We are talking about how to set goals as an entrepreneur! On Lunch with Norm we will discuss the process to goal setting, the mistakes people make when setting goals, how to handle risks as an entrepreneur, and advice for new sellers. Beginning in 2015 and pivoting to wholesale and private label, founder of Seller Systems, Brandon Young now is considered by many to be one of the leaders in current Amazon Private Label strategies.
Voted best Amazon Private Label Consultant two years in a row by the Seller Poll, Brandon Young is considered by many to be one of the leaders in current Amazon Private Label strategies. He began selling on Amazon in 2015, as most sellers do, with arbitrage / reselling. Seeking a more scalable business model, he pivoted to wholesale and private label. In June of 2016, he launched his first private label products. Less than 5 years later, he is an exclusively private label with multiple brands and 8 figures in revenue annually.
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Episode: 243
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Brandon Young – Seller Systems Founder and Lead Instructor
Subtitle: “Scaling and Goal Setting as an Entrepreneur”
Final Show Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWQrHoHBSOI
Back on Lunch with Norm…Learn how to set goals as an entrepreneur. In this episode, we go over the goal setting processes, mistakes people make, and creating KPIs. Today check out, Seller System’s Brandon Young, one of the leaders in current Amazon Private Label strategies.
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Norman Farrar 0:01
Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with Norm, the Amazon FBA and Ecommerce podcast. Alright, today we have another great show, we’re going to be talking about scaling and goal setting as an entrepreneur. So this is another topic that not a lot of people are talking about. But I think I’ve got a great guest to cover this. So this is first time as a guest. Also, I’ve known him for years. But great guy, um, keep again, selling I think a little bit after me about 2015 with Amazon arbitrage. And then he was trying to scale his business model, he pivoted wholesale into private label, private label selling, which he’s done extremely well. In 2016. He launched his first private label product five years later, he is exclusively a private label seller with multiple brands and eight figure revenue annually. Now, something that a lot of people don’t realize about my guest, is he was also featured on Storage Wars. Yes, Brandon Young was featured on Storage Wars. So we’ll talk a little bit about that as well. But before we get to it, just a quick 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 Dimon his team over at solarize.com and remember, Solarize is with one R. Alright. Where is my beardo son?
Kelsey
Not me. Hello.
Norman Farrar
Am I really weird? Little weird?
Kelsey 2:08
Good. Yeah. quirky.
Norman Farrar 2:10
Yeah. quirky. That’s a good word. So how’s it going?
Kelsey 2:13
I’m doing fantastic. How are you?
Norman Farrar 2:15
I am doing fine. Thank you for asking. Alright,
Kelsey 2:18
so we have a ton of beer Nation members joining in on this one. Good. Oh, we got Jessica Rabbit. Jeff rad. Welcome. Welcome, Simon Manny. Me see cool hand. 99. Great to see you again. Yeah, super excited for this episode. Super excited for Brandon to be on. And yeah, it’s gonna be a great episode. If you’re new to the show. We get started by smashing those like buttons, giving us a thumbs up. And yet, subscribe to our YouTube channel if you haven’t already. Also, I want to give a shout out to one beard nation member in particular rad. I got this in the mail. Yes, thank you read. So if you’re interested, check out solar plus more. They do a ton of great stuff with solar motion lights. We have flashlights. This is for the patio. So check it out. Thank you, rad. That was a great little surprise. And yeah, we can jump into the episode as well. And
Norman Farrar 3:20
well, I think before we get started, just a small thing, right. Tim Jordan, let this out of the bag. He told me to hold off on everything for two days yesterday. And I see that he announced our Mexico trip. So anyways, Kelsey, you can post that link. I don’t think pricing or anything’s up yet. But anyways, Tim Jordan and I are doing a Mexico sourcing trip. We’ve got a bunch of people, a bunch of manufacturers and distributors coming into the World Trade Center in Mexico City. And we’ve got some really great sponsors as well. Alibaba is sponsoring the event, Helium 10, sponsoring the event. And then after the event, we’re going over to Cancun, and we’ve got just a large mastermind going on for a few days. So anyways, that was supposed to be I thought a secret for a little while, and we’ve kept it under our hat for a little while. And I noticed on Tim’s Facebook yesterday, he announced it so. Alright, very good. So there you go.
Kelsey 4:29
Alright, so yeah, I’ll be dropping the link in the comment sections. If you guys are interested. Check it out. But uh, yeah.
Norman Farrar 4:36
Alright, so if you have any questions, throw more in the comment section. Sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee or tea or whatever suits your fancy. And enjoy the episode. Welcome, sir.
Brandon Young 4:53
Good to see you in ARM How you doing? Good. Let’s talk about Storage Wars. Yeah, I was just experimenting with some different business models. And I had seen that and it was fun. And so we went and bought a bunch of storage units. And it turns out they were trying to do an offshoot of Storage Wars Miami, which the cast was terrible. And I
Norman Farrar 5:20
remember that I remember this storage warm Miami. Yeah,
Brandon Young 5:24
we went to a couple shooting like a couple episodes. And everyone overbid everything because they wanted to be on the show. So it wasn’t worth being there. And then the cast was just everything was so fake and terrible. But yeah, I got featured on it a couple times because of that, and, um, it was, it’s terrible business storage storage units are such a grind, you have to clean out the unit. And there’s a lot of trash in there. A lot of people don’t realize the worst are mattresses, yeah, you get mattresses with pee on them. And just like you have to, you have to move them and they’re hard to move, you have to rent trucks and help and labor. So by the time we were done, I had a guy working for me that I was paying like $12 An hour cash. And he ended up making more money than me after like four or five units, because he was paying them hourly, then all the work we actually put into sorting, figuring out what to sell online, and then what to sell at a flea market. And it was it’s such a terrible business, but it was an experience.
