Stressed out from overcomplicated systems with your business? I would like to introduce to you today’s guest, Amazon Expert, Tomer Rabinovich. Tomer has been selling for the past 5 years. He grew into a successful businessman with zero background in online sales, thanks to his unique ability to simplify complex tasks. Tomer speaks at events all over the world, he also consults to 7-8 figures seller with his special mastermind coaching program. In this episode, Tomer shares how to step outside of “the day-to-day” while still being in control. We will be discussing when should a seller start delegating tasks, what do you need to delegate first, and who should you hire? Get ready to learn all about hiring & systems.
Episode: 76
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Tomer Rabinovich, an Entrepreneur, an Amazon FBA Private Label Expert and The CEO at Top Dog Global.
Subtitle: “The Best Way You Can Learn Anything Is To Teach Someone Else How To Do It.”
Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-76-delegating-tasks-and-simplifying-systems-w-tomer-rabinovich/
In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Tomer Rabinovich, an Entrepreneur, an Amazon FBA Private Label Expert and The CEO at Top Dog Global.
Tomer has grown his Amazon business with zero background in online sales because of his unique ability to simplify complex tasks. In this episode, he discusses why and when should sellers delegate tasks and who they should hire.
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Norman 0:01
Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm a.k.a The Beard Guy here, I’ll say that again. The Rise of the Micro Brands
Norman 0:23
Alright, I’ve decided to repeat everything twice today. How’s that? It wasn’t a mistake. Alright guys, today on the show, I can’t wait to talk to my buddy Tomer Rabinovich. Anyways, he’s an Amazon expert. He’s been selling for four or five years, he grew into a successful businessman with zero, get this, zero background in online sales and he’s an incredible guy. So in this episode, Tomer and I are going to be talking about the next step outside of the day to day activities while still being in control. We’re going to be discussing when a seller should start looking at delegating tasks, what they need to delegate tasks, and why you should and how you should hire. So how’s that? Anyways, where’s Kelsey?
Kelsey 1:18
Here I am.
Norman 1:19
Oh, there you are. So you have to say everything twice today.
Kelsey 1:21
We’re at 76 episodes, and I thought you’d be able to get that line finally. But still, it’s tricky.
Norman 1:29
It was in the script.
Kelsey 1:32
Alright. So we already have Dr. Koz joining us from LA. Tanya, nice t-shirts and shorts. Radd. Hello, welcome. As everyone’s joining, if you’re watching from the Facebook group, we’ve had the issue whenever it says like anonymous user, or like private user, we got around that. But you guys need to go to this link. This is posted in the Facebook group, you need to press on this link and just open up your settings and it should fix the problem.
Norman 2:04
Unless you want to be anonymous.
Kelsey 2:06
Unless you want to be anonymous. But if you’re posting, commenting from your Facebook group, it comes up as unknown users and things like that. So if you go to this, this fixes the problem. Okay, we got Mark joining us. Hello. Welcome. We got Nathan from San Diego. So all the regulars are here. Nice to see you guys and yes, so we are an official podcast. So Apple, Spotify, any of those platforms, you’ll be able to find Lunch with Norm. Also, if you’re new here and you miss an episode, you can find everything on the YouTube channel. It’s right there. Full episode, short clips, we’ll mix it up and we got Elgin joining us from Turkey.
Norman 2:52
All the way from Turkey. Wow.
Kelsey 2:54
Okay, and so if you have any questions about today’s episode, please feel free to put them in the comments. I’ll be kind of curating everything. We’ll try to get through at least one question from everyone. But if we miss something, you can always post into the group and we got Ray from Dubai. Wow.
Norman 3:16
An international crowd for sure.
Kelsey 3:18
Yeah. Okay.
Norman 3:20
Elchin, I went to Turkey. Well, not just recently, but I went to this really incredible place. I think it was called, I’m gonna say it wrong. The Ephesus? Anyways, I just wanted to let you know that I was in Turkey, I saw that site and it was unbelievable. I don’t know if anybody’s ever heard of it. But anyways, it’s an old ancient city and just on the off topic, by the way Kels.
Kelsey 3:49
Yeah, no worries. It’s your show and so the Facebook user. This is from Marina Wendy. Marina Wendy, if you want to be seen, instead of Facebook user with your picture, just go to the link that’s in the group and you’ll be able to fix it and we got Cargo from Estonia. Wow. We got around the world. Okay, so let’s just jump into it. We do have a prize. We’ll start it off right now.
Norman 4:15
Or multiple prices.
Kelsey 4:17
We got five prizes today. Do you want to start right now or should we wait for Tomer?
Norman 4:20
We can start right now.
Kelsey 4:22
Okay. Alright. So we are giving away five hours of Tomer’s time. If you want Tomer, #I want Tomer and you’ll be entered into the prize. There’s five entries for this.
Norman 4:39
So five 1 hour sessions with Tomer. If you have not heard of Tomer Rabinovich, he is a world class consultant, coach. I mean, he does it all and on top of that he’s a multi million dollar Amazon seller. So getting an hour of his time will be worth it and yes, Victor, of course you’ve been there. Alright. So let’s get this thing started. Oh, Kelsey is letting me start. He’s not even being annoying. Oh, there he is.
Kelsey 5:11
I’m still here.
Norman 5:12
Okay. Alright. So if anybody has any comments, just put them over on the right hand side and if you have comments or questions, we’ll get to them as soon as we can. Anyway, sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show. There he is. The man, the myth, the legend. How are you, sir?
Tomer 5:31
Very good. How are you my friend?
Norman 5:33
I’m not worthy.
Tomer 5:36
It’s very good to see you.
Norman 5:37
Yeah, it’s been a long time. Usually we bump into each other, everywhere all over the world. But it’s great to see you again.
Tomer 5:45
Yeah, I don’t remember the last time I went to an event that you weren’t there. I don’t know what happened.
Norman 5:52
That’s the same with you. How’s that? So, for those of us that don’t know you and don’t know your background, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Tomer 6:05
Sure. I started selling on Amazon back in 2015. The very beginning had multiple brands that I was running, just because they found kind of an opportunity to just open more brands. That’s not the way to go if you ask me, looking back. But that’s kind of what happened and took me about, like two years into that business, I went full time and I also had 12 people working for me in the Philippines, some were part time, some were full time that didn’t work out at all, fired. The 13 started over and then it worked a lot better and that’s part of what we’ll discuss today and also on top of my own business, I also consult seven and eight figure sellers all around the world for the past few years. Also host the Top Dog Summit that you’re in multiple times over here in Israel and from Israel.
Norman 7:03
By the way, the Top Dog Summit is one of the best events I’ve ever gone to. So anybody gets a chance to go, if we can ever get together again, I would highly recommend going.
Tomer 7:17
That one event is never going to be virtual. The whole point is the networking and everything. So I’m not moving that to be virtual or anything. So it’s just gonna be live whenever that’s going to be possible.
Norman 7:28
Perfect. Sir, let’s get into it. So what are some mistakes that you made right off the bat, starting your Amazon, and I want to talk more about mistakes you made with looking for people.
