On this episode we talk about why budgeting is important. We find out what the best practices for budgeting, and the most common mistakes or traps accounts fall into. Starting in early 2015 with Amazon advertising, Brent Zahradnik quickly saw tremendous potential when an acquaintance selling on the marketplace came to him for help with his Sponsored Product campaigns and started AMZ Pathfinder. Since then he’s scaled his company to 30 advertising experts who speak 11 languages and work with the North American and European markets. He lives in Southern France with his girlfriend, their cat and entirely too many bicycles.
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Episode: 233
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Brent Zahradnik, Founder & Owner at AMZ Pathfinder
Subtitle: “Budgeting for Q4 and Beyond: Keys for Amazon Success!”
Final Show Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zhTd9FtSk8
Back on Lunch with Norm…On today’s show, why is budgeting so important? Find out the best best practices for budgeting on this episode of Lunch with Norm. Brent Zahradnik started in early 2015 with Amazon advertising, when an acquaintance selling on the marketplace came to him for help with his Sponsored Product campaigns and started AMZ Pathfinder. Since then he’s scaled his company to 30 advertising experts who speak 11 languages and work with the North American and European markets. He lives in Southern France with his girlfriend, their cat and entirely too many bicycles.”
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Norman Farrar 0:02
Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with Norm. The Amazon FBA and ecommerce podcast. Okay, so not in the fetal position, but at this point if anybody who is a listener wants to come over and spend some time, if you know anything about technology, this is driving me crazy. I have no idea but my cameras keep disconnecting and my mics go dead. Anyways, that’s why we’re late today. It’s all my fault. Yes. It wasn’t to do with Kelsey. It was me. I’m putting the onus on me. So today we had a great show. And we’re going to be talking about budgeting. We were going to start off and we were going to talk about budgeting q4, but we had to bump our guests. And now we think it’s a great idea to talk about q1 budgeting, how to do it, why to do it. Anyways, our guest today is a first time guest on the show. And he started back I guess his Amazon advertising career back in 2015. He was acquired, and then he started Amazon Pathfinder a few months later. He has skills. Sorry guys, I’ve got a bit of a not a cold but a scratchy throat today. So I’m trying to, if I’m not in the fetal position, dealing with this bloody cold or sore throat with us with a lot of ginger in my mouth. I’ll get through it. He started with 3030 employees working with them. 11 languages are covered within North America in the European market. And we are talking about Brent Zahradnik. I can’t even say anything bad. Brent Zahradnik. Anyway, before we get to it, let’s have a word from our sponsor. Thank you solarize for sponsoring this episode of lunch with Norm solarize is your comprehensive solution for your everyday business needs. Everything you need to grow and scale your Amazon business is just one click away. For more information, contact demon his team over at solarized calm and remember solarize is with one R. Alright, so where is Kelsey?
Kelsey 2:34
Hello. Hello. Happy Friday. How are you doing?
Norman Farrar 2:38
Yeah, look at Andrew lay off the cigars. It has nothing to do with cigars. Andrew, how dare you say that?
Kelsey 2:45
All right. Well, welcome everyone. We’ve got a great crowd already. We’ve got Andrew, Manny Jesica Rabbit, Raja, Jeff, Howard. It’s great to see everyone. Yes, Norms got to lay off those cigars. But I’ll, I’ll hold them and hold him about that later. But if you’re new to the show, we start off the show by smashing those like buttons giving us those thumbs up. We’d really appreciate it. If you’re interested in joining our community, the best place to go to is our Facebook group. That is our beard nation. That’s lunch with Norm, Amazon FBA and Ecommerce collective. So today’s topic is going to be about budgeting and budgeting into q4 q1. And so super excited about this. I don’t think we’ve ever actually talked about this on an episode. So this is a new topic. And just let us know in the comments too. If you’re looking for a topic that we haven’t discussed yet, let us know in the comment section. What are you looking for? And if you have any guest suggestions as well, we’re always open to see I’m going to be doing some podcast invites. But anyways, just one more thing if you’re interested in our membership program for the podcast. This helps support the podcast but if you go to our lunch with Norm website, click on the membership button. You’ll be taken to our page where it goes over all the different tiers for our membership program. We do q&a sessions with me in Norm guest lessons. Monthly SOPs. We do discounts for norms, businesses, you get a lunch bar mug, a bunch of cool stuff anyways, you can go over there, check it out, and let us know. And yeah, I think that’s it for me. Anything else?
Norman Farrar 4:33
Oh the Patreon also helps with throat laws injures What are you doing? Oh look at mums here giving me vitamin C tablets. I don’t believe it
Kelsey 4:43
out come on like that.
Norman Farrar 4:47
She I’m I you know what I love. I’m love that this is a live podcast and my wife is dropping off vitamin C tablets. I guess she’s listening upstairs or something.
Kelsey 4:57
Lovely. So right
Norman Farrar 5:01
Okay, let’s get through this unless you want to take over the podcast is time kills.
Kelsey 5:06
It’s lunch with Norm sorry,
Norman Farrar 5:08
it could be lunch with Kells. Alright, so sit back, if you have any questions throw it over, I see that somebody asked about uh, what what are we talking about today, we got a great subject, it’s going to be about budgeting, one of the most important things that you could possibly do in your business. So we’ll get to that in two seconds. So sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee. I’ve got some vitamin C tablets, and enjoy the show. Welcome, Brett.
Brent Zahradnik 5:33
Hello, hello. Thanks, Aria.
Norman Farrar 5:35
One of the weirdest introductions ever.
Brent Zahradnik 5:42
I thought it was pretty smooth. Not as smooth as that baseline though, when you guys dropped the intro music I was thinking, is that you on the bass? No, no, that’s
Norman Farrar 5:50
my other son.
Brent Zahradnik 5:52
Okay, it’s on the family. Right? Yep. Some
Norman Farrar 5:53
people call him the what is it? The producer for the people? Is that right? Kelsey? Something like that. So yeah, he was voted by producer for the people. I’m sorry, guys.
Kelsey 6:05
Like, sometimes I get my older brother into help fill in. And yeah, he betrays me and becomes the producer of the people for the podcast.
Norman Farrar 6:14
Yeah. Okay, so, Brent, it was a rough introduction. I know. But can you just tell us a little bit more about what you’re doing? Who you are what you do?
Brent Zahradnik 6:26
Sure. Yeah. You got the outlines? All Correct. Yeah, I’ve been running Pathfinder since 2015. I started off just doing consulting for people one on one and Facebook groups in the early days of when it was like kind of a private label Amazon and ads had just started the previous year in 2014. I was working on Google Ads prior to that, an agency for several years and had a friend who was selling on Amazon. So he was like, hey, there’s ads on this platform. And I was like, Amazon has ads, that sounds so terrible. And actually, truth be told it was terrible. back then. They had like no match types. And there’s no negative keywords. It was just really basic sponsored products. And that liquid, it’s got to it’s like, I don’t know, $9 billion a quarter or something like that. Amazon counselors are their biggest, like growth segments. And, you know, I got a team about 30 people now spread all across North America, Europe, Asia, and we’re managing accounts for clients in those same markets.