Norman Farrar 6:23
Yeah, I bet. Now, one of the things I do want to let everybody know, and I really appreciate this is you’re under the weather right now. And we didn’t even think that you’d be able to come on as of last night. So again, I want to thank you for taking the time and kind of going through all this. No, I
Brandon Young 6:45
appreciate it. Man I had already posted on the show before but um, yeah, turns out I have COVID we we’ve been really careful. But you know, you have a 10 year old that goes to school and everyone in Miami has COVID right now. So yeah, but pretty much what I’m hearing is pretty much inevitable that you just can’t afford it. It’s so easy to catch.
Norman Farrar 7:03
Well take care of yourself and get better. And again, I appreciate you taking your time today. Thanks. All right, sir. All right, sir. So let’s get into this. Now you like you were saying you got really into the arbitrage side 2015, then you started doing private label selling and now you’re kind of hooked into wholesale and private label selling, you’re very successful at it. I think you are one of the best experts to talk about scaling a business and how to scale and mindset. So there’s a lot of things that go through when you first start a business. There’s a lot of hurdles that happen daily, weekly that you have to overcome. So I think this is a great topic for us to talk about. And I guess the first thing I want to talk about is starting out as an online entrepreneur, where do you even start with goal setting?
Brandon Young 7:58
Yeah, what’s interesting is, we had to hire a CEO coach ourselves. Last year, we’ve spent six figures in coaching to help us scale our own business. And it’s been really a big breakthrough for us to to learn how to how to set proper goals. And we read every single management book we could get our hands on. So it was really interesting. And what we started to notice is that there’s a pattern, all of the management books basically are the same exact system, but with different names. So everything is essentially working backwards. And one of the books that that we’re reading and going through right now is called work working backwards. And it’s a it’s about the Amazon story and about their processes and how they’ve iterated and been able to launch so many successful offshoots of their business. And it for someone just starting out, I think it’s important to understand the fundamentals, how the processes work, how to look at the data, how to make solid decisions based on data, increase your success rate of launching a product, learn all of those processes. But then when you want to scale that business, you really have to set an objective and then work backwards from there as to what it’s going to take to achieve that. What are the so they call them output measures or lagging metrics. So sales, for example, if you want to set sales as your lagging metric, or your goal, by the time you achieve sales, it’s too late to do anything about it. So it’s a lagging metric, or an output metric. And so what are you going to do on a daily basis? What are the leading activities that you can do on a daily basis, that will, that will get you closer to that goal incrementally over time, right. So if I set that goal for, you know, four quarters out or 1212 months out, I know that there are ways to incrementally measure my progress towards that goal, but what am I doing on a daily basis to get there? So for Amazon sellers, there’s a couple main levers that people pull. Sales are made up of two to only two things, existing sales from existing products and new products, right? So if you know how much you’re expecting to make from existing products, and you set a goal here, that delta is what you need to cover with new products. Okay, so what are your leading activities to develop new products, product research, ordering samples, you know, launching new products, and eventually, as you work down what all those processes entail, what resources you need, what capital you need, what team you need. To do all of that, you will be able to determine pretty accurately, whether you’re going to achieve your goal, you know, pretty early on, you’re going to see if you’re on target, or you’re low or you’re high, and you need to adjust from there, do you need more resources? Do you not have the capability to achieve it? So someone just starting out that has two or three skews and says I want to do 10 million next year, it’s probably not realistic. But it’s, it’s possible, you would need to fill that organization chart with other seats besides yourself. And you would need to set a lot of have a lot of resources to do it. But it’s possible.
Norman Farrar 11:20
You know, one of the things that you mentioned was, you are you have a coach. And so I don’t care if you’re just starting out. And you know, you might join an organization like EO which is a fabulous orbit organization, and it’s everywhere in the US. And if you have, I think, Oh, 1 million in the US, I think 1.5 up in Canada, you can join this. And it’s the amount of information that you can get at your fingertips is fantastic. But if you don’t have access to that, even a mentor, get somebody that can drop some information so you can start to grow. And what I like about what what you said is you’ve got this seal, EO at your level. And it’s important that you get a coach at your level, if you’re and I know the Dan Sullivan was Strategic Coach, you know, he broke it down into okay, if you’re making $100,000 a year, this is your peer group. 250,000 is your peer group 500,000 Is your peer group. Don’t mess up, don’t lie, don’t go say if you’re making 50,000, don’t try to get into a 250,000 or the million dollar, because you’re out of your league. There’s completely different goals, there’s completely different tasks that you have to do to achieve your goals in those in those settings. So I really liked the idea. And I know that you also like the idea of sharing information, but finding a mentor that can help you right at the starting of growing your business. If you want to grow, you need that mentor, what do you think
Brandon Young 13:02
100% If it requires a humbleness to understand that you don’t know everything? And you know, and, and it skips the learning curve. It’s smart, right? Like, yeah, we figured out Amazon private label in large part on our own with trial and error, we had a lot of success, we had a lot of failure. And every time we learned what worked and what didn’t work, we analyze data in different ways every single time and, and it’s all about what we teach. But the even at our level, we understood that we were not capable of building the right team and growing the organization to become a real company. Right? So what we also talked about is that in Amazon, a solopreneur, you yourself, maybe a VA can drive this business to $3 million in sales. It’s very possible. I’ve seen it hundreds of times, right, right. That’s the inflection point at that point as to what you’re gonna do next. And a lot of people at that point either sell or scale, and those are your two options, right? Yep. If you linger, you’re gonna die. So stagnation is death. So at one to 3 million, you need to make that decision, am I going to go to 6 million or am I going to sell the business and start all over and at to get to 6 million, you can start to hire specialists, right? You can outsource something to an agency, maybe, if that’s the way you want to go. You can hire a specialist in a specific seat that basically is still task oriented. They’re only going to do what you tell them to do right now to get from 10 million to 50 million though. You can’t have an organization full of specialists, you need managers you need you need a players you need VP level talent, and they need to be able to think independently and be aligned with your goals and objectives and understand and communicate with the other departments that are that require it. Am I able to share? I have Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I have an org chart that I’ve been working on that I’m doing. I’m sharing. Because we just had this. Let me see if I can share.