Tomer 7:44
Yeah, so I think like when I started, and I wanted to start outsourcing, you can say now when we talk about outsourcing, and we need to be very clear here that we all outsource too many things. Even if you have your first product, you outsource the production, you outsource to a freight forwarder, you outsource your graphic design copywriting. All of that was outsourced to experts, usually to freelancers to help you out what we’re talking about is when you hire someone to kind of work with you in your business every single day and usually what happens is you hire someone for customer support, that’s usually the first hiring people do because it’s the easiest one to usually hire. The problem is that the mistake that I think I made back then is that they hired someone for like two hours a day and that was that. So they were just working two hours a day, every single day and the problem with that is they have other jobs, or they’re looking for a different job instead, or whatever it is so they’re just very busy. I think when you don’t have someone working for you full time, they will never be with you. So that’s I think the first mistake that I can think of other people are doing instead of hiring full time from the very beginning.
Norman 8:55
It really doesn’t cost that much to hire 10 hours a week to 40 hours a week, right?
Tomer 9:04
Yeah and I think what sellers always say is, what are they going to do for all of the time that they have to work for me, but we can we will talk about that as well. So yeah, but that is I think the first mistake that you think in your head is that you are so good at what you do, which is something with Amazon. So only one person can do customer service, another person can do inventory management and another person for the PPC, every person has like a very small piece of the puzzle, and you can orchestrate that whole thing and that’s I think the first mistake, that’s the first business day I had, so I had 2 hours a day, 4 hours a day, full time, 12 people total, and they were all reporting to me. So I was very much development of my own business and they didn’t really talk to each other that much. So that was the main issue there. So that is not the way to go from my experience. Yeah.
Norman 9:53
So when you when you started out, so you’re selling, you’re starting to get busier, you’re starting to get busier, all of a sudden you’re panicking a little bit because you’re getting overwhelmed. So what are the steps that you take? Or how do you track your first delegation or task?
Tomer 10:12
I think the first thing you should be delegating is the thing that you are also kind of sick of doing to yourself, you don’t really want to do it to yourself anymore and you know how to kind of teach someone else how to do it the way you want it to get done and again, usually customer service is very simple. For others, it might even be PPC, maybe you know how to do PPC really well, and you kind of want to get rid of it. So you hire someone and teach them your way of doing it. But with customer service, that’s kind of the first thing that I would say that most people will do.
Norman 10:47
What do you do when you want to start to record the task? Do you have a process that you’re doing?
Tomer 10:59
I think again, this is another thing that a lot of sellers are fixated on, they think they need a lot of SOP. So Standard Operation Procedures in their business, like long PDFs explaining every like where to click where to do everything. My question is, how many SOPs that you do for yourself when you started selling on Amazon, probably zero, right? Everything is on YouTube now anyway, so you can just send them a link to YouTube on how to do something anyway. So my suggestion is this, you basically hire to grow, and you don’t grow so you could hire someone, the growth comes from you hiring and starting to delegate tasks. So I always recommend, like, once you see that you are working too many hours and everything and you’re wasting time on $3-4 an hour tasks, when your time is worth a lot more, that’s the time to actually hire someone and teach them something so that teaching can be over the shoulder type of thing. So you share the screen with Zoom or Skype or whatever you record it and then what I tell them to do is they write the SOP from what they understand from that video. I believe that’s the correct way to do it, so busy not sitting down and writing it yourself. Because the best way you can learn anything is to teach someone else how to do it. So they are basically writing it and teaching themselves how to do that task and then when I go in and just read that document, I immediately know if they got the task or didn’t get the tasks that need to get done. So it’s that simple.
Norman 12:25
Do you use an app like Sweet Process or anything like that?
Tomer 12:29
No. Again, I don’t think that’s really needed. They know what those are. There are a lot of different apps that basically record your screen while they do something and then they make it into a nice PDF. But again, I don’t think that’s needed. I think they will learn more just by writing that SOPs themselves, by taking screenshots and everything and if that’s not enough, at the end, they also add another video on top of what I did and then we have a video, we have a written document and we’re done.
Norman 12:59
Just like that. Easy.
Norman 13:02
One of the apps that we use, Oh Melissa has joined us, there we go. One of the apps that we use, and this is something that we use almost every day is Loom. It’s a free app, you can get a premium package. But you just record whatever you’re doing and like I know Vandana is probably listening right now and her eyes are rolling. She’s my assistant and she gets bombarded with Loom videos every day. But that’s what we do. We just record what you’re saying. If somebody has to learn something new, they go through the video, I think that’s a really good point. I don’t do that, what you were talking about, just send the video and have the person just write the SOP. My step is I have the person watch the video, I put together where I train my staff to put together SOPs but there’s that one step removed that you’re doing is I go back, I put down a ton of steps, though not just 10, I might have 30 steps, every little click, and then I go through it, or the person I’ve trained goes through it with that person to learn the SOP. But that’s great getting the person to do it themselves. It’s a great way to train the person and to find out if they understand it correctly, right? So if it goes up, and it’s wrong this is what I tell everybody that works with me. Don’t sweat it if you make a mistake, and I want you to make a mistake the first time or the second time. I don’t want you to make a mistake or mistake the third time. That’s not gonna happen. Yeah.
Tomer 14:40
Also, I will also add to that, that we never use PDF files anymore, because you cannot edit them. They are not editable and you don’t really want to redo your SOPs all the time and just keep updating them that way. So we use Google sites for this. If you go to sites.google.com that’s a free service that you can use. It’s kind of like sharing a document in Google Drive, let’s say a word document, for example. But instead, it’s like a Wikipedia site for your own company. So everything is stored there, all of our SOPs, everything, all the details about our products, I call it like the text of the company, anything if this text goes there, also my home address. So to send samples for like everything, you can think of like bank information that is not sensitive, like passwords and things like that. So everything, every small piece of information about the business goes there and again, that was built over three years time, that was built with time, you don’t need to start with that. You just build it with time. So you can either use that, also Notion, the Notion is a great tool, which is free.
Norman 15:45
Hold it. So go back to those. What was it called? I’ve never heard of it.
Tomer 15:49
It’s all sites, if you go to sites.google.com, you will just sit, you can just open accounts with your Google accounts and if you have like G Suite account, like your name@brand.com, if you have that, you can just open that Google sites for that specific brand and then all your employees immediately have access to that as soon as you open it up. You can also limit the access if you want to, to different sections in your sites. But that’s a very simple place, you can just store all the information in your company, just in one place.
Norman 16:21
Well, what about outside people? So we have a lot of people that aren’t employees that don’t have a Gmail domain or an email. Okay, are they still allowed? Can you still allow them?
Tomer 16:34
This is not really for that. This is not really for them to see our SOPs or anything? For them, we can just do that in different ways. We can just like, email them with that SOP or just copy paste. It’s like, again, like I mentioned the Wikipedia page, with everything on the side, and you just click and you open anything that you need. That’s kind of how we have set it up.
Norman 16:53
You mentioned another one, nope? Notion? Notable?
Tomer 16:58
Notion. notion.io I believe. That’s another tool that you can use, that I know different sellers use as well. Again, it can be used for many different things like task management and a whole bunch of other things. But a lot of people use it as a kind of wiki site for your business. So that’s another solution people use.
Norman 17:17
Alright, I just saw Victor’s say that he uses Clickup as well.
