The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] Jason: You have to slow down and take time to be creative and really think through what you can do to unlock value for your customers in a way that’s beneficial to your business.
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[00:01:10] Jason: We’ve entered a very special time of year friends. It’s early November as we’re recording this and we’re entering a series and I call the double doubling season.
[00:01:20] It’s a time of year. When you have an incredible opportunity to do two things, you can both impact your income and your business in this current year while there’s still time. And you can also set the stage for doubling your income in the upcoming year. It’s a very special moment every year in business’s life cycle.
[00:01:42] And I really want to make sure people understand how best to go after this and enter this season of double doubling, effectively. And so in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about stress. To make that a reality, Michael, you ready to jump into this?
[00:01:55] Michael: Absolutely. This sounds quite an intriguing setup.
[00:01:58] You’ve given us here. Certainly piqued my interest. So yeah. Explain what is this mysterious, double doubling of which you speak?
[00:02:05] Jason: I, you know, I, I think it’s important to just explain the timing thing here, because this is one of those deals where it there’s a, there’s a moment for this topic and, and this early November.
[00:02:15] Timeframe is the moment for this topic. And, if you’ve heard, a sermon about this idea of Kronos versus Kairos time, or if you ever heard those phrases in the Greek, there’s two words for time. One is Kronos like it’s 8 0 4 right now. That’s the time is actually being recorded on a daylight savings time.
[00:02:34] So in the U S we’re all scrambled a bit. But there’s another word for time and that, in the Greek, and that’s the word Kairos, which is more like the, the opportunistic time. It’s not about the clock. It’s about the season. You find yourself in with a specific opportunity at play. And so there’s a time in life for things.
[00:02:53] There’s a time in the calendar for things generally. And this is the idea here that as we enter early November, it’s a Kairos moment. You could call it in a Greek phrase where we’ve got this. For just a few weeks to really, really set the stage for a powerful outcome and ending for the current year.
[00:03:11] And again, set the stage for a terrific 2022. And this, this moment here that we’re we’re, we’re in this upcoming. As we approach it. And so that’s the gist of the idea and why now is the time to do this work? You can’t do this work in March. You can’t do it in August. You can’t do it. And you know, in other times of year you, you need to do it right.
[00:03:33] To really take maximum advantage of the situation you find yourself in as a business owner. So there you go. So that’s sort of the timing of it. Why there’s urgency to this as we talk about it right now.
[00:03:44] Michael: Yeah, I like it. I’m in quite a few things in life. I suppose there’s a natural rhythm to things isn’t there and rather than sort of trying to create it, if you recognize it, go with it.
[00:03:52] Then you get a much more powerful you’re supported by the weather as it were the season, rather than fighting against it. I’m in right now, Q4 is that certain time where in many, many product categories, not all, but most there’s a big surge upwards of demand. And so it’s kind of hard to ride that way, but equally you’re right.
[00:04:07] There is a certain timing to annual planning, which I confess I’m not really very good at. And my. Most of our members last November, I had the pleasure of you going through your process with that. And we revisited that a couple of weeks ago. I know that was more or less their reaction. And then also when we looked at the numbers that they’d said they were going to try and achieve and what they’ve actually achieved, that was a humbling moment.
[00:04:29] Let’s put it that way. So I, I’m a believer in the power of, of planning. And I know that I’m weak on this. So this tell me about this, this phrase and it carers Kronos. I love my sort of AC Greek concept. So you’re, you’re speaking my language, but what made. Think about this, what’s led you to this whole concept because it’s not a common thing in e-commerce.
[00:04:46] Jason: No, it’s totally different. And so two trains of thought one, I’ve been doing this for a long time, man. You know, we started it in eBay at our kitchen table in 2007 and saw how it went first year with our total sales for the first year were $12,000. The second year, 24 full months into our e-commerce. The sales were still at $12,000 that year.
[00:05:12] So you go through two years of this and you think to yourself, how do we get better at what we’re doing? But, you know, that was over a decade ago. And so we’ve just lived this for a long time. And, and so every year about this time, I start to think, okay, we’re closing the books and, you know, seven weeks, six weeks or whatever it is, for the year.
[00:05:33] And then also. We have this opportunity for the planning and prep for upcoming year. And the thinking behind it for us is a lot of, a lot of what you do. You kind of have to pick your rut carefully. There’s this little cartoon that was that, you know, it was on an old country road and the sign said, pick your rep carefully.
[00:05:51] You’ll be in it for the next 20 miles. So the January 1st demarcation day is an opportunity to change things in your. And, you know, so because you want to generally do stuff for a full year where you’re like, okay, this year we’re doing it this way. Last year, we did a different way. And so you, you can’t think that stuff up on December 31st now is the time to do it.