Norman Farrar 15:18
So just one thing. We’re doing a live stream, but most of the people listen to this on a podcast. So you describe a little fan? Yeah. Okay, so don’t do charades.
Brandon Young 15:36
That’s the wrong one. Let me stop sharing, give me one second, share, share screen. Okay. Here’s the thing, when you first start out the business, you really only have the top layer, here. So what we’re looking at is an Amazon private label chart, you have the CEO at the top. And underneath, you have brand manager, you have head of product, you have head of creative, you have supply chain management, you have your marketing director, and you have your CFO. And these are the main departments that you’re going to have an Amazon private label business or Amazon brand business, ecommerce business. And a lot of people don’t realize because they don’t, they don’t, they don’t take the time to separate the tasks that they’re doing into these different processes and into these different seats. And what’s funny is like when you’re a solopreneur, it’s literally you write the name of who’s in the seat, and it’s you, you, you you you write, and then maybe you’ll find a VA that’s helping you with, you know, customer service, which is on here. But you know, at the end of the day, you need to learn the fundamentals of every single one of these seats at a very high level. So if you’re talking about how to product development, how does that start? Well, the leading activity for product development is keyword research, its product research, it’s understanding the competition and the demand of the market. How are how are our competitors getting their sales? And how good of a job is are our competitors doing at meeting that demand? Are they ranked well, right. And so if you can understand the fundamentals of product research, now you need to learn the fundamentals of sourcing and logistics. Now, now you need to learn the next step, which is, you know, content and getting someone really, really good at content, understanding the fundamentals of what triggers conversion rates, and understanding marketing at a high level. And understanding that this business is two things, there’s only two things that matter with almost every business and it’s traffic and conversions. So then you break down traffic and conversions and who’s in charge of traffic, who’s in charge of conversions, and you have, you have all these different hats you’re wearing as you’re growing. But eventually, you’re gonna need to start filling out this chart in order to grow this is what a, you know, a $25 million, Amazon private label business will look like eventually, where you have a different name, and each of these seats, and you have a players and managers at the head of each of these, these these seats. So you know, if you’re not watching, or you can’t see, I mean, underneath head of creative, you don’t even think about it. But you have copywriting you have photography, videography, you have graphic design, you have product design, you have to do unique packaging, you have to do unique products. For supply chain, you have inventory planning, you have logistics, and you have orders and orders coordinator, someone coordinating and making sure you never run out of stock. So you have different KPIs for each of these seats as well. So your supply chain team is in charge of your out of stock rate, your days of inventory, your shipping costs. And then you know, you have your marketing director who is in charge of paid ads off Amazon on Amazon. And then you can start to branch out to other marketplaces, you can have b2b and wholesale retail. So this is this this organization chart that we’re that we’re that we’re you know, talking about starts with you wearing all of those hats, and you have to understand what are the leading activities for each of those seats that are going to drive you towards those objectives at the end of the year. And it might just be you, it might be you and one other you and two others you and assistant. But once you want to get to eight figures, and you want to scale towards nine figures, you’re now talking about a real company, right? That’s a real organization that is going to require you to understand how to have regular meetings with real objectives that are very efficient, and you’re working backwards from that objective with really measurable leading activities.
Norman Farrar 19:31
Right, and one of the things that we do with our, the way that you put out your org chart there, will put instead of Mee Mee Mee Mee Mee we’ll put the just the title of whoever has to do it. And then what we’ll do is we’ll start matching up for different dollar ranges 10 100,000 10,000 And we just kind of start to draw lines to it and who’s going to be Doing those tasks, right? And the ones that are the $10, that we can get going out really quickly. Those are the ones we’re working on to get off of our plate, and it kind of just goes up. So you’re working at the $10,000 an hour. And I mean, that sounds crazy. $10,000 an hour, but you’re working on your business, and you’re growing it, and you’re strategizing, and you’re making the thing grow. Now, I, I think you might know, my buddy, Colin Campbell. He’s out in Fort Lauderdale. And I’m pretty sure you probably run around in the same circles. But he’s got a, he’s he just sold his one company to GoDaddy, very successful. He’s had like, probably 510 really, really successful exits. And he’s come out with something, just basically his chart is start scale, exit, repeat. And so if you can visualize that going down with all these tasks that you have to do, and then he has the columns, people, money storage, and what’s the last one systems, and he just kind of fills in all those blanks. And he just uses that. And it’s a formula for success. Like if you fill in all the art, and you take that, you take that org chart that you have, and at least you’ve got to visualize in your mind that one of the things that and I know Shane really hates me for this and lobby hates me for this. But every year or every quarter, it’s okay, let’s update the business plan. Okay, what’s the strategy going into the next quarter? Or? But you have to have that roadmap, right. And I think that’s what you’re bringing to the table?
Brandon Young 21:46
No, for sure. So someone was asking like for a solopreneur? What do you do? Well, I recommend walking each process as you’re going through it for that first launch, but become an expert at everything. And that’s why we call it seller systems because it has to be based on systems this way that you’re you know, you were talking about Colin was talking about, if you don’t have systems, you don’t have anything. And then it’s a matter of you know, now how do you scale these systems? I have another chart. I’ll show you really quickly. And for those listening, I’m sorry that you’re not able, you should go to YouTube and watch this and hit the Smash, smash
Norman Farrar 22:20
smash those likes, subscribe. Yeah, ring the bell. I’ve learned all these terms.