Tomer 17:21
Yeah. Clickup is a more elaborate tool for task management, communication, and also data and everything that we just discussed, but it’s a more elaborate thing.
Norman 17:32
Okay, so now, you said at the beginning, and I’ve experienced this so many times, especially with social media people, Oh my God. Social media is a tough one to hire. But for people hiring, how do you go about hiring and finding the right person for the job without going through a hundred people?
Tomer 17:55
Yeah, so I think it’s gonna be different for each person. For me, I think my best skill is actually explaining exactly what I wanted to get done. So for me, I hired people from the Philippines only with zero experience, like everyone that I hired had no prior experience before in my Amazon business, and my consultants, they did it a bit differently. But in my Amazon business, I just knew kind of how I want to get things done and I just taught them everything. Now, what happens is, new things come around, like ManyChat right? ManyChat came around, I think, like 2017, or something and I wanted to obviously use that strategy with my employee who was doing social media at the time and she was only doing like daily posts on Instagram and Facebook and that was pretty much it. So what we did is I basically understood how to do one simple flow for any chat, taught her how to do it and then she did a few flows with some Facebook ads and we lost like $5,000 immediately without doing anything. So then I thought, I still want to work with her. I don’t want to hire a freelancer to manage my ManyChat, and that really know what’s going on. So I hired an expert on Facebook ads that also manage ManyChat, again, it was just the very beginning of ManyChat and that experts sat down with my employee for 10 hours, we paid $50 an hour, so we paid $500 and after those 10 hours, my employee was an expert in what we needed at a time for many chat sequences with Facebook ads,
Norman 19:21
Then she left and started her own ManyChat?
Tomer 19:23
No, so again, that’s another thing with the Philippines, they don’t really think like that. I think if you fail, you have a full time. Regardless of how much they work, they will stay with you forever. I didn’t let anyone go since this new kind of structure.
Norman 19:39
Nice. So you’re actually hiring consultants or coaches just for specialized tasks, like ManyChat.
Tomer 19:51
Right, to train kind of my employees basically. So this can either be to train my employees or just to outsource that completely, but they still very much want to know what’s going on? Like, if you right now use an agency for PPC, I highly recommend it. Hopefully you’re doing it already, you know exactly what they’re doing in your account. Because if you don’t, and sales drop tomorrow or something happens, and you want to let them go, you can’t, because you don’t really know what they’re doing. Right? So it’s very important to have someone on your team, if you don’t have anyone to, that needs to know what they’re doing to your account, not because you’re gonna exchange them, like you’re gonna replace them tomorrow with an internal team that runs it. But you have to know what’s going on. This is your biggest expense after your cost of goods, right? So yeah, you have to know what’s going on.
Norman 20:41
I guess if you take a look at the scheme of things, going out and hiring somebody at $50 an hour, you should, as the business owner, be looking at those $100 or $1,000 tasks, and building your business and that $50 an hour for 10 hours is worth its weight in gold by teaching somebody correctly.
Tomer 21:04
Right. I heard you say this before Norm, I think three years ago, maybe and that really sparked something in my head, like the $1,000 an hour. So I think the reason people don’t really think that way, is because when you start your time is worth $0 an hour, right? Because you don’t have any products and as you start building your business, you have tasks, like finding a new product can be like a $1,000 an hour task, right? Just looking for products for 10 hours can easily be worth $10,000, like long term, right? If you find a good product, but spending 10 hours in customer service with, I don’t know $30-50 total, right? So if I spent an hour looking for a product, like doing customer service, and my time is worth, I don’t know, even $100 an hour, I’m basically losing like $97 for every hour I’m working on customer support and I basically tell people like you are not paying your employees to work for you. They’re paying you because they’re releasing you of all this time that you don’t need to work in your business. Right?
Norman 22:04
Right. So Kels, are there any questions?
Kelsey 22:08
Yep, we got some questions coming up. So from Tony, is there an ongoing competition to keep the best talents for your business?
Tomer 22:21
I’m not sure what he means by this? Norm, do you know?
Norman 22:25
I’m not sure. Hey Tony, can you clarify that a little bit? Do you mean just finding the best talent, like a talent pool? Or while they’re working in your business?
Kelsey 22:36
Okay, as we wait for that. From Radd, do you hire a VA from the Philippines and India? Could you share the cost?
Tomer 22:43
Yeah, sure. I only hired people for $3 an hour again, because they didn’t have any prior experience and all of them are from the Philippines and we will talk about this in a few seconds. But we’re promoting them to become managers. Once they are managers, they’re getting $4 an hour. That’s it. That’s how much I pay. But again, I can allow myself to pay that because I teach them everything. If you bring an expert from the outside, it’s gonna cost you a few times over, obviously.
Norman 23:12
Yeah, I always talk about paying higher in the Philippines. But you already have that person with the skill set. If you’re teaching them, then that’s great. I know one of the things that we do, it can happen right off the bat. But when we’re hiring somebody, we do this right off the bat. We get a screenshot of their internet speed, we take a screenshot of their computer, and they send it to us because one thing we will pay for, I don’t know if you do this, but we pay for upgrading your internet. We need that because let’s say your internet is extremely slow. Well, that $3 turns into $9 or $12 because they can’t communicate right and over a period of time. So over a six month period, we’ll get them a computer if they have a slow computer. So as they grow with us, we’re also increasing like you said, increasing their wage, bringing them up to that manager position so they can train SOPs and I don’t know about you, but the most that we’ve done is bought a generator for somebody because they were always losing power.
Tomer 24:27
Yeah, that happens a lot in the Philippines.
Norman 24:28
It does. It happens a lot. Okay Kels, more questions.
Kelsey 24:33
Yes, from Yelchin. Tomer, how do you find these guys from the Philippines?
Tomer 24:38
So you can use online jobs.ph. So this is what I did. I use Upwork for my first hire. So I did something similar to what Nrom just said. I basically typed in, I’m looking for a customer service employee that will start this four hours a day and it’s going to move to full time if we’re both happy. Okay, then I had some like a lot of questions for them before even jumping on an interview and those questions are kind of like questions for your supplier, just to see if they are serious enough about this job. So this is a screenshot about their internet speed, even a picture of the work environment to see where they work and operate. I even sent him a few tests, like emotional intelligence tests and IQ tests and a bunch of other things, just to see if they will do it, they don’t even really look at whatever they’re doing, and they just want to see who is serious about this and then we jump on an interview and that interview by the way, is just text, and not a video interview. Because I’m just texting my employees all day, we are not really talking that much on video calls. So the most important thing for me is text, especially customer service, because that’s all they’re gonna do with their customers right, with your customers. So that’s how I hired my first employee and that first employee helped me hire everyone else. So what I did after that is I just gave my employee more and more and more tasks and part of the interview by the way, is asking them, do you want to become manager one day? Do you want to really work for me full time, not just the customer service, but doing whatever it takes to grow and become a manager and if they agree to that, not everyone does. But if they do agree to that, I basically, again, train them and everything and then once they have too many tasks, so let’s say we start with customer service, then I teach them how to do product research, then I teach them like basic stuff in social media, or whatever it is. Once it’s too much, I basically promote them and then they get me five people. Now when they find five people, they go to their Facebook groups, they go talk to friends, they talk to whoever they want, they can post on Upwork, whatever they want, they get five people. They interview those five people, they tell me who they think we should hire and why and only then I’m doing the interviews myself, and we decide together, because that decision needs to come together because they are going to be responsible for that next employee. So that’s why it’s so important. So I strongly advise that whoever you hire as your first hire should be someone that will work with you full time and maybe it will take a month, two months, three months to get them there to kind of build that position in your company. But that’s kind of how you should do it. Because long term, it’s going to be so beneficial to you because they will and guess what, I didn’t need to train a whole bunch of employees. I only trained two people in my team, and they train the the rest of them because they know every single task in this business, it’s kind of like you think of a restaurant and someone becomes a waiter, then she becomes the hostess, then she becomes a shift manager, then she helps be the owner maybe afterwards, right? So that’s kind of what you’re doing, you’re just promoting that person internally in your company. Instead of bringing like outside experts into your company, which was kind of my 1st company was like, and they don’t know your team, they don’t know your products, you don’t know anything about them and many times, it’s more difficult to kind of manage it that way and also, when you bring someone with experience, a lot of times you teach them how you want the things to get done, and they learn it and then they go back to their old ways of doing it. So that happens many times as well. So that’s why I preferred like blank slates, teach them how to get things done, and then they don’t know anything else. So that’s just how they do it.