Norman Farrar 7:25
It used to be so cheap back then to yes, you’re
Brent Zahradnik 7:27
paying two to two to two to four cents per click for it was at $9. I remember, I’ll never forget it because it was like, you know, astonishingly cheap.
Norman Farrar 7:36
Yeah, yeah. But anyways, it’s not that anymore. No, no. So, you know, when we were figuring out what to talk about, you came up with a really great subject, and that’s budgeting. And, you know, it’s important, a lot of people, you know, jump into something, they end up that they don’t under Well, once they put pen to paper, they understand that they have to either cut back or expand or do something to have a successful product. So let’s talk about budgeting. And like, from your view, why is budgeting so important?
Brent Zahradnik 8:17
Yeah, sure. So I think one mistake that we see, a lot of our clients and people I just speak to in the general Amazon sphere make is they don’t really allocate appropriately for budgeting when it comes to ad spend. And they don’t zoom out enough to think about ad spend as a component of something that they can budget for an allocate for properly for their business on a quarterly and then down to a monthly then down to a campaign and product level. You know, it has to filter down from the top, I kind of see it as a as a triangle that goes like this, where you’re starting at quarterly and people right now should be thinking, okay, what are we going to spend in quarter one? How’s that going to be broken down? And how I see a lot of people start as they say, Okay, let’s set up five campaigns, I want to spend $100 A day go, and they don’t have any more complicated, you know, bigger picture, thinking about it. That’s more like systems oriented. It’s just Alright, well throw some money at this. And you know, maybe it’ll be a cost center, maybe it’ll be a profit center. So let’s, let’s find out.
Norman Farrar 9:18
So let’s find out where to start. If you’re new, you maybe you’ve been working with an insurance company or a real estate broker, you find this opportunity in E commerce. And, you know, Amazon, where do you start?
Brent Zahradnik 9:37
With with advertising specifically?
Norman Farrar 9:40
No, just in budgeting in general? Hmm.
Brent Zahradnik 9:43
Yeah, I mean, I think that I think that the best way to look at it is if you are going to have visibility for a product if you want to give a product like a fighting chance, and the advertising realm. You have To have some baseline visibility. And I think that this has been proven out, I actually heard you on a show the other day, because I was listening to a couple episodes here getting into the, into the groove. There’s a honeymoon period that exists for products on Amazon right now that that’s pretty much something that has been, I wouldn’t say proven, but it’s like a kind of the theory of gravity. You know, we all we all live with it, we abide by it. But it’s not necessarily 100% proven. But it does exist, right. So my thinking is, you have to have some of your budget for promoting that product and getting out into the world put towards advertising. So I would say don’t forget that when it comes to gaining visibility and getting traction getting a foothold. People don’t adequately do that a lot of times, I think,
Norman Farrar 10:50
right. So you know, some of the starting features like when I when I’m looking at a product, or when I’m looking at bringing a product to market, you’ve got to really trap everything, you’ve got to go in there. And you’ve got a lot of people when they budget. And if you have like QuickBooks, by the way, there is a budgeting tool that’s in there, we usually go and we use a product called Live plan. It’s I think it’s $19 a month, but we build out a full business plan. And I like to do this, for any business that I get into now, it doesn’t mean every brand that I get into, because that’s just a division of or another revenue stream for the business in general. But I start there, and it walks me through step by step everything about my business. Once I get to that point, I can see whether the like just through the p&l, whether this is a viable project product or not. But it does take the same amount of research, as it would be to launch a product you have to go in, if you’re going into the plastic shoe stretcher business, you know, what’s the competition? What’s the competitiveness? How much market share, do you think you can take? You know, what price point do you think you can take? You know, where are you going out? Are you going for volume? Are you going for like a higher perceived value? There’s so many things that you have to take into consideration. And once you get that done, you have to like a lot of people, like you were saying a little earlier, they don’t take into consideration outside of their landed costs, like you got a product. Okay, you’ve got that honeymoon period. Right, you get a bit of a grace, how much you putting towards your PPC. But even before that, what about all those other costs that you have to your your freight costs? Yeah. Are you going to be shipping it over in a container? What are the container cost right now? Did you plan those container costs out last year or this year? You know, there’s a huge difference in costs. Are you gonna fly over some to get the sales rolling? Did you get consolidate any can samples like what did the samples cost you? Those could cost you, you know, 100 bucks, they could cost you 1000 bucks. Were there any molds? There’s so many different things that to take in consideration. And I’ve got a whack of charges that we can discuss in a second. Do you have anything to add to that?
Brent Zahradnik 13:24
No, not particularly, except that what I hear from clients all the time is that yeah, the container prices are ridiculous. But I think anyone listening to this show and in this community that you run in, they know that I was reading something very interesting the other day about Amazon chartering ships, I don’t want to say privately, but they were basically avoiding some of these ports that are more congested, like let’s say La and like San Pedro, that’s all like super clogged. And what they’re doing is having these ships, you know, take Amazon product and basically do the run around and just come up to Everett. And I think they had some other port in the Pacific Northwest. They were putting them through maybe even Vancouver and BC. And you know, they’re getting products into like a side door that way. And even the cost that they were quoting sellers to get a space on the ships was far below what they’re getting quoted by these other big companies. Like I don’t know, what’s a big one Maersk or something like that. Yeah, so that was really interesting. And I’m interested to see if Amazon continues to push further into the shipping business as they already have a fleet of what do you call it a fleet of planes? That’s like a gaggle of geese. That’s right. An Air Force of planes, you know, these are rented 740 sevens and stuff, right? They don’t own them, but they basically couldn’t buy them. You know, ship is another investment that’s significantly more costly. And you have to have a crude man, it’s dangerous. So yeah, who knows if Amazon will get into that? But that’s another cost. Yeah, that is in flux. And this time, you know, this time last year versus now that stuff looks totally dissimilar?
