know, more times than not, we’re gonna succeed.
Josh Hadley 34:02
I love that. I think the key word that you talked about there is, you know, you had things systematized, right. And so it was, hey, yeah, we could venture into these other categories now, because we’ve systematize things because we went so deep. We learned all the ins and outs. Now let’s go replicate that. Now. I think, Jamie, let’s kind of peel it all back now and come back to reality. Because I think, you know, for entrepreneurs like myself, I’m not at nine figures. And I’m thinking like, wow, those are some massive teams to have to orchestrate everything that you just talked about. So let’s boil it down to really the ideal, you know, a client that you’re currently serving and coaching right now are those six, seven, and even eight figure businesses that want to scale. So how do you take all of the great knowledge that you just shared now to say, Alright, here’s how that looks to move a business from seven figures, to eight figures and beyond. These are the systems that I would focus on. Tell me more about how this all relates to growing a seven to eight figure business.
Jamie Davidson 35:04
Yeah, so a couple things that come to mind because I think of things that are just different how we look at things, verse verse, Then is one is because of the market, you know, there’s software, provided there’s masterminds, there’s all this. There’s a whole ecosystems that’s been created within the Amazon community. We did everything in secret, right? So no one knew who we were, we’re just in this warehouse. We didn’t network very much with people. And so now you have this opportunity, of course, to connect in and, you know, really dial into alpha. And it’s part of the reason. Like, I believe that it’s not that one person is the expert or guru, but tapping into figure out what your core competencies are, but leverage a lot of the other resources out there and people out there that you can pull in to help figure out you know, how you want to get there, as far as the specifics in terms of going from it is also like, hey, what’s the current environment? What the reason we’ve been successful, we could always reinvent our strategies every year, it wasn’t that because you know, how you got reviews in 2015, where you could like pay someone to say, as long as I left a fair and honest review on bias review, even though it was totally paid for, you know, that went away, people think, oh, no, I can’t do that. And then there’s a new show, there’s always new way. So part of the reason I say you want to be plugged into people, and again, I can name is there’s a group of people that I really like and trust in different elements of the business that I think are good that you want to constantly just be able to plug into, like, I need to get reviews and 2023 or 2024. You know, how does that work now? And there’s it’s? So that’s one thing. And the other one, is it a lot of it’s just the unsexy fundamentals, which are the same in terms of, you know, systematizing things, and you got to find out stuff that you’re spending a lot of time on, that there’s this natural tendency, things like, well, you know, they can’t do it as well as I can do. But you’ve got to really challenge yourself to, to invest the time to take things off your plate so that they can be automated, but you’re happy to go into any specifics as worthwhile. Yeah.
Josh Hadley 37:02
What are some of the actionable strategies that you’ve seen? And maybe do you have any case studies that you could share with some of the people that you’ve coached? Sure, you help them implement certain strategies that really helped them, you know, scale their business faster? Yeah. So
Jamie Davidson 37:17
one gal, women with me now, Joey Roberts has come aboard part of our team, Joey went from zero to a million and like our little over 1,000,012 months, I say with us, I mean, it’s really, there’s a lot of really cool things we did. But one of the big things, and also know this from also helping people exit their business and sell their business is your margins are so critical in your business. And so one thing Joey, did really well, which is this focus, and she talks about this, and she took it to the extreme a little bit is like she wanted to profit at least $100 in every unit sold with her product. And that was the mindset she came in with, which is it takes a little bit of a unique product. So you can do that meaning she was selling the product for $250 to $300. But she achieved that. So she got to that part. And then the other one, what I found with people that are successful, that are selling stuff, is the inventory management, right. So a lot of people screw that up all the time. So you know, I’ve told a lot of people who’ve helped to, you know, buy three golden rules are never run out of stock, never run out of stock, and never run out of stock. And most people ourselves included. So you’ve got to really focus on that aspect of the business and understand it, not just from an Amazon, you got to understand the retail game of how turning inventory, the return on investment of that cash, how that works. So you got to put a lot of time, especially you know, for that seven, eight figure mark, you’ve got to get that part dialed in. And again, there are some more tools now and people help you solve it. But you lose a lot of money for a lot of reasons, including your keyword rank. Anytime you run out of stock. So it’d be a big one. The other one I’d say is just obviously, the time you listen to us, obviously API’s. There’s a lot of stuff going on there. But it’s not that AI is a magic bullet, but look at what tools could help make your team better around that. So for AI, you know, there’s plenty of tools out there now to help you, for example, like challenge your mind to think about any aspect of your business and how you can leverage AI for it. So for example, like SOPs and systems, right, what are the best tools and processes out there that can help write great SOPs, or have your team or your virtual assistants do this and do it, you know, at a 10x rate than what they did without it?