Norman 28:05
Nice. One of the other things that we’ll do in Kelsey is gonna roll his eyes. But we have our team take one hour a day, they don’t care when they do it. But it could be one hour or five hours on Saturday, or whenever it is for training. We pick up the training, they want to learn something, we pick it up. So we want people to be experts in whatever they do. So that’s just a bonus, again, that they can use, but it’s something that everybody has to do on the team.
Tomer 28:34
Right and again, I can just say one more thing about this that let’s say you’re looking you have someone in your team, and you’re looking for a copywriter in Fiverr. Okay, for example. So you say, get me a copywriter from Fiverr. Right? Or get me five so what are they gonna do just gonna browse Fiverr send you five pages of Fiverr, you just need to decide who to hire, right? Instead of that, always ask for your employees’ opinion before. So you say instead of saying that, you say give me five people from Fiverr. Tell me who you think we should hire and why and when they do that, you will usually just say, Okay, that’s fine. They’re just gonna do the same process that you are, you don’t want your employees to be a pipe between you and whoever you’re going to work with. Because then they are useless, you are still the bottleneck, you still need to make all these decisions every single day and you don’t want to have that decision fatigue, you want to kind of avoid making so many questions, making so many decisions every single day. You want to avoid some of those.
Norman 29:36
That’s so important and that’s one huge way to create a performance based culture. If they come to you and just say how do I do it? Here it is. You’re right, you’re the bottleneck. So let the person solve the problem.
Tomer 29:53
They know that whenever they talk to me and ask me a question, my question back is going to be what do you think so they don’t do this anymore. They just tell me this, this and this. This is what I think. What do you think? They already come with their opinion about it and that’s what I want. They’re wanting to think for themselves. Right? That’s the whole point here.
Norman 30:10
Right. Alright Kelsey, any more questions?
Kelsey 30:14
No, not right now.
Norman 30:15
I saw something from Tony come up, was it?
Kelsey 30:19
More of a statement. I’m also reluctant to give out references of referrals these days. The person who does make Google now has gotten so much business because they have so many more clients, the service has gone down. He’s also asked about if you use Fiverr, but I think we covered that.
Tomer 30:37
Yeah, I think again, I think all of those Fiverr, Upwork. All those are great to find experts in their field, just to work with your team as a one time thing like a copywriter, or it can be let’s say ManyChat and just teach your team to do something. So that’s up to you, that’s kind of what companies want to have, what you still want to keep in house, what you don’t mind outsourcing outside of your company. That’s kind of up to you. I can say that we are not doing anything on an expert level internally, probably and we outsource all of that outside of the company and we are very systemized and organized in how we operate.
Norman 31:16
How much of your time is now delegated?
Tomer 31:21
I work about four hours a week now in my business and that’s mainly meetings with my team. So I have two calls with my two managers once a week. I have another call once a month, which is a strategy call with the entire team. Each member of the team has goals they need to work on for 90 days at a time. That keeps them also again outside of whatever their comfort zone is and what they know how to do that helps them kind of grow outside of that when they have goals. So yeah, I don’t work that much on that business but I am very much involved still. Everything goes through me just to be clear, like I still approve every single shipment that comes out, the money that goes out of my bank account directly by me approving it. So all the samples get to my house. I approve everything that goes on, but I don’t do anything actively in the business anymore.
Norman 32:19
Do you have a different department, like is your accounting outsourced?
Tomer 32:24
Accounting is outsourced, yes. Yeah, accounting and financing is outsourced and they work only directly with me. That’s the only thing that is kind of directly with me because my entire team is in the Philippines. So I didn’t really want to give it to anyone else in the Philippines or something. So I still do that.
Norman 32:42
Okay and then for legal, what do you do? Do you have somebody that represents or do you go out to up counselor sites like that?
Tomer 32:52
We have different attorneys that we work on on different things when we need it. As you Norm, we both have like a wide network of people that we know, and trust. So those people like work in my accounts as much as needed for that, so.
Norman 33:08
Okay, very good. Alright, look, before we go on any further, I know we’ve got five giveaways and I want to give away one of those giveaways to your people that are listening. So if you didn’t tune in at the very beginning, Tomer is going to be giving away five one hour consult, which is awesome. Thank you Tomer. Let’s give away one right now and all you have to do is put in I want Tomer and Kelsey, you want to spin the Wheel of Kelsey.
Kelsey 33:43
Yeah, just give me a second. Yeah, so I believe there was stipulation. Tomer, you prefer someone selling around 50,000 or more?
Tomer 33:56
Oh hopefully, but even if they are active on Amazon, I can help them out.
Norman 34:00
So as long as you’re active on Amazon, then we’re good. Yeah. Hey, Jason. Just saw that he popped up.
Kelsey 34:08
He wants Tomer.
Norman 34:09
Yep, everybody wants Tomer.
Kelsey 34:10
Alright, so I’m going to get Milos, Michael, Tony. Okay, so I’m going to stop that for now. We still have five or four other giveaways. Okay, so I’m going to share my screen and we’re gonna go through people that haven’t won before.
Norman 34:39
Do you want me to do Jeopardy song?
Kelsey 34:41
Okay, I think I got it. I’m not sure Victor if you’ve won before, but I’m gonna put you in.
Norman 34:48
Let Victor go. Let’s just spin this.
Kelsey 34:50
Okay. 321
Norman 34:59
It’s Jeffrey. He squeaks it out. Okay, so there’s one for you Tomer. Congrats and everybody else will be kept in and you’ll just be adding them as we go. Right Kels?
Kelsey 35:15
That’s correct. Yes.
Norman 35:17
Okay, very good.