Brandon Young 22:27
These kids these days, these whippersnappers. Yeah, Kelsey. So this is about the leading activities. And it’s just an example of like losing weight. But I want to show you specifically. Yeah, that’s different org chart. There it is. Okay. So now you’re talking about how do you determine what levers to pull or what to focus on each quarter? And this is what you were just talking about norm, right? You were saying that? Okay, every single quarter, you need to kind of revisit, what is your goal or activity? Like, what are you trying to achieve for the quarter? What is your, we call it a hot, some people call it a rock, some people call it, you know, there’s EOS. There’s 40x, there’s, you know, like I said, all these different management systems, they call it something different. Yep, it’s all the same thing, you’re setting up an audacious or an objective. Now, the key is that in an organization, you can only achieve one or two of these every quarter. So you’ll see here it says Q three, Q three, Q three, and then there should be different like for for q3 is too many. So, but what we’re looking at is the taxonomy of value of a business of an E commerce business, specifically, Amazon, right, Amazon private label. So you have your company valuation at the top and what drives company valuation. That’s obviously what the goal is, is to build up the value of the company as much as possible. Well, it’s made up of sales, it’s made up of profit, and it’s made up of capabilities. So what you need to do is understand, okay, what are what are the things I’m going to be doing each quarter that can I can incrementally improve, and you’ll learn, you have to be honest, you go back to that org chart, and you have to say, Okay, I’m gonna give myself a grade in every one of those seats that I put myself in, and the ones that you’re the worst that you should probably replace yourself first, right? Now, let’s say that you’re not good at content. So your click through rate your traffic as well. And you’re having trouble with some keyword ranks and conversion rates. Your marketing isn’t as good your launches aren’t doing as good. Well, that’s a content issue, because you have to, you have to understand the again those two main factors traffic and conversions, traffic, you have to understand what levers or what you can do to what you can do to to fix traffic. So let’s see. Click through rate. You can you can change your main image, you can change your price, and those are the main those are the main factors but I’ll try to be more conceptual here, right where I explain it. Um, I’d say we’re looking at, again, all the different levers, and each of those were formulas. So we understand that our click through rates a little low, we’d like to increase that that’s the goal for the quarter is to increase the traffic to all of our listings. So to increase click through rates, essentially, well, the two main levers there are content and, and, you know, price. Okay? Now, we also have additional outside marketing we can do. So now you need to break that down, what are the leading activities are we going to drive outside traffic are we going to improve our content and test five new images. So the goal is, okay, test five new main images for each product. That’s our activity for the quarter. That’s all we can focus on. Now you get moving, and then that’s relating activity test the new image, check your click through rate testing an image Check, check your click through rate, try alternate pricing, add a coupon, raise your price, add a coupon, lower your price adequate add a coupon, right. So you have those levers to control. But if your focus is traffic for for this quarter for all of your products, now you understand what drives traffic, and then you can figure out what are the leading activities you’re going to do for the quarter. And that’s true for every single one of those, those that chart every single piece of that, that that taxonomy of value, it’s all a formula. And then you have to figure out, okay, if something, if something’s not as good as I want it to be, then what are the things I can do? What are the leading activities I can do to improve it this quarter. And then that can be what you’re focusing on for the quarter with your products. And again, like the overhead the the the low hanging fruit is always adding new products. But you should always be focusing on also optimizing existing products and getting better at different systems, scaling and growing the team so that you can meet those capabilities. Don’t hire just a hire, but know why you’re hiring, what are their activities? What are they going to be doing? And then again, that’s all about working backwards and finding out what are those leading activities I need to do to meet those objectives that we set.
Norman Farrar 26:58
So I just noticed a quick comment about the charts. Would you be able to supply the visuals so we could post them in the show notes. So people who can’t see them can get a glance at them in the podcast?
Brandon Young 27:11
Yeah,
Norman Farrar 27:12
I can do that. All right, fantastic. Now, before we get to anything further, there’s a couple things. First of all, Brendan’s come to us with an incredible multi giveaway today. So Brandon, why don’t we just talk about that for a quick second. So I asked you, Hey, can you give away something and what did you come back with?
Brandon Young 27:35
Yeah, so I have a I have a masterclass on PPC, I have an older one that we did a year and a half ago, things have changed dramatically in Amazon with regards to play ad placements, different different places that you can advertise, the rules are a little different, the algorithms a little different. So we’re updating that masterclass. It’s going to be four or five parts across five or six hours. And I’m going to give five, five seats into that masterclass to your listeners.
Norman Farrar 28:08
That’s fantastic. So, and I know the information and the content that you deliver is always high end premium content. So if you’re looking for a great PPC course, hashtag, we’ll have Kelsey, tag two people, and you’ll get a second entry. Okay. This is one of the best giveaways that we’ve had and look, five seats. That’s fantastic. Brandon, again, I want to thank you on that. Now, one last thing, Kelsey, put your finger on the button. We’re going to 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 Alright, I’m thinking about the action steps. There’s a lot there, right? There’s so much and you don’t want it to be overwhelming. What are like maybe two or three action steps that people can get get going to just get started with this.
Brandon Young 29:29
So what do they have? SKUs? Are they just yeah, let’s
Norman Farrar 29:31
let’s just say that they’ve got their first asYn up there or maybe two. And they’ve just never done it before. Now we have discussed a lot of this kind of in in detail but just quick action steps. Okay, if I need a checklist, what do I have to do? 123
Brandon Young 29:49
So there’s okay. This is like a five hour masterclass in itself. Oh, yeah, it is. Okay. First of all, you have to make sure that you did that. proper keyword research to index and write your listing for maximum ranking. That’s the first step. So creating what we call a master keyword list, understanding all of the keywords that drive sales potentially for a product, what are all of the keywords that different sellers are using, because they’re all not using all of them. We’ve proven that many, many times over and over. And once you look at that chart, and you put your listing in that chart, also, your product, you’re going to see what holes you have in your in your listing from a keyword perspective, are you missing different routes, a lot of times there are different ways people call things right like so for example, a toiletry bag can be adopt kit, it can be a bathroom bag, it can be a travel bag, well, if you only included a, you know, toiletry bag in your listing, you’d be missing out on about half the market, because you missed out on dopp kit and bathroom bag and men’s travel bag and all those things, right. toiletries bag is another you know, like just a, you have so many different keywords that drive sales for products. And you need to be able to identify all of those and know which ones to prioritize. So start with good keyword research, good indexing and good writing, right. And once you’ve done that, and you feel like you’ve done a good job with indexing and writing your listing, then it comes down to then traffic and conversions on those keywords. So you’ve given Amazon all the opportunity to rank you. But now you need to do better than your competition, and everything’s relative for every market. So you need a better click through rate a better conversion rate, you need to drive more revenue, right? So relevancy we fixed by writing our listing better doing the keyword research and writing it better. That’s a big part of ranking. Once we write our listing properly, now we need to focus on click through rate, conversion rate and revenue. Click the rate again, we just talked about, which is price and content, work on Main images, even if you think your image is better than your competition, maybe it’s too different. Maybe it’s not as good as you think use services like helium, 10, and PickFu. And they have different services where you can test many different images against the competition, you can take your main image and the four best other best sellers and say which one do you like the best? And why? They’re going to come back and tell you they’re only going to click on you 5% of the time? Well, you need to do better than that. Right? Right. Majority. So content, I think is the way you win and moving forward if you have a solid Keyword Research Foundation, but that’s also how we do product research. So I mean, if I’m, if I’m looking at a potential product, I can understand what the risk is of the product, what the opportunity of the product is. Let me see something I can share real quick again. I know it’s visual. But let me let me do a make this smaller as you mounts. It’s gonna be hard for people to see but that’s okay. All right.