Norman Farrar 14:54
Yeah, so like, if you think of it, there’s so many different things like even outside of what I mentioned what about the packaging? What about the insert? What about the the fulfillment? Like, are you sending it to a three? Pl? Are you splitting your shipment? How much is a pallet gonna cost you? You know it? I know over with F Alavi, it’s 20 bucks. So okay, how long is it going to take you? Is it going to take two months to get that inventory out? Do you have? Like, what is your lead time? What is your turn? You know, and to get it over to Amazon, then what are your and this is very interesting. Amazon FBA fees over the over a period of I forget how many years I think it was 2015 to now had gone up from I think they said 19%. I just did this for our, our Centurion league. And I think I showed they went from 19% to this year being 31% on average. Yeah,
Brent Zahradnik 15:57
that that net mimics us that I saw cuz I put together a newsletter for a lot of our clients and subscribers to our small list. And I just like, wrote something like that general interest because I mostly write about advertising topics. But this is something that of course touches advertising topics, because it’s, you know, you’re talking about margin compression, and you’re talking about a cost and what sense it makes to advertise products at what costs or what cost per click and for what budgets all ties back to this. Yeah, AMI is obviously Amazon’s taking that much of a percentage. That’s really, I don’t want to say insidious. But it’s, it’s concerning, right? And then you add an ad costs. And that will take that number up even further. I’ve even seen some people that follow on Twitter who are kind of in the Amazon sphere of Twitter talking about oh, yeah, when I looked at my all my costs for Amazon, including ads, they basically take like 61 or 62% of the retail price when all is told, which is astounding. Yeah. And I wonder how much of that is due to just you know, slowly incrementing costs from things like storage, because I know those go up every year, I was looking at the FBA rate card the other day, because I you know, like to put that out for clients. Not that they don’t know that as well. I’m sure they pay close attention to it, like all your audience probably does. But also just things beyond their control, like the environment that we’re faced with right now in advertising, which is that CPCs year over year really have gone up. And in the past, I’m someone who’s always kind of poopoo this idea like, Oh, no advertising is not getting more complicated. That’s like a narrative driven by, let’s say, software companies or management agencies that are being maybe a little bit dishonest and trying to like create a little bit of fear or stir up some consternation with people. But in our own data, and the agencies who I talked to who I really trust, you know, a lot of people in the industry are good friends of mine, say the same. Yeah, it actually is the case. Now, the CPCs are significantly more expensive year over year, and the percentage of sales from advertising is also higher. So there’s a couple facets there that are kind of like almost immovable objects, you know, that are not the fault of any seller or any supply chain thing, like we’ve talked about, but really the competitive nature of the environment, the marketplace, and things that are actually Amazon’s fault, because they’re constantly changing and rearranging where ads are shown and what kind of prominent placement they get, how they crowd out organic, for instance, is are all things worth noting. And I hope that Amazon is maybe listening to us when we talk about
Norman Farrar 18:27
it’ll fall on deaf ears.
Brent Zahradnik 18:31
Don’t give me too much hope, man.
Norman Farrar 18:34
Yeah, they try. They try. All I can say is they try but you know, it’s it is a beast, right. And it takes a lot for them to do a little. So And sometimes what happens, I don’t know if any of the listeners have seen this, have experienced this. But the pendulum swings too far to the right, and then too far to the left. And, you know, either they let everybody get away with something, or all of a sudden they’re suspending everybody. So anyways, hopefully that can change. One of the things that I think we have to look at going into next year, and in something that it started this year, it’s actually started about a year and a half, but it’s really come to play that we’ve got to take into consideration is building your brand community. And I don’t know what your thoughts are on this, Brent, but it’s time that end there’s a right place and there’s a wrong place to spend money, right. So you’ll see this but you’ll see it come back tenfold. Unfortunately, there’s no way to measure this really, unless and I’ll show you some tricks in a second. But I’m talking about Amazon post, Amazon live, driving people to your storefront using Facebook or whatever ads there are driving people to Amazon using Google My Business just Driving people over to get them to click that bloody Follow button and to build that community, so then you can start targeting them with your customer experience, ads or modules. So you can email these followers and repeat customers. But this is very similar, I think to PPC, it looks like it’s a big expense doing it. But at the end of the day, like every, every one PPC sale, you’ll probably get two or three, at least organic sales. Would you agree?
Brent Zahradnik 20:36
Well, yeah, that’s usually the ratio we observe. From our own data, you know, let’s say a healthy account should have maybe 35% of sales coming from advertising. That’s like a pretty good ratio. You know, we have some clients that are higher, some clients that are lower, but I’m talking about, you know, healthy accounts that are doing in excess of 100k a month are spending a substantial amount of money on ads. That’s a good ratio. So yes, I mean, sounds about right. To me, the one thing I will say about posts, I don’t have this on really strong authority, but I have a theory that posts are next year, going to receive some kind of paid promotional aspects, which will put them kind of in the purview of our advertising world that I you know, think about all the time, because right now, posts have been something that I’ve looked at from a little bit of a remove and said, Okay, that’s interesting, you know, we got a couple clients really doing well with them, we have others that barely use it or aren’t interested at all. But as soon as it becomes something that we can pay for, and has some kind of auction model, I become interested. So
Norman Farrar 21:32
yeah, yeah. And I jumped on post, the day I was introduced to them, I thought there’d be something up with that. And a lot of our clients, we got onto post, some didn’t want to spend the time nor the money, we found it really easy to work with posts, because you’re using whatever you’re using in social media, you’re just repurposing that content. But now, and if you use posts, and you have at least 10 posts, so if you’re doing nothing, or if you just have one, get 10. And all of a sudden, you’ve got a carousel on your listing on your product listing. So it’s a new program that they started a little while ago. So if if you want to show pose, and I think that’s just a bit more leverage, where you’ve got your slide deck, but now you have the ability to show a lot more lifestyle, benefits, ingredients, just more social media posts right there. And people love that. And it’s a carousel that runs right on your product listing, which, you know, was never there. You know, I guess three months back this, this is brand spanking new. So it’s kind of cool.
Brent Zahradnik 22:44
Okay, I’m gonna write that one down in class, because I didn’t know about that. It kind of reminds me of the bundles feature, which we advise clients to use, because that effectively pushes ads and other kinds of stuff on that screen real estate further down the page, though, it’s you’re just dominating more spot. And you know, you can actually run sponsored brands to bundles directly as an ad type, which is really interesting. We do this for very few clients, because it’s just, it’s something that only some of them even use, despite our kind of encouraging or goading. But like, yeah, it’s also possible to run ads right to that, which is really interesting. So
Norman Farrar 23:18
you know, another area have to budget and the good money, bad money, just like I mentioned, but this is more on Walmart, that if you don’t have the proper, or the quality in your listing, you will die very quickly. Because unless it’s a major brand, that might post something that’s crappy, for some reason, I don’t know why they would. But with Walmart, they have your listing. And then directly below, they don’t run PPC, they run all your competitors listings in a carousel like just not in a carousel, but just right below your your listing. And if you’re not, if your primary image isn’t the best, you’ve got all these other people that they can just easily click on. And it’s an it’s a one step add to cart, which really sucks because they get to your listing. And if you don’t have a good quality listing, or there’s some reason why that customer is going to bring their eye down, like we did, we’ve done episodes where we’ve just showed product listings on Amazon and where your eye would move and you know based on color, or angle or camera lens. That’s the same on Walmart, and this is an area for cute one. I think if you’re new or just to recheck what does that number page one look like? And can you improve it? If you’ve got an iPhone photo up there? I would change that. If you’ve if you’re not using lifestyle. You got to Check that out and pay the money not for some stupid stock photo that’s got a bar. So five times bigger than the person’s hand. But you know, pay for quality. And just that, now you’re getting engagement, that extra money that you spend, will actually come back and make you a better return on investment than anything. No, I’m not sure about your thoughts. But even if they do that, Brent, they’re caught if they’re getting a higher conversion rate, that’s also going to help with their PPC, right?