Tomer 35:19
So you actually started to ask me about departments. So I do believe in departments in your own company. We change the kind of structure throughout, like the lifecycle of this business. But basically, I have two managers and five employees that they manage. So seven people total, I also wanted to keep a very lean team and not go crazy because that’s going to be more time consuming as well. So I like having a very small team. So basically, the way I kind of have it structured is that one person is in charge of SEO. So they’re doing all the keyword research, PPC, anything with keywords, basically in the business, I have another person doing inventory. So everything to do with reordering, managing the 3PL, suppliers, China, all of that stuff, they are handling that. I have a creative person handling all of the images, videos, copy, and that person is also responsible for product research, then I have a customer experience person, so someone who is managing, like, reviews, support. Also trying to create something that I call a six star experience with my own products, then I have a social media person who is managing all of the Facebook, Instagram launches of new products they’re responsible for because we mainly use social media just for launches and then I have the management. So they’re in charge of the strategy, KPIs, human resources and salaries for the employees and everything and those six departments kind of run throughout the company and I used to have it a bit differently than I do now. But basically, every employee kind of manages the department now and that’s kind of how we have it and almost everyone worked with someone who we also support. So like, they are in touch with more people outside of their teams and the managers don’t really have any day to day work, they need to get done, they have their goals, and they have their team and they help them out whenever the team needs. So let’s say someone cannot do something or someone needs a day off, or whatever, the manager can take over. If a manager needs time off, the other manager can kind of come in and just help out if needed or whatever. So I’m not really hanging on someone in my team and must have them every single day, or it collapses. So I always have a backup if whatever happens.
Norman 37:38
So that was gonna be my next question about the overlap. I mean, it’s complete madness and it’s fragile, like you’re really walking on thin ice, if you don’t have that overlap. If you have the ability to like you said, or example, we just have somebody go on Mat leave. Luckily, we have somebody that can take over for that. Yeah so you’ve always got to be prepared one step. Like you said at the beginning, it’s a chess game. You got to be in front, you gotta play that second move. Alright. What about communication? So it’s coming from the top down, how do you get people to communicate?
Tomer 38:25
So, again, I believe so I mentioned, kind of the information, right? How we store the information, where to search it, which is Google Sites, then we have the files of the company that’s stored in Google Drive, then we have the communication and tasks and all that stuff. So up until recently, we used it in communication, we just use Slack for all the communication inside the team, we are still using Slack. We are transitioning to a different tool, because tasks are managed in Asana, communication is done in Slack and also I basically what I’m still responsible for is making big decisions and giving what I call green lights in the company basically moving the thing like down the path of the task itself. So I’m approving almost everything along the way and that’s mainly done by Excel spreadsheets. So we have like an Excel spreadsheet for a lot of small parts of the business. We put some data in there, and then it just shows me Option A or Option B just gives me all the data to make a decision. The managers come up with their own thoughts before and then I give my own inputs on top of that.
Norman 39:30
Your spreadsheets are incredible by the way. I mean, you put a lot of thought behind it.
Tomer 39:35
They’re not complex or anything, they are simple, but for the VAs or your employees to understand, but yeah, the whole goal is to actually make decisions with them.
Norman 39:46
Okay, so and when you’re communicating with your team, so is it the managers communicating with everybody? Do you have weekly meetings? Monthly meetings?
Tomer 40:01
Yes, I have two weekly meetings with my two managers. So one of them is more about inventory management, reordering those types of things and also pricing, PPC, like anything with our ongoing products, the other weekly meeting is more interesting. That’s like product development and launching. So that’s the two meetings that they have, both lasts for like 60-90 minutes long with them and then they have right after the meeting with me, they have another meeting with their internal teams. So one manager is managing two people, the other is managing three and that’s kind of how it’s structured and then on top of that, we have like they are meeting without me regardless, obviously, like one on one all day, and just talking between themselves and also we have those strategy meetings as well, once a month.
Norman 40:50
Alright, and I think it’s very important. If you’re not with your team, and you’re not communicating with your team on a regular basis, it’s really hard to get things done and people want to be part of something, right? They want to see the growth of the company, they want to see what’s happening. So it’s nice when something like that can happen. Alright. So that’s interesting the way that you’re communicating with your team. One of the things that we’re doing, I don’t know if you do this, I don’t know Asana, I know of it. But we have something on a project management tool called Teamwork and I’m sure you can do this with Monday or Clickup. But what we found is very important is creating tasks that’s dependent. Okay, so it depends on a person completing them.
Tomer 41:44
Yeah, you cannot can do that. Before you finish. That’s it. That’s all the task management tools nowadays. So everyone does the same thing. Yeah.
Norman 41:52
So you just don’t trip up. I’ve had it where things were done before they should have been done and it just doesn’t make up. For rebates for example, if you don’t get the keywords, and somebody does a rebate, or somebody does a press release with other keywords, then you’re all messed up. I’ve seen that happen. Okay Kels, more questions.
Tomer 42:12
I will also add to this, like everything we are talking about, what am I think you’re, you have multiple businesses, obviously, and everything, and they think we are kind of on the same page, and everything, like how you should delegate everything. But I can say this is not for everyone. So I can say for example, in my consulting, I had this guy doing everything on his own doing, like 200k per month and I talked about like all of this stuff and he was like, Yeah, I want to start hiring, I want to do this and this, and I want to sell in six months, my business I’m like, so you don’t need any of this stuff. He wants to sell and kind of want to sell to Amazon. So I’m like, so why build this whole thing if you want out? Like this won’t add anything to your bottom line and I had another guy that tells me like, he was doing everything on his own and told me like, I used to have a big team, he worked in a very, very big high tech company and everything he was doing already, almost eight figures almost entirely on his own. He had like one person to do customer service and I talked to him about this stuff and he said, that’s great. But that’s not what I want. He prefers to work on his own many hours a day and not be worried about any employees or taking care of them or anything like that, because that’s not what he wants. So this is not like what I’m doing or what Norm is doing, or whatever you’re doing right now. There is no right or wrong answer. But Amazon gives you the freedom to kind of choose which business we want to have and you can just want to be focused on that and do everything you can to kind of build towards that you’re a company. I wanted to have my business kind of run on its own. I’m not intending to sell it anytime soon, because it’s kind of just runs on its own. It grows on its own. So I don’t really feel the need to kind of sell it. I’m not burned out. Everything is fine. So I had to mention that.
Norman 44:04
I think it’s really important when you said that it might be completely different for somebody else. Right? You’ve got to find what you’re comfortable with and I will recommend a book I’ve talked about before for entrepreneurs. It’s called The E Myth. I mean, there’s tons of this type of book out there about policies, procedures, SOPs, running your company, making it scalable and automated. But Michael Gerber’s The E Myth is the one that started me off and it’s interesting, you’ve probably seen this, but a lot of successful entrepreneurs or people that have launched on Amazon, it happens a lot. You’ll be very passionate about your product. You’re going to grow the sales, you’re going to watch your account, if you get that one star, it’s going to kill you. You love the product, you love the product so much, you drive the sales, you work around the clock, you finally hire somebody. The problem is, you’ve never trained the person. So you get frustrated when they make mistakes and at the end of the day, you take back that person’s job, only to do it again, hire somebody, but you don’t train properly.
