In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Adam Runquist (Adam Heist), an e-commerce entrepreneur who exited multiple Amazon brands. Adam shares insights from his five-week global travel adventure attending Amazon seller events, before diving into key strategies for e-commerce success: prioritizing product development, consistently A/B testing Amazon listings, and building external traffic sources. He also discusses personal productivity through his “three things” philosophy and recommends Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul for personal growth. The episode delivers actionable advice for sellers looking to scale their brands to eight figures and beyond.

Bullet Points:

Links and Mentions:

Tools and Websites
“Ecomm Breakthrough Consulting“: “00:00:58”
“YouTube Channel: Adam Heist, FBA Masterclass“: “00:02:04”

Actionable Takeaways
“Product Development”: “00:05:11”
“Listing Optimization”: “00:06:09”
“Driving External Traffic”: “00:08:22”

Books
“The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer“: “00:09:51”

Additional Notes
“Three Things Philosophy”: “00:10:20”

Transcript:

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Econ Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Previous guests include Kevin King, Stephen Pope, and Roland Frazier. Today I’m speaking with Adam Runquist, aka Adam Heist, and we will be talking a lot about lessons learned from exiting multiple brands and the new strategies he’s implementing with his new brands he’s working on. This episode is brought to you by Econ Breakthrough Consulting, where I help seven figure companies grow to eight figures and beyond. Listen, Adam, I started my business back in 2015 and grew it to an eight figure brand in seven years, but I made a lot of mistakes along the way. That made the path of getting to eight figures really take a lot longer than it needed to. There were times where I really had a lot of self-doubt, or whether my brand could actually become a household brand name and actually survive, and also dealing with cashflow issues and trying to make sure that I had the financial acumen to manage the books and to grow the business.

Josh Hadley 00:00:58  So to our listeners, those of you who have hit similar plateaus and want to know the next steps to take your brand to the next level. Then go to E-com Breakthrough to learn more. That’s ecom with two M’s. And as a special bonus to my podcast listeners, this month I’m giving away one $10,000 comprehensive business strategy audit session at no cost. All you need to do is email me at Josh at Ecom Breakthrough and plead your case as to why I should choose you and your brand to work with for this month’s strategy session. And if you don’t win this month, don’t worry. You’ll be entered to win for future months to come. Today I am super excited to introduce you all to Adam Runquist. Adam has spent nearly a decade in corporate life as a director for a fortune 300 energy company. This eventually led to the acquisition of a physical products brand, Goal Zero, a journey that inspired him to build and sell a number of his own Amazon centric Ecom brands. Adam now runs the YouTube channel Adam Heist, FBA Masterclass and numerous brands in the cycling niche.

Josh Hadley 00:02:04  So with that introduction, welcome to the show. Adam.

Adam Runquist 00:02:07  Josh, man, it’s, it’s good to be on here. Thanks for chasing me down and, and making this happen. Excited to chat with you, man.

Josh Hadley 00:02:12  Hey. Well, I’m appreciative of you joining the podcast here. I know we initially met at Kevin King’s Billion Dollar seller summit. You were speaking there, and, as soon as I saw you talk, obviously, I’ve been following your YouTube channel for a while. And once I heard you, you talk. I was like, I got to get this guy’s info, see if we can, twist his arm enough to get him onto the podcast. So thanks again for for coming on.

Adam Runquist 00:02:37  Yeah, man. Super grateful. We got to connect there, too. And, glad we got to parlay that into the chat today.

Josh Hadley 00:02:42  And you were. I guess you kind of just did a world tour over, what, a five week period, right? You went to seller sessions in London.

Josh Hadley 00:02:50  Billion dollar seller summit. Where where all did you go?

Adam Runquist 00:02:53  Yeah, it was interesting, man. So I did a ton of traveling kind of in my, in my college era, the typical kind of poor backpacker staying in hostels things. So I did that for I think a couple of months in my junior year of college and I’ve traveled, you know, here and there since then, primarily for business, you know, within the US and Canada for, for personal reasons. But, you know, I think a lot of why we do this is that we aren’t encumbered by the typical schedule and asking our boss for PTO. And hey, I can only take one week because my, you know, employees are going to, you know, or people at my corporate job are going to get kind of where’s Adam for for a week plus. So. So I took a step back. I’m like, you know, it’s been a minute since I’ve done that. And it kind of happened to align with the the spring schedule.