Brent Zahradnik 25:36
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, in fact, there’s even a part of our agency, we’ve considered taking into more conversion rate optimization direction, but most of our clients are large enough that they have teams internally where we’ll tell them, hey, we think that this listing or this aspect of the listing is not what we call retail ready, which is basically Amazon’s way of saying, like, it’s not up to par, you know, if you ran the helium 10, check on it, or you did like a Gosh, was a call like a, you know, inventory, you know, assessment. Sorry, like listing assessment, it doesn’t meet some of these requirements that we think are best practice, or at least, you know, to be where we think they should be. If we’re going to be spending your money client to run ads to this product, we need you to up your game with this. So the conversion rate is improved.
Norman Farrar 26:20
Right. Okay, so before we go any further, if you have any questions about budgeting, please put them in the comment section. Also, we have a giveaway today. So Brent, why don’t you explain? Explain the giveaway?
Brent Zahradnik 26:35
Yeah, sure thing. So we do all kinds of audits for potential clients for aggregators, or buying businesses, for people who want us to come in and basically do a whole account evaluation, because their internal person needs some help. But what we will do for this giveaway is basically do an in depth account advertising audit. And not only will it be my myself in the team looking at it, but I’ll just take a call with you as well. 30 minutes an hour, whatever you want to do is fine with me. I don’t really care. I’m always happy to talk and meet people. And basically the idea is we give you a like a makeover on your advertising. So we come and say, Okay, you need to do this, this and this, what we would do is this, this and this, and then hey, let’s have a phone call and just talk about the details. Could be a good way to start. Start the New Year ring in the New Year New you with some advice and setting off on the right foot.
Norman Farrar 27:27
Right? Yeah. Okay. So if you like that, that console the audit. From Brent, it’s hashtag we’ll have Cal Andrew Smith, you got it. Hashtag we’ll have Kelsey, if you take two people, you will get a second entry. Okay, and now guess before we go any further, let’s have another word from our sponsor. I wanted to give a quick shout out and say thank you to global wired advisors for sponsoring this episode of lunch with Norm. Global wired advisors is a leading digital investment bank focused on optimizing the business sales process. For more information, please call Chris shuffling and his team over at global wired advisors.com. Wow, I’m glad I’m on mute when that happens. I just had a coughing fit. So there we go. Let’s talk a little bit about budgeting with PPC now. So there’s all sorts of different tools out there that we can use for budgeting, but what do you see going into q1?
Brent Zahradnik 28:35
Oh, man, so many things. So I could talk about some of the new tools that Amazon has put out inside the advertising console, which are also available through the ad API. And many of your listeners are probably using, you know, management methods directly in the ad console, or they’re using a tool. So they’ll see these things in both places. But I want to first like zoom out and talk about it from a bit of a conceptual standpoint. Because like I mentioned at the top of this discussion, like if you’re thinking about advertising budget, I really do recommend sitting down even with some paper doing this and thinking quarterly monthly. And then if you have more than one Amazon account or Amazon business account, you need to also account for what kind of spend you’re going to put towards your Shopify site or your Pinterest account. I know tick tock is quite popular with Amazon sellers these days and spending on there, but then break it down even further. And this doesn’t have to be like exact numbers. You don’t have to get this right there’s no there’s no teacher who’s going to grade you at the end of it. You know, think about what is a you know, the brands that you have the products in those brands and then all the way down to the level that I think most Amazon business owners think about when it comes to budget, which is like the portfolio or campaign level. And that’s the part where like the rubber really meets the road and things get super granular with budgeting. So do that as like a concept or an exercise first. I really encourage everyone To do that this is something we try to do enforce our clients to do on a quarterly monthly basis. And we have our own method internally to like, devise what we think is an appropriate budget. And then we’ll bring that to clients that don’t have a good idea. And we’ll say, hey, we want to do this for this reason. And then kind of work your way backwards. From there, you have to build things from the ground up, after coming from the top down. And so I see it. So what ultimately dictates how much you spend on Amazon, it’s your CPC, your cost per click bids, or in the case of sponsored display, we now have CPM, your CPM bids, you know, cost per meal for display ads. But the higher your bids, the more you’re able to spend. And so make sure everything is calibrated that way. I mean, one common mistake we see all the time norm is like someone will set, let’s say, you have like 10 campaigns that are running inside advertising console, right, just like 10 campaigns for I don’t know, a handful of products you have, and your daily budget cap is like 150 US dollars, or you know, 200 euros or whatever. And then you have one or two campaigns each have 100 euro per day budget, well, your campaign budgets are higher than your daily overall budget. So something something needs to happen here, because you’re not sending signals to Amazon’s system to say, I want to spend the full campaign budget here. Because my cap for the overall if you have one in place is not going to allow that to happen. And then necessarily what you’re bidding at the target level, you know, keywords, ASINs audiences, whatever has to be the most important thing that’s going to influence what actually gets spent and what is basically what I call, like, you know, starving for oxygen, because some keywords they just won’t spend and you’ll be like, why are they not spending? I don’t understand it’s because other keywords have already spent their budget and that same campaign or that same portfolio, and they’re kind of sucking the oxygen out of the room. So they don’t they don’t have anything to sustain them.
Norman Farrar 31:53
You know, we just were working with a new client. And I looked through the their PPC. And I was like, they were weren’t spending enough. And this was a higher end product. They were they’re probably spending about 50 grand a month on adspend. But I’m looking at it going. Why are you not doubling quadrupling? Your budget? It would only make sense. So yeah. Okay, well, we’ll double it. Now they’ve tripled. And now we’ve quadrupled their budget, you know, and they’re seeing great returns. Because they, you know, just because there’s a lot of people out there that oh, I’m doing 7% a cause? Right? Well, I’m feel sorry for you. You know, you’re leaving money on the table?