Tomer 45:25
I’ll add to that Norm that none of us were born CEOs, right? None of us know how this is my first actual business and for many that are listening, maybe they’ll don’t even see it yet as a business, but it is, that’s what this is and you have to kind of grow yourself into it. No one kind of did a degree and now they know how to be a CEO, this is going to work that way. You kind of have to learn it as you go. Being a CEO is one of the only professions that you can also move from industry to industry, right? Maybe you saw a CEO in a very big company managing a thousand employees quit and then move to an entirely different industry with like another thousand employees doing something completely different. But that’s their profession, they know how to manage and move their people in the company forward. So none of us were born CEOs, and that’s fine. But you kind of have to learn as you go. There is no other way around this.
Norman 46:18
By the way, that’s called a sales roller coaster, which is something that Michael Gerber was talking about, and I saw something come up, it was called The E myth. It’s called the E Myth
Revisited now is the name of the book. Yeah, so check it out. They also have a whole course, which I highly recommend. I went through the course it was called The E myth Academy and it’s all done online now. So check that out. Like Tomer said though, it’s not for everybody and I’ll give you a great example. Our friend Kevin King, he ran a bunch of listings. He never brought on a VA. I think he’s working because he’s got a bunch going on right now. I think he’s finally thrown in the towel and he’s got a couple. But anyways, he manages an 8 figure business with nothing.
Tomer 47:16
But again, that’s what he wanted.
Norman 47:18
That’s exactly what he wanted.
Tomer 47:20
Yeah, he’s nothing about hiring. He’s like, That’s great but that’s not what I want. It’s all the kind of business that you want to have.
Norman 47:25
Exactly. Okay Kels, let’s go. What are some questions now?
Kelsey 47:31
Okay. Yeah, we have a couple that came in. Alright. So how do you manage your team or make us a piece if you’re not good with English?
Tomer 47:42
So again, it depends really on your position. Hopefully, everyone that you hire has pretty good English. I think that’s the most important thing, especially for customer support for example, and for anything in this business, because they’re going to be in touch with people all the time either suppliers, either influencers, whatever it is. You want to seem professional. Most of you, I assume, you’re either selling Amazon US or Amazon UK doesn’t matter. You speak English and you want your team to speak really good English, especially in writing. So their grammar, everything needs to be top notch. So you just need to make the video. They’re writing the SOP, I don’t care if the SOP has mistakes in it. To be honest, I just want the kind of to get them to know what they need to do and after you do it once, twice, three times, they will never look at that SOP again anyway. So SOPs are again really overrated. Everything is on YouTube now. If I see something and I want it to get done, I YouTube it, if I find it, I just send that video to my team. That’s the SOP. Okay, it’s that simple. Amazon keeps changing the backend anyway, all the time. PPC is almost useless to do SOPs, because they change everything in the backend every single day. So that’s how this usually happens. So SOPs are okay for the beginning to make sure they know the ropes type of thing, but then you just kind of grow out of it.
Norman 48:59
So you just hit something Tomer. Okay, we talked about this. How do you know you’re getting the right information? You go to YouTube, you want to pass it on to your team? How do you know that this person knows what they’re talking about?
Tomer 49:16
No, I mean, just small things like creating a shipment in Amazon, for example. Alright, how do they do that? So that’s what I mean. You don’t need to do it yourself in your seller central account, you just Google it, and you’ll find someone who did a video about it and that’s it.
Norman 49:31
So it’ll probably be Tomer.
Tomer 49:35
I have none of those videos.
Kelsey 49:37
Okay, next one. How do you split divide your task? So what do you combine? Customer service, social media plus ManyChat, can that be combined for one employee?
Tomer 49:50
Yeah, so the way I have my team set up is I have two managers and two employees here, three employees here. The way I kind of looked at it from the very beginning is you have an analytic people and you have creative people. So the analytic side is all about SEO. So PPC, keyword research, that stuff, and inventory management because there are a lot of numbers like planning inventory and all that stuff, negotiating that type of stuff. So a lot of that is just analytic stuff and then the other side is the more creative side. So that’s like customer support, social media, product research. All the design, copywriting, all of that stuff is under the same side. So basically what I’m saying is, if you hire someone for customer service, don’t give her to do PPC tomorrow because she’s gonna kill you. So you want to give her like social media, product research, talk to copywriters, graphic designers, she will love that and then you can kind of grow the other side as well, which is more analytic and I will say you want to start with whatever you are not, so kind of complete the other side. So I’m very analytic. So I decided to kind of grow the creative side first and once that was kind of came about, then I grew the analytic side, and just kept doing that by myself for a short while until I’m gonna build the entire team up.
Norman 51:06
Just on that subject, I’ve made this mistake many times, and I’ve got to constantly remind myself, Am I putting too much too many tasks on a certain person? So just an example, just because somebody’s good in sales, it doesn’t make them a good sales manager. When you’re looking at social media does not make them good with customer communications. So if you continue to pile and pile and pile because the person is good with one thing, you could lose a really good employee and that has happened to me on two occasions over the last few years that I trusted not trusted, I just put too much on the person, put them on a pedestal. At the end of the day, they became not that great in anything.
Tomer 51:59
Yeah, I totally get it, and also like when I kind of grow that employee when they have too much going on, and we need to start delegating underneath them. I asked them, What do you want to delegate first, and then we talk about it? It’s very important to keep the conversation always open, the line of communication open with your employees, how’s everything going? Are you happy here? Do you see yourself in the company for the next two years? You just want to keep the conversation going with your team constantly, to kind of see how they feel. I mean, again, this is just from reading business books, listening to different podcasts outside of Lunch with Norm, and like doing other things outside of Amazon, that’s so important. Because there is a book that I read that says innovation only comes from outside. So I really believe that like if you just want Amazon all day, you will just know whatever other Amazon sellers know. But if you learn a different industry, you can kind of take that and use that for your Amazon business and that’s kind of where innovation comes from.
Norman 53:00
Right. Okay Kelsey, is there any more?
Kelsey 53:02
Yep. Yeah, we got a couple. From Dr. Koz. Tomer, you are a machine. Are you selling on Shopify? Is your team trained only on Amazon or other marketplaces?
Tomer 53:12
That’s a great question. So Shopify, we spent like 50K trying to build our Shopify store for one of the brands, failed miserably and then I decided not to focus on Shopify at all. So we still have a Shopify store for every single brand, just to have it, we don’t make any sales off of there, under 1% of the sales are coming from there. So this is my thoughts about Shopify, and other marketplaces and all that stuff. So if you are doing that, that’s great. But only do that, please only do that if you are really passionate about your brand. If you’re passionate about whatever it is that you sell and your passion is your brand, go ahead and build a Shopify store, go to retail, whatever it is, because this is your baby, this brand is your baby. Now, for me, I am a lot more passionate about Amazon. So my passion is actually selling on Amazon. I didn’t go into Amazon to go into retail, I could go into retail before that. I could build a website of my own and send traffic to it and all that stuff, and then social media and blow it up that way. But that’s not what I wanted and also I’m not really passionate about what I sell. I am very passionate about Amazon, and the business model and the freedom it gives me and my family and everything. So I really like and I don’t know a lot of sellers, there are obviously a few, but that is killing it on Shopify, let’s say over 20% of their revenue is coming from Shopify, when they started from Amazon. I barely know anyone that made it happen. It’s very difficult, more difficult than what most of you think probably. So if you think it’s another sales channel or something, open a new brand. Do something else, do consulting, whatever. Open another stream of income, but you don’t have to go to Shopify like I would just say launch more products. That’s the best way to diversify your income, I would say, and a lot more than a Shopify site.