Adam Runquist 00:03:31  There was a ton of events in the Amazon space in the spring. So I started off in in the UK at several sessions live. And then I had a in May, and then I had another speaking engagement in Estonia early June, which is kind of the other side of Europe. And then I had the capstone at Billion Dollar Seller Summit, where we met in Puerto Rico, and it really didn’t make sense to fly. I’m in Utah, so it’s quite a jaunt to to get to Europe from that side of the US. So I’m like, you know, why don’t I just hunker down in Europe? And aside from those three venues, I kind of just let, let my inspiration take me where I wanted. So I ended up going to about 12 or 13 countries, four continents over five weeks. So it was, it was a gauntlet, but it was a super fun way to travel. And it kind of reinvigorated that, that travel bug in me. So it was super sweet. So, yeah, I spent some time in the UK, did a five day hike in Portugal.

Adam Runquist 00:04:21  my origins are Sweden, from my Swedish from my background. So I got to go to the motherland for the first time, which was cool. and then went to Morocco. So I hit Africa up briefly and then went to the Middle East, to check out Tel Aviv. There’s a ton of people in the Amazon space in Israel, so got to kind of reconnect there and go to a buddy’s wedding, went to Dubai and then and wrapped it up in Puerto Rico. So yeah, it was a whirlwind tour. Super, super fun and interesting experience.

Josh Hadley 00:04:47  That’s amazing. Adam, this has been a wealth of information that you’ve shared. You’ve dug into a lot of different rabbit holes today, and I appreciate you, you know, really getting into the nuts and bolts of everything. And that’s kind of the purpose of the podcast, right, is sharing the actionable Strategies. And so as we kind of wrap things up here today, Adam, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode.

Josh Hadley 00:05:11  Here are the three takeaways that I noted. Adam, let me know if you think I’m missing something. Number one, it’s going back to the list that you just shared, which is start first with product development. Your product research and development is your biggest lever that you can pull on Amazon. And so if you’re the CEO of the business, if you’re the founder, like that is where you should spend the majority of your time thinking of and coming up with ways to better serve the audience that you’re targeting. Right. And so whether that is a an influencer or mommy blogger, right type of avatar or whether it’s, you know, an older person, whoever your avatar is, get to know them, get to know them. Well, Adam talked about the surveys that he had done, and you heard how well he knew his end user. That is how well you need to know your end user in order to have success on Amazon and really just in general in the e-commerce space for years to come.

Josh Hadley 00:06:09  So that’s action item number one. Action item number two is getting into the basics of Amazon of listing optimization. And there’s a lot that goes into it. But how often are you a b testing your main image. Right. That is your greatest driver of click through rate on Amazon. How often are you actually testing your price, moving the price up to see if it can grow your profit? Moving the price down to see if you can grow profit by increasing the number of orders that you’re getting. And then in addition, like what are your images look like and what are your PPC strategies? And really your PPC strategies need to layer in with all the optimization strategies that you are doing. And Adam talked about doing like one optimization per month. It’s like you you work on one thing one month. See what happens with that lever that you just pulled and then start creating that, I guess your own Rolodex or library of tests that you’ve implemented, and you’re going to look back a year from now and be able to say, oh, I’m finding a pattern when I change the title or when I change the main image.

Josh Hadley 00:07:12  These things typically shoot my listing back up to the top. So that’s action item number two. Actually implement those optimization tactics that you’ve heard a number of a number of times. Final action item number three is driving external traffic. And this is, I think, what is going to set apart the e-commerce. I guess success stories five years from now. I think that Amazon is going to we’ve already seen that on page number one, 50 to 60% of the ad spots on page one are all ads. Right? And so you’ve only got maybe 40% of the page for organic listings. So who’s going to win on Amazon and e-commerce in general in the long term? It’s those people that know how to build an audience and create a raving fan base, and that can then direct that traffic to your listings, whether you’re trying to offer it on Shopify or Walmart or Amazon, if you can gather the eyeballs and then direct that traffic, that is what’s going to set you apart in the future. Adam, is there anything else that you think I missed that we should give as a takeaway from this podcast?