Brent Zahradnik 32:50
Exactly. Yeah. Cuz like it costs is one measurement. Right? Right. There’s three metrics I think everyone should really look at it causes one, right? And then the second one would be what most people call tacos, like total a cause. Right? And then the third would be what percentage of sales at an individual SKU or asin level are coming from ads? And can you keep that in a reasonable balance? I think a fourth, maybe honorary metric would be what percentage of that spend, and sales and ads is going towards branded terms, that company we’re talking about, I have no idea who they are. But they probably have some brand awareness, right. So when you looked at their big brand saw people were spending, or they were spending rather against their brand terms. And that’s all well and good. I mean, you should defend your brand terms. But we do audits for accounts regularly, where they’re like 70% of adspend. And even more than 70%, like 85% 90% of the sales is just branded terms. Well, that’s really leaving money on the table. Yeah, you might be at 7%, a contact, you might be three, but you’re not really doing anything, you’re not meeting new customers where they are, you’re not doing exploratory campaigns, you’re not advertising on category or generic keywords, you’re really shooting yourself in the foot. So right, we try to keep that ratio within a reasonable balance. And going back to the budget theme, you know, we say to clients, okay, this is how much we’re spending of your budget of this month or this quarter on these terms that are branded. And so we want you to have visibility into that and understand it. And you know, some some people are funding or they’ll say, like, I don’t want to spend on my brand. And then we have to convince them, hey, it’s probably a good idea to like defend your search terms a little bit. And then others are like, spend on brand, just go crazy, do whatever you want. And our approach is somewhere in between those two, I would say,
Norman Farrar 34:30
I think that’s very important. And that’s exactly what was happening with this brand. You know, they thought that oh, we’ve got we’ve been told that we should be targeting this and we’re targeting this and it was oh my gosh, there’s so much you know, more to go to achieve. Anyways, I just wanted to point out like up door. Hey, how are you sir? Rad. We got so many listeners. Andrew Rosalyn, anybody who’s had budgeting blunders, let us know what they were, and how you got through them. Okay? I know I’ve made a ton of mistakes when I’ve done my budgeting, or even tried to calculate my budgeting for the year. And sometimes one of the things that I look at, kind of, you know, just keeping on theme is, how conservative, you know I would be, or how liberal I would be. So you know, you want to have, it sounds really crazy. And like my partner, Tim Jordan, when we’re putting together a budget, you know, he thought I was crazy when I mentioned this at first, but we really want to put together three, you know, we’re forecasting, and depending on how the forecast goes, you know, we want to be able to come back and look at the budget and relook at the budget on the quarter. So anyways, that’s just a tip that, that I have, you know, for people is that, you just don’t want to go out there and put it down, and then look at it at the end of the year. You want to make sure that you’re hitting your milestones, setting your goals, and hitting them. So anyways, that’s just a quick tip from me.
Brent Zahradnik 36:19
I think that’s really valuable. I know if I could actually pause on that for a second. So when we set these budgets for clients made these discussions with them will sometimes give like high medium low targets. This is particularly useful during periods we just had, like the turkey five, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. And you know, for some clients that are that we have and people who are listening. Yeah, it’ll probably be a really good tip for early next year, because maybe they have a quarter one heavy product, or they’re still going through some pretty extreme sales right now. I mean, I know speaking from experience spend is up for a lot of our clients who are quarter for heavy. But I think it’s realistic to have like kind of a budget trajectory over the month and then plan out like high, medium low. Okay, we could land here, we could land here, because it depends on the demands of that season. I think what we saw this year with spend is that a lot of the demand for what is usually focused on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and then further in the month into December is actually pulled forward slightly. And we saw a better spend and better metrics earlier in the month of November, so much so that it was a bit surprising for us. You know, we had clients that year over a year had much better early mid November’s than we would expect expected. And then their Black Friday was like, you know, on par, maybe a little bit below. But we didn’t, you know, foresee that we had to be flexible with our budgets and spend more towards the beginning of the month than we anticipated.
Norman Farrar 37:43
Yeah, there’s when you’re looking at working with Financials, and I mean, if you’ve, if you’ve listened to this podcast before, I stress knowing your numbers, and that’s every aspect of your business, you know, you’ve got to know your numbers. Or it could be a PPC takedown, like you’re just overspending and you’ve got no return. Or it could be on the manufacturers site, you’re just not taking into consideration everything? Well, I would recommend, highly recommend going out. If you don’t, if you have never taken an accounting course, or if you don’t understand how to read a financial statement that you need to balance sheet, the p&l, cash flow. Those are the three that people think of right, most of the time you hear about p&l, cash flow is the next thing that you need to work on. Because if you’re gonna have a poor month, and I saw this with one of our companies that we had a really great month, and then because everything had to be paid the following month, our cash flow was gonna be tight. And so what did we do, we had a sale. So we got you know, we got the the cash coming in, that could cover up the cash that we needed. And then we went forward. But it’s so important to run that cash flow statement. But with that, the forecast in the budget, like if you can do those, and you could just get like on a Saturday, just sit down and just start plugging away. It’s like when we talk about our standard operating procedures. And we have 400 plus standard operating procedures that are quite complex. It didn’t happen overnight. And so even if you could just start getting into that, like, get into the habit of doing this, like on a Saturday morning, if you’re spending all this time on your Amazon, if you think you’re going to cash out, and usually 18 months to 24 months on a nice exit. Well, if you have this information there, and you just understand where you’re going, it’s going to help you so much more. I’m just I’m being very long winded on this but it’s it’s it’s like a roadmap You know, the old paper roadmaps, you know, now you’ve got GPS, but you don’t fold it in? How the heck do I get here, and you’d have to know how to get there. It’s exactly like that. If you don’t have, in your mind exactly the numbers, and you don’t know those numbers, you don’t know if your business is failing or not. Or if you should cut bait, you’ll never know. So I just highly suggest that you take every little number that there is, make sure you have a spreadsheet, just add it, just add it. Next one all insert cost me two pennies of the transparency sticker that I’m going to put on the packaging, it’s going to cost me half a cent. Oh, the handling fee for my fulfillment center is $3 per box box has four items in it or six items. Okay, what that’s going to be, and you put that into one big spreadsheet, and now you know, your landed costs, you know, everything goes into there. And then you’ve got the variables. Okay, PPC, right. So PPC, we know it’s 30% 35% of the budget, but it’s going to get me two or three to one. You got to take that into consideration. What’s that budget? There’s so many little things. I don’t know if they have anything more to add to that.
Brent Zahradnik 41:16
No, not not on that point. No.
Norman Farrar 41:19
And hopefully everybody can hear me because of my deep Basie voice today. So let’s go to the next question about, you know, next year, are there any special things within budgeting, either PPC, or anything that you think we should talk about?