[00:06:14] So this is all, you know, kind of the thinking preparatory work. That’s gone into this every year for us for a long, long time. And, and then of course it’s always, you know, 2, 3, 4 weeks before black Friday, cyber Monday, you’re thinking of. You know, what do we do this year? How do we make the end of your Q4 numbers really pop, and you know, do well to wrap up the year.
[00:06:35] So, so that’s it. And then in terms of the phrasing, I’ve heard sermons on that several times, Kairos moment, Kronos moments, there’s a, it’s sort of a Greek phrase that stands out to people. And, and when you hear that, you’re like, oh, that’s, that’s really interesting. And it can apply to anything. It doesn’t need to apply to, you know, church stuff.
[00:06:54] It can certainly apply to the season of, of life in a business and in the moments we haven’t taken advantage of. So yeah, talking
[00:07:01] Michael: of who it applies to, I mean, it, it sounds like he’s got a broad applicability, so, you know, we mostly speak sometimes visibly to Amazon business phone is sometimes more Shopify or direct to consumer.
[00:07:12] I presume this applies to everyone.
[00:07:14] Jason: Yeah, I think absolutely. I think that any business model you run, you can ask yourself these questions, which we’re going to talk about this morning here. We’re going to, we’re going to unpack this for everybody who’s listening live. And for those listening to the podcast.
[00:07:25] So we will explain what we’re, you know, the details here in a moment, but yeah, it, this applies to retail, arbitrage folks, replen sellers, wholesale sellers, private label. I mean, name it, you name the category of business, and this even extends beyond, e-commerce operations. This is really universal in, in applies to anybody in business.
[00:07:45] I don’t care what you do if you’re a service provider or whatever this applies because it’s, it’s sort of, you know, business strategy level, conversation.
[00:07:55] Michael: Makes sense. Yeah. I like that kind of stuff. Cause it’s more evergreen because sometimes business models go in and they go out of effectiveness. Right.
[00:08:02] They’re not. So you might bolt on or change your own business model within your business, but yeah, very good. Okay. So you, I’ve mentioned my mastermind and I think, you know, I know you’ve been running a mastermind successful. Hopefully inspired by the 10 K collective. I don’t know. But the reflections on your last year that you’ve been doing with your mastermind group, I know you’ve been doing that recently that, that maybe this is related to that.
[00:08:22] So I’ve mentioned reflecting as well. How, how does that come into this situation?
[00:08:27] Jason: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s, there’s a.
[00:08:29] Three broad buckets that we can talk about. Sorry. Is that going to answer your question effectively? Three broad buckets we want to talk about, or
[00:08:37] Michael: I can do that. That’s maybe a different question. Yeah. What’s this the three. Okay.
[00:08:41] So
[00:08:42] Jason: yeah, so I think we’ve got an opportunity to do really effective, black Friday cyber Monday year year-end campaign work.
[00:08:49] And you’re in the moment where you’re literally, you know, as we record this November 7th, you’ve got the opportunity to have a battle plan and strategy for black Friday, cyber Monday in your ear and Christmas type campaigns. And really figure out how to do well, in, in this year. And then you’ve got a second layer, which is, you’ve got your strategic planning.
[00:09:08] For an extra year, or you talked about the one we did with your mastermind group a year ago, that you just revisited. It’s the tool we use with our coaches, coaching clients is, it’s a 10 question framework and it’s a, the questions really help you understand where you’re at in your business and what your goals are and how to get after your goal.
[00:09:25] So that’s strategic planning, Kramer. And then the third big area that I would say is sort of layered into the both is what I would call profit. And this is something we haven’t really camped on. It’s my new training for this year. In fact, it, it looks as if we’re going to do an actual workshop in support of the prophet habits teaching on, I think December 6th, ish or that week.
[00:09:50] So we don’t have it finalized yet, but profit habits is the, the workbook we have and we’ve, been teaching our coaching clients, the details of it. It is an opportunity for business owners. Really understand how to optimize their business for profit, as opposed to just top-line sales, for example, and we have 17 habits and I’m going to be doing that training was Zack Martin.
[00:10:11] One of our clients who has just been phenomenal operator with a wholesale and private label business. And, and he has a background of CPA background and he’s, he’s done really, really well financial management, aspects of his business. So, so there you go. So those are the three broad buckets that go into all of this.
[00:10:28] If that gives sort of a, unpacking a little bit of the framework.