Josh Hadley 39:22
Yeah, yeah, I think one of the key takeaways, especially on the AI front, and I continue to tell my team this is that a chat GBT isn’t going to be here to replace anybody’s job. It’s to actually make everything you’re doing that much better. And that much quicker so that we can continue to just scale without, you know, you can just get a lot more done. But here’s the key thing that I tell them, chat GPT brings you all the ideas and also things that you never would have considered and it can also streamline things and put it together more quickly. But at the end of the day, a human need To oversee that process, make sure that the prompt going in is kind of going to lead to the end result that you’re looking for. And then secondly, with the response that you get back, whether it’s writing a blog article or responding to an email, or whatever you have it set up to do, you need to make sure that that’s dialed in, and that, hey, add in the extra context that you need to. It’s not just a, hey, my emails are now on autopilot. Whenever somebody emails me, AI shoots them an email, I can only imagine the mess that that would go out, because it’s like, Wait, did you actually pay attention? So I think that’s the key thing. Is there any other like high level things that you’ve learned with using AI?
Jamie Davidson 40:42
Yeah, I mean, that now just gave us kind of just what I described, even with our team in China versus us, like, we don’t say, oh, China Team, you guys handle all the marketing and push it out. And hopefully, it looks good enough. Like, no, we need a US person to review for the US market that this actually makes sense and works. You know, what I found is, you know, in this stuff’s moving so quick, so is listening to but things like trench trainable AI is really interesting. So things like customer service, I think is super, you know, to me that if they can learn, basically, so it can really learn about you, your company, your brand, in a way to represent again, I always think not 100% of solution, but if it can help resolve 80% people. So things like customer service, I think a massive one, obviously anything content creation is a super powerful again, as long as you have your eyes on it to review it, chat, chat, GPT or AI tool. Sometimes they lie, sometimes they make mistakes. So they’re not these perfect, perfect humans. They’re these extremely powerful things. But sometimes depending on how you prompt it, whatever else, it may go astray. So all the more reason you got to do it. But I mean, there are some absolutely amazing things those specific, like, let’s say your podcast of a tool can make it sound perfect. Well, in that case, like boom, there’s a simple use case, I’m going to implement that all the time. If it can help me create a certain tool or an SOP, you know, I’m going to do that. But mostly, like you said, I’m going to try to make my VAs and my team make them super VAs make them super team members so that we can all be more productive, we can all make more money, what are ways
Josh Hadley 42:11
that you think that human intelligence is still going to be required? Talking about, you know, the specific, you know, you’ve got logistics, you’ve got product development, we talked about PPC management, listing optimization, like what role does AI play? And then what role do humans need to end up playing, you know, as we try to predict what the future looks like, a year or two from now with how quick things are moving? Yeah, so
Jamie Davidson 42:37
I think I mean, the easiest one that comes to mind is just in terms of how do you put everything together the strategy, like anything in life, if everyone has access to something, right, then, you know, ChatGPT by itself is not a competitive advantage, because anyone can use it, right? So it becomes well how to use it differently with AI tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney, which does the images, you know, a lot of it’s, of course, is the prompting what you’re going to put into and how it can be different or more complex than, than how someone else does it. But beyond that, it’s like, you know how to think about how to put the pieces together from a strategy perspective in terms of your company, that doesn’t really change. Because AI is not a magic bullet to that the other thing too, like AI that can handle a lot of stuff quickly. But even even content, if you give a content too long, it gets very complex quickly. And it can, it likes to deal with things a little bit smaller. And so if you talk about your entire Amazon business components, like, again, you’re going to need to drill in on those. So it may be in a couple of years, this will change. But first, I think you should have the exact same kind of strategic mindset of every aspect of your business, and then just drill in there, you know, like AI is not new. It’s just at a different stage, obviously, right now. But, you know, companies like Cortana, they’ve been touting AI for the last couple of years. So it’s kind of a vague term, but it’s more about specifically, you know, where it can be really, really powerful. I mean, certainly things like listing optimization, some of those things almost become commodities, because every Amazon software tool is going to have that built in because it’s not hard to include it. The other thing to keep in mind, too, is ChatGPT right now that the AI tools, most of them don’t have access to the Amazon data. So there’s still you know, the Amazon API, like the core data from your account. These tools don’t necessarily know it unless, you know, I’m sure it’ll progress here continue to progress. So you got to keep in mind that it can be helpful, but at the end of the day, where you’re relying on your Amazon either need to connect it in there or manipulate it, or you need to, you know, not use AI in certain cases and still use some of the traditional methods outside of AI.