Brent Zahradnik 41:42
Yeah, the one thing I want to highlight that I think Amazon has done a pretty good job with is they’ve added a new budgets tab in the advertising console. So if you’re, you know, surfing around in there, managing your campaigns, you can see at the top left area, there’s like budgets, it says beta next to it. You can click on that. And my favorite feature in there, there’s two columns in there that I really like one of which is like average time in budget. And for whatever time frame you have selected, let’s say it’s seven days or 14 days or something like that. It’ll give you the average time per day that that campaign has been like actively spending. So you can like click on that column, and you can sort ascending or descending and you can see, oh, this particular campaign that has a super good A cos is in budget like 25% of the time for the last seven days? Well, that’s a situation that you might want to ameliorate right? How can you make changes to that campaign or your budget setup such that that campaign is spending more often. Now that might also change the cost because it would be running at different times of day, and you might have more exposure. However, indications are good that you should probably give it more juice, right? You want to accelerate that if you have the cash on hand, like you just mentioned, Norm, you know, don’t spend yourself into a hole. But if you have the cash on hand in the business, and you can afford that you have the budget set, you might want to go go harder on that. One thing I anticipate that Amazon will provide us with next year is hour of day information for spending with ads. This is something that there’s no publicly available version of yet, but I think it’s something that we’ll see I’ve gotten reports from people at Amazon, you know, Amazon employees before, who are like attached to some of our larger clients that show us some of that basic information. And we can say, Oh, this campaign went on a budget at, you know, 1300 hours, PST, you know, Pacific Time, Amazon time. Okay, so what is that in our timezone here in Europe? How could we relate that back to that client account? How can we modify it, but I think Amazon is gonna open up more of that in the future. The second thing I really liked about that budgets tab is you can see the estimated missed sales, missed impressions, Miss clicks, whatever the most important thing is missed sales. So yet again, this is an estimate, these are not numbers that a teacher is going to come check and say you’re wrong. But Amazon is giving you a range, they’re saying you could have had this many sales actually, if you had this campaign in budget, you know, you only 25% If you had it 100%, what would it look like? So I really recommend that everyone, check out that budgets tab that’s really quite useful. I like that, that one a lot. A second thing that they have rolled out that I would really encourage listeners to check out is a new feature that allows your budgets to be dynamically adjusted at the campaign level. So you can set some rules. If I could show a good screenshot, I would I don’t have one ready at hand. But basically, if you go into the campaign, and there’s a budget rules area, it’s it says beta also or beta, as the folks in the UK like to say. It says like, yeah, you can adjust your budget based on a date range. So before Black Friday, there was an option in there for some campaigns and it is campaign dependent, depending on what products you have in there, where it says, Hey, tricky five is coming up. Why don’t you boost your budgets by 25% for this day, this day, in this day, and you could say okay, cool, sounds good. But you can To set a custom one based on performance thresholds, so what most of our clients are interested in, and most people I speak to is, you know, either a cos or RO s, whichever one they want to talk about, which is effectively the same thing. And you can say, hey, this a cost is below 25%, please boost the budget by 50%. And what it will do and the timeframe that you set is that a look at the last seven days, if the cost is below that threshold, or on that threshold, it will increase your budget for you. So this is like an automated way to ensure that the best performing or highest converting type campaigns are getting a little bit more extra based on these rules. And we’ve started to like trial this in a couple client accounts, we have software that does something very similar already. But the fact that Amazon is building it into the interface and making it Yeah, making it like a permanent fixture, I hope is really encouraging. So Amazon is starting to grow up when it comes to budgeting on their ad platform. Really happy to see some of these some of these innovations.
Norman Farrar 45:59
I’m curious, your thoughts on if Amazon with their with their app, okay. And their recommendations Oh, bump it up. Like with this dynamic bidding, right. I found in the past whenever I was talking to Amazon, and they were we were talking with a rep about, you know, what’s best for our account was best over here. Usually, it’s what’s best for Amazon. If you get what I mean? Oh, yeah, that’s the dynamic bidding. Are you finding that it’s whatever’s best for Amazon? Are you getting results?
Brent Zahradnik 46:37
Yeah, I will, I will have to make sure to be clear. So the budget rules feature is at the campaign level, dynamic bidding, the one that says like, up and down, we almost never use that feature, I would I would recommend against doing that our favorite is still dynamic down. And also just fixed. For some campaigns, we use fixed bidding as a bid type. But you’re right, a lot of the recommendations that and I know how it works at Amazon, they’re told as reps who talked to clients, and even senior reps is like, hey, talk about this, this is our storyline on this, push this narrative on that. And a lot of times you have to kind of pick through some of that and say like, this is something I can use for the business. This is something that suspiciously looks like it’s just advocating for more spin to flow right platform, and maybe isn’t necessarily correct for me. I’ll give you guys a great example. Amazon has been pushing sponsor display very hard. And there’s some great use cases for it. But this CPM model, which is much more middle and top of funnel and the advertising realm is first of all strangely expensive for what it should be more, in my opinion, cheaper CPM bidding type, and they’re not really doing a great job of educating a lot of sellers about it. So they’re like, hey, try this out. We built some campaigns, go hit enable, or upload this bulk file. And then people are expecting like, I want to 10% it costs, but those campaigns aren’t freight costs, therefore impressions, therefore, Share of Voice there for gaining a lot of clicks at a cheaper price. They’re not necessarily oriented towards the same things that say sponsored products with your your top keywords are. So that is one area where I’m like, pretty suspicious. Yeah. And I’m like, You should examine that before you apply.
Norman Farrar 48:19
Okay, so Kelsey, are there any questions?
Kelsey 48:23
Yeah, we have a couple that came in. Let me see the first one from Jessica Rabbit. When setting ad budget, what criteria do you consider that leads to conclusion to spend more? When spending more? Is it on PPC? Only? If there’s other things, what else?
Norman Farrar 48:43
Go for Brent.
Brent Zahradnik 48:44
That’s a pretty complete question. Yeah. The first part, you know, when setting ad budget, what criteria do you consider that leads to conclusion to spend more. So I would say this, talking about budget, like we have so far is only as useful as it is talking about the specific products and what your goals are with those products. Even if I have a campaign that wants a lot more ad spend, and the cost is super low, and the product is selling like crazy. Well, if I only have three days left of stock, none of that matters. None of that is relevant, right. So you have to look at it through that lens first. But what you should have is an idea of what your target is for the product and how these campaigns are helping you reach that target advertising is a means to an end, not the end itself. And so if it let’s say a campaign is really helping with the sell through of a product because you’re being placed aggressively on a lot of other competitor ASINs. Like let’s say you’re doing product targeting either with sponsored display or sponsored products, I would recommend giving that campaign more budget and probably increasing the CPCs until you get to an A cost threshold that is even basically your breakeven or you know, profitable but within your comfort zone. That would be an area to increase. That would be the criteria that I’m looking at or a client is looking at and we’re having a strategic discussion about. It’s not simply Oh, the cost is low push more, because like I said, if that product is just been suspended, or you’ve had an issue with inventory coming up, because the containers cost $12,000, to get to America from China, none of that matters. Alright, the next part when spending more as a PPC only, I really encourage a lot of our clients to look at off Amazon channels these days. Absolutely. I mean, we even manage some Google ads for some clients, just as a test. We’re messing around with that right now. But yeah, these other like, places to drive traffic are great. I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t spend on tick tock or facebook if update hasn’t hurt you too bad.
Norman Farrar 50:45
Especially when they have the referral program.