[00:10:32] Michael: Yeah. Great. So in the immediate plan for Q4, including black Friday cyber Monday, which I know we’ve talked about before, I think recently. Strategic planning framework and then the profit habits, which sounds really cool. What, where do you want to go with this?
[00:10:46] You’ve got three different frameworks, I guess we talked about black Friday, cyber Monday. Do you want to mention anything else about that, that we need to sort of reinstalling people’s brains?
[00:10:54] Jason: You know, I think it’s just one of those situations where you have to slow down and take time to be creative and really think through what you can do to unlock value for your customers In a way that’s beneficial to your business. It is a little bit of. Rubik’s cube situation. You’ve got to think through how to do it effectively. And the operators who are most thoughtful and most strategic in how they use these sales holidays or these promotional campaign days, have the best outcome.
[00:11:25] And so, you know, Encourage everybody slow down, take an hour, take an afternoon, whatever it is, and really think through your battle plan. We’d done prior conversations about this. And so it’s not a new topic to our listeners, but you can go back and listen to those conversations where we break down, the day party for black Friday cyber Monday week in particular.
[00:11:45] So if you haven’t listened to those episodes previously, go look at that day by day schedule for that, you know, black friend does cyber Monday week and that by itself, Can really tilt the profitability of a business. And it’s not an over-exaggeration to say that there many times e-commerce operations that have had a lot of sales by this time in the.
[00:12:11] For the year to date revenue, but there, if they look at their numbers, their profit is not where they wanted it to be. And it’s not too late to close that gap and make a big difference, in your profit numbers. And so that’s the, that’s the gist of the, of the, black Friday cyber Monday work. And I just encourage people to do it.
[00:12:29] It’s hard work to think through how best do you to you perform for your clients and customers and, and get it done.
[00:12:37] Michael: Yeah. And all I’d add to that is, worth revisiting the, the episodes we’ve done on that. I would just say, make sure you’re playing your game. Not say Amazon, for example, because Amazon’s game is very different to yours.
[00:12:47] They want customers to be loyal to animals, and that they’re mostly going to do that because they get fantastic products or really reduced prices. And that’s not necessarily going to come inside with your profit goals as well. I would say. Major hints. The rest of it needs to be up to you to really actually have a plan.
[00:13:04] As you say, rather than just reacting to the signals you get. I think if you don’t have a plan, you don’t even have a sort of what’s the word counter. Grounding thing to make you feel, oh, hang on. That’s odd. Why am I being asked to do X? Because if you don’t have your own plan, there’s nothing to compare it with even instinctively.
[00:13:21] I don’t know. I’ve put that very well, but you know what I mean? Like sometimes we don’t even realize we’re being played by Amazon or, or for that matter, Google ads. Until we make our own plan and then somebody else has to do something that conflicts with what we set and that makes us reflect. And I think this reflection moment is where we start to really create real plans.
[00:13:38] Right. And that’s all I would say. I mean, I don’t have any magic on this, but I do see a lot of people playing Amazon’s game. And like, why are you obsessing with maintaining sales rank when you’re going to run out of product about December the 15th and your whatever is December the fifth or something, that’s it?
[00:13:52] Yeah.
[00:13:53] Jason: Right. Just to camp on that idea, you know, I think it was, Mike Tyson, who said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. But sadly, that’s not true. Many times people don’t have people and then they also get punched in the face. Yeah.
[00:14:09] Michael: Yeah.
[00:14:09] Jason: You’re right. Not a good situation. So yeah.
[00:14:12] To your point, completely agree. Have your own plan, evaluate it, execute it. And then see what happens. And then the beauty of these businesses is that we get to try again next year, if we’re so lucky and it can stay in business for a year. And so, yeah, have a plan is the, is the first step now I’ll just also say this, you know, I, I literally just got an email a couple of days ago by somebody who point to, to your point.
[00:14:37] He, his email went like this. Aren’t you tired of all the hype during November? You probably are. So I’m just going to put all my programs half off for the entire month. No hurry. No stress. Buy what you want. Let’s have a nice month with no promotional. So, and he did that literally, I think it was probably three or four days ago.
[00:14:59] So, you know, early in the month of November. So he’s basically D I black Friday cyber Monday with his own promotion, which was in essence, a promotion that was earlier, you know, than anyone else’s doing, but he caught it. Maybe right before people were, you know, seeing a ton of emails about holiday promotions, any kind of poked at the idea of them being.
[00:15:22] By doing one, but you get the idea. And so that’s a plan and that was pat Flynn, by the way, who did that? A great, you know, e-commerce operator, coach and podcaster. And so there you go. That’s, it it’s have a plan and execute on it. So that’s, that’s the, the, the, the power of that is, is really crucial though, to.