Josh Hadley 44:40
Totally agree, Jamie, I appreciate all of your insights that you’ve shared with us today. Is there anything that we haven’t necessarily touched on? Or anything else on the top of your mind that you think would help seven-figure businesses scale to eight figures and beyond based on your experience? Yeah,
Jamie Davidson 44:57
I think the seven to eight figures and again, you guys are there so you know, it’s hard, it’s messy, but you’ve done the hard part getting a successful product. So you can do it. That’s why it becomes the less sexy stuff around, around products around team building around really connecting into other people and you know, really leveraging other people that are have done it. So, you know, I’ve gotten a lot of people in the industry and people like, like Dima Cooper came and visited my warehouse, he’s close to, I think it was that eight figures are close to time, because I want to fly up and see your operation. Come on, in. So you know, find people and vice versa, like, he helps us with a ton of stuff because he’s really, really smart. And so find people that you can, you can connect with and, and look to help each other give value and see if they can give value is probably the big thing that’s helped us the last couple years. Awesome.
Josh Hadley 45:45
Love that. That’s great feedback. Now, Jamie, I love to leave each episode with three actionable takeaways for our listeners, hear that three actionable takeaways that I noted, you let me know if you think I’m missing something here. But first of all, the key parts that you talked about with growing and exploding your business from that 50 million to 100 million, came down to two things. And we’ll take those as our kind of top two. Number one is building out your team. And you address this, like as an entrepreneur, as you’re growing from six to seven to eight figures, what you are working on in the business should continue to change. But what you need to do is you need to offload things off of your plate in steps, right? You’re not gonna wake up tomorrow and be like, I got to offload everything, or I need to hire a CEO tomorrow. That’s not that’s not necessarily the step, what you do need to do, conduct a time study, understand where you spend most of your time. And then understand where is most of your time going, and can that thing be done at least 80% as well, if it’s done by somebody else, if so, SOP that process, it might be tedious to begin with, but sop it out, and then hire somebody to take that load off your shoulders. Because if that happens, you now have an extra, let’s say that took up 50% of your time, that opens up 50% more of your time to focus on other initiatives in the business to help it continue to grow. So that would be action item number one is like scaling out your team, systematically, you’re not going to have the 200 Plus team members that Jamie talked about tomorrow. But over time, you can build that out. Action Item number two is in product development. I don’t think we could talk about that enough. Number one, it’s not creating me to products. Number two, it’s staying on top of trends that are coming up in your aspect, it was, you know, what’s the latest iPhone going to look like? And how do we pay for and get early access to this information so that we’re ahead of the curve, right? So similarly, this should become a core focus in anybody’s business. What are the upcoming trends? And how do I get access or knowledge about these upcoming trends, because if you can get that first mover advantage, I mean, that can make a world of a difference, let alone that it’s continuing to refine your business, because old products launched in 2018 are just you know, there’s increased competition, designs change and what customers want changes over time. So you can’t just rely on a SKU or multiple SKUs that have done well in the past for you. Then, and then finally, action item number three is focusing on your profit margin and inventory management both of these together. I think, wherever you’re at in your stage of business, six figures, seven figures, eight figures, those are two ultra important aspects that you need to have dialed in. Do you have the profit margin, you need to continue to reinvest in new products? Right, and then making sure you’re never going out of stock with all of that, and we could dive so much deeper in there. But, Jamie, those are my three takeaways for our listeners. Is there anything you think I’m missing here?
Jamie Davidson 49:10
I love those, those are big ones. And I think you recapped it really well. Awesome.