Norman Farrar 33:07
While we’re waiting for this, Kelsey, we’ll be doing interpretive dance.
Brandon Young 33:13
This is a this is what we call a master keyword list. And this is the example I have here is that diaper caddy, right. So on the diaper caddy, we’re seeing that there are three if there are 234 keywords that have 355,000 search volume combined with a three relevancy and a 350 search volume. And the way that that works is that we assign the relevancy score based on the number of these top sellers, we took the 15 best sellers. And we gave a relevancy score based on how many of them are ranked well for a keyword. Logically speaking, the more of your exact competitors that are on the first page for a keyword the more the more relevant it is, right. So now we can sort by relevancy. We can sort by search volume, but this gives us an idea how big is the market, the market is 234 Major keywords that have at least the three relevancy 350 355,000 search volume, but how good is our competition? Well, this guy is on 94% of that search volume. He’s 332,000. So let’s say that you’re deciding to do this product well, you’ve got a lot of oranges, a lot of red you got guys that are that are really good at Amazon, you got for good to very good. This is a saturated market, they’re all selling kind of the same product, you can’t differentiate too much. And price point is you know, pretty standard. Lots of reviews is a product I wouldn’t do so I can evaluate risk. I can evaluate competition by understanding how to pull keywords and do keyword research. But let’s say we did this product like weed without you know, fall of our own. We didn’t do the proper research upfront. We decided to do this product and we are mom code. Well, what we can do We can go down this list we inserted ourselves here, we see immediately our main image is much smaller than everybody else so we can optimize content. If we do a deep dive on the content side, we can see how good the images are for our competition. And then if we go to ours, we’re see it’s not as good, right? If we look at a keyword that we’re not indexed for 307 means not even index, probably not in our listing, what is it? It’s baby basket? That probably means I didn’t even work right the word basket into my listing. What is this one baby storage organizer? I’m missing something there. Am I missing storage? Am I missing organizer? Am I missing storage, an organizer close enough together in my listing as a phrase to to get credit for it? Amazon doesn’t even think maybe storage organizer is relevant for my listing. Meanwhile, I have competitors. I have this competitors, number one for it, driving sales for it, I’m not right. So by looking at the keywords and going in depth with the keywords and understanding how to pull this data, you’re going to be able to identify holes in the market, you’re going to be able to identify how to write your listing better, how to how to do a better job than them. And whether you can do a better job like if it’s a saturated market, and it’s really mature and there’s not a lot of keywords. Don’t do that product. Move on to the next one. So the foundation of product research and optimization comes from keywords.
Norman Farrar 36:21
Very good. Sorry, I click the mute button. I’m, I’m good because we could talk another podcast or two on this topic, like you said, but I’m kind of curious. So your successful people know you as being a successful seller. I want to know, some of the mistakes that you made, I call it fail to succeed, right? What what did you do to succeed?
Brandon Young 36:50
I think our biggest failures were keyword based because we didn’t do the proper research. We did a set of expensive headphones at one point. They were active noise cancelling headphones, when it wasn’t really that popular or common to see them. Now, what I didn’t realize was how good and saturated the market like how good the competitors were, and what keywords I would need to rely on. And I didn’t understand the ranking algorithm, I didn’t understand that revenue is a large driver of that I didn’t understand click through rate and conversion rates were a large driver that just naturally, someone’s more likely to click on a 999 headphone than they are on an 8999 headphone right. They’re much more likely to convert when someone clicks on them too. So I’m not gonna be able to rank for the keyword headphones, right? Or bluetooth headphones. And it’s saturated with with a market that has Bose and then a bunch of 1099 headphones or headphones. Right? With my 8999 Never heard of you brand, right? So even on the active noise cancelling headphones keyword, I could get to like number eight or number 10. But that wasn’t good enough, right? Like I thought I could do a lot better because it’s a headphone niche. So I ordered a lot of those and it was like a $40,000 lesson.
Norman Farrar 38:09
Wow. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s always a learning curve, isn’t it? Even when you launch 100 products, you’re still gonna pay somewhere along the line, you’re gonna pay your Amazon tax, because they’re always coming up with something different, or you’re learning something different.
Brandon Young 38:24
Yeah, that was a big one for us. We had another one where, again, keyword driven lesson. And after this lesson, the headphones and this other lesson, we did a set of bricks, that light up, right. So it was like lighted bricks that you could set into sets. And it’s similar to one that’s on the market. But we had found like the lighting mechanism was different. So we weren’t infringing on any, any patents or anything. But the key was that no one’s searching for lighted bricks on Amazon. If they are, there’s very few. And then I’m not gonna be able to rank for generic brick keywords. And I’m definitely not going to rank for any Lego keywords, right. So knowing what you can potentially take advantage of and rank for, and what keywords can drive sales for your product is the foundation. So we we overestimated our ability, we didn’t understand how to drive sales, or how to rank the product, how to write and optimize the listing. And so we ended up with selling very few of those units. And it was it was just a breakthrough for us. I mean, luckily I didn’t order as many there I had like three different sets and a few 100 units. But now I’m much more confident I know how to write the listing how to do the keyword research what I can realistically get sales from, and then how to estimate how many units I’m going to be able to sell in the first 60 to 90 days.