Brent Zahradnik 50:48
That’s right. Yeah, we’d even talk about that norm. That’s great. So yeah, Ted was it 10%, you probably know more about the details of the site, 10 percents an
Norman Farrar 50:55
average of 10, it can actually be quite a lot more but, and the average seller will save instead of paying 15% referral fee, they’ll pay 5%, if they drive your own traffic, from Google ads, or wherever the the trick to this is that you have to, you have to be brand registered, and you have to have the attribution program. So once you get that set up, you can take the link or the tag, and then you can start going out to whatever source you have to drive the external traffic. Now, you won’t get a direct. Like, if you direct if you direct a lot of traffic, and you get sales, you’re not going to get it back in the form of a check. It’ll be a credit towards your account.
Norman Farrar 51:46
Right? That’s great.
Norman Farrar 51:47
I mean, that’s one way. So you can spend more. If you find a really efficient channel, like say it’s Pinterest for you. Pinterest is fairly inexpensive. Or it might be tick tock or might be whatever. But as long as you have that tag is no, like you’ll get you’ll get the bonus.
Brent Zahradnik 52:06
Yeah, that’s huge. I think that I actually do know this for a fact, next next year, they’re going to be rolling that out to European countries, too. And your own beloved Canada? Oh, yes, only right now Canada is going to be getting that referral bonus as well. Someone in Amazon counted the beans and they said, Hey, this really makes sense for us. We like these external customers, because they turn into Prime customers, they maybe are not habitual Amazon shoppers like people already are. So it makes more sense for us to incentivize sellers to get them over. And we’ve even seen data we haven’t had this experience personally. But we’ve seen data to suggest that pushing external traffic to Amazon on a listing, even if those aren’t really high converting customers or potential customers will still help with organic rank for particular keywords. If they’re not like super ultra competitive, I don’t know if you’ve seen the same thing and your tests or people you’ve talked to norm I know you a pretty big community out there.
Norman Farrar 53:03
Yeah, no, yeah, we’ve seen it to be a benefit. So know, if you’re not doing it, that is definitely something to do. You’re going to get the love, you know, Amazon’s going to Amazon will give you the love. That’s what they’re trying to do. It’s external traffic. Now kills before we get to the next question, this will be the last call for the giveaway today with Brent, which he’s going to personally have a call with you 30 minute phone call. Plus he’s going to him and his team are going to look at your accounting, give your account an audit and come back with a bunch of information. So you can kill it in q1 next year.
Kelsey 53:44
All right. Yes, that is hashtag. We’ll have Kelsey. So you just need to comment that and put that into the comments section. If you take two people, you get an extra entry as well. So our next question is from Red. What is an ideal scalable percentage for advertising?
Brent Zahradnik 54:03
Oh, it’s good question. Yeah, this one’s much easier to answer the hard number. So I’m curious what you think your norm because you have all these businesses, you’ve talked to many people in the space, what we see from an ad agency perspective, let’s talk about this tacos figure. So total a cost, right? This is your not ad spend, you know, with your ad sales, but rather ad spend with your overall sales. So you’re trying to figure out what is the overall impact that my ad spend is having? Usually, the percentage that we see that is, let’s say comfortable is anywhere between, let’s say 5%, up to 12, maybe 13. And most percent, what we call tacos. For larger clients, it’s usually smaller. So let’s say someone is spending a quarter million they might have it like four or five 6%. That’s, you know, that’s because their business is large enough that that’s like a still a substantial amount of money, of course, but a lot of our smaller clients that might be as high as 13 12% Tacos for that business, I would say that is scalable because you can continue to grow the company and keep your spend in proportion to that amount. It as long as Yeah, we talked about cashflow as long as you have the cash flow to do that. So that that’s direct of an answer I can get, I suppose.
Norman Farrar 55:17
Yeah, I would agree with that with those numbers. And don’t forget, when you’re scaling, I’ll just give an example. That happened over the last couple of weeks is we scaled, it was a really great performing product. But we went to television. And we started pumping out commercials on Fox, and that we’ve seen a ton of new business. And it was all you know, we had to weigh it out. But I mean, it was a it was a good size brand. And it’s crushing it right now. I think it was Friday was the best sales in the last three or four years that we’ve seen, like it just killed it. Because you know, people and if you run an ad once, you’ll get nothing. And this is very similar to, you know, just brand awareness on Amazon, but brand awareness anywhere, if it’s a radio commercial, if it’s a billboard, if it’s whatever, you need to have those multiple touchpoints. And this, this was that opportunity to scale. Now scale could be looking at different platforms to going to fair and selling way wholesale, could be going to mom and pop shops. There’s all sorts of opportunities, once you get to a certain limit. And we just talked about the bonus program, where you spend a bit of money, you’ll get some back so yeah, I I love scaling.
Brent Zahradnik 56:54
All the one thing to add on to that is how many jingles Can you think of from your childhood that you heard on the radio, when you’re driving around your parents in the car, you can still remember the tune. It’s like some like local tire shop or something like that, you know, for cars. Yeah, you still remember that tune? Like okay, maybe I was exposed to that enough times and it drilled it into my head I can think of the same for, you know, infomercials I saw on History Channel when I was 12. watching documentaries about war two or something like Yeah.
Norman Farrar 57:21
Okay, next.
Kelsey 57:26
Alright, so these two questions, I think might fall in a similar kind of lie. So I’ll ask them together. But if you want us to break them up, feel free. So are there any budgeting software’s you would recommend for sellers? And the second question is from Jeff, how do you follow your profit accurately? So I’m not sure that’s two questions that you can answer together if you want to talk to them separately.
Norman Farrar 57:52
So Jeff, are you talking about PPC or budgeting in general? Can you just answer that?
Kelsey 57:59
Okay, and as we wait, yeah, budgeting software, is there anything you’d recommend for sellers?
Norman Farrar 58:07
Yeah, so if if we’re not talking PPC, if it’s budgeting in general, you can, if you have a QuickBooks subscription, you can use there is a budgeting tool there. But if you want to spend a couple extra dollars, and build out a proper business plan, with all the financial statements and the budgeting, I go to live plan.com. And it’s a it’s just an app that is fabulous for building out business plans, it gives you examples, step by step. And at the end of the day, you could have something to give to an investor or somebody, let’s say you’re exiting, there’s everything that they need to know. And it looks completely professional. And they’ve got a ton of examples that you could use from so anyways, that’s what I would recommend.
Kelsey 59:07
Okay,
Norman Farrar 59:08
so is there a budgeting tool that you use Brent for, for PPC?
Brent Zahradnik 59:13
Yeah, two things I was gonna say. I mean, we’re a company that really likes Xero a lot. That’s what an x x CRO and we use that like, I have a finance person full time who deals with all these things, thankfully. And she’s a huge fan of Xero. And we find that to be really great plugs in with a lot of software we use for filling and other things like that. I imagine it works quite well for E commerce. I don’t have any
Norman Farrar 59:36
zero is a great app for for E commerce as well.