[00:15:43] You know, right now you’ve got an opportunity. If you’re, you know, November 7th year, as we record this to look at your shelves and your pallets and your warehouse and your stock counts and say to yourself, what worked, where am I at? What, what, what didn’t work? What have I not sold effectively? This.
[00:16:03] What do I do with that reality? You know, like what, what is the, what are the cards I’ve been dealt as you know, from January 1st through November 7th and how can I then play my last hands over the next, you know, six, seven weeks, whatever it is to end the year. I mean, however many weeks is left to end the year with optimized profit, and, you know, a very common thing is people have stuff on the shelves that just the headline.
[00:16:28] Like, well, I made a big, huge bet last year, two years ago, three years ago, I’ve got all this inventory here. It sits it’s worth nothing to me as in its current form, but I paid a lot of money for it and it’s not moving. What do I do? And so, you know, those are the things that you want to think through and the battle plans you want to create so that you liquidate as needed.
[00:16:50] You raise prices. If you’ve got hot topic, hot property products. To optimize when there’s a million things you can do, to think through how do you end the year effectively so that all of that work goes into kind of this end of year, energy.
[00:17:04] Michael: Excellent. Now we’ve mentioned the 10 part questionnaire that you use.
[00:17:09] Very good stuff. It is nice and straightforward, but thought provoking to typical view, not to over, over ridiculously complex. Cause that generally does never gets done in my spreads, but we did reflect on this recently with the mass, my members and. One question for you is how do we hold ourselves accountable to that?
[00:17:27] Because setting goals is very lofty. A lot of people set revenue goals. That reality was quite humbling when we all revisited it, which I just, it just occurred to me. I said, Hmm, it’s been about a year. It was about 11 months, I think, since we did this. And I just thought I was just looking through the notes and yeah.
[00:17:42] We compared notes with reality and the revenue goals. For example, the reality is normally much lower or much higher than you said. So how do we kind of create a feedback loop between the goals and the outcomes? This is a new question, but
[00:17:57] Jason: you’ve just described it really nicely. I would say step one, have a coach who reminds you of a view of the commitments you’ve made, make them publicly in a group, have the.
[00:18:10] I have the grace and, you know, honesty to say, let’s look at these numbers, friends, please boot this up, get your worksheet out. What did we say a year ago was going to be the outcome and you did it, and I’m super glad you did that. It’s really exciting that you did that with your group. I’d love to be a fly on the wall in that conversation.
[00:18:30] Maybe you can kind of recap. Some of it sounds like some are over, what they made of maybe stated as goals somewhere. But the hard work of doing that. And then publicly talking about it. I guarantee you, those people are better goal setters right now for 2022 than they were a year ago for 2021. And that’s the name of the game is how do you do it well and get better at it over time.
[00:18:55] So, Any feedback on just the, I know it’s toxic,
[00:19:01] Michael: it’s not top secret. I’m not going to reveal anything that say shouldn’t be reviewed. I mean, what was interesting is that, which is a very interesting thing about goal setting and. On, you know, extrapolating from a set of data. And how valid is that data to extrapolate what’s going gonna happen in the next 12 months or 24?
[00:19:20] One of the things that people got was that they they’d made fantastic money by the end of 20, 20 way more than they’d anticipated in 2019 goal setting. And therefore, of course, the goal setting for 2021. I ended up being, you know, in terms of revenue targets much higher than they actually achieve because in 2021, there was a lot less locked down.
[00:19:37] For example, in that affected people’s buying habits. Some, some people are know sort of vaguely health related products, and obviously they had a big boost in 2020. One of the other factors is the impact of Brexit for UK based sellers. A couple of people sold. Seven figures in Europe in 2020 and 2021, they will almost nothing, a few tens of thousands of apps the most.
[00:19:57] And of course that’s hard to predict. So the predictability of the future and its relationship to goal setting is very, very interesting to me right now because of COVID and any other political things. I mean, Brexit is one China’s relationship with the U S is another one to watch, obviously. So. In that context, it’s syncing.
[00:20:14] Isn’t that? How, what the okay question for you then in that context, what’s the purpose of goal setting? Is it to be rigid and we have to achieve this or it’s a failure? Or what, what would you say is the purpose of goal
[00:20:24] Jason: setting? It’s a great question. Well, we’re going real Metta, not Facebook meadow, but where this is going to the top of the top here.