Norman Farrar 39:37
I think this is going to be a question unless we can answer it very quickly because I want to get into the questions. But one of the things that I get asked a lot about is what happens if you’re bringing a unique product to Amazon. So you’re bringing a Kickstarter campaign, some sort of crowdfunding campaign and nobody knows the product, right? Like what was the score? Potty, right? Well, I mean, there was so much money thrown at that. But if you have a not yet known niche, how would you go about getting it recognized on Amazon and ranking?
Brandon Young 40:15
Okay? The most important lesson for everyone listening is that you cannot create demand on Amazon. Right? Amazon has its own ecosystem. It has its setup, it has its buyers, they have their search terms, they have what they’re looking for. If no one knows to look for what you’re selling, they’re not going to find it. Now, if you have a better widget that solves something better, and it’s cheaper, and you can display that in the main image, and you have an advantage of key key advantage, it has to be a huge advantage for them to click on something they’re not recognizing, right. And there’s a lot of keywords that you think you can rank for, and actually get clicks and conversions on because it’s an existing market that you’re that you’re meeting an avatar that’s really already buying that that niche, and there are search terms they’re using that you fit in, then that’s different. But for the most part, if you’ve never, no one’s ever heard of it, they’re not going to search for it, you’re not going to sell it no matter how many ads you run on Amazon. Now. That’s why something like squatty potty or Kickstarter exists, you can build up a list, you can drive them to Amazon later, you can try to get more publicity around it. People, you can go to retail, and people can see it in the store and then go search for it. And then then you start getting branded search, you can run direct, you know, direct to your own website traffic. So like a DTC play where you’re driving to Shopify, and you’ll get some halo effect on the Amazon because people don’t trust Shopify, so they’ll go search on Amazon. So you can have a few units and FBA for that case, right. You don’t want to lose that traffic. But for the most part, a brand new invention, I wouldn’t touch unfortunately, I just like to take something that I know people are searching for and work backwards from there and do it better than the competition.
Norman Farrar 41:59
Very good. Fantastic. Okay, Kelsey. Questions.
Kelsey 42:05
All right. So let me see.
Norman Farrar 42:07
I have a feeling there’ll be at least one. There is at least one
Kelsey 42:11
Yeah. So first off, I asked the audience what their mistakes along their journey were. Yeah, let me see. So not listening to my wife regarding product choice. That was one. For many, I’m still doing this mistake. I’m a one woman show without any help. I know, it’s my biggest mistake. No one can bring same a cost and white and black variations on the same parent, we forgot what the buyer wanted. So those are just a couple mistakes. So let us know what your biggest mistake and how you learned from it. But let’s jump into some questions. From Andre, what are your thoughts about listing new ASINs in 2022, as character limits have been shrinking more and more, both for bullet points and title and making it harder for new products and sellers to rank?
Brandon Young 43:01
Yeah, I think you just need to be a lot more efficient as to what keywords you’re prioritizing, you have to be able to take that that master keyword list and prioritize based on relevancy based on search volume based on what we call ranking juice. And you need to understand that content, visual content is the biggest driver for sales anywhere. That second image is probably more just as important as the main image. Because if you can show those benefits to the buyer, and that second image a lot of times and they’re going to connect with it and purchase images drive sales more than written word. So the title take advantage of it. That first bullets really important. Usually, the way people go is they look at the images, they’ll look at a plus content. And then they’ll get to the bullets on mobile, sometimes on on desktop, the like, which is now the minority on desktop, they’ll read that first bullet and then make a decision. So that second image, you need to talk about the benefits that first bullet, you need to talk about the benefits everywhere else. I just get as many keywords as I can in there and make it readable, but you need to know which which to prioritize. Very good.
Kelsey 44:09
Okay, great. Let me see you. Next question. From red. How about YouTube and influencers? Are they more relevant to bringing sales on Amazon?
Brandon Young 44:21
I love influencers, I think. Yeah. And I know that Tim talks about YouTube a lot and has some great strategies there. He’s a he’s a beast when it comes to YouTube influencers and programs that you can do some affiliate programs that you can do. I’ve heard some of his ideas there. Tim Tims, the man there, I would say tick tock is going to be a huge play moving forward, but you really have to understand the ecosystem and the fulfillment there. I think it’s going to be something that larger sellers can start to take advantage of because you have to be able to manage the supply chain and you have to understand what’s going to sell do some small tests and then bring in enough units micro influencers content driven sales from out of Amazon are the future I think, you know, Amazon still going to do great, you can still rank your product and make a lot of money within that ecosystem, but a lot of people are going to make a lot of money on Tik Tok. And there’s an opportunity there. The key is, understand what your capabilities are, stay focused on what you’re doing. And if you have the ability in the time to shift your focus or to put someone else in charge of it, or have your your company running and bring that on as a new project, make sure that you understand what are all the leading measures? What are all the, you know, what are all of the resources, you need to do that properly, while still not abandoning and neglecting your other business?
Norman Farrar 45:43
It is an art form. Sorry, and rennen I know it’s your first time on the podcast, but we never ever give Tim a compliment. Just want to put that out there. Okay. Yes, joking, Tim.
Kelsey 46:06
So our next question, it’s in regards to scaling. So how do you cover the when? When is the right time to scale? Is it the number of products, the amount of revenue? Are there any goalposts that you need to cross first? When you start growing your team?