Brent Zahradnik 59:40
When it comes to PPC budgeting. That’s a good question. I think one area that a lot of PPC tools actually fall short is the budgeting estimation. We use a tool called intent wise, which I’m quite a big fan of. We switched to it at some point last year from another PPC tool that could probably talk for a full hour just about that tool but one feature Has that I quite like is a budget pacing feature. So it doesn’t actually make changes to your account that’s up to you to figure out or your agency, whoever. But what you can do is set an estimated spend for the month, and then it’ll show you a trajectory, okay? Well, you spent this much, here’s how here’s how it looks day to day goes up and down a little bit. But then here’s what you need to spend per day for the remainder of the month to hit your target by the end of the month. It’s very helpful. So it gives us guidance, and it, of course, dynamically adjusts every day as data comes in will change itself. So we like that. And there’s very few instances where we don’t have a target set for a client account. You know, the only reason we wouldn’t do that would be just negligence, I guess, because like, it’s really easy. Just say, Okay, we’re spending 35k This month, put it in even if you know we’re gonna spend over under we can adjust it as we go, you know, being being flexible in this approach is what’s important to respond to the, you know, conditions of the business changing in the in the month changing, but yeah, we like that feature of that a lot.
Norman Farrar 1:00:59
Okay, so near had a couple of comments. I don’t think a question what were they kills?
Kelsey 1:01:05
Yeah. So I asked the beard nation how in control are you have your budget from a scale of one to 10. And then near said, we are expanding the scale of controlling the PPC, one of the most important things, it does not mean that everything is amazing, but each campaign has specific targets and reasons for using it. But we know
Norman Farrar 1:01:24
that near is amazing. So just saying
Brent Zahradnik 1:01:29
that sounds sounds like well manage set up. Yeah. And one of the things that you’re probably mastered if he if he’s got that mentally already kind of dialed in is, it’s really important to understand that campaigns are the best way to segment out the spend. So like we talked about these campaigns that have too many things in them, they’re too crowded, too many keywords or too many ad groups in there. break those out, especially if it’s a top spending top performing keyword, whatever it is, you need to give it space to run. It’s like it’s like a dog it’s hyperactive. Gotta let it off the leash. Let it let it tear around.
Norman Farrar 1:02:02
Very good. Any more questions Kells?
Kelsey 1:02:06
No, I think that’s it. I think so. Is
Norman Farrar 1:02:08
it that time?
Kelsey 1:02:10
It sure is.
Norman Farrar 1:02:11
Okay, Grant. I don’t think you’ve seen this. Get ready.
Kelsey 1:02:17
Here we go.
Norman Farrar 1:02:30
Alright,
Kelsey 1:02:31
alright, so thank you, everyone who entered today’s draw, I’m just gonna shuffle. Alright, so if you are the winner, please email me Kay at lunch with norm.com. Spin it. And yeah, you have 48 hours to Alright, Jeff. Jeff, new winner. gratulations. I’ll connect you with Brent afterwards. And yeah, thank you for entering everyone.
Brent Zahradnik 1:03:06
Right on cool. Yeah, I think I’ve only heard that not seen it. Yeah.
Norman Farrar 1:03:10
Okay, so, Brett or Brent? Jeff. That’s fantastic. First time winner, congrats. And Brent. That’s it. How do people get ahold of you?
Brent Zahradnik 1:03:22
Let’s see. I mean, a couple ways. You can just email Hello at NZ Pathfinder that goes to me. You can find me on Facebook, I respond to messages there. I’m on LinkedIn. And I’ve just recently started using Twitter more especially for the Amazon crowd. There’s a small group of us on there. You know, the Amazon community is very Facebook and LinkedIn centric. But there’s a small group of us on Twitter. So I’m adding Saran Nick on Twitter, which is just my last name. Okay, good. Find me on there.
Norman Farrar 1:03:50
All right. Great. Well, thank you for coming on the podcast today. Been a pleasure. Okay, until next time, everybody. Hopefully this sore throat will go away by then. We have a really great show coming up on Monday. Trent dries med. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Trent. He’s got a great podcast himself. But he’s got an incredible app. You guys know how much I love automation and scalability? Well, he is the owner, founder of flow, stir and wait to see like I I’ve had a call with them trying to prep for the for the podcast. And it’s unbelievable. And he’s got these flows, workflows that you can either build yourself, or they’re already pre made. And I don’t know if you remember, Steven Pope was on and at the end of the show. He said, Oh, here are my flows. Well, he used flow stir to go through everything for us. And this is on keyword research. And that blew me away that Wyatt reached out. And that’s why we got Trent on. So stay tuned for Trent on Monday. It’s going to be a great show. I can’t wait this, you know that, like I love. I don’t know, that’s my thing. So anyways might not be yours. I love automation. I love scalability. So before we get into anything else is that last word from our sponsor? Thank you Z CO for sponsoring this episode of lunch with Norm. Are you looking to take your ecommerce business from local to global, you can with the help of z and their brand new app. That’s right, you can track live shipments with push notifications. Get detailed lead times for each stage of your shipment, and store all compliance and VAT reclaim documents in the palm of your hand. All while listening to lunch with Norm. Ready to expand your E commerce empire. And take your Amazon FBA business global. Use the link in the description to learn more about Z’s new app that’s now available on desktop and mobile. That’s z.co z e dot C O. Okay, Kelsey.
Kelsey 1:06:12
Right. So I hope everyone enjoyed it. Today’s episode, and yes, just a rabbit. I hate busy work, too. So tune in for Monday’s episode. And yeah, we’ll try and tackle that issue. So if you haven’t already, please smash those like buttons, give us those thumbs up. And as I said before, we’re going to be sending some invites out to some guests. And we’re looking for topics and guest suggestions. Just to give you the guys the very best for 2022. So if you have anyone in mind, you can email me Caitlin’s with Norm calm. And I think I also put a post up in the Facebook group to the Facebook group is lunch with normal Amazon FBA and E commerce collective. And let me see Oh, and thank you to our latest Patreon subscriber Andrew. You’re awesome. Thank you for subscribing. I just saw that come in, during the podcast. So we’ll get you set up with that. And if you are in the Patreon program that we have at lunch with Norm, you can go over to our lunch with Norm websites and click on the membership button, you’ll be able to see our three tiered program. Basically, if you want to get q&a sessions with me in norm this, we do this three times a month, where we sit down with a small group of people, our beer nation VIPs. And yeah, we let them ask us questions, we deep dive into anything they want to talk about. And we also have guest lessons from Steven black. Me, we spent Leonard off the lobby, those and all those are recorded too. So you can go back and watch them as many times as you need. But yeah, so check that out if you’re interested. And I think that’s everything. Don’t forget to follow us on social media, of course. That’s either the Facebook or Instagram. We’re also hitting up tick tock hard now so check those out. But I think that’s it for me and anything else.
Norman Farrar 1:08:14
That’s it. So thanks for bearing with me today. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. Thank you for being part of this community. We could not do this without you. And enjoy the rest of your week. And week end their mantra
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