Norman 55:01
You’re right. There’s all sorts of different channels out there. But one of the reasons even if it’s a one page, like you said, very simple Shopify site, you want to do that, because what’s going to happen? You’re a micro brand, you’re on Amazon, people check you out. Where are they gonna go? They’re gonna go to Google.
Tomer 55:22
That’s a good sign but they’re gonna buy on Amazon.
Norman 55:24
Yeah, they’re gonna buy on Amazon. They’re gonna check out maybe your social media articles or your Shopify, and it’s got to look good. As long as it looks good, then you build some authority, authority builds trust, trust builds sales.
Tomer 55:38
Right and you need to understand they’re buying on Amazon because they trust Amazon. They don’t trust your brand, they might look it up as Norm said, and that’s great and you want to have that website, you want to have a Brand Registry, you want to have a trademark, you want to have a store in Amazon like a storefront, all of that stuff you want. But you don’t need to kind of go nuts about, I really need to make this Shopify thing work. There is so much money to be made in Amazon, the biggest sellers that I know, seven, eight, even nine figure sellers, 99% of their sales are coming from Amazon. I know you might have been told differently, but that’s what I’ve noticed over the years.
Norman 56:14
How many nine figure brands do you have?
Tomers 56:19
No. Your cells that are doing nine figures, though? Yeah, that’s referring to.
Norman 56:23
Okay, great.
Kelsey 56:24
Okay.
Tomer 56:26
I have a lot of those by the way. In general, I think they are only top 100 in Amazon. So as sellers.
Kelsey 56:33
Okay, so from Milos. For booking, what tools do you use?
Tomer 56:38
For what?
Kelsey 56:39
Booking.
Tomer 56:41
Booking what?
Norman 56:43
Milos, Can you clarify? I’m not sure.
Kelsey 56:46
So Milos, if you can clarify. What do you mean like making meetings, I’m guessing like scheduling.
Norman 56:53
Oh, maybe that. So Milos is that a meeting or a calendar app that you’re looking at? Can you just clarify?
Kelsey 56:58
Yeah, we’ll get back to that. But for now Radd, do you design your own products? Or how do you choose the winning products?
Tomer 57:07
Yeah, so I have a whole methodology on product selection. Norm saw me speak of that in New York in January. That was my last time abroad since. I talked a lot about this. We don’t really do any crazy designs or patent designs or anything. We just improved the product slightly and launched them when I was on. So choosing the winning products is our entire talk and maybe for the next podcast.
Norman 57:32
Yeah, that would be great and actually, you came out to our event in Greece and talked about that too. That was good.
Kelsey 57:40
Okay. Bookkeeping is what he meant.
Tomer 57:43
Yeah, we use QuickBooks. I have an LLC in the US. That’s what we use for that and I have another accountant in the US that they use for my Amazon business. Yeah.
Norman 57:52
Yeah. So Milos, if you are looking for an accountant or a bookkeeper, just ping us after the podcast. There’s a guy that I know in the states is very good with Amazon sellers, and fairly inexpensive.
Kelsey 58:10
Okay.
Norman 58:12
There’s Victor, he saw your presentation in Brooklyn. There you go.
Tomer 58:15
Yeah, I gave him a $5 gift card to just jump on a podcast and say that.
Kelsey 58:19
Alright. Do you have any good resources to build different types of SOPs?
Tomer 58:26
You don’t need different types, you need one type and that’s it pretty much. So yeah, again, very simple. Make a video, have your employee write it down. You can make one SOP yourself, you can just google like good SOPs or something. But again, don’t worry about the design. Don’t worry about anything, it will be fine. So again, it’s not a big deal.
Norman 58:49
I gave Victor five bucks as well.
Kelsey 58:56
We got a couple more. From Sha, How can we avoid a listing going to keyword lock 32? Is there anything specific that triggers a listing stuck into keyword lock?
Tomer 59:06
Yeah, I know what this is about. This is a new glitch in Amazon right now going on. So I don’t know anything that can get you kind of out of it. But it didn’t know it comes and goes all the time. So if you look at your Keepa or Helium 10 extension or whatever, you just see the jump in keywords like all the time, not in Keepa or in helium 10 Keyword Tracker, you can just see there, or whatever tool you’re using.
Norman 59:31
Yeah, so there’s nothing getting around that right now. Is there?
Kelsey 59:36
Okay. Let’s see what Tony says. How do you feel about sites like FreeUp which freely allow the VAs to meet off the platform and do screen share on Zoom for instance, versus like Fiverr, where I recently got a warning because I used to send them a copy to my calendar link.
Tomer 59:51
Yeah, FreeUp is great. FreeUp is what we use for the ManyChat, as I mentioned before. So FreeUp is a great site, again to train your employees. That’s one option. The other option is to kind of hire very skillful freelancers as well to know Amazon on a deep level. For example, I’d use FreeUp for merging and splitting variations all the time with one guy they gave me a few years ago and I don’t trust my team with that, because it’s very insensitive, obviously to like merge variations, splitting them up and everything. So that’s what I still use for that. But they’re amazing and I think like better than Fiverr, for example, in whatever comes to really understanding Amazon on a deep level. So they’re great for that.
Norman 1:00:34
Yeah and they’re vetted. So it’s less looking. One other thing and I know this isn’t for everybody, but a spin off of FreeUp, Nathan Hersh. So Nathan’s been on, and if anybody’s interested, I don’t know if we have a link. We don’t accept affiliate links here. But I think there might be some sort of bonus that we have for it, but the Outsource School, and it’s with Nathan Hersh, I’m a member of it. I wanted to take a look If somebody wanted to go that one extra step. Again, it’s just a different approach to what either Tomer may be doing, or I might be doing, it might give you that help that’s needed. But again, it’s called the Outsource School and I think Kelsey, we might have a bonus or we’ll contact Nathan and get something for you guys.
Kelsey 1:01:27
Yeah, I’ll look at the emails now. But if we do have it, I’ll post it. So we are at the hour mark. Okay, so the giveaways.
Norman 1:01:40
I see Jason’s asking something.
Kelsey 1:01:42
Norman and Tomer, Do you have a good Shopify guy?
Tomer 1:01:48
Depends for what Jason? But I strongly advise going to experts.shopify.com or just Google, I think. I’m not sure that’s the correct domain. But if you just type Shopify experts, you will see a lot of qualified people there and they are vetted as well. You can see reviews about them everything, we’ve built a few sites with someone that we found through there. So I highly advise that. If you are building a new site or something I even better option is 99designs.com. I found multiple graphic designers they work with. If you go to my website, which is my name .com, you will see a website it was built with 99 designs, as well by finding a freelancer from there and they are working with us now on more projects. So that’s a great website to see like a lot of designs, and then just choose the one you want to work with.
Norman 1:02:36
Okay.
Kelsey 1:02:37
Okay and our last one last question. Do you ever have a good agent in China? Like the Chinese employee?