Brandon Young 46:26
Yeah. So the key is that you have to look at when you look at that taxonomy of value, you have to understand what are the different things I can put the least amount of effort on, that are going to drive the most? Like reward? Right? The most the most, the most, the business towards that objective? Raise the valuation of the business the most with the least amount of effort. That’s how you pick those those levers. Right? That’s how you pick those objectives for the quarter. Now, if you’re going to talk about man, I don’t feel good. COVID sex, sir, sorry, buddy. Now, if you’re talking about when you’re really early on, you have a few skews, you have to make a realistic goal as to how much time and effort it’s going to take to achieve it. So you could just throw a number out there. Let’s say you did a million dollars last year, half a million dollars last year, and this year, you want to do two and a half million, right? 5x is a lot. But let’s say you just put that number out there. Now work backwards. Okay. From my existing skews, I know I’m gonna get, you know, I might have a product drop off, I might have another one get better as I optimize it. But I’m gonna do roughly 500,000 like I did last year from those, I need to add $2 million in revenue, how am I gonna add $2 million in revenue? Well, if I add an average of eight skews, you know, that do about four $400,000. That’s to 2.5 million, 2.4 million. But let’s say I do seven skews that do about 300,000. Right. And it’d be a running two and a half million by q4. Right? I won’t be actual for the year. But you do the running 2.5 million by the end of the year? Well, now I know, I need to add seven skews. Well, how do you add seven skews? Well, half of the skews we launched we keep the other half? We don’t keep we lose money on a very small percentage of those. But we abandon about 30%. And we keep about 50%. Right? So we know in order to launch seven successful products by the end of the year and have those generating revenue for us, we need to launch 14 products. Well, how do you launch 14 products? Well, you need to order a lot of samples, what percentage of your samples that you order turn into orders? Well, maybe it’s 20%. Maybe it’s a you know, maybe it’s half so that for easy numbers, let’s say it’s half for 14 products, I need to order 28 samples of different products, probably from multiple factories to but I need 28 different products of Sam sample products that I want to get now, from that, how did I order those samples? Well, I needed to look at a lot of products, how many products do I need to look at and analyze and do a deep dive into? You know, and you know, to, to place a sample order? Maybe it’s one in 10? Okay, well, now I know I need to look at 280 products to order 28 samples and analyze 280 products. You know, like 28 become samples, and 14 become orders. Seven become successful by the end of the term there now okay, what are the resources? I need to start with leading activities, looking at products and analyzing products? What are the leading activities? Who can do that? Who’s wearing that hat? Am I wearing that? How long is it going to take me? Do I need any capital to do it? Do I need any other team members to do it? So now you’re building resources, you’re building leading activities you’re building, you know what’s required to achieve that goal, but you’re moving in that direction. And so let’s say you’re moving that direction and you you analyze you realize you’re going to front load all of the samples, you’re going to front load most of it and you’re going to do all the product research For the next month, so that you can launch, you know, 14 products this year. And so you start, you know, that’s your leading activity doing product research, right. So that’s how you work backwards. That’s how you scale your business.
Norman Farrar 50:13
Yeah, one of the other things that I would probably add is if you’re planning on growing your company, or going to a VA, or hiring somebody outsourcing, training is so bloody important. You can mess it up, and you can go through 100 Different VAs if you don’t train properly, so and I would make it to a point where your SOPs are you, you can hand it to a 99 year old aunt, and she would be able to go through it and understand it. And same thing with you have the SOP, you have the templates, you have the training, it takes time. And this is one of the reasons why we say like, just take that one, and just do one SOP a month, if that’s all you can do, but train that person properly. Because if you don’t, they’re just not going to do it right. And you’re gonna have to take the task back and probably fire the person because they’re not doing it right, because you didn’t train properly. So training is really important from our end.
Brandon Young 51:17
Yeah, management’s hard. growing the team and management is hard. What’s good is that once you actually set those leading activities, you assign a KPI to every seat, everyone has to own the, you know, every seat owns a KPI and every KPI can only be owned by one person. Now, a lot of team members can contribute to the success of that, but someone needs to own it. Right? Right. So once you start to fill out an org chart, and you understand that someone is on top of something, and everyone has their leading activities, and you check in on a regular basis to see is that lagging metric moving in the right direction? Are the leading activities being done checkmark, and is that on pace to actually achieve what we want to achieve? Or do we need to adjust right and then you just adjust and improvise and iterate. So but it should get you moving in the right direction. And it should get the whole organization moving in the right direction as you scale it.
Norman Farrar 52:12
So Kelsey, let’s take one more question. Like Brandon’s feeling awful right now. So let’s, let’s just get I know there’s a ton of other questions, but let’s just get one more.
Kelsey 52:23
All right. And just a reminder, because you know, we can’t get to every single question. We do have our Facebook group lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and ecommerce collective. Go over there. Ask your questions there. We have a ton of experts in that group. Our guests from the show, a lot of them are in that group. So know, me, Brandon
Norman Farrar 52:41
Lee was popping in one day.
Kelsey 52:46
I think so too. So this is from Simon, once you have a real company with 30 or 40 stuff realist in quotations. How do you hold on to your personal why?