Josh Hadley 49:15
Alright, Jamie, let’s get into my favorite three questions here that I ask every guest number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why yes,
Jamie Davidson 49:24
I think there’s there’s so many main ones. I think one of the ones is a little more nuanced is I like a lot is Blue Ocean Strategies. Blue Ocean Strategies, it basically talks around that most people compete in the red ocean, which is like where the sharks are all eating each other. And so you really want to it’s a really kind of fun, easy book, really challenge ourselves to find like you’re talking about the key to growth as you can’t rest on your laurels from years back into your products is to always be looking for new opportunities where it’s blue ocean you don’t have to worry about out as much, you’ll have some competition, but where it’s so much smoother sailing, and really try to challenge yourselves to find that because when you get the product, right, you know, this business so much easier there, part of the reason we grew so fast is because, you know, it was a blue ocean, there wasn’t people really doing this stuff. And as it got more competitive and choppy, then you got to kind of, you can still do well and refine it. But the more you can find those products and opportunities that are kind of blue ocean or kind of trending, or unique ways to stay, you know, kind of build those moats, the better you’ll do. So yeah, Blue Ocean Strategies. Yeah,
Josh Hadley 50:31
completely agree. Great recommendation. Question number two, what’s been your most favorite productivity or software tool that you’ve been using? that you think is a game changer?
Jamie Davidson 50:42
Yeah, I’ll share one. This is one more recently the last year or two, which is I’m a big fan of go high level. So if you guys have used the tools like click funnels, there’s all sorts of tools for email management, everything else. But a really pretty clever tool in terms of putting together all of your email, your text messaging, landing pages, your bunch of other things that you have, if you want content, course creation, websites, all this stuff, kind of all in one at a at a reasonable reasonable price. So yeah, voice mail drops, like the ways you can follow up with customers. Pretty powerful stuff and do it in a way that’s a lot cheaper than a lot of the tools were in the past.
Josh Hadley 51:23
Awesome. Go high level. Great recommendation. Alright. Last question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space and why?
Jamie Davidson 51:31
Alright, my last name two people or I gotta keep it one more.
Josh Hadley 51:34
Yeah, give it give us give us your
Jamie Davidson 51:38
So one of them. I mentioned before, who I said, came up shortly after I met him at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit few years back. We kind of hit it. It was the first event that Kevin King held there and was guy he was speaking which is, so Dima Kubrak was the final speaker. But we got to know me. Like two weeks later as i Hey, can I fly up to to meet with you. So Dima I think is one of the smartest people in the industry. He’s really fun, has a good time with it. But he’s built he’s really good at building businesses. So that’s that’s one. I’ve been asked that by, like a big aggregators in the room said, you know, who do you think the smartest guy in the room is that they should know? And Dima is the one I pulled out. And then the other one who’s I have a ton of respect for to is just is Carlos Alvarez. So Carlos and I both talked about the battle to nine figures back in the day, but, you know, Carlos, down in Miami, he’s got a massive following and group I just really respect his approach to the industry and his humbleness, his willingness to help and so much about earlier try to give value to each other or find people who can do it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a mastermind. He’s an example of someone when we’re together, I’ll, I’ll give him a couple of tips. And he’ll be like, Oh, my God, I’m gonna implement that right away. And the guy will like, you know, he’s given me so much to help me out too. So, but yeah, Carlos and Dima are probably the two that come to mind.
Josh Hadley 52:59
Awesome. We’ve had Carlos recently on the podcast, he will probably his episode aired, I think three or four episodes before yours. Perfect. So people should definitely go back and take another listen to Carlos this episode. Great conversations and great recommendations. Now Jamie, if people want to, you know get to know you a little bit more. They want to follow your journey. They want to learn more about AMZ Insiders and your coaching services. Where can people reach out to you?
Jamie Davidson 53:26
Yeah, just two ways. One is, Instagram is totally fine. You can feel free to DM me I think if you follow me it’s a little easier. But that’s JamieDavidson.official. So on Instagram there so love to hear from you. If if you’re interested in chatting and you want to get on a call, it’s I’ll give you it’s AMZinsiders.org/apply and essentially book a call, and we’ll chat with you to see if we’re a good fit to help you out. Whether it’s building your brand scouting or if you’re looking for advice to how to x it will give you tips whether we end up we’re good fit to help you or not.
Josh Hadley 54:00
Awesome. Well, Jamie, you’re highly respected in the industry. And I appreciate your time that you shared with us today and thanks for your insights.
Jamie Davidson 54:08
Thank you, Josh. Really appreciate it.
Outro 54:11
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