Adam Runquist 00:08:22  No, man, I think you, you honed it in.

Adam Runquist 00:08:24  Well, I do a lot of talking and not a lot of thinking, so I’m glad that you’re taking notes and, and remembering all this that we talked about, but, yeah, it was a fun combo, man. Great, great, job leading it.

Josh Hadley 00:08:33  Awesome. Well, I’ve got a page full of notes, that’s for darn sure. Now, Adam, I like to ask each guest the three following questions to wrap things up here. So question number one, and I didn’t prepare you with these. So here we go off the cuff. What’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Adam Runquist 00:08:51  that’s interesting. And maybe this is a bit of recency bias because it’s one that had a really big impact on me this year. it’s a book by Michael Singer called The Untethered Soul. again, as I’ve gotten a lot more into philosophically better understanding my life and businesses is really a spiritual vehicle. It’s a self-discovery vehicle as much as it is a business thing. And I’ve come to learn and understand that.

Adam Runquist 00:09:12  And how do I approach my life across all facets, including business that that matter and so Untethered Soul is just really good at it basically helps you realize that you’re probably not the person you think you are. So, you know, yeah. My name is Adam. I grew up in Canada, moved to Texas, was in corporate, did acquisitions that led me to physical products. Now I do YouTube. You know, I mountain bike. All those those are things I do. They’re not who I am as a human being. also the thoughts that you have on a daily basis, you know, we’ve all got this voice in our head oftentimes replaying a similar script over and over and over. Oftentimes it’s not a kind voice. That’s not who you are either. So like more deeply peeling those layers back to understand who you really are, what you care about, what matters to you. So other untethered soul has been one of the most profound, impacts in terms of a book and helping me understand who I am and what I care about.

Josh Hadley 00:09:59  I love that getting down to the root of, like, do you know who you truly are deep down inside? I think that’s an important thing that everybody needs to do some soul searching on question number two for you, Adam, what has been your favorite, maybe new productivity tool or software tool that you’ve been using or maybe recently discovered that you think is going to be a game changer?

Adam Runquist 00:10:20  Yeah, I’ve played a lot with this, in terms of trying to optimize my life and frankly, build some discipline into my life. I think that’s one of the things that kind of, you know, when you’re your own boss, you call your own shots. You can also get lazy and undisciplined. And I’ve certainly had to kind of, you know, rein that in over the years. But the biggest thing that seems to work really well, and it’s not software and it’s it’s not any kind of tech based thing, but it’s just a new philosophy that I hold myself to, which is the three things.

Adam Runquist 00:10:48  so I’ve made a deal with myself, and you’ve got to make this deal with yourself because you’re the one that’s ultimately gonna hold you accountable, not some software reminder, which is, I need to do three things in my businesses every single day that are high leverage in that matter. That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to check an email. I’m not going to sign an invoice like all the other stuff that you got to kind of keep the ship running. Those things need to happen to. But if I do three things that matter right now in my business that are high leverage and that that one thing is going to have a cascade of benefits, either for my team and or for my business for weeks, months and years to come. If I do three of those in a year, that’s, you know, north of 1000 things that moves mountains. So for me, it’s like every day I made a commitment to myself that I don’t have a time around it. I don’t have a thing on my Google calendar.

Adam Runquist 00:11:29  I don’t have a timer. That reminds me, I don’t have an app checklist. It’s just like the morning I sit down and I think about what are the three things that would really matter today? And I make sure that I do those by the end of the by the time I go to sleep. And then I do that the next day, I do that the next day. It’s tangible. It’s not overwhelming because most people can do three things, and it’s simple too. And it doesn’t have the same constraints of like, oh, I got to do this by 9 a.m. and I’m doing this by 10 a.m.. so yeah, the, the three things that’s been the, the biggest, biggest benefit productivity wise for me.

Josh Hadley 00:11:58  Yeah.