Tomer 1:02:45
Yeah, so good to see you here, Chris. I know Chris. So yeah, I have multiple sourcing agents that I work with. They were found in different ways from recommendations, just going to Canton Fair and also browsing Alibaba. Actually, if you type in Alibaba sourcing agent, you can find a bunch of sourcing agents that way and the way you kind of want to do that, I use sourcing agents kinda like I use Alibaba. So it’s another search. Like another way to search for products. So I basically send them a list of things that I like about the product, things that I don’t like about the product and if they can help you to find a better version of it, or to improve whatever exists. That’s kind of how we use our sourcing agents and everything. So I highly recommend having sourcing agents in China, not on a retainer or anything, you don’t really need that, just pay them like a one off thing for the first shipment. That’s the best way to go usually.
Norman 1:03:38
Okay, very good and at the end, I got one question. But while we’re talking about this one question, if anybody wants to be entered into the contest for four different one hour sessions with Tomer just put #I want Tomer, and you’ll be entered and we’ll give you about 30 seconds to a minute while I ask Tomer the last question, which is, Alright, we’ve already talked about a lot of this, but an action step. What’s the 123 steps that people can do to get started?
Tomer 1:04:12
So the first thing I would suggest hiring someone for like $500-600 a month, as soon as you can afford it full time, like, they don’t start full time. They start for a month, two months, whatever, and you build it up to full time, once you see they are working full time for you. That’s the first thing you want to do and that person should be on whatever you are weakest at, and you don’t want to deal with anymore and they’re going to take that site off of you. That’s the first thing. Next, you want to start organizing everything about your company that can be in different departments, or think about what it is that you want out of this Amazon business. Why don’t you just start in the first place and kind of go towards that for the next year, two, three years down the line? Because this is I think the only business model that I know of In the world, which you can start with investing $10,000 in your first inventory, and become a millionaire in two, three years. That doesn’t exist, I believe anywhere else in any other industry that I know of that is legal, maybe. But yeah, I think those are the main two things that you need to do and also you want to grow yourself, as you grow your business. When you start out, you spent $5000-10,000, in your first shipment, you didn’t sleep at night, right? Because that was like a big investment, you put that 30% deposit, 70% deposit, you didn’t sleep at night and then what happened next, you needed to spend double, like 10,000 or $20,000 on your next inventory. Then q4 comes in, he spent like 80k on the inventory and you don’t sleep at night, right? So you kind of have to get comfortable being uncomfortable in your own business and just know that it’s never going to get comfortable. A friend of mine just spent in q4 $1 million on one ASIN for like stock on q4. So you never get comfortable. He has a big business and he still doesn’t sleep at night. So it’s all just yeah.
Norman 1:06:04
You know what Tomer? I just came off of a call with a client of mine that opened up their container, two containers and they decided that this is five years dealing with this manufacturer, they didn’t get an inspection done and guess what? All of it, all the product was wrong. So I’m just thinking about SOPs, right? But just simply getting that $300 inspection done, would have saved people there and you want to make sure that you have systems in place.
Tomer 1:06:43
You need to make sure you can fix them. So we had shipment with the wrong barcode on a packaging of a new variation, so we have the same barcode on that packaging for another product. So let’s say we saw a four pack, then we shipped an eight pack with the same fn SKU code, the supplier caught it that we missed it and then we added just another step when the task went in the sun and the test management tool to check that the barcode is correct. That’s all we did. That never happened again, right? Whatever happens, you want to be able to go back and kind of fix it in your own processes every single time.
Norman 1:07:15
Right. Okay, so I think it comes to the Wheel of Kelsey. Okay.
Kelsey 1:07:24
So I believe we got everyone in here. I’ll even shuffle up the names a little bit. Okay, so we have four to do. So 321
Norman 1:07:42
Alright. Argo, first winner.
Kelsey 1:07:46
So we got Argo and Geoffrey. Let’s see. 321
Norman 1:07:52
These are good odds.
Kelsey 1:07:58
Okay, Milos.
Norman 1:08:01
Alright, fantastic. Can’t believe you give away five 1 hour sessions.
Tomer 1:08:08
I’m gonna outsource that Nrom, don’t worry..
Kelsey 1:08:13
Justin and the last one. Chris. Okay, so everyone that has one, you can message me at k@lunchwithnorm.com and I’ll get you in touch.
Norman 1:08:39
Why don’t you throw it in the comment section there Kels? Yeah, everybody just get in touch with Kelsey and then we’ll forward all the information over to Tomer. So, sir. I don’t know when we’re ever gonna meet again.
Tomer 1:08:53
Hopefully, soon. This is like way too much time in the house. So hopefully that’s gonna happen soon.
Norman 1:08:59
With two kids under three.
Tomer1:09:03
Two kids under three. Yeah.
Norman 1:09:03
That’s a lot of fun. Alright, my friend. Thank you for coming on. We got to have you on again, maybe we’ll talk about product opportunity. But you’ve got a million things that we can talk about. So thanks for coming on.
Tomer 1:09:17
Thank you so much for having me Norm and hopefully, I’ll see you soon.
Norman 1:09:21
Alright. See you later Tomer. Okay, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the podcast today. Just remember, if you go to Norman Farrar a.k.a The Beard Guy, you’ll be able to see not only this episode, but content and a bunch of clips that Kelsey has put there. If you want to watch the videos, just go to the YouTube channel just called Norman Farrar. Kelsey, where are you?
Kelsey 1:09:46
I’m here. Thank you for watching everyone. We had a huge turnout. I think this is like one of our biggest shows that we’ve ever done. Awesome.
Norman 1:09:55
Well, then I guess we should announce the newsletter that doesn’t suck. Alright. So Hey, by the way, we do have a newsletter that comes out today every Monday with content, how to become a better online seller, not just Amazon. But to become a better seller. All you have to do is go to lunchwithnorm.com or normanfarrar.com, and just sign up there and you will receive this every Monday. Oh, and I should mention, by the way. Our next guest, she’s been on before and she was one of the most popular guests that we’ve had, Maayan Gordon. This lady has over, I think two and a half million followers on TikTok. So she is going to be talking about social media, the whole influencer marketing side of things and that’s going to be on Wednesday. So please join in then.
Kelsey 1:10:52
Yes and actually, we’re going to be releasing a Secret Episode into the group tomorrow. So this is a pre-recorded Lunch with Norm. So the only way to watch it is to join the group. So yeah, if you’re interested in getting an extra bonus Lunch with Norm, go ahead and join the group. It’s going to be released at 12 o’clock. I’m going to try to download it onto Facebook. So if everything goes well, 12 o’clock. There is a I believe a giveaway with the Secret Episode.
Norman 1:11:28
It’s a great giveaway.
Kelsey 1:11:30
So join the group. We’re looking forward to seeing you. We’ve got groups growing. We got over 300 people now which is great to see and we got people commenting, talking to each other, friendships are being made. It’s awesome. So yeah, highly recommend it. You get access to me and Norm the whole time.
Norman 1:11:51
You’re the key. Okay everybody. So thanks again for joining us and you can see us every week Monday, Wednesday, Friday at noon, Eastern Standard Time and thanks again for sharing your time with us today and enjoy the rest of your day.