Brandon Young 52:59
Yeah, that’s up to you man. Like so? I think that’s a great question to end on. Because I think it’s super important. A lot of people get caught up in chasing the money. And they lose track of what they what’s really important, which is their happiness, right? We talk about scaling to eight figures, nine figures, that’s not gonna make a lot of people happy. Some people hate it. Some people hate managing some people hate hiring some people hate scaling and growing their business beyond what they are. And that’s why that’s perfectly fine. If you want to have a lifestyle business with one or two or five skews that you can manage on your own and wear all those hats, because you hate hiring people, and you hate dealing with people you’re not good at it and it makes you uncomfortable, and it makes you unhappy, and you want more freedom, then I would say that’s perfectly okay. Don’t, don’t let someone tell you you have to become a seven or an eight figure seller right now. Our goal right with our toy brand is to really scale it heavily over the next couple years and be at like a $50 million run rate in the next 18 months. That makes me happy. I love the process of building new products and product development and learning and marketing and those things like I’m I don’t feel like I work any day but I put in more hours than just about anyone I know. Right? So I think that my wife and I are aligned because we have the same passion and we enjoy it. But every once in a while you need to disconnect to and go there but let let your happiness be your your you know, and don’t confuse that with uncomfortableness push yourself to improve just because you’re not good at something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn how to do it and become better at it. If your goal truly is to become a millionaire and financially free and you’re just stuck because you don’t have the right mentor are the right systems or the right help. Get help skip the learning curve hire someone take a course like buy the right software like there’s there’s different things you can do your surrounding by your you’re on this podcast so you know that you’re in. I know you’re plugged into the ecosystem and you know who’s out there and who’s available to help you. So, um, let let happiness determine what your next step is right? You could sell that business as a solopreneur for a couple million dollars. Put a little money in the bank, put a little money aside, do it again. This time, maybe with some help hire someone, right? And then and travel more live wherever you want, do this business. But you know, or drive to eight, nine figures build a real brand that you’re going to sell for a ton of money. Whatever makes you happy guys. Like that’s right.
Norman Farrar 55:36
Exactly. Okay, I think that’s about it. Brandon, you’ve probably never seen the wheel of Kelsey.
Brandon Young 55:43
The wheel of calcium.
Norman Farrar 55:45
Yes, yes.
Kelsey 55:46
Oh, you’re in for a treat. Here we go. All right, here we go the wheel of Kelsey. Sure, that was great for your migraine. Sorry, Brandon. But uh, here we go. We got a ton of entries. So thank you, everyone who entered. Now we’re giving away five of these. If you don’t see your name the first time Don’t worry, you got four other chances. So I’m just going to rifle through these. And you have 48 hours to reply and reach out to us. That is k at lunch with norm.com. So that’s the first one eye in it. All right. congrat. Right. Do that. Again, alright. And our second ones. We have Jeffrey E.
Norman Farrar 56:46
Alright, Jeffrey. That was close. Yeah.
Kelsey 56:50
All right. Next one. And also reminder, YouTubers, especially I have no way of reaching out to you. So make sure you reach out to me. It makes our job a lot easier. Oh, Marina, Marina. Congratulations. Alright, two more to go. And then we’ll wrap it
Norman Farrar 57:12
Kelsey 57:15
And just keeps going. All right, Anna.
Norman Farrar 57:18
Fantastic. And acuity. And our last,
Kelsey 57:23
last and final one. For the master class of Amazon PPC.
Norman Farrar 57:32
Oh, of course. When does he know when Tony, when does he not when
Kelsey 57:37
he is a winner? For sure. Tony, congratulations, congratulations to all of our winners. So that is k at lunch with norm.com. Please reach out to me. You guys have 48 hours. And then we’ll spin again if we don’t hear from you. So then brand new gradually over everyone.
Norman Farrar 57:54
We’ll get you over the information. And next time you come on, hopefully you’re feeling better. And hopefully you have a lunch with Norm mug. And we can share coffee together. There we go. Alright, Brandon, thank you so much. I wasn’t expecting we were actually going to be looking for somebody to come on, but I’m just glad you pulled through. It was fantastic. Really appreciate you coming on today.
Brandon Young 58:20
It’s always good to see you, man. And I’m gonna go get into bed. All right, you get into
Norman Farrar 58:24
bed. Take care. And thank you. Okay, everybody. So I hope you enjoyed it. I know you enjoyed it. There’s just been a ton of engagement in the comments section. Next episode on Friday, we even got my old buddy, actually, Brandon and I always meet up at BTSs billion dollar seller Summit. But Kevin’s gonna be on again for his Kevin King for his monthly shop talk. And we’re just going to go over some new things that are happening good, bad and ugly on Amazon right now. So that’s Friday. And I think that’ll be fantastic. We always have really great engagement during that episode. Kelsey, I think we have one more word from our sponsor, and then get back here. 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 Alright, Wonder where are you?
Kelsey 1:00:01
Alright, hello, everyone, I hope you guys enjoyed. I see some people were asking about where to find Brandon’s course if you are not the winner, so it is cellar systems.com. Just remember you have the hyphen in there and you’ll be able to find all of his different courses he has, and for the winners. So again, congratulations to iron it. Jeffrey, Marina and Tony. Please reach out to me Kay at lunch with Norm calm. And for those that are joining us that have never seen the podcast, we do this every single episode, we have our little deal of Kelsey that we do. So come back. Coming kings episode is always great. That’s 12pm Eastern Time, and we go live every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So yeah, we hope to see you back. We saw a lot of new people today. That’s great to see. So head on over to our Facebook group lunch with Norm Amazon Kelsey. Collective. Kelsey. Yes. Hold.
Norman Farrar 1:01:01
Are you wearing a virtual mask or something? Oh, you had something up over top of your mouse? So yeah, something like that. Oh, yeah. It looks like a virtual mask. You don’t have to worry, you know, you’re not gonna give me COVID or anything? Well, maybe are but yeah, not digitally.
Kelsey 1:01:18
Alright, well, thank you. Thank you, just wondering how to use. But yeah, that’s about it. Also, don’t forget this. Give us those likes, smash those buttons. We’d really appreciate it. Give us a thumbs up. Also, if you have recommendations for guests that you want to see on. Maybe someone you’ve never seen on before. Let us know. We’re always looking for new guests and to see what you guys are interested in. So thank you again to everyone. Today. It was a great episode. Yes. Zorro. But, uh, yeah, it’s looking forward to our next episode.
Norman Farrar 1:01:53
All right, very good. So if Brandon’s coming back, I know he is. We’re gonna ask him. I know it’s tough. But if you want to, if you want Brandon to talk to some about something specifically, let us know. And we’ll see if we can get them back on the show real soon. Okay, so join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. Look, we have great turnout today. Thank you so much for being part of the community. We really couldn’t do this without you. Have a great day. And hopefully you’re back here on Friday, and you’ll enjoy the show with Kevin King. Mantra
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