[00:20:31] Okay. Here’s this, this is a, this is really, really important. Your job as the CEO is to both simultaneously mitigate. And optimize for outcome for good, for good outcome. And then it doesn’t matter if you’re a fortune 500 CEO or if you’re a, you know, kitchen table entrepreneur, like most of us, your job is to mitigate risk and optimize for good outcome.
[00:20:56] And the planning process gives you a lens in which to do that. Like who could have known two, three years ago that container shipping costs would go. Crazy expensive and slow down radically because the way things most go it mostly go is things become cheaper and they become faster. And when you just couldn’t have predicted that, but a strategic planning process annually asks those types of questions.
[00:21:26] What are the existential threats to our business? How do we mitigate against those? How do we build a business that is, Tigris. Yeah. To use the phrase of a booklet we wrote a few years ago, so that there is nothing that can destroy your business. And the questions related to that are okay. If this type of thing happens, what would we do?
[00:21:45] What would, you know, if this type of thing happens, what, what would we do? How do you prevent your business from being completely re. And those types of, risk mitigation exercises, are increasingly important. The bigger you get. We work with clients every day who have scaled tremendously on Amazon and therefore have this back of their mind nagging concern that they’ve just exposed themself and their livelihood to a big, big risk because their account gets shut off.
[00:22:14] When you. Now that, you know, so that’s, so then they think, okay, what do I do? So anyway, so that’s, that to me is the meta question is that’s why the annual, you know, planning process is so important because it’s not just, all go all, you know, green lights all the time. It’s also, how do you shore up what you’ve got, make sure that you got a good footing to go forward because you know, many of us can juice sales in the short term.
[00:22:37] Anybody can come into a business and say, Hey, here’s how you totally blow up sales positive. It might not be profitable and it might not be sustainable and you might ruin your marketplace. You, you might be the tragedy of commons where you just spoil the whole marketplace for people by doing something, but you’ve made a little bit of money, so that’s not why it’s planning.
[00:22:55] And, that’s, that’s the, that’s the reason you do this stuff.
[00:22:57] Michael: I like it a lot that reminds you of a couple of thoughts. One is there’s a very good book by an old business coach of mine. Dan Bradbury called, turnover is vanity profit is sanity and, which I believe so much to be true, particularly in the Amazon space. There’s a lot of that, people forget that truth and he talks very much about business continuity.
[00:23:14] Three chapters. I think out of nine, sort of is basically how do we preserve what we got, right. We still haven’t done yet with that and still I’ve done with it. And he’s a big fan of, I I think it’s Keith Cunningham, who is a CPA by, by training and background and, entrepreneur in the us. The other thing is I can’t remember which thing is another us general, who said I’ve planned planning essential, but I find plans useless.
[00:23:35] Now that’s a little bit harsh on plans, but to your point, what you were just saying is having to think through, in order to set goals, the things that might enable them and that might get in the way is really vital exercise. So that’s quite interesting. Thank you for those thoughts. Cause that’s quite different to the traditional view of goals, I think.
[00:23:53] And, and that ties in for me with reality of the experience of the bucking Bronco that we call e-commerce these days. Yeah. You’ve
[00:24:00] Jason: mentioned that Dan Bradbury book a few times and I’ve just got it on Kindle here. I’m going to get it. So it’s a turnover. Turnover is vanity profit is sanity nine and a half steps to improving your profits and cashflow love it.
[00:24:13] This is up my alley. So
[00:24:14] Michael: sadly, we’re not affiliates for him, but I have no official connection to him. I used to do some work from years ago, but very sharp business thinker and for smaller, medium, but fast growing exercises. So. Enterprises. So in other words, our, our target listeners.
[00:24:25] Wrapup: Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening to the e-commerce leader. Again, today’s topic I think is really central to business, which is profits, and it sounds kind of obvious, but really, really deeply thinking this through and all the implications for what it has for what are you going to do different.
[00:24:41] Is really powerful. I love Jason’s thinking about this is like a critical time of year. So we’re currently November, 2021, but whether it’s November or near the year, that’s the sort of sweet spot for not only getting your black Friday cyber Monday and the rest of your 2021 sorted, but getting the rest of the following year in good shape.
[00:25:02] So really exciting stuff. If you want to join Jason on that. Workshop, you mentioned with Zack Martin, which I’m certainly going to be wanting to be part of because that’s really powerful stuff, a CPA or an accountant meeting, a small business coach and small businesses. That is where the magic happens.
[00:25:20] As we’ve said, then there is no date for that yet. But what I can suggest you do is simple. Go to the e-commerce leader.com and sign up for the email list so that you get notified when we are dropping podcasts or lives, and also events like that. That’s the main thing I would say. The other thing of course is as ever, don’t forget to subscribe.